Jenny sat in the corner of the room, hunched, shivering and naked on the cold concrete floor. The only illumination came in the form of a narrow beam which streamed in through a tiny window placed high in one of the stone walls. Even this meagre light lasted for only a few hours each morning- well, she called it morning, since they always came for her when the light was at its peak.
The sun had shone through the window fifteen times since she had first woken in the room.
Now, she noticed the angle of that one beam of light changing gradually until it shone almost directly down on her. Her pulse quickened and her stomach roiled in fear.
They would come soon.
She curled further in on herself as she heard the creaking of the stubborn hinges on the heavy door, trying desperately to hide her fear. Heavy footsteps moved across the room towards her. She clenched her fists and struggled to regulate her breathing.
The light from the window glowed red through her eyelids as she deliberately tried to ignore sensation of their hands on her body.
Hours later, she lay battered and bleeding in the darkness, and only one though occupied her mind as she slipped slowly into blissful oblivion.
"Daddy"
In a comfortably appointed parlour, lit by the warm glow of an open fire sat two figures that could have been called human, except that they weren't.
The larger of the two stood at nearly seven feet tall, with closely cropped dark hair and sloping shoulders. Any resemblance he bore to a human man ended there. In the place of eyes, he had a pair of mismatched gashes, each held open with crude stitches to reveal glittering black points embedded in mangled flesh which shone with a cruel intelligence. His 'mouth' was a similar gash, this one twisted in a permanent grotesque sneer, made all the more horrifying by the pointed teeth which jutted disturbingly over the bottom 'lip'. Where the nose should have been, there were instead two slightly flared slits, not unlike a snakes.
The second figure certainly looked more human than his companion, until you noticed his eyes. They were large, bulbous and yellow. Not human eyes with yellow irises, but blankly staring globes the colour of rancid butter. He was much shorter than the other creature, standing only five feet tall when he was feeling particularly optimistic. He also had dark hair, however his was slicked back and thinning at the front.
For all their differences, both figures exuded identical auras of smug self-satisfaction.
"Well my friend, we've finally done it. How does it feel?" The shorter man spoke jovially. His grotesque friend bared his teeth in a twisted approximation of a smile.
"Feels...good. Proud." The creatures voice was slow and measured, with a slight hissing tone and a disturbing touch of malevolence.
"Good, good." The shorter man stood with his his hands clasped behind his back and bounced on the balls of his feet. "What do you say, Phobos, fancy a drink?"
Phobos grunted in approval. "Sounds...good...boss."
Jenny paced worriedly around the perimeter of her cell, cold, hungry and decidedly unsettled. The prior two conditions she was accustomed to, but the third was a new development. Her captors had failed to arrive in over two days. The first day, she had felt nothing but an incredible sense of relief when, after waiting in terror for over an hour, she had realized that they weren't coming. On the second day, she had begun to worry that they were only ignoring her in preparation for some new torment.
This morning, she had felt something change.
She wasn't sure what it was, or indeed, how she knew about it, but something was different. There was a tension in the air, an intangible frission of energy that made it impossible for her to lie or sit passively as she had been for days. Something was coming.
Just as the thought occurred to her, she heard an odd squeaking noise, accompanied by the familiar tramp of heavy boots outside the door. She whimpered involuntarily and ran to the corner, as though she could hide from them in the shadows.
The door creaked open and she saw that the odd squeaking noise was made by a stainless steel gurney being wheeled into the room by the tall, hulking man whose grotesque excuse for a face haunted her dreams each night. His odious little yellow-eyed companion soon followed, wearing an odd little grin.
"Well now my sweet, we've finally succeeded. Do you know what that means?"
Mute with terror, Jenny simply shook her head.
The man's grin widened. "It means, sweetling, that my experiment is complete. It means that my friend here will be the first of many. It means, my dear, that you are finally pregnant."
Donna and the Doctor sat curled up on a large, squashy couch in the TARDIS library, their silence broken only by the soft humming of the ship around them.
"Well then." Donnas tone was one of blank shock.
"Yeah." The Doctor, by contrast, sounded faintly disbelieving.
"That was..."
"I know."
They continued to sit in silence for a few minutes, thinking back on the events of the day.
It had started off as a regular day for the duo, with a hearty breakfast (prepared by Donna), a set of random co-ordinates entered into the TARDIS navigation systems and the usual corrupt government to overthrow. Just another day at the office.
And then Donna had been shot.
The Doctor shivered slightly as he recalled the look of sheer astonishment on her face as she crumpled to the ground. He remembered screaming her name and running to catch her before she hit the concrete (what was it with warehouses?). Then, impossibly, her hands had started to radiate with a gentle golden light. The Doctor had scrambled backwards, exclaiming "What!?" in disbelief. He knew that she had absorbed some of his genetic material as well as his memories during the metacrisis - that was what had saved her mind from burning up - but this should never have been possible.
Evidently, however, it was possible, and although he had grimaced in sympathy when she shrieked in pain as the fires of regeneration consumed her, he found himself grinning widely at the thought that Donna might be able to stay with him for longer than thirty or forty more years.
This had been confirmed when they had returned to the TARDIS, Donna leaning heavily on the Doctor as she struggled to remain conscious. They had headed straight for the medbay, anxious to determine exactly what had happened to Donna. What the scans had revealed had shocked them into their current state of stunned-mullet silence. It seemed that, when Donna had touched the Doctors old hand she had not only absorbed his memories and enough genetic information to make her brain compatible with them, but also the four additional chromosome sets containing the necessary information to facilitate regeneration. The upshot of this was that Donna was now a fully-functioning Time Lady, complete with second heart and respiratory bypass system.
Settling back into the couch a little, the Doctor snuck a quick glance at her, to find her staring determinedly in the opposite direction. He wondered when he had started sneaking glances at his best friend. That didn't seem like a particularly 'matey' thing to do. Now that he thought about it, things between them had been different ever since they had left Rose in the alternate universe with his duplicate. Since their telepathic link had been functioning at full capacity at the time, she had known full well that his story about the duplicate being dangerous was a ruse. The three of them had worked it out wordlessly whilst they were towing the Earth back into its proper orbit. The Doctor had realized right away that Rose's tale about the dimension cannon 'just starting to work' conveniently in time for the collapse of the multiverse was most likely missing a few vital details, and that whatever remained of his feelings for her had vanished when Donna had told him about what happened in the universe created by the time beetle. He could not in good conscience love someone who thought nothing of tearing his ship apart to serve her own selfish purposes, not to mention her callous attitude toward Donna as she lay dying.
Understanding this, the duplicate Doctor created by the metacrisis had offered to stay with Rose in the parallel universe to discourage her from using the dimension cannon again, as they were quite certain that it was what had caused much of the preliminary damage to the walls between the worlds. Donna and the original Doctor had agreed, but only after he had pointed out that there was really nothing for him in this universe. Donna and the Doctor had each other, and he was not quite their child and not quite their brother- an aberration. Although they vehemently disagreed with that statement, they accepted that he would rather make a new start for himself than live in their shadows.
Since then, Donna and the Doctor had resumed their old lifestyle, running and laughing together. But something indiscernible had changed between them. They had always been a bit familiar for people who were 'just friends', but now their hugs lasted just a fraction of a second longer, and they often found themselves holding hands when there was no running to be done at all. There were glances, stolen and fleeting, which left them looking away from each other and blushing furiously. Things were different, and...he found that he liked it.
Cautiously, he flicked another look in her direction, but this time he was surprised to catch her looking at him, with a speculative expression he was sure was mirrored on his own face. They sat like that, frozen, for a few seconds and then they were kissing, feverishly and without reserve and alright, fine, maybe he did want a bit more than just a mate.