Gallifrey is Gone, a doctor who fanfic

A/N: I tried my best to get all the Classic Who references correct, but as I have watched all of two of the Classic episodes, I had to hope that the TARDIS wiki and the Classic Who fanfiction I've read were all faithful to the original series – please point out any inconsistencies!

This is a bit of an experiment in POV and tense – please give me a heads-up if any of it is unclear.

Gallifrey is gone.

The emptiness echoes in the back of your mind, the gentle susurration of mental voices that had always been there is now a void that threatens to drown you.

Gallifrey is gone.

Not that your piloting was anything to boast about before, but navigating the Vortex is so much harder without the Fixed Eye of Harmony and the stationary Web of Time.

Gallifrey is gone.

There are rooms in the TARDIS dead and unlit, doors locked and half-melted into the walls, a whole section of the console you will never touch, because –

Gallifrey is gone.

You know your memories of before are fading, the tapestry of time they were woven through now shredded because –

Gallifrey is gone.

Where there used to be a trillion voices, now there is only one, and that one is screaming – always screaming – that –

Gallifrey is gone.

Gallifrey is GONE.

GALLIFREY IS GONE.

The fact of the absence is so sharp that you don't realize how much you are forgetting until Sarah walks into the school you are investigating and you find that you have to think and think hard to remember which incarnations of you she traveled with. The introduction the headmaster gives throws you off as well – you recognize the name, of course, it did ring a bell – but you are shocked to find that you only remember Sarah Smith, and Jane was lost into the aether. It's why you keep calling her Sarah Jane afterwards, though you never had before.

You meet K9 again, a machine dog you have no memory of until Sarah Jane brings you to him. You spend much longer than you should have to repair the rather simple 51st century machinery because you are learning the operating system from scratch – even though you suspect you built K9 yourself, just by how familiar the basic design is.

Later, after the Krillitanes are defeated, after leaving Sarah Jane with a brand new K9 you hurriedly built from scraps in the TARDIS, after Rose and Mickey turn in for the night, you sit in the console room and wonder –

Gallifrey is gone. How much did Gallifrey take from you when you Locked Her away?

You find that you can remember nothing at all about Leela, except her name and her knife. You think she stayed on Gallifrey, but this is more deduction than memory.

Jamie and Zoe are names only. You eventually recognize Jamie's timeline woven through Earth's 18th century when you are stranded there (then) for a few hours with Reinette Poisson, Madame de Pompadour – when you strained constantly to see the strands of time, trying desperately not to panic about walking the slow path. It is this which tells you that Jamie and Zoe were not actually left on Gallifrey – but you must have brought them there at some point, nothing else could explain why you do not remember anything.

You know Romana had a longer name, you know that you've seen her wear at least three different faces, you know she was Lady President for a very long time – but you remember none of it. All you remember is the Matrix Crown and the way her hands trembled as Rassilon took it from her.

You don't remember much of your First Life. What little you know about that time, about those first four hundred years or so, is, at best, a memory of a memory of a memory. You have lived for so very long, you think that it has been like this since before the War – but you cannot quite believe it. You suspect you remember so little because so much time was spent with people who were removed from the universe when you shut Gallifrey away.

You cannot remember if Ace had any other name – you are sure she does, but it's only a feeling, not a memory. Other than that, you remember quite a lot about her, about the time storm, about Fenric, about the baseball bat and the Dalek, so she should never have ended up on Gallifrey. But you are still afraid to look for her, since you also remember Ace saying she wished to travel through time on her own and you remember telling her about the Academy.

You know that a large part of your Third Life on Earth was spent thwarting someone but you do not remember who. You suspect it is someone from Gallifrey, but you do not even remember the details of those particular adventures, much less any identifying characteristics of the villain.

You discover a hundred thousand holes in your memory, until your mind reminds you more of Swiss cheese than anything else, and you stop searching your mental landscape because you are afraid.

Gallifrey is gone. And She took most of your past with Her.

You remember the Master only after he locks you out of the TARDIS and the TARDIS whispers/wonders in your mind that this Time Lord essence is familiar – so very familiar. He demands you use his name – he should be thankful the TARDIS managed to communicate her own memories of the Master to you in the midst of weeping/shrieking about what the Master will-do/has-done to her.

In the end, when you refuse to kill the Master, refuse to condemn him, it is not because you and he are the last, the only ones outside the Lock. It is not because there is now a second voice in the dark void of your mind – you have enough difficulty ignoring your own madness, you do not need his. It is not even because you were friends when the two of you were children – he and you have spent far too long fighting each other.

Rather, it is because there are so many holes in your memories that are filled now, your past is a hair more complete than before. And you are absolutely terrified that if the Master dies, not only will you lose the memories from before the War and the Lock, you will also lose all that happened afterwards.

When he dies, when he refuses to regenerate, you weep and wait for the memories to seep away.

The old memories of the Master from before the War – they burn to ash with his pyre. The new memories of the Paradox are hardier, but they too begin to fade.

Gallifrey is gone. And She will make sure you suffer the consequences of Her disappearance.

You don't know when exactly your knowledge of Time Lord technology and culture begins to disappear.

When you sit in the alley of New-to-the-power-of-fifteen York, and describe to Martha what Gallifrey looks like, you find a gap – you have forgotten how the glass dome around the Citadel functioned. You keep speaking, describing the suns, the grasses, the mountains, even as you cast your mind back to the night after the Krillitanes. That was the last time you catalogued your memory, and you know that, while Rose and Mickey slept that night, you still knew what Gallifrey looked like, you still knew how to use the Crown of Rassilon, you still knew the traditional dress of a Time Lord, you still knew the molecular structure of that dome. Sitting before Martha, you know none of that, and all you remember is that, once upon a time, you used to remember.

Even the Master's reappearance doesn't fill in these particular gaps.

And later, you stand over a girl with two hearts, listening in blank fascination to a double heartbeat. You let Donna's voice wash over you, babbling about how the girl belongs with you, because the girl is a Time Lord too, while you reach into the shadows of your mind, reaching for the knowledge that was there while you sat in the alley of New-times-fifteen York with Martha – and all you find is void. Where once there was a list of differences between Time Lord and Gallifreyan, between Time Lord and human, a description of what you must do to become a Time Lord – now there is nothing.

You snarl at the girl that a Time Lord is a code, a shared history, a sum of knowledge that is gone forever now – you say that she is only an echo of a Time Lord.

You do not say that you are only an echo of a Time Lord as well.

Later, when the Master returns for a second time, when Gallifrey itself looms in the sky, the only thing you can think of is the only thing you never forgot, not even for an instant –

Gallifrey is gone, changed into a Nightmare during the War, and you will mourn Her forever.

And then you stand before Rassilon, and it isn't only indecision over how to stop the Lock from breaking that keeps you staring and gasping for air.

You stare at a costume that should be familiar, that you know you have worn before. And yet based on your shredded memory, you could swear that you have never seen such a strange get-up in your life.

You stare at the newly resurrected Master and you know that you know this man, and all his previous incarnations. And the feeling of new/old memories surfacing due to the Master's presence and simultaneously being erased by the Lock's proximity nearly makes you vomit.

You stare at Rassilon and the four Time Lords who came with him and you think you can feel your lost memories seething in the light behind the Five, still trapped behind them in the Lock. You stare and the only thing that fills your mind is that no matter how you wish you had your lost memories (and how dearly do you wish! You know those memories Locked with Gallifrey are good memories, because all the memories you hold now are the bad) your not-yet-lost memories shriek that the good times are a small price to pay.

Then the Lock cracks.

A Time Lady hiding her face lowers her hands.

You are blinded suddenly by a deluge of all you lost –

– RomanadvoratrelundarLeelaSusanForemanCampbellZoeHeriotDorothyGaleMcShaneTheRaniJamieMcCrimmon –

– so many names and memories, compressed in an instant and you can't sort through the memories quickly enough to remember who is that Time Lady –

– and the Time Lady looks beyond you in one silent forgiving gesture –

You turn and destroy the link. The memories vanish. The Lock tears Gallifrey away. The Master disappears. You survive.

But not for long.

Gallifrey is gone. And She will do Her best to take you with Her.

Later – four months, a few hours, twelve years, five minutes later – you stand before an alien ship that projects a hologram of every villain that has ever tried to take the Earth – and there is more than one that you do not remember – but you console yourself with the fact that you never live your life in order, and it's highly likely that what has happened for the Atraxi is yet to happen for you.

And if not, you'll get used to the holes in your memory.

Gallifrey is gone. From the very fabric of the universe, and from your mind. Forever.

Later, you pick a glowing box out of space, and you stare in mild incomprehension at the white-lit cube. When Amy and Rory ask, you open your mouth to say you have no clue what it is, no idea whatsoever –

– then you see the Ourobouros carved on one side and the voice trapped within the box screams and the Corsair blooms in the shadows of your mind – a hundred chance meetings write themselves into the blank pages of your memory before the War –

You babble about psychic containers, emergency messages, tattoos, changing genders in regeneration, letting all of your newly regained memories stream from your lips, because the moment you set the hypercube down to dance around the console, you can feel the new/old memories begin to evaporate, like so much fog beneath the rising sun. By the time you step outside the TARDIS doors, you've already lost everything except the idea that there is a Time Lord here, and the here-again-gone-again name of the Corsair.

Amy asks later why you are searching for these Time Lords, asks if you are looking for forgiveness. The answer: of course you wish to be forgiven. You wish forgiveness from these still-untainted Time Lords who stayed away from the End when all the others were driven to worse horrors than anything the Daleks ever did. You wish forgiveness from the Time Lord Council who were willing to commit unforgiveable atrocities and tear the universe apart. You even wish forgiveness from Gallifrey Herself, to be allowed to remember again. (And you know that you've gone completely mad yourself, when you begin to see the natural consequences of a TimeLock as the punishment inflicted on you by a planet that isn't even sentient in its own right.)

Later, after House is driven out, after the TARDIS is the TARDIS again, after Amy and Rory go to their brand new king-sized bed, you take the packaged screams of hundreds of Time Lords from your bigger-on-the-inside pockets. And every glowing box you touch becomes a hypercube and brings forth a hundred thousand flashes of sight-sound-smell that scrawl multi-colored across the dark blank expanse of your memory. And every hypercube you set down becomes just a glowing box and a magic eraser is dragged across your mind.

Gallifrey is gone. The Time Lords are gone. And you will never be allowed to remember either.

– – – – –

An epilogue of sorts:

You will be in your Twelfth Life, and your new Earth companion from the late 21st century will not believe you are not human, and to convince her, you will reach for the memories of who and what you are

and you will find nothing

"Well? What kind of mutant are you, then?" she will ask in a teasing voice.

"I'm a Time Lord," you will say to her, because you vaguely remember using the words to refer to yourself in previous Lives.

"Oh?" she will say, raising an eyebrow to show her utter lack of amazement. "And what exactly is a Time Lord?"

Again, you will reach for the memories, and again, you will find nothing. Just a void that echoes endlessly with three words in a language you will swear you used to know, once upon a time.

Gallifrey galuena vol'taras.

"I don't know," you will answer, and you will begin to babble to try to drown out the susurration of a gently undulating lament.

Gallifrey galuena vol'taras.