Author's Note: I do not own Doctor Who-as cool as that would be.
Cradling his broken wrist, the Doctor hunched under the skeletal trees. Beneath closed lids, his eyes flicked with incessant movement. His face calmed and he opened his eyes. The Nightmare Child crouched in front of him, her face pressed close to his.
"You've gone to a lot of trouble," he said. "Built up everything from scratch just to get at me. The attention is flattering, really. Most wouldn't go to this much trouble."
The girl reached up and ruffled his hair. "I like a brave face. Smiling at death. Always so serious, the other Time Lords. But not you." She leered at him. "We're going to have fun, you and I."
"You didn't answer my question." He was very calm.
"You have yet to ask it." She peered at the Doctor. "You were another man in the war, wore a different face. But it's not him you see when you allow yourself to remember." She let her hands hover over the Doctor's face, tracing his features in the air. "It's this face. For all your talk of forbearance. For being the man who would never," she licked her teeth as the Doctor winced. "You see yourself standing under the burning sky, these lungs blacking with ash and dirt and smoke." The backs of her fingers just bumped against his. "This hand was made for a weapon."
"A fighting hand," he muttered.
"What a fearful sight you were on the battle field. Fury and destruction. The On Coming Storm the Daleks called you. What would they call you now, Doctor?" She leaned down close to the Doctor's ear. "The Storm has come. It didn't take much to turn the Lonely God into a Devil."
He closed his eyes.
The Nightmare Child pulled back as the Doctor clambered to his feet. "And that's enough about me. Let's talk about you." He gestured as grandly as he could with one hand. "Let's talk about the Time War's own abomination."
The child knelt in the dust, threading her thin fingers through her hair. "How I was hated—feared." She began drawing in the dust, humming snatches of an old Gallifreyian lullaby. "Would they have made songs about me, to frighten the children?" Her lips jerked into a frown. "If there had been children left. All those little hearts stopping dead with terror when the Dalek's shattered Haven. Doubly silent hearts." The girl's hand strayed to her chest.
"That's not going to work," said the Doctor as he turned back to the child.
"Telling the truth?" She shrugged. "It would have been better if your own had been swallowed up in the silence. Better than being spattered across the breadth of the Time War. There was only one left for you to kill when the Moment fell into your hands."
A ghost rose in the Doctor's mind. A face he had kept locked away, forgotten. She looked just as she did the last time he'd seen her. The war had thrown her into her third regeneration, a young woman with a slender build and delicate, elfin features. Her strawberry-blonde hair twisted into a loose braid that nearly brushed her heels. His little Rho.
She had stood against him at the end. The Doctor remembered the way her milky complexion had flushed as she drank in Rassilon's heresy. The way she had pleaded with him to join them, dissolve into purity and fly beyond the destruction of all things. Finally, they would have total mastery over time, and there would be no need for fetid bodies ticking through regenerations. His lives were draining away, and then his teeming mind would be silent. He should join them. They were too vast for this existence.
The worst had been her eyes; large lakes of sharp blue that gleamed with a feverish light. They had been so bright and horrible. Such hungry eyes. When he had seen her, his hearts cracked. His little child—how else could he see her, but as a little girl shrieking through the grass—had become a monster.
He'd taken the Moment and ran. The TARDIS welcomed him as he curled at the base of the time rotor and cried, unable to shake the image of Rho standing shoulder to shoulder with Rassilon as he preached his madness. He couldn't forget how she looked with her ceremonial robes thrown over blackened armor. Her mind had echoed after him, calling him traitor, coward, and all the while cajoling in that incessant way she had, that he should come round to their way of thinking. The Time Lords had this right, it was their destiny to ascend beyond these flimsy bodies and this universe with its sentients still crawling in the mud.
He'd heard her voice above all the others as the Moment bloomed and Gallifrey burned. He'd wished she'd called him traitor then. The fires ate up her voice, but he heard it in the silence and the darkness between the stars. A little voice calling for her father to save her.
Author's Note: Shorter update this time, but giving a bit more of a glimpse into the war. Strangely "The Day of the Doctor" didn't make this as AU as I thought it would-in fact, with a few very small tweaks, this could probably still work with cannon. I have trouble writing the Doctor sometimes, especially his dialogue, so constructive criticism is welcome. Sometimes he starts talking and I can see David Tennant doing the lines and it's great-other times well...less so. R &R!