The road less travelled...

Title: Friends or Strangers 11/12
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 IX

“What do you want?” she asks in a voice that is barely louder than a breath. “With me, I mean.”

“I want to be with you,” he says softly. “More than anything. I – Donna, I’m in love with you. But if you find the idea of me as the Doctor too difficult to deal with, I’d give all that up. Become John Smith – a human being. I can do that. And if it’s what you want, I will. Let the Doctor disappear forever.”

She stares at him, stunned. She couldn’t have said what she expected from this moment, but that certainly wasn’t it. Random thoughts chase each other across her mind, one repeating itself over and over, until the words finally force themselves out of her mouth.

“The Doctor saves Earth. Saves the Universe.”

“I’d give all that away if you wanted me to.” His voice is soft, insistent, and she has no doubt he’s telling her the truth. “I’d do anything you asked me to, Donna. Become John Smith. Kill the Doctor. Even if that meant the end of the Universe, because at least I’d be with you.”

She continues to stare at him, completely silenced now. She can hear the emotion in his voice and see it in his dark eyes, which are boring into her. His grasp of her hand is almost too tight, but she can’t find the words to ask him to let go. She doesn’t want him to, either, because she’s certain that, if she rejected the Doctor at this moment, she would never see him again. And the thought of not being with John Smith is almost impossible to bear.

The minutes tick away almost audibly and yet she has no idea what to say. Then she jumps at the sound of a scream from somewhere behind them in the city and it seems to galvanise the man opposite her.

“I need an answer, Donna.”

“I… I don’t know.” She finds tears suddenly springing to her eyes. He’s asking her to choose his fate and she’s terrified of making the wrong decision. “I – I think I need some time.”

“Of course.”

He nods and then turns into the small, narrow alley that runs beside his apartment building. Donna glances in that direction and then does a double take. Where she had been sure, a moment ago, that the space was empty, she can now clearly see, standing at the far end, a blue police box.

The little blue box.

Suddenly all of that makes sense.

But before she can speak, he has fished a key out of his pocket, unlocked the door and led her inside. She’s silenced by the incredible size of the interior, but the colours and patterns prompt the strangest emotions inside her. Familiarity. Home. She’s instantly comfortable here, in spite of the fact that she’s seen the outside of this little blue box and there’s no way this massive space should be able to fit in here.

“It's bigger on the inside,” he says before she can speak. “That's all.”

She turns and arches an eyebrow at him, her uncertainty and shock momentarily suppressed, replaced by surprise. She lets go of his hand so that she can prop her fists on her hips. “Oh, that’s all?”

He nods, a frankly proud smile on his face.

“Where am I?” she asks softly, awed by the beauty of her surroundings.

“Inside the TARDIS,” he answers, and a strange expression, almost like a flicker of pain, crosses his face.

“Inside the what?”

“It’s called the TARDIS.”

She tilts her head to one side, feeling mildly impatient. “That’s not even a proper word,” she scolds

His lips twist, although she’s not sure why. “It’s an acronym,” he tells her. “Stands for Time and Relative Dimension in Space.”

“So the Doctor really travels in space?”

“And time.” He nods, his hands sunk deep in the pockets of his jacket. “So, what do you think?”

She’s almost completely recovered from her initial shock now and isn’t about to let him get away with the smug expression she can see on his face. She rubs her upper arms in an exaggerated gesture.

“Frankly, you could turn the heat up.”

He laughs and Donna feels some of the tension drain away. Finally he steps away to pick up the familiar brown duster which is draped over one of the coral-coloured beams running from the ceiling to the floor. Pulling it on, he moves back to stand in front of her, taking her face in his hands.

“I want you to stay in the TARDIS,” he says. “You’ll be safe here. I’ll come back – I promise.”

And he lightly touches his lips to hers as if to seal the vow in the time-honoured manner.

Then he’s gone.

Donna hears the doors close behind him and then there’s complete and utter silence. She feels as if, for a moment, she’s drowning in the nothingness, and it terrifies her.

But then she hears a soft mechanical blip, almost like a friendly greeting, and that, too, summons something like recognition from deep within those parts of her mind that she can’t control. She lets her feet carry her over to the other side of the massive console in the middle of the room.

A screen is flickering and then the picture stabilises and Donna can see the figure in the brown duster walking down the alley towards a mass of UNIT soldiers who are aiming guns at an indistinct grey form in the middle of the park.

Her eyes come to rest on the face of the man approaching the soldiers. There’s something cold and strange and terrifying in the features she knows so well. She can see a tired look in his eyes, as if he’s seen all of this so many times before. She doesn’t know how she understands what he’s feeling at that moment, but she can read it in the lines of his face, which aren’t nearly as obvious when he’s with her. At this moment she can almost believe his claim that he’s so much older than she could ever have imagined.

He strides forward with a strength and purpose she’s not used to seeing in John Smith. The bouncy, manic, childlike energy she’s glimpsed on numerous occasions – and of which she’s secretly fond, even if she usually rolls her eyes – is all gone, funnelled into icy rage.

She’s terrified.

This isn’t the man she’s in love with.

And that sense of strangeness only grows as he comes up to the group of UNIT soldiers, stopping in front of the captain of the team, snatching the weapon out of the man’s hand.

“No guns,” he insists from between clenched teeth before throwing the hated object away and marching off in the direction of a small, misty shadow some metres away.

The sentiment may be identical to that once uttered by John, but the look in his eye – the expression on his face – is completely foreign, and Donna is deeply unnerved by the difference that simply closing the door behind him made to the man she thought she knew.

He stalks past the line of soldiers, almost bristling, and comes to a halt before a shadowy, indistinct figure.

“I’m the only one who can help you,” he warns, his voice a low, threatening growl that makes a chill run down Donna’s spine. “But take one more life here and I’ll make it my personal business to destroy you.”

“My world has been destroyed,” comes the snarling reply from the figure opposite him. “I seek another. A life here or there makes no difference to me.”

“You have one chance to change your mind,” the Doctor declares. “And that was it.”

I believe in giving everyone a chance.

Donna lets out a slow breath and stares at the screen with renewed intensity. Now, as she watches, she’s beginning to see more of John Smith in the Doctor.

She recognises the little nod of his head that she’s seen him give more than once when he’s trying to find the solution to something. Nothing quite so shattering as an alien that wants to destroy the population of the Earth, of course. The answer to a cryptic crossword puzzle usually.

And that gesture with his hands.

There’s that familiar flicker of the eyebrow, too, as he’s waiting for an answer. She’s see that more times than she can count, most recently when he asked what she thought of the spaceship she’s currently standing in.

The more she watches, the more she can believe that that is John standing there.

Somehow even the anger that she can see him only just holding in check is familiar, even if she wishes with all her heart that it wasn’t and they hadn’t argued. And when she sees the cloaked figure stretch out a hand and one of the UNIT soldiers collapses, she knows what the Doctor will do, because she knows what John would do.

And yet her heart is in her throat as she watches him take on and defeat the creature, because she knows that he’s just as vulnerable as anyone else standing out there, and she can’t bear the thought of losing him.

Even if she’s still not sure who ‘he’ is.

Finally, though, as the figure in the brown coat stalks away from what is now a smoking hole in the ground, and the scanner goes blank, Donna turns away with a shaky sigh, realising at the same moment that her hands are trembling violently.

It’s almost inconceivable that the man she loves, John Smith, that quiet, bookish, funny, modest, and yet on occasion extroverted person who has crept beneath her brash defences and found a place in the warmest corner of her heart, could be the same man who has just faced down one of the most frightening creatures she’s ever seen.

John Smith fighting aliens. The idea is simply ridiculous.

And yet…

The more she thinks about it, the more natural it seems. Not because she’s got any physical memory of it happening, but because it’s as if the sight of him standing there, that icy cold stare on his face, touches a chord in her that resonates so strongly she can’t ignore it.

Familiar is the wrong word, because how can something be familiar if she can’t remember it? But, as she wanders back to the place where John left her, she just knows it’s right.

* * *
Teaser for the next part

‘It was killing people, Donna. I couldn’t let that continue.’