“Had you ever wondered about me?” The Doctor whispered, staring at the screen filled by the small blue and green planet.
“What do you mean?” asked Donna, a worried look on her face. The Doctor was notorious for his flashes of black despair, but this seemed different somehow. “I wonder about you all the time.”
“Did you not ever wonder about my obsession with your planet? Of all the infinite number of planets, why is this one insignificant ball so special?”
“You’ve explained that, haven’t you. You like humans because we are all so bloody marvelous,” she said, with her usual cheekiness, trying to get him to smile.
The Doctor smiled but it never went past his lips. His ancient eyes were black holes into which all humor disappeared.
“Did you ever wonder about how the Time Lord’s reproduced? Did you ever wonder why the loss of Gallifrey was so utterly…. final….for my species?”
“You are the last. No way to make baby Time Lords with no one to….” she held her hands in front of her and made a motion that looked like she was trying to mash two grapefruit together with unsuccessful results, “mate….. I’m sorry. Are you about to explain the birds and the bees, Time Lord style? I don’t think I…..”
The Doctor raised an eyebrow, amused in spite of himself.
“Oh, come now. Surely you cannot be squeamish about simple bio-mechanics? How many planets have you been on?”
“Twen…Thir…a lot.”
“And on all those planets, of all those species, did any one of them produce the next generation in the same way as humans?”
“How should I know?” Donna snapped. She hated being put on the spot. “I was too polite to ask!”
“Yes, exactly!”
“What is that supposed to mean?” she growled menacingly.
“You assumed. You assumed that it took one male and one female. All those body parts and exchanging of fluids. A great complicated mess. Meiosis and chromosomes and zygotes. It is a wonder you manage to reproduce at all.”
“Oy! And I suppose Time Lords do it soooo much better, then?”
“There are thousands of ways to create the body which houses the being inside. In my species, gender ceased to have any bearing upon procreation long ago. The flesh is merely the vessel. It is the being who animates it that is important. It was Gallifrey who controlled that. She was the Prime; The OneMother. It was she who birthed all the Time Lords.”
“Gallifrey. As in your home planet, Gallifrey?” Donna asked, trying to wrap her head around what he was saying. “Your mother was a planet?”
“In a manner of speaking, yes. Mother, wife, sister, daughter.”
“Wife? You were married to a planet?” Donna asked, her hands clamped to the side of her head, sure it might soon explode.”
“You do not have a human concept that equals this. Even the for the Tardis, the words are not translatable. But I need you to understand, Donna. I need you to hear me. I need you to forgive me.”
He said the last in a whispered plea.
“Forgive you? Forgive you for what? What have you done?”
The Doctor looked down at the Earth, beautiful and pristine under its golden sun. Donna’s eyes widened.
“Oh, my gawd, Doctor, what have you done?” she begged, fear sucking the breath from her lungs.
“The war did not kill us all, you see.” he said, as if that was explanation enough.
“What? You are the last! You. Said. You. Were. The. Last!” Donna snarled fiercely.
“Well, that is not exactly true.”
“What do you mean, ‘That is not exactly true?’,” Donna said, a shrill edge beginning to shade her words. “What was all this haring about from one end of time to the other? You have been looking. I know you have and you have found no one. You are completely and utterly alone.”
She grabbed his sleeve in her fist and shook it.
“I have watched you weep in despair. WAS THAT A LIE!?” she shouted.
“Listen to me for just a moment,” he said desperately, prying her fingers out of his clothes. “Let me explain. After Gallifrey was destroyed, there was no point in continuing. We died trying to defend her and the few who survived through sheer chance could not survive their own grief. They all fled to the end of time and jumped through the Veil, believing the myths, with only their hope to guide them.”
“Wait a minute!” Donna shouted in frustration. “Myths? What do Time Lord fairy tales have to do with Earth? Tell me what you have done!”
“Listen!” shouted the Doctor, trying to be heard. “Gallifrey was a singularity. The only Time Lord planet. But it was said that at the beginning of time, she had seeded the universe, laying the eggs for the next generation of her kind. The collapse of this universe, this timeline would trigger the birth of the next and in that birth, a million Gallifreys would be born. It was just a story. The others leapt away, blindly, believing in it. I could not trust it. I needed to make sure, do you see?”
Donna stared at him, stared at the hand he held out to her in supplication, shaking her head. She turned and began pacing up and down the metal deck grating, her arms hugged close, as if she were cold. After a few moments of muttering to herself, she stopped and glared at him.
“Earth is has one of those seeds?”
“Yes. It….”
Donna held up her hand and resumed pacing. She got three steps down the deck before she turned.
“Millions of seeds, you said. If there are millions, why do you haunt Earth? Why this planet and not another?”
“It was just a story,” the Doctor said tiredly, “a story told to children to keep the boogey man at bay. I have been to the end of time. Earth’s seed is the only seed that survives. The others have been ….. consumed.”
“What?” she asked. “Who would eat a planet?”
“Not a planet. The seed of a Time Lord. It is the most powerful thing in all the universe. They …. mine them like ore and feed them into reactors.”
The Doctor looked up into her face in anguish.
“The children of Gallifrey have been turned into stone,” the Doctor said, his voice shaking with barely controlled rage, “their power stripped from them to feed the appetites of species too primitive to understand what it was that they destroyed. Do yo see? I was right not to trust the myths. I was right not to jump across the Void with the others. Someone needed to stay behind and guard the children. Someone needed to make sure we did not die in vain.”
“But …. you only saved one,” Donna breathed in dismay and confusion. “Why didn’t you go back in time and save the others?”
“I tried,” he said, shaking his head. “Thousands of times. But it is the same as a Time Lord’s death. It becomes a fixed point in time around which all reality pivots. Earth is the last. I will defend it by whatever means is necessary.”
He looked at her and added firmly, “What ever it takes.”
Donna studied him intently, trying to hear what lay behind those words.
“Oh, Doctor,” breathed Donna, suddenly feeling ill, “why does that sound so final, so awful. Tell me. Please.”
“Gallifrey should not have died. She should have gone into the Void at the end of time. Things are out of place and out of balance in this timeline.”
The Doctor grimaced and ran his hands through his hair.
“So many shoulds,” he whispered, looking at the screen. “I should have trusted her, my Mother. I should have gone on, with the others but my faith was not as strong. I should have left her to her own devices. I was never an obedient and dutiful son.”
He closed his eyes. Donna put a hand out to touch him in his pain but her fingers stopped just short of his hair.
“My despair was like an acid that wore away her resistance,” whispered the Doctor. “My tears were like water. The seed, Earth’s seed, woke before her time. She woke alone, without husbands. It was a lack she will soon remedy,” He looked up into Donna’s eyes. “Her name is Gaia. She is very young, so you would be kind to forgive her mistakes.”
“Mistakes?” Donna asked, drawing herself up in alarm. “What kind of mistakes?”
“Well,” the Doctor shrugged, “the twentieth century did not go as well as she planned. The last twenty years have been her attempts at resetting the timeline. Like I said. She is quite young, and still learning.”
Donna stared at him, her mouth hanging open.
“Donna?” asked the Doctor hopefully.
“Remedy.”
“I’m sorry. What?”
“You said she is going to remedy her lack of husbands. What,” Donna said, speaking each word with precise care. “is she doing, exactly?”
“Oh,” the Doctor shrugged. “She is playing with the timeline, altering genetic codes, influencing mutational shifts, playing with the sun’s power output, stuff like that.”
“What! Why? To what purpose?” Dawna yelled in fury.
“I thought I made that clear. She needs Time Lords.”
