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The Doctor was not a particularly paternal person. Well, it wasn’t as though he’d been consulted before the Council used his TNA to loom a new Time Lord. Of course, one was always free not to participate in the upbringing of one’s offspring, but he’d done his best with the Poet.
And now the Poet was a father himself, and had left his child with the Doctor for a month while he worked on his next great work in seclusion.
The child was too young to have a proper name, of course, so the Doctor just used “Grandchild.” It had been a rather pleasant week so far, reading together and exploring the wilderness around the Doctor’s home. There was something very rewarding about seeing familiar sights through young, fresh eyes.
“What would you like to do today, Grandchild?” the Doctor asked over breakfast.
“I would like to play pretend.”
“Pretend? What should we pretend?”
“Let’s pretend that we are humans, living on Earth.” The child’s eyes sparkled with excitement. “We can pick out human names from the book I was reading the other day.”
“Humans?” Children did have some strange ideas. “All right, then. I shall be Doctor Human.”
“Grandfather, no! You have to pick a human name!”
“Of course that’s a human name, human is right there in it,” he teased.
“That’s not a human name! You can be...John.”
“All right, then,” he agreed. “John it is. And what will you be?”
“I want my name to be Susan.”
The Doctor opened his mouth to point out that the book had said Susan was a girl’s name, and wouldn’t the child rather have--but he closed it. Examining his grandchild’s bright eyes and stubbornly jutting chin, he realized three things: first, that this choosing of names had been the point of the entire exercise; second, that his grandso--no, his granddaughter was a clever and determined child; and third, that she was going to have a rather rough time of things, and was testing to see whether her grandfather would be a help or a hinderance.
“All right,” he said. “Susan it is. What time period are we living in, Susan?”
“We are the first humans to leave the solar system,” Susan said with a grin. “It is very exciting for us.”
“Oh, my. Outside the solar system? What an adventure.”
Puberty begins late in Time Lords compared to other sentient species. Although she was far too old for games of pretend, the Doctor still called her Susan whenever they were alone together. She visited him regularly.
“I told father,” she said over dinner one such evening. “About the way I feel.”
“How did that go?” the Doctor asked gently.
“He told me it would be fine once I regenerate.” She put her fork down on the table with a bit too much force. “As though hundreds of years of being unhappy don’t matter!”
“Susan...please don’t do anything rash,” the Doctor said. It had been his worry for years now. “Using up a regeneration is no small thing.”
“It’s as though that’s what they want me to do,” she said. “There are more people like me, did you know? Nobody knows how many more, because most of us don’t talk about it. I think maybe it’s a lot of the people who regenerate from funny accidents. I’m not going to. I shouldn’t have to.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” he agreed.
“Do you know, other races--races that don’t regenerate--they have treatments for it? Hormones and sometimes surgeries. It’s not as though Time Lords are immune to things like that. They just think it would be beneath us to worry too much about one body when we’re going to get more.” She gave him that look he remembered from the day she became Susan to him, eyes flashing, chin pushed forwards. “There are ways of blocking puberty hormones. It’s even been done with Time Lords before, to treat early puberty or people who are producing too many hormones.”
“What do you need me to do, Susan?” he asked, and she smiled.
“I don’t know what to do.” She’d been on the hormone blockers for years when she turned up on his doorstep unannounced in the middle of the night. “Father’s taking me to a physician tomorrow, to figure out why I haven’t begun puberty yet. I think he suspects something.”
“Oh, Susan,” the Doctor said, and pulled her inside and into a hug. It wasn’t something Time Lords did a lot of, embracing, but he felt the situation called for it. “Do you want me to talk to him?”
“It won’t work, you know it won’t,” she said, her words muffled by his tight hold on her. “He’s a traditionalist through and through.”
“I know,” he said, and gave her a final squeeze before gently pulling back so he could meet her eyes. “What do you need me to do?”
“We need a laboratory that can synthesize female hormones,” she said. “I have to go through puberty eventually, and I refuse to go through the wrong one. And we need to get away from father, and the council, and all the rest of them, at least until I regenerate. And--”
“You can stop working up to it, my dear,” he said. “I know you have a plan.”
“We need to steal a TARDIS.”