Doctor Who: The Day of the Doctor

Many years later, in circumstances too scandalous to relate, I asked Ohila what had been in the goblet.

‘Lemonade and dry ice,’ she admitted, as I lit her cigar. ‘Or something like that, I was in a hurry and it needed to look dramatic.’

‘The Idiot Child was a warrior his entire life. The universe needed him to be a little more honest on the subject, so I provided a moment of theatre that facilitated his change of hearts.’

‘He knew that darkness was always inside him. Allowing him to pretend it came from elsewhere was a mercy of sorts. From that moment on he had quite enough to worry about and I didn’t want to add self-loathing to his many burdens.’

‘Just practical. The Doctor has been so many different people, self-loathing could take all day.’

‘Of course. Of course we did, the Sisterhood always knows. But there was no one else. Simply no one else could do what that man could. He was so special, in so many ways, the Idiot Child.’

Ah, Ohila, always such a beautiful woman, and a thrilling and innovative darts player. She’s a little too inclined to lecture me on my sexual politics, but for all that, she makes a lovely cuppa.

Now most of you, as keen students of the Doctor, will also know what was ahead of him at that point in his life. The Warrior formerly known as the Doctor (or the Doctor of War, as people insisted on calling him, despite his protests) went on to wage the bloodiest campaign in the history of the known and unknown and partly known universe. It was said he felt every blow he inflicted, and grieved for every life he took, but that none of this pain ever stopped him or slowed him or diverted him from his purpose. He had become a warrior to end war, and he fought more fiercely in that cause than any soldier known before or since. The wrath of the Doctor of War was the last wonder witnessed by the many billions who stood against him. He took command at the slaughter of Skull Moon; he battled at the fall of Arcadia; he fought to prevent the rise of the Nightmare Child; he witnessed the seven deaths of Davros and he led the final charge up the slopes of the Never Vault.

And as the centuries passed, and he grew old, he realised it was all for nothing. So long as there were Daleks and Time Lords alive in this universe, this war would never end. And now that his own people had become as vengeful as their sworn enemies, he began to see there was only one solution. As is known, he broke into the Time Lord vaults and stole the Moment, a powerful weapon from the ancient times of Gallifrey, and used it to wipe out every last Dalek and every last Time Lord. A single moment of dreadful slaughter, and suddenly there was peace everywhere in the universe—except, of course, in the hearts of that lone traveller who once again called himself the Doctor. He had not expected to survive, and so lived on in the firm belief that his continued existence was punishment, and that his purpose was repentance.

Let it be said, that repentance was sincere. He travelled the galaxies, and brought peace and hope and kindness everywhere his TARDIS landed. In time the peoples of the universe forgot the war, and no one spoke or heard a word of it anywhere—except those brave souls who looked into the eyes of the last of the Time Lords and asked him what was wrong.

This much you all know. But there is so much more. We come now to the second of the Doctor Papers, which can only be described as Chapter Eleven. Yes, I know, but as I have explained, there is no correct sequence in which to tell this story. Timey-wimey, as an idiot once wrote. Before we begin, I wonder how many of you realised that the last document was written by the Doctor himself, even before that fact was made evident? Show of hands, please. No, go ahead, put your hands up. Doesn’t matter where you are, I can see you. Oh dear, what a lot of books suddenly got snapped shut. Look, it’s hardly my fault if that’s where you choose to sit and read.

By the way, all of you reading this at work, you should be ashamed of yourselves. Yes, you. And you. Holding it under the desk doesn’t fool anyone, you know. And for heaven’s sake, put it down, Chris, you’ve got far too much to do.

Oh, lots of you figured it out. Well done, many people don’t get that. It’s an interesting peculiarity of the Doctor’s prose style that he almost always refers to himself in the third person. He rarely says ‘I’, he tends to use ‘he’. It’s almost never ‘me’, it’s ‘the Doctor’.

There are many theories about this. My personal favourite, is that ‘the Doctor’—the title he chose, rather than the name he was born with—is more of an idea in his head, than a statement of his identity. The Doctor is the man he aspires to be, not the man he believes he is. What, then, are we to make of his occasional lapses, because there are many times—some purposeful, some seemingly accidental—when ‘the Doctor’ becomes ‘me’. Are these moments, perhaps, of personal weakness or even fear, when he has failed to live up to the standards he long ago set himself?

Also, you will notice, he is happy to invent interior monologues for other people, which betrays the arrogance so characteristic of him. In fairness he is blessed with exceptional levels of empathy, and even low-level telepathy, so we should not assume they are entirely fictional.

With all that in mind, I invite you now to identify the author of this next document: The Flight of the Doctor. Authorship will remain our subject throughout this volume—please don’t assume it will always be a simple matter. Pay close attention.

We shall be rejoining the Doctor many centuries after the end of the Time War, when the memory of it has started to fade, even for him. At this phase of his life he is a happy man, a hero to many, and one who has all but forgotten his dangerous past. He would, perhaps, have been wise to remember that for a time traveller, the past is never truly over.

Chapter 11 The Flight of the Doctor

The Doctor was young—which, he reflected, was a rare pleasure at his time of life. That morning in the TARDIS, over tea and jammy dodgers, he found himself remembering his first proper inspection of the face he was wearing now. It had been a busy day already, he was explaining to Clara, who was listening as rapt as always. He’d just had another massive falling out with the Master, who typically had gone and turned everyone in the world into a copy of himself (‘Yes, even you, Clara, shame I missed that’), cleverly saved an old friend from dying of radiation poisoning, started dying of radiation poisoning, said goodbye to all his best friends because he was dying of radiation poisoning, died of radiation poisoning, regenerated, made a mental note to apologise to all his best friends for possibly overstating the situation with the radiation poisoning, destroyed a garden shed which had stupidly collided with his TARDIS during a largely successful emergency landing, met a new friend with orange hair, invented fish custard, had a stern word with some giant flying eyeballs who were mucking about on Earth for no good reason, and put an end to the mysterious plans of Prisoner Zero (plans so mysterious, in fact, that no one ever found out what they were) before finding time to dash back to the TARDIS and spending seven and a half frustrating hours looking for a mirror.

He found one in the three-fingered hand of a mostly dormant robot clown that stood abandoned and ticking in one of the thickly ivied alcoves of the stone deck.

He sat on the stump of a fallen pillar, and there, among the jagged tumble of ivy-throttled masonry, braced himself for the new him. Cheekbones, he thought, staring at his new face. Thin! Ooh, sharp corners! In fact the planes of his face now seemed so steeply angled that he wondered how they joined up at the back. He popped the mirror behind his head to check, then realised he couldn’t see his reflection any more. He quickly turned to have a look, but unfortunately so did his reflection.

‘Ah,’ he thought, with a big smile, ‘I’m an idiot this time!’ That was good, he’d always liked being an idiot. He decided to give a delighted little clap, missed with both hands, and accidentally hugged himself. ‘Possibly a little clumsy,’ he noted, picking up the largest shard of the broken mirror, which had somehow gone flying across the room during his attempted clap.

There was a lot of hair now, he noticed. Not ginger, sadly—dark brown. Oh, and thick. He made himself a little dizzy spinning round as he tried to focus on a giant quiff, which was now swaying across his brow. When he checked his reflection again, he noticed the ticking clown passing behind him, as it shambled off into the cloisters. Probably ought to do something about that some day, he thought. He was just on the point of deciding he might be a bit too handsome for comfort, when he turned his face to the side, and saw the chin that adorned the lower half of his face like a diving board. ‘Banana-head!’ he laughed. ‘Face like a boot! I’m Mr Moon!’

Oh, that would do nicely, he decided. Very him, very Doctor. Bit handsome, bit silly, bit like a banana. He did a quick series of calculations in the dust on the floor, and realised this was his eleventh face.

‘No, it isn’t,’ breathed a voice in his ear. His hand froze in the dust. Suddenly his hearts seemed very loud in the silence of the cloisters.

‘Would you deny me?’ whispered the voice.

The Doctor took a deep, careful breath, and fought the voice away. Regeneration angst, that was all. ‘Eleventh,’ he said, aloud and firmly. And eleven, by a lovely coincidence, just happened to be his new favourite number. As he straightened up, he considered another delighted clap, but decided he needed a bit more practice with the arms first.

In truth, over the years, he’d never really got his arms under control, growing convinced that his speech centres had somehow been wired to his hands. He now seemed unable to speak a word without both hands fluttering around him, like two birds trying to escape from a net. He was fairly sure the left one was attempting lip-sync. Sometimes he got so distracted by his own gesticulation that he fell silent, and his hands just froze in the air. This quirk of accidentally surrendering had proven to be a tactical disadvantage on more than one occasion. Why couldn’t his hands just stick to straightening his bow tie, like he wanted them to?

Clara was laughing silently. He glanced over at her, and noticed for the first time that she wasn’t there. Oh, he’d done it again. He was always chatting away to people without checking if they were there first. He looked sadly at the two cups of tea he’d poured, and remembered that she was at that silly job she insisted on having, even though there was a whole universe of wonders waiting to be explored, and steam engines. He made an attempt at being cross, but ended up sighing. Much as he liked talking to himself, it was more fun with an audience.

And so it was, on the morning of the day that would change every aspect of his life forever, the Doctor, formerly known as the Warrior, also known as the last of the Time Lords, who thought bow ties were cool and that purple tweed was simply the ultimate, decided he was bored.

Moments later, in a field on the outskirts of London, a lone cow looked round in surprise, as a tall blue box appeared out of nowhere. The Doctor popped his head out, and reached for the phone inside the little cupboard on the door. He’d decided, one slow evening, that, since his space-time machine was stuck looking like a phone box, he might as well get the phone working.

‘Hello, I’m a perfectly normal bloke, and I wondered if Clara Oswald was coming out to play.’

Mr Armitage, the headmaster of Coal Hill school, rolled his eyes, audibly. ‘No, you’re the Doctor, and you’re an alien from space.’

‘Ooh, bit racist. So much for diversity at Coal Hill.’

‘She can come out when the school closes.’

‘That’s not for another 73 years,’ he protested. ‘Oh, that was a fire.’

‘I was referring to today, in fact. There’s a staff meeting, she should be free about 5.15. Fire? What do you mean, fire?’

‘5.15?? Still ages.’

‘You have a time machine!’

‘How did you know that?’

‘The Governor of this school is an old friend of yours.’

‘Is he busy?’

‘He and Barbara are leaving on their fourth honeymoon right about now!’

‘Tell them to wait, I’m coming along.’

‘No more!’ breathed Mr Armitage.

‘No more what?’ asked the Doctor.

‘I’m sorry?’ said Mr Armitage blankly, then added, ‘Too long I have stayed my hand, no more!’

‘What are you on about, staying your hand??’

‘I didn’t say anything about my hand,’ sighed Mr Armitage. ‘I was saying, if you tell me where you are, I will pass the address on to Miss Oswald, who, I’m sure, will be able to join you later today you leave me no choice, today this war will end, no more, no more.’

The Doctor gripped the console to steady it, although it wasn’t the console that was shaking. That hadn’t been Mr Armitage’s voice, not at the end. He knew that voice.

‘Doctor?’ Mr Armitage was asking.

‘Doctor no more,’ whispered something long dead.

Why now? Why was he hearing that voice now? It was all over and done with, and forgotten, and never to be thought about again. He closed his eyes fiercely, and pictured all his secret days locked away in an old oak chest at the bottom of a deep green sea. It had always worked before, when his past rose up to claim him—but this time the chains round the chest were rusted and broken, and the lid was starting to rise. He snapped his eyes open in fright, and noticed that the console was shaking worse than ever.

‘Doctor, are you still there?’

Oh, Mr Armitage! He quickly gave his best guess as to his current address (‘There’s a field, a road and a cow!’) and hung up.

No, he thought, pacing the TARDIS, his feet landing in angry clangs on the floor of the brooding steel chamber. No, no, no! Some things were over and stayed over, and that was it, thank you very much. He grabbed his most boring book, sat on his second favourite staircase, and started to read, angrily. It was a book of complex temporal theory, and he’d already lost several days trying to find Wally. He was starting to think that Wally wasn’t actually in every book, but how could anyone be truly sure?

‘You hide yourself in whimsy,’ said the whisper in his ear.

He focused on the boring words, and pretended there was nothing to hear. Those days were gone, that darkness had been spent. Of course he knew that wasn’t strictly true. The trouble with living in a space/time ship was that however fast you flew, the past never got any further away; it was always waiting just outside the door. And sometimes, as now, the door knocked.

But no, he thought. He was going to sit here, and read his book, and wait for Clara, and when she arrived they’d fly off and have an adventure, probably with cocktails along the way. The past was the past, the Doctor decided, and in no way, shape or form, did it hold any terrors for me.

Clara Oswald arrived in the TARDIS in a roar and a high wind, swerved the console, and screeched to a halt. He heard her feet clattering on the floor as she dismounted. The Doctor, his eyes still on his book, realised she had probably come on her motorbike. Showing off as usual, he thought, and in retaliation he kept his back to her, and turned a page.

‘Draught!’ he said, and heard her snap her fingers. The TARDIS doors slammed themselves shut. He’d begun teaching her that trick ages ago, in the confident expectation it would take years to master it, but she’d got the hang of it almost immediately, and could even do it in gloves, which had always eluded him.

‘A field and a cow?’ said a voice with a Blackpool accent. ‘Lucky you put a tracker in this thing.’

‘Fancy a trip to ancient Mesopotamia,’ he asked, ‘followed by Future Mars?’

He looked round. And there she was, taking her helmet off in a swirl of hair, while her motorbike purred into silence behind her. She was giving him one of those looks that made him grateful that big brown eyes and the cheekiest smile in the universe could never have any kind of an effect on a Time Lord such as myself.

‘Will there be cocktails?’ she asked.

‘On the Moon.’

‘The Moon will—’

The motorbike narrowly missed her face as it bounced upright and went sideways into a bookcase, the stairs the Doctor was sitting on arced over his head, and the central console was suddenly spinning far above them both as they tumbled round the walls of the control room like socks in a washing machine.

Deep beneath the Tower of London, in an unnumbered room, which appears on no maps or schematics of any kind and is never referred to in any documentation, among a labyrinth of shelves and alcoves and barred doors and sealed chambers, there is a small blue safe, with the word TARDIS on the front. Inside, there are a number of sealed envelopes, one of which shows evidence of having been recently been steamed open and re-closed. The document contained inside is several typed pages and concerns the protocols surrounding ‘TARDIS discovery’. It notes that the TARDIS is the most powerful and dangerous piece of alien technology to regularly visit the planet, and warns of the dire consequences if it were to fall into the wrong hands. It goes on to say that the Doctor is in the habit of parking it in random places, and while entry to the machine is all but impossible, the danger of anyone achieving it is too great to be ignored. On a sighting of the TARDIS (various photographs of the police box are appended) by any UNIT personnel, the location must be phoned to Central Command who will immediately dispatch a helicopter to airlift the TARDIS to the nearest secure premises. The Doctor will then be informed of its new location, which doesn’t usually create a problem, as he rarely remembers where he left it.

Underneath the typescript, in jagged handwriting suggestive of anger, is a note from the Doctor, which reads:

Could you please, please, PLEASE check if I’m still inside it first???

‘Would it kill you to knock?’ bellowed the Doctor. The wind was shrieking, the helicopter was thundering and the world was upside down. He was hanging headlong out of the flapping TARDIS doors, phone at his ear, with Clara holding on to his ankles, and the London Thames swaying majestically below him.

He’d guessed what had happened the moment the TARDIS had been lifted off the ground, and he’d dashed straight for the phone when it started to ring. As he threw himself out of the door hundreds of feet above London, he’d reflected, not for the first time, that wiring your principal communications device to the outside of your spaceship was not always practical. He managed to grab the phone, and Clara his ankles.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, the head of the Unified Intelligence Taskforce. ‘We had no idea you were still in there!’

‘You phoned me!’ screamed the Doctor, hoping Clara would manage to keep hold.

‘You’ve listed this number as your mobile.’

‘It’s the TARDIS—how much more mobile do you get?’

‘He’s still in the TARDIS,’ he heard her say to someone else. ‘Tell the helicopter pilot to take him straight to the site, we’ll meet him there.’

‘Site, what site?’

‘Doctor, I’m sorry, but you are needed.’

‘Needed? What do you mean, needed?’

‘By Royal command.’

Royal what?? he was going to ask, but the wind whipped the receiver out of his hand. It whirled in a circle on its cable and cracked him on the back of the head.

When his vision cleared, a pair of blank stone eyes were glowering at him from underneath a giant stone hat and a pigeon was cocking its head at him. Nelson had seen better days, he thought, fuzzily. As the statue drifted upwards past him, followed by the weathered old column on which it stood, he realised he was being lowered, head first, into a cordoned-off section of Trafalgar Square, and that far below him a division of UNIT troops was even now slamming to attention and saluting him.

Dazed, upside down and rotating gently as he descended, the unpaid, unofficial scientific adviser to UNIT attempted to recover some dignity by returning the salute, and hit himself in the face.

Twenty feet below him, Kate Lethbridge-Stewart suppressed a sigh. She knew the men and women around her were getting their first glimpse of a UNIT legend, so kept her face straight. Next to her, Osgood was barely containing her excitement—she was all big round eyes behind big round spectacles, and now and then she even remembered to breathe. ‘Inhaler,’ Kate said, and Osgood took a puff, without taking her eyes from above. You wait, thought Kate, he’s not what you’re expecting.

‘He’s an idiot,’ Kate’s father had explained, long ago. They were in the UNIT Research Institute and at the far end of a sprawling laboratory, a tall man with a mass of curly hair and a booming voice was protesting that he was caught in some kind of force field, while a dark-haired young woman patiently disentangled his scarf from a pair of double doors. Kate found herself staring at the scarf. It was stupidly long and multi-coloured. Who would wear a scarf like that? Although she was only seven, she had already guessed that this was the scary, funny man who worked with her father, and who sometimes kept the whole world safe.

‘The Doctor?’

‘Yes, the Doctor,’ said her father, who always seemed a bit cross when he talked about his old friend. His moustache was twitching as if separately irritated.

‘I thought you said he was a genius?’

‘He is, of course he is. The most extraordinary genius anyone has ever met.’

The Doctor was booming away again. ‘Yes, Sarah, yes,’ he was saying, ‘but there might have been a force field as well!’

‘Then he’s not a genius all the time?’ asked Kate.

‘No, it’s all the time,’ said her father, with funereal regret.

‘So when is he an idiot?’

‘All the time.’

‘That doesn’t really make any sense,’ said Kate, after a moment’s consideration.

‘Yes, that’s about the size of it,’ he replied. The Doctor was striding towards them now, and as always her father straightened his shoulders and put some effort into a smile. Many years later, Kate found herself doing the same.

‘Doctor,’ she said. ‘May I extend the official apologies of UNIT.’

‘Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, a word to the wise!’ said a very different version of the same man, who was now scrambling to his feet. ‘As I’m sure your father would have told you,’ he continued, ‘I don’t like being picked up.’

‘That probably sounded better in his head,’ said a pretty young woman, appearing next to him. She’d just emerged from the TARDIS, which had now come to rest in the square. Ah, yes, Kate thought, Clara Oswald, the schoolteacher. Where does he find them all?

‘I was acting on orders direct from the throne,’ said Kate and nodded to Osgood—who, she noticed in sudden horror, was wearing a stupidly long, multi-coloured scarf. Dear God, this was no time to be fangirling.

Osgood had passed the thick, ancient envelope to the Doctor, who was now inspecting the wax seal with what looked like alarm. Kate frowned: alarm, she thought, or could that that be guilt? Out loud she said: ‘Sealed orders from Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the First.’

‘The Queen?’ asked Clara, whose eyes had somehow got even wider. ‘The First? Sorry, Queen Elizabeth the First??’

‘Queen Elizabeth the only,’ snapped the Doctor, who suddenly didn’t look like a buffoon any more. ‘She didn’t like being numbered, and I sympathise entirely.’ He looked dubiously at the envelope, as if he didn’t want to open it, didn’t even want to hold it. So much for his famous curiosity. ‘How do we know this is genuine?’

‘Her credentials are inside,’ she replied.

With visible reluctance, the Doctor started to break the seal but Kate laid a hand on his arm. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Inside.’ And she gestured to the huge ornate building behind her.

‘Inside the National Gallery?’ asked Clara. ‘What kind of credentials do you keep in a gallery?’

‘Nice scarf,’ said the Doctor to Osgood, and left her fumbling for her inhaler as he strode toward the steps. Clara was already running to catch up.

Kate watched them go, and kept the frown off her face. The change of mood was quite striking. ‘Sometimes you get the clown,’ her father had said, in his final illness, ‘sometimes you get the ancient beast.’ Then he’d started to laugh which had set him off coughing again, and she’d had to sit him up and get him some water. When he’d recovered, he corrected himself. ‘Actually, I think you always get both.’ And he’d given her that smile which had always comforted her as a child, but now just made him look frail and old. They’d sat in silence with only the clock ticking and the rain at the windows.

‘God, I miss that man,’ he had said at last.

‘Maybe he’ll visit tomorrow,’ she had said, her hand tight on his.

‘Maybe tomorrow,’ he had smiled, closing his eyes.

She could never decide, over the years, if those were the best or the saddest last words.

The Doctor and Clara were striding in step through the evacuated gallery, when Kate caught up with them.

‘Did you know her? Elizabeth the First?’ Clara was asking.

‘Unified Intelligence Taskforce,’ the Doctor replied.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘This lot,’ he said, waving a hand at the various soldiers standing guard around the building. ‘UNIT. They investigate alien stuff, anything alien.’

‘What, like you?’

‘I work for them.’

‘You have a job?’

‘Why shouldn’t I have a job? People have jobs. I’d be brilliant at having a job.’

‘You never have a job.’

‘Yes, I do. This is it. This is my job.’

‘What kind of job could you have?’

‘This one. This one I’m doing right now, in front of you.’ The Doctor threw an eye-roll over his shoulder at Kate.

It took an effort, but Kate managed not to slap him. Had he really never mentioned any of it? Clara was obviously, at the very least, his friend. Had he never told her he’d spent years, trapped on Earth, in her father’s protection, working with him? They’d stood guard on a world together, they’d been friends. Best friends, she’d thought. She fought down the memory of the dying old soldier in the hospice. Maybe tomorrow.

I’m sorry, said a voice in her head, and it almost froze her. She’d been briefed about the Doctor’s occasional telepathy: low level, they’d said, and rarely used. I miss him too.

Not now, she thought back at him, we’ve got work to do. She felt her cheeks flush and her jaw tighten: he should have the damn decency to stay out her head!

As you wish, said the Doctor, and stepped politely away. But as I returned to my own thoughts, I took an image of Kate’s dying father with me, and filed it for later: Alistair waiting for me. ‘One should live with one’s sins,’ I’d told a young man once, though I couldn’t remember who or why. Clara was glancing at me, so I kept striding and smiling, as she expected. Clown and ancient beast—was that really what Alistair had thought? Was that what Clara thought too? I resisted having a look inside her head. In front of us, a pair of doors were being opened, and I forced my mind back to the present. Work to do! I squared my shoulders, straightened my bow tie, and the Doctor stepped through the doors.

At the far end of a long, darkened room, two soldiers were standing on guard, either side of a large painting mounted on an easel. The painting itself was draped in cloth, like it was something forbidden. Or maybe they were just keeping the dust off—why did he always think it had to be something sinister? He resisted the part of his mind that was now listing all the reasons in chronological order.

Kate had stepped ahead of him now, and given a nod to the soldiers. The drape was pulled back and an oil painting lit up the room like a fireplace.

A shattered city below a black and orange sky; plunging battleships suspended over a burning skyline; an intricate lattice of stabbing energy beams; running people, frozen in their screams.

The Doctor could feel the double slamming inside his chest. He wondered if everyone could hear his hearts.

Kate’s voice now, from so far away. ‘Elizabeth’s credentials,’ she was saying. ‘She left an account of where to find this painting, and its significance to you.’

The Doctor couldn’t find his voice. His eyes were locked on the painting. He felt himself taking Clara’s hand, although it wasn’t Clara who was afraid.

‘This isn’t why you were called here today. This is just proof that the message in your hand is from Elizabeth herself. Obviously, over this amount of time, forgery is a possibility.’

He tried to make sense of her words over the roar of the painting, but surely no one could. Surely everyone could hear those screams? And then, from deep inside him, from another place and another life, he found himself saying: ‘No more.’

‘That’s the title!’ said Kate, evidently surprised.

‘I know the title,’ snapped the Doctor, and reached for Clara’s hand, before remembering he was already holding it. She was shaking, but dimly he realised it might not be her.

‘Also known as—’

Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it!

‘—Gallifrey Falls,’ finished Kate.

The Doctor didn’t reply for a moment. He noticed Clara’s grip was very tight, then worried he might be hurting her and released her hand. He willed himself to speak. ‘It’s the fall of Arcadia,’ he said. ‘Gallifrey’s second city.’ Say it, say it, just say it. ‘The last day of the Time War.’

The last day. The floor tremored at his feet. Were there shockwaves coming out of the painting?

The last day. He was back on Karn, so many faces ago, and he was drinking the poison, ready to walk into the storm.

The last day. The desert was hot beneath his boots, and a tiny barn shimmered on the horizon.

The last day. Elizabeth of England tilted back her face to be kissed, but it wasn’t really her.

The last day. He was trapped in a cell with two old men who hated him, but the shadows hid their faces.

The last day. He was standing in a gallery, and Clara was asking him if he was okay.

The last day of the Time War. That was wrong, he suddenly realised. Because somehow all those different days, spread across his life, were also the last day. Somehow the last day had become millions of days, each of them, impossibly, the last. No such thing as last, something screamed in his mind, laughing at him.

And understanding arrived, like sickness: a truth he had been running from for centuries. A long time ago, he had taken a decision to become a warrior, and many years later he’d thought he could walk away from it. How stupid. Of course not! He’d drunk the poison, and walked into the storm, and never found his way out. He had forsaken his name, gone to war, and in one terrible moment of unparalleled savagery, slaughtered them all, Time Lords and Daleks alike. Everyone had screamed, and then everything had stopped.

The murderer who stood alone and alive, in that awful silence, told himself what he’d done was justified; that peace was worth any price; that the war, at last, was over.

He was wrong of course. The Time War wasn’t over. Not for me.