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To refuse to regenerate, to die on one’s own accord, is devastating to any Time Lord. It is painful, agonizing, and as slow of a death as can be, because how could the universe ever be kind to the two of them?
Every cell in a Time Lord’s body fights with all its energy to regenerate, to renew itself once more. To fight against it is an uphill battle, filled with hours of torment. The Doctor still couldn’t grasp, with his oldest friend’s cold body cradled in his arms, how much spite the other Time Lord could have held for him to willingly die through such pain.
He supposed it began long before the two were the final Time Lords, two faces of the same coin—before they donned the names of the Doctor and the Master. When their most pressing concern of the week was the submission of thermodynamics homework, and not the end of their world.
The diverging of their paths was initiated centuries ago by the Untempered Schism, what both of them believed to be the Master’s first step towards his descent into madness. Two young Time Lords, with their millennia long futures waiting ahead, peering into a rift in the very fabric of reality. One driven with inspiration, excitement, the other to insanity. The Doctor wondered there, minutes passing by as he waited out the Master’s slow death, whether the drumbeat he spoke of still rang in his head. The same beat his friend would tap out every day in class, in their dorms, amongst their friends in the Deca. The same beat he'd beg to stop, or to affect his fellow peers in the same way.
Despite what he told himself, the Doctor knew that wasn’t the last of it. There was the Master’s experience with Death herself, those 10 years and the choice that defined who he came to be. In that moment, the Doctor could only blame himself for all of it.
No one in the aircraft’s room spoke, not Martha, not the ever-obtuse Captain Jack, not even the Master’s wife, who shot the very bullet that led them to where they lay then. Even if they had, it fell on the Doctor’s deaf ears. For hours, his sobs alone droned out any conversation outside of their little bubble, the very Last Time Lord and his best enemy.
The Doctor mourned for hours, accompanied by an intense feeling—not of loneliness, but of desolation. Knowing he’d soon continue to travel through the cosmos, liberate entire planets and species, leave a mark on the lives of countless humans, but still remain desolate at the most fundamental level. There could be millions of galaxies and timelines to explore, but the Master’s decision left him alone.
He’d wait out the rest of the day with the other’s body in his arms, Theta Sigma's palms still glued to Koschei's chest with the hopes of hearing even the softest thud of his two hearts, to no avail.
Once more, he was utterly solus in the vastness of the universe.