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Rassilon was the writer and the narrator and the protagonist, actor and director, muse and audience, and most of all, a vicious critic.
***
Social convention occupied a bizarre liminal space between real and not-real. So long as everybody agreed to abide by it, it was real. As those who flouted it learned the hard way. But the fact that it could be flouted at all meant it may not be quite as real as the people who believed in it liked to think. People could defy social constructs, whether intentionally or even by simply being unaware of them. People had leeway in how they chose to adhere to social constructs; they could twist the words and the sentiments involved to suit almost any actions if they were skilled enough in the art of rhetoric.
To say nothing of how cultures shifted over time.
Social conventions were real when everybody agreed to abide by them, but they were only real when everybody agreed to abide by them, and public opinion was a fickle thing. Far too fickle to make a decent basis for the fundamental laws of reality itself.
Oh, sure, magic was deep, spiritual, magic was freedom, blah, blah, blah, but it also placed everybody in a constant cosmic legal battle against their own vocabulary.
As much as Rassilon enjoyed arguing—well, he enjoyed winning arguments (although the distinction was all but pointless for him)—arguing with the universe about everything was exhausting.
***
There was only one narratively satisfying conclusion to this.
He'd known that much for a non-linear eternity, now.
Death wasn't inevitable for Rassilon in the same was it was inevitable for most beings. Hardly anything could kill him, let alone something so mundane as age. He'd lost bodies to age—age, exhaustion, stress, stabbing, shooting—he'd had bodies sliced open, limbs torn off, left to bleed out on the battlefield—he'd had one body crushed at the waist, and another mangled by a landmine, only just intact enough to regenerate—and there was no counting the amount of bodies he'd used to run unprotected across active combat zones and get as close to the enemy as he could before regenerating explosively. The ability to regenerate made suicide bombing a viable tactic.
But bodies were mere objects.
Eventually he lost track of how many times he'd regenerated. Eventually he lost track of his physical form altogether; it had been a long time since he'd been aware of what he looked like. In his own mind, he didn't look like anything. He was a concept, a noncorporeal entity of pure detached consciousness. Sometimes he forgot he had a body at all.
On the increasingly rare occasion that he should feel primitive things like hunger, thirst, exhaustion, pain…he ignored them, because what need did a higher being have for such things? Animals needed to eat and sleep. Was a Time Lord—the Time Lord—no better than an animal?
(It wasn't on the public record that he'd regenerated from all of the above multiple times each. It was infuriating enough that Rassilon himself had to live with the knowledge that he was…technically…fallible. He couldn't even think it without wincing. Letting other people know was not an option.)
It was Rassilon's own fault the universe itself had a mortal lifespan; he wrote and codified and set up an extensive civil service to enforce the very laws of physics that guaranteed it. The heat-death of the universe. Inconvenient, but one of those details that couldn't be changed or else the rest of it became riddled with holes and inconsistencies. Physics weren't like magic; you couldn't simply make things work by refusing to think about how. There was a "how" to every process since the Anchoring of the Thread, from the sub-atomic to the intergalactic.
Once, a long time ago, back when the revolution was in full swing, Rassilon might have believed the heat death of the universe would be his final end.
These days, however, the thought of living that long seemed less exciting and more depressing enough to crush what little remained of his soul.
Death was inevitable for him, not because he had a lifespan (any more than the universe itself did), but because he knew he would kill himself one day. When there was nothing else left to do. When his character arc reached a proper conclusion, Rassilon would end it. And for once, he'd finally be too busy—too dead—to agonizingly micromanage every detail of everything and everyone. Being the one to rewrite reality was exhausting.
It would take a vast team of thousands of Time Lords to replace him, but even Rassilon wouldn't be quite so vain as to create a universe that couldn't function in his absence.
His entire platform had rested on the idea that laws of physics ought to be constant and consistent, no matter who did no matter what. Eternity under the reign of magic had demonstrated all too clearly why leeway with reality could not be permitted under any circumstances, which meant Rassilon himself was as bound by the new order as everyone and everything else. With that in mind, he had no reason to sabotage the stability of the universe in the event of his death. The rest of Gallifrey could handle it.
His creation could evolve without him, although hopefully they wouldn't evolve too much, since there really wasn't much left that needed fixing anymore.
***
He did not think about how being the civil service of spacetime would have been easier with Omega around. Omega the experimental physicist, the Time Lord who treated science the way lawyers and judges treat the definitions of words.
Rassilon's stomachs churned, bile rising in the back of his throat, as he pathetically failed in the effort of not thinking about Omega. Killing him should have been the end of it. Life could go on. Patience could cry about it, Tecteun could raise an eyebrow about it, and Rassilon could never think about it again and focus on setting the standards for politics in a world newly without magic. Free to know "omega" as the name only of a letter, free to forget he'd ever heard the name Peylix—
He'd had no choice but to address the situation when it happened. The death of one of the foremost Neo-Technologists was a major world event; it would have caused no end of controversy had the Lord President of Gallifrey refused to give any kind of comment, especially considering that they were supposed to have been the very closest of friends. There was no getting around at least a quick this was a terrible loss for all of Gallifrey or he died a brave death in the line of duty, he died a hero—
During the interview proper, every word of the well-thought-out eulogy Rassilon had prepared and painstakingly rehearsed in the mirror fled his mind on the spot.
Cameras trained on him, microphones all around, his every minute movement and microexpression visible to everyone on the planet, Rassilon barely finished saying Omega was a great man before he was overcame by an urge to cry so strong and so sudden he didn't have time to fight it off. His chest felt as though he'd been placed under a hydraulic press, his antexes tensed so tightly they'd been sore for days afterwards—he'd never been so weak before, not in front of so many people.
He'd stormed out in tears.
So much for successfully convincing the world he wasn't capable of crying.
He managed to spin the whole ordeal, of course, but it ought never to have happened. He wasn't meant to have such feelings at all, let alone to give into them, let alone in public. He wasn't meant to care about Omega, not when Omega had proven he couldn't be trusted anymore; that should have been the end of it. Sentiment served no practical purpose for a rational being.
And somehow, all these centuries since—thinking about Omega still made Rassilon want to pick up his de-mat gun and…he dissuaded himself from pulling the trigger by reminding himself that he made the universe as it was now. Removing such a monumental figure in history from history entirely had to be inadvisable. Think of the paradoxes. Think of the narratively satisfying conclusion.
These days, it was getting more and more comforting to remember that he would get to kill himself one day.
That bloody Sisterhood and their bloody elixir. Anybody who honestly believed they wanted eternal life ought to be made to live a hundred thousand years and see how they liked it.
***
Life went on for a long time. So long that it wasn't worth measuring in years, for the same reason you wouldn't measure the distance between galaxies in milimetres.
Over the ages, the borders and nation-states dividing Gallifrey were dissolved, followed by the social distinctions that persisted long after they stopped being recognized on paper.
The revolution popularized language over pure telepathy, but most of Gallifrey's existing languages were woefully underdeveloped; constructing a new one that could adequately fill the role of "default method of communication" kept Rassilon occupied for a couple of decades. The result was an objectively superior language, if…complicated, but people were complicated, so it was only logical that a proper language should reflect that.
Reminding himself to speak it proved more difficult than encouraging its use as a global language. Within ten generations, hardly any of the old languages had any native speakers.
Being immortal was unpleasant, but it also made changing the world so much easier. What could anybody really accomplish in the measly three-hundred years they once had? It almost made it funny, in retrospect, how much time Rassilon had once spent pushing his ideals by military force. Immortality removed the need for that sort of thing, for the most part; waiting for all thirteen of a normal Time Lord's lifespans was easier than waging war over every little societal reform. Those who opposed his vision could only keep up the effort for as long as they lived.
***
No head of state could so much as take office at all without facing opposition; Rassilon did not expect to reign for eons upon eons without putting down the odd attempted revolution. It would be downright stupid of a being who'd come into power by overthrowing his predecessor to think nobody would try and follow his example.
Funny how the last Pythia had been immortal too, in a way, and she didn't have it in her to thwart the first real rebellion against her. The melodramatic idiot. Having now been in the position of "ruler being rebelled against," Rassilon could honestly say he wasn't planning on throwing himself off a cliff or trying to bring about the extinction of the Gallifreyan species any time soon. The Pythia had pretended to think she was the most powerful being there was, but she obviously never truly understood just how powerful she could have been if she'd just been patient.
These would-be revolutionaries were too silly to be worth a footnote in history. Rassilon had managed more competent revolutionary fervor before he was even half a century old. That any of these people thought they were accomplishing something similar was disgraceful.
The only problem with armed rebellion was how familiar it felt to fight it off.
The Time Lords were not meant to be a warlike culture. They were meant to be scholars, bureaucrats, scientists, rhetoricians, that sort of thing. Most of them these days were sedentary and wouldn't last a minute in a real fight—which was a good thing, because the fact that this wasn't causing problems proved that Gallifrey had progressed beyond the need to be physically strong. Fisticuffs, like sleep and sex and so many other things that mattered so much to lesser beings, were obsolete.
It wasn't hypocritical for Rassilon of all people to build a society that avoided the battlefield; he'd honestly hoped he could leave it behind as well. He hadn't sparred with anybody since all his old sparring partners were dead and most people these days revered him too much. Surely, by now, after all this time, fighting should be as foreign to Rassilon as it was to every other Time Lord.
But the battlefield never lost its familiarity.
In fact, it remained so familiar that there were times—too many times, an unacceptably frequent amount of times—when it was easier to train than to sleep.
Hitting punching bags until his knuckles bled through his gloves should not have been soothing, nor should shooting at targets, and certainly not coming up with new ideas for weapons of mass destruction, and he really did try to break those habits. He succeeded in resisting the urge to hit the gym every time he regenerated, but that was an easy habit to break, as he'd also largely stopped regenerating more than once every few centuries or so.
Keeping a firearm on his person at all times wasn't something he could put off for a thousand years; it was an urge that struck every few minutes if he didn't give in to it.
He tried to make himself deal with his fits of hypervigilance via artistic means instead of athletic ones, but the harp was not an instrument that lent itself well to being played in an aggressive manner, and as such it was of no use as a diversion from the urge to rip somebody's throat out. (He learned this the hard way by accidentally breaking one too many strings.)
He resisted the urge to wonder if maybe the peaceful world he'd fought and killed and died for so many times held no place for a soldier like him. Resisted and resisted and resisted. No matter what it took. That line of thought was not productive and thus certainly had no place on Gallifrey anymore.
More than once—more than ten times—he tried to stop thinking about war and fighting by making himself regenerate. No Time Lord could think coherently while their brain deconstructed and reconstructed itself on a molecular level.
It never worked longer than a few hours, but shooting himself satisfied that militaristic itch almost as well as shooting somebody else.
Funny how none of the would-be rebels ever managed to land a blow. Rassilon really had to do everything himself.
***
Strategically speaking, the Pythia's suicide was a solid move. She may have had to die to do it, but by doing it herself, she successfully made it that much harder for her opponents to define her legacy and historical reputation after her death. Suicide put the figurative ball in her figurative court. Rassilon hated it—if it had been up to him, he would have preferred to throw her off that cliff himself—but as a politician, he had to respect it.
***
People had told Rassilon he was destined for politics since…as long as he could remember (which was longer than anybody with his lifespan had any business remembering). Since he was in primary school, in a building that had fallen into disrepair and then ruin and then been demolished and built over so many times, in a city that had long since ceased to exist, in a country whose borders had long since been dissolved, rallying the other children to watch him give a speech in the schoolyard. Something about how if they all revolted against their spellcasting teacher together there was no way she could have all of them flogged.
It wasn't a very good speech, but nine-year-olds weren't known for their speechifying skills, and the language they spoke back in the day barely contained enough vocabulary to say more than "good day" and "praise the Menti Celesti" and other incredibly basic sentiments. The fact that Rassilon managed to string enough sentences together to give any sort of speech was a testament to how amazing he was at giving speeches.
He was certain his mother meant it sarcastically when she heard about this incident and suggested he ought to run for office, but she didn't know how right she was.
She didn't actually know much about politics at all; probably because she was born into it. Guaranteed office from day one. Nobody ever questioned whether or not she really deserved to be where she was or whether she really knew what she was doing. She had the odd controversy here and there—marrying a Shobogan suet-shredder foremost among them—but nothing she did was enough to undo the basic default assumption that she, by virtue of being born the eldest daughter of a baroness, was destined for influence.
Rassilon had to be utterly unimpeachable, and even then, he heard sentiments to the effect of "oh, how cute, the baroness's silly little son thinks he's a politician" enough times to make him want to start gouging out eyes. Anything he didn't do flawlessly was taken as proof that he was just another dumb boy playing at skillsets only women were meant to be capable of possessing.
Funny how, eons later, nobody remembered his mother's name or anything she'd ever done in her miserable life. Nobody cared about petty details like sex or gender; most Time Lords would be both at least once in thirteen lifetimes. Rassilon had been both too many times to count; he thought of himself as a he more out of habit than anything else. He, they, she, it. It didn't matter. To anybody. Way back when, so many people had insisted these things were immutable. The way they whined and complained and droned on and on, you'd have thought the world might end if men and women were treated as the same species.
Rassilon did not believe he was ever "destined" for politics. Or for anything. Rassilon did not believe in destiny.
Where were the so-called powers that be when he was spending centuries building an entire new system of physics? Where were the Menti Celesti when he was weaving the threads of reality into a cohesive, stable fabric? Did "destiny" decree that he should lead the Gallifreyan people into five spatial dimensions as well? The whole idea of destiny was a cop-out that people employed to make themselves feel more helpless, and consequently, more blameless. If Rassilon was the greatest leader to ever grace the universe, which he inarguably was, then it was by action. Not because somebody else spoke it into being when he was born.
That was what set him apart. Even the Pythia, even while wielding dictatorial power, always insisted whatever she did was the will of the Menti Celesti or the Sacred Flame or whoever or whatever. Anything but her own individual decision, the bloody hypocrite. What others called narcissism, Rassilon called a greater degree of honesty than most politicians. He didn't need to pretend his actions were being backed by someone or something greater than himself to justify them.
Of course, the problem was that whether or not a "higher power" existed in the traditional sense, logic dictated that there must always be a highest power in the universe.
And currently, that highest power was the being who'd written the laws of reality.
Having railed against religion and spirituality and everything of the sort for what felt like forever, Rassilon wasn't always sure how he felt about the fact that he was the closest thing the universe had to a god these days.
Going from "planet's foremost atheist" to "all-powerful God-President" constituted, beyond what he could argue against even in his own mind, a sort of betrayal of the revolution (not that any of the other Neo-Technologists were still around to feel betrayed).
He justified it by the fact that he was a far more productive god than any of the old ones; other gods existed only as thought-terminating clichés and logical fallacies and philosophical crutches to fall back on when people didn't feel like explaining natural phenomena or their own actions. If they were tangibly real, then they were so passive they deserved to be executed for doing nothing to justify their existence. Nobody on Gallifrey ever debated whether or not Rassilon existed; they didn't have to. He made no secret of it. He wasn't content to confine himself to granting cryptic visions to prophets and paying lip-service to political movements he had no intention of meaningfully doing anything to support.
There was only one answer to the question "does Rassilon exist," and that answer was "have you, perhaps, been living under a rock and also wearing earplugs and a blindfold for the past few thousand centuries?"
(The only person who ever wondered if Rassilon really existed was Rassilon himself. Omega had once called him "a stack of masks over masks with nothing underneath." Accused him of having killed and buried any semblance he had of an authentic personality so effectively it begged the question of whether he'd ever had any authentic personality in the first place. Sometimes Rassilon stopped that line of thought dead in its tracks with a quick well, that inauthentic stack of masks is still alive, so who's laughing now, Omega? Other times, his accursed brain dwelled on the idea in too much depth for his liking and he had to come up with some project to work on to distract himself.)
"Calculating" and "conniving" were meant to be moral insults, the implication being that a person morally should put zero thought or effort into how they presented themselves to the world and just be unfiltered all the time like a drunken idiot, and if they did put in thought and effort, then they must be evil. Rassilon wasn't sure how much he believed in good and evil these days, but he took being called "calculated" as an insult nonetheless, albeit of a different nature. If people could tell he was carefully calculating everything he did, then he obviously wasn't calculating carefully enough. They weren't supposed to be able to tell.
Gods weren't supposed to even think about these things.
Sometimes Rassilon wished the Menti Celesti would appear to him, just so he could read their minds and see if they ever agonized over every tiny detail of every word they spoke, every outfit they wore, the tones of their voice, their posture, gait, hand gestures, everything, like he did.
Of course they didn't exist; nobody who really existed could keep up the image of perfection without devoting millennia to it. Only a pure concept could accomplish that.
But Rassilon had gone however-the-hell-many years without outright asking any other gods to grace him with their presence, and he wasn't going to start asking them now. If any of his divine peers had anything to say to him, than let them initiate that conversation.
***
On the official records, it was Rassilon who created the Matrix.
Strictly speaking, he did have a role in the project—he had a role in every project on Gallifrey—but it wasn't really his idea.
It also wasn't the sort of thing he could openly oppose.
Well, he could openly oppose anything he wanted to; the number of Time Lords who'd actually contradict him was probably in the single digits. But wielding authority as a cudgel to smack down anything he didn't like would be an awfully ironic parallel to the Pythia. And exactly what she did to turn the public opinion against herself for good. If Gallifrey needed him to be even more fucking immortal than he already was, then so be it.
(What he really wanted was to grab hold of the person responsible for the idea of a digital afterlife and rip out his epasi. The urge was so strong he had to take to the shooting range afterwards and imagine the poor fool's face on the targets.)
Unfortunately, there was merit in the idea of such a comprehensive archive—which just made Rassilon want to commit murder-suicide even more, because he wasn't meant to be wrong about things—and the rest of the team involved in this project didn't even think it would apply to Rassilon, because they didn't think he would ever die and certainly no self-respecting politician would ever outright tell their constituents "I am going to kill myself."
***
The time finally came due to, of all things, another rebellion. Well, a potential one. Things didn't escalate all the way, but this potential rebellion had all the makings of a proper one; better organized, more public support, leaders who actually knew what they were doing. Rassilon didn't honestly believe they could overthrow him—he didn't honestly believe anybody could at this point—but what they could do was tarnish his reputation.
Besides, what was left to do for the person who'd already accomplished everything?
It was as good an excuse as any to tick off that final item on the checklist. With everything already done, his reputation could only decline; best to take himself out and cross that threshold between "revered leader" and "revered historical figure" before it had the chance.
He was not taking a page from the Pythia's book, because he didn't issue any curses or otherwise try to take the entire Gallifreyan race with him.
Of course, the most important part was to stage an appropriate death. He was far too good to jump off a cliff (and it was hard for a Time Lord to regenerate from blunt force trauma, let alone permanently die). The other methods that first came to mind almost all fell under the category of either "too mundane," "too survivable," or both. Or, in the case of most of the weapons he'd invented himself, too liable to obliterate his entire timeline too thoroughly.
The thing about famous historical figures is that how they died was often publicized just as much as when. If somebody lived an eventful life then died from tripping over their own robes and splitting their skull open against the floor of their office, that went down in history. It became part of their character. It would be a crying shame for somebody as grandiose as Rassilon to be stuck with "stepped on a landmine" or "suddenly remembered the importance of hydration only to fall for the old glass-of-water-dosed-with-acetylsalicylic-acid trick."
He certainly couldn't stage an assassination; he did not need his last public act to involve somebody else getting the best of him, even if it was all scripted. Never vulnerable, never on the defensive, that was an integral part of his image and he would not allow that image to be tarnished. He died on his terms.
Ultimately, he decided on leaving it ambiguous. He was basically a god, he could have things stricken from the record like that if he wanted to. He tried not to use that excuse, but this was an acceptable occasion.
***
The amazing thing about the Matrix was that digital beings could be edited.
In life, Rassilon had been able to essentially "edit" other people because there weren't any telepaths out there who could contend with a million-year-old Time Lord, but there was nothing he could do when it came to himself. In the Matrix, on the other hand, "he" was nothing more than a set of extremely complex data.
Other people in this situation might start pondering philosophical questions such as "am I still truly myself?" That was the wrong mentality entirely. The correct question was "can I go into my own developer settings?"
In this state, Rassilon didn't need to keep his thoughts and feelings in check by willpower alone. Finally, he could bring an end to his greatest, longest-enduring battle: the battle against his own mind.
***
Gallifrey being what it was, there was no telling how much time had passed.
It took several milliseconds for Rassilon to realize he was breathing again. He was at least ninety-percent certain the lungs he was using to do so had never belonged to him before; this was a new body. The other people in the room spoke a language he didn't recognize. From the way they reacted when he tried to ask what was going on, they couldn't understand him either.
It was disconcerting how little the situation agitated him. He really should have been panicking, and perhaps killing somebody for having the audacity to bring him back from the grave. The feeling of actual physical hearts beating in his chest and the telltale full-body ache that came with regeneration should have sent him into a frenzy the likes of which he hadn't achieved since he burned the capital of the Pythian empire.
He felt perfectly calm. Like he couldn't panic. The neurons were firing, but the signals weren't being received; something was…blocking him from reacting to the situation.
***
Millions if not billions of years since his death, the Time Lords still revered Rassilon. Maybe even more so than they had when he was still alive—well, the last time he was still alive—not that he'd expected them to forget about him (how could anybody?), but people could be rather daft, so it was a relief to see that the Time Lords weren't. They invoked his name like an oath or an expletive.
They were especially impressed, it seemed, by how effortlessly calm and in-control he was. Despite his situation. Surely if anybody else got brought back to life after being dead for such a long time, they'd go mad.
And it truly was effortless this time, because Rassilon couldn't think the way he had before. The way he was fairly certain he had before. His memory was…strange; he had the cerebral knowledge of everything that had happened in his previous series of lifetimes, he knew what his memories were supposed to be, but he felt nothing about any of it.
To test how deep this ran, he even tried thinking about some of the memories that he thought were certain to draw a reaction. How many times he'd worked himself to death in the effort of inventing looms; how much of the population had refused to use them until they had maybe a few decades left before extinction. The wars. Omega. Tecteun. The curse.
He remembered holding his infant daughter, stillborn the very day she was due, for the first and last time; he remembered burying her with all the toys and clothing he and his wife had picked out for her. He could not remember how it had felt.
How anything felt.
When he tried to remember feelings, his mind simply blanked.
So his efforts in the Matrix were successful.
If the part of him he'd finally killed off once and for all hated him for what he'd done, he wouldn't know.