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It was a peaceful day.
At 5pm, classes were over and, so far, none of the Deca members had showed up to bother her. Millennia was out on a date with Rallon, which meant Ushas had the room all for herself, so she could get all her Temporal Engineering work done and have time to go to the lab by evening and work on some experiments. That was just an excuse, of course, because then she could schedule a log of eight spans (eight hours) and work on her real experiments, which were considered illegal on Gallifrey and all its colonies.
Ushas managed to finish a couple of chapters on her assignment and jumped on her chair when she heard a fist slam repeatedly on the door. She chose to ignore it. There were a bunch of second graders running down the halls and playing pranks on the older students (one day, she would kidnap one of them and open their skull and study it). But other than that, few were the ones who dared to knock on Ushas and Millennia’s door. Ushas, herself, didn’t have a lot of friends, nor did she like the ones she had to get near her stuff.
Rallon only stopped by after asking Millennia, who had to notify Ushas; Magnus came by in person during class and asked, discreetly, if he could see her. Vansell and Jelpax texted in advance. Drax and Mortimus just didn’t dare to go near that room. There were only two people who were stupid enough to show up there out of nowhere…
The fist slammed on the door once again, and then a second one joined on the slamming, in sync.
Theta and Koschei.
That day had been too peaceful to be true.
Ushas waited for them to invade the room as usual, but then she remembered they had had a very unpleasing experience the week before, when they walked into Rallon and Millennia… well. Needless to say, the experience was more unpleasing to Millennia and Rallon than to Theta and Koschei. So, she sighed, stood up from the chair and opened the door.
Yes, she was facing exactly the two people she expected. Nothing unusual. Not even the panting from them, or the brown package in a brown blanket that Theta carried in his arms. He had a nervous smile on his face, and Koschei was white as a paper sheet. Switching her vision from one to another and back to the package, she decided to ask:
“Before I let you both walk into my room with a potential explosive device: what the fuck is that? I’m just curious. Don’t tell me too much, I don’t want to get into whatever mess you two are in.”
Theta and Koschei looked at each other nervously, and the latter removed a piece of the blanket out of the way, revealing, well…
A baby.
Theta, Koschei and a baby.
Ushas goggled her eyes at the sleeping newborn for what felt like an eternity.
“What the fuck is that?”, was the only question she could think of.
“You already asked that, and I showed it to you”, Koschei explained slowly and condescendingly, “it’s a baby.”
Ushas crossed her arms. “I know what a fucking baby is. I wanna know what you’re doing with it and why… fuck, why the hell should I know about it? Why the hell do I even want to know?”, Ushas whined, her hand moving to close the door, when she noticed Theta’s face. He looked both ways down the corridor in urgency, and then at her, and his brown eyes were begging her.
That was the second of a sequence of many exhausted sighs that were fated to be let out by Ushas that day.
In that millesimal of a second, Ushas pondered. She could slam the door on both of their faces, go back to her homework, take a long bubble bath while drinking a glass of wine, watch Dinosaurs for the twentieth time and later go to the lab. Or, she could help them, then take the kid and use it as a lab rat.
And she did like having new possibilities.
Ushas opened the door and let her friends in. “Lock the door”, Koschei ordered. Ushas nearly told him to go fuck himself, but Theta tightened his lips and looked at her in a way that screamed ‘do it!’. Koschei paced back and forth, his fingernails digging into his hands – an anxious Koschei meant that they had done something really, really bad, and not in a way that brought him pleasure. Theta sat on Millennia’s bed, rocking the baby gently while he stared at the floor like he was trying to burn a hole through it with his eyes.
So, Ushas locked the door.
“Theta and I were at Gallifreyan Biology class”, Koschei begun, without looking at her. Ushas sat back down on her desk chair and watched him pace around the room. This was going to be interesting. “It was our first class. Second, actually. The first one was just theory stuff. We were going to get to the practical part today…”
Theta let out a pained noise, his eyes still drilling the floor. Ushas ignored him to hold back the laughter.
Koschei continued: “Each of us were going to use a strand of our hair to create a fetus on the Looms. It was going to be kept in a glass pot and we were going to study what had been formed so far. That was the purpose of today’s class.
“Yes”, Ushas agreed. “I’ve had this class last year. Go on.”
Koschei stared at Theta, who was still in the same position, rocking the sleeping kid in his arms.
“Well. Theta thought it would be romantic if we used both of our DNA samples on the same fetus and created our own baby”, he narrated grimly.
“You agreed that it sounded like a good idea!”, Theta retorted, whispering, so as to not wake up the child.
“No. What I said, was, ‘Yes, Thete, I really wanna have a child with you as well, but this is our second class and I don’t think it’s the right moment in our lives.”
“I only heard the part where you said you really want to have a child with me…”
Koschei smiled at him as red blossomed on his cheeks. “Never doubt that. When we graduate…”
“I’m going to throw up on both of your faces”, Ushas interrupted, eyes rolling back on her skull. “Quit stalling.”
“We mixed our DNAs”, Theta spoke this time. “But I think we left the machine on longer than we should.”
“Nah-ah-ah! No, definitively not. I said, ‘Theta, the tutor told us to turn it off’, to which you replied, ‘I can’t, Koschei. I can’t do this to our child. This might be our only chance to have a family!”, Koschei said, mimicking Theta’s voice.
“Okay, but why would this be your only chance to have a family?”, Ushas asked, intrigued.
“Koschei is under the CIA’s watch for suspicions of terrorism on the Citadel and… an attempt on the Lord President’s life? Is that it?”, Theta replied, looking at the other for a confirmation, which he got, with an unashamed nod from Koschei. “Yeah, that’s it. And I tried stealing a TARDIS in fifth grade.”
Ushas nodded in agreement, slowly. “Yeah… I don’t think they’d accept a Loom application from you two.”
“Well”, Koschei went on, “I just want it on record that, against my will, Theta turned the speed on the development way too high and formed an eight month old child. Our tutor suspected something was wrong when some smoke started coming out of the Loom, and he was about to yell at us pretty bad, when Theta opened up the capsule, took out a practically fully formed baby, and I told him to take her and run. There was smoke all over the room and I nearly died of intoxication, but I managed to catch him up. The rest of the class stayed inside, maybe because I locked the door from outside, and I heard some fire alarms on the way, but I didn’t look back.”
Ushas stared at the couple, sitting with a hand under her chin, dumbfounded. Still, she shouldn’t be so shocked. Ushas knew Theta and Koschei from their first years at the Academy, when she – just a small nine or ten year old – was still a hall monitor (and still worried about maintaining a teacher’s pet reputation, that is, before the Deca) and caught both boys sneaking into the ventilation tubes with buckets of pig-rat blood in an attempt to pour it over the Chancellor during a lecture in the auditorium. She barely knew those two, but didn’t snitch on them, because she didn’t like the Chancellor.
She also didn’t like the Biology tutor.
“And what do you need me for?"
Theta and Koschei shared a look. Theta spoke, in a shy tone, avoiding Ushas’ gaze: “You’re always here for us, in everything. When we need to study, test new experiments, or when we were younger and a bully tried to pick on us, when Koschei and I had a crush on each other and none of us would take the first step, when we fight, you know…”
The thing is, despite what the two of them had always believed, Ushas didn’t know the first thing about relationships and always gave the same obvious advice, like, “For Rassilon’s flappy dick, just talk to him, Koschei. It’s literally all you have to do”, or, “I don’t know. Figure your shit out. Go put your dick inside him, whatever”, just so they’d stop getting on her nerves and leave, and it always worked.
A shrill crying noise interrupted the conversation, reminding the three friends of more urgent matters.
Ushas approached Theta and examined the baby he deposited in her arms. A girl, according to them. Slightly too small, which was expected for a baby formed in an hour and a half, but sort of chubby considering her size. Her face was red and contorted from all the crying, but Ushas was able to notice a pair of blue eyes and, on her head, a nest of brown hair.
She rocked the baby lightly until her crying gradually ceased into an exhausted breathing. It was an essential aspect of gallifreyan biology that would affect the baby’s health.
“It worked”, Koschei exclaimed excitedly.
“Not for long”, Ushas continued rocking the baby, staring at her face distractedly. “Her organism is too frail and prone to severe health issues due to malformation. I doubt she’ll be able to receive e regeneration cycle. Or that she’ll live long enough to.”
When Ushas looked back at them, she saw two crestfallen faces. So… they weren’t just messing around. In the short time they had to create a whole baby and run down the corridor to her room, they had somehow gotten attached to the baby.
Ushas had spent more time creating well-developed creatures on her lab and had no problem getting rid of them than that. But something told her she couldn’t say that to them. Not when they had those faces on.
She sighed exhaustively for a third time.
Sitting on her bed and followed by Koschei and Theta by each side, she asked: “Let’s say you raise this child. One: how are you going to hide her from the tutors? You can’t keep her here. Two: children are expensive. You have eight years to take care of her before you dump her in the Academy forever. None of you have a job. No, Theta, exploring the Universe won’t give you any money, and you two are going to receive a ton of hospital bills with this one. Three…”, she pondered over the third one for a while. She would regret this, “…I can help you make a new child.”
“Sorry, Ushas”, Koschei shook his head, “but I don’t think you can make a baby with three people. At least, we haven’t learned that in class…”
“I had a grandma that had twenty children with three of her four wives at the same time”, Theta countered.
“Theta, I’ve explained this like a thousand times”, Koschei said, “There’s no way how. Your brother himself said that day that she had four cycles, ten kids with one, three with the second, six with the third and one with a lover. Which doesn’t make sense, because she had another wife left.”
“No, grandma Ivanabine, the last wife, she doesn’t do stuff like that. She only joined the family because my twenty-seventh grandfather was a loan shark and her family didn’t have money to pay their debts, so they made a deal that she’d join the Lungbarrows and help pay our bills, which I don’t get, because we never paid them anyway. So grandma Ivanabine made a vow of chastity saying that the only one she would have sex with is Rassilon, when he wakes up from his eternal sleep and comes back to rule Gallifrey once more. Everyone in the family respects her wishes.”
“I don’t think I wanna be a part of your family anymore, Theta.”
“I lose an amount of ten billion braincells every time one of you opens your mouth. And that’s not an exaggeration, I know a lot about braincells”, Ushas felt heat on her face from irritation, but the weight of the baby on her arms immobilized her from physically attacking them. “Figure your shit right now, in a microspan, or I’ll throw this baby out of the window and end our problems.”
Theta and Koschei shared a look.
“I guess I could take a job”, Koschei pondered. “Actually, my father already has a job ready for me, but I didn’t want it, because I didn’t want to pay taxes or care about stuff. But now, I have a daughter, and I know he’d want to have a talk about ‘responsabilities’”, he air quoted the word, “so, I think I should just take it.”
Ushas rolled her eyes, and turned to Theta. He seemed lost.
“What? I have to take a job?”, the worst of all, Ushas thought, is that apparently he really hadn’t thought about that in eighty years of life.
Ushas sighed for a fourth time.
“I’m afraid so, Theta”, she replied in a sarcastic tone, “I mean, at first one of you will have to spend more time with the kid, care for her while she’s still young, but yes, you two will need jobs.”
Theta seemed to consider the idea. She watched as it travelled through his mind, and his reactions were fascinating. His expression of worry… fear… terror… conformity… and finally, the innocence of someone so full of hope that hadn’t considered the idea long enough to accept it – well, he didn’t even consider anything in the first place, which is how they had ended up in Ushas’ room with a baby.
“Back to my first point, which is the most important now: where are you going to put this child?”
Koschei took the girl in his arms carefully, and examined her with an affectioned face. The idea of Koschei as a father was absurd, Ushas thought. She had no maternal instincts, but recognized herself in him – add the sense of responsibility, reason and the intellect –, especially when it came to caring about other people. But Koschei cared about Theta, maybe more than anything in the Universe, and so he would care about their daughter. And then, the idea didn’t seem that absurd anymore.
Ushas, on the contrary, cared about no one. Nobody. The others were either tools or obstacles.
(She ignored memories of when she hugged Millennia after a fight with Rallon and, even though Ushas didn’t know what to say to her, they remained in a comfortable silence for hours; Or when Drax had difficulty concentrating in classes and, while still complaining, she organized a study chronogram and used Millennia’s colorful notecards to write mental maps for him; That time Magnus invited her to a surprise date and, even though she hated surprises she went because she had nothing better to do and was ready to dump him on the first opportunity – but then he took his father’s TARDIS and took her to watch dinosaurs on Earth, then gave her the blue feathers of an arqueopterix as a gift. She still keeps it, well hidden; And the thousands of times she got in trouble because of Theta and Koschei, listened to their crap and let them rest their heads on her thighs in the gardens while she read a book).
“I think the first step, Ushas, is picking her name”, Koschei pointed out. Theta smiled brightly, bouncing on the bed excitedly until Ushas slapped his thigh.
“How about… Emma? It’s a very common Earth name, beautiful!”, Theta suggested. Of course.
Koschei considered for a few moments, examining the baby’s face. “Hmm… I don’t know. I’ve always liked Annihilator Galaxy-Destroyer, killer name for a baby.”
Theta considered for a moment. “Can we call her Annie, for short?”
Koschei reflected upon it. “Nahh, I like Annihilator better. All the kids will fear her.”
“I just think Annihilator sounds better as a boy’s name…”
“Names have no gender, Thete. And she looks like an Annihilator.”
“She looks like a knee”, Ushas interjected.
“Ushas!”, Koschei hurriedly covered the child’s ears, sounding offended.
The door was suddenly slammed against a wall as Millennia and Rallon stumbled into the room making out, hard, without noticing the other people. Ushas cleared her throat right before Rallon completely lifted the upped part of Milennia’s robe just as it showed her bra, and the couple broke off their kiss in fright, like deer in headlights.
“Ushas! I had no idea you’d be here by now”, she laughed nervously, fixing her clothes, putting her handbag on top of the desk and leaning on it to take off her shoes. Rallon stared at the baby Millennia was yet to notice, frozen in shock. “Rallon and I went to that new place in the Citadel, we’ve got to go together. There’s a barman that makes a drink that, if you drink, you start hallucinating some weird stuff, it’s like, if you take five shots you get into a comma, but you’ll have some fantastic and very trippy dreams in the two months you remain unconscious. I didn’t do it because I have an exam in a couple of days, so Rallon here thought it was better to not drink too much, but I have a friend that swears on Omega reincarnated that her seventh cousin knows a guy that saw a guy fall into a temporal crack, but she doesn’t know which one of them was high”, she closed the door behind Rallon and followed his stare – and only then, she saw the baby.
Millennia’s jaw dropped, and her face lit up: “A baby! By Omega, how cute!”, she ran and dropped on her knees near Koschei to watch the baby closer.
“Why do I get the feeling”, Rallon began, slowly, “that you two did some real fucked up shit in Biology class?”
“RALLON!”, Millennia yelled and ignored Theta and Ushas’ reprehension. “It’s not shit, it’s a beautiful baby! Is that how you’re going to address our kids?”
“But that’s exactly what happened”, Ushas commented. She and the others ignored Millennia’s horrified stare and explained what happened. The couple sat cross-legged on the floor, watching the three intently.
“And now”, Theta said, “we have here five people and we can vote a name for our daughter. So, what’s it going to be: Emma or Annihilator Galaxy-Destroyer?”
“Emma?”, Rallon made a face. “Theta, do you hate your kid? Annihilator Galaxy-Destroyer is way cooler.”
Theta didn’t have one of the most intimidating faces, but there was something really weird about his face when he got angry. Like a pissed off golden retriever. Or something darker. He just looked like a golden retriever.
“Rallon, I am not letting you name our kids. They’re not gonna be psychopaths like Koschei. But yeah I agree, she doesn’t look like Emma.”
Their faces turned to Ushas.
“Seriously?”, she frowned. “Listen, picking a kid’s name means that you’re going to keep it. Neither of you is in any condition-“
“They don’t have to do it alone”, Millennia interrupted. Rallon shot a desperate look at her, but she pinched his arm. “The Deca has ten members. It’s impossible that ten people can’t take care of a baby!”
That baby would die within three hours, Ushas thought.
Koschei and Theta’s faces lit up. They begun making plans for the child – “We’ll raise her in a TARDIS and show her the Universe. The Academy will just crush her spirit and she’ll become a conservative old lady at fifteen, just like Vansell”, Theta decided and the others nodded in agreement.
Then, Rallon pointed out: “Ushas, you still haven’t voted.”
In her fifth sigh, now in defeat, Ushas paused for a moment, then said: “Aster. It means ‘star’”.
Theta and Koschei studied the baby, then Theta inclined her face to the side, trying to figure out how ‘Aster’ fit her. After what seemed like forever, both first-time parents smiled.
“Aster”, Koschei whispered to the girl, who let out a bubbly sound, a green snot forming on her nose. She looks like a monster, Ushas thought. Then she picked up a paper tissue from the desk and cleaned the tiny nose, as Koschei watched with a smile. “I think she likes it”, he said.
Millennia got up and signed for Rallon to do the same. “Rallon and I will arrange a meeting with the Deca to share the news. You’ll do the honors, of course”, and with the parents’ permission, they both went out to look for the others.
Ushas got up from the bed and walked to her desk, putting away the books as she knew that, unfortunately, she would get no more work done that day. Looking back to the three of them, she noticed that Theta and Koschei shared a look (What’s with that? Are they talking through their shared mental link right in front of me? And a baby? Gross), then looked right at her.
“No”, she simply, but firmly, said.
“No what”, Theta asked.
“I don’t know, but I know you’re going to ask for something else, and I’ve already spent the night dealing with your shit. In fact, I’ve spent a third of my life dealing with your shit”, she stacked the remaining books on top of the other with a bang that made them nearly jump on the bed.
“Actually”, Koschei begun, “what we’re gonna ask is… how do I explain this? Theta?”
“Go straight to the point so I can just say no.”
“We want you to be Aster’s godmother!”, Theta blurted out excitedly.
Ushas stared at Theta, Koschei and Aster, then Aster, Koschei and Theta, then Theta, Aster and Koschei, with her eyebrows shot up so high on her forehead it nearly reached her hair.
“You’re fucking with me.”
“No. You literally gave her a name”, Koschei reminded.
“So I take my suggestion back. I will not take this responsibility. I already carry this entire sack of losers we call Deca on my back, I can’t deal with a creature who can’t control their bladder and wets themselves inconveniently. We already have Mortimus for that.”
“Ushas”, Theta stood up and held her hands. She tried to get away, but he was weirdly strong for someone that skinny, “After Koschei and I, you’ll be the most important person in Aster’s life. Scratch that, you will be the fourth, I want to make Brax pay some stuff for her because he owes me. But anyway, she needs someone who can help her with homework, teach her everything, because you’ll say we teach her wrong, and maybe you can take her to visit your favorite places, like, you know, the Citadel General Hospital, because we’re not legally allowed there anymore after Koschei set it on fire.”
Ushas considered it for a moment, staring between them. Yes, it would be great to have a pupil, someone to pass on all of her knowledge and maybe she could even conduct some – harmless – experiments to try to, somehow, expand Aster’s lifetime and quality of life. From the short hours Ushas spent with the kid, she was able to notice a lot of characteristics that would lead to severe health issues. So this could be a long and challenging experiment. She wasn’t doing it for her friends, nor for the kid.
Ushas’ sixth sigh was in resignation, but now, it didn’t feel entirely like a defeat: “So, I will decide that, for the sake of this child, I will be her godmother. You two aren’t fit for shit, much less for parenthood. She needs a good role model in life, not people who go to the Low Town to have strangers do body shots off of their bodies.”
Koschei stood up from the bed and, with Aster in his arms, he and Theta hugged Ushas in a very uncomfortable way, a mess of limbs that tightened around her. She heard their repetitive thanks and tolerated their loud, sloppy kissed on her cheeks and forehead and eyelids, all for, well, the sake of the child, as Ushas claimed.
Ushas then took Aster in her arms and the baby watched her with her curious blue eyes. A specimen created carelessly by the most irresponsible people she knew, but, still, there was something unique about her. There was potential, Ushas decided, and did that rare thing she never showed anybody – she smiled down at her godchild.
Hundreds and hundreds of years passed. Theta and Koschei were now the Doctor and the Master, ex-husbands – more or less. The Master refused to sign the divorce papers, made a scene at the court house, shot the judge and their friend had to drop everything in Miasimia Goria to be a defense witness and bail him out – and Ushas, now universally known as the Rani, lived relatively happy in her new planet.
Aster visited her from time to time. The young woman went to the Academy, but to everyone’s relief, she became nothing like Vansell, but a brilliant scientist with a special talent to Cosmic Science, just like her father Koschei.
She hadn’t seen her parents in a long time, and the Rani didn’t think it would be a good idea anyway. The Doctor and the Master would be terrible influences for her, they had always been, hell, even for young Ushas.
And so Aster grew up under her godmother’s influence, guide and care. Even though she didn’t receive a regeneration cycle and never became a Time Lady, she decided to leave Gallifrey an find a place for herself in the Universe, as she felt she didn’t ‘fit’ anywhere. The Rani didn’t stop her, in fact, she encouraged her.
Aster was what the Rani considered a failed experiment at first, but, thanks to her, became her best and most successful one.