"Doctor?"

The Time Lord didn't look up from the work he was doing on the far set of controls for the TARDIS. "Clara."

"What are those circle thingies up at the top of the column there? The ones that spin around whenever we take off."

He turned around. "What, the Gallifreyan?"

Clara quirked an eyebrow and gave him a withering smirk. "Am I supposed to know what that means?"

The faintest ghost of a smile passed over the Doctor's face. "It's a language. My language, actually. I'm the only being left in the cosmos who knows how to read it. Other than the TARDIS of course."

"I thought you said the TARDIS translates all alien languages," she remarked, the confused frown becoming more and more pronounced.

"She won't translate Gallifreyan. I can tell you what it is if you really want to know."

"I'd like that."

Taking a deep, bracing breath, he murmured, "Well, those are the names of all the people I've traveled with. Ever since the beginning. My granddaughter was the first human to ever travel with me. Well, I say human, but she wasn't completely human, she was mostly Time Lord. I've only ever met one other person in over a thousand years that was a mix between Time Lord and human, and that was Professor Song. It's no easy feat to sustain both sets of DNA in one body... Oh, would you like to hear their names?"

She grinned. "I think that'd be lovely."

"Beginning or recent?"

"I think backwards from me."

Taking another heavy breath, he began to speak: "I'm not entirely sure I can do them all in order, but here goes... River, Brian, Amy, Rory, Donna, Wilf, Martha, Jack, Mickey, Rose, Romana, Turlough, Adric, Sarah Jane, Susan, that was my granddaughter, Ian, Barbara..."

A/N: the only reason I had the Doctor recite them out of order is because I could in no way say some of them in order because I don't know 6/7/8's companions or 2's. (And obviously I could do the NuWho people in order AND INCLUDE RICKY. I MEAN MICKEY.) Brian and Wilf also deserve a special place on that list because they're the superdad/granddad that everyone loves no matter what. Seriously you just can't hate them. [Also as a sidenote I wrote this before TDotD. So basically he still believes he committed mass genocide of his own race.]