When the Doctor emerged, it was with bright eyes and a bounce in his step. He'd been too exhausted to really take it in before. But it was becoming real to him now. Not only had he managed to wrench free the restraining collar from his sexy TARDIS, but then said TARDIS had helped him pilot herself around a Time Lock and through all the traps set up by ancient Time Lords to finally come to a stop at a point in the Vortex so far into Gallifrey's past that there were no more traps.

Entering the console room, the Doctor brought up the scanner and looked through the information the TARDIS had collected while he'd slept. According to this, he was 563,482,629 years before he was loomed. Gallifreyans and Time Lords had yet to make the decisive split. Rassilon and Omega hadn't trapped and tamed a black hole, and his people had only one lifetime. He was so far back in his people's past that all records of this time had been sealed. He knew nothing about what his people were like - it was exciting!

The Doctor picked a spot several kilometers away from the open rift into the Vortex that would one day be the center of his people's civilization. He really didn't want to go anywhere near the untamed, wild energy of the Untempered Schism right now. Or ever again, really.

Sure, it was the Schism that made his people what they were. Gave them their time senses and allowed them to regenerate. So what? It terrified him. And he wasn't going near it.

The TARDIS landed silently and without a bump, her characteristic sound silenced for the duration of their stay on ancient Gallifrey.

Suddenly it hit him with the force of a charging nathak. He was on Gallifrey again! A Gallifrey without the horrors of war, or the pompous asses who had run the society for several millennia. A huge grin spread across his face at the thought. Gallifrey! Twin suns, orange sky, red red grass... He bound down the ramp and through the doors, allowing them to slam shut behind him.

Gallifrey…

He stood there and just soaked it up. No matter how many planets he stood upon, or how many different atmospheres he breathed, there was always something just a little bit off about all of them. Some vague undefined bit of wrongness that acted as a small irritant. Reminding him at all times that this was not the world he had evolved to walk upon. A trillion trillion years of evolution and self-evolution had never quite removed from his people the vertigo associated with standing on any world but their own. Too many senses to be fooled by the mere closing of the eyes.

He felt no such vertigo now. Just the breeze brushing his cheeks and ruffling his hair. He opened his eyes to a sight he thought never to encounter again. The TARDIS, beautiful thing that she was, had parked herself right in the middle of a forest. The silver leaves and trunks of the trees burned with the light of the rising first sun. He stood with his feet on a game trail. Sardurs, by the look of the tracks. Sardurs were creatures that looked like nothing so much as the Echidna from ancient Greece back on Earth. Great snakes with arm-like appendages coming out the sides of their bodies and a brilliant purple crest for the males, each tipped in poisonous barbs. That was in addition to the claws on the ends of their arms as well as their toothy mouths and voracious appetites. Horribly aggressive, they were.

Best move on, then.

He turned and looked at the TARDIS, expecting for a moment to see a blue box sitting incongruently amongst the silver trees. When no such shape presented itself, he recalled with chagrin that he'd fixed the chameleon circuit. His beautiful blue box was masquerading as a tree at the moment. He stepped back up to the silver annielo he knew to be his TARDIS and inspected the bark carefully for the keyhole. Always important to know how to get into ones timeship.

Once satisfied that he'd found it, the Doctor set off at a jaunty walk, his tongue clasped firmly between his teeth to keep from whistling a happy tune. He was on Gallifrey again! For hours he wandered. He took in the sights, the scents, the sounds, greedy for every bit he could get. A small recording disc hovered silently at his left elbow, filming anything and everything he came in contact with. Once he had built the door, he couldn't ever come back. The temptation to change things would be too strong. It already was almost unbearable.

Following the signal from his screwdriver, he emerged from the forest onto the top of a small hill and found himself faced with the mountains Solace and Solitude. He was surprised to find the beginnings of the Panopticon nestled in the valley between the two mountains. It was more of a village than a city, really. Couldn't be more than three thousand souls living inside its borders.

With a start he realized that he should be able to hear these people in his mind. Should be able to feel their presence even at this distance. He opened his barriers and stretched out his mind, searching telepathically for the people he could see before him. He found them, but they weren't the same. They gleamed brightly against the backdrop of his mind, but without the riot of colors designating other telepaths. He was so far back that his people hadn't developed telepathy yet.

"Well paint me green and call me a colddrake." He'd always enjoyed taking strange human sayings and injecting a bit of Gallifrey into them. But this one was…"No, no. That's horrible. Not saying that again." He reached out with his hand and caught the recording disk. A quick buzz with the screwdriver and it floated away from him and down into the town.

He retreated to the edge of the forest and settled down to wait for the disk to return. He needed to know - to be absolutely certain - of everything there was to know about the town before he went down and tried to insert himself into their lives. For now, their timelines were strong. But he knew how frail they could be. How quickly they could unravel and leave their subject grasping at the threads of their own existence.

It was probably best that his people hadn't developed their telepathy yet. He missed their presence in his mind so fiercely, he probably would have been unable to protect his secrets from them. And that would be so utterly cataclysmic it simply didn't bear thinking of.

After an hour, the disk came floating back, filled with non-stop images of the daily going ons in the lives of his ancestors. He took it back to the TARDIS and spent the remainder of the day studying its contents in detail, determined to learn as much as possible. Then he wiped the information from the disk and prepared for bed - after saving the information to the TARDIS core, of course.

As he stripped his clothes off, he considered how odd it was to be back on Gallifreyan time. His people measured time by such a vastly different method that human and Time Lord ways simply didn't match up. Just as with the Gallifreyan language, there literally was no translation between the two concepts. Only, there was a very basic form, of course. Things that could be translated to things like hours, minutes, days, and years. But the bulk of the way his people expressed time was characterized by words used to describe what they observed using the other eighteen senses they had. Their 'time senses'.

But these people...they had yet to discover the stable rip in space/time that would one day become the Untempered Schism. Was already the Untempered Schism. Would always be and never be the Untempered Schism. Their perceptions of time were just as rudimentary and flawed as the humans'.

The Doctor was hit with a wave of longing and loneliness. He had no telepathic connection to these people. No temporal connection. And, as shown by the data from the disk, no cultural connection. For all intents and purposes, these were not his people. He was alone on Gallifrey, as he ever had been.

ooOO00OOoo

He spend a Gallifreyan month (five weeks per sixty days or 4706.352 hours Gallifreyan which was 15,381.77024 earth hours went the running mathematical monologue in the back of his mind) sending the disk out to capture the life of these ancient ancestors. Every time he cleared its memory banks and sent it back out, he got a clearer image of who these people were. Paired with his understanding of timelines, he was fast approaching the point where he would be able to attempt a first contact. The really hilarious thing about how careful he was being was that it was looking more and more like he had no reason to be. His first impression of this time period had been of a Gallifreyan equivalent of the Earth's 21st century. The more he studied the recordings, the firmer that impression became. Cars, banks, mobile phones...it was all the same. Could it be that his people had something to do with the way the humans had developed on Earth? The similarities between these people and the ones that evolved on Earth were just too eerily similar. But that was a puzzle for another day. For now, all he needed to do was learn about the Gallifreyan culture before him; then he had to locate someone with a weak - but resilient - timeline, pluck them out of it, and carefully insert himself in their place. Easy-peasy.

Right.

Still, one week later, he was stepping out of the TARDIS for the final time in what was likely to be several months of back-breaking work.

He had a plan, one that was as simple as he could make it. Boiled down to its simplest form it was this: 1) Locate and dig up some daygum rocks. 2) Put them in a state of quantum entanglement so that their futures and timelines existed symbiotically - what happened to one would inevitably happen to the other, no matter the distance between them. 3) Follow this world forward until the formation of Pete's World. 4) Hurl one rock through the widening gap between the worlds, building a bridge into the parallel world using the daygum rocks as keystones in the doorways. 5) Create a closed circular paradox with the rocks so it becomes a set point in time. 6) Rescue Rose.

Six steps. A much simpler and easier plan than some of the ones he'd concocted in the past. Except for the parts that required him to insert himself into Gallifrey's timeline without destroying it. And the part that required him to entangle two rocks...and the whole make-a-circular-paradox thing.

All right. So not that simple after all.

Still, he could do it. He knew he could. The execution would be nothing less than horrendously difficult, but he would manage. Because the idea of leaving Rose abandoned on Pete's World made his hearts break. And this way, she wouldn't have to choose between him and her family. With a stable doorway between the realms, they could come and go freely. He'd never wanted to make her choose. Oh, he'd pulled her away from dinner, or refused to stay for a cuppa. But he'd always brought her back. And she was the first. He'd never returned companions to their families before. Never stayed for Christmas dinner like he did after he regenerated. But she brought that out in him. All the things he'd studiously avoided in eight lifetimes, and he'd done it all cheerfully for one slip of a girl named Rose Tyler who had seen him for who he really was - and challenged him to be better.

The Doctor was smart. He'd never made any pretense of being anything but. He knew how Rose had felt about him. Had known even when he'd been in his ninth body and full of so much anger. He'd soaked in her love like a sponge, used it to shore up the holes in his ragged sense of self-worth. She'd believe in him, believed he'd always do what was right, even as she chastised him. He'd made all of his companions better. Braver, wiser, more compassionate. Better able to care for themselves and far more willing to stand up and do what was right. All of them were better for having known him. All but Rose. He was better for having known her.

After the Last Great Time War, the Doctor had felt the worst sort of jaded. She knew he was the last of his kind. She knew he was the one to end it by killing all his people, taking the Daleks with them. She knew that it had been a last act of desperation that had driven him to destroy two of the most ancient and powerful civilizations. She had assumed that he had destroyed Gallifrey to keep the Daleks from gaining access to his people's technology, or to keep them from what the Daleks would do if they'd managed to overrun the planet or because he had been instructed to. She didn't know he had done it because his people were winning.

He thought back to the horrors he'd seen in the interminable years he'd fought in the war. All the terrible things did to each other...bombings and biological warfare; guns, knives, and bare fists. Hitler, Stalin, Waldorf, and Missengrade. None of them, none of them compared to the misshapen creatures the Time Lords had concocted to fight off the invading Dalek force.

The Might Have Been King and his army of Neverweres. A Creature made up of the ten thousand most vicious beings through all of time, cut apart and stitched together while still living to give it an overwhelming rage at everything in existence. Able to break itself into its component parts to attack from all sides with an impossible amalgam of disjointed arms, legs, and various appendages floating independently of the controlling mass. A morass of ten thousand minds forcibly linked together with psychic tethers implanted directly into the centers of the still conscious brains.

The Horde of Travesties. Three creatures born out of the darkest desires of the three most brilliantly twisted serial killers his people had ever encountered. He'd seen them dance gracefully into the oncoming fire of a hundred Daleks and then come out the other side chewing merrily on the tentacles of the Daleks they'd stripped from their casings. One of them preferred to suck out the lone eyeball while the Dalek was still alive. Said it gave better flavor.

And the Nightmare Child. Not a child at all, but really an amorphous black cloud that had been carefully crafted to be able to seek out and mimic the deepest, most elemental fears of its enemies. Each encounter with a new species or individual had only caused it to grow. When it settled over a battlefield, all Daleks had standing orders to turn and run, regardless of their objectives. They would never admit to feeling any fear at all, but the Nightmare Child killed without harming. It played upon the natural paranoia associated with these elemental fears, and caused its victims to turn on each other. At the end, prolonged exposure would so shatter their minds that they would then turn on themselves, ripping open their own flesh to welcome the Nightmare Child to come in and sit on their hearts.

But that was only the beginning. After them came the Forever Young. An army created by the Daleks specifically to combat the Horde of Travesties, these young maidens existed slightly out of phase from the rest of the universe, and so could not be harmed. But they could sync up voluntarily for nanoseconds, and deal massive damage with a single touch of their temporally-syncopated hands.

The Blind Ones were unaffected by the Might Have Been King and his army of Neverweres because they had no psychic awareness and thus created dead zones where their pure mindblindness nullified the tethers keeping the King's consciousness together, rendering it unable to act. They carried psychic weapons which could not harm them, but which stripped the minds away from any psychic victims like sheets of paper.

And the Nothing with which the Daleks had combated the Nightmare Child...

And so it went. Each side created more monsters which got progressively worse as the Time War continued. But then the tide had turned. The Daleks were driven back from where they'd spread across the surface of Gallifrey to just one small base, which had then been summarily crushed.

Oh, the joy they'd all felt when Gallifrey belonged solely to the Time Lords once again. They'd sent their Army of Horrors out to destroy the ten thousand Dalek ships floating in orbit. Then, before the war had truly been won, the talks had begun. Words like, 'retro-rule' and 'galactic compensation' were paired with more frightening terms like 'divine right' and 'Time Gods'.

When they brought Rassilon back, he knew that it had all gone horribly wrong. That the horrendous things his people had done - and the things that were done to them - had broken something fundamental about their natures. Broken and reforged it into something hard that glittered with greed and the banked fires of sadism. Something had to be done, and quickly, or all of the universe would fall under the control of his warped brethren. He'd traced the timelines, followed the war to its inevitable conclusion and saw the influence of his people explode outwards until it encapsulated all of every universe. Every universe. Every parallel world, subspace, pocket universe and alternate timeline tied down and shackled to serve its Time God masters.

He'd had to try. He went before the Senate, before Rassilon and all his Believers. He begged them to stop with the destruction of the Daleks. Wasn't the genocide of an entire race enough? Why must they seek to rule all of Time as well? His questions had gone unanswered. When Romana had turned her back on him, he'd known that he had no choice. Once again, to save all of Time, he would have to make a hard decision. The hardest he'd ever had to make. He would have to destroy his own people...

And so he had.

The worst part, the worst part, was how easy it all was. Even though she'd turned her back on him, Romana still trusted him. She played the part of loyal Believer to Rassilon, but when he showed up on the steps of her Presidential suite, looking to use her power as President to do what had to be done, she needed no distractions or to be turned away. She welcomed him into her Presidential Rooms, gave him access to the Omega archives. Told him to use the only weapon left there and end it all. Once again, he begged. This time for her to come with him. But she refused. They both knew that she would have to stay behind, to mask his departure until the deed was done. He offered to stay in her place, to allow her to be the one to survive. She'd kissed him then, a tender goodbye...and he'd left her to die.

The Moment was innocuous as far as weapons went. Just a wooden box with carvings on it, carvings so ancient that he wouldn't have been able to read them even if he had been in any state to do so. He'd wished for a big red button, something simple and uncomplicated. What he'd got instead was...he couldn't remember it. Curious that.

He did remember what had happened next though. He'd flown into the heart of the battle, saw Davros' ship fly into the jaws of the Nightmare Child...

At the center of Gallifrey, deep in its core, a black hole opened up. Uncontained, unrestricted, it had ripped through superior Time Lord defenses tragically pointed the wrong way. When the Daleks had realized what was happening, they'd tried to retreat. But the Might Have Been King circled around them and blocked their escape. But then Nox, the first of Gallifrey's two suns had gone supernova, and it was all over. Unprepared, not even the Dalek fleet could withstand both a black hole and a supernova.

Weeping, the Doctor had closed the TARDIS doors against the shockwave and felt it slam against the outer shell moments later. The TARDIS had erupted from the outside in. The shell was charred black, the interior burned - and he along with it. He did not fight the fires of regeneration, but welcomed them. He longed to leave the whole horrid war behind. But he'd had one more thing to do, and as the light faded and he stepped out into a new body, he approached the sparking console and pushed a series of buttons he never thought to use.

And sealed all of Gallifrey - Daleks included- in a Time Lock.

Now, he pushed his memories of Gallifrey's death away and focused on the present. Today, he was going to insert himself into a stranger's timeline, take their life as his own, and get. Rose. Back.