The road less travelled...

Title: The Problem of Regeneration 1/1
Author: katherine_b
Rating: G
Characters: The Doctor
Disclaimer: Not mine but I'm hoping, if I keep begging, someone will give them to me for a present.
Summary: The Doctor thinks about regenerating.
A/N: This is prompted by mimingdonna's A Stitch In Time series. Probably best you read that first.

If he’s honest with himself, he’s actually sick and tired of regenerating. Quite apart from what it does to his much-prized mental abilities – at least in the short term – he’s fed up with the identity crises that accompany them. Never knowing what he’ll end up as.

And you’d think, just for once, he might end up ginger.

But the thing that hurts most is the effect it has on his companions.

He can still remember the terror on Rose’s face and the suspicion with which she greeted the new version of him. The really hard part is that it’s happened just like that with every companion.

Not that he can blame them. If one of them turned up with a brand new body and face, yet continued to insist that they were someone else, he’d probably question his own sanity, or theirs.

Of course, the worst part – by the very nature of regeneration – is that it always happens at a terrible moment, when it seems like the Doctor is about to die. Is dying. In a manner of speaking. Sort of.

So they’re already upset enough about that, and then the Doctor goes and changes into a different person on them.

No wonder it upsets them.

And he really doesn’t want to see Donna upset like that.