Reflections

The Doctor stood amongst the trees on the bluff overlooking the valley. He watched solemnly as the funeral cortège moved up the hill towards the small stone church. The two adult coffins were horrible enough but the child-size ones which followed them were what brought the most tears of regret to his eyes.

Too late.

The TARDIS hadn’t brought him here in time. He suspected that this was deliberate in the circumstances. She knew that he couldn’t stand to see children cry. He wouldn’t have been able to do what needed to be done this time. He couldn’t have done what Jack had had to do to fix the problem he’d helped to create. This one was Jack’s burden.

But the Doctor wasn’t here about Jack, not even with Jack’s great loss in all this. This was about Donna.

Donna had encouraged him to rewrite time itself. To save one family. After losing Donna, carrying on saving that one family had become a part of him. From Rome to the ends of the Earth; he’d tried.

Branch after branch, that one family had spread across Europe, and then the world. Each time they would flourish and he would visit them, only to watch that branch die out completely. Again and again. Across the time between then and now, they died out.

Till, finally, only one branch of that tree remained. This one. This one with its father; the spitting image of a father gone before. As if to taunt him with his inability to save them. Time would not be rewritten. Again and again, Time herself had slapped his efforts down.

The Doctor watched as they laid them into the ground and then returned to his TARDIS with the tears still wet on his face.

Once there he ranted and railed against the forces that bound him. He set out to try and win. This would not be it. This was not it. Time would stay rewritten when he said so… And he, with boundless energy, set forth to try again. Again and again, he succeeded. Again and again, he failed.

Many, many years later, the Doctor – newly regenerated – dressed himself in a new costume. He caught sight of himself in a mirror for the first time and paused, momentarily startled by the face he saw reflected back. His smile was a wry one as he took in the features, from a time long past, that he would never forget.

“Arrogant hubris remembered with every look in a mirror!” He muttered quietly and looked away, then smiled broadly. “But doesn’t mean I’m going to give up trying to save them. Just one family, one person, one planet, at a time.”