Sorry for clogging your inboxes, I hate that ffnet doesn't let you just edit uploaded chapters willy-nilly, it complicates things so much...

Chapter Rating: Whichever is the one with mild-cursing and stuff. (is too lazy to re-check)

A/N: I've taken longer than I thought I would obviously. If I keep updating irregularly I'll put a summary of what's been happening at the start, if you want it anyway?

I know the chapter title is not really inspired but I'm not inspired. I used up all my imagination while typing that chapter on my phone

Oh and yeah, HAPPY NEW YEAR (three days late XD)

The Doctor's Child

Chapter 16: Uh oh…

The Doctor couldn't help the thrill that ran through his spin when River sent him her easy smile as she stood next to the wooden cot. All this time, the answer had been right in front of his eyes! Then again, even by his standards, this whole story was beyond mad and impossible. Yet here she stood, another child of the TARDIS in the flesh. It all made so much sense and yet so little.
He couldn't suppress the squeaky giggle either when she confirmed it all again. He'd been on and off snogging Melody bloody Pond. His Amelia Pond's little girl. It felt so wrong and yet so genuinely right, he couldn't wipe the silly grin off his face.

Turning around with an enormous smile, he sauntered back to his Sexy, giving his friends their last orders, ignoring (with the ease of practice, really) Amy's loud objections.

He turned one last time to look at River who was looking at him in obvious amusement and giggled a little again before closing the door of his ship.

The Time Lord skipped happily to the controls and with a last small chuckle, entered the coordinates to seek directly Jack Harkness. The thought was somewhat a little sobering.

Sometimes, the Time Lord's ability to multitask was both a blessing and a curse. The whole time while searching for Amy and baby Melody (the only water in the forest is the River! Bless her! Even while dying, his Sexy still tried to help him out! How stupid of him not to have actually LISTENED to her for once!) his mind had been filled with different scenario of how things had been going on Earthside with Jack and Evan.

And even if he was often seen as an eternal optimistic, as time rushed for him and they had to resort to more and more violence to find the trail left by the Silence, the scenarios he envisioned became more and more apocalyptic with him going back to find Jack in pieces and his son gone.

But that one phone call (had it really been only two days ago?) from Ianto had settled most of his fretting and just made him more determined to finish with this whole affair as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

But now here he was, in the middle of the Time Vortex that would lead him to Jack and of course, his son. The preliminary scans placed the man in the middle of a warehouse so maybe not with Evan then, but he could always get the man and set sail for Evan's location with him. For once, he actually felt like coming in unnoticed. As much as he loved hearing his beloved ship in landing, some niggling at the back of his head made him put the brakes off on this one.

The scene he walked on when he strode out made him freeze momentarily. He immediately catalogued the computers and the lines of codes they were showing. But also, the different people standing around, mostly military or slightly mad scientist type, and the little child being led in while a woman was screaming from behind soundproof doors, tears of despair on her face. He saw Jack starting to enter an algorithm he deciphered easily, into the computer and immediately unfroze.

"What the bloody hell doing think you're doing?" He snapped angrily, stalking in long strides up to the immortal, all amusement vanished.

"Doctor!"

He ignored the relief in Jack's voice when the captain turned sharply to him. Finally reaching the man, he whipped out his faithful screwdriver and "sonic-ed" the console all the while ranting angrily at Jack, who just stood there with a wince.

"Of all the absolutely stupidly MORONIC ideas you've ever had, Jack, I think this one is the absolute worse! And I'm counting the released nanotech and the zombie people in the middle of an air-raid in that! Why in all blazing hell did you even attempt to do this without proper preparations and a plan that would, oh i don't know, maybe NOT USE A SODDING CHILD AS CATALYST? oh don't even bother answering that! I don't want to hear it and there is nothing you could ever say to even begin to explain what you were THINKING! Now I had to go and make do with that awful contraption of yours and the only modification I could make on such a short notice, was to change the imprint needed to accept an adult mature brainwave instead of a child's. Now Jack just go in the middle and get your brain fried And come back so I can yell at you some more later."

Jack gave a slight wince at his friend's ruthlessness but the Time Lord just stared back at him with a hard, unforgiving expression on his face.

The end result was somehow anticlimactic. Jack dropped dead after about five minutes of convulsions and the woman that seemed in charge of the military type people reported the all-clear from the Thames House, whatever that meant about the situation.
It took him about half an hour and he'd been moved to a quiet area by then, when Jack took a renewed gasping breath and jerked up.
When he was finally aware of his surrounding, he realized that he was not as alone as he'd first thought. Lucy was standing slightly in retreat yet close to his gurney and was looking at him with red-rimmed eyes and a harsh glint in them, that he'd seen before in her mother's.

"Mom was always right about you! You kill everything around you" the woman said in a low, broken voice. "You were going to do it! If your bloody Doctor hadn't arrived when he did. You would have sacrificed him. Your own grandson. MY CHILD!"

Jack opened his mouth to try and defend himself but he knew that nothing he could say would repair his relationship with his only daughter. He was going to sacrifice his own kin for the sake of a world that he sometimes wondered the worth of. He kept the deep hollow feeling in his heart from showing on his face as she continued reaping into him, ending with an order never to seek them again and to stay away from them forever, including any children her son may ever have.
He stayed sat there for a long time, letting a lone tear of self-hatred and bitterness falling from his eye in the privacy of the empty room.
And just as he was finally getting his feeling into order, the door opened with a loud clang, letting in a still very furious looking Doctor.

"Grab your clothes. We are leaving." The Time Lord simply said, sending him a blank look that Jack hated on any face of his brilliant friend.

Knowing better than to argue, Jack did as he was told.

Another chapter! Yay! Relatively shorter than usual, sorry, it's a two part chapter I think. xD Reviews are appreciated and sometimes even read out loud so the whole family so they can cheer or tell me I'm a hopeless failure. ._.'