Disclaimer: Me =/= owner of DW

Notes: The rating was raised because this chapter contains the Time War and it's NOT pretty. The second half of this chapter explores how Romana died (We all hope that she lives, but that's more a plot for a long multichapter fic - a short fic works better with DRAMA muahaha. And I've wanted to do something Time War related in a long time.) I hope this chapter manages to suit the hight expectations...

05: [Corruption]

In the end, they would say that he had corrupted her.

Of that, he had no doubt.

What did it matter to them that taking her along with him hadn't exactly been his own idea?

After all, he was the renegade oddball and she was, at least until a relatively short time ago, what would have been considered a gifted, promising exemplary citizen of Time Lord Society and this was all that mattered to them.

Of course he had corrupted her.

Just a few months, maybe a year ago, she had been aware of what a conduct becoming a Time Lord consisted of, or, as the rest of the Universe would probably put it, she was haughty, icy, imbued with an (un)healthy dose of arrogance and completely convinced that she didn't need to see the universe to know more about it than the largest chunk of its population, that there was nothing left to learn for a Time Lord anywhere in the universe(or rather, a Time Lady, more precisely, her) after she had finished the academy back on Gallifrey.

The concept of 'fun' seemed to go above her head, and she dared to touch his TARDIS console, even going as far as using the blasted blue stabilizers, much to the annoyance of the elder Time Lord who was still in denial about their very existence.

She looked down at him, probably considering him little more than a scatterbrained old eccentric, not to mention her academic inferior – back then at the academy, he had tried to get the minimum score on purpose (trying a little to hard on his first attempt) and now, it was coming back to bite him – That he, unlike her, possessed an actual doctorate didn't seem to bother her much.

And if all that hadn't been annoying, humiliating and hindering (not to mention humbling since she did indeed pass her TARDIS driving licence test and was definitely not making up her level of expertise, actually making him doubt the quality of his own handiwork a few times) enough, she actually insisted on being called Romanadvoratrelundar!

What on Earth, or rather, Gallifrey had her parents been thinking?

He couldn't possibly have a companion called Romanadvoratrelundar, if he had to try and properly pronounce that abhorrent linguistic travesty each time he wanted her to hand him a tool, whatever doomsday device he was working to defuse would probably blow up in his face before he had finished talking. Admittedly, his own name wasn't that much better, albeit for different reasons, but unlike her, he did not expect people to use it.

In short, she was everything he had hated about Gallifrey condensed and compressed into the shape of one young woman.

But that's just what she was, a young woman. She was merely shaped by the world she had grown up with, and unlike him who had hopelessly failed at that task, she found a way to adapt to that world, to deliver what was expected of her. She was simply acting how she thought she had to act if she wanted to be respected and accepted, reminding him of the façade of harsh grumpiness he had once projected around himself just to get by on his so called homeworld.

As he realized very quickly after seeing her reaction to the face of danger, the way he could almost hear the wheels in her head turning like a quick, well-oiled machine fresh out of the factory, she was in no way limited, obstinate or truly arrogant, merely a bit… inexperienced and trying to do what she thought she ought to, still very much an innocent girl at heart and soul.

Not that 'innocent' should be confused with 'harmless' or 'ineffective' – She undoubtedly had the intelligence she claimed to possess and knew how to use it, a skill he'd always had great respect for, even if he found it in his enemies, and it was truly nice to have someone around that would actually understand the complex technological terms he'd occasionally throw around – not that he blamed any of his former companions for not getting all of it, he was perfectly capable of doing that kind of things on his own, no thank you.

However, that didn't mean that he didn't appreciate Romana's help… a bit.

Technically, even more than just a bit. Perhaps even a lot.

Not that he'd admit it.

He didn't want any of those who came before her an injustice as each of them had been brilliant in his or her own ways – Both Liz and Sarah Jane had been his equal in more ways than one, but he hadn't travelled with anyone who had rivalled him in the field of analytical, somewhat numerically measurable intelligence since that fateful trip to the Medusa Cascade or possibly even his little ventures through the scarlet fields and ashen mountains of the place he grew up in with the Master at his side.

Until he met Romana.

He hated to admit it, but her improvements to the design of the sonic screwdriver were astonishingly useful.

No one likes to swallow a humble pie, much less in a field one normally excels at- nonetheless, he did depart into space to learn new things, didn't he?

As he travelled with Romana, he came to the conclusion that they were actually pretty much alike at the cores of their beings, and he couldn't help but develop a strange sort of fascination as he watched her find out who she really was, free of the confines of Gallifrey telling her who she was supposed to be.

She had only heard of the things her fellow Time Lords dismissed as not worth seeing, never touched them with her own hands.

There was no way that a being like her could react with cool, haughty indifference to the miracles that lay hidden in the sky, scattered amidst the empty darkness, those wonderful, sparkling, important islands of being in the sea of nothingness.

So it came that he watched her indifferent expression melt into a jaunty smile and her sharp, strict-looking features into rounder, softer shapes on which her avid expression no longer looked out of place, her eyes reflecting the glittering lights covering the canopy that opened before her as if it had been waiting for her to step into it.

Before any of them really noticed, the ice around her heart shattered into one thousand coruscant pieces and allowed her to become the widely smiling free spirit she had always been meant to be in some corner of her hearts.

It was the unparalleled temptations of the stars that had brought about her so called 'corruption', not him.

He did not have such kind of power.

Oh no, he hadn't really changed anyone in his life – he had only helped them to become what they had really been all along, to see the potential within themselves, to understand why they had fascinated him so much.

Contrary to what their fellow Time Lords may think, he hadn't corrupted Romana – He hadn't done anything at all. It was all her.

Her, the person she had been born to become.

And as such, she no longer longed to return to the confines of her now discarded, frosty chrysalis, oh no, she was going to do what she had been made for: She would spread her wings and fly, preferably at his side – and he gladly showed her the universe and introduced her to its secrets, only to see her admire their beauty with the same glee as he did, smiling the same, mad smile because of it, creating the same, convoluted formulas to measure it, delighting in their mathematical beauty just as he did, seeing the world the way he did.

She was the first person since the Master to give him the feeling that he was made to meet them, to be so very alike to him, to understand what he was thinking in such a way.

And she was much more than that – Because unbeknownst to either of them, a very different kind of ice had broken between them.

He had described her as pretty and attractive on various occasions, not with that sort of intent on his mind, but because she was – She had been good-looking when he first met her, exuding an ice-queen-ish aura in those white dresses of hers, but that second incarnation of hers, with that face she had copied off someone else on a whim was quite a remarkable sight to behold – and she had to make herself blonde of all things. (He didn't approve of such practices, as he felt that regeneration was to be taken seriously – still, he kept wondering how she did that, he could barely manage to finish the process with two arms and two legs, and not without being struck by at least moderate aftereffects… Most of his fellow Time Lords seemed to be able to initiate or stop the process at will and appeared to have some moderate control over what they would look like, but to turn oneself into an exact carbon copy of someone else needed an impossible degree of control, and to try out different forms… Theoretically, that should be possible within the first few hours, but to actually do it, Romana certainly had to be a particularly talented individual – which was perfectly possible if there were remarkably clumsy examples like himself running around. As with all biological processes, there were some individual differences – He was probably a bit envious that he could not get his new mirror image to please him )

They had huddled close against each other to be transmatted, got stuck in caves together and even went to Paris, without him really thinking of the implications of these things – He had been busy with other less than pleasant, potentially world-threatening issues.

He'd even turned up in the control room clad in nothing but a red towel to deposit a case of tool tools there, simply because the bridge of the TARDIS used to be between the shower, the cupboard where he kept some of his tinkering supplies, and the wardrobe, completely oblivious to the causes of Romana's embarrassed reaction.

However, just because he was too thick to see what was in front of his eyes, the distance between his eyes and the elephant in the room did not shrink.

It was obvious to anyone but themselves.

The less-than-sane, adventure-hungry smiles they shot each other, the way the air in between them spontaneously electrified itself, the particles that made up their being attracting each other, just one volt away from discharging themselves in the shape of a lightning bolt connecting them, the playful way they challenged each other's intellects, the little tasks he gave her, just to see the sheer beauty of her working mind that would immediately output the answers like a calculator.

All these looks and little gestures, just small, yet countless things, deep understandings that had no needs of petty, confusing, one-dimensional things like words, hindered and yet sweetened at the same time by the innocence of two children running through a meadow that formed the border of their small little world and, to them, was as wide and as broad and as endless as the sky encasing it, going on and on and on in every single direction, giving them a feeling of absolute freedom as they spread their arms like the wings of a newly liberated butterfly, nothing but little dots in the endless fields of green… or red, depending on which part of the universe you found yourself in.

Their endless meadow was the cosmos itself, and the cosmos was black anyway.

The most evident sign, however, was the light sense of ease that accompanied them wherever they went, the certainty of having found the place where one had always belonged and the person to share it with.

At this point of his life, he had been fairly content with traveling on his own, but the silent, lonely nights always kept at least a tiny spark of their horror. He was well aware that Sarah Jane, Leela and all the other humans he had known before couldn't possibly have stayed forever, and in back then still rare moments of silent darkness, when they had been asleep, he had wept to have what he feared to loose – they were so horribly fragile and transient.

Things were different with Romana – her being another Time Lord was not one of the things that had drawn them together, he stuck out on Gallifrey as much, or even more than he did anywhere else, and sometimes was not sure whether he still considered himself one of the Time Lords at all, having never felt all too connected to them, their society or their world.

Nevertheless, her being of the same race meant that she had a comparable life expectancy – She was great deal younger than him and still in her second incarnation, she would probably outlive him by millennia.

She could stay, remain at his side until he had finally tired of this world.

And maybe, just maybe, given enough time and one or two of the invaluable life lessons hidden amongst the galaxies, he might finally be able to speak those three words for the first time in his life.

But as they were slowly becoming aware of their budding wishes, either fate or the High Council of Time Lords had already long since decided that they were not to be granted.

The end of their joint journey kept steadily catching up with them, sewing their footsteps together until they obliviously tripped over the point of no return, unaware of the speed at which those untroubled days were running through their fingers.

They wanted her back.

And there was nothing he could do – they had decided to tolerate him for now, but they had little problems with entering his life and forcing him to do their dirty work whenever they pleased. They could find him easily and they could find her – and they'd be way more eager to find her than they ever had be to find him – he was a crazy old man, but she was a until recently 'virtuous' young girl – they would assume that she was a victim, that he had corrupted her, that she needed to be saved.

She was completely capable of saving herself, but telling them that would be no use.

The Time Lords demanded her back, and he suddenly found himself wishing she was human so they'd leave her alone.

He did not want her to return to Gallifrey, he wouldn't want that either – but it was already out of his hands. All he could do was to drive the TARDIS sloppier than he usually did, and to his own surprise, he succeeded.

At the parting of their ways, as the seemingly last knot intertwining the strands of their fates unravels, he does his best to govern his very blatant initial shock, for he knows that it's either E-Space or Gallifrey for her, and he knows all too well what he would choose in her place. He makes it quick and hands her K9, as unable to bear goodbyes as he has always been.

Like many before her, she departs to follow the beliefs he had taught her, to grow her own TARDIS and do exactly what he has done for a long time now – travel the universe and liberate the oppressed.

Too bad that they won't be traveling the same universe.

When he assures Adric that "She'll be superb", his voice doesn't sound as confident as he wants it to be, all four syllables tainted by the sudden, devastating realization that he'll never see her again.

Or at least that's what he thought.

Oh, if he only had been right.

Maybe Davros had been right and it was all his fault, maybe all this is his punishment for being such a horrible person that ripped ordinary people out of their safe, normal lives.

He did that.

He made her the sort of person that would not simply rest on her laurels after liberating the Tharils and aiding them in building a peaceful society.

Yes, she had made E-Space a better place, but there was another locality she had been neglecting: Her homeworld, Gallifrey.

She returned to the planet she had run from, not in an act of surrendering, but with the firm intention to make it a better place with the skills she had now, and thus, in order to turn her vision into reality, started a political career.

Everything went well for Romana – until the war came, the most incomparable, most gruesome of all wars, striking from the clouds like a harpy to teach the Time Lords fear like they've never known before.

In their desperation, they preferred the legend they grew up with to a mortal, if determined and righteous woman and in choosing their leader, inevitably chose their future as well, for it was not the onslaught of the Daleks, but the return of Rassilon that sealed the fate of Gallifrey.

All those myths of his power madness, his treachery and insanity that could not be ended, only contained, they were true, and the Doctor had been young and naïve to assume that he lured those interested in immortality into his cruel games to save his beloved planet from those who coveted eternity – He merely wanted to get rid of any possible Rivals so he could reclaim his planet at any time he pleased.

The people of Gallifrey had lived in peace and stagnation for so long, that they had forgotten that history is always written by the victors – And who had lived to become a legend? Who had named every single dangerous artefact on the planet after himself?

What sort of ego would one have to possess to create all those sinister items and then have the audacity to label those heralds of death and bloodshed with his very own title?

He would not accept anything short of the total annihilation of the Daleks – not even dying in the attempt to do so was possible for him, and whoever spoke of compromises could as well have asked for a violent death.

What followed was an endless, senseless cascade of death the Doctor felt helpless to stop.

In the strife, he encountered someone he had never expected to see again – and he wasn't referring to Leela whom he found sitting atop the person in question, holding a knife in her shaky, bloody hands.

"If Andred should die… if he does not regenerate…" her voice revealed that she was close to tears, but never lost its streght and vitriol. "…I'm going to hunt you down and find you, you damned bastard!" She gives the man below her a powerful punch to the face that might as well have fractured his jaw. "And then, I'm going to kill you! If you're alive now, then only because I'm keeping a promise to an old friend of mine!"

He hears her voice from afar, but fails to arrive before the man she nailed down shoots her dead, moving his intangible, immaterial arm straight through the leg she had been restraining him with.

Her blood sprays out of her back and splatters her killer, who then carelessly pushes her corpse away from him.

He dryly grins at the Doctor, and the two men recognize each other instantly.

The Valeyard.

He taunts him, telling him that he always hated this world and should be glad to see it burn. He tells him to look deep into himself, to reach for the intangible presence of joy that would one day fill his frame.

"I am you, and because I am you, I know. Within me, there has always been that feeling that I never belonged anywhere. I've always hated Gallifrey. It was little more than a prison to me. And that's why I destroyed it."

"D-destroyed?"

"Many years ago, I was given the opportunity to wipe out the Daleks. Yet, I did not, and I carelessly watched as countless people died. Because of my own decision. Because I let them live. Those Dalek embryos hadn'd done anything yet as the time, so my useless morals prevented me from killing them, but my guilt has never left me. So I decided that I needed to be punished. And it would be only fitting if I faced my punishment at the hands of the Daleks, don't you think? So here I am. Punishing my pitiful self. I tried to kill myself before, to prevent this from happening, to break free of you and become a real being, not just an aspect of you. To make my potential existence a definite one. But I refused to die as I deserved it. An old friend of mine intervened. I never even thanked him, I think I shall punish myself some more, this time by facing the truth: It was me who told the Daleks that I've been sent to destroy them. It was me who confessed my sins, but not just my personal sins, oh no. The Daleks always were after me, but they did not yet see the other Time Lords as a threat to them – They had planned to exterminate them eventually, but they weren't too high on their list – until I told them of everything. To destroy the planet that confined me, the planet I hate. The people who executed me once. The people that cast me out and conspired against me several times. The people that kept annoying me with their silly little missions. The people who didn't allow me to stay with Romana. They are stagnant and limited anyway, what change does exterminating them make?"

He is shocked beyond words, suddenly more aware than ever that this evil is his own.

The Valeyard throws himself into the mouth of a monstrous Skarosian monstrosity created by the Daleks to attack from beneath the ground as soon as it breaks into the building, crying tears of joy as he falls towards his death.

As he clutches the lifeless body of the savage warrior who had been some sort of student and at the same time, a trusted, reliable companion to him, he understands.

Everything and anything he has done until now, all his travels, his entire life had only led to this war. He had always hoped to avoid violence and preserve life wherever he could, and yet, he had always been destined to cause the greatest agglomeration of death in all of creation.

He wants to die.

Because he's also understood another thing: There is only one single way to end this senseless waste of life. Only he can end this absurd banquette of blood that was progressively turning the entire universe into a slaughterhouse. He now understands the self-hatred embodied by his darker self, understands the guilt that caused him to take the form a a court prosecutor, because he know what has to be done, and he has to resist the impulse to chop off his hands pre-emptively to keep him from doing what he's about to do.

He has to. He will not allow any more innocents to get involved in this. This is the least he can do to honour Leela and all the others who lost their life in this hell.

He sees Romana one last time, and contrary to all logic, she's still loyal to him.

They set out to collect the Moment, and they succeed.

Oh what a victory, it disgusts him to even call it one.

The ancient artefact is a small, orange, crystalline sphere that glows softly from the inside.

Its inner layers move in a mesmeric way, almost as if it had a life of its own and it bizarrely resembles the planet it's meant to destroy.

Romana paid a high price for the cursed thing – Only the Doctor leaves the ancient temple it was hidden in on his feet, carrying the woman he once loved across the blasted ground of a dying world.

A single TARDIS exploding is enough to undo the entire history of the universe, a single Dalek capable of starting the chain of events that would create an entire empire capable of disintegrating all of reality.

Needless to say, the Time War was messy.

Rassillon and his lot sat far back in their little citadel with their eyes turned away. They would be the last ones to bleed and Romana, who had always sought to end the fighting, lay dying in his arms.

Her face was literally, physically cracked like glass, with several 'shards' missing and various cracks extending all over her otherwise normal-looking, soft body. The physics-defying sharp edges formed by her relentlessly bleeding skin showcased only a little of the reality-shattering horrors she and the Doctor had endured, and there was yet no telling of the impact that they would have on her mind.

She was delirious at best, barely even conscious most of the time, eying both the Doctor and the inferno around her with a gaze that contained no recognition.

There had been painful moments of clarity, one where she had accused him of not preventing this and tried to strangle him in her unstable, nightmarish state, and he'd just let her, partially because it took significantly more strength to snap a Time Lord's neck than her weak, pale hand were able to summon up, partially because he felt he deserved it.

In other lucid moments, she had assured him that the atrocity he had planned to commit was the only way out, with a shocking clarity and awareness of what was to happen and then there had been a time where she had asked him where his scarf was – this form also had wild brown curls and deep blue eyes, and she was far too torpid to properly perceive his face.

The world was screeching around them, the structure of time itself groaning with the strain the fighting put on it. The ground was reduced to burned earth, and even the air itself seemed roasted, little rocks floating in it as if they were light as feathers.

Any vegetation was reduced to the carbon molecules serving as their base material, any water had long since evaporated – the only bodies of liquid were rivers of molten metal and stone. Where the ground was not reduced to burned earth or in the process of decaying into its chemical components, it had condensed into glass-like, slippery obsidian.

The very sky shines in a bright, bloody red, the space-time continuum itself heating up from the battles that were, had been, and would be carried out in it. The stars were but overshadowed, black dots, some of them having collapsed into black holes or decayed into doughnut-shaped compounds that transcended the logos of this world, and all across the sky, there was a fissure, torn wide, wide open, it's edges rolled together like scrolls, the eerily distorted stars still visible on them, and beyond the fissure, there was even more warped reality, battling spaceships folding themselves into the oddest directions and blinking in and out of existence, occasionally joined by unperceivable monstrosities.

Their path was littered with mountain-high piles of burned out Dalek shells, the occasional crashed spaceship and hopelessly mangled Time Lord corpses – as impossible as it seemed, most of these people had died of clean Dalek Laser shot wounds.

It was just that properly killing a Gallifreyan wasn't that easy a task which could only be accomplished by what would be considered ridiculous overkill on any other victim – or just by shooting them until they stop coming back to life.

That many regenerations in a row were bound to have horribly misshapen results – Some of the pitiable individuals still twitched, alive, but unable to move as much as a finger.

The Doctor had already relieved several of them of their misery, knowing very well that they would be raised anew very, very soon.

Another common sight were time fossils, unintelligible footprints of battles that had now never happened. Time and space bended and cracked around the abominations marching across the landscape, and the stench made that of hell sweet and pleasant by comparison.

He looks at the limp form in his arms.

She was so young.

Proving once again what she was made of, she regains consciousness and she refuses to follow his instructions to run away and even insists to walk on her own without any help from him.

She tells him that she's almost two-hundred years old and doesn't need him babysitting her.

He'd cry if he wasn't out of tears.

On their way to his faithful TARDIS to embark on what should be their final trip, the last journey to the place where they plan to end everything, they cross paths with the Hordes of Travesties. It seems that they're not even allowed one single, final voyage together.

She notices the danger before he does, and offers herself as distraction without a moment's hesitation.

He wants to take her place, but she merely reprimands him for being silly.

She clearly tells him that he has greater chances of succeeding with their ungodly task and knows it very well, pointing out that he's not the boss of her and that there was way more at stake than just her life, and he, having finally experienced the lessons of life he was hoping for, does what he failed to do all those years ago in at the doorway to E-Space: He grabs her by the shoulders and plants a kiss onto her lips before he departs, knowing very well that this is his last chance.

The arrival of the abominations prevents either of them from speaking the three words, or any other words for that matter.

They rip her to shreds.

Eleven times in a row, tearing her flesh apart much faster than it could mend itself.

He does not see her defiled remains, and he doubts that he would have been able to tell her corpse apart from any of the others.

At the time of her Death, he is already struggling with himself to make the hardest decision in his entire life. His thoughts wander back to the faraway past when the "Keller Machine" showed him his greatest fear – a burning world. His own world burning.

At that time, he had seen his adopted homeworld burning, as he had then recently seen a parallel version of it reduced to ash. Now, he was about to see his native homeworld reduced to glowing rubble.

Feeling an almost surreal light-headedness, he just presses the button.

He had been fully aware of the fact that his construct would most certainly explode on him – in fact, he had not actually planned on surviving.

He is reduced to a charred lump of flesh, but apparently not charred enough: Whatever was left of him was still capable of regenerating.

He wakes up, staring up at the remains of a planet scattered across the sky.

The image instantly burns itself into the back of his skull.

He stumbles into the TARDIS and collapses.

She brings him to the only rock in the universe he remotely wants to see right now.

It is only after he spends hours under a public shower to get rid of the stench of blood that he begins suspecting that he may be imagining it.

He burns his old, blood splattered outfit and wraps himself in the colour of mourning, unable to even look at the bright colours and mismatched patters he used to love.

The leather jacket properly grows on him later, (It's a fantastic jacket after all!) but the moment he chose it, one of his main concern was for it to be devoid of colours and patterns that could make him think of her voice, asking him in bewilderment where his scarf had gone.

Just wearing black isn't going to shut up her equivalent in his nightmares, tough.

Even someone as skilled as her would have ended as a tangled mess after 11 regenerations in a row, and his memory of the heavy disfiguration that the Master suffered after such an ordeal fuels his fantasy.

Mix in all the guilt and loneliness that had been troubling him at the time and you end up with the tangled, warped, oozing mess of disfigured limbs and twisted flesh that kept haunting him in his dreams for the first months after the war.

Her face remained mostly untarnished, perhaps his subconcious' way to tell him who the pile of mismatched features was supposed to be. The fate of her skin, always blotched and half-rotting, varies from dream to dream: Sometimes, it was ripping and tearing like paper, sometimes hanging off her bones like tattered cloth, sometimes half-melting, sometimes peeling off and most of the times everything at once, huge chunks of the mess that was constantly chasing him and crawling after him in his nightmares kept falling off, and despite her horrible state, she always seemed to be able to torture him with accusations and piercing questions, even if she had a leg sprouting from her mouth or something like that.

However, the pain that these visions cause him only lasts until he wakes up and in his waking state, finds himself able to think rationally.

He knows very well that Romana would never have blamed him for her fate, she faithfully supported him until the end not only because of her loyalty and love to him, but for the sake of the entire universe that threatened to be blown apart by the war raging within it.

She would have understood.

Like she always had.

Don't blame me if you're traumatized, I warned you. Next up is one of my personal favourites: The 'delightful Miss Perpugiliam Brown', as the Master once called her, in Chapter 06: [Weakness]