A/N - In my mind, season 6 had it wrong in so many ways. Not only was the Doctor suddenly marrying a psychopath trained to assassinate him, but there were golden opportunities there for something different to come around. I love the Unbound range, exploring alternate Doctors.

What if the Doctor regenerated into a Silurian female?

Silurian Doctor.

No Longer Human Looking.

What he was doing was incredibly dangerous, but as he calmly checked the future - something he needed to be really clever about, and if there was one thing centuries of phone box time travel had taught him, it was how he needed to be careful and cautious when it came to travelling into his immediate future, but after the mess in Berlin when Amy's old friend Mels turned out to be her grown-up psychopath of a daughter, and he had come dangerously close to dying, the Doctor was willing to take the risk.

As long as he was very, very careful, then time would not be damaged. But right now, the Doctor was determined to have answers to his questions about his own future, and he was truthfully uncaring about what would happen to causality if he peeked into his own future; he wasn't normally cavalier with time and the TARDIS knew it. She was reluctant to take him into his future, but she was offering him a silent level of support even though it was obvious she was fighting her inbuilt programming.

Indeed, when the temptation to simply use the TARDIS using the information he'd downloaded from the Tesselecta as a guide, the Doctor had almost obeyed his immediate impulse and ignore it all, and let his future run its natural course.

But he couldn't.

He was tired of going everywhere through time and space and meeting people who knew of his immediate future.

He was frustrated with the knowledge there was some religious sect or organisation, who wanted him dead and had even taken the time and the trouble to recruit an army to fight him off although it turned out to be one big con in order to kidnap an innocent baby and transform her into a Doctor-hating weapon to kill him.

He was… tired of himself and his friends being targeted by the Silence and he wanted answers; he could well understand the Silence's use of Amy in this game. She had spent years sleeping in a bedroom with a crack in time bleeding small amounts of temporal energy into her mind. She was…a companion, a friend, and they had needed her and Rory to become intimate.

The Doctor had ignored the dangers and he had ignored the questions about the child, and considering what he was doing right now, he was not going to make that mistake again. It had proven costly to Rory and Amy. He did not want to put anybody else in danger.

No, this time he was going to investigate the whole mess. He needed to.

He already had some of the pieces of the puzzle, but not enough of it.

But what was the question, this oldest question in the universe the Teselecta had been badgering about, although it hadn't even known it - the Doctor was angry and frustrated that the stupid time-travelling android which possessed a crew shrunken down by a compression field would have an enormous amount of knowledge about him, even being aware of Melody/River Song and yet it didn't know a single thing about the question.

Foreknowledge was dangerous, he had to give them that, but right now the Doctor didn't care about the Laws of Time. He sighed as he once more switched on the scanner screen and found himself looking at a photograph of himself standing in front of a placid looking lake, with a mountain range framed behind. The Doctor shivered as he read the information on the screen;

The Doctor

Death Date: 22/04/2011

Time: 5:02 P.M

Location: Lake Silencio, Utah.

The Doctor swallowed nervously and ran a hand through his already floppy hair, patting the console for reassurance from the old girl.

"I guess this was going to happen at some point anyway, right old girl?" He whispered. This was one of the reasons why the Time Lords banned time travellers from learning their future, it was only too easy for them to find out details like this. The Doctor shrugged his shoulders and adjusted the controls. As he walked around the console idly, thinking about the recent mess in Berlin, he wondered more about Melody, Mels, River.

He just didn't get it.

River Song was apparently Rory and Amy's daughter, and she had inherited traits from the vortex. She'd had the means to regenerate like a Time Lord, and the Doctor had little doubt in his head the Silence believed she had all of the abilities a full Time Lord possessed. She would have had superhuman strength, the ability to regenerate and she'd had several lives - the Doctor remembered Mels commenting on doing it once before when she was nothing more than a toddler in the middle of New York; the Doctor shuddered at the thought of that.

Regeneration for a Gallifreyan Time Lord was bad enough, but for a human, and a young one at that… The Doctor had seen her as a child, and the Silence led by Kovarian had snatched her away and hidden her somewhere out in the universe. It was painfully obvious that it was Melody in that spacesuit that Amy had shot at, and she had somehow escaped while all that time River had known everything that was going to happen; the archaeologist had known precisely how she had escaped from the suit because she had been that child herself, and the Doctor clenched his jaw in anger knowing she knew precisely what was coming up.

He sneered in disdain as he thought about her favourite line 'spoilers,' and how she liked to talk about preserving the timeline whenever she appeared demanding his help. Frankly, her attitude was annoying even if he had been finding her fascinating lately, but now the Doctor was left asking himself if the woman was worth it.

The Doctor knew he was slightly petty to her at first, but now he wondered if he was right to put some distance between them after that mess on the Byzantium. He was still irked by her comment to Lux during that incident in the Library that he needed her; he had lasted through various lifetimes, going through the universe during those innocent days where it was just himself and Susan, his capture and exile to the 70s to Earth by the Time Lords. He had come face to face with Davros, Omega, Queen Xanxia, the Black Guardian, various Dalek Emperors, Cyber controllers. He had dealt with a number of Time Lord conspiracies. He had faced down the Ravenous, for goodness sake and he had walked away from the Last Great Time War, and now suddenly he had a stranger telling him to hold her hand.

But what he couldn't grasp was why Kovarian and the Silence had allowed Melody to live with Amy and Rory nearby. Surely they knew Amy and Rory could discover the truth at any given time? Okay, yeah, he knew the Silence had been conditioning and brainwashing Mels for years, possibly from the second she had learnt how to walk and talk.

All to kill him.

But why? What was the point? Why would they take so many risks just for Amy and Rory to raise her? What was going on? The Doctor shook his head irritably, frustrated with his inability to understand the logic of the Silence. Eventually, he decided to just focus on other details, and as he came full circle around the console, he accessed the TARDIS databank and fed into it; Lake Silencio, Utah, Earth.

A few moments later the scan returned with information about the lake. It wasn't spectacular, it was just one of a number of unremarkable features on Earth. But there was one little detail that attracted his attention. Lake Silencio was the location of a still point in time, but the Doctor knew this was fixed before he even saw the file read fixed point since it had apparently happened already. There was no way out of this and he knew it. But why were the Silence taking these steps in the first place? The Doctor ran a hand through his floppy hair and thought long and hard about the situation. He knew the Silence were worried about him because of something he was going to be doing in the future, his future. They had tried to blow up his TARDIS in the vortex, they had kidnapped a baby from her mother after she had been conceived in a travelling TARDIS. They had taken that same baby girl and had put her in a dangerous suit. The girl had escaped, and that girl had become Mels, who had then become a best friend to Rory and Amy - why the Silence took that step, the Doctor still wanted to know - and she had regenerated into River Song.

People like the Silence were not likely to just give up.

She was a brainwashed assassin - the Doctor was grateful towards her for helping him in the end, but she was going to be kept at arm's length from this point onwards. He didn't care. But then he thought about the mess in America; ignoring the bits with Nixon, being trapped and forced to grow that itchy beard, and the fact he had decided to go on adventures because he had known there was little hope of finding the girl - the Doctor regretted he had not really made no real effort to try to investigate; if he had then perhaps a large number of his problems would never have happened.

And then he remembered their reactions when he saw them in that diner.

The Doctor's face became icy and he ran out of the console room, heading straight for Amy and Rory's bedroom. When he got to the door he knocked on it loudly. "Wake up, the pair of you. We need to talk."

He stormed in without giving them a chance to react. …and he covered his eyes when he saw how undressed they both were.

"What the hell!" Rory yelled.

"DOCTOR!" Amy screamed, covering herself up in vain.

The Doctor glared at them both after he got over his embarrassment. "Lake Silencio."

The Ponds went still and silent. "What?" Rory whispered.

"Lake Silencio. You couldn't believe it when I walked through that diner door. Why?"

The two humans looked at each other before turning back to face him. Finally, it was Amy who spoke up. "We saw you getting shot by a figure in an astronaut suit come out of the lake, and shoot you. You looked like you were glowing like River was-."

"Glowing?" The Doctor jumped. "Was it a golden, yellowy light?'

"Yeah."

"I was regenerating like Melody was?"

"Yeah."

"That can't be right."

"What do you mean?" Rory asked, rubbing his eyes tiredly. It was clear he had been sleeping incredibly soundly when they'd been woken up and he was still lightheaded.

"I can't regenerate anymore. Time Lords can only regenerate 12 times; my last self wasted a regeneration because of vanity issues and because I didn't want to die. Stupid and moronic, and it used up one of my lives to heal myself; when I finally did give in and regenerated for real, I used up the last amount of regeneration energy; all I have left is a small amount to keep myself alive and I can use it to heal others if I need to. Just because I can't regenerate anymore, doesn't mean I can't use what I've got left to help others, right?" The Doctor looked between the couple solemnly.

"But what about River?" Amy asked, tears sparkling in her eyes.

"Yeah, I mean she passed on her regenerations-," Rory began.

"And it did nothing to restore my regeneration cycle," the Doctor finished for him. "When a Time Lord is dying from the poison of the Judas Tree, they would need to regenerate with at least 10 or 12 of their allotted lives. That's only to heal the body. But if somebody else passed on energy to them to cure them of Judas Tree poison… it won't give them new lives. It just cures them of the poison without forcing a change. That's what's happened now."

"So you're gonna die, Raggedy Man?" Amy was starting to cry now.

To the surprise of the Ponds, the Doctor grinned suddenly; with all the time he had spent looking back over recent events and how he had been exposed to this knowledge, he had been looking back deeper into his own past. Amy's question and the sight of her face had awakened his desire to live. "No. I've got an idea."

"What?" Amy leaned forwards.

"It's mad, but it might just work."

"What is it?"

"I'm going to try to get a new regeneration cycle."

"What? You can do that?"

"Why haven't you done it already?"

"Hold it," the Doctor held up his hands. "Answering your questions, yes, I can do it, but I haven't because a part of me wanted to accept the fact death was inevitable. But I've decided to live," he grinned, going through his mind the options he had available.

"Oh thank god!" Amy clasped her hand to her chest. "But what's your plan?"

The Doctor smiled. "Oh just a little piece of Time Lord history," he thought, already wondering how he was going to break into Artron's tomb, and he decided to use the time where the Master's incarnations had finished with the place and left after that mess with the Eleven and the Ravenous. "In the meantime, we're going to be looking at the Silence Time Machine. I want to know what it has in its databanks. The Silence wants me dead; they have already tried to blow up the TARDIS which caused the cracks in time, and there's a chance they might become desperate enough to try that again, they kidnapped your daughter. I want to know why and what's the point behind all of it."

"You've got that right, Doctor," Rory folded his arms and glowered at him, although there was no anger in his expression. "Those bastards kidnapped my daughter. I want to know why as well."

"I had to cope with Kovarian sneering at me through a porthole for months while she had me replaced with a Ganger," Amy nodded in agreement, her eyes flinty with anger as she remembered what Kovarian and the Headless Monks had done to her, she was hardly likely to forgive that.

The Doctor nodded and he leaned forwards to discuss his plans.