When he wakes, he’s lying on a bed somewhere.
And she’s watching him.
Not Watching him, because that’s his job, or used to be, until he was told how useless he was at it. Just watching. With her head tipped slightly to one side and her eyes filled with disconcerting and distant consideration.
He’d thought he was dead. But he clearly wasn’t. Not just because she was there, with her cascade of cobalt hair and the face with which she’d lied to him while his life’s blood had stained the floor. He knew he wasn’t dead because he could feel the echoed thump of one heart after the other, pounding inside his chest.
Two hearts.
Damn.
The Scholar sat up slowly, feeling every shivering ache of a body that had twisted and shifted and changed. His father had lied to him. He’d told him that his human heritage would deny him the privileges of his alien one. He’d been born with only one heart, and it wouldn’t matter what he did to compensate for the fact, that would still be all he’d ever have. One heart, one life, and no expectations. Except one.
He’d expected to die and he hadn’t.
He’d simply regenerated.
“Are you done?” Illyria asked, tilting her head the other way so as to observe him better. The Scholar shook his head, climbing to his feet and stumbling a little as he made his way to a nearby mirror. He had to know the worst. Had to see what he’d become. Regenerations were never predicatable. Height, weight, colouring – even personality. Everything would have changed.
When he got there, he found the face of Wesley Wyndam-Pryce staring out at him from the glass.
“What?” he questioned, reaching to touch the impossible image. That wasn’t possible. “No. I can’t … good lord!”
Even his voice was the same. He reached to touch his face, seeing his hand trace its path in the mirror, finding familiar curves under familiar fingers. But it wasn’t possible. He’d died. He’d felt the end come. Had reached, heart and soul, for the illusion of a love he’d never have …
… and woken with two hearts beating in his breast, a dead god watching him and his own face staring out of regenerated flesh.
“What have you done?” he demanded, swinging round to glare at her, anchoring his bewilderment in the accusation. “What did you do?”
“I have done nothing.” She sounded confused. “I wished to do many things. Tear down the world. Kill everything and everyone because they were not you. I thought you’d left me. I went into battle and there was much death. But at the end of it, I felt you call to me and I came here. To where I’d brought you. I have done nothing. But you have wakened from the darkness, and are no longer human. Like me. But not like me.”
“I am nothing like you,” he declared, swinging back to reaffirm the impossibility of his existence. “And I have never been human. Not entirely, anyway. My mother was. But my father …” He paused to think about that. About the savage unholy glee he’d felt when the Watcher had called to tell him they were the only ones left. He’d outlived his father. The half breed had survived, where the true lords of time could not.
And not even the realisation that he’d probably lived because he wasn’t worth bothering with had dampened that sense of fierce exultation.
He put out his hand and touched the glass. This wasn’t Illyria's doing. She didn’t have the power to call the dead back to life. This – this – had to be his mother’s gift. He had come into his father’s legacy, yet somehow remained entirely himself.
“My father was a Time Lord,” he announced, turning back to where a creature as old as his father stood watching him. “Apparently, so am I.”