Chapter Text
“Doctor? What’s wrong? What was all that? How are we back here? Where did you all go?” The Doctor had stood in silence at the console, hands still clutching the monitor, the moment dragging on for a long time until Yaz’s voice finally broke it. The woman’s voice was gentle yet firm as she demanded an explanation. The Doctor was silent for another few seconds and she didn’t look away as she answered, her voice quiet.
“It was the Time Lords.”
“What?” They all looked confused, Graham’s eyebrows drawing together, “But you said they were all gone. We saw your planet.”
“It… they weren’t from now. They were from a very long time ago. It’s…” she took in a deep breath and turned to them, her expression guilty, “I have a lot I need to tell you, about what I found out from the Master, in the Matrix. About why he destroyed Gallifrey. It wasn’t a viable excuse in any way, but he did have a reason.”
“Which was?” Yaz asked, folding her arms as she frowned, clearly unhappy over the Doctor keeping secrets again and the Time Lord tried not to wince in regret. She had a hard time sharing things this time around.
“That I’m older than Time Lord civilisation itself, that my DNA played a hand in giving the original Gallifreyan people the ability to regenerate. And I just found out there that all those projections were my memories, that I was made to forget. They wiped my memories, for some reason, and somehow had me reloomed into a child and I grew up with no knowledge of who I used to be. I still have no actual knowledge, just what I’ve been shown. There’s still a disconnect there. Like they belong to someone else.” There was silence for a few beats after this as the Fam all tried to digest the information that they’d been given.
“So,” Yaz started before pausing and frowning, “you’ve just been… sitting on this information for a while, on your own?”
“What else was I supposed to do? With Gallifrey gone, I had no way of finding out anything else. There wasn’t really much any of you could do to help.”
“We could’ve been here for you, this is something big, having your pals around you could’ve helped.”
“I did have you around?” the Doctor countered with a raised eyebrow and a bemused smile, “it helped. I’m just not… big on sharing this time around, I guess. But I had you all close.”
“Not what I meant.” Yaz told her before sighing heavily as she relented slightly, “just… tell us these things. We care about you.”
“I’ll try.” The Doctor told her after a moment of guilty thought.
“So,” Graham decided to break the somewhat tense silence that followed, “what did you see when you and your other selves got transported away? Because you all disappeared and then there was another bright light and we were back in the TARDIS.”
“We ended up, I think, back on Gallifrey, I think that’s probably where we were the entire time. Just, Gallifrey from a long, long time ago. Back to the times of Rassilon and Omega.”
“Who?” Ryan asked.
“Time Lord society was, as I was taught, created by three people. Rassilon, the great engineer, The Omega, the mind behind Gallifrey’s scientific advancements and-” she cut herself off suddenly, realisation dawning on her face and her entire body seemed to jolt with the force of the realisation that occurred to her, “Oh!”
“Doctor? What is-” Yaz started but she was quickly cut off by the Doctor who flapped her hands at her desperately.
“Yaz! I love you but shut up a minute. Let me think.” The human obediently fell quiet and they all watched as the Doctor began to pace suddenly, her eyes still wide before she dropped onto the steps leading further into the TARDIS, the realisation giving away to shock as she mumbled out her next words, “I’m the Other.”
“The what?” Ryan asked, the Fam all gathering closer to the Time Lord who looked up to them with still wide eyes as she explained.
“There were the three architects, so I was taught, that had a hand in the Time Lords advancement as a species. Rassilon, Omega and the Other. The Other was only called that because nobody knew anything about him. All information about him was lost but we knew there was a third person. A stranger in the shadows.” She thought of that projected memory of Ruth. Of her creeping through the shadows as she helped those women escape from who she assumed to have been Rassilon.
“And you think you’re this Other?” Graham asked and she threw her hands up, somewhat distressed looking.
“Who else would I be? Rassilon and Omega said they’d wiped me from all records. Maybe all that remained was passed down through word of mouth. But over time the stories get diluted, bits get forgotten. All that remains is the knowledge that there was someone there, but they don’t remember anything else.”
“Is there anywhere you could go to find out more?” Yaz asked, moving to sit down next to the Time Lord who silently moved to lean her shoulder against the human’s.
“With Gallifrey gone, I don’t even know where I could go. It’s not as if there’s a whole bunch of Time Lords that got sent off…” this time she trailed off slowly and slowly broke out into rather manic looking grin that made the Fam slightly uncomfortable but she leaped to her feet and towards the console before they could even question her.
“What is it?” Yaz asked, watching the Time Lord as she threw herself around the console at breakneck speeds, clearly with a destination in mind.
“We need to find Rassilon.”
“How? You just said that all the other Time Lords were gone?” Ryan asked, clearly bewildered by the manic excitement for the Time Lord in front of him.
“Ah, well,” she paused her dash around the console for a second to hold up a finger to him, “the last time I was there, after I saved it and finally found it again, I exiled Rassilon from the planet. Him and the entire High Council.”
“How’d you manage that?” Graham asked, incredulous.
“Well, I ended the Time War, saved Gallifrey from total destruction by hiding it in a pocket universe.”
“What?” she stopped, blinking, completely bewildered for a moment before her face scrunched up in question.
“Have I never told you about the Time War?”
“No.”
“Huh. Well, there was a war. A huge one. All throughout time and space, between the Time Lords and the Daleks. They wiped out entire parts of the universe. Turned entire star systems into black holes just to try and get the edge over one another. It was bad. Eventually the Time Lords started to lose, the Daleks closed in on Gallifrey. At first… I destroyed them all. But then I found out, centuries later that I’d gone back and actually saved them. Trapped them away, Rassilon still at the helm cause the Time Lords had brought him back to try and get ahead in the war.”
“Thought you said he was an engineer.”
“And a war hero. He commanded and lead the war against the Great Vampires.”
“That,” Graham struggled for the word for a moment, “that thing that we had to run from back there?”
“Yeah. They infested the universe after Rassilon and Omega tried to create the first Eye of Harmony. They accidently tore a hole in the fabric of reality, during an apparent experiment gone wrong, and the Yssgaroth poured in and were basically unstoppable. The Time Lords wiped them all out.”
“So… one of the founders of the Time Lords, and they just let you kick him off the planet?”
“Why not? His plan to end the war involved wiping out all life itself. Letting Time Lords live on as bodyless souls. Minds trapped in eternal darkness with one another. My people might have been pompous and arrogant but the common people outside of the High Council wouldn’t have stood for that. The Time War was time locked. It went on for seemingly forever, I ended it. Saved them all and most life in the universe in doing so. Most of those men and women fought alongside me on the front lines. They trusted me.”
“You fought in it?” Yaz asked, seemingly surprised and the Doctor shrugged, looking back down to the console.
“Course I did. Why wouldn't I have?”
“It’s just… you’re always saying violence is never the answer. Seems kind of…” she trailed off but the sentiment was clear. The Doctor sighed and turned to her, her excitement turning to stone as an expression passed over her face that they’d never seen before. Memories of the time during the war flashing through her brain. She might forget a great many things, even in just the last two and a half thousand years, but the memories of that war would stay with her forever, as much as she wished they wouldn’t.
“Sometimes you have to. They were my people. And I fought to protect the rest of the universe as well. If we’d let the Daleks continue then they would’ve wiped out the universe. But they would’ve been much more ruthless about it than Rassilon ever could have been.” Silence stretched on for a long few seconds, as the Fam digested all the information they’d been fed. The Doctor shuffled uncomfortably as she waited for how they’d take it. “I didn’t even realise I’d never mentioned it before. It normally came up. Guess it’s just been so long; I don’t really think about it as much anymore.”
“So,” Graham said finally, “how do we find this Rassilon?” The Doctor smiled, entire body relaxing from a tenseness that she hadn’t realised she was holding it in, and she turned back to the console, hands all over the place as she explained.
“Now, when I sent Rassilon away, I didn’t really care enough at the time to check where he went, I just wanted him gone.”
“Well, that was smart.” She rolled her eyes at Graham’s sarcastic remark and sat her hand on the take-off lever with a smile.
“I know where to go to find someone who will know.”
“Let’s get a shift on then.” Yaz told her with a smile and the Doctor broke out in a grin and pulled the take-off lever, sending the TARDIS hurtling through the vortex towards its destination.