∞
∞
Chapter One
The Doctor flicked a couple of levers on the console, setting the TARDIS to hang still in the safety of the vortex. As he listened to the engines powering down, it crept over him yet again how utterly quiet it was, nobody home but him. But at least it was by choice this time. Perhaps he should have let Christina come with him - hadn’t Donna told him he needed someone to stop him? And she was always right, in the end. He could hardly claim he’d left Lady de Souza behind for her own good - she wouldn’t have regretted it, not for a moment. No, it was only himself he needed to protect. He liked Christina; she would have been brilliant, she could have saved worlds and become legend. But in the end, he would have been here again, in a dark console room filled only with the quiet electro-organic murmurings of the TARDIS. Another abandoned room to close the door on, another life he’d shattered without ever getting around to telling them how much they meant to him.
Donna had been the last straw, but he’d known for a long time. He’d kept on ignoring it, too scared to be alone. And sure, sometimes it was great - and yes, they left him heartbroken. But they went on to be brilliant. Hadn’t Sarah-Jane been wonderful without him? And Jack, well, Jack was something else altogether.
But there were those who weren’t so lucky. The ones who were left, not bright and shining, but broken - or dead. He could still hear Tegan’s footsteps as she ran off into the London streets, never to be seen again. Not by him, anyway. And Adric’s voice, asking to be taken home - if only the Doctor had done it when he asked. That boy could have had the universe at his feet, any universe he liked! But instead had died on an alien planet in an alien universe, and far, far too young.
He wouldn’t have been the first to leave him for E-space, either. And that had really hurt, watching Romana walk away. With her he’d started to feel things he hadn’t felt since his first regeneration, when he met Susan’s grandmother. He started to think that maybe he was getting a second chance, to do it right this time - having fantasies of spending all their regenerations together. But of course, he never did tell her; couldn’t possibly give breath to things he hardly dared to think. He was too suffocated by his own ego and a paralyzing fear of rejection, which he covered every minute with a faux-confident swagger that seemed to amuse her, and an utterly foolish air of authority that she lovingly, and only slightly mockingly, pretended to acquiesce to. And then one day she was leaving. And he couldn’t push aside his idiocy long enough to draw breath, and ask her to stay.
But it would have been better if she’d stayed in E-space in the end. At least then she’d still be alive; if trapped on the wrong side of a now impenetrable void - and hey, he’d learned how that one went already. The loss of Gallifrey would have been almost bearable, if Romana hadn’t been on it at the time. The loss of a family that didn’t speak to him, a society that alternated between pulling him right under their most critical glare, and flinging him far enough away that they could pretend he no longer existed. Losing them, well yes, it stung. Losing Romana -
He shrugged off his pinstripe jacket and listened to the TARDIS engines falling into gentle sleep, taking one last check of the chronal stability before switching off the monitor. His own eyes appeared before him on the darkened screen, his face rendered grotesque by the blue lights that poured up from the console. A different face from the one he wore when he’d last seen her - on Gallifrey. Alive and shining and powerful; a shining success without him. A different one again from when he’d first met her. He thought he could figure her out at first, teasing her and changing her name, just to see if he could get into her shell. But she couldn’t be pinned down; every time he thought he had a hold, she’d shift again, and rewrite his perspective. And so he’d try again, he always did in those days. An insurmountable ego, maybe, but an indomitable spirit and energy, just, so much energy. But all of that was draining away from him now, and every time he got knocked down it took that much more to get back up.
“Where do I go now?” He asked his ghoulish blue reflection. Onwards, into the unknown? Just keep running, that way he never had to look back. Could that really still be the only answer? He ran his fingers through his hair and it stuck out at odd angles, bright eyes shone out of his reflection like the ghost of the man Romana had loved. His voice, and voices of all his once upon a times, crowded his head.
Just bloody running again? And what d’you reckon that’s gonna solve?
Are you really going to let fear control you?
Sometimes we have to go back if we want to make progress, else history teaches us nothing.
Cowardice doesn’t really suit you, after all.
I think, dear boy, that it’s time you held account of your actions.
“And if I can’t?”
You can’t very well keep running like this.
“I know. I need sleep, I need to go to sleep.”
But when you’re ready, you will go, won’t you?
“To Gallifrey?”
To what’s left of it.
“Yes.”
*****
He could almost hear a contended sigh issuing from the TARDIS engines as they landed; she seemed to think she was home. The Doctor, however, knew better. The rocky wastelands beyond the doors could have been Gallifrey once, the land beneath their feet could have been the Continent of Wild Endeavour, enrobed in russet grasses and silvery leaves, and crowned in snow-capped peaks. But that was in a different timeline, one he’d long since ceased to be a part of. He stood still before the TARDIS doors for a moment, wondering if he could really do this. But before long he realised that it really didn’t matter - it didn’t make a jot of difference whether he was capable of accepting, or even comprehending, what it was he’d truly done. Because he was stepping through those doors regardless, and as usual, letting consequences fall where they would.
He opened the doors and stepped through onto dusty ground. There was nothing before his eyes that surprised him in the least; a barren, rocky world with barely the ghost of an atmosphere clinging to it - he felt his metabolism slowing down to compensate. Nothing to surprise, and yet it shocked him to the core. There were contours in the landscape that he recognised, rows of grey-faced peaks hemming in the horizon on either side of the wide, empty plain where he and his little blue box threw the only flecks of colour onto the endless monochrome of rocks and dry ground. The Mountains of Solace and Solitude they should have been - and here, where he stood, was where the great glass dome of the Citadel would have towered. He looked around, as if expecting to see some sign of the city he had erased from time. There was only lifelessness and bare dirt, and arid planet where no life could flourish, no great civilisation could raise its head and cast its eyes out over the endless skies. The twin suns glared mercilessly through the insubstantial atmosphere, and he knew he’d have to leave soon. Not even a timelord could survive the conditions on this planet long.
He turned his gaze back to his TARDIS, his only home in the universe now. And tried to think about how he could start to put the pieces of himself back together. And really, the answer was the same, the only one he knew. Just carry on. To lose and grieve and to pull himself together because other people needed him. Save a few hundred more planets in eternal penance for the one he couldn’t save. He took one last look around him, the first sun was setting, and the low light glowed through the copper mist of the sky, setting the stony mountainsides silver. And just for a moment, when rays of dying light fell golden over the barren land giving it a reddish glow in the almost-twilight, the ghost of Gallifrey was thrown up all around him in silver and copper, the jewel in the heart of the Kastaborous Constellation, the Shining World of the Seventh System. Then the last rays of the first setting sun disappeared between the mountain peaks, and the second star folded a greyer twilight over everything, pushing it back into lifeless monochrome. The phantom of the dead planet disappeared as quickly as it came, and the Doctor walked back to his TARDIS.
Back onboard, the Doctor set the controls for Cardiff, 2010. It seemed like a good idea to drop in on Jack, after all, if anyone was likely to get him into some perfectly distracting trouble, it was Jack. He cranked the lever on the console and smiled to himself as the time rotor grumbled into motion. The hum of the engines translated into a buzzing all through the floor that shot tingles all up through his body every time. But then, the buzzing shuddered, coughed, and stopped altogether. The time rotor fell still and the TARDIS resolutely refused to move. The Doctor wasn’t overly alarmed by this hitch, the TARDIS was getting on in years as much as he was, and she never was too reliable to begin with. He tried again, this time involving a hammer in the process, but again, no joy. Concern drew across his features and he set the computer to run a full diagnostic. I ticked over for a minute, and then threw back a completely blank result. There was apparently nothing wrong with her - well, nothing out of the ordinary. She was perfectly capable of flying, but it was as if she simply didn’t want to. He pulled up a piece of the grille floor and dropped into the engine room below. With the sonic screwdriver between his teeth he began to run a manual check of everything that could possibly go wrong with the TARDIS. He triple checked the links in the power cells, recalibrated the dilithium crystals twice - he even dismantled and reassembled the entire huorn particle acceleration unit. But three hours later, he’d found nothing. Finally, he had to consider the possibility which he’d been desperately pushing from his mind. The possibility of outside interference.
As he climbed back up into the console room, he tried to close his mind down to anything that looked anything like hope. Whatever was stopping his TARDIS from flying had nothing to do with the timelords - that was an utter impossibility. He’d stood there, seen what had become their mighty citadel. There was nothing there. Couldn’t possibly be. He kept this going as a mantra whilst the ship’s computer scanned the surrounding area, until he found himself actually whispering out loud “There’s nothing out there, nothing could be, there’s nothing out there...” Then, the computer found something.
It was a box. Several miles underground and about the same size as the exterior dimensions of his TARDIS. And buried directly below where the central spire of the citadel would have stood. But there were no readings to say what might be inside, the box was locked. Not about to be stopped by a little locked door, the Doctor hot-wired the scanner to the communications unit, and linked them both up to his sonic screwdriver. Using the controls on the comm. unit he tried to hack into the locking mechanism. But the box wasn’t just locked, it was time locked. It did, however, send him back a coded data stream, which was simple enough to work out, providing one understood... He stopped and read the data feed again, unable to quite believe what he was seeing. The little box under the ground was sending him messages in Old High Gallifreyan.
He stopped, simply stopped, breath and all thought suspended. It was as if the ground, no, reality had dropped away beneath him, and all he knew was the sense of falling. Gradually, comprehension started to click back into place.
1. This was impossible.
2. The impossible cannot be understood, so don’t even try.
3. He had to know what was inside that box.
4. He had to decode the data stream.
He quickly translated the coded signal and deactivated the locks. He scanned the box again for information. The computer told him two things; firstly, that though the interior wasn’t vast, it was dimensionally transcendental. Secondly, there was something inside the box giving off a hell of a lot of energy - something that may have been organic, though, with timelord technology it was very difficult to tell the difference between a bio-engineered mechanism and an actual organism. There was only one way to find out what was giving off that energy, and luckily, the small space it was housed in was still plenty big enough for a police box. He set the co-ordinates and fired up the engines, somehow quite unsurprised to find the TARDIS dematerialising without the slightest trouble.
Within moment she lurched to a standstill inside the box. Beyond the TARDIS doors lay the last remaining relic of a dead civilisation. And he had thought that title was his alone, but somehow a little box that they’d buried below the citadel had survived the destruction of the planet above. And there was the slenderest possibility that the something inside it was alive. He opened the doors.
The small room was filled with a bright golden light that resonated with intense energy. As soon as he stepped into the room his body threw itself into an intensely violent reaction to the energy washing over him. Chunks of his hair fell to the floor as it fell out and regrew each second. Dark bruises bloomed all over his body where skin cells twisted in on themselves and bright red swellings blistered across his skin where veins tore open under the pressure. He folded in on himself and collapsed. With both hands pressed against the floor he clenched his teeth against the throbbing pain inside his skull and the sharp spikes of pain that sparked behind his eyes and lifted his head to look up. What he saw merely confirmed what he had instantly known - the energy source was an indistinct figure in the centre of the room, and the pain he was experiencing was the result of entering the field of another timelord’s regenerative energy.
Unable to do anything else, he crawled back into the TARDIS and clicked his bruised and swollen fingers so the doors snapped shut behind him, cutting off the burning light. He lay on the cool metal of the console room floor and slowly collected his fragmented self back together. His thoughts gathered speed again, taking up mad, dizzying circuits in his head, until there was one vast idea reverberating and ricocheting around the inside of his skull.
A timelord. The energy source is a timelord. And she’s alive.
Gradually, more developed concepts began to pierce his state of shock. The room had been placed in temporal isolation, and was hence isolated from the timelock placed over Gallifrey. However, the destruction of the planet had placed considerable stress on the capsule, affecting the internal environment so much as to trigger regeneration of the individual within. Scientific detachment could not quite stop the reality of this moment springing up in the Doctor’s mind. It would have grown hot, so hot that the air she breathed would have burnt her lungs, flesh starting to cook where the pads of her feet touched the floor. And then the pressure would start to affect the dimension ratio, the space around her expanding and contracting and collapsing into total instability.
He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to reclaim his thought process. Pressure on the environment triggered a regeneration cycle. The regenerative energy would have then interacted with the time lock, creating a temporally static environment within the field of regenerative energy, holding the timelord in stasis midway through regeneration. All he had to do was remove her from the temporally isolated environment and the regeneration would complete. Then he would be able to ask her who she was, and how she had come to be there. He could speak to her, have a conversation with a fellow timelord. He wasn’t looking forward to some of the questions he would have to answer, but that hardly mattered. He would have someone to talk to. Already he felt some of the constant loneliness, the ache of loss, draining away and leaving him with a renewed energy, and brand new sense of hope.
He stood up, heaving his aching body off the TARDIS floor, and opened the doors again. This would hurt, quite possibly more than anything he’d ever experienced. But absolutely nothing in the universe could stop him from bringing her back with him. He steeped through the doors, and though he was expecting it this time, the pain ripped through his already battered body and brought him to a standstill, bowed down and barely standing. Nevertheless, he clenched his fists and took back control of his body. He raised his head, fixed his eyes on her and staggered towards her. With each step closer, the energy pushed more heavily on his body. Blood vessels burst in his eyes, colouring his vision in shimmering red, and yet more blood leaked from his ears and bubbled up in his throat. Shockwaves sent spasms all through his limbs and his spine twisted and contorted like unravelling thread, so his stagger became a mad, shambling dance. It took every last bit of strength that he’d ever possessed to keep enough control over his arms, so he could wrap them around her and carry her back to the TARDIS.
He dropped her to the floor and staggered to the console. As they returned to the surface of Gallifrey, the golden light around her receded, and the Doctor was able to sink down to sit on the floor beside the console, and watch the fuzzy outline of the figure form into defined features. And from the golden shroud of regenerative energy emerged a face. And though the face was brand new, he recognised her the moment she opened her eyes.
“Romana?”
“Doctor?”
She smiled and blinked slowly, eyes slightly unfocussed as if looking at something only she could see. “You look different.” She said, in slightly slurred tones. “I know what it is! You’re not wearing your scarf! Sorry, I was using it to tie the randomizer in place while I was fixing the - thing, something. Oh! The thing that goes whiz!” He stared, opened mouthed, trying to figure out how to respond. There was no point in contradicting her ramblings, so he simply said “That’s okay, I don’t really need it.”
“Yes you do! You’ve got to get dressed, we’re going out! You’ve got to show me Paris, remember?”
And then she passed out.
Chapter One
The Doctor flicked a couple of levers on the console, setting the TARDIS to hang still in the safety of the vortex. As he listened to the engines powering down, it crept over him yet again how utterly quiet it was, nobody home but him. But at least it was by choice this time. Perhaps he should have let Christina come with him - hadn’t Donna told him he needed someone to stop him? And she was always right, in the end. He could hardly claim he’d left Lady de Souza behind for her own good - she wouldn’t have regretted it, not for a moment. No, it was only himself he needed to protect. He liked Christina; she would have been brilliant, she could have saved worlds and become legend. But in the end, he would have been here again, in a dark console room filled only with the quiet electro-organic murmurings of the TARDIS. Another abandoned room to close the door on, another life he’d shattered without ever getting around to telling them how much they meant to him.
Donna had been the last straw, but he’d known for a long time. He’d kept on ignoring it, too scared to be alone. And sure, sometimes it was great - and yes, they left him heartbroken. But they went on to be brilliant. Hadn’t Sarah-Jane been wonderful without him? And Jack, well, Jack was something else altogether.
But there were those who weren’t so lucky. The ones who were left, not bright and shining, but broken - or dead. He could still hear Tegan’s footsteps as she ran off into the London streets, never to be seen again. Not by him, anyway. And Adric’s voice, asking to be taken home - if only the Doctor had done it when he asked. That boy could have had the universe at his feet, any universe he liked! But instead had died on an alien planet in an alien universe, and far, far too young.
He wouldn’t have been the first to leave him for E-space, either. And that had really hurt, watching Romana walk away. With her he’d started to feel things he hadn’t felt since his first regeneration, when he met Susan’s grandmother. He started to think that maybe he was getting a second chance, to do it right this time - having fantasies of spending all their regenerations together. But of course, he never did tell her; couldn’t possibly give breath to things he hardly dared to think. He was too suffocated by his own ego and a paralyzing fear of rejection, which he covered every minute with a faux-confident swagger that seemed to amuse her, and an utterly foolish air of authority that she lovingly, and only slightly mockingly, pretended to acquiesce to. And then one day she was leaving. And he couldn’t push aside his idiocy long enough to draw breath, and ask her to stay.
But it would have been better if she’d stayed in E-space in the end. At least then she’d still be alive; if trapped on the wrong side of a now impenetrable void - and hey, he’d learned how that one went already. The loss of Gallifrey would have been almost bearable, if Romana hadn’t been on it at the time. The loss of a family that didn’t speak to him, a society that alternated between pulling him right under their most critical glare, and flinging him far enough away that they could pretend he no longer existed. Losing them, well yes, it stung. Losing Romana -
He shrugged off his pinstripe jacket and listened to the TARDIS engines falling into gentle sleep, taking one last check of the chronal stability before switching off the monitor. His own eyes appeared before him on the darkened screen, his face rendered grotesque by the blue lights that poured up from the console. A different face from the one he wore when he’d last seen her - on Gallifrey. Alive and shining and powerful; a shining success without him. A different one again from when he’d first met her. He thought he could figure her out at first, teasing her and changing her name, just to see if he could get into her shell. But she couldn’t be pinned down; every time he thought he had a hold, she’d shift again, and rewrite his perspective. And so he’d try again, he always did in those days. An insurmountable ego, maybe, but an indomitable spirit and energy, just, so much energy. But all of that was draining away from him now, and every time he got knocked down it took that much more to get back up.
“Where do I go now?” He asked his ghoulish blue reflection. Onwards, into the unknown? Just keep running, that way he never had to look back. Could that really still be the only answer? He ran his fingers through his hair and it stuck out at odd angles, bright eyes shone out of his reflection like the ghost of the man Romana had loved. His voice, and voices of all his once upon a times, crowded his head.
Just bloody running again? And what d’you reckon that’s gonna solve?
Are you really going to let fear control you?
Sometimes we have to go back if we want to make progress, else history teaches us nothing.
Cowardice doesn’t really suit you, after all.
I think, dear boy, that it’s time you held account of your actions.
“And if I can’t?”
You can’t very well keep running like this.
“I know. I need sleep, I need to go to sleep.”
But when you’re ready, you will go, won’t you?
“To Gallifrey?”
To what’s left of it.
“Yes.”
*****
He could almost hear a contended sigh issuing from the TARDIS engines as they landed; she seemed to think she was home. The Doctor, however, knew better. The rocky wastelands beyond the doors could have been Gallifrey once, the land beneath their feet could have been the Continent of Wild Endeavour, enrobed in russet grasses and silvery leaves, and crowned in snow-capped peaks. But that was in a different timeline, one he’d long since ceased to be a part of. He stood still before the TARDIS doors for a moment, wondering if he could really do this. But before long he realised that it really didn’t matter - it didn’t make a jot of difference whether he was capable of accepting, or even comprehending, what it was he’d truly done. Because he was stepping through those doors regardless, and as usual, letting consequences fall where they would.
He opened the doors and stepped through onto dusty ground. There was nothing before his eyes that surprised him in the least; a barren, rocky world with barely the ghost of an atmosphere clinging to it - he felt his metabolism slowing down to compensate. Nothing to surprise, and yet it shocked him to the core. There were contours in the landscape that he recognised, rows of grey-faced peaks hemming in the horizon on either side of the wide, empty plain where he and his little blue box threw the only flecks of colour onto the endless monochrome of rocks and dry ground. The Mountains of Solace and Solitude they should have been - and here, where he stood, was where the great glass dome of the Citadel would have towered. He looked around, as if expecting to see some sign of the city he had erased from time. There was only lifelessness and bare dirt, and arid planet where no life could flourish, no great civilisation could raise its head and cast its eyes out over the endless skies. The twin suns glared mercilessly through the insubstantial atmosphere, and he knew he’d have to leave soon. Not even a timelord could survive the conditions on this planet long.
He turned his gaze back to his TARDIS, his only home in the universe now. And tried to think about how he could start to put the pieces of himself back together. And really, the answer was the same, the only one he knew. Just carry on. To lose and grieve and to pull himself together because other people needed him. Save a few hundred more planets in eternal penance for the one he couldn’t save. He took one last look around him, the first sun was setting, and the low light glowed through the copper mist of the sky, setting the stony mountainsides silver. And just for a moment, when rays of dying light fell golden over the barren land giving it a reddish glow in the almost-twilight, the ghost of Gallifrey was thrown up all around him in silver and copper, the jewel in the heart of the Kastaborous Constellation, the Shining World of the Seventh System. Then the last rays of the first setting sun disappeared between the mountain peaks, and the second star folded a greyer twilight over everything, pushing it back into lifeless monochrome. The phantom of the dead planet disappeared as quickly as it came, and the Doctor walked back to his TARDIS.
Back onboard, the Doctor set the controls for Cardiff, 2010. It seemed like a good idea to drop in on Jack, after all, if anyone was likely to get him into some perfectly distracting trouble, it was Jack. He cranked the lever on the console and smiled to himself as the time rotor grumbled into motion. The hum of the engines translated into a buzzing all through the floor that shot tingles all up through his body every time. But then, the buzzing shuddered, coughed, and stopped altogether. The time rotor fell still and the TARDIS resolutely refused to move. The Doctor wasn’t overly alarmed by this hitch, the TARDIS was getting on in years as much as he was, and she never was too reliable to begin with. He tried again, this time involving a hammer in the process, but again, no joy. Concern drew across his features and he set the computer to run a full diagnostic. I ticked over for a minute, and then threw back a completely blank result. There was apparently nothing wrong with her - well, nothing out of the ordinary. She was perfectly capable of flying, but it was as if she simply didn’t want to. He pulled up a piece of the grille floor and dropped into the engine room below. With the sonic screwdriver between his teeth he began to run a manual check of everything that could possibly go wrong with the TARDIS. He triple checked the links in the power cells, recalibrated the dilithium crystals twice - he even dismantled and reassembled the entire huorn particle acceleration unit. But three hours later, he’d found nothing. Finally, he had to consider the possibility which he’d been desperately pushing from his mind. The possibility of outside interference.
As he climbed back up into the console room, he tried to close his mind down to anything that looked anything like hope. Whatever was stopping his TARDIS from flying had nothing to do with the timelords - that was an utter impossibility. He’d stood there, seen what had become their mighty citadel. There was nothing there. Couldn’t possibly be. He kept this going as a mantra whilst the ship’s computer scanned the surrounding area, until he found himself actually whispering out loud “There’s nothing out there, nothing could be, there’s nothing out there...” Then, the computer found something.
It was a box. Several miles underground and about the same size as the exterior dimensions of his TARDIS. And buried directly below where the central spire of the citadel would have stood. But there were no readings to say what might be inside, the box was locked. Not about to be stopped by a little locked door, the Doctor hot-wired the scanner to the communications unit, and linked them both up to his sonic screwdriver. Using the controls on the comm. unit he tried to hack into the locking mechanism. But the box wasn’t just locked, it was time locked. It did, however, send him back a coded data stream, which was simple enough to work out, providing one understood... He stopped and read the data feed again, unable to quite believe what he was seeing. The little box under the ground was sending him messages in Old High Gallifreyan.
He stopped, simply stopped, breath and all thought suspended. It was as if the ground, no, reality had dropped away beneath him, and all he knew was the sense of falling. Gradually, comprehension started to click back into place.
1. This was impossible.
2. The impossible cannot be understood, so don’t even try.
3. He had to know what was inside that box.
4. He had to decode the data stream.
He quickly translated the coded signal and deactivated the locks. He scanned the box again for information. The computer told him two things; firstly, that though the interior wasn’t vast, it was dimensionally transcendental. Secondly, there was something inside the box giving off a hell of a lot of energy - something that may have been organic, though, with timelord technology it was very difficult to tell the difference between a bio-engineered mechanism and an actual organism. There was only one way to find out what was giving off that energy, and luckily, the small space it was housed in was still plenty big enough for a police box. He set the co-ordinates and fired up the engines, somehow quite unsurprised to find the TARDIS dematerialising without the slightest trouble.
Within moment she lurched to a standstill inside the box. Beyond the TARDIS doors lay the last remaining relic of a dead civilisation. And he had thought that title was his alone, but somehow a little box that they’d buried below the citadel had survived the destruction of the planet above. And there was the slenderest possibility that the something inside it was alive. He opened the doors.
The small room was filled with a bright golden light that resonated with intense energy. As soon as he stepped into the room his body threw itself into an intensely violent reaction to the energy washing over him. Chunks of his hair fell to the floor as it fell out and regrew each second. Dark bruises bloomed all over his body where skin cells twisted in on themselves and bright red swellings blistered across his skin where veins tore open under the pressure. He folded in on himself and collapsed. With both hands pressed against the floor he clenched his teeth against the throbbing pain inside his skull and the sharp spikes of pain that sparked behind his eyes and lifted his head to look up. What he saw merely confirmed what he had instantly known - the energy source was an indistinct figure in the centre of the room, and the pain he was experiencing was the result of entering the field of another timelord’s regenerative energy.
Unable to do anything else, he crawled back into the TARDIS and clicked his bruised and swollen fingers so the doors snapped shut behind him, cutting off the burning light. He lay on the cool metal of the console room floor and slowly collected his fragmented self back together. His thoughts gathered speed again, taking up mad, dizzying circuits in his head, until there was one vast idea reverberating and ricocheting around the inside of his skull.
A timelord. The energy source is a timelord. And she’s alive.
Gradually, more developed concepts began to pierce his state of shock. The room had been placed in temporal isolation, and was hence isolated from the timelock placed over Gallifrey. However, the destruction of the planet had placed considerable stress on the capsule, affecting the internal environment so much as to trigger regeneration of the individual within. Scientific detachment could not quite stop the reality of this moment springing up in the Doctor’s mind. It would have grown hot, so hot that the air she breathed would have burnt her lungs, flesh starting to cook where the pads of her feet touched the floor. And then the pressure would start to affect the dimension ratio, the space around her expanding and contracting and collapsing into total instability.
He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to reclaim his thought process. Pressure on the environment triggered a regeneration cycle. The regenerative energy would have then interacted with the time lock, creating a temporally static environment within the field of regenerative energy, holding the timelord in stasis midway through regeneration. All he had to do was remove her from the temporally isolated environment and the regeneration would complete. Then he would be able to ask her who she was, and how she had come to be there. He could speak to her, have a conversation with a fellow timelord. He wasn’t looking forward to some of the questions he would have to answer, but that hardly mattered. He would have someone to talk to. Already he felt some of the constant loneliness, the ache of loss, draining away and leaving him with a renewed energy, and brand new sense of hope.
He stood up, heaving his aching body off the TARDIS floor, and opened the doors again. This would hurt, quite possibly more than anything he’d ever experienced. But absolutely nothing in the universe could stop him from bringing her back with him. He steeped through the doors, and though he was expecting it this time, the pain ripped through his already battered body and brought him to a standstill, bowed down and barely standing. Nevertheless, he clenched his fists and took back control of his body. He raised his head, fixed his eyes on her and staggered towards her. With each step closer, the energy pushed more heavily on his body. Blood vessels burst in his eyes, colouring his vision in shimmering red, and yet more blood leaked from his ears and bubbled up in his throat. Shockwaves sent spasms all through his limbs and his spine twisted and contorted like unravelling thread, so his stagger became a mad, shambling dance. It took every last bit of strength that he’d ever possessed to keep enough control over his arms, so he could wrap them around her and carry her back to the TARDIS.
He dropped her to the floor and staggered to the console. As they returned to the surface of Gallifrey, the golden light around her receded, and the Doctor was able to sink down to sit on the floor beside the console, and watch the fuzzy outline of the figure form into defined features. And from the golden shroud of regenerative energy emerged a face. And though the face was brand new, he recognised her the moment she opened her eyes.
“Romana?”
“Doctor?”
She smiled and blinked slowly, eyes slightly unfocussed as if looking at something only she could see. “You look different.” She said, in slightly slurred tones. “I know what it is! You’re not wearing your scarf! Sorry, I was using it to tie the randomizer in place while I was fixing the - thing, something. Oh! The thing that goes whiz!” He stared, opened mouthed, trying to figure out how to respond. There was no point in contradicting her ramblings, so he simply said “That’s okay, I don’t really need it.”
“Yes you do! You’ve got to get dressed, we’re going out! You’ve got to show me Paris, remember?”
And then she passed out.