The man peered out the window. Outside the old tenement housing, war was being unleashed. Explosions roared and pulses of light flashed across the sky. Vessels tore through the air. Saucers and eldritch things wrestled amongst the clouds. He could feel the intensity of it in his bones. The universal fibers of reality were twanging with each blow as two colossuses jabbed punches at one another, punches whose affects went beyond the intended target and racked the jaws of all the spectators (plus those who were just innocently walking around outside the arena). He growled as he watched men and machine moving from building to building taking cover behind vehicles long blown up, turned over and left behind by a populace was either extinct or evacutated, though it was far more likely they just burned.
The Monans were supposed to be extracting him out of this; he'd already disrupted the pyramidal harmonic on the planet and was waiting when a Dalek assault force decided to take advantage of the Time Lord's confusion. He grumbled quietly to himself as he held the staser rifle against his chest and leaned against the edge of the window. The building shook and bits of ceiling rained down from above. He could hear the Daleks screeching in the distance, and the whir of a saucer thrumming overhead. There was a sizzling sound and the man dared to peak again. Another platoon of Gothically augmented Ogrons grunted as they transmatted to the ground below. The jutted-browed beast men grunted at each other and fanned out in an orderly manner guns pointed forward firing at suspected targets.
This was getting too close. He leaned forward and pointed his rifle at one of the Ogrons, it had fillagree and a presumptuous look on its face. He hoped it was a commander and taking it out would at least slow the rest of them down. He brought his eye to the site and got the fancy Ogron's head in the crosshairs. There was a hollow whine as the bolt of streaming transcendental particles spliced through the creature's head, and the Ogron fell with a soft fleshy thump to the dirty ground. The man instantly twisted and plastered himself to the wall adjacent to the window he'd just fired from. There was a lot of commotion down below, hooting and hollering and other noises that sounded not dissimilar to a troop of howler monkeys discovering a Harpy Eagle had just snatched their alpha male. The man just stared forward, listening, staring into the empty room he was hiding in, its gray walls covered in dirt and sludge and black scorch marks. What furniture had been in the room had long since been torn or blown apart and laid in tattered mounds. He realized he was holding his breath and decided to inhale.
The hollering calmed and the man slowly inched his face back to the edge of the window. The Ogrons had dispersed. The Goths' augmentation had made the creatures seemingly more intelligent, when in actuality they just made them more efficient in being stupid, largely by lubricating Ogron neural pathways with Krillitane oil. They still were stupid, they were just faster at it, and thusly came to the correct decision quicker through trial and error by sheer biochemical will.
"Where did they go?" The man mused quietly as he tried to get a fuller view from the window. They had completely disappeared. They couldn't have been re-transmatted, there was no smell of ozone, and anyways the battle saucer had departed as soon as the Ogrons had hit the street. The man's eyebrows knitted in frustration as he tried to work out where they had gone. He put his rifle down by his side and pulled a small telescope from his leather jacket and brought it up to his eye. He scanned the streets up and down, nothing. He leaned back and gently stroked his grizzly, beard quizzically.
That's when he heard the thud behind him. He spun around; an Ogron was lying face down in front of him. A small hand-crafted knife was implanted in the back of the creature's thick neck. He looked up; a woman was standing in the frame of the doorway. She was old, far older than she looked, though she looked middle-aged by human standards. Her face had thin lines around the edges of the eyes and lips and gentle crinkles at the neck. She was thin, but not frail, lithe may have been apt but even that word lacked the concept of robustness the woman projected. Her hair was long and white. She wore a leather tunic that was slightly less conservative than a woman her age should be wearing, but it still wore well on her.
"The others are also deceased." The woman said in an authoritative voice. "I was unsure if the janis thorn toxin would work on these….brutes, but I am glad that it did."
"I suspect I am as well." The man replied, looking at the woman.
The woman strode forward, stepping over the fallen Ogron. She had a limp, in her left leg. "You were not paying attention, you lost focus. You were lucky that I arrived and saved you, he was going to shoot you in the back."
"That I have no doubt of that." The man said as he turned back to his window, his fingers playing over the butt of his staser rifle.
"It is you, is it not, Old One?" The woman asked.
"I have no idea as to what you're talking about." The man said, not looking back at the woman.
"You cannot fool me, Old One, I know about your tricks of appearance, of your ability to change faces." The woman said, coming to his side and staring at him closely with sharp blue eyes. "I have lived with your tribe for a long time, now; this shape change does not fool me, Old One. You attempt to deceive me but I am not deceived. You may change your appearance but I can smell you and you always smell the same no matter what face you wear. You have drenched yourself in blood and burning flesh but I can still smell it, the cinnamon, the Kuva berries, the orange jelly-babies. You cannot hide from me, Old One, and I have been looking for you."
"How did you get here?" the man asked, still not matching the woman's gaze, rather watching the sprawling shifting conflict out the window.
"I acquired a flying device, and K-9 has been assisting me in searching for you." The woman explained. "I am glad to have found you."
The man huffed dismissively and turned away from her leaning against the wall and sliding to the floor in a pile of fluff that had once, he surmised, been a duvet at some point in its history.
"I did not expect to see you with a gun, though." The woman continued. "The others had said you had not fought in the war. I had told them that even if you would not fight with guns, that you would fight as you had in the past, that you had a plan to end the war, to defeat the Daleks."
The man snorted and then started to inspect the rifle closely.
"I do not understand, Old One." The woman said, she took a step towards him and knelt next to him and reached out towards him. "Doctor…"
"Do not call me that!" the man gruffly snapped, glaring at the woman.
"But it is your…"
"No, it isn't, you are mistaken, girl." The man said, the corners of his eyes twitched.
"You are he, you are the Old One." The woman said staunchly, the frustration pouring forward. She grabbed his shoulder and he looked away from her. "I know you are. I have searched for you across the universe, alone with K-9. The others said you had died or fled, but I knew, I knew you were alive. I prayed that I could find you, that you had a plan to end this war. I wish to assist you once more as I did in the past when we fought monsters and demons and evil gods. I have nothing left now. Andred, my sons, my daughter have died in this war, more than once. I am growing old; even the healers of your tribe cannot extend my life forever. I wish to end this war so no more mothers have to bare the pain I bared, so no more wives have to know that their husbands were killed on some distant planet in some distant time alone, and afraid, and in pain. This is not a war of honor. It is a war of idiocy, like we had between the Sevateem and the Tesh. It is a war of obscenities that produces nothing but destruction and death and sorrow. Old One…"
"Leave me alone, woman." The man growled, trying to free himself from the woman's grip, but her grip was deceptively strong and she held onto him tightly.
"I will not leave you." The woman said sternly. "We can end this war together."
"No, we can't!" The man snarled, looking up at her. "You are right, I have a plan but it's a horrible plan."
"I will help you, Old One, regardless. Even your horrible plans are better than the war!" The woman smiled at the old man's sadness.
"No, you won't." The man replied. "This war will not end easily. There are no tricks or traps that will stop the war. It can only end one way, and you will not want to be part of it."
He looked into her eyes. His gray eyes shimmered, with a sadness that the woman could only grasp the edge of; his face softened and then he looked away from her again in embarrassment. He looked down at the floor.
"I do not understand, Old One…" The woman's hand slid down and clasped his.
"There can be no war if there is no one to fight it." The man said quietly. He gave her a side long look and sighed as he caught the change in the woman's demeanor.
Her eyes hardened and her lips pursed. Her hand fell away from his. She narrowed her eyebrows. "You intend to…"
"Yes." The man replied. "Both sides, everyone loses."
"No…" The woman stood up and backed away from the man. "You would not. You could not."
"I am nearly there." The man said quietly, he looked up at her. "Only a few more stages left." He smiled an almost arrogant smile, though the eyes betrayed the complete disappoint he also felt, "I am actually surprised at how easy it has been, both sides too preoccupied to notice, I suspect."
"Old One, you mentored me for a very long time, about needless…"
"I am not the man you think I am." The man said as he braced himself against the rifle and stood up, balancing his other hand on his knee as he stood. He winced as the old joint popped in retort. "The Gallifreyans were right. The Doctor died. I am not he."
"You are right." The woman said, the disgust in her voice building. "This is not the act of the Old One I know. It is the act of the Evil One! Maybe my tribe was not completely ignorant when you came to our world. Maybe you were always casting an illusion. You had tricked me…into believing you were wise, that you were a good man, but you are a fool, you are evil!"
The man stared at the woman. "Do not poison the memories of the Doctor. He was an honorable man, a good man. He was too good for this universe, too good to survive in this war. I am what the universe deserves now, what this war has created to replace the Doctor." He hoisted the rifle up and slung it over his shoulder. "Woman, you may be lucky. Flee from this area, run away and hide. There are safe places in the far reaches of the universe, stretches of reality still not yet stripped by the war. You are not of Gallifrey, you are not Gallifreyan. You only were ancillary to the war, tangential a bit part, left on the side-lines. If you stay unconnected, you may survive the final death throes of the Time War. Your history may change but you will survive."
"But you will not!" The woman's hand reached down and grabbed at a satchel, producing a dagger. The blade glinted in the flashes of light of the battle. The man could see the small discoloring at the tip of the blade. "The toxin will even kill one like you, Evil One. I will not allow you to complete your wicked mission."
"It needs to end…this is the only way, I'm sorry." The man said remorsefully, he looked at a watch on his wrist, there was a light blinking on it. "Good-bye, noble savage."
The man's final words struck a nerve that was primal, and even after centuries of Time Lord civility and politeness she was still Leela, proud and mighty Sevateem warrior and she screamed a battle scream. The woman sliced forward, but as she did a blurring green light flooded over the form of the 'Evil One' and he disappeared into thin air. The smell of burnt air filled the room, as she glared upwards.
"I will find you, Evil One." The woman growled to the sky. "Even if I cannot stop you, I will continue to hunt you. If you survive the war, I will find you and I will strike you down! I will avenge my husband, my children, and their tribe. I will avenge the entire universe! You cannot hide from me!"