A/N: Please note this chapter is rather dark. The accidental death of a child is mentioned. The Doctor is brooding and depressed at this point in his story, and I felt he would be revisiting some of his darkest memories, which is why I've written the following. But be warned of the content, anyway, before you decide whether or not to proceed. This chapter can be skipped without losing the story.
Also, I have written up to chapter 23 already, and the final chapters are already written. I expect to finish writing this within the next week fairly easily.
Chapter Text
"The Time Lord Victorious is wrong." The voice of Adelaide Brooke rang in his mind, over and over. The flash of her pistol's energy discharge burned into his retinas as the world dropped out from below him.
What in the name of all that is have I done?
He feels a presence in his mind and spins about only to see Ood Sigma watching him from down the snow covered street.
"I've gone too far," he says, holding back a sob. "Is this it? My death? Is it time?"
He falls to his knees, casting his eyes towards the unforgiving stars peeking through the snow-bearing clouds.
The snow melts beneath his legs, seeping through to chill his already cool skin. Pain prickles down the length of his legs as he silently begs the universe for a reprieve he know will not be granted.
Rising, he staggers into the TARDIS, her disapproving hum casting further shadows on his thoughts. Bracing his hands on the console, his head falls in defeat and the last of the Time Lords struggles to hold back tears. The enormity of perverting the power of his people – of altering a fixed point – descends on him and his shoulders begin to shake. The weight of the universe crushes him. The wrongness of the situation squeezes his hearts and he is dizzy with shame at his actions. He is no better than the council, who would have destroyed the universe to have their own way.
Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. Oppenheimer's mistranslated quote of Krishna's words occurs to him, and he reflects momentarily on the fact that the real words are even more appropriate. I am become Time, the destroyer of worlds. Death, Time, the Doctor is both, and worlds slip between his fingers the tighter he tries to hold them.
He takes a deep breath and then another, gathering what strength he can. There is nothing more for him in this time. Shaking himself out of his grief, he reaches for a lever on the console, dancing through the steps of dematerialisation as he had done so many thousand times before.
As the ship wheezes her farewell to the Earth, he hears the sound of the cloister bell. Its resonant clang vibrates the air around him and dread seeps into his soul.
The universe insists his time is ending. The Doctor calls out to the universe at large, "no!" He pulls a lever, and disappears into the vortex.
The Doctor ran.
Over nine hundred years, and still he ran as far and as fast as his legs and his TARDIS would carry him. But after leaving Earth behind, he found himself paralyzed in the time vortex, guilt and shame and hatred writhing within him, competing to dominate his mood.
Adelaide Brooke had died at her own hand because of him. He had tried to change a fixed point, and had brought about the suicide of one of the bravest women in human history.
A memory, an aeon past, flashed to the fore of his mind.
The peppery smell of redgrass crushing running feet rises into the evening air as two boys gallivant, screaming in delight, through the waving sea of grass towards a stand of berry bushes.
The taller of the boys stops and bends towards the ground, vanishing behind the scarlet grass in a crouch.
"What is it Kos?" the blonde boy asks, coming up behind his friend.
Koschei draws up his cupped hands and stands. "It's a leero. Looks hurt," he says. With delicate fingers, he holds up one of the small creature's iridescent blue wings. The silky feathers beneath were soaked with deep red blood and caked with black earth. The creature shuddered with each breath and peeped weakly.
"Let's bring him to my father," says the smaller boy. "He's good at fixing things." He rifles through the pocket of his plain grey robe and pulls out the small cloth he'd planned to use for gathering berries. "Give him here."
The two boys, their game forgotten, walk back towards the heavy-beamed house on the edge of the estate gardens. "Come on Thete, pick it up!" Koschei calls to the smaller boy whose shorter legs have caused him to fall behind.
"Don't call me that!" the smaller one yells back. "It's not my name!"
"And what right do you have to a name?" sneers a taller child who is exiting a small shed full of toys and games. "Mongrel like you."
The blonde-haired boy stands frozen, fixing his eyes on the injured leero in his hands. He gulps down a breath, and then another, willing tears not to come.
A moment later, a red blur whizzes by him and the taller boy's face contracts in pain as Koschei connects with his chest, running at full speed. "Shut up Rass," Koschei screams, fist flying for his brother's face. "Shut up shut up shut UP!" It connects with a smack and the taller child falls backwards. Raising his arms to protect his face from his little brother's onslaught, he makes no effort to break his fall.
With a sickening crunch, his head collides with a rock hidden in the grass.
Koschei's hands still and he jumps away from his fallen brother. Eyes wide, he looks to his friend. "Look what you made me do," he growls.
Seeming to shake himself from a trance, Thete kneels beside Rass. "Go get help!" he yells to Koschei. He gently deposits the leero on the ground, in a pile of soft grass, and reaches around Rass's head to where he's bleeding. He presses the bit of cloth to the wound and murmurs words of reassurance to his friend's older brother.
"Come on now, Rass. Kosch'll be back soon with someone, alright? They'll fix you right up. You'll be back at the Academy right after harvest holiday." He repeats his words, over and over, as the light fades from the sky and no one comes.
His father finds him kneeling in the dirt beside Rass' body, his hands caked with dried blood, a dead songbird in his lap wrapped in a reddened cloth. The small boy shakes with sobs, his tears sparkling in the unforgiving light of the stars.
He had begged his father to take him back in time, to use the power of a Time Lord to fix the events of the day. To bring Rasserin back to life. To give him enough time to help the injured bird. But his father had refused, and had talked of their duty to time, to maintain the integrity of timelines without interference.
As he falls into a fitful sleep hours later, the blood washed off his hands, he seethes with all the hatred a seven year old child can muster. For his father's callousness in the face of tragedy. For his refusal to do all he could to help make things better with all the power his position as a Time Lord granted him. He swears he will never be so cruel.
He felt the same as he had that cold night in the field. As useless and hopeless and angry as he had been as a child
Nothing he did changed anything.
They all still died.
Worlds still ended.
What good was having the power of the Time Vortex at his command if everything he saved turned to ash and worlds slipped faster between his fingers the harder he tried to hold them.
He looked down at his hands and could see only the blood of billions of lost lives for which he was responsible.
"You would make a good Dalek." The words of the hateful creature in Van Statten's vault echoed through his mind.
"I've killed more of my people than the Daleks ever did," he said aloud to the empty TARDIS, his voice raw from disuse. It had been weeks since he had last spoken.
He sat on the edges of dying systems and watched planets meet fiery ends as their suns exploded into supernovae. Stellar nurseries swirled around the TARDIS as he named newborn stars, then travelled billions of years ahead to see what became of the planets that congealed around them from the dust and grit of space.
The universe lay before him for his study; grand and beautiful, an intricate dance of matter and time, magnificent in its destructiveness and its ability to give rise to all that is.
All this beauty before him, and nought a one to share it with. They were all gone.
Rose, locked away in another universe, hopefully living happily in a house with doors and carpets and a mortgage. Wait, no mortgage. Rich father; she probably wouldn't need to borrow from a bank. With her family and his other self, living the life he never could.
Donna, with all that she had become locked away in her mind. Unable to know her own truth lest she burn to death.
Martha, the idealistic aspiring physician now a hardened soldier, working for U.N.I.T.. A cog in a machine larger than herself; the rosy-eyed idealism of her youth crushed under the weight of death and tragedy. His mistakes had cost her dearly.
Jack, the man who shouldn't be, his timeline solidified and polluted with the poison of rigidity.
Sarah Jane, oh his Sarah Jane, who had finally got on with her life. Who had a fantastic son, and by all appearances an exciting, but very human, life.
And so many, on and back through the years. Faces flashed before his eyes. The people who had come along.
Not even a year ago, the room where he now stood had shone with the energy and vibrancy of celebration. The faces of his friends, his family, reflected the glow of the time rotor as they cheered their victory. Hugs and kisses, tears and joy and pain. Even he had lost himself in the exuberance of the assembly of all he held dear.
That the return of Earth to its own cosmic home was a pyrrhic victory had not yet been clear. That millions had died, and an entire race been wiped out at his – sort of – hands was something they had not had time to digest, to realize.
In the golden hours before they had all parted, the Doctor had looked across the joyous faces of his companions and, for perhaps the first time since the fall of Gallifrey, felt the ache to belong begin to ease.
But now he sat, alone. The ebullient happiness was long gone from the darkened console room, existing only as an echo in his mind. There was no Jack, smile broad and gleaming, to clap a hand on his shoulder and say something wildly inappropriate. No Martha to pull him from his shell, piece by excruciating piece. No Donna to hold him back from what he had done to the brave and wise Adelaide. No Rose, to curl against him on the library sofa, to read with him, to listen to his stories and share silly films with. Rose, who had promised him forever, even she couldn't stay.
The TARDIS' presence in his mind nudged him softly, worriedly. He felt her concern, such that it was, and opened his mouth to assure his oldest, dearest friend that she would not be rid of him so easily. But he found the words did not come, and he dropped into the jump seat as the weight of all he had lost consumed him.
He wept for Gallifrey. For his children and grandchildren, long dead in the War. For the two billion, four hundred and seventy two million Gallifreyan children he had condemned because of the cruelty of their elders. For the billions he could not save, and for those he chose not to help. He shouted his grief into the empty console room, a wordless scream of rage and loathing for what he had been forced to do, what he had chosen to do, and what he had failed to accomplish. For the man he had been before the War had stolen all that he was. He had saved the universe at the cost of himself.
And his punishment was to live, to see those he loved fall away. Now his song was ending and even for all the pain, he didn't want to go. This universe of unremitting loss had also given him such beauty.
He took a steadying breath and walked to the doors of the Tardis. The long fingers of his hand rested against the jamb as he pushed open the door to reveal the violent whirling of the Time Vortex.
The last of the Time Lords sat at the edge of his TARDIS' open door, legs hanging down into the entirety of spacetime; the ache of the Vortex suffusing his every cell. He closed his eyes and breathed carefully as he listened to the song of time, her constant thrum along the threads of reality a voice so few could hear but which ran through the very blood of his people.
He felt a cacophony building. A disturbance in the flow, like a boulder in a stream or a knot along a spooled thread it disturbed the lines around it.
A mess of disharmonious screeching reached through space; a derangement in time's harmony so great that the universe itself called for him, a message across all creation.
He was marked and travelling on borrowed time. His song would end, and soon.
Only one thing to do then, the Doctor told himself.
Run.