The Doctor's Daughters (1/1)
Title - The Doctor's Daughters (1/1)
Author - earlgreytea68
Rating - Teen
Characters - Ten, Rose, Jenny, OCs
Spoilers - None
Disclaimer - I don't own them and I don't make money off of them, but I don't like to dwell on that, so let's move on. (Except for the kids. They're all mine.)
Summary - A generated anomaly among daughters created the old-fashioned way.
Author's Notes - For twenty bucks during the last Support Stacie auction, you won a fic all your own. This is catyuy's, generously sponsored by ramblinsuze (I hope I've got that right). She wanted "The Doctor's Daughter," in the Chaosverse.
EVERYONE. WE HAVE REACHED A MOMENTOUS OCCASION. THIS IS MY LAST SUPPORT STACIE FIC FOR THE APRIL AUCTION. PLEASE PAUSE FOR A BEAT OF APPRECIATION BEFORE BEGINNING TO READ.
Thank you to jlrpuck, who did not bat an eyelash at any of my hysterics over the weekend and is the world's best beta (even if I remain suspicious as to what she said about me in the beta-ing panel). And thank you to Kristin, who as always is a fantastic fic-discusser. She's like a one-person WriterCon every night.
The TARDIS had crash-landed, and the Doctor was glancing around the tunnel they were in, taking stock, when there was a sudden commotion, startling all of them. A group of soldiers came dashing toward them. “Don’t move!” one of them barked. “Stay where you are! Drop your weapons!”
The Doctor lifted his hands in the air. Rose and the girls followed his lead. “We’re not armed,” he assured them.
“Alright, process them,” commanded the first soldier. “Him first.”
The Doctor suddenly found himself grabbed by two soldiers, who began dragging him toward a machine set up in the tunnel. His entire family immediately launched into action, shouting over each other as they tried to pull the soldiers off him, but they were ineffectual in breaking the soldiers’ grips. The soldiers shoved his hand into the machine and he shouted with pain.
“What are you doing to him?” Rose demanded. “Stop it! Let him out of it!”
The kids took up the chorus.
“Everyone gets processed,” the soldier responded, calmly.
“Not us,” Rose bit out. “Stop it. Now.”
“It’s taken a tissue sample,” gasped the Doctor. “And extrapolated it. Some kind of accelerator?”
“What’s that mean?” Rose asked him.
“I…dunno,” he admitted, as the machine abruptly released his hand. Rose immediately took it in her own hand, studying the Y-shaped incision on it now.
“You lot are all completely mad,” Athena told the soldiers.
The machine opened, swirling smoke all around it, and a girl stepped out, blonde and blue-eyed, with a perky smile.
“Arm yourself!” barked a soldier, tossing a gun to her.
“Where did she come from?” asked Fortuna, wide-eyed.
“From…me,” the Doctor answered, slowly.
Rose looked at him. “What?”
The blonde woman went happily skipping over to the cluster of soldiers, where they immediately began babbling about guns and warfare.
“It’s a form of progeneration,” said the Doctor. “Reproduction from a single organism.”
“Reproduction?” Rose wrinkled her nose. “But that…”
“Yeah,” the Doctor affirmed, grimly, hands in his pockets as he studied what was, in technical terms, his daughter. His other two daughters stared at her as well.
“She’s got blonde hair,” contributed Fortuna, finally. “Like me.”
“Except you get that from me, and I didn’t have anything to do with this,” remarked Rose. She looked at the Doctor. “Where’s the blonde hair come from then? And the blue eyes?”
“I don’t know! We’re in the middle of what appears to be a war, and you want to quibble about recessive genes?”
“I’m just saying you were all in a dither when Fortuna didn’t look like you, and here’s one whose creation was entirely up to you, and I’m noticing a distinct lack of Time Lord hair,” sniffed Rose.
“Something’s coming!” shouted the Doctor’s new daughter, and there was a sudden hail of gunfire.
The Doctor, Rose, and the girls instinctively ducked. People were shouting all around them, talking about detonating the tunnel.
“Detonating?” the Doctor repeated. “I think detonating is-”
Fortuna screamed, cutting him off. A large creature with the head of a fish had grabbed hold of her. Fortuna twisted, kicking and biting in an effort to get free as the creature started to drag her away.
“Oi!” shouted the Doctor. “Let her go!” He scrambled after the two of them.
“Look what I’ve got!” he dimly heard the new daughter say brightly. “The detonator!”
“Don’t-” he said, just as the new daughter hit the detonator.
The tunnel rumbled, throwing him back, off his feet, toward Rose and Athena and away from the soldiers and Fortuna. He could just see Fortuna’s look of horror before the curtain of rubble descended between them.
“Fortuna!” Rose raced past him, clawing at the rubble. “Fort! Can you hear me? Fort! Help me clear this.”
“We can’t,” said the Doctor. “We might bring the whole tunnel collapsing in on all of us. Let me think for a second.”
An entire army of fish-men suddenly came racing into the corridor, brandishing guns.
“Thinking time’s over,” remarked Athena.
***
“Excellent!” rejoiced one of the soldiers, looking at the fish-man, who still had a hand around Fortuna’s arm. “A Hath prisoner! Release her!” The fish-man dropped Fortuna’s arm.
Fortuna stood staring at the wall of rubble. She could feel her father querying about her well-being, and she assured him she was fine.
“Come on!” said the woman who had emerged from the machine, cheerfully. “We’re going back to camp!”
“I don’t want to go to camp,” Fortuna protested. “I need to find a way to get back to my family.”
“Your what?” said the soldier who was clearly in charge.
“My family. You know, father, mother, sister.”
“Oh,” said the woman, brightly. “He’s my father, too!”
Fortuna bristled possessively, automatically. He was not. There was much more to fatherhood than whatever biological activity had reproduced her father’s genes-and Fortuna did not like to think too hard about the biological activity that had resulted in her. It didn’t matter; what mattered was that her father had cradled her when she was a baby and suffered through tea parties on her behalf and distracted her with ridiculous stories when she was sick and snuggled her when she felt lonely. Fortuna Tyler knew for a fact, because she’d seen a lot of fathers, that hers was the best in the universe, and she was not about to share him with…
…This poor girl who had never been young and so had been deprived of all those fatherly moments. Fortuna realized she was being both idiotic and cruel in being jealous of this strange new creature that had come from her father.
“I suppose,” she allowed.
“That makes us sisters!” announced the girl.
Fortuna regarded, with envy, the golden blonde hair on the girl’s head. Fortuna’s own blonde hair had been steadily darkening as she’d grown older, just like that of the mother the two of them did not share. “Well,” she said. “Half, anyway.” The army was now walking back to camp. Fortuna followed, not sure what else to do for the time being. “What’s your name?” she asked.
“Haven’t got one yet.”
Fortuna paused. “You’re a generated anomaly. How about Jenny for now? Mum and Dad might want something different later.
There was a moment of silence. Fortuna decided she may as well try to learn more about her new sister, and offered, “ I’m Fortuna. How’s it work, then? You don’t know your name, but you know how to talk and everything. What else do you know?”
“How to fight. Is our father a general? He seemed important.”
Fortuna frowned. “He’s not a general. Well. I think he was, once, but he doesn’t talk about that. He isn’t one now, he’s important for other reasons. He saves things. Everything.”
The solder in charge fell into step beside them. “Are you from the pacifists in the Eastern Zone?”
Whatever a pacifist from the Eastern Zone was, better that then a half-human Time Lord from a vanished planet. “Yeah.”
He frowned. “No use for pacifists.” He gestured to a couple of other soldiers. “Lock them away.”
***
“Fort’s fine,” the Doctor and Athena said at the same time, and Rose assumed she had just broadcast a message to them.
They were following the fish-men, who kept gurgling at each other.
“Why can’t we understand them?” asked Rose. “Is the TARDIS hurt?”
The Doctor shook his head. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Are you hurt?” Rose picked up their joined hands and studied the incision on his with concern, remembering that the only other time the TARDIS had stopped translating, he had been close to death.
“Hey,” he said, softly, and she looked up at him. “I’m fine. I promise.” He winked. “I think it’s possible their language isn’t advanced enough to translate properly. So. This planet.” He looked around him. “Seems they’re in the middle of a war. They’ve apparently been breeding generations of soldiers, judging from the…girl.”
“What are we going to do with her?” asked Rose.
“The girl?”
“For all intents and purposes, she’s your daughter, isn’t she? Makes sense your love child would be with a machine,” she mock-sighed.
“Don’t worry,” he rejoined, lightly, “it didn’t mean anything.”
“Purely physical?”
He grinned. “No, I save the purely physical stuff for you.”
“Please stop it,” inserted Athena. “I’m right here, remember?”
“Sorry,” said the Doctor, and was silent for a second. “I don’t know,” he sighed. “She’s born of war, and I’m…so tired of war.”
“She was born of you,” said Rose.
The Doctor looked at her for a second, then shifted his attention behind her. “Hello, what’s that?” Rose sighed as he went scurrying away, recognizing the avoidance tactic. “A map!” He pulled out his specs, reached out and touched it. The map shifted, and the fish-men began to dance around in what was unmistakably joy. “Uh-oh,” said the Doctor. “I think the war’s been over this.” He pointed. “And I think I just found it for them.”
***
They ended up inside a huge garden, and just as they raced in with the fish-men, Fortuna raced in.
“Fort!” he exclaimed in surprise.
“Dad!” she said, and hugged him tightly before turning to Rose and Athena. “Mum! Theenie! You’ll never guess! Jenny totally got us out of the prison cell, and she can do this thing where she jumps through lasers-”
“Jenny?” the Doctor interrupted.
“Oh. Yeah. I named her. D’you mind?”
“Hi, Dad,” said Jenny, perkily.
“Hi,” he answered, after a moment, and then the human army came running in. The Doctor sensed they might be in the middle of an epic battle if he didn’t move quickly. Then he spotted it: a third-generation terraforming device. “Hold your fire!” he shouted, dashing over to the device.
“What are you doing?” asked the soldier in charge.
“I am declaring this war…” He lifted the device over his head. “Over,” he finished, throwing it to the ground, where it smashed, and the humans and fish-men, amazed, put down their weapons, watching as the terraforming spread.
“Not a bad day’s work,” said the Doctor to his family, sauntering back over to them. They stood together, watching the terraforming, delaying the moment of the return of the TARDIS.
“She should come with us, Dad,” Fortuna said, finally, voicing what they’d all been thinking. “She has two hearts.”
“Has she? But we can’t feel her.”
“Maybe she’ll learn that,” suggested Fortuna.
“She’s ours, right?” said Rose. “We can’t just leave her here.”
“Ours?”
One minute he was gazing at Rose, and the next minute there was a gunshot, and he flinched, turning, just as Jenny was falling to the ground. He caught her, even his mind pieced together what must have happened, how Jenny must have leaped in front of the bullet which had been fired in his direction.
“Jenny,” he said, urgently. “Jenny.”
“Fortuna told me all about the planets,” she said, drowsily. “She said I could choose the next trip.”
“Of course you can,” he said, desperately. “Of course you can. Listen to me, you have to regenerate. C’mon, Jenny, you can do it. Regenerate.” But Jenny was very silent and still in his arms. Two hearts, but they couldn’t feel her. Maybe there wasn’t enough Time Lord inside of her.
The Doctor set her down carefully. He leaned forward and took a deep breath and kissed her forehead shakily. Then he stood up and walked over to the soldier who had tried to shoot him. He picked up the gun and he pointed it steadily at the man’s head and he felt the weight of it in his hands. He could remember that weight. How odd that you never forgot the feel of a gun in your hand. Or maybe that was just him.
“I never would,” he bit out, throwing the gun aside. “Have you got that? I never would!”
***
Rose found the Doctor in their bedroom, pretending to sleep. It must be very bad, she thought, if he was trying to hide so thoroughly. She crawled into the bed next to him. “I know you’re not sleeping.”
He sighed and opened his eyes and looked at her.
“You alright?”
“I’m always alright.”
“I know.” She curled into him. “We’ve come so far from that,” she murmured.
“We have.”
“So tell me, then.”
He was silent for a very long time. “I held that gun today, and I…I would have done it. Had it been you or Athena or Fortuna, I would have done it without thinking.”
She absorbed the implications: of the fact that he would have done it, of the fact that he didn’t do it for Jenny. “I love you,” she said, because she had no other words to give him. They were silent together. “It’s been a very long day.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“I think we need a break.”
He exhaled slowly. He felt like he needed one desperately. “There’s this pleasure planet I’ve been meaning to take us to. Midnight.”