or_timelords | This could prove to be interesting.

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This could prove to be interesting.

from

laser_not_sonic

If you woke up one morning and found me in your bed, what's the first thing you'd think or say?

The Doctor shows his other the surprisingly orderly room in which he keeps the spare TARDIS parts (a room that bears a strong resemblance, in its tidy organization, workbench along one wall, racks and cases of bits and bobs and tools arranged along the other walls, to the armory—though here the coral desktop theme still carries the decor). The fine tuner's in there, he tells his other, kicking at a trunk to one side of the room, and then heads on to the sick bay. The other Doctor shouldn't have any trouble finding the tuner in the trunk, and the Doctor in black wants to get away from his other quickly, give himself time to think.

There's not much equipment left in the sick bay; he's scavenged many of the diagnostic devices for his laboratories, particularly his master laboratory, now housed in the Zero Room.

What's left is enough to repair his injuries. Simple, clean breaks, no complicated fractures—twenty minutes with his hand in a nanite field (trying to hold still, and the medic program in the field generator bleating at him, telling him to stop fidgeting) and he can flex the fingers on his right hand again, with only the barest stiffness. Even that will pass within the hour.

Such a small injury. He shouldn't have snapped.

The other Doctor must have found the fine tuner, because he's not there when the Doctor returns to the spares room. He reaches back into a recess in the wall and fishes out a few light-array panels for the rondules. One of the easiest repairs on the TARDIS, really—plug-and-play, about as hard as replacing a lightbulb.

Another small injury. When did he get so snippy?

Back in the console room, his other's still nowhere to be seen, but the other TARDIS is still there, and so is that clear, familiar mental signature, his but not.

He fishes his sonic screwdriver out of his jacket pocket, throws the jacket onto the console and gets to work, unlocking the broken light-arrays, unsocketing them, and replacing them with the new.

By the time he finishes, he's back in a good mood, a level mood. He stands back and looks at the repaired rondules. Not a hitch. The TARDIS agrees, and notes that he should have applied some of that mechanical finesse to not applying Peeps to his other's TARDIS.

On her side already?

A twinge at the back of his mind, her exasperation at him, and he grins. Aw, she's on his side still, no matter what she says.

He flicks a glance at his other's TARDIS doors. He'd knock, but...maybe his other needs the time apart, too. So, instead, he shrugs back into his jacket, and lounges in the console chair, using the scanner to catch up on routine maintenance checks.

The fine tuner is quite easily found; this storage room is almost disturbingly neat. Even the inside of the trunk is organized. The Doctor picks up the fine tuner - and yes, this should work, it might even be a later model than the one that's currently installed in his console - and is careful to put everything else back where he found it. Most of it is stuff he keeps in his spare room as well, only it's stored in a much tidier fashion. He idly considers that he really should get his own storage room organized at some point, but then, every time he does try to tidy things up, he ends up not being able to find anything. It sounds like a cliché, but it's actually true in his case.

When he returns to his TARDIS, the first thing he does is get a cleaning spray from the kitchen and scrape the sticky marshmallow coat off the console. He can feel the TARDIS' relief, mixed with a slightly apologetic twinge. Quite right, too. He's still angry with her, although now that he's got a quiet moment, he can feel her discomfort not only at being in this newly discovered multiverse, not only at having been compelled to take the passenger seat and not only at having her century fine tuner ruined, but also at being around another Doctor and another TARDIS who are so similar and yet so different at the same time. He can understand the last part; his other, despite the fact that he's decided to help him, still does make him a little bit nervous. It's nothing the Doctor would ever mention, but the constant echo of the drums is something he will have to get used to.

Replacing the fine tuner is not a lot of work; since he's replacing the whole component, it's really just a matter of taking out the old one and hooking the new one up to the wiring. The complicated part is calibrating it, but he can't do that when the TARDIS isn't in flight, and now that he's got her parked where he wants her, he won't move her unless he absolutely has to. Yes, I know you don't like it. I can't change that right now though.

Once the repairs are done, the Doctor gets to his feet and is about to pocket the sonic screwdriver when he remembers that he's not wearing his own jacket. The screwdriver he's been using is not his usual one, either; he used one from his stash he keeps in one of the boxes under the console. Right, time to go see if his clothes are still where he left them last night.

They are; as he enters the bathroom, his suit jacket and trousers are still flung over the towel rail, and the coat is in the bedroom, lying on the foot end of the bed, which is unmade. Well, it usually is, but he knows that this is where he disappeared from this morning. He takes out the sonic screwdriver and runs a quick scan, but there's nothing. Strange. He'd have at least expected some sort of trace of a teleportation device or something like that.

He shrugs and quickly changes into his proper clothes (and this feels much better, much more like himself), exchanging the blue Converse for his own beige ones after he fishes them out from under the bed respectively the night stand.

Before he leaves, he eyes the bed, almost longingly - for some reason, he's tired. He shouldn't be, he just woke up, and he's got work to do. He shakes his head, once, briefly, and heads back to the console room. He'll see if his other has returned already, and if he's maybe in a bit of a better mood by now.

When he pokes his head out of the TARDIS doors, he can see his other on the jump seat, fiddling with the scanner. He steps out of his TARDIS completely and smiles. "Hey."

"'Lo!" The Doctor in black grins from the seat and waves—with his right hand, a wave that involves wiggling his fingers ostentatiously. The stiffness worked out while he was repairing his TARDIS, and the bruising receded long ago. "Good as new." It's not clear whether he's referring to himself or the TARDIS or both.

He has his feet up on the console (the TARDIS never approves of this, but the only time she's really taken him to task was when he tried it right after visiting Skerpluck, a planet named for the sound made when travelers try to pull their feet back out of the muck that covers its entire surface) and his sonic screwdriver in one hand—he's finished up the maintenance routines and has been playing Viva Pinata on the scanner's XBox 360 emulator, using the screwdriver as a stand-in for a controller.

"You, too, hm?" The other Doctor's found his "right" clothes again, and now he looks like all of the other Tenth regenerations of himself this Doctor has ever met. The long coat with that dramatic flap when he runs, the suit tailored for the lanky frame of this regeneration, the tie that always stays tied... He's the Doctor. The Tenth all the way through, dressed to run forward into the future; the soldier he was during the War isn't there anymore, put away on a rack with clothing too dark for his new tastes.

"The fine tuner's alright, then? Found it in an antique store, would you believe it? Under a load of plaseramic bobble-head dogs, on Casb. 320th century." There were other parts compatible with TARDIS, too; the shopowners knew a salvager who'd found them out on a moon somewhere, thought they might be worth something. The Doctor tracked the salvager down, and had him take him to the site—one-third of a TARDIS console, defying physics, standing as though it were whole on the moon's surface. A craft fractured by the time lock, caught in and out of the War and proper time. He had touched it, and it had screamed silently and grasped for something in him, in his mind, the part that was his TARDIS, and then fallen back into the lock, disappearing into War time.

The salvager had yelled at the Doctor for losing him his find.

He'd thought better of it moments after.

The Doctor smiles and nods as his other waggles his healed fingers at him. "Good," he says, looking around at the repaired TARDIS wall as well. "Good, good." All fixed, his TARDIS, his other's TARDIS, and the other Doctor; maybe they can now stop breaking each other's things and proceed to doing what he came here for. Well, stayed here for.

"The fine tuner's perfect; I'll still have to calibrate it, but I can do that next time I'm taking her somewhere. Antique store, eh? If this were my universe, I'd say its the one some kid stole out of my TARDIS when I forgot to lock her once in Birmingham in 1874. I have no idea how he did it, you can't remove those screws without a sonic device, but when I tracked him down, he was really just a ten-year-old kid with some ingenuity and criminal energy. And he'd already sold my fine tuner, and really, he could use the money." The Doctor pauses for a moment, musing, remembering the small, skinny boy with the dirty feet and the mischievous twinkle in his eyes. His name, if the Doctor remembers correctly, had been Jake. "I wonder what became of him."

He shakes his head, chasing the memories away, and slips his hands into his pockets. The other trousers didn't have pockets, so being able to do this feels comfortable and right. "I ran a scan in my bedroom, but there was no teleportation trace residue or anything. I do wonder what happened."

Something else they can find out in the lab. The Doctor is anxious to get started, but he doesn't want to interrupt his other if he's busy - working on his high score? Huh. Well, the Doctor has four-dimensional Tetris installed on his console; he knows these games can get somewhat addictive.

The Doctor, actually, is currently managing a rather successful farm full of Mallowolves, Crowlas, and Kittyflosses (yes, he keeps cats on his pinata ranch, hush). But he saved the game and set the scanner back to its standard Gallifreyan display while his other told him about Jake.

"1874? Well, no harm he could do with a fine tuner. The best human minds for millennia couldn't reverse-engineer an artron-activated system. Wouldn't do them any good if they did."

He frowns at his other's comment on his lack of findings, though he's less surprised than he would have been several weeks ago. "Mm. I thought you might say that. I reckon it's the multiverse. I've got a few theories on the place, basic universal sentience, laws of improbability, but they're only theories, haven't developed instruments yet that hold calibration out there." He jerks a thumb at his TARDIS' doors. "Physicist's worst dream or best nightmare—'s like the back side of embroidery, a mess, colors and knots everywhere and you can't see the picture for the stitches."

"Speaking of," he swings his feet down from the console and pops up from the chair. "Ready to see the labs? We can run a closer scan there."

The time spent repairing his TARDIS and managing papier-mache virtual wildlife has put him back in a decent mood; the influence of the drums is slight, though if he bothers to think hard about what he's doing—admitting that something may be wrong with him; letting his other self into the secret, worrying, very personal world of his work; inviting his other and his violent TARDIS to stay, a constant reminder of the different choices they've made—they tick up, scratching at the back of his mind, a warning.

A human race with access to the kind of technology to reverse-engineer a TARDIS - yeah, no, the Doctor has to agree. That wouldn't do anyone any good. He's not sure if the fact that the Time Lords had had that technology had done anyone any good.

"Hmmm." That theory of the multiverse - that it's like the backstage area of a play, all the order and the costumes stripped away to leave an organized chaos that works despite the fact that no-one knows which way is up - does sound intriguing. He would love to find out what's keeping the place together, because there has to be something; it can't be ultimate entropy, because if it were, linear time lines wouldn't exist, and nothing would be able to survive here.

His thoughts are interrupted when his other gets up, and the Doctor nods. "Yes! Yes, labs, we could run a molecular structure scan on me to see if I was transported recently. The only other way I could have got here is a time fold, I think, and my TARDIS would have noticed that. So would yours, I would imagine." But wait, that's not what he's here for. He follows his other as he leads the way to the labs. "You should probably try and see if you can conjure up some energy emission again. I'm sure that's significant; I've never heard of anything like that happening, except during regeneration, of course. You didn't by any chance keep some of that in a test tube or somewhere?"

He's got some theories, but he's not sharing them before he's tested them in the lab.

"Energy emission?" He throws a quizzical look back over his shoulder at his other, as they walk through the halls of the TARDIS—his TARDIS. It's been a busy past hour or so, and somewhere among waking up in bed with himself, sharing minds twice, and breaking...well, a lot, there was quite a bit of breaking, he'd almost forgotten about the intensity of that connection with his TARDIS—and its aftereffects.

Forgotten, or been trying not to think about it.

He runs a hand up the back of his neck, through his hair, looking away from his other. "Oh, yeah. Yeah, um, no. I didn't have any on me...Right, here we are."

They've arrived at the door to the Zero Room—replaced during the Time War. Romana had offered him a new TARDIS, the newest and best, top-of-the-line, a war model if he wanted, but he'd refused, accepting only basic repairs and refitting for his old girl—such as the replacement of rooms he'd had to jettison over the centuries.

He's isomorphically locked this room, too—some of the materials and machines inside could cause serious harm, if handled improperly, and he doesn't want any guests wandering in and hurting themselves—or throwing off any of his tests. The lock takes long moments to respond—longer than the instantaneous acknowledgment of his genetic/psychic signature it should provide. He's used to this—they're calibrated to his old "fingerprint," from after the War but before his reconstruction by the TARDIS, and no longer quite recognize him as himself—he's not yet bothered to recalibrate them because they still open and...it's just another thing he doesn't want to think about, enough so that he's stopped thinking about. Locked doors just open slowly, that's all.

"Mi laboratorio es su laboratorio," he says when the door finally slides back. "Adelante!"

Counters full of diagnostic equipment scrounged from the sick bay, purchased from various corners of time and space, or invented specifically for certain projects and purposes clutter the pinkish-gray room, with only narrow spaces separating them—not aisles proper, just spaces, and it looks like some of the tables can only be reached by vaulting over or slipping under others. Whatever organizational tendencies this Doctor has that his others don't do not extend to Science!—the priority here has been fitting in as much gear as he can, not in keeping it hospital-corners-neat.

Shelves of binders and notes held together with brads and tattered journals crawl up the walls, an old stepladder wedged in on one side used to gain access to their upper reaches. Everything handwritten in this room is in Gallifreyan, though print-outs and screen displays are in any number of languages.

"We'll have to try and make it happen again, then - oh, we're here, right."

They're in a part of the TARDIS that's different to his own. It was the same up until a few corners back, so he roughly knows in which part of the ship they are, but if they were on his TARDIS, they'd be standing on the observation deck right now, facing the huge transparent "window" wall that gives a view of the outside of the TARDIS.

In this TARDIS, they're standing in front of a door, which is taking quite long to respond to his other's attempts to open it. The Doctor frowns; it looks like a simple isomorphic lock - which is good, that means he'll be able to get in and out easily enough without them having to recalibrate anything - but it seems to be not quite in 100% working order. He knows how it is, though, he's got quite a few technical bits in the TARDIS that would need some fixing up, which he never seems to get around to. Finally, though, the door does open, and the Doctor's pleasently surprised.

"Oh, you've rebuilt it!" It's one of the things he always wanted to do but for some reason never did - rebuilding the Zero Room. It really is the best place for a laboratory; its close approximation to a closed system makes it perfect for conducting experiments - even though this can also sometimes render the experiments rather theoretical. His own lab is situated in a big Victorian ball room - not because he's got so much equipment; he's pretty sure there's more crammed into this room, but because he has a habit of knocking things over if he doesn't have enough space at his workplace.

Space is the one thing of which this room doesn't have a lot. The Doctor edges around a table into the room, pulling his glasses from his pocket as he does so, and starts to examine the equipment and lab utensils. A lot of this, he realizes, was probably brought here from the infirmary; mostly diagnostic devices the Doctor recognizes as standard TARDIS medical equipment. Some of the stuff he recognizes as medical or scientific devices from all sorts of different planets - from Earth (there's what seems to be a modified EEG reader on a table in one corner), but from other planets as well, most of them home to a humanoid species - except there's also an ESP meter from Laguanate, a planet whose inhabitants exist as incorporeal wisps of energy. And some of the stuff he doesn't recognize at all, or he recognizes it only in parts.

He picks his way through the lab, running his fingers over some of the equipment here and there but not picking anything up. Despite the vastness of instruments on display, this whole lab does seem meant for one purpose only: the study of a living, sentient metabolism. Any medical researcher would have a field day in here, while a nuclear physicist might find their resources somewhat limited. Be that as it may, it's a pretty awesome lab.

"This is really quite impressive, I have to say." He stands in the middle of the room, in one of the narrow spaces between the tables and workbenches, and does a 360 degree turn to take it all in. He gestures at the shelves bending under the weight of the folders and lab journals. "Your notes, I take it?"

"Hm?" The Doctor looks up from right inside the door, where he's emptying out his pockets onto the surface of one long lab counter—or what surface there is, around the jumble of wires and electrodes and touchpads and readout screens surrounding the Fifth Atlantean reality-synchronization counter bolted to its center. "Oh, yes. They're not all on the...the uh, percussive phenomenon, those are under 'P.' And 'D.' Annnd there might be some under 'R.'"

The notes are indeed labeled with letters and relative dates, small (and in English, he does his filing in English, at least) on their sides. The other Doctor may notice that the 'T's are quite extensive, for 'TARDIS,' 'Telepathy,' and 'Time Vortex,' as are the 'R's for not just 'Rhythm,' but also 'Regeneration' and 'Rassilon Imprimature,' and the 'S's for 'Symbiote' and 'Symbiosis.'

And if the other goes too early in the 'D's, he'll find the notes on Daleks and their susceptibilities to chemical and physical weaponry. The interesting word 'astriform' gets some coverage under 'A,' and appears in a few of those symbiosis-related packets, as well.

The Doctor in black picks something out of the detritus of his pocket contents—a clear orb, the size of a shooter marble. He peers at it closely, and then grins. "Ha! Got you! Catch!"

He tosses the orb over to his other—a high arcing toss, easy to catch. If his other catches it, he'll see that it contains a few sparks of golden energy arcing out from its center, like a novelty plasma ball, full of captive lightning. If he doesn't catch it, it will...bounce off under the desks.

Regardless, the sample's not large enough for identification, despite the Doctor in black's hope that it is.

The Doctor's closer to the start of the alphabet, so he ducks around a table and takes a closer look at the 'D' section. The first journal he pulls out is indeed one about the Daleks; loopy circular Gallifreyan handwriting that doesn't quite look like his own, and sketches, specs and specifics on the most effective ways of building close combat weapons against Daleks. For a moment, he stares at the random page he's opened - it's a detailed description of the effects of intensified alpha radiation on the Dalek clone - and then snaps the journal shut, feeling faintly sick. He looked into his other's mind, but it's always a difference between knowing something intellectually, and seeing it before your own eyes. The War really did never end for the other Doctor.

Right. D. D as in drums. He skips the Dalek section - and it's extensive, which he notices with discomfort - and finds the notes on the drums. There are quite a lot of those, too, and as he pulls out one of the folders and takes a look, he's rather lost at first. It looks like his other has made up his own mathematic symbols for these calculations, and yeah, this will take a while, going through these notes. Especially since he's not sure how much of this is relevant - the second journal in the 'drums' section he pulls out is actually a stack of sheet music of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. Cheerful.

"Should these be in here?" He waves the sheets of paper over his head before he puts them down on a nearby table to be able to continue browsing. As the other Doctor calls out, though, he looks up and quickly catches the object his other threw to him. "What's that - oh."

It's pretty; a small transparent orb with a tiny, golden, moving swirl inside. He's afraid, though, that pretty is all it is. He holds it up against the light. "I don't think this will be enough to run any tests on. Especially not if we want to do more than one test."

"Oi. Well. Nothing like a second opinion, especially if it's your own." The Doctor bobs under one table, snakes down several passageways between desks and shelves and counters and snags of wire extruding from the backs of instruments and snaking across the floor; he moves through the tangle without watching his feet or stopping to consider his next move through the labyrinth—he knows this room backwards and forwards, inside out and upside-down.

In seconds, he's standing at the shelves by his other, scooping up the Mahler. "Huh. I haven't seen these since..." Since very shortly after his Tenth regeneration. He wasn't in the lightest of moods at the time. "...Years. Du mußt nicht die Nacht in dir verschränken, Mußt sie ins ew'ge Licht versenken." His expression clouds briefly—he's not done so well, with banishing the night inside of him. But he tucks the sheaf of sheet music under one arm, slips his glasses out of a pocket, jams them on, and looks at the first folder on the drums his other has pulled out. "Oh, right, this is early work, fairly crude, a stab in the dark, but it informs my later hypotheses. See, these are stimuli to perceived-volume sequences, I thought I could work out a relationship..."

Someone is avoiding the energy issue.

The Doctor is still studying the small orb with the golden swirl caught inside; he can't be sure what it is, but something looks off about this wisp of energy. It should be Artron; after all, his other emitted it, and Artron is the only energy a Time Lord can emit. It doesn't look like Artron, though. Not entirely. Or maybe it does, and he's just seeing things. He's not sure.

His other has picked up the lab journal the Doctor pulled from the shelf, and when he speaks, the Doctor looks up. "Hm?" He lowers his eyes to the scribblings his other is pointing at, and yeah, he can see that these are formulas describing some sort of impulse reaction, but beyond that, he doesn't know nearly enough about this yet to be able to say what exactly is going on in that calculation. "Yeah, I'll have to go through all of these to get myself up to speed. Maybe you could pick the most relevant ones out later, and I can read up on what you've got so far." Preferably not here in the lab. It's a good lab, but it's not much if you're looking for a place to read. If his other won't oppose, he'll later take the journals and folders with him to his library.

"Right now, I think we should figure this out." He holds the glass orb against the light again. "Just look at that. It looks like Artron, but can you see that second spin on the third energy level? That's not Artron specific; I don't know what that is." Although he does know, or he thinks he knows, but he can't put his finger on it.

The Doctor runs a hand down his notes, thoughtfully. Even back at the very beginning of his studies, he'd known that there had to be a scientific explanation—there always was—and felt, every step of the way, that he was close. There were relationships, between volume and stimuli and mental activity, between time of onset and their gradual strengthening, that almost fit together. With two of them working on the problem, he and his other, the objective outsider but just as brilliant, the same background, the same quick mind, they'll have it solved in no time.

This is the problem he wants to work on.

He gives the ECaSS (Energy Collection and Sustainment Sphere) a glance, as his other holds it up to the light, fascinated. And he would be fascinated, too—he should be—because his other is right, the properties of the energy, as it curls in the orb, pooling against the inner surface where his other's fingers touch the outside, differ from artron energy. Except that energy came from him, and he's getting tired of discovering he doesn't know quite who he is, anymore. "Mm. Yeah, the spectrum shift's off, too, see those sparks? Bit too far to the violet, almost out of the visible entirely."

"It's not artron." He's seen energy like this, right after his reconstruction by the TARDIS—he radiated the stuff for days—he even tried to run tests on it. But his notes from that time period read as nonsense, when he fully recovered and looked over them again—ramblings and doodles and equations that involved colors and flowers and rubber ducks taken to the cauliflower-th power, written in Gallifreyan and English and High German and...hieroglyphics, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, for Rassilon's sake.

Not the best science. The TARDIS had been very worried, at the time; now she just remembers him bashing about his laboratories and waving sticks at beakers and drawing chalk diagrams on the walls to perform "alchemical chemical super-zoning-triangle analysis" with amusement.

"We really should figure out what that is, shouldn't we?" His tone of voice says 'I know we should, and I'm trying to convince myself.'

The Doctor squints, and yes, he can see the violet. Tiny streaks in this already tiny swirl of energy, but they're there. Yeah, this is not Artron. It's something a lot like it, though.

"Has this ever happened before?" His other seems unperturbed enough by the fact that he's emitting Artron (respectively Artron-like) energy while his body is completely stable and fully regenerated, so that the Doctor concludes he must have seen this before. There might even be notes on this in the vastness of lab journals, the Doctor realizes, but his other hasn't mentioned any. Huh.

"Of course we should." The Doctor's surprised at his other's hesitant manner. He asked him to help - well, the Doctor offered, but his other accepted. You'd think he'd be more interested in solving the riddles his condition seems to cause.

The Doctor shelves the lab notes and sets the sheaf of sheet music back down on the counter. The drums will have to wait; he knows his own curiosity, and it seems to remain a constant across universes—his other won't let this go.

And why should he? The energy's new, something neither of them, it seems, has seen anywhere in their universes. It could be dangerous, it could be important.

The Doctor in black doesn't have the memories of John Smith, having never reclaimed the body of his version, but, if he did, he might recognize his feelings about the energy, recognize how similar they are to a human man's feelings about a fob watch, which, once opened, could erase his understanding of himself, of who he is—partially, entirely, he has no way of knowing.

He just wants to be the Doctor. Gallifreyan, whole, himself. What he's always been. Nothing else.

"Once. After my TARDIS...reconstructed me, I saw energy like that. It came off of my hair, my skin, when I breathed, when I spoke—and I talked streams, don't think half of what I said made sense, but no one was listening but me, so who's to say? Followed me everywhere I went—everywhere in the TARDIS. I didn't leave her—I don't think I could've." He waves down towards the 'R's and 'Regeneration.' "I took notes. You're welcome to them. The effect wore off before I came back to my right mind, so...well, they're a bit...oblique."

The other Doctor's tone is even enough, but it carries an almost wary undertone. And, well, the Doctor realizes that it would; it would be strange if his other didn't feel wary towards the fact that he's apparently able to create an entirely new form of radiation. The Doctor in black had been basically dead, stripped of the one thing that made him the man he was, his corporeal form, until his TARDIS rebuilt him. To the Doctor's knowledge, it's not something that has ever happened before. His other is the Doctor, a Time Lord in his tenth regeneration, but he is also new, different, and yeah, the Doctor can understand why he would feel a little wary about that.

"Down here, you said?" The Doctor dodges a few tables and squeezes past a workbench to get to the shelf with the notes on - ah, regeneration. That makes sense. It wasn't a regeneration per se, but what his other is describing sounds like a more severe version of post-regeneration trauma, so the process was probably similar to a 'normal' regeneration, or at least based on similar principles.

He picks up one of the lab journals and opens it, hoping to find maybe somewhat confused, but still legible research notes - and finds a page filled with drawings of small fish. Some of them are part of equations - two fish plus three fish make eight fish, and yeah, even the simplest of those fish-equations don't make any sense. He flips to another random page, and this is more like it. At least these are recognizable mathematical symbols, even though they're from Earth's early 20th century, and why would his other use this rather limited mathematical language for these types of calculations - until the Doctor realizes that he's looking at a recipe for pancakes, carefully spelled out in mathematical equations.

The Doctor flips the journal shut. "Yeah, no, I think we'll have to redo those, um, tests." He's quite sure that even if he found a page filled with actual calculations and lab results on the strange radiation in his other's notes from that time, they'd be rather unreliable. "We'll need to try and get you to emit some more of those particles. Do you, um, want to try it the way it worked before, or do you know another way?" Merging his mind with his other to communicate with his other's TARDIS had been an interesting experience, but he's not sure if it feels like something they should be doing again such a short time after. If his other doesn't know a different way to create the radiation, though, he will go ahead with the merge. He's pretty sure this radiation thing is significant.

The Doctor registers his other's reaction to the notes with a slight smile—he went through those backwards and forwards himself in the weeks after his full recovery, hoping to find something that made sense, but all he got were a few unusual but quite tasty recipes, a handful of new knock-knock jokes, the discovery that you could write haiku using only the chemical symbols from the Yelvian Expanded Periodic Table (Plus Footnotes), and the general impression he'd been enjoying himself, which fit in with the scattered memories he retained.

"Try test number three hundred point pink. It's in very bad Latin. I think I was trying to summon a Patronus."

And despite his reluctance, he's already found his way to a modified general diagnostics table, which looks rather like a late 20th/early 21st-century doctor's table, except for the scanner panel floating full-length above it, the snake's nest of electrodes and psionic sensory samplers wired into the headrest, and the readout and instrument panels haloing it, angling up from its sides.

He taps in some basic settings, priming the table. "Mm, I'd rather you stayed out of the loop. One of us needs to stay the objective scientific observer, and I don't think either of us can do that if we're tangled up in each other's minds."

"Right," and he takes off his glasses, tosses them on a nearby table, throws his jacket over a lab stool stacked with bulky texts, and proceeds to strip off his jumper, "I reckon I can simulate the merge by lowering all mental defenses and entering a pre-forced-regenerative state. That sets up a time resonance—remember our Fourth-to-Fifth? The new regeneration will be on the cusp of existence, right outside of space-time, and the TARDIS will try to get through to him, it's instinct, make the bridge from me to him. That's a highly-charged moment, entirely potential energy, and the readings should be extremely strong."

He's applying electrodes to his chest and back as he talks, wincing now and again—some of the sensors also take blood readings, piercing tiny, sharp biometallurgic hooks down into his skin. But it's all routine, he's run tests like this many hundreds of times before—though never one quite this...precarious.

"If it looks like I'm going over into full regeneration, you know what to do. Psionic-electric shock, should break the connection, reestablish temporal-physical stability, the trigger's here." He indicates a keypad on one side of the table. "If that doesn't work, well..." He looks over at his other, with a very quiet smile and a shrug. "Take care of me, will you?"

Festooned with electrodes, he hoists himself up onto the table. "Ready?"

So Harry Potter exists in his other's universe as well. Heh. Some things are just cross-universal constants.

He postpones checking out the Patronus spell, though, as his other starts preparing a diagnostic table that looks rather a lot like a mixture of Dr. Frankenstein's workplace as seen in old black-and-white movies, and something a late 22nd century homeopath might use. It's quite obviously a piece of equipment his other put together himself.

Yes, scientific observer, they need that, and they're only two people. The Doctor nods at the suggestion, wandering over to the examination table and taking a closer look. It might be home-made, but the Doctor has a feeling that every hospital or research facility treating humanoids would itch to get their hands on it. It's not only a complete biometric and physiologic scanner, it also has sensors for neurological activities. A look at the scales tells the Doctor that it would even pick up Omega brainwaves, if an Enzophal were to hook up to the machine. It's rather impressive, as most things are in this lab. Well, except the post-rebuilt notes. Those are just bizarre.

It all looks rather promising, but as he listens to his other's plan, it starts to sound stranger by the moment, deviating very quickly into 'unacceptable'. The Doctor lets his other finish, watching him as he hooks up electrodes with a skill that only comes from routine, the urge to interrupt subdued by the shock he's feeling at his other's suggestions.

When his other asks him if he's ready, he only blinks once. "Whoa." He shakes his head. "I was only talking about making you sparkle a little. How did we end up with a life-endangering experiment that might end in me having to take care of you?"

The Doctor in black pulls one knee up and leans his arms on it, watching his other. Huh. He hadn't thought of that—that his other might not even know the risks attendant on what he wants to explore. That explains some of his eagerness.

"Well..." He runs a hand through his hair, expression ambiguous—embarrassment, earnestness, uncertainty, something a bit like fear, and a kind of tense eagerness—this is an experiment he's never before let himself consider running, one he couldn't run on his own, and now that he's actually thinking about it, he just wants to go with it, to see how far he can push it. It's like walking to the edge of a cliff—get too close, and the whole world opens up below your feet, and you just want to jump. "It doesn't just appear, I've gone...what is it, now, almost two years without a flicker. Judging by what happened in the wardrobe, it must be generated only while I'm in extraordinarily close...contact, I s'pose you could call it, with my TARDIS. I don't know if you could feel it, no reason you should have, but while she was making contact with you, I—I was her and she was me. Her in my mind, that's nothing new. I invite her in all the time, she helps. But loss of identity boundaries like that...that's very close to...there was a liminal state, when she'd—this is all theoretical, I've only got the barest memories, but I've got hers, too, and they corroborate this—she'd got the best part of me out of the watch but she had to..."

He plucks at one of the wires hooked into his chest, frustrated and uneasy—all of this is somehow, oddly, very personal. It feels almost wrong, indecent, to talk about it. "...I wasn't all in the right order. It took her years to put me right. And we're not sure she did, there're bits that stayed in the wrong one of us, and I reckon she did some patching, with her own memories of me, where she'd lost my own memories."

"So, rough analogy, she had to defrag the software before she reconstructed the hardware. And, while she did that, there weren't any divisions between us. The entire process involved her recreating the division."

"That's what it felt like, in the wardrobe. Faster, of course, moments, not years, but the same process. Subsumption and redivision. It's a new field, I haven't developed terminology."

He throws his other an apologetic, frustrated look—this is a long, convoluted explanation, and terribly imprecise, almost metaphysics, not science, and he's sorry for that. He wishes he had better words, knew more.

"If we want to recreate that scenario under laboratory conditions, I'm certain I need an external focus point for her to attempt contact with. I've run tests pushing our symbiote resonance up to levels far beyond any historically recorded—brain scans show activity indicative of the Rassilon Imprimature throughout the nervous system, beyond the symbiotic nuclei. But identity permeability increases with increased resonance. If I push it to the levels I think are necessary for energy emission, she'll...we'll merge again. I'm not certain what the effect would be."

"But, if she has an external focus, the merge, judging from what happened in the wardrobe, becomes a temporary state, it's controlled. Once contact with the external focus is made, the conditions the merge was triggered to achieve are met, and the redivision occurs spontaneously. It becomes an unstable peak, emitting energy and returning to ground state, instead of a...a stable jump, up from one energy level to another. Physical reaction instead of chemical. Conducting electricity instead of being burned by it."

"It's not clean." By this point in his monologue, his hair's standing out at all angles, he's run his hands through it so many times, and he's given up fidgeting with the electrodes and wires in favor of tapping his rhythm against his knee, unconsciously, as the picks his way through the imprecise mess of words. "The science is rubbish. I'm making the language up as I go."

Blimey. This is... different.

The Doctor did notice that the connection between this Doctor and his TARDIS is closer, different, but he didn't realize how different. His own TARDIS, she's always there in his mind, but she's her own consciousness. Their thoughts don't merge, their identities don't mingle. They're two separate individuals, existing alongside each other. The Doctor can't really imagine how it would be not to have this separation, to be the TARDIS instead of just being with her.

It's a scary thought. The TARDIS is so different, she's got time and space and eternity all wrapped up in herself, and only touching that can sometimes be too much. Having it, in your mind, in yourself - it would have to change you, mentally and physically.

The Doctor realizes that his other is basically a whole new form of existence, at least physically. Not Gallifreyan, not entirely, not anymore. The merge with his TARDIS has changed him, and they can't be sure of anything anymore. He knew that, basically, it just took him a while to realize the extent of it.

He nods at his other's explanation. "I can see what you mean now. You need a third reagent, almost like a catalyst, to channel the psychic energy into." That makes sense; if the division between his other and his TARDIS is an artificial one, the symbiosis would try and use any energy input to reach its natural state of unison.

That's just it, though. The symbiosis between a Time Lord and his TARDIS is in its natural state when they're just connected minds. The Doctor might be able to become one with his TARDIS, but it would not be easy, and the amount of psychic energy required would be enormous. And it would not be a stable condition. With his other, it's the opposite - his state of separation from his TARDIS is the unstable configuration, and a merge would be the logical reaction to energy input.

The Doctor wonders if this might have something to do with why his other hears the drums. He knows they started before the reconstruction, but this has got to be significant.

"Well, but considering all this, it would be even more reckless to go ahead with what you suggested. The reconstruction obviously changed you on all levels. If you attempted regeneration, who's to say that you would even be able to change your body? Maybe you can't." And that, right there, is somewhat of a scary thought, and if he's feeling that way, Rassilon knows what his other is thinking. The Doctor continues, softer now. "You can't play with something as risky as regenerative abilities if you can't be entirely sure whether you even still have them. And you don't have to, not for this experiment, anyway. You've got all these fancy instruments, they're scientific observer enough. I can be the catalyst; it didn't do me any harm last time."

The Doctor shifts on the surface of the table, turning to face his other more squarely, letting the leg he's not leaning on hang over the side.

"I've run extensive tests on general healing and disease and poison resistance. I'm fit. I couldn't test regenerative capacities, of course, without initiating a crisis, but...you're here now! I needed a second, there's no one I'd trust more than myself. We can kill two birds with one stone. Stun. Stun two birds."

"Come on, of course it's a risk. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, where no Time Lord's gone before, all that." Despite the offhandedness of his words, he watches his other with a tentative, tense seriousness—he wants to be enabled, he wants to go out on this limb, now that he's allowed himself to consider it, to recklessly confront these questions he's been unable to answer—or ignored—for far too long.

Hearing his other correct himself on this rather harmless proverb is both sweet and sort of sad. The Doctor takes off his glasses to be able to run a hand over his face.

"Risks are often necessary, I agree, but they have a time and a place. I'm sure you're fit and all in working order, but you don't know if your working order still includes regenerative abilities. We can test for that, we should test for that, and I've got some stuff back in my lab on the TARDIS that we can use on a tissue sample, so you won't have to initiate a crisis to find out. We don't have to take this particular risk for this experiment. There's no logical reason we should, your instruments are precise enough to record the data reliably. We can simply connect and do the same thing we did back in the wardrobe, and no-one will be in any danger of dying."

He recognizes his other's eagerness as something he's seen in himself and never wanted to acknowledge to be there. It's the urge to run away, to start something new and see if that will change everything, because that's what it means, the word new, doesn't it? Change. Except that it never works, at least not quite the way you had hoped it to. The Doctor's learned that much.

His other sees what the Doctor in black hides from himself—that this recklessness, the desire to initiate an experiment that could easily result in death or regeneration, comes from his wish to run. To run from himself into someone else, a new personality that might not have the drums or that might know how to make peace with them, a new personality that would be one more remove from his mistakes.

Like his other, he runs from himself without stopping to look at what he runs from, the inescapable hurts he never holds still long enough to think about, and so none of his running can ever help him. He doesn't look at the way, in his Tenth, he clings to the remnants of his Ninth, clothing and body language and the quick temper, the harshness that the drums approve of and that sits poorly with his current personality.

Regeneration has not helped and cannot help him, because the man inside the changed body has not changed.

The man inside refuses to change. He was broken and healed at wrong angles, and he must break again in order to heal properly.

He must face the pain of the rebreaking, at his own hands or the hands of another. A Doctor's hands.

But he doesn't think any of this, not consciously. He pulls the leg dangling over the edge of the table back up, rests his arms on his knees, and his chin on his arms, brows drawn down in frustration as he regards his other. He catches the expression and smooths it over, converting it into formal, flat neutrality, a mask for his disappointment and irritation. After all, what his other's saying does make sense.

"Fine. No, fine, you're right. I don't know what I was thinking." He twists back around and lies down on the table properly, stretching out his long legs and settling his head back into the tangle of sensors at the top of the table. They begin to attach themselves automatically, electrodes positioning themselves at his temples and along his hairline, sharp-ended bio-reads slithering down along the back of his neck, disappearing under his skin to lace themselves into his spinal column. He has other devices that can take similar readings less invasively, but the extra margin of accuracy these sensors allow outweighs the snags of pain.

"Preliminary readings coming through?" He could cue the machine to recite its findings to him, but with the other Doctor here, it's quicker if he just has him check the displays.

His other's expression is not a happy one, and the Doctor knows this feeling, too. They don't like to be told what to do, and they don't like to be told to stay when they want to leave. He rarely ever listens himself when someone tries to stop him from running, so when the Doctor in black swallows his frustration - it's a visible moment; his face changes from a deep frown to a neutral mask - the Doctor feels relief.

Maybe this Doctor really does want his help; maybe he wants it badly enough that he'll actually let him help. The Doctor can only hope this is true, because he does want to help his other. It's hard to see yourself so lost.

The electrodes slither into position, and the Doctor slips his glasses back on, squinting at the read-outs on the monitors. The readings that appear are within Gallifreyan parameters of normal, and this is strange, having the proof that his other is exactly like him right there in front of him.

Well, not exactly like him. The heart rate is normal, the pressure in his other's cardiovascular as well as his pulmonary system is within range, the blood gases read normal, and so does the impulse velocity in his other's nervous system.

The EEG is different, though. It's spitting out alpha and gamma waves at the moment, as expected, as well as some beta and even some delta waves in the temporal regions, which is also well within the norm. Just above the Bridge, though, the broad part of the Gallifreyan brain that connects both hemispheres and that holds, among many other things, the symbiotic nuclei and the telepathic and the time sense, the readings are more than puzzling. It almost seems like an overlay of two readouts, one Gallifreyan, and the other - different. These bands are nothing like anything one would ever see on a normal brain wave scan; they're new and different, a slow frequency with a big amplitude, but much more regular than delta or theta waves.

The Doctor is quite sure that this is an echo of his other's TARDIS, and it's fascinating. It takes some effort to tear his eyes away from watching that additional, strange rhythm; he'll have to study the recorded data very closely. EEG readings from a TARDIS might just be something no-one's ever been able to study; it's not as if a TARDIS has a brain, after all.

"Yes, yes, coming through. Everything seems within the norm." He checks the other monitors, making sure that all the readings he's getting are making sense, and then turns to look at his other, spreading his fingers in the traditional gesture that communicates a request to enter his other's mind. He lowers his own mental shielding, which he'd been unconsciously reinforcing to keep out most of the echo of the drums. They're gaining volume now, he can hear their constant beat, radiating out from his other in the old, well-known rhythm.

"Ready?"

The Doctor notes the moment his other shifts his gaze to the EEG, the sudden intent fascination of his gaze, the way he leans in closer and pushes his glasses further up his nose as though to bring the readings into clearer focus (though they both know the glasses don't do anything—funny, isn't it, he thinks, that they still wear them, even alone or around each other). He remembers the first time he read the presence of his TARDIS as part of him, knit into the signature of his mind—marveling and disturbed by how well she fit, as though his brain structure had been missing an element before, a gap that had now been filled.

He'll have to point out his genetics notes to his other, later. In any given strand of his DNA, a fraction of the gene sequences are undetectable using even the most advanced medical instruments—he had to develop analogous devices that could sense and render fourth-and-higher-dimensional structures according to first-to-third dimensional principles before he could map the "missing" genes. The sections aren't new—nothing's been added to his genetic structure—it's only that a fraction of it (and which fraction can change at any time) no longer exists in standard physical space.

He has yet to work through all of the implications of that, including the fact that his RNA polymerase can read and transcribe hypodimensionally-encoded data.

But explaining that to his other can come later. Right now, the other Doctor's offering the mental contact that can initiate this experiment—the Doctor in black can feel the undisturbed quiet of his mind, as he lets his shields down.

He puts his hands out as his other leans over him, reaching up to touch his other's temples as his other's hands position themselves over his.

Before he can catch himself, he licks out into his other's mind, a brief but intimate intrusion, like tongue in a casual greeting kiss, tasting his other's silence.

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