My head slammed hard against stone and the impact echoed inside my skull, making my ears ring and my vision go blurry. I swore under my breath, tears leaking down the sides of my face towards my neck. Rubbing my eyes and wiping the tears away about a minute later, I rolled onto my side and tried to figure out where I was. My vision went in and out of focus a few times before finally clearing up.

"Where the-?"

There wasn't very much light, but what little there was was tinted slightly blue. About a foot away from my face was a tall, thick pillar carved in a Greek style with vines wrapping around the entire length, cracks and chips barely visible past the vines. I tried to sit up to view the rest of my surroundings, but was overwhelmed with the most horrible headache I had ever experienced and groaned loudly.

A scream suddenly echoed around me and I jolted into an upright position, looking around frantically and trying to not give in to the temptation to throw up or pass out. The room I had been deposited in was about the size of a small courtyard and was lined with more Greek stylized pillars. Across the room, in between two pillars, a figured shrouded in shadow glided in and out of sight. There were no features that were identifiable except for a large, semi-circle object placed behind the figure's head.

Time Lords? Holding a hand to my head in an attempt to suppress the endless pounding, I struggled to my feet and braced myself against a pillar. I don't understand. Am… Am I on Gallifrey? Was that even a Time Lord?

"Exterminate!"

I gasped and stumbled backwards into the shadows, unsure of the source of the war cry but knowing beyond the shadow of a doubt that I needed to get the hell out of there and fast. Running proved difficult after just a few steps, however, because I was overwhelmed by another dizzy spell. The Dalek screamed again and I forced myself to stumble onwards, hidden in the shadows as I raced along the gentle curve of the wall.

Finally I came to the opposite end of the courtyard, standing between the two pillars where I thought I'd seen a Time Lord silhouette. I looked into the light, emanating from somewhere down a short corridor, but couldn't make anything out. I stepped back into the shadows and searched along the ground for anything I could use as a weapon: a stick, a rock, even a piece of vine might prove to be useful! In the end, I settled for a chunk of pillar that was light enough to lift and throw, but heavy enough to do damage if thrown at someone's head.

Just beyond the corridor was another small courtyard lined with pillars and I practically flung myself into the shadows the moment I passed the corridor's end. I pressed myself against the wall and looked around, trying to determine where I was or find something recognizable.

Another scream pierced the eery silence, only this time it was much closer. Gliding towards me like a ghost was the luminescent, half-visible figure of a Time Lord, his mouth agape and his eyes widened in terror. I screamed and bolted in the opposite direction, only to find myself running towards a Weeping Angel. I screamed again, launching the chunk of pillar as hard and far as I could, and scrambled into the center of the courtyard with my eyes locked on the Angel.

The sound of bare feet clapping against stone startled me and I instinctively turned towards the sound. When no one came into view, I turned around again and choked on my own tongue upon seeing the Angel reaching out for me, its body mostly covered in shadow but the very tips of its clawed fingers bathed in the white light that shone from somewhere above. My eyelids trembled as I fought the urge to blink, instead very slowly closing one eye whilst keeping the other fixed on the statue.

"Don't blink!" a voice cried behind me. "Don't turn around! Just- Just reach out behind you. I'll grab your hand." My eyes had started watering again as I stretched my left arm out, fingers grasping wildly at empty air. "I'm going to take your hand now. Don't blink."

Cold fingers curled around my hand and I strained to keep at least one eye fixed on the Angel. The person who had grabbed hold of me released me for a second, leaving me frantically searching for them until they took my hand a second time. I turned my body towards them, but kept my head fixed in place so the Angel was still in plain sight, my other hand searching blindly for their arm.

"You can blink now. I can see it." I sighed in relief and closed my eyes, savoring the darkness. "They say that nothing in here can really hurt you, but… sometimes the things down here are a little too alive."

I turned to thank my rescuer and froze upon seeing their face. There was something about the… man? standing before me that seemed oddly familiar despite the fact that I had never seen him before. Dark hair had been slicked back over his head and bright, curious eyes rested heavily on the Angel that still loomed somewhere behind me.

"You scream incredibly loudly for someone who shouldn't want to be found."

"Do I know you?"

The young man laughed and shook his head. "No, I'm sure I would've remembered meeting someone as wrong as you."

I frowned, taken aback by his confusingly rude remark. "What's wrong with me?"

"As if you don't know. Can you look at it now?"

I looked over my shoulder at the Angel. It hadn't moved, but just the sight of its fingertips made me feel sick to my stomach. "Yeah," I croaked. "I got it."

"I have a way out," the man said, slowly pulling me backwards. "I'll share it with you if you keep watching that thing."

The longest minute of my life passed with the young man guiding me by his voice and his hands clasped around mine, while I kept my eyes locked on the Angel. When it was out of sight behind a corner, the man dropped my hand and heaved a sigh of relief.

"We don't have to look anymore. It won't follow us out here."

I refused to look away from the corridor. "It won't?"

"No. I've passed it before. It never moves beyond its sanctioned area, but I don't like to leave these things to chance." He chuckled. "Better safe than sorry, eh?"

Brushing my hair out of my face and taking a moment to collect my thoughts, I took a deep breath and finally turned to face the man. He stood about three inches taller than me, of a thin build and wearing some of the strangest clothes I'd ever seen. The first thing I noticed was that he wasn't wearing any shoes and his feet were covered in dirt. He wore dark, loose-fitting trousers, a belt, and a wine red blouse.

When I looked at his face, I stepped back in surprise because he was staring intently at me, his eyes impossibly wide. "It's you," he murmured.

"What?"

"I should've known. The last time I felt this, it was when I saw you."

"I don't know what you're talking about or who you even are," I said, retreating another few paces.

"But it was definitely you I saw! At the river! That was years ago," the man said, his eyes wandering across my face. "Everything makes sense now. When I touched you, it was so wrong. I didn't even think about it, but I remember that feeling hanging in the air the last time we met. You're wrong. Everything about you is wrong."

My arms crossed over my chest as I hugged myself, my body starting to fold in on itself as the man stared at me. He smiled, his head tilted to one side. "What are you?" he asked.

"What are you?" I countered defensively. "A dick?"

"What's that?"

I laughed humorlessly, my eyes darting around the room the man had led us to. "Never mind. Can we get out of here, please?"

"Not until you tell me what you are."

"Ugh, screw you." I scowled and started for the other side of the room, giving the man a wide berth in case he tried to move towards me.

"That's not the way out."

"Well, I don't like you, so I don't care." I really, really did care, but I also hated men who acted exactly like him. I decided to find my own way out instead. If I kept searching, maybe I could find an exit or a way to contact someone-. "Oh, I'm so stupid!" I reached for my the back pocket of my jeans and smiled when my fingers closed around my phone. "Thank you, thank you, thank you, Doctor!"

"Doctor who?" The man had come up behind me while I was distracted, his voice sounding in my ear and making me yelp in surprise. He snatched the phone out of my hands. "What's this?"

I spun around, my pulse hammering loudly inside my head, and swatted at the man's arm. "Give that back!" I lunged forward, but was shoved back when he caught me by the shoulder with his free hand. "Stop! I need that!"

The man ignored me, having already unlocked the phone and was starting to snoop through my messages. "I've never seen something like this before. It's looks… like Earth technology." Finally looking away from my phone, the man turned to me. "Are you curious about Earth, too? You didn't make this, did you?"

"It's a phone and it's mine, so give it back!"

The man smirked and held the phone over his head so that, despite him only being a few inches taller, I couldn't reach it no matter what I tried. "I'll return this if you'll at least tell me what you're doing down here."

"You wouldn't believe me. I hardly believe it myself." I could see in the man's eyes that he still wanted an answer, so I sighed. "I don't really know how I got here. I just did. I know it sounds like I'm just making this up as I go, but I swear I don't. All I know is that I travel somehow, but I don't know how or why or how control it."

The man frowned. "That doesn't make any sense."

"I didn't say it would make sense," I grumbled. "Now can you please give me back my phone? I really need it!"

True to his word, the young man lowered his arm and allowed me to snatch the phone from his hand. He watched as I searched for the Doctor's contact, then said, "You're not a Time Lord, are you?"

My thumbs froze, hovering over the phone's dimly lit screen. "Time Lord?"

"I've met other Time Lords and they're nothing like you, they're perfectly normal, but I don't know how else to explain why you are the way that you are."

"Now you're not making sense."

The man's hand shot out and grabbed me by the wrist. He stepped forward whilst simultaneously tugging me towards him, his eyes shut. When I protested and tried to pull away, he shushed me and placed his free hand on my elbow to keep my arm steady.

"One heart," he murmured. His eyes flew open with a gasp a heartbeat later, my arm slipping from his grasp to hang at my side. "You're human," he said, awestruck. "How did you get here? No human has ever been on Gallifrey before."

"I-I don't know!" I stammered. "I can't explain it! I just come and go, I don't- Wait. Wait, Gallifrey? I'm on Gallifrey?" The man nodded seriously. "Who are you?"

"You can call me Theta Sigma. Everyone else does."

In that moment, it seemed as thought the entire universe had skidded to a halt. My eyes frantically searched the man's face for anything that I might recognize him by, a certain scowl or the particular furrowing of his eyebrows, but he looked nothing like he should have. His skin was a shade darker than mine, his features appearing more East Asian than European like I had expected from the First Doctor. It was then that I wondered if I would ever recognize the Doctor in the future if their incarnations continued to follow the ongoing pattern of looking either feminine or non-European.

"Why are you looking at me like that?" the young Doctor inquired.

I quickly diverted my gaze elsewhere. "Like what?"

"Like you know me. You said you'd never seen me before."

"I haven't."

Theta frowned. He rubbed his forefinger against his chin, lips pursed, and I knew immediately that he was the Doctor. Or, at least, that he would be one day. "You're very strange," he said. "But luckily for you, those are the only people I care to associate myself with. Come on. I'll show you the way out."

As we walked, Theta Sigma explained to me where I was: the Cloisters, far beneath the Capitol. He told me that he came to the Cloisters looking for adventure and answers to all of his unanswered questions, and figured out how to talk to the Wraiths and Sliders, the ghosts of dead Time Lords whose preserved brain waves were projected into the Cloisters to serve as guard dogs. I was curious to learn more about what Theta had discovered among the misty, haunted courtyards, but hesitated to ask very many questions due to his patronizing explanations.

The exit turned out to be slab of machinery laid into the stone floor at the center of the Cloisters with Circular Gallifreyan script carved into the surface. "The Wraiths told me how to escape," said Theta, falling to his knees and ghosting his fingers along the writing. "If I can open these doors, it should open to a tunnel that will lead us out of the Capitol."

I followed his example and knelt at the edge of the slab, watching his fingertips leave trails in the dirt. "What does it say?" I asked, pointing to the foreign script.

"Can't you read it?"

"No. What makes you think I know how?"

Theta glanced up from his work, his brows furrowing. "If you can speak Gallifreyan, then you should be able to read it."

"But I can't speak Gallifreyan, Th-Theta." His name felt strange and alien in my mouth despite the fact that I knew it originated from a human language.

Chuckling softly, Theta Sigma focused his attention on the carvings in the floor. "Earth humor is very strange."

"I didn't make a joke. I'm speaking English."

"Then how can I understand you, hm?"

I opened my mouth to respond, but said nothing because I realized that I didn't know. I frowned and suddenly recalled the things Rose and the Doctor had said mere hours ago. Thrilled that I knew something valuable, I snapped my fingers and sat up straight with a laugh. "The TARDIS! She gets in your head and translates. She must still be doing that for me."

Theta stopped his movements again. "You have your own TARDIS?"

"No, it's the Doctor's- I mean! I-I mean, it's my friend's."

"This Doctor, you mentioned them before. Who are they? A Time Lord? A renegade?" he asked, growing more and more excited with each word.

"She's just a friend." I locked my eyes onto the hills and valleys of dust that Theta had created, not wanting to say more. My memories of the Doctor's adventures were still somewhat hazy, a few key details seeping through and easily accessible with most of them locked away somewhere in the back of my mind, but I knew that Theta discovering too much about his future could be dangerous. "That's all."

"Will she come for you?"

"I don't think she even knows I'm here. I was going to call her, but - well, I got distracted."

"You were going to contact her with that device?" Theta asked; I nodded. "Even if the signal made it past all the shields and restrictions and forcefields, it would still be detected. You'd be lucky if the Time Lords only threw you in prison."

Defeated, my shoulders slumped and I ran my hands down my face, ignoring the way my glasses shifted and distorted my vision when my fingers bumped into them. "I don't want to stay here. I don't even know how long I'll be here."

"You don't seem to know much about anything."

I scowled. "Well, I know you're rude."

"Must be a human characteristic," Theta said to himself, ignoring me completely.

"I can hear you!" Grumpily crossing my arms over my chest, I mumbled, "I liked you better as the Doctor," too irritated to care about preserving timelines.

"What?"

"Nothing."

Theta worked the doors open several minutes later. The mechanic slab opened up straight down the middle and slid apart, leaving an opening in the floor that revealed a passageway dimly lit in hues of orange and yellow. Theta dropped inside first, then myself, and I was overwhelmed with mental images of the console room and the Doctor. Although I had known the Doctor for no more than two days, I already missed her. She was the only person I really knew in my new home. She and the TARDIS were familiar and welcoming, and I was on an alien planet with a man who irritated me to no end. I didn't care where we went or what we did, I only wanted to be with someone in a place that didn't leave me quaking in my boots.

"If I did call the Doctor, do you think the Time Lords would intercept it or would I be able to get through before they found me?"

"That depends on how good your device is." Theta pointed down the right side of the passageway. "This way. I think. With any luck, we'll be out of this tunnel in a matter of days!"

"Days?" I retrieved my phone, unlocking it and letting my thumb hover over the call button as the Doctor's contact information lit up my face. Would it be worth it to try and contact the Doctor? "I really don't want to be here anymore. I don't want to be stuck here for days in this tunnel! If… If I can call the Doctor, if she can find me-"

"You're willing to risk imprisonment just to get off this planet?"

I caught Theta's dark eyes in the sunset colored lighting. "Gallifrey scares me. The Time Lords scare me. This place is terrifying and I don't belong here. You said so yourself." The light on my screen faded from inactivity and I tapped the screen, illuminating the Doctor's number again.

It took me a moment to realize that I had, in fact, pressed the call button. Half in shock, I held the phone up to my ear and listened to it ring. It rang, and rang, and rang. After nearly a minute, I feared that it would either never stop ringing or the call would be cancelled and I would turn around to find a Time Lord standing ready to arrest me. But then the receiver crackled and there was silence.

The voice that answered me sounded tired, old, and confused. "Hello?"

"Doctor?"

"Who is this?"

I glanced at Theta, who watched me with silent curiosity. "Um, i-it's Diana. Is this the Doctor?"

There was a moment of silence. "Diana?"

I was having trouble discerning the voice was male or female, but I was sure that I didn't recognize it from either of the Doctor's incarnations that I had met. "Yes. Please, can you give me to the Doctor? I'm lost - well, not really lost, stuck. I'm on Gallifrey and I need to get out of here. I thought that maybe the Doctor could come and get me. I-Is she there? Or he? They?" I added, sparing Theta a glance.

"Where are you?"

"Under the Cloisters. There's a tunnel-"

The sound of the TARDIS materializing cut me off before I could finish speaking. A harsh wind whipped through the tunnel and the winds grew stronger and the TARDIS continued to groan, I noticed that my surroundings were beginning to change. The tunnel, the orange-yellow lights, and even Theta Sigma were quickly replaced by white and grey roundels, faint, white lights, and the skeletal outlines of the TARDIS' console room. In the center of the surprisingly small room was the console and standing beside it was a woman with shockingly white hair cut short and dressed in dusty clothes. Her face was unfamiliar, but as I looked over her clothes I began to suspect that I knew exactly which incarnation had come to my rescue.

The Doctor looked small inside her battered, brown leather jacket and the tattered cloth tied around her throat threatened to swallow her entire face. The doors rattled on their hinges and I turned towards the sound to see them shaking slightly. Theta Sigma was banging against them, calling to whoever would listen that he wanted to be let inside. The Doctor glanced at the console, flipped a switch, and looked back at me as the TARDIS began to dematerialize.

As she stared mutely at me, I realized that my phone was still pressed against my ear and sheepishly, I locked the screen and slipped back into my pocket. "Thank you," I said when she remained silent. "I-I didn't think it would actually work. I thought the Time Lords were going to throw me in jail or somethi-"

"It's really you."

"I'm sorry?"

The Doctor shook her head in disbelief, her eyes beginning to well with tears. "After all this time," she said with a low, strained voice. "I never thought-…"

"Doctor?"

At first, the Doctor took a few hesitant steps in my direction, her hands clasped nervously in front of her. Then she stopped and looked at me again. I said her name again and she winced, but then she strode forward and took my face in her hands. She had the most incredible dark grey eyes I had ever seen, but they were sad and tired.

"I've missed you," she said.

I was drawn into a firm embrace with the Doctor's hands moving to cup the back of my head. My face was caught between her cheek and her shoulder, and when she took in a shuddering breath, I felt it reverberate throughout her entire body. She coughed to cover her sudden case of the sniffles and I discovered that the most unbearable sound in the whole universe was that of a broken, crying woman.

Author's Note: I'm sorry that this chapter is a little shorter. It's just under 4k words, but it felt right to end it here. (It also gives me some more time to figure out what I'm going to do in the next chapter.)

The artist whose work originally inspired this story did a piece of the War Doctor, but I can't remember which ethnicity she said she was trying to portray in her work. I think she said Jewish, so I tried to think of a Jewish actress who fit the image of the Doctor that I had pictured. It turns out that Jamie Lee Curtis is half Jewish, so there you go, folks!

Don't forget to leave a review to let me know what you think! Your feedback is seriously helpful and greatly appreciated.