Orbit
She screams and laughs, in her new ginger body, as gouts of flame spike around her and sparks pour from the console and the TARDIS goes spinning, spinning, spinning down to the planet's surface; and when it lands—with a great splintering crash—it narrowly misses a small boy dressed as a Roman.
She doesn't know about the boy, of course, still less how he's dressed, until she stumbles out of the regenerating TARDIS and finds him staring at her, all tousled blond hair and great staring eyes and rumpled, overworn fancy-dress, the kind that comes out of a plastic package. A shiny tin sword, dangling limply from one hand as he gapes at her, completes the costume.
"Right, kid," she says, "this is where things get weird."
...
In the kitchen, the boy slices an apple halfway to show the star and says it's how his uncle cuts them for him. The Doctor throws both halves out the open window in disgust after one bite. He fixes her a marmite sandwich and she spits it in the sink. He cooks her a two-minute egg and she smashes the shell into it. Finally she peels an orange, segments it carefully, and dips each segment one by one into a container of cream cheese, polishing off the orange with relish while the boy watches her and slowly eats an enormous piece of cake.
"What's your name?" she asks, when she is halfway done with the orange.
"Rory Williams," he says.
"Rory," she repeats. "Rory, Rory, Rory. Rory the Roman." She grins at him. "We're not really in Rome, are we, Rory?"
His face grows sulky. "No. We're in Leadworth, and it's 1996 and there haven't been Romans here since the fifth century." He stabs at his cake. "Rubbish."
"Oh, fifth century, is it? Clever clogs, you."
He glares. "I know things."
"'Course you do, lots of things from the size of ya." She drops the last morsel of orange into her mouth. "Umn."
"Did you come through the crack in the wall?" he asks suddenly.
Her gaze rests suddenly and piercingly upon him. "What crack? There's a crack?"
"In the spare bedroom. Voices come through, sometimes."
She considers him, eyes narrowed, thinking. "Show me."
...
Halfway up the stairs there is a small mirror and she stops to look at herself. "Oh, it's properly ginger this time, isn't it?" she says aloud, holding the ends of her hair out and letting it fall. She inspects her face. It is a flawless, creamy white dotted with freckles in places people don't mind seeing them. She doesn't know if she likes it yet. She was rather attached—one might even say, too attached—to her last body, chocolate-skinned and soft- featured and a smile that lit the room. This one is—this one is so-
"Am I Scottish?" she demands to the boy next to her.
But before he can answer she doubles over with a sharp cry and blows a puff of gold out of her mouth.
When she looks up, Rory is staring at her with huge, concerned eyes. "Are you okay?" he asks.
"I'm fine," she says, scrambling up again. "Just still cooking a bit."
"You're weird," he says definitively. "Why are your clothes all funny?"
She's still wearing her last self's shiny maroon jacket and flared jeans and both are much too short for her now, besides being badly singed from the burning TARDIS. At least she had the good sense to kick off the tall heels she favored. "It's complicated," she says, and walks straight into the wall of the landing.
She leaves Rory in his dark backyard, after opening up the crack in the "spare room" wall long enough to see what was on the other side. She does not question Rory's insistence on calling it a spare room, even though it has clearly been lived in, and recently, and by someone who was not a guest—well worn sheets and a crumpled duvet on the king-size bed, the detritus of everyday life scattered about. "Parents have company much?" she hazards, and he frowns and says, "I don't have any parents. This is my uncle's house." She glances at a side table where there is some kind of professional badge printed with a photograph of a blond woman and the name "Alma Williams" and says nothing.
...
She leaves him to perform emergency maintenance on her badly damaged TARDIS and promises to return, even though he does not ask her to. "We'll get this mess sorted," she says, "and then we'll go to Rome."
"Don't be daft," he says. "People can't just go to Rome."
"Rory the Roman," she says, "do I look like people?"
From the doorway of the listing TARDIS, she looks back at him and grins. She wonders what her grin looks like, this time. "You can trust me," she says. "I'm the Doctor."
There's a girlfriend when she returns, five minutes and far too many years later, a tall young woman with a deep voice and hair that never stops, who takes one look at the Doctor and says to Rory, "I always said I'd be damned if you were lying, Sweetie. You haven't got the imagination for something like that."
Rory is angry with the Doctor, as well he might be, and objects when she calls him "Rory the Roman." "I hardly play dress-up anymore, do I?" he snaps.
"You're playing dress-up now," she protests. "What's this supposed to be, then?" she waves her new sonic up and down to indicate the nurse's scrubs he's wearing.
"It's my uniform," he says, annoyed. "You're wearing the same clothes as the last time I saw you."
But she doesn't have time to stand and argue with him. She's got a planet to save, and that's something she can do almost on autopilot—which is fortunate, since this regeneration's gone a bit sideways, and is taking far too long to sort out. "Ooooh," Rory's girlfriend (Melissa? Millicent? No. Mel—Mel-Mel something. She'll ask later, if she remembers) says, when the Doctor breathes out a lungful of glittering gold, "Rory, you never mentioned she could do that."
...
In the locker room of the hospital, the Doctor discovers that this body likes clothes a lot. "Melody! Aren't you going to turn around?" Rory asks, shocked.
But Melody (that's her name), all flirtatious smirk and laughing eyes just says, "Oh Sweetie, relax. I'm just seeing how impressive she really is." When the Doctor turns around, wearing an orange sweater and a short, tight skirt, Melody winks and mouths "very." The Doctor winks back and charges up the stairs to the hospital roof to confront the Atraxi.
The Atraxi scan her, her past selves flashing before her like a movie reel—dark and exotic, pixie and fair, older and wiser and young and fresh. Her last face rises before her and she pushes through it, not wanting to dwell on what she no longer is. She looks up at the Atraxi, feels a smirk lift the corner of her mouth, and whispers, "Run."
"Why are you in your pajamas? Are we going to Rome, or what?"
Rory stares. "Rome? Are you kidding? Fourteen years later and she says we're going to Rome."
The Doctor does some quick calculating. "I thought it had just been twelve years. Whatever. Run in, get Melody. She seems like a girl for an adventure."
"Melody and I aren't together anymore. It has been two years since we saw you."
The Doctor sighs and crosses her arms. "You're tellin' me that you're going to turn down a trip to ancient Rome because of a teeny, tiny little miscalculation in the re-entry vortex calibration."
"I...look, I'm not nine years old anymore. People don't just...fall out of the sky and...and..."
The Doctor fixes him with a shrewd look and turns, opening the door of the TARDIS. "Rory the Roman," she says over her shoulder, "after all this, you still think I'm people?"
Wouldn't you know it.
There are Daleks in Rome.