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Nanogenes are more trouble than they’re worth. That was what the Doctor reminded himself, the first and every time he had sustained an injury on Trenzalore.
Most of the humans on Trenzalore were happy to receive healthcare from robots they never had to think about, and ordinarily, the Doctor would be too. However, the nanogenes that filled the atmosphere in the town called Christmas were proprietary to the Church of the Papal Mainframe. Even if he didn’t have the rarest DNA in the universe he’d be dead before paying a genetic tithe. The fine print almost always gives them the right to track people and synthesize their DNA.
So when injured from his unending battle with seemingly the concept of evil itself he left nanogenes for the humans and healed the old-fashioned way. The really old fashion way. He was out of regenerations and had used up much of his remaining regeneration energy on any cut and scrape on any person he thought deserved it. Whether it was out of kindness or another facet of his god complex he wasn’t sure.
The lack of regeneration energy doesn’t stop the cells from trying to regenerate. In the same way, pain is an indicator for the human nervous system to flood the area with white blood cells, pain triggers a Time Lord’s body to flood with regeneration energy.
While small nicks and scrapes would still be healed by normal processes of cell regeneration, major tissue damage was a different story. Regeneration doesn’t just heal damaged cells. It completely rewrites them. If the injury is bad enough regeneration kills every cell in the affected area, healthy or otherwise to completely rewrite them. With enough leftover regeneration energy, the injuries will still heal. Without it, the tissue decays unless the neural pathway is blocked from trying to continue to regenerate.
Before the Time Lords figured out a solution to regeneration injuries they had called the phenomena something to the effect of “coffin nails.” The necrosis that took hold when a Time Lord could no longer heal oneself.
The solution they did come up with was a permanent chip in the brain to block the synaptic connections and interrupt the nervous signals triggering regeneration. Every time a time lord was injured the chip suppressed the regenerative process long enough for the injury to heal by normal cellular regeneration.
This would have worked just fine, and the doctor even knew how to make the chip. But on a locked-down planet with limited supply access and no naturally occurring silicon, this was easier said than done.
Which is how he finds himself where he is now. Synthesizing opiates from poppies in a confessional. That was one of his first improvements to the church upon moving in. The confessional, not the opiates. The townspeople had long since lost any attachment to earth religions so no one noticed when it vanished under a perception filter and got a teensiest bit bigger on the inside.
On the inside, it was now a 5x5 meter square room with a pitched ceiling that the doctor used as a lab space and kept experiments, weapons mainly, for the town’s people to use against invaders in the event of his death.
Not all of what he had produced in the lab came with warlike connotations. The doctor had developed a stockpile of penicillin, aspirin, a silphium concentrate to induce abortion, and anything else he could synthesize from nature as a backstop for the town if the planet’s life support systems begin to fail.
Not all of it went to the stockpile. The nanogenes kept the people of Christmas healthy but they were just a way of keeping meat fresh and that wasn’t the only reason people sought out a doctor.
Colony planets with lower populations often had restrictions to access birth control.
The first time a woman approached him about ending a pregnancy he refused her. That was decades ago now. She had been terrified of the tricks her mind had played on her after the birth of her first child. The Doctor offered instead to help her through the pregnancy and help support her when the child was born. Her son had since grown up and trained as a midwife but moved away from Christmas to another corner of Trenzalore when the extraterrestrial threat became too much for his own growing family.
The second time the Doctor was approached to help in that area it started a soft knock on the church door while most of the small town was asleep. The doctor opened the door to a girl who couldn’t be more than 14, in an oversized jacket that reminded him so painfully of Ace. With more bravery than the Doctor had ever seen she asked him for help. After this, the doctor never questioned the request again. And he can’t say he tried particularly hard to save the girl’s teacher when the next wave of cybermen descended from the sky.
That wasn’t the only reason to dip into his apothecary. He’d managed to make weak anti-convulsants and anti-emetics to help calm the anxious conscious of town. He also made a fair amount of painkillers. Nanogenes weren’t always the best when it came to chronic illness and cancer so the Doctor did his best to keep those patients comfortable.
He almost wished he was making this particular brew for that reason. He’d been avoiding it. He’d broken his arm hours ago and would be putting off treating it even longer if he felt like the arm could survive it. But regeneration had started to kick in and he knew it would soon be too late. He had to block neurological signals trying to induce regeneration before it killed the tissue.
How do you block neurological signals, with no access to medicine and no way to create the tech you’d need? The Doctor did his best to avoid finding out the answer. As the years passed he got predictably reckless. Towards the end of his first century on Trenzalore he was shot in the shoulder by a human trying to help him fight the Daleks. When the dust had settled he went back to the church, bit down on a rag, and dug the bullet out. The wound glowed faintly with regeneration energy and then stopped. Within days the Doctor was in Agony struck with lightning-like pain intermittently as his body tried desperately to heal itself. He also noticed the flesh around the wound begin to blacken.
He had to try something to stop the nervous response from killing the tissue or he would go septic. And as much as he resented the only idea he had he had to try something. And after all, that was how painkillers worked.
The laudanum had worked. Not only did the pain stop but the tissue death was halted. It had worked the first time, anyway. Low doses under the tongue for 2 days and the tissue death stopped.
About 70 years after the bullet wound the Doctor found himself hung by his skin from a meat hook courtesy of the Sontarins.
Nothing vital punctured and the bleeding staunched by his body relaying to his non-dominant circulatory system.
After defeating the Sontarans he limped as far as he could toward home and nearly crawled the last 15 feet into the confessional.
It took weeks of increasing the dose for his body to stop trying to regenerate.
It was the injury after, that made him try something stronger. A broken orbital bone threatening his brain tissue and already taking a scrape out of the vision in his left eye. Trying to save oneself from brain damage with heroin felt like using a knife to plug a bullet hole. He looked for other answers: steroids, sonic therapy, electric shock. They were time-wasting experiments that led to him being forced to cut off his own pinky toe. So he was stuck with this: zombie or junkie? He resented his arrogance that they had once seemed synonymous and that he once felt exempt from either category.
He would never do the stuff recreationally. It made him feel like shit, having to be on it for weeks to suppress the regeneration while the wound heals enough naturally to stop it altogether. Otherwise, he’d be rotting from the inside out. And after all of that, the detox was always enough to make him question the amount of effort he was putting into staying alive.
It didn’t make him feel the way it made humans feel, At least he didn’t think it did. It kept him in a syrupy fog devoid of emotion. And the occasions when he had to defend Christmas in this condition seemed to correlate to more injured humans.
He’d hoped to not have to use the drugs this time. He’d broken his wrist. He’d had plenty of bone breaks that didn’t trigger the regeneration and this one had seemed mild enough. Until hours after the break when the doctor found himself convulsing and sick. His nervous system was out of gas and still trying to get the ignition to turn over.
The distillation was ready and the doctor was preparing to dose. Tying off the circulation above the elbow and pulling one of six glass syringes he’d managed to come across on Trenzalore out of an autoclave.
After shooting up he left the confessional and sat down in the rectory with one of his earliest diaries from his time on the planet. These numb moments were one of the few times he dared to remember what he couldn’t let himself forget.
Weeping Angels took five children from the lower schoolhouse today. heads down while playing thumbs-up like some sort of prank.
The schoolmistress had only been gone for a second and has since been inconsolable with guilt.
The angels had already been gone by the time I got to the school and when I got back to the church I cried thinking about Clara. About how she had asked to stay, how she likely would have become a teacher here as well, and the pain it would cause her to lose a student.
He missed her. He missed her coffee-brown eyes that were lively and complex as the drink itself. He missed how deeply she loved and cared and did everything the right way. And yes he also missed her tight skirts. He’d been lonely on Trenzalore which was saying something for someone who’s the last of their kind.
He had long believed that pursuing physical relationships with humans would be an act of cruelty. At this explanation, River, an obvious exception to this rule had questioned whether that cruelty was really towards himself.
He was peeled out of this thought by a sound he thought he would never hear again. The beautiful cosmic scraping of the tardis. He stood up immediately but almost fell backward whether it was a head rush or because he was high on smack didn’t concern him. The Tardis has returned to him with a Time Lord medicine and the tools to make a proper chip to halt regeneration.
Racing outside he sees it. A blue obelisk monument to the universe’s curiosities. What he didn’t expect to see was an earth school teacher in the same thin clothes he’d sent her off in. It must have been only minutes for her.
After their greetings and grievances were aired he led Clara inside the tardis. Stepping into the machine he felt more energy than he had in years. The plastic quality to his vision was fading and he was sobering up faster than he would have in Trenzalore’s atmosphere. Clever Time Lords! Even proximity to the tardis would help him heal. He would still need the chip, mind, but exposure to the rift energy would help stabilize him.
It was alarming how comfortably he slipped back into the performance he put on for Clara. Quick, smart, competitive. He thought that her presence was making him feel better too. He got to regale her with centuries of stories, although he highly edited. Telling her nothing about his injuries or how he came to be the town’s chemist. She got to update him on roughly 30 seconds. They spent the next hour trailing through tardis corridors collecting supplies for the church and the town.
The tardis was able to produce the chip to keep stave off regeneration in less than an hour and he managed to install it with a special shunt planted briefly into the base of the skull. He had sent Clara to grab Good Night Moon for the Christmas Library to get her out of the room for the procedure.
He was free. Finally. No more brainless hours, no more dope-sickness, he could just heal. His body immediately felt as if it was in one piece again and not shattered from attacking itself. He was holding back tears as Clara walked back into the console room with a book and a larger version printed in Braille— both Goodnight Moon.
“You alright, doctor?” Clara’s bright tone was nearly a song.
“Perfect now, I have you back,” the doctor said, just then realizing just how much he meant it. At that moment he also realized that he looked older than Clara now. Not too much older, just enough that the façade had faded. He wondered if Clara had thought he looked frail, Walking with a cane now after so many injuries. He felt ice sparkle through his hearts at the idea. It could never go back to the way it was. Their story had ended. He was going to have to send her away again. He would show her what he was fighting for first. He would try to make this feel real to her in any way he could.
He led her back to the church and put the kettle on. They took their tea to the roof and were fighting yawns as he showed Clara her first sunrise on Trenzalore. He told her that he planned to stay in the town called Christmas, and planned to die there.
Wordlessly they took to the Doctor’s bed. sleeping innocently at first and then less innocently, and less wordlessly they made what they agreed was a mutually cruel and worthy choice.
When he sent her away the next day, he felt like he had never put the chip in at all. Physically, he was fine but he felt as if a black hole had been opened between his hearts and that somehow he was once again rotting from the inside.
He went through the motions for the rest of the day. He helped the people of Christmas fix equipment, He taught the last hour of the day at the secondary school when the teacher had an opportunity to call a friend off-planet. He’d finally managed to compound lithium salts and was looking forward to being able to help a young woman in the town with whispers in her ears and creeping figures around her line of vision.
When he got back to the church Clara’s absence settled over him like a shroud. He didn’t regret saving her, he lied to himself. It was better that she got to live on without him, he thought, inhaling her scent off his pillow.
Better now that she was just a memory. He mused, approaching the confessional.
And easier, now that he knew how to take the emotion out of a memory.