Chapter Text
The Doctor woke on his TARDIS with no real memory of what he’d done just prior to regenerating. He wasn’t sure why that would be, but he knew what he must have done, and had no wish to regain the memory. Dying permanently would have been better, but apparently there was something inside him that wasn’t ready to give up just yet, so here he was, a new man. He was the Doctor again, and now he had a new title: Last of the Time Lords.
The TARDIS took him to Terminus and then all but booted him out the door and into Nyssa’s arms. She’d only had a few months without him, he gathered, and her presence was soothing in its familiarity, her hands gentle as she nursed him through the worst regeneration sickness he’d ever had.
“They’re all gone,” he told her--the only words he said to her the entire time he was there. “I’m the last.”
He saw the partial understanding in her eyes, felt her try to send a pulse of empathy through telepathic pathways he’d built with her in their time together, and although he accepted the comfort he would not let her in, would not tell her the whole truth. Sweet, gentle Nyssa, last of her kind as well, but he would lose all her sympathy if she knew that his isolation was of his own making.
If she knew he’d killed them all. Worse than killed, unmade. His father, his daughter, his granddaughter, Romana, Koschei. So many people he had never and now could never meet, so many children. In a very real way, they had never existed. In a way that was just as real, he’d burned them alive.
As his body healed, the Doctor went deep into his mind and built walls. Tall, sturdy walls that would keep the pain and the grief inside. He could not manage those feelings alone, could not use any of the mind-techniques that the Time Lords had developed for dealing with trauma, not without assistance that no longer existed. All he could do was repress and cope, like a primitive. Like a human.
There was a reason he’d regenerated instead of just dying. A reason that the universe still had a Doctor. It wasn’t fate or some sort of higher power, just him. Just the part of him that lived to change and to meddle and to help, however he could.
Even if he lived long enough that his personal timeline stretched past the age of the universe from its fiery birth to its dark death, he would never be able to truly atone. But he could help.
When his body had healed and his mental defenses were as strong as he could possibly make them, he stood up from his sickbed. Nyssa gently admonished him for moving too quickly, but he silenced her with a kiss, the first he’d had in two lives, pouring all the gratitude and affection he felt for her through the connection.
Then he left, before he could be tempted to form a deeper connection and expose her to guilt beyond bearing.
The war had displaced beings and civilizations and entire species, and now the survivors were quarreling with one another. He could help. He was the Doctor, and he would make it better or--maybe preferably--die trying.
It was grimmer work than it had been in the past, largely because he was a grimmer man. No absurd frippery, no bouncing hair, just a close crop and a leather jacket. No point even looking in a mirror. He’d been at it for at least a month when his travels brought him to Earth--to London, in particular. London had always been a favorite of his. Humans, too, daft barely-beyond-animal things though they were.
And there was a girl. Her mouth was disproportionately wide and her accent grated and she’d chemically stripped the eumelanin from her hair for some incomprehensible reason. Holding her hand, tugging her along behind him and away from danger, listening to her admirably rapid adjustment to living in a larger universe than she’d ever suspected made him feel more like the Doctor than anything had since he’d cast off that frock coat, so many violent years ago. He was having fun again.
She had to come with him. Nothing could assuage the guilt, but a bright human presence on the TARDIS again would go far in fighting the loneliness. It should be easy, convincing someone so clever and so brave that her life would be better by his side. It could even be true, had often been before, although he doubted that it would be this time. He was too broken. The fact that he was determined to do it anyway was proof enough of that.
He laid the bait--”That’s who I am. Now forget me.”
He set the trap--”Goes anywhere in the universe, free of charge.”
And she said no.
He almost broke down then, standing in the empty TARDIS in the emptier Vortex. Maybe he’d lost his touch, his knack for luring young humans into danger and the unknown. Maybe he wasn’t the Doctor after all, much as he wanted to be...just the warrior. Just the destroyer.
The TARDIS’ hum in his mind was just enough, just barely enough, to keep him going. It was like starving to death very slowly, feeling the gnawing emptiness every moment of every day. There had been times long ago when he’d resented the permanence of his mental link to the Time Lords, times when he’d hated them, even a time when he’d tried to sever it. He hadn’t known, then, that it could feel like this. Like the universe contained nothing but himself and his TARDIS and death.
He never asked twice. The Doctor never asked twice, that was a part of it, a part of the little game he played with himself and his companions over the centuries. Sometimes they stowed away, sometimes he kidnapped them a bit, but he never asked twice.
She’d wanted to come, he’d seen it. Without knowing it, she’d been hungry for something like this. It was clear in the way she’d hung on his every word, in the way she grabbed his hand and ran with him, in the immediate way she said “Yes” when he asked whether it was alright that he was alien. It was more than alright with Rose Tyler, if her glazed expression at the time had been anything to go by. She’d wanted him to convince her to come. If he went back, she’d be on his TARDIS in an instant.
But that wasn’t how it worked. Anyone thick enough to turn down a trip through all of space and time didn’t get a second chance.
As soon as he’d thought it, he saw the loophole and grinned hugely, returning the TARDIS to its previous position.
“By the way, did I mention, it also travels in time.”
And just like that, no more empty TARDIS.