The Mistress is dying. She knows this intimately.
The Mistress knows what death tastes like on her tongue, smells like as she breathes in breath after rasping breath, sounds like as her ears start to deafen and yet sound like ringing, the sound almost dizzying.
She is on a road, a dirt path, as she is every time, and she walks it, through fields of red grass even taller than herself, dyed with the rust in the ground from so much bloodshed.
These are not the fields of her youth.
And yet somehow, inexplicably, they are those same fields too.
There are odd clearings in them, places where the ground has been scooped away from the path, places where she almost touches the grass in her attempts to keep going.
The ground is dusty but the plants stand resilient in the face of this drought as does she, need for sustenance gone for the moment.
She knows that she is not within her body right now.
Or to put it more rightly perhaps she should say that she is deep within her body, below everything, deeper than she will ever have a memory of if she surfaces, chooses to live again.
She knows this as surely as she knows that every single version of herself she has ever been yet and ever will be, excepting the last, will not remember time spent here, will never be able to recollect it under any circumstances.
She sees visions as she walks and she knows that they are not real as much as they have happened before.
The Doctor, grinning at her, delighted by her plan for once, his laughter as he is looking away, tending to something in his tardis with a mug of tea beside him matching the one which was in her hands, his soft smile as he wraps a child back up in a blanket, tells her that she's done a good thing, kisses her cheek.
He is beautiful, always, in every angle she sees him, smiling, happy, proud.
She thinks that she wants to see him again though she knows it can't be with these eyes.
The Mistress halts on the path, fields going on endlessly but in the distance, far, far, far in the distance, a clearing in site, further, if she could actually see it, an old shed in the middle of nowhere. She smiles to herself, shaking her head.
"Oh, Mistress, you really are so stupid." She says to herself, closing her eyes and taking a breath.
"Of course this was always the only option." The Time Lady says to herself.
She breathes in and out again, knowing her decision though it was hardly one to make.
The Mistress decides to push her body one last time.
The Mistress decides to regenerate.
The Mistress decides to be with him again, one more time, another go on the wheel.
And she knows that she doesn't have enough strength left in her to control who she changes into, let alone her shape.
And yet she chooses him anyway, regardless of who she will be.
The Mistress, with the remnants of this self coming apart, just hopes that she will be able to see him again.
The Mistress wishes that she can finally be good.
Her blood burns in her body.
It eats her mind.