Author's Note: A short little endeavor created between projects. (I'm also working on a much larger Doctor Who project on top of my Avatar: The Last Airbender project) This is a babyfic. It's exceedingly fluffy with a side of angst. You have been warned.

A quick note on Classic Who canon: This is my first ever Fifth Doctor story! I love him. He's great. He may or not be in character. Also: My Theories on Gallifreyan child-rearing come into play a little bit. I did my best to keep them as ambivalent as they are on the show, although since they're almost non-existant on the show, that was a tall order.

Feedback is welcome regarding characterization!

Enjoy!

1.

The Doctor was already in a foul mood. He had been forced to make an extended stay at Ordo Grocharum, the satellite which held all major diplomatic conferences for the interconnected stars of the Pars System. The major players in the system's hard-won peace had asked for him to stay just long enough to help mediate the negotiations between their disparate factions. Long, drawn-out sociopolitical debates were not The Doctor's forte to begin with, but this particular conference was so charged with hostile energy he thought he might spontaneously combust from the ambience. None of the delegates seemed interested in genuine dialogue; they all seemed more bent on infuriating one another in the most snide of ways possible, only to claim they were just joking and call a recess to the discussions out of pique. The Doctor had nearly had it up to his eyeballs with politics, and he had only been on Ordo Grocharum for two full days.

To make matters worse for The Doctor, all three of his companions had decided to stay on the TARDIS while he went to deal with the diplomats. Tegan had begged off with the excuse of exhaustion, and The Doctor couldn't argue with her. Tegan had gone through a trying few days helping The Doctor sort out the conflict on the Pars System's many stars. Nyssa and Adric had both claimed to need to stay on the TARDIS to monitor an experiment they had started in one of the space-and-time-ship's many laboratories. The Doctor, a little over-tired himself, hadn't bothered to make a fuss over their reluctance. Instead, he had donned his fawn-colored coat and had left the TARDIS, alone, to face one of the most unpleasant side effects of peace he had ever experienced.

Now, seated in a room full of various lifeforms making icy remarks about their rivals' planets, The Doctor sighed in weariness. "Can't you please just come to a resolution?" he asked, irritably. "All this squabbling will accomplish absolutely nothing, as you all surely know."

"Doctor," said one of the delegates, his orange head crest fluffed up in indignation, "please do not refer to our negotiations as 'squabbling'. These are serious matters that we must discuss."

"Oh, really? It sounds rather petty, for negotiations." The Doctor shrugged, feigning innocence. "But, you know, there are reasons why I never considered a career as a diplomat. I have no finesse for this sort of thing."

"Are you mocking us, Doctor?" the orange-skinned diplomat blustered.

The Doctor widened his eyes, his expression just shy of ridiculous. "Why would I ever do that?"

With a huff, the orange delegate turned back to his former conversation. His teal-skinned rival welcomed his return and began to fire off semi-sarcastic questions with even greater zeal. As the orange alien's crest sprang into stiffness once again, The Doctor gave a languishing sigh and slid further down in his chair at the long conference table. He enjoyed another moment of stillness before an irate representative of the allied star Juhai Duram borrowed his ear to rant about his tormentor.

The Doctor spent the next half hour soothing bruised egos and pushing the conference toward a definite ending, mentally gritting his teeth all the while. This sort of political garbage was half the reason he had left his own planet, Gallifrey, in favor of travelling the universe. Time Lords could talk other species under the table, and they had the capabilities to do it in several languages, dimensions, and timelines. As soon as the Pars delegates appeared to be somewhat calm and not likely to erupt into a riot, he would discreetly see himself out of the conference room and into his TARDIS.

Two rounds of motions raised and rejected later, The Doctor had determined he would need to take a firmer stand in this debate. He stood and delivered a poignant, rather perfect speech, but he hardly knew what he was saying even as he spoke. He just wanted to convince the delegates to come to some kind of resolution regarding peace on their planets. The delegates interrupted him occasionally, but he silenced them with the efficiency of one who has had to shout down Tegan Jovanka on a regular basis.

The Doctor was close to the end of his compelling speech when, from out of nowhere, he heard a peculiar noise. It was a tinny, high-pitched cry that originated from somewhere outside the conference room. The sound grated on his ears. With a twitch and only a minor flip of his smooth blonde hair, The Doctor continued his speech, only to be interrupted again by the same sound. He listened intently this time, and realized something puzzling: the noise was the cry of a baby.

"Go on, Doctor," one purple-toned delegate urged.

"Oh," The Doctor, said, "yes, well, it's just that—" He cocked his head to the side as the cries continued, "do you hear that?"

"Do get on with it, Doctor," another diplomat said, testily.

"Yes, of course. I do apologize." The Doctor cleared his throat and pressed on with his speech, trying to ignore the pitiful little sound echoing throughout the satellite.

As his last sentence drew to a close, The Doctor had to admit that he had never been very good at ignoring small creatures in distress. He knew it had nothing to do with instinct, because Time Lords did not have parental instincts, and he would react much the same way if he heard a baby bird or a baby reptile in distress. Of course, he knew this, it was a fact of biology, and it was quite simple. Time Lords were not driven by the baser urges of less evolved species. They did not go sprinting out of conference rooms to locate babies which were crying so loudly.

"Do you hear that child?" asked The Doctor, after he had finished his speech.

The Parsian delegate to whom he spoke said, "Of course, I hear it."

"Well, isn't one of you going to go take care of it? Surely, it belongs to one of you Parsians." But the delegate was no longer listening; he had been pulled away by his orange-skinned companion. "Oh, honestly," The Doctor said, annoyed, "a crying baby is a more important matter than which color the treaty should be printed in."

Around him, the fruitful dialogue The Doctor had tried to create began to blossom, but he no longer felt satisfied by his success. He moved around in a small circle, demanding, "Isn't one of you going to find out whose baby that is?" and "Yes, but do you hear that small person crying? Don't you think you should attend to him or her?" When he got no results from the first two questions, The Doctor tried again. "Every species in the Pars System is highly nurturing to its young, so isn't that noise bothering you?" The delegates The Doctor addressed would all look confused by his questions or ignore him entirely. The buzz around the conference table grew stronger, but the baby's cries got weaker, and all of a sudden The Doctor's thin thread of tolerance for stupidity snapped.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," he cried, shoving back his chair, "are you really going to make the least paternal person in the room go find that crying baby? Oh, what a brilliant idea! One would almost think you lot had planned this out, but why anyone would do that is too baffling to contemplate! Good day, and good night, and goodbye!"

With a sharp flourish of his long, fawn-colored coat, The Doctor turned and stalked out of the room, leaving a stunned mass of diplomats in his wake. He stormed along the corridors of Ordo Grocharum, muttering to himself in Gallifreyan. The baby had nearly stopped crying, and The Doctor knew that its lungs must be exhausted. It had been crying for twenty minutes without relief. "What kind of Parsian parent leaves its offspring alone for that length of time?" The Doctor said, still in Gallifreyan. "It's practically an abomination of nature. These delegates are some of the most backward people I have ever met, and that includes the Backward People of Drawkcab."

The irritated Time Lord continued in this vein until he came upon the tranquil garden which had been set into the center of the satellite. The Doctor always thought Parsian peace gardens resembled a pleasing mix of Earth Japanese and Earth French sensibilities, and this large, extravagant affair was no exception. The vibrant green ferns and red-leafed trees were arranged in the Parsian symbols of harmony. Each cluster of plants drew the eye toward the center of the garden, where a fountain flowed over with the shining black water which was the trademark of Juhai Duram.

The Doctor hardly even noticed the alien symmetry of the peace garden, for there, lying beside the black-water fountain, was a small, fluffy white bundle. The bundle squirmed and snuffled, then hiccupped violently. The Doctor hurried into the garden and knelt down beside the fountain, scooping the little mass of blankets into his arms. "There, there," he said, hurriedly, "there's no need to snuffle quite so enthusiastically. Someone's found you, now." He reached for the triangle of white material which covered the tiny creature's face. "Don't worry, I'll find your parents, and you'll be back in a Parsian family unit in-", the blanket dropped away from the creature's face, "-no time…Oh." The Doctor blinked his wide blue eyes down at the bundle. "You're not a Parsian."

The baby didn't have a secondary color for a skin tone, and it had absolutely no head crest. Instead, it had smooth, creamy pale skin, a modest layer of white hair, a snubbed nose, and only two enormous blue eyes. It had stopped making distressed noises as soon as it had been picked up, but now it wiggled in The Doctor's arms and gave another strangled cry.

Quite without warning, The Doctor's fingers on his left hand reached out and smoothed themselves against the baby's forward. Then, also without warning, his forehead made delicate contact with the smooth, soft skin of the baby's brow. As he sat there, wondering where his hand and skull had learned to perform actions independent of his brain, The Doctor felt his heartbeats slow and his breath fall deeply and evenly across the baby's face. Astonishingly, The Doctor could feel the baby's fragile heart drop to a gentler rhythm in its chest, and its hitching breaths turned into quiet, restful sighs.

The Doctor pulled his face away from the baby and stared at it, stuck somewhere between confusion and alarm. "Now," he said to the baby, "what is a high-level telepath infant doing on a satellite full of Parsians?" The baby's eyes drifted closed, and it dropped into sleep. Sighing, The Doctor tucked it more firmly against his chest and turned to leave the garden. "Why do I always have to solve these sorts of questions alone?" he muttered to himself. He carried the baby through the satellite and returned once again to the conference room. The loud buzz of conversation between the many delegates did not rouse the baby from its contented sleep. It simply turned its head and tried to burrow itself into The Doctor's chest cavity.

The Doctor stood a moment and observed the Parsian diplomats. They all seemed to be engaged in animated but civil debates. No one hurled insults or made cuttingly sly remarks. No one ruffled their head crests or released toxic quills from their forearms. In fact, the assembly appeared to be a different group of people entirely from the ones The Doctor had wrangled only half an hour before. The Doctor continued to stand in puzzled silence until one of the delegates noticed his return. "Doctor," he said, "where did you go? We wanted to tell you: we've arrived at amiable terms for the treaty!"

The Doctor still didn't understand. What had happened between his departure and this moment to make the assembly behave like civilized beings? "Excellent," he said, for lack of a better response. "And, now that you've got that matter settled, you can take this baby back to its parents. Surely, they're somewhere on this station?"

Several more delegates looked up and stared at The Doctor. "Baby?" one of them asked.

"Yes," The Doctor said, "the baby. The one I am currently holding. The one who wouldn't stop crying."

"Oh," the delegate said, in a disinterested voice.

"You did hear a baby crying, just a minute ago?"

"Yes, of course."

"Well, I wasn't certain that you did, since none of you seemed very worried about it." The delegates all blinked, their faces blank. The Doctor sighed. "And, none of you are worried, now, either."

The first delegate looked bemused and said, "It's not a Parsian baby, Doctor," as if that explained his attitude perfectly.

The Doctor felt anger flash through him, before he forced himself to give the delegates a thin smile. "And, there is the problem with your entire star system, in a nutshell. I do hope you all manage to keep this treaty for at least a decade, but the timelines indicate that my hopes for your people were a bit deluded. I'll just take me and my Not-Parsian baby out of your hair, then, shall I? Goodbye, again!"

With no further words to the Pars System's most eloquent minds, The Doctor walked out of the room and back to his TARDIS. "Don't listen to those cold-blooded fools," he murmured to the child sleeping in his arms, "their limbic systems are under-developed, and they're about as open-minded toward mammalians as clams are open to…well, anything, really." The Doctor shifted the baby slightly to fish his TARDIS key out, opened the lock on the door of the bright blue box, and brought his tiny charge into his time-and-space machine.


Adric was in the console room when The Doctor entered the TARDIS. The Doctor's teenaged companion was bent over the cylindrical time rotor which stood in the middle of the room. His hands were elbow deep in the console's control panel. He had removed one piece of the panel and was manipulating its inner parts. Sparks would occasionally fly from the depths of the large round structure. In response, Adric would do what any self-respecting teenager would do: he leaned forward and tried to figure out where the sparks originated.

"Adric, what are you doing to my TARDIS?" The Doctor said disapprovingly, although in a much softer tone than usual. The baby was still sleeping, and even a Time Lord with no parental instincts knew a quiet voice was needed while holding a sleeping infant.

Adric turned, then yelped and dropped the screwdriver in his hand onto his foot. "Doctor," he said, "where did that baby come from?"

"Didn't they teach you any basic biology on your home planet?" asked The Doctor, distractedly, trying to jiggle the baby over to one arm so he could toggle a switch on the TARDIS.

"I know where all babies come from!" said Adric, a little too loudly. The Doctor put a finger to his lips and pointed to the baby. Adric's already pink cheeks turned red. He said, in a quieter voice, "I meant, where did this particular baby come from? Where'd you get a baby?"

"Ordo Grocharum," The Doctor said. "It was lying in the peace garden, crying, and no one seemed to care. When I asked the delegates, none of them knew the baby or expressed much concern over its fate. So, I've decided to bring it here, and we'll find its parents."

"How are we supposed to do that?" Adric demanded. He connected two wires on the console and ducked below the curve of the control panel as more sparks shot out of the machine.

"Well, between the four of us, we have formidable intellect and skills. I should think it would be an easy task, for us."

"Doctor, we can't even land in the proper time and place, much less drop off passengers. You've been trying to get Tegan to Heathrow Airport for months. How are we going to find a baby's parents when we'd have to search the whole universe for them?"

More sparks erupted from the console, and the resulting light and noise startled the baby into wakefulness. It started to wail, but The Doctor quickly placed his fingers on its forehead and soothed it back to sleep. Adric watched, amazed, as a being who could be so standoffish toward Adric himself held a tiny person close and calmly and carefully lulled it back to unconsciousness. Adric felt very petty when he realized that a flare of jealousy had sprung up in his heart as he stared at The Doctor and this newfound traveling companion. He went back to work on the console and tried not to think about what sort of a person he was if he could be jealous of a little lost baby.

"I've got a species indicator in the infirmary that should tell us exactly what kind of humanoid this baby is," The Doctor said, as he lightly stroked the baby's face. "We might even get a planet name out of the readings, if we're lucky. Some species are scattered all across the universe, which is a predictable but sometimes annoying side effect of space travel. Still, it should be a promising start to this quest, don't you think?"

"It sounds like it," Adric said. "I take it you don't want to discuss this with all of us, before we adopt this as an official mission?"

The Doctor looked indignant. "Certainly not. This is my TARDIS, need I remind you, Adric. On my TARDIS, we don't have 'missions'. We have voyages, or perhaps the occasional adventure. But, we absolutely do not have 'missions'."

"Of course not, Doctor," said Adric, hiding his face in paneling so he could roll his eyes in peace.

"Don't roll your eyes at me, Adric."

"I would never do that, Doctor."

"Right," The Doctor said, in a huff, "I'm going to the infirmary. Do tell Nyssa and Tegan I'm back, if they come through." He walked past the dismantled console. As he passed, the baby sneezed in its sleep, wrinkling its snub nose against his lapel. "I know," The Doctor said, "teenagers can be so trying, can't they? Not like babies. Babies are such small, helpless creatures, and they are physically incapable of rolling their eyes. I much prefer babies, I think."

"Babies can't fix temporal stabilizers," Adric called out after him, sounding a tad insulted. The Doctor smiled in reply, but he didn't verbally respond.


"Hello, Adric!" Nyssa said, with a serene smile, as she sailed into the console room.

"G'morning, Adric," Tegan said, in a much less sunny voice. She had a cup of coffee clutched in one hand and a croissant in the other. Adric knew she had slept for almost fourteen hours after her efforts to help bring peace to the Pars System. "What are you doing to the TARDIS?" the older woman asked, as she saw the pieces of the control panel strewn across the floor.

"The Doctor's got a baby," Adric blurted out, then immediately knew that he should have chosen better words.

The two girls' mouths dropped open simultaneously. "What?!" Tegan shouted. "What?"

"What do you mean?" asked Nyssa, looking terribly confused. "The Doctor hasn't had time to procreate with any of the women on the planets we've visited." She turned an inquisitive eye on Tegan. "Unless…"

Tegan's face turned tomato red, and her curly hair seemed to stand on end. "Nyssa," she thundered, "you can't possibly believe that The Doctor and I would—would—combine our genetics! On the TARDIS! With you two kids on board!"

"It's not like I'd be offended if you did," Nyssa said, reasonably. "I'm old enough to know these sorts of things, you know."

"What on Earth would ever give you the impression that The Doctor and I are even remotely interested in one another like that! We practically spit in each other's faces every day!"

"Aggression is a mating ritual on some planets."

"Oh, my word," Tegan said, and took a steadying gulp of coffee.

"No, no, Nyssa," Adric cut in hastily, "it's not The Doctor's baby! He found it on Ordo Grocharum, and he wants to find its parents. I told him I thought that was an impossible task—"

"Oh, I bet he liked that," Tegan said, dryly.

"—and now he's gone to the infirmary to run a species identification test on it," Adric finished.

"Oh, I see," Nyssa said. She turned to Tegan. "I'm sorry for jumping to conclusions, Tegan. That was very rude of me."

Tegan smiled weakly. "It's all right. But, if you ask me, I haven't had enough coffee for these kinds of discussions."

Nyssa smiled back, but then she put a hand to her chin in thought. "Although, I still think my theory about mating rituals has merit where the two of you are concerned."

Tegan spit her mouthful of dark, rich Arabica onto the console room floor.

After Adric reassembled the TARDIS console, the Doctor's three companions decided to join him in the infirmary. Nyssa and Tegan had asked Adric what the mysterious Non-Parsian baby looked like, but his vague description had not satisfied their curiosity, and they had concluded that the best way to know more was to go see the baby themselves. Tegan had thought to make a detour to one of the TARDIS's several kitchens to scrounge up a croissant and a cup of coffee for The Doctor, as well. The two teenagers had agreed to this change in the plan.

"You know," Nyssa said, as she wrapped the croissant in a square of baking paper, "it just occurred to me that we don't really know anything about Gallifreyan child-rearing customs. I wonder if The Doctor knows anything about babies."

"He doesn't strike me as the doting type," Tegan said. She poured a generous measure of coffee into a futuristic thermos and added a heaping spoonful of sugar.

"He seemed to know what he was doing," Adric said, from his position in the doorway. "I think the baby's at least slightly telepathic, because when it started crying, The Doctor took his fingers and did something like this." He mimicked the same gentle, stroking motion that The Doctor had performed on the baby's forehead on his own face. "It worked brilliantly," he added, somewhat grudgingly.

"You sound like that's a bad thing," Tegan laughed.

"It would be nice if The Doctor wasn't always more experienced at everything," Adric grumbled.

"Adric, he's at least a few centuries older than you! It only makes sense that he's got a bigger skill set."

"It is a bit surprising that he knows anything at all about babies, though, isn't it?" asked Nyssa. She handed the wrapped croissant to Tegan and followed the older woman out of the kitchen.

"I don't know," answered Tegan. "I really don't know all that much about The Doctor, now that you mention it. Don't you think he's had children, and maybe even grandchildren, in his life?"

Nyssa and Adric both looked rather taken aback by this supposition. Tegan reminded herself that they were both very young by their own people's standards and still naïve about many matters she took for granted. "I…hadn't considered it," Nyssa said, her blue eyes wide, "but, of course, you're right, Tegan."

"You hadn't thought about that, but you'd considered whether we'd tangoed on the TARDIS," Tegan muttered to herself.

The three traveling companions said nothing further until they reached their destination. The infirmary was a medium-sized, sterile room, which had a transparent wall which slid open like a door and several beds stocked with accompanying medical devices. One whole wall of the infirmary contained shelf upon shelf of neatly labeled supplies. Tegan had often found it rather irritating that all the labels were in Gallifreyan, and therefore indecipherable to humans. But now, she was far less distracted by the constant annoyance of useless labels and much more interested in the two people in front of the shelves.

The Doctor stood at the supplies wall with the baby still in his arms. As the companions watched, he replaced one tubular device into its proper box and drew another one out. He waved the device over the slumbering baby, intermittently flicking a button on its side. The slim device whirred, then clicked, and The Doctor hummed in approval. "The scan's finished," he said, turning to face his companions, who entered the room at his beckoning gesture. "This is a Thionic baby."

"Oh," Tegan said, in a voice much sweeter than her usual tone, "look at this little sweetheart." She walked over and put her face very close to the baby, taking in its fine, white hair and rosy skin. "Oh, isn't she just precious?"

"How did you know she was a girl?" asked The Doctor, looking flummoxed. "I had to have a scanner for that!"

"Well, you could have just checked the old-fashioned way, if you'd really wanted to know," Tegan said, "but, as for how I knew…I don't know, I guess she just looked like a girl. She's so tiny, and she's rather chubby. I don't have any idea about Thionic babies, but Earth girls are usually smaller and more chubby."

"Thionic babies are like Thionic adults," The Doctor said, "and are highly telepathic beings who sense the emotional and physical atmosphere of their caretakers to such a fine degree that they can detect as small as two beats' difference in your pulse rate when you're holding them against your heart. They need telepathic parents to keep them in a sort of cocoon of mental stability until they're old enough to control their own telepathy. They're rather like Gallifreyan babies, actually."

"They sound even more high maintenance than human babies," Tegan said. She leaned over further and smiled down at the baby's round face. "It's a good thing she's so cute."

"Such a dependent child, and she was just lying in a garden in the middle of the Parsian satellite," The Doctor said, a dark frown on his face. "There's something very wrong about this situation, Tegan."

"Not all parents are happy to have a child, Doctor," Tegan pointed out, but feeling rather pessimistic for doing so. "On Earth, babies get abandoned every day."

"How terrible," Adric exclaimed. "Your people can be so barbaric, sometimes, Tegan!"

"So, no one ever leaves their baby alone to fend for themselves on your planet?" Tegan said, a little defensively. "Sorry, Adric, but I have a hard time believing that."

"On many planets, abandonment is punishable by death," Nyssa said, seriously. "That wasn't our custom on Traken, but I've heard of civilizations in the universe where both parents would be put to death for that crime."

"Well, if the parents are executed, who takes care of the baby, then?" Tegan asked.

Nyssa shook her head. "Their nearest relatives would adopt the child as penance for his or her parents' shameful act."

"Abandonment isn't exactly common on Gallifrey, either," The Doctor murmured. He paused a moment to adjust the baby in his arms. "Well, abandonment in the physical sense of the word isn't common. One could argue that certain other forms of abandonment are part of our culture…" He cleared his throat. "But, I'm getting distracted from the real issue at hand: Where are Garden's parents, and how can we return her to them?"

"You've named the baby 'Garden'?" Tegan said, her mouth open. "Doctor, that's not a proper name!"

"Well, she's not my baby, and I don't want to give her a Gallifreyan designation, because she's only going to be here for a short time and we don't just hand out names willy-nilly. So, I decided to call her by the place where I found her: in a peace garden."

"So, why not call her 'Peace'?" asked Adric. "That's rather pretty, isn't it?"

"It's much prettier than 'Garden'," Tegan said.

"Yes, but it's so cliché," The Doctor said.

"I think I have to agree with Tegan and Adric on this one, Doctor," Nyssa said, trying not to giggle. "I rather like 'Peace' better."

The Doctor twitched his shoulders indignantly. "Look here, who found this baby and brought her here? I did. I have temporary naming rights. Besides, the word 'Peace'—" He stopped speaking suddenly and looked down at the baby, who had hiccupped loudly as the word 'Peace' passed his lips. "Oh," The Doctor said, rather breathlessly.

"What is it?" all three of his companions asked, anxiously. They thought the baby must be disturbed or experiencing physical discomfort.

"She quite likes that word," The Doctor said. His gaze was riveted on the tiny person in his arms. "That's the strongest telepathic signal I've felt from her all day. When I said, 'Peace'—" the baby hiccupped, and The Doctor gave a delighted smile, "there, she did it again! That was the telepathic equivalent of a smile, or a laugh!"

"I don't have a clue what a telepathic signal is supposed to be," Tegan said, with an answering smile, "but that hiccup was the most adorable thing I've seen in a long time."