A/N: After years, back in my Doctor Who phase again! I will never stop coming back to this show or the characters. I have a whole outline drawn up for this fic... one day (maybe 56 years from now, but one day nonetheless) it will be finished!

5

It was a perfectly ordinary house, apart from the elaborate military procedure taking place out front.

A small silver car puttered down the sleepy lane. It pulled to a stop on the kerb a cautious distance from the cluster of black armoured vehicles that preceded it, scattered round the residence like swarming beetles. The headlights dimmed and the doors unlocked. From the driver's seat climbed a petite black woman in a white coat and scrubs, an old-fashioned doctor's bag slung over her shoulder.

No less than six firearms swivelled instantly in her direction. She irritably flashed her badge at them and, without a second glance, trudged up the driveway toward the otherwise ordinary house.

"Greyhound Six?"

The call drew her attention, slowing her stride. A young, well-built, dark-skinned soldier was crossing the grass to her, an assault rifle slung across his barrel chest. He stopped in front of her, positively towering, and lapsed into a curt, deferent salute. "Ma'am."

Martha winced reflexively and batted a dismissive hand. "At ease, Private Goldman. Where's the Colonel?"

"Inside the residence," answered the deep-voiced soldier. "He's waiting for you. However, I'll need to see your identification before permitting access."

Martha blinked, waiting for the punchline. Not a single muscle in Goldman's face moved.

"Excuse me?" she said.

"Your identification, ma'am."

She stared at him a moment. Then, with a repressed sigh, figuring she hadn't the time to make an issue of it, she shrugged her bag off her shoulder and unzipped it. After a moment of rummaging she produced the necessary card. The soldier took it and held it up to the sky, checking its reflectiveness.

"That enough for you, Detective Inspector?" she asked after a moment, a hand braced impatiently on her hip.

"Apologies, ma'am," he boomed in a monotone that was entirely unapologetic, handing the card back to her. "But you understand we can take no risks while the operation is under Delta-Red Classification."

Martha almost took a step back in shock.

"Delta-Red?" she echoed sharply. "What exactly are we classifying here?"

"All information concerning Blue Eagle, chiefly its whereabouts, has been officially placed under Delta-Red Classification as of eleven-hundred hours."

"The Doctor's whereabouts are classified?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"He leaves a literal smoke signal across London for the whole world to see – footage of which has been uploaded to the Internet God knows how many times already – and we're classifying his whereabouts?"

"Yes ma'am," replied the soldier without inflection.

"That's absurd."

Goldman said nothing. She wasn't surprised – he hadn't yet the rank to express opinions on the job. She sighed and shook her head before looking toward the house. "Am I good to go in?" she checked. "Or are you going to frisk me as well?"

"Not unless under express orders after buying you a drink first, ma'am."

Her right brow skipped up, and she gave a bit of a scoff – as surprised as she was amused. "Now that was borderline insubordinate, Private."

"Yes ma'am."

"Never gonna happen," she chuckled as she walked by him with a flash of her engagement ring, "but the line wasn't half bad."

"Thank you, ma'am."

Shouldering her bag, Martha closed the distance to the front door. Upon trying the knob, she found it unlocked – and scoffed to herself. So much for Delta Red, she thought, and pushed right in.

Never in a million years could she have predicted what awaited her inside.

There were soldiers at arms in her sitting room. A crew of men struggling to heft the police box out the crater in her garden. Her no-good daughter was home again: this time, sitting in handcuffs in her grandfather's armchair.

And that wasn't even to speak of the child.

Finding herself on the precipice of tremendous violence, in her dressing gown in a home full of strangers: Sylvia Noble did the only reasonable thing she could think of, apart from having a stroke.

"You made them tea?" Donna all but shouted at her.

"Cheers," said the man interrogating her, accepting the mug politely.

"If you would just tell them the truth," Sylvia said through gritted teeth, "they would leave us alone."

"I am telling the truth! Hardly my fault they're too thick to listen!"

"We're not your enemy, Miss Noble. We're just trying to establish a timeline here and confirm the Doctor's whereabouts."

"Well, he isn't being bloody subtle about them, is he?" she snapped. "Just listen!"

Through the wall, very clearly, a child's wailing could be heard from the kitchen. Except it wasn't a child, not precisely. Or perhaps it was. No one was entirely clear on that bit yet, least of all Donna. The only thing she could say for certain at this point was that it was the Doctor – and that he was throwing an unearthly tantrum.

Which, historically, wasn't all too much of an unusual thing. But it was safe to say that his past episodes of brooding and sourness did not even come close to the authenticity of what the humans unfortunate enough to be cramped into Sylvia Noble's frumpy bluish-beige kitchen were presently bearing witness to.

Not that Donna was particularly bothered by it anymore. Served them right, frankly. She scowled at her handcuffs and hoped he was kicking and biting up a storm.

Being surrounded on all sides by dark-clothed weapon-toting strangers wasn't something the Doctor tended to handle very well even when he was at the appropriate age and size. So it was no surprise that the little Time Lord had taken one look at his new environment, its ominous inhabitants, then Donna – who for some reason he seemed to find universally upsetting – and dissolved into a level of hysterics the ranks of highly-trained soldiers were entirely unprepared to process.

It was such a thoroughly shocking development to process, in fact, that they had swiftly resorted to denial to avoid at all doing so.

"Enough games, Miss Noble," snapped the interrogator in his twenty-ninth new inflection yet, slamming down his teacup as he reverted to Bad Cop with the grace of a ten-car pileup. "Where is the Doctor?"

"Look, Sunshine, you ask me that one more time and you'll really be looking for a doctor when I'm finished with –"

"Would you please just answer the man properly, Donna?" Sylvia hissed, interrupting what had been shaping up to be an impressively graphic threat. "They're not letting you out of those things until you tell them what's really happened."

Donna stared at her mother in disbelief.

"You don't believe me," she said.

"It's rubbish, Donna. I mean, really. He became a child? Do you even hear yourself?"

Exasperated beyond words, Donna looked round for help. Standing sentry at the doorway between the kitchen and the sitting room was a rather blockish, grey man with a stony demeanour and an impressive array of medals. He kept scratching his head – it seemed to be thinning increasingly by the second – and adjusting his stance every few moments, taking calls every now and then and grumbling orders when required.

Donna recognised him from the Judoon incident: he was the one in charge. She was also very aware of the fact that he was the only person who had yet to accuse her of lying.

She stared at him hard, trying to catch his eye. His nose twitched and he gazed resolutely ahead at nothing at all – ignoring her with white-knuckled determination.

She let out an enormous sigh and gave up, flopping back into the chair. "Where's Gramps?" she complained, desperate for any sanity to cling to in the madness.

"Where else? Up the bloody hill. And he's not going to get you out of this one, Lady."

Colonel Mace allowed a silent exhale of relief.

He'd rather be scalped than get any more involved than he already was at this juncture. The environment was oppressively domestic. The mother and companion alike, outstandingly belligerent – at each other's throats from the outset. He'd never seen bloodthirst quite like it.

Thirty minutes had elapsed since arriving on the scene. In that time, fires outside had been quietly extinguished and friendly ret-con visits had been paid to the neighbours. Beyond the kitchen window, the recovery effort was blundering: the TARDIS sliding back into the crater a third time as titanium chains snapped under what seemed to be an incomprehensible weight. His migraine had begun to pound in time with the trembling childish wails in the room, and his head threatened to explode with every passing moment.

He was increasingly optimistic about the possibility. An exploded head, after all, would spare him a great deal of paperwork. It would also spare him from the fact that this operation was in shambles, disfigured beyond recognition – and he'd no idea what to do about it.

The primary function of U.N.I.T was to maintain homeworld security. To contain alien incursions. It was a rather simple proposition when the alien was threatening death and enslavement from a warship in the upper atmosphere: aim ballistic missile, rinse, repeat.

How precisely to fulfil the mission statement became rather less straightforward when the incursive alien in question was barricaded under a kitchen table in a house in Chiswick, wailing inconsolably.

The Doctor had always been something of a special case, to be sure, a persistent thorn in his side. But usually it was his irritating, glib benevolence (and tendency to openly interfere in governmental proceedings wherein he had no jurisdiction) which Alan found himself stymied by. This was something rather new.

He stared restively at the crying child, mulling his options.

They were severely limited. If it came down to it, he supposed the missile would still do the trick – though even to his militaristic sensibilities that seemed a bit like overkill. And worse, a waste of a perfectly good missile.

Mace was under no illusions that the companion was lying. There was no explanation for the child's astounding lung capacity, other than that it was simply a creature from another realm. He could also see a striking and inescapable resemblance in the boy to the infuriating man he had met during the Judoon incident. Not to mention, there was no benefit to deception; the woman was very obviously as frazzled and out of her depth as they were. She'd gladly allowed them to separate her from the child – her only advice on handing him over being that she hoped they were up to date on their rabies shots.

Lieutenant Friedman was firm in his denial, however, and persisted in the interrogation. The mother seemed to derive some sort of warped pleasure from joining in on the verbal assault. Indeed, after half an hour the repetition was wearing on the Colonel's thoroughly fried nerves – but so long as they were engaging the companion, he didn't have to admit he had no plan as to what to do next.

Nauseous, he looked in on the spectacle unfolding within the kitchen. Four male agents stood awkwardly on the perimeter of the small space, looking out of place and uncomfortable, doing everything they could to avoid confronting the fact that the saviour of their planet – whom they all idolised unhealthily – had been reduced to a bawling child. Agents Porter and Morelli were on the frontlines: on their hands and knees on the old blue linoleum, holsters empty, contorting their faces into outlandish expressions and emitting stupid-sounding high-pitched coos as they tried to coax the child out. One held a stuffed animal from the residence's attic, the other fluttering a piece of chocolate, futilely attempting to curry favour with the child and lure him out.

Neither woman was successful – but neither dared to attempt a manual extraction. While the Doctor when in his right mind preferred a largely pacifistic approach to conflict resolution, he clearly now harboured no such feeble reservations. Anyone attempting to remove him from his chosen refuge could expect to be met immediate and indiscriminate violence. Agent Gordon had discovered this the hard way, and was still in the van receiving medical aid.

It had, he was obligated to acknowledge, been a dreadfully entertaining spectacle, seeing the hardened soldier retreat from the wrath of such a pathetically small child. If not for the sobbing, he might've preferred this version of the Doctor; he seemed to possess a refreshing aggression that his senior patently lacked.

If only his mere existence didn't mean that a fundamental leg of Planet Earth's defence strategy was presently – perhaps permanently – defunct.

Mace envisioned himself trying to describe the situation to the Prime Minister, and felt a sickening rush of vertigo.

He locked his knees and swallowed hard, glancing at his watch. Salvation was on its way. Any moment now. He could contain the situation once she made sense of it; he only had to survive until she made her arrival. If he kept telling himself that, perhaps he'd begin to believe it.

Or his head would just explode. Either eventuality suited him fine.

"We'll never get rid of them unless you start talking!"

The mother was back at it.

"I've already told them everything I know. Which is nothing!" Donna shouted. "I don't know how it happened, I don't know how to fix it. All I know is that that," her cuffs clanked violently as she gestured to the kitchen, "is the Doctor! And why are you on their side, anyway?"

"I'm not on their side!"

The Lieutenant took a sip of his tea then. "Oh, that's lovely."

Sylvia glanced at him. "Do you need milk? Sugar?"

"No, it's perfect, thanks."

Donna stared daggers at them.

"Now, Miss Noble," he addressed her again, setting the cup down, "this could all be over with just one word from you. If the Doctor has gone into hiding –"

'"Oh, for the love of God," she groaned.

"I understand that he is your friend, and you feel obligated to keep his confidence. But you must understand that while his objectives often seem frivolous and unguided, the Doctor's intentions are a matter of national – global security, even. We have a duty to our planet and fellow man to – "

Donna was on the verge of telling him in harrowing detail just what she thought of his duty and where he could happily shove it, when, quite suddenly, the front door creaked open.

Her head whipped around and she perked up – expecting to see Gramps in the doorway.

Instead, she found herself staring at a young woman in a white coat, and felt relief of a whole different kind.

"Martha!" she shouted, sitting up straight; delighted to see a familiar and competent face.

Colonel Mace snapped around so swiftly he nearly lost balance. He all but galloped towards the woman in the doorway. "Doctor Jones," he greeted lowly, sounding utterly flattened. "If you haven't been briefed, we're under Delta-Red classification at the moment. I need your immediate analysis of the situation, for –"

"Why is she in cuffs, Lieutenant Friedman?"

Mace looked a bit perturbed at being ignored, and awkwardly stood at parade rest.

"Doctor Jones." The Lieutenant stood and gave her a brief salute. "As you understand, it is standing protocol to –"

"Uncuff her," demanded Martha, rather harshly. "Now."

The man thinned his lips. "The Colonel has advised against that course of…"

"That was an order, Lieutenant."

Slightly but perceptibly, the man bristled. Then he tugged the keys from his belt without another word and turned to unlock the handcuffs.

Donna couldn't help but smirk nastily at him as she did so, harrumphing. She snatched her hands away and stood from the chair, giving her mother an equally dirty look.

"Are you all right?" The young doctor hurried over to receive Donna, taking her by the arms and seemingly scanning her for damage. "You're all… sooty, what happened? You aren't hurt, are you?"

"I'm fine," Donna assured her, and they shared a brief but tight hug – the kind of warm, natural camaraderie that could only ever come from almost dying with someone. "Thank you," she exhaled. "You've got to teach me how to pull rank like that."

"We'll need to get you a rank first," Martha chuckled a bit breathlessly, before pulling back, her eyes wide and concerned. "Where's the Doctor?" she asked. "I can't seem to get a straight answer out of anyone."

And rather suddenly, the very same question that Donna had spent half an hour answering with furious confidence – it tripped her up for the first time.

She winced, and almost reluctantly, her eyes slid toward the kitchen.

Martha followed her gaze instinctively. "What is it?" she wondered, voice still rising in anxiety. "Whose kid is that? What's happened to him, why's he crying?"

"It's…" Donna took a deep breath. "Right, there's no way to say it without sounding barmy. It's him, Martha."

"Who?"

"That's the Doctor."

Martha blinked at her. She looked at the wailing child under the table, then back to Donna.

"I wish I was kidding," Donna sighed in response to the look on the younger woman's face. "Just… trust me when I tell you it's been a really long day."

Martha shook her head slowly as she moved toward the kitchen, eyes fixed on the dirty, crying child beneath the table. As she came up behind the agents struggling to calm him, they moved out of her way gladly, seeming exhausted by the effort as they let her by.

"Doctor Jones," Agent Morelli greeted, saluting half-heartedly. "Thank God you're here. We really could use you with this one."

The words seemed to go in one of Martha's ears and right out the other.

"Oh my God," she breathed, having finally drawn close enough to see the boy properly. "That's…"

"You see now," Colonel Mace said curtly, retaking his post at the doorway, "why there were… limitations in our intelligence. Concerning the particulars of the operation."

"Yeah, I bloody see!" Martha exclaimed, bewildered. "The Doctor's a bloody kid!"