Author's Note: first Doctor Who fanfic :) actually, I've had this plot rattling around in my head for a while, and i needed to get it out before it started causing me physical stress or before a major case of writer's block hit. :P yes, this is just the first chapter - i won't leave y'all hanging, don't worry - and eventually it'll end up including the eleventh doctor too. but for now, please read and enjoy! REVIEWS ARE LOVE, and i hope you like it! :)

also, feel free to notify me if i've made it a tad dramatic - it is a regeneration scene, after all. the tenth doctor's, if it isn't clear. okay, i'll be quiet now. :)

He staggered into the TARDIS, the familiar warm glow of the console room doing nothing to assuage the terrible pain that was emanating through him. Every fiber of his being, every molecule of his DNA, was on fire - being ripped apart, torn down, rewritten and resequenced to form a new man. A new Doctor, one that would be so different and so entirely not him.

He wasn't going to die, he knew, not physically at least. But on another level, the important level, the level that held the person he was now and the person he wanted to stay - that would die, he knew, and he wasn't ready for that.

It was all, he thought viciously to himself, because of Rose. Getting herself trapped in that stupid department store, tearing her way into his life, drawing him to her like a beacon of light drawing a sinking ship to shore. She had been there last time, last regeneration, and somehow that had made it easier to swallow the pain. To be strong for her, keep that goofy smile on his daft face until the last possible moment. He was who he was now, he knew, because of Rose, and he was dying like this because of her, too, wasn't he? Because if it hadn't been for her, he knew he would have died some way or another, some mad escapade or act of furious rage bringing him down along with whoever he was up against. Rose had taken the anger of his ninth self, made it disappear, replaced it with a smile and a squeeze of the hand and the thought that yes, okay, everything will be all right. She had made him so human, so imperfectly, perfectly human. She had completed him.

And now she was stuck in another world, another dimension, and somehow she had him but he could never have her.

Oh, he should have known, the universe had a strange sense of humor like that, didn't it? Nine hundred-odd years of dashed plans and twisted scenarios, things that should have worked out but didn't because something always had to happen. Even when Rose was gone, even when she had gotten her happy ending - she deserved that happy ending, she was safe, at least - he still had been himself, he still had that chance at adventure that he had ran away to get. Just the Doctor and his TARDIS, then, if that was the way it had to be. And now, because of humans, because of human things like sacrifice and goodness and character and bravery, he was going to die. Alone, too, with nothing but the lamenting wails of the Ood to accompany his screams into oblivion.

He wouldn't have given up a moment, a second, a breath of it up, though.

But that didn't mean he wanted it to be over.

A stab of golden light ripped through his hearts as the radiation poisoning began its final rounds through his dying body. He stared down in horror as amber rays began to spew from his fingertips, then his palms, then finally from his chest. The console room lit up like it was on fire, coral struts dancing with regeneration energy, bronzed and shadowed dramatically in odd places with the glow. The Doctor looked up at the ceiling, imagined the stars there, Gallifrey, all the places he and Rose had visited. He saw Sarah Jane, Jack, Mickey, Martha, Wilf, Donna - oh, Rassilon, Donna, I'm so sorry - all the amazing people that he had come to love with both his hearts, all the things he had seen and experienced in this regeneration, all the things he could have done.

"I don't want to go."

Would any of them recognize him, he thought, as the gold reached his face and gleamed at the edges of his vision, if they ever met again?

The smile - Rose's smile - flashed across his blazing mind. It hadn't been more than five minutes ago that he had said his last goodbye to her, and she didn't even know. It had been her first smile to him, and it had been his last smile to her.

He knew she'd have a great year. He breathed, one, two, and steadied himself before the energy swept through him like wildfire, bursting his cells, dismantling and rebuilding his genes, scorching his soul and branding him deep.

And just as he closed his eyes and succumbed, the TARDIS door banged open with a terrific crash, resounding like a slam of thunder around the console room as a gangly man with messy brown hair sticking up at all angles and a blond with a smile that he knew all too well bounded through the entrance.

"DOCTOR!"