The road less travelled...

Title: If You Knew Your Future… Chapter 3
Author: katherine_b
Characters/Pairing: The Doctor (Ten) and Donna
Rating: G
Spoilers: All of series four of NuWho
Summary: Donna wakes up to find herself in a world that is much too familiar.

Chapter III – Return to the Nightmare

For just an instant, as Donna stands on the teleport platform and the Doctor fiddles with the switches and pretends he’s going to explain things to her, she considers jumping off and running back to him.

Of course she can’t, and the opportunity is gone before she can grasp it, but it’s the only time she thinks about doing it.

Really.

Absolutely messing with time and completely destroying the timelines.

Because the only place she really fears, in the whole of time and space that she has seen with the Doctor, is what is waiting for her inside CAL.

It’s not because of Lee and the children. They’re what she can’t wait to see, to hold again.

It’s the fact that this is the only place where she will forget about the Doctor.

She’ll forget all her knowledge about her time with this Doctor and the previous one.

And she’s terrified that, just maybe, something will happen and he won’t save her and the other four thousand and twenty-seven people saved in the database.

But she can’t even manage to scream before she’s dragged first out of the Library and then out of the TARDIS into that computer-generated half-life.

And then she forgets.

* * *

She opens her eyes to see the inside of the TARDIS and everything comes crashing back to her so hard that she drops to her knees, her hands pressed to her temples and her eyes closed again to shut it all out until she can cope.

After a moment, when she’s certain that the world has stopped spinning and the nausea has faded, she opens her eyes and realises that she’s looking straight at the Doctor’s severed hand in its glass jar.

The preservative fluid is bubbling gently.

And she wonders what would happen if she smashed the glass right now.

Would the second Doctor form from the hand?

If he did, would she become the DoctorDonna again?

And what would that do to the timelines?

She’s reaching out to the jar when another thought suddenly strikes her.

What happens if there was no metacrisis, or if there was one but it didn’t go both ways and she never became the DoctorDonna?

Those incredible moments in the Crucible flash back into her mind: her standing at the magnetron, mocking Davros; the fear on the faces of everyone else as the Daleks prepare to exterminate her and she blocks the weapons as easily as she used to prepare a report for one of her temporary bosses; her turning the Daleks from a threat into a joke; and then all three of the Doctors returning the planets to their proper position in time and space.

But what if there was no DoctorDonna to do all that?

And, even without a Time Lord mind, she knows the answer to that question at once.

She can see the deaths of everyone on the 27 planets, and then the entire Universe, at the hands of the Daleks. It’s as if it’s happening in front of her.

But it’s the deaths of every member of that small group of people in the Crucible, and of her mother and grandfather back on Earth, that are the real reason she stops short.

Her hand is back in her lap before she even realises she’s moved.

And in the end, with a massive sigh of regret, she gets to her feet and silently leaves the TARDIS.

Outside, the boiling mass of people who are queuing up to get to the teleport in the little shop make it difficult to locate a particular individual.

Still, she can’t bring herself to give up the search.

She knows she won’t find Lee, but she keeps looking anyway.

She finds the Doctor instead.

* * *

“Oh, come on! They’re boarding now! It’s no fun if I see it on my own. Four hours, that’s all it takes.”

Donna had always known that this would be the most difficult moment not to change, and it proves itself to be just that as she listens to his pleading on the other end of the phone. She’s seen how the Doctor has tried to protect her from the various dangers they’ve faced, and now she has to let him walk cheerfully into what she knows will be one of the most terrifying events of his life.

And yet…

If the Doctor doesn’t go on the cruise, he will never agree to her proposed trip to Shan Shen to cheer him up afterwards.

And without that, they never get the message about Bad Wolf.

And if that doesn’t happen, they won’t be in time to save the Earth from the Daleks.

Donna closes her eyes, presses her thumb and forefinger to the bridge of her nose, and tries to dissuade him without revealing everything.

“You be careful, all right?”

But because he’s determined to go, and she can never change his mind when he’s decided on something once and for all, he misses the desperation in her voice.

“What could possibly go wrong?”

She paces the pool deck for hours, waiting for the slow shuffle of his footsteps across the tiles. And her embrace is more fervent than it was last time, her own feelings of guilt making it almost impossible for her to meet his gaze.

But perhaps he’s forgotten her knowledge, or else because he understands what it’s like to relive events from one’s own past, he doesn’t say a word of recrimination.

And she’s certain that she imagines the whispered “Well done, Donna,” as she follows him back into the TARDIS as they leave the cursed planet.

Shan Shen is as delightful as she remembered, but it’s almost agony to follow the fortuneteller into her tent. She casts one desperate look back for the Doctor as she goes, but he’s nowhere in sight and in the end she has no choice but to sit down and go through it all again.

This time, though, the dreamy events of that parallel world, which last time faded almost as soon as the Doctor appeared, now stay strong in her memory.

Oh, she lies and says that she can’t remember.

But he’s watching her more warily, more closely, than he did the last time. Somehow he knows that what happened to her in that other world is important. Presumably his own experience with the Trickster has taught him to take these things seriously.

And when she finally allows herself to pronounce the words ‘Bad Wolf’, he grabs her hand as he bolts from the tent, so that she’s with him, rather than trailing behind, when the world is suddenly full of that dreadful omen.

Last time they had been all but silent as they flew threw the vortex to Earth.

This time, as they’re hurtling through space, the Doctor wrings every last detail of that parallel world from Donna.

“I know you remember,” he says grimly, as he works the controls. “I can see it in your eyes. So you might as well tell me.”

“You told me not to.”

“Donna, the whole Universe is in danger,” he explodes, giving up manipulating the gears to come and stand in front of her, his hands gripping her shoulders. “I don’t know what the darkness is, but I know it’s not good, and I know that you know about it.”

“Doctor, I can’t tell you!” She’s desperate, pleading with him. “I can’t change time!”

“If Rose has crossed over from the parallel universe, it’s not because she’s come for a cup of tea,” he insists, holding her so tightly that her shoulders ache. “Donna, I need to know why.”

“You’ll figure it out,” she says stubbornly, although part of her is desperate to tell him, to send him to the Shadow Proclamation before the Earth is stolen, in the hope that, by doing so, they can save the lives of those who will be killed by the Daleks.

But her remembrance of life as the DoctorDonna, as well as her own sketchy knowledge of timelines and parallel worlds, keeps her silent, particularly about her own fate in that other, Doctor-less world.

She’s not about to upset him like that.

There’s already too much for him to have to face without knowing about that.

Next Part

Links to previous parts: Part 1 Part 2