Perhaps you cannot hear anyone scream in space, but the silence that fills that void is deafening. An assault upon the eardrums greater than any high pitched expletive or mighty cannon roar. My head reverberated. Blood pounding twin staccato against my temples, rushing through the migraine narrowed passage ways with a ceaseless pressure born of despair.
I watched, as seers do, measuring time by the miniscule movements of sand particles in an unforgiving desert of emptiness. Shifting contours of identical particles, possible of treatment and shaping to be beauteous creations of dazzling cut glass but in this raw state barren unyielding of anything but torturous monotony. The southern dunes of Gallifrey lay open before me. A seeming endless labyrinth of klik after klik of wind sculptured nothingness. Large enough to swallow some planets whole, it was still small enough to be but a dot on my multidimensional paradoxical home world.
I was born midpoint between this place and the Citadel, half way atop the tallest of the Mountains of Solace. My father had been president of the Academy, a scholar beyond parallel but for all that a fool. Unable to dissect ideal from reality he had watched the blossoming rivalry between the High Council and Skaro but had failed to see the concluding genocide for both planets ruling races.
I watched our second sun slowly clear the horizon and was as always was filled with wonder and awe. So close as to seem impossible her orange glow filled my world with light and color, the very soul of Gallifrey, touching every molecule with ambient warmth that made this place magical and seeming indestructible. If only Lords of Time were so easily transmuted by her majesty to Lords of Light. Within our hands we held the tools to fill this galaxy, all galaxies with peace, knowledge and happiness to overflowing. It was the very crux of our uniquely improbable existence. Having power beyond measure to create harmonious union and yet to be unable to raise one finger in that noble cause.
Looking south, always south, my back firmly planted against the horrors behind me. I had returned to this spot, this exact moment in time perhaps a hundredfold and never in all these centuries dared to look north. What point such misery? I knew what would confront me, had heard the account of all and witnessed each monumental blow from the perpetrator of the final solution, brother mine. The right hand of deity, as much as mine was the left, he had taken the responsibility that no other might and in a moment doomed us all to memory.
I hoped he yet existed, still traveled through the same endless tunnels of futures past as I. Space doomed our meeting again as a forlorn possibility, a mere figment of chance in a casino neither could control with any predictability. Indeed the very dangers of our crossing in the time space continuum were fraught, causing a rift that might describe some permanent damage to that delicate veil. Yet I would risk such for a glance at my blood, just one last reminder that purpose outweighs ultimate action.
Bare soles crossing the narrow distance between the TARDIS door and the rocky outcrop that was my chosen throne. Twelve short steps, gliding almost imperceptibly across rapidly heating grains that in a few short minutes would burn bare skin on contact. I knew the sound, recognized the swaying hipped stride, measured the weight to a gram and felt full.
"Hatter, the whole world behind you is burning."
Instinctively I went to look but stopped myself just in time.
"It has burned for eons now and will continue till all has been consumed to the last molecule."
Gallifrey was burning, plumes of smoke rising endlessly to form billowing clouds around the once proud planets equator, yet I could smell her scent now as distinctly as earlier upon our tussled pillows.
"I feel a fool!"
"Why?"
