A few days after the Sontaran incident, the a familiar team of four was called to UNIT headquarters. "Wasn't the Captain called here for help?" Leo Fitz asked as he looked around.

"He was," Phil Coulson replied, looking at his phone as he closed the driver's side door closed. "But there hasn't been contact with him for a few hours."

"I wonder what they need here," Melinda May wondered as they approached the mobile headquarters. "The problem with the ATMOS has been solved."

"I wonder if the Doctor and Jessie were here," Jemma Simmons put in. "It seems like the mess they would get into."

"Whatever they need, it's important," Coulson figured as they stepped inside.

All four of them stopped short. "We're talking outside," Steve told them. "There's someone I want you to meet."

***

As they approached a fountain nearby, Coulson eyed the blonde woman dressed for combat examining every little detail in interest. She was even looking at the water like she wanted to try it. "Jenny!" Steve called.

The woman looked up, and seemed more relaxed when she saw him. She ran over, smiling at him. "This place is amazing!" she told him with enthusiasm, and Coulson noted that her accent was similar to the Doctor's.

"I know," Steve told her with a smile before he turned to the SHIELD team. "Jenny, this is Phil Coulson, Melinda May, Leo Fitz, and Jemma Simmons."

"Hello," Coulson told her with a smile.

Jenny smiled back. "Nice to meet you."

"They were the ones I promised your parents I would introduce you to."

Jenny brightened. "Really?" she asked in excitement, examining each and every one of them before furrowing her eyebrows. "But they have guns," she noted, turning to Steve.

"We avoid using them if we have to," Coulson told her, eyeing her in a bit of confusion. Who were her parents?

"So they have choices?" Jenny clarified.

"Yes," Steve confirmed. "There's always a choice."

"I don't mean to sound rude," Fitz spoke, "but . . . who exactly are you?"

"Right." Steve cleared his throat. "Coulson, May, FitzSimmons, this is Jenny. She's the Doctor's and Jessie's daughter."

Four jaws dropped open. "Their daughter?!" Coulson exclaimed.

"How did that happen?" Fitz demanded at the same time.

"When was this?" May asked.

"Why aren't they here?" Jemma put in.

Jenny was more concerned with, "I thought her name was the Bad Wolf?"

Steve sighed. "First, Coulson, yes, I know, I said daughter. Fitz, it was a progenation machine on the planet Mestaline - "

"Messaline," Jenny corrected.

"Messaline, thank you," Steve acknowledged. "It took both the Doctor's DNA and Jessie's, and Jenny was the result. May, it was right after the whole problem with the ATMOS. It's been two days since we returned. And Jemma . . . they need time," he finished a little awkwardly. "Messaline was not the best trip we've ever taken." He turned to Jemma. "Her original name was Jessie Nightshade," he explained to her. "She changed it to the Bad Wolf after she lost both of her best friends in a battle here. Only the Doctor, SHIELD, and the Avengers call her by her previous name."

"Oh," was all Jenny said before she blinked. "How many versions of her are there?"

Steve chuckled. "Just the two currently."

"Hold on a minute," Coulson said, sitting down at a picnic bench nearby. "Let me get this straight. On another planet, this machine took the Doctor's and Jessie's DNA, combined it to form Jenny, and they just left her back here?"

"I chose to stay," Jenny told him as she sat down next to Steve. "I wanted to run so many places. I wanted to see other civilizations. But I hope I can still do a ton of running."

"You will," Steve promised, squeezing her hand before looking at the team. "You'll want to sit down for this." They eyed him, but they sat down as well. "I heard about what happened on the Valiant, where the past version of Jessie appeared," Steve began. "But it really wasn't . . . her, was it?"

"No," came four answers.

"It happened again on Messaline."

"You saw her?" Jemma asked eagerly.

"Yes," Steve replied with a nod. "She helped to end the war between the humans and the Hath, an alien race that was at war with the humans. They'd been told the war had been going on for generations. But with the progenation machines, the Doctor estimated that they could create twenty generations in a day. The war had only been going on for a week. Jessie used the Source, full of materials needed to start an ecosystem, to heal the planet, and the humans and the Hath stood down. But the humans' General, Cobb, shot the Doctor. Jenny stepped in front of the bullet instead. It took her in the throat."

"No one could have survived that!" May denied in shock, looking at Jenny. "There isn't even a scar!"

"The first version of Jessie healed her," Steve explained. "She used the Source and the Vortex to completely heal her and bring her back to life. She gave the Hath and the humans instructions on how to carry out Messaline. She told the current version of Jessie a few things that seemed to scare her before she left. Apparently, she was heading for the Valiant next."

"What did she say?" Fitz asked.

"I don't know. I couldn't hear."

"Something about . . . knocking?" Jenny put in hesitantly.

Steve smiled encouragingly at her. "Seems like you got your parents' heightened senses."

"Can I just . . . check one thing?" Jemma asked her.

"Sure," Jenny replied in a little confusion.

Jemma came around to the other side of the bench and placed one hand on the right side of Jenny's chest, then the other. She bit her lip. "Two hearts," she whispered before smiling and giving her a hug. "Welcome to Earth, Jenny."

Jenny smiled, hugging her back. "Thank you."

"I'm taking her back to America with me to introduce her to Stark and Banner," Steve told the team as he stood. "Then I'll talk to Fury about being her S.O. in SHIELD."

"That's a big job," Coulson told him. "Are you sure?"

"Never been surer," Steve replied instantly. "It's time for me to do something else in this world. I'm going to show Jenny what she's wanted. Save the planet, rescue civilizations, defeat terrible creatures."

"And run!" Jenny finished.

Steve laughed. "There is going to be lots of running," he promised before holding out his hand. "Ready to start?"

Jenny smiled, grabbing his hand. "It was nice to meet you!" she told the SHIELD team before the two of them took off.

The four watched them go before Fitz finally spoke. "Stark and Banner are going to have a field day."

***

The Doctor closed the library door behind him silently, finding Jessie curled up on the couch, just like he thought she'd be. She was gazing into the roaring fireplace, arms tight around herself, legs pulled under her. "Hello," he told her, walking over.

She didn't turn around. "Hi."

The Doctor sat next to her, leaning forward, elbows on his legs. "Quite a few days," he remarked.

"Not the best we've ever had," Jessie agreed before blowing out a breath and looking down. "Stopped a war, though. That counts for something." The Doctor waited, knowing she wanted to say something else. Eventually, she did. "I wanted to kill him."

"Cobb?"

"How could a man like that be so obsessed with killing?" Jessie asked, curling in on herself even more in a rare display of vulnerability from this version of her. "Is that what I was like?"

"No," the Doctor told her firmly, turning to her and reaching out to cup her cheek, turning her face to him. "Jess, you were nothing like that. There's one huge difference between you and Cobb. You killed to protect me, when there was no last resort. Cobb was killing because it had taken him over completely."

Jessie closed her eyes. "She gave me a warning, before she left," she told him, bringing her legs up behind her as she leaned against the back of the couch. "I've been trying to make sense of it, and I don't know what they mean."

"What did she say?" the Doctor asked, straightening at that. The last time her past self had been there as Bad Wolf, it had been so keen to their timeline, and it was now because their daughter was alive.

"She said the Laws of Time are at stake, and to beware the knocking," Jessie replied, frowning. "That doesn't sound good."

"No, it definitely doesn't," the Doctor agreed, frowning as he thought about it. "Unless a fixed point in time was changed, like a really major one, maybe even more than Pompeii . . . "

"What could be so important that would be changed?" Jessie asked.

"I don't know," the Doctor replied. "I can think of tons, but that doesn't matter right now."

"That's the future," Jessie agreed. She sat staring at the fireplace a little bit more, then said out loud, "Jezebel."

The Doctor blinked. "Sorry?" he asked.

"Well, you told me your name," she told him. "And a lot of people know my other one. What do you think about Jezebel?"

The Doctor swallowed, thinking about what the name meant. "It's Hebrew. For impure, wicked - "

"Yeah."

"And absolutely the opposite of you," he told her, twisting to look at her. "Why would you want that name?"

"Because I know you would say it and not care what it meant," she replied, looking at him. He blinked, caught off guard by that, and she smiled. "It describes me perfectly. I'm not anything close to pure, and the things that I've done are wicked. But you don't have a care in the world about that." She looked up at him. "Jezebel. That's my name. The one that only you know."

The Doctor considered her, then nodded slowly. "Jezebel," he repeated, brushing her cheek with his thumb. "I accept. And I promise you this: I will spend whatever time we have left remaining in our lives proving to you that you are anything but what your name suggests."

She smiled at him as he leaned down and kissed her softly, feeling her memories swirl through his head. The first discovery of her mutation, her life throughout middle school - he felt the serious urge to go back and readjust the timelines so he could kill Rick Johnson himself, but unfortunately, his death was already a fixed point in time, and for that, he didn't care if he had thought Saleen Harper was ever an idiot, that made up for it all - her entrance into SHIELD, and every last memory she had of her last self, all of the pain she'd endured of watching him act like she didn't exist.

And it was a hard punch in the gut, bad enough that he pulled away from the kiss abruptly, and she knitted her eyebrows. "What is it?" she asked worriedly. "What's wrong?"

"All of it," he whispered, looking at her in fear. "What I've done . . . what you had to go through . . . I'm sorry. I'm so sorry!"

"Don't be," she told him, shifting so she sat on her knees and reaching out to grab his shoulders and shake him slightly. "What happened in the timeline happened. What we are today came out of the past. It's just a window to look through. What I went through was hell, I'll admit that. But I wouldn't change it for anything for what we have now."

"But how could you forgive me for all of that?" he asked, not understanding it.

She gave him a pointed look. "How could you call me by my name and not think of how well it fits me?"

"It doesn't," he replied instantly.

"And I can forgive you for what happened," Jessie told him with a smile. "So just shut up for a while, yeah? We need a break. Simple as that."

The Doctor took a deep breath, nodding. "Yeah. I can agree with that."

"Good. Now budge over."

The Doctor chuckled, doing that and holding out an arm as she curled up into his side. "You really like using me as a pillow, don't you?"

"You're comfortable," was all that she mumbled.

The Doctor smiled. "Well . . . "

"Shut up," she told him, swatting him in the chest.

He snickered at that, and when Donna poked her head around in the doorway, he held up a finger to his lips before nodding down at the exhausted blonde nearly in his lap. Donna smiled and nodded, walking quietly away.

The Doctor spent the rest of the night listening to the fire crackle and pop, silently running his fingers through his wife's blonde tresses, most likely twisting them into dozens of knots and tangles, but as she slept soundly for the first time in weeks, he was content with just watching her. He really didn't have any idea whatsoever on how she could have forgiven him. But she had.

"One day, I'll understand why," he promised to himself before adjusting himself a little bit so he could sit more comfortably as he laid his head down on the back cushions.

***

Donna found the two of them sound asleep about an hour later when she woke up, both of them out completely, and she smiled. "Like I said," she whispered. "Bloody adorable."

She quickly and quietly left so she didn't disturb them. As she walked, she couldn't help but think of Lance, and of how she had thought he had been perfect for her. Her smile faded a little as she headed to the TARDIS kitchen to make herself a mug of tea.

She could only wish that she had someone for her like the Doctor and the Bad Wolf had each other.

***

The First Bad Wolf and her theme on the side. :)

To clarify, the First Bad Wolf - as Bad Wolf, when she was scattered throughout time and space as she said from "Parting of the Ways" - is sort of going in reverse order, just like River Song's timeline was. That's how she knows what's going to be happening.

Also to clarify, I saw two different meanings of Jezebel: one was "impure," which I really liked because that's what she sees herself as, and also "wicked," where she might think that's what she is, after all of the things she's done. The Doctor and the Bad Wolf. Kasterborous and Jezebel. Sound like the stuff of legend, don't they? ;)

READ: With this last interlude, this book is officially on hiatus until I've finished the first of "Apocalypse Rising." After the prologue and possibly "The Christmas Invasion" of the next book is done, I will start re-uploading every Doctor Who book. My priority is to get the first of AR done so the AR series and TCS series aren't so close together, because right now, they're on each other's tails.

But please, if you haven't already, check out the other two series! They follow most closely along the storylines of the actual Doctor Who show, with Rose and her company included. ;)

Until the ending of "Apocalypse Rising," I will see you soon!