He sat alone among the cloisters. A youthful figure, but now his brow was furrowed with lines. He leaned forward, clasping his hands together and closing his eyes, almost as though in prayer, but he was thinking.
Around him, there was silence; the constant hum of the TARDIS didn't exist here. The silence was a comfort, letting his thoughts flow freely.The stone columns around him reached up into . . . infinity. He didn't know how high they were. They changed as they rose: the light of an artificial sky illuminated them. But here, around him, the columns and archways were dark and shadowed and twisted with ivy. The stones were crumbling, and he remembered with distaste the last time he had sat in this room, a mere lifetime ago, when he was someone else.
He was the Doctor of tragedies.
He gathered them to him as he existed in a shadow of himself; a white shadow. He couldn't even remember it now, the half-formed nature of his fifth body. But he had brought them all there at the end.
A boy and a girl that he had protected from the almost end of the universe: he had freed one from a repetitive cycle of an existence, a constant boredom of working with no achievement; the other, an orphan, taken before her world died.
He knows that he saw the third too, before he met her. He had watched her when she was still innocent of terror, mere hours before she saw her aunt dead, and blackness sweeping through the universe.
He had gathered them, and they had surrounded him as he was born.
Then he watched as, one by one, they had died.
The first, literally, engulfed in flame in a futile task; the second left to a hopeless cause, a cause that would kill her, and thousands more, and the third; the third he had destroyed, leaving her with her faith in the universe shredded.
He was meant to protect them.
Guilt was such an ugly emotion. It held him prisoner when he realised that he could make mistakes. It filled him with the fear of the fallible, bringing him closer to his companions, his friends, but they could no longer trust to his invulnerability.
He had wanted to show them the wonder that the universe offered, the marvels that existed within its infinite nature. He wanted them to share his joy of life, but he could not shield them from its dark side. Terror and fear was offered alongside hope and love, and he no more deny one than the other.
He did not play cards, but he felt that the universe had dealt him in anyway, offering him a hand of tears.
When he had left Turlough, it had been a relief. Here, at least, was a happy ending. Now, he could reassure himself that what he had done was right. He was capable of helping those he needed; he could protect, and save, his friends from the universe after all. He could succeed.
But then he hadn't given up on Turlough, even as he had try to kill him, the Doctor had believed, had had faith that in the end good would win. That he would win, and that Turlough could go home.
Yet even this victory was bitter for him. He could not think of it without remembering his great failure, when he had finally given up hope for his friend, his enemy. Twisted and desperate, driven by a single desire, the Master's grand schemes for conquest were shadowed memories, as his phenomenal will focussed on survival.
He remembered a time when their encounters had seemed little more than games, and he had relished the prospect of winning, but now the skirmishes left a sour taste and he constantly hoped that each would be the last. He wasn't quite sure when he had finally decided that the man who was his friend was dead; he wasn't quite sure when he had given up hope. He comforted himself with the thought that at the end, the very end, it was a dark and twisted insanity that he had left to burn.
He had watched his friend's desire for power lead him into madness, and somehow he felt as though it was his fault.
He should not have given up hope.
And now another companion had joined him, and he was afraid of the fragile optimism that told him that he will not fail her. Not this time.
He made himself a promise, among the stone and the ivy and the quiet solitude of the cloisters: a solemn and secret vow that he sealed between his hearts.
He will not allow her to end in tragedy.