Blearily staring at the countdown timer she'd placed in her Zero Room, the Gallifreyan began to swear fluently and rapidly in exotic tongues she had picked up over the last few hundred years of her travels. She had escaped from devious traps set on a dozen planets, defied certain death at the merciless guns of Daleks, single-handedly prevented the destruction of the universe (only the once, though, unlike some egotistical members of her species), inspired immortal literature, and solved temporal paradoxes that had broken the minds of brilliant scientists.

And like a foolish child, she had overslept the first twelve Sol hours of her most recent regeneration. It was for the best her most recent traveling companion had decided to return to the normal flow of time; Rebecca Lynn would have laughed her right off her own TARDIS. Such disrespect simply would not do towards a Time Lady of Gallifrey.

Not that she particularly liked the grandiose title other women of her people claimed, but it had its uses.

She rubbed her eyes, then stretched, feeling her new body. It didn't feel much different than the last. So far, everything seemed the same. A stab of primal fear shot through the back of her brain. Had her regeneration failed? Was she still trapped in the weakening shell she had chosen to abandon? If that were the case… she began adding elegant Latin oaths to the cursing both mental and spoken. But as she continued to stretch, she realized that she could still feel the energies of the regeneration coursing through her. Her heartbeats were strong and steady, her body eager for action, her mind and spirit both fully refreshed.

She kept a mirror in her Zero Room for occasions like this, when she wanted to get acquainted with the form she would be wearing for the next few hundred years, and perhaps make changes to it if she had time and the inclination. She studied herself carefully: light brown skin, dark hair that was already frizzing, intense brown eyes, taller than the average human woman but on par with her species, a stocky build that could easily be made stronger… but as she looked closely at her new face, tracing every chiseled feature, she realized that something had indeed gone wrong. Somehow, despite the impossibly slim odds, she had regenerated in almost exactly the same form as her previous incarnation.

Damn. And she'd been hoping to be a redhead this time. It had looked so very good on Bess, and she thought it would have been interesting. Bess certainly had been- sharp as a tack, quick as lightning, and more willing to experiment than any of the other lovers she'd had since. Of course, that experience did make it hard to take seriously any literature that went with Bess's public image as a lustless virgin. The last time she'd been on Earth, she'd had to answer some close questions as to why she kept laughing at historical dramas…

She shook herself out of the reverie. Time enough for that and more once she'd done something about this body. As the reflection wavered and changed, her excess energy dissipated and faded away until it was all expended. She knew even without looking that the changes she had tried to make hadn't been completed- hadn't even come close to completion. It was worse than she thought, though, when she took a look. Her hair hadn't lightened at all- if anything, it might have darkened a couple of shades. She did stand a little bit taller, her shoulders were a little bit broader, fierce tattoos no longer marked her skin, and she had managed to alter her face enough that people wouldn't immediately recognize those cheekbones and that chin. But anyone who had seen her in her previous incarnation would almost certainly recognize her now- perhaps they might do a doubletake, or doubt the evidence of their own eyes, but they would know her.

"Damn, damn, damn!" she muttered, making an obscene gesture at her traitorous reflection.

Nothing to be done now, though. She'd have to be more careful next time, that was all. She'd have to have a companion she could trust to awaken her at the proper time. Perhaps returning Rebecca Lynn to her space/time had been a bad idea, but it was either that or let the young human wander loose on a strange planet, and she'd lost a companion that way already.

I warned Amelia to stay in the TARDIS. It's not my fault.

Had she been this bitter about Amelia two regenerations ago, back when it had actually happened? Something in the back of her mind suggested to her that her frustration at this botched regeneration was already starting to affect her personality, but she informed that little voice of wisdom that it could go hang.

Kit would have been by your side…

Kit would have run screaming from the devil's magic.

Then, too, it had been a long time since Kit. A very long time.

This time she let herself fall into the memory.

Stars shone sullenly through the torch smoke that hovered over the roofs of London. Dimly, they cast faint washes of light into the room above the tavern, tracing the shapes of the two bodies twined together in the bed. "Ah, my Muse, again thou crownest me." The man kissed the inside of his lover's thigh. "And again I have plumbed thy depths, and yet remainest thou more a mystery than the night."

The woman hid her smile. "As ever woman was to thee, Kit."

"S'blood, cuttest me to the core! I wonder still how other men find pleasure in this chase!" Kit's gaze grew abstracted, and he reached for an absent quill. None came to hand, and he laughed ruefully. "Aye, thy kiss is the Muse's whisper. Well did I name you my Laurel, for Apollo and his daughters blessed thee at birth."

"Save thy honeyed words for thy work, lest they slip from thy mind," Laurel replied. "Come to my arms and love me as thou didst before."

Tenderly, the man pulled the thin sheet over his lover. "Thou'rt chilled," he murmured.

"Nay, worry not for me," she answered. "As ever, 'tis thy life shouldst fear for. Thou hast angered dangerous men. Thou art king in thy mind, and king of my heart, but to men such as these, thou'rt a pawn to be knocked over with nary a thought."

He laughed. "Sweet chuck, I have dodged them time and again. An I wish it not, they cannot find me." Turning serious in one mercurial switch, he took her hand and pressed it to his lips. "Be not afeared. I have powerful friends."

"Aye, and those I fear the most." Laurel slipped her hand from Kit's. "I have feared, yes, for I dared not tell thee before tonight: I must away and never return to London."

"I'll aid thee!" Kit exclaimed. "There are those who know my works and would shelter thee 'til all was safe for thy return-"

"Nay, dear Kit. The way is clear, but the road only travels one way. I must leave thee forevermore." The rolling cloud cover over the city's haze darkened her face and hid the tears rising in her pale blue eyes, but her voice was thick with those tears, and Kit was not deaf to her pain.

"No, a thousand times no! I will- I must wait for thee as Penelope for Odysseus, as Dido for Aeneas! I could love no other woman but thee, sweet Laurel! All now that I write, I write for thee, o queen of my heart!"

Laurel sighed. "I do not wish this, believe you me. For as you could love no other woman, I can love no other man; in this we are alike. There is no touch, no love, like yours in this world. Would that I could live with thee and be thy love, yet I know in my bones that were I to stay by your side, 'twould mean thy death and mine both. I dare not give thee the false hope of my return, lest I consign thee to Dido's pyre."

He wrapped his arms around her, burying his face in her long, light brown hair. "Then if our fates are set and this be our last night together, let us use it 'til the sunrise." As he spoke, he began to ply her with kisses at the back of her neck, eliciting small moans from her until she turned and kissed him hungrily, as if she could never let go.

In some ways, she reflected, she never had. Kit had been an experiment- and, as it had turned out, she had been an experiment for him as well. True to her word, all through her spatial and temporal travels, she had never lain with another man. There had been women, to be sure, but Kit would always be special. Knowing what had happened to him, she sometimes wondered if she should have taken him as a companion on her travels, to save his life and keep her company, but she knew full well that anyone who was going to travel in a TARDIS was going to have to have some basic technological concepts that Kit's time and place hadn't reached.

Thinking of him would do her no good now. She couldn't go back to his city like this, not with her dark skin and foreign features. She'd always had a knack for blending in, but this would lay too much stress on her mind. And it wasn't as if infinity and eternity had limits that one such as she was forced to acknowledge. All of time and space were open to her.

Yet she longed for something familiar, somewhere where she could return to her study of those curious humans, someplace where she would feel welcome despite not being one of "them", somewhere that she knew and knew well, someplace where she wouldn't stick out in the crowd no matter what she did. In all her travels, she had encountered few places so open-minded, but there was one that had provided her a safe haven once before; she had spent several subjective years there, watching the humans and living among them.

She'd have to skip forward some years, though, or else she would overlap with her previous incarnation. But she'd left a couple of projects unfinished, and this was as good an excuse as any to resume her studies.

Her stomach growled, reminding her that reshaping her body had taken a lot out of her, even with the regenerative energies. "Kitchen," she told herself, and she jumped onto the ladder, reveling in her renewed strength and agility.

"Ugh," she muttered, sighting a cockroach on the wall. It had to have gotten in during her last stop, when she dropped off Rebecca Lynn. Sickened by the thought of such unwanted company in her TARDIS, she prepared to smash the vermin with one of the durable sneakers she had awakened wearing. Thought was action. Momentary gross-out over, she continued to the snug, cozy kitchen, took out some energy bars, and sat down at the table with a pad and pencil. Not that a false name was necessary right now, of course, but she liked to pick a basic one that she could alter as necessary, something that reflected her state of mind in those few hours after awakening. Last time, upon emerging from the Zero Room, she had been so inflamed with rage from the circumstances that had forced her to regenerate that she had given herself a name that meant "reaper" in one of the old human tongues. This time she would not allow her frustration to guide her. Her last regeneration had been fiery and charismatic, a good person who had steadily worn away at the old bitterness she carried until it was gone.

Perhaps her past would be a good place to begin- and a happy part of her past, not the horrors she had seen in her time or even reminders of the bitterness she had carried. Her hand began to move across the page. Yes, Marlowe would be a good starting place- perhaps not a first name, perhaps not even a last name, but a name worth bearing.