The road less travelled...

Title: If You Knew Your Future… 5/12
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.

So I wasn't going to post this today. I was going to let you lot think either that was it or make you sweat on the hope that there would be more. But sonicgirl2005 'persuaded' me otherwise... *hides cattle prod*

Chapter V – A New Day

She’s woken by a tiny click.

For a moment she just lies there, feeling the softness of the pillow under her head. Bed. Warm blankets. Bit too warm, now that she thinks about it. If she wasn’t so comfortable, she’d throw one off.

“Donna?” a voice murmurs from the doorway.

Ah, so that’s what woke her up.

Typical.

Interesting, though.

She can remember more this time.

Both Doctors.

Both times through the same piece of history.

And she can’t help wondering where – and when – she is now.

“Oh, Donna,” comes a sigh from further in the room. “I’m so sorry.”

Ah, that clarifies a lot of things then. She might not know which Doctor she’s with, but it’s definitely after the events in the Crucible. He never sounded like that before he had to take her memories away. So she won’t have to go through it all over again. That’s something to be thankful for anyway.

For a moment she considers messing with his mind and pretending that she doesn’t know who he is. She’s even ready to be indignant at having a stranger in her bedroom.

Then she feels something wash over her: the deepest sorrow, mixed with waves of guilt-ridden agony. She felt similar echoes of emotion before, when she was the DoctorDonna, in those last moments before the Doctor – both Doctors – wiped her mind. She knows it’s what this Doctor is feeling now.

And she can’t possibly prolong that.

There are soft footsteps on the carpet – Donna knows that, before the metacrisis, she would never have heard them – and then she can feel as he bends over the bed. After a moment, there’s cool breath on her face and then the gentle touch of his lips on her forehead.

She can’t help smiling a bit.

“Just mates then?” she says cheerfully, and watches as he straightens so fast that it’s a miracle he doesn’t throw his back out.

“Donna?”

She grins, hugely amused by the complete astonishment on his face.

“’Morning!”

“Donna?!”

“Ooh, you’ve got a bit stuck there… Bless!” She sits up and turns on the bedside light. “Try another word, it might be easier. Oh, and try not to make it ‘what’. You’ll probably run out of those one day.”

“What?”

“See, that’s what I was talking about.” She draws up her knees and hugs them. “You just keep saying it. Then again, I suppose you were expecting me to wake up and demand to know why ‘John Smith’ was standing in my bedroom. Oh, and where I was. Not very smart, I would have thought, bringing me back onto the TARDIS when there’s a danger of my brain melting. Still, you always were one to take risks.”

“Donna…”

He continues to stand beside the bed, his mouth hanging slightly open, staring at her.

In the end, Donna throws back the blankets and gets up to stand in front of him. She can’t help but think that he looks older – not only older than he was at the start of their time travelling together, but even older than the Doctor she can remember as he took away her memories. There’s also a terrible sadness and longing in his eyes as he looks at her.

“You know,” she says in a desperate attempt to dispel that gloom, “you could at least have changed the sheets since I left. Or, I don’t know, dusted or something.”

Before she quite realises what’s happened, she’s been pulled into his arms and lifted off her feet as he hugs her so hard that she can’t breathe.

The strangest part is that he’s completely silent.

It’s almost as if he’s afraid that, if he makes a sound, she’ll disappear.

As she’s starting to get dizzy from lack of air, he sets her feet gently on the floor, and pulls back ever so slightly so that he can look into her eyes. His hands are clasping either side of her head, his thumbs brushing stray strands of hair off her face. And although there’s no hint of a smile on his face, his eyes tell her everything she needs to know.

“Donna Noble…”

She laughs. “Have you really got nothing else to say to me? After all, it’s been one hundred and ninety-one days, eighteen hours and six minutes, with a few assorted seconds, since I was last here. Don’t I even get a ‘hello’?”

Now he smiles, somewhat tentatively, but it’s better than nothing.

“Hello.”

“Well, that’s a start, I suppose. Still,” she gently pokes his chest, “it’s going to be pretty weird around here if I go from a Doctor who never shut his gob to one who sounds like a stuck record.”

“Oi!”

“Bit of an improvement.”

And a proper grin is gradually appearing on his face. “You haven’t changed at all, have you?”

“Would you want me to?”

He’s grinning from ear to ear now. “No, I probably wouldn’t.”

“I should hope not.” She rests her hands on his chest, feeling his hearts beating under her fingers. “So, this is just a random guess, but I have the strangest feeling you might have missed me. Just a bit, you know.”

“Maybe just a bit,” he agrees, and then hugs her again, almost as hard as before. “Oh, you have no idea how much!”

* * *

An hour later, they’re in the TARDIS kitchen. The Doctor is making tea and Donna has had time to think.

The biggest question, of course, is which Doctor is waiting for the kettle to boil.

Is it the one who took away her memories when she begged him not to, or the one who refused to do it until she pleaded with him?

She studies him, trying to find a difference between them.

In vain.

Not that that’s really a surprise.

He catches her watching him as he picks up the boiling kettle.

“What is it?”

Donna smiles in reply, deciding not to ask him directly. She doesn’t want him to think that the metacrisis has somehow affected her sanity.

“Mmm.” She rests her elbows on the table and her chin on her intertwined fingers. “Just thinking – did you know I was going to remember you?”

“No.” The smile vanishes from his face and he turns away to pour water into the teapot. “In fact – I was pretty sure you wouldn’t.”

“Were you looking for me?”

“Definitely not.” After warming the pot, he pours the water down the sink and then adds tea leaves to the little holder in the pot before turning back to face her. “Random co-ordinates. It’s all I’ve been doing since I left you behind. And then I came out of the TARDIS and found you lying on the ground in an alley.”

“Where?”

He half-smiles. “Just behind Adipose Industries. Right where you’d parked your car, the day we got back together again. And the TARDIS landed exactly where it did on that day, too. It was almost as if we’d just left after stopping Matron Cofelia and your mother had come to pick up the car.”

She nods, her gaze travelling to the tabletop, as he pours hot water into the teapot. She’s not particularly surprised by this news. It explains why she can remember duplicating everything that happened after they saved the world from the Adipose, but not the events of those particular days. That must have been the unstable moment in time that sent her to the other Doctor.

“So why bring me into the TARDIS then? That seems like a pretty risky thing to do.”

The Doctor’s expression becomes suddenly serious. “If you’d been all right, I was going to call an ambulance and leave you there. But you weren’t, Donna. Your heart was racing faster than I’ve ever felt any human’s beat and your breathing was all funny. By the time an ambulance arrived, you could have been dead. The TARDIS was the only place that I knew you’d have a chance of surviving.”

“And for reasons unknown to logic, you decided that my bedroom was a more sensible place for me than the medical bay.”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” He rolls his eyes and then carries the teapot over to the table. “Of course I took you to the medical bay! Then I left you to be scanned to catalogue what was wrong with you while I sent the TARDIS back into the vortex. I wasn’t about to drop you off home before you regained consciousness, was I? How could I explain that to your mother?”

She grabs his hand and grins. “You know I’m only teasing. Go on, what happened next?”

He wraps his fingers around hers. “I came back into what I expected to be the medical bay and found that the TARDIS had changed the room to your bedroom. She had you all tucked up in bed and everything. I could already see that you were improving, too. Your heart wasn’t beating so fast and your breathing was more even. So it was easier for me to leave you there.”

“And then you left me to sleep and headed off to fix the chameleon circuit or something.”

“Don’t be daft.” He reaches over to brush a curl off her face and takes the opportunity to slide the tips of his fingers down her cheek. “Of course I didn’t.”

She reaches up and takes his hand, entwining his fingers with hers and smiling at the relief in his eyes as he looks at her.

Next Part

Links to previous parts: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 (the sad one) Part 4 (the really sad one)