AN: I really wish I'd been able to drag this out a bit more, but the Challenge is drawing to a close and I think this is as good as its going to get. I hope you enjoy it despite its length.
*Possible spoilers for the 50th Anniversary.*
Prompt: "And you can't help but think, 'What's the point of them being happy now when they'll be sad later?' and the answer, of course, is 'Because they'll be sad later.'" —The Eleventh Doctor, 'The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe' (Doctor Who)
*Edit: Changed the title. Original title should have been 'The Coward Cried "No More."' but as FF deleted my punctuation I found this more appropriate.
He'd woken up to a new face and a clouded memory, but one thing he knew for certain: the Time War was over. And he'd been the one to end it. Scorch-marked and blast-pocked debris was all that remained of the Dalek race. And Gallifrey was gone. The Doctor That Wasn't had destroyed his entire race so thoroughly that there wasn't any evidence they'd ever existed. Just a gaping hole in the galaxy, filled in by a mass of corroding Daleks.
An entire planet annihilated. How many dead? How many children killed long before their time? He didn't know.
So he counted.
For hours that stretched into too long days, he counted and remembered the children of Gallifrey.
All 2.47 billion of them.
The blood of more than two billion innocents stained his hands and there was no escaping that, no making up for it, no place or time when that wouldn't be true.
He ran all the same.
He ran and ran and never dared stop- until he found a little blue planet in an out of the way system. A planet he'd once loved dearly and visited often; A planet bursting with life and potential.
And drifting over the Earth's sky, he heard a sound he dreaded; a child cried.
But this time the cowardly Doctor didn't run away. No. This time, he made a promise.
On that day, a story was born- a story about a man from the North that visited children in the night and stopped their tears. That story was passed on from child to child, year after year. Tales of a wonderful man and the fantastic gifts he brought, of a man that flew across the sky to visit every child across the world in a single night- tales that grew into legend.
The legend of Father Christmas.