A/N: Sorry about the long wait, it has been a very rough period for me with anxiety and all. I hope you enjoy the chapter!
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The Doctor struggled to keep up with Clara. Feeling relatively well and with quite a lot of energy, she had started to prepare everything they were going to need for the baby, so they wouldn't be caught off-guard when the little one was born. He supposed this was a good thing, because it meant Clara had no doubts that their daughter would come into the world healthy and safe without complications. She had no reason to think otherwise obviously, but the Doctor found that the thought of something going wrong with her pregnancy surely haunted him, late at night when his many other concerns decided he wasn't feeling troubled enough.
What he hadn't considered was that Clara would be fully against the TARDIS producing for them everything they might need and was instead bent on buying most of it. The Doctor liked the idea well enough, enjoying seeing Clara excited and enthusiastic about something and mostly carefree, until he discovered how dull going baby things shopping could be.
For instance, she barely let him choose anything regarding clothing, going for awfully warm full-body thingies with shirt and trousers and socks all together in one piece, with no pockets and of colours going from light pink and light yellow to light green, light blue and, finally, white. Where were several layers of clothes? What if the baby felt too warm, wrapped up in that one-piece thing? Why not choose good colours, like dark blue or bright red or purple? And no pockets. Why no pockets? That was just impractical. Clara argued that babies did not need pockets, that they needed to stay warm and that they didn't have preferences in colours. The Doctor wasn't convinced, so Clara agreed they would have the TARDIS get them some clothes of his liking, affirming that that way he'd at least stop sulking. He did no such thing as sulking, he protested. At all. Ever.
It was a constant allowing and prohibiting. Yes, they could keep his cot from when he was born. No, he couldn't build a mini sonic screwdriver for their daughter to play with -he built it anyway-. Yes, he would need to change diapers like everyone else. No to going for dangerous adventures for a long while. Yes to having the TARDIS create the room that was going to be Ellie's.
The process was simple, really. They only needed to choose a place for the door and the TARDIS would create the room from what was in their minds.
The Doctor and Clara stood in the corridor, facing the wall opposite to their bedroom door, so they could sleep as close as possible to the baby. The Doctor started picturing his daughter's room in his mind, thinking of deep blues and reds, a big room with stars and galaxies moving on the ceiling and hundreds of toys scattered everywhere. Clara on the other hand imagined light pink and lighter blue, a small room bathed in sunlight furnished with everything needed to take care of their child, a few stuffed animals sitting on the shelves together with little books made of improbable materials.
"What happens now?" Clara asked.
The Doctor smiled knowingly at her, certain that the TARDIS would favour his vision rather than Clara's.
"Well, we have a look at it."
He opened the door for her. A familiar human door, white, with a golden bow just above golden letters that read 'Eleanor Elevian Oswald' in both English and Gallifreyan alphabets.
Clara entered the room first and the Doctor followed suit.
The room was nothing like he had expected. It was better.
A dark blue night sky complete with stars began on the eastern wall (was there an east in the Time Vortex?), right from floor level, and gradually shifted to a slightly lighter colour, losing the stars only to give into the oranges and reds of a stunning sunset. The sky continued with lighter and lighter blues on the domed ceiling and the wall the Doctor was facing, turning into the bright sky of a midsummer day, decorated with birds and fantastic winged creatures flying in unpredictable patterns. Moons and planets were just barely visible in the clear sky free of clouds. Reaching the western wall, the colours slipped morbidly into the gentle pinks of dawn before fading back into darker blues and rising -setting?- stars. Every sun and star was secretly a source of light and heat, and the room seemed to vibrate with the warmth of it, so natural and yet artificial. It was perfect.
The Doctor stood open-mouthed with Clara's hand in his. He didn't recognise the alien system of two suns pursuing each other in an eternal dance, but it reminded him of Gallifrey and it moved something deep inside of him. He exhaled an uncertain breath as he took in the rest of the room: his cot, supplies for every need of a baby, infinite colourful toys neatly stored in even more colourful big boxes that the Doctor had no doubt were bigger on the inside, a huge bookshelf where every children's book had been moved from the library in its best illustrated edition. He felt Clara's emotion and approval through their always-linked minds, and he squeezed her hand in response.
"It's amazing. Perfect," she murmured, turning towards him with bright eyes and a brighter smile.
She pressed a tender kiss to his lips. He wrapped his arms around her. Her bump kept growing. Their baby kicked as Clara's belly pressed against the Doctor's body. Clara giggled and the Doctor smiled in the kiss, wondering if the kick was out of approval. He liked to think it was.
~oOo~
As the second part of Clara's pregnancy reached its end and the final sixteen weeks took its place, the Doctor realized just how blessed a time that had been. Clara had felt better, stronger, more active. That all rapidly ended. He was in awe of their child growing inside her, the changes in her body, but Clara almost suddenly started to feel tired, everything became hard to do. The weight she had to carry didn't do any good to her back, so she was constantly sore and constantly complaining about it.
The Doctor had always thought he was the complaining one, but now the roles were inverted, so he was trying his best to make Clara feel better. Even though medication was out of question, since he didn't want to risk anything bad happening to the baby, he could still give Clara a massage, make her fall asleep when she thought it impossible, bring her in the calmer space of his mind where there was no pain. Taking care of Clara, together with the excitement for the baby's imminent arrival that was inexorably gripping him tight, made it so that he was spending less and less time trying to discover who was menacing them. At this point, he didn't know whether worrying less was a good or a bad thing anymore.
The first half of October came and went, together with the date that meant forty weeks had passed and their baby would be relatively safe now, even in case she would come into the world prematurely. The Doctor felt like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
It was a short period of relief before things could start worrying him again: if what bothered Clara the most was her pain -which was definitely a legitimate thing to be bothered about, the Doctor decided- what left him speechless was how she was changing as the weeks flew by. He had seen her change physically, yes, but he had seen nothing but beauty in it. This was different: Clara grew anxious in a way he had never seen. She rarely felt like going on adventures or leaving home at all. She preferred to stay in the TARDIS, saying she felt safer. The lust for adrenaline she used to have seemed gone. She wanted him close, in sight at all times, insisted he slept with her and held her close -which he honestly could not bring himself to complain about- and almost begged him to stop travelling on his own. The Doctor had never seen her like this, so vulnerable and almost… scared. It terrified him. Clara's strength was, and always had been, the primary source of his.
Now Clara would very often wake him in the middle of the night to talk, asking for reassurance, sometimes even just making sure he was there and not in his study, so he thought nothing of it when one night she gripped his wrist tight, waking him abruptly. She had gone to bed with a bad backache earlier: perhaps she couldn't sleep. His mind fell into hers automatically at the physical contact, out of habit, only to feel suddenly drowned in pain and utter panic. He felt like suffocating. He separated their minds immediately with a gasp, but some of the pain stuck with him. Pain at his wrist, Clara's grip steel-tight and her fingernails digging into his sensitive skin.
"Clara?" he winced.
She sat on the bed, sheets pushed aside, looking down at herself in a puzzling mix of horror and realization. There was a small wet patch on the mattress, gradually widening thanks to a slow drip down her thighs.
"I- I-" she stammered, looking up at him with eyes wider than he'd ever seen. "Baby. Coming. Now."
The Doctor's brain needed a moment to register the information. A long moment when the world seemed to freeze and narrow down to the expression in Clara's eyes, silently begging him to understand.
"What- oh. Oh."
The world spun on its axis.
"Yes!"
"Baby! Coming!"
He might be panicking. Slightly. Just a bit.
"Yes!"
"Now?!"
"Doctor, get off your bloody arse and take me to the bloody doctor, NOW!"
The Doctor tumbled out of bed so quickly he tripped in the sheets, banged his head on the floor falling and then hit it again against the doorframe as he staggered out of the room.
~oOo~
"Doctor?" Clara asked, one of the many times she woke him in the middle of the night those days.
"Mmh?" He turned towards her only half-awake, but attentive, as he always listened to what Clara had to say.
"When the baby comes… and I mean when I'm- actually giving birth… I don't want you to… well, I don't think I want you there."
That woke him just fine.
"What do you mean?"
The resolve on her face was clear. She was deadly serious about it.
"I mean… I'm going to be screaming. I guess. Probably. Crying. I-" she stopped, but he could still read her thoughts. 'I don't want you to see me like that.'
The Doctor could see it in her face. She had given this thought, and it was really important to her. Yet, he couldn't understand it.
"Clara, my Clara, do you think I would think any less of you if I-"
"It's not about you!" she interrupted, eyes locked with his. "It's about me. I just- you can't see me like that."
She let her thoughts flow into his. He could not see her that weak, that vulnerable. He just- couldn't. She couldn't allow it. It was already hard enough for her to let him see those thoughts. The Doctor could understand that. Much like he had done very often in his life, Clara had built up a wall strength and bravery and confidence between herself and the rest of the world, to protect a piece of her deep inside that someone, something had broken.
"Clara…"
He didn't know any better than offer his understanding. Suddenly, Clara's request didn't seem so absurd.
"Please."
"Anything you want," he whispered, soothing her, caressing her hair and tugging her mind and her body closer to his.
~oOo~
Out. He was out. Out of the room where Clara was giving birth. Out of her mind, unable to calm her, to reassure her, to lessen her pain. He found unacceptable that she should go through that kind of suffering alone. And she was suffering: he could hear her scream. The walls of Doctor Zhabehasetrul's clinic were supposed to be sound-proofed, but no species in that galaxy had quite his earing, so he could hear something. Not everything. Just the very worst of it. He was angry beyond belief at himself for agreeing with Clara when she had intimated him to shut up, go fetch her dad and gran and wait. There weren't a lot of things the Doctor hated as much as waiting, if anything because he wasn't used to it. Usually he just fast-forwarded to when he wanted to go.
"How long has she been in there?" Clara's father asked almost timidly, as though afraid the Doctor might just go off like an atomic bomb. The Doctor had to admit, only with his pyjamas on, bed hair, gritting his teeth in apprehension and compulsively tapping his right foot on the floor at a speed approximately three times that possible for a human, well, he must have looked quite a fright.
"2 hours, 33 minutes, 15 seconds, 3 deciseconds, 20 centiseconds and 7 milliseconds. And counting," the Doctor answered briskly. He kept counting. It was keeping him sane. Or maybe not, hard to say.
"Uh. That's… very precise," Dave Oswald muttered. Clara's gran had decided not to come since she was too old to wait hours on an uncomfortable hospital chair, and she could always see the baby when they brought her home in a couple of days. Dave had come, though, much to Linda's badly concealed disappointment.
"Time Lord," the Doctor answered automatically.
Another scream, the loudest so far. He'd kept track of the decibels. Then, silence, at least for what he could hear, until something obliterated every other auditory, olfactory, visual and tactile stimulus, and even his own thoughts. Loud and clear, like it was the only thing his brain was able to register as relevant, was the sound of a crying baby.
The Doctor didn't remember getting up of the chair, or walking to the doors. He slammed them open so forcefully they were flung out of their hinges. That had to have made a noise. He didn't hear it.
~oOo~
"Give her to me," the Doctor ordered plainly, taking his crying daughter from Doctor Zhabehasetrul's arms as she was cleaning and drying the baby. "Shhh. Here. Daddy's here," he murmured to his baby, his and Clara's baby, taking her in his arms and against his chest.
Everyone wondered why babies came into the world crying. The Doctor knew. They were more or less suddenly tore out of a hot, familiar, secure place, the only place they'd ever known, and pushed into somewhere completely new, could and unknown, full of smells and noises and a million new sensations all at once. It was terrifying.
The Doctor cleared his mind of every negative thought that could damage the baby, letting it fill instead with the happiness of holding her for the first time and the grounding feeling that he would keep her safe. The baby stopped crying. He had done it all on instinct, pure primal instinct at the sound of his baby crying to be consoled. He looked down at her for the first time, feeling his hearts skip a beat and his breath hitch. She was small. Incredibly small. He didn't remember babies being so small. He could easily have held her with one arm if he weren't absolutely terrified of letting go of her even if just partially. She was warm, not as warm as Clara but not as cool as him either. She was the exact miniature of a human, down to her hands and fingertips and fingernails. All perfectly formed. The only difference was the steady beat of two hearts in her little chest. A tiny bow of a mouth -this face's mouth, he reckoned- was just learning how to breathe. The baby wailed something like a sigh, eyes still closed, and buried her tiny head into his chest, short dark hair tickling him through his shirt. The Doctor realized dimly that she was learning this new world right under his eyes. She exhaled through her nose -a nose with an undetermined something funny about it just like Clara's- then took in his scent as her mind reached instinctively for his. He felt her make her first connections, constructing the idea of him, of Dad. Just the feel of that in his mind had his throat go dry.
'Gods, you're perfect,' was the thought that filled his mind and pushed everything aside. She was his daughter and she was perfect.
Her eyes that had never seen light before pried open just barely, just enough for him to notice, and their gazes met. The Doctor knew she was seeing him. Not him really, something pale pink and something grey, but he felt the connection as they stared into each other's eyes for a long moment. It reminded him of the first time these eyes had met Clara's, not just because how similar his expression had to be just then, but because he felt it, the bond of being the first face his daughter saw, and because he instantly, involuntarily, abruptly fell in love in the space of a few interminable seconds.
"Oh," was all that could escape through his lips of all the emotion he was experiencing inside.
"Doctor."
Clara's voice shook him from his awe, and he immediately turned towards the sound. He was greeted by tired eyes that possessed a new light.
"Clara." He felt himself grin spontaneously. "We made this baby," he said idly, shifting his eyes from his daughter to her mother and back.
He automatically stepped towards Clara and she stretched out her arms to hold her daughter. The Doctor saw Clara wear an expression of such tenderness, unlike any he'd ever seen in her eyes, that seemed to melt something inside him. He sat on the bed next to Clara and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, resting his head on hers, inhaling the scent of her hair and her sweat and the new scent of their baby, trying to imprint that instant in his memory.
"My Clara. You've been so good. You're perfect."
Clara rubbed her forehead against his head affectionately, letting him sense the haze of tiredness and joy she was wrapped up in just then, seeking the comfort of his mind and his own happiness as she held their daughter to her chest.
"You should try to feed her," Doctor Zhabehasetrul said gently. "It may be that nothing comes out just yet, but it will help your body to know your baby is born and needs to be fed."
The other doctor didn't intrude more than she should have in their moment, just showed Clara what she was supposed to do even though Clara seemed to already have a pretty clear idea. She winced in discomfort at first when the baby latched to her breast, then her expression turned into one of surprise.
"Doctor. She's in my head."
"It's instinctive for a Gallifreyan. She needs it to develop her telepathic skills correctly," he explained, speaking softly into Clara's soft hair, watching his daughter drink avidly if a bit messily. He prayed to no one in particular that she didn't have his appetite, or Clara would never let him live that down.
"What should I do?" Clara asked with slight panic in her voice, her eyes not leaving her daughter.
"Well, just say hi," he chuckled.
"Hi," Clara murmured. "Hi, Ellie."
Clara's voice broke into a giggle, and she looked up at him with bright eyes before looking down at Ellie again.
The Doctor watched his girls, his Clara and their daughter, and felt a fierce wave of pride and strength hit him. He wasn't going to let anything hurt either of them. Ever.