Chapter Text
200,100 AD
Gemma felt strangely displaced as she finished her jump and staggered out of the small, claustrophobic room she was in. She closed her eyes against the bright light that met her and grabbed blindly for something to hold onto as her knees were about to give up on her.
Someone caught her just before she lost her balance and hands wrapped around her arms to steady her. Gemma’s hands landed on the stranger’s chest and she instinctively clutched the leather jacket underneath the palm of her hands.
“Are you okay?” a male voice questioned and Gemma frowned at the Northern accent. Where had she ended up this time?
“Yeah, just feeling a bit sick.” Gemma nodded and slowly opened her eyes to look at the person she was clinging onto.
She was met by a pair of blue eyes and momentarily lost her breath, when she took in the rest of him. He wore a serious expression on his face, which seemed to be all sharp lines and edges. He was handsome, but she felt intimidated by him as well.
“Doctor,” she breathed in relief, suddenly feeling the two hearts beating in his chest, and let go of his leather jacket to wrap her arms around his waist.
“Where are we?” Gemma asked as she pulled away, noticing with a frown that the Doctor hadn’t hugged her back.
Maybe he just wasn’t a hugger like one of his older regenerations. Gemma couldn’t know since it was her first time meeting this regeneration.
“In Big Brother apparently,” the Doctor replied offhandedly and turned away before suddenly narrowing his eyes at her, when he realized she had called him Doctor. “Have we met before?”
“What d’you mean? It’s me, Gemma.”
“Gemma who?” the Doctor asked as his eyes glided over her searchingly. He found her strangely familiar, but couldn’t remember ever having met her.
“Another new contestant? Isn’t that against the rules or something?” someone exclaimed from behind the Doctor, and Gemma leaned past him to find two women and a man staring at them.
“Doctor, please tell me you know who I am,” Gemma pleaded quietly, ignoring the others’ outrage, but all the Doctor did was frown at her.
“Would the Doctor please come to the Diary Room?” a computerized voice called out suddenly and a buzzing noise sounded by a door, signalling the Doctor to go through it.
“Doctor,” Gemma tried again, begging him to recognize her, but all she got was one last look of confusion before he disoriented disappeared into the Diary Room.
“You know him?”
Gemma looked around to find a blonde girl by her side, looking excited and nervous at the same time. Her hair was gathered in pigtail buns, which reminded Gemma of the 90’s, and she was wearing green sweatpants and a white jumper.
Looking down at herself, Gemma suddenly felt overdressed in her green long-sleeved dress and brown wedge-heeled boots. She had been ready to go out when she had been pulled away, but the outfit wasn’t so different from what she usually wore.
“Yeah, but I don’t think he knows me,” Gemma told the blonde sadly and a sudden thought made tears well into her eyes. What if this was really the Doctor’s first meet with her and what if this would be her last? What if she was doomed to repeat River’s fate?
“Hey, it’s okay, I’m sure it’s just the transmat messing with his memory. It does that for a few minutes after,” the blonde tried to comfort her, when she noticed the stricken look on Gemma’s face.
“No, that’s not it. The Doctor doesn’t remember me, because he’s never met me before.”
Please don’t let this be the last time I ever see him.
--------
1966
The first time Gemma Chesterton opened her eyes was on 4th July 1966 in a London hospital. She was perfectly ordinary, to her parents’ relief, and wailed like any other baby would.
Ian and Barbara raised their daughter as normally as they possibly could, away from time travelling and monsters, but when bedtime came they didn’t tell the stories of Cinderella or The Little Mermaid.
By age ten Gemma knew every adventure her parents had had with the Doctor by heart, but kept them to herself after three girls from year six had laughed and told her she was crazy for believing in aliens and a police box that was bigger on the inside.
But Gemma believed in the Doctor and read everything about time travelling she could possibly get her hands on. She was eight, when her parents realized she was different, after all.
She learned new languages without great difficulty and was able to fluently speak German, Spanish, French and Portuguese at the age of fifteen.
Her understanding of physics and astronomy overshined her father’s before she was even admitted to Oxford University. He joked that she wouldn’t need a TARDIS to travel in time as she could simply invent her own time machine.
UNIT tried to recruit her the day she finished her masters in mathematical and theoretical physics, but Gemma declined. Even the chance of one day meeting the Doctor couldn’t persuade her. He was like the hero in a fairy tale to her and one should never meet one’s heroes.
Instead Gemma took a job as a physics professor at the Imperial College London; the youngest to do so at the age of twenty-seven. She moved to an apartment in London with her boyfriend, Charles, and the extraordinary woman enjoyed an ordinary life.
It was only a couple of months after she had turned thirty-four, when it all changed.
2000
It was after midnight, the sun had set hours ago, when Gemma walked down an empty street on her way home from a faculty party. She was more than a little tipsy, but had insisted on walking home to get some fresh air.
All she registered, before she was flung into the air, was the sound of screeching tires and the yellow headlights, which suddenly lit up the road in front of her. She turned around just in time to find a car coming right towards her as it swerved dangerously.
For a long moment everything slowed down as Gemma was bathed in light, but she didn’t have time to scream before she was thrown over the hood of the car and landed on the ground; her body limp like a ragdoll.
The car continued down the road at a high speed and left Gemma alone in the dark. The light from a street lamp barely reached her and no one in the surrounding apartment buildings seemed to have heard the accident.
Gemma felt strangely calm as she lay dying on the street, but she also knew that soon the adrenalin would fade enough to let her feel the pain and then the shock would kick in; effectively killing her if she didn’t bleed to death before that.
She didn’t want to die. She really, really wanted to live. Not only for her own sake, but also for her parents, her boyfriend, all the people she cared about.
Gemma was about to lose consciousness, when she noticed the glowing light that was slowly enveloping her. It was beautiful, like golden particles flowing through the air, but Gemma didn’t get much time to admire it before her brain caught up and all the pain signals threatened to shut down her body.
She couldn’t scream or move; just lie on the ground and hope she would die sooner than later so it would end. She had a moment of clarity to wish that she had been killed on the spot.
But then something changed, a small shift in the torture she was going through, and she could feel how her body started to heal broken bones and stop inner bleedings. Her gasps for breath were loud in the silence as the rib, which had punctured her lung, healed and Gemma realized she had almost stopped breathing completely.
It wasn’t long before Gemma had healed enough to slowly get to her feet and she looked down to find that the golden particles, which now covered every inch of her, came from her. With help from the particles she was healing herself and she didn’t know how, which was an entirely new feeling on its own.
Gemma was staring down at her glowing hands in wonder, when a new kind of pain overwhelmed her and she doubled over. It felt like she was burning from the inside. Like every cell of her body was changing and her very being was being ripped apart only to be stitched back together.
She could feel an incredible force of energy build up inside her and when it became too much Gemma threw open her arms to push it out, letting out a soundless scream as she did. For a long moment all she saw was a bright light that seemed to burn through her and then, all at once, it ended.
The pain was gone, but was immediately replaced by an onslaught of emotions and sensations as if she could feel everything at once. Gemma could do nothing but stand completely still as the world spun around her, only to stop so abruptly that she lost her balance and clumsily fell on her butt.
“What the bloody hell,“ Gemma muttered as she looked down at herself and then paused when she didn’t recognize her own voice.
Instinctively, she lifted a hand to her throat and then quickly the next one as well. Her neck felt shorter than usual. Looking down the rest of her body, she noticed that her clothes hung on her in a way it hadn’t done before and she was almost certain her legs used to be longer.
Quickly, but with some effort, Gemma got back on her feet and stepped under a street lamp. Something was wrong with her. Either it was her brain and she was imagining things, or her body had actually physically changed. Her logic told it was the former, but she couldn’t dispute how real it all felt.
She was shorter than before, at least five inches, and she was younger, maybe even by twenty years. Her tall and lean body with long limbs and narrow hips was gone and instead she found herself in the body of a sixteen year old girl with wide hips and short legs.
What freaked her out the most was how keenly she could feel the changes her body had been through. Most of her organs had been replaced, probably because of the damage they had taken, and a scar she had had on the back of her hand since she was a child was gone.
Then everything around her seemed to blur and she promptly fell unconscious.
2005
Five years later Gemma took a position at UNIT as a field scientist. She was a thirty-nine year old woman in the body of a twenty-one year old and wasn’t going to start over like her parents had initially suggested.
She had already spent enough years at Oxford and fought more than enough for her position as a professor. She wasn’t going through that whole process again. Especially since everyone would treat her like the twenty-something year old they thought she was.
UNIT knew her secret. They had been the ones to cover up the death of Gemma Chesterton and put her through multiple tests to figure out what had happened to her. They hadn’t all been pleasant and nothing conclusive had come of it.
The closest thing had been someone suggesting that she had regenerated; something only the Doctor, a Time Lord, was known to do. But no one could explain why and Gemma’s parents had had to repeatedly assure everyone, including her, that Gemma was definitely their daughter and not an alien.
Which was why Gemma had finally joined UNIT. If they couldn’t give her an answer, the Doctor had to and the easiest way to find him was through UNIT. He was no longer the hero she was afraid to meet, but the expert she needed to see.
Gemma had, after some time, grown comfortable in her new body and was satisfied with how she looked despite the drastic change. It was no longer a stranger looking back at her from the mirror.
Her face had changed a lot, though. Her narrow nose was now smaller and more rounded, while her lips looked like they had been augmented. Her face was rounder with a wider, more defined jaw and her eyes had gone from light brown to a bright green colour.
What had bothered Gemma the most, and still did sometimes, was the hair. Her dark brown and straight hair, which had always been easy to handle, was now voluminous and curly and… red. She was a freaking ginger. And it took a lot more work to not make it look like she had just gotten out of bed.
She had wanted to colour it and maybe even cut it short, but her mother had stopped her, so after five years Gemma had sort of just gotten used to it. Most days she even liked it.
It had almost been a relief when Juliet Chesterton, her new legal name, had turned eighteen and old enough to move out of her parents’ house (again). She loved her parents, but they were old, over seventy now, and living with them hadn’t exactly been easy.
She sorely missed the independence and freedom adulthood had given her, and while her parents didn’t treat her like a teenager, she desperately longed for a place of her own. She had tried to go out and play teenager, but being a teenager in twenty-first century was much different from being one in the seventies and eighties. And the forty year olds, her actual peers, usually just dismissed her as being too young.
2008
It wasn’t until Martha Jones was hired by UNIT three years later that she finally made a real friend. Their first meeting had been strange at best with Martha acting like they already knew each other until she had suddenly gone very quiet and explained that she had thought Gemma was someone else.
Martha had travelled with the Doctor and Gemma had asked a thousand questions about the man; some of which her parents had already answered, when she was a child.
Gemma had thought about asking Martha to contact the Doctor, so she could finally get some real answers, but Martha always had a look in her eyes, when she talked about the Doctor that told her not to. Like some of the things that had happened were too painful to even remember.
She knew travelling with the Doctor wasn’t always fun and games. He was notorious for attracting, or more likely finding, danger and had more enemies than Gemma could name. Gemma had early-on been given admittance to the Black Archives and had read the files UNIT had on him and on his companions as well. She was one of few who were allowed to leave the Archive with her memory still intact.
UNIT also had a file on Gemma and when she had complained about not being allowed to read it to Martha, the woman had just replied with “spoilers”.
But Gemma didn’t have to wait long before she finally learned what was actually hidden in that file.