When the Doctor read the same paragraph five times and still didn't know what it said, he decided he'd had enough.

He'd regenerated. He'd sworn he wouldn't get depressed about it, but here he was, unable to finish his book no matter how hard he concentrated. He set it on the table, briefly regretting his decision to turn down Grace's offer, even though he knew he'd make the same choice a million times over. Would make? He already had, a million times over.

Over a thousand years. One of his human companions (he couldn't remember who) had asked him once what it was like to live a thousand years. He'd been flippant, saying he'd know when he got there. He should have said it was hard on the memory, for it was. Not that he couldn't remember things, but everything was running together, like a dream about a waterfall rushing faster and faster.

Less than a day before, he'd regenerated for the seventh time. Eight bodies – one born, the others...each blooming and growing from the one before, that original body remolded again and again, the cells rearranged to save his life and clear away some mortal wound which would have killed someone else. He only had five regenerations left. He was starting to realize why the Time Lords limited themselves to twelve – any more, and a person just couldn't stand it.

Morosely, he stood in front of a dusty mirror in the console room, looking again at this stranger before him. Who was he? Just another face, another persona. Each regeneration of a Time Lord was a different side of a multi-faceted gem, and now it was his turn to shine. His seventh self was still thrashing inside him in a fever, trying to get off the operating table, trying to live. But he hadn't made it. He had died, and a new self had been born, a new rearrangement of the brain cells.

A body, K'Anpo once told him, was simply a projection, an extension, into the physical plane. It was nothing more than an image representing the vast, impossibly complex soul inside it. People of other species got older, he'd pointed out, their bodies growing and changing, first becoming stronger and then frailer over the years. And the person within the body also changed as they left childhood behind and learned new things. Everyone changed.

It was just that Time Lords changed suddenly instead of gradually, and grew older in a much different way. And if the projection took a new shape, and different aspects of the person were stirred to the surface, the soul inside was still the same, and the light in the eyes could shine just as brightly.

He was still the Doctor.

He looked at his new face, his new projection, and turned his head side to side in a so-so manner. He was rather handsome, if he did say so himself. He was taller, his dress sense was still conservative, his dark hair was shoulder-length and wavy, his eyes had darkened slightly. He thought briefly about his seventh self, about the mysteriousness he liked to blindside people with, and the plans and schemes he'd been making, and he shuddered.

It always happened this way. After every regeneration, he soon looked back on his previous self and wondered what he'd been thinking, like an older man looking back on days of youth and asking, "Just who was that, and why did I do what I did?"

The Doctor shrugged it off. After all the years, all the life and death, all the friends come and gone, he'd long ago learned to let go, that every closed door opened another. That was why he hadn't dwelt too long on not staying with Grace. He knew where his hearts were.

They were in a place which knew no boundaries.

The TARDIS was his home, and all of time and space was his to see. Each year, he'd lived and learned more than any of his fellow Time Lords would in a lifetime, no matter how many books they read or treatises they wrote. They still hid safely – stagnant, unreachable, untouchable – behind Gallifrey's impregnable barrier.

But it was a trade-off, this eccentric lifestyle of his. His life would be shorter. Over half his regenerations – in only a fraction of his natural life span – were gone, because of the adventures he kept finding himself in, because he just couldn't bear to stand by and watch people suffer when there was something he could do. At this rate, he would die a young man. Die having lived.

He shrugged that off, too. He'd also learned long ago that life was just one paradox after another, and insane asylums were filled to the brim with people who tried to figure them out.

He went to the console and scanned for the nearest uninhabited hospitable planet. He hadn't moved too far from Earth, and had drifted only a couple of centuries into the future. He needed to meditate and slow his metabolism after his regeneration, and for once, he didn't want to be cooped up in the Zero Room. Or did he have the Zero Room any more? He couldn't remember. It didn't matter. He needed some open space, some sunshine, and some quiet. For a little while.

 

Sweating, True looked out of the transrover's cab over the hills around them, and the stretch of mountains which curved to the north, into her field of vision. She knew if she followed the line of mountains back with her eyes, she'd see the range sweep behind them. But she didn't look. She never wanted to see those mountains again. Not after being trapped in them all winter, freezing, starving, and bickering.

All those months of cold, praying and offering anything for some warmth, and now she was sweating bullets. The transrover's air conditioner had broken – ironically, it was the months of freezing temperatures which had damaged it – and Dad hadn't had time to fix it because there was always something more important to do. And they couldn't go fast enough to make a breeze because most people walked.

But she'd finally given in to her tired feet and hopped up next to her dad, because the dunerail was already occupied, and Alonzo was scouting ahead with the ATV. Not because he really needed to, but probably just so he could feel wind on his face. She sighed. "Dad, if you don't fix the air conditioner tonight, I will."

John Danziger glanced sideways at his ten-year-old daughter – almost eleven, now – with a wry smile. He knew she wasn't kidding. "You don't have to worry, pal. It's first on my list after supper, or someone else will be driving this thing tomorrow. You'll still help me, right?"

"Adair said we were resting tomorrow."

"Oh yeah?" He looked at her again. "Good. We could suuuure use it. And her name's Devon."

"You call her Adair."

"Yeah, but somehow, it just doesn't sound right comin' from you." He keyed his gear for voice, leaving it draped around his neck. "Hey, Adair, we get to sleep in tomorrow? That's what True said."

He could see Devon about 50 yards ahead. He saw her key her own gear while agreeing with Yale about something, then heard her voice in his ears. "Yes, that's what you wanted, wasn't it?"

"Well, yeah...sure. I guess. Are we stoppin' on my account?"

"True told me you needed a day to make some repairs to the transrover."

Danziger's eyes found True staring straight ahead, biting both her lips.

"She did, huh?"

"Yes, she did."

"Well, there is some work I could do on it, so far as it goes. But my daughter doesn't always quite live up to her name."

"It's all right, John." Devon traded a tired smile with Yale, who was listening on his own gear. "I think we were going to take a day off anyway. I'm pretty sure we'll be hitting a stream before nightfall."

"All right. Danziger out."

He looked at True again, who was busy examining her hands in her lap. He just shook his head. What, oh what, could he possibly say?

Yale was laughing lightly in a way which was downright infectious. "I sometimes pity John for having such a spirited girl on his hands," he said. As always, he made Devon smile, made the load on her back only a fraction of what it could have been.

"Listen," he said. "You're on the roster for making dinner tonight. Why don't I take it? You stayed up half the night poring over survey maps."

"Yale, I-"

"And I know you're going to do the same again tonight, because you want to make sure we aren't delayed another four months somewhere."

Devon tried to protest again, then realized Yale was correct. She was exhausted. And he knew perfectly well it had been much more than half the night. "Thank you, Yale. I could use it."

She squeezed his arm to let him know she appreciated him, and wondered again what she would do without him. Others she had known, even sometimes Commander O'Neill, had looked at Yale as a necessary burden – a good tutor, but someone who would just take up space and be an extra mouth to feed beyond that. The truth was, he was an anchor in her topsy-turvy world, and had been for almost two decades. Especially since O'Neill's death, when the universe had ripped away her other anchor, barely two days after the crash.

Only Yale knew how hard she'd cried. Only Yale knew how close she'd come to despair that night, and how she'd been so ashamed of herself for feeling that way. That night, before the Terrians had taken Uly, she'd felt eerily like Commander O'Neill himself was telling her to get her ass up and take care of her son and take care of herself and stop worrying about him. And she had so desperately wanted to believe it was really him talking to her.

And then, by a miracle, Broderick O'Neill came back.

And then he'd been ripped away again. Her only consolation was that the second time, he'd known how good a friend he'd been to her. She'd made it a point to tell him, terrified of that God-awful pit in her soul which came from losing a friend without ever telling him what he meant. He'd brushed her off, as afraid of deep emotions as she was sometimes, but she'd planted herself squarely in front of him and made him listen. And it was a damned good thing she had.

She glanced back to the transrover at John Danziger, the man who had become, despite herself, another anchor time and again. An anchor which sometimes pulled a little too hard, but an anchor nevertheless. At the moment, he was waving his right arm in a circle, evidently emphasizing some finer point of his lecture to True.

Boy, did she know what it was like being a parent.

Her own nine-year-old child, Ulysses, was walking along, carrying that staff he'd made, with the ribbon tied to it in a way which seemed important, symbolic. It was the first time in his life that he hadn't really talked with her about something he'd made and obviously cared for. He wasn't being secretive about it. It was just...personal, somehow. He'd just made it one day, and that was that. And he hadn't excitedly run to her to show off what he'd made, like he normally would have.

Devon had never told anyone, even Yale, about the Ulysses she'd met in her dreams, a young man from the future. It was only a possible future, but still, she knew as he got older, as he became his own person and claimed his own life, he would tell her less and less. And some things, as a woman teaching a boy, she wouldn't be able to help him with at all. He would probably turn to Yale more and more if she didn't get him a father. Not that there was anything wrong with Yale. She just really wished she could find a father for her son.

And a man for herself.

Besides, Uly didn't just need help and guidance to be a man someday. No, as if that wasn't enough, he was a link between two entire species who would be sharing a planet. And whether that planet's living ecosystem accepted them or not, for now at least, depended entirely upon him. Hopefully, other children on the colony ship could become links, too. But Alonzo, translating as best he could, had repeatedly called Uly the link.

Not a link. The link.

Devon secretly wondered if the Terrians had cured Uly of the syndrome only because he was their link, and whether they would do the same for the others when they arrived. She didn't like to think about it.

Regardless of whether there would be others, Uly was the first, and for now, the only. Devon couldn't imagine what pressures and choices lay ahead of him as he paved the way for others...her precious little boy, whom she'd saved by sacrificing one of the biggest personal fortunes in human history. The burden on him would be greater than the one she carried now, trying to get this group safely across a continent.

She took little comfort that he apparently did not share her worries. He was too young to know the magnitude of all that had happened lately, which was for the best. For now, he just walked along, being a nine-year-old boy.

A nine-year-old boy with the beginnings of a Terrian staff.

She watched briefly as Baines walked past Uly, unshouldering a magpro. He strode up next to the dunerail, driven by Julia, as it rattled along, and tapped Morgan on the shoulder. Morgan was lying back in the front passenger seat as best he could, getting a sunburn which he would no doubt later ask Julia to cure.

"Time's up, Morgan," Baines said. "Here ya go." He handed him the weapon, and Julia stopped so he could get out.

Morgan took one look and groaned softly, his head rolling around. But he took the gun and climbed out of his seat, looking as stiff as he felt. Baines climbed in while Morgan took his turn to guard the tiny caravan from whatever might threaten it. Bess, seeing her husband awake, caught up to walk with him. Magus took her turn at guard duty, relieving Cameron of another magpro.

"Hey, everybody!" Devon heard Alonzo's voice over her gear. "I've found running water and a bee-yoo-tiful place to camp. I will be waiting here for all you slowpokes!"

"Hey 'Lonz, make me a bed so I can crash as soon as I get there?" Danziger asked tiredly.

"Oh, why did he have to say crash?" Morgan whispered to Bess, shaking his head.

"How long until we reach you, Alonzo?" Devon asked.

"You should be here in about two hours. I'm starting a simple transmit for you to home in on."

"We'll do that," she answered.