Chapter Four: Destruction

The universe burned. Blood spilled like wine across the cosmos as time lines shifted, changed, and winked out of existence before his eyes. It was enough to make him mad, if he wasn't already that way. He was an old man now, and old man in a velvet waistcoat and weathered, leather jacked, watching the end of the universe.

"It is never easy, is it?"

"No, it isn't." The Doctor's words whispered through the chaos. His companion, if you wanted to call him that as he wasn't a "companion" in the strictest sense of the word, leaned against the side of his TARDIS. It, like his companion and himself, stood dusty and worn, battered by the destruction all around them. He was a man, tall, broad, the sort who looked like a soldier. His hair was the same rust color as the mountains of home, his hands blunt and powerful. But it was in his gray eyes, in his stance, that weariness that spoke to just how tired he was of the scene before him.

"Gallifrey is gone, isn't it?"

"Yes," the man said simply, but not without compassion. "Or at least it will be."

"It doesn't have to be," the Doctor countered, almost imploring.

"Do you think that these things will stop unless it is?"

The Doctor supposed they wouldn't. "The Daleks always were bloody single-minded. All the way back to Davros. I should have killed him when I had the chance."

"Would that have been the answer, really? Would one person's destruction have prevented all of this?" The man held his muscular arms wide to encompass the entirety of what had been once Gallifrey, the shining jewel. Now all that remained was pride and memories. Pride to last till the end of the universe and memories that fed it and kept it going.

"They will never give up, you know. Even now, Rassilion is planning how we will survive while everything else will…"

He drifted off, knowing the other man understood what he meant far more than he did.

"He won't succeed. Not if you don't allow him."

'But if I stand up to this, our people…everything will die!"

"And if you don't, reality itself will cease to exist." The man with his stormy gray eyes regarded him evenly. "Which would you rather sacrifice, Doctor, the entire universe or the lives of your people?"

"Neither," he shouted back, tears blurring his vision as he gazed upon his broken home. Even now, in the skies above, Dalek ships, millions of them, hovered above them all, determined to rid themselves of their greatest enemies. And in what remained of the glittering halls where once he stood before the Untempered Schism, Rassilion was prepared to lead his people to ascension as he called it, destroying and forsaking the universe that they had promised to protect.

"Why must it come to this?"

"Some things just must," replied the man. He tilted his head, the waning sunlight glittering through the copper of his ponytail. "Everything dies. Everything ends. It isn't pleasant. It just is."

"Easy for you to say. I will be the one carrying the blood guilt of two entire races on my hands."

He didn't have much to say to this.

"I had such high hopes," the Doctor side, tears aching his throat. "I wanted my life to be so much more than this. I am the Doctor. I am a teacher, a healer, a man who brings wisdom. A great man. I am not the destroyer."

"Sometimes in destruction great things are created."

"Do you honestly believe that?" He glanced at the man beside him dubiously.

"I have to. Else I too would go insane."

"How are you certain you aren't?"

"I'm not," he shrugged with a small smile. "But my sister is very fond of me and delirium and madness seem to follow in her wake."

"Perfect, I'm taking advice from someone who is quite possibly mad."

"You have to be mad to consider something like this. And yet, it must be done. Neither outcome is desirable, Doctor, but which is the lesser of two evils?"

To let the universe end while his people absorbed time itself or to burn his own planet, condemn them all to hell and lock them there forever in time so that no one could return to change it. No one would survive. Everyone he loved would be gone, his family, his children and grandchildren, for what good he had ever done them. His friends, including poor Romana, they would all disappear into the hell that he would create, never to be free, separated from the entire universe for the rest of time. And he would be left, alone.

"I will forever be remembered as the killer of worlds," he muttered, silent tears coursing down his cheeks. "The man who destroyed his own kind."

"No one said destiny meant you got to make easy choices."

"To hell with destiny," he screamed turning on the man. "I've had enough of it. Since I was a child, I've done nothing but run and where has it lead me."

"I am sorry," the other man said, a wealth of compassion and grief in his gaze. And for his part, the Doctor believed him.

"So am I," he replied, rubbing the traitorous evidence of his pain away from his face, into the sand and dust of his home. "If I am to do this, I need to do it quickly."

"You have the means," he companion asked.

"Yes." There, in his pocket, he could feel it. "Perhaps, if I'm lucky, I will go with it. Do you think I will die too?"

"I don't know. That's not my department."

"Of course." The Doctor supposed that it would be something like that. "Well, then, if I must, I shouldn't waste anymore time on this."

He wished he could stand there and remember this moment forever.

"Best of luck, Time Lord," the man called. The Doctor didn't bother to turn to acknowledge him. He knew the man would be gone.

And soon, too, would be the Daleks, his people, and his home. If he was lucky he would go with them as well.