We are the Supreme Beings!
"The Daleks are the superior beings."
"We are the supreme beings!"
Every time he met the Daleks, it was inevitable he would hear the endless chanting about their brilliance, their supremacy; they'd come up with so many variants of the same theme, the Doctor had started keeping a tally of the times they'd said a specific variant even if it all boiled down to the same thing.
The Doctor had long since stopped bothering trying to make idle conversation with the Daleks; they always said the same thing and while many of their plans were different, in the long term when you had defeated ten Dalek plans you'd seen them all, and you knew the plan was part of their larger plan, to continue their interminable wars against the rest of the cosmos, the war against every lifeform other than Dalek, and eventually conquer the universe. In any case the Daleks had never listened to his urgings to make peace, so he had long since given up, and it had happened quickly thanks to his original visits to Skaro in his first incarnation before encountering them during that invasion of Earth.
He had asked the Dalek Supreme during his second visit to Skaro when he'd tried to get that wretched Fast-return switch to return the TARDIS to the 1960s to return Ian and Barbara home why the Daleks could not make peace with the Thals and it had seemed like a good idea at the time. The Daleks were more advanced than the Thals, but there was so much the Thals could have learnt from the Daleks despite having spent the previous 50 cycles working to utilise whatever technology had been studied in the Dalek city.
But the Dalek Supreme had refused to listen, and he had led the Daleks into trying to destroy the Thals once and for all to end the war the Daleks' ancestors the Kaleds had begun millennia before. Now the Doctor never bothered to waste his time or his breath in trying to stop the Daleks. He knew it never did any good given how the Daleks refused to listen to reason; him trying to persuade Davros to stop the creation of the Daleks in the way he had known them did not count. He had underestimated just how much of a Dalek Davros was; Davros had been sick in the head, and how he had passed on that sickness to them, so the Daleks had inherited his madness and his cruelty.
Thinking of the Time Lords' mission to Skaro made him scowl especially since he had gone off on his merry way, letting the Time Lords mitigate the changes to the timeline, meagre as they were, so they did not affect the rest of the universe too adversely, without thinking the Daleks would now realise what the Time Lords had tried to do through him.
The Time War.
Just thinking of the conflict where the Daleks had come so dangerously close to conquering the universe and proving their beliefs they were the supreme beings was enough to make the Doctor sick, especially when he recalled how his eighth self had tried to avoid the Time War to the point where he could convince himself it was not happening even when he was being dragged into it. He knew now with his new perspectives thanks to regenerating into that warrior - he sometimes asked himself if the Time Lords, becoming so tired with his constant refusals to join, even when Ollistra had meddled in his business, had somehow manipulated events so his eighth self would want to fight after that business with Cass crashing into Karn; it seemed convenient - there was no way he could avoid it forever. At some point, the Time Lords would either become tired of his constant refusals to fight, or more likely he would have become tired of the bloodshed as more and more sections of the universe collapsed due to the war, and he would have joined of his own accord, although he sometimes viewed that as unlikely.
He had thought - hoped - when the war was over, and he'd made his decision to end it once and for all, the Daleks would be gone. Their sick plans to conquer the universe, inflicting atrocities on creation and justifying it all by saying it was because they were supreme beings⦠he had long since hoped the end of the war would be the end of it, but as he'd told Rose and Jack on the Gamestation (Satellite 5), he had thought the Time Lords going had been worth it, but they had died for nothing.
The Daleks had come back, and they would always come back. Deep down the Doctor knew the Daleks would never leave him, since they needed to prove once and for all they were the supreme beings.
