A/N:

Basically, I am so so so so so so sorry I haven't updated in (YIKES) two years! Believe me, it's not because I'm giving up on this story. I'm actually really fond of this story, and I hold it so dear to my heart that I'm afraid I'll mess it up! However, that's not a fair excuse, and I do beg your forgiveness. I'm not giving up on this, no matter how long between my updates.

Just think of this as a New Year's gift- it's even one of my resolutions for this upcoming year. I want to make some serious progress on this, if not finish it within the year. I'm trying to get myself into the habit of writing more frequently, and not leaving my poor readers in the wake of my terrible procrastination.

But nevertheless, thank you guys so much for sticking with me! I beg your forgiveness.

And without further ado, here is "Of Our Own Design: Of Hospitals and Hinkypunks"

It was very quiet when Rose awoke. It was dark and quiet and her head felt heavy. Although, it didn't feel as heavy as her left arm and chest did. Her eyes began fluttering open, the dark room coming into a bleary focus.

"Hey there," the Doctor's voice came quietly from beside her. She turned her head toward where he was seated up by the head of the bed.

"Doctor," she asked, recollecting the most recent events. "Oh my God, Doctor," she snapped, fully remembering her last thought. "Where the flippen hell were you?"

"Shh," he chuckled, pushing her hair back behind her ear. "We'll talk about this later," he told her softly, smiling faintly.

"Oh no," Rose snapped. "You don't get to tell me when we'll talk about this. We'll bloody well suss it out now. You said you'd be gone two days," she barked, furious.

"Rose, you know I ran into trouble! I called and let you know it was all alright, didn't I," he asked, eyebrow raised into his hair. "And yes, I'd prefer to talk about this later because Luna's finally asleep and I'd rather not wake her up. That girl has a gob worse than mine- not to mention an imagination to compete with the Xylax people," he finished, gesturing to the little girl curled up at Rose's side- head resting on Rose's chest.

"Oh," Rose stated, dumbfounded. "Oh," she repeated. "I'd wondered why I felt so heavy." She gently reached for the bedside controller that she'd seen to her left and pressed one of the buttons to slowly raise herself up into a semi-seated position. She'd tried not to bother the sleeping child, but upon feeling the bed readjust, Luna had scooted downward to rest her head on Rose's lap instead. Rose chuckled slightly before looking back to the Doctor.

They were quite the sight, Luna and Rose, moving in sync with each other. The mystery of the child had plagued him the entire day. After hours of non-ending chatter, Luna had only managed to inform him of Nargles- which he'd then committed and entire fifteen minutes to educate her of her misinformed conception of the poor creatures. As she had believed them to be troublemakers and thieves, she was quite surprised by his claim that they were only seeking suitable habitats for the queens of their colonies.

Along with Nargle-talk, she told him more about the fire, and how Rose had gone up the tree because the entire ground level of the house was in flames. Lucy had been upstairs because her dad had grounded her. Rose had been across the street at Racheal Stevenson's house, watching their MTV when she heard the screams and then ran out to help.

The Doctor had asked Luna if they knew how the fire had started, but she simply shook her head and resumed coloring quietly. For hours, he tried to navigate the conversation toward something useful or, like her parents and who they were, but the loquacious girl had always found a way to redirect him by becoming distracted.

Speaking to her, however, the Doctor was able to make a general assessment of Luna. She said she was three, but her speech patterns suggested she was closer to four, although he would have wagered she was four and close to five. She was very bright, and watching her facial and bodily mannerisms during conversation led him to believe that she was more mentally competent than most human children her age. Luna was clever, well spoken, mostly distracted, granted. But he'd never been one to begrudge a person of that particular quality.

He rather enjoyed her, to be honest. The past few hours had been fun and mostly amusing, if not slightly counter-productive. But here she lay, head on Rose's lap as Rose cautiously put her fingers to the sleeping girl's hair.

"Who is she," Rose asked softly.

Quickly and bewildered, he looked at her. "You mean you don't know," the question sounding harsher than he'd intended.

"Am I supposed to," she huffed.

"No, no. Sorry, it's just," he stammered, tiredly rubbing at his eyes with his palms. "I thought you might know her- she seems to be very fond of you," he gestured toward her.

"I haven't got any idea why," Rose admitted, amazed at the prospect.

"She was here when I got here. Which," he pointed out, "was as soon as I got the call from the village." Rose had no idea how he had returned so quickly this time, yet couldn't show the same courtesy when he'd promised to be gone only a couple of days. Unfortunately, she'd resigned herself to never knowing how his priorities were sorted, and stored the musing with all the others that she'd labeled, 'that's just the way he does things.'

"I've never seen her before," she reiterated after a few minutes of gauging her situation. She'd tried to feel the familiar sense of discomfort, being embraced by a strange child. But the feeling never came.

"Her name is Luna," the Doctor informed her, leaning back in his chair again. "She said she's three years old, but I reckon she's a bit older," he chuckled.

"How long was I out of it," she wondered aloud.

"Oh," he replied, "a couple of days. But I've been here eighteen hours. Luna's been asleep for five. Wouldn't stop talking between then and when I got here," he complained, although the tone was too soft for the complaint to be too serious.

The feeling in Rose's leg had slowly begun to dissipate under Luna's tight grasp, so she gently untangled the girl from her leg and held her in her arms.

"So," she started slowly, blowing a hair out of her face in thought. "What do we do? We have to find her parents, right?"

The Doctor grinned, "Always the domestic approach, Rose Tyler!"

She glared at him. "Well what am I s'posed to bloody say? S'pose you just assumed we'd leave her here for her mum and dad to find her. Bloody useless you are."

Brow furrowing at her tone, he lifted the sleeping child and answered, "No. Of course not. I only figured you might like to be discharged before we did anything else, seeing as how you seem to have forgotten that you're currently laying in a hospital bed," he finished flatly, the laying the unspoken inquiry down thick.

Rose glanced her surroundings sheepishly. It wasn't often she snapped at the Doctor, but likewise, it wasn't like him to leave her for two weeks out of her own time zone. Fortunately she'd been on Earth, but she felt her annoyance was still justified. It was likely just as bad that she had taken that time away from him and landed in hospital anyway.

"I'm sorry, Rose," he said softly, reaching over and hitting the button that rang the nurse or doctor on duty. "I shouldn't have waited so long to find a way back, I know. But I don't want this," he tried to gesture around the sleeping infant in his arms to the entirety of the room, "to be something that happens every time I'm not around.

Rose chuckled, "Well it's only happened this once, and-"

"Rose is awake!" Luna's small voice drifted from the Doctor's arms. She struggled lightly to leave his hold and hopped onto the bed with Rose once again. "I'm glad you're okay," she whispered into Rose's ear and hugged her across the middle. Quickly recovering from their previous conversation, Rose grinned at the child and thanked her.

It wasn't long before someone came in and prepared Rose for her discharge, the Doctor all the while assuring them with the assistance of his psychic paper that he was an MD and could care for her injuries in the safety of their home, from where he ran his practice.

They had to finish that conversation. Rose knew it—so did the Doctor, or, at least she assumed he knew. She also assumed he would do his best to avoid it. The subject matter was too heavy, she could see it in his eyes when he assessed her burns and bruises, or when she struggled for breath. He blamed himself. Part of her wanted to blame him, too, but she knew that wasn't fair. He'd left her in Ottery St. Catchpole, yes, but he didn't tell her to scale a burning building and rescue the girl. He'd never ask her to do that. In fact, that was exactly the type of thing he would have told her not to dare do, had he been there at the time. But he wasn't there to do it himself, she told herself, and someone had to do it. The firemen would have been too late, and Rose was not about to stand by and watch a defenseless little girl die.

As the Doctor and the doctor continued their consultations, Rose turned her attention to Luna, who was seated next to Rose, thigh to thigh along the side of the bed.

"Luna," Rose started, the blue eyed child staring up at her. Rose tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear and smirked as Luna mimicked her. "Do you know where your mummy is?"

The child shook her head in answer. "Mummy went away, daddy said," she murmured. "He said she'd gone away on accident." Rose's heart broke. She didn't know if that meant Luna's mother had passed away, or if she'd left willingly, but she did know that this small girl latched to her side didn't have a mother. No one to braid her hair at night and giggle with her over silly things, or watch telly with until three in morning, or cuddle with her after her first heartbreak. She supposed any friend could do those things with her, but not quite like a mother.

She blinked back the tears she hadn't realized had appeared in her eyes. "Well," she cleared her throat. "How about daddy? Do you think he's looking for you?"

Luna giggled. "The Doctor asked the same question. Why would daddy be looking for me? He knows where I am." Rose Blinked.

"He does?"

"Uh-huh," Luna sang, beaming up at Rose.

"Well, we can go ahead and leave at any minute we please," The Doctor interrupted happily. Rose glanced at Luna and he knowingly took the little girl's hand. "Up we go Loony Luna!"

Luna's giggles were infectious to both adults as they joined in her glee.

"Let's go find your daddy, eh?"

DW~DW~DW~DW~DW

It was weird, Rose decided, riding in a car with the Doctor. It was even weirder that they had a small passenger in the backseat chattering away at them as they drove back into the small village community where they'd decided to look for Luna's father. Rose quickly pieced together how the Doctor had mistaken the small blonde's age, because she spoke quite a bit more and quite a bit more eloquently than most children she'd known at the age of three.

Even weirder than the child in the back seat of the car was the Doctor driving and chatting along with her, saying things Rose wished she could still consider bizarre. It was bizarre, though. Luna was saying things about HinyPinkies or something, and the Doctor would give her a brief history of the creatures. Although the language was insane and unbelievable, the environment made her feel fuzzy. Not an altogether bad or sick kind of fuzzy, but warm, and excited.

The Doctor's smile widened at Luna and shot the girl a wink through the rearview mirror in reward for asking a question that must have been "the right question," and continued to drivel on about the HinkyPinkies. Rose's cheeks felt warm when her gaze met his for half a second, but she threw in a question of her own just to humor them.

"Sorry, but I don't think I've seen a HinkyPinkie before… What color are they?"

Luna guffawed as the Doctor chuckled and corrected her. "Hinkypunks, Rose," he said with a soft smile, and Luna dove right in on describing the foreign creatures to his companion.
He listened to child natter on about the Hinkypunks, and marveled at her surprisingly accurate description of them. It was absolutely astounding how much she knew, being so young and from Earth. In 1983, no less. There was something about her, though, nagging at his thoughts. Or his mind altogether, like it was begging to gain entrance. He hadn't felt something like that in a long time, and although his mind wanted to reach back out to it, he stopped himself.

He didn't know anything about this child, though he had picked up on her being a rare medium-level telepath (bordering on high-level, if he was honest), and allowing himself to make that connection with the part of her mind that was reaching out was akin to walking by a house, seeing a cat and taking that cat away from that house and bringing it back on the TARDIS with him.

Well, maybe that wasn't the best analogy, but the point still stood. It would be very rude to her family, regardless of them sharing her mental capabilities or not. He couldn't quite tell if they did, though, because Little Luna seemed to be quite adept at keeping personal things locked up and personal—almost with the proficiency of someone who had been taught to do so. Questions surrounding the girl buzzed through his head quite rapidly. Who was she? Who taught her? Who or what were her parents?

The sight before him as they rounded a large grassy hill made him gasp. Rose turned her attention back to the driving Time-Lord in question. Seeing his eyes widen at whatever he'd seen, she took a peak out the window as well.

"Is that really—" She started when Luna yelled over her.

"That's Bill's house!"

The Doctor hit the brakes and made to turn up the driveway, lurching Rose forward and back suddenly, still not quite believing her eyes.

"Doctor," she whispered, eyes glued to the tall building with several chimneys. It was more than four stories tall and so precariously balanced that it seemed to lean over the small barn which sat quite near to the base of it. The pigpen off to the side of the safety-hazard house held four small creatures which resembled pigs, but looked as if a pig had a more attractively fat cousin that preferred to stay clean and perfectly well groomed. The whole scene was like something she'd read out of a book—a very specific one.

The Doctor stopped the car and Luna immediately unfastened herself and went running up the steps of the porch. The Doctor turned to Rose, who was still bracing herself on the dashboard, his eyes wide with laughter and disbelief. "Rose," he exclaimed—

"Wizards," they both exclaimed.