Introduction: The 11'th Doctor is traveling with his wife, River Song, and the Ponds when he accidentally stumbles across a stray television signal, which hacks into the scanner via a virus (which the Tardis purposely created, mischievous as she is). Suddenly, a familiar face shows up on the scanner before the Doctor's eyes: Rose Tyler!
"ROSE! Heeeyy! It's me; can you see me?!" he exclaimed, waving his hands and shouting at her. Bizarrely enough, she looked up from the floor, where she and several small children were busily drawing pictures, and gaped at the sight of the strange man in a bowtie shouting at her, with the Tardis in the background!
"Doctor?!" she asked, softly, hesitantly.
"Yes! It's me!" he shouted gleefully, for a moment looking as if he would grab the scanner and kiss it. "How do I look, Rosie?"
"Well, look at you," Rose smiled, amazedly. She picked up a baby as she stood, placing it on her hip. "Not a day older, are you? But—" her smile faded, "I can still see it. I can see it in your eyes. Doctor, why'd you change again?"
"You're still blonde!" he shouted, excitedly.
She laughed and shook her head in spite of herself at the craziness of this new man. "What, do you think I dyed my hair or somefin'? All my kids are blonde, too, all three of them. It makes John mad—not one of them's brown like 'im."
"None of them ginger, either, I don't suppose?" the Doctor frowned.
"Nope! But, you never know! We're still young! Oh, and I called him John—about that! It's cause he's human—it just made things easier. I still call him Doctor a lot, and so do some friends. But he goes by John."
Eleven met her gaze, smiling without saying a word. There was an expression of pride, and wonder, at the woman he'd once known so well, now older and different, like him, but also so beautiful.
She smiled back, searching his face.
"Let me look at you," Rose said finally. Kneeling down and letting the squirming child go crawling away, she placed her hands on the TV screen and looked him all over. When she spoke again, her voice grew soft. "When you regenerated," she said quietly, "he felt it. The middle of the night. He dreamed of everything, John did." A tear fell from one eye as she spoke. "He told me about New Year's. I remember you now, all alone, standin' there. Thought you might wanna know that."
He nodded, feeling so strangely comforted by her words, even if they were half a million accidental calculatory timey-wimey dimensions away.
"And—" she continued, "Tell me you're not alone still. Doctor, please don't tell me you stayed alone. You can't have done that, right?"
"Don't be silly, Rose. Dying alone one time was dying alone enough. I've got one more life left, Rosie, I've used up all my regenerations. I've got one more time to die. I have to, no way around that. But this time, might as well make it a party instead of a funeral. I've got a right to that at least once, don't I?"
She laughed through her tears. "Of course you do! Oh, you're daft, you mad, mad Doctor! Show me your companions now; who are they?"
"Right over here!" he grinned, grabbing Amy by the shoulder. "One Pond, Two—where's the other Pond? Aha!" He grabbed Rory as he came down the ladder, yanking him in front of the screen with Amy. "Two Ponds! Two married Ponds. Can you believe it, Rose? Two married Ponds, and they're both insane enough to travel with me. And don't let me forget—" River came up to the screen to see what they were all up to— "Professor River Song, their daughter and—pause for effect—my wife."
Rose clapped a hand to her mouth. "Seriously!" she exclaimed. "Oh, that's wonderful! I'm so happy for you! But—" she looked at River, "you're older than they are!"
"Oh, shut it," Amy rolled her eyes.
"What can I say?" the Doctor said modestly. "I'm just brilliant, that's all. Absolutely brilliant." He grinned like a kid as he waved his hands in dramatic gestures, nearly knocking the Ponds away from him by accident. "And what about you, then? What do you do now? Do you just work and sleep and eat fish sticks like you always did? What sort of trouble has my human self gotten into lately, eh? What KIND of trouble?!"
She smiled, her eyes lighting up. "You know? It's funny. Some days it's just like that—all the cleanin' the kitchen, and fixin' scraped knees, and cookin' and shoppin' and takin' Alex to school every morning. And I wonder what it's all for, why I'm doing it."
"And why do you do it?" he smiled, chin sticking out a bit more than usual as he leaned in to hear her answer.
"Cause, you see, you can have a fantastic life in an ordinary world, but you got to look for it," Rose continued. "It takes work, so you've got to believe that all the mistakes that you make have a way of bein' forgiven, that all the good things you do are bein' kept track of; that at the end of your life you'll be able to look back and see what it all meant, and that when you die, it's only the beginning." She looked away for a second and hollered in a direction behind the screen. "Jacqueline Smith, you get off the banisters, you hear me?"
The Doctor grinned. "Don't wanna find out what that was!"
She grinned back. "Nope! They're practically your kids, though, I wouldn't wonder if you could predict any trouble they get into."
"That was an awfully pretty speech, Rosie; I hate that it got interrupted."
"Yeah…so as I was saying!" she laughed. "Other days— I get coffee every morning after dropping Alex at school—it's that one little treat a family can still afford—and sometimes I pay for the person behind me in the line. It's so fun to see the surprise on their faces, and then walk away with the girls, no one knowing who I am or anything, just that somebody cares about them," Rose's eyes lit up as she talked.
"Or I'll sort through photographs during naptime, and see how all three of the children have grown so much. You just don't notice it when you're busy every day. And John and I—we still do sciency stuff together, him and me. He comes home from work and we talk about seein' the stars again, and how close Torchwood's getting to it. And if they ever get naughty again, start doing stuff they shouldn't be messin' with—well, you know we're ready to stop them. Already have, once or twice."
"Of course you have! Rose Tyler, Defender of the Earth!"
She grinned. "That's John and Rosie Smith now, Doctor. Defenders of humanity, and anything else that follows."
Suddenly he heard a door open from somewhere in her house, and a beeping of the entrance alarm. Rosie looked away, then burst into smiles. "John! John, get in here! Guess who just showed up on the telly?"
"What, am I on TV?" joked a familiar voice. The Doctor's eyes opened wide with mischief as the younger version of him, 'sticky-uppy hair' and all, with a little schoolboy in a backpack at his side, stepped into the room. The Meta-Doctor looked very well adjusted to human life, wearing a checked shirt and jeans and missing some of his former swagger, but still carrying himself with a defining air that could only be described as 'Doctor-ish'. "Wait!" he stopped dead in his tracks as he caught sight of the screen, mouth hanging open. "What? WHAT! I AM on TV!"
"Oh, don't start," the Doctor put his feet up on the Tardis' dash. "Hole of space and time, just happened upon it, looked up, and saw Rose on the transmitter. How's it going, Mr. John Smith?"
"Come onnn," the Meta-Doctor protested, "I'm as much the Doctor as you are." He suddenly made a face. "Well! That's quite a final regeneration, Doctor! Rather a profound-looking chin you've got there."
The Doctor pouted. "I miss your eyebrows," he muttered.
"Don't you!" he laughed, then squinted at the screen. "Wait, is that River Song?"
"She absolutely is," the Doctor replied, "And you can apologize in advance for insulting her profession. I find that archeologists are much more interesting after you get around to marrying them."
"Marrying! Well, I guess you could've expected, after what she told you!"
"Couldn't you!" River gave him her coyest smile, causing Rose's eyebrows to go up.
"Well, I apologize for insulting your profession, Mrs. Doctor, in advance. I can't exactly promise you won't hear more of it." John grinned.
"So he's you, trapped away in time, is he?" River nudged the Doctor. "Quite a cheeky regeneration. And I thought you were bad enough nowadays!"
"Just so you know, he still does pick apart every archeologist we meet," Rosie put in.
"Wall! Only every now and then—wall! Maybe some of them—wall! Most of them—wall, all of them, but that's not the point, Professor Song, I promise I apologize!" He grinned at the screen, taking Rosie's hand as the children began to take an interest in the strange man on the television screen.
"Who's that, Daddy?" little Jackie asked, blonde curls rubbing against his leg. Rosie picked up the baby in her other arm, and Alex dropped his backpack in the corner and began examining the TV as if to figure out how it could be performing such a function.
The Doctor looked at the clock. "Time's running out," he warned them, referring to the calculations the Tardis had been running about the length of time the connection could remain stable.
"It always is," the Meta-Doctor replied, the old, haunted look coming back into his eyes.
"Not forever," Rosie surprised them both by saying. "The physical connection's gonna break, but Bad Wolf always comes back for you." Her husband stared at her in bewilderment. "Rose Tyler got sent home," she continued, looking the Doctor straight in the eyes. "I'll always stay here with the family, bein' the person you made me into. But you better decide if you're afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf, Doctor, 'cause she's about to hunt you down."
John made a face, confused and concerned. Neither he nor the Doctor knew what she was talking about.
The Doctor registered Bad Wolf vaguely as he took one last look at the family. The clock in his head ticked down. John and Rosie Smith, defenders of humanity. And there was Alex, and Jackie, and—
"Wait, what was the baby's name?" he shouted as the seconds ticked down to five.
"I'm sorry—" the Meta-Doctor started, face blanching.
"Her name! What's her name?!"
"Mender," her father said quietly. "Mender Liamell Smith."
The screen went blue and their faces disappeared from sight.
"Ap! Blue screen of death! They're gone," Amy shrugged.
"Mender Liamell Smith," it continued to echo through the Doctor's head.
Behind him, the Ponds went back to messing around with whatever it was they were doing before, but River hovered behind his chair. "Who's Mender?" she demanded gently.
The Doctor let his head rest on the back of his seat, looking up at her from a backwards position. "My daughter," he said quietly. "My youngest daughter, five hundred years ago, on Gallifrey. The only one who died before the planet itself was lost." His voice was slow and gravelly, like it always was when he talked about past events he didn't want to remember.
"How?" River asked softly.
"Time Vortex. Eight years old. I should never have let them take her. There were rumors of children being lost, but I never thought it would happen to me. It sucked her in and she was never seen again."
River slid onto the seat next to him and put her arm around his neck, a strong arm, to lean on. Tears began to slide down his face as a tiny smile appeared, then faded again.
"My little girl."