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“The War lasted five hundred years,” he starts. It’s as good a start as any. Nice, linearly defined, easy for time-insensitives to understand. It’s not actually any of those things, of course, but it’s a good point to build off of.
Jack looks confused.
Martha doesn’t. She thinks he’s 903—which he is, by some count, or at least he was right up until just now, when the Guardians reached into the Moment and changed him but somehow nothing and everything else—and five hundred years of war sounds like a lot to her. Just over half of his ancient, alien life, drenched in the most brutal war in the whole of creation.
If only.
But Jack is immortal, not to mention a former Time Agent, and he knows how short five hundred years really is. After all, the Rutan-Sontaran War spans a hundred thousand years (or several million, depending on whether you count it as one big war or dozens of little ones with short pauses for breath in between), and that’s hardly the Time War. And he also knows, whether from the Doctor’s own ramblings in his last regeneration or from the history they taught in the Time Agency, that the War raged forever; that it encompassed the whole of Time; that its echoes and wounds can be found all across the universe, if you only know where to look.
“Earth years? Or… Gallifreyan years?” Jack asks. It’s an easy question, or it should be, and it would be an easy, linear solution as well. Only the Doctor knows how long a Gallifreyan year is—or even how to count one—so, for all Jack knows, five hundred Gallifreyan years is the whole of Time.
“Both,” the Doctor answers promptly, then frowns. “Well, not both. Either. One or the other, or any number of—”
He cuts himself off as he sees two matching blank faces staring at him. He tugs at his hair and groans, frustrated—he’s not explaining it well, he knows. But he doesn’t know how to explain the vast, incomprehensible beast that is the Last Great Time War, how to make them understand.
They’re never going to understand, he thinks. Not wholly, maybe not even partially. But if he can get them to grasp one thing, just one thing, and that one thing just a little bit, then he won’t be the only person who knows about that little bit of that one thing. Then he won’t be quite so alone.
He already tried the whole not explaining thing, anyway, and look how that turned out.
So he gathers his thoughts for a moment, a short moment, from an external perspective, and he takes a breath and tries again.
“The War wasn’t defined in terms of discrete units of time. It couldn’t be, there was too much… messing about with timelines, and the like.”
There. That’s good, right? Better than both, well, not both, either, at the very least. He doesn’t look at Martha or Jack, not yet, even though he can see them, instead keeping his senses trained on the comforting thrum of the TARDIS around him, wanting to get out as much as he possibly can before he faces them.
“So we, well, we defined units of time in terms of the War,” he says. That’s not quite right, and it’s certainly not enough, but it’s not quite wrong, either, so instead of backtracking in his timeline or in his words, he lets that statement sit there, and then adds to it. “The beginning of the War was easy to define. There were countless beginnings, countless ways the War could have started, that it did start—” he pauses here, wondering if this is making any sense at all, but he can’t imagine there being only one beginning, so he sticks with it, “—but all of them were recognizably beginnings, so whichever one we were using at the time, whichever beginning was the actual beginning, for the moment, we could still say it was the start of the War. So whichever one it was, however long it lasted, we called it the First Year of the Time War.”
And he’s rubbish at explaining things, he knows this, but if anyone’s going to get it, it’s the immortal, impossible Jack Harkness, and Martha Jones, the Woman Who Walked the Earth (even if she hasn’t done that yet, technically, and maybe never will). Brilliant, the both of them, so he wades through probabilities like water, hoping and calling on anything he still believes in—
“So, it could be an Earth year, or a Gallifreyan year, or any other type of year, but not at once?” Martha asks.
—and the Doctor breaks into a wide grin, even though he’s talking about the Time War. And oh, isn’t that novel, talking about the War like it’s something that can be talked about?