"The winds howled at hundreds of miles per hour, blowing in every direction, sweeping up everything in their paths and encouraging the fires." The Master had lead the Doctor through to the nearest bathroom and sat him on the toilet seat while he started running a sink of lukewarm water to tend to his cuts. As soon as the Doctor began talking it was clear his mind left the TARDIS and was sucked back into the Time War, his expression was empty, his voice the same. "The fires were everywhere, worse than any fire you will ever have seen. Time Lords were turned to ash within a second of being touched by those fires. They barely had time to voice their screams before their death and their remains were swept away by the winds. Those unlucky enough to survive any length of time in the War walked around with the ashes of their family members and friends blowing in their face at every moment without pause. Every step was a death trap, the fires, landmines and where there wasn't fire there was ice. Sometimes both. It is impossible for fire and ice to coexist and yet the Time War seemed to be defying all the laws of the universe. There was no one to tell the hail storms that in a city so hot from burning that it was impossible for ice to fall from the sky because fall the ice did. Hail stones with the size and power to kill and they did kill. So many deaths because of fire and ice."
The Doctor didn't blink, he didn't move at all, except to subconscious jump as the Master gently ran a damp cloth over his back. Otherwise he just stared into the empty space of the TARDIS not really seeing it there, not seeing the Master, not seeing anything, just talking. "Words cannot describe the dread and fear felt when walking through the first city I saw like this. It was Axtrica, the town in which I had grown up and that was the worst part. Mostly I could detach myself from the fact that it was Gallifrey, my planet that was burning and just concentrate on fighting and surviving but not there. When I left Gallifrey I thought I no longer held any sentiment with it but my hearts broke properly for the first time when I saw the devastation of that town. It was my home, my childhood reduced to fire and ash and death. How many wars have you fought in?" He didn't wait for an answer, he didn't even turn to the Master when he asked this, he barely even seemed aware that he was asking a question "I guarantee none would come close to the horrors of this one. Even that word, 'horror', is too small, too inadequate to really describe it. As I said there are no words, not in old Gallifreyan or any language of the universe."
He winced slightly as the cloth went over a particularly painful cut. The Master stopped moving the cloth and waiting for the Doctor to continue and after just a short moment he did, "Every Time Lord I came across was the same as I was, fighting with everything that had in a desperate attempt to survive while silently wishing and hoping and even praying for death. They didn't say it, of course, no solider would say such a thing, Gallifrey would've fallen so much quicker had they said it, but it was written in their eyes. Each one a mirror image of myself. Even children. No one should be living in such danger, in such terror that ever moment they long for death but children just made it so much worse. Children clinging to their parents or whoever they could find because often their parents would have died to save them, just clinging to whoever because they needed some sort of safety but their petrified eyes said that they knew they wouldn't find it." subconsciously he put his arms out as if so hold a child close to him. "Their eyes, their tiny arms attached, the dried tears on their faces spoke of broken hearts and terror and screamed for a way out no matter what that way was. It removed hope. Children were the future of Gallifrey, they would run and rebuild the planet when the War was over. If the War ever ended because no one could see an end. If there was no hope in the children what hope was there for the planet? I saw none, I saw the Time War from every angle, I fought from every position and it only even got worst never better. No one saw hope, no one could see a way out."
His arms dropped limp and his eyes closed, the Time War continued to play out in his mind "And it changed us, it completely ruined us. Wars do that. We lost who we were, what we stood for, everything, because I spoke of fire and ice and landmines and there's times when I think that was the nicer edge. No, not nice, the Time War didn't have a nice edge, but I think fire was a better way to go because it was one touch. One touch and it was over, no coming back, no regenerating, just death. It was the controlled areas that were worse, my town and others like it were abandoned, just left to burn. Nothing could be done to save them and so no one even bothered to try. No one cared enough to try and help a few helpless towns. They had bigger worries. The Time Lords changed, the change in them terrified me but mostly because I saw the same change in myself. They would've done anything to survive, they fought and killed and tortured. Oh Rassilon, the torture. They were as bad as the Daleks, maybe worse because the Daleks always were like that. It was no surprise that the Daleks tortured and killed and waited for us to regenerate just so they killed us again, but when the Time Lords did? There was no chance Gallifrey could survive with that. They were paranoid, completely and utterly paranoid, they didn't trust anyone."
"They?" The Master asked, his voice was quiet, almost nervous about interrupting, worried the Doctor would stop explaining and he needed this explanation. The drums were loving it, they became quieter and steadier as the Master lost himself in the image the Doctor was painting. He stopped what he was doing as the cloth he was using became too soaked with blood and waiting for the Doctor to start talking against before getting a new one.
He didn't have to wait long. The Doctor just about registered the voice and the question and explained without breaking his line of speech "They thought everyone was against them, the High Council of Time Lords, the Lord President only trusted his closest advisors and anyone he thought was a traitor he ordered to be tortured, often having the pleasure of doing it himself. And he seemed to relish in it, he seemed to love it, he was crazed. And it wasn't his fault, he couldn't be blamed, he wasn't a bad person but the War got to him, the War changed him, the War destroyed him. When he wasn't ordering and committing torture he was planning, scheming, plotting. Anything to keep Gallifrey alive, anything to make sure the Time Lords emerged the winners. Anything to kill the Daleks and everyone else who got in his way. But underneath it, underneath all that, he was just like everyone else, he just wanted it to be over but wasn't willing to give up before necessary."
A small, humourless laugh escaped the Doctor's lips, quickly followed by a tiny whimper as the Master continued to clear the blood from his back, "It's funny really, humans. They're so tiny in the universe, they know nothing about what's going on while they're baby apes stuck to their little world and yet they don't realise how true some of what they say is. 13, they say, unlucky for some. 13 lives meant 13 deaths. It meant dying and coming back only to be tortured and killed again. And there was such inventive torture techniques. The Time War never seized to amaze me, because I was amazed. I was scared, I was completely terrified, I was hating every moment, I was wanting it to be over, but there was that part of me, a part of me that was just like the Lord President, a part of me that watched the torture just amazed at how creative it was. It fascinated me. And that's what I mean, the Time War made us lose ourselves, no one was truly themselves in that War. Everyone became something else, mostly something worse."
"How did you decide to end it?" the Master needed to know, he hated relying on the Doctor for information. He hated that he had been a coward and ran from the War, he hated that he would never truly understand it, but now he needed to know as much as he could. He needed the Doctor to keep talking, he needed the drums to stay silenced.
The Doctor didn't ignore the question, he didn't answer because he didn't hear it. "There was the Nightmare Child, you've probably heard of it, Davros died there, well would've, had Dalek Caan not broke the Time barrier and got him out." He broke off on a tangent "I still don't know how he did that. How could he possibly do that? The Time Lock was impenetrable. How could he get out?"
"Doctor…" the Master said gently, to bring the Doctor back to his point.
"The Nightmare Child was one of the worst, I don't even know which side created it, both sides lost hundreds, thousands to it." The Doctor came back on topic, his voice still empty and full of pain, "It was a child's voice, a sweet innocent, scared child's voice, because who can resist the voice of a child? No one. The good would go to it to try and help, to save it, the bad would go to it to destroy it, an easy target and either way everyone was drawn to it. A child's voice would draw you in and once you were in you never got out again. I only got close to it once, but I heard the rumours, I heard that once you were drawn in you were forced to live your worst nightmares, hence the name. I heard you were forced to live your worst nightmares until it killed you. But I don't see what could possibly have been worse than living through that War. What nightmares could it possibly be making people live out? I don't understand."
The Master finished clearly the blood and just stared at the Doctor's back, but like the Doctor he wasn't really seeing what was in front of him, he was seeing the image the Doctor was painting. The Doctor paused momentarily and it was a moment too long for the drums which became agitated and make their presence heard again. "Doctor," he said, his voice a silent beg not a threat.
The Doctor turned to him momentarily, blinking as thought brought back to the present, "You asked a question earlier didn't you? What was it?"
The Master had to think for a moment to remember what he had said, his mind too lost on everything the Doctor had said, "You ended it, how did you decide to do that? When did you see that it was too much? That Gallifrey would be better off DEAD than in that War?"
A single tear fell down the Doctor's cheek and he didn't answer for a moment. He swallowed to pull himself together and eventually said "When everyone became so lost in the fight that no one even cared what we were fighting for. All we cared about was killed, spilling blood. Nobody even cared how or why it happened, just so long as someone got hurt and it didn't matter who it was. It wasn't about Gallifrey anymore." As the Doctor was talking the Master moved over to a cupboard to look for a pot of cream, "It wasn't about everything. It was just… just about killing. And that's not Gallifrey. People turned on each other. Brothers fighting brothers, not even seeing who it was. Just fighting…"
He found it and turned back to the Doctor, "But how did you decide? You said before that at one point you wanted to destroy it, tell me about that?"
The Doctor looked stricken at the thought of explaining that, about having to continue talking about the War, and yet at the same time he looked relieved, like he needed this opportunity to tell something what it was like. "I said all we cared about was killing and spilling blood, that was all that mattered. And that was all that mattered to me, I wasn't myself. I was killing and hurting and torturing and I was enjoying it. It was exhilarating."
"You felt powerful, like you were in control," the Master said, simply. It was a statement, not a question. It was something he understood well. He started rubbing the cream over the Doctor's cuts, "This'll help it heal quite quickly…"
The Doctor nodded, ignoring his second comment, "That was it. That was exactly it. Everyone wanted control in that War because control was exactly what they didn't have and I wanted it. I wanted to be able to control it. Not just the people around me but everything and everyone. And… I don't know, it wasn't something I thought about really, the idea just came to me. It just ran through my mind, I could kill everyone. I could survive. I could have the ultimate victory. I could do what everyone wanted. I could kill every single Time Lord in existence and survive. The only survive. The Time Lord victorious."
The Master's subconsciously pushed his fingers into the Doctor's back as he tensed at what the Doctor was saying.
The Doctor winced slightly and snapped at him, "You told me to talk about it, it's not my fault if you can't handle it."
The Master was a little taken aback by this and just continued applying the cream.
The Doctor shook it off and continued explaining, "I thought that and it snapped me back to my senses. The thought horrified me. I had wanted to destroy my planet, I had wanted to kill. I had been killing and worse I had been enjoying it. That moment, it was like I woke up to everything that was around me. The planet burning, the people destroying each other. The Time Lords were already dead by this point. Sure they were still there fighting but everything they were, everything they stood for, everything they believed in, that was dead. They couldn't see what they were doing just like I hadn't been able to."
"And?" the Master pressed, a level of desperation entering his voice. He finished creaming the Doctor's back and sat down on the floor, with his back lent against the bath. He watched the Doctor as he continued.
"And I knew Gallifrey was a lost cause. I knew there was nothing which could make it better, there was no way to save anyone, there was no way except to… to end the War. To destroy Gallifrey" the Doctor explained, his voice becoming quieter and more reluctant. He continued nonetheless, "It terrified me. I tried to reason with myself, I looked everywhere for another option, I tried everything. But there was no way. I put it off for as long as possible and then… spoke to the Lord President."
The Master's eyes widened in shock, but the Doctor didn't notice, staring straight ahead not seeing anything around him.
"He said I was a traitor to Gallifrey. He said I was worse than everything and everyone else in the War. He said I deserved to be killed, but not until I was tortured within an inch of my life, not until I was at the point of begging for death. Only then would he kill me," the Doctor continued, shuddering slightly at this. "The worse thing is I wasn't scared. I wasn't scared of him or what he would do. At that point I don't think I was scared of anything. And part of me almost let him…"
"You wanted to let him kill you?" the Master asked, confused.
"I didn't want to destroy Gallifrey. I didn't want to have to be the one to do that. It was necessary, it had to be done but that was the one thing I was scared off. Destroying Gallifrey, surviving. Part of me would rather have died. But before I spoke to the Lord President, I saw this little kid." The Doctor closed his eyes, remembering him. "A young boy, he was so small, covered in cuts and bruises, bleeding from various places, tears running down his face continuously they wouldn't stop, they couldn't stop. And he clung to me, his arms hardly having the strength to wrap themselves around me and he looked up and me and he begged me to stop it, he begged me to make it end. When the Lord President was threatening me, it was because of him that I didn't just give in and accept it."
The Doctor looked right at the Master, meeting his eyes, "I'll never justify destroying Gallifrey, I'll never claim it's a good thing, I'll never forgive myself for killing millions. But you have to understand, you have to believe me, it was the only option. It was the only way to end the War, it was the only way to save them. I- I had to do it."
"Do you understand why I left?" the Master asked, not addressing the Doctor's final comment. He didn't wait for the Doctor's response, "I knew what it'd be like. Not properly, of course, but I couldn't bear to find out. Yeah, I was scared," his expression made it clear he hated admitting this, "I was bloody terrified, but not of the War. I was scared of what would happen to me. I have to be in control, all the time, throughout my whole life, I had to have control. Because I can't bear the drums if I'm not. You think I'm a monster, you think I'm a psycho, but I they need it, the drums, they need the death and destruction. If I had been there, I would've been just like you," this thought clearly disgusted him, "I would've wanted to destroy Gallifrey for the victory and I probably would've done it for that reason and that reason alone. I'm not a coward. I stay away for the better. Do you understand? Do you get it now?"
The Doctor just nodded, too numb to say or do anything else.
Hey! Two things to thank for this chapter: Laura545 (again, gotta love her!) for helping me when I got stuff and Skillet's song 'Dead Inside' which inspired me to write about the Time War long before I knew I was going to make the Doctor talk about the Time War in this fic. This chapter sort of ran away, it's actually longer than the first chapter which shocked me, but yeah. I think it's all right, but I need you lot to review and let me know for definitely. Ly'all.
Carly. X