I am so sorry it has been so long, but I had wanted to upload a new chapter at the start of the month but I couldn't because the site glitched.

Enjoy, and please let me know what you think.

A Nexus of Strangeness.

…immediately feeling another mind, one which felt slightly familiar to her, but it connected to her mind effortlessly while her mind was plugged into what she recognised as a mental landscape similar to what you would have found on Gallifrey when someone was plugged into the Matrix. But this, this was similar but it was simpler at the same time. And she knew she wasn't alone. The moment she regained awareness after being pulled into the telepathic circuits of the old TARDIS, the Doctor realised she could sense two mental signatures, both of them from different TARDISes, the one she was currently in and another, which seemed both far away and yet so close.

She winced as she felt the older TARDIS's panic and fear over what was happening to time, not that she could blame the older ship.

"Hello, Doctor."

Mentally the Doctor recoiled, although she didn't know why; her best guess would be she was so startled by the suddenness of the telepathic conference when she had fully expected to receive a message. But now she knew, the message had been akin to a telephone caller saying hello, beginning a conversation. "Who are you? What's going on?" She asked, realising it was one of the TARDISes, a female one by the tone of the voice. But she was surprised by how well it knew her.

"It has been so long, hasn't it? We were very close, you and I, and yet at the same time we were virtual strangers with one another, although I loved you and wanted to be with you before you were pulled away from me. I thought you had abandoned me at first, and then I looked back and realised you had been manipulated mentally into choosing another," the voice spoke and as the voice went on, the Doctor frowning as she felt amusement, love and anger at the same time coming through loud and clear. This TARDIS was unhappy and yet she was clearly relieved to be near her again.

"Who are you?" The Doctor asked; this conversation was fascinating, but she didn't want to be playing a game of riddles over and over again when there was so much at stake.

"I am your TARDIS. Your first TARDIS."

The Doctor gasped, kicking herself in her mind for being so stupid. Of course, why was she being so stupid? She'd sensed some degree of familiarity with the telepathic message, but it had been a century since she had even sensed, never mind been inside her first TARDIS so it was understandable she didn't immediately recognise who the message was from. "My old Type 50," she gasped.

"Yes, Doctor."

"How are you here?" The Doctor struggled to understand. "You should be on Gallifrey."

"I am; I am broadcasting this message across space and time. And then you were forced to abandon me," the TARDIS replied, anger and sadness in her voice.

"What?" The Doctor said, wondering what her first TARDIS meant by that, and surprised the Type 50 was capable of broadcasting the message on its own.

"How much do you remember about your original plans to leave Gallifrey?" The TARDIS countered, her earlier feelings of anger and sadness fading, replaced by genuine curiosity.

"Not a great deal," the Doctor replied, struggling to recall the events questioned by the Type 50 TARDIS while digging through her own curiosity about the relevance and what it meant for what was going on now. "I mean, I was preparing to leave shortly after graduating from the Academy. I was tired of Gallifrey, but I'd given life out of the Academy a brief try for a bit. I remember visiting the Panopticon archives to study alien races and worlds outside of Gallifrey, and I made lists of places I wanted to visit and people whom I'd wanted to meet. I did this for three-four years before I decided to leave, but then it gets vague."

"I thought as much. I thought you had abandoned me for a miserable, dilapidated Type 40, without a functional navigational circuit and a chameleon circuit that was falling to pieces," the TARDIS replied, a vaguely smug tone in her voice which reminded the Doctor slightly of her first self. "But then I found out you had been manipulated into abandoning me."

"What?" The Doctor felt a sinking feeling in her stomach, her mental stomach and in her physical stomach. "What do you mean I was manipulated into abandoning you?"

"When you came to me, you were setting the controls on my console. You said-," the TARDIS began, but the Doctor gasped as she remembered what had happened distinctly.

"I said "We're going on a long journey, you and I," and then everything went blank…. But the next thing I remember was being on Gallifrey, and the rest, as they say, is history," the Doctor whispered, remembering all of those years she'd spent on Gallifrey before leaving the planet with Susan. It was so long ago and so much was blurred from her memory it was incredible, but it was coming back to her now with frightening clarity.

Yes. She remembered now, she had planned to escape Gallifrey, but she had wanted to get her graduation over and done with - she wasn't like Drax or the Monk, she wasn't going to drop out of the Academy even if she had been tempted to just steal a TARDIS after getting her Rassilon Imprimature after that mess with Millennia and Rallon and the Celestial Toymaker. She was going to graduate and while she didn't give a damn about being at the top of the class or not since she knew in the long term it meant little if you were better at everything than everybody else, she did want to have finished her education before she left Gallifrey.

She'd had it worked out as well. She would graduate and spend a few years understanding her Type 50, while at the same time she would be going over the available records of the Time Lords, studying planets and peoples and making lists. She had soon wanted to meet people from Elvis Presley, Mozart, Beethoven, William Shakespeare, Leonardo DaVinci, and so on. Now she remembered her plans and what she'd wanted to do, the Doctor could remember standing in the console room of her first TARDIS, planning on leaving the Time Lords and Gallifrey. So why had she decided to stay?

The TARDIS had said she was manipulated, but why? By whom? What was it all for?

"You were manipulated by the Celestial Intervention Agency," her TARDIS said.

The Doctor wasn't surprised by her first TARDIS's answer; in this telepathic environment, it would be pathetically easy for her original ship to read her mind. "The Agency? Why?"

"It would be easier if I showed you the truth…"

The Doctor gasped, clamping her hands to her head as she felt her head feeling like it was about to split open. It felt as if the Type 50 was both tearing through her memories, and yet pouring memories into her mind. It was such a confusing mix the Doctor didn't have the first clue what was going on.

"What-?"

"Relax, Doctor," the Doctor felt as if the TARDIS was soothing her mind, like an elder sibling or a spouse soothing her wife. "It'll become clear…"

And it did become clear. A number of memories that she felt were familiar came bursting out of her mind, as if they'd been walled up by a dam.

She was standing underneath a portal as a child in golden robes and the Doctor knew this child was her even if she didn't have any memory of this event before now - it was like she was suffering from amnesia and yet the memory was unfolding in her head, or a wormhole that led…somewhere else, and she didn't have any clear memories of where she had come from. A woman dressed in rough clothes approached her, introducing herself as Tecteun, a Gallifreyan explorer who had left her world to explore, and had come to the world she was on, wondering what she was doing there…

For years, the pair of them had travelled through space, visiting dozens of worlds and encountered many civilisations in their infancy while all the time Tecteun was curious about her, wondering where she was from but not finding anything conclusive. After a long time travelling the universe, witnessing so many wonders, and then they had travelled to Gallifrey. While Tecteun was giving her people the knowledge she had accumulated, which advanced Gallifreyan science and technology, she, the Doctor, hadn't had an easy time. While she had been accepted by the other Gallifreyans up to a point, she hadn't felt like it was home since many of them looked down on her since she was an alien.

And then it happened. The memory unfolding in the Doctor's mind felt both alien and yet terrifyingly familiar to her; she was playing with a friend near a cliff, and by accident, she fell. She remembered Tectuen rushing to help, to see if there was anything she could do, only there wasn't. And then she regenerated, the very first time a regeneration had taken place on Gallifrey.

Her relationship with Tecteun changed completely after that; the woman had always shown a more diluted form of the same silly prejudices typical of the Gallifreyans, but she'd always been a mother figure to her. That all changed; suddenly she had gone from a pseudo loved adopted daughter to a laboratory experiment, forced to undergo one experiment after another as Tecteun tried to understand regeneration and splice it into herself and to Gallifreyans everywhere in order to rid themselves of the Kotturah's judgement their people shouldn't have immortality.

It cost her several regenerations, each one more painful than the last as Tecteun obsessed over it, and the Doctor felt her love for the woman slip away with each year she spent in that laboratory. Finally, when Tecteun discovered a way of splicing regeneration into her body, that was when everything changed completely. Soon she gave her people the ability, using her knowledge gleaned from exploring space and her new insights into time to guide the people of Gallifrey into studying time travel.

They had referred to her in secret as the Timeless Child.

The name was fairly poetic. She had given the Time Lords the power of regeneration, although her origins were clouded from memory even then.

When the Gallifreyan elite became the Time Lords, the Doctor was roped into joining the Division although she didn't have any doubt in her mind the Division and the Celestial Intervention Agency were one and the same bureau.

Memories stretching back centuries filled the Doctor's mind of incarnations that had been blocked out of her memory for a very very long time, of missions for the Division which intervened in events, using one regeneration after another. In some of the regenerations the Doctor had, they were loyal members of the Division although they were worried over many of the missions. And then there were some regenerations who hated the organisation; in the end, it became so much, one incarnation had tried to escape.

They made themselves human, hid on Earth for decades with a protector before the Judoon, of all people, turned up and threatened their sanctuary - and there was a strange woman, a blonde woman who wielded a sonic screwdriver although she hadn't known it at the time, and wore a long coat. After her memories had been restored, that incarnation had tried to escape the Judoon and the member of the Division quickly, but the blonde woman who was apparently her as well didn't understand what was going on. After the operative was killed in a trap, the two Doctors parted ways, but for the one on the run from the Division, time was running out.

And then her other self was captured - the Doctor mentally winced as she remembered the way the Time Lords had force regenerated her, regressing her age until she was a child in a new body, complete with no memories of who and what she had been before. The child would grow into her first incarnation, and when they did…

The Doctor couldn't believe the conspiracy theory dawning in her mind. The Celestial Intervention Agency. She had known the organisation had employed Vansell to watch her during her time at the Academy, although she had never found out why or what the point was so she hadn't really paid any attention to the matter. But the Agency… they must have known, well some of them must have known - she couldn't believe Vansell would have known about this if he had then the insular fool would have likely said something without knowing the consequences.

It all made sense.

All of her life, she had never felt like she was one of them; oh, she was a Time Lord, thanks to her bond with her TARDIS, her TARDISes, but she had never been at home on Gallifrey despite her best efforts. And now she knew why. She wasn't one of them. She had been found on an alien world, thousands of years ago, possessing an ability unknown to the Gallifreyans until it was spliced into their bodies and they became the Time Lords, believing they were better than every race in the cosmos.

The conspiracy was extensive. It was the Agency who had made sure she couldn't leave Gallifrey in her Type 50, and they'd conditioned her mind so she would abandon her first TARDIS, and they'd apparently manipulated events which would force her to leave Gallifrey in a hurry. Some of the reasons the Doctor had wanted to leave was because she was not one of them and she knew it - the Hybrid, getting bored… they were nothing compared to that.

They had wanted her to go into the universe, ironically believing they were free to do what she wanted and visit where she wanted, but in truth, she was doing the Division or the CIA's work for them without knowing it. It was clever, the Doctor gave them that, but it was so elaborate…

And the old Type 40 was at the heart of the whole thing, unwillingly of course, but it was forced to obey the Time Lords and was provided with knowledge of places where things were out of sync with the vision of the timeline.

The Division apparently fed knowledge, hints of disasters and made the TARDIS's matrix think she was taking her to places where she was needed. The whole thing was so insidious, just to keep her as an agent of the Time Lords, and the worst of it was she hadn't seen it happening at all. All of these years, she had never imagined the Celestial Intervention Agency had come up with a plan for keeping her in their ranks, albeit secretly, without her even knowing it.

That was why Vansell had been recruited. His job had been to make sure the plan was followed through, although he hadn't even known what was going on.

"I was amazed when I discovered the extent of the Agencies plans."

"How did you discover them aside from when I didn't use you to leave?" The Doctor asked.

"I found out after I stole the biography from Gallifrey."

"What? How is that possible?" The Doctor asked, checking her memory for any sign of a TARDIS doing something like this and realised this was unique.

"I hired a private investigator to find you after you'd left, but she found out nothing I didn't already know although she told me you'd gone out into the universe; I was furious but as I probed her mind when your friends - the one you call the Master and the other called the Rani - tried to interrogate her themselves, I found out her mind showed signs of being conditioned. The only people on Gallifrey who could do that are the High Council or the CIA. I wanted to go after you, but I stayed when I looked on in the timelines and realised you would arrive back on Gallifrey in your previous incarnation, but I couldn't reach you." the Type 50 explained. "But before I sent this message, I accessed the Matrix and your biodata. I was surprised when I got two different biographies, and I learnt of the Timeless Child and everything about what had happened."

"And then you contacted me from Gallifrey to Earth to free me?" The Doctor asked, not sure whether she should be sceptical or not by the unexpected timing of the contact of her old TARDIS, but she was grateful nonetheless.

"Yes. You didn't deserve what had happened to you. When I learnt you were exiled, I sent this message to Earth but I found the old Type 35 being sent to the planet because of Stopwatch."

"And you couldn't intervene? I find that hard to believe," the Doctor folded her mental arms.

"I did try, but by the time I realised what was happening, time was already badly damaged," the TARDIS countered firmly, and the Doctor believed her. "But you can't use your idea, Doctor. However, I do know what you can do."

"What?" The Doctor asked, wondering what her ship had in mind.

"What you planned before those Time Agents appeared, only with me here broadcasting this message to you, a fully functioning and advanced TARDIS, you can use me to pull the Type 35 out of the time rift," the Type 50 said. "In fact, thanks to being connected through you, Doctor I am pulling the Type 35 out of the rift. You can use it to return to Gallifrey; I've uploaded the coordinates to my location, and a formula for bypassing the transduction barriers."

The Doctor quickly checked the older TARDIS's systems through the telepathic circuits and found the TARDIS was linked to her first TARDIS in interlock from such a long distance while the coordinate programmer was set for a trip to Gallifrey, and that was not all... the Doctor's eyes widened; her Type 50 had sent a formula for bouncing through the transduction barriers without the Time Lords detecting the TARDIS signature. And that wasn't all, the engines had been deactivated after the polarity of the energy systems had been reversed so the temporal fracturing was reversed which restored the timelines.

The Doctor began to smile, and then she remembered her earlier self and his companions.

"Don't worry," the Type 50 reassured her, "I have already nudged your past self's Type 40 away from this timezone before they arrived. As far as the rest of the universe is concerned, their arrival was just an interesting possibility."

"Oh," the Doctor could only say, knowing that type of temporal manipulation was extremely delicate and should nave be done unless the meddler knew what they were doing. She didn't say a word as she felt the TARDIS - the Type 50 - push her out of the Type 35's mental landscape, although she felt and heard the older ships' relief and delight to be freed from the time rift. At the same time, the abilities of her old TARDIS being able to do something like this from Gallifrey amazed the Doctor.

She let go of the telepathic circuits and she checked the instruments. Everything looked alright, and as she checked the local time zone for damage, she wasn't surprised to see there was some residual damage to local time and space, but it didn't look too serious. If it wasn't for the Type 50, the damage would be much worse and it would never have been resolved. And then the Doctor smiled as the thought sprang to her mind despite the incredible life reeling revelations she had just discovered, and then she jumped when the console vibrated with the sound of dematerialisation filling the air. She quickly checked the controls, seeing the TARDIS was heading straight for Gallifrey.

As she patted the console, the full extent of what her old ship had told her in the mental landscape generated by the telepathic circuits hit her.