The road less travelled...

Title: Time After Time Epilogue
Author: katherine_b
Rating: G
Summary: Have you ever wondered what happens to those the Doctor leaves behind?
Word Count: 2,000 words (so, yeah, not so much of a 'drabble' then...
Characters: Donna/the Doctor (Ten)
A/N: Written for the twenty-eighth weekly drabble challenge with the prompt ‘red’.
A/N 2: Also written for sykira, graphite and juliet316, who all insisted I couldn't possibly leave it 'there' and that a more satisfying resolution was called for. I hope this was what all three of you had in mind!

Epilogue

The Doctor pulls away a little and gazes into Donna’s blue eyes. She can see that, as part of the mercurial nature that is a standard feature of this incarnation, he has already begun to think about other things. However she knows that the pain caused by the destruction of Gallifrey is still lingering close to the surface, as it is in her.

She can’t help but be pleased that they both have someone to share that burden with.

“Now then,” he says, bringing her thoughts away from that miserable topic, “let’s get you settled in. That is,” he adds suddenly, drawing back as if he was afraid she might slap him, “if you’re actually going to stay.”

For a moment, she considers teasing him, like she used to, and just as she knows Donna would have done. But she’s aware that it’s going to take time for him to learn to recognise both the similarities and the differences between Donna Noble and Donnakranoltondusoldar.

“Well,” she says in the end, “I’ve said ‘no’ to you twice. I suppose it’s only fair that I say ‘yes’ twice, too.”

His eyes blaze with obvious delight – the same joy he had shown when she agreed to travel with him before – but he merely grabs her hand and pulls her up off the couch.

“Come on then!”

At the head of a long hallway lined with doors, he stops short, his brow furrowing in puzzlement, and she can hear his voice echoing in her mind, asking the TARDIS which room is for Donna.

However she replies before he gets his answer.

“This one,” she tells him, stepping towards a familiar-looking door, even as she feels one of her hearts skip a beat at what she understands the TARDIS has done for her.

“How do you know?”

“I just do.”

She turns the knob, hearing the familiar click, and pushes open the door.

The room is only dimly lit by candles, but as she walks inside, they brighten to reveal shelves, heavily laden with books. The few spaces on the walls are taken up by well-worn wooden shutters. The chairs scattered around the room already have slight indentations in the cushioned seats, almost as if her father and mother had just stood up and left the room. She can even believe that she could smell the faintest aroma of the tobacco her father would smoke every evening.

“You beautiful thing,” she murmurs to the TARDIS, smoothing a gentle hand down the door as she moves aside to let Theta follow her in.

“What is it?” he demands, although his voice is soft, perhaps understanding that this is important to her. “What is this room?”

“It’s just like Gallifrey,” she whispers longingly. “Like home.”

She turns her eyes in the direction of the small corner that once held the small kitchen, but now contains her four-poster bed, hand-carved by her father and transplanted from what had once been a small room to the side of the main area. Everything is exactly the same as the last time she saw the room.

Apart from the colour.

Her eyes widen at the sight.

“Except that,” she says in a more matter-of-fact voice.

“Why?” the Doctor demands in obvious confusion. “What’s wrong with it?”

“I certainly wouldn’t have a scarlet bedspread.” She rolls her eyes. “I had enough of that colour with my robes.”

“And it definitely doesn’t go with your hair,” he teases, winding a curl around his finger. “I remember when you said I could never have ginger hair back on Gallifrey for that reason.”

It’s only at that instant, even before she can get out the chuckle that his comment prompts, that she realises just how close he is. She can feel the warmth from his body almost touching hers. And when he reaches past her to slide a hand down the thick timber upright that reaches from floor to ceiling at one corner of her bed, she realises that her respiratory bypass system has kicked in as a result of her temporarily forgetting to breathe.

She shakes her head a little at her own stupidity and moves away to look at the books at the far wall, but she knows without looking that he’s followed her.

“So,” he says slowly, and she tenses as his arm reaches past her and he runs a long finger against the spines, “this is where all your knowledge of books comes from.”

“Yes,” she agrees.

Silence stretches between them, strange and uncomfortable. It’s never been like this before, but Donna doesn’t know what to say to change it. For a strange instant, she’s unreasonably and unaccountably jealous of Donna Noble, who never felt things for the Doctor and therefore never experienced the mad flurry of fear and anxiety and panic and hope building inside her that Donnakranoltondusoldar does now.

“I only wish,” Theta bursts out suddenly, “that I could read you as easily as I could with Rose – or even Romana! Then I’d know if you were feeling the same way I am, or if I’m going to have more empathy with Martha than I could ever have thought possible!” He huffs impatiently in her ear. “You’re impossible, Donnakranoltondusoldar!”

“If I wasn’t,” she replies quietly, her gaze fixed firmly on the books in front of them, determined not to meet his gaze, afraid that her eyes might reveal what her mind doesn’t, “then I would never have survived all those epons on Gallifrey.” Waiting for you, she adds mentally, but she doesn’t say it out loud because she’s too afraid of what his response might be.

“I spent all that time travelling the universe,” at his words, she glances up to see him shaking his head, as if surprised at himself, “and it’s only now that I realised it was because I was looking for someone – that I was looking for you.”

He’s so close to her now that she can feel his chest brush hers as he breathes, and then his fingers close around her shoulders with gentle but unyielding pressure.

And then, because she’s so busy thinking about what she should say and not what she should do, she unconsciously leans her head against his shoulder. A heartbeat later, as if in response, she feels his head come to rest on hers.

“And,” he goes on, his tone infinitely more tender and relaxed, as if he somehow knows what she’s thinking, “if you’d come with me in the very beginning, I would never have needed anyone else.”

Lifting his head off hers, he turns her to face him, raising a hand off her shoulder to wipe the traitorous tears off her cheeks, and it’s only then that she realises she’s crying.

Now she knows how he understood.

But she’s still uncomfortable about this situation, because it seems so wrong that she should feel this way.

“It’s not wrong.” He’s clearly picked up on her thoughts. “I promise you, Donna. It’s definitely not wrong.”

“How can you be sure?” she whispers almost under her breath.

He sighs, but not in aggravation or annoyance. Rather as if preparing himself for what he knows will be a long struggle.

“Do you remember what I said on Messaline?”

She stares at him in confusion. “What?”

He goes on as if she had never spoken. “I said I’d been ‘a father’ before.” He cups his palm against her cheek, his fingertips brushing against her hairline. “Not that I’d been married or had a family.”

“I…” She swallows and tries again, her voice almost inaudible. “I don’t understand.”

“I got over the loss of my wife a long time ago.” His dark eyes stare into hers, his gaze more intense than she can remember ever having seen it before. “But I never got over losing you.”

Without warning, he draws her into his arms, his face pressing against hers, meaning that his thoughts and feelings are enhanced in her mind.

It means she can feel the tidal-wave of thoughts coming from him, can understand the power of his feelings, and knows just how much he’s thought about her during all of the times that have separated them.

The strength of his emotions almost takes her breath away.

Overwhelmed, she can only murmur, “I have no right to this.”

His tone is insistent and his eyes glitter with an almost angry light as he pulls away to glare down at her. “You have every right. Do you think I can’t imagine what it was like for you on Gallifrey, all those epons, surrounded by people who were suspicious of you because of your connection to me? Do you think I don’t know how you must have felt, isolated like that for so long?”

She remains silent, feeling tears prickling the back of her eyes, emotions in a jumble, but the strongest is relief that here, at last, is someone who understands.

“If that had been me,” he says at last, pulling her back close to him, his lips brushing soft against her skin as he speaks, his breath coming in shallow puffs of air, “waiting for all that time, only catching a glimpse every so often, with the person I thought about almost every day never knowing who I was on the rare occasions I saw them – Donna, if I’d been in your position, I would have gone crazy long ago.”

“Maybe I did.” She pulls back slightly, feeling a sudden and terrible emptiness at the lack of his skin against hers, but forges on regardless. “Maybe that’s what this is – all that it is. Some unhealthy obsession.”

His places his finger beneath her chin and tilts up her face to his. “Do you really believe that?”

“I…” She stops. “I don’t know what to believe anymore. What to think.”

“Don’t think,” he orders gently. “Just feel. And tell me how wrong this really feels.”

He gently tilts her head up, his long fingers providing gentle pressure so that she can’t lower it again, and his lips brush against her cheek, gradually travelling around so that they press gently against hers.

She can’t even fight him, and realises, an instant later, that she doesn’t want to.

If she merely understood his feelings about her before, now that sensation is magnified one hundredfold, as if she was swimming in his love for her. She clings to him, responds to his touch, surrenders herself to him completely.

And she almost whimpers aloud when, much too soon, he pulls back.

“Do you believe me now, Donna,” he asks softly, but still with that insistent tone in his voice, “that this isn’t wrong?”

She wants to believe him so much at this moment, wants him so much that it actually hurts, like his absence is a physical pain.

“Yes,” she murmurs back, because it’s the only coherent word she can muster, in any of the hundreds of languages she can speak.

His eyes glow with what she knows is a combination of relief and delight, and she can feel how that bond they have forged has magnified her knowledge of his thoughts and feelings.

“I want you.”

His words echo back to his passionate exclamation in the library, but Donna knows they have a different meaning now.

“I want you, too.”

He scoops her up in his arms – in the back of her mind, where the remnants of Donna Noble linger, she can hear her former self making a crack about how someone as skinny he is shouldn’t be as strong as this – and kisses her as he carries her the short distance to the bed. Placing her down as if she was something precious that could break, he shrugs out of his jacket and then crawls up the bed towards her.

Neither of them notice the instant when the much-maligned scarlet bedspread, with its brilliant orange back, turns a deep purple, with a gold-embroidered seal of Rassilon in the centre.