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The day he regenerates, the Time Lord tells his TARDIS to take him wherever she wants to go. They’re both so used to the War that when he opens the door to see a weapon factory he just sighs and wanders around listlessly, waits for the orders to come.
It’s just habit, really. He lived so long with his head full of psychic messages telling him what atrocity to do now. They don’t come. Instead, he’s filled with the aching emptiness of being the last of his kind. His TARDIS—the only TARDIS in existence, now—hums in the back of his mind, but it’s not the same. He’s lonely.
And then he realizes that he will never have to take orders again. He is free. He has no responsibility anymore. There is no higher authority. He has no home planet to return to, no family, no friends, but the War is over. He ended it. He is the last of the Time Lords, and maybe he lost the War but so did the Daleks and now it is over. He can be the Doctor again, an enigmatic, flighty thing, a traveller who has seen worlds and worlds and still has so much left to discover. If he doesn’t look at the place in the sky where Gallifrey should be, he can almost pretend everything is alright.
He may not have orders, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a goal. The Doctor has seen enough war for more lifetimes than even Time Lords could imagine.
The day he regenerates, the Doctor burns Villengard’s largest weapon factory to the ground and stands amid the dangerously radioactive ashes and plants a tree and feels fantastic. In a past life, he’d be kissing someone right now just for the fun of it. That man is dead, but he’s still elated, still feels alive for the first time since the War started.
He leaves, then, and goes off to have some new adventure. He’s not sure where he’s going, exactly, but he’s going to do everything he can to stop any hint of war when he gets there.
Maybe he’ll plant more trees. Bananas are good, which is something he finds the universe sorely lacking in these days.