25

Mount Weather, Virginia.

He landed his ship, smoking and screeching and fighting him all the way, within the most secret room of that most secret underground city, concealed by tonnes of granite and a five-foot-thick front door. He landed slap bang in the middle of the most jealously guarded location in the world.

A place where one could comfortably survive a nuclear holocaust.

The TARDIS sat at the centre of the official room, where official authority figures panicked. The room where they debated and schemed.
Where they finally sent signals to their missiles to launch, to track, and to blow the living Hell out of the unfortunate country which had decided to start the fight.

He paced almost sedately to the complex of computers, unchecked, unchallenged.
Of course, who would think to guard a room that was already surrounded by an impregnable fortress?

His lips curled, and he drew his sonic screwdriver to breeze past the security systems. Even when they noticed, they wouldn't stand a chance.
Not with their inferior technology.

Five minutes later, he had set a course for every warhead in America that could fly. A few thousand to each nation would do the trick, aimed mostly at cities and towns. He'd let them go in groups, gradually – give the recipients some time to retaliate with missiles of their own, and wipe out this land and all of its inhabitants in turn.

This was the fell swoop. This was the packed punch.
And then – he would make it his personal business to hunt down every rural village, every forest tribe and every lucky traveller who had happened to survive – and exterminate them through whatever means necessary. He would leave no stone unturned. This world would pay in full.

I raised my head from a pool of something sticky.
I touched it, held it close to see.
Blood. My blood.

"Doctor," I mumbled as the ground tilted away from me and I hauled myself to my feet.
The air curled with smoke. Sparks flew intermittently from the console. And the door was open.

"Doctor!" I forced my quivering knees to bend and propel me towards his vague silhouette. "What's happening?!"

Like lightning he turned, his velocity making my stomach churn with giddiness.
At that moment, alarms began to go off. Higher, louder, more insistent even than the cloister bell. Coming from outside the ship.

I saw the room, I saw the computers. My vision began to sharpen with the adrenaline rush, and I made out the complicated diagrams, the lines of indecipherable text on those innumerable screens. With a strangled cry I half-guessed at what he was doing, and made to leap at him, to stop him, with whatever strength I prayed would come to me.

I never got to him. The green of his screwdriver flashed, and the TARDIS doors snapped shut against me.
"NO!" I launched myself at them, wobbling dangerously as my head pounded with the blood that poured down my temple. "NO!"

She wouldn't open to me, which could only mean one thing.
She was protecting me from certain death.
He would murder me outright.

I tried to scream so that he could hear over the alarms, their clamour clogging my own ears hopelessly.
"DOCTOR! DOCTOR!"

No words I could force on him would make a difference anyway. I had been inside his head. I knew the intensity of that tempest, I knew what Skaro meant, and I knew that he was bent on one thing, chased by memories, whipped by guilt and self-loathing, driven on by bloodlust for vengeance.

His vision was veiled. He only saw that part of his past.

There was nothing I could do.
Nothing I could do…
But –

With a sudden shock of movement I bounded to the console, bellowing with all my might at the TARDIS to switch on the scanner, to turn on any speakers that I hoped to god had been installed.

"VOICE INTERFACE!" I yelled, "I NEED YOU TO MAKE HIM HEAR US!"
"Voice interface enabled." The hologram fizzed into existence. "Speakers enabled."
"DOCTOR!" I cried again, aloud, to the room at large, to him.

On the monitor that I pulled around to face me, an image of him working away at the computers blurred into view.

He was striding to and fro, pointing the screwdriver at one screen and another, and another. Furiously his arm swung and snapped in the air. He barely flinched at my voice echoing over the sirens. Didn't even turn his head. For one heart-stopping moment I was absolutely certain that this wasn't going to work.

"Doctor, I forgive you," I said.

He paused, shoulders stiffening and raised as though to fend off a physical attack.
I wanted to throw my arms around those shoulders. I would have held him even as he strangled me to death.

"It wasn't your fault and you didn't deserve this. You're not what you think you are." I stumbled, trying to find the words. "There's been so much more than the War and you need to see it. You can't go on without knowing. I have it all, here, I can show you everything. The TARDIS can tell you. The TARDIS has records of everything that's ever happened to you. Don't you want to know why you risked so much to save us? Why Earth was so important?"

He jerked violently and I knew I had hit the wrong nerve.
His arm shot back up. The computers whirred in a frenzy of action as he bombarded through their security.
I had lost him.

"NO! Voice interface, tell him! Tell him that he loved us! Tell him why!"

The hologram gazed back at me with a look of such despair and loss that the tears sprang from my eyes and mingled with the blood dripping from my chin.
She couldn't give an answer so complex, so infinite, as it needed to be. She knew he wouldn't listen, wouldn't understand.

"Launch in, sixty, seconds," barked out a cool female voice. The missiles.

"TELL HIM!" I screeched, banging my fists off the panels in a desperate fury, throat ripping with the sound, chest heaving with sobs that came from nowhere.

The end of the world the end of the world the end of the world, and I've failed them, I couldn't do it, I couldn't do what he always did.

"I can't," his translucent image replied.

Grief surged over me, submerged me, and at the same time an all-consuming fury that I had never dreamed of.
I was angry. I was angry for them. For the people who didn't want to die.

"NAME THEM." the words tore gutturally from me. "NAME THOSE PEOPLE HE LOVED. NAME THE LAST FIVE PEOPLE WHO TRAVELLED WITH HIM, GO ON!"

On the monitor's image, he had turned around to look at us. He was stock still. I couldn't make out his face.
Was it the blood or the salt water that was flooding so heavily down to my neck?

Through vision that was beginning to glaze over again, I looked to the hologram.
It was smiling at me. It was beaming. An ethereal light seemed to uplift its features until it was blinding and angelic.

"Amy Pond," it said in triumphant tones. "Rory Williams. River Song. Rose Tyler. Donna Noble."

I felt the bottom of my stomach disappear and my insides fall away into nothingness.
My hands clenched around the monitor were clammy.
There was a moment when I felt that the entire Universe had stopped to look at me.

"Donna Noble?" I choked. "Donna Noble?"
The Doctor stood in speechless thought on the screen, filled with his own revelations.

But it barely mattered. It barely mattered at all. Because the most incredible sensation had taken over my body.

"Donna Noble?" I repeated once more. "Mom?"

He heard. Over the alarms he heard that word, and took a step back.

"Launch in, thirty, seconds."

His hand trembled before lifting the sonic screwdriver to the computers once more.
Shaking myself out of what must be – must be a dream – I darted to the TARDIS doors, and they unlocked at my will.

He glanced back at me, once, daring to break his concentration.
His cheeks were dashed with tears.

There was an awful grinding noise, a high-pitched squeal riddled with technology. The workstation was straining under some immense pressure. The screwdriver buzzed and zipped. His wrist vibrated with the effort.

"Your mother," he called over his shoulder in a broken voice, "was Donna."
"She was – she was one of your friends?!"
"I remember her now."

Another crunching whine from the machines.

"What are you doing?" I screamed.
"Preventing the worst mistake of my whole life. I'm reversing it."

I gaped like an idiot, while the blood soaked down to the bottom of my shirt. Then, sure enough –

"Launch terminating. Launch terminating. Warning. Warning. System, failure."
"WHAT'S HAPPENING?"
"It's trying to stop twenty thousand missiles at once!"

"Twenty thousand? The US only has five thousand!"
"Not in nineteen eighty-nine they don't! Apparently I was feeling extravagant. The whole thing's in overdrive, anyway!"

Simultaneously the fact rang out. "Launch terminating. All systems, in overdrive. Warning. System, failure."

"WILL IT MANAGE TO STOP THEM?"
"I can support it! But there's going to be some fireworks!" he called back.

His voice was so odd. He sounded almost jubilant, ecstatic, thrilled. He sounded like the Doctor.

It hit me, in that moment, that he didn't mean tame fireworks.
He meant that the whole place was going to go up. The muscles in his arm, taut and trembling, told me as much.

"Can you get out in time?" I yelled.
One more glance in my direction, and a small, sorry smile.
"I'm afraid not."

Gravity made strange shapes and I found myself falling against the doorframe. Nothing would stay still.
I looked down at my clothes which were red, all red, and felt a sigh leaving me.

He almost broke his position to rush to her – almost broke his concentration – but managed to steady himself in time.
She was still standing. That was the important thing. And she was strong. Didn't he know it.

Her eyes fluttered open again and she pulled herself upright through sheer force of will. That's my girl.

It was all so clear now. The rage, the fire, had been extinguished at just the drop of a hat – at the drop of five names.
Everything he had ever worked for, everyone he'd ever cherished. He could name them all.
And Donna, incandescent amongst their faces, smiling on him with a warmth he thought he'd never feel again.

"There's something you have to know about Donna!" he shouted over the spluttering alarm bells.
"What is it?"
"She explains everything about you. Sarah," he laughed out of pure disbelief, "your mother was a Time Lord."

He could see the sparks beginning to burn at the edges of screens. The wave was coming fast.

"YOU NEED TO GET OUT OF HERE!" he bellowed suddenly, making her jump.
"I AM NOT LEAVING YOU!"
"YOU HAVE TO. YOU'LL DIE."

"SO WILL YOU, IN AN EXPLOSION!"
"ONLY MAYBE!"

He couldn't help but twist around, just one last time, to take her in. To grin impishly at her.
To let her know that everything would be fine, whether he survived or not.

Her image, framed by the blue of the ship, stood out like a splash of vivid scarlet against the bleak backdrop of the room.
He felt a jolt of terror as he finally noticed just how much blood – and he had done that, he had caused that, and – it was a horrifying amount of blood.

Would she make it?

"GO!" he roared, "GO! Find a hospital! She'll take care of you!"

"I love you," came the last reply, so faint he almost didn't hear.

The TARDIS doors slammed shut, and then the whirring, grinding noise carried her away from him.
She left the brakes on too.

The explosion was sparking up like a breath inhaled before a sigh. Before the storm. Before the blast.

"Launch terminating," spat the computers. "Launch terminating."
"Please," he closed his eyes and prayed. "Please."

"Launch… terminated."

Success rippled through him with the wave of searing heat that burst from the complex. He felt the ground beneath him shifting and then disappearing entirely as he was lifted off his feet by the explosion.

Fire and shrapnel enveloped him.

He didn't open his eyes.

I held the bunched up cloth to my forehead and worked furiously at the keyboard, gulping down air, barely keeping my head above the surface of consciousness. The ship's heart writhed against my commands, squealing and scraping loudly.

"No," I growled furiously as I wrenched the space-time throttle. "We are waiting for him."

Finally, it consented to land on the mountainside thirty seconds after the explosion, standing precariously out on a flat ledge.

I didn't even bother to check the external scanner as the noises came to a halt.

"DOCTOR!" I flung the doors wide, still clutching the quickly darkening material to my head as I scrambled on three limbs across the rocks, fighting nausea, fighting unconsciousness. "DOCTOR!"

It wasn't hard to miss. The caving hole in the slopes betrayed the spot where the room was, where the explosion had broken through the granite, fragments still crumbling into the gap. I stumbled along, gasping out his name at every other breath, my heart throwing itself against my ribs with a speed that crippled my limbs and blurred my vision.

Finally I stood at the mouth of that small recess, waiting for him to emerge, to speak, to stem the tears that hurled themselves down my face and the panic that clawed its way up my throat.

I waited.

His name echoed down into the blackness of the hole.

I waited.

My own voice echoed back to me, but not his.

I waited.

An eternity slipped by as I slowly realised that he wasn't coming back.

I didn't dare to lower myself through the gap.
If I fell I wouldn't get up again. If I saw him… I wouldn't get up again.

The thought alone was beginning to drive me to a frenzy, gnawing away at my stomach as I stood there and refused to believe he was gone. I looked down, and realised that the blood on my hand wasn't from my head. It was from where I had bitten into the skin, from the crescent-shaped puncture wounds. It welled up and dripped from my fingertips.

I stared at it, because if I didn't concentrate on all that red life that was draining out of me, if I didn't keep my focus entirely on those crimson beads, I would tumble into the endless abyss and never emerge again. The abyss at my feet, both physical and otherwise. There was nothing, nothing in the Universe, but myself and this last image that I clung to.

My eyes, unmoving, stung with concentration.

I didn't quite feel the rock against my knees, or the sensation of my body slipping some way down the mountainside. My mind was light and adrift, and after a while somewhat beautiful. The sun glowed over the scene as though it was any other day, in any other place. The thin atmosphere tugged at my lungs and made them wheeze.

It really was a Heaven, all the way up here.

As the last of my consciousness ebbed from me I forgot him. I forgot everything except the sky, and soon enough even that was fading.

In the final moments of uncomprehending wakefulness, strange and wonderful shapes began to wind lazily across my eyes against that azure blue… a golden, gorgeous luminosity, like the marks burnt into your vision after the waving of a sparkler on bonfire night.

The angels are here, I thought with a last surge of pure joy. The angels have come for me.

The light was all around him, blazing from his blackened skin and purifying everything. His exposed flesh began to knit back together, his bones resetting, his arms regrowing. He flexed his new fingers, and could feel his face reassembling itself.

He staggered through that hole, out into the cool air of the day, out onto the mountainside.

There she was, crumpled on the rocks just metres below.

Unmoving.

"No," he threw himself down after her, emitting a choked snarl, "no, no, no! SARAH!"

A faint smile stood out against the gore smeared across her cheek and matted in her hair.

He grabbed at her with golden-glowing hands, hauling her into his fiery arms as the cries came from him uninhibited.
Donna's daughter. Donna's daughter. Dying in his arms. After everything she'd done.

The most important woman in the Universe. Just like her mother.
Just like her mother.

His jaw slackened, lower lip trembling uncontrollably, as he clasped her body to his radiant chest and watched his light flowing over her.

"I love you," he said.

Then he tilted her blank expression up to his own, cradling her heavy head in his hand – hadn't she once held him this way? – and with a small intake of breath, sealed his mouth over those faintly smiling lips.

A struggle – a jolt – and then it seemed to rush out of him and into her limp and frail form.

He opened his eyes to see the golden rays pouring into her, illuminating her from within. She was unearthly, and beautiful, the most beautiful creature he had ever seen. He wanted to flood all of his life into her, every last ounce. The urge was so strong, to give himself over to her utterly.

But he reigned himself in, and forced himself to measure, to count out the precious regenerations that he gifted her with.

Sarah Noble. The daughter of a Time Lord.
Saved and made whole by his power.

It was time.

He broke away, his eyes grazing over her figure, lit up with his vital energy, ready to detonate, to carry her with the force of a tidal wave into her new regeneration. Their new regeneration.

He smiled, and held her close against him. He had done this once before – transmitting his energy into another entity. Last time it had produced a duplicate Doctor and caused Donna to transform. This time it was just the two of them, he and his companion, and both would keep their faces, their identities. Nothing would change.

Well. Almost nothing.

Instinctively he reached up to touch the back of his own head, where the Soul was being dissolved inside him.
Gone. Gone forever.

He was himself again.

The inevitable blast of light and colours danced around them as their bodies expelled the excess energy.

Her wounds were gone. The blood was gone. She looked fresh and incandescent as the first day of summer.

And at that moment, her eyes opened.

He didn't bend to kiss her again, knowing that the process might be interrupted – but he pressed his palm to her cheek, fingers curling through her hair, and let his tears soak into her shirt wordlessly.

She murmured his name just once, before unable to bear it any longer, he pulled her up and threw his arms around her, his face buried in her collar.

Her loose grip increased as the sobs erupted from her chest, her hands finding his back, his neck, his hair, his arms, not knowing where to settle. Finally she clasped his head between her palms and drew him back to look into his eyes.

"It's you," she said blankly. "It's you. Doctor. You're healed. It's gone."
"Yes. It's gone."

He admitted it, admitted to the centuries of memories that had settled once again upon his shoulders, a million burdens to bear, a universe of unspeakable sorrows wedged in his heart. But it was alright.

As long as she held him, all of that was alright.

She drew him close and kissed his forehead tenderly, pressed her own against it, her eyes closing softly over.
Utterly safe, utterly trusting, in his care, in his keeping. The man who not ten minutes ago could have killed her in cold blood.

All over now.

They stood for what felt like a moment and an eternity.
He could almost feel the thoughts coursing through her, and knew that they were like his thoughts.
Time, space, she saw them all as he did. She saw the cosmos with a Time Lord's eyes. She saw him as he ought to be seen.

"People will be arriving," she whispered at last. "We ought to get the TARDIS away."
"Yes."

A pause.

"The first thing I need is a really long hot bath."
He laughed aloud. "I think that's a realistic goal, as long as her circuits haven't blown."
"I hope not."

For a minute they simply couldn't let go. They clung to one another like survivors out at sea, rocked by violent tides.
Then, finally, her hand found his and she squeezed comfortingly.

He opened the door for her,
they stepped inside,
and just like that,

two Time Lords were off to see the Universe.

The End.

(But if pushed I may write you an epilogue in which Sarah takes her new boyfriend to meet her mother... imagine the possibilities.)