This story marks Part Four, and will probably be the last of the series about CJ Ephraim and his amazing, wonderful parents! Certain aspects of it will make much more sense if you have read through the whole series, but in case you are not so inclined, I'll try to make it easier:

Things We Weren't Meant To Know: The 10th Doctor and Martha Jones' relationship begins as canon, though over the course of trying to thwart an intergalactic plague roughly 60 years in the future, they fall in love. They seek out the help of a biomedical expert called CJ Ephraim, only to find him already dead from the plague. As they root about through his research for answers, they run across his memoir, and realize that he is their son, and some incredibly hard times lie ahead. In addition to knowing when, where and how he will die, they learn that for his own protection, they will have to give him up at the age of thirteen to be raised by Martha's sister, Tish. They also learn that CJ will carry a torch throughout his life for Haruka, a Japanese woman who eventually runs off, gets married and never returns his feelings. At the end of the story, Martha finds that she is pregnant, and temporarily imbued with the Time Lord consciousness and abilities of the new life inside.

Dress Code: A malevolent being from the Phlotigo Galaxy, without corporeal form, begins "stealing" people out of thin air and holding them prisoner as data codes inside the internet. Once he learns who the Doctor is, what he is capable of, and that a new Time Lord is on its way, his primary objective becomes to appropriate the baby's consciousness. The Doctor and Martha are able to dispatch him, but they soon learn that similar beings from the Phlotigo Galaxy have been alerted and are on the prowl, and that this might be the sort of thing that could cause them to have to leave CJ someday, for his own protection. The story ends with Tish's wedding as a backdrop, and Martha and the Doctor in a state of gloom and doom, believing they have worked out the logistics of their sad eventual separation from their son.

(Fear takes place sometime during Dress Code. It is less a "story arc" story, and more of a piece of therapeutic writing for me.)

Portrait of Time: Attempting to have a leisurely holiday before the baby comes, the pair go to a carnival, where an enigmatic artist who calls himself Michelangelo paints a disturbingly lifelike portrait of Martha. Someone alerts them to the fact that the carnival is run on slave labor. In the course of investigating, they realize that Michelangelo is an enslaved Time Lord, and the portrait is a plea for help. They rescue the slaves and learn that Michelangelo had been a traveler like the Doctor, and this is how he had been captured, and survived the Time War. Michelangelo becomes a bit fixated on the baby that Martha is carrying, making Martha quite uncomfortable. But, he departs peaceably enough, vowing to find other "traveler" Time Lords who had survived the war. The story ends with Martha going into labor two months early!

I hope you love the CJ stories as much as I do! I know they are not always super-accessible to the passing fan, but neither, I would argue, is our beloved Doctor Who! I say, try it, you might find yourself hooked!

With this story, I am hoping to get back to some of the raw emotion we experienced in Things We Weren't Meant To Know, which will not be easy. But now with baby CJ in the mix, and some new, tender issues to deal with, we might find ourselves back in weep-land. At least, that's my goal!

Enjoy!

Chapter 1

It was 3:04 a.m. when Martha felt a hand on her arm. It shook her just slightly.

"Martha," the familiar voice said. "Martha, wake up, honey."

"Oh, no," Martha groaned. "I told you, the extra bottles are in the fridge." Instinctively, she turned away from the voice and burrowed further into her pillow.

"I know that, love, it's just... well... something's wrong with the baby."

"What?" Martha shouted, sitting up suddenly. She switched on the lamp beside the bed, and illuminated her mother's worried-looking face.

"No, no, no," said Francine, her hands out in front of her, in a stop gesture. "I'm sure it's nothing to fret over."

"Mum, what is it?" Martha asked, her heart racing, throwing the blankets off and climbing to a standing position. She raced out of the bedroom with her mother following behind.

The bedrooms in Martha's flat were narrow and deep. She threw open the door of the room she had always referred to as "the guest room," but it was so small, she had always used it more as a closet than anything else. There was just enough room for a crib and a wooden rocking chair, and an irregularly-sized chest of drawers that Martha had bought at a boot sale a few years before, specially for this weird little room. And for the moment, it makeshifted as a changing table.

In fact, the whole room was sort of makeshift. There was no teddy bear wallpaper, no jungle animal decals or even any paint, and the only thing comfortable about it was the cushy crib Leo had been happy to dislodge from their storage space. After the super-early birth, which had occurred in the TARDIS, the baby had had to stay in an incubator for a couple of weeks. They had not taken him to hospital because his anatomy was not fully human, so they had had to tell Martha's parents that the little guy was in intensive care and was not allowed to have visitors. This nearly killed them, but they said they understood.

But as CJ got ready to breathe on his own, just before they released him from the incubator, the Doctor had come back to Martha's flat with Leo, and the two of them had cleaned out the guest room, set up the crib and bought a rocker from a second-hand store.

Because, for some reason, it had never occurred to any one of them that Martha's parents would want to come stay and help with the baby, and they couldn't have them coming to stay in a time-travelling Police Box that was bigger on the inside. So, while there was a brand-new, lovingly decorated nursery in the TARDIS parked in the back garden, they used this glorified walk-in closet as their son's bedroom, for appearance's sake, when the Joneses were about.

The baby was awake and calm, as it turned out, lying face-up, looking wide-eyed at his mother and grandmother, and refusing to be swaddled, as usual. He was wearing a yellow preemie-sized sleeper, and his hands were covered with linen mittens to keep him from scratching himself.

And he was glowing.

"Oh," Martha sighed. "Yeah. I see."

Neither of them knew what to say for several moments. The two just stared at the tiny person, illuminated as yellow dust swirled about him.

"Well," said Francine, clearing her throat awkwardly. "Have you ever seen this sort of thing before? Like, maybe, in your obstetrics or neonatal rotation?"

"Y-yeah," Martha said, her eyes suddenly snapping away from the baby to meet her mother's. "This is... yes, I've seen it before. It's nothing to worry about."

"Oh, good," Francine sighed. "I just wasn't sure."

And suddenly, baby CJ began to cry. He was six weeks old, and only weighed just over five pounds even now, so his cry wasn't loud. But it packed plenty of a punch for his mum, even at three in the morning, even when she was exhausted. So, Martha reached down and picked up the little guy.

"No, no, go back to sleep, honey," Francine said, trying to take the baby. "I'll get him back down again."

"I've got it, mum," Martha said beatifically, sitting down in the rickety rocking chair.

"You're sure?"

"Yeah."

"Okay, then," said Francine. "You know where to find me."

The baby had stopped crying immediately when Martha had taken him up in her arms, and now he nestled between her elbow and breast and drifted off to sleep. She rocked in the semi-dark and stared at him, still in total disbelief of what she was seeing.

When he'd first been delivered, as they had read in the adult CJ's memoir, the Doctor had held the little, squirming, slippery thing and cried, almost crippled with emotion. For a few long minutes, he hadn't even found the wherewithal to wrap the baby in a blanket or cut the umbilical cord. He just sat with his elbows on his knees, and stared at the newborn in his hands through a veil of tears. He'd been stressed to the max over the inhumanly quick labour, over the earliness of it, and having to deliver the baby himself. He'd been moved to tears having seen how incredibly tiny he was, and over the prospect of being a father again. Babies are innocent, helpless, love personified...

...but mostly, Martha knew, when the Doctor looked at CJ, he saw the Mandala. This child was a fixed point, someone and something that was destined to exist no matter what else the fates had to say. He was meant to have a certain life, to achieve greatness, the sort that would change the universe. It would have a ripple effect through time that would turn over on itself and culminate somewhere in the Doctor and Martha's past. His birth was like Vesuvius, the Battle of Hastings, the Atomic Bomb: an immutable axis around which so many other events rotated, reality might collapse without it.

And she knew that's what the Doctor saw, because six weeks ago, she could see it too. She could see the web of existence that surrounded her son, all the little threads and the things at which they tugged. His birth, his death, and every significant moment in-between. There would be a catastrophe in thirteen years that would separate him from his parents forever. There would be a woman whom he'd meet eighteen years from now who would shape his view of love and companionship, perhaps not for the better, but for the necessary. Without her friendship and eventual rejection, he could not become despondent nor independent enough to immerse himself in the biomedical research that would save the universe as we know it. Martha had seen it.

Now, that view was waning. The ability to know instinctively the workings of time and the turn of the universe, it had been borrowed anyhow. It was a power that belonged to CJ - she had just been keeping it warm for him. She was not a Time Lord, but her son was, and difficult as it was to accept, she was slowly having to give up her perspective over Time and Space, her ability to read Gallifreyan, to fly the TARDIS, and frankly, to keep up with the Doctor intellectually.

She did not wish necessarily to keep that power for herself; that's not why it was difficult to accept losing it. It was difficult because as she watched the baby sleeping in her arms, she knew that as it left her, it went into him. All of that incredible knowledge and insight, the gift and horrible burden of it, they were all floating about in his little brain somehow. He would not have the language nor the context to understand it in any meaningful way for a few years, but it was there.

But she knew that it hadn't completely passed from her to him yet, because the baby was still glowing from time to time, as he was right now. The Doctor had said that with each regeneration, excess energy emanates from the body in surges, until the new life has had a chance to fully establish. In adult Time Lords, it's about fifteen to twenty hours. For a newborn, more like a month.

But CJ had been a preemie, so his hearts and lungs had not fully formed when he had emerged, and his mind had not yet assimilated all that it was meant to. As soon as all of his systems were stable, the excess regenerative energy would dissipate, but he would likely be three months old by then.

"What do you see?" she whispered to him as he slept, and the glowing dust settled gradually into the dark. "How much do you already know?"

Francine was careful not to make any noise as she shut the door to the baby's room. She was not surprised when she turned around to find the Doctor standing there in a tee-shirt and a pair of striped pyjama bottoms. When Martha had leapt out of one side of the bed, Francine had seen him out of the corner of her eye, very slowly getting to an upright position on the other side.

"Everything all right?" he asked, rubbing his eye and yawning.

Francine sighed, and stared at something just to the left of the Doctor's feet. She put her hands stoically at her sides and said, "He's glowing."

The grogginess left the Doctor all at once, and he felt hot with pressure. "Oh," he said before he'd had time to think. "That's..."

"Martha said she's seen it before in her obstetrics rotation," Francine said, still not making eye-contact. "Or maybe neonatal."

"Yes, yes, I'm sure she has," the Doctor told her.

Francine nodded. "I figured the two of you would know what it was, how to handle it."

"Yes, it's... normal... in a manner of speaking," he said, a little relieved. But only a little.

An awkward silence passed, and the Doctor finally asked, "I'm going to make some tea. Would you like some?"

"All right," she said.

"I forget - milk and sugar?"

"Just milk."

"Okay. Give me a few minutes," he said, heading for the kitchen.

As his hand pressed against the kitchen door, Francine spoke again. "Doctor?"

"Yeah?"

She spoke softly, calmly, without anger or malice. "Martha is an intelligent, ambitious and a fantastically, open, free spirit."

The Doctor seemed to look about the room a bit, to try and find whether he was missing something. After several seconds, he said, "Yes. Yes, she is."

"She has always been that way. And I don't know if you can see it or not, but for some reason, when she met you, she changed. I don't know why or how, but suddenly she abandoned medical school and became secretive about her life."

"I see."

"That made me angry."

"I had noticed that, yes. Well, my left cheek noticed."

She pretended she hadn't heard. "But I see things, Doctor. I see more than I think either of you give me credit for. I could see early-on that she loved you. Granted, for a long while, I couldn't see why, but that's neither here nor there."

The Doctor smiled a little.

"And yes, I railed against it, against you, even against the pregnancy, but eventually... well, I suppose you all thought I stopped squawking just to keep the peace, so I could be there, as a grandmother to your son."

"More or less"

"That's not why," she said. "Doctor, I like to think that when it comes to my children, I see everything."

"I understand," he said.

"Yes, I think you do."

He gulped, and said nothing.

"I love Martha, Tish and Leo with ever fibre of my being. And Martha loves you. I see the two of you together, and I can see real love in you as well, and I can see that that might be as good for her as finishing medical school, in the long run."

"Well, it's not like she has to choose."

"It's good to hear you say that," she told him, and indeed, he could hear the relief in her voice. "Over time, I've seen that you probably do want what's best for her, and you'll help her achieve it, whatever it may be."

"I will."

"So I accept the fact that we just call you the Doctor, without knowing your name or anything else about you."

"Thank you."

"And I've watched you, Doctor. You're a good father," she told him, swallowing hard. "A wonderful father, in fact. A very natural father. My gut tells me that this is because it's not the first time you've been a father, but I think... I think you're not ready to talk about that for whatever reason, and neither is Martha. But I accept that too, because CJ is loved and well cared-for, and that's all that should matter to me."

Heat was rising through his neck and cheeks again. "Thank you."

"I accepted that I couldn't see the baby until he was two-and-a-half weeks old, though my nephew's little girl was a preemie, and I was allowed in to visit her."

The Doctor could do nothing but nod. He stared at the floor.

Francine, very uncharacteristically, came close and took his hand.

"And Doctor, I've seen not only our lives, but I've seen what's been happening everywhere. I saw what happened to Big Ben, and on Christmas Eve a couple years ago, and the temporary hole in the ground that Royal Hope left when it went to the moon," she said.

"Yeah."

"So, I will also accept whatever excuse you and Martha decide to give me as to why my grandson is glowing in his crib. For now. But someday, Doctor - maybe not today or tomorrow, but someday soon - you and I will need to have a serious talk."

He nodded, barely perceptibly. "Okay."

"In the meantime," she said, squeezing his hand, a motherly smile forming. "Thanks for making tea."