"Where is she?" Brook hissed, placing another hand onto her gun momentarily to keep her aim steady towards the Doctor's head. "Daddy, you might want to tell me now."

"Who, Brook? I don't know...I don't know who you're talking about," he responded. Though he tried to keep his voice from shaking, it wasn't successful. As he put his hands up in the air, it became clear that they were quivering.

Brook, on the other hand, held the gun nearly perfectly still. Knowing her mother, it was very clear that she would have a sure shot. Without a doubt, she knew exactly how to handle the weapon. But as the weapon was pointed towards the Doctor's head, it didn't make him feel any better.

"Brook, please just put down the gun," Clara urged. "You don't have to use it in order to get your point across, promise."

"If I were you, Clara, I would be quiet right now," Brook said, her voice soft. "You don't know anything about this."

"Actually, I think Clara's got the right idea," the Doctor replied, giving a nervous laugh. Brook continued to glare at him, her chest heaving with every breath she took. Her fingers were curled so tightly around the gun that they had began to lose their color.

"No need to change the subject, Daddy. Tell me where Mum is. Now." She accented the last word with a slight shake of her head, allowing her curls to bounce out again. This was beginning to be a familiar sight for the Doctor and Clara, but this version of Brook seemed to be a polar opposite of the blushing bride they witnessed just hours ago.

"Come on then, cough it up. Where's Mum? I'm ready to shoot whenever you are."

The Doctor pressed his eyes shut. Of course that's who she wanted to know about. Why hadn't he figured that out sooner? Brook had figured out quite a bit already. As a very bright girl she must have seen right through to what the Doctor had worked out. That was information could do terrible things to time if the wrong steps were taken-if any steps were taken, really.

"Brook, you know I can't tell you anything." There was a massive chance that he truly couldn't. Firstly, Brook seemed fairly unstable and the information wouldn't help her. Secondly there were spoilers, bits of information that could tear apart time and space at its seams.

As if she were possed by some creature, Brook blinked her blank eyes and tilter her head to the side. She still kept the gun aimed straight towards the Doctor's head, as if she were unable to take it away. The Doctor kept him hands up high, Clara watching on and unable to do anything. This was a stalemate if the Time Lord had ever been through one.

"Well, Daddy, I do know this much," Brook said, breaking the silence. She smirked as she continued, saying, "Your future is my past, my entire past. I know if you've regenerated. Which means I already know whether I've shot you or not."

There was nothing the Doctor could find to argue with there. But as the Time Lord pondered over her words more and more, it seemed like Brook was more desperate for information than she was anything else.

She was willing to threaten her father with the means of death in order to get herself just a crumb of information that she likely couldn't even use. It was now crystalline clear that something had gone terribly wrong when she was growing up. Terribly, terribly wrong.

"Nothing, Daddy?" Brook sighed, pursing her lips. "You're not going to tell me anything?" She gave him another chance to come up with something, but he just shook his head at her. "Nothing? Well then."

Brook began to turn around, whipping her entire body around until she was pointing the gun straight towards Clara's head rather than the Doctor's Clara's expression went from surprise to fear in less than the blink of an eye. However, this didn't seem to bother Brook, not in the slightest. No, she looked to be very pleased with herself.

"Oh, now the stakes have been raised! Let's see if you care enough to divulge a little information now," Brook said, giving a slight chortle at the end of her sentence. The Doctor stared at her, horror filling his deceptively young face.

"Still nothing, I see," Brook said, giving an exaggerated sigh. "I guess I can understand why. She's already died several times. I'm sure you wouldn't mind if she died again. After all, she'll always pop back up somewhere else and you can just pick her up in your TARDIS again. Or maybe not. Who knows?"

Clara was far too fearful of the gun pointed towards her to notice what had just been said about her. Brook was grinning like an idiot, and it made the Doctor sick to his stomach. His daughter turning up her lips as she was about to murder his companion.

"Feel free to say anything, absolutely anything. I know that you're not telling me something. I can tell these things. You know something important and you're not telling me and whatever the reason is it's not good enough." Rolling her eyes as if she were getting bored, she said, "Tell me or she dies."

"Brook," the Doctor said simply, finally allowing himself to speak. But in that word he was able to pour in so many emotions. Brook must have taken note of this, as she no longer looked as gleeful to be about to murder as she did before. The tips of her lips fell back down to a neutral position, and her eyes lost the sinister gleam from before.

This now allowed the room to fall into another period of silence. But unlike the others, this was one felt unnaturally still. Each believed their heartbeats could be heard loud and clear across the room, as it seemed to be the only source of movement and sound. No one even seemed to be breathing at this point.

The silence was then split apart by Brook's words as she said, "So you're not going to tell me anything of use then, are you."

It wasn't a question, far from it. Brook now knew that she wouldn't get anything out of them. No one was going to have to die for this information, not on this day. She had experienced a change of heart (or rather, hearts) when she realized just how flawed her tactics were.

She began to lower the gun towards her side, and it seemed like everyone in the room could breathe properly again. Each one of them let out the breaths they didn't even know that they had been holding in for so long.

But this was nothing but deception. It seemed as if things were beginning to be okay, but then Brook snapped the gun up next to her head. Her fingers were poised and ready on the trigger, closer to shooting than she had been with both the Doctor and Clara. In front of them now was a girl who was fully ready to pull the trigger.

"Fine. If you won't tell me anything, I'll just have to figure something out by myself."

"What?" Clara gasped. Her chest began to seize, the fear inside of her only increasing. 

"I'll see if I'm a Time Lord," Brook responded, her voice stoic. "I'll see if I can regenerate."

"Is that what this all about?" the Doctor asked, his voice barely above a breath.

"Yes, it is. I want to be a Time Lord for Foreman," Brook said. "I want him to have a wife who won't die off thousands of years before him. I want to have children with the blood of Gallifrey running through their veins. I want them to be able to regenerate. I have to...I need to..."

"Brook, I don't think that's going to be a problem," the Doctor said, holding out his hands in front of himself. "I can regenerate, River can regenerate-you and your family should be exactly the same. There's no need to test it."

For a moment, the Doctor thought he had succeeded in changing her mind. She began to loosen her grip on the gun. But then Brook readjusted her hand so that she was holding it more firmly than ever.

"Brook, no!" The Doctor lurched forwards as Brook's finger shook on the trigger, again with no plan. Clara made a start towards him, but was just as powerless to help.

"If you really thought that I would regenerate, you wouldn't be so worried right now," Brook said, smiling somehow despite everything. "You don't have any faith in me! I know that much for sure."

"No, Brook! If you put a bullet through your brain, it could still kill you! Time Lords can die, you know! I've seen it time and time again, please don't make me see it once more."

"Time Lords can also regenerate, even after suffering massive injuries," Brook retaliated. "That's all I want to know. I have to know. This is the only way I can know for sure."

"But...why? Why?" the Doctor asked, unable to comprehend this.

"I'm doing this because of you, Daddy," Brook said, her breathing beginning to go erratic. "Because of you." 

"The Doctor would never do a thing to hurt you," Clara said, forcing her voice to be firm. After being a nanny for so long, she hoped that she had learned how to be comforting. Brook focused on her, her eyes bulging. "I know him well enough to understand that."

"It's not what Daddy did do," Brook replied, breathing heavily. "It's what he didn't do."

"What do you mean?" Clara asked, trying to soften her voice. 

Instead of responding to Clara, Brook's gaze whipped over towards the Doctor again "You were never there! You know all of this already. You never came, and when you did...no. I grew up...thinking...always thinking, yes, always thinking that you didn't care. Now I think I know."

She inhaled a shuttering breath before continuing. "I'm not a paradox, nothing special like that. I'm just simply not supposed to exist, I can tell that much for sure. There's nothing inpossible about me, nothing that you absolutely must figure out. Nothing that keeps you with me. I'm just a girl that's been left on the side. With all of that running, there had to be something left behind. Or someone, Daddy."

"It wasn't his fault, Brook," Clara tried to urge. But Brook wasn't going to listen to her, not for a moment. "I am positive it was not his fault."

"I'm not so sure of that. I think you were just rubbing salt in my cuts whenever you did come along, Daddy," Brook continued. "Every day you come along you fed me with stories of Gallifrey, stuffing them down my throat. You made it seem like a fantasy world. You made it seem like a place where I could never belong.

"Well, let me just say...there's a reason why I love the dictionary most. It's about solid facts and knowledge. Somewhere I'll always belong, because you don't think I can be part of Gallifrey."

"It's not about Gallifrey right now," the Doctor responded. "It's not about Time Lords, or stories, or knowledge. Right now, it's about keeping you safe, and keeping you alive."

"Listen to the Doctor, Brook," Clara added in.

"Who gave you the right, Clara Oswald?" Brook said as she stared straight ahead, gritting her teeth. "You are not my mother and you are not taking her place!"

"What?" Clara said, feeling a pang in her stomach. "I wasn't...I..." But Brook's comment had now rendered her speechless.

"You were always kind to me Clara, yes, but you were always trying so hard to be something you weren't! You're not my mother. You can't tell me what to do. You're not my sister, or my teacher, or even my nanny. And Daddy, well, he can't tell me what to do either. He wasn't like a real father, no. He wasn't there!"

"Brook, please," the Doctor pleaded. "Put the gun down. We can talk our way through this."

"No, I have to know. I have to be sure. I feel wrong, like I'm not supposed to be here, like everything was a colossal mistake. That I am a mistake."

"You shouldn't have to feel like that, Brook. You can fly the TARDIS like you were born to. You have two hearts. Why can't that just be enough?" the Doctor said, trying to calm her down, ease her away from the gun.

Brook's mouth hung open as if she were about to speak, but her tongue felt dry as if it were devoid of saliva and words. Then finally, the right words come to her.

"It just isn't," Brook murmured, her voice drowned by the deafening sound of a gunshot.

"Brook! No!"

She crumpled to the ground in a lifeless heap. After an initial moment of utter shock, the Doctor and Clara ran over to her motionless body. Brook had shot herself right through the head, a fatal shot. There was nothing to be done at this point in order to help her.

The Time Lord and his companion sat in silence for a few minutes, unable to speak until finally the Doctor whispered with the shake of his head.

"Why do they all have to die?"

He got up and started to walk back towards the TARDIS. The Doctor couldn't bear this scene any more. The man who ran from everything was going to run again. He was going to run as far from Brook and her fate as he could.

"Wait, Doctor," Clara called out, still crouching by Brook's side. He stopped, turning around to see his companion beginning to get up. "We need to wait and explain to Foreman what happened."

"I don't want to have to tell Foreman that his wife committed suicide because she wanted to make sure she was a Time Lord," the Doctor said quietly, protesting against it. He started turning back around again, moving towards the TARDIS.

"Well, we can't just leave and wait for him to come back and find her this way," Clara replied. "We...we have to stay. For Foreman's sake. It's his wedding day, for goodness sake!"

Still staring at his blue box, the Doctor stared down at the ground. "As soon as we tell him, we go," he responded.

Everything in the room felt heavy, as if the very air was made out of metal. The motionless body that had once been Brook still laid at the side of the room, serving as a sign of what had happened. Even a tiny glance was enough to make any heart in the area start to sink.

Without warning, there was a flicker of movement from the side of the room. Clara jumped back from Brook's body, seeing that the girl had moved.

"Doctor, look!" Clara yelped, pointing wildly at Brook's hand. There was the golden hue of regenerative energy flowing out from her twitching fingers. It started to spread as Brook started taking in breaths, looking more like she was waking up from a nap than death.

Brook eyelids fluttered open, and she both looked surprised and delighted. She looked around at herself, focusing on her hands to start out with. The glow was definitely there, cascading out from her fingertips.

"Well, look at that. I'm regenerating," she murmured quietly. The way she said it didn't sound like how someone who had just practically come back from the dead would sound, finding themselves able to turn on. In fact, it sounded more like she had just read a particularly nice line in a book and was commenting on it.

Brook began to regain her strength in order to stand up, wobbling around and grasping for balance in the beginning. She still kept her hands in front of her so that she could stare at them, turning them back and forth and the glow got brighter and began to spread. It flowed up her arms and appeared on her legs like a fire beginning to consume her.

"Back up, get away!" the Doctor called out to Clara as the energy started to overcome Brook. These regenerations could be explosive, he had first hand knowledge of that. Clara immediately started running backwards, taking her place right next to the Doctor. She knew more than enough to trust him on this subject, especially when he used that tone of voice.

"I told you, Daddy. I told you!" Brook was practically jumping up and down with excitement. It was almost unfathomable to believe she had been a corpse just moments ago.

She held out her arms as the regenerative energy took over her. Within a few seconds it was like Brook's entire body was engulfed in a golden fire. Her excitement was still there, but now she was screaming.

Regenerations might look fairly pretty from the outside, but they were excruciatingly painful, with every cell being manipulated and changed into something different. Nevertheless, it was something that would fade away fairly quickly.

Brook seemed to be composed of a blur of gold, yellow, and orange. Clara watched with her jaw hanging open as she had never experienced this before. Although it burned her eyes with its brightness, she refused to look away even for a moment. It was nothing short of capitivating to the human companion.

In a final burst of the regenerative flames, it became clear that the process was over. It had only taken a matter of seconds, luckily enough. Brook let out a little whoop of relief to finally be over with the pain. Now, everything was going to be far better for her.

"Whew! That was intense!" Brook yelled out, allowing herself to laugh. Taking a nice big breath in her newly regenerated body she then said, "Now, how do I look?"

Both the Doctor and Clara's mouths were now gaping open, shocked as they stared at Brook. She tilted her head as looked at them, trying to read their faces. At first she thought they were just joking around for some reason. Maybe her regeneration had been especially surprising. But no, that didn't seem to be right.

No, she could tell that something wasn't right. Something wasn't right with her, because they were staring at her.

"What is it, what's wrong?" She laughed a little at the end of the sentence, a very unsure giggle. She was attempting to keep her own spirits up again, to encourage them to speak. But they continued to be absolutely silent and still gawked at her in a form of surprise, or horror. Whatever it was, it could not possibly be good.

Brook's voice now fell into a whisper as she stared straight back at them, Terror had taken over her the same way the regenerative energy had a matter of moments ago. She spoke to them once more, finding her words wobbling.

"What is it? Please, tell me. Tell me what's wrong. Please."

A/N I love this part. I'm sorry. That's just how I am. I think it's one of the best parts that I've ever written. I mean, it's very fast paced, but who says that it's a bad thing? I personally like this a lot, and I think it works well with some of the new aspects I've added into it. I also tried to tie it back into The Child's Mistakes a little bit more. Always a good thing.