The road less travelled...

Title: Friends or Strangers 9/12
Author: katherine_b
Rating: PG
Characters: Donna/the Doctor (John Smith)
Disclaimer: If the Doctor and Donna were really mine, this story wouldn’t even need to exist!
Spoilers: Up to and including Planet of the Dead
Summary: Donna’s got a new friend…

Chapter VII

Donna glances around before entering the small coffee shop around the corner from her office. The young man she’s come to meet is already waiting at a small table, a file of papers in front of him.

“Sorry I’m late,” Donna apologises as she sits down. “Couldn’t get away.”

“That’s fine.” Her friend smiles and sips his half-empty cup. “Another five minutes and I would have called.” He pushes the file across the table. “That’s all I could get you. Everything for the past two years is still highly classified, but what I’ve got for you there has been released. No pictures though. Couldn’t get them to print out clearly enough. Not that there were many in any case.”

“Brilliant.” Donna draws the file across the table, briefly eyeing the large letters U-N-I-T on the front, and flips through the pages before looking up with a smile. “I owe you for this.”

“Hey, not a problem.” Nathan grins. “I owe the Doctor big-time – I mean, he saved my life and then got me the job with UNIT. So this if this helps him in any way, I’ll feel like I’ve started paying some of that back.”

“The uniform suits you,” Donna remarks teasingly. “And I bet your mum’s proud.”

Nathan rolls his eyes. “What, you haven’t heard her?”

“Are you kidding?” Donna laughs. “You’re held up as an example for me to follow. ‘Anna’s young boy – you know Anna, one of my Wednesday girls – well, her boy, Nathan, he’s got a proper job now. Why can’t you be like him and settle down? You’re so much older than he is…’”

“You’re kidding! Really?” Nathan looks astonished. “I’ve never been an example for anyone before! It’s always been ‘You don’t work hard enough and you don’t care about anything. Why can’t you find something to do with your life? You’re old enough now’ and so on. You should have heard her when I lost my job! I’m just glad I had the UNIT option to tell her about – that probably saved me from copping it even worse!”

“Well, you can now tell your mother that my mum’s so impressed with what you’ve achieved that she’s hoping I’ll follow in your footsteps.” Donna winks at him. “That should set her right.”

“Probably.” Nathan gets to his feet and touches his index finger to his crisp, new red beret. “I must be off, Donna. Let me know if you need anything else.”

“Coffee’s on me,” she tells him. “And thanks, Nathan!”

“You’re welcome.” He grins and heads out of the café. Donna watches him go, standing straight and tall in the black uniform, unable to help thinking how much more confident he is than she’s ever seen him before. She orders a drink for herself and then opens the file.

The documents begin with a summary of the Doctor’s association with UNIT since the early 1960s. Donna feels her cheeks burn as she reads about how the Doctor and UNIT worked together, and the Doctor’s particularly close association with someone called Alistair Lethbridge-Stewart. Donna quickly realises that this is ‘the Brigadier’, the man she had first learned about when she was making all those mistaken assumptions during her earlier research into the Doctor.

Donna sips her coffee when it arrives and goes back to reading. She’s always hated being wrong about anything, but at least she’s now getting a chance to learn the truth.

* * *
“That’s disgusting!” Donna declares as John eats a chip he has dipped in ketchup, then mayonnaise and then mustard. “I mean it – really revolting!”

He grins and winks at her. “Try it before you jump to any hasty decisions,” he tells her as soon as he’s swallowed the mouthful.

“I have – well, I’ve tried them with mustard and with mayonnaise separately, and I couldn’t get them down.” She waves a calamari ring under his nose. “And you won’t try these.”

He pulls a face. “I don’t like fish, that’s all.”

“Yeah, just chips and bananas.” She prods him in the ribs. “You know you won’t get away with that now that I’m living here too, right? There’s actually going to be food in the cupboard.”

John grins in obvious delight. “Does that mean you’ll cook?”

“Only if you do the dishes.”

“Sounds like a fair deal.” He bundles up the paper that her long-gone chips came in (he stole at least half of them) and flings it in the direction of the bin. It wavers on the rim for a moment before falling in. “Done!” he says cheerfully.

“That’s it, I’m so cooking something tomorrow that uses every pot and pan you’ve got! You’ll have dishpan hands by the time you’re done.”

He turns what she mentally calls his ‘puppy dog’ eyes on her. “You wouldn’t!”

“Oh, watch me!” She chuckles and eats the calamari ring. “You won’t know yourself, mate! You’ll rue the day.”

John picks up a chip from his serving and pops it into her mouth. “Never,” he assures her.

She smiles and feeds him one in return. There’s a long silence between them, but it’s comfortable, which is more than Donna had expected when John asked her to move in with him. She thought that, at least for the first few days, they would sit in clearly defined spaces to stay out of each other’s way, but instead they’re lounging on the couch together, side by side, the television on quietly in the background as they share their first dinner together like this.

“You know, I’d never have picked you as the type to like Shakespeare,” she says as she finishes the last calamari ring, waving her hand towards the film version of Much Ado About Nothing which is playing on the television

“You’re the one who calls me a bookworm,” he reminds her as he selects another chip.

“And I expected an apartment full of bookshelves,” she admits. “Where are they all?”

“Library.”

“Fair enough. But I imagined you preferring the dramatic Shakespeares – Hamlet or Macbeth or one of those. Not the comedies.”

“We-ell, I do, but these are fun once in a while,” he admits. “All the twists and turns and silliness and people still ending up with the ones they’re meant to.”

“Do you believe in fate then?”

“I take it you don’t.”

She smiles. “I’d say you were right, but I can’t prove it, so I’m not going to.”

He chuckles. “Have I got you scared now?”

“Just – more open to things,” she admits.

“I’m glad to hear it.” He leans down to dot a kiss on her lips. “Good girl, Donna.”

She reaches up and returns the kiss before stealing one of his chips.

“Oi!”

“Oh, bite me, whiny boy.” She chews and swallows the chip before speaking again. “So you do believe in it? Fate, I mean, not me nicking your food.”

“I’d have a hard time not believing that!” he tells her indignantly, defending his parcel of takeaway by cuddling it to his chest. “But as for fate – yes, I do.”

“Why?” she asks as she leans her head against his shoulder – and takes the opportunity to steal another chip.

He chuckles and sets the package down between them before sliding his arm behind her neck and starting to stroke her hair. However he sighs before speaking and Donna looks up to see that his eyes are sad.

“I heard a story once about two people,” he begins, and she half-smiles because she’s heard that beginning often enough, but she lets him continue without interrupting.

“The woman was important,” he says with another sigh. “More important than she would ever have believed. So important that the Universe conspired to make sure that she was in the right place at the right time to save everything from a terrible fate. The most unlikely things happened to her – things you would never believe – but because she was so strong and so brilliant and so incredible, everything worked out fine.”

“Not quite the kind of fate I was talking about,” Donna tells him.

“Oh, but that’s not the end,” he kisses her hair, “because there wasn’t just a woman. There was a man, too. A man who didn’t realise until much later, after the woman had saved the Universe, that the fates weren’t just conspiring to get her everywhere she needed to be. They were working to make sure he was where he needed to be as well. That everything he’d done in his life – all of the mistakes he made and the things he learned – were all there to make sure that he ended up with the most important woman in the Universe.”

Donna smiles again, reaching up to smooth her hand down his cheek, feeling his stubble brush her fingers.

“That man in your story – that was you, wasn’t it?”

He chuckles softly. “Can’t keep anything from you, can I, Donna Noble?”

“And the woman?”

She looks up to see something suspiciously like tears glistening in his eyes, but his smile is warm when he looks at her, his arm tightening around her shoulders.

“That woman,” he tells her softly, “was someone I loved more than I ever realised, until she was gone.”

* * *
Teaser for the next part

‘Let me get this straight – you want me to leave?’