"You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
Red sand stings in her eyes as the wind sends her hair into a frenzy, but she keeps them wide open, mesmerized by the ever-burning fires reflected in what remains of the gleaming spires of Arcadia. As she wanders through the dead city, some of the embers come dangerously close to the hem of her sky grey coat, but she pays them no mind. There's nothing more this place can do to her. Just ash and bones and pillars of smoke.
You know, back in the day, I burned an entire city to the ground just to see the pretty shapes the smoke made.
A haunting wail fills the ruins, and it takes her a minute to realize it's coming from her. It's a sound that's been hiding like sediment at the bottom of her lungs, the kind of crushing weight that's almost become a comfort in its familiarity. Because for every memory of crimson fields and silver leaves, there's a dozen more filled with charred land and ashy skies. In a terrible, terrible way, this is how things are meant to be. Gallifrey in ruins. Her home on fire.
And she's come to realize that now, hasn't she? Despite all the running, the betrayals, the 4.5 billion years of torture, this is her home, always has been. And now she can never have it back.
Broken glass crunches under her boots. She looks beyond what remains of Arcadia's dome and wonders if any part of the barn remains. She catches a glimpse of a thatched roof, but whether it's real or imagined makes little difference to her. The line she (he?) once drew in the sand is long gone by now. Maybe there never was one to begin with.
I need you to know we're not so different.
Ash scrapes her throat as she coughs up a laugh. After the Time War, there was no wreckage to sift through. At least the Master was considerate to leave something behind.
Speaking of…
She should be surprised to see him here, but after everything she's endured in these past few weeks, she doesn't have the strength for outrage. She doesn't even bother to turn and face him, can't stand the sight of him right now. So instead she lets him wordlessly stand beside her, as they take in the fallen glory of the oldest civilization in the universe. Orphans on an orphan planet.
She hears the familiar sound of his double heartbeat in time with her own, and she has to shove her clenched fists in her pockets to keep them from shaking. After everything she did to help him (her?) see reason, this is the moment he decides to stand with her. Without hope, without witness.
My reward, she thinks bitterly.
"Do you understand now?" he asks her, softer than she had expected. She doesn't acknowledge him at first, but she soon relents and glances in his direction. The fires, the rubble, none of it seems to register for him, his dark brown eyes focusing solely on her. There's madness there, like always, but something else as well, something she hasn't dared to hope for in a long time. A millennium ago, she might have called it pity.
I need my friend back.
"My history's unravelling," she tells him in a hushed voice, even though there's no one left to overhear. "There's a face I can't remember, a face I should remember, because she doesn't know that Gallifrey is gone. She's buried deep in my mind, just like the Timeless Child." Her grey coat flares out when she spins, and she's momentarily caught off guard by how they can be eye-to-eye for the first time since they were children. "Why? Why can't you tell me?"
The Master smirks, but there's less heart in it than usual. "Oh, come now, love," he drawls. "Can't cheat off me like you did at the Academy."
I think genocide gets you more than a week's suspension, she wants to bite back.
"I've been searching for you," she admits instead, before she realizes what she's saying. "For weeks I've been scanning the universe for your TARDIS, and now you're suddenly here? Why?"
The Master shrugs and folds his arms. He carries with him the familiar arrogance he's always had, but there's something in the way that he's able to mask his rage underneath such a calm facade that makes this incarnation a new type of dangerous. "Maybe I just wanted to take a trip down memory lane? Seems like you've been doing a lot of that lately. Tell me, Doctor," he continues, taking a step towards her so that their faces are just inches apart, "is it disappointing that someone beat you to Gallifrey's destruction this time around?"
She grits her teeth, refusing to take the bait, but he continues regardless. "Of course, I have to give credit where it's due," he murmurs, reaching out to fiddle with the golden chain of her ear cuff. "With Rassilon in exile, the High Council in chaos, and their precious Lord President running away like she always does? You made it too easy, love. They never stood a chance."
He takes a step back to admire her, the blinding rage of the Oncoming Storm compressed into the body of a petite young woman. Unlike this short-tempered incarnation of his, hers is a fury that simmers behind those deceptively youthful eyes, swelling to an exquisite crescendo until three… two… one….
Right on cue, her hands are wrapped around his neck, and she slams him into the glass dome of the Citadel. She thinks back to Paris 1943, her head dangling off the edge of the Eiffel Tower as he threatened to snap her neck with one hand, and she lets her slender fingers press a littleharder on his windpipe. Both of them know that he's not in any mortal danger, his respiratory bypass still minutes away from kicking in, but she nevertheless finds satisfaction in seeing his eyes bulge like a dead fish. She's been constantly underestimated in this body, both mentally and physically, and though her name is a vow to never take up arms, a dark part of her is pleased that her delicate frame still has the strength to stand up to him.
When she finally releases him, the Master falls to his knees, and when their eyes meet she knows they're both remembering the Adelaide Gallery. Perhaps he expects her to kneel again, but instead she impatiently grasps the lapels of that ridiculous purple suit he's chosen and hauls him up.
"Do not try to make me feel responsible for what you've done," she hisses, eyes wild. "I have enough sins of my own to carry."
To drive her point home, she shoves him away, but that infuriating smirk is still plastered on his face. "Oh, Doctor, if only you knew what I do, you'd be thanking me."
"Would I?" she demands. "I was once prepared to wipe out the Time Lords if it meant keeping the Time War from scorching the universe, but even then I couldn't live with myself. Had to go back into my own timestream, risk tearing a hole into the fabric of time itself, just to undo the biggest mistake of my life."
"The Council trapped you in your own confession dial for half the lifespan of the universe," the Master reminds her. "You should know better than anyone the universe is better off without them."
"I'm not talking about the Council." The two Time Lords begin to circle each other, their shoes kicking up tiny puffs of red dust clouds. "Did you even count?"
For a second, the Master's overbearing mask of confidence slips. "Count what?"
The Doctor's hazel eyes glisten like dying stars. "How many children were on Gallifrey the day you massacred it."
He scoffs, but he can't seem to bring himself to look her in the eye. "Doctor, I've destroyed hundreds of civilizations on a whim. What makes you think I'd get sentimental now?"
"You will," she whispers. "Maybe not now. Maybe not for centuries. But you'll go back. You'll count. But unlike me, you won't get a chance to make things right. The kind of paradox it took my past selves to teleport Gallifrey to the end of the universe, that can only happen once. It's gone, forever."
You are only serving at the glory of ash and bone.
"So tell me what you found," she finishes, as another gust of wind sends the hems of her trousers whipping at her ankles. "Unless you truly want to be the Last of the Time Lords, you'll tell me what was worth slaughtering the only people I've ever managed to save."
"Do you really believe you saved them? You trapped them, Doctor, left them to suffocate in a frozen moment in time like moths in a glass jar."
"I gave them hope," she bites back.
"Hope only works when there's someone who bothers to save them."
"So is that why you won't tell me about the Timeless Child? To punish me?"
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."
"Seriously? For Rassilon's sake, when did any of them tell us the truth?" She weighs her next words for a moment. "If you're really that worried about it, then show me." She takes his hand and places it near her temple, even though they know each other's minds far too intimately to require physical touch anymore. "Show me what they hid from us."
We see what's hidden, even from yourself. The outcast, abandoned and unknown….
The Master cocks his head, considering her for a moment, before pulling away. "Do you want to know how I did it? How a lone renegade managed to bring down the most advanced civilization in the universe?"
Gallifrey's second sun melts into the smoldering horizon, casting deep shadows across the Doctor's face.
"Basically, I decided to tell them a story. And there are so many stories about you. The Hybrid, the Other, the Doctor of War. But there was one more story they had forgotten. A story I imagine you haven't thought of in a long time."
He turns to face her again, and his maniacal grin is reflected a hundredfold within the shattered crystal walls. "Imagine a story so dreadful that it would send the War Council scrambling for weapons only used during the darkest days of the Time War, not to curb a Dalek invasion, but to destroy themselves before an even greater horror could descend upon the universe."
Crackling embers are the only noise to break the silence. "You're lying," she tells him, but much like Paris, the words aren't as sure as she'd like them to be. "They've imprisoned me, tortured me for information, even forced me to regenerate. They'd never blow up Gallifrey because of me. I'm just another Time Lord."
"You're wrong, though," the Master says, stepping forward to take her hands. "You and I aren't just Time Lords anymore. We've both surpassed our natural regeneration limits. And whatever regeneration energy the Council kept in reserve is here at our disposal. We can have eternity, love. It's what we deserve after all they've done to hurt us."
He presses her hands to his chest, the closest she's seen him come to tenderness, but she's heard the same proposition from him for thousands of years, and perhaps this is the point where she's finally had enough of the game.
"As if we haven't done enough to hurt each other," she sighs, pulling away. "Besides, it's not like I asked for those extra regenerations, just like I never asked to use the Moment. That was always you, not me." She pauses, crossing her arms as she feels uncertainty creep like lead in her chest. "The Time War… how do you remember it ending?"
The Master's face lights up like a child on Christmas Day. "There we go," he says, miming applause as the Doctor's blank confusion morphs into something else. "Now you're starting to get it. But, of course, the better question is: how do you remember the end of the Time War?"
She blinks, and for a fraction of a second it's her in the barn, not one but two Moments laid before her, left hand suspended over the button while her right hand slams down without hesitation.
Unlike all the other times when her former selves have collided, she remembers both viewpoints with the same startling clarity. No more-gallifrey falls-gallifrey falls no more, no more gallifrey falls no more, nomoregallifreyfalls, falls, falls, FALLS-
She cries out and presses both hands to her throbbing temples as contradictory memories do battle inside her head. This isn't how it's supposed to be, she tells herself over and over. One version of history should have faded away, like hard drive being written over. Her mind shouldn't be sustaining the paradox.
I've seen Gallifrey destroyed, twice! First by a war, second by a lunatic who I'm still trying to find.
"The Web of Time is unravelling," the Master tells her simply, unmoved by her pain. "History is fracturing, as is the future. That's why we're having memories we shouldn't have. And you know who's at the heart of it all."
"But it doesn't make sense!" she insists, crystalline towers amplifying the echo of her voice as she clenches her teeth and begins to pace back and forth. "When I saved Gallifrey, I saw all my incarnations, all my previous faces. The face I met with the Judoon, she wasn't there…."
She digs the heels of her boots into the red gravel. Neither was I.
Of course she wouldn't be there, she chides herself, the pressure in her head building. Why go back to save a planet doomed to die?
You can't be me. I know what I've done. I know my own life.
Except she doesn't, not anymore. She's interfered with her personal timeline so many times that it was bound to leave holes eventually. That's what she tells herself, anyway. Because to entertain the possibility of not just a life, but lives unknown to her, locked away inside her head along with other secrets best kept hidden….
The Doctor lives his life in darker hues, day upon day, and he will have other names before the end.
It's unthinkable. She will not entertain the thought.
But her mouth doesn't seem to listen. "No one's heard of this face before. Across the galaxy, there's not even a record of a young, blonde, female incarnation of the Doctor. Why is that? Why don't I fit into my own timeline?"
I suppose one more lifetime wouldn't kill anybody.
"Because, my dear, you never did."
And that's the final key she needs to unlock the darkest recesses of her mind. Four and a half billion years shrinks to a second in eternity as her mind is bombarded with old lives, old faces, old cycles of old faces, stretching back further than the beginning of Gallifrey at the dawn of the universe. The entirety of the Time War is but an echo of a bad dream, for she can see the never-ending destruction of the Time Lords across all of space and time. She's unable to tell if she's a soldier or a healer in it all, but in the end it doesn't matter, does it? All they do is either hasten or delay the inevitable, the inevitable cycle of dying, crawling blindly through a dark universe, and dying again. It's so pathetic when laid before her all at once. Even the Time Lords managed to achieve nothing more than twelve rehearsals for when the golden light finally sputters out and the darkness drags them back again.
I'm not a human being; I walk in eternity.
All these people here, they're like smoke; they blow away in the moment.
I have seen things you wouldn't believe! I have lost things you will never understand!
Sometimes I think a Time Lord lives too long.
Everything has its time and everything dies.
Well, everything except for me, of course, she thinks wryly, as electrical impulses that outnumber the Time Lord matrix explode behind her eyes.
She turns to her friend, her oldest friend in the universe, and for a second he's elated that she finally, finally understands, but then he pauses, uncertain if he does.
"Doctor?"
When the Valeyard smiles, it's like lightning tearing a gash in a pitch-black sky. "The Doctor's indisposed, I'm afraid. Now," she breathes, eyes glinting with not just the fires on Gallifrey, but all the many fires to come, "why don't you call me by my name?"
"Doctor. Doctor!"
The three humans wince as the Doctor smacks her head on the underside of the TARDIS console, but the Time Lord doesn't seem to register any pain. "Sorry, Yaz, must've spaced out for a sec." She straightens up and starts flipping random switches with a manic frenzy, golden hair swishing across her face. "What do you need?"
Yaz takes a deep breath. "Back on the observation deck, when that creep showed us our worst nightmares… what did you see?"
The Doctor winces, and for a second she's tempted to shut down, lie, run away like she's become accustomed to doing. But she feels three sets of human eyes drilling into the back of her neck and knows their patience with her is wearing thin. The cracks are too wide to ignore. After weeks of running, perhaps she's finally short of breath.
"Not sure you lot would understand," she says lightly, keeping her eyes resolutely fixed on the console. "Time Lord psychology's a tad different from humans, after all."
"We know." Yaz's voice is soft and tired, tired of chipping away at the Doctor's walls. "But you're shaken up about it, just like the rest of us. Talking helps, that's all."
The Doctor sighs, because she's trying to be kind, they all are. They're nervously stretching out their hands, not knowing a dark chasm of eternity stretches between her and them. You don't know me, she remembers, regretting the tone but not the meaning. Not even a little.
"You all dreamed about death, in one way or another," the Doctor begins, treading carefully so that she doesn't give the impression that their fears are insignificant to her. "I get that. I've felt that, each time I've regenerated, because it's always like one Doctor dying so that another one can be born. So you see, I don't see death the same way you do."
"So if you're not scared of dying, what are you afraid of?"
The Doctor raises her eyes, and for the first time, much to her horror, Yaz can see in them a pinprick of darkness stretching backwards into her skull, into eternity.
"Living."