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The Doctor wanted to fall to her knees and scream until her voice broke. To let the tears burn down her face until there was nothing left inside her, but silence. Because this was unfair. Because this wasn’t how it was meant to be.
Everyone had a home, a world, a place that belonged to them. And so did she. Its name was Gallifrey. She hadn’t been born there, but that had never mattered. It was still her home, the cradle of her childhood, the echo of her laughter, the soil that had once known her footsteps. There she had learned what it meant to have a family. There she had whispered mother and father for the first time, felt the warmth of belonging, known the reckless joy of friendship, even if those same friends would one day turn their backs on her.
There she had fallen in love for the first time. Even if the man she loved would later become her greatest enemy.
There she had built a family of her own, children, grandchildren brief, fragile threads of love woven through the tapestry of eternity.
And for that world, she had fought endless wars. She had died a thousand times, waded through rivers of blood, and carried the guilt of every lost soul. She was a child of Gallifrey, its citizen, its President, its orphan. She might not have been born under its twin suns, but her hearts beat in their rhythm two burning lights mirroring those distant stars.
Three regenerations, three lifetimes she had lived in the shadow of her own conscience. To save the universe, she had set her home aflame. She had turned Gallifrey into ashes. She had slain her own people, the Time Lords, one by one. For centuries, the weight of that act had dragged her down into the dust. She remembered the names of every child she had killed, whispered them into the dark until the list was complete, until despair made her wish for death. Sleep had long abandoned her.
River Song — beautiful, merciful River. When she had seen the torment in her husband’s eyes, she had done the only thing she could: she erased his memories, hoping he might find peace in the emptiness. But peace never came. Every time the Doctor closed her eyes, she saw Gallifrey burning. She saw the Academy, the Citadel, the screaming children frozen in the firelight.
And yet it had all been for nothing, because none of it had been true. The Doctor had never destroyed them. She was not a monster, but a saviour, a genius who had given everything to protect her world.
So why?
Why had it all led to this to Gallifrey lying in ruins once more? Was all her pain, all her penance, just to watch it die again?
When she learned the truth of the Hybrid, she had run for centuries not from Gallifrey, but from herself. Once, she had believed that she and Clara were the Hybrid, two souls bound by tragedy and defiance. But how wrong she’d been. Clara was only human, a mortal girl chosen by the Master to protect her, to walk beside her, to fracture herself across time for the Doctor’s sake. Brave, kind, fleeting, but human.
The true Hybrid was something else entirely. It was them: she and the Master. The Doctor, whose origins lay beyond their universe and the Master, a Time Lord shaped by Gallifrey’s cruelty. Together, they were the storm that would end their world.
When the Master had learned the truth about the Doctor — about what she really was — he had done the unthinkable. He had destroyed Gallifrey himself.
“It was all for nothing,” she thought.
“I’ve had the rug pulled beneath my feet.” That was what went through her mind the first time she saw Gallifrey, broken and hollow, smoke curling into the red sky like veins of grief. The words echoed in her chest like a wound.
The one who had done this, the one who had turned her home to dust, was the same person she had loved most in all her lives and the same one who had hated her more fiercely than anyone ever could.
Which truth was crueller: that Gallifrey was gone or that the Master was the one who had taken it from her?
Could she ever forgive him, the man who set fire to her world?
Would you forgive your husband if he burned your home to the ground and turned everything you’d ever built into nothing?
No one could and yet, she feared she might.