The Doctor had failed Perpugilliam Brown, failed her utterly.

And worse than that, he had entirely forgotten it. That wasn't his fault of course, that blame could only fall on the Time Lords, but nonetheless he felt it like a weight in his chest.

He knew he should do what the Doctor does best, and move on, but he couldn't dislodge that weight from him, try as he might. The Time Lords had plucked him from the timeline before he'd had the chance to rescue her, and now it was too late, beyond any intervention he could do. To make matters worse, they'd used the circumstances of their parting ways as evidence in their trial, making it now a fixed point forever. Immutable. It had of course been the greatest relief to know, once the whole affair had ended, that Peri had not died horribly, as he'd been led to believe... but he could almost hear her voice in his ear, "Oh, so I'm not going to die, I'm just going to be stranded here and become a barbarian queen? Some comfort, Doctor." No, it wasn't even worth considering for her. She'd been so young, she'd only come with him because she'd wanted an interesting vacation. And look at what he'd led her into.

He regretted every sharp word that passed between them. He wished the memory of his hands around her throat had stayed buried in his post-regeneration mania. He wished it had never happened, or indeed any of the miseries they'd shared.

He would like to think that if Peri had asked him to go home he would've taken her, but he knew in his hearts that she never would have. And that was his fault too. And Turlough's, damn the boy, asking her to look after him as if he needed to be cared for. He shook his head at the memory. He couldn't blame Turlough, really; his parting request paled in comparison to the arrearage he had thrust upon her in his desperation to save her life, in dying for her. They had never discussed it, beyond her griping that she'd preferred his previous self, but despite all the tension between them and the problems he dragged her into he knew she'd felt she couldn't leave him, no matter how miserable she was, like she owed him her life. He felt the inverse was true, that regenerating for her sake meant that this body, this life, should have been dedicated to protecting her. At that, he could not have failed more spectacularly.

His time sense had been completely thrown into dissaray by the trial. The past and the future coalesced within his mind, blending what had already happened with what he shouldn't know was soon to come. He hadn't retained all of it, of course, but he knew that his future was careening towards Melanie Bush, and that they were poised to have many an adventure together. He ought to run into her any day now. But he was loathe to land the TARDIS anywhere these days, letting the ship drift listlessly through space as he paced and lounged and tried to think of anything but Peri. Instead he found himself going over the list of everyone he'd lost, and the various means by which he'd lost them - romantic fancies, clinging to the chance to return to their own times, excision by the Time Lords, death, duty, simple exhaustion with his own callousness and the endless deluge of hopelessness that accompanied him - which naturally did nothing for the pit in his stomach but did give him a thought, one simple horrible thought that he couldn't dislodge no matter how he turned it over in his mind, desperate to throw it away from him.

When enough time had passed that he knew he could not lose the thought without risking complete madness, he set the TARDIS coordinates to the last place he'd ever wanted to return, to Gallifrey. He couldn't believe what he was about to do.

Before too much bureacracy had been attended to, and not without the application of his own signature charm and tact, he found himself before the Inquisitor to pleas his case once more. The Inquisitor had shown partiality to him, and with her poised to ascend to Presidency surely this wouldn't be too much to ask. As he made his request, he almost shuddered at how pompous and concerned for Time Lord values he sounded; of course, his greatest concern was the effect on the timeline - what a nightmare notion it would be for a human from 20th century Earth to remain on an alien planet hundreds of years in her future! He was doing the Time Lords a favour by prompting them to return Peri to her proper place in time and space.

As he watched Peri on the viewing platform, he thought back to the last time he'd been in this position, his entire world crumbling around him as Jamie and Zoe were returned obliviously to their lives, everything shared between them vanishing like mere ephemera. He was sure that if any of his previous selves discovered that he would willingly return to that feeling they would consider him akin to the Valeyard.

He watched as Peri woke up on a lounge on the beach of Lanzarote, not too far from where the TARDIS had originally whisked her away, with the Doctor himself blissfully unaware she was onboard. He tried to imagine what she was feeling. Damn it Doctor he could almost hear her saying, Well, I suppose it was too good to be true, to get to holiday on a spaceship. She hadn't even known it was a time machine, then. The Time Lords had placed her back in her clothes from when she'd left the Earth, or a near enough approximation. She looked as fresh as the day he'd met her.

After only a short while dazed in the sun, she picked herself up and wandered towards the edges of the screen, back to her much simpler life, her dreams of vacation overseas, her family drama (he wished he could remember what she'd said of it, now, even if he'd moaned at the triviality of it all before), and the screen faded. He felt suddenly hollow, and wondered for a second if this had been the wrong choice. Would Peri forgive him, if she knew what he had taken from her? All her memories of their time together? Would she understand his desire to spare her of all the horrors she had witnessed? Maybe he was as obdurate as she'd often accused him of being (though in more colourful language). He thought of all the