What She Knew
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He was asleep. The first time in a month he slept. Time Lords didn't need sleep like so many other species, but even for him this was an unusually long time between naps. He had changed. Not physically, not yet, that was coming, but he had changed mentally. She could feel it, like a mother touching her child's forehead she could feel the emotional fever building.
Her vision swept upward and outward and in every direction. The universe was aflame. The time vortex was shattered and bent. She could hear the rage of the war in the distance, the screeching dictation of Daleks, the roaring rhetoric of Rassilon. The universe had gone mad.
She could extend her vision far beyond the tiny asteroid where they were currently hidden. She often did this, if only to look for hope. She had not found any hope though, just the broken bodies of her sisters, bloated and festering in the vortex, torn apart by Dalek weapons or Gothic ingenuity. Almost all of her sisters were dead now; she was one of the last of a dying breed. The remainder that survived now, that were bred in the midst of the war, were not like her or her sisters, they were feral, belligerent, uninterested in their surroundings, only interested in unsheathing their claws and tearing at a target.
She turned her attention back to him. He was turning restlessly in the chair. Tressail was where it all changed, where finally his resolve had failed him. The rage, the fury, it wafted off of him like bad cologne. It was the first time he had hurt her. He'd overcharged the plasmic shell, searing the outer surface, and released a blast of artron energy so powerful that it disabled every vehicle surrounding Tressail. Dalek saucers and Time Lord Bowships hung impotently in orbit, and he had leaned against her console as they left, and he wept, not the saddened weeping of the mournful, or the cries of the fearful, but an angry, primal, raging cry. Tears for his own failure as much as for the small broken child he'd brought with him. He wept for the passage of more than a life. He wept because he had lost his truth, the one thing that he had defined himself as.
So it was that they would land on the Eye of Orion. He had placed the child in the ground, and performed a ceremony. He returned to her once more and lost himself in her labyrinthine corridors. She could sense what he was looking for, and she tried her best to deflect him from the forbidden treasure he had kept all this time, sealed away. He was not to be deterred or thwarted and for the last month he had tinkered, twisted the forbidden thing making it more powerful, more monstrous. He was also changing her. She resisted, but he refused to be hindered by her contrivances.
They crisscrossed reality. No longer were they saving people, no longer were they helping the refugees and the dispossessed, there was no plan anymore, no machinations. In his head, she could hear the rage bellowing in his mind and she knew what was coming. The more he saw the more he became enraged. She could see it coming, the day she had hoped would never come, the day he would lose himself.
He never knew the truth about her. Never known why she was on the junk heap. She had allowed him to believe that she was there by coincidence that she was there because she had gotten old and broken and obsolescent, but that was only half of the truth. The truth was she was there because the Time Lords had placed her there; she was there because they had peered into the future and seen the war, and seen the fall of Gallifrey, and seen her at the center of it.
She'd seen the same thing that the Time Lords had, but more. She had to escape and to take him with her, so when he came she unlocked her doors and let him and his granddaughter in, and then she made her escape, and she never turned back. She knew him, better than he knew himself. She got accustomed to the families he created for short periods, his strays and orphans and the occasional silly robot. She'd watch him change his face, watched him grow old. Now she was watching him sleep.
He needed someone. This was what she knew. His friends and family acted as stabilizers for him. They kept him sane and he had been alone now for so long, centuries since that woman from Earth. His hearts had grown cold and hard and petrified. His hope was lost; buried on the Plains of the Soul. There was only one hope to bring him back from the edge he was walking towards. So she listened, and there it was, a gunship attacked by pirates and crashing. It was in the inner-temporum of Gallifrey near Karn, but she could get there.
She raised the alarm, and he roused with a jolt and looked around. He quick stepped to her console and stared at the scanner, and shook his head.
"Another one…" He said, and moved his hand towards the switch, turning the scanner off.
She would not be thwarted. She had indulged this nihilism too long. She had let him become wronged and angry and filled with rage. She re-directed the transmission to her emergency broadcast system.
"Help me! Please, can anyone hear me?" The voice of a woman came across the speakers.
He looked quizzically upwards and around himself, not entirely sure how the transmission was getting through. She displayed the ship on the holographic projection system over the console. He watched it tumble. He could hear the woman on the ship arguing with the computer. He smirked. She had him now, hooked; this version of him could never ignore a clever damsel in distress. Before she knew it, she was underway, bouncing across the vortex, leaping across space and time rushing after this mad flying rocket that was falling towards Karn. At this moment she would've said, if she could speak, that this was the first truly joyful moment they'd had in decades. He gallivanting after a woman trapped on a burning space ship, she gleefully chasing after it like some slobbering Labrador retriever. However, that was the problem with living in the moment. She should've seen it coming, being a temporally transcendent mind that encompassed all of time and space, but she was too busy being proud of herself. It was too easy to ignore the details when at the moment; her thief was smiling like a school boy.
They were closing in. Final calculations were being made to materialize within the vessel, towards the back. He was snatching his sonic screwdriver and pocketing it. She was pushing herself into the lower dimensions of the universe squeezing her enormity into the shape of a 1960s London Police Box, because well, mostly because she was stubborn and had gotten comfortable in that shape, and also because she'd forgotten what other things looked and felt like. Within minutes he was at her doors and rushing out, gallant and heroic. She had already started mapping the woman, figuring out who this new stray was, the woman was perfect….and then that's when she realized. The details flooded in, and it was too late. She braced herself as she felt the ship tip, she begged and pleaded for him to leave that woman, but she knew him too well, he would do whatever he could to save her, because he was the Doctor and he helped where he could, even if he couldn't help, he would die trying.
In attempting to avoid what would come, she had delivered her thief to his destiny. She had wired herself and her thief into the causal nexus of reality and fixed their position in history. She would lose him, to himself, to the Sisterhood of the Eternal Flame, and she would be witnessed to the most horrific disaster in the history of the universe. Within the deepest part of her matrices, the TARDIS wept.
