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It starts almost immediately. The Doctor is surprised he even notices, the world around him soft at the edges with that familiar post-regeneration haze.
“Why are you calling me ‘madam’?” he asks, new face scrunching up in confusion.
“Because… you're a woman?”
“Am I?” he turns, eyes wide, a hollow feeling squirming into his stomach. He doesn’t even remember his own name. “...does it suit me?”
“What?” the police officer frowns.
“Oh yeah, I remember,” he - she (?) holds up a hand, deflecting quickly. Focus on the trouble at hand. “Sorry. Half an hour ago I was a white haired Scotsman. When’s the next train due?”
"There's this moment when you're sure you're about to die and then... you're born. It's terrifying. Right now, I'm a stranger to myself. There's echoes of who I was, and a sort of call towards who I am, and I have to hold my nerve and trust all these new instincts. Shape myself towards them."
“You alright?” Yasmin's voice calls through the curtains.
“Yeah,” the Doctor calls back.
“You've been in there for ages, you got lost?”
He - she blinks. The changing room is tiny, it'd be impossible to get lost in here. But -
There's a narrow mirror on one wall and the Doctor can't seem to bear to look away from it. This body is still fresh and new and thrumming with regeneration energy, and it lies there in the mirror before the Doctor, and the Doctor barely recognises her own skin, even now. Even as she remembers her name and herself, this skin is...
Is it because she’d been old and tall and Scottish for so long? Four and a half billion years… and that was just one Tuesday. Is it because this body is another cheat? An extra? Is it because this body makes people see the Doctor differently than she’s been seen before? (Madam…). The Doctor shivers. She’s never had this much difficulty with regeneration before. Not even the cheat one last time felt this odd.
“I'm fine,” she replies. “I'll be out in a mo. I'm trying out some looks.”
Footsteps shuffle away from the curtain. The Doctor stares at her body, stares at her chest and pink knees and ringless finger and -
A sob hitches in her throat but she catches it. Now isn't the time. She needs to pull herself together. She needs to find the TARDIS so she can scour the gratings for her ring. His ring? She needs to go home.
She yearns, sudden and sharp for her beautiful arched wardrobe, her soft hum reassuring a Doctor that doesn't know herself yet. Remembers the last time, another body cold in an alley staring at his reflection in a puddle, an old man with a coat, a warm voice saying "no, that watch was beautiful!", remembers the time before that, hands tugging clothes off pegs in a hospital, tying ties around his neck on a rooftop. Remembers Christmas music humming in the background as he ran his tongue over his teeth and twirled his coat in front of a mirror, the TARDIS’s approving rumble making him laugh fondly before he’d set out for a big dinner with Jackie, Mickey, Rose.
It’s been lifetimes since then. The Doctor can barely remember how it felt to wear that face. She’d been so confident of it back then, known how people would see him with that smile and that jaw. She glares at the mirror and grabs the first pair of trousers she can reach.
The TARDIS hums under her hands, warm and loving and gentle as ever.
"My beautiful ghost monument," the Doctor breathes, head pressed to her panels. This, she knows about herself. She’s the Doctor. She belongs with this TARDIS, wandering the universe, helping out. Being kind.
She finds the ring. In between her attempts at taking Graham, Yaz and Ryan back home, she looks and looks and looks and it’s nowhere to be found. The TARDIS hums and the Doctor doesn’t understand it for the first time in her lives, until the TARDIS clicks, frustrated and offers up the ring on a tray poking at her hip.
“Oh,” the Doctor mutters, embarrassed.
She picks it up and the metal is cold. The ring doesn’t fit on any of her fingers.
“Hey,” a voice calls, and the Doctor stuffs the ring into a pocket, desperate for Yasmin not to see.
“Hi,” she grins, look at her and Ryan and Graham and says, “let’s try and get you home again,” she says, fighting off her glumness. “Maybe we’ll see thirteenth time lucky.”
It happens again. The Americans look at the Doctor and call her ‘ma’am’ and it sits ugly in her chest. She manages to get the humans back home and they’re going to leave, but -
But they stay.
Graham catches her studying the ring in the dark one evening and doesn’t say a word, but the next morning he hands her a chain and gestures to the pocket where she’s been keeping the ring.
“Carry them with you,” he says softly.
The Doctor does not cry. She does take the chain though, and she is more grateful than she can express that Ryan and Yasmin don’t question the presence of the ring around her neck when they come to join Graham for breakfast.
It goes like this. They travel. People look at the Doctor and say, “women with me and Mum, men over at Prem’s house”, and include the Doctor in that group. They call her “miss”, “madam”, “ma’am”, and it’s like each time it stings anew, each time it pushes a lump into her throat and fire itches at her palms as her hands clench into fists.
The fam notice, because of course they do. The three of them stand across the console one afternoon, quietly chewing over the ramble the Doctor’s been filling the silence with for ten minutes. Honestly, the Doctor is running out of steam on this topic and hopes desperately they spit out whatever the three of them are so clearly dying to ask soon. They’ve been tiptoeing around it all week.
"...and then we ended up accidentally setting the place on fire," she finishes, pushing a few buttons idly. "So what are you three wanting to ask about?"
Silence.
"I can see there's something," she rolls her eyes. "Has been for days. Do you wanna hop home for a bit? Ask where the pool is for the fourth time? I keep telling you it’s still in the library."
"No," says Graham, soft, careful. "It's. Uh."
He glances around for help.
“...so you’re an alien, right?” Yasmin blurts out. Graham looks relieved. “You were talking about how you used to be a Scotsman, and you kind of, minorly space out whenever anyone calls you ‘miss’ or whatever. But you always wave it off with a joke, I guess we're just wondering… if that’s an alien thing or a, well... a gender thing?”
The Doctor feels warm.
“What are you asking?” she says, still slightly cautious.
“Like. Are you not? A woman? Like, in whatever way your… alien gender works?”
The Doctor blinks. “I… I don’t know.”
“Oh?”
“It’s like I said… this is all new to me,” the Doctor says, grimaces.
Yasmin reaches out, rests a hand on her arm. “We’re here for you,” she says. “If you wanna talk it through, no matter what you realise, or remember, or-”
“Thanks.”
“In the meantime?”
The Doctor shifts. “I don’t like ‘madam’ and stuff much.”
“Noted,” nods Yasmin.
King James and the Witchfinders are not the best of it. The disregard, the presumptions, the constant, constant “lassie”s. The Doctor hates it, wants to claw at everyone around her and turn herself inside and out and show them her blood and scream, ‘look at this! Look at this and try and define me’ . But she doesn’t. She plays along. Lets Graham take control when they expect him to, stay silent when others expect the Doctor to.
She hates every second of it.
The Doctor's never cared before, but there's something different about people seeing her as a woman than a man. There's something in the difference that it makes now that makes her gut twist hard, her breath catch and fists clench.
Because it's wrong, everyone else... they're wrong.
The Doctor thinks about, ‘so Time lords… bit flexible on the whole man/woman thing, yeah ?’ and wishes she could go back to say, Yes and no. Yes we're flexible, but we don't frame ourselves that way. It doesn't mean to me what it does to you. I am no man. Missy is no woman. Not the way you mean it.
The Doctor wishes, absurdly, for the Master's cold laughter. ‘Missy’ , the Doctor thinks. A hilarious joke on the Master's part. Poke fun at the humans of the time and their binary obsessions. The Doctor thinks about changing her name for something as frivolous as a joke and her blood runs cold.
That's the Master all over though.
The Doctor misses them. The Master wouldn’t be wrong. Would look at the Doctor and see them. Not a woman, a madam, a ma’am, a whatever else. The Master would see her and see her as she’s always been. The Doctor. A friend. An enemy. The Master wouldn’t see her wrong, not like everyone else does. Like everyone else has always done.
“You’ve never been a woman, have you ?”
The Doctor blinks at herself - themself in the mirror.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been a man.”
The Doctor is so old and life is a circle of realisations. They’ve known for lifetimes. The mad man in the box was never a man at all.
Graham, Yasmin, and Ryan are yawning. The Doctor waits till they’ve had breakfast, waits until they’re reconvened in the console room, excited at the prospect of their next destination.
“Before we set off,” says the Doctor awkwardly. “I wanted to say something.”
“Oh?” Ryan smiles.
“I. Uh,” they swallow. The TARDIS hums lightly. “It’s not a gender thing, it’s an alien thing. Or it’s a me thing. Or it’s an all of it thing,” they say, words all jumbled in their anxiety.
The fam waits for them to breathe a moment, collect themself, hands twisting together. They let out a breath.
“I’m from a planet called Gallifrey,” they say, biting their tongue against the usual bitterness the words bring. “My people can regenerate if we’re close to death. Our whole bodies change. When I say I used to be a Scotsman, I wasn’t joking, that’s how I appeared to humans, but… I’m an alien,” they pause a moment. “I’m not a man, or a woman, not like you think of it. Not how my people think of it, really. And I wasn't Scottish, and I’m not from Yorkshire. I’m just an alien, a Time Lord. I’m just the Doctor.”
There’s a moment of silence.
“Okay,” Ryan nods after a moment.
Yasmin and Graham smile too and the Doctor smiles back at them.
“So I’m thinking Mars?” they say, turning to the console and smiling at the warm hum that greets them.
“Don’t be ridiculous, I’ve read the files,” C dismisses. “The Doctor’s a man!”
The Doctor doesn’t bother forcing a smile, opens their mouth to get back to the topic of the man in front of them trying to kill them and their friends.
But Yasmin scoffs before the Doctor has a chance.
“They’re a Time Lord,” she says, eyes rolling. “Idiot.”