"Wakey-wakey, Romanadvoratrelundar. Or is it Fred? I can never remember."
She wasn't dead. Romana couldn't label this an unmixed blessing. She felt no pain. Brilliant light beat against her closed lids. She put a hand over her eyes and slit them cautiously open. "Doctor."
"Excellent! I thought you didn't recognize me."
"Is there anyone else left? I know what you did."
"I saved Gallifrey! Look, here's everyone. I cleaned up the place a little. I thought it could be a memorial to our godhood. A kind of theme park. I think that the Tomb of Rassilon would make an excellent water ride. All those pointless corridors, you know."
Hands clutched her shoulders and she felt his breath burning her ear: a hot, dry wind. The Doctor was whispering. "He's in there, you know, pretending to be dead, but I'm on to him."
She opened her eyes and found herself staring into his: golden pools of infinite light. He didn't merely contain the Vortex, he was the Vortex.
"Godhood?" Her eyes adjusted to the light and she looked around. There were other Gallifreyans wandering around dazedly. A group of Shobogans was pointing at her and the Doctor.
"It's really the only way. Destroy everything, start over again; but I won't have my people sitting around on their duffs being transcendental while I do all the work. Everyone is going to have to do their part in creating tomorrow's mistakes today. I destroyed the ENTIRE universe to save their ungrateful hides and all they do is whine and complain and I WON'T HAVE IT!"
The ground split in wide crevasses; some people fell; others fled.
Except the Shobogans, and Romana.
The Shobogans hurried to the tomb of Rassilon as if for shelter.
Romana took the Doctor's hands. They were like ice and the cold numbed her hands almost instantly.
"You've done more than anyone could have asked or expected, Doctor. Indeed, you've done too much for us."
The Doctor said modestly, "It was nothing, really. Very easy, when one is the embodiment of all of Time. Time flies, you know, and so does fruit."
The fall of heavy stone shook the ground.
"I didn't do that," the Doctor said indignantly. "It's no use blaming me."
The Shobogans had opened Rassilon's tomb.
"Would you like a banana, Romana?"
"No, thank you, Doctor. Let's go see Rassilon. I think he's stopped pretending to be dead."
Her hands were white and almost lifeless when she freed them from his and took his elbow instead. He escorted her politely over to the tomb of Rassilon and he did not wear the same face, body, or clothes for more than two steps at a time. But by his words, no matter how mad, he was still the Doctor even if only in some small struggling part of him.
"Had a nice nap, Lord Rassilon? Nothing like a few million years spent snuggled under the Blanky of Rassilon for a good sleep, I'll warrant."
Rassilon was skeletally gaunt, robed in black. His eyes were black, and his teeth were fanged. As the Black Scrolls had hinted, Rassilon was a Vampire.
"I have waited for the ending of Gallifrey. I expected that ending in many forms, Doctor, but never in yours."
"It's NOT the ending! Don't be silly, old chap! It's the beginning. We will make all things new. I know! Perhaps you and Romana could be the new Black and White Guardians."
Romana found herself white robed and power shone through her mind until there was hardly a trace of the Time Lady Companion of the Doctor and the last Lady President of Gallifrey. The old Black and White Guardians had represented concepts of chaos and order. The Doctor had changed this. Now the Black Guardian, Rassilon, represented order in the form of death and stagnation. She, the White Guardian, was chaos in the form of life and chance.
She released the Doctor's arm and joined Rassilon. "You have slain me, Doctor. There is little left of she who once loved you, but I speak in her name now. I am the White Guardian, and you are the enemy of Life, Doctor."
"You've gone bananas, Fred. I am going to make Life! I'm going to do it right—there won't be any Daleks or Cybermen or Masters in my universe. I'm in charge. TARDISes and jelly babies for everyone!"
The Doctor lifted his hands for applause.
…
He wriggled his little finger and the air filled with phantom cheers and applause.
"Must work on my delivery."
"You have committed an error, Doctor." Rassilon spoke. His dead black eyes swallowed all light.
"Nonsense. Er. What error might that be?"
A Shobogan girl came up shyly. She had a flat shard of glass in her hands and she held it up to the Doctor.
It was a mirror.
The Doctor stared at his reflection and shrank back. "No! It's a trick. That is NOT MY FACE!" The mirror shattered. The splinters drove into the girl's hands and face and blinded her. She shuddered but did not move, her blind and bloodied face still lifted to the Doctor's.
"I know what face you saw," Romana said gently. "You fought him so many times and knew how perilously alike you were becoming. Now you have achieved what he always desired. You are the Master of All."
The Doctor was silent. Gallifreyans came out of their hiding places. Time Lords, common citizens, and outcast Shobogans rubbed shoulders in the democracy of apocalypse.
"There is another way." Rassilon's voice filled the world as if carried by every shadow. "Everything ends, Doctor. The people of Gallifrey did not forego conquest all these millennia to now raise ourselves to godhood. I, forced into immortality, laid a trap for those Time Lords who sought ultimate power in death's shadow. You refused the prize once, Doctor. Do you truly want it now?"
"You want me to reverse what I did."
Romana spoke now. "Everything has its time, Doctor, and everything dies."
A man and a woman came to get the blind girl. The woman wore a knife and the man was tall and dark. The Doctor knew their faces from a past now dim.
"Leela."
"Xoanon."
"Sorry, I'm out of bananas. Maybe Fred has some." The Doctor coughed and golden light swirled out of his mouth.
"Romana, are you there? I don't feel very well."
The White and Black Guardians came to flank the Doctor.
"Romana! Did I ever tell you that you look just like Princess Astra? That's the key to this."
He threw back his head and screamed. The light of the Vortex poured out of every cell in his body. The sun, the anchor star of the constellation Kasterborous, lived up to its name and devoured itself, the Eye of Harmony, Gallifrey, and much of local space. The last Gallifreyans were swept away, made dust in the million years that passed in less than a second.
"But, Romana… I've just realized…"
"That you will survive?"
"No! Well, yes, that too, but I won't be ginger any more."
"I promise, Doctor, that when you choose, you also will end."
"Oh, that's all right, then. Whew! That's a weight off my mind. Say! What about the Daleks?"
"They may also choose. As Gallifrey has chosen."
"My head hurts. I need a Doctor."
Time convulsed. Gallifrey burned, and millions of Daleks burned with it.
A battered old blue police box rode shockwaves of unimaginable forces too strange to be called merely 'energy'. It hurtled down the newly reformed probability lines of the Vortex. Gallifrey was gone, but there was a place too familiar ever to be lost. It could find Earth with both rotors tied behind its back.
The TARDIS landed near a football stadium in Manchester.
A golden mass of energy subsided and left the last Time Lord naked as a baby on the floor. It was easy to reintegrate his body, but his mind struggled to make sense of the patterns of the recent past and found them fading as Gallifrey was torn from history. The scar in his mind and the scar in the Universe were one, but he was now too small to contain it. Other remnants of the Time War were inevitable. History might never be whole again.
It certainly needed a Doctor.
The Beginning
Ouroborous – from the Greek 'tail-devourer'
Kaster, aster, Astra – Greek for 'star'