Sorrow Of A Time Lord
The Doctor had witnessed many terrible things in his lives, but there were few things more terrible than having to watch a space freighter crash into Earth knowing one of your friends was on board, knowing there was nothing you could do to save that friend. And, when your friend was a young boy who should have had his whole life ahead of him, it was even worse. Adric, for all his faults, had shown great potential; he could have become one of the greatest mathematical minds in the Universe. Now, thanks to the Cybermen, that would never happen. Adric, the bright but somewhat self-willed youth who had stowed away on the TARDIS shortly after it fell through the void into E-Space, was dead. And he was so young, still not much more than a child.
A child for whom the Doctor had been responsible. When he learned that Adric had stowed away on the TARDIS, his first thought had been to return the boy to the Starliner as soon as possible. Instead, as he had done with other young orphans over the centuries, he had taken Adric under his wing, coming to regard him as a surrogate son. And Adric, alone since his brother's death at the hands of the Marshmen, found in the Doctor and Romana the family he had been lacking. But that had not lasted; when the Doctor found the way back into N-Space, Romana had chosen to stay behind with K-9, leaving Adric as the Doctor's only companion. Until Tegan and Nyssa joined them right before the Doctor's most recent regeneration.
Tegan and Nyssa. The Doctor was aware of them crying nearby, seeking solace in each other's arms. But he himself was so numbed by shock and grief that the release of tears eluded him. He couldn't even comfort his remaining companions; he just stood rooted to the spot, staring helplessly at the closed scanner screen. Part of him wanted to believe there was still hope, that Adric had not actually been on the freighter when it crashed. Just as Jo wasn't on the Thal spaceship when the Daleks blew it up. Just as Sarah Jane and Harry were still some distance from the Kaled City when the Thals' missile destroyed it.
But, in his hearts, he knew the truth. There was no way Adric could have escaped from the freighter; its only escape pod had been launched minutes before, while the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa were fighting the Cyber Leader and his Lieutenant, who had forced the Doctor and Tegan to take them to the TARDIS. Leaving Adric on a craft which had been locked on a collision course with the prehistoric Earth . . . And there was no way the boy could have survived the explosion which followed, the explosion which caused the environmental changes which wiped out the dinosaurs.
Earlier, the Doctor had remarked that he'd always planned to pop back and find out why the dinosaurs became extinct. Well, he'd found out all right, but at a terrible cost; he'd just seen a young life snuffed out. Any hope that Adric might one day be able to develop his mathematical skills even further was lost forever, the boy's potential wasted. Why? The question circulated through the Doctor's mind, but there was no way to answer it. He had never felt so helpless in any of his lives.
And hot on the heels of the question "why?" came a series of thoughts beginning with the words "if only". If only he and Adric hadn't had that argument just before all that business with the Cybermen started. If only he had given the boy the attention he needed, rather than spending so much time trying to get Tegan to Heathrow. If only he had worked faster to repair the damaged console. If only . . .
If only there was a way he could tell Adric how sorry he was. Sorry for all the times he had scolded him for doing something foolish. Sorry for having failed him so badly. But there wasn't; he would never be able to tell Adric anything again, not without disrupting the timelines. Adric, the boy he had grown to love as a son, the boy he had always sensed had the potential to become something more than the awkward adolescent who tried his patience, the boy who . . . They said the greatest tragedy was outliving someone younger than yourself and, as a Time Lord, the Doctor was well aware that his companions would almost certainly die before him. All the same, the death of a young person, even one from a race with a shorter lifespan than your race, was hard to bear.
And it also posed another unanswerable question. Why had fate allowed a despot like Davros to extend his lifespan far beyond what was natural for most humanoid races, but denied Adric the chance to reach full maturity? It wasn't fair and the fact that Adric had shown so much promise and potential made it even worse. The boy had had his faults, but he was good at heart; he had just needed someone to steer him in the right direction. The Doctor had done his best, but things had never been quite the same between himself and Adric following his regeneration; his new personality was ill-suited for dealing with a temperamental teenager.
All the same, he had still felt a certain amount of paternal affection for the young Alzarian. He bitterly regretted every sharp word he had ever directed at Adric, even though most of them had arisen because he was concerned for the boy's welfare and didn't want him to be led astray by corrupt leaders like Monarch, nor to take foolish risks like attempting to pilot the TSS. He should have made allowances not only for the impetuousness of youth, but also for the fact that Adric was in what was to him an unfamiliar universe. But he hadn't and it was too late to make amends. Adric's death was a fixed point in time; there was no way he could go back and change what had happened. If he tried, there was no telling how much damage he would do to the timelines, especially since Adric had died at a pivotal moment in Earth's history.
The Doctor recalled how the Cybermen had locked the freighter's co-ordinates; no doubt, they had protected their device with a set of complex logic puzzles. Puzzles which would need someone with a highly mathematical mind to solve them, someone like Adric. The boy must have tried to crack the codes; that would explain why he had insisted on staying behind. But he had no way of knowing that the freighter was destined to become the "meteorite" which killed the dinosaurs. In fact, he hadn't even known what dinosaurs were; while the Doctor, Tegan and Nyssa were discussing the prehistoric creatures, Adric was in the TARDIS calculating the way into E-Space.
So he couldn't have known that he wasn't meant to stop the freighter from crashing, that it was all part of Earth's history. Which made his loss even harder to bear; even the knowledge that he had at least prevented the Cybermen from destroying the Earth of the 26th Century was small compensation. And not only was it impossible to go back and rescue Adric, even retrieving his body wasn't an option. The explosion had been so powerful that the freighter and everything in it were completely destroyed; there was nothing left of the young Alzarian except the badge for mathematical excellence he had prized so much. The badge which had been shattered when the Doctor used its gold content as a weapon against the Cyber Leader, shattered like the Doctor's hearts.
The Doctor never knew what finally stirred him from his state of numbed shock. Perhaps it was the TARDIS's telepathic circuits reminding him that there was still unfinished business, that the escape pod containing the survivors from the freighter was still out there, that he was their only chance of getting back to their own time. That meant he would have to finish repairing the console, too late to help Adric, but not too late for a small group of humans from the 26th Century.
First, though, he would have to perform a ceremony he had only performed twice before, a ceremony of remembrance for a fallen companion. With that in mind, he went to find Tegan and Nyssa, who had left the Console Room while the Doctor was distracted by his grief. As Adric's fellow companions, they should attend the ceremony that was, in the absence of a body, the closest the Doctor could come to holding a funeral for a boy whose life had ended much too soon.