The Mistress feels herself wake, air feeling like it's tearing holes through her lungs as she coughs, head spinning, and manages to roll over.
She'd thought that that would have killed her- it had hurt enough that it felt like that, closer to that than she's ever been before.
Her parasol is on the ground she sees when she finally stops coughing, throat raw, lungs feeling heavy as she opens protesting eyes.
She picks it up, uses it to stand, legs feeling full of molten lead as she swallows, leans against a tree, rests her head against the bark, rough, and tries not to vomit.
She knows that she is dying still.
Perhaps not this second but sooner rather than later her body is going to give, start to burn itself out in earnest.
The one thing that drives her is the taste in the air, unmistakable, regeneration.
She knows well enough that the Doctor had been holding off, wearing so thin that his skin almost glowed with his effort to fight it off, to stop another person from having to take on the burden of being him.
She can taste it still, scattered on the air and hopes against hope that somewhere among the wreckage around her he is here.
So she limps, left leg scraping against metal, through thick mud, charcoal, as she tries to find her way back to that farmhouse where he'd been going to make a final stand, ignoring the pain, pushing it down past the lump in her throat, the building headache in her own head, following scraps of golden energy on the air, a wisp of smoke and then gone, the essence of him, shining.
The dirt has mixed with oil and water, churned up and grabbing at her limbs as she just keeps walking, as far as she can, as fast as she can.
She finds the crater outside the front of the house, the ruins of where it used to be razed, fires still smoking, sending chemicals into the air which would kill her if she wasn't already dying.
She knows that he was there, that he's left her again.
She can't blame him and sighs.
She breathes out gold and almost falls over in surprise and horror.
This was supposed to be her last, no more, she'd always been reckless, stupid with her lives and this was the final one she'd managed to force into her body, the last go round.
She shouldn't be regenerating- she doesn't want that! For the first time in her long, long life she doesn't want to keep going, keep hurting, keep destroying.
She swallows, hands shaking as she raises them to her face.
Gold seeps from small cuts on her skin and she closes her fists, closes her eyes, doesn't cry.
She can feel that she doesn't have control over this one, that this one is him again, that she will become him again, mad and burning and cruel.
She tries, knows it to be desperate, useless, but tries still, to wrench back control, to wrestle herself back from whatever he has done to her.
Her head spins with the effort and she falls to her knees in the mud where the Doctor surely had lain and screams because it's all she can do about it.
She doesn't want this.
She needs to leave.
The Mistress thinks for a moment, head quiet, nothing left except planning.
Minimise the damage, don't let this one good act be in vain.
She repeats it to herself out loud, her words weak in the creaking and groaning of the ship.
"Minimise the damage, don't let this one good act be in vain."
She pushes herself up from the ground, from the mud, sees a cyberman nearby, lights out, gone.
It's not difficult to rip its arm off, even in her state, when she can use glass to sever the connections in the shoulder which hold it to the body.
After another few minutes of scavenging and building one of the fires until it would burn her alive if she wasn't already burning up from the inside she manages to fashion a weapon of some kind, a gun, if she's generous with herself. It's enough.
The path back down is something she doesn't remember, pain and burning and fire and the shock of electric running through her body, collapsing and standing and falling and aching bruises and burning.
But she stands in a room with a computer, changes the code, feels herself burn, hears metal hit metal as the cybermen, one-by-one, deactivate, never to be brought back again.
The Mistress has just enough time to lock herself into an escape pod and eject herself into space.
Her last sight is gold mist, her hands pressed against cold glass, that ship, black hole like an old god behind it.
She burns.