It had happened again.
He'd been running and jumping and leaping and fiddling with gadgets and spouting madness to whoever would listen and, all-in-all, just being very Doctor-y. He hand't had a plan, but then he never had a plan really, so he had figured that was all right.
And then he'd been hit.
He'd done something terribly clever and heroic which involved much reversal of currents and flipping of switches and buzzing of his sonic screwdriver (all by himself, he might add). Well, not all by himself. Of course there had been a beautiful humanoid woman who had been swept off her feet by the Doctor and aided him in all of his surreptitious and cheeky endeavors. But that was beside the point.
He had just been shot by a space-age crossbow. A crossbow? Really? Someone had tried to kill him with a crossbow?
Well, they had succeeded.
He wasn't particularly in the mood for company while the temporal energy built in his core, and so he bid his interim companion (Gia? Genova? Geoffrey?) a chaste farewell and ran - well, more sort of shuffled (he wasn't feeling his best) - back to the TARDIS.
He pushed the "Pull to Open" doors apart, and collapsed against the console.
"Well old girl, this one was fun, wasn't it?" he asked his eternal partner. "Quite the ladies' man, if I do say so myself, and I do. Even despite the forehead."
He paused to gasp in pain.
"I'll have to go through the whole teeth fiasco again, now. Words are never the same. I'll need a new catchphrase - geronimo will sound all wrong in a different mouth. I do hope I get to be ginger, though."
He looked down, and contemplated whether or not to remove the leknum-duragian alloy shaft protruding from his chest.
"TARDIS! How would having a Bolesion arrow rammed through my chest affect my regeneration?"
The holographic interface popped up. It took the form of a rather wan, bedraggled, and altogether tragic woman. The Doctor had never programmed her into the mainframe, but the TARDIS insisted on using her, as a message that she remembered their meeting fondly (or perhaps that she looked forward to it - time is really relative when one's a TARDIS). As always when he saw the bittersweet phantom, his gaze roved over her form. Every time he saw her, a small part of him willed her eyes to brighten, her face to lift with emotion, her body to move with a purpose, but she remained slack, a specter.
Her crisp voice brought him out of his reverie-
"Due to the unique nature of the arrow's composition, the time energy would react violently with it on a molecular level, impeding your regeneration and creating a small black hole."
"Better get it out then." The Doctor told the image with a grim smile, as he yanked the projectile out.
Out of the rip in his chest, a glow began to appear, with a golden quality like sunlit motes of dust. "Just in time," he remarked.
And collapsed.