Hello! Thank you again to everyone who has stuck with this story from the very beginning! It's been three years since I started writing this, and your ongoing support and reviews have really kept me going. And if you're new (or newer) to this story, welcome!
*NOTE: This chapter was a bit of an experiment for me in terms of style and formatting. Unfortunately, this site is pretty basic in terms of formatting, so if you want to see this chapter the way it's actually supposed to look like, please free to go over to AO3 and read it there (I'm WonderstruckGuardian). I'm sorry for the inconvenience.
Chapter 12: How Do You Kill a Lonely God?
Last thing I remember, I was
Running for the door
I had to find the passage back
To the place I was before
"Relax," said the night man,
"We are programmed to receive.
You can check-out any time you like,
But you can never leave!"
—"Hotel California" (Eagles)
[The PYRAMID]
There were voices nearby. The Doctor could hear them, fading in and out of his perception like waves lapping at a shore. Sometimes he understood what they were saying. Other times their words were too muffled to recognize.
He tried to open his eyes, tried to open his mouth to speak, tried to move at all, but if he succeeded at any of that, he wasn't aware of it. He felt like he was floating, drifting in a dark, endless sea. Heavy fog pervaded his mind, clouding his thoughts and slipping past all the psychic barriers he had spent centuries building up to keep out unwanted intruders.
He was only vaguely aware of his body, of the dull ache in his chest and the prickly, tingling sensation in his limbs. He couldn't feel his tongue at all. And he was afraid. Something was wrong with him, everything was wrong, but he didn't know why.
After what felt like eons of hellish waiting, he felt a faint pinprick of pain, possibly in his neck, and a pressure in his temples that grew stronger by the second.
It took him too long to realize what was happening. Far too long, and by the time he did, it was far too late. He belatedly attempted to summon additional telepathic barriers, shields, anything to keep out the foreign presence pushing its way into his mind, but each new wall he formed crumbled almost instantly.
The fog thickened, darkened, until all he could perceive was inky blackness rolling through his mind.
He tried visualizing a series of corridors—coral, like his TARDIS—lined with doors, locking his thoughts and memories behind each one to protect them from the fog. He made the corridors of his memory loop back on each other and spiral off into endless, inescapable labyrinths meant to trap the encroaching darkness, to keep it from moving further into his mind until he could find a way to force it out.
For a moment, the Time Lord thought his plan was going to work. The roiling fog billowed through the maze of corridors, angrily rattling doors and shaking the ground when it found that was unable to find a way out or further in. Then it turned its full attention to him, abandoning its previous attempts to seek out individual vulnerabilities in his mind.
The darkness had no face, but the Doctor still felt like it was watching him. Something about the presence behind it almost felt familiar, but he couldn't put his finger on who or what it reminded him of. Whoever they were, they were extremely persistent.
Barely a second after he thought this, the dark presence surged forward and enveloped him completely.
The Doctor's mental landscape went dark, corridors disintegrating in the blink of an eye. He thought he heard distant voices calling out his name, but this time they didn't seem to be coming from an external source. They echoed around him, crying out from the depths of his own mind.
Images began to flicker across his mind's eye, not of his own will but something else's. Half-remembered moments fluttered past his awareness in fragments barely tangible enough to perceive.
"Help me!"
Rose's voice pleading for help. A rough bought of regeneration sickness. Killer Christmas trees smashing through the walls. Clashing swords with the Sycorax.
"I'm not entirely sure…I'm not…Are we still here, or have we left into the stillness? I'm not entirely sure…"
A fridge door swinging open and blinding white light spilling out. Warped dining room wallpaper. Ripples of darkness lined with light swirling in a vortex, reaching out to swallow him whole.
"That moment stretched into an entire eternity…"
A black and white condolence card lying on a wooden table. Children's notebooks piled around it.
"Order Perfects Creation."
The Doctor couldn't recall where he had heard that phrase, but he knew it was important. It was something like a motto…
"…the very first word I ever said to you. Trapped in that cellar, surrounded by shop window dummies, oh, such a long time ago. I took your hand. I said one word, just one word. I said...Run!"
Oh, Rose. His love, though he'd never said the exact words.
"I don't age. I regenerate. But humans decay, you wither, and you die. Imagine watching that happen to someone that you—"
And then he'd lost her. She was so important to him, and he'd lost her. The last Time Lord, a stalling coward, never saying the things that mattered until it was too late. It was so very him.
He hadn't dared to say that four letter word out loud. The universe was not kind to him or those close to him, though he poured his own regenerations, blood, sweat and tears into keeping it going.
"I love you."
"Quite right, too. And I suppose, if it's one last chance to say it, Rose Tyler—"
Always too late, or too early. Never enough.
The Doctor promptly shoved those memories to the back of his mind along with all of his other pain and guilt.
"Oi! No stupid Martian is going to stop me from getting married."
A fiery woman in a wedding dress…Donna. He'd been overwhelmed by loss and heartache when he met her. When they'd faced the Racnoss together, deep beneath the surface of the Earth, and released a flood of water from the Thames to drown the ancient race, there had been a moment when the Doctor had wanted to drown with them. Not just out of heartache, but heartbreak.
Hearts broken without hope of repair. Homesick without the slightest chance of ever returning home.
Gallifrey, home.
TARDIS, home.
Rose Tyler.
Home.
Something writhed now in the shadows of his mind. Something that was almost familiar, left over from his lowest moments and darkest hours. Something dark and bitter to remind him of his pain, lest he attempt to forget it entirely.
He did try, sometimes. Just a little bit. Always running, never wanting to say goodbye but always forced to in the end.
Forgetting was a common side effect of regeneration. New personality, new dawn. Out with the old, in with the new. Sometimes the Doctor wasn't sure whether it was better. He was damned either way.
"If you talk to Rose…just tell her...tell her I...Oh, she knows."
He remembered falling, falling, falling through pitch darkness into the pits of Krop Tor, and facing a devil, the Devil, with nothing but his mind and words and belief to find his TARDIS and get back to Rose in one piece. He had believed in Rose then, more than any god he'd ever heard of, and he still believed in her now.
But this time he was alone, Rose was gone, and he was left with the devil's hissing laughter echoing through his memory like one final taunt.
And beneath the laughter…there was something else. A storm was rising, devouring everything that defined this incarnation of him along with all the others that came before. The Doctor tried to fight it, but the shadows smashed through his mental landscape without mercy, shattering everything faster and faster and cracking open memories he had meant to forget about entirely, or shouldn't have been able to access yet to preserve timelines.
Memories of companions and places he hadn't thought about in centuries, from long before the War. Back in the days of celery stalks on lapels and colorful scarves so long it was a wonder he hadn't tripped over it and accidentally strangled himself into his next regeneration.
Back when there had been other Time Lords and Ladies, some of them his friends and others his enemies, but all of them alive and part of a constant, often comforting telepathic resonance in the back his mind. He missed that feeling, knowing he wouldn't ever be alone, no matter how insufferable most of his kin had been.
"Regenerate. Just regenerate. Please. Please! Just regenerate. Come on."
He remembered pleading with his enemy, his oldest friend, the only other Time Lord left. Begging him to not let him be the last. He could still feel the weight of the body in his hands, see the flames of the pyre he'd built rising higher…
Time folded in on itself like an imploding star, tying itself into knots around the Doctor's hearts and mind. He couldn't repair his telepathic barriers fast enough to prevent the collapse, couldn't even tell where the devouring darkness was coming from. It simply surrounded him, rising from the deep on all sides.
It lit fires throughout his memory, sparking pain into flames and stoking them with fervor.
He could almost picture golden sparks beginning to flake off his skin at the rush of heat that surged through him.
No, no, no! He couldn't be regenerating! Not yet! He still had so much left to do!
"There was a war. A Time War. The last Great Time War. My people fought a race called the Daleks, for the sake of all creation. And they lost. They lost. Everyone lost. They're all gone now. My family, my friends, even that sky. Oh, you should have seen it, that old planet. The second sun would rise in the south, and the mountains would shine. The leaves on the trees were silver, and when they caught the light every morning, it looked like a forest on fire. When the autumn came, the breeze would blow through the branches like a song."
He could still picture the Citadel so clearly, could almost reach out and touch the beautiful silver leaves on the trees, and feel Gallifrey's telepathic field resonating—
—but then fires and screams and darkness started, the skies blackened, and his soul cried out NO MORE—
"Pouring every ounce of my being into the rift…"
"…because I could hear his voice."
A young boy, 10-years-old. Blond hair, grey eyes. Lost in a Multiverse that should have been impossible. A house in California resonating with psychic echoes of pain. High-pitched screaming, humming, and the impossible sound of a universe tearing itself apart.
Images flew through the Doctor's mind faster and faster, disintegrating one by one into infinite, welcoming darkness. All the pain, all the passion, all the happiness he could no longer have…the shadows pressed on, enveloping him, inviting him to release his most painful memories so he could finally be at peace.
He rebelled at the thought of letting go. He had to hold on! He would not be swayed by the darkness invading his mind! He was stronger than that!
The darkness laughed at his resistance.
"It is said he will talk to a wanderer, to the man without a home, a lonely god."
Finally, the presence that had crept into his mind and grown there like bindweed, spoke. It didn't have a voice, not really, but the Doctor still understood the impressions it forced into his mind.
All lonely gods want something...
"Who are you?" he demanded telepathically.
Do you not want love?
Do you not want to be free and unfettered?
You hold yourself back for the sake of a universe that could care less about you. But you could do so much more.
You know it's true.
Just say the words.
No. This was madness. This was his mind, HIS! He didn't want whatever the darkness had to offer. No matter how much he wished for the same things, he knew better than to take them.
"Let me go!" the Doctor snarled.
Three words.
"Never!"
Never?
He tried to drown out the darkness so he didn't have listen to it. "I'm the Doctor. I'm a Time Lord. I'm from the planet Gallifrey in the constellation of Kasterborous. I'm nine hundred and three years old—"
You cannot resist forever, no matter how much you pretend you can.
Pain flared through him, pushing him to the very brink of what he could bear. Only the fires of regeneration had ever burned this hot and this close. It terrified him.
He stood on a precipice, staring into that familiar, all-consuming fire, and felt the pain grow by the second.
Three little words.
What difference does it make if you say them in your own mind?
No one will hear you.
The flames climbed higher and higher, wrapping around his consciousness like a tender and destructive lover.
Try it.
Order. Perfects. Creation.
At the last second, the Doctor shrank back in the face of the inferno.
He gave in, just a little, and repeated the words just to see what they felt like. "Order perfects creation? But I don't—"
Say it again.
What? No. He wasn't some bloody pet that could be commanded to do things at will. He just wanted to understand.
SAY IT AGAIN.
Three little words, that's all.
Order Perf—
No! No, this was wrong, this was all wrong! He was the Doctor. He was the last Time Lord from the planet Gallifrey, in the constellation—
"I'm burning up a sun, just to say goodbye."
Loss and heartbreak crashed over him again. His mental defenses slipped even further.
"They used to call it the Shining World of the Seven Systems. And on the continent of Wild Endeavour, in the mountains of Solace and Solitude, there stood the Citadel of the Time Lords. The oldest and most mighty race in the universe. Looking down on the galaxies below, sworn never to interfere, only to watch. Children of Gallifrey were taken from their families at the age of eight, to enter the Academy. Some say that's where it all began, when he was a child. That's when the Master saw eternity. As a novice, he was taken for initiation. He stood in front of the Untempered Schism. It's a gap in the fabric of reality through which could be seen the whole of the vortex. We stand there, 8 years old, staring at the raw power of Time and Space, just a child. Some would be inspired. Some would run away. And some would go mad."
"What about you?"
"Oh, the ones that ran away! I never stopped."
He was losing parts of himself to the darkness now, so much and so fast. He could feel it all disappearing so very fast, and he couldn't do anything to stop it. The hope, and love and friends that had made him who he was, all of it was slipping through his fingers faster than the sands of Time.
"The Doctor. The man who keeps running, never looking back because he dare not, out of shame—"
He recoiled from that voice, blue light and metal casing and screams of "EXTERMINATE!" flashing through his mind. He was no longer sure what was fact and what was fiction, real or imagined, but each new moment he glimpsed was like a knife to his hearts.
"There are Laws of Time. Once upon a time there were people in charge of those laws, but they died. They all died. Do you know who that leaves? Me! It's taken me all these years to realize the Laws of Time are mine, and they will obey me!"
Another knife. He could too easily imagine madness burning in his eyes, his teeth barred against all the timelines he no longer saw fit to exist.
"Tell me what happens."
"I don't know."
"Yes, you do."
Oh yes, he did, and he would grow arrogant because of it. Challenging Time to a duel he could never hope to win.
Always failing someone in the end.
"You keep insisting you're not a soldier, but look at you, drawing up strategies like a proper general."
Oh, his daughter…the daughter he had never intended to have, but maybe one he had needed. The daughter he had never really gotten to know. So young and spirited, curious and eager to see the universe. So like him.
Too much like him.
"You're my daughter…You're going to be amazing. You hear me? Jenny?"
She was gone now, too. He'd kissed her forehead, gently laid her body down, and picked up a gun. He'd held it to a general's head, the one who had taken her from him. He hadn't pulled the trigger, but oh, how he'd wanted to.
How could he possibly say he'd never reached for a gun, never used a weapon instead of clever words? He couldn't. He knew all too well that words could not always win wars. That didn't mean he liked reaching for a physical weapon when words could be infinitely more effective.
"I could bring down your Government with a single word."
"You're the most remarkable man I've ever met, but I don't think you're quite capable of that."
"No, you're right. Not a single word, just six."
Sometimes when he was alone and there was no one to remind him of the person he had once promised to be, it was hard to remember exactly why he had chosen "The Doctor" as his name.
His words were always the first weapons he reached for, and there were times when he didn't even need them to win. His silence could be violent, too.
Order Perfects Creation.
He wanted the darkness clamoring for his soul to go away, to yank it out of his hearts and cast it aside for the rest of time. But he couldn't do it. It refused to budge.
"He can't just run away crying all the time if he wants to join the army."
"He doesn't want to join the army. I keep telling you."
"Well, he's not going to the Academy, is he, that boy? He'll never make a Time Lord."
His own household had been so sure he would never amount to anything, let alone a Time Lord.
If only they could see him now.
Order Perfects Creation.
Fragments of memories began to filter into the Doctor's mind more slowly, each one less tangible and more like a faint echo of a possibility, or a half-remembered dream.
"The name you choose, it's like a promise you make. He's the one who broke the promise."
First, do no harm. That was a promise. A doctor's oath and sworn duty. FIRST, DO NO HARM.
Rule number one: The Doctor lies.
He had never imagined himself as a murderer, an instigator of genocide. And yet, in Gallifrey's darkest hour, he had done what he had to do, and lived with the horror of that choice ever since.
"Never forget, Doctor, you did this. I name you. Forever, you are the Destroyer of the Worlds!"
And so he was. The Last Time Lord. The Destroyer of Worlds. The Oncoming Storm.
Order Perfects Creation.
"—what was the last thing you said to me? Go on, say it."
"I said, Rose Tyler."
The darkness grabbed hold of that precious name along with every other name he held close to his hearts, and all the grief and pain he associated with them, and tore it all to shreds.
"Like a broken clock, glitching between frequencies…"
The Doctor was burning again, faster and faster, consumed by whirling fragments of time and memories. Timelines splintered, shattered, and dissolved, and all he could do was watch.
"2005. I'll tell you what, I bet you're going to have a great—"
Order Perfects Creation.
The storm quieted for a moment, granting the Doctor a brief reprieve.
You could do it, too.
Perfect creation.
Perfect Order. Perfect creation. Perfect balance. All things were as they should be. It almost sounded…pleasant. Something he would want for himself and the rest of the universe. He wanted to have adventures, and enjoy the thrill of running as fast and hard and free as he possibly could. But he wanted other things, too.
He wanted what the rest of the Universe had.
"Imagine watching that happen to someone that you—"
Something in the Doctor finally gave way, one last barrier slipping away into the fog, and the blessed numbness that swept through him felt glorious. For once, there was no more pain in his hearts.
Memories—what memories?—were vanishing so fast from his mind now, so very fast, and everything was changing. He was changing. He was burning, numb, lost—
No, not lost. He was…better.
He was free.
Free to become what he had always stopped himself from becoming, because now he could finally see the truth. He wasn't just the sole survivor of his race, the last one standing at the end of the Time War. No, he was so much more than that. He was the Victor. And now he was free to bring Order to the universe the way he was always meant to. Without fear.
And why should he fear anything?
Now you understand.
Order Perfects Creation. That is all.
Wait.
No…..That wasn't right. He should fear. Fear was good. Fear kept him in check.
The last vestiges of the Doctor panicked, screaming out into the dark. "Stop! I refuse to be part of this! Let me go!"
Then let go.
Let go, and give the Universe the Order it deserves.
"I will not be your soldier!"
You can bring an end to all pain, an end to all war, an end to all loss.
Even your own.
Just let go.
"I…I could stop all of that? Keep everyone safe?"
Everyone.
"…...I could make the universe better, the way it should be."
As it should be.
Order perfects creation, and so will you.
The Doctor paused.
He had tried so hard to be good at heart, had long ago chosen to suffer so others hopefully didn't have to. And where had that gotten him? What had been his reward?
Nothing. Nothing except loneliness, heartbreak, and despair.
So, the last of the Time Lords made his choice. "I…I will make Order perfect creation."
Order Perfects Creation.
Order Perfects Creation.
Order Perfects Creation.
Order Perfects Creation.
Order Perfects Creation Order Perfects CreationOrderPerfectsCreationOrderPerfectsOrderPerfectsCreationOrderPerfectCreationOrderPerfectsCreationOrderPerfects CreationOrderPerfectsCreationOrderPerfectsCreationOrder—
Accepted.
.
.
.
.
The Charter thanks you for your loyalty.
That is all.
And the Doctor knew no more.