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He doesn’t care that there’s blood staining his coat. He really, really doesn’t care. Which is a problem that he’s trying to fix, that he really needs to fix, by slicing flesh with a focused grimace.
“Wow.”
“Shut up,” he hisses without glancing at the noise. Then, he haphazardly shifts his attack to another part of his forearm, drawing long thin lines of red across it. It stings, of course it does. It hurts, which is good. It makes him think, which is the intended result, and it makes him appear with that terribly smug face of his off to the side.
“I didn’t take you for the cutting type,” the Master says absently, settling down next to him.
“Yeah, well, it was more of a habit in my eighth, and you weren’t around much then,” the Doctor replies before continuing with a renewed, frantic pace. “And I don’t think this counts as a continuation, considering I have a multitude of good reasons and really, I just need to think. And everything else is so boring it’s clogging my senses.”
He’s breathing hard, fast, and he thinks he could whip around and punch, kiss, stab the Master to death right about now, not that he would. A galaxy, too. It wouldn’t survive a glance from him. He doesn’t enjoy pain, but the sensation of anything is good. The universe is boring, he’s bored, he needs action. He needs to burst into flames, he needs to bounce from the brink of death, he needs a million eyes on him as he raises his arms up high, he needs the cheers. Or maybe that was the wrong direction, he needs someone to hold his hand, he needs a singular person to look into his eyes like he is alive, he needs just one connection that doesn’t fizzle into dust, one thing that can stand the test of time to a being that experiences it on infinitely more levels.
“Doctor,” that thing says to him, an eyebrow raised high, concerned, maybe. It’s a tantalizing sound, sweet, and he digs in whatever he had in his hand further into whatever it was digging into as he stares, stares, drinks it in. That thing, the thing sitting by his side so innocuously looks back, a flickering figure that he’s afraid will vanish if he looks away for even one second.
Fingers, or hands, or something different reaches for the thing, blood coating swirls and metal dripping more, and blue on blue on red on red on a rock that sits in his hand too firmly in a river that swirls with the most beautiful crimson and a body that feels too warm to be dead and a pyre that blazes so high he can’t tell who is being burnt in it.
And then, the apologies that come spilling from every mouth to him, for not being enough, for not understanding him, for dying so soon, for being too weak, for being too strong, for not leaving him sooner, for trusting him so much, for believing that he could still be anything, for throwing up when turbulence hit, for watching him die and rebirth in a beautiful light.
There’s a force stopping metal from advancing further into skin, and he stares at the culprit with ice that could freeze over universes if he tried. And he will try, he will try now that he understands. Beautiful lines of blooming red cover his arm and he’s thinking, he’s thinking, and he’s caring which is the entire point of this ridiculous exercise that he’s assigned to himself—how could anything dare to try stop him so close to achieving everything.
He turns the knife around and stabs it into the chest of the thing, piercing right above one fluttering heart. It looks at him, hair floppy and suit falling apart at the seams, withering away from the knifepoint outwards.
“Oh,” the thing says with a grin. “You’ve really lost it this time.”