Two
by AstroGirl

He'd been the only one of his kind left in the universe, he was certain of it. But there is more than one universe, and even if he didn't think about it much, a part of him had always hoped. He'd never expected to randomly pass her on the street, though, and certainly not in mid-21st century New York City. Not one of his favorite spots, to be honest, but Rose had some silly notion that, no matter how many planets she visited, her life was never going to be complete till she'd seen Broadway and Times Square.

She still looked the same. Romana, that is, not Rose. Same body, anyway, at most a century or two older. Just enough to give the girlish face he'd remembered a comfortable layer of maturity. It looked... right.

She whirled around as he called her name. "I'm sorry... Do I know you?"

"Yeah," he said, and as he came closer, she suddenly did.

"Doctor! You're alive!"

"'Course I am," he said. He might have said more, but he was interrupted by her leaping into his arms. He laughed and twirled her around. "Oof! That's a bit harder with this body!"

"I heard what happened," she said softly, when they were done.

He wasn't going to ask how. "Yeah. I happened. Did you hear that?"

"Yes."

There was a moment of awkward silence.

"Come on," he said. "It's not exactly Paris, but I know some places. We can go out for lunch on Sagritanteus Major, afterward. There's a little café I always meant to take you to. Wonderful crusteacean burgers."

"You're not in the middle of something here? No alien invasions?"

"Nah. Just shopping. I think you've just saved me from dropping dead of boredom, to be honest."

"You? Bored? Now, that I find hard to believe." She paused for a moment, thinking. "Actually, you shopping is hard to believe."

He shrugged. "My friend. Rose. She's the shopping type." He rolled his eyes a little.

"Oh. Is she going to be looking for you?"

"Eh. I'll pick her up five minutes ago, later. Come on, there's a good place for a drink around here somewhere, unless they haven't got round to opening it yet..."

They went out for the drink, though the place the Doctor was looking for was closed, and they ended up having it in San Francisco instead. Then lunch on Sagritanteus Major was interrupted by a minor revolution, and when they were done dealing with that, he'd decided he'd much rather do Paris again than head back to New York. But he'd got the date wrong, and by the time they'd dealt with everything that came of that, he figured they needed a rest, somewhere with a beach. And after they'd saved the Calexian beach-dwellers, he suddenly remembered an errand a couple of galaxies over that he'd been meaning to run for centuries.

Romana seemed game for it all. Just like old times, really. He'd forgotten exactly how much he'd enjoyed her company.

Sometimes they talked about Gallifrey. Mostly, they didn't.

"I have to go back to E-Space soon," she said, a year or two later. "At least for a while. But before I go, there's something I'd like you to do for me."

"You're leaving me again already?" It came out sounding sulky, probably because it was. Not fair, he had to admit. He'd agreed with her reasons for leaving last time, hadn't he? And she had her own life, her own battles to fight. He could hardly have expected her to stay forever. He shook his head and tried again. "Yeah, anything for you, Romana, you know that."

"I've decided to have a baby."

"I mean, of course, if you have to go, I'm not gonna..." He stopped and blinked as her words finally penetrated his mind. "You've decided to have a what?"

She smiled at him cheerfully. "A baby. You're familiar with them, surely? They're just like people, only tiny."

"I know what a baby is! It's just... you want to have one?"

"Yes."

"Well, all right. Not stopping you, am I?"

She stood there looking at him patiently.

"What, with me?" He put a hand to his chest, as if there might be some confusion about what the word "me" meant.

"I don't see anyone else about, do you?"

He was finding it rather difficult to speak. "Yeah, but... why?"

"I like children. I'd always thought I might want to have one, sometime." When he failed to respond to this, she let out a small sigh. "Honestly, you'd probably be my first choice even if you weren't the only Time Lord left in the universe, if that's what's bothering you."

"You really want to... No! Just... No! No way. I've done my share of raising kids. I finished with that centuries ago. I'm done! It's bad enough looking after all these humans."

She gave him a big, sunny smile. "Well, that's all right. I mean, I'd hardly expect you to raise it. You're not exactly suitable, are you? Unpredictable, irresponsible. No background in the scientific theories of child-rearing at all..."

He glared at her. "Hey, are you saying I'm a bad parent? You are! You're saying I'm a bad parent! Well, you don't know nearly as much about me as you think you do because, let me tell you, I am a fantastic parent!"

"Oh, good. That's no problem, then. I'm glad we're agreed."

"Yeah! No, hang on..." This conversation seemed to have got entirely out of his control somewhere.

"I'll rig up an incubator unit, shall I? After all, just because the Gallifreyan maternity wards are gone is no reason we shouldn't be civilized about things." She pulled her sonic screwdriver out of her pocket and started fiddling with the settings. "I do believe I saw an old cryogenic pod in one of your storerooms. It should be easy enough to modify using parts from the DK-111 bio-regulator unit, and I know you have one of those, because I bought you one when we were on Ratafelion. You haven't used it as a planter or something, have you?"

Great Rassilon, how long had she been planning this out? "Now, look. I'm the Doctor. I don't do babies!"

She put the screwdriver back in her pocket and looked at him. "Oh, come on, Doctor. You like babies. Don't deny it. I've seen you." She grinned nostalgically. "Making funny faces at them, offering them sweets, telling them wildly exaggerated bedtime stories about how you've rescued princesses from towers, or whatever it was."

"There was nothing exaggerated about that story! And just because I like babies, it doesn't mean I want one." He wrinkled his nose. "They're horrible, smelly things. High maintenance. Not much use when you're fighting off Cybermen, either. Not my thing at all. I mean, they don't quite fit with the lifestyle, do they?"

"You've done it before." Her smile was now small and sweet, and the Doctor distrusted it entirely. "How many times have I heard you talking about your granddaughter?"

Not very many, he thought, but leave it to Romana to remember them all in detail. "I was young. That's the sort of thing you do at the beginning of your life, not eight regenerations on."

"Well, I'm still young. And I'd hardly think you, of all people would worry about what's traditional. Besides..." Her smile never wavered, but for a moment, something sad touched her eyes. "This is a beginning, isn't it? That's what happens after endings. Beginnings."

"You're going to say that's one of the things I taught you, aren't you?" She nodded. "Aargh. I was insufferable, I was. I don't know how you put up with me."

"Oh, I don't know. I rather liked you." She pulled a notebook from her other pocket and began jotting down notes. Plans for an incubation unit, he noticed without much surprise. "If it helps, I do fully intend to take care of the smelly, high-maintenance stage. It gets tiring, you know, running around saving planets all the time. I just liberated sixteen worlds before I came here. Sixteen. I know you don't feel the need, but every so often, one does want to take a decade or so off. I'd say looking after a child sounds like a nice change of pace. When it's old enough to have a chance against the Cybermen, I'll bring it to you, and you can show it the universe. You can't pretend you don't enjoy that." She stuck her pencil behind her ear and tilted her head at him in that adorable Romana way, her eyes glinting.

"I... I..."

"You're out of arguments, aren't you?"

"Yeah." He glanced down at his feet, feeling oddly embarrassed.

"Good. Now, I haven't decided on a boy or a girl. I thought it might be fun to leave it up to chance..."

"Hang on. There is one thing."

"Mmm?"

"Yeah." The embarrassment was fading out, giving way to a slowly building anger, bubbling up from somewhere he didn't like to think about. "We've been dancing all around the subject, so let's just have it out in the open, shall we? You and me, we are the last of our kind. Last Time Lord, last Time Lady, and here you show up, wanting a baby. A bit suspicious, I'd say. And if this is some lame attempt to -- oh, I dunno, what do you want to call it? -- 'repopulate the species' then I don't want any part of it."

"You never did much like the species, did you?" she said quietly.

It was surprising how much that hurt, considering that it was true. "That's not the reason."

"No, it's not."

"Yeah, well, if what you're trying to tell me is, 'Oh, it's okay if you destroyed them all, Doctor, we can always make some more,' then no bloody thanks. And if you think some half-arsed gesture in that direction is gonna salve my conscience and make everything all right, well, it's not! Because they're dead, all right? It's not something a bit of hanky-panky and a little fiddling with a sonic screwdriver is going to fix."

"Are you quite done?"

Actually, he'd had more, a bit about how the problem with half the megalomaniacs he'd dealt with was that they couldn't accept the fact that things end, and a long rant about whether it might not be better for the universe in general if the Time Lords just quietly went extinct. But something in the patient, hurt expression on Romana's face sapped all the anger out of him. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm done."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

He thought about that for a moment. "Yeah."

"Thinking I'd think that."

"Yeah..."

"If nothing else, it's quite an insult to my intelligence. Even with multi-layered Gallifreyan DNA and the application of Hentarian gene-variation techniques, to assume that a mere two individuals could repopulate an entire species would be..."

"Really stupid, yeah."

"...Really stupid. I'm not stupid, am I, Doctor?"

"Nah." He couldn't keep himself from smiling. "Nah. 'Course not. You're Romana."

"Yes." She tossed her hair and gave him a little sideways smile. "You think I'm intelligent. Sensible. Good-hearted."

"And modest," he said.

"Oh, yes, we mustn't forget that. And you like me, don't you?"

He shrugged. "I love you. Always did, really."

"Well, then. You're going to give me a baby."

She'd always been able to outsmart him, whether he'd been willing to admit it or not. That was one of the things he'd liked about her, too. The smile slowly spread across his face. "I guess I am. As long as it doesn't mean I have to get all domestic, mind."

She grinned, threw her arms around him, and kissed him. "Now," she said with a twinkle, "there are a few things I thought we could do the low-tech way..."

"That," he said, running his hands down her back, "I have no objection to at all."

One of the many neat tricks of Time Lord biology is the ability of the females to ovulate at will. Thus, only a short while later they had something to implant in the newly-rigged incubator. Which meant that when the first rush of fear kicked in -- funny how it took something like this to scare the trousers off of him, when death and Daleks couldn't do it -- it was too late to change his mind. The reaction didn't last long, in any case. It was in the Doctor's nature to feel affection for weak and helpless things, especially ones in which he could see potential.

By the time Romana was ready to leave with the tiny mass of cells, he was already giving it lectures on proper dental hygiene and techniques for defusing explosives, and was seriously contemplating asking her if she mightn't at least consider leaving it behind. Romana, bless her, never once said "I told you so." Even if he could tell she was thinking it.

He was a little miffed, though, at her refusal to consider calling it "Fred."

"So," he said. "Have a good time shopping, then?"

"Yeah," said Rose, dumping more bags than he'd have thought a human could reasonably carry onto the TARDIS floor. "It was great! I got all kinds of stuff, for Mum, Mickey... Everybody in my family, really. I figured, maybe sometime if we get home for Christmas... Anyway, yeah, it was fun. You should have come."

"Nah. Not big on shopping, me. Anyway, it would have just been all depressing. You, buyin' Christmas presents for the family, and me not having one."

"Oh!" Rose's hand flew to her face. "Oh, God, Doctor, I'm sorry, I didn't..." She trailed off, blinking in confusion. "Doctor? Why are you smiling like that?"

He thought about telling her. He'd meant to, really. But, nah. He'd much rather see the look on her face when Romana came to visit.

Anyway, "I don't do domestic" was far too useful an excuse to undermine just yet.