"Rose River" AU
'The Oncoming Storm'
Chapter Two
- Aftermath -

The first thing the Doctor came to realize, was that there shouldn't be pain when you're dead. The second thing was that he was caught in a five second time loop. The last thing he discovered about himself was that he couldn't feel any sort of gravity.

Opening his eye turned out to be a bit of a mistake. The room was beyond bright, and played havoc with dimensional reasoning. Squinting through the shuddering stuttering of those looping five seconds, he could see the console room being reconfigured around him. His mental link with the ship told him that she was cannibalizing quite a bit of her own matter to save both him and herself. The brightness died away when he saw the shell of the room coalesce into a coral sphere. No artificial theme then, it's au naturel, he thought. Then came the next obvious thought. Why am I still alive?

"Because you must be," a feminine voice said to his right. Turning his head, his one remaining eye took in something impossible. He could see a woman in red robes standing a bit away from him with her head back and arms outstretched, deep in concentration. The other figure was what had his attention though. Transparent, he couldn't make out any features, save for the outline that determined that this was a female.

He thought he was hallucinating, but ran with it. "Killers must be brought to justice," he rasped out.

The golden apparition reached her hand out to touch his face. "No. You saved creation."

"By killing everyone?" he asked while closing his eye.

He felt the thumb of her hand rub his cheek. "By stopping those who would end everything else."

"I don't deserve to live," he whispered.

The force of the grip on his chin had his eye opening automatically to look at her. "YES, you do," she said with a voice that was final in its declaration.

The other lady in the room was next to her at this point. "You must rejoin," she told her. "You've been out too long as it is."

Only able to tell that the apparition looked at her from the change in her outline, the Doctor could see her nod. Then, she bent down and kissed him. As soon as her vaporous lips were on his, he could feel his regeneration kicking in, and he fought back. Lack of gravity didn't help him, and the more he fought, the stronger the energy within him grew. Before he realized what was happening, he exploded with a scream.

His next thought when he was aware of himself again, was "No." Sitting up, he looked at his hands and found them to be larger than he remembered. Past his hands was more evidence that he'd grown with this regeneration, as he could see tattered socks sticking out the ends of his boots. His clothes were tight as well.

Completely uncomfortable, the Doctor pulled himself upright with the console, then noticed the changes to the room. Everything was coral now. Nothing else for it, he left to go find out where the wardrobe ended up.

Stumbling into the room, he looked around and found that while the ship was still repairing itself, she'd managed to hold on to some clothes. Dropping his tattered clothing as he went, he ended up sitting on a bench for a long time, sobbing. The silence in his mind was too much, and he could feel snapshots of memory and thought flicking about in his head in complete disarray.

With nothing but chaos in his mind, he ended up staggering through the wardrobe and depended on the TARDIS to guide him to the clothing he was after. After twenty minutes of getting his boxers, dark trousers, jumper, leather jacket, socks and boots on, it felt like he was shoved into a room he thought was completely destroyed a long time ago: The zero room.

It was the next day when he was able to come out, and other than being able to feel the ship and the surrounding dimensions again, his brain still insisted he was in the zero room. After satisfying his stomach in the galley with something that resembled food, he was standing in the console room again. Standing by way of having his arms wrapped around one of the coral supports and fighting tears.

It startled him when it happened, but he could feel the ship's matrix swell in his mind, trying to fill the gaps that over a billion minds once inhabited. It didn't help much, but he could tell that the old girl was doing her best. Then he realized that she was just as out of it as he was, and sent her his gratitude – such as it was – over her efforts.

Another hour passed before he could let go of the support, and he familiarized himself with the new configuration of the console. Nothing was out of place, but what was used seemed to have come from the TARDIS attic. Everything from a glass paperweight to a bicycle pump was hooked in. The sight of it all actually made him smirk. "Guess we go with what we have," he mumbled.

Instead of asking about the status of Gallifrey, which he knew already, he programmed Earth's coordinates into the navigation system, then went about the console while the ship moved through the vortex. The ride was more than bumpy, and he found himself on his arse more than once before they landed.

Not caring about what date it was, he stumbled out the door and let himself feel the world turning under his feet. The tectonic forces calmed him a bit, as did the bustle of the city around him. London he figured, always London. The smell of the air said it was sometime close to the end of the twentieth century or just into the twenty first. Opening his eyes, he could see the cars and realized it was approximately two thousand and five.

Satisfied that Earth was where it was supposed to be, he went back in the TARDIS. "Same old thing?" he asked aloud, not expecting an answer. The ship surprised him when he felt the pressure of her matrix increase, and swore he could feel her sympathy. "Distract me with something," he asked. "I can't stand the quiet," he rasped.

He was still next to the doors when the central column of the console started up. While it somewhat surprised him, he didn't seem to really notice. Making his way over, he pulled the new monitor around to the keyboard and read what was in front of him. "That's… not good."

The date was a few weeks later than when he initially landed and noticed he got the year right, it was still Earth, and he could see a warp shunt trail leading down to the surface. What was most disturbing about it, was that the readings from the ship stated that it was made completely from polymers. "Very not good," he muttered.