AN: Fun fact you guys may have forgotten, it was actually Martha who nicknamed their living room "Nerve Centre" originally.

Þa Dohtor Tīma

Rose

"Thank god, your dad said you'd be in here… wait, what's going on?"

Rose had just walked into the TARDIS garage, where the Eleventh Doctor had informed her Jenny was most likely to be, and saw Jenny surrounded by large boxes of belongings. She looked up, surprised to see Rose searching for her, her wounded hand still as unpleasant as Rose remembered it and now with an additional injury to boot – a black eye. How had that happened? Did Rose even want to know?

"I'm just putting some things on the ship," Jenny explained, perusing what looked like a photo album.

"Well, why?" Rose asked. Jenny was distracted by the picture she had spotted, smiling vacantly. "Jenny."

"Hmm?"

"Why are you putting stuff on your ship?" The bulbous flying saucer hovered silently in the room between them, reflecting a distorted but spotless, shining picture of them both. Rose was still carrying the sword and magic lamp.

"Oh, uh… I'm moving," she after some hesitation, glancing back at the photo album again, "To the village."

"You're…? You're leaving the TARDIS?" Rose couldn't believe it. Jenny, who had just reconciled with her father after two centuries, had just begun to have the life she had dreamed of travelling endlessly through time and space, Jenny whose future Rose had just assured by doing something cruel and unpleasant, was leaving the TARDIS? Throwing everything away?

"Yeah, well, you know. I keep getting injured and roped into all these schemes, and it's not so easy being around Jack and Ianto, honestly. That's not a good situation. Plus… well… you know," her eyes strayed to the picture again. Rose's curiosity got the better of her and she walked over to see what it was; a photograph of her and a young woman Rose didn't recognise.

"Who's that?" Jenny and the stranger looked very happy in the picture laughing.

"Astrid," Jenny said, "First person I was dating I moved in with. Long time ago, in Berlin."

"You're moving in with Clara, then?"

"No, she doesn't want to, I'm going to live on the ship. It's bigger on the inside," she added wryly. Rose noticed the black eye really was quite nasty, even partially swollen. Jenny cleared her throat and closed the photo album on the picture of Astrid, leaving Rose waiting for an opening to bring up another figure from Jenny's past. "But, y'know. I don't think I should be ashamed to admit that I want to be closer to the girlf."

"To the…?"

"Girlf."

"Which is?"

"Girlfriend. You know what, I called her that the other day and she told me very expressly never to do it again because it sounded ridiculous, and now I'm saying it to somebody else I see what she means," Jenny said, more to herself than to Rose, who had never heard anybody say the word 'girlf' in reference to anything before.

"Isn't the TARDIS sort of, like, everything you've ever dreamed about?" Rose decided to just ask the question outright instead of guessing about Jenny's feelings. Lucky Jenny was in a good mood, Rose had been expecting her to be cold and and indifferent. But then, everybody did say that Jenny was like living sunshine.

"I don't care about the TARDIS, I care about my father," she shrugged, "I'll still see him all the time. He can't get out of fatherhood that easily, now we're finally friends. Anyway, what's up? No offence, but you know you're filthy?" Rose had forgotten. She had trailed mud, water, and other substances onto the ship with her. "What's that weird mud on your shoe?"

"It's not mud, it's mashed up pieces of some dead person's hand," Rose explained, nonplussed, burdened with the purple space-sword and magic lamp. "That's not important."

"If you say so."

"I only wanted to talk to you about something." Jenny crossed her arms and raised her eyebrows, waiting for Rose to explain. "I met Emmett today. Emmett DeLacey."

"You what?" Jenny's arms dropped immediately and she wore an expression of shock and sadness, "Where? When?"

"In the Eleventh Century. He was sent there to sort out this problem."

"What problem?"

"Zombie Vikings – but that's really not relevant, it's just… I'm sorry. The time vortex showed me his future. How he has to meet you, how he has to die. And I told him he should go to Tungtrun. To his death. I had to do it, for the timeline, so that everything would happen to you like it's supposed to," Rose explained. She hadn't a clue how Jenny would react, she was a very tricky person to read and often behaved unusually.

But Jenny's usual response to many things was to remain silent, stoically calm, and it was this side of her which Rose saw again. She did not say a word, only turned and lifted one box from where it stood on top of another and opened the cardboard flaps of this one on the bottom. After a few moments of rifling, she pulled out an urn; silver, simple, tightly sealed, Jenny held it out to Rose to show her.

"This is Emmett," she 'introduced', "When I moved to America I took his name. Now when people hear 'DeLacey' they think of… mobsters, and moonshine, not him, who promised to save me from Tungtrun… so, was he as cute as I remember him being?"

"Honestly, he was hot," Rose admitted. Jenny laughed a little.

"Just wanted to check my memory wasn't playing tricks on me." She held up the urn and examined it for a few moments longer, before resolving that she would put it back in the box until she could find somewhere to put it on her ship. "I had some things to ask you, anyway, so-"

"Oh, me too," said Rose. There was a pause.

"Well, you go first, then."

"I just wasn't done talking about Emmett, that's all, he gave me something," and then she held out the sword.

"He… gave you a sword?" Jenny looked at it suspiciously.

"I asked him to give me it, he was just going to get rid of it otherwise because he doesn't know how to use a sword at all," Rose shrugged, "And I thought I know somebody who might want it. It's purple, it's made from an asteroid. Oh, and… at my suggestion… he named it Jenny." Again, Jenny was shocked, and took the sword from Rose, drawing it out of its hilt. No longer in the night-time rainstorm of the Dark Ages, the sword's colour was able to shine much more vibrantly.

"You're just going to give me a sword?"

"Well, I don't want it. And he didn't want it. Besides, it's named after you, sort of. You've got to have it. It's like, meant to be, or something," Rose shrugged.

"Have you seen it?"

"I don't need to have seen into the future to know that you're supposed to have this sword," Rose said, "Take it. In exchange for you being nice to the Tenth Doctor at his wedding in a few days. And I know, you don't like him, but it's just for one day and it would mean a lot to me. Him. Us." Truthfully, this was a spur-of-the-moment ultimatum, she had originally been planning to just give Jenny the sword regardless. But using it to bargain that she be well-behaved and polite at the wedding would give Rose some peace of mind (she'd been quietly worried that Jenny might publicly start shouting at her father for his shortcomings, or worse, not show up at all.)

"I… okay," she seemed resentful of making this promise, but made it anyway. "I'll be good. Do I have a plus one, also?"

"Yes, Clara can come."

"Really!?" Jenny beamed, apparently under the impression that Rose was going to ban Clara Ravenwood from accompanying her. "But, um, she might not be able to go to the service, is that alright? You won't be, like, offended? I'm sure she wishes you the best, it's just, she's not so great with religion."

"It's really not going to be a religious ceremony."

"Still. Best to err on the side of caution, right?"

"Honestly, it's fine. I want it to be a happy day, for everyone, not just me," Rose said, "You don't have any song requests, do you? I'm taking song requests from everybody. Or karaoke."

Jenny barely had to think before she answered, "The Beatles. All My Loving. Always cheers me up, nostalgic. I was also meaning to ask, though, if you have a wedding cake yet."

"No, actually. Why?"

"Well, it's just – in the village, I got a job, in a bakery, and I was talking to dad and I thought maybe, if you needed one, I might like to bake it. Whatever you want. Just to get me back into the swing of things before I start in a week. But obviously, it's fine if not, and-"

"Of course you can bake it. The Doctor wants it to look like a TARDIS. I said I don't care what it looks like as long as it's not a fruit cake – I hate fruit cake, don't understand why it's 'traditional.' I said, if I'm marrying an alien I'm having a chocolate cake, end of story."

"I can do a TARDIS, it's just a big rectangle. And chocolate it is." Jenny beamed.

"I just need one more favour." Rose held up the magic lamp. "We were given this lantern by a Zuar – you know, as in the species who built the technology that brought Esther back from the dead. The Zuar said that this lamp should help her when she sees ghosts, if she sees ghosts – Martha said she does, I have no idea. It's supposed to calm them down, or ward them off, I don't really know. Can you pass it along? You see Esther all the time."

"Sure," said Jenny without question, setting the sword down on top of her boxes and taking the lamp from Rose as well, "How does it work?"

"Apparently Esther will be able to figure that out for herself," Rose shrugged.

"Well, I'm sure she'll be grateful if it works."

"And Martha's looking for you. She said to go find her later on this evening. It's about your thumb."

"I'm not letting anybody break it again," Jenny warned, "I don't care how many presents you give me-"

"She wants to put a cast back on it until it's completely healed, she thinks that's for the best, and if you don't go find her she'll come and find you, and you really don't want to make her angry at the moment," Rose said, not wanting to spill the beans about Martha Jones' imminent bundle of joy. But Jenny wasn't particularly intuitive, so Rose didn't worry.

"I'd rather not. She hasn't seen my black eye yet, she'll give me an earful. But how is it my fault if Clara's ex-girlfriend likes to jump out from around corners and punch me in the face?"

"Why did she do that?"

"For a joke. She's sadistic."

"Just go see Martha. And make sure you have that eye covered up for the wedding photos, alright? Get some concealer."

"Fine."

Martha

Upon returning to the TARDIS, Rose had done as-promised and repaired her broken phone, restoring it to an earlier point in its own chronology. And because of that Martha, alone in the console room, was subjected to an almighty barrage of previously undelivered text messages from her worried husband. She had left him a note, of course, but it had been a very vague and non-specific note which couldn't have comforted him an awful lot. Not wanting to be questioned about why she was covered head-to-foot in mud and dirt, she took the long way around to get back to the Bedroom Circle where she assumed Mickey would be, skimming the paranoid texts as she did. Rose had already left her and teleported away to try and find Jenny, who was hopefully going to come and find Martha later on so that she could have her cast reapplied.

Checking carefully by peering around the corner that the Bedroom Circle was empty, she breathed a sigh of relief and approached her own bedroom door, opening slowly so that she didn't startle Mickey. He was sitting cross-legged on their bed with a laptop on his knees, headphones in, serious expression on his face. Whatever he was browsing must be important. He took out the headphones as soon as he saw her though, and practically leapt off the bed. He had been about to hug her, like she'd been gone for weeks, but thought better of it when he noticed how dirty she was.

"Are you okay!?" he exclaimed, reaching over her head to close the door behind her so that they had some privacy.

"I'm fine, I'm just muddy."

"Very muddy, where did you go?"

"Random forest in the Dark Ages during a rainstorm. Had to go swimming through a cave."

"A cave!?"

"It's not that bad," she told him, sure that if he had the chance he would cover her in bubble-wrap and wait on her hand and foot for the next eight months. Still, she made up her mind not to tell him about the zombies. He might faint. "None of that is important, I have to show you something…" she rummaged in the wet, dirty pocket of her jeans and found the disc she had been given by Itrux. "We met an alien doctor. But, more than that – a thousand-year-old alien doctor from a race only made up of doctors. They're like, the Time Lords of medicine. And she… ugh, basically I've been dying with worry ever since we found out about, you know."

"Have you? You didn't say anything."

"I knew how worried you were, I didn't want to make it worse by adding my anxieties to the mix. And there are a lot of them. I've been having Helix scan me every day, I can't sleep, I keep having bad dreams about everything that could possibly go wrong, because-"

"Don't sit on the bed," he said quickly when she had been about to do exactly that. "What? You're really dirty. You need to have a wash, desperately." She shook her head. "You should always tell me when you're worried, Martha, that's the point of being married."

"I know, it's just… overwhelming. I haven't been thinking clearly, it's just…" And Martha began to do the last thing she had expected to do: she began to cry. A combination of the lack of sleep, bad dreams, constant worries, very stressful day. Or perhaps just the one fear she had deep down. Mickey lost all his reservations about how muddy she was and did hug her then, and she wished she had talked to him more in the last week, about more than just cold, hard facts to do with money and jobs and living arrangements, because all of that was nothing compared to how she felt. "I'm just so scared something will go wrong… and I feel guilty because I'm supposed to be happy, because it's a baby, but I'm not happy, I'm just terrified…"

"Find me a pregnant woman who isn't terrified," he said.

"But does it make me a bad person? A bad mother?"

"What? No! No. Definitely not. You have more empathy than anyone I've ever met, you're going to be the best mum in the world. I promise, it's normal to be worried, you should know that. And I'll be right there to whole time, let me worry. Tell me everything you're upset about and then you can stay calm and I can be stressed, it'll be better that way. Let me show you what I was looking at when you came in," he let go of her, though she was still crying softly because everything just felt like it was too much and picked up the computer. She saw on the screen various house listings he had bookmarked. They did not own any property, just rented a flat in central London, and she was still intent on not raising a child in central London, even if it was where she and Mickey had both grown up.

"You want to buy a house?"

"Maybe, or rent, I don't know, but… we need to leave, I think. I think you'll feel better if we're not the TARDIS and we're properly preparing, and we can go to all the scans, the sonograms, get a nursery, other baby stuff-"

"Have you been researching?"

"Of course I've been researching! I'm gonna be a dad, I have to do research. I've found a lot of books, and – I had this idea. But you might hate it, so I haven't said anything…" he put the computer back down and fetched her a handful of tissues from their tissue box. She wiped the tears from her eyes and the snot from her nose, still feeling her heart racing with anxiety. But at least she had Mickey. Even if her worst fears came to fruition, she would always have Mickey. "I was just thinking that, well, we have savings. And we're going to stop alien hunting, that was your idea-"

"We're definitely not alien hunting anymore," she reiterated sternly.

"I know, but you're a doctor and I'm barely qualified to be a mechanic, and I haven't even done it for years – I don't want to go back to it. And with us being concerned about the same thing happening to our baby as what happened to River…"

"What are you saying?"

"What do you think of me being a stay-at-home dad?"

"Well, I…" her surprise at this suggestion managed to stop her tears, and she wandered over to lean on the wall, thinking. She hadn't even entertained the idea, assuming that they would both go back to work.

"I think it's a good idea. At least for the first few years. And you'd be able to support us. Not that I want to put all the financial responsibilities onto you – obviously if you think it would be too much strain; I wouldn't want you to be overworked or you wouldn't be able to spend as much time with the baby, but-"

"Let's go for it," she decided, "It solves a lot of problems. And you're right, I'm a doctor, and I could always… do specialist training, you know? There's a lot of money in specialising in infectious diseases or oncology, more than there is in emergency medicine. And it's less stressful than working in A&E."

"See? You're calming down already now we're talking about things. I always want you to talk to me, I don't care how much worse you think it'll make things, because it won't. It'll only make things better. What are you holding?" She had forgotten about Itrux's disc in her hands.

"It's a scanner," she told him, and then she clicked it down and held it in the palm of her hand. The same hologramatic image of a tiny shape, no bigger than a grain of rice, appeared in the air between them.

"What's that?"

"It's a live image. Of the baby." She let him take the disc as he stared in awe, as if he could actually make out the features of this tiny shapeless picture.

"I'm in love with it already."

Martha laughed. "There's, um, something else, too…"

"What?"

"I told Rose."

"What? I thought we were going to talk about it first before we tell anybody else?"

"I know, but she was there, and I thought the time vortex was going to tell her about it anyway because it tells her all kinds of things – like how Donna has apparently adopted Tentoo and is putting him up in one of her flats and it's some huge secret from Rose, but Rose has known about it the entire time. And, this might sound stupid, but I just really wanted to talk to another girl. One who isn't in my family."

"What did Rose say, then?"

"She's so excited you'd think she was the one having the baby," Martha said. Mickey laughed.

"Really?"

"Yeah. Wouldn't stop asking me about it, convinced me to talk to the alien doctor who gave me this scanner. And I might have promised her I'd talk to you about her being the godmother."

"Rose? The godmother? I'm her ex-boyfriend."

"I said that, but she's been begging me all day. And we don't really have any other candidates."

"What about Gwen?"

"We already decided we'd ask Jack to be godfather-" It had been a very tough decision to choose between Jack and the Tenth Doctor, but ultimately they thought they owed more to Jack for bringing them together when they worked for Torchwood, and encouraging them, and him being the first person they told about the baby, "-I don't want two people in Torchwood. Plus, Rose is a time god. As well as probably my closest friend, somehow." Mickey remained sceptical. "She's probably going to pitch you on it the next time she sees you, so just wait until that happens and then tell me if you still think we should talk to Gwen."

"Mmm… okay. I'll think about it. If you're still so sure we have to have a Christening-"

"I told you, my mother will kill me if I have a baby and don't get it Christened. It's not worth making her angry over. Easier just to do it."

"You have to have a name before you can have a Christening," he reminded her, because he kept trying to convince her to talk about baby names even though she thought it was much too early. Also because she didn't have any ideas because she had been trying not to think about the whole thing. "And I still think-"

"I told you it's not being called Rita if it's a girl." Rita-Anne was Mickey's grandmother's name and he was vying for the opportunity to name the baby after her. "I'm putting my foot down."

"But-"

"No."

"Come on."

"Middle names. Maybe."

"…Do you feel a bit better?" he changed the subject to something other than the pointless name debate.

"Maybe. A little." She thought that as soon as they stopped talking all of her worries would come flooding back regardless of anything else.

"Better enough to go and have a shower and get changed so you don't stink? Because you stink. Think of the conditions you're forcing our unborn child to live in-"

"Oi!" she protested, but he just laughed.

"Go! Have a wash. Please. For my sake. Please. I'll make you a cup of tea. I'll even come into the bathroom and carry on talking to you if you need it."

"That's the worst excuse I've ever heard for wanting to stare at a naked woman."

"What!? I'm your concerned husband – why would I want to see you naked?" he challenged jokingly, switching off the disc and putting it down on the dressing table. She said nothing, only looked at him, reminding herself how lucky she was to have met Mickey Smith, how lucky it was that Rose had broken his heart so many years ago and run off with an alien.

"Thanks," Martha said eventually, "For everything. For being you."

"Luckily I'm always me, and I'm not going anywhere. Promise."