The Threads of Time – Epilogue (Dealing With Regeneration)

ATTENTION: Skip to Chapter 2 if you want to get to the bit about regeneration directly.

PREVIOUSLY ON…

{ This story is actually the epilogue to another story which I dropped because I couldn't get a good grip on what I wanted it to be it about. Seeing how these few pages were supposed to be the very last bit of it, here's what should have happened beforehand:

Set after 'The Sontaran Experiment', but with some real life influences, the Doctor returns to Earth not only with Sarah and Harry, but also with a broken collarbone and a damaged scarf. The point in time he makes it back to, turns out to be merely seconds after the ending of 'Robot', so that Harry, Sarah and the Brigadier together manage to persuade the disgruntled Doctor to three days of rest. In order to cheer him up, his friends hold a celebration for him at the National Gallery of London, during which Sarah also returns the repaired scarf to him.

The epilogue then starts sometime after the end of the festivities... }

When Sarah stepped out of the National Gallery, it was perfectly dark outside, save for a few stray lights here and there and, of course, the highlights illuminating the local sight. The air was chilling and she rubbed her arms through the leather jacket she wore as she tried to adapt to the night time temperatures. It was so strange to see London like this, she thought as she walked down the stairs that lead up to the gallery's entrance. It was so quiet, so peaceful, compared to the usual amount of people and cars rushing through London's streets. Last time she has had that impression, Dinosaurs had sprung up all around the city, but this time – luckily – it was a perfectly normal sensation. Most of mankind simply happened to be asleep at night. And because of that, she could actually enjoy the quiet for once. Feeling like she was the only human in this world, feeling sort of special...

It was a bit what everyone wanted to be, wasn't it?

Sarah stopped at the foot of the stairs and, placing her hands and her hips took another deep breath. It might have been simply because the air was much cooler now, but it seemed to her that it was much fresher, too. Once more, she remembered the adventure with the former Captain Yates' involvement in it, and thought for a moment about the time he had tried to convince her of the beauty of a deserted London. He may have turned his back on them once, but his intentions had been more than reasonable, she knew.

"Hello there!", called a very distinctive, very familiar voice, disrupting her train of thought.

When she turned to look, she found the Doctor sitting on a patch of grass in front of the gallery, all by himself, as long as you didn't count a glass of red wine as company. He smiled that maniac, happy smile of his as he waved over to Sarah.

With a hop in her step she walked over to him. "Hello!", the young woman greeted back, both waving and smiling back at him. Actually, she had hoped to find him.

By now, everyone else was either getting home or was already gone. The celebration had ended, but she wanted to stay a little longer, still. Truthfully speaking, it had been a long and stressful day and she was tired at least as much as Harry, which meant that a part of her mind nagged at her to get home and be done with today. But she knew that the Time Lord, unlike all of her human friends, rarely took as much as a nap and it felt a bit strange to her to leave him hanging around London at nighttime, all alone, while everyone else had left to get some sleep. Sarah figured, the least she could do was to stick around for a little bit and ask him whether he had enjoyed being the guest of honor earlier.

"Quite a beautiful night, wouldn't you say?", the Doctor asked her and raised his glass towards the night sky while Sarah sat down next to him. The grass was a bit damp with morning dew, but she didn't mind. Following his gaze, she looked up.

For once, the sky was clear of clouds and thanks to most of the street lights being turned off at this hour, one could actually spot plenty of stars tonight. The longer she kept looking at it, the more stars seemed to show up. She even thought she recognized the belt of thousands of stars that formed the milky way. It felt so funny to know that she had been out there. Millions over millions of miles away, and misplaced thousands of years into the future, or hundreds of years into the past. And yet, here she sat in front of the National Gallery in London. One of the most well known, ordinary places in that tiny world of hers. At home, so to speak, and looked out into the endlessness of the universe with a mind that had only recently opened up to all the wonders that lay far away, somewhere, wondering if she would ever be able to grasp it all.

"It is.", she answered quietly, not able to turn her sight away from the thousands of tiny, sparkling lights in the blackened sky.

"Hmhm." The Doctor agreed and out of the corner of her eye she noticed him taking a sip from the wine and lying back in the grass. "Did you know that many of these suns you are seeing don't exist anymore? The light that reaches us here is, in fact, several millions of years old."

Sarah thought she had heard or read about that fact sometime before, but she wasn't entirely sure. However, it was a very interesting notion, still. "That also means that there are new suns out there whose light has yet to reach us, doesn't it?", she wondered aloud as she kept pondering about it.

"Mhmmm... Yes, that's right."

If one went even further than that, maybe the time it took for the light to reach Earth could span the entire lifetime of a solar system. Sarah wondered if it made the entire planet a bit of a time traveler if they could see events that originated so far in the past. Probably not... but it was a funny thought to look at it that way.

"I should take you and Harry into orbit around your planet sometime.", the Doctor mentioned casually as he did his own bit of pondering.

Sarah finally managed to turn her eyes away from the night sky and looked at her friend instead. "What for?", she asked him because he had such an expectant twinkling in his eyes as though he was waiting for her to say something.

He shifted slightly and crossed his feet to lie more comfortably. "Because the milky way is even prettier to look at with the Earth in the picture. It's called the blue planet for a reason, after all."

"Hm, I'd like to see that one day!", she responded smiling back at him, but he wasn't looking over to her, so he didn't notice.

"You should.", was the only, quick and short answer she got.

Seconds passed and Sarah's eyes were still resting on him, looking at that awful sling that held his shoulder and arm in a safe position.

"By the way, how's your collarbone doing?"

The Doctor shot her a quick glance. "My collarbone's doing splendid.", he answered as his gaze returned to the night sky and his face showed a simple smile. At the same time, Sarah found him rocking his foot in the rhythm of a silent melody.

"Is it, really?", the young woman wondered aloud and raised an eyebrow at him. This recovery seemed a bit fast to her. Even the Doctor had suggested earlier that it would take at least three days to heal, given the fact that his regeneration had happened only a day or so ago.

"No, not really.", he admitted and his smile faded for just a moment as he placed his glass of wine down and felt for his shoulder through the sling and clothes. "But I'm feeling rather splendid, and by transitive relation, so must the rest of me." Although it seemed that he was still experiencing some minor pain, he did not allow his mood to falter.

There wasn't a whole lot which Sarah could have commented to this, but she was glad to see and hear that he was happy for now. After all, that was what the entire set-up had been about, and what she had wanted to hear. Everyone had been in on it, the Brigadier, Harry, Benton… They would have invited some of the Doctor's earlier companions, too, but knowing that those of which they could have gotten a hold on might not have recognized him now, they had decided not to make things more complicated than they had already been. But all was well, so no regrets.

"I must say, I do feel very well taken care of…", the tall, curly haired man continued slowly and chuckled. "It's not that I don't have other friends in the universe, and it's not that there aren't other places that welcome me… But there's only Earth which feels like a second home to me. Ha! Sometimes even like my first home, at times when Gallifrey doesn't want me!" When he looked back at Sarah, he was chuckling and with one hand, he pushed himself back up into a sitting position. As he did so, he took great care not to put any stress on his broken shoulder.

"But why would Gallifrey not want you back?" Although Sarah was not certain, she could imagine that he did not fancy going back to his home planet – being the eternal traveler and everything – but she failed to think of any reason why they wouldn't want to have him back. Even given the consideration that he was a national treasure to Earth only, and possibly a total nobody among his own kind. They wouldn't treat him bad, would they?

With half a shrug, the Doctor explained a bit of the relationship he had to his home planet.

"Oh, I've parked the TARDIS in a few wrong spots. They got a bit cross about that." He was looking for the glass he had put down before. "I'm terribly sorry.", he excused himself, "If I had known you would come to join me I would've brought a glass for you as well."

"It's alright.", she put it off, guessing that he had just meant to change the topic, really. Although Sarah had a good feeling that he was sincerely underplaying whatever he had done that got the authorities mad, she merely raised an eyebrow at his short explanation, but decided not to dig deeper into it. It wasn't necessary to dip into an uncomfortable conversation at this time. "Cheers!", Sarah said, in regard to the wine glass in his hand and watched him raise it to her before he drank the last drops of red wine.

Placing the now empty glass back down and pulling the ends of his newly repaired scarf closer, he laid back down, hands folded over his chest. This time, Sarah followed his example and allowed herself to fall back into the soft grass, too. From this position there wasn't much else to look at but the starry night sky and not much else to hear but the sound of the wind softly rustling the leaves of a tree nearby. The tiredness was still nagging at her, and she could feel her eyes getting slightly heavier than they had been before. She knew she had to leave before she risked falling asleep, but as her thoughts had begun to wander, there was one that got stuck in her mind.