The watch clicked.
For a moment, nothing happened. I stood alone between the garages, my thumb still on the button, London drizzle pattering softly on the concrete.
Then my world exploded.
Light burst out of the opened case, not shining outward but inward, folding through my eyes and skin and bones. My lungs seized. My knees buckled. The yard vanished from my sight.
My body fell to the ground—except for my mind there was no ground. I felt like I was continuously falling.
I fell through a tunnel of spinning symbols, circles within circles, lines looping and intersecting in patterns my human brain had never seen, yet my other mind recognised immediately. They weren't just shapes; they were sentences, names, equations, poems.
Gallifreyan, I realised. The word rose like something long buried finally given air.
The answer finally rolled off my tongue in my mind, and I understood this was the word I had been searching for earlier.
Voices flooded in. Not from outside, but from inside the watch, inside my skull, inside my history.
A child laughing as a screwdriver twice his size sparked in his hands.
A stern teacher in gold and crimson robes saying, "Again, Halevar. If you cannot reassemble a Type 20 stabiliser with your eyes closed, you do not touch one with them open."
A friend's hand clapping my shoulder on a balcony beneath an orange sky.
Alarms howling far below the citadel.
The roar of war-ships zipping through the air.
The steady thrum of an engine older than empires, singing to me as I crawled half inside its console, coaxing it to behave.
The tunnel of symbols twisted. Human memories slammed into Gallifreyan ones and tried to occupy the same space.
A cramped London flat.
A mum yelling that I'd be late for school.
Jackie banging on the wall because I'd left the telly too loud again.
Fixing my first engine at the garage.
Watching "Rose" in my old life, as Jonathan, criticising the visuals and then falling in love with the story anyway.
Jonathan Smith.
The name hit me like another impact. Different body, different world, same continuity.
I wasn't just Steven Hale, garage mechanic from the Powell Estate.
I wasn't just the man who'd once been Jonathan Smith, an office worker from another universe who died pushing a boy out of the way of a bus.
I was both of those and someone else entirely.
Someone with two hearts.
The pain finally arrived.
Every vein felt like it was burning. My skull rang with a sound like grinding gears. I tried to scream and heard three voices at once: a frightened human boy, an older human man, and a calm, annoyed Gallifreyan technician telling everyone to stop panicking because this was all, theoretically, under control.
The light surged one last time and then slammed inward, packing itself neatly where it had always belonged. In me.
It was over before my body hit the ground.
Cold, wet concrete under my palms. The smell of oil and distant rubbish. London. Night. Rain.
I lay there, gasping. My chest hammered.
Ba-dum ba-dum.
Ba-dum ba-dum.
Two rhythms, not quite in sync, overlapping.
I rolled onto my back and stared at the sky. It was the wrong colour. I almost laughed. Of all the details, that was what my brain chose to focus on.
"Okay," I croaked. "Okay. That… happened."
The watch was still in my hand, open. The inside wasn't glowing anymore. It looked almost ordinary now, even more ordinary than before: silver and glass and tiny, impossible mechanisms. But I no longer heard anything from it.
My watch. My mind. My species. All back where they belonged.
"…I'm a Time Lord," I said aloud, just to see how it felt.
The words settled into place, solid and undeniable.
***
I stayed on the ground until my breathing steadied and the spinning in my head dropped from hurricane to heavy breeze. My human body had been rewritten on the fly; everything ached, but in a distant, muffled way, as if, out of courtesy, someone had turned the pain down to a manageable level.
Eventually I pushed myself upright and sat with my back against one of the garage doors.
Memories sorted themselves.
Not neatly—nothing about war and exile and death was neat—but at least into piles big enough that I could put labels on them.
Gallifrey. The Academy. The workshops under the citadel where the "real work" was done while the council argued above. Long nights elbow-deep in broken time machines with other students who also preferred elbow grease to glory.
The Time War. I remembered the beginning more clearly than the end. The first time a colleague didn't come back from a repair mission. The first time a TARDIS arrived home half-melted and forever broken. The first time the sky over the citadel changed from peaceful orange to bruised purple, streaked with enemy fire.
And then—running. Evacuation orders. Someone shouting my name. A plan thrown together too fast. A talk with a being in a place outside time, promising reincarnation, a second chance wrapped in rules and conditions.
I pressed a hand to my forehead.
"Right," I muttered. "So not only am I a refugee from a temporal apocalypse, I'm also technically on my... what... third life? Brilliant."
And under all of that, like a quiet little note threaded through the chaos: the extra gift.
Assimilate.
I could feel it now, like a secondary process idling at the back of my mind, quietly analysing everything I saw, heard, or touched. The reason fixing gearboxes and televisions had felt so easy. The reason human technology had slotted together in my head faster than any manual could keep up.
On Gallifrey it had made me one of the quicker students in my year. On Earth, wearing a human brain, it had made me a minor genius in a small corner of London.
With both sets of memories active, it purred like an engine warming up.
Steven—no, that was just the name I used here—closed the watch with a soft snap.
Instantly, the whispering stopped. Not from the watch; those were in my mind now. But the constant distant murmur that had followed me for months faded away, leaving behind something close to silence.
For the first time since I'd come to this universe, my thoughts were fully my own.
I sat there for a long time.
It would have been very easy to panic.
I could have curled into a ball, screamed at the sky, or tried to pretend I hadn't just changed species in the back yard of a council estate.
But Time Lords were trained to handle information overload. Even the ones who mostly preferred working with faulty stabilisers instead of equations had drills for this.
Breathe. Catalogue. Prioritise.
I did that now.
First priority: body.
I did a quick internal check. Hearts, both present and correct, beating strongly. Respiratory bypass available. Temperature regulation improved. Vision sharper. Hearing—ow; I winced as a car door slammed three streets away. Definitely sharper.
No sign of regeneration energy flaring out of control. Good.
Second priority: identity.
I was Steven Hale, registered human citizen, National Insurance number and everything. I had a job, a flat, neighbours who might actually notice if I suddenly vanished.
I was also—the older memories told me—the Engineer, a junior technician from the Citadel's Engineering Corps, specialising in TARDIS maintenance and dimensional stabilisers, temporarily attached to evacuation projects in the final years of the War. I remembered my true name as well, but when I became a Time Lord I took an oath and chose a new identity.
And before that, I'd been Jonathan Smith, from a world where Doctor Who was a TV show and Time Lords were a cool idea in somebody else's story.
Three lives. One mind.
I could feel the potential for that to pull me in different directions. But right now, bizarrely, the different selves agreed on one thing.
The Doctor is real. He's here. And I just pointed his own screwdriver at a killer mannequin hand like I'd been doing it for years.
I groaned softly and let the back of my head thud against the metal door.
"Oh, that's going to be fun to explain."
Although, judging by the look on his face, he'd probably already connected the dots and simply left me be out of… what, respect for privacy? Very kind of him, I guess.
Third priority: situation.
I replayed the last hour as calmly as I could. Auton attack and workplace explosion—Rose had told me her workplace had blown up. Plastic arm trying to strangle the Doctor and then Rose.
The Doctor.
In my Gallifreyan memories, the Doctor existed as a sort of half-myth: the madman who stole a Type 40 and ran away, the troublemaker teachers used as a cautionary tale. In Jonathan's memories, the Doctor was a beloved character on a screen. In my life as the Engineer hiding as Steven, he was now a man in a leather jacket who'd looked at me with quiet recognition when "Steven" instinctively used a sonic screwdriver.
And, if Jonathan's knowledge of the show was accurate, tonight or tomorrow some very bad things were going to happen under the London Eye.
Bad things that the Doctor would fix. That he had to fix. That he had always fixed.
Which raised the big question:
How much was I allowed to interfere?
I remembered the entity's last words before shoving me into this universe.
"Please note this is necessary to help your new identity be better integrated in this universe. May you find your worth in your new life."
Well, that wasn't exactly a detailed mission statement. But there had been more. As a Time Lord, I knew about fixed points, about not tearing the story apart just because you knew the next page.
Jonathan, of course, knew time travel shouldn't be this simple. The butterfly effect tells us that even just placing a simple object in another place can vastly change history's outcome. But he also knew that this "rule" was implemented by writers to tell viewers more interesting stories. Besides, Time Lords are the professionals. If they say it's fine, it probably is fine.
So I suspected that if I tried to rewrite major events, the universe would push back. Hard. But everything else? Fair game.
"Fine," I said quietly to the empty yard. "I won't steal the plot. But I am not just going to sit and do nothing either."
I was a mechanic. I fixed things. I didn't have to be the hero of the story to stop a few gears from jamming. But I sure as hell wasn't going to sit around and let certain tragedies happen when I could change them.
***
By the time I stood up, my legs felt steadier. My mind had gone from "screaming vortex" to "overcrowded but manageable office".
I slipped the watch into my pocket. It settled there with a reassuring weight.
As I stepped out from between the garages, I automatically tested my new senses. Distance, angles, the faint threads of temporal energy that clung to the air after the Doctor had been nearby.
There. A direction, faint but traceable, leading away from the estate toward the city centre.
I could follow it.
I glanced down at myself—work boots, worn T-shirt, cargo pants still smudged with grease from the garage—and thought about showing up wherever the Doctor was going next.
Hello, yes, I'm your traumatised neighbour who just broke open his own mind, by the way I used to fix TARDISes for a living, please don't ask too many questions.
Haha. No.
I needed a moment to process before throwing myself into the Doctor's orbit. And the Doctor, if the timeline held, already had his hands full with living shop dummies and a hungry plastic monster under a tourist attraction.
Instead, I turned in the opposite direction and started walking.
Not toward home.
Not toward the garage.
Toward the railway arches where, in my Jonathan memories, I knew a certain blue box would eventually materialise again after tonight's crisis. As for the exact location, thanks to Steven's memories I knew London like the back of my hand.
I wouldn't interfere with the resolution of the Nestene mess. That belonged to Rose and the Doctor. A common mistake is that protagonists act like they are the only competent person around and the rest of the cast becomes inexplicably incompetent. I had left the Doctor and Rose very early "in the story", so the rest of the "plot" had a really good chance of happening exactly as it did in the show.
Although this is the real world now. How can I be so certain nothing will go wrong? Decisions, decisions.
I supposed I could be nearby. I could watch, learn, and decide what kind of Time Lord I wanted to be in this life before jumping in feet first.
I could prepare.
Assimilate purred approvingly at the back of my mind.