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Martha stares at him from across the table. He absentmindedly licks the bottom of his ice-cream cone. Jack leers at him as he does so, and the Doctor fights the urge to flinch from the sheer wrongness emanating through time. Vanilla, he thinks, is a very boring flavour, crunching the cone with his teeth.
“So Doc,” Jack says cheerfully, “what’s the emergency this time?”
“Another evil Time Lord about to conquer the Earth?” Martha jokes, eating her own ice-cream – cherry – thoughtfully.
He looks at her then. Knows the bitterness in her tone is well deserved even if he will only acknowledge it subconsciously. He could think of a thousand explanations of why he called her. In two days’ time, a family of Martians will crash down on Earth. He sees that timeline. Sees himself and Martha and Jack, sometimes, sending them back – UNIT killing them – resettled on Earth – sometimes the youngest child dies on impact. In a few timelines, they all live. In most, they don’t. Or the Sontarans will invade again. That will happen tomorrow, if it ever happens at all. Sometimes they will simply never return to Earth. Other timelines see the Earth burning under their fleet – burning – burning. Everything always burns -
“Can’t I catch up with some old friends?” he says playfully, before scowling dramatically at the ice cream, “this ice cream is far too vanilla-ee. Reminds me of that trip to Altros. Beautiful beaches but the company could have been better.”
The company was just himself, of course.
“You should have got the mint chocolate chip then,” Martha points out sensibly and he nods enthusiastically.
“But why are you here Doctor? No offence, but you’ve rarely done social calls.”
He stares at her again. Starts the conversation in the next timeline, sees her put down the cup and walk away. In another he tells her of another threat to Earth and they all go on a mad adventure together before Jack is shot by a Cyberman. In this one, he sees the possibilities, and decides to be honest.
“I don’t. Usually.” He starts, and Martha, with those clever eyes, looks at him sceptically, opening her mouth to interrupt and he knows what she will say so he speaks first, “but you deserve an explanation.”
He does not look at Jack.
He pauses. Knows he has their attention even if the wariness has not quite faded from their eyes. He feels his age then. How often did he ruin the trust of those who blindly gave it to him?
“Alright then,” she says, “what’s your explanation?”
The Doctor doesn’t tell her that it is because of the Year That Never Was he offers this to them. He doesn’t tell them how difficult it is to get the words out. But they both lived a paradox, a whole year gone, and he knows what it feels like remember something that had never happened. (He is so proud of her. But some part of him wishes she never lost faith in him. He’s begrudgingly proud of Jack as well but wishes he would die.)
“How much do you know about the Time War?” He asks casually.
(How can he say it so casually? They died. Worse. They never existed in the first place. Locked away outside the universe leaving him alone – the first and the last)
In another timeline, he tells them something different, tells them of the Academy, and the Master, and falling in love and the ugly, painful, end that all of it led to. In that timeline, he sees pity, then condemnation on their faces because they will not understand –
In this one, he does not (not that it matters, he’s dead as well, they’re all dead by his hands in some way or another. The Doctor: the greatest killer in the universe. Here to help.) and tells them instead about the Time War.
They are confused. He knows that. But curious. All his companions are curious. It usually gets them killed.
“Not much,” Jack says cautiously, and the Doctor wonders if he thinks he will stop talking if he pushes the Doctor too far, “just rumours really.”
“Only what you’ve mentioned,” Martha says just as carefully.
Her hands are folded in her lap, and she leans forward with interest.
He feels all the dimensions pressing down on him and feels the earth rotating and feels nothing.
“The Time War was built on paradoxes. Or rather – we used them to fight. Imagine The Year That Never Was, then imagine it a billion times longer, a billion times more often. Whole timelines were dissolved, and futures that were certain never were. I remember so much more than my age, remember all these timelines but none of them happened. See, I talk about the Time War, but it never existed.”
Martha looks baffled, but Jack, once a Time Agent, frowns.
“How could a war never exist Doctor? That doesn’t make sense.”
It couldn’t. Not to three-dimensional beings.
“It wouldn’t to you,” and Martha rears back at the insult, but the Doctor blithely pushes on through, trying to get her to understand –
“There were infinite ways the war could have started. And infinite ways it did start. Time, in the war, was in flux. We weaponised it. Logically, we should have been wiped out by the Daleks, but we are Time Lords for a reason.”
Were. Not are. Tenses are so confusing for time travellers, even more so for those who don’t speak Gallifreyan. But no matter where he is in his timeline, there is no more ‘are’.
“So the war was contained like the Year That Never Was,” Martha says.
No. No.
“If you say so,” the Doctor smiles blithely, “but containing that many paradoxes? Impossible. Time starts to break.”
The war was inevitable the minute he’d made that choice on Skaro. Before then, even. He could have stopped it all, only he couldn’t have. Nothing could have stopped it in the end.
It was inevitable.
The Time Lords were called to fight. The Lord Doctor was called to the frontlines.
The Doctor laughed as he fought. As Dalek fleets were decimated above countless planets, wiped out. He made sure they’d never existed in the first place.
Except – there were always more Daleks.
And soon they began to manipulate time.
Not like the Time Lords. They were called the Lords of Time for a reason. It was them who had created black holes, feats of dimensional engineering that no other race could compare to, they who had stared into the Untempered Schism and saw all of time and space. It was they who watched, never interfering. All-knowing.
They were blind. And then they intervened.
“Doctor,” the Master had said before he fled the war, “you’re falling apart.”
And he was. Timelines were fracturing so that he flickered between realities where he died. In a parallel one, he collapses in the Master’s arms, and his best enemy, his best friend, flees with him. In that one, the whole of reality collapses and nothing ever exists.
On a good day, and a day could be measured in so many ways then, a few hundred galaxies would be destroyed. Sometimes, they’d even manage to reverse it.
But Time is ‘wibbly-wobbly’ as he explained it to Sally Sparrow once upon a time. And though time is always in flux, too much pressure on too many points sees it break.
The Nightmare Child was a result of this. A new dalek, Davros had said with glee. The Doctor had laughed when it began consuming Davros’s command ship.
He had stopped laughing when it kept eating.
“In some timelines, the Master tried to save me from it,” the Doctor says, and he cannot make this sound casual. He has to make them understand.
“He’s a psychopathic monster who hates you,” Martha says flatly, but she does not leave the little café that they have found themselves in.
“Suppose it doesn’t really matter,” he says sadly, “those timelines never existed. And he’s dead now.”
“People always said the Time War was just a myth, at the Time Agency, I mean.” Jack cut in, and the Doctor stared at him solemnly, watching him shift under the weight of his gaze. He softened his face slightly, grateful for the distraction.
“It is,” he said glibly, “it never happened. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
He and the Master were the only ones left. Children of a planet that never existed. Born from parents that never existed. Attended an Academy that never existed. Ran away with the only TARDIS in the universe from a world that never existed.
The Rani never came to earth. Romana and he never travelled together, except in his memories. Rassilon and Omega, figures that had loomed over the universe, simply never existed. Susan, in one life, lived on Earth for years. In this one, the Doctor never had a granddaughter.
“My people never existed.” He could say and see the pity on their faces.
Instead, he takes out his sonic screwdriver from his pocket and scans the offending vanilla ice cream.
“Ah!” he says triumphantly, “too many emulsifiers. Too artificial.”
“Doctor,” Jack says quietly, and he knows he wants an explanation.
He will have to make do with this.
He sighs. (Even if he shuts his eyes, the screaming of infinite galaxies will never stop. They would have drowned the universe out, if he hadn’t ended it.)
“Look,” he pauses, “humans aren’t built to comprehend what I’m trying to explain. The Time War happened. And it didn’t happen. I am the only person in this universe who remembers it. Except for the Master, and he’s dead now. I owe you both an explanation for the Valiant. Me and him… we were not just the last, but the only Time Lords ever in existence. The only ones in the War. He had every right to be furious at me, in a way.”
He killed them all. No. Worse. He unmade them. And he was the only other one who remembered.
“Even now Doctor,” Martha says bitterly, “you are still trying to justify his actions.”
No, he almost says, frustrated. No, I’m not.
“What you need to understand,” he says quietly, “is that The Year That Never Was was the Master having a temper tantrum. In the grand scheme of things, it was nothing. He could have done so much worse if he’d wanted. He’s a Time Lord. If he really wanted to rule this galaxy, he could have easily. The same way I could have if I wanted to. Earth is nothing to him, except for the fact that it meant something to me. And even then, everything he did was reversible. No one remembers except for you. If he wanted to, he could have done so much worse.”
He does not mention the Time Lord Victorious. Knows there is a reason why he travels with humans. The stars in their eyes keeps him grounded.
“After all this time Doctor,” Martha, shining, brilliant Martha, says furiously, “you’re saying that that year was nothing?”
Yes, it was nothing. One paradox.
The Time War held infinite.
“Yes. It was.”
She moves her hand then, in an aborted motion of fury, and rises from the table.
“No, I think I understand,” Jack says softly, staring accusingly at the Doctor, “he could have done worse, if he’d wanted to. Not just a paradox.”
“Yes,” he nodded, relieved, “it’s… ok, well, there’s a war, and imagine you escape the war and then imagine that your best friend, your lover – “ he ignores the surprised exclamations at that, rewinds, does not speak the last two words this time “ – is the one who killed your entire species and saved what was left of the universe with it. Imagine you then wake up, and for you it has been mere days since then, and you don’t know, but Gallifrey is silent and your mind is silent, except for the drums and you are going mad faster and faster and faster and you just want to make your friend hurt, so you target Earth.”
He takes a breath. Restarts.
“What I am trying to say is that the Master had very good reasons for doing what he did, and, I’m sorry Martha, but it could have been so much worse.”
She sits back down.
“You killed them all?” she asks quietly.
He ignores the horror in their faces.
“Time was breaking,” he murmured, “reality would have been ripped apart, caught between the Time Lords and the Daleks. And there was a big red button that would save the rest of the universe, but unmake all of the higher species. The Time Lords and the Daleks both would be dead, and the rest of the universe saved.”
He stares at Jack then. He sees the scorn in his eyes and wonders if the Doctor put it there himself.
“Yes, Martha,” he says bluntly, “I killed them all. If I hadn’t, every single life-form in the universe would never have existed. So, I pushed the big, red button and locked the Time War away forever.”
The Doctor’s punishment was living when everyone else had died.
“There are myths about that, Doctor,” Jack says carefully as Martha stares in blank horror, “I just didn’t think they were true.”
He smiles grimly.
“Why do you think I’m the only one left?”
“I’m sorry Doctor,” Martha says quietly, and he closes his eyes.
“Where were we?” he cries, as if he had somehow lost the thread of the conversation, but that would be as impossible as a Time Lord being unable to sense time, “ah, yes, The Time War.”
In the end, it is just the Doctor, and the Moment.
In the end, there is only one choice.
He begs, pleads, cries to someone, anyone who will hear. Let him die with them. Please.
What will this make him if he destroys them all? Who will he be?
You must have felt like a god, the Master whispers in his ear, and he cannot deny that, yes, for a moment he was. He hates it.
Only one choice, the universe sighs.
In the end, he presses the button -
- and all the stars go out.