Long Forgotten
I don't know – maybe you forgot. Maybe we all did.
But that good man is not good. He has never been.
Unless, his repentance means anything to you, or are you the heartless ruler who blamed him for the demise of your entire planet?
He fled your world, and wandered through those stars, eternally in darkness and solitude, and then, when you need him most,
He would come back, not a moment's hesitance.
The Doctor was a man running from himself.
The land from which he came was golden and sparkling, a thousand and one shades of that stunning red adorning the skyline – his planet was on fire, both at the beginning,
And at the end.
He watched it burn. He watched it scream from its very core and he did not relent. His actions scarred him as deeply as the most unhealing wound, scorched into his very skin, no matter how many times it transformed itself to another face, so much younger and always so much harder to put that action to.
How could someone so young be so destructive? You ask yourself.
Gallifrey, they say, was the pinnacle of the universe. It shone like all the stars together, and it was beyond your imagining – it was everything and it was beautiful.
And he had to leave, once his work was done. Once the task was complete and once the flames had died, now just a gaping hole, an ocean of expanse, in the place where it should have been.
There were mountains – Solace and Solitude – and in between stood the citadel. The shining world of the seven systems. The race so very above and so very powerful. So very, very unknown and yet feared, revered, looked on in awe everywhere they went. There were silver trees and golden skies, and at night, it would bleed crimson and black, and you would still see their sun, dimmed like a star, still hanging in the sky like one solitary diamond.
But the Doctor always had one thing he'd never own up to.
How he'd run in the face of time itself.
How it would terrify him, how deeply rooted in him it was, to control time itself and be one with it, never able to unsee what he had seen.
The Untempered Schism was his undoing.
And he never looked back.
Brought there so young, and only realizing,
Time was and would be forever his enemy.
It bore itself into his head and rested there like an animal waiting,
Trying to consume him whole.
'Some would be inspired.
Some would run away.
And some would go mad.'
So, why do you ask of it? Gallifrey disappeared such a long time ago, most don't even know it ever existed.
The last remaining man of the Time Lords, forever wandering, forever lost.
He is but the last thread, before the light goes out,
Before everything is lost. Before they are lost forever.
They say they would come back, language burned into our lives.
Time.
It rules even us,
Just as they ruled it.
So I'll ask you again, why do you think the Doctor keeps running?
Because he never wants to remember,
The day Gallifrey burned.