He was battered and bleeding, but not mortally wounded. He wished he was.
Gallifrey.
Gallifrey.
Home. Family. Friends. Future.
Gone now.
All alone. I am alone.
The TARDIS didn't even hum in response, as if it too were grieving.
Dead. They were all dead. He killed them all.
And he wanted to say, to think that he'd had to, to save the universe, end the hell. But he knew better. At the end, he hadn't done it to save anything, anyone, but himself. He'd killed them all. His own species.
He'd have to change his name, now. He was no longer the Doctor.
Murderer. Killer.
Names he'd called himself ever since he enacted The Moment.
They would all blame him, if they could. Romana. The Master. All of them. Everyone and anyone who knew what he'd done. They'd stand around him and tell him he could have found another way. Murderer, they'd say. You committed genocide, specicide.
If he could be held to trial, he knew what sentence he would give himself.
Why don't you just die?
He curled up on the grated floor of the TARDIS and waited until he did.
When flames engulfed him and left only the ashes of a former self, he found a soldier with a heart of stone, suicidal tendencies and a contemptuous streak three miles wide.
But he found that he was still the Doctor, and, in time, he found that stone could melt, and a heart could heal.
A girl named Rose became hope and light and life and everything, and eventually, suicide became sacrifice.
And the soldier became the romantic, who would love and lose so much in a burning, blazing firework of a lifetime.
Murderer. Killer.
The Oncoming Storm became the Last of the Time Lords.
And when the romantic, the Last of the Time Lords, became too broken and burned out, too angry and lost, for the name Doctor, he became the Time Lord Victorious.
And suffered his greatest defeat.
The knocking was almost a relief. Will it stop now? The question in my head? The voices? My accusers? Will they stop now?
It was the sound of his own madness.
The Last of the Time Lords, the Time Lord Victorious, became the Madman with a Box.
Murderer. Killer.
Madman.