Disclaimer - I don't own Doctor Who, or any of the characters, just the idea of the story.

After reading the letter Reinette had written to him again after leaving that ship, delivered by hand by the King of France himself after her death, the Doctor had wanted to be left alone after he'd locked the Time Windows the Clockwork robots had used to reach back into the past; he still wasn't sure what the point was. Yeah, he had gathered for himself the robots had gotten desperate enough to use the human crew they'd once served as parts for the ship, but why would they need the brain of Madame dePompadour as a component?

He sat down on the pilots chair after setting the TARDIS's controls to random, hoping that his ship had enough common sense to not drop him somewhere dangerous after the mess of trying to help Reinette. A smile blossomed on his face as he remembered meeting the girl that only history books would only describe when she was an adult, and it made him wonder if it was worth meeting famous people throughout history as children before he discounted it. While meeting Reinette was nice, he didn't want the same thing happening all over again and he definitely didn't want children growing up into adults only to depend on him.

Dependency.

The Doctor sighed as he closed his eyes, feeling the weight of the universe on his shoulders as he considered how many things and people were dependent on him without realising it. They needed him to stop time from being abused, from time meddlers running around messing history up; while the Monk's interference in history was bad, at least he had been a Time Lord and knew what he was doing even if he didn't understand the rules. But time travellers in today's universe without the Time Lords around… they might claim to be responsible, and that they knew what they were doing, but they were amateurs. He had done his duty as a Time Lord to ensure Reinette survived long enough, but he had failed someone whom he'd promised to take with him, though truthfully he was unsure if he could have done. It was dangerous to extract people from history, particularly important people who were responsible for shaping it because without them history could unfold differently.

Maybe if he had been very careful and been very clever, the Doctor could have taken Reinette with him and then returned to the exact point in space/time where he'd taken her, and even the TARDIS would have to follow through with that one because it was dangerous to history if something happened if Reinette was gone.

And if he couldn't….. With the universe in its current state with the Time Lords virtually extinct and him being the only one left to pick up the slack whenever there were signs of the Web of Time being damaged, maybe it was a good thing that the flow of time between the two points of the Time Windows was different so then Reinette, an important historical figure, wouldn't have been able to travel with him, but he squashed that thought instantly. Yeah, as a Time Lord he should never travel something or someone important historically, but that didn't mean he couldn't imagine travelling with someone like Reinette.

Travelling with Reinette could've been a great experience for him and it would certainly have been nice having someone who seemed more empathic to other people's feelings. The only other person who was empathic was Mickey. It was too bad that Rose wasn't, whom he had thought was empathic and understanding, but his mind had been changed after the mess with the Krillitanes though the mess of his recent regeneration had proven Rose wasn't a really understanding person, but his last self had noticed times where she pretended to be compassionate but was in fact only interested in herself.

He couldn't believe the attitude the stupid girl had shown towards Sarah Jane, and he hated the way the girl had arrogantly assumed that she was the only one to travel with him.

He was hundreds of years old and had travelled through a number of incarnations already. Did she really think she was unique? Well yeah, she was unique, all his companions were, but for Rose to be so selfish and childish when she'd met Sarah Jane Smith.

Why were humans always thinking of relationships in a sexual sense?

But it was her lack of restraint. It was sickening.

Could Reinette have coped with that kind of treatment? Maybe she wouldn't have taken it so patiently like Sarah Jane had, though his fourth incarnation's old companion had fought against Rose's unnecessary bullying. The Doctor mused on the type of relationships his new incarnation had over his previous lives. For some reason this new body and personality seemed to encourage romantic attachments, something the Time Lords had definitely frowned upon, and now he was beginning to see the downside himself. While there were some advantages there were positive downsides, one of them was having Rose Tyler around, someone who was truly selfish.

But Reinette… maybe she would have been different from Rose, but would she? That was the problem the Time Lord had, and now she was dead he couldn't just slip back through time in the TARDIS and pick her up to answer 'what if?' and he couldn't do that. The Doctor had crossed many Time Lord laws over the years, but he had managed to get away with them in his previous lives because he had had the support of the Time Lords who'd been able to mitigate the worst of the historical interference.

Now his people were gone, he couldn't just be casual anymore. He needed to be careful with the way history unfolded around him and taking Reinette Poisson out of time would have been exactly the type of temporal mess he was determined to avoid. Abruptly he stood up and threw his coat off and walked away from the console room and headed down to his room. He was tired and he just wanted to be left alone. He didn't know if Mickey and Rose were awake or not but he didn't care. As soon as he walked into the room, he got to bed.

The next morning the Doctor woke up and got dressed in a t shirt and his usual pinstripe trousers and trainers but he didn't bother with a jacket or tie. He headed towards the console room to just check over the TARDIS, but he also wanted to find out what the repercussions the robots on that ship had had on the timeline, and if there was any really residual damage after the Time Windows were used. The Doctor may have been careless and carefree since the end of the Time War and not really have done any work on monitoring the Time Vortex, but as long as he was on the ball then he could mitigate the worst of the damage unwanted time travellers caused.

The Doctor had just gotten started when Rose walked in followed by Mickey. "Where're we going to go?" Rose asked, bouncing in brightly.

"I don't know. I set the controls to random," the Doctor said not looking up from the monitor.

More perceptive and more aware than Rose, and noticing that the Doctor was doing a lot more than just setting the controls, Mickey came round to see what was doing, looking at the diagrams and data on the screen with incomprehension. "What're you doing, Doctor?"

"I'm trying to find out if the Clockwork robots meddling damaged the timeline. They ripped dozens of holes into the Time Vortex, I'm trying to see how bad they are before I fix the damage," the Doctor replied.

Rose flopped onto the pilots chair, pouting. "It sounds boring," she commented.

The Doctor looked up at her. "I've got to do this, Rose. I might not show this, but ever since that disaster with the Reapers I've been looking more and more into the damage the universe has sustained."

"What do you mean, damage?" Mickey asked.

The Doctor turned to look at Mickey. "The Time Lords didn't just travel around in TARDISes Mickey. We created the Time Vortex, the wormhole the TARDIS uses to travel around the universe, and we also created the Web of Time. It's a metastructure that is basically a stable timeline, and it also rationalises the universe, but its not impervious to damage. The Time War caused a lot of damage to reality, and with my people gone I'm all that's left picking up the slack. It may sound boring, but that is the life of a Time Lord."

Mickey nodded in apparent understanding. "And since those Clockwork robots were tearing holes into the past, trying to nick Reinette's brain…."

"They would've caused quite a bit of damage," the Doctor said, wincing at Mickey's word use. "The TARDIS can repair the damage to the Vortex, no problem, but I don't really want to travel anywhere at the moment. I want to check if there was any more temporal damage."

Rose huffed.

The Doctor glared at her before resuming his work. "Not now," he grunted. He was seriously getting tired of Rose's temper tantrums and her childish attitude - yeah, he knew he was childlike at times, but there were moments he needed to be a grown up; if the girl couldn't understand that this important to him then she would find herself back home. Mickey could stay if he really wanted to, though the Doctor was sure he was only here to protect Rose's virtue. Personally the Doctor didn't care, he had no feelings of romance towards Rose despite imprinting on her after his previous regeneration, and it made him wish he could have taken Reinette with him, because he was sure she wasn't as arrogant as Rose was proving to be.

"What do you mean, not now? We're supposed to be travelling, yet we keep running into your old friends and meet French Kings mistresses," Rose snapped.

Mickey backed away when he saw the anger in the Doctor's face and he was hoping that Rose didn't push the angry Time Lord too far. He'd noticed that about the Doctor, even before he'd changed his face, that when he got angry the aftermath was usually terrible. Worse Rose seemed to ignore the fact that if the Doctor believed that whatever his bizarre Time Lord jobs were important to him, then she usually always found herself on the receiving end and she never learnt from her mistakes.

Then again she never did learn. Mickey knew that from experience, she had been that way many times in the past, when they were dating or not.

That was the problem with Rose. Whenever she fixated on someone else she would quickly become bored if life with them changed too drastically from the norm.

Struggling to keep his voice and temper even, the Doctor said, "The state of the Time Vortex is more important to me at the moment Rose than running away from aliens planning to kill us. If you don't like it, and if you can't take the fact that I've got responsibilities to time that goes way ahead of running around, acting like an idiot, well that's your problem. Don't forget Rose, just because you travel with me, that doesn't mean I can't change my mind and take you home."

Mickey winced, but the Doctor ignored him. He was too busy glaring at Rose.

The human girl shook the threat off. "I don't believe you," she snapped. "I know how sad you are-"

"SHUT UP!" The console room shook with the sudden roar that emerged from the Doctor's vocal chords as Rose's stupid remark got under his skin. Even Rose was taken aback by the anger in the Doctor's face, the fact she claimed to know him made it even more pathetic, but then Mickey was not surprised she was taken aback. Breathing hard, the Time Lord advanced on Rose, a dangerous glint in his eyes.

"How dare you think you're more important than you are in reality! What, do you really think that if I hadn't gone back, told you the TARDIS could travel through time, I would never have recovered from the Time War without you there? Are you really that stupid and arrogant? Do you really imagine that I wouldn't have met someone else, someone who didn't lash out at people like Sarah Jane, who deserved far more than you gave out, to help me recover from the war?"

The Doctor walked back to the monitor where Mickey was standing, but the human scuttled out of the way at the look on his face. He rubbed his eyes tiredly.

"Don't ever think I'm not grateful for you being there for me, Rose," the Doctor whispered, "but don't you dare get a big head, and don't ever ever get between me and my duty as a Time Lord. It goes way ahead of you, Mickey, even the Earth. Because if you try, well let me tell you, you'll wish that I had never gone back for you. That's a promise Rose."

While the humans were standing there, still like statues, the Doctor took advantage of the peace and quiet to check the monitor and continued checking the timelines and the state of the vortex. Not for the first time the Doctor wished the Time Lords were here, though for professional reasons because they would have had the facilities to monitor and repair this type of mess, but while he loved his TARDIS there was only so much she could do to monitor the timelines, and they weren't designed to conduct this type of long range monitoring.

No, the Time Lords had used the TARDISes and their scanning systems connected to the Matrix on Gallifrey in conjunction with the Temporal observation offices and laboratories on Gallifrey to monitor the Web of Time. With the Time Lords gone and only him left to pick up the slack, the TARDIS's monitoring capabilities were still better than those of more primitive time travelling races who believed they knew everything about time travel, but they didn't have the monitoring systems on Gallifrey.

The Doctor knew he should be spending more of his time trying to augment the interstitial antennae of the TARDIS's time sceptre to boost the power of its monitoring array, but with everything going on like his travels with Rose and Mickey, aliens like the Slitheen, Clockwork robots, Daleks, he found it hard to even get to that part of the TARDIS to do the work.

Some other Time Lords would have told him that the TARDIS was simply too old compared to later models, but truthfully age didn't really come into it. Well it did, and it didn't make any difference if the TARDIS was old or modern by Time Lord standards; all TARDISes had the same monitoring capabilities, and they weren't meant to do the Time Lord's jobs, just observe, collect information and send it off into the Matrix for the Time Lords to examine.

And here he was, the last of the Time Lords, forced to pick up the slack. This was one of the reasons he had wanted to be sealed inside the Time Lock with the rest of the Time Lords, so then he wouldn't have to pick up the slack. That was one of the reasons he'd been so enthusiastic about travelling through time originally, because while he may have tweaked time whenever someone interfered with it, or when the Time Lords sent him on those missions, he knew their presence would protect time and space. Now they were gone he knew he'd have to do their jobs.

But it was a duty that was important to him. It was one of the few things he had left of the Time Lords.

And Rose didn't make a difference.

After the fight with Rose, the Doctor had decided to spend a few days alone. It wasn't hard - the TARDIS micro universe was vast, there were millions of places he could hide, though he wouldn't call it hiding. No, he was just sick of humans at the moment, tired of their stupid needs and wants when they were so quick to forget his points and arguments, but mostly he wanted to remember Reinette and the promise he'd broken to her. He took the time to walk through the TARDIS, knowing that the pedestrian infrastructure would return him to the console room in case of trouble, and knowing he wouldn't get lost when his human companions would.

Rose and Mickey knew only a few rooms in the TARDIS. They knew about their rooms, the library, the wardrobe, the swimming pool, the gym, some of the gardens, but they didn't know the full size and scale of the micro universe they were living in. The Doctor could wander around the corridors without them knowing where he was, and truthfully he didn't care what they thought.

The Doctor found himself spending a lot of time in places he very rarely ventured to - like the part of the TARDIS the Protyon core was. He could have travelled down to the Eye of Harmony, but he didn't want to feel the strong dimensional forces down there, not when he could feel something more calmer instead. He smiled when he saw the massive room full of blinking organic eyes. This was the living brain of the TARDIS, the brain which gave his ship and others which had once existed the intelligence needed to maintain stability while travelling in space/time. Now it was the only one left in the universe.

The Protyon core was vast, with round things holding big eyes that kept blinking in binary, the organic matter which was unstable for the needs of the TARDIS. The Doctor had seen this type of room many times before, both in his TARDIS and on Gallifrey, and it was always an experience for him. Now he came here to think while he was in one of the few rooms that held the proof of his ship's sentience. He wasn't worried that Mickey and Rose would find him here, the TARDIS would only let him in here as the pilot and operator of the ship, they were just human passengers. Besides in his current mood the TARDIS knew he wanted time to himself.

The Doctor closed his eyes and just fell into the telepathic embrace of the TARDIS. It was stronger here since this was the brain and one of the centres that showed the TARDIS was a living being.

"What would she have been like, Reinette, how would she have coped travelling in you?" he asked.

The TARDIS didn't and couldn't reply.

"We'd have had to return her home, of course," the Doctor added, knowing that there was no other way around that since history recorded that Madame dePompadour had died in France, "since she was a part of history, but if I had brought her with me through the remaining Time Window….." He fell silent, a new consideration falling into place. "Could I have stayed with her, if I hadn't known the original Window was still functioning, giving me a way back to that ship, the long way?"

He had lived for a long time. He had lived through exile several times in the past, stayed in one place for long periods; he still remembered the frustration he'd felt during his third incarnation, how the technical limitations of the period had hindered him in his efforts to repair the dematerialisation circuit and regain the knowledge the Time Lords had taken from his mind during that trial near the end of his second life. Oh, he had railed against the exile, believed it to be the end of the universe, not aware that a much longer exile was waiting for him during his eighth life, all knowledge of the TARDIS, of the Time Lords, even the details of who he was for god's sake blocked off. The Doctor's expression darkened as he remembered that mess with Faction Paradox, Gallifrey's supposed destruction, and his memory being erased by the sheer mass of the Matrix downloaded into his brain.

It would've been very different for him if he had stayed without being aware of the Time Window. At least during his eighth life's exile the TARDIS hadn't been far away, even though her dimensions had been collapsed, rendering it as small as a matchbox, but if his current self had stayed in France he'd have been without his ship for much longer than normal, plus it would have been the first time he had spent more than a few years in one body. Rose didn't realise it but after the Nestene Consciousness was defeated and she had said "no" to travelling with him, he had spent 50 years on his own before he decided to go back and return for her. For humans 50 years was virtually a whole lifetime, for a Time Lord and for other long lived species it was no more than the blink of an eye.

If he had stayed in France with Reinette, the Doctor would have stretched his current life a century or two, make it last longer. He needed to make sure his remaining regenerations lasted longer than they normally did, and he had only two lives left. He couldn't waste them pointlessly like he had in the past though he always tried to live life to the fullest in each incarnation so then he wasn't spending one year in one body, and then spending 400 years in a different one.

As the last Time Lord, the longer he lived the more he'd be able to make sure time and history was protected and maintained before the universe collapsed. It was a tall order, but if he was going to make sure the Time Lord's legacy lasted longer until the universe finally collapsed and the next one began then he would need to do it.

Maybe when Rose and Mickey finally left the TARDIS, he'd exile himself for a brief time to one of the nexus points in the universe and monitor the state of time from there, because a nexus point was analogous to the centre of a spider's web, and in such a place he could augment the TARDIS's shortcomings with monitoring the whole of the Web of Time and replace the advanced temporal monitoring systems on Gallifrey with something a little more basic but still advanced enough to make a difference. Again, it was a tall order but the Doctor knew it could and should be done even if the quality of the set up wouldn't be as good as the ones on Gallifrey had been. Travelling around the universe and botching up a few aliens' plans for conquest or stopping idiots from wrecking what was left of the universe after the Time War had left the whole of reality as fragile as a pane of spun glass wasn't enough anymore.

The Doctor sighed as another thing occurred to him. Rose and Mickey. It was very uncommon for him to wish people would just leave the TARDIS, but now all he wanted was for both Mickey and Rose to leave even if he found Mickey's company better than Rose's. At least he didn't make stupid demands, act like a self centred little girl, act like a self righteous end all be all when it came to companions and behave like a spoilt brat like Rose did sometimes, though it was virtually all the time since his regeneration.

He knew Rose would leave him sooner or later, she went through boyfriends incredibly quickly and he had caught a few of her thoughts when she'd dragged Adam and later Jack into the TARDIS. Rose hadn't really cared if Adam was on his own after that mess with the 'metaltron' Dalek in Van Statten's museum of alien artefacts and Goddard had used her common sense to order the place to be buried under tonnes of cement in the aftermath when 200 people were slaughtered by the Dalek when ROSE had touched the bloody thing rather than keep the museum and god knew what else down there. With Jack it was the same thing.

It had nothing to do with compassion, which others took it for.

Her mind was easy enough to read. Sometimes being telepathic was a blessing.

Rose had been trying to make him jealous, and while he thought her naivety was amusing, he was getting sick and tired of her trying to invoke emotions that he simply didn't have for her. The Doctor shook his head, deciding to focus on the Dalek in that damn museum.

Hadn't Rose learnt never to touch anything alien after encountering the Gelth, the Slitheen, and the Adherents of the Repeated Meme? Didn't she think? Okay, so she was trying to be compassionate, but that was what some races did, use compassion as a weapon. Alright - admittedly most of it was his fault. His previous self had been wallowing in so much guilt, so much grief from being alone, it was virtually impossible not to think about the war, and the knowledge he could have wiped the Daleks out centuries ago. He had the chance. He could've killed Davros, blown up the planet, time looped the solar system (he'd had to have needed to call the Time Lords in for that one since the TARDIS could only time loop a small mass), but he hadn't done any of those things.

Would anything change if he crossed his own timeline by accident?

Could he preserve history now he was much older and more experienced?

The Doctor didn't know. All he did know was his history was linked to that of the Daleks. But that was no excuse. He should have shown Rose a picture of the Daleks, told her that those mechanised trash cans were the reason he was the last of his kind. If he'd done that, she would have walked out of the cell the Dalek in that damn bunker was imprisoned in. Or would she? Would Rose get it into her skull that the Dalek could be made to see reason? That was typical Rose Tyler - set herself up as a saint, the girl who knew everything when in fact she didn't and could never know everything. Rose was many things, compassionate and sensible were not her best qualities. She didn't think, she just took. But that Dalek…..The Doctor closed his eyes to exorcise that thought because it ventured into territories that were better off left alone.

He decided to focus his mind on Reinette. While she had ambitions with the King of France, she wasn't a spoilt tart in the same way most brats were. When she couldn't be the King's mistress anymore, she was just there as a friend rather than as a lover, and he saw her as invaluable. As a child she'd been innocent, and when she'd looked into his mind by accident, he had felt her empathy even though she could never truly understand the kind of life Gallifreyan children had to live at the academy.

Mickey found the Doctor in the garage. The boy had been looking the Doctor all morning, well both him and Rose had for some time, but while the Doctor wasn't in the mood to speak to Rose, he was alright with Mickey.

The young man thought that he had gotten lucky. In actual fact the Doctor had let Mickey come to him after mentally telling the TARDIS it was alright. The moment Mickey saw the garage, the Doctor knew it was the right decision.

"Wow!" Mickey whispered in awe when his eyes fell upon the Doctor's collection of cars, motorcycles, bicycles, quadricycles, trains and monorails, and even aircraft that he'd picked up over the years. The Doctor looked up and smiled before returning his attention on Bessie; he'd taken the yellow Edwardian roadster with him after that mess with Morgraine in his seventh life, and he felt it was kind of UNIT and Alistair for looking after the car for him. While he rarely used the car anymore since his exile, and his fourth, fifth and seventh, and eighth incarnations uses for the vehicle, Bessie still held a dear place in his hearts and he tried to spend as much time as he could tinkering with her.

Mickey saw the obviously alien technology scattered around the car and he became intrigued, especially when he saw the personalised number plate reading WHO 1. "This is your car?" he asked.

The Doctor nodded. "I've had Bessie for years, ever since my exile to Earth."

Mickey looked up at him. "Exile?"

The Doctor sighed, but it was too late, and besides reminiscing of his life before things became a complete disaster was one way he had for coping for all his losses before his life darkened around his fifth incarnation with Adric's death before events spiralled out of control with the way Borusa had tried to acquire Rassilon's immortality, his sixth incarnation's mania, his second Time Lord trial, the Valeyard, the messes with Peinforte, the Hand of Omega, and so on.

"Yeah. I was exiled to Earth back in my third incarnation. The Time Lords caught me after I summoned them to deal with aliens who'd kidnapped human soldiers from different points in history. I didn't have an amazing control of the TARDIS back then, and the technology the aliens had which helped them move the soldiers in the first place was breaking down, so I had to call for help and the Time Lords caught me. The yanked me into one dangerous mess after another - they submerged the TARDIS into the sea of a planet, then they forced a landing in crocodile infested waters, and then yanked us around space before bringing me and my friends Zoe and James to Gallifrey. There I was put on trial."

The Doctor sighed again, this time Mickey could see the pain in his eyes. The human thought the Doctor was just sad that he was once more thinking about how he was the last Time Lord.

But that wasn't just on his mind.

The Doctor would always be haunted by the looks on Zoe and Jame's faces when the Time Lords caught the three of them trying to escape Gallifrey; he'd always known the escape would be virtually impossible, especially after the War Lord's incredibly stupid attack on the High Council. Didn't the War Chief tell the stupid fool anything about the Time Lords, their powers? His people had mastered space/time travel when the universe was a fraction of its size, did a bunch of barbarians really think they could take on the Time Lords? But the Doctor hadn't really cared about the War Lord's dematerialisation. He'd deserved it, especially after all he had ordered and the crimes he'd committed in the name of power.

But James and Zoe?

He had warned them back on the War games planet that he should travel on his own, but the end result was the same. They were sent back to their own times at a point before they left with him. He tried to muster a smile as he recalled how Jamie had wanted to try to escape even with the forcefield blocking the way into the TARDIS before the young and hotheaded Scot had finally admitted defeat.

The Doctor shook his head and resumed his work on Bessie. He had just come here to the garage for the hell of it, besides once he saw his beloved collection he knew he had to tinker with something.

"How are things with you, Mickey?" he asked, feeling slightly guilty with avoiding the human simply because of Rose.

Mickey shrugged. "Not bad. Apart from Rose. Did you really have to say those things to her?"

"It was the only way to get things into her head, Mickey," the Doctor replied, not looking up from his work. "I'm tired of Rose and her tantrums; the girl is supposed to be 20, and yet she acts like a 13 year old. Okay, granted, I don't know much about humans, but when I was in the Gallifreyan equivalent of a teenager, I had a totally different experience. Even you can't deny Rose doesn't know when to quit, can you?"

"I guess," Mickey relented after a minute with a weary sigh. The Doctor felt sorry for him, and wondered just how he had coped with Rose these past few days.

"I'm sorry, Mickey," the Doctor stopped working and just fixed his gaze on Mickey's dark eyes. "I really am. This isn't shaping up to the travelling experience you'd hoped for, is it?"

"Not really," Mickey admitted. "Sorry."

"No, don't apologise," the Doctor replied, and after a minute he stared at Mickey, who was looking at the work he'd done to Bessie, clearly noting the alien technologies integrated into the old chassis, but having enough common sense to not touch anything. "Mickey, why did you decide to travel with Rose and me after resisting for so long?" The Doctor asked; he already knew the answer, but he wanted to hear it from Mickey.

Mickey jumped in shock at the question, having not expected it, so he stuttered.

The Doctor took pity on him when he realised that he should have been a bit more gentle. "It's to do with Rose, isn't it? You don't want us to get together. You needn't worry," he added, dropping the bomb on Mickey's head.

"W-what?" Mickey's face was so comical that the Doctor almost laughed, but this was a serious conversation and it needed to be taken seriously. "But…Jackie and I thought-"

"You thought I was in love with Rose, and then we would live happily ever after? No, she's not my type, just like I'm not hers," the Doctor interrupted and finished Mickey's broken reply. He returned to fiddling with Bessie's engine before realising Mickey was still staring at him in surprise at the admission.

"What do you mean, she's not your type? I mean, the pair of you run around, laughing at everything-"

"So do friends," the Doctor pointed out. "Just because Rose and I run around doesn't mean we're in love. Didn't she date dozens of boys before you two even hooked up - that's the right expression isn't it? Yeah, hooked up - and didn't she find something interesting about their interests before moving on?"

Mickey thought for a minute, entering territory he truly didn't want to go into, and realised the Doctor was right. Rose had dated so many people, boys whom she'd thought would give her more out of life than what she had already. Only to dump them later when someone new came along - Mickey remembered only too well how Rose had only dated him because of his car. That was it.

And then the Doctor appeared, with his TARDIS. How could anyone compete with that? But that was - she would always try to take take take without bothering to see what she already had.

"Yeah," he whispered, feeling the heartbreak at the realisation that if Rose decided to never travel with the Doctor, or after remembering the Time Lord's angry threat from the other day, the more likely event of her finally pushing the Doctor too far and leaving him with no choice but to leave her on Earth, then she would never want to date him again.

The Doctor smiled in regret towards him. "It would never work between Rose and I; she's a human, I'm a Time Lord. Did you know that apart from Jack, Rose brought in another human, a boy from your time, more or less, just to m make me jealous? And as for spending the rest of her life with me…..please. Humans have incredibly short lives, and she would be unable to cope with a longer lifespan even if I took her to a time period where humans genetically augmented their lives to have much longer lifespans. Did you know that, barring time travel, Jack was over 300 years old when we met him?" he asked rhetorically, knowing that Jack hadn't broached the subject of age with anyone, especially during Mickey's first meeting with him before Margaret returned on their radar.

The Doctor went on, ignoring the look of shock on Mickey's face and he had to hide his smile when he saw Mickey shaking his head in disbelief. "Oh, believe me, he was 300 years old. That was only because humans of the 51st century were evolved to the point where longer lifespans could be physically and mentally accepted."

"And Rose and I aren't?" Mickey clarified.

"You two haven't reached that point. The reason Jack's generation had reached that point is through genetic engineering, with every new human paradigm carefully chosen. They only did that to adjust to the different environments that your species will encounter in space. You think you are ready for long life, Mickey, but long lifespans could cause mental ill effects; you could wake up a thousand years into the future, your body still young, and you wonder if its all worth while. Even Time Lords feel that way - its a depression in the mind, a melancholy especially after using up so many of your lives. I feel it a lot, especially now."

The Doctor suddenly entered that melancholic sadness that he always entered whenever he thought about how he was on his own, the last of his kind, weighted down by the fact he was old now, older than he could even believe when it seemed like only yesterday he was only 234. Mickey felt sorry for him, especially after what he'd just learnt. He had known the Doctor was the last of his kind, he never kept it a secret, but he did keep it close to his hearts, but he'd never heard him speak about it like this before. "Doctor," he said, hating himself for interrupting this heartrending moment, but he couldn't help himself, "are you sure there aren't more Time Lords running around in their own TARDISes?" Mickey cringed a little, hoping he hadn't just crossed the line.

The Doctor chuckled sadly, not angry in the least about the question. "After Rose and I encountered that Dalek in 2012, she asked the same thing. Time Lords are telepathic Mickey, we can hear each other, even over long distances. Even when I left my homeworld, I could hear them because I was attuned then as I am now into the timeline, but in this part of the timeline….the Time Lords are gone. I can't hear anyone. It's been so long since there's been even a single voice in my head. But….. soon it will end when I die, and then the Time Lords will be truly extinct. Everything my people were, everything we ever did, all our knowledge, our domination over time and space and matter, our experience, our skills… it will be simply lost when I finally die, with no more regenerations. Heaven forbid I do die before I can regenerate."

"You can die before you….change?" Mickey asked, not knowing what else to say, or how to word his question.

"Yes." The Doctor whispered as his mind went over the ramifications of that happening, and the whole gravity of the issue. "I can still die before regeneration hits, but its has to be something bad. Say for instance if someone used a gun and shot me in both hearts and put another bullet in my head. I'd never be able to regenerate from that. I might even be killed in mid regeneration; a Time Lord's body is already dead when the regeneration becomes critical."

"Critical?"

"Yeah. You see," the Doctor paused for a second as he tried to find the right words to describe his explanation, "when a Time Lord begins to regenerate, the body has already begun to die. That's the trigger for the regeneration in the first place. So, when the regeneration energy builds up, it's primary job is to rebuild the cells by simply shedding the previous cells with a massive burst of energy. It's not instantaneous; the energy needs a moment to build up until it reaches what Time Lords call the critical point. But its a narrow window of about a minute, and if a Time Lord is killed by that point, then he would die because all the cells were dead anyway and the body didn't have time to make it to the next incarnation. If the body was simply injured during the early phases of regeneration, it would either simply be accelerated, using twice more energy than was needed or necessary."

Mickey looked stunned at the information overload he'd just received.

The Doctor decided it was time to get off the subject; regeneration had always been a sore point with him, and it made him more aware now of how many of his regenerations he had squandered. Others would say he had sacrificed his lives to help others, but the Doctor knew it wasn't the truth anymore. But Mickey had to interrupt before the Doctor could even suggest to him that they should do some work on Bessie or one of the other cars, but the Doctor should have been expecting this one.

"Doctor, how many times do Time Lords regenerate?"

The Doctor considered lying, but he decided not to. Not this time. "Time Lords have a regeneration cycle consisting of 12 regenerations, giving us 13 lives."

Mickey blinked at the number. "13?" he whispered. "13 Doctors? How many lives have you had already?"

"Too many," the Doctor replied bitterly, thinking back on his first eight lives before…before he thought of his War incarnation. He swallowed the bile as he remembered the things he had done in that life, and focused on Mickey. "This is my Ninth regeneration," he lied, though he felt ashamed since he had done nothing but tell Mickey the truth throughout this little conversation, now he was going to have to lie. "I'm the Tenth Doctor. I've only got three lives left."

He almost cried at the next lie.

He wondered how things would've been if Reinette had been there, with Mickey, confronting him in the garage and asked him questions.

He'd never now.

Reinette was gone.

Author's note - I'm sorry if you don't like the Rose bashing, but I'm not really bashing her. All I'm doing is showing that while the Doctor enjoys Rose's company on occasion h wishes she were more mature and understanding. And besides you can't dispute the fact she did parade Jack and Adam around to make the Doctor jealous.

Please tell me what you think.