I am become Death, destroyer of Worlds,

Robert Oppenheimer, misquoting the Bhagavad Gita

After...

Breathe in, breathe out: such are the weaknesses and strictures of the flesh. Hearts pounding still, I rested my weary bones against the chill surface of the stone bench, tucked away in an alcove off the corridor leading to the Panopticon. Distant sounds of life were heard faintly, but were muffled against the maelstrom of my own thoughts and recollections. So introverted was I, that I barely heard the stealthy approach of footsteps and the whisper of voluminous robes against marble floors.

"Lord Doctor, I did not think to find you here." Romana was looking down at me, face a picture of inscrutable dignity.

"Don't call me that," I said as a matter of habit, glaring up at her. Often I had said it, but no one ever listened, locked into habit or perhaps their own obstinacy. "Not now, not after..."

"This war has changed us all," Romana said softly, eyes averted as she spoke.

I didn't reply, as it would merely be stating the obvious, and forming words was one chore too far at the time.

For a moment, it seemed like she was carefully choosing her words, turning them over and weighing them against circumstance and reason, before coming to a foregone conclusion in her mind. "I heard about Arcadia... the most recent version of events, that is." Uncommon hesitancy in her voice, she looked up again, eyes meeting mine. An uncommon sheen of some unspoken and indefinable emotion glistened there.

"There is nothing to say, nothing to speak of that will do any good. Some things cannot be changed," I grated, closing my eyes, unwilling to speak of it. That was a mistake, for the events replayed themselves behind my eyelids, like they had been wont to for the interminable length of time since then. Even a Time Lord lost track of the days, weeks, months and years with all the rewritten timelines, paradoxes, and shattered fixed points - much less the seconds and minutes between, no matter how regrettable and sorrowing they were.

Then...

The one time I had been too late was when it mattered the most. The fourth, fifth, or maybe the hundredth time that we'd fought for Arcadia and it had gone wrong, so wrong. The same batch of untried recruits as so many times before that, Alex amongst them as always, and the foolish old man who couldn't save them one last time. The same mad rush to get them out of there, to evacuate the city before the Daleks breached the Sky Trenches... only this time, the Daleks had retained the barest glimmer of a memory of the previous aborted timeline. Remembered and brought the appropriate weaponry to use as covering fire to hold off the removal of the civilian population beforehand.

"To the TARDIS," I had called, the city already in flames around me, smoke and ash burning my throat and stinging my eyes. I could see women and children fleeing from the attack, but I was too far to help them. Too far away to help anyone, it turned out.

Then came that fateful blinding flash, followed by the feeling of total wrongness that accompanied shifting timelines and temporal disturbances. Luck- or as I would have it, misfortune- was all that spared me, that and the nameless and nearly faceless guard, who caught me by the bandoleer and bodily restrained me.

He was shouting some meaningless garble in my face and shaking me by the lapels of my jacket, words lost in my distraction. How could I have heard him, when all I saw was them? Caught up in that advanced time field, centuries and millennia passing in a fraction of the time it took to blink an eye, the glow of a hundred mere youths going through their regenerations in seconds lit Alex from behind. Alex, poor Alex, too human to regenerate and too Time Lord to be anything but caught in the trap, helplessly bathed in the fires of so many regenerations cycling futilely around him. Aging through middle age, to old age, to crumbling decrepitude will I could only watch in horror. Hair going from dark, to grey, to white in merest moments while some prattling fool held me back. Going from the flower of youth to a decaying ancient, eyes never leaving mine as he stared at me in bewildered, confused terror. No one had ever told them of that danger, told them that that could happen. Death was a given risk, nearly a foregone conclusion, but not this. Not the type of death where the lines between life and death blurred, merged, and transitioned until all was dust. Time could be rewritten, victories and losses could be undone, but not that. Not death by a Warp-Chrono-Field Generator, a misbegotten variant of our own Demat Gun that had been developed by our foes. A far lesser one that was, nonetheless, as effective as the original.

Done and dusted they were, while I had been forced to watch helplessly from the sidelines, as useless as I had ever been. What was I going to tell his mother? Susan had believed in me, believed I could keep him safe. He'd just been a boy. They'd all been little more than mere children, innocents not even past ninety, in the bloom of their first incarnations, just barely past living through the nightmares from the Untempered Schism. In Alex's case, his only incarnation. They hadn't belonged there, not on the charnel fields of Arcadia that were the rightful venue for those disheartened and disillusioned Gallifreyans who couldn't even gaze upon a mirror for fear of what they'd find looking back at them. People like me, and why hadn't I been the one in their place? I'd lived my time, I'd done enough, while they'd just started...

Only once the last of the glow had died down to the flickering imprints left upon psyches and retinas, did my tormentor let me loose. Standing, I couldn't even summon the strength to do more than stare at those pitiful, cruel little piles of turgid dust and ash left where a hundred young Gallifreyans had once stood. All those hopes and dreams, all the possibilities and futures: gone. What place was this for anyone, much less those with so much to live for and so much left to experience? I had seen so much, lived through so much more, why couldn't it have been me instead?

"Sir, please, you can't," that voice kept repeating in an almost mantra-like chant, forcing me to look upon my captor. He snapped his eyes away from the bloodless horror to look at me, jaw fumbling and quivering with his attempt to firm up his chin with resolve. Forcing the semblance of determination into his voice, he said, "We need you, Doctor, we need you so very much, Sir."

"Don't call me that," I snapped, and he promptly saluted, taking it as an order. Cringing at the reminder of my position, I pulled his hand away from his forehead. "Don't, just... don't."

"Sir?" The question held a wealth of confusion and bewilderment, but I hadn't the energy to explain to this simpleton.

"Or that, either," I added. Eyes burning with restrained emotion, hope dissipated like so much ash and smoke upon the breeze, I regarded him numbly. Fair curls darkened with sweat and partially smoothed down against his skull by a headset long since lost, he looked familiar. Almost like a ghost from the past, he was. Quailing slightly under my unflinching stare, he shuffled uncomfortably. "I've heard the stories, Sir, and-" He looked up again, eyes bright with misplaced belief- "you're the only one that can lead us out of this mess, find another way."

"Then you've been told wrong, my boy. Only a fool listens to rumors and takes them for truth." It was too much to bear. I had turned away then, unable to look upon such hope, such faith when I had none.

But that persistent fool ran after me, catching the sleeve of my jacket, gloves timidly grasping at the battered leather. "Please, Sir, the stories - my father told me them. About how you once turned down the Presidency, and saved Gallifrey from defeat before, when the Sontarans invaded. And when Omega tried to force himself back into a permanent place in reality-"

I turned back, annoyed with his forthright earnestness. "Who was your father, that he would fill your head with such foolishness and twaddle at such a young age?"

Taken aback, stiff posture betraying his offence, that callow youth keep his tone formal and measured as he replied, "Commander Maxil, of the Chancellery Guard."

I sniffed in amused displeasure at the memory of that prior meeting. "Horrible man, not an iota of humor in him anywhere. Couldn't take a joke, either." I catalogued the man before me. So similar, but not. Serious and driven by duty, yes, but possessing a fool's share of optimism when it was no longer warranted. "But perhaps I did manage to make an impression upon him, seeing as he's played the cruelest joke of them all on you."

His face screwed up with even more confusion. "Sir?"

Harshly, I pointed a finger to the plain behind us, still harboring the scattered remnants of Gallifrey's last hope. "Tell them how anyone can save you now. Tell them how much anyone can do to stop this abomination. It's too late now, far too late for them, when they're gone." Hearts pounding in my chest and breath coming quicker with each word, I quoted, "'Tell them in Sparta, you who read, that we obeyed their orders and are dead.' Truer words were never written, scribed on parchment by a mere human from Earth's past, no less, but even he knew the sum of it all. If you take nothing from this, nothing at all but for one thing, know this: I can't save you, the High Council can't save you, the Lady President cannot save you."

With that, I turned and walked away through the burning rubble to my ship, leaving that resolute idiot to stand and gape at me.

"But Sir, you can't - you're the highest ranking officer here. Where will I get my orders until the War Room enacts the reset?" he called. "And the President..."

I ignored him, closing the door of the TARDIS with a firm finality.

After...

Bone weary, the centuries heavy upon my flesh, I sagged back. Perhaps she could still see the glow reflected in my eyes or perhaps the Couriers had already brought the news from the front lines, but Romana's eyes softened then. "I am truly sorry, Theta," she said softly, for once not using my long since abandoned title. Placing a hand that was meant to be comforting on my arm, she continued, "I know what this has cost you. Poor Alex. It was a mistake, a horrible mistake, and one that must not be repeated."

"Why didn't anyone plan for this? We knew what they were capable of, what lengths the Daleks would go to to recreate our own weaponry. Why didn't you foresee the possibility?" I asked her, too wrung out for the full force of my accusations to be apparent and too knackered to hide my weary defeat. "I taught you better than that, Romana. To see the possibilities no one else saw, just because no one else would see them. Why?"

"I did." Eyes downcast, her lips twitched in the barest hint of a bitter smile. "I did see it, and believe me, I did tell them, but they didn't listen. The Visionary foresaw the possibility and I had deduced the meaning from her circuitous ramblings, but no one heard me. They were too busy celebrating the instatement of Rassilon into office. I've been deposed."

Her words seemed to echo, catching me off guard. I was blaming the wrong person for the day's folly, when the one who was culpable was elsewhere. Elsewhere and supposed to be dead. I had told them they'd rue the day they decided to resurrect the past at the cost of the future. Resurrected and the cost was the futures of so many innocent lives...

I rose from my seat in righteous anger, ready to storm into the Council Chambers for a tongue lashing like none other. I would tell them in no uncertain terms what their hubris had wrought, make them see the true cost of war... but once more I was held back.

"Wait." Romana's voice was hushed, urgent. Eyes darting to and fro, her senses open wide for signs of eavesdroppers, she spoke barely above a whisper, "Before you go storming in there to tell them the errors of their ways, you must know this: it's too late. They've listened too long to Rassilon, the war has taken too much of a toll on us all. Most are prepared to follow him in his madness."

Angered at being restrained by someone with their own ideas of my best interests, I snapped, "Is there anything more obvious you can tell me? A planet-wide proclamation that the sky is orange, or that the snow on Mount Perdition is cold, or perhaps, that I'm too old and too tired for these sorts of games, Romana?"

Eyes flashing with her own temper, she retorted, "If you're going to be that way, fine. I'm sure you can rail at the inconceivable folly of it all while you're wafting about the nothingness as a blot of pure consciousness with the rest of us, while everything else in the cosmos is just memory. I'm sure you'll be content to know it's the last time there'll be a battle of Arcadia."

That brought me to a standstill. Alex and those untried and untested recruits being erased from time was agonizing enough, but this...

Seeing my expression, Romana nodded toward the direction of the Panopticon. "After they've reset the timeline and all the forces are gathered there at Arcadia once more, when the Dalek fleet is all within range, they're set to start the 'Final Sanction,' as Rassilon has called it. Simultaneously blowing up the Eye of Harmony and the Time Vortex in a method that will cause a causal loop that will tear all of reality apart. Everything will cease to exist, outside of the germs of Time Lord consciousness left in the Matrix data banks," she said flatly, emotions failing in the face of something so unimaginable. "All those planets and people you once showed me, they will never have existed. The Louvre, E-Space, all just... gone."

My voice broke on the single word I forced from a throat raw with heartsbreak: "Why?"

"Because they've given up hope, like you have," she replied softly. "They see no other way out from under the shadow of war and can't imagine anything else but death and destruction anymore."

"There has to be a better way," I denied, almost ready to weep from it all. Already ideas were beginning to form in my mind, possible scenarios that were all just as terrible as that. They would spare the rest of reality, but the price... Ye gods and the little fishes, the price we'd have to pay. But what was that, in the face of the alternative? Everything reduced to us versus them in its purest form.

Seeing Romana, the sad acceptance in her eyes, the weight of responsibility bowing her shoulders but not bowing her resolve, she knew. Oh how she knew, and knew it was all down to me. "I think the universe needs a Doctor, someone who'll make things better," she said softly, as I strode away to enact my final condemnation.

As Arcadia burned again and refugees fled before the invading Dalek troops, I requisitioned a plasma cannon off that supercilious offspring of Commander Maxil's. With it, I left my only warning to my people writ upon the crumbling remnants of a city wall before making my way to the Archives. I took what was needed and made my way to the plains, far from the Capital and further yet from where Arcadia was falling.

This could not stand; this could not go on. Even if I managed to stir them from their mass hysteresis, it wouldn't turn them from their set course and this could not go on.

No more.

"Daleks of Skaro, Time Lords of Gallifrey, I stand in judgement upon you all..."