The Hypervodka Incident

Clara dragged her heels on her way through the TARDIS door. It closed behind her the moment she was properly inside, and the Doctor instantly threw home the lever. The rotors turned. Clara sighed.

“No time to waste, slowpoke,” the Doctor said.

Yeah. She didn’t have any more time to waste. It was now or never, and never was impossible. Though she could yet chicken out. She could. But running away was not something Clara Oswald was going to start doing now.

“Doctor.”

“Clara?”

“Remember the night with the hypervodka?”

The Doctor smiled briefly: a moment of mutual embarrassment. Clara was sympathetic. There had been karaoke with a group of strangers in a bar on Ceti Alpha VI. The Doctor had belted out “Bohemian Rhapsody” like the best of them. There had been hypervodka shots. More shots. A duet on “Endless Love” that she really wished she couldn’t remember.

He said, “Parts of it. Mostly the parts before the bar. After that, not so much.”

“Do you remember waking up?”

“What’s this about?”

Clara ignored him and repeated herself, more firmly. “Do you remember waking up?”

The Doctor chewed on his forefinger. “Yes. Vividly. My head felt like it was doing the Titanian Two-Step all on its own.”

“You were in your bedroom when you woke up. With your clothes all over the floor.”

He stopped chewing on his forefinger and stared at her instead. “How do you know that?”

“Because I woke up first. In your bedroom. With you.”

His mouth opened and closed a few times. “We– we– Did we?”

“Yeah, we did. I didn’t remember it, but it must have happened, because. Well. Just because.” Because of the way her body had felt, because of the love bites in odd places, because of the chafing in places she did not want to describe to him.

“And I didn’t remember either,” he said, so quietly she wasn’t sure she’d heard it.

“Yeah. That was pretty obvious the next morning.”

His hands were now deep in his trouser pockets, and he was looking at the floor instead of at her. “Hypervodka is dangerous like that. I’m sorry.”

“Well, it’s okay, sort of. We’re both adults. We probably knew what we were doing. Even though we don’t remember it.”

He smiled at her very briefly, then moved toward the other side of the console from her. Clara followed. He pressed a few buttons as if they were the most important buttons ever, then stopped abruptly. He folded his arms, unfolded them, then shoved his hands deep into his trouser pockets again.

“Forgive me, Clara, but that was two months ago. Why bring it up now?”

“It’s only sort of okay. I, um.” There was no letting him off the hook on this one, but now that it came to it, she didn’t know how to say it. Words. She’d written a speech out in post-it notes, but they were not in front of her now.

“What?”

Clara couldn’t find any way to say what she had to say next without yelling and she wasn’t angry at anybody other than herself and she was more scared than angry anyway. So she pulled the little stick out of her pocket and held it out to him.

The Doctor took it gingerly and looked. Then he handed it back, pulled out his sonic, and scanned her.

“Yeah,” she said, when she saw his face change.

He yanked the viewscreen around toward them. He did something to the sonic and scanned her again. The monitor changed to a display of what she assumed were her guts, color-coded and moving in three dimensions. She leaned closed to take a look: tables of numbers flickering, an image of her belly, a cavity, a moving thing inside. He pointed at one of the charts of letters. It changed to a display of a double helix spinning, with labels along the edges.

Clara craned closer to the image on the screen. “Is that the baby’s DNA?”

“Yes. It’s Time Lord DNA. My DNA. Your DNA. The thing I don’t understand is– oh.”

“What oh? Explain oh. You don’t get to say oh and then not explain it.”

“I was merely wondering how this–” he stabbed a finger at the helix – “happened. Humans and Gallifreyans can interbreed, yes, but to produce this requires intervention.”

“Who intervened?”

“It happened on the TARDIS. She’d have– there are machines– I once set up something so that if – I set it up originally for River, a very long time ago, but nothing came of it. She was angry with me and so I went off for a year and built a semi-autonomous gene splicer and then when I went back to her the next day her time she was still angry and I’d completely forgotten what we were fighting about. And then I forgot about this. Until now.”

He was babbling. Still babbling, though Clara wasn’t paying attention any more. Well, that was annoying. She was pregnant because a thousand years ago he’d set up something to let his wife get pregnant, maybe, if they’d ever decided to, and the machine had just blithely done something with her DNA and his DNA and then it had spliced them together into a fertilized egg without even so much as asking her and she couldn’t even remember it.

Though she did remember the love bites on her shoulders. Those had taken days to fade. She’d been mortified because they’d been left by him and neither of them remembered it. She’d had wild monkey sex with the Doctor, and he’d got her pregnant, and she was going to have a Time Lord baby and she didn’t even remember it.

There was a clatter and a thump. The Doctor was now kneeling on the floor, with the screwdriver rolling away from him. His hands were on her shoulders.

“Clara? Are you okay?”

Clara noticed that she was sitting on the floor next to the Doctor. Speaking of things she didn’t remember: sitting down was another one.

“Yeah. I mean, aside from the morning sickness and the napping.”

“And the sudden collapsing.”

“That’s like the napping. Third period I have free, and I spend it asleep in the faculty lounge. I used to wake up with my head on my desk until I got smart and started commandeering the couch.”

“I think that’s normal,” he said. And then he reached out and laid a hand on her forehead, and tutted. The Doctor, who rarely touched her (except when he left love bites all over her shoulders, a traitorous part of her mind said), was touching her now, solicitously.

“Are you going to turn into one of those?”

“Those?”

Clara shook her head. He’d only deny it as if the suggestion outraged him.

“You seem well enough,” he said.

“Doctor.”

“What?”

“What are we going to do?”

He was watching her now, almost warily. “I don’t know. What would you like to do?”

“What do you want to do?”

“I asked first.”

“No, you didn’t. I asked first.”

“Oh.”

He sat down with his legs crossed. His thumb went up to the corner of his mouth and he worried at it with his teeth. Clara watched him fret. Could she see him as a father? Yes, she could. He’d been a father once; he sometimes boasted of his dad skills, and from what she’d seen, they were real, if off-kilter from what the average human thought of as a dad skill. The question was, did he want to be a father right now? Did she want to be a mother if he didn’t want to be a father? And what were Time Lord babies like, anyway?

“It’s your body. It’s up to you. You could terminate. You could put him into storage here in the TARDIS for a time later on when you wanted to carry him. You could put him into an artificial womb until he reaches full term. You could continue on the old-fashioned way.”

“Wait. Wait a second. Did you say him?”

“Oh, sorry, yes, XY chromosomes, other gene sequences say he’s probably going to turn out to be male in the usual way, which means most of the regenerations will be male except for a few extra-fun ones. I hope you didn’t want to be surprised.”

“It’s okay. Um. That’s a lot of choices. More than I knew I had.”

“You don’t have to decide yet. You have another week or so before some of the options become, er, tricky.”

“Well, actually, I sort of know what I want to do already. It was just more a matter of, well, you.”

“Me?”

“You. Do you want to help me raise him or would you prefer to show up on birthdays and give him wildly inappropriate presents that I’ll have to hide away before he uses them to splice cat and dog DNA or engrave his name on the moon with a laser or–”

“Yes. Please.”

“Which one?”

“Help. Raise him.”

“Okay. See you do it, now. No vanishing for weeks at a time because you messed up the times. You’re here–”

“Mostly.”

“Mostly, and you’re helping. Even with the nappies.”

“Oh, nappies, there’s a perfectly good robot that can do those, I got it working once when Ace came to visit with her twins and it only malfunc–”

“Shut up. You’re changing nappies.”

“Yes, boss.”

They held hands now sometimes, at stressful moments. That was a thing. The Doctor would seek it out, even, and would hold her hand without any prompting whatsoever when things got weird. This hadn’t changed after their drunken night together. He reached out for her hand now and laced his fingers through hers. They sat like that for a while, hand in hand on the TARDIS floor, and Clara felt better. She had had some vague idea that he might have fled instead of welcoming it, dumped her in Croydon and come back in five years to see how it worked out. But no, he was sticking around and holding her hand and still smiling at her like he’d been given a present. Which, well, maybe he had.