Damage.
When she woke up from a deep sleep, the woman didn't know who she was. All she had in her head were so many disjointed and incoherent thoughts and memories that the woman couldn't fit together because all of them were jumbled, and the woman had problems sorting through them all.
As she opened her eyes, the woman winced as she was met with a terrible dazzling light that made her instinctively throw her arms up to cover her eyes before she was used to the glare.
"You doughnut, Ryan," she heard a voice say, and aside from recognising the voice the woman had problems recalling where she had heard it, but she knew the name 'Ryan.' Very well in fact. "Draw those curtains, quick."
She sensed rather than saw the light level dropping, and she moved her arms and looked around herself, letting her eyes adjust to the lighting. She….felt she recognised this place, although she wasn't entirely sure when she had seen this place before, and she found herself looking into the face of a woman.
For a moment the woman wondered if she was looking at a reflection of herself, but she quickly realised this was not her, but she definitely recognised the face from somewhere, and a distant memory of a blonde woman with jaw-length hair and hazel eyes with a wide smile popped into her mind before fading away, but the woman felt the blonde woman was someone important.
"How are you feeling?" the woman sitting next to her asked.
The woman shook her head, closing her eyes and holding her head. "Oh, my head!" she complained, and then she stiffened a little. Her voice….it felt and sounded….different.
The woman sitting near her seemed surprised by the sound of her voice. "You sound Irish, now."
"Irish?" the woman repeated, lifting her head up and looking deeply into the woman's face, trying hard to sort through her memories to find a clue as to who this woman was. She knew her from somewhere, but she just couldn't seem to place her. "Is that good, or bad? Or somewhere in-between?"
There was also something familiar about Irish, but what? Oh great, another thing in her head.
"No," the woman sitting opposite her said quickly. "No, there's nothing wrong. It's just unexpected. I mean, you told us once you'd been a white-haired Scotsman, and then you had a Yorkshire accent."
"What?" the woman tilted her head slightly before she rubbed her eyes.
"What's the last thing you remember?"
The woman lifted her head and saw two men - one who looked, physically, to be around the same age as the young woman sitting near her with dark skin, and a physically older man, although something inside the woman's mind said that she was a lot older than all of them combined - and looked between the three of them, who were staring at her with interest.
"I…," the woman had to strain her mind a little bit as she carefully sat up, and she looked down at her clothes and saw she was wearing a dark shirt with what looked like rainbow strips over her chest, and blue trousers held up by braces. Hm, how odd…. "There was a….a city. An explosion…And I was opening the door to a…..a TT capsule, but as I was getting in….."
"A TT capsule?"
The woman looked up into the face of the younger man who'd spoken. "Oh, a TARDIS-."
Her eyes widened as her mind, forced to remember recent events started snapping together, and additional memories suddenly flooded through her mind; the meeting with the Master when she'd discovered her old enemy working with the Kasarvin, the news from him Gallifrey was gone and her suspicion he was lying even though she hadn't been sure at the time, her visit to the Citadel only to find the planet had indeed been razed to the ground and her certainty the Master had been responsible for the devastation of their world before his holographic message had confirmed it, her mood swings as she tried to find the Master again to find out what the Timeless Child was, the encounter in that alternate timeline where Earth had succumbed to the ravages of pollution, the mess with the Judoon in Gloucester where she met another version of her whom she had never been before, and the way her attempt to defeat the Lone Cyberman had gone wrong so quickly because she hadn't bothered to go after him when her friends had brought her Jack's message…
I was so obsessed with finding that psychotic bastard when I should have been more interested in stopping another monster, and I was so stupid I didn't plan ahead.
"I'm an idiot!" she closed her eyes, groaning in frustration with herself.
"Whoa, what do y'mean by that?" the older man in the room asked, looking at her in concern.
"I mean I was so obsessed with finding the Master rather than taking care of other matters," the woman answered, still mentally kicking herself in annoyance even as other memories became untangled and clearer in her head. Unfortunately, a lot of them focused on the Master, although she doubted it was surprising given how focused she was on the man/woman.
Memories became untangled in her head included the incident on Destination, hundreds of years and twelve lifetimes ago, back in the days where life was so much simpler when all she felt she needed to do was protect Susan from the cosmos, meeting the Master again when during the Second World War, to the confrontations in the 1970s when he'd been trying to demonstrate his power, that encounter with the Master when his body was a burnt-out husk, all to that business where the Master's interference with Logopolis threatened the entire universe, the Master's uneasy alliance with the Rani in Killingworth at the time of the Industrial Revolution, that business in San Francisco where the Master, nearing the end of his rope, tried to steal her remaining lives before falling into the Eye of Harmony….
Only to encounter the Master again and again; that bald incarnation who had coveted the power of the Eminence and who'd been stupid enough to enter into a small temporal war with one of his previous incarnations, tried to steal the brain print of Artron during that mess with the Ravenous, those battles during the Time War….only for him to return true to form when Martha inadvertently drew attention to Professor Yana's watch which restored his mind, the Year that Never Was, that mess with the 'Immortality Gate,' Missy and her Cybermen, and that business on Skaro before taking custody of her and sticking her in that vault, believing stupidly Missy can be rehabilitated and being happy with her progress until they'd arrived on that Mondasian colony ship only to encounter her immediate predecessor who'd lulled her back into evil, and her betrayal when she had begged the two Masters to help against the Cybermen.
Now this…the destruction of Gallifrey when he'd discovered that all Time Lords including himself shared some DNA of the Timeless Child, although there were so many things she wasn't entirely sure about that, desecrating their own people, turning them into the CyberMasters.
"You wanted to find out what he'd done to your planet," the young woman pointed out.
"That doesn't justify my stupidity," the woman said, shaking her head as more memories snapped into place. "I'd visited Gallifrey often enough times after he'd burnt it to the ground; I could have tracked down his movements prior to what he'd done. I could have accessed the Matrix and watched what he had done, and pieced it together instead of going there to experience survivor's guilt again."
"Again?" the young man echoed while his friends looked surprised. "You mean this has happened to your planet before?"
The woman bit her lip and nodded. "Yes," she admitted, her mind haunted by the memories of the Time War; all of the ones which were not fogged of course, but since so many of them were paradoxical anyway, it made little difference as far as she could see, but she remembered the pain and destruction she had seen in the War as clearly as she saw this room now.
"What happened?" the young woman gasped.
The woman sighed as the memories became more coherent in her mind. "The Time War. The Last Great Time War…the greatest war in the universe's history," she said before she closed her eyes as her head ached again.
Instantly she felt hands on her shoulders, and she opened her eyes and looked into the eyes of the young woman, who was looking at her in concern. "What's wrong?"
"Are you okay, Doc?" the physically older man asked.
Doc?
"Doc?" the woman tilted her head as she repeated the man's strange word. "Is…is that my name?"
She had just asked the question out of curiosity, but she had underestimated the effect of the question would have on them since they had clearly known her for some time. The young woman shared a look of upset with her friends. "Oh, god, she can't remember," she said in dismay.
"Don't you remember the last time, Yaz?" the young man said. "She couldn't remember her name then."
Yaz.
Ryan…and Graham. Wait….
"Yaz, Ryan, Graham," the woman said slowly, letting the names trickle from her mouth. "I….I am the Doctor!"
"She remembers!" Graham grinned.
"That was quick!"
"You gave me incentive," the Doctor smiled, but she fought down another wave of dizziness. "Can…can I have some tea, please Graham? The superheated tannins and free radicals will definitely help the synapses."
Graham jumped to his feet and rushed to the kitchen. "Okay, Doc," he called back, not seeing the Doctor wrinkle her nose; she wasn't sure at this point if she liked the nickname, but there was still time for her to get her newly regenerated personality sorted out.
Ryan and Yaz glanced at each other, clearly hoping the other would break the silence; in truth, the Doctor was thankful they weren't speaking at that point, she needed to sort through her mind, and let it heal a bit. But she had to ask something important. "How long was I out for?" she asked quietly.
Yaz checked her watch. "Nearly two days," she replied.
The Doctor needed a second to remember the times of Earth before she nodded. "So, I'm no longer regenerating? That's good."
"When do you stop regenerating?" Ryan asked.
"When it starts, the energy surges through the body, changing everything until the Time Lord's appearance changes. Once that's happened, the old body dies and the life of the next one begins, but after that, the regeneration continues for another 15 hours until it stops and settles, but in those 15 hours the Time Lord's mind and body is vulnerable; in the early hours, if I was knocked unconscious it could start all over again."
"So," Ryan began as he tried to process what he'd just heard, "if you were knocked on the head quite badly, it will happen again? You'd change again?"
"Yes," the Doctor replied simply. "Early days of a new incarnation are always fraught with trouble."
Graham came back with a mug which he offered the Doctor. The newly regenerated Time Lady took the mug with a grateful smile, and she closed her eyes and inhaled gently. The inhaled steam from the mug quickly went to work, and she felt her mind clearing up. The Doctor, eager to be healed, placed the rim of the mug to her lips and she drank slowly, but she closed her eyes and pulled her lips away. Before her friends' eyes, she exhaled another, slightly longer stream of golden particles.
"Oh, that's so much better," she whispered.
"Do you feel better now?"
"Much!" the Doctor grinned, but her smile faded a little as she took another sip of her tea, gazing at her companions thoughtfully. She knew, even with her regeneration disorientated mind, they had dozens of questions. "I know I owe you more than a few answers," she said.
"A few?" Graham repeated.
"More like a thousand!" Yaz pointed out, looking at the Doctor with that pointedly annoyed manner that she had seen many times. "Well, for starters…why didn't you tell us about what happened to Gallifrey?"
The Doctor looked down into her tea for a second to gather her thoughts. "The Master told me about what had happened when we were in Paris, during the Second World War. At first, I refused to believe it, but after making sure he was dealt with when the Kasaavin took him to their realm….well, I travelled to Gallifrey. I couldn't believe it…the Citadel, the dome….the centre of Time Lord civilisation….the Panopticon," she smiled nostalgically as tears came to her eyes, surprising her since she had turned her back on her world, her heritage many, many times over the centuries, but it was still her home, "the Time Lords themselves, the Academy where the novices would go on to become part of the elite….All of them, gone. I don't know if some of my people survived, escaping in their own TARDISes, but it's something to keep in mind."
She looked down. "It's funny…I ran away from Gallifrey for so many reasons. One of the most prominent reasons was because I wanted to explore the universe. I didn't want secondhand knowledge, and I had never fitted in with the others despite my best efforts, so I ran away and I've been on the move for two thousand or so years…"
"Two thousand years?" Graham whispered, recalling all the times he had moaned about his age and how he was barely able to keep up. Now he knew the Doctor was many centuries older than he was, but hearing the number…it put things into perspective. "And all this time I thought my age was old…"
"For humans, yes, but for a Time Lord….," the Doctor shrugged, a wicked smirk on her face. "I'd be a teenager."
Her expression turned darker. "The Master had planted a holographic messenger in my pocket, knowing sooner or later I would go to Gallifrey. He said in the message he had needed to make them pay for what he'd discovered, that everything he - we - had known, was nothing but a lie. He brought up the Timeless Child."
"The Timeless- hold on, on Desolation, those cloth things said something about a Timeless Child. You told them to get out of your mind," Ryan said.
The Doctor nodded. "It was instinctive. According to the Master, it is buried in the Time Lord identity. And it is. Every time it was brought up since I would get little flashes of memories that weren't mine…of a small child wearing golden robes, standing underneath some sort of wormhole, or portal on a planet with a blue sky, with two monoliths towering over her. I've spent the last few months trying to find the Master, to make him give me answers. I knew he had escaped from the Kasaavin realm; the Master has exhausted his original regeneration cycle, forcing him to steal and hijack other people's bodies under unique circumstances, he has survived many near-death experiences that would have reduced another Time Lord to ash. He even survived a black hole. Getting trapped in an alien realm wouldn't have been an issue, and knowing the Master he would have made the Kasaavin regret imprisoning him."
"What do you mean?" Yaz asked.
"The Master is a sore loser. He likes to win, and he hates to lose. He holds onto a grudge like you wouldn't believe - you only need to see the long feud he's got with me to see it - and if he is imprisoned, he makes short work of those who imprisoned him. Once, many regenerations ago, the Master was caught on Earth and placed in a maximum-security prison; he had been trying to harness the powers of an alien who came from a species who'd uplifted humanity aeons ago. The Master got in touch with a group of Sea Devils to release him so he could see them wipe humanity out."
"What?!" Yaz yelped in horror.
"Who are the Sea Devils, Doc?" Graham asked, his eyes showing the horror he felt at how close humanity had come to being wiped out.
"Millions of years ago, Earth was ruled by a near reptilian species. I say near reptilian because of their appearance, but they share many warm-blooded traits. The human that discovered them called them the Silurians, but he got the period wrong. The Sea Devils were their marine cousins, and both of them were highly advanced societies. They ruled the Earth for centuries, but they went into hibernation when they discovered a small planet approaching the Earth. They calculated it would destroy all life, so they placed themselves into suspended animation in underground and underwater cities all over the planet, but the small planet didn't do what they'd calculated and it went into orbit and became the Moon."
"The moon?! Hold on, Silurians? When we met the Skithra, you said that gun was a Silurian blaster," Yaz said, momentarily pushing aside her shock about the moon's unexpected history in favour of getting fresh answers.
"Same technology. I don't know how the Skithra got it, but it's possible they stole it from a Silurian ark; some Silurians were more creative, and they designed and constructed ark ships to take their civilisation through space. I don't know if they planned to return to Earth once the disaster had passed, or if they planned to set up their civilisation somewhere else, but it's likely a mix of both for some," the Doctor took another sip of tea before she got back to the basics of the conversation. "Anyway, I wasn't surprised the Master came through the Boundary. I had hoped to bluff him, force him to talk…but when he threatened you Ryan, and the others, I couldn't let him so I let him take me through."
"I thought the Master had run out of ways to make me ill," she whispered. "Making plans to tear our world apart, desecrating the dead by putting in swimming pools, and torture chambers…It made me sick. But what made me more disgusted was how he'd invited the Cybermen to Gallifrey. But he showed me the truth of the Timeless Child."
"What is the Timeless Child?" Yaz asked.
The Doctor sighed and shook her head as she tried to make sense of what she'd learnt. "Before the Time Lords were founded, Gallifrey was a primitive world in comparison even if we had basic FTL travel. An explorer bravely left home and travelled the universe. She eventually found a planet where there monoliths that seemed to be opening a wormhole somewhere else, with a small child underneath. She never found out where that child came from, although truthfully I doubt she truly bothered to look.
"Anyway, the explorer took the child with her through the universe. She tried to find out more about her new charge, but she couldn't find anything. It was until they returned to Gallifrey, some of the mystery was resolved….but another came into sight. The child was playing with a friend, but there was an accident and the child fell to her death. The explorer watched as the child regenerated into a new body. For some time - I can't say how long - the explorer studied the Child and even caused a few regenerations to take place, just to find out how it worked. She eventually spliced the Child's DNA into her body and triggered a regeneration in her self."
The Doctor shook her head. "There are so many accounts about regeneration - no-one truly knows how it started, but it looks like this is how it started, and all the other experiments which made it work came afterwards. Rassilon, the Founder of Time Lord society, came up with a limited form of regeneration, but many believe the Time Lord engineer and scientist Artron discovered it. Maybe they both built on the Timeless Child discovery, and developed it into something the Time Lords could understand."
She hoped they didn't ask too many questions about Artron or Rassilon, although in the latter's case she knew it would happen given how she would be explaining about the Time War soon. But she didn't want to talk about Artron; the mess with the Master's 'Bruce' incarnation and the Eleven's alliance with the Ravenous brought back some really nasty memories.
"But…why would the Master destroy your world because of this?"
The Doctor sighed. This was the part of the story she still found hard to believe. "Because he claims…I am the Timeless Child."