Work Text:
The old memory is still there. False now, but inexorably there. The Doctor will never be able to pretend he wouldn't have what it takes to go through with sacrificing 2,47 billion children just to end it all.
He would have done it again, almost did. The Doctor can never pretend because in the end, without another way, there is no version of him who would make a different choice. This is hope and it is atonement, but never absolution.
The Doctor saw Gallifrey burn. Watched from the eye of the hurricane the Moment held him in, secure but not unaffected.
No psychic shielding could have withstood having all its tethers violently burnt away in a single Moment. She made it a quick death, engulfing the entire planet faster than any wildfire, unstoppable, faster than the speed of sound.
He heared their screams anyway. When the House of Lungbarrow collapsed, it took what belonged to it down with it. And with a hole like that torn through the foundation of him, the Doctor had no hope of blocking anything out.
Only right, for him to feel exactly what he had done. To be alone in remembering the sensation, forevermore.