And what is going on here?

Chapter Two

The Doctor perked an eyebrow at her statement. Stop time from unraveling…? He thought to himself. What was she getting at, or was she simply another person with a god complex? He had certainly had his fair share of those.

"What do you mean, to stop time from unraveling?" he asked slowly. A wave of pain hit him, causing him to lean against the console for support as his knees nearly buckled.

"I've seen the future," she took a step forward abruptly, one hand catching his arm and the other splaying out on his chest. He could feel her muscles still shaking.

"What -" he was cut off as a horrible sensation racked his body. Suddenly his ship came alive, the humming and wheezing of the engines rattling the floor beneath him as he collapsed. The fog that had disappeared for a while dispersed all around the time rotor and down into the console. He sucked in a painful breath as his muscles tightened around his ribs. What was going on instantly hit him, "You've stopped the regeneration process!"

"Yes," she whispered, using one hand to support his head while the other stayed on his chest.

He clenched his teeth as it felt like ice was seeping through his bones and fighting off the heat of the regenerating power. Every spark of pain flared into a burning inferno, rendering him nearly paralyzed as whatever the mysterious woman was doing started to beat off his natural healing process.

"What are you doing?" he gasped and bit his tongue from crying out.

"I'm preventing you from regenerating and I'm forcing my healing onto you," she said quietly. A single drop of blood ran from her nose, sliding over her lips and down her chin. As he opened his mouth to speak again, she used her folded leg to support his head and put her hand over his eyes. "Hush," she ordered a bit harshly.

"That's not what I meant. What are you really doing?" he whispered as his breath shuddered from both fear and pain. The icy feeling started to seep through to his hearts, to his mind, and to his veins. He could feel it creeping up his spinal cord, leaving behind a trail of vicious pinpricks of horrific pain. Arching his back, he let go of his silence and screamed in pure agony.

"I'm rewriting history."

Everything was kind of fuzzy when he woke up. Blinking several times, the Doctor finally managed to realize that he was staring up at the ceiling of the TARDIS. It's funny how a good shock to your system can mess up your vision. He tilted his head to the side, groaning as his neck popped back into place. What was he lying on? What had happened?

As the fog slowly lifted from his mind, everything started to come back to him: the deadly dose of radiation, saying good-bye to Rose, the Ood, the hourglass, the strange woman, and then deathly pain everywhere before he lost consciousness. That was the moment it clicked in his brain that he was still laying on top of her leg.

"What are you?" he questioned aloud as he sat up, all his vertebrae popping back into place all up his back. His hearts fluttered as he recognized his same voice, not a different voice.

He knew she was unconscious when there was no answer. Blood was beginning to dry under her nose and on her lips, but the shaking in her muscles had stopped. "Who could prevent a Time Lord from regenerating while healing him at the same time?"

There was no reply, just the soft breathing of the woman as her chest rose and fell. The Doctor put two fingers under her jaw and felt a steady, if a little slow, pulse thumping under his fingertips. Heaving a sigh and getting to his knees, he glanced down at her with a curious expression. She was leaning against the console, her head bent at an awkward angle. Gently he put a hand under her neck and laid her flat on the floor.

"A bit too cold for a human," he said, pressing the back of his hand against her forehead. With his fingertips he pushed aside a few choppy silver strands of her hair, noticing a scar across her left eye. "A bit beat up, too," he added. "What are you, though? You're not human, at least not fully."

As if on cue, a few tendrils of the mysterious golden fog leapt from his fingers onto her and turned a frosty silver color. She started coughing violently, and didn't stop hacking. The Doctor swiftly got her into an upright position, feeling her chest shudder since he had her leaning against him.

"It's okay, just breath," he whispered soothingly as he rubbed one hand over her shoulders. The silver tendrils wisped away under her skin, into her veins. She seemed to choke for a moment until the fog drifted away out of her mouth, tinged with red. His sensitive nose detected an odd scent. "Doesn't smell like blood, smells like ice. Why does it smell like ice? What is it? Who the hell are you?"

The woman gave him a feeling of unease. It was like the feeling you get when you're in the forest and you know something's watching you, or like the unease you feel in the silence preceding a massive and devastating storm. His mind felt like it was being teased, having been given clues as to who she was but not being able to figure it out. It also felt like he couldn't quite see her clearly, like his vision was being shrouded from seeing her for what she truly was physically. Something was sitting in the very back of his mind, where he had buried his past.

"Please forgive me," he whispered as he put two fingers on her temples, delving passed the temporarily down mental barrier of her foremost memories and thoughts.

Everything inside her mind was shrouded in a thick fog, like it had been pushed aside for very many years. The Doctor shoved passed the cloak and into the darkness of several memories.

Blood splattered through the darkness. Freckled the hands of many. Concern plagued him as he caught a glimpse of the crimson dripping from her fingertips. There was so much death, so much violence seen. Some of it she caused, but everything else had been seen through years and years of observation. To him it was impressive in a morbid way. He gave a startled yelp as he felt the pure fury and anger that pulsed through her every time she found them. Who was them? The stench of blood, death, and ice was almost too much for him to handle. She had murdered. But through the scattered images he saw who, what she had murdered. And he didn't condone murder in the slightest, but he understood the driving force behind the actions.

The Doctor watched as a spray of blood and ice trickled down amongst the stars of the vast night sky, disrupting his visions of the horrid scenes of dead people. Frost crept across the ground at his feet, whispering in many tongues and shimmering with flecks of crimson and hoary flecks of sorrow and anger.

Rivers of tears flowed past him to unknown destinations. There was so much sorrow and pain and guilt. It was here that he found the repercussions of the men that had been killed. Justice, obligation, instinct, the job, it was all jumbled there.

There was the constant stabbing and shredding pain of losing someone so dear to her, but whoever it had been was clouded and hidden from his sight by ancient armies and slain bodies of people who had tried to come at her. Guilt swirled like a thick mist around him. It was guilt for the men she had slain, for the one person that started it all, for the chaos worthy of the ancient gods of Egypt that she had caused, and for shaking the universe to its core. Yet, there was a spark of laughter at the feats she had achieved.

And then there was something so shrouded in mystery, fear, and respect that he could barely claw his way through its defenses to catch a glimpse of what it was.

And what an almighty sight it was.

Surrounded by hundreds of billions of stars and fog made of every emotion possible stood the towering Hourglass. Sand billions of years old shifted and pelted the inside of the smooth glass. Frost encrusted the glass on the outside, creeping across the rough cave rock that the glass was cradled by. Golden flecks of sand particles stuck to tears of ice as they ran down both the inside and outside of the Hourglass. There was a tumultuous storm caused by humans and aliens alike that thrashed the fine grains of sand in every direction. Huge black wings were beating midair beside the glass, carved into the rocks and yet not, swirling and shoving aside the fog with soundless, effortless movements. This was the equilibrium of the entire universe.

The Doctor pulled his fingers away like he had been burned. He blinked a few times, trying to rid his mind of the dead men that haunted the woman's brain. Never had he seen a human mind that was so full of memories and pain. It was too much for a full blooded human to handle. Humans, he had noticed, were very emotional about what they had seen and some things could burn their minds from the inside out. And some of those memories tracked back to earlier centuries, out of the range of the human life span. So that left him with the assumption that she was something else completely.

"What are you?" his question was no longer inquiring about who she was, but what she was. There was an image starting to form at the back of his mind of whom and what the woman was, but it was like it was being prevented from forming. Instead it was trying to reawaken old memories. The pain was not something he wanted to deal with right now, so he shoved the reawakening memories back behind the mental barrier he had built. "Wake up, wake up, wake up! I just need to find out who you are and what you think you're doing, messing up the time stream and all that. And then I'll decide what needs to be done with you."

The air inside his ship was cold, ominous almost. There was a very unsettling, foreboding sensation that was nestling into his bones, raising the hairs on the back of his neck. Something was definitely wrong and he could sense it. Deep down he could feel the twisting and sickening pain when time was being bent out of shape, being forced to obey the hand of someone. History was indeed being rewritten.

He stood up, laying the woman gently on the grate floor. Glancing up at the pumping column of the central console, he laid a hand on the keyboard and swung the screen around to face him. Fingers flying faster than any secretary could ever dream of, the intricate computer system brought up several diagnostics that came from directly what the TARDIS was reading.

"Oh," he breathed out as he scrolled down through the delicate and incredibly beautiful words of his native language. His dark brown eyes narrowed as he read more of what his ship was coming up with. "Someone's playing God at the moment. The time vortex is in a state of confusion, but it's also not trying very hard to straighten itself out. It should be, something just put a major dent in it."

The Doctor leaned against the console, chewing on his knuckle while taking in more of the very disturbing readings. As he read on, he couldn't tell whether the whole picture of what was going on got clearer or vaguer. And the TARDIS seemed to be pulsating with a certain air, like someone would be if they were on pure oxygen.

"Strike the word 'major'. I think something along the lines of a dent the size of the moon in the stream of things is more appropriate. Future and past events are trying to reorganize themselves," he rubbed the back of his neck as the readings continued to pop up. And what they said surprised him. "What d'you mean, it's nothing too major? I was supposed to regenerate. I think that is going to put someone's history out of whack, never mind my own. My regeneration was fixed, it should have caused a big difference. There's something else, there's always something else. Now only if I can find it."

He looked down at the woman, saying quietly, "Mind you, stranger things have happened."

Debating whether or not he should try to get inside her head again ran through his mind. It wasn't worth it. In order to get to the part of her mind where that information might be stored would mean he would have to push pass all of the pain and guilt and death for a second time. Tearing down the mental barrier that would most likely be around who and what she was would be like getting past a Dalek fleet without the TARDIS. The first time was bad enough, forget trying a second time.

"Oh, come on!" he ran his hands through his spiky hair in frustration.

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