A.N.: This is my personal headcanon of what regeneration is like; it might not be the same for everyone, but this is how I think it happens.

Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who (or the lines from The End of Time Part 2)


Chapter 2 – The Doctor Flies

Regeneration was a funny thing. The Doctor had done it enough times that he was well aware of just how it felt to die and change and be effectively reborn like a phoenix rising from the ashes – even though he had carefully avoided it during his first life, as people did when they had never died before, out of fear of just what might happen, until he was forced into his second life by that body having been run ragged and he ended up collapsing out of pure exhaustion – yet he didn't think that he would ever get used to the uniquely peculiar sensation.

He felt himself shrinking – not his body, but his consciousness – until he became not himself but a collection of memories. Anything else about him disappeared, burned away by the golden energy surrounding him as he changed atom by atom. Around that cluster of memories – which grew with each regeneration – a new self was built from scratch: a new body, a new personality, but with the same mind and the same memories and the same knowledge of self; he was still confident that he was still the same person throughout time and space, but merely with different characteristics and mannerisms.

Yet the process was painful, far more painful than he remembered it ever being before. His new vocal cords were screaming as the process was completed, and the golden energy evaporated quickly as the old, brash, Northern exterior was replaced with something… new.

The first thing that he noticed was that his clothes were too big – far too big – but he didn't particularly mind because he'd been wearing leather for two lives now and he really wanted to try something different this time round.

Yet clothes were inconsequential; they could be changed with minimal effort – he needed to know what he looked like.

He looked down at himself, seeing a skinny and lanky body.

"Legs!" he exclaimed, excited at the prospect of the limbs. He lifted his left leg to make sure that he wasn't hallucinating having such wonderful appendages. "I've still got legs!" He bent down to kiss his knee before moving on to the other aspects of this new body.

"Good. Arms. Hands…" He lifted his hands to inspect them, twiddling his fingers energetically. "Ooh, fingers! Lots of fingers!"

He reached up to his face and individually inspected his ears, his eyes, his nose – he'd had worse. He was surprised by his chin, but not nearly as much as he was by his hair.

There was so much of it! He'd been practically bald last time – where had all this come from? His mind, which was still unsure of how it worked, could come up with only one explanation as he ran the long locks through his energetic fingers.

"I'm a girl!" he squeaked, and his high-pitched voice certainly seemed to support that conclusion, but he'd been flat chested when he'd looked down at himself, and he was sure that his voice had sounded deeper when he'd been muttering to himself previously.

"No… no!" he reached down to his Adam's apple and found that he had been mistaken. "I'm not a girl."

He was relieved at that, because after nine lifetimes of being fairly consistent with his biological sex, he didn't think that he would be able to work out just what to do with a female body by this stage in his regeneration cycle, but there was one more thing that he just had to know…

He grabbed his luscious fringe and pulled it down, thankful that it was so long that he didn't have to look in a mirror to inspect it, so that he could see it for himself. Excitement built within him as he pulled the locks down in front of his face, only for it to turn to sheer disappointment when he saw the true property of this new Barnet.

It was brunette.

"And still not ginger!" he growled, and he made a mental note of the fact that this body could get frustrated; that was good to know – frustration could come in handy.

His personal inspection over, he felt a niggling inside his head; there was something that he was forgetting – he was sure of it.

"There's something else," he muttered, "there's something… important. I'm…" His frustration at the elusiveness of the information he was trying to remember was building as he tapped the sides of his head with his first two energetic fingers on each hand. "I'm…"

Somewhere behind him, there was a massive explosion that sent him flying to the ground. He collided with the metal grating and looked up at the destruction that he had only just noticed. The TARDIS was falling apart, sparks fizzing all around him and parts of the control room were on fire.

That could only mean one thing, he realised, cackling.

"Crashing!" he cried happily, laughing and whooping as he pushed himself onto his knees so that he could reach some of the controls. "Geronimo!"

The TARDIS was spiralling out of control, flying wildly wherever they were as the Doctor desperately tried to regain control. He pulled the sonic screwdriver out of the inside pocket of the now far too big leather jacket before shedding the garment and dropping it rather unceremoniously on the floor of the control room. He pointed the screwdriver at the controls, trying to regain some semblance of normality within the ship so that he could at least keep the old girl in an upright position.

Yet he didn't seem to have much of a handle on his screwdriver yet, and all he succeeded in doing was to tip the TARDIS so that the doors flew open and he found himself sliding against the grating towards the open doorway.

Yelling in fright, he tried to reach out for the floor at the edge of the doorway to grab on to it so that he could pull himself back up into the ship, but his fingers slipped on the edge and he fell out of the TARDIS, heading straight for the Thames some hundred feet below.

Great, he thought; he'd only just got this body, all shiny and new, and now he was going to die all over again while the TARDIS collided with the Clocktower further down the river…

Hang on.

He had a new body. A new, shiny body. And that meant that he had new wings: a pair of new, undamaged wings – wings that would be able to take flight.

For the first time since the Time War, he could fly.

He looked out to his sides, seeing a pair of light blue wings stretching out on either side of him, rather than the black and red ones of his previous life. He drew as much energy and as he could and pumped it into the wings; with a massive contraction of his muscles, he flapped them, laughing as he felt them lift him up rather than failing and leaving him to plummet to the icy depths of the river below.

Guffawing hysterically, he flew up to the TARDIS and through the open doors, feeling lighter than air as he ran towards the controls and changed the course so that they wouldn't collide with any major landmarks.

Yet the TARDIS was still in trouble, as things continued to fizz and spark and explode around him; it would no doubt need some time to fix itself – probably rebuild itself, as the damage was so extensive – and that would mean that he needed to at least try and land it somewhere safe.

A set of coordinates entered his fresh, new mind, and he put them in without a moment's hesitation; he was confident that there were no buildings there, and that there wouldn't be any people there – especially at this time of night – and thanked his newfound luck that he had managed to come up with them at a mere few seconds' notice.

His personal congratulations didn't last long, however, when another shudder sent him slipping across the floor again, this time away from the doors and deeper into the bowels of the ship.

There wasn't enough room in the corridors for him to be able flap his wings and stop his momentum, but the TARDIS – even in her distress – was able to shift the rooms around so that he landed in the swimming pool in the library rather than somewhere potentially painful.

He emerged from the depths of the pool a few moments later, gasping for air and soaked to the skin, his previous self's jumper incredibly heavy as it hung off of him, drenched with chlorinated water.

A loud thud and a shudder filled the entire TARDIS, and the Doctor breathed a sigh of relief in the knowledge that they had landed – they had crash landed, but they had still landed.

The doors to the library were open, and because of its new location within the ship, that meant that he could see through the library doors all the way up to the outside world: the corridor outside ran straight from the library door to the control room, and the doors at the front of the TARDIS were still open, now facing a dark night sky – the TARDIS was on its side.

Thankful that the TARDIS hadn't landed on its other side, the Doctor pulled himself to his feet and rushed over to a nearby bookshelf to retrieve a rope attached to a grappling hook. Sarah Jane had made fun of him for having a rope attached to a grappling hook on a bookshelf in the library, but he now allowed himself to feel a small sense of smugness at the knowledge that he had been right at the time to assure her that, at some point – he didn't know when – having a rope attached to a grappling hook on a bookshelf in the library would be useful.

He swung it round a few times before throwing it up through the corridor now connecting the library with the control room, so that it caught on the same edge that he had reached (unsuccessfully) for when they had still been over the Thames, so that he could climb up and out of the ship.

Thirty seconds later, the Doctor – who, at some point during his ascent, had developed a sudden craving for apples – emerged from the TARDIS, his fingers curled around the bottom of the doorway and his head poking out into the outside world…

Only to be faced with a child in her nightie: a young girl with long red hair and a confused look on her face.


A.N.2: Just in case you aren't familiar with Cockney Rhyming Slang, a Barnet (or Barnet Fair) is hair.

A.N.3: So, Ten's era is over (and Nine's) and now we're up to Eleven! Because, in this Verse, the Doctor has portrayed by David Tennant never actually existed, but the Doctor as portrayed by John Hurt did, Matt Smith's Doctor is actually the eleventh incarnation, but he sees himself as the tenth. If that makes sense...

A.N.4: The next fic in this Verse will hopefully be posted tomorrow; it's just a tiny little oneshot set at the very beginning of The Eleventh Hour, and after that there aren't anymore re-writes for a while!

UPDATE 13/07/14: Next part of the Angel!Verse, Amelia's Prayer, has been uploaded.