CHAPTER THREE: REGENERATION

xxxMARTHAxxx 

Three days later Jack was using Martha’s mobile to talk to one of his team members from Torchwood. Martha recognised Ianto Jones’ voice from across the room. Donna was sitting in a chair near the door of the medical lab biting her nails. She’d been doing that for three days now. Martha was surprised she had any nails left. 

Martha checked Mandy’s vitals for the sixth time in the past hour. She was feeling incredibly guilty for the girl’s accident. She knew Jack was having a worse time of it. He kept excusing himself to do something. A couple minutes later they could hear him ramming his fists into the hardest objects he could. If it hadn’t been for them and their little transport onto the TARDIS Mandy would be fine right now. 

Martha sighed. She and the Doctor had brought her to the medical lab on the TARDIS and ran all the tests they could think of. Mandy was severely broken in many ways. When the cupboard had crushed her against the wall it had shattered three ribs, one of which had punctured her left lung. Her left leg was set; it had been broken in four places. Her wrist was also broken. And if that wasn’t bad enough her left heart had been crushed and ruptured. 

That was the biggest shock for them all. When Martha had listened for her heartbeat she’d discovered that where her heart should be there was no beat. Upon checking the other side she’d found a feint but steady beat. That meant she had two hearts and there was only one reason for that. She’s was a Time Lord, or a Time Lady to be exact. Once that shock had set in for the Doctor he started doing all he could remember from when he’d been on Gallifrey, trying all the old remedies to save her. 

Unfortunately for them both, nothing had worked. The part that worried them most was that she hadn’t woken up since she’d fallen into unconsciousness three days ago. Given the fact she was a Time Lady she should just regenerate but for some reason she hadn’t. The Doctor was pacing over the medical bed grabbing at his hair with one hand. 

“Doctor, maybe you should rest…” 

The Doctor turned to look at Martha and sighed. 

“I can’t just stay here. I can’t watch her die.” 

“But you don’t know that she’s going to die!” 

But Martha couldn’t say that whole heartedly. Mandy wasn’t regenerating, she wasn’t getting better, and she wasn’t waking up. Martha was terrified for the poor girl. She hadn’t been able to start her other heart like she had the Doctor’s one time. One punctured lung, one ruptured heart, three shattered ribs, a major concussion, a dozen other broken bones... The girl would have been dead on impact if she had been human. 

“Don’t I? If she wasn’t going to die she would have regenerated by now,” the Doctor said his eyes tired from unrest. 

Martha stared at him. She knew he was hurting. He’d already lost two women he’d become unwillingly attached to in the past month. He’d rescued this girl and somehow she’d turned out to share the same genetics. She knew the Doctor couldn’t stand sitting around when someone was dying and there was nothing he could do about it. She also knew it was affecting him most because it had happened on his ship. 

“I never even would have known she was from Gallifrey,” the Doctor said resuming his pacing. “I’d have dropped her right back off on Earth and never have thought twice about it.” 

She looked at Donna and tried to get the woman to help her. Donna stared at her and shook her head. Martha knew Donna was just as skeptical that the girl would live as the Doctor. Martha couldn’t give up that easily though. She’d become a doctor for a reason. She’d seen millions of people suffering in the year that never was. She wasn’t going to lose this girl over a damn shelf, a damn shelf that never would have happened if she’d argued with Jack to just wait for the Doctor to come himself. 

“There’s still a chance she could get better. She hasn’t died. She isn’t getting worse…” 

“But she isn’t getting better either! Martha don’t you understand? When we aren’t regenerating there’s a reason for it. Either we’ve none left or our time in the universe has run its course. Obviously her time is up.” 

“Doctor! You can’t know that! You can’t just give up, run away.” 

“I’ve been running all my long life Martha Jones. So don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do!” He said angrily, he knew he was being childish but he couldn’t help it. 

“You two aren’t helping her any by fighting like cats and dogs you know,” Jack said matter-of-factly. 

Jack snapped the phone shut and tossed it onto an empty chair. He leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. Martha and the Doctor had the sense to look ashamed as they both glanced at the girl. She was strapped to wires and an intravenous tube, an oxygen mask covering her mouth; the TARDIS was doing its best to help her along. 

“I don’t know what to do. I’ve tried everything I could without admitting her to a real hospital. All I can do is keep her hooked up to the intravenous tube and on oxygen,” Martha said quietly. 

For years the Doctor had spent a lot of time alone. Picking up a temporary human companion here and there, even some non-human ones. He’d fallen in love with a couple of his companions. Rose Tyler was one he missed greatly, even still. Her memory was a painful one. Then he had found Martha, the doctor in training, and she had fallen in love with him, a love he couldn’t return. She’d traveled with him a long while, through thick and thin, before she finally walked away. 

Then after she had left he’d come across Donna, a woman he’d met over a year before Martha had left. Donna had become the down-to-Earth sister he needed in his life. Donna was always perky and opinionated and chatty. She was well able to stand up to the Doctor when she saw fit, and if he was honest with himself, that was good for him. Martha and the Doctor looked at Donna who was sitting uncharacteristically quiet. 

Martha walked over to Mandy’s bedside and brushed a stray strand of brown hair out of the girl’s sleeping face. Martha felt helpless. Here she was a well educated, practiced physician and she couldn’t help when it mattered most. 

“Don’t give up,” Martha told her. “There are people that need you to get better. People that love you, waiting for you to come home." 

She prayed that the girl would suddenly get better or regenerate if only to ease the mind of the Doctor who had yet to leave the TARDIS. He’d thought he was all that was left of his kind for hundreds of years before stumbling upon the Master, a Time Lord that’d attempted to take over the universe starting with Earth. The Doctor had hoped to save him, make him better, care for him. But in the end the Master had been shot by a scorned wife and refused to regenerate just to hurt the Doctor. 

The Doctor was left more torn than ever after having to adjust to the idea of being the last of his race yet again. Then he got better upon finding Donna again and having her tag along with him. The Generated Anomaly was the biggest shock of his long life. She was a completely unnatural creation and born to fight. Her natural instinct to use weapons was disastrous. Every instinct rebelled against her very existence, against opening his hearts to that girl. But he had in the end. 

Donna had not only named her, she fought him over his treatment of her, and showed him the truth of her biology. Jenny’s two hearts were another shock; Time Lords started with a single heart, so how could she start with two? In the end, it hadn't mattered. She proved too much like him where he had been unwilling to see how precious she was – until it was too late. She'd stepped between himself and a bullet, ending her too short life. That loss was still too fresh and now he was about to lose another. 

Amandalyn Tate might have been an accidental find, but she was an important one. She was part Time Lady and the only one left. Even if she was only half. But the human side of her seemed to be taking hold and the regeneration process wasn’t activating. Maybe, just like Jenny, she didn’t have the ability. Even the Doctor didn’t know what abilities she could possibly have due to the partial biology. 

“I have to go somewhere, do something…” the Doctor said. 

Martha stared at the Doctor as he paced the floor absently reaching up to rub the top of his head and pulling at his hair. Here he was with the chance of having found someone else from the same place, same time, and same species to live the rest of his life with and he was going to run. Run from fear of being let down. Fear of being alone. Afraid of fear itself. 

“Coward,” she said quietly. 

She saw Donna and Jack look at her sharply. She didn’t let that bother her, nor when the Doctor stopped his pacing to turn his dark eyes on her. 

“What?” He asked looking at her angrily. 

She knew what he became like when angered and pushed too far. It was hard to ignore just how alien the man could become when he became the vengeful angel he hid away. 

“Coward,” she yelled at him. “You know what Doctor? You deserve to be alone. All this time you’ve been taking companions not caring what it is you do to us in the midst of your adventures. You make us care for you and then dump us back home without a second thought. Leaving us wondering, hoping, dreaming…” 

Martha knew she was being unjust. Most of her anger was due to her own personal disappointment at his not returning her feelings. She couldn’t stop now though, not now that she’d started. 

“Here you stand over a young woman who’s never known her true heritage, something you could easily fix, but instead you want to run away. What about her? She’s one of them, of you! A true child of Gallifrey and what’re you going to do? Hop off onto another planet and ignore everything!” 

The Doctor stood there staring at her. He didn’t move, didn’t blink, didn’t breathe. Martha also held her breath. Never before had she ever yelled at the Doctor like this. There had been many times she’d wanted to but hadn’t. That tended to be Donna’s job. Slowly he raised his hand to his face and rubbed it. When he lowered his hand again there was pain written all over it. His deep eyes seemed to go on forever as she looked in them. The depths seemed bottomless and through them she felt such pain and sorrow that she gasped. She wished now she could take back what she’d said. 

“Don’t go,” Martha heard herself plead. “Don’t do this to her. She needs you… and I… I think you need her too.” 

The Doctor sighed and slowly pulled Martha into his arms. He felt Donna and Jack relax a bit. In all his nine hundred and three years he’d never taken such a risk. He’d grown to fear hope. The last time he’d found a Time Lord it had ended painfully for him. Then he lost his daughter, Jenny, before he’d even been able to give her a chance. Now another child of Gallifrey had appeared and he was more afraid than ever. He felt a tear slide down his cheek and reached up to rub it away in confusion. Time Lords didn’t cry, especially not this one. 

Martha looked up in his face and felt her own tears fall. She was sorry she’d yelled at him. She knew how much he was hurting. But she also knew she couldn’t let him just walk away. He needed this girl, no matter what he thought. She blinked as the room began to get brighter. 

“Doctor…” Jack said warningly. 

Martha turned slowly out of his arms to stare at Mandy’s body. It had begun to glow brightly and she felt the Doctor grab her arms and pull her back. Jack reached for Donna as she backed away from the girl’s body. 

“She’s…” Martha started to say. 

“Regenerating,” the Doctor finished. 

The Doctor shoved Martha into Jack’s reaching arm and dashed to the regenerating girl’s side. He placed his fingers to the girl’s temples hoping to help her through the process. He wished he’d had someone to help him through his past nine like this. Her back arched off the table as she gave a shuddering gasp, her mouth and eyes open in shock. The light poured from them. The Doctor felt her resistance and panicked.

“Don’t fight it! You have to regenerate or you’ll die! Don’t fight it!” He told her.

Memories assaulted his mind that he knew weren’t his own. He was seeing Amandalyn’s past, memories lost to her until now. He saw the mountains of Gallifrey as she’d seen them, the sweet red grass blowing in the breeze as a blonde woman walked toward them, the trees with their silver leaves rustled by an invisible wind. The memory changed and he saw Amandalyn wandering through the Shining City’s enormous library running her hands delicately along the spines of the age-old books, she was so small, so delicate, so fragile looking.

Another memory shoved into his consciousness. He saw Amandalyn playing in the old forest just outside the Citadel. Shadows passed overhead and he saw her look up in terror. He watched the Daleks invade Gallifrey as she’d seen them, the start of the war. He watched her run back toward the Citadel for safety. The vision changed and he watched that same woman controlling a flashier model TARDIS, her long blonde hair tumbling in a tangled mess to her waist. He recognised what she was doing as she attached a fob watch to a sort of helmet. He knew, because he’d done it himself. She was rewriting her biology, she was becoming human.

The Doctor watched the woman place her hands on either side of Amandalyn’s face; she couldn’t be more than eight, the age in which they were usually taken to the academy. He saw the girl’s tears as the memories of Gallifrey and the Time War were wiped from her mind. The memories of her family, friends, her planet, her only home. The woman laid the child on the floor where she remained unconscious as tears of her own cascaded down her cheeks.

“You’ll be safe now. We’ll all be safe. We’ll go to Earth, I’ll raise you as a human, no one will know…” the woman whispered.

He watched the woman strap the machine to her head and watched as she screamed through the entire agonising process.

The memory changed again. The Doctor saw a little girl at the dinner table with three others. Amandalyn, he decided. She couldn’t be any more than a couple years older. But she looked so aged, so tired, so… sad. Before he had time to really notice the faces of the others at the table the visions faded away.

The Doctor felt Amandalyn trying to stop the regeneration. She was fighting with everything she had left. He couldn’t let her. He had to make her understand.

“You can’t do that. There is someone out there that loves you. Someone needs you to live. If you stop this you will die. No one will know, you’ll just disappear,” he whispered in her ear hoping it would work.

It did. He felt the shift of the regeneration begin as the flames of energy began trickling out from Amandalyn's body and wrapping itself around her. The Doctor held her head in his hands despite the burning sensation he could feel radiating off from her. The Doctor squeezed his eyes shut as the bright light exploded white hot. She screamed in agony and he gently rubbed his thumbs on her cheeks.

“I know. That’s a girl. It’ll be over soon,” he attempted to soothe.

He could see Jack holding Martha and Donna tightly, staring horrified at the scene unfolding before them. The Doctor held tightly to the girl’s head as she seized from the chemical reconstruction going on inside of her. 

Violent torrents of bio-energy lashed out from every inch of her as she screamed. He could feel her body reconfiguring as muscle and sinew stretched and twisted formless in blood fire. The energy radiated and swelled as she healed. And then she burned. His hands gripped air as every bone crumbled turning to white vapor, every ligament in her body alight and every cell glowed gold and she was just bodiless raw energy. 

Then her body reformed. He felt the changes as bone and muscle formed. Finally the light dimmed. When he opened his eyes he was surprised to find she looked the same, well, not completely. He quickly grabbed a sheet to cover her before the others saw her. Her clothes had disintegrated completely in the regeneration. He’d drawn in the rest of the regenerative power so as to avoid blowing up the TARDIS, which he knew could’ve happened as damaged as she was.

He could tell her physical makeup had matured by maybe two or three years, she looked closer her 21 years. The biggest change was her shape itself. She’d lost most of her weight with this regeneration. The most notable change due to weight loss was the bust and hips, or lack thereof. Her body looked firm and supple, with delicate curves.

Her facial construction hadn’t changed at all; same nose, same chin, same cheekbones, whether she had the same eyes was yet to be seen. Her once shoulder length brown hair was now long and blonde, tumbling to her waist, the same as the woman’s in her memories. He knew she was an inch or two taller and her skin was flawless and smooth. 

She’d rehabilitated closely to fit his own physique. He supposed it was bound to happen. When a Time Lord linked to another during regeneration in most cases the regeneration drew the anatomical genetics of the other to replicate a similar atomy. In other words, she was a female mold of his own current regeneration, only shorter and blonde. He’d have to see what else the regeneration had copied from him. 

Slowly the girl’s body settled back into the table. He saw Jack approach with Martha and Donna and looked at them. They looked her over as they got closer. Jack was the first one to say anything.

“Why does she look so…? You always look different.”

“I think it’s the human part of her. Her human body kept the same basic shape but her Time Lord DNA linked to mine and changed her body to fit mine… That’s what happens when Time Lords link to another during regeneration.”

“No wonder she’s gone all flat, it’s like you put a hole in her,” Donna said. “Hope she doesn’t mind losing all that extra.”

“Will she be alright now?” Martha asked concerned.

“Yes. She’s completely healed.”

“You know… I rather liked her – ”

“Jaaack!” The Doctor warned.

Jack smiled and winked at him, purposely irritating the Doctor, just because he could.

“Just sayin’. She was perfectly built to my tastes. Though she’s pretty tasty this way too. Wonder what she…”

The Doctor pointed a finger at the door.

“You,” he said. “Out!”

XxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXxXx

xxxMANDYxxx

I drifted back to consciousness feeling out of sorts. I felt dizzy, disoriented, and I tried to remember how to move my fingers. Curious, that such a simple task was suddenly so difficult for my nervous system. Curiouser and curiouser, I could remember what a nervous system was but not what it did…

A voice drifted over me, distracting my thought process as I tried to focus on my body’s main functions. Breathe in, breathe out. I felt hands being removed from my face. Hmm, I hadn’t even noticed there were hands on my face…

“You,” I heard above me.” Out!”

Okay, body control one; breathing. Check. Body control two; speech. I groaned. Check. Body control three; motor function. I tried to open my eyes. Not check. I tried again. Finally I got my eyes to open and lifted my hand to my aching head. I brushed my hair