Detour: Prologue

Title:Detour
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Eleven, Martha
Rating: Older Teens
Summary: Martha struggles to adjust to the Doctor's new face and decide if she wants to continue traveling with him, just as a renegade band of Time Agents attempt to steal the TARDIS for their own personal greed. But their leader, Kaydin, has plans for the TARDIS that have nothing to do with thieving, and everything to do with changing history so that the Time War never happened...
Prologue
Regeneration


They’d done it. The Freedom Coalition had made good on their threat to kill an innocent in their quest for freedom. Their cause was a noble one, but their methods were dishonorable, as far as Martha was concerned. The gunshot that had put a bullet into the Doctor’s stomach as he’d turned to protect her still rang in Martha’s ears. She caught him as he fell back, seemingly in slow motion.

Pulling the Doctor inside, Martha slammed the door of the TARDIS and slid the lock shut for safe measure, even though she knew the TARDIS would admit no one without a proper key. He leaned heavily against her, and she tried to urge him up the ramp to the other side of the room. If she could get him to the lift, she could send it to the infirmary, where she could operate.

“It’s going to be okay, Doctor,” she said, fighting back tears at the look of pain in his dark eyes. “I’ll get you to the infirmary. I’ll save you, I promise!”

“You can’t…dying…” he said. Blood sprayed from his mouth as he coughed. He sank to the floor at the command console, and rolled onto his back.

“Don’t you give up,” she commanded. “Don’t you stop fighting. I’m going to get supplies. I’ll have to operate here—”

But he gripped her arms weakly. “I’m going to change. It’s the only way.”

“Change?” she said. She remembered him saying something once in the past, when they’d been trapped on the Pentallion and heading for a living sun, that his race went through some kind of process when they were about to die, and she remembered Yana had turned into the Master, but she couldn’t believe she hadn’t asked him more about the process in the intervening two years.

“I’ll look different…I’ll sound different…but it’s still me. It’s still me, Martha—”

“What—”

Light suddenly erupted from the Doctor; it poured from his eyes, his mouth, it enveloped him completely, and like something transforming in a movie, the Doctor’s face and body seemed to melt and reform right before her. The man she’d loved from the day she met him, the man she’d sworn she’d gotten over but had in fact not, changed right before her eyes.

Dark brown hair lightened to light blond, his fair skin turned even paler. He became a little longer, definitely bulkier. When the light faded, he lay on the floor gasping for air. He opened his eyes—they were dark blue, cobalt blue with a touch too much gray. The Doctor was gone, replaced by this beautiful stranger.