The Time of Change

Times Change

Clara stares at me with wide eyes, frightfully wide eyes. Like she's just been electrically shocked, or seen the ghost of a loved one. That second one might be a bit closer to the truth. I tug on the hem of my jacket, in all its tweed glory. My fingers no longer ache when I move them. The joints are no longer stiff and immobile. I no longer feel the folds of skin beneath my sleeves and my shirt. When I rub my hands together habitually, I no longer feel the unevenness of my aging skin, the bumps and marks and scars. The breaths that enter and leave my lungs are no longer a laboring process for me. I can do it with an unprecedented ease that I have been so unused to for so very long. My eyes observe everything around me clearly, not with a blurred image swimming before me -- I never did remember to bring her glasses out of the TARDIS to help me see better, you see.

"Hello," I greet her with a little smile, my hand rising to give the tiniest of waves. Clara seems to notice that her arms are somewhat extended out to her sides and lowers them. Her face softens from consternation to interest, mild concern. I watch as her mouth falls marginally agape and her eyes peruse my form, taking in every inch of me. I let her. It's the least I can do, right now. "You're young again," Clara quips softly, happily. My hearts lurch. "You're okay. You didn't even change your face."

I give an excited chuckle, waltzing toward her with light steps. She grins at me. "It's started," I say. I stroll around the panel, touching knobs here and there but not really doing anything. Out of the corner of my eye I see Clara's face fall ever so slightly, but that hope in her eyes doesn't quite die. Not right away. "I can't stop it now," I go on, and I slap the button to turn on the Scanner. It buzzes to life overtop me, showing Christmas around us. I try not to feel anything, try not to feel felonious and remember that this is for their own good, it's for them. I can't possibly stay here, no matter how badly I wish I could, because then I'd be culpable, liable for what happens here when this damned golden light overtakes me. And I try not to think about the emotions that went violently circling through my head when I realized I wasn't dying. I try not to think about the fact that I wanted to die, so, so badly, because living is so, so lonely, but I'm not thinking about it. I'm not thinking about it.

"This is just the reset," I tell Clara with something along the lines of diluted ecstasy in my tone. I dissimulate these demented thoughts in my head quite well, even now. "A whole new regeneration cycle. Ooh," I add, spotting a bowl on the console. I remember now, this is where I left it! I pick one of the fish fingers out of the little ceramic bowl and drench it in custard, and now positively inhale it. Some distant part of me is ravenous, I suppose, though I don't necessarily feel it. I put the bowl up to my lips and sip the thick substance, gulping a bit more loudly than I meant to. When I set the bowl back down on the controls, I can sense something like a thin yellow mustache on my upper lip, and suddenly my hearts nearly implode with the criticality I crave to have her here to wipe it away with her soft touch and sweet, shy smile. I rub my coat sleeve across my mouth in an attempt to scrub those kinds of thoughts from myself, to stop them from coming. There is now a gelatinous yellow streak on the fabric of my jacket.

I comment to Clara as I take another trip around the circumference of the console, "Taking a bit longer. Just breaking it in. Oh! Gah..." I grunt, clutching at my side as a white hot needle of pain pokes there near where my kidney should be. With my other hand, I shove the temporal flux out of its "parked" position, and the TARDIS's engines groan around us. Such a beautiful old sound, that. Clara's eyes follow me as I straighten back up, I can feel them. Discomfort is blossoming all across me, replacing the blood in my veins with rocks, or Jell-O. I don't remember when I had that, or why, but I do remember that it was the most mind-boggling thing I've ever eaten. Both solid and liquid simultaneously. Ingenious.

Maybe a third of me screams that it was her, but I know it wasn't. Couldn't have been. Well, maybe. I don't know anymore, and that's what hurts the most. The things that are most important to me, to this soul in my body, I can't seem to remember. I can recall every mistake I've ever made, all the people I've hurt and planets I've saved or destroyed, each disaster and close-call I've ever had, but I can't remember every moment of my life with her. And that's the one thing I've always wanted. To remember her, and only her, because her memories fill me with a warmth that no accomplishments or anything else can ever even try to compete with. The pain that accompanies that intense happiness is something I can live with, if only I just get to see her face for a moment, a fraction of a moment, inside my head. And I've gone through periods where I didn't want to think about her, I didn't even want to let her name form in my mind, but why? Because it hurt? When did I become so weak? A little pain is nothing to me. It's the things that hurt us the most that are worth fighting for, and if anything was worth the fight, it's any memory of her I can scavenge, anything I can save from the blank mist of forgetfulness. And I wasn't strong enough to fight for her then, so I'm fighting for her now. As this awful tingling envelopes me and consumes my body, I'll remember her face and her voice and her hair and her skin and the way her laugh sounded and the way her eyes were impossibly more stunning than any constellation I'd ever seen and how her lips felt on mine and how her hand felt when it grabbed my fingers, and I'll be home again.

"It all just disappears, doesn't it?" I ask Clara, my breathing heavy. I thought I was finished with this difficulty. I blink a bit. "Everything you are, gone in a moment. Like breath on a mirror." I move my hand dreamily in front of me, as if I'm wiping something out of the air with the gentle movement. Clara's shining eyes follow me and I vainly attempt to stifle my manically festering sense of panic, of crippling dereliction. "Any moment now," I whisper, "he's a-coming."

"Who?" Clara demands, and her voice cracks up an octave and I have to force myself not to draw back. "Who's coming?"

I shake my head and smile at her, hoping she'll perceive me to be in a sort of stupor-like excitement. "The Doctor." My answer comes out as a simple statement, sounding like she should've known it all along and it was silly to ask, but hopefully it doesn't sound condescending. "But you," exclaims Clara as a tear falls from her eye and drips down her cheek. She steps toward me with desperation, her hand reaching out to touch me but jerking back, unsure. When she speaks again, her voice is a breath of wind. "You are the Doctor."

I feel another sharp, digging, excruciating stab of pain, this time in my chest. It blooms across like blood creating a crimson flower on my shirt, but I know I'm not bleeding. I've always wondered why pain is described as "hot," though. Why hot? Why can't it be frozen? Cold has a tendency to paralyze anyone to their absolute core; why is it that when there's pain, it's automatically hot? Because of blood? It's searing, I'll admit, but it's paralytic, immobilizing, inescapable. Like being caught in an ice storm would be. Perhaps it's just one of the many, many things I will never understand.

"Yep," I grunt out in response to Clara. "And I always will be." I glance down at my hands, the left scrabbling at my stomach and the right clinging to the console for support. They've begun to glow, yet they're the only things on me that don't hurt currently. Quite a stark difference from the last regeneration, I recognize dimly. Wasn't it my hands that hurt first, then?

I think it was.

Probably.

But does it matter, Doctor? Regardless of how it was then, your hands are glowing, and you're going to change. Soon.

But I don't want to go.

Oh, shut up, you. No one asked for that old line of yours.

And besides. You've already gone.

They're right. It's my turn.

Never be cruel or cowardly.

Never give up.

Never give in.

"But times change." I hold my hand out in front of me, staring at it apprehensively. My voice sounds constricted. "And so must I."

Giggling. I hear giggling. I look at Clara, and she glares back at me, angry and upset and fearful. But she's not smiling, and certainly not laughing. So who am I hearing? Who could possibly have the ability to laugh right now? I listen closer, deciphering the sound. A girl's, definitely. One of my hearts flutters violently against the other, and very, very slowly, achingly slowly, I turn my head to the ramp behind me. The hand that was holding the console slips to my side as a flash of light brown, curly hair on top of a thin form flits past my line of vision.