PTSD sufferers don’t get to move on. This is how the disease works. Forgiveness, acceptance, inner peace–all of things are well and good, but at the end of the day, PTSD doesn’t care. You’re still going to jump when someone slams a door. You’re still gonna have nightmares. The trauma is not just a horrible event or experience. It’s a life sentence. It’s a burden that cannot be shed.
The Master, breathless and fatigued from running, spins with dread at the brassy female voice. Horrified alarm becomes amusement and something very implausible, coming from this particular Time Lord toward any human: admiration.
“Well I’ll be damned. You’re nothing if not persistent.”
He raises both palms in surrender.
“Honestly, Ms. Noble, I’m guessing from the fact that you know exactly who I am, and not in the standard ‘oh my God, you’re that nutter who got Prime Minister and disappeared’ fashion, it means that the Doctor spared your memories and you’re not feeling charitable toward the bloke who turned the whole planet into himself and scared the piss out of you. Long and short of it: self-preservation. Now I must warn you, if you’re armed, I shall have to do something drastic, like gnaw off your face with my bare teeth, because I’ve left my laser screwdriver in my TARDIS.
Is that dead seriousness or a truly perverse sense of humor? Rather impossible to say.
“Well, there’s no need to point it out so obviously.” He’s sulking, the way he always does when anyone points out something he thinks he’s been keeping well hidden. “Shut up, Roundface. I love you. Stop being so good at reading me.”
The worst thing about chronic emptiness is that you keep trying to fill the space inside you by doing dramatic and drastic things but nothing helps and you’re left with so many regrets and the same desperate emptiness
Icarus 