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Tegan sat at her bedroom window, gazing up at the night sky littered with stars all winking at each other as if sharing some universal joke which she could never comprehend. Despite this though she still thought it the most beautiful sight in the world, or out of it depending on which way you looked at things. Even now it still amazed her that each of those stars was a solar system or galaxy, some of which she had actually visited when she had travelled with him.

She sighed; three years and she still couldn’t get the Doctor out of her head and God knows she had tried. Did she regret leaving him? More than she had ever thought possible. At the time leaving had seemed the right thing to do but she had been in a very emotional state after the fight with the Daleks; witnessing all those deaths had shook her up badly (and the knock on the head probably hadn’t done her much good either). She hadn’t been thinking straight and had acted irrationally. Of course she had regretted it the moment she turned her back on him. She had even run back, intending to apologise, to stay with him, to continue their adventures. But she was too late; he was gone.

Afterwards she had returned to her life, her (as much as she hated to admit it) dull, monotonous life or so it seemed after all she had seen and been through with the Doctor. She wanted more than anything, even now, to just forget about the Doctor and that whole period of her life; to just go back to the way she was before she met him when she lived life to the full, enjoying every minute, and thought her job was the most exciting occupation in the world. But she found she couldn’t; couldn’t even bring herself to move house or switch jobs because she half expected the Doctor to find her again just as he had in Amsterdam; to just turn up on her doorstep one day and say something like, “Hello Tegan, fancy an adventure?” Then she would smile, take his hand and they would go home to the TARDIS.

Tegan sniffed and wiped her eyes. All this was not the worst part of being separated from him though. It was the not knowing that tore her up inside and made her sick with fear every time she thought about him; the not knowing if he was alive or if he had re-NO! She couldn’t even bear to think about it. She knew what he was like, devil may care and totally mindless of his own well being, and she had always felt responsible for him.

Tegan gasped suddenly as white hot pain seared through her chest, making it almost unbearable to breathe. “No”, she cried. “No, it can’t be.” She did not know how she knew it but she did. This pain; it had to be the Doctor. Somewhere up there, Tegan’s eyes searched the heavens desperately, he was in pain, he was…dying!

“No”, she screamed again, louder this time as if, somehow, he might hear her. Something was going wrong; he was not regenerating, he was dying. Tegan could feel him slipping away from her and she was willing him with all her might to hold on. “What was it you always told me, Doctor? Brave heart,” she cried out, praying desperately that he would hear her, that he would listen.

All at once the pain left her and Tegan sank to her knees on the floor, shaking and searching her mind frantically. She could feel him there, he was not dead but… he was not him either. The full force of what had happened hit Tegan and all the relief she had felt at him still being alive drained out of her. He had changed, regenerated. Suddenly the link between them seemed to break and she could not feel him at all anymore. Her Doctor was gone. Forever.

Sitting there on the floor of her apartment beneath the stars, somewhere among which a new incarnation of the Doctor was beginning his life, Tegan Jovanka began to sob uncontrollably from grief because her Doctor was gone, he was never coming back, and she had not been there to help him, maybe even save him or at least to hold his hand and say goodbye. But a little part of her also cried out of relief because now she finally knew that her Doctor was gone and, even though the thought of it tore her heart in two, she knew that she could now stop waiting for him, get on with living her life and simply remember him and the good times they shared.

And as Tegan sat in her bedroom, grieving the loss of one of her dearest friends, in another time and another place a slightly younger Tegan Jovanka walked into a police call box that was not a call box and lost her way, but ended up having the adventure of a lifetime.