Retcon

By TwinEnigma

Warnings: Character Death, spoilers for The Ultimate Foe, Hints to Stolen Earth, and now, updated for The Day of the Doctor

Disclaimer: I do this for fun and not profit and I definitely do not own Doctor Who or any related characters.

It starts in his dreams. He does not sleep often and dreams even less, but when he does, he remembers. Usually, it's about his time, his companions lost and how he loathes that naïve, arrogant man he used to be a part of. Every now and again, he catches a glimpse of gold fire, of the curving lips of a woman he can't place, and fragments of a resounding emptiness that causes him to wake, gasping for breath and horrified. Slowly over a period of years, these fragments grow in length and number, as places he's never remembered and faces he doesn't know encroach upon his sparse dreams.

All around the Panopticon he hears rumors of war, of the Daleks growing in strength. He doesn't remember this happening and it bothers him. Yet, he keeps quiet, does his job, and keeps his head down, lest they figure out the Keeper of the Matrix isn't quite what he appears to be.

The night before the war starts in full, he dreams he is standing before Davros in the belly of a Dalek ship and he can hear the madman proudly screaming his triumph, his horrifying creation, the Reality Bomb. He wakes screaming, the faces and names of companions he's never known burning in his brain.

Not long after, he watches as an uncharacteristically solemn Doctor finally returns to lead their people to war and he thinks this should not be happening, that none of this is as he remembers it to be.

Time is changing and it frightens him.

The glimpses come to him in his waking hours now, stronger than ever. Bit by bit, he feels his memories being chewed up by the War and replaced with these fragmentary horrors of a future gone horribly wrong. He's losing himself in great big chunks and being replaced by something he doesn't know and doesn't understand and it's terrifying. He feels like he's going completely mad.

It isn't until Arcadia that he sees the Doctor again and when he does, he punches him square in that face, the one that makes his gut churn in dread for reasons he is only barely starting to comprehend. The strike bowls the Doctor over and he stands, shaking with fear and rage as he looks down at that worn, weary face that is both young and old and neither all at once. Oh god and that leather jacket he's wearing... he remembers that and Rose and Jack and no, no no, no...

Around them, the war rages heedlessly on.

"Why?" he screams, because he can hear them all in the back of his head, dying and never dying, an unending burning chorus, and he can feel the ache of their looming absence, of echoing silence thrumming through him in a tidal wave of foreboding awareness of the inevitable outcome he can't remember happening. Over and over, he screams that word until at last he sinks to his knees and begins to sob in earnest.

"What's wrong with him?" the soldier next to him asks, lowering his rifle.

"Oh! Oh no, oh no!" the Doctor says in dawning horror. "Oh, Valeyard, I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

He cries harder because he's said that too when he was skinny and rude and not ginger and can't change anything. It hurts so much, so very much, and this is not how it's supposed to be, not at all. It's all wrong. Everything is wrong. Gallifrey isn't supposed to burn.

The Doctor gathers him in an embrace, rocking him as he remembers rocking his child and his grandchild and whispering soothing words of Gallifreyan nonsense as the gun presses into his ribcage.

"This isn't how it's supposed to be," he whispers.

"I know, I know, and I'm sorry, so very sorry," the Doctor tells him, but hesitates in pulling the trigger.

"You always were too soft," he says and presses the Doctor's finger down.

Author's note: There was supposed to be a little extra bit of an epilogue here, but Valeyard, once he finally decided to cooperate with me, wrote himself so well at the end that my original ending just would have ruined everything.

Updated: fixed a few grammar things, but surprisingly, this needed very little to be brought in line with the 50th - I literally just had to put the leather jacket on the Doctor and allude it was the War Doctor. And then I just made one or two tweaks to make it read better.