Xxxxx

The Doctor was standing in the console room of Ruth - no, the Doctor's TARDIS, a version of her TARDIS, the same TARDIS at a different moment in their timeline - lost in thought while her other self dealt with Gat. She knew her other self had left her in the TARDIS to keep her away from Gat. She had seen the thought during their conference.

Personally, the Doctor didn't really care.

She was too busy reeling from the discovery she had just made.

Her life…. It was all a lie. How do you cope with that? How do you cope with the knowledge so much of your life has been erased? How could you deal with that? The Doctor didn't know.

The Doctor had always had an odd, faint sense of deja vu, a knowledge she had done something during her time at the Academy, but she had no clear memory of doing it, like reading a book, seeing different parts of the universe and spouting off the facts about them and yet she had never seen them.

Never.

When she had fled Gallifrey for the second time around, the Doctor had planned to steal spaceships and time machines, hoping the lack of use of any Time Lord technology would allow her to blend in with the background, especially as the Time Lords only looked out for signs of their renegades by detecting materialisations on planets; they couldn't do the same with hyperspace shunts, warp drives, and wormholes and expect a Time Lord to travel like that.

It would be a long existence and a fairly boring one, moving from planet to planet using vortex manipulators and Chula time ships and conventional spaceships, but it was keeping her safe and a few steps ahead.

Anything was better than being executed, although after what she had heard, what she'd learnt... the Doctor knew if the Time Lords did execute her, they'd cause a time paradox of unmitigated proportions that even they couldn't mitigate.

In all that time, she had genuinely never imagined, nor suspected this.

Ruth was her. She was one of many incarnations of a life the Doctor had never before even guessed at.

Centuries ago, long before the foundation of the Time Lords, a group of Gallifreyan explorers left Gallifrey and they explored the universe. There was Rassilon, Omega, Artron, and Pandak. They would go on to become the Founders of the Time Lords, and they explored the universe in a starship that used wormholes to travel around. But there were two other Gallifreyans among the crew.

One of them was an unknown to the Doctor, known as Tecteun, and the other was known as a child found on a planet, somewhere out in the universe. Also known as the Timeless Child.

The origin of the Timeless Child was, on the whole, strange.

For years the starship mapped out the cosmos, travelled through wormhole reefs looped through dozens of galaxies, and passed through interdimensional gateways, and time warps which inspired Omega and Rassilon to study the effects of time travel, and many other forms of natural temporal phenomena.

And then they discovered an unusual wormhole on a planet, where there were ruins right beneath it.

Standing underneath the wormhole, was a child.

Alone, the Founders had taken the child with them, and tried to understand their new charge, but it wasn't until they returned home things changed.

The other Founders were intrigued but it was not until their return to Gallifrey, that something happened to the child. She died. She became a whole new person. The other Founders had looked on in shock as the new incarnation of the child recovered slowly.

Fascinated, the other Founders led by Tecteun and Rassilon, began dissecting the child, triggering many regenerations. They experimented relentlessly on the unfortunate kid to discover the secrets of regeneration, of immortality. It took them years, and many of the child's regenerations were lost, but in all of those lives, he still had no choice but to help them. With the first rebirth, he helped them with time travel experiments and once the Time Vortex wormhole was created, a symbol of their supposed power and might, but secretly a sign of the obsessiveness of Omega and Rassilon to master immortality and time travel.

Rassilon saw immortality as a way of ensuring the growth of Gallifrey, but Omega was more pessimistic and believed it to be impossible so believed time travel was more realistic, and that was why Omega kept hounding the child for aid in increasingly advanced experiments he knew instinctively about time travel, which helped them master time travel in the first place.

Time dilation technologies. Easy.

Time corridors. Simple.

Vortex manipulators. Basic.

Transdimensional engineering is simple when you get the hang of it.

Temporal physics, done.

But Tecteun, Rassilon and Artron were still trying to crack regeneration. Finally, they succeeded, and Tecteun and Rassilon experimented on themselves, and they too regenerated. Soon the ruling elite of the Time Lords could regenerate as well.

The Age of the Time Lords had begun.

Now Time Lords could regenerate; a blast of temporal energy, and a person who could have been would have been left behind, fully healthy with new personalities. As the generations passed, and Time Lords and Gallifreyans did away with biological reproduction to ensure natural evolution didn't stop them, everyone became better at regeneration until Time Lords today could move from body to body without any trouble or adverse side effects.

Well that explained a lot, the Doctor had to admit her own regenerations had been nothing but trouble. And painful.

Now she knew why.

She was not from Gallifrey, but from a different realm, one where there was a race capable of perpetual regenerations. All the Gallifreyans did was steal something that didn't belong to themselves, and in typical fashion, they lied to their own people.

But that was not the end of the Timeless Child; while there were still massive gaps in the memories, which meant whatever happened to them to make them forget hadn't happened yet for Ruth's Doctor, which gave the Doctor a number of bad ideas, the child - her - and Tecteun joined to become part of Division, a clandestine Time Lord organisation set up in the aftermath of the Minyos disaster (a disaster manipulated and accelerated by Tecteun, the scientist had wanted the disaster to happen so then they could create an organisation like Division), tasked with shaping each world in the cosmos as TARDIS technology improved, giving them technology and help, but also conducting different activities like assassinations of scientists who got too big for their labcoats, politicians and so on.

Some of the Divisions' activities sickened the Doctor, but they were extremely subtle, she had to admit. And all the time, her other self had been sickened by what they were doing, passing through more lives than they should have done, making the Doctor wonder if the Child - her - had absorbed more time energy than conventional Time Lords, that would let them perpetually regenerate at all.

They tried to leave, after regenerating thousands of times, but Ruth had evaded them with Lee's help. They had arrived on Earth and went in disguise.

The Doctor was still trying to make sense of what she'd seen, but she just couldn't since there were so many chunks still not there. But now she knew where Division was - it stunned the Doctor that Division had created a void ship/station of such power; now she knew how to get to it, she could find it again in her timeline, expose them to Gallifrey, and gather her memories again while the Time Lords sorted out the mess.

Just as she was making up her mind, the Doctor was shaken out of her thoughts when Ruth walked back inside with the rifle. Her expression was grim.

"What happened?" The Doctor asked as Ruth dematerialised the TARDIS.

"Gat's dead," Ruth replied shortly.

"Dead?"

"Yes. She took the rifle and she died because I programmed it to kill the user instead," Ruth speared her with a look as if daring her to comment, but the Doctor shook her head; her brain hurt with the knowledge it had taken in. She also knew her other self had done it to get rid of Gat and put the Judoon off the scent.

But what her other self would do…the Doctor didn't know.

All she knew was one day, Division would capture her, wipe her memories, and arrange for her other self to be given to the Lungburrow family to raise without knowing about their past. But why? What was the point? Why erase their memories in the first place?

From what she knew now, Tecteun and the Other had been close friends. Why would she do this? Had power corrupted her? After peering into her other self's downloaded memories, the Doctor knew the answer was yes. Some of the things the Tecteun of this version of her time were radically different from the Tecteun of old.

That Tecteun had been a scientist, curious about the universe. This Tecteun was all about control and scientifically experimenting with different worlds and galaxies to make them do certain things in a certain way. And if they didn't, then Division would arrange for something nasty to happen, like an intergalactic war crossing close to their world, or something devastating like that.

"I'm taking you back to Gloucester. You can make your own way off world," Ruth said as she guided the TARDIS with a skill the Doctor, sadly, knew would be lost, "I'll drop you at the docks near my flat. How's that?"

"Fine," the Doctor replied. "I promise one day, I'll remember you."

Xxxxx

When she stepped out of the time vortex corridor, the Doctor breathed a sigh of relief as she found herself on the flight deck of her ship. She took her seat, glancing at the TARDIS as she did, wondering how many secrets there were out there, to discover. She had just encountered a secret history of herself she had never imagined, she had discovered the founders of Gallifrey had lied in the most hideous way imaginable, and she now needed to form a plan to take on Division.

But right now, she just wanted to rest.