Disclaimer: Definitely not mine. I just love them.
Maybe
He'd never been particularly good at the whole regeneration bit. Maybe it was because he clung too tightly to each life, so desperate to remain the same, to maintain the same sense of self that he undermined the very process designed to help with it. Maybe it was because, much as he loathed and belittled the hands-off policies of his people, his own proactive approach to the universe, his own power, which flowed unchecked, uncontrollable as regeneration rewrote everything, frightened him. Maybe it was because each time brought him closer to the final, permanent death, and he'd spent too much time with humans, lost too many of them, to approach that point without fear.
Maybe it was because each time it happened he had to awaken to a new life facing denials of the only identity his reeling mind could ever hope to hold on to, the very humans he cared for denying him the name he'd taken long before they knew him.
It didn't matter what the reason was. All that mattered was that her Time Lord wasn't very good at putting himself back together again. Before, when there had been others, it had been difficult but not unmanageable. No matter how many hard feelings there were on both sides, it wasn't possible for them to deny aid when one of their own was screaming in the back of their heads. Just a nudge, a shove toward equilibrium, enough for the physical form to settle and the excess power to begin dissipating, that was all he needed from them. Once he was over that she could help him deal with a millennia's worth of memories, with the arching knowledge of how history was meant to go that was his inheritance.
Maybe that was why her people had allowed themselves to be allied to the Time Lords in the first place. It was refreshing, exhilarating to have someone close who could see even a fraction of what they saw, a hint of the true universe they were living in. They were fragile, though, so very fragile, only able to see crucial patterns where she could see individual lives, individual moments.
That was all right. It meant he could act, could change things, where she would spend eternity trying to weigh this life and that one. He could move in, not bound by the technology that sustained her as a recognizable consciousness on his level, and talk, and judge, and heal. Where the pattern seemed to deviate, where he thought it could be better, he would reach out and twist it, and she would watch, translating in his mind, sharing the experience but not interfering.
Never interfering, until that last time. Two patterns, shining so brightly in her mind, one setting him as a coward and scattering the remnants of his people throughout the stars, bereft of place and position, leaving the Daleks supreme rulers for centuries… one setting him as a hero, the one who saved the universe despite the cost, the one everyone would hail but none would travel with, fearful that should the need arise he would sacrifice them, too.
She hadn't expected him to play the part of conventional hero. Hadn't seen the desperation, the growing terror, and she should have. They had watched the War come together, been called to the front lines together, pointedly ignored old debates with older once-friends together as the final battle neared. She should have seen what it was doing to him, what it had done. Should have seen one path gaining precedence over another.
Maybe she should have let him die as he wanted, as he expected.
Even once she knew what he was going to do, why his last command had been a pre-designed flight pattern that would set her on a nice, friendly planet with a mildly telepathic race, she hadn't realized that he wasn't planning on coming with her. It had been unthinkable, to be separated from him forever. They were bound, not just by the technology that made him her true pilot but by choice. She would stay with her space-traveler, borne of boredom and frustration, because she believed in him, trusted him, and he would stay with her because somewhere, somewhen he had come to believe in loyalty.
Maybe she had spent too much time with him, that her view should be so clouded and obscured.
No, she didn't truly realize what he was planning, but she knew when the screams started that he wasn't coming back. He intended to burn with his people, to burn with Gallifrey rather than live knowing the sacrifice he'd willingly made, purposefully planned.
She started screaming then, something she hadn't ever done before, didn't think she could do again. It was a summons, a call, a demand that he come back to her, a refusal to leave until he did, and his already-reeling mind cracked under it.
He came, already burning with the flames of death and the fury of regeneration, and she took him away from the nightmare, took him away from the screams as two races were wiped from the face of Time itself.
What she couldn't do was take the screams from his mind, fill the cold nothingness that lurked where the connection to his people had been.
So instead she let him scream at her, incoherent through the first long, timeless hours after regeneration, and she'd almost wished she'd let him die as he planned. It certainly wasn't living, what he did then, outwardly silent, curled on the floor of the control room, a new-born draped only in the charred remnants of his previous life, shivering, starving, not moving.
Inside he howled, screamed, cursed, and she did all she dared, held him as close as she could. It was hard, to touch his mind, so fragile, so small, and be present enough to help without being close enough to hurt, to let him see any more of the truths she carried within than was already his burden. She tried, though, would have tried anything to help him get up, move on, become her Time Lord again.
Did do anything.
Maybe it was wrong, using the borrowed voices, pulling up the memories to lure him to food, the shower, the wardrobe. Still, she didn't think the ones she used would mind. They had loved him, too, each in their own way.
It was after the wardrobe, after he found the dark jumper and faded black leather jacket that he started talking with his mouth again. And even if he cried, it was real tears; the nights when he screamed, they were real screams, living screams.
He'd been in his new form for three weeks when he finally stepped outside her door, skittish, maybe even a bit scared, but the faintest traces of her Time Lord beginning to slip through. She had chosen a small planet, backwards, far from anyone who might know of him, where the political and social structures had been firmly in place for hundreds of years.
He managed to uncover and thwart a conspiracy by a good dozen top-ranking leaders who planned on handing the planet over to a War-weakened, resource-hungry consortium.
They didn't stop after that, and she began to fear for him again as his obsession deepened. Never stopping, never resting, desperately trying to find and help anyone he could who had been touched by the War, the last of the Time Lords threw himself back into his mission with an almost suicidal fury.
He didn't even stop to look at his new face until almost two weeks later, back on Earth, among the species he perhaps loved most of all in the universe. Just as before, he moved in, saved them, risking his own life without any fear… and met the girl. Asked her not once but twice to go with him, an unexpected opening of his defenses, a reaching-out that she hadn't anticipated, hadn't picked from the myriad patterns surrounding him then, so many ending in death.
The worry began to fade as the newest companion climbed aboard, and she welcomed the release. The girl, young and naïve and so very kind, began almost immediately to scratch at the manic, desperate energy he'd been using to defend himself, refused to be turned away by the aura of danger and the hunched shoulders in dark leather that dared anyone to try to know him.
The girl would have died for him in a heartbeat, was willing to, multiple times, with no recriminations. Told him it was all right, that it wasn't his fault, and as she translated the words into Gallifreyan, passed them to her Time Lord with a shudder of what might have been despair, she knew that she could grow to love this companion. Even when the girl dragged another along, sparking possessiveness in her Time Lord, maybe even that which was called jealousy, she knew the human, so very young, was exactly what he needed.
Thought that maybe, just maybe, he wouldn't have to defend his identity this time.
The man came next, cocky, self-assured, but with a dark undertone to his thoughts, and he was just what her Time Lord needed, too. Someone else who had lost something, who, if he stopped moving and acting for too long, would find his mind drifting, trying desperately to find something that was no longer there.
Someone else who found himself drawn to the girl, to her innocence and ability, above all, to forgive.
Someone who wouldn't try to take her away, not just because he knew what she meant but because he, too, had nowhere else to go.
She didn't want to know how the human came to be involved in the patterns forming, didn't want to imagine her trio as anything other than whole, and so she didn't look, and he didn't see it coming.
He didn't scream when he died again, even though he was young, had seen the world through those eyes for less than two years. There wasn't fear, or anger, or blame, for the girl or for her, and she thought that maybe it would be all right this time. Maybe he could manage it without his people, without her.
He almost did, too, standing, coherent, immediately after his rebirth, memory intact.
And then the girl had to question him. Had to ask if he could change back, if he could undo it, if he was really who he claimed to be, and it all started to unravel. She couldn't blame the girl, could understand why she was confused, lost, scared, but she wanted to. Wanted to scream that he had died to keep the girl safe, to keep her alive and with him, and that he needed her now, needed only a kind voice and a soft bed, but she couldn't.
He would hate her for interfering like that, berate her for endangering the girl's mind.
Besides, he needed her strength more than she needed emotion, and she gave it to him again. Shut down everything that wasn't necessary, gave him everything she had as she tried to help him keep his form stable, his memories intact, and it was working until the girl asked for help.
Now they were both dying, a true, final death, her following him into the darkness. She couldn't leave him alone, wasn't willing to live now only to die a forgotten relic, the last of her people, the last faint echo of his.
There was no anger, no resentment. There was pain, deep and pervading, but he struggled against that, fought hard to get this new body into working order, to get up and protect them… protect her.
The girl who had been willing to die at his hands for her world to live as his people hadn't been for the universe.
The girl who had come for him, courting death and madness willingly so long as he survived, so long as he could live.
The girl who mourned him even though he wasn't dead yet, and even if the strength of the denial and grief was less than that of previous companions, it still hurt her to see it.
She would do what she could to help him, though, and if he wanted the girl to stay, she would allow it. The girl was young still, and naïve, and so very good at forgiving, and if she was going to learn anything from these people, that was the first thing she wanted. And maybe they'd be able to find the man again, somewhere in Time, pick him out of the patterns without tainting the whole outline, and her people would be whole again, not necessarily happy but whole, and one always preceded the other.
Maybe, because that was how the universe was defined for her, an infinite series of maybes that only shifted into one was once he had passed through them.
And that was all right, because right now, the only thing that mattered was that her Time Lord wasn't very good at the whole regeneration bit, and she was going to help him.