The watch clicked open.
My heart stopped for a beat. I caught my breath, waiting.
Nothing happened.
I stood alone between the garages, my thumb still on the button, London's almost continuous drizzle falling softly on the concrete.
I let out my breath.
For a moment, I questioned whether I was overthinking it. Whether I'd thought too much and my earlier panic was just paranoia.
I wanted to laugh.
Maybe it was just a broken watch after all. Maybe—
Then my world exploded.
Light burst out of the opened case, it didn't shine outward, but inward strangely, being absorbed through my eyes and skin into my bones and muscles. The yard vanished from my sight. My lungs seized. My knees buckled and I fell to the ground, kneeling—except for my mind there was no ground. I felt like my mind left my body and continued falling.
It felt like I was falling through a tunnel of symbols, circles within circles, lines looping and intersecting in patterns my human brain has never seen before, and yet I recognized anyway. They weren't just abstract shapes; they were sentences, names, poems, equations.
Gallifreyan. The word rolled of my tongue and it made me experience such a relief, like something long buried was finally given air.
The tunnel of symbols twisted. Human memories clashed with Gallifreyan ones, each trying to occupy the same space.
Memories came back from my first engine fix at the garage. The way that gearbox had just… made sense. Like I'd done it a thousand times.
This followed immediately by a Gallifreyan one:
Emergency klaxons. A TARDIS console was sparking and half her systems were offline. My instructor was shouting: "We need someone who can bypass the—"
But I was already fixing it before he could finish the sentence, my hands finding components I'd only read about in class, the connections forming in my mind faster than I could even articulate them. The TARDIS hummed back to life.
Afterward, my instructor had just stared at me. "You've never done that before."
"No, sir."
"But you did it anyway."
"…Yes, sir."
He'd looked troubled. Not impressed. Troubled.
My friend had just laughed. "You're going to be insufferable when we're senior technicians, you know that?"
I hadn't understood what he meant then. It had seemed normal to me—didn't everyone's brain work this way?
The memory faded, but my sudden understanding remained.
All those months as Steven. Every engine, every circuit that made intuitive sense. Understanding technology I'd never touched before.
It wasn't human talent.
It was my gift. Bleeding through the chameleon arch the whole time, trying to express itself through human limitations.
The tunnel of symbols twisted again. A different memory surfaced that belonged neither to Steven nor the Time Lord.
Jonathan Smith.
Oh God.
Oh *god*.
The name hit me harder than anything else in the last few minutes.
I remembered dying.
No, I wasn't remembering it. I was experiencing the *moment* again. That kid's shoulder under my hand as I shoved him to safety, headlights filling up my vision.
Then the impact.
I'd died. I had actually, literally died. And then been… what? Recycled? Reincarnated? Shoved into some new universe with a shiny, brand new Time Lord body and then made to forget?
The thought made my chest tighten. It made my stomach churn.
Here I'd been worrying whether my life as Steven was even real. But even my *other* life is fake. How much of Steven had actually existed? How much of the Time Lord? How much had been created just to give Jonathan's consciousness something to anchor to?
Did it even matter?
I was a dead man walking in someone else's skin, living the life I'd asked for. Piloting a refugee Time Lord's body, pretending to be a human mechanic. And all three of those people were equally real and equally *me*.
It should have been absurd. Laughable, even.
Instead, it felt like standing on the edge of a cliff, staring down into nothing, only seeing an endless void.
How many times could you die before you stopped being *you*?
I didn't know.
And I was terrified to find out.
After this the pain finally arrived.
Every vein felt like it was set on fire. My skull rang with the sound of gears grinding against each other.
I tried to scream and heard three voices at once: a frightened human young man, a middle-aged human man, and a calm, annoyed Gallifreyan technician telling everyone to stop panicking because this was all, theoretically, under control.
And underneath all three: a desperate thought.
'Which one of you is really me?'
The light surged from the watch one last time and then slammed shut.
It felt like minutes, but in reality it was over in seconds.
When I came back to myself, I was already on the ground. I felt the cold, wet concrete under my palms. I smelled the oil and the distant rubbish.
I lay there in the rain, gasping.
Then I felt it.
Ba-dum ba-dum.
Ba-dum ba-dum.
Two rhythms in my chest. Not quite in sync. Overlapping like competing melodies trying to find harmony.
Two hearts.
I really was a Time Lord.
I rolled onto my back and stared at the sky. It was the wrong color. I almost laughed. Of all the detail, that was what I had a problem with.
"Okay," I croaked "Okay. So, that… happened."
The watch was next to me on the pavement. It wasn't glowing anymore. It looked almost ordinary now, even more ordinary than before.
But I no longer heard anything from it.
My memories. My mind. My… species. All back where they belonged.
"I'm a Time Lord," I said aloud, laughing, just to see how it felt.
***
I stayed on the ground until my breathing steadied and the world finally stopped spinning. My human body had been rewritten on the fly; everything ached.
Eventually I pushed myself upright and sat with my back against the garage door.
Memories continued to sort themselves.
Gallifrey. The Academy. The workshops under the citadel where the "real work" was done while the council argued above.
Long nights elbow-deep in broken time machines with other technicians who also prefered elbow grease to glory.
The Time War. I remembered the beginning more clearly than anything else. The first time a colleague didn't come back from a repair mission. The first time a TARDIS came home half-melted and forever broken. The first time the sky over the citadel changed from peaceful orange to enemy fire streaked purple.
And then—the running.
I pressed my hand to my forehead.
"Right," I muttered. "So I'm a refugee from a temporal apocalypse on my third life. Wonderful. "
But.
For the first time since I'd come to this universe, my thoughts were finally fully my own.
I sat there for a long time.
I could have curled up into a ball, screamed to the sky, or tried to pretend I hadn't just changed species in the back yard while raining.
But Time Lords were trained to handle information overload, and I did precisely that: Breathe. Catalog. Prioritize.
Well, except my hands were shaking and my breath was still somewhat ragged and every priority screamed equally loud in my head.
"Focus. You've handled worse. Hadn't I?"
Right. Body first. If I was falling apart physically then nothing else mattered.
I did a quick internal check. Hearts? Present. Breathing? Available. Nice. Vision? Sharper. Hearing—
I winced as a car door was slammed three streets away.
—Yep, definitely sharper.
Second priority: Identity.
This one was harder.
Three lives. One mind.
Jonathan had been kind. Ordinary. He'd died saving someone, which was more than most people managed.
Steven had been… what? A performance? A disguise? Except I remembered Steven's first love, remembered the taste of his mom's terrible cooking, remembered the weight of loneliness in that cramped flat. You couldn't fake feeling that specific. Could you?
And the Time Lord… I barely knew him. A technician who'd fled a war. Someone competent and clever and probably… most likely traumatized in ways I hadn't even begun to process.
Which one was I supposed to *be* now?
That one was harder.
Legally, I was Steven Hale. National Insurance number, job, flat, neighbors who'd notice if I vanished. That identity was still intact— still *useful*, even if it had been manufactured by cosmic bureaucracy.
Historically, I was the Engineer. A junior technician from Gallifrey's Engineering Corps, specializing in TARDIS maintenance. Someone who'd run from a war and chosen to forget rather than keep fighting.
Originally, I was Jonathan Smith. Dead at twenty-nine saving a stranger. Winner of the cosmic lottery. The reason any of this existed at all. Three lives. One body. One very confused consciousness trying to reconcile them.
I closed my eyes and made a decision:
I was all of them. And none of them. I was whoever I chose to be going forward.
The past—all three pasts—had brought me here. But they didn't have to define what came next.
The thought should have been freeing.
It wasn't. Not yet.
But it was a start.
Third priority: situation.
The Doctor was real. He was here. Right now, hunting Autons while the Nestene Consciousness prepared to activate.
And I knew how it ended. I knew Rose would convince him not to blow up the transmitter. They'd stop the invasion. Saving the day.
But I also knew what the show never showed. The people who'd die. The victims the Autons would kill. Even Jackie's going to be in danger.
Could I stop that? *Should* I?
I was a Time Lord now. I understood fixed points, causal loops, the danger of rewriting events just because you knew the script.
Jonathan's memories whispered that this was a TV show, that plot armor would protect the main characters, that everything would work out.
The Engineer's memories countered that this was *real* now, that people would actually die, that I had the knowledge and ability to help.
Steven's memories—manufactured or not—reminded me that Rose and Jackie were his neighbors. His friends.
Could I really stand by and do nothing?
I stood slowly, testing my balance. My legs felt steadier. My mind had gone from the screaming vortex it was moments ago, to something manageable.
I could feel the Doctor's temporal wake. Faint threads of artron energy in the air, leading toward central London. I could follow him. Show up wherever he is right now. Offer my help.
*Hello, yes, you're not the last surving Time Lord. By the way, I used to fix TARDISes for a living.*
I almost laughed.
No. Not yet.
I needed time to process. To figure out who I was before deciding what I was going to do. The Doctor already has his hands full with the Autons, to bother with me trying to learn how to be myself first.
Whoever that was.
I turned away from the Doctor's trail and started walking. Not toward home. That flat belonged to Steven and he might not even exist anymore. Not toward the garage either. I wasn't sure I could face Mickey right now and pretend everything was all right.
Just… walking. Testing this new body. Listening to the double rhythm in my chest. Feeling the rain on my skin that was more resilient than it was an hour ago.
I had time. The Nestene invasion wouldn't activate until tomorrow night at earliest. I could watch. Learn. Decide what what kind of Time Lord I wanted to be before throwing myself into the Doctor's orbit.
I could prepare.
And maybe, just maybe figure out which voice in my head was actually *mine*.