The road less travelled...

Title: Five of a Kind 7/8
Author: katherine_b
Rating: At least PG…
Characters: Donna and the Doctor
Spoilers: There may be mentions of everything except the Next Doctor, so proceed with caution if that sort of thing bothers you.
Summary: Donna might be having a few regrets…
A/N: If you haven’t read All In her Mind, which was part one of this story, or Lost for Words, which was part 2, in those stories the Doctor and Donna were happily reunited and had a bit of fun one night when they played board games and the Doctor got a bit drunk. Well, a lot drunk. Well, completely smashed, actually. And it was all Donna’s fault (or so the Doctor claims). They ended up in bed together. This is the consequence of that happening…

Part VII

“Oh, wait!” Donna exclaims suddenly, pressing a button so that the TARDIS judders to a halt. “I just thought of something.”

“Something that doesn’t involve us going to Chiswick?” the Doctor asks hopefully, peering at her through his fingers.

“Yeah, dream on, Spaceman,” she says sarcastically. “No, it’s more important than that.” She walks across and pokes him gently in the chest. “Important as in – have you been to see them since you got into my head and left your unconscious body in my apartment?”

An expression of horror and guilt floods the Doctor’s face. “Um… no…”

“And did you warn them what you were planning?”

“Donna,” he straightens up and looks her in the eye, “you heard your mother’s voice when she ‘introduced’ you to John Smith. Do you really think I want to go back and face that again?”

“Ah, so you’re a coward,” she teases.

“Any day,” he agrees. “Particularly where your mother is concerned.”

“Well, let me tell you, something, Time Boy,” she pokes him again, a bit harder this time, “she’d be a darned sight worse if we turned up with me looking like the side of a house, which I imagine I will in a couple of months. And I’m no more keen for there to be an unplanned regeneration of you than you are of the same thing to happen to me. So it makes far more sense for her to have an idea of what’s going on.” She straightens his tie and runs a gentle hand down his lapel before touching a light kiss to his mouth. “But if it’s any comfort, I’m probably more likely to cop it than you. She’s probably going to be so glad to have me back and not have to tiptoe around me like I’m made of glass that she’ll forgive you – in time, anyway.”

* * *
They arrive only two days after the Doctor turned up at Donna’s apartment. Donna gets the Doctor to wait with the TARDIS while she goes up to the house. She’s threatened him with every kind of punishment, up to and including torture by feather duster, if he takes advantage of the moment to do a runner.

“Hello, love!” Gramps kisses her cheek and ushers her inside. “My, aren’t you looking a right picture? Your Mum’s just on the phone, but she’ll be glad to see you.”

Donna follows him down the hall, finding it almost impossible to believe that it’s only been a few days since she was last here, but with no memory of the Doctor. Time, as she knows only too well, is a very complicated thing.

“Well, young lady,” is her mother’s greeting as Sylvia slams down the phone, “decided it’s time to pay us another visit, have you? Come to tell us you’ve lost your job, I suppose.”

“Mum, of course not!” Donna rolls her eyes. “You know, sometimes I do have things to tell you that aren’t all bad.” She smirks a little. “Actually, I wanted to introduce you to someone.”

“Really?” Sylvia looks immediately interested. “What’s his name?”

“John.” Donna glances at her watch. “I asked him to come by around four so that you could say hi.”

Sylvia at once begins to bustle around, tidying up a pile of magazines and handing Wilf two empty mugs with a nod that says he’s to take them into the kitchen. “And how long’s he been in the picture, Miss? Months, I suppose, but you couldn’t be bothered introducing us before now.”

“Well,” Donna struggles not to giggle, “I’ve known him for a while, but we only decided to see how we’d be as a couple a few weeks back. So I thought you should meet him.”

“Hmph.” Sylvia rolls her eyes, but Donna has caught a glimpse of excitement in Sylvia’s eyes. She has to wonder what the reaction will be when it turns out that this new man is actually the Doctor.

* * *
In the end, the reaction is pretty much what Donna had expected. There’s an awful lot of shouting, but in the end Donna is able to out-bellow her mother and gets her to listen. The explanations are long, complicated, and Donna suspects that neither Sylvia nor Wilf fully understand them. Still, in the end, she’s right and they’re so glad she’s okay that neither of them are too critical of the Doctor. That said, the things he says probably help to sway matters more than a little.

“I couldn’t do without her,” he says, his eyes shining with intensity. “I need Donna. So I did everything I had to in order to get her back.”

And that seems to be the end of that.

The pregnancy announcement, however, has a very unexpected response.

Sylvia bursts into tears.

“I though I was supposed to be the emotional one,” Donna teases, staring at her mother in amazement.

And when they leave the house, the Doctor is weighed down with several bags of things that Sylvia has hunted out of the attic from when Donna was a baby.

“You know,” Donna says, opening the doors of the TARDIS for him, “I think she likes you. Sort of. A bit.”

“Hah!” The Doctor drops the bags and leans wearily against one of the support beams. “I think this is a cunning plan to suffocate me under all this weight and then she won’t have to bother about me!”

Donna giggles. “Suspicious Martian.”

He shoots her an annoyed glance. “How many times do I have to tell you – ?”

“I’m not from Mars,” she joins in his indignant chorus. “Got it,” she adds, sidling over to plant a kiss on his annoyed mouth.

His irritated expression fades. “I’d take you there to prove it,” he tells her, strolling over to the console, “but the air’s not healthy for someone in your condition.”

* * *
Over the next nine months, Donna discovers that the air of a lot of places isn’t healthy for someone in her condition. She finds herself left behind on an increasing number of occasions while the Doctor is out saving a wide variety of planets. Still, she does manage to rescue him once by making the TARDIS materialise inside the jail cell where he’s being held captive and getting him away before he’s executed for jaywalking.

Most of the time, however, she’s left behind a lot to twiddle her thumbs, and she finds that she’s getting very sick of it.

“What am I going to do then, break?” she demands on one occasion as the Doctor is trying to find a dry spot to land the TARDIS during a flood.

“It wouldn’t be good for them,” he says, reaching over to rest his hand on her swollen belly. One of the babies kicks vigorously in response. “Or you,” he adds, reaching out to stroke a hand down her cheek.

“Oh, give it a rest, Spaceman” she growls.

He puts his arms as far around her as he can – which, if she’s honest, isn’t very far – and leans forward so that his forehead is touching hers and his dark eyes are staring into her blue ones. “Look, Donna, whether you like it or not, there’s no way you could run at the moment, and if you recall, we used to have to do quite a lot of that.”

She’s about to speak again when he lifts a hand and places it on her lips.

“If anything happened to you, I’d never forgive myself,” he says softly, dots a kiss on her mouth and then ducks around her out of the door.

* * *
So, of course, it’s completely in character for him to be off saving yet another planet on the day that the contractions begin in earnest.

The Doctor escapes while she’s having a shower, and Donna comes out of the bathroom to find a note pinned to her pillow telling her that he had to go and he loves her. Oh, and she mustn't leave the TARDIS, no matter what. She snorts, crumples it up and tosses it into the bin.

“It’s like being married to Superman,” she complains to the TARDIS. “Turn around and he’s vanished. Off to save the little guy.”

The ship creaks in a sympathetic tone and Donna smiles. “Thanks, girl.”

In the kitchen, the kettle is already boiling and the bread is toasting, but Donna has to grab the back of the chair as a somewhat vicious cramp strikes.

“Bloody Braxton-Hicks,” she complains. “Typical that something like this would be named for a bloke. Still,” she eyes the toast, which has just hopped out of the toaster, “not sure I’m hungry now. Maybe just a copy of tea, eh? I’ll have something later if I feel like it.”

And the TARDIS, which has been so obliging at providing whatever bizarre combination of food that her cravings demand, now produces not only a steaming cup of tea, but a bottle of cool water.

“Oh.” Donna stares at the two objects in front of her and her hand unconsciously moves to her stomach. “Right. And I don’t suppose this has anything to do with the fact that Martha told me to keep up my fluids, particularly in the first stages of labour?”

There’s an innocent creak from the TARDIS, but the Donna notices that the room around her seems to be morphing into something else.

Something that looks suspiciously like the infirmary.

And before she can touch it, the cup of tea has vanished, to be replaced by another bottle of water.

“Ah,” she says slowly, the word becoming a groan as a wave of pain hits. “Yeah, thanks,” she complains through gritted teeth to the ship. “Still, you couldn’t have let the Doctor in on the secret so he was here?” She sits back as it passes. “I suppose I’ve got to go through this on my own then, do I? Or just with you for company?”

And that’s when she hears somewhat tentative footsteps in the hallway outside the infirmary door.

* * *
“I don’t know,” says Martha, after they get through the longest contraction yet. “I was in the office when I heard the TARDIS and then it was right there beside my desk. The door opened and I thought I’d better check it out.”

Donna tightens her fingers around Martha’s hand. “I’m glad you’re here,” she says, and means it, particularly as the next contraction hits. “I just wish,” she says through gritted teeth, “that the Doctor was, too.”

Part 8