How I Came To Be Here

We studied him at the Academy, of course.  How could we not?  A renegade who fled our society, broke our civilization's sacred vows of non-intervention, only to later force us to re-examine those vows and elect him our leader.  He was a complex figure and my fellow students and I were deeply divided over him.  Some revered him.  After all, for untold millennia we had been content to sit like insects frozen in amber, frozen in our timeless perfection as we looked down with detachment upon the struggles of "lesser species."  But he changed us.  He made us shake off the dust and become involved, to try and make a difference.  For this many of my peers regarded him as a sort of messiah, eager to join the Celestial Intervention Agency his influence had created in our society.  But I was never so sure.  To be frank, he frightened me.  Death and destruction were his constant companions, and as the Matrix showed, he was not above using even those closest to him to achieve his ends.  What did he really care for his people?  He had, after all, run away from us once.  In my heart, I feared where he might be leading us.

Then came the Time War.  His Time War.  The policy of intervention he had introduced to our society compelled us to enter the fray, to take on an alien race that had conquered much of the cosmos and even begun to meddle in Time.  We had a "duty" to lesser species.  We had to "stand up" for them.  We had to "save" them.  And so we fought, and we died, and our cities burned.  My friends rushed to join the Time Legions and so I, reluctantly, followed them.  I was there when the Time Lord fleet engaged the Could-Have-Been-King and the armies of Meanwhiles and Neverwheres, just a lowly foot soldier, but I was there.  I watched Time and Space come burning down around us, my friends and commanding officers annihilated.  I was there and I did the unthinkable.  Just as he had, just as the Doctor had all those centuries ago, I stole a Time Capsule and I ran.

Knowing the universe was crashing down, knowing that even the Eternals had turned their backs in disgust and departed, I decided nowhere in the continuum would be safe.  So I took refuge in a parallel universe, a Second Life.  The walls of reality closed and hardened behind me, and I have been here ever since.

I learned later the fate of my people, and my world.  I learned that the Doctor sacrificed us, burning Gallifrey and the Daleks together at the same time.  He saved his precious lesser species by bleeding his own, my turning the world of his birth into a lost ruin.

On Gallifrey, Before the End in the Uniform of the Blood Onyx Legion

I was right about him all along.