#but if past regenerations are ghosts i think yana deserves a haunt.

[quietwingsinthesky]

the last unicorn post from earlier has me thinking about the master. that yana is still in there, you know? is still someone he was, if even for a brief flash across the life of a time lord. there’s no way to unlive that life. there are ways to twist it later, sure, to make utopia into hell on earth. but the life was lived. in much the same way that the doctor can remember, can feel, the love he held onto as john smith even as that life is ripped out of his hands. the doctor choose denial and then grief and then to shutter it all away. and so john smith died, and so professor yana died, and the doctor and the master live on. the doctor has done this before, and he lives in orbit around humanity, trying to keep the best parts of them and hold them deep enough to take root (which he can pretend he gets to choose, as a time lord. as a human, it all floods in and can’t be dug back out.) but what about the master, right?

to borrow a turn of phrase: i think there are two time lords left in the universe, and they both learned how to regret.

#regret here meaning less feeling the emotion of actual regret obviously because time lords do not actually funxtion on unicorn rules. they #already get sad just fine on their own. no humanity needed for that. #but i dont know. i just dont think he brushed it off so easily. i think he did a hell of a job convincing himself he did. #and what better way then to twist his own great works and destroy the species he was working so hard to save at the end of the universe. #but what about the knowledge that he *could* be that person. that somewhere in him exists a version that wanted to save people. #a version that is painfully too much like the doctor. even. now is that part worse or better than the human part? #but if past regenerations are ghosts i think yana deserves a haunt. #anyway maybe ignore this one im rambling about nothing here #theres just. i dont know. what if you were the last of your kind and in surviving you made yourself Not Like Them in a way you’ll never #escape. #i mean doctor who is just so concerned with all these plots about hybrids and children of the tardis and clones and What Makes A Time Lord. #but they’re so obsessed with it in just. a very Lore way. is what it feels like. we get brushes of more like with jenny and how she’s #physically a time lord and the doctor denies her that inheritance. a shared suffering… #but me myself im just fascinated with the doctor and the master as the time lords who survived. but they survived Wrong #its. its. children of gallifrey that don’t belong to her anymore. you know? #i dont care if river’s got time lord dna!!! or the metacrisis is physically human!!! i dont care!!! talk to me about what it means beyond #their blood and bones!!! what’s it like to have your sense of self stripped from you like that!!! #what’s it like when so much of you is the shed skin of time lords past. but one of you was human. one of you was painfully *humiliatingly* #human!!! #enough about how much dna you need to count as a time lord. i want to know how much they can mutate until they can’t be recognized as one. #does that make sense?