The voice on the other end of the line turns low and serious, whispering into his ear with a familiarity that has nothing to do with the voice itself, so brash and new. "Where is it, Doctor?"

He makes himself swallow. He had thought it had grown easier, repetition of the telling blunting the taste of ash in his mouth, but it's all a lie; it doesn't get easier, it doesn't stop, and all the tellings before were only dry practice runs for this, the words falling on the only ears in all the universe that truly know what he's saying. "Gone."

There are kilometers between them, bridged by satellite signal, electronic waves carried through hydrogen and oxygen and the turning of the planet around them, but through the tiny distant line he can still hear it. The voice bites the words off harshly and he can feel it, not just against his ear but in the thrum of his own hearts, his own helpless cry thrown back to him down the echo of a cel phone connection. "How can Gallifrey be gone?"

"It burnt," he whispers, and the words are ash in his mouth. Ash and fire. It isn't just the truth. It is the Truth, a truth beyond all truths. He closes his eyes when he says it, shutting away blue skies and green leaves and feeling the unchangeable truth of it in his very bones.

Gallifrey the mighty, the eternal, had burnt. Gallifrey's children had burnt. It is the truest of truths because it is still true. Gallifry is burning. Gallifrey's children are burning still and it is fire and ash in his mouth. Fire in his fingertips, where he clutches plastic and metal of the thin phone. Fire in his ears, where the sound of breathing echoes across the distance. Fire in his bones, in his hearts, clear to his feet that cleave to the endless tumbling turn of this small planet on which he stands. Fire in his veins, in his mind, sweeping through his thoughts. He burns with it, an endless inferno that heats every word, every gesture, burning him from the inside out with the cries of a whole world, a whole race, all of his people. They burn, eternal, and he burns with them, driven on and on by the endless inferno.

They burn with them. Because he isn't alone now and he wants, desperately, insanely, to ask if the other feels it. Feels the fire, the heat, tastes the scorched air and the endless ash that will echo in their minds forever and ever. Gallifrey is gone. Only the idea of her remains, but someone once said that an idea would live forever, so long as someone remembered it. They both remember and so Gallifrey lives on, incandescent and shining, burning eternal through the last of her children with the weight of all eternity and the breadth of all space and time to fuel a fire that will never ever die so long as either of them draws breath.

They haven't stood properly in the same room yet. Haven't breathed the same air, haven't stood toe to toe in the flesh. Already the fire leaps across the kilometers between them, burning, burning, and he wonders, dimly, where the fire burns inside and he can never stop thinking, never just stop, if those flames, brought that close one to the other, would go up in an endless inferno that would never cease.

They're all that's left. All of the might of the Time Lords, everything of it that remains in all the universe, distilled down and contained in just two fragile bodies. Pure essence of all that remains of Gallifrey, polar opposites in perpetual binary orbit, two ordinary stars flared into supernovas burning bright and hot with the fuel of their entire race. There is only one star mapped out on the blackness behind his closed eyes where there used to be all the bright glittering wealth of a universe of stars, but he's been a beggar too long, grown used to the utterness of pitch blackness. That single star burns brighter than whole galaxy clusters to him, blinding and brilliant in the void, and he can feel the fire in himself burn the brighter for it.

"Can't you hear it?" the voice whispers to him and yes, yes he can hear it, the fire licking through every word with vibrating energy that throbs in every syllable that tumbles through that distant mouth. "I thought it would stop but it never does, it never ever does. The drumming, Doctor, the constant drumming."

Yes, he wants to say. Yes, he can hear it, but it isn't drumming. It's the crackle of fire. Can't you feel it? Can't you feel the burning?

Fire and drums, burning and beating, and the other may say it's too late but it isn't his choice to decide - the fire and drums are already there, beneath their skin, threaded indelibly through the double beat of their hearts, and it's all there is, the last breathing moment of which they are the last embodiment and it will never, ever, stop.