Chapter Text
Burnt orange sky shimmered above, a little girl with eyes as blue as the box that stole his heart away all those years ago laughed in the sunlight. He knelt down next to her in the deep red grass and took her tiny hands in his.
“Give us what we want,” she said, suddenly cold and harsh; the illusion shattered. How dare they, he thought. How dare…The Doctor shoved hard against the mental link, coming back to reality. The force tore apart the technician’s mind who was linked to the Doctor through a series of wires and cables. The young man’s body kept twitching as they removed him from the white padded chair, peeling off the layers of electrodes and sensors from his head.
He didn’t see the sunlight for…
Time had no meaning.
They couldn’t believe that they had broken him so quickly, but what they didn’t know was that he had been half way there already. I’m just the good wizard, he thought, pleadingly; the good wizard from all those fairy tales you read as a little kid. But the thing is, fairy tales do not have happy endings. The reality is, there was no woodsman to save the little girl from the big bad wolf; she died, eaten along with her poor old grandmother. The end.
We’ve sanitized our fairy tales over the years to give them happy endings because it makes it easier to deal. We like to believe that there are such things as right and wrong, and that sometimes (just maybe) everything works out in the end if you just believe hard enough.
The Doctor also kept his memories heavily sanitized and edited; it made it easier for him, too.
A Daft old man, who stole a magic box and ran away. Oh, the adventures he had…
But the compartments of his mind were melting like candle wax, and
…the truth is sleeping beauty didn’t wake up with a kiss. The truth is, she didn’t wake up at all…
His façade was melting bit by bit. The fairy tale of ‘The Doctor’ that he had built up in his mind was crashing all around him.
The good wizard became a vengeful god, slaughtered billions, and lost his mind.
The rest was just a lie, really; fairy tales don’t have happy endings.
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Time Lord science and Gallifreyan history. They had hit the jackpot. There was just enough proof that the Time Lords had existed at all that kept them from being lumped along with Elves, and Unicorns and the lost city of Atlantis; but just barely. And so they tortured him to see how long it took before his cries were no longer understandable; till he was babbling and sobbing in a language no one was alive still to understand.
A pen scratched roughly against a yellow-lined notepad, pausing only for punctuation. “Very good,” the Director said, pleased with their progress, screams echoing all around the large room. “Very good indeed.”
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The vengeful old man was very clever, and very patient. Once upon a time he waited in the dark for the world to go up in flames.
Gotcha.
Surprisingly, he lived through the cataclysm. His mouth tasted of ash, and the ringing in his ears barely covered the screams in his mind. The rubble burned all around him, his wrist painfully still attached to the wall. He hadn’t expected to survive, but sitting here, blood pumping and lungs full of air, he found he really had no intention of dying today.
But he would never let them take him alive. Not this time.
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The Doctor was not a religious man. But a name was on the edge of his tongue, one prayer….
He caught a glimpse of long curly hair, and the glint of red shoes out of the corner of his eye. The Doctor didn’t believe in miracles, but he would always put his faith in unbelievably good luck.
He started laughing.