The Doctor woke up; his mind clouded by a thick, blank fog. His memories of the last few days were extremely hazy. He picked himself up from the hard, wooden floor and moved to a chaise-longue that was pushed back up against a roundel-patterned wall. The chair was of crushed, red velvet and the Doctor was soon drifting off back to sleep. His tousled hair fell over his penetrating blue-green eyes in waves of blonde and brown.

While he slept, the ship continued to roar. The mechanical motions of the central column eliciting a wheezing-groaning sound.

The blue light from the central column spilt onto the sleeping Doctor; it lit up his face and hands enough to show that the skin was beginning to burst, droplets of blood poured from welts on his face and hands. The time had come to pay the price for his actions.

"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

The planet lay in ruins. Only days earlier, there had been people moving in and around the Capitol. Now, it was nothing but rocks and debris. A devastating hammer blow delivered by the Enemy. It had left the remaining troops - already scattered and demoralised - without any hope. There would be no more reinforcements to help them. It seemed that they would finally win. The last great Time War was coming to an end, and the beings who had set themselves up as the Guardians of Time were going to lose.

Unless, they could bring him into the conflict.

He had steadfastly refused to become involved in the War. He had even refused a summons from the President herself. He had even bypassed the recall circuit hardwired into every single Time Capsule since the very first Type 01's had come into operation. He was already well known as a renegade. He used his powers to help those in need. He traversed the cosmos in an effort to bring evil to justice. Now, he was needed to bring the greatest evil to justice.

When they had contacted him and told him of the destruction of the Home world, the renegade had brought his stolen Time Capsule to one of the last colonies still held by the Guardians of Time. The Enemy were preparing to strike.

The Enemy had been preparing for the Time War for centuries. They had trained their troops by conquering and enslaving planets. The Time Guardians were caught off-guard. They had their devices for predicting the future, but nothing ever indicated the Enemy would become the serious threat to all of Time that they had become.

Nothing ever indicated that the Home world would fall. That it would become ruins. That billions of years of history would come to and end - the entire race of the Time Guardians coming to all-but-extinction - in a matter of seconds.

When he had been brought into the conflict, he was offered all the biological advantages that the Time Guardian race had installed in themselves. They were unprepared for War, they had to make themselves ready. They altered their appearance, their very genetic structure, all to give themselves the powers they needed to win a War that would be fought, not through space, but through Time itself.

He refused.

He had explained: "...You have become no better than the Enemy. Manipulating your bio data until you've become nothing but a crude parody of the people you once were."

"When you look into the Abyss, the Abyss also looks into you."

He, however, agreed to help. He did not want to see the last relics of his race consigned to oblivion. He wanted, someday, to bring his planet and people back - the way he remembered them. Every renegade dreams of a day when he can return home. Absolved of all his crimes.

His crime was curiosity. He wanted to explore, he wanted to see the universe. The Time Guardians had become stagnant. Their powers had enfeebled them. They could see the entire universe simply by peering into their advanced machines. They could bring things throughout the cosmos to them with their machines. What they couldn't do, though, was interfere. The Time Guardian's creed: "For the crime of interference in the affairs of other cultures, there can be only one sentence..."

He, of course, was the Doctor. He had left his home of Gallifrey when he had grown sick of the Time Lord lifestyle. He had wanted to expand his knowledge through action, not through study. Many times, the Time Lords had attempted to bring his renegade life to an end. But now, they needed him. The Time Lords, through their genetic manipulation to breed better soldiers, had lost many of their fantastic powers.

Powers that the Doctor still had. Powers over Time and Space that had long since become dead to the Time Lords.

When the Doctor had arrived at the colony, the Time Lords numbered but a few hundred thousand. With Gallifrey destroyed, the Time Lords connection to the Web of Time was unravelling. The Doctor would be safe, of course, he had weaved his own connection to Time centuries ago. None of the other Time Lords would be spared from a fate worse than death, though.

The Time Lords wanted to take their Enemy with them, though. "If we die," they had explained. "Leave nothing left of the Enemy who brought us to this state." They wanted the Doctor to destroy the Daleks. He'd had the opportunity to do so in the past. Now, it had become the dying request of a race that the Doctor no longer felt himself a part of.

Using the powers of the Time Vortex, the powers that the Time Lords had lost, the Doctor incinerated the Dalek fleet, and their home world, Skaro.

The Doctor had to pay his own price, though: The loss of another regeneration, the loss of the TARDIS, the loss of his entire planet ... The loss of all that kept him going.

"You can never go home again."