Had the Doctor possessed the strength, he might have tried to hide how much he was hurting. He might have lied, as he did so often, and said that he was all right. That strength wasn't there, and Rose, his brilliant, beautiful Rose Tyler, saw it and tried to give him something to hold onto. He turned his hand to lace his fingers through hers. How often had she saved him from his darker urgers? How often had she sacrificed her own happiness to hold him up when he would have fallen? It wasn't fair to her, but just now, he needed that.
"They came back," he told her. "The Time Lords. All of Gallifrey. The Master broke the Time Lock. They came back and I had to do it all over again." Once he started, he couldn't stop. The whole story came pouring out, a confession, of sorts, to the one person in the universe who mattered to him more than anything. "I had to condemn them to a hell of our own making a second time. It was them or the Earth. The entire universe. I couldn't find another way. And for a moment, when it was all over ... all I could think of was how glad I was to still be alive. To still be me. How can I be so selfish? My own people died at my hands, and all I thought of in that moment was myself. How do I come back from that?"