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“Doctor?” Donna says, passing him the induction coupler.
She’s in the TARDIS console room with him, down on the lowest level, helping him with maintenance - well, he calls it maintenance; she usually calls it “pointless tinkering” but nonetheless seems content to help when she’s not otherwise engaged. The Doctor suspects it’s at least partially a ploy to “keep an eye” on him, but he’s not about to turn down free labour.
Or Donna’s company, truthfully.
“Hmm?” he hums around the sonic screwdriver clamped in his teeth as he connects two wires. Nothing sparks, so he decides he must be on the right track, and uses the screwdriver to reactivate the conduits as Donna talks.
“Grandad mentioned something last time I saw him, about you saving his life. I know you’ve saved the planet loads of times - thanks, by the way,” she interjects, nudging him playfully, “but it didn’t sound like he meant that, it sounded like he meant him, specifically. And then I thought, that business with ATMOS, but it was Mum who got him out of the car, so I can’t figure what he was talking about.”
The Doctor’s hands still, because he knows what Wilf had meant. “It was after I wiped your memories,” he says, and even now, hundreds of years later and with Donna right next to him, it hurts to remember having to do that. “Christmas 2009,” he specifies.
“Hang on, I remember something weird happening then. Or hearing people talk about it, anyway - everyone was going on about some man appearing everywhere and planets in the sky again. I chalked it up to too much Christmas libations, at the time.” She pauses, and he knows she’s thinking about all the things Sylvia and Wilf had to keep from her, to protect her. “So come on then, tell me what really happened. How did Grandad get involved?”
“He found me, actually. Must be a family talent,” he says, grinning despite himself at the memory of being tracked down by a group of senior citizens.
“But why’d he want to? Since remembering you was gonna cause my head to explode, and all.”
The Doctor briefly considers tripping one of the TARDIS’s circuits - nothing that would cause any real damage (hopefully), just enough sparks and noise to distract Donna from her question, because there’s no way to answer it without dredging up a lot of memories he really prefers to leave buried. But if Donna doesn’t get an explanation from him, no doubt she’ll go to Wilf for it, and he doesn’t want Wilf to have to explain that terrible day.
“Something was coming back through time,” he starts, disentangling himself from the inner workings of the TARDIS enough to see Donna’s face. “The Ood could sense it and they warned me; that’s how I knew to come. And Wilf could sense it too.”
“And whatever it was was bad enough to make him try and track down a man who could’ve been anywhere in space and time,” Donna says, filling in what he hadn’t. “This wasn’t a fun adventure, was it?”
It’s so much of an understatement it would be funny, were it about anything else. “No,” he confirms. “That man who replaced everyone, I knew him. We’d fought dozens of times, and there was always collateral damage. His name was the Master.”
Donna snorts. “The Master?” she repeats incredulously. “I know I’m talking to a bloke who goes by ‘the Doctor,’ but still, a bit on the nose, isn’t it?”
“Well, he chose it, like I chose mine.” He can practically see her thoughts racing as she tries to make the obvious but impossible connection, and decides to save her the effort. “He was another Time Lord.”
“But you said they all died, in the war. You said you were the only one left.”
“I thought I was. But the Master saw the horrors of the war, and ran away from it. Probably the one sensible thing he ever did. He ran all the way to the end of the universe, and disguised himself as human so perfectly that even he forgot who he really was.” He feels a stab of grief for Professor Yana, who had been brilliant and gentle and never really existed. “But then I found him, and he remembered.”
“But why would he -” Donna starts, then frowns and backtracks. “Actually, what was it he was trying to do? And why did you have to stop him? I mean, if you’re both Time Lords, the only two Time Lords left, shouldn’t you have been on the same side?”
Hadn’t he made the same argument? Don't you see? All we've got is each other. Not that it had worked.
“We were, once upon a time,” he tells Donna. “We were friends, even. But it wasn’t enough for him, in the end, just to see the universe. He wanted to control it, to own it. I thought he had gone mad, and I didn’t know how right I was. He had this sound in his head, you see, a drumbeat.” He taps his fingers on the floor, a quick one-two-three-four, then wishes he hadn’t. “A constant noise, driving him mad. I didn’t think it was real, just a delusion of his insanity, but it was. And once he replaced every person on Earth, once there were seven billion Masters, the sound was strong enough that he could follow it back to its source.”
“Which was?”
“Gallifrey. The High Council planted that noise, that signal, in his head, all the way back when he was a child.” I don't know what I'd be without that noise, the Master had said, and the Doctor wonders too. All that rage, all that destruction, would it have happened without the drums? How many of the Master’s victims might have been spared?
“But why?” Donna asks, pulling him back to the conversation at hand. “What’d they want to drive him mad for?”
“Driving him mad wasn’t the point,” the Doctor corrects. “Though I doubt they lost much sleep over it. The point was the signal itself. It gave them something to follow. An escape route out of the last days of the Time War.”
Donna goes still and silent, and he knows why. It’s been more than six months now, of dinners and tea and the TARDIS parked in her backyard and difficult, necessary conversations, but he still doesn’t talk about the war, tries his best not to bring it up.
Maybe it’s finally time.
“The war is time locked; that’s how I ended it. The whole thing, with Gallifrey at the centre, got sealed away. Inside, it’s always the final days of the Time War, while the rest of the universe moves on. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. At least, that was the idea. But the Master escaped, and the signal with him, and the Time Lords could use that to break the time lock.” Donna blinks at him, clearly trying and only mostly succeeding in following him, and he searches for a suitable metaphor. “Like finally having enough of a gap to wedge a crowbar into.”
“Okay… but why is that bad? Because I’ve seen you, when you talk about your planet and what happened to it, and you always look so sad. Don’t you want it back?”
The red grass, the silver leaves, the glittering domes and stately mountains under an orange sky. He’s seen countless planets and landscapes, and none of them have ever been able to replace that.
“It wasn’t just Gallifrey that would’ve broken through the time lock. It was the whole war. Never mind Earth, the entire universe would’ve been at risk.” He looks at Donna, and there’s careful sympathy on her face, but he knows she’s imagining explosions and laser fire, scenes lifted from blockbusters of the sci-fi variety. It’s not her fault, but he can’t help but resent the ignorance a little. “You can’t understand what it was like,” he tells her. “Literally, you can’t, because you’re not time-sensitive. Fighting with time - it’s brutal, it’s monstrous. People don’t just get killed, they get killed and then unkilled and then killed again. Or they’re erased from the timeline altogether, so that they never existed at all, and sometimes even that gets undone and redone. Eventually time itself begins to splinter, different timelines bleeding - crashing - into each other. I remember things that didn’t, couldn’t, happen, and know people who never existed. It’s enough to drive anyone mad. And it did.”
“You’re not that far gone, despite occasional evidence to the contrary,” she says, and it’s so Donna that he feels his mouth twitch in a smile, just for a moment.
“Thanks, I think. But I actually didn’t mean me.” He sighs, and that flash of humour already feels like a million light-years away. “I meant the rest of the Time Lords.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk about what your people were like,” Donna says in a gentle invitation for him to continue, a contrast to her usual forthright questioning.
“They were… well, I suppose they were pretty much what you’d expect from a race that called themselves ‘Time Lords.’ Clever and brilliant, even great by some measures, but also pompous. Surprisingly resistant to change, for a species that regenerates. Frequently arrogant and dismissive of the ‘lesser species,’” he says, and Donna’s eyes narrow in disapproval of the phrasing. “You can see why I ran away,” he adds.
But even that description is too kind, he knows. Decadent, degenerate, and rotten to the core, he’d once called them, without realising just how right he was.
“Eventually it became clear, even to the High Council cloistered away inside the Citadel back on Gallifrey, that the war couldn’t be won, not by them, and they couldn’t bear it. The Time Lords, the greatest civilization in the universe, becoming nothing more than another extinct race, of interest only to dusty historians? It was unthinkable. And so they decided that if they couldn’t have the universe, no one could.”
He tilts his head back, closes his eyes. “The Final Sanction, they called it, but they meant the end of everything. They would have destroyed time, destroyed creation, destroyed reality itself. Omnicide. With the Time Lords as the sole survivors, ascended into pure consciousness. The ultimate victors.”
And he remembers, unwillingly, standing in a snowy street in London with Adelaide Brooke. I'm the winner. That's who I am. The Time Lord Victorious. All those years spent as a renegade but in the end he’s just as much of a Time Lord as the rest of them.
He reluctantly opens his eyes and sees Donna looking horrified, a hand covering her mouth. “That’s why I had to do it,” he says, the pleading justification he’d made to himself countless times. “That’s why I had to kill them, trap them along with the Daleks inside the hell that was the end of the Time War. And that’s why I had to break the link and send them back to it.”
It’s hardly secret knowledge or a new confession - I made it happen, he shouted at that Dalek in Utah; the killer of his own kind, the Devil had taunted; fear me, I’ve killed all of them, he calmly stated as fact. But the guilt feels as raw as if it happened yesterday and he braces for Donna’s reaction.
“I’m sorry. Oh my god, Doctor, I’m so sorry you had to do that.” Her lower lip trembles and she impatiently dashes away a tear, and he knows she’s trying to imagine it, imagine slaughtering her own people because otherwise they would’ve slaughtered everything, and he wishes she wouldn’t. It’s not something that can be imagined; the only way to know what it’s like is to actually face it and he wouldn’t wish that knowledge on anyone. “It wasn’t your fault,” she continues. “You didn’t have a choice.”
We always have a choice, he remembers telling Jenny with another pang of grief. He hadn’t told her that sometimes all the choices are bad ones, and it’s just a question of degree.
“Yeah,” is all he manages to say in response, and he’s grateful when Donna doesn’t comment on the way his voice threatens to break just from that single syllable. He fiddles absently with the wiring, just to have something to do with his hands.
“Was that what Grandad meant, then?” Donna finally asks quietly. “You saved his life when you stopped the Master and the other Time Lords?”
He could lie. It’s his first thought, that he could lie and say yes and probably get away with it, because for all Donna favours the direct approach he doesn’t think she’s going to go to Wilf and check his story, not about this.
But he would know. He would know that he had lied to her, to his best friend, about something that involved her own family. About the sort of man he really is, when the chips are down and he has no more tricks up his sleeve. He can’t pretend the thought sits well with him.
“No,” he admits reluctantly, “it was afterwards. The Time Lords were gone and they took the Master with them, but the device he had used to copy himself onto every human was still running, and pulling Gallifrey through the time lock had caused its nuclear drive to overload.”
“That sounds bad.”
“Fortunately, it was designed so that the excess radiation would be vented into the control room, to contain it. Less fortunately, they’d also designed the control room to be constantly staffed. It had two chambers, and the door to one could only be unlocked by someone entering the other. And Wilf was inside. He’d let some poor terrified technician out when everything started shaking.”
He glances at Donna, and can tell by her face that she already knows where this is going. “You didn’t just use the sonic to let him out, did you?” she asks, except it’s not really a question. “You took his place.”
He realises too late that he’s told this all wrong, that he’s allowed Donna to imagine some selfless rescue rather than the reality of him scared and raging at an empty room. “I didn’t want to,” he confesses very quietly.
“I wouldn’t expect anyone to want to die of radiation poisoning, even if they knew they were going to come back,” Donna says, then furrows her brow in thought. “Wait, did you even know you’d regenerate?”
“It wouldn’t have mattered if I had. I didn’t want to regenerate. Ridiculous, really,” he says, more to himself than Donna. “I should’ve been grateful for a fresh start by that point.”
He expects Donna to have something to say about the fact that he didn’t know if he’d survive, or to ask why exactly he might’ve wanted a fresh start, but she surprises him. “Is that what regeneration is, a fresh start?” she says instead. “I don’t think I’ve ever asked about it, really. How it works, what it feels like.”
“It’s…” he starts and then trails off; he can’t think of any comparable human experiences. “I’m always the same person. All the pieces are still there, but regeneration shuffles them around. Some traits become more prominent, some become less. I’m still me, but a different version of me.”
Donna nods but slowly, like she’s thinking something through. “So after you regenerate, whatever happened before - it feels like it happened to a different version of you?”
“I didn’t forget you, if that’s what you’re asking. I never forget anyone I loved,” and he only registers the word as it’s leaving his mouth. Donna clearly registers it too, and he hurries on before she can comment. “But yes, regeneration can put a bit of distance between me and the memories. I suppose that’s why I didn’t want to do it.”
“Think you’re gonna have to walk me through that bit of logic, brain box,” Donna says, understandably enough.
“I’d lost you,” he says, though he directs it more at the TARDIS circuitry than Donna. “I’d lost you and Rose and Martha and all the others, if not to metacrises and parallel universes then to families and jobs and real life. And it hurt, Donna, it hurt so much but that hurt was all I had left of you and I didn’t want to let it go.”
He glances at Donna, and finds her looking at him sadly. “You know I would’ve wanted you to move on, right?”
“I know,” he says quietly. “It wasn’t penance, it was something much more selfish. All I could think was that I had lost and lost and lost and it wasn’t fair that after all of that, after all the people I’d saved and all the sacrifices I’d made to do it, I still had to lose the only thing I had left.” But this is what I get. My reward. And it's not fair! he remembers screaming, shoving papers off a desk in a pointless display of rage, and looks away from Donna. “It wasn’t my finest moment.”
“But you still did it,” she reminds him. “You still took his place, even though you didn’t even know if you would survive at all.”
He wants to argue, though he’d be hard-pressed to explain why. He had, factually, risked his life to save Wilf’s, but she makes it sound so noble, so heroic, when it hadn’t felt like that at all, and he wants to squirm at the implied praise. “Well, I couldn’t just let him die, could I?” he says, trying to downplay it. “Not good old Wilf.”
“You would’ve done the same thing for a perfect stranger, though,” Donna says, and it’s a statement rather than a question.
For all her certainty the Doctor makes himself think about it, imagines if it had still been that nameless technician trapped in the booth at the end. “Yeah, probably,” he finally agrees. “I was glad it was Wilf, though,” he adds. “It felt like one last thing I could do for you.”
He barely has time to register that Donna’s eyes have gone rather shiny before she crashes into him, throwing her arms around him in a tight hug. “Thank you,” she murmurs into his shoulder.
His arms close around her automatically, but his thoughts are still back in the Naismith manor, stuck on the look on Wilf’s face when he realised what the choice was. I’ve had my time, as if the Doctor hadn’t. “I should apologise to Wilf,” he says.
Donna pulls back to give him her best unimpressed look - which, when it comes to Donna, is really saying something. “You think you should apologise for saving his life,” she repeats back at him, her tone making it clear she thinks he’s being an idiot.
“I’ve been the person who survives because someone else didn’t,” he says seriously. “It’s not a comfortable thing to live with at the best of times, and I certainly didn’t help by carrying on the way I did.”
“You can apologise if it’ll make you feel better, but I think you know as well as I do that he wouldn’t blame you for not going gentle into that good night. And neither do I.” She pauses. “It reassures me, actually, to know that you do in fact have more survival instincts than a lemming.”
He doesn’t have to ask to know that she’s thinking about the conversation they’d had several months back. I wasn’t standing there thinking about how much I wanted to live, he’d said, and he’d hardly expect Donna to forget something like that. But for all the concern underpinning her words she’d phrased it as a joke, so all he says in return is, “It’s a common misconception, you know, that lemmings throw themselves off cliffs -”
He’s cut off by Donna. “Oh, shut up, spaceman,” she says, but she’s pulling him back into her embrace and tucking his head under her chin, so he’s not going to complain.
She doesn’t let go even as the seconds tick on, and he’s not going to complain about that either, but she worries about him enough as it is. “I was all right in the end,” he tells her. “Regenerating wasn’t so bad once it was over. I had more adventures, made new friends.” And then lost them too, he can’t help but think, though he does his best not to dwell on it. “And now I’m here with you, after all these years. It’s more than I ever could’ve hoped for.”
Those last few words are thick with emotion, but it’s the good sort of emotion this time. He closes his eyes, presses his face a little more firmly into Donna’s shoulder, and thinks, not for the first time, about how lucky he is.
And that’s before Donna says, as casually as if she were discussing dinner plans, “I love you too,” and kisses the crown of his head.
Then she makes a noise that he thinks would be best transliterated as “eurgh,” though that hardly does it justice. “Just how much hair gel do you use?”
Very, very lucky indeed, he decides, laughing.