Fic: Miniature Disasters
Title: Miniature Disasters
Rating: G, yo.
Characters/Pairings: Eight/Romana, Ten/Romana, Ten/Martha
Summary: A heartwarming tale of marriages and a baby.
Miniature Disasters
Later, when she was asked about it, she’d look you straight in the eye and say, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
In fact, at the time, no-one thought it was a good idea, not even the bride or groom. They were doing it more because the fusses their respective Families kicked up amused them than because they actually wished to engage in the Ancient and Noble Tradition of Matrimony as laid down in the Scriptures of Rassilon. (The Scriptures weren’t actually written by Rassilon, not much was really, but he did have a very impressive looking signature, and he liked signing things. A lot.)
So there was to be a marriage, and no-one, not even the bride or groom thought it was a good idea. The bride’s Family threatened to disown her, bar her from the Heartshaven house and never speak her name to each other again. The groom’s Family tried something similar until they remembered they’d already disowned their most notorious Cousin, which hadn’t stopped him blowing up the Lungbarrow Family home during his last highly unwelcome visit. The bride was generally known as Romana and no-one could remember the groom’s name, so he got called the Doctor, to his face at least.
At the wedding Romana wore her Presidential Robes, because she was President. The Doctor wore purple velvet because he liked how it felt and purple went rather well with his long curly brown hair.
This is how the Doctor and Romana agreed to marry:
Romana asked the Doctor.
The Doctor said yes.
“Oh,” said Romana.
“Wasn’t that the answer you were looking for?” asked the Doctor.
“Well, yes. I just thought... well, I thought I’d probably have to talk you into it.” She shook her hair back over her shoulders. “It all seems a bit of an anticlimax now.”
“Sorry,” said the Doctor. “We can try again, if you like. Have a proper blazing row, draw a crowd, give Coordinator Narvin a fit.” He smiled and she smiled back. He took her hand and she squeezed his fingers.
“That’s quite alright, Doctor. I think I can live with a simple yes.”
“So,” asked the Doctor as his hand slipped to her waist and he pulled her into a slow waltz (dancing was not The Done Thing on Gallifrey, so the Doctor danced at every opportunity he could), “why are we getting married?”
That was, in fact, the very question that was now being asked by a great many Time Lords. Everyone knew that the Lady President was something of a maverick, but she was a dignified maverick. She certainly had some very funny ideas about the lesser species of the universe but no-one could deny that she knew every Ceremony of Rassilon off by heart and her robes were always most artfully arranged. The Doctor, on the other hand...
It was pointed out by Cardinal Rodin that the Doctor had once been President of Gallifrey himself. That comment that was met by unanimous agreement that the Doctor’s Presidency was the very worst thing that ever had happened to Gallifrey in the past ten thousand years. Rodin - who was very young and naive and rather fond of the Doctor in a clinical sort of way - mentioned something in the way of Omega, black holes and the Doctor saving the entire universe from oblivion and suddenly everyone was desperately interested in what the Lady Romana was planning to do with her hair on the auspicious day of her nuptials.
The Lady President had already had to suffer the most salacious rumours regarding herself and her alien bodyguard, the Lady Leela. The amount of time the Doctor had spent with both parties prior to the wedding was fuelling the rumours in even more absurd directions. “Threesomes,” protested Cardinal Vitale, wrinkling his wizened old nose, “but three isn’t an even number!” And no-one had ever doubted Cardinal Vitale’s skill in mathematics.
The Panoptican was quiet. Practically silent, in fact. Leela, K-9 and a handful of guards were the only witnesses to the happy event. Just before the ceremony began, the Doctor leaned in to Romana and whispered, “This is my very favourite wedding ever. I mean my favourite one where I’ve been one of the participants in the actual marriage part.”
Romana glanced at him from the side of her eyes. “You were good at ever,” she murmured.
“I thought how I felt wasn’t important?”
“It’s not. Now do be quiet.”
There was something of a scandal when it was discovered that the Doctor and the Lady President had not left Gallifrey in the Presidential T-T capsule but in the Doctor’s outmoded antique. Half the High Council shook their heads and said they might as well declare her dead right now. The other half told them not to be so ridiculous but ordered all public portraits of the Lady President to be taken down as she’d undoubtedly have a new face when she returned.
On the return of the Doctor and the Lady President there was instant suspicion cast on the couple when the inhabitants of the Citadel began to notice that they were now nothing but polite to each other in public. The CIA investigated, but found nothing of interest. Coordinator Narvin concluded that the pair of them had somehow outsmarted him and had all details of the investigation erased.
The reason that the Doctor and Romana were now no longer arguing with each other was this:
“You can’t just foist it off onto some human you barely know,” hissed Romana.
“Why not?” asked the Doctor. “What human doesn’t want a baby?”
“Most of them, I’d hope, given how overpopulated this world is.” Somehow they had got to the stage of having the baby Time Lord, their baby Time Lord, in a basket, neatly tucked in with a rather pathetic sounding note written in the Doctor’s near unreadable scrawl. They were crouching in an unlit alley peering round the corner at the door of a house whose occupants the Doctor wished to give their child to.
“We’ll pick her up later,” said the Doctor, tickling the baby under her chin. “It’s not like we’re abandoning her, Romana, just giving her a good solid education in alien cultures.”
Romana grabbed the basket from his hands. “You are an idiot.”
“It’s because she’s an alien to them, isn’t it? You think they won’t be nice to aliens.”
Romana took a deep breath. “I think that the next time you insist upon us fulfilling matrimonial vows you should take a bloody contraceptive first.”
The Doctor looked put out. “It takes two to-“
“Quiet,” said Romana. “Someone’s coming.”
“Who is it?” asked the Doctor, peering over her shoulder. A moment later, his face fell.
Romana didn’t even need to look at him. “What now?”
“Er... I think that might be me.”
“What? All of them?”
The Doctor felt a stab of fear, and then common sense managed to prevail. The feeling of all-pervading doom that appeared in his stomach whenever he met one of his other selves was always a great deal stronger when there was more than one involved. His current feeling of all-pervading doom was positively mild, as feelings of all-pervading doom go. “No,” he said. “I’m the one in the trench coat. Will be, I should say.”
Romana stared. “What have you done to your hair?”
“It is very... big,” conceded the Doctor.
“It’s ghastly,” said Romana. “Let’s give the baby to him.”
“Wait, no!” The Doctor blocked her way.
“Why not?”
“Well... well...” Well, I get along badly enough with my other selves already, I don’t want to be known as The One Who Gives Out Unwanted Babies, he wanted to say, but that probably wasn’t going to hold much water with Romana. “Paradox,” he tried.
Romana looked at him. The Doctor remembered who he was talking to. Bugger.
“I’m getting married,” he said, waving absently at his future self and trying to forget whatever he’d seen. “You can’t do that to me... her... the bride, can you? Humans are very different about their weddings. Very funny. Can’t turn up on their wedding days and give the happy couple the groom’s unwanted baby from a previous marriage. It just isn’t done.”
Romana bit her bottom lip, glanced at the approaching party. Sure enough, the young woman was dressed in an elaborate white garment that Romana recognised as a human wedding dress. “Alright,” she said. “But we still can’t take the baby back to Gallifrey.”
Some considerable time later, the Doctor found himself trapped in 1969 with very big sticky-up hair and decided to find his very best friends ever, the Chestertons. He stood on the street outside their house and hummed. It was not a happy hum.
He went inside, checked the date on the wall calendar, and went through to the kitchen. “Martha,” he said. “We have to get married.”
Martha stared at him. Barbara shook her head and glanced at Ian. Ian shrugged at Barbara and tried to hide a smile.
“Really,” the Doctor said. “We have to get married Tuesday next week or the whole planet’ll be destroyed in a temporal paradox.” He considered. “Possibly. Possibly destroyed in a paradox. But clearly we can’t take that chance, so matrimony it is.”
Martha put down her tea. “That,” she said, “is the least romantic proposition I’ve heard in my life.”
The Doctor seemed pleased. “Oh good. So that’s a yes then?”
“No!”
“Oh, Martha, please. Please marry me. It won’t be for very long, I promise. Just until we can get back to the TARDIS. It’ll make everything a lot easier around here, with finding somewhere to live and filling in all those forms you humans like so much. And I’ll divorce you straight away once all this is over.”
Barbara put a hand on his shoulder. “Doctor,” she said. And the Doctor looked at her and then looked at Martha.
“It really is important,” he said. Martha sighed.
“Fine,” she said. “Where’s my engagement ring?”
The Doctor rustled around in his pockets and then produced the most ridiculously over garnished ring that Martha had ever seen. “Here,” he said, then took her hand and slipped it on her finger. “I was given that after I saved my... the President from a particularly nasty assassination attempt. Didn’t want it but she said she’d take any excuse to clear the junk out of the archives.”
“That’s just lovely,” said Martha, giving the ring a dubious look. “Very romantic.”
“Give it a second to warm up and it’ll meld to your finger size,” said the Doctor. “Oh, and don’t go pointing it at any black holes. Not unless you want to blow a hole in the universe. Which you don’t. Obviously. I hope. “
“Well,” said Ian, “I guess congratulations are in order.”
“I’ll put on a pot of tea,” said Barbara.
At the registry office, Martha felt ridiculous in her wedding dress, but the Doctor had insisted on the thing and used the destruction of the world as an excuse to make her feel very self-conscious indeed. Despite that, the whole event actually turned out rather well. Ian and Barbara told her about the time the Doctor accidently got himself engaged to a charming Aztec lady, while the Doctor himself was in a very good mood, practically giggling. Almost like he really was getting married. He refused to let go of Martha’s arm, and kept smiling down at her and whispering stupid jokes in her ear.
Full of food and wine, they made their way back to the Chestertons’, Ian and Barbara trailing behind. Martha could feel the tension in the Doctor’s arm and looked up at him, concerned.
“Is it about to happen?” she asked.
The Doctor stayed silent, his steps became smaller and smaller and he seemed afraid to look up from the pavement.
“We’re home,” said Martha at last. The Doctor nodded; his fingers tight round her arm. “It’s alright,” she said, leading him inside. “World’s still here.”
That night, they slept together. This is how it happened:
Martha came downstairs in the early hours of the morning to find the Doctor sitting on the sofa, staring into nothingness. She made them both a cup of hot chocolate and pressed his into his hands. He looked down at it, and then at her, his eyes so ridiculously grateful it made Martha’s heart ache.
“I guess this isn’t your first marriage?” she said, sitting at the opposite end of the sofa.
He shook his head and took a gulp of the hot chocolate. Martha sipped at hers and waited for him to talk. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“First one on Earth, I think.”
“Lucky me.”
“First one since the War.”
“Did she...?”
“Yes,” he said shortly.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’d have liked her, I think. And I think she’d have liked you.”
Martha smiled, but that wound was still very raw and very painful, so she said, “Any more?”
“Hmm?”
“Marriages. Any more marriages?”
“Oh, hundreds,” he said.
She coughed. “Really?”
He stared at her and she counted the seconds. “Nah,” he admitted. “Sixty... eight. That I know of anyway. And most of those were accidents, and more than one was preceded by some rather nasty threats.”
“Well, that’s what you get for going gallivanting around the universe without bothering to check on the local customs.”
The Doctor smiled. “Romana might’ve said that.” He downed the remainder of his hot chocolate. “Still, that was definitely one of my very favourite marriages, Martha Jones. No death threats, no embarrassing rituals, no assassination attempts and attended by two of my very best and oldest friends.” He glanced at her. “The bride wasn’t too bad either.”
She swatted him across his shoulder, put her hot chocolate to one side. “So what’s my name now?”
“Martha Jones,” said the Doctor. “Very definitely Martha Jones. Couldn’t change that. Quite unthinkable.” He shuffled down the sofa a little, close enough to feel her body heat. “You wouldn’t want mine anyway. Mrs Doctor would sound terrible.”
“Mmmhmm,” she said, leaning into him and holding her breath, but he didn’t move away. She relaxed into the curve of his body as he put his arm round her shoulders. “We are going to get home, aren’t we?”
He squeezed her shoulders, tucked her head under his chin. “Course we are, Martha Jones, course we are.” He meant it and she believed him and, for a little while, they were both quite perfectly content.
He fell asleep first, and Martha hadn’t the heart to wake him to return to her bed. When Barbara came downstairs in the morning she found them both asleep, and slipped a blanket over them before she left for work.
In the end, of course, they did get home. But it was only after Martha Jones walked the Earth that she realised that they had never, in fact, obtained the promised divorce. Later, when she finally related her adventures with the Doctor to her mother, she chose to omit that particular fact.
Romana and her Doctor were, however, still in something of a bind. Romana knew that a war was coming. The Matrix had revealed to her the dark and terrible truth of it and she would not bring her child to Gallifrey when it was perfectly clear that, very soon, everyone on Gallifrey was very probably going to be quite dead.
She didn’t tell the Doctor that; she only told him that there was no way she was having his crazy Family anywhere near her kid so she’d have to grow-up off world.
“What about him?” said the Doctor, peering through the bushes in the grounds of UNIT HQ. He pointed at himself. His other self was in a laboratory, doing something that was either very complicated or, more likely, looked very complicated so as to impress all the humans in uniforms that were standing around watching.
“I thought you didn’t want to be known as The One Who Gives Out Unwanted Babies,” said Romana.
The Doctor opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. Then he said: “I never told you that.”
Romana gave him a pitying look. “You’re so obvious,” she said. Which he very definitely was not. He was dashingly unpredictable. It was one of his best features.
“I am not. I’m dashingly unpredictable,” he said. Then he added: “It’s one of my best features; it’s how I save the universe so often.”
Romana mouthed something which looked worryingly like ‘blind luck,’ but the Doctor decided that he had, in fact, won this round and turned his attention back to his previous self. “I’m stuck on Earth, anyway,” said the Doctor. “I’m practically living with Jo and-“
“Didn’t she turn you down for some Welsh professor?”
“She was confused,” said the Doctor. “It was all the Welsh mountain air. She loved me best really.”
“I see,” said Romana.
“Anyway, I have a job and a girlfriend and a car. All that’s really missing is the baby. Which I would have had were it not for unhealthy elevation of Welsh mountains.”
“Who’s that?” asked Romana, squinting as someone dressed in very black clothes appeared in the Doctor’s lab.
“Er...” said the Doctor.
Romana swore. Then she narrowed her eyes at the Doctor and folded her arms and looked, all things considered, slightly pissed off. “It’s your ex, isn’t it?”
“Er...” tried the Doctor again.
“You want me to give my baby to you when you’re stuck in one time and place and your evil, homicidal and exceedingly annoyed ex-boyfriend is hanging around trying to kill everyone on the planet because you won’t put out. And Rassilon knows why, Doctor, because, seriously, you’re not that good.”
“I am so!” he said automatically.
“So what d’you think he might do when he realises you’re looking after your daughter?”
“Er...” This was really getting embarrassing.
“I’d give you five minutes before you were distracted by something shiny and an hour before you were playing a game of ‘Where’s The Baby’s Corpse?’ This is not a good environment in which to raise a child.”
“We could always fix my TARDIS,” suggested the Doctor hopefully.
Romana gave him A Look.
It was then agreed that they should not attempt to guilt trip any of the Doctor’s previous regenerations into looking after his daughter. They also ruled out future regenerations on account of the fact that one of them might turn into the Valeyard. “You may always have lacked style,” said Romana, “but at least none of your non-evil personas has ever worn a bin bag on his head.”
However, they still had a baby to look after and Romana had to get back to Gallifrey, because she was President, and the Doctor felt that he should probably go with her, since they were married and Romana said he had to go with her because something very important was going to happen and she needed his help.
The Doctor drummed his fingers against the console and tried to think of anyone he knew vaguely qualified to raise a Time Lord. He looked up at Romana, hit with inspiration: “How about Torch-?”
“No,” said Romana.
One day they arrived at the End of the Universe and, after sharing a packet of Rolos (“Haven’t we done this before?” asked Romana; “Aren’t these Nestle? I boycott them,” said the Doctor), they popped back a few hundred years to Almost the End of the Universe and discovered a planet that looked very like many other planets they had visited. In other words, there were a lot of rocks.
The Doctor decided that he really needed to free the rather violent humanoids from a tyrannical robotic overlord and Romana found an insectoid city and an awfully nice insectoid couple who wanted very much to have a little insectoid of their very own but were quite unable to conceive.
Romana had An Idea.
It was not the best idea she’d ever had, but she didn’t think it was too bad. And, all things considered, if there was going to be a Time War, Almost the End of the Universe was quite a safe place to be. So, making sure the Doctor was busy combating the evils of an AI gone mad, she snuck back to the TARDIS, made a few adjustments to the chameleon arch and carried a beautiful little insectoid girl back to the insectoid city.
Several weeks later the Doctor woke up and poked Romana in the arm. “What?” she mumbled, knowing it probably had something to do with the fact she’d stolen all the blankets on their bed.
In fact, it had nothing to do with the blankets at all. “Romana,” said the Doctor, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but our baby’s disappeared.”
“As a matter of fact, Doctor, I did notice.”
“Oh. Aren’t you worried?”
“No. Go back to sleep.”
“Does that mean we’re going back to Gallifrey now?”
Romana thought about that for a bit, then she said: “I suppose we’ll have to, won’t we?”
Then there was a war. It was very big and very complicated and almost no-one in the universe noticed that it was happening. Everyone on the planet Gallifrey did notice it was happening, and then they didn’t notice anything at all. This was because it was the end of the war and they were all blown-up.
The Doctor was quite sad about this. This was despite that fact that he was the one who had blown them up. He had rather hoped to be blown up too, but the universe thought it much more fun to let him live. Fun for the universe, not the Doctor. He was not having fun. In fact, he was quite sad.
Some time later, after spending a bit of time with some humans, the Doctor remembered how not to be sad all the time. And then he found out that Romana was not in fact dead and he remembered how to be happy almost all of the time, no matter what Romana said or did.
Romana was not very happy at all. This was because the Doctor had told her about what he’d been doing since he blew Gallifrey up.
“So,” said Romana, her voice even deadlier than the Doctor remembered, “what you’re saying is that after you decided going to the End of the Universe was a good idea-”
“But we’ve been there before!” protested the Doctor. “It was great. Remember the Rolos? I really liked them. Well, actually they tasted like bitter, bitter ashes, but only because of their manufacturer. The actual chocolate was delicious.”
“I told you-“
“I hope you put the foil-y stuff in a pocket. I’d hate to think we’d littered the End of the Universe,” said the Doctor, quite taken with his memories of himself and Romana and what, to his mind, was a terribly romantic date, even if it did conclude with the destruction of all known space and time.
“Doctor!”
“Hello!” said the Doctor and smiled. Winningly.
Romana was not so easily won. “End of the Universe. Where you woke up your homicidal ex, let him nick your TARDIS and kill our daughter.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know who she was?”
“I left you a note, Doctor.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In the diagnostic room. Pinned up on the door.”
“But I never go in there.”
“You’re supposed to run a basic diagnostic once a month.”
“Yes, well... couldn’t you just have stuck it to the console?”
“The point, Doctor, is that you got our daughter killed.”
“She killed him too, y’know.”
“What?”
“Chantho. She killed the Master.”
“It isn’t quite the same when he regenerates and, as I understand it, regenerates into a very young, very attractive form that you found more or less irresistible.”
“Er...”
“It’s not going to work you know.”
“Right,” said the Doctor, feeling as though he’d entirely lost the thread of the conversation and was just agreeing so Romana wouldn’t shout at him again.
“You’re going to have to save her.”
“Who?”
“Our daughter. You’re just going to have to go back and save her.”
The Doctor thought about this, and then thought it through again because he really really didn’t want Romana to shout at him again. Then he thought it through a third time and concluded it was just no good, she was probably going to shout: “Can’t really do that,” he said.
“Doctor!”
“I’m already there! I think I might notice if I turn up again. It’s already temporally unstable that close to the end, as you’ve pointed out. All sorts of terrible things could happen.”
“Worse than the universe ending?” asked Romana, sensibly.
“Um... maybe?”
So the Doctor and Romana returned to Almost the End of the Universe and the Doctor tried not to look to embarrassed as he popped in whilst his younger self was staring wistfully at his TARDIS containing his very ex and very homicidal boyfriend. He gave Martha and Jack a quick wave while they were fighting for their lives, then picked up Chantho and nipped back into the TARDIS and hoped he hadn’t prematurely brought about the End of the Universe.
Due to the miracles of Time Lord medicine, the Doctor and Romana were able to revive their daughter and return her to her Time Lord state. She was very small and gurgly and smiled up at the Doctor when he waggled his fingers at her.
“She doesn’t remember a thing, does she?” said the Doctor.
“I’m not having our daughter remember how her father was an utter arse who got her killed because he was too busy mooning over his crazy ex,” said Romana sweetly.
“We need to find someone to take care of her,” the Doctor said. “Until she grows up and becomes someone interesting.”
Romana nodded. “Got any ideas?”
Rating: G, yo.
Characters/Pairings: Eight/Romana, Ten/Romana, Ten/Martha
Summary: A heartwarming tale of marriages and a baby.
Miniature Disasters
Later, when she was asked about it, she’d look you straight in the eye and say, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
In fact, at the time, no-one thought it was a good idea, not even the bride or groom. They were doing it more because the fusses their respective Families kicked up amused them than because they actually wished to engage in the Ancient and Noble Tradition of Matrimony as laid down in the Scriptures of Rassilon. (The Scriptures weren’t actually written by Rassilon, not much was really, but he did have a very impressive looking signature, and he liked signing things. A lot.)
So there was to be a marriage, and no-one, not even the bride or groom thought it was a good idea. The bride’s Family threatened to disown her, bar her from the Heartshaven house and never speak her name to each other again. The groom’s Family tried something similar until they remembered they’d already disowned their most notorious Cousin, which hadn’t stopped him blowing up the Lungbarrow Family home during his last highly unwelcome visit. The bride was generally known as Romana and no-one could remember the groom’s name, so he got called the Doctor, to his face at least.
At the wedding Romana wore her Presidential Robes, because she was President. The Doctor wore purple velvet because he liked how it felt and purple went rather well with his long curly brown hair.
This is how the Doctor and Romana agreed to marry:
Romana asked the Doctor.
The Doctor said yes.
“Oh,” said Romana.
“Wasn’t that the answer you were looking for?” asked the Doctor.
“Well, yes. I just thought... well, I thought I’d probably have to talk you into it.” She shook her hair back over her shoulders. “It all seems a bit of an anticlimax now.”
“Sorry,” said the Doctor. “We can try again, if you like. Have a proper blazing row, draw a crowd, give Coordinator Narvin a fit.” He smiled and she smiled back. He took her hand and she squeezed his fingers.
“That’s quite alright, Doctor. I think I can live with a simple yes.”
“So,” asked the Doctor as his hand slipped to her waist and he pulled her into a slow waltz (dancing was not The Done Thing on Gallifrey, so the Doctor danced at every opportunity he could), “why are we getting married?”
That was, in fact, the very question that was now being asked by a great many Time Lords. Everyone knew that the Lady President was something of a maverick, but she was a dignified maverick. She certainly had some very funny ideas about the lesser species of the universe but no-one could deny that she knew every Ceremony of Rassilon off by heart and her robes were always most artfully arranged. The Doctor, on the other hand...
It was pointed out by Cardinal Rodin that the Doctor had once been President of Gallifrey himself. That comment that was met by unanimous agreement that the Doctor’s Presidency was the very worst thing that ever had happened to Gallifrey in the past ten thousand years. Rodin - who was very young and naive and rather fond of the Doctor in a clinical sort of way - mentioned something in the way of Omega, black holes and the Doctor saving the entire universe from oblivion and suddenly everyone was desperately interested in what the Lady Romana was planning to do with her hair on the auspicious day of her nuptials.
The Lady President had already had to suffer the most salacious rumours regarding herself and her alien bodyguard, the Lady Leela. The amount of time the Doctor had spent with both parties prior to the wedding was fuelling the rumours in even more absurd directions. “Threesomes,” protested Cardinal Vitale, wrinkling his wizened old nose, “but three isn’t an even number!” And no-one had ever doubted Cardinal Vitale’s skill in mathematics.
The Panoptican was quiet. Practically silent, in fact. Leela, K-9 and a handful of guards were the only witnesses to the happy event. Just before the ceremony began, the Doctor leaned in to Romana and whispered, “This is my very favourite wedding ever. I mean my favourite one where I’ve been one of the participants in the actual marriage part.”
Romana glanced at him from the side of her eyes. “You were good at ever,” she murmured.
“I thought how I felt wasn’t important?”
“It’s not. Now do be quiet.”
There was something of a scandal when it was discovered that the Doctor and the Lady President had not left Gallifrey in the Presidential T-T capsule but in the Doctor’s outmoded antique. Half the High Council shook their heads and said they might as well declare her dead right now. The other half told them not to be so ridiculous but ordered all public portraits of the Lady President to be taken down as she’d undoubtedly have a new face when she returned.
On the return of the Doctor and the Lady President there was instant suspicion cast on the couple when the inhabitants of the Citadel began to notice that they were now nothing but polite to each other in public. The CIA investigated, but found nothing of interest. Coordinator Narvin concluded that the pair of them had somehow outsmarted him and had all details of the investigation erased.
The reason that the Doctor and Romana were now no longer arguing with each other was this:
“You can’t just foist it off onto some human you barely know,” hissed Romana.
“Why not?” asked the Doctor. “What human doesn’t want a baby?”
“Most of them, I’d hope, given how overpopulated this world is.” Somehow they had got to the stage of having the baby Time Lord, their baby Time Lord, in a basket, neatly tucked in with a rather pathetic sounding note written in the Doctor’s near unreadable scrawl. They were crouching in an unlit alley peering round the corner at the door of a house whose occupants the Doctor wished to give their child to.
“We’ll pick her up later,” said the Doctor, tickling the baby under her chin. “It’s not like we’re abandoning her, Romana, just giving her a good solid education in alien cultures.”
Romana grabbed the basket from his hands. “You are an idiot.”
“It’s because she’s an alien to them, isn’t it? You think they won’t be nice to aliens.”
Romana took a deep breath. “I think that the next time you insist upon us fulfilling matrimonial vows you should take a bloody contraceptive first.”
The Doctor looked put out. “It takes two to-“
“Quiet,” said Romana. “Someone’s coming.”
“Who is it?” asked the Doctor, peering over her shoulder. A moment later, his face fell.
Romana didn’t even need to look at him. “What now?”
“Er... I think that might be me.”
“What? All of them?”
The Doctor felt a stab of fear, and then common sense managed to prevail. The feeling of all-pervading doom that appeared in his stomach whenever he met one of his other selves was always a great deal stronger when there was more than one involved. His current feeling of all-pervading doom was positively mild, as feelings of all-pervading doom go. “No,” he said. “I’m the one in the trench coat. Will be, I should say.”
Romana stared. “What have you done to your hair?”
“It is very... big,” conceded the Doctor.
“It’s ghastly,” said Romana. “Let’s give the baby to him.”
“Wait, no!” The Doctor blocked her way.
“Why not?”
“Well... well...” Well, I get along badly enough with my other selves already, I don’t want to be known as The One Who Gives Out Unwanted Babies, he wanted to say, but that probably wasn’t going to hold much water with Romana. “Paradox,” he tried.
Romana looked at him. The Doctor remembered who he was talking to. Bugger.
“I’m getting married,” he said, waving absently at his future self and trying to forget whatever he’d seen. “You can’t do that to me... her... the bride, can you? Humans are very different about their weddings. Very funny. Can’t turn up on their wedding days and give the happy couple the groom’s unwanted baby from a previous marriage. It just isn’t done.”
Romana bit her bottom lip, glanced at the approaching party. Sure enough, the young woman was dressed in an elaborate white garment that Romana recognised as a human wedding dress. “Alright,” she said. “But we still can’t take the baby back to Gallifrey.”
Some considerable time later, the Doctor found himself trapped in 1969 with very big sticky-up hair and decided to find his very best friends ever, the Chestertons. He stood on the street outside their house and hummed. It was not a happy hum.
He went inside, checked the date on the wall calendar, and went through to the kitchen. “Martha,” he said. “We have to get married.”
Martha stared at him. Barbara shook her head and glanced at Ian. Ian shrugged at Barbara and tried to hide a smile.
“Really,” the Doctor said. “We have to get married Tuesday next week or the whole planet’ll be destroyed in a temporal paradox.” He considered. “Possibly. Possibly destroyed in a paradox. But clearly we can’t take that chance, so matrimony it is.”
Martha put down her tea. “That,” she said, “is the least romantic proposition I’ve heard in my life.”
The Doctor seemed pleased. “Oh good. So that’s a yes then?”
“No!”
“Oh, Martha, please. Please marry me. It won’t be for very long, I promise. Just until we can get back to the TARDIS. It’ll make everything a lot easier around here, with finding somewhere to live and filling in all those forms you humans like so much. And I’ll divorce you straight away once all this is over.”
Barbara put a hand on his shoulder. “Doctor,” she said. And the Doctor looked at her and then looked at Martha.
“It really is important,” he said. Martha sighed.
“Fine,” she said. “Where’s my engagement ring?”
The Doctor rustled around in his pockets and then produced the most ridiculously over garnished ring that Martha had ever seen. “Here,” he said, then took her hand and slipped it on her finger. “I was given that after I saved my... the President from a particularly nasty assassination attempt. Didn’t want it but she said she’d take any excuse to clear the junk out of the archives.”
“That’s just lovely,” said Martha, giving the ring a dubious look. “Very romantic.”
“Give it a second to warm up and it’ll meld to your finger size,” said the Doctor. “Oh, and don’t go pointing it at any black holes. Not unless you want to blow a hole in the universe. Which you don’t. Obviously. I hope. “
“Well,” said Ian, “I guess congratulations are in order.”
“I’ll put on a pot of tea,” said Barbara.
At the registry office, Martha felt ridiculous in her wedding dress, but the Doctor had insisted on the thing and used the destruction of the world as an excuse to make her feel very self-conscious indeed. Despite that, the whole event actually turned out rather well. Ian and Barbara told her about the time the Doctor accidently got himself engaged to a charming Aztec lady, while the Doctor himself was in a very good mood, practically giggling. Almost like he really was getting married. He refused to let go of Martha’s arm, and kept smiling down at her and whispering stupid jokes in her ear.
Full of food and wine, they made their way back to the Chestertons’, Ian and Barbara trailing behind. Martha could feel the tension in the Doctor’s arm and looked up at him, concerned.
“Is it about to happen?” she asked.
The Doctor stayed silent, his steps became smaller and smaller and he seemed afraid to look up from the pavement.
“We’re home,” said Martha at last. The Doctor nodded; his fingers tight round her arm. “It’s alright,” she said, leading him inside. “World’s still here.”
That night, they slept together. This is how it happened:
Martha came downstairs in the early hours of the morning to find the Doctor sitting on the sofa, staring into nothingness. She made them both a cup of hot chocolate and pressed his into his hands. He looked down at it, and then at her, his eyes so ridiculously grateful it made Martha’s heart ache.
“I guess this isn’t your first marriage?” she said, sitting at the opposite end of the sofa.
He shook his head and took a gulp of the hot chocolate. Martha sipped at hers and waited for him to talk. She wasn’t going anywhere.
“First one on Earth, I think.”
“Lucky me.”
“First one since the War.”
“Did she...?”
“Yes,” he said shortly.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’d have liked her, I think. And I think she’d have liked you.”
Martha smiled, but that wound was still very raw and very painful, so she said, “Any more?”
“Hmm?”
“Marriages. Any more marriages?”
“Oh, hundreds,” he said.
She coughed. “Really?”
He stared at her and she counted the seconds. “Nah,” he admitted. “Sixty... eight. That I know of anyway. And most of those were accidents, and more than one was preceded by some rather nasty threats.”
“Well, that’s what you get for going gallivanting around the universe without bothering to check on the local customs.”
The Doctor smiled. “Romana might’ve said that.” He downed the remainder of his hot chocolate. “Still, that was definitely one of my very favourite marriages, Martha Jones. No death threats, no embarrassing rituals, no assassination attempts and attended by two of my very best and oldest friends.” He glanced at her. “The bride wasn’t too bad either.”
She swatted him across his shoulder, put her hot chocolate to one side. “So what’s my name now?”
“Martha Jones,” said the Doctor. “Very definitely Martha Jones. Couldn’t change that. Quite unthinkable.” He shuffled down the sofa a little, close enough to feel her body heat. “You wouldn’t want mine anyway. Mrs Doctor would sound terrible.”
“Mmmhmm,” she said, leaning into him and holding her breath, but he didn’t move away. She relaxed into the curve of his body as he put his arm round her shoulders. “We are going to get home, aren’t we?”
He squeezed her shoulders, tucked her head under his chin. “Course we are, Martha Jones, course we are.” He meant it and she believed him and, for a little while, they were both quite perfectly content.
He fell asleep first, and Martha hadn’t the heart to wake him to return to her bed. When Barbara came downstairs in the morning she found them both asleep, and slipped a blanket over them before she left for work.
In the end, of course, they did get home. But it was only after Martha Jones walked the Earth that she realised that they had never, in fact, obtained the promised divorce. Later, when she finally related her adventures with the Doctor to her mother, she chose to omit that particular fact.
Romana and her Doctor were, however, still in something of a bind. Romana knew that a war was coming. The Matrix had revealed to her the dark and terrible truth of it and she would not bring her child to Gallifrey when it was perfectly clear that, very soon, everyone on Gallifrey was very probably going to be quite dead.
She didn’t tell the Doctor that; she only told him that there was no way she was having his crazy Family anywhere near her kid so she’d have to grow-up off world.
“What about him?” said the Doctor, peering through the bushes in the grounds of UNIT HQ. He pointed at himself. His other self was in a laboratory, doing something that was either very complicated or, more likely, looked very complicated so as to impress all the humans in uniforms that were standing around watching.
“I thought you didn’t want to be known as The One Who Gives Out Unwanted Babies,” said Romana.
The Doctor opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. Then he said: “I never told you that.”
Romana gave him a pitying look. “You’re so obvious,” she said. Which he very definitely was not. He was dashingly unpredictable. It was one of his best features.
“I am not. I’m dashingly unpredictable,” he said. Then he added: “It’s one of my best features; it’s how I save the universe so often.”
Romana mouthed something which looked worryingly like ‘blind luck,’ but the Doctor decided that he had, in fact, won this round and turned his attention back to his previous self. “I’m stuck on Earth, anyway,” said the Doctor. “I’m practically living with Jo and-“
“Didn’t she turn you down for some Welsh professor?”
“She was confused,” said the Doctor. “It was all the Welsh mountain air. She loved me best really.”
“I see,” said Romana.
“Anyway, I have a job and a girlfriend and a car. All that’s really missing is the baby. Which I would have had were it not for unhealthy elevation of Welsh mountains.”
“Who’s that?” asked Romana, squinting as someone dressed in very black clothes appeared in the Doctor’s lab.
“Er...” said the Doctor.
Romana swore. Then she narrowed her eyes at the Doctor and folded her arms and looked, all things considered, slightly pissed off. “It’s your ex, isn’t it?”
“Er...” tried the Doctor again.
“You want me to give my baby to you when you’re stuck in one time and place and your evil, homicidal and exceedingly annoyed ex-boyfriend is hanging around trying to kill everyone on the planet because you won’t put out. And Rassilon knows why, Doctor, because, seriously, you’re not that good.”
“I am so!” he said automatically.
“So what d’you think he might do when he realises you’re looking after your daughter?”
“Er...” This was really getting embarrassing.
“I’d give you five minutes before you were distracted by something shiny and an hour before you were playing a game of ‘Where’s The Baby’s Corpse?’ This is not a good environment in which to raise a child.”
“We could always fix my TARDIS,” suggested the Doctor hopefully.
Romana gave him A Look.
It was then agreed that they should not attempt to guilt trip any of the Doctor’s previous regenerations into looking after his daughter. They also ruled out future regenerations on account of the fact that one of them might turn into the Valeyard. “You may always have lacked style,” said Romana, “but at least none of your non-evil personas has ever worn a bin bag on his head.”
However, they still had a baby to look after and Romana had to get back to Gallifrey, because she was President, and the Doctor felt that he should probably go with her, since they were married and Romana said he had to go with her because something very important was going to happen and she needed his help.
The Doctor drummed his fingers against the console and tried to think of anyone he knew vaguely qualified to raise a Time Lord. He looked up at Romana, hit with inspiration: “How about Torch-?”
“No,” said Romana.
One day they arrived at the End of the Universe and, after sharing a packet of Rolos (“Haven’t we done this before?” asked Romana; “Aren’t these Nestle? I boycott them,” said the Doctor), they popped back a few hundred years to Almost the End of the Universe and discovered a planet that looked very like many other planets they had visited. In other words, there were a lot of rocks.
The Doctor decided that he really needed to free the rather violent humanoids from a tyrannical robotic overlord and Romana found an insectoid city and an awfully nice insectoid couple who wanted very much to have a little insectoid of their very own but were quite unable to conceive.
Romana had An Idea.
It was not the best idea she’d ever had, but she didn’t think it was too bad. And, all things considered, if there was going to be a Time War, Almost the End of the Universe was quite a safe place to be. So, making sure the Doctor was busy combating the evils of an AI gone mad, she snuck back to the TARDIS, made a few adjustments to the chameleon arch and carried a beautiful little insectoid girl back to the insectoid city.
Several weeks later the Doctor woke up and poked Romana in the arm. “What?” she mumbled, knowing it probably had something to do with the fact she’d stolen all the blankets on their bed.
In fact, it had nothing to do with the blankets at all. “Romana,” said the Doctor, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but our baby’s disappeared.”
“As a matter of fact, Doctor, I did notice.”
“Oh. Aren’t you worried?”
“No. Go back to sleep.”
“Does that mean we’re going back to Gallifrey now?”
Romana thought about that for a bit, then she said: “I suppose we’ll have to, won’t we?”
Then there was a war. It was very big and very complicated and almost no-one in the universe noticed that it was happening. Everyone on the planet Gallifrey did notice it was happening, and then they didn’t notice anything at all. This was because it was the end of the war and they were all blown-up.
The Doctor was quite sad about this. This was despite that fact that he was the one who had blown them up. He had rather hoped to be blown up too, but the universe thought it much more fun to let him live. Fun for the universe, not the Doctor. He was not having fun. In fact, he was quite sad.
Some time later, after spending a bit of time with some humans, the Doctor remembered how not to be sad all the time. And then he found out that Romana was not in fact dead and he remembered how to be happy almost all of the time, no matter what Romana said or did.
Romana was not very happy at all. This was because the Doctor had told her about what he’d been doing since he blew Gallifrey up.
“So,” said Romana, her voice even deadlier than the Doctor remembered, “what you’re saying is that after you decided going to the End of the Universe was a good idea-”
“But we’ve been there before!” protested the Doctor. “It was great. Remember the Rolos? I really liked them. Well, actually they tasted like bitter, bitter ashes, but only because of their manufacturer. The actual chocolate was delicious.”
“I told you-“
“I hope you put the foil-y stuff in a pocket. I’d hate to think we’d littered the End of the Universe,” said the Doctor, quite taken with his memories of himself and Romana and what, to his mind, was a terribly romantic date, even if it did conclude with the destruction of all known space and time.
“Doctor!”
“Hello!” said the Doctor and smiled. Winningly.
Romana was not so easily won. “End of the Universe. Where you woke up your homicidal ex, let him nick your TARDIS and kill our daughter.”
“Well, how was I supposed to know who she was?”
“I left you a note, Doctor.”
“Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In the diagnostic room. Pinned up on the door.”
“But I never go in there.”
“You’re supposed to run a basic diagnostic once a month.”
“Yes, well... couldn’t you just have stuck it to the console?”
“The point, Doctor, is that you got our daughter killed.”
“She killed him too, y’know.”
“What?”
“Chantho. She killed the Master.”
“It isn’t quite the same when he regenerates and, as I understand it, regenerates into a very young, very attractive form that you found more or less irresistible.”
“Er...”
“It’s not going to work you know.”
“Right,” said the Doctor, feeling as though he’d entirely lost the thread of the conversation and was just agreeing so Romana wouldn’t shout at him again.
“You’re going to have to save her.”
“Who?”
“Our daughter. You’re just going to have to go back and save her.”
The Doctor thought about this, and then thought it through again because he really really didn’t want Romana to shout at him again. Then he thought it through a third time and concluded it was just no good, she was probably going to shout: “Can’t really do that,” he said.
“Doctor!”
“I’m already there! I think I might notice if I turn up again. It’s already temporally unstable that close to the end, as you’ve pointed out. All sorts of terrible things could happen.”
“Worse than the universe ending?” asked Romana, sensibly.
“Um... maybe?”
So the Doctor and Romana returned to Almost the End of the Universe and the Doctor tried not to look to embarrassed as he popped in whilst his younger self was staring wistfully at his TARDIS containing his very ex and very homicidal boyfriend. He gave Martha and Jack a quick wave while they were fighting for their lives, then picked up Chantho and nipped back into the TARDIS and hoped he hadn’t prematurely brought about the End of the Universe.
Due to the miracles of Time Lord medicine, the Doctor and Romana were able to revive their daughter and return her to her Time Lord state. She was very small and gurgly and smiled up at the Doctor when he waggled his fingers at her.
“She doesn’t remember a thing, does she?” said the Doctor.
“I’m not having our daughter remember how her father was an utter arse who got her killed because he was too busy mooning over his crazy ex,” said Romana sweetly.
“We need to find someone to take care of her,” the Doctor said. “Until she grows up and becomes someone interesting.”
Romana nodded. “Got any ideas?”