Regeneration
-: A Doctor Who fanfiction :-
Regeneration. re-gen-er-a-tion [ri-jen-uh-rey-shuhn]
1. Act of regenerating; state of being regenerated.
2. Electronics. a feedback process in which energy from the output of an amplifier is fed back to the grid circuit to reinforce the input.
3. Biology. the restoration or new growth by an organism of organs, tissues, etc., that have been lost, removed, or injured.
4. Theology. spiritual rebirth; religious revival.
Humans always seem to have the need to try and explain things. They try and take something that is too big for their tiny minds to comprehend and force it into one, tiny, sentence, then pretend that just because they have come that far, that they can call themselves experts and professors and academics, but they are still small, oh so small and even when they have ascended to the stars, in their ships and begun to interact with the rest of the wide-reaching, ever-expanding universe, they are still small.
He knows it isn't their fault, that they do not have the capacity or the brain-power to grasp the concepts that the children of Gallifrey were taught on their first days out of the looms and that this will seem like arrogance, but no species in the universe is ever going to come close to seeing what he can see, what a Time Lord could see.
Still, he is surprised at how they define regeneration and wonders whether the people who compliled this dictionary have had contact with a Time Lord (perhaps they know one of his companions who have witnessed one) because while the entry can never fully convey exactly what regeneration means, it does come close. It is the restoration and growth of organs and tissues, but goes much further than they could envision, as it is an entire body, every single bone, the muscle and tissues that cover them, the eyes and nose and ears and mouth and the feeling in the nerve endings that let him - them - sense everything, down to every single strand of hair on his head - it is all new and so wonderful and exhilerating and fantastic!
Fantastic.
A word spoken by a dead man, but one who still walks in time and remains within him.
"A man is the sum of his memories. A Time Lord even more so." His fifth spoke those words (he thinks of them, his past selves, in terms of the order in which they came. He knows that one day his successor will think of him as eleven and this thought chills him, yet warms him at the same time) and they are words that keep coming back to him. For while everyone around him will always notice the biological aspects of regeneration first, he is more involved and concerned with what the humans call a 'theological definition'.
Spiritual rebirth.
A body is one thing and while he can admire how he looks (sometimes, according to his companions, to the point of obsession) in the end it is only a body. He can still run and jump and climb (mostly run) and eat and sleep and dance (he remembers dancing after everyone was saved) and laugh and cry and sing and talk. He might look different, but this doesn't change what he can do, what he has made it his life's purpose to do.
Inside is another story. Not biologically (all his organs do the same thing) but his feelings and thoughts, his motivations and desires, what he loves, what he hates, what he needs.
He knows, for example, that his tenth had vowed never to take a companion again after Donna. That the pain of having to erase her memory to save her from the metacrisis had broken more than one person that day and that this vow was something he had wanted the eleventh to adhere to, but the tenth couldn't stop the spiritual change that regeneration brings.
That doesn't mean he doesn't respect the tenth - they have all respected and admired their past selves, despite the antagonism between the second and third (or the sixth and everyone else) but he knows that this desire was born from everything that the tenth had gone through and that he, the eleventh, is a completely new man. He cannot forget what the tenth, ninth, eighth, seventh, sixth, fifth, fourth, third, second and first have all done and that yes, he will probably face similar challanges and that yes, he must therefore acknowledge that as the sum of all their memories, their responsibilities and guilt also belong to him, but he is not the same man.
The memories of his past selves are always there, but the feelings behind them are harder to sense. He knows they were happy or sad, when they are jubiliant and when they were remorseful, but he cannot feel those emotions as they did then. There is only one exception and that is when he is in the first twenty-four hours of his regeneration cycle, where as well as being able to regrow a limb he can also feel the emotions of his last body - and just as the tenth had felt the fear and regret of the ninth when he failed to set off the Delta Wave, so can his emotions be felt by the new Doctor.
What he feels makes him want to cry.
There is exhileration and the rush of adrenaline as the tenth had run around the TARDIS, then anxiety when he had tried to convince Rose who he was. There was fear, as the regeneration had failed to stabilise, then joy, oh, so much joy as the tenth had faced the Sycorax and reconnected with Rose. He feels the happiness of their adventures, then the grief of losing Rose. The confusion of the tenth's first encounter with Donna and the regret he had for what happened to Martha as she had walked the Earth. He feels the surprise of Donna searching for the tenth and the agony of not knowing what to do as they had been in Pompei and she had begged him to act. Then there is anguish as he feels the tenth losing her, then an almost overwhelming anger as the tenth had become the Time Lord victorious.
Finally there is a bone-crushing weariness and resignation.
The tenth didn't want to go, but the eleventh can sense that he knew there was no other option. A life that had begun so full of promise had ended with nothing but fear, grief, agony, anguish and weariness, which tortured the tenth far more than the pain that had wracked his body as the regeneration had begun. The tenth wanted to stay, wanted to try and fix his mistakes, but was too afraid that all he would do was ruin more he died.
The Time Lords saw regeneration as a way to continue beyond the scope of a normal Gallifryan lifespan and reserved it only for those who they felt showed promise (which considering they gave it not only to him, but to the Master and the Rani, shows how misguided they could be) but the Doctor can see it differently. Regeneration is a rebirth, a chance to begin again and every other time the Doctor has embraced that completely, but this time he cannot forget the sacrifices of his last self. He can remember standing in front of Rassilon as the legend of his people had reminded the Doctor exactly why he had locked them away and why he had left Gallifrey the first time. The Time Lord victorious had been the act of a desperate man who had forgotten the sins of his people and in becoming that man, had become like them.
No.
The Time Lords had always discarded a body like a human did with their old clothes, ignoring what that body had been and done.
No more.
The Doctor would carry the memories of his last self with him, but he would also think of what he had wanted.
He is certain that the tenth would be proud.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who is (c) the BBC.
Authors note: Though I will not wail and whine like an obsessed fan-girl, I do miss the tenth Doctor, and as a writer, I choose to deal with this through writing.