The road less travelled...

Title: The Skies Turn Dark 5/7
Author: katherine_b
Rating: PG
Characters: The Doctor, Jack Harkness, Martha Jones, Donna Noble
Summary: The Doctor needs help.

Part V

“Your heart is slowing down, but the Doctor’s is racing,” Jack says as he sees the line showing the Doctor’s heartbeat seeming to beat at twice the rate it was before.

“It’s not racing,” Donna assures them. “I’ve got his second heart beating again, that’s all.”

“But you, Donna.” Martha places her hand on the Doctor’s shoulder, and Jack can see that her eyes are glistening with tears. “If your heart stops, I don’t know if we can save you.”

“The most important thing is the Doctor.” Donna’s voice is full of certainty. “And maybe, once he’s safe, he might be able to save me.”

“Might?!” Jack’s hand slams down on the bed beside the Doctor’s head. “He’d damned well better!”

Donna’s voice is quiet in response. “He isn’t going to be able to save me if I can’t save him.”

There is a long, painful silence in the room in response. Martha fishes in her pocket for a tissue and wipes her eyes as Jack moves to stand beside the bed holding Donna’s motionless body. For a moment he rests his hand on her arm, remembering when she threw her arms around him in the TARDIS, recalling those few words she spoke to him, and thinking, too, of the warning tones in the Doctor’s voice as the Time Lord named him to his companion.

He would never know what it was about the Doctor’s voice that, for the first time, warned him away from someone. Somehow, though, he got the impression that Donna Noble was well and truly out of bounds and, perhaps for the first time in his long life, he had curbed his natural, fifty-first century propensities.

He would certainly never forget the agony he had felt when he first learned Donna’s last name and what that meant to him. What he had taken away from her without even realizing. Who Peter Noble, born to the then-Sylvia Mott and placed in an orphanage because Sylvia was an unmarried teenage mother, might have become if he hadn’t been given to the 456.

“Donna,” he says, his voice hoarse, before suddenly deciding to change the subject, “what – how are you doing that anyway?”

“Well,” Donna’s reply is thoughtful, “you know about the metacrisis. The other Doctor grew out of this Doctor’s old hand. But I got a massive jolt of energy from that process, and another from Davros. Remember?”

“We’d be hard-pressed to forget,” Jack says drily, and Donna manages a soft chuckle.

“Okay,” she goes on, “the energy from Davros burned inside my mind like a fuse, unlocking the parts of the Doctor’s mind I received during the metacrisis. But finally that fuse reached the normal parts of my mind, which tried to cope with all of the information it received from the Doctor. But there can’t be a human-Time Lord metacrisis. The human mind simply can’t deal with everything it has to try and absorb during that process. So the Doctor did his best to cut the fuse by blocking my memories of him and everything we did together.”

“What?!” Martha’s voice is full of horror. “All the things you did – those incredible things – he made you forget?”

“Everyone else forgot what you did,” Donna reminds her quietly. “The Year That Never Was.”

“But… that’s different…”

“Because the Doctor wasn’t the one who did it,” Donna finishes for her. “And you hate to think that the Doctor could ever be wrong.”

“How did you know about that?” Jack demands, as Martha is clearly silenced. “That year. You weren’t there!”

“The metacrisis,” she reminds him. “If it’s in the Doctor’s head, it’s in mine.”

“So why did you suddenly remember the Doctor?” Martha asks. “Was it because you saw him?”

“No.” Donna sighs. “It was the words he was saying. He taught me a little Gallifreyan one day when we were stuck in a jail cell on a planet in the Andromeda galaxy. Language is stored in a different part of the human brain from those memories he erased from me, but of course, unless someone who knew that language spoke it, there wasn’t much danger of me hearing it. But, of course, he did, and hearing those words triggered the fuse to start burning again. That’s why it hurt.”

“But you’re safe as long as you’re in his mind?” Jack asks idly, his eyes on the cardiac monitor.

“Mmm hmm. I think so. I hope so,” she adds with a forlorn attempt at a laugh.

Before Jack can reply, however, Martha grabs his arm, her eyes also fixed on the line, slowly rising and falling in irregular patterns, that shows Donna’s heartbeat.

“Ice,” she orders. “Is there any here, with it being deserted for so long?”

“There’s the morgue,” he reminds her. “We can make that room as cold as you want. But why?”

“The Doctor would never survive if you cooled him down,” Donna interrupts. “And if you move my body now, neither will I. If the connection between us is broken…”

“No, we need something portable,” Martha interrupts. “If we get Donna’s body cold enough to induce hypothermia, we might buy her enough time to let her finish helping the Doctor.”

Jack nods and bolts down to the massive kitchens that had once provided meals for the staff of Torchwood One. In the huge freezers, as he’d hoped, he finds large bags of ice that he loads onto a trolley and pushes back to the lift as fast as his feet can take him.

Back in the infirmary, he finds that Martha has covered Donna’s body in towels.

“Bags?” she says as he pushes the trolley in through the doors. “Good. Pack them around her, particularly between her arms and her chest. Not on her, though. She needs to keep breathing.”

She grabs one bag off the trolley, breaks it into the sink and rolls some of the ice into a towel, tucking it under Donna’s neck.

“Jack, put it on my legs, too,” Donna’s voice directs, and for a moment, Jack stares at the Doctor’s body in confusion, before realizing what Donna means and packing the bags on the lower half of Donna’s body.

As Jack arranges the ice around Donna’s feet and legs, he watches as Martha sets up a thermometer to see the results of his efforts. Slowly he can see the temperature of Donna’s body begin to fall, as does her respiration, and although her heart slows, it seems to become somewhat more regular.

“Good.” Martha gives a brisk nod before turning away from the monitors. “Donna,” she asks, her voice anxious, “how’s the Doctor?”

“Improving.” Donna’s voice is almost soothing in its calmness. “Getting stronger. He’s going to be all right.”

“Which would be fine if he wasn’t killing you to do it,” Jack can’t help putting in.

“Jack, don’t!” Donna’s tones are sharp, and, Jack can’t help thinking, sound almost more like the Doctor himself than Donna.

The next moment, Jack realises that Martha has stopped dead, her fingers frozen in the act of checking the strength of Donna’s pulse and her eyes fixed on the Doctor.

“Martha,” Jack calls, “what is it?”

“Donna’s voice.” Martha’s eyes narrow. “It’s different. Deeper. More like…”

“…the Doctor’s,” Donna finishes. “Yes, I know.”

“How?” Jack demands, almost dropping the last bag of ice as he realizes that Martha’s right.

“He’s – well, taking over would be the best way to put it. As he heals, he’s taking back control of his mind from me.” A smile creeps over the Doctor’s features. “Molto bene.”

“Don’t!” Martha exclaims in horrified tones, and Jack’s surprised and concerned to see tears in her eyes. Leaving the ice, he crosses the room, placing an arm around her shoulders.

“Martha,” he says anxiously, “what is it?”

“Just,” a tear slips out of her eye and begins a slow trek down her cheek, “if the Doctor’s taking his mind back…”

“…what happens to me if I can’t survive in my own mind without burning up?” Donna finishes for her. “I know, Martha. Okay, I don’t actually. No idea. Well, not much of one. Well, a bit. Maybe.”

“Don’t,” Martha sobs. “Please don’t!”

“I can’t help it.” Donna’s voice – her tones fading, replaced by others, just as familiar – is soft with sympathy. “Really, I can’t. This is the Doctor’s mind, his body – and his voice. All I could do was make use of it for long enough for you to understand what was happening. And perhaps…”

“Perhaps?” Jack fills the silence. “Perhaps what?”

“Perhaps just long enough to say goodbye.”

The echo of that final word, spoken in a voice that is solely the Doctor’s, is still dying away when the machine showing Donna’s heartbeat sounds an alarm at the same instant as the line on the cardiac monitor goes flat.

* * *
Teaser for next part:

‘She’s gone.’