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"Someone's got to look after this stupid lump, so."
"Okay, see you around," you say, with false cheer in your voice.
And you step into your TARDIS. And you run.
There's a weight, inside of you. There's a weight, in your chest, the size of a planet with red skies and shining cities, pressing in on you with every breath. And emptiness in your head, lonely, desolate, like the space between galaxies. And you can barely breathe, but you must.
Earth was always your favorite planet. You loved it, loved the blue skies and the little towns and the trees and the people. They were primitive, sure, but that was part of the charm—they were carefree. Carefree. Young and happy and just so different from the Time Lords—
(a hitch in your breath)
—so different, that in instants, in those little, precious instants where there's a grin on your face and an explosion behind you, you can almost forget. Or you tell yourself you can.
Because you can't.
Because the emptiness won't let you. Where before there were billions – trillions – of voices, a web of thoughts and minds that spanned across space and time, there's now one. Your own. And it almost destroys you, because even as a renegade, even as you traveled to the ends of the universe and to other universes, it has never been so silent.
There's a chameleon arch somewhere in the TARDIS, you know, and if you thought hard enough, you could remember where it was. But you don't. And even though you're a coward, even though every second of every day weighs down on you and all you want is peace, you know this is your guilt to bear. Your loneliness. This is your pain to bear. This is your penance. You're the one who killed them, and now you must live with it.
(One day, you find yourself blindly running towards the room that it's in, and it takes everything you have to force yourself to the ground, force yourself to stop running)
Sometimes, when you remember the woman you tried to save or see a planet that might have been destroyed, you can almost convince yourself that you can live with it. Sometimes, you can almost push away the roiling of self-loathing and disgust inside you and almost push away the thoughts and memories and that emptiness and convince yourself that it was worth it. That the Time Lords had become monsters, and the Daleks were now at least gone. Then you remember the children. And try very hard not to think of your own.
Then you run.
You go on adventures. You save a family before they board the titanic. You talk to kings and queens and bargain with peasants. You visit the Medusa Cascade. You go to Barcelona, the planet, and distract yourself with dogs with no noses. You learn the language of the Judoon, just for something to do, and you search up the translations of "alone."
You save a shop girl from Autons. You admire her spirit, and her courage, and her goodness. You offer her a place in the TARDIS, by your side. And she declines.
No worries, nothing special, plenty have declined before. And yet this one cuts, pierces your two hearts, and it's all you can do to walk away. You bleed, bleed into the air around you, your soul and mind ragged and bleeding.
When the TARDIS is in flight, you sit down on the ground and stare at nothing, because she—She was brave, and she was good, and you are not. And now you're lonely, and you're broken, you're bleeding, because she's too good for you. Because you've been running. Because you've been hiding. You are a coward, an utter coward, and a murderer of trillions. And the genocide of two races was just your final atrocity. How many planets had you sacrificed as the Warrior? You always went unarmed, and yet you had so much blood on your hands. How many races, and peoples? How many cities and little villages and towns and homes and families?
(Never cruel, never cowardly, but you've been both, haven't you?)
How many children were on Gallifrey that day? The day you killed them all?
You never knew, you never counted. You never wanted to know. And yet now, sitting on the ground on the console room of your beloved TARDIS, you need to know. You need to. How many children? How many children?
Almost without conscious thought, you stand up and walk to the console. You press a few buttons, pull a lever here or there, crank a few cranks, then pull down a handle.
The TARDIS stays in the time vortex.
You blink. You read the coordinates off the screen. Then you slam your hand into it because the War is timelocked. The war was timelocked. You can't go in, you can't go out.
How many children?
Your hearts beat. One-two-three-four. One-two-three-four. Because you know one place the Time War still exists outside the timelock. And you have been avoiding it. But you need to know.
The dreams of a Time Lord primarily differ from those of a human in two ways.
One, they're always lucid, for Time Lords are psychics after all. And two, if the Time Lord dreams of a place and time they've been to before, the dream will be accurate.
The subconscious was a wonderful, terrible thing.
And so, you park your TARDIS in a planet of three moons and only trees, where the water is deep sapphire and the skies are a calm green-grey. And for the first time in what might be weeks since the War, you let yourself fall asleep. Then you plunge into hell, because hell is the only word that can describe the last days of the Time War.
Hell.
The fabric of space and time is falling apart around you, twisted into revulsive unrecognizability. The skies are a patchwork of night and noon, cluttered with clouds of smoke and ash and debris and motes of golden energy. Dalek ships and TARDISes (one of them yours) fight amongst them. The ground is charred and burnt and bloodied, littered with mutilated ships and corpses just starting to rot, and in the distance, one of Arcadia's tall spires collapses.
You look away. You don't need to look. The fall of Arcadia is emblazoned in your memory, still fresh and painful every time you almost let yourself stop running. Panic rises inside of you and you must distance yourself, remind yourself that it's a dream, even as your hearts beat a rapid one-two-three-four one-two-three-four inside of you.
Beside you lies a dying Time Lord, one of your classmates from the Academy, though you barely recognize him as he lies trapped beneath a piece of burning spaceship. An arm is missing, and his clothes are ripped and burnt and bloody. You swallow the panic and look on dully, watching him die because that's the least you can do for him.
(You have seen so many deaths already. What's one more?)
When he lets out his last breath, you close your eyes. And time slows.
Your mind is still empty, but here, here in a dream of hell, you can still trace the ghostly lines and voices and minds that you know aren't real. And it's worse than the emptiness.
But you soldier on, because that's what you are. You're a soldier. You're a soldier that destroyed their own planet, a soldier who had never wanted to fight. You soldier on, and you sort through those half-present threads and links, and you start counting.
One.
Every time you find a child. Every time you feel the grief and fear and mourning in the young mind of a child, you count.
Twenty-four.
The empty ones hurt. The minds so filled with horror and fear and pain that they're vacant. In a fugue state. This mind is about three, the youngest so far, and something inside of you breaks. You stay with him a while, then you count him and move on.
Ninety-seven.
There are ones that are almost happy, far out in the countryside, still young enough to be able to forget. Playing with ribbons and running and laughing, even as they turn away from the fires in the distance. Those ones are the worst.
One thousand and twenty-three.
You count how many child soldiers you've seen so far, as well, count how many children had picked up guns and weapons and fought because no one else could.
Twenty-two thousand three hundred and sixty-four.
The numbers go up. Somewhere in the real world, your cheeks are wet.
Five million nine hundred and eighty-five thousand, and two
You're shaking. You're shaking and breathing is uneven and whatever calmness, whatever distance and dulling you managed to gain has dissolved into nothing. You're falling, but it's all you can do to keep counting.
Seventy-two million, forty-two thousand, three hundred and thirteen.
A grandchild of yours, huddled in a cramped bunker with hundreds of other children, where the ground shakes and the air reeks of fear and waste and death. It's a level of detail you shouldn't have been able to see through a distant link, but your timeline is so intertwined with theirs – your timeline stopped theirs – that you can see everything.
Eight hundred and twenty-one million, eight hundred and three thousand, six hundred and thirty-seven.
A toddler, trapped in a room with a Dalek, running through all their regenerations in the space of about a minute.
One billion, two hundred and thirty-five million, seven thousand, one hundred and ninety-six.
You've never hated the Daleks more.
Two billion, four hundred and seventy million, fourteen thousand, three hundred and ninety.
You've never hated the Time Lords more.
Two billion, four hundred and seventy million, fourteen thousand, three hundred and ninety-one.
You've never hated yourself more, or so desperately.
Two billion, four hundred and seventy million, fourteen thousand, three hundred and ninety-two.
The last child is small. A baby, really, perhaps just under a year old. She's swaddled in a blanket, sleeping, blissfully ignorant. You count her, and your task is done.
You ought to move on, ought to wake up, move away, but you stay with your eyes closed on the fields by Arcadia, stay with your mind by that little innocent babe as the sheer envy and guilt and pain rise within you and you scream. You scream into the skies of hell. You scream until there's no more air in your lungs to match the emptiness of your soul and you scream until you wake up, in the TARDIS, rocking back and forth in a tight ball and surrounded by emptiness and silence.
It's in that silence that you lie, unmoving, for longer than you'd care to admit. It's in that silence that, for the first time since the War, you stop running.
How many children?
Two billion, four hundred and seventy million, fourteen thousand, three hundred and ninety-two, Two billion, four hundred and seventy million, fourteen thousand, three hundred and ninety-two, children, with their lives stretching out in front of them, that you killed. Two point four seven. Billion. Children.
And some broken, twisted part of you would've laughed if the number weren't so crushing. No Sontaran, or Cyberman, or Dalek could stand up to that. Could stand up to you. They had their numbers and their kills and it all paled next to you. You.
You were a hero, once. A brother. A president, a friend, a husband, a savior. A father. And now you are nothing, nothing but a hollow husk, sinking with the weight of genocide and drifting in that horrible, endless emptiness.
The Time War had ended. But at what cost?
Two billion, four hundred and seventy million, twenty-four thousand, three hundred and ninety-two.
It should've been worth it. It should've been worth it. The Time War, had it gone on, would've left the universe burning in its wake, and yet you remember every face, every mind of every child on Gallifrey that day. Every one of those two point four seven billion. Every single one.
What if—what if there had been another way?
The TARDIS stays silent even as you break.
You're a good actor, you know, when you try to be. And yet it takes you weeks before you can pretend to be fine, weeks of running before you stop shutting down every time someone mentions anything distantly related to the time war, weeks before you start knitting together the broken pieces of yourself into something that resembles, if only vaguely, a whole. Every child's laugh still hurts, every mentioned death still pierces, but running is what you do. So you run.
You run. You run around the universe, wherever the TARDIS takes you, and before you realize it, the TARDIS takes you back to Earth, and you open the doors to the sight of a blonde, brave, good woman, mere moments after you last left her.
It hurts to see her, but you need someone, and maybe she'll run with you.
"By the way," you say, "Did I mention it also travels in time?"