Work Text:
Here is what the Doctor knows about Time:
It will always continue, and there will never be enough of it.
No one will teach you this lesson at the Academy. Would. Maybe still don’t, ever since he decided somewhere, somehow, there might still be an Academy.
It’d be hard to convince anyone to be a Time Lord if you told them from the start how little they could rule.
The Doctor imagines they must all learn this at some point. There’s no wheel, no brakes, no steering. You ride it out lucky, clever, or both. It still won’t be enough.
Here is what the Master knows about Time:
Time can be bargained with.
(He knows this in the way all once-and-never-again sacrifices do and knows it better than the rest of the terrified whelps who stared into the schism. What happened made him special.)
It demands mostly itself from you. Time is self-cannibalizing, but she feeds it well to get what she wants. She knows how to sweeten negotiations with blood. She’ll do that gladly. It isn’t her own.
The greatest boon she demands of Time is herself, of course. She negotiates survival. She’ll pay any price.
She’s in control.
Here is what Even knows about time:
They can’t get Gallifreyan tenses right. It frustrates the Master, but when he corrects them, his words sound exactly like the ones they make, even if they understand he means something different, means future, means past. They can only speak about the present.
They travel through time. The present is always closer than the future or past can be. The present can be touched. You reach for any other time, and it becomes the present.
That’s why Even doesn’t need to think about the past.
That’s why Even can’t think about the future.