Title: The Powers of Two
Category: TV Shows » Doctor Who
Author: aragonite
Language: English, Rating: Rated: K+
Genre: Mystery/Angst
Published: 06-17-13, Updated: 07-04-14
Chapters: 14, Words: 78,307
Chapter 1: One: The Season's End
ONE: THE TIME IS RIPE.
He couldn't regret a thing.
His first body.
Of course he would be a little nostalgic about it; one never forgot their very first life. But he'd known this moment would arrive sooner or later—sooner thanks to the succession of opponents that kept erupting in their lives. If he had time to be honest with himself, it was a large reason for leaving Susan behind. Her memories were still so vulnerable, and any threat of renewal might re-crush her fragile improvements. No; renewal would remind her of their shared tragedy. He couldn't change with her so close to him. They had to part ways, and he did so as soon as he was satisfied she would be well cared for. That young human was ready to die for her if need be, and of all his criteria that was the most important of them all.
It was only a matter of time. He felt it long before the last nonsense with the Daleks. They'd only pushed things along, instigated the inevitable earlier than he'd expected. The season had been harsh in the end, but it did end, and in a (beg the pardon), timely manner.
He had a slight but uneasy suspicion, a prickle of his long-lost prescience, that Daleks might cause him trouble of this nature in the future. Cybermen…what about the Cybermen? Why were they so important, these odd, terrible miscarries of the mind and body?
At the end of it, he was ready to go, to pass on, to deal with this worn out body. His friends were clustered about, fluttering with questions that he couldn't answer yet. So tired...there was nothing to worry about, not really. Best to go through this now, in the company of these quaint little humans. The sounds of the TARDIS vibrated into his bones as he stretched out upon the floor. His hearts slowed, matching her tempo. He'd heard of this phenomenon, but never had chance to personally witness it, even among his own people. When a TARDIS bonded with her (for female was the default pronoun) Time Lord, they shared in the change together. Fitting, that the TARDIS, which he owed do much to, would stand as his own kin at the end, be his own kin.
He was sorry Susan wasn't with him, but she was with humans of her own now. They'd thrown their lot in with humanity, the two of them. What had been desperation and fugitive cunning had become something much more. Humans were primitive, brash, and fatally uneducated, blind to the Universe and equal parts ignorance and arrogance...all the reasons that would keep any self-respecting Time Lord milliparsecs away—they didn't even visit it save to demonstrate its smallness, the hopeless limitations of its many species, and to compare themselves in icy Gallifreyan superiority.
If they used Humans for anything resembling a positive light, it would be to show the Universe that the Time Lords had been perfection upon the first, and the Humans, who resembled them physically in all ways, was the cheap imitation, a Cosmic Joke.
Earth was the last place they'd ever look for him—and better yet, the last place they'd look for Susan. He'd hidden her in plain sight. Even if they found him, they'd never dream he would have put his own precious granddaughter in the same screeching backwater world of primates.
Oh, but that was the trouble with primates, you know. They either slid downward, or they slid upward. But they never stayed the same, and he knew that Susan's instincts were to be trusted. These folks were on their way up.
The Change was coming.
He could feel it; a sleepy lassitude slipping cell by cell through his body, surges that followed the pulse of the TARDIS. No pain; it was too advanced for that. An early Change was agony, he remembered being told. The lack of discomfort assured him that this was perfect timing. His eyes closed, and the floor felt soft, soothing,. He could hear over his twice-timed heartbeats and that of the TARDIS (triple heart now?) they were turning him over, crying out, worried. They were a constant trial with their inquisitiveness and challenges to his clearly superior intellect and they never accepted that he didn't have to answer their questions. Despite it all, they were dear things, more flexible than Time Lords. Susan had once told him, they only had one heart each, but they beat for the right reasons.
It was all worth it in the end. He'd tried so hard to do the right thing with his life. He'd done all that was expected of him after his brash youth before his family suffered further from his actions; he'd settled down and accepted the duties of his Family. But when little Susan came into his life he knew the troubles of his youth had only simmered; they were now boiling.
Susan was too much like him. She asked questions where were no answers, and Time Lords never forgot nor forgave such atrocities.
It had come down to the choice that was no choice. Stay and watch them break her the way they had broken him, or free her, even if it meant putting them both in danger.
It was more dangerous to keep her on Gallifrey. They would shatter her even harder than they'd broken him. How could he watch that young, fresh face full of wonder and joy crumple up with age-old horrors? How could he watch her age centuries overnight with one glimpse into the Forever, or run mad? She wasn't ready for the Glimpse. They had hurt her badly enough! It could take centuries and perhaps more than one body, for her to finish healing. From a bright, bold, eager and curious little girl to a fearful, timid and wounded thing. Oh, his people had everything to answer for!
But Time Laws made no allowances for the preparedness of the Novice. She had already caused trouble with her questions, and her beautiful toys, self-built, childish and lovely things, were considered dangerous hearsay for what they represented.
Time Lords did not "play." They were not frivolous. They were Time Lords.
Go mad; be inspired; run away. Those were the three choices. But there was a fourth choice...one he could make before she took her Turn upon that gauntlet of legalized madness.
He was inspired to run away.
Sometimes he wondered what his few remaining friends thought when their escape made all the news. It wasn't as though he had associated with the best examples of their race… Of course he would steal not just any TARDIS. It would have to be one of those aggravating, obsolete Type 40's. Too much personality embedded into the electrical brains of the antiques; over an extended use they had an alarming tendency to develop intelligence of their own, and bonded deeply with their Gallefreyan pilot. They had been out of favor for millennia, thrown aside for the newer, cleaner, brighter things that had data but no intelligence; extrapolation programs but no un-prediction; attention to detail but no joy of random happenstance or spontaneity and they never, ever went where they were not ordered.
Really, if one is fleeing from Gallifreyans, it only makes sense to use their most embarrassing achievements against them. Gallifreyans weren't prophets, but they could calculate probabilities with their multi-temporal views of time. This battered old Type 40 would make them even harder to catch.
The fact that his first TARDIS ride had been in a Type 40 was just a coincidence.
The roar in his ears, his hearts, the blood in his brain, the drum under his skin...their voices blended with the Tidal Time; the lindos organ was blooming within his chest, opening like a flower, sending its messages to every part of his ancient body.
And he did feel ancient. Quite ancient, and ephemeral as the sands that blew about the base of the pyramids, or the temporal grains floating about the Rock of Eternity. He was changing, and hard though it was, he concentrated on what he needed to become...someone younger, definitely. He needed a stronger body for all this gadding about. He didn't plan on running into Daleks or dropping into a Cybernest; he was quite content to hide in the mists of Earth History and never, ever, go further than a few hundred years past the 20th century.
He didn't plan on it, but common sense dictated something like this would happen again, and it would fare worse for him if he wasn't prepared.
So he thought of what he wanted to be, guiding the lindos nectar into his own re-shaping.
Younger.
Stronger.
Agile.
He needed a body as clever as his mind—his old body simply couldn't keep up with his mental perambulations.
Size didn't concern him; cleverness did. A large body could cause more troubles than it was worth in his experience, but he left that open...let the lindos do its work without much direction (he was too inexperienced, for it was his first regeneration after all, to know that his brief mental side-trip was enough to send the lindos into making a considerably smaller body).
He was almost ready. Seconds had passed, his hearts blending with the grinding wheeze of the TARDIS. The sound helped him concentrate, took away any residual discomfort from the act of Changing on a cellular level. He wondered if the TARDIS was changing with him. No matter. It was witnessing his new future.
A flicker of mental wildfire: the lindos was in his brain now, repairing age-damaged neural synapses. He was a little indignant; when had they become so damaged? And he hadn't known? Most unfair!
Almost...almost complete...the TARDIS was grinding to a halt in his mind and body; marking the closure of the Change. He would temporarily lose consciousness, and then wake up, not unlike a rebooted computer, and he would start anew.
The last thought slipping across his mind, influencing the lindos, was a wistful hope of his subconscious.
It was the wish that he'd fled Gallifrey long ago.
When he was still young enough to have some fun.