The only thing he could hope was that if he ran far enough, and fast enough, he would leave them all behind.
His human companions would have called them ghosts. He thought of them as echoes possibly transmitted through a temporal glitch amplified by memory and the TARDIS herself. Somehow going into the technical specifications did not particularly help, though, not when he could hear his granddaughter's voice murmuring to him a litany of failures. They were all there, every one, and their numbers only growing.
After all, there were so many deaths he could be held responsible for, and they'd all latched onto him.
It was a wonder, really, that the TARDIS didn't feel more crowded.
They brushed up against him, little touches of cold. The first time he stopped, suddenly, as Jabe's voice whispered burn burn burn all you do is burn everything me Time Lord last of the Time Lords Rose had waved a hand in front of his face.
"Oi, Doctor! You all right?"
No one else ever heard them.
It was new, after (Gallifrey) the Time War. Maybe losing (everything) his planet somehow he had become more susceptible to these – echoes, whatever they were. (Or maybe he was just going insane. It wasn't as though he had anyone to compare with.)
He ran to the end of the earth, the end of the universe and nothing changed, nothing nothing nothing except more whispers, and half of them he didn't even know their names.
They followed him around the TARDIS, watching, whispering, all their voices filled with spite. Even the ones who had died like Jabe, good and kind and compassionate – that wasn't what they were like now. They were all hate, all hate and vengeance and nothing else.
On the impossible planet circling a black hole, they found their way out of the TARDIS. Hanging in the dark, he heard Cassandra tittering. So far to fall, she whispered. So far to fall and all in the dark, always in the dark. For a moment, he thought he heard the sound of the Time Lords singing, and his grip on the rope nearly slipped.
Don't fall, they gloated. Don't fall. In the dark, eyes closed, he could almost see them hovering, hands whispering around the rope they longed to cut. They crowded close around him, full of pain and anger, and he shuddered and let go.
They followed him all the way down.
It was worse when he was alone. There was no one else to listen to, just their voices; names, stories. "Why me," he asked, out loud.
Death follows you, and so do the dead, said his granddaughter, and he could almost see her for a moment, sitting on the control panel. We are yours and you are ours.
On a lonely planet after Rose had gone, he was trapped in a cave with the water rising and no way out. They laughed, jeered gleefully, hopefully, and their voices seemed to echo in the stone chamber.
He got out. He was lucky again, still alive, still fighting. But they didn't leave him alone.
They never left him alone.
Sometimes, amid all that death, it felt like he was the only one in the entire universe still alive.
~.~
"There are ghosts," he said, one afternoon, to Martha.
"What?"
"In here," he said, gesturing around them. They hadn't solidified again since Susan was last there. Susan was the one he saw most. Sometimes he thought it was because he wanted to see her. Usually those were the days that he wondered if he was insane, something broken in his mind. "They follow me. Just about everywhere."
Martha sat back and looked amused. "You're having me on."
"Yes," he said, though what he meant was no, and smiled. "Sorry."
My wife was beautiful, one of them sobbed. But she died because you weren't fast enough and they came for our women and children. They killed me too. You should have come faster. Or you shouldn't have come at all.
Behind Martha, something tried to coalesce and solidify, but it melted before he could see a face.
He might have been glad about that, and might not.
He listened for Rose among them, but she never came.
They came across Jack Harkness and the Doctor watched him closely, trying to see if Jack had his own ghosts that no one else can see, but Jack seemed the same as ever (and not at all). It was comforting, in a way, that Jack would never be a ghost. Jack could never die and so Jack would not follow him like all the dead did now.
They clamored more around him, though, and the Doctor could see them flickering into being around the edges of his vision, always gone when he turned his head.
Jack stared at him so much that he finally asked. "Do you see them?"
"See who?" Jack said, and hard as he looked there wasn't a flicker of a lie in this fixed point's eyes.
It's just you and us. It's always just you and us, said Professor Richard Lazarus, and he just blinked, unable to decide, suddenly, if that thought was horrifying and lonely or somehow comforting.
~.~
He wondered if the fact that they got more and more solid meant something, or if he were reading too much into nothing. Maybe he's dying more and more and coming closer to them, and he was suddenly glad he's never seen himself among any of these echoes. They nagged at the fringes of his mind, kept him from sleep, and he could almost feel himself fraying around the edges.
Donna, he thought, maybe Donna would see them, or at least he'd be able to talk to her about it, but the words stuck in his throat and he never said a word as they gathered closer and tighter and whispered whispered (whisper the word that sounds like what it is) with the insistent voices of thousands, all his dead.
And they were his. He could accept that, in a way, even if he hated it, the way their ranks grew and the way they had latched onto him. He wondered sometimes if without sleep or rest (because he kept trying to run, even knowing that they would never leave) that he was going insane now, if he hadn't been before, if he hadn't been insane all along.
Donna went; they all went, they always did.
The ghosts stayed.
~.~
The Master's fingers touched his temples and both mouth and mind asked can you hear the drums?
This time, he had his own question. Can you see the ghosts?
~.~
They quieted as he died.
It wasn't respectful quiet, though. It was the quiet of vultures, and he watched them perched around him, aching from the inside out. Almost, they promised. Almost.
Next time, he thought, they would be gone. Next time there would be silence, blessed silence. No more ghosts, no more echoes.
It was the Ood who sang, but the ghosts who closed his eyes.
~.~
When he woke, everything was different. He was different. The TARDIS was in flames and falling. He opened his eyes.
They watched him.
He screamed until his lungs were empty, and threw the TARDIS towards the Earth.