You may not be human, but you're still man,
and remember that even the Time Lords could be killed.
You may last longer than most,
(and indeed survive even though you've long since died)
But one day you'll fall like all men do.
Because your long life isn't a blessing,
most days it's a curse. Living with the memory of destroying Gallifrey, of watching men, women and children be killed over and over again inside your head. The screams of millions that you dare not count. You remember the pain of leaving companions behind, of seeing friends murdered and civilians caught in the crossfire. You've felt it all before and will feel it all again.
Because even though you're the Doctor, even though you're a saviour
you're still the destroyer of worlds and if you couldn't have saved Gallifrey, what makes you think you can save them all?
you can't save the Earth from others,
You can't even save it from destroying itself.
…
But time and time again you try anyway
try and save a planet, a world, a handful of people from rampaging hell
but fail
And do it all over again another day.
Because that's what you do. You save people, you can never turn down someone who needs you. Even if it cuts you until you bleed, you'll hold their hands as they die because that's the Doctor does, what you've always done, and you don't know if you can ever be selfish enough to stop.
If you could ever drop the sword and surrender, give in (give up), let someone else save the day for once you would. But you can't, you're a Time Lord and there will never be another like you. No one can do the things you do: to bend and stretch time; invent history, distort the future and change the past and perhaps no one should.
You are singular, and there are no others.
Your companions congratulate you, once the deed is said and done; say you succeeded. Even when the blood pools and cools in your hands, the blood of the dead, the children who trusted you and died anyway. Even then they smile, and it kills you inside to watch.
(Could they not see the bodies piled around you? Could they not see the blood on your hands?)
Could they not understand that if even one person died when you were supposed to be protecting them you had failed?
They had put their lives in your hands, trusted you when you said you could save them but and you lost. You had failed them all.
("You saved as many as you could," they'll say, "but not even you could've saved them all")
But you should have. You have a duty of care. They trusted you with their lives and you watched as they died. It's your fault. You have a time machine: no one should have to die at all.
To hell with the time lines and fixed points. To hell with the dead and the damned and all the people you've left behind.
You couldn't have saved them.
But even then they call for you, your name over and over. Doctor. "the name for wise man, or healer" the man who will always come (if not just in the nick of time) and save the day.
Could they not see?
Did they not understand?
("Fear me, I've killed hundreds of Time Lords")
No, fear me.I've killed all of them.
...
It took you two regenerations to admit it.
That man who did it, the you who did it, the Doctor who pushed that button and ended the world closed his eyes and pushed it anyway because he had to and not because he wanted to.
The War Doctor, the you you tried your best to hide, the man who ended the war from a barn at the end of the world. Pushed the button and killed Daleks and Time Lords alike- killed them all while you walked away unharmed.
And you regenerate,
and start anew an old man with a new face, The Doctor fresh from the Time War. The one with leather jackets and jumpers and big ears, the man with blue eyes and devastation inside.
You have adventures, you take companions, you try as hard as you can to block the sounds of dying screams from your ears but you can't. Forever that sound will ring in nightmares and nightmarish reality, and still you can't bear to see children cry.
Did they not cry out on Gallifrey?
how many children did you kill in cold blood that day, Doctor? Your own children for Rassilon's sake.
Did you not cry then?
Did you not curse injustices then? Did you not cry out for them, for the children and mothers and sisters, all the men and women who died that day? Died because of you?
I had no choice, you say, that ever appeasing thought. they would've died anyway.
The Time Lord's are long gone, and I can no longer save them. They're dead (dust to dust) and there's nothing but silence hanging where Gallifrey once stood.
But there are some who can be saved, pockets of time where history is in flux and deaths can be rewritten.
(But no matter how many people you've saved, you've killed more often than that. Billions on your ledger Doctor, a red so deep it can never be washed out.)
But still you come to their aid, still save lives on your trek across the stars and cry when they die. Still you scream and beat your breast when people die before their time, the men and women who held weapons aloft in your name for your cause and fell just the same. Died with your name on their lips, their saviour and the man who failed them. They damn you over and over again, and their last words join the billions of others swirling and twisting in your mind. The sound of millions and millions who died because of you.
(But it wasn't you, not really. You weren't the one who delivered the final blow, you didn't hold the gun or shoot that blast. You weren't the one who killed them. But you did push that button, and genocide is on you, the Killer of Your Own Kind)
You take responsibility
and weep into the night because you know you could've prevented it had you been braver or cleverer or smarter when they needed it the most.
Because you're a Time Lord, not a god, and you're certainly not a hero. Most days, you're a coward, because you had known from the beginning that you couldn't save them all. You've spent nine hundred years chasing the daydream of running far enough would mean your demons couldn't catch up to you but you were wrong. Because bad dreams and bitter truths run faster than anything, and you can't ever outrun it. You can't run from the truth.
Not now, and not ever.
Not from Gallifrey, not from the barn on another world and the terrible choice you made. Not from the Time War, and you've failed every day since. Pretending it doesn't bother you, staying awake for too long because you couldn't stand the nightmares, the visions that haunted your subconscious, the memory of your wife, your brothers and parents and children and grandchildren you had killed that day. The two billion children who fell to fire and brimstone because of you.
You had to, you tell yourself, that ever placating though. There had been no other way.
Sometimes it helps, that appeasing thought. Sometimes it keeps the nightmares away. Sometimes you sleep, sometimes you rest, but near always you're moving, pushing forward, never daring to look back and think of what happened that day. Because what was the point? Of thinking of it? Of the billions upon billions you had killed to end the war? Of the Time Lords, the great and terrible race, gone because of you. And the last survivor, the mass murderer, hiding away in your stolen TARDIS and running as far as you can, away from the blood and the screams and the horrors of war. Away from the bodies of your family and friends and enemies, away from Gallifrey for the very last time.
And now at the end of it all, you're alone. You're an endangered species, the very last of your kind.
(And you're free)
But you're not, and never before had you been so wrong. because guilt is the heaviest yoke, and with all the horror you had inflicted, all the screams of the dying and the dead, the grief that must never be actualized in fear of it desolating you.
The screams so bountiful you will never be able to count them, never be able to forgive yourself or forget. Never be able to move on, because how could you, really? From genocide?
There is no going back.
Not to the War Doctor, not to the one you never speak of, try to ignore. He's the one who broke the rule.
Never cruel or cowardly, never give up, never give in.
Gallifrey fell to fire and brimstone that day, the last day of the war. The Citadel of the Time Lords shattered and scattered and the Gallifreyans with it. But it took days, days for them to be killed.
At least they died with their own kind, too injured to regenerate, too alive to die, at least they died with family close at hand.
But you didn't die that day, you were a million miles away, the three of you together making that impossible choice, plagued with those damning thoughts that you would carry for the rest of your lives.
You saved them, Doctor. But that's your curse. You'll never know if it worked, if Gallifrey really was saved or not. You'll live, but the Doctor is dead, and will spend hundreds of years wondering if you did the right thing.
You'll spend terrible nights thinking about it, screaming and wailing in the injustice of it all; so many false hopes, so many miscalculations and potential paradoxes. But there it hangs, Gallifrey, just out of your reach. And you'll never know, not for thousands and thousands of years.
...
So Time Lord, so Doctor, what can be said for the lone survivor when all the others are gone?
Where were you when the others were killed?
Why did you make it out and they didn't? How did you survive when all the others died?
Are you a murderer, Doctor?
Suicidal, most definitely.
But you saved it, you brilliant man- suspended it in time and locked it away, spent 4.5 billion years chipping away at the diamond wall keeping it from you.
Repeating the same cycle over and over again, finding yourself in that room, murmuring confessions to keep your murderer at bay, so many truths bitter on your tongue, why you left Gallifrey, why you never loved that world or the people on it. Why you became a Time Lord only to run away anyway.
Why you keep running endlessly, always forward never turning back.
Why you did it, oh so long ago, now. Why you destroyed it, killed them all, why you spent a hundred years regretting and a thousand forgetting. Why you regenerated into pinstripes all those years ago to save a girls life when you had killed billions of your own species without a second thought.
Redemption? Placation? To starve off the nightmares, or maybe (just maybe) that unloveable man had found someone to live for.
And always ever on that sound will ring; screams and devastation, crying and absolution. Death and terror and running, the Doctor in his TARDIS, forever the lone survivor. Always the one left behind.
But children will always cry, and whether or not you were there you will always be able to hear them; echoing in your ears forever.
You're alive, Doctor, and its worldly to feel remorse. But when you fall and die who helps you? Who comes to your aid when your world dies and your companions leave and you're left alone?
Who stops your hand when Rose is gone and the Ponds are dead and Donna doesn't remember you?
Who saves you then? Who stops you then?
Who cares about the Doctor when he can't help anymore? When he can't protect or guard or save? Who saves him when he can't save himself?
Who pays attention when you tried to burn through your remaining regenerations? Who cared when you almost took your own life all those years ago?
Time to cash in your favours, Doctor. Your world is dying. Who's coming to save you now?
You had given up on companions after the Time War. No more, you couldn't watch one more person die on your watch. Not after Gallifrey, not after the billions of children who died because of you.
Because you thought yourself a god, in control of life and death, with a button between the two to choose, to make that impossible choice, they died.
Because even then you couldn't stand to watch children cry.
The Dalek's did, but the Time Lord's with them. All gone, all dead because of you.
The Doctor who killed a planet and has felt nothing but death since.
But you'll run anyway, because you're an old, sad man who cares too much to stay anywhere for long, because that's when it hurts the most; when you have to leave them behind.
Some sneak up on you.
like Rose Tyler, like Donna Noble and Martha Jones and the Ponds.
Some see your darkness and love you anyway. Some stand by your side knowing they can't live forever, they can't stay for always, but squeeze their eyes shut and say the opposite, because they still believe in impossible dreams and fairytales coming true.
Some acknowledge their mortality and meet it bravely, some stick it out till the bitter end because they say you're worth it. Worth the monsters and the death and the pain.
But are you?
Are you worthy to be their final words?
Grow into their expectations, Doctor. Be strong even when it kills you. Hold fast to goodness and hope when all seems lost. Come when they call and never make promises you can't keep. Don't just survive, Doctor. Choose to live.
When you finally slam the TARDIS doors shut and slip into the vortex, leaving without thanks, without praise and certainly without injury- if not to you then certainly to your hearts. Every day somebody dies, and more often than not they die because of you. Alone, alone alone, lonely then and lonelier now. The man and his box, the Doctor in the TARDIS, and someone brave enough to hold him back.
...
So ask yourself this, is it worth it? Is saving one, two, three people, being selfish enough to take companions and lovers and friends with you to the ends of the earth for them to die? They'll always die, and it'll always be your fault.
Saving a person here and there because you were kind; it's how you live with yourself. Margret the Slitheen was right after all.
Rose. Taking the heart of the TARDIS within her, becoming the Bad Wolf to save your life, dying to save her and regenerating right in front of her. Scaring her, almost losing her, and loving her on stolen ground. And again, when she lost her grip and fell into the void, when you couldn't save her without killing yourself, when you loved her only to lose her just the same.
Then finding her again, losing her again. Never getting to courage to tell her you loved her, not until it was too late. Losing her to yourself, to the metacrisis Doctor, and going on alone.
Martha. Knowing her when you had already lost so much. A girl who saw beyond your downcast eyes and loved you anyway. But never again, not after Rose. You'll never love again because it hurts too much to leave them behind. And she does, she leaves you, and even though you never gave in, she breaks your hearts and once again you're alone.
Donna. She stayed with you, as a friend, (never a lover) the best friend you hadn't had since Rose. Loving you and staying with you and becoming better, a better person because of it. Saving a world, saving a family, a handful of people when you forgot that not everyone has the die. Not always. For that was a night for lost things to be found.
Losing her, wiping her memories and watching as she forgot you, dismissed you, becoming shallow and silly and normal once again when the universe owed a debt to her. Leaving her behind and regenerating alone.
Amy. The girl who waited. Amelia Pond in her nightgown saving the universe, side by side with you. She promised forever too, just like all the others before. And you believed her, because she was Amelia Pond and the universe wasn't cruel enough to steal her away from you too.
Then Rory, then River and your little family expanded and exploded and complicated. River's your wife, Doctor. She's the best thing that ever happened to you, and you'll love her one day, wait and see. Wait to meet her continually in the wrong order as you love her more and she knows you less.
And it kills you, just as she said it would. Back when the date of your death loomed over you like a reaper you knew your story was coming to an end. Because one day you'll be standing on the shores of Lake Silencio and die before you can regenerate, die because you need to, die because the universe will implode if you don't. But River's the spaceman and she'd die if she had to kill you. So you find a loophole and marry your assassin on top of a pyramid while time swirls and ticks around you. 5:02, 5:03, time ticking and beating and existing beyond the time of your death, the fixed point that was altered because your wife couldn't bear the thought of a life without the Doctor. Not now, and not ever, not ever again.
Because she River Song, that woman is Melody Pond, the daughter of your best friends, and you couldn't just stand there and watch her suffer. Watch her kill you because she needed to, no. Not now, not ever, she loves till the end and would follow you anywhere if you asked.
She's part Time Lord, Doctor. You're not alone anymore.
So remember your wedding day when you're cursed to travel in different directions. Don't give up when she doesn't know you, when she nearly lets you die in Nazi Germany. Don't hate her because she doesn't know you, but don't give the secret away, She'll love you someday, Doctor, and she'll marry you on that day that almost never came.
New York, then; the day that you lost them. Amy and Rory, Dead and gone in the world that you can never reach. Just like Rose, Doctor, history repeats itself again. But you still have River, but no more saving. No more rescuing (Not now, not ever)
They're gone too, Amy and Rory, killed by the angels and sent to the past, to the one place that you can never find them. And it kills you inside, because for a minute you were better. With them, you were still a saviour, still a Doctor, and you don't know how you can go on being the Doctor without them.
Then Clara. Your impossible girl, the girl who transcended time and space to keep you safe, the girl you forgot and moved on without. The one who saved you from yourself, from a life of selfishness and solitude, the girl who reminded you that you had survived, that you were alive, that you were important and worth it to her. Clara Oswald, the one who sailed into this world on a leaf and will never ever stop flying and twisting into your life. Oswin Oswald, soufflé girl, the one who guided you out of the asylum and died saving your life. The barmaid, the governess, that brave, brave girl who stood strong and still till the end. She was you. She will always be Clara to you, your impossible girl, the hoper of far-flung hopes and the believer in impossible dreams. The girl who saved you, the one who died for you time and time again.
The one who convinced you to keep moving, keep running and saving the universe when you had already sworn never again. The second one since Rose to stay with you through a regeneration.
Living again, dying again, the girl who jumped and fell into your time stream to save your life for all your lives, the woman who died for real and was killed by the raven. She was dead on your watch, and you spent 4.5 billion years trapped in a confession dial to bring her back. To save Gallifrey, and to save her. And when the universe threatened you with paradox you laughed before collapsing because the universe is over. and you are accountable to no one.
So she's caught (a fly in amber) suspended in time, alive (but not really) living in limbo between one heartbeat and the next. Clara and Lady Me, off to see the universe while you sit on the sidelines. It's you who forgets this time. You who doesn't remember your impossible girl sitting right in front of you, you who plays her song and tells her the story of a friend you had lost and will never see again.
But she made you the Doctor again, and you're a Gallifreyan again. Not alone, this time; you saved them after all.
Fourteen regenerations, thirteen new faces. The twelfth, now. Grey and Scottish with an electric guitar and sunglasses. The one who found it, Gallifrey, redeemed himself in accordance to his own morality and saved them. The Doctor who forgave himself, even after all this time.