SUMMARY: Of Regeneration, he called a 'dodgy process', yes? 'Never know what you'll get', that's what he told me back then. Never expected this...thought he'd at least always be a Time Lord, but apparently not. If I had not had Bad Wolf still within me and many centuries alone to look forward to, he'd have died at the end of his 13th life when the TARDIS did...but he didn't. He just...changed.

CHANGES

The police box wasn't just blue, it was a rich, sparkling Royal blue with trimming that could only be called Ginger, more of a lady's color than the navy most people thought of when it came to the TARDIS. But that was because it wasn't really the TARDIS, it wasn't Sexy at least...Sexy had died several hundred years before, finally reaching the end of her lifespan...this one...this one was something else, someone else. This one coddled me, his bonded, like no TARDIS ever had, but this one's bonded wasn't and never had been a Time Lady, though I had once been human. And this one's Chamelion's circuit worked just fine, because when I left the ship, the ship changed back into the Doctor I had most adored...and it seemed to the wider Universe that he was still on his Tenth body...the one everyone else thought was his Ninth one. Northern and a bit grumpy, but still so careful of me.

When in a hotel or a rented flat somewhere, he stayed in Time Lord form, but when it was time to go, he wrapped his arms around me and changed, materializing around me in ship form and took me off to the stars again. Within his soul, he still had Sexy, though her body was long gone...and she did most of the driving, truth be told: Not that he mentioned that bit to me, told me herself, she did. Just as well, I told her, as he was a rubbish driver.

The surprise he and Sexy unveiled to me had taken this long to manage...some things couldn't be speeded up and the recreation of a particular Time Lord and his ship were some of the things that took Time and lots of it. In a far distant corner of the TARDIS he had become to stay with me, the Doctor and the Soul of his TARDIS had been growing a replacement for Sexy's body. A real TARDIS, not one cobbled together in desperation at the prospect of leaving me all alone...and a real TARDIS, grown in the last of the clean Gallifreyan soil on the ship, soil from before the Time War, mingled with soils from many places in the wider universe, Earth not being the least or the only planet to contribute soils to this project, took centuries to mature under the artifical conditions within the Doctor's TARDIS form. When he took his former Time Lord form, the process was placed in stasis until he returned to TARDIS form.

Neither he nor Sexy had mentioned it...not until now...not until this moment when he revealed the newly matured box in a distant garden and told me all of it...he merged briefly with the new box to allow Sexy to slip into it with her conciousness and away from him...taking the ability to become a ship with her...and beside me, for the first time in over fifteen hundred years, the Doctor regenerated into a male Time Lord form. New one, this wasn't a redo...and I smiled at the brilliant green eyes and firey hair that emerged.

"You're finally ginger..."

"Really?"

"Coppertop."

"That's...fantastic..."

**End**