Save me.

The echoes of words only half-heard haunt him. He stands at the door of the tardis, dropped within a sun at the height of its life, and watches the world burn around him. Colours at the edge of his sight flicker and fade in turn, morphing through all the spectrums he sees and some he doesn't.

Sometimes, all he wants is for all the world to burn.

So it won't be his problem anymore.

So he can spare himself the pain.

Because even if there are wonders, they can't hide the undertow of grief and pain that he's been running from, the knowledge that everything he touches will turn to dust and cave in beneath his weight.

He knows that if he stays here much longer, the sun he's in will compress in, converge around his ship and collapse when he dematerializes to become a black hole. But he'll be long-gone, not there to watch the consequences, as usual.

It was always good fun. Definitely. Friend in hand, running from whatever he'd stirred up – alas, it could not last.

He'd sped across the surface of his troubles, keeping the better memories as well as himself on the top; the memories so that he could feel a modicum of what some might call normalcy, and himself… So that he didn't sink down and be carried away to madness. He knew if that happened, he'd land himself in hell.

Even after things went wrong, he couldn't stop. Even as the tears slid, bitter as cyanide down his face, every fibre of his being telling him to stop, he went on. And then he'd be alone.

And that always showed him just how badly unhinged he was. His limits fell away, he became reckless and dangerous and… People got hurt. Not those that mattered to him – for them, he'd shatter the walls of time itself – but those that fell in his name, or trying to stop his mad scheming, were all a solid punch to his gut.

Most of the time, that'd send him slinking back to his tardis, wandering around time just looking, watching things happen.

He sighs, staring at the bullets of plasma arcing through his field of vision.

Inevitability. That was what his life had been. A thousand years of nothing but the inevitable. Because he'd come to believe that everything was already written out for him. That all his decisions were somehow all done and seen to completion, but that he still had no idea. So he did what he could, fought on, and never stayed.

The Doctor doesn't think it's over for him, but neither is he beginning, and nor can he begin again. He's tired – sometimes he just needs someone to step in and save him. From himself, and from the universe conspiring against him.