I am become Death, destroyer of Worlds,
Robert Oppenheimer, misquoting the Bhagavad Gita
After......
Breathe in, breathe out: such are the weaknesses and strictures of the flesh. Hearts pounding still, I rested my weary bones against the chill surface of the stone bench, tucked away in an alcove off the corridor leading to the Panopticon. Distant sounds of life were heard faintly, but muffled against the maelstrom of my own thoughts and recollections. So introverted was I, that I barely heard the stealthy approach of footsteps and the whisper of voluminous robes against marble floors.
"Lord Doctor, I did not think to find you here."Romana was looking down at me, face a picture of inscrutable dignity.
"Don't call me that," I said as a matter of habit, glaring up at her. Often I had said it, but no one ever listened, locked into habit or perhaps their own obstinacy. "Not now, not after...."
"This war has changed us all," Romana said softly, eyes averted as she spoke.
I didn't reply, as it would merely be stating the obvious, and forming words was one chore too far at the time.
For a moment, it seemed like she was carefully choosing her words, turning them over and weighing them against circumstance and reason, before coming to a foregone conclusion in her mind. "I heard about Arcadia..... the most recent version of events, that is." Uncommon hesitancy in her voice, she looked up again, eyes meeting mine. An uncommon sheen of some unspoken and indefinable emotion glistened there.
"There is nothing to say, nothing to speak of that will do any good. Some things cannot be changed," I grated, closing my eyes, unwilling to speak of it. That was a mistake, for the events replayed themselves behind my eyelids, like they had been wont to for the interminable length of time since then. Even a Time Lord lost track of the days, weeks, months and years with all the rewritten timelines, paradoxes, and shattered fixed points- much less the seconds and minutes between, no matter how regrettable and sorrowing they were.
Then....
The one time I had been too late was when it mattered the most. The fourth, fifth, or maybe the hundredth time that we'd fought for Arcadia and it had gone wrong, so wrong. The same batch of untried recruits as so many times before that, Alex amongst them as always, and the foolish old man who couldn't save them one last time. The same mad rush to get them out of there, to evacuate the city before the Daleks breached the Sky Trenches... only this time, the Daleks had retained the barest glimmer of a memory of the previous aborted timeline. Remembered and brought the appropriate weaponry to use as covering fire to hold off the removal of the civilian population beforehand.
"To the TARDIS," I had called, the city already in flames around me, smoke and ash burning my throat and stinging my eyes. I could see women and children fleeing from the attack, but I was too far to help them. Too far away to help anyone, it turned out.
Then came that fateful blinding flash, followed by the feeling of total wrongness that accompanied shifting timelines and temporal disturbances. Luck- or as I would have it, misfortune- was all that spared me, that and the nameless and nearly faceless guard, who caught me by the bandoleer and bodily restrained me.
He was shouting some meaningless garble in my face and shaking me by the lapels of my jacket, words lost in my distraction. How could I have heard him, when all I saw was them? Caught up in that advanced time field, centuries and millennia passing in a fraction of the time it took to blink an eye, the glow of a hundred mere youths going through their regenerations in seconds lit Alex from behind. Alex, poor Alex, too human to regenerate and too Time Lord to be anything but caught in the trap, helplessly bathed in the fires of so many regenerations cycling futilely around him. Aging through middle age, to old age, to crumbling decrepitude will I could only watch in horror. Hair going from dark, to grey, to white in merest moments while some prattling fool held me back. Going from the flower of youth to a decaying ancient, eyes never leaving mine as he stared at me in bewildered, confused terror. No one had ever told them of that danger, told them that that could happen. Death was a given risk, nearly a foregone conclusion, but not this. Not the type of death where the lines between life and death blurred, merged, and transitioned until all was dust. Time could be rewritten, victories and losses could be undone, but not that. Not death by a Warp-Chrono-Field Generator, a misbegotten variant of our own Demat Gun that had been developed by our foes. A far lesser one that was, nonetheless, as effective as the original.
