You might want to refresh yourself on the notes on convention at the top of Chapter 1 if you've forgotten. Seriously, you'll want to keep the formatting conventions close to your chest when reading this. In the words of Amy herself, "this is where it gets complicated."
Oh, and I'm not going to bother to make the distinction between the species Gallifreyean and the subset Time Lords, since it doesn't actually matter. Steven Moffat doesn't, that's good enough for me.
CHAPTER 2. The Last of the Time Lords: 22 August 2010
The Doctor watched in shock, horror and in fascination.
No... it can't be.
He looked down at himself. He was well acquainted with the intricacies of regeneration, having been through ten and a half of them. He knew what the fire coursing through his veins was, but his hands were the same familiar hands that had accidentally set fire to a giant purple crystal not ten minutes previously. That could only mean that he had used up enough energy to heal himself, but the excess energy that he needed to change his appearance had been redirected, just as it had after he'd been shot by the Dalek. Channelled, in essence, away from him and into something else.
Or someone else...
He pursed his lips in self-directed fury. You should have told her about this, he chastised himself, instead of keeping her in innocent bliss. Then she would have known, and she wouldn't have done...
As the last golden lights flickered out of his friend's fingertips and hair, she collapsed lifelessly on the ground. He scrambled across, at her side in an instant. For the first time in... well, as long as he could remember, his fingers trembled as they felt for her neck. The rhythmic thumping he felt there assured him that she was still alive.
Not just alive.
Amy woke to soft, cream-coloured light.
I'm in heaven.
Her vision quickly cleared, and the room she was in came into focus. No. Not in heaven. The TARDIS medic bay, she realised. So I'm alive. Always good to know.
The last fragments of blurriness washed themselves from her vision. She felt good. Wonderful, than she ever had before. The pain in her leg had gone, she noticed. She felt and moved it experimentally, and was surprised to find that the wound had gone and her leg moving naturally.
No doubt some miracle medicine of the Doctor's, she decided. On the table next of her was the crystal that had embedded itself in the leg. She gazed at it for a second, momentarily transfixed by the way the light danced around the tiny facets.
She widened her gaze and took in the whole room. Everything seemed sharper, clearer, more than it ever had been in her life. More... obvious, she thought, for lack of a better word. As if the universe, over the course of her sleep, had decided to reveal its secrets to her and laid them for her to discover. It was as if she had lived her entire life with her mind tied up in a straitjacket, and suddenly she was free.
Free.
"Hello, Pond."
She turned around, and saw her Raggedy Doctor, alive, same as ever, leaning on the doorframe.
"Doctor!" She raced towards him and hugged him so fiercely they toppled over.
"Sorry," she said sheepishly as she disentangled herself from him. "Just relieved that you aren't, you know. Dead."
"Yes, it's a state that I'm all too happy to avoid," he said, a wry smile on his face. She laughed in relief. He did the same in response, and two of them found themselves unable to stop, her high girlish giggles and his deep guffaws intermingling and echoing throughout the TARDIS corridors.
"I tried to do CPR on you, you know. Bit stupid, I know, but hey, it worked. Just like in the movies," Amy eventually managed to say, when they finally calmed down.
The Doctor's smile vanished.
Ah. So that's what happened. CPR... mouth to mouth, he calculated. Yes, breath exchange would be a very good transfer mechanism for the energy. Very efficient. Just like with Rose.
Amy felt his sudden mood change, even though she hadn't even been looking at him. She sat up, concerned.
"Doctor? What is it? What's wrong?"
Developing her psychic abilities rather quickly, that curious, observant side of him realised, but he hid the thought.
"No, no nothing wrong." He paused. It was time, he realised, to say what he should have said at the start. "You remember when I told you I was nine hundred and seven, and you asked how someone like me managed to last so long?"
"Yeah, you said you were lucky. And that you didn't age," Amy replied.
"Well, correct on both counts, but that's not... the whole story."
Amy's eyes narrowed.
"Go on."
The Doctor looked down, unable to meet her piercing green eyes.
"Us Time Lords, when we - well, when we die, we don't just... die. We get another life, sort of. A new life. Same person, same personality, but a new body, and a new life. We call it regeneration."
"So that was how you came back to life," Amy said quietly, realisation sinking in. "And you were going to tell me this... when?", she asked, her tone rising. "I thought you were dead!"
"I'm sorry, Amy, I just... didn't want you thinking about it. About me dying." Worst excuse ever, Doctor.
"So why do you still look the same? New body, yeah? Bit coincidental that it looks the same as the old one." Suspicion and cynicism lay thick on every one of her syllables, and the Doctor winced.
You have got to stop lying to your friends some day, Doctor, he told himself, and today would be a great day to start.
It was time she knew the truth. The whole truth.
"A full regeneration heals all my injuries and changes my appearance," he explained, "but I don't need a full regeneration to heal myself. Sometimes if there's a- a container, an outlet, for that excess energy to go into, I can heal myself without changing my appearance. That excess energy then... does its thing on... wherever it's gone." His voice was calm and steady, but beneath his brain was working in furious overdrive and his twin hearts beating at a ridiculous pace.
It can't be, he argued with himself. She's human. Even if she completely absorbed all that energy, the chances of a perfect DNA rewrite are so small...
You felt them, Doctor, a voice, born from his adventurous, starry-eyed side, said in answer to the cold logic. Her pulse. Two heartbeats. You scanned her with the sonic. And the TARDIS. You can see it in her eyes, sharper, brighter, more perceptive than any humans. You can feel her psychic presence, reaching out, inadvertently trying to reach out to yours. Amy Pond is an impossible girl – what's another impossibility to her?
"So where, Doctor, did it go?" Amy whispered, her voice thick with fear and apprehension.
He had to be sure before he could tell her, and there was only one way. Only one thing that only a Time Lord could understand.
He sat up and met her eyes, clear blue meeting vivid green. When he spoke it was a single word, but not in English. Rather, in a language that could only be understood by one kind of mind and, until a few hours ago, by only one person in the universe.
The lost language of the Time Lords.
"You."
Amy Pond opened her mouth, slowly, but the words simply couldn't come out. Shock had robbed her of her ability to speak, to respond.
What the hell did he say? Well, he said "you". That's big in itself. But... what the hell did he say it... in? Maybe the TARDIS translated it. No. No, that's not right, because then I'd have heard it in English. And that sure as hell wasn't English.
The Doctor smiled, as if... he could sense her confusion. As if he knew.
"It's Gallifreyean, Amelia," he said softly, continuing in that same alien yet completely familiar tongue. "The language of my people. Do you understand it?"
She opened her mouth, hesitated, and closed it. It's impossible, Amy, she told herself. She'd never head it before, so how could she possibly speak it? It was completely impossible.
Impossible is nothing to Amy Pond, she told the nagging voice. She took a deep breath.
"Yes." The word flowed off her tongue, effortlessly, as if it were a part of her very core. It was as if her entire existence was built around her being able to understand it, to speak it. The Doctor's shoulders slumped, the tension flowing out of them.
No longer the last, then, she heard in a distant corner of her mind.
She started. Wait, she thought, doing a mental double-take, that wasn't me. The last what? I didn't think that. What...?
She shook her head, trying to clear her mind. This was getting far too much for one day.
"When you tried to resuscitate me, the excess energy from my regeneration flowed from me into you. Mouth against mouth happens to make an excellent conductor for regeneration energy," the Doctor said quietly, returning to English, a faraway look etched on his face. He decided to avoid the word 'kiss', remembering the events of last month and not wanting to make the conversation more awkward and difficult than it already was. "So it entered you, and it... did its thing."
Amy ran her eyes over her own body, her hands, running her long, fiery hair between her fingers.
"But I still look the same. I haven't changed."
"No, you haven't. There wasn't enough energy to do that on top of what it had to do."
"Do what, Doctor? Stop stalling." Amy snapped.
Still got that temper, then, he realised with wry amusement.
"A regeneration, Amy, isn't cosmetic surgery. We're talking a full DNA rewrite. And regeneration energy is only meant for Time Lords." He paused, letting the words sink in. Now that he knew for sure what had happened, he knew she would be able to work it out for herself.
Amy's eyes widened in realisation. She felt for her chest. Thump-thump-thump-thump. A rhythm of four. Two heartbeats.
"So I'm..." she whispered. The Doctor nodded. "And you... you aren't..."
"Correct, Amelia. I'm not the last Time Lord." he replied in Gallifreyean.
"Oi, that's Time Lady to you," she shot back.
"Scottish accented Gallifreyean. In nine hundred and seven years, I have to admit, that's one I didn't see coming." Unable to stop themselves, both Time Lord and Time Lady burst out laughing. And this time, they didn't stop.
I know I take a slight liberty with canon at the end, but just roll with it (thanks to Marcus S. Lazarus for pointing it out).
Reviews are fantastic.