The Face That Defied Time
One last sunrise. She stepped out of the TARDIS for one last sunrise. This wasn't the end, not really. Other suns would rise, but it wouldn't be her eyes watching them paint the sky orange.
She stands at the precipice of death and rebirth, listening to the tides crash upon the boulders. No one here but her for miles and miles, self-imposed solitude.
It was better this way. Her regenerations were getting more and more violent— there was no one here she could hurt. No Yaz she could hurt.
But the fact remained, she had already hurt her by asking her to leave. She told Yaz she needed to do this part alone. She hated doing this part alone. But if Yaz had stayed— no, it was better this way.
To know Yaz was safe, safe, and alive and will continue to be. That she would have a long, full life, find someone deserving of her love, someone who could love her in all the ways the Doctor could not.
A shudder runs through her body, the biting cold wind from the ocean welcomed against the burn in her veins—soon everything she is will burn away. It's terrifying.
But she will not seek refuge within the TARDIS, allow herself the comfort of the honeycomb walls, or to hear the soothing familiar hum of the brakes with these ears for a final time.
The Doctor wants whoever she's going to become to still have a home to return to, not wander lost on a desolate planet looking for their ‘ghost monument’ when the old girl eventually takes off to heal herself from all the damage the Doctor's regeneration did to her interior.
The Doctor remembers the chaos of her regeneration well. The fear of free falling to earth mere moments after her ‘birth,’ that she would die even before she got to live. She broke every bone in her body crashing through that train in Sheffield, but thankfully, she had been within the first fifteen hours of her regeneration.
The fall was also what had brought the fam into her life, and she wouldn't change that for the world.
“One more lifetime won't kill anyone except me.” Suddenly, her previous self's words rang in her head from when he decided to let her exist. Little did he know this lifetime would kill everything they thought they knew about themselves and their past. The Timeless Child. The blueprint for the Time Lords. Tecteun's experiment.
She thinks of the fob watch hidden deep within the TARDIS, somewhere she can never find. She's afraid of what she will find. How many lifetimes, how many faces, how many lies? Was this even truly the first time she had learned of her origins? Tecteun must have erased her memories for a reason.
There is no time for these questions. She needs more time. But a part of her is almost relieved to regenerate. To become someone else. To not bear the burden of the universe any longer.
Maybe the next one would find the answers. Ask the TARDIS to give the fob watch back and confront their past. It's up to them now. She can rest.
“Right, then. Doctor, whoever I'm about to be.” A small smile plays on her lips. “Tag... you're it.”
A phoenix rising from the ashes—it's as beautiful as it is tragic. With a cry, her head upturned and arms outstretched, blinding regeneration energy filled the space.
Golden lightning in the sky. The Doctor's regeneration energy had never taken on the form of a silent thunderstorm. It had played on her fingers like a fire in the degeneration chamber, now it coiled like static in the pits of her stomach, igniting her entire being.
When the lightning faded and the pain reduced to a dull ache, she stared at her hands, turning them, inspecting them, and a couple of confused blinks later let them drop at her sides. They didn't look any different. They didn't feel any different.
She ran her tongue across her top teeth. Same tongue. Same teeth.
Her face scrunched. She realized what the problem was. She didn't feel any different.
“This is…” Same voice, the Yorkshire lilt. “Impossible.”
She's impossible.
She ran inside the TARDIS, hair swept under her chin in all too familiar motion. Her grey coat flowed behind her—not regeneration-burned, not raggedy, but somehow crisp on her back… newer?
That's not right. Nothing about this was right.
The old girl greeted her with a cheerful hum that she was oblivious to in her panic, sliding the console scanner over to stare at her reflection, just as she had the first time before. The same reflection stared back at her.
In this game of tag, she was it. Again. Or had her turn just not finished yet?