'All of it is yours, Kithriarch. And well deserved too! You fulfilled none of the potential that we expected. None of it. You are a failure and a disgrace to my name!'

The Cousins began to jeer.

'Just a minute,' butted in Romana. 'That is no way to address a former Lord President of the High Council of Gallifrey!"

'President? What President?' Quences raised his ghostly eyebrows. 'And who are you?'

'She's my successor,' said the Doctor, and Romana displayed her ring of office.

'The Doctor stood down with honour," she said.

'Well, not really,' said the Doctor, embarrassed. 'I'm no longer President because I couldn't be bothered with all that power political business.'

'President?' whispered Quences. He stared down at his coffin. 'You were President of Gallifrey?"

'More than that,' said Romana. 'Much, much more.'

'The captain was a Cousin of Andred's,' said Leela.

'The Castellan?' grinned Dorothée. She had just stopped herself calling him Leela's toyboy. 'Are you married then?'

'Like Housekeepers to Houses? No. We are ... together.'

Andred treated Leela with a proud devotion, while other Time Lords smirked behind his back. In return, she tried

hard to behave in the way that he said was proper and she thought was stupid. But in the secret dark, when they

lay together, they giggled at the affectations and manners of the Time Lord gentry and had secrets and made

plans that were theirs alone and could not be accessed on a catalogue port or consulted in an authority list.

'I'm so lucky,' he'd said amid their frequent bouts of giggles. 'They never taught us this at the Academy. I'd like to

see their faces. I don't think anyone's done this for... it must be thousands and thousands of years. All the others

do is watch the aliens at it and précis their notes afterwards.'

And then the giggling would stop.

DOCTOR: What do you want, Ferain? What do you want me to be? Shall I reveal my blazing power? Might that not fry you to a crisp? Shall I sweep away evil and chaos? Reorder the stars in their courses? Banish burnt toast forever? Well, I won't. I wouldn't if I could. Who do you think I am? I'm me. The Doctor. What I have been, someone might have imagined. What I will be, how can I tell? I'm not immortal.