The Doctor was bored. Simply and utterly bored.
The Ponds had retired to their room after strictly lecturing him on the rules that they had instigated about bedrooms. He had no desire to interrupt them, anyway-not now that they were finally getting along again. He had a slight feeling that if he disturbed them Amy would kill him, using Rory's sword.
But that left him sitting alone in the console room, wondering if it was possible for him to regenerate from boredom.
Drumming his fingers in a staccato across the console, he considered his options. He could try and sleep. But he knew, after the adrenaline-packed day that he'd had that that wasn't a good choice- he wouldn't be able to sleep. He could go and possibly visit somebody? Who would he go and see, though?
The Doctor wasn't particularly well-known for staying in touch with his previous companions. He heaved a sigh, running his hand through the messy mop of hair at his head. Glaring at the phone as if willing it to ring, he groaned.
He couldn't just sit here all night. Reaching a decision, he threw the TARDIS some coordinates and waited for the landing noises that always accompanied him when he flew, before striding out of the door in the direction of the vast forest that he knew to be awaiting him.
Amy woke slowly, staring at the familiar grey-green ceiling above her for a few moments before realizing that Rory was awake.
"Hey," she said softly.
"Hey," He replied, leaning in to kiss her gently. She reciprocated, before scowling.
"Ugh, morning breath."
Rory grinned, before rolling over to get out of bed.
"Hey, that's weird," Amy began as she, too, removed herself from under the warm, inviting quilts.
"What's weird?"
"The Doctor hasn't been in here yet. He never lets us sleep in." That was one of the rules of the bedroom. They were allowed to remain uninterrupted until the next day where the Doctor would always come in and wake them up, usually with some exciting plan in store for the day.
"He's probably just hanging around. You never know with him," Rory reassured her, and she smiled weakly. Of course he would be. She was just worrying unnecessarily.
She believed that until she reached the console room and saw a smeared line of blood trailing around to underneath the mainframe of the TARDIS.
"Doctor!" She yelled, as Rory, who had been several paces behind her and buttoning up his shirt, looked up in alarm.
The pair of them quickly but cautiously headed in the same direction as the blood smears, until they located a mass of flesh and spilled blood.
"Doctor?" Amy called again, as the pair of them recognized that the mess was their beloved alien.
"Pond?" His head shot up, his eyes unfocussed and wearing a dazed, dumbfounded expression. "Oh. Don't worry about me, I'm just dying."
"Wha-" the red-head spluttered, "What do you mean 'just dying'?!"
"Regenerating," his statement confirmed as light began to pour from his mouth.
"Wha- How?!" Rory cried, Amy gripping his hand tightly.
"Don't worry," The Doctor grinned, though it looked more like a grimace. "You should see the other vampire bat."
He gasped, choking on regeneration energy as it surrounded him. Amy leapt back from his body as it seemed to implode, white-golden light streaming in all directions away from him. She clasped a hand over her eyes to shield them and sensed rather than felt her husband copy the action moments later.
When they opened their eyes again, the Doctor was gone.
Well, not exactly gone.
Amy gasped, Rory paled considerably and both of them stared in shock at this new regeneration.
A toddler, around the human age of two years, sat on the floor in front of the bewildered Ponds.
"This… this isn't right. This is a dream. Like when the Dream Lord was in here and was messing with our minds, only worse because the Doctor isn't here to-"
"Rory. Shut. Up." Amy warned through gritted teeth, ceasing his rambling at once.
The child stared at Amy through bright, green eyes, exposed through gaps in the curly, orange hair that was spreading over his skull.
"Hey, Doctor," The woman leaned down to his level, his eyes following her movement as his tiny, underdeveloped teeth gnawed on his bottom lip in a way that could only be described as adorable.
That was, until he began to inhale huge gasps of air. Then Amy decided it would be a good idea if she backed away, instinctually knowing what came next.
The Last of the Time Lords, known as the Predator, The Oncoming Storm and the Doctor, over 900 years old, and feared and awed by many, began to wail loudly.
Oh God.
Amy and Rory exchanged a glance, before reaching a simultaneous conclusion about what to do from there.
Amy scooped up the crying Time Baby, who only began to scream with intensity, and carried him down the hall into his previous regeneration's bedroom, while Rory grabbed the phone and hit "Speed Dial".
"River? It's Rory. I think we're going to need your help."
Two minutes had passed before their curly-haired psychopathic daughter zapped herself into the middle of the console room.
"When are we?" She asked breathlessly, flipping her mane of hair away from her face, ignoring the fact that it was even frizzier due to the Vortex Manipulator she'd travelled by.
"We've just done the Asylum," he began, and she continued, asking him what was wrong.
Rory opened his mouth to respond but was cut off by an even louder cry than before,
"….Is that..?" River asked, her jaw dropping as she inclined her head towards the corridor Amy had taken the protesting Doctor through, "Is that a baby?"
"Well…. yeah," Rory replied, not really knowing how else to put it so simply.
"Congratulations, Dad- why didn't you tell me? I know a lot about taking care of children, I could have come earlie-"
"Oh!" He interrupted. "No! No, it's not mine and Amy's!" He turned somber as he recalled the argument that had almost led to the Pond/Williams divorce.
"Then what…?" River didn't seem to be requiring an answer as she headed down the corridor herself.
Rory groaned, it had been his job to explain it and had quite obviously failed miserably. He waited in by the console, and wasn't at all surprised to hear his daughter shout out in surprise "Oh my- Doctor!"
Minutes later, the four of them sat in one of the lounge rooms littering the hallways of the TARDIS. Amy and Rory sat together, while River held the Toddler Time-Lord on her lap, having successfully calmed him down by soothing his fears.
"Now what," Amy began, breaking the awkward silence.
"Well. I don't know. There isn't exactly a guide-book for what to do when your husband, a millennia-old alien, regenerates into a two-year-old," River snapped, bouncing the Doctor up and down on one knee.
"Well, he has to regenerate back into an adult, doesn't he," Rory stated.
"It's not that simple," River interrupted as Amy began to reply. She shifted, as the child on her lap was becoming increasingly uncomfortable. "Would you be able to kill him?" The three of them stared at the innocent child, who stared back with wide eyes.
"No," Amy replied, and Rory nodded.
"I guess, we'll have to wait it out for now," River began, only to be met by silence.
"What I can do," she began her plan, "is take him and the TARDIS back to Earth. They'd have to stay with you, though, because I can't take him or the TARDIS with me to Stormcage." Even as she was speaking, her parents looked disappointed, upset even, at the prospect of having such a responsibility foisted upon them. Their own child, they could handle. But an energetic Time Lord with too much knowledge for his age? That would be dangerous.
"Alternately," she said, "I can wait with him here in the Time Vortex until he's old enough to pilot the TARDIS himself. Then I can go back to Stormcage. Time will pass normally here, for us, but then we can travel back to the beginning of this whole fiasco."
Amy and Rory looked much more comfortable with that idea, as did the Doctor, who snuffled against her shoulder and attempted to get closer.
"Besides," she muttered to herself, "How much trouble can he cause?"
"Doctor! NO! That's not for chewing on!" River scolded.
It had been two months since she had dropped her parents back in Leadworth, two months since she'd begun her long-term babysitting job for her husband, and one month and thirty days since she'd become absolutely sick of her job.
Grabbing the Sonic from his slobbery mouth, she wiped it on the tea-towel she'd grown accustomed to wearing around while he was in the vincity. Scowling at the teeth-marks that lined the edge, she tucked it back into the cabinet underneath the console floor, locking the door. Standing upright, she could see that he'd found himself another target.
"No, no, no, no, no!" River Song had prided herself on being a patient, calm woman before. But there was no sign of anything but frustration as she took away the bow-tie that he had started to gnaw on in the place of the Sonic. She threw it into a container that she was using as a bin, ignoring the way that he screwed up his face in response, and began to hiccup.
"Oh Rassilon, please, no, don't start," she murmured under her breath, and, like he always had, he ignored her, beginning to scream and whine at her.
Stooping down to his eye level, she spoke in a chilling, clipped tone, "Do you want to go to the naughty corner?"
He looked at her, ceasing his cries, and shaking his head. She sighed, picking him up and settling him against her side. Carrying him up the stairs, she located the 3x3metre square pen that she had found way back in the centre of the time machine, placing him in it with a pillow and a soft toy that her mother had kindly dropped off for her in some form of sympathy-gift.
He growled, and kicked his feet out, but she ignored him, placing him in the pen that she knew he wouldn't get out of in a hurry. He started hiccupping again, but one glare from the psychotic woman and he quietened down.
"That's better. Stay there." River mumbled, heading over to pick up the new book that Amy had also bought. She was only a few pages in, however, because somebody kept demanding her attention.
She'd read up to page 15 when she glanced up to check that the Doctor had actually gone to sleep, and hadn't just fooled her. She got the shock of her life when she realised that he wasn't actually in the pen at all.
"Doctor!" She called, demanding to know where he was in that single exclamation. She heard him giggle, and slapped herself in the head with the book. That was never a good sign. A laughing Time Lord was never something you wanted to come across.
Walking around the console, she heard tell-tale noises of buttons being pressed as the little child ran shortly ahead of her, pressing as many buttons as his tiny hands could reach.
"I swear, I'm going to kill you myself and then we won't have to wait for you to grow up," River growled, going the opposite way around the circular console so that his little legs ran him straight into her. Scooping him up, she couldn't help the small smile that flittered over her face as he grinned at her unabashedly.
"Whatever," she said, hugging him to her a little bit, noticing as he began to drift off in her arms, finally tired. She placed him back into his pen, making sure to keep a closer eye on it.
It had been a year now, and the Doctor had been speaking full sentences. It was almost as though he had only been miniaturized, not regenerated. He would tell her off about the way that she did things, ignore her when she scolded him, and hug her when he finally annoyed her enough that she wanted to scream.
They'd had a reasonably passable time, though. She was glad that she had been able to spend even the smallest amount of time with him, even though he had been a toddler.
Not anymore, though.
As soon as his cognitive functions had properly kicked back in, he had realised what he had to do in order to become a fearsome -well, at least, respected-Time Lord once more.
She still blamed herself a little bit for allowing it to happen- for leaving her things lying around even though she knew he could- and would- reach for them. But ultimately, it had been his own decision.
The Doctor had shot himself through the head. With her favourite gun.
She didn't really blame him- okay, she did, and she'd proven that with a slap to end all other slaps around his face once he'd regenerated. Followed by a toe-curling kiss. Of course.
But she couldn't imagine what it would be like to be restricted to being a child yet again. And she knew it had been irritating him. That still hadn't prepared her for watching him shoot himself as a three year old through the head.
He was himself again- astonishingly, as though the previous incarnation had never existed at all. The same floppy mess of hair framed the same awkward, eyebrow-less face. How he'd managed to regenerate back to the way he was before, she had no idea, and he certainly wasn't telling. It was though he had wanted to forget the entire thing had ever happened at all.
Well, in some respects. In others… not so much.
In the months that followed his return to 'normal', she would be shocked by the flirtatious mannerisms he showed to her after the Ponds had left or gone to bed.
He continuously left small hints that reminded her of their time together made her blush- him mentioning the 'naughty corner', or chewing suggestively on the end of his Sonic screwdriver, as if waiting for her to act in order to stop him. Her favourite change in her beloved husband, however, had to be the way that he would ring her constantly while she wasn't travelling on board the TARDIS, offering her trips to see the galaxy or to spend time together.
Which she accepted, the majority of the time. After all, couldn't have him being bored again, could they?