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It had been a long time since Rassilon had felt envious of anybody or anything. Such a long time that the amount of time probably could not be quantified as a real number. As a rule, he avoided envy. It was up there with guilt, empathy, and self-deprecating jokes on the list of expressions of insecurity no effective leader would ever openly engage in. As far as anybody else knew, Rassilon did not need to be anything other than what he was; other people wanted to be him, not the other way around.
This…entity deserved an award for being the first…well, it wasn't a person, per se, but the first being to make Rassilon feel like he wasn't the one setting the standard.
From the perspective of a three-dimensional observer—and Rassilon often felt like an outside observer, when it came to his own physical bodies—it probably looked like he'd just gone still for no reason. He was the one who made language itself popular, he practically invented the art of explaining things, but even he understood that some things could not be explained; only experienced.
It probably wasn't a matter of possession. Any being that was halfway decent at possession knew how to suppress the native mind of whatever body they were piloting, so the fact that Rassilon could still think probably meant this thing wasn't possessing him. It also ruled out mind control; nobody had ever successfully controlled him by psychic means, but plenty had attempted it. Whatever the hell this was, it was physical, in ways beyond even a Time Lord's perception.
The idea of the basic three-dimensional body being more fallible than the being it was attached to was not foreign to Rassilon; it was the norm. Rassilon did not get tired, or hungry, or thirsty, Rassilon did not feel pain or pleasure, he was not the tiny fraction of himself that lesser beings were able to perceive, he was a force of nature. He couldn't count how many bodies he'd worn out and discarded over the eons, because whatever maintenance requirements a body had, they weren't really needs to somebody who could generate an infinite string of them. When the entity stilled his body, it was no more alarming to him than when the damned thing stopped moving for any number of other reasons.
But it didn't really feel like exhaustion or injury. It felt like the presence, the other being, was…exploring him? Poking around where it shouldn't? Whatever it was wasn't confined to real spacetime, so whatever it was doing, Rassilon couldn't figure out beyond vague impressions. He wondered if this was how the Kro'ka had felt when they began merging together, or how a human would feel at the endpoint of a metacrisis with a Time Lord. He strained, the parts of him that weren't limited to planespace thrashing and struggling, but…the presence didn't even seem to notice. Rassilon had pulled spaceships out of orbit and made entire crowds of people stand still with less psychic effort than he was putting in now, and this entity didn't even care.
He could feel whatever-it-was examining every part of him, inside and out, suppressing each sense, studying each process until it could run them instead of him. Like the presence was making his hearts beat and his cells synthesize ATP. It didn't get the physical senses quite right; when they returned, they were all wrong in ways that made Rassilon wonder if he was being overwritten by something even vaster than he was. Like his five-dimensional body was being made to process more than that. His suspicions were confirmed when the entity surged through the rest of him as well, overloading and warping his higher senses the same way it did his physical form, until time itself felt distorted and nonsensical.
He couldn't tell if it didn't want to communicate in a way he could understand or if it didn't care to. Or if it couldn't. Perhaps it could no more communicate with him than he could communicate with an insect.
There was actually something thrilling about the experience.
Being the most powerful thing in existence was boring. And the boredom of absolute supremacy was something that Rassilon had willingly pursued and put a lot of effort into attaining, and he would never give it up of his own accord. He hadn't spent nobody-knew-how-long fighting just to decide victory wasn't enough fun. But it had been a long time since anything had made him feel anything besides exasperation, frustration, or any number of other emotions not warranting a stronger reaction than an eyeroll or perhaps, occasionally, a dramatized show of anger, and this was worse torture than any of the actual torture he'd been through, and maybe there was some part of him that was actually relieved to realize that what he was feeling now was nothing short of terror.
Terror was a real feeling, not something somebody merely going through the same motions of life and dictatorship over and over again for all eternity could experience. The kind of feeling that would have had his hearts racing if the presence didn't have control over them, would have had adrenaline coursing through his veins if the presence wasn't stymying and partitioning his neurotransmitters so it could study each one individually.
Rassilon had been "defeated," for a given definition of the term, plenty of times. But a defeat that came about entirely as a result of his own actions or inaction wasn't a true defeat. No opponent could stand against him when he really gave it his all; he simply did not really give it his all most of the time, because he never encountered situations that were worth it. He viewed the various petty conflicts that arose in his lives these past few eternities the way humans viewed the levels of those little auto-generated mobile games they played to waste time when they had nothing better to do. The vampires were gone, the Pythia was gone, the thread was anchored, and Rassilon was reduced to stupid shenanigans that you'd think a deity ought to be above, because it was that or sit on his throne until the natural end of the universe waiting for another war to happen that could hold a candle to the ones he'd fought in his youth. Getting into silly situations where the Doctor or Romana or somebody-or-other could drive themselves up the wall foiling his half-arsed plans was marginally better than nothing.
He'd actually spent a while, now, almost wishing somebody would defeat him. Wishing something could contend with him when he wasn't phoning it in.
He never expected to be physically and psychically overtaken by some sort of cosmic thing that put him on the receiving end of how he treated lesser beings. To be shown in excruciating detail just how much he was not, in fact, the singular unsurpassable supreme being.
His face moved without any input from him, like the presence was testing out different expressions. Trying to imitate how a being with a face might use it. It actually reminded Rassilon a bit of how he used to practice expressions in the mirror, perfecting the subtle differences between a professional smile and a friendly smile and a furious, threatening smile, the differences between a truly neutral expression and an apathetic one, and all sorts of other nuances that were more important to social and political situations than most people liked to admit.
If the presence was studying expressions, and had a sophisticated enough understanding of the facial muscles to do so, then it understood the basic idea of conveying sentiments through body language. Which meant either the presence itself belonged to a species and had similar concepts on its own level, or, more likely, that it had encountered people and attempted to familiarize itself with their behaviour before.
When the presence began speaking with his voice, Rassilon was too psychically scrambled to process what it was saying. He was surprised it knew what words were.
But if it intended to appropriate the body and voice of the god of Time Lords, that could be a problem. Enough reveling in the novelty of deafeat; he had to resume fighting. He gathered his wits as best he could, tried to get enough of a grip on his brain to concentrate; in a moment—a much briefer moment than most Time Lords, even trained ones, could manage—Rassilon's circulatory system flooded with lindos, and he exploded.
Regenerating was a process most Time Lords found difficult. Rassilon had found it difficult, once, but doing it thousands of times rendered it mundane. He'd perfected every aspect of it now so thoroughly that regenerating was no more "complicated" or "difficult" for him than taking a deep breath. He detonated with a force that could have brought the Panopticon down, burning hotter than a neutron star.
For a moment—or maybe a millennium—Rassilon's time senses really weren't working—it was as if he and the presence had merged into one being. Existence folded in on itself, fractalizing into uncountable directional axes. The presence felt emotions that hadn't been invented yet, sensations a Time Lord had no way of experiencing, as it was ripped from the spaces between every cell, and even like this, even in the brief moment he got to be noncorporeal like whatever-it-was, Rassilon could feel the separation gutting him in five dimensions—
When Rassilon finished reconstituting, his new body awkwardly oriented on the v-axis, the presence was no longer there. Every trace of it had vanished. Somehow, he doubted he'd actually incinerated it, or even made a dent in it, really, but it had vacated five-dimensional space in favor of retreating to whatever plane of existence it usually kept to, imperceptible to the rest of the universe. For all intents and purposes, non-existent. When it untangled itself from him, it had felt so visceral. Like something had actually filled all the empty space inside him that existed in all physical matter, then rushed out of him like water being squeezed out of a sponge under a hydraulic press, and now he was left feeling dazed, unnervingly light and empty and…violated.
He could barely form any coherent thoughts, the thing had scrambled his mind well enough that it might actually take a moment to regain his faculties, but he knew he had to find a way to locate this entity again and study it. That thing was so far beyond a Time Lord that it was able to treat Rassilon Himself like a small helpless animal on a dissection board, or perhaps a microorganism on a slide under a microscope. If life could exist at all in such a perfect noncorporeal formless form, then there had to be a way to imitate it. He had never been more certain of anything than he was certain that he needed to become like that entity. And if he had to go through this again to figure it out, that wouldn't be so bad.