Chapter Text
“Doctor!” Martha calls after him, then runs after him, before he can get through the door. It attracts attention – most of the people here are from UNIT, and from overhearing their whispers he’s well aware that the only reason he wasn’t swamped on sight was that Martha made it quite clear to everyone that if he did show up, they were to leave him alone. And not salute him. Which he was grateful for, really, but now he realizes that coming at all was a bad idea and if he still had Donna he wouldn’t’ve been so stupid as to cross timelines like this, but he’d just wanted to see someone who was still happy, who thought he was still happy – and now he’s ruined that.
“Doctor,” she says again, much closer, putting her hand on his arm, and he sort of wants to lean into it and let someone else support him for a while.
He can’t speak, he can’t even look at her, but she fills the silence with an apology. “Doctor, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t – I shouldn’t have pried.”
It’s ridiculous, her apologizing to him, after what he’s said. Oh, Martha.
“I ran into a tree the other day,” he blurts out before he can stop himself. He’s still not looking at her, but he can feel her double-take anyway, and he has to mentally review what he’s just said in order to understand why. Oh, right. “I mean, I met a tree – nice fellow, from the Forest of Cheem – they’re descended from your rainforests right here on Earth, lovely people.”
Around them, an oddly-shaped bubble is forming, as the more polite UNIT personnel try to give them some space and the more curious ones attempt to eavesdrop on the legendary Doctor talking about alien trees.
“He had no idea what Gallifrey was,” he says, still almost disbelieving it himself. “No idea at all. I thought, I mean, the Forest of Cheem, they’ve got probably the best racial memory in the universe, they’d remember, but no – he knew what the Time Lords were, but of course he knew, I’ve mucked about with the Forest too much for them not to know.”
Martha doesn’t stumble at all over the idea of a sentient tree, now that his verbs have been cleared up. “Was the Forest on Gallifrey, before?”
“No, of course not,” he says automatically. “Gallifrey hated outsiders, aliens. Complete xenophobes. No, but – you all used to speak of Gallifrey,” and he’s used his planet’s name three times in the last minute; that has to be some sort of record for this incarnation. “Everyone on Earth, in every nation, in every time-period – even before you lot went out to the stars. And on all the other planets, too, every species, every culture, through all of history. Everywhere I went, I couldn’t get away from it. It was the news travellers brought. Priests lamented it. Prophets saw it. On so many worlds, it was the beginning of their creation myth.” Oh, how he remembers that, how the name of his lost homeworld had stalked him through the universe, how he’d fled before it. “‘Gallifrey,’ they’d say. ‘Gallifrey has burned.’”
“How?” Martha asks, tentative but still curious, willing to grab answers as long as he’s willing to talk.
“It was the echoes. When the Time War ended, everything that had come undone – it all sort of snapped back together all at once. It sent ripples through the universe. But they fade, like any other echo. I thought the forest of Cheem might last, but – oh, it doesn’t matter.”
He runs out of things to say at last and closes his eyes. The feel of the earth spinning around the sun sweeps out from under him, and for a moment the only thing keeping him anchored to this reality is Martha’s hand on his arm.
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly as he struggles to pull himself together, to plaster on a grin and stuff everything back in its box.
For a long moment he is tempted to remain here. To stay. He could wait for the Daleks in secret and then help his previous self take them down instead of relying on the metacrisis – he wouldn’t have to sacrifice Donna, he’d get to keep her – and he could take the Reapers on, he could. He’d worked it all out after Adelaide, how he could have sorted the Reapers if she hadn’t gone and shot herself – and with Donna right there, his own previous self wouldn’t do anything so stupid as that. He could do it, he could –
In the back of his head, there is a sound like the Cloister Bell ringing. The Doctor jerks around to stare unerringly in the direction of the TARDIS, even though there are several walls between him and her. The bell-tone feels like a funeral dirge, like knocking, and suddenly staying is the last thing he wants to do. “I have to go,” he says, not quite managing to keep his voice steady.
“I’ll see you around,” she says, her eyes dark and worried.
“Yes,” he agrees, but there’s none of the certainty that should be there when discussing an event that he’s already attended. “Twice more, at least,” he adds. Martha’s eyes widen, but she drops her hand, takes a tiny step back, and offers him a way out anyway.
The Doctor does what he’s best at, and runs.
---
Sometimes a change would spawn longer timelines. Mostly they spawned shorter ones, as everything died around him.
He was all eight of his regenerations at once, now, and more than that; in many timelines a regeneration went differently, or he (or sometimes she, now) ran through them quicker and got to nine, ten, eleven, twelve – all the way up until thirteen, and when that one ran out sometimes the Council gave him more. It was mad, being so many people at the same time, but it was better than being dead, because he was that, too; in increasingly many timelines he didn’t survive to reach this point at all. Oh, he knew exactly why the Eternals could no longer stand this War, why they’d left; existing in so many states at once might be their default, but when all those states were of War, such existence turned into Hell.
Yet it was this same warping of his self that seemed to make him immune to the very different kind of warping spreading throughout the Time Lords. Ever more of them whispered of the Ultimate Sanction, of transcendence, of an escape from the horrors of war. He had to believe that he was immune, at least – for if it was not some outside force acting upon both him and his people, then he would never be able to forgive them for suggesting such an abominable scheme. Yet Rassilon’s careful politicking spread, and by the time it came to a vote from the Council – with seventeen dedicated paradox machines just to ensure that this timethread could not be cut out – the verdict was nearly unanimous. The Doctor felt its ramifications wash over him in a single united Moment across all of the timelines.
In despair, he unlocked his bit of Eternity and stepped within.
He sat in the TARDIS for a very long time. Outside around him, the War raged on, began, ebbed, frothed – but never ended. This was a war that stretched across the whole of Time, and there was no end inside of Time. For this war to end, the universe itself would end.
Safe within this Moment, Time couldn’t touch him. The War couldn’t touch him. His own timeline moved forward and went nowhere, for he was the Paradox Machine, now. Futures died out as his presents consolidated, dragging his mind back into sanity, and forcing his pasts to merge into a single stream where –
---
He never left Susan in the year 2164, because he never had a granddaughter. Two curious teachers never followed a strange girl home from school and stumbled into a space ship. Eventually a human did wander in by accident, though, just in time for him to take off without realizing he had an unexpected guest.
Jamie and Zoe never had their minds wiped, because he never called his people to get the War Lords’ victims back to their proper eras. The War Games that they encountered had a mix of aliens from various cultures but only one time, for the War Lords had no War Chief to lend them time-travel technology. But it turned out that humans were not the most vicious species in the universe after all, and when the dust settled, they all three died and only the Doctor came back to life, stuck on Earth with a badly damaged TARDIS and only a Level 5 planet’s resources to assist in repairs.
The Master still bothered him on Earth, but then, the Master was, like him, a Great Meddler, pasts and futures and present split – or so he explained it to himself at the time. They didn’t hunt each other through the Matrix, though, because the Matrix was never built (and the silence echoed so loudly, he thought he’d gone blind and deaf).
The Rani, of course, was already wiped from Time.
The Monk followed the Rani.
Borusa didn’t go insane and send four of his incarnations to the Death Zone, because there was no Borusa and no Death Zone, either.
The White Guardian never sent him to find the Key to Time, and he never met a young Time Lady who had attained a triple first at the Academy. There was no Academy, and the Six-Fold God had passed out of Time with the Eternals before the universe began, leaving the Key to Time in his TARDIS, ready to lock the Moment shut.
He was never put on trial by the Valeyard. (But he forgave the Valeyard now, because if he had the chance, he would kill his younger self, too. His only criticism was that the Valeyard should have aimed at his first incarnation, before he ever went to Skaro in the first place.)
He never went to Skaro.
He never came from Gallifrey. Like his memories of the Rani, his recollections of his homeworld were fake and always had been. His timeline sprung full-formed from nothing in a British junkyard one November in 1963, leaving him born feeling three centuries old. But those centuries never happened.
The Hand of Omega never collapsed that first black hole, and Rassilon never harnessed the Eye of Harmony. No Time Lords looked into the gap in the universe, and the only thing that kept any black holes in existence was the first and last TARDIS, the only TARDIS, with its bit of the Eye. She was never merely a run-down, outdated old ship – she was the most powerful construct in the universe, the lynchpin upon which creation rested: destroy her heart, and the universe itself would come undone –
---
The Doctor cried.
There was no other solution that he could find – he, a master of pulling gambits from thin air (or hard vacuum, as the case might be) was stymied, here and now, at the most important junction in his entire existence.
The Key sat waiting in the Lock. But as soon as he turned it... it would stop everything. The universe would be over – a simulacrum would take its place. Much of the original would be excised out, banished behind the largest Time Lock ever forged. The Time Lords would be purged from every reality and sentenced to Hell: his very own Ultimate Sanction.
With them would go the other Temporal Powers, and more lesser worlds than even he could properly comprehend. He’d become the most horrific mass-murderer ever, far surpassing the Master’s death toll at Logopolis – that had been but one reality. And at the same time he would bring life to countless new species on countless new worlds as lesser races winked into being, replacing their predecessors.
(You must have been like God, the Master breathes, and he cannot deny it.)
He stared at the Key, for an eternity and no time at all, stared and thought and dreamed as the Valeyard came to life in the back of his mind and whispered do it, DO IT.
The Doctor reached out, cringing, thinking, there’s no other way, and –
- turned the Key –
- (connected the wires) –
- (pulled the trigger) –
And all the skies of all the worlds went dark.