The road less travelled...

Title: In Dreams – Living The Dream 3/3
Author: katherine_b
Rating: PG

When the seas and mountains fall, and we come to end of days in the dark, I hear a call. Calling me there. I will go there and back again.

Part III

“Do you think he knew?” Donna asks, wiping her eyes on the tissue the Doctor has just handed her from the box on his lap.

“Probably.” The Doctor sighs, sliding his hand through his hair, his other arm being around her shoulders. “Most beings with enhanced mental capabilities have an idea of when their time is up.”

There’s a worried look on Donna’s face as she raises her eyes to his. “Do you?”

“Don’t worry.” He rests his head lightly against hers. “There’s a good few centuries in this old body of mine yet.”

“Maybe there would be, if you’d stop trying to risk your life for every being and his dog,” she retorts harshly, and he can hear that her voice is shaking with the grief she’s feeling for Ood Sigma and her evident fear of losing him.

“You’re more important to me than any other being in the Universe,” he promises her, “Both of you,” he adds as his eyes fall on Adam, who is lying on the floor and happily kicking his legs into the air. As he’s in the bed that the Ood gave them, he hasn’t picked up on his parents’ distress.

Donna suddenly throws her arms around him so that the tissue box falls to the floor. He wraps his arms around her back and brings his chin down to rest on her shoulder.

“Donna,” he whispers, “I made you a promise, remember? That I’d always be there with you. And I am.”

“You weren’t,” she says thickly, and lifts a hand off her back, he guesses, to wipe a tear off her face.

“I know.” He smooths her hair. “And I’m so sorry.”

“All those days,” she goes on, and he wonders if she even heard what he’d said, “when I knew there was something – someone – missing and no one would tell me what it was, not even Gramps!”

Her clenched fists thud into his chest, above each heart, but not hard enough to do him any damage. He keeps her within the circle of his arms, saying nothing, letting the emotions come out without hindrance. He knows she needs this, that she needs a chance to get out everything she’s been suppressing since he left her in Chiswick.

“You made them lie to me!” she chokes out. “All that time – I thought I was going mad! I had these dreams, such wonderful dreams, and I could never remember them when I woke up. I mean, okay, that wasn’t your fault exactly, but,” tears glisten in her eyes and she stares at him, betrayal and pain written in every line of her face, “the best friend I ever had in my life and you made me forget you!”

He’s ready when she collapses, sobbing, against him. She grabs handfuls of his jacket in her fists, her body shaking as she buries her face in his shoulder. He wraps his arms around her, knowing better than to make a sound, simply holding her against him, waiting for the worst of the anger and the pain to evaporate. He’s been expecting this, knowing that she has every right to blame him for what happened, although she can’t hate him any more than he already hates himself for what he did to her.

“I don’t,” Donna mumbles as he reaches this point in his thoughts, and he looks down, gently easing some strands of damp, tear-soaked hair off her face so that he can see her features.

“Don’t what?” he prompts softly, resting his head against hers and hearing as she inhales a shaky breath.

“Hate you.” She strokes her fingers over the jacket she had been crumpling in her hands, carefully smoothing out the creases. “Maybe I should,” she adds, lifting her reddened eyes to meet his gaze. “But I don’t. I can’t.”

“Why not?” he can’t help asking.

Donna’s lips twist into a faint ghost of a smile. “I love you too much.”

The Doctor is unable to stop his eyes from widening in surprise. Not that he’s shocked at her feelings for him – they’re all too evident – but because he didn’t expect her to be able to state them so easily.

“I mean it though,” she goes on, apparently misinterpreting his silence for disbelief.

“I know,” he says reassuringly, pulling her gently against him. “I understand, I really do.”

She gives him a teary smile and slips her arm around his back, resting her head against his shoulder.

“It’s weird,” she says at last, just as he begins to wonder if she’s exhausted herself with her tears.

“What is?” he prompts.

“This.” She tilts her head up to look at him. “Us. Us being like this.”

He can’t help smiling a little at the awe in her voice. “‘You’re not mating with me, sunshine!’,” he mocks in a reasonable imitation of her indignation on that day.

“Yeah, I reckon it’s a bit late for that now,” she retorts, nodding at their son, who is watching his parents out of unblinking eyes.

“Probably,” he concedes with a half-smile.

They sit in silence for a while. The Doctor knows Donna is still awake because her fingers, resting on his hip, are gently moving back and forth. He already knows it’s the same gesture she uses to soothe Adam to sleep, and the fact that she’s subconsciously using it on him amuses him hugely.

“When did you realize things had changed?” he prompts suddenly, because it’s the question filling his thoughts at this moment.

“The same moment I remembered you,” she replies. “Properly, I mean, not just as a hazy figure on the edge of my memories. And that was when I was about twenty weeks along in my pregnancy.”

“But you knew something before that?” he pursues, his eyes fixed on Adam.

“More that I knew something was wrong. No,” she amends her sentence before he can speak, “not wrong. Different. It was like – for the first time in ages, I had a reason not to stay in bed all day. Like I was waiting for something to happen and I had to be ready.”

“You told me that’s how you felt last time,” he reminds her, gently rubbing his hand up and down her arm. “Before we met up again at Adipose Industries.”

“I realised that, too,” she agrees. “At least, I did once I remembered all about that time when I was looking for you.”

“So for the first few weeks, until you started to remember,” he prompts her, “what did you do?”

“I got my life back.” He glances down in time to see her smile, and he can see the relief and satisfaction in her eyes. “Got a new job,” she goes on. “Got myself into a routine so that, on the days when I really wanted to stay in bed, like when I was having bad days with morning sickness, I got up anyway. I didn’t want to go back to the way I was before,” she adds, anxiety building in her voice. “Where I didn’t do anything. Where I worried Mum and Gramps.”

“And me,” honesty forces the Doctor to add.

“That makes two of us then,” Donna says, intently studying his face with eyes, as if trying to see signs of pain or suffering. “I couldn’t imagine what you must have gone through after leaving me behind.”

“How can you compare yourself to me?” he asks in wonder. “I might have lost you, but I still had all the memories of what we went through together – what you became. You’d lost all that.”

“And that meant, at first, nothing really seemed that different to me,” she points out gently. “I couldn’t remember anything else, so I couldn’t miss it. It was only when the dreams started to have an impact on me that I really understood that I’d missed something big. Before that I just dismissed it.”

“But after that?” he prompts. “After the dreamworld, when did you realize you were pregnant?”

“Only after Mum insisted I see a doctor because I was being sick all the time.” She gives a somewhat bittersweet smile. “It was a bit of a shock.”

“I imagine it would have been,” he says dryly, before anxiety prompts him to ask, “Were you upset?”

“No.” There’s wonder in her tones. “I should have been, I suppose,” she goes on before he can speak. “But somehow I always believed it would work out for the best. That it was something to do with that time I couldn’t remember and that eventually it would all make sense.”

“You didn’t get that from him,” the Doctor says, frowning, as he nods towards Adam, who is clearly the reason Donna is alive now, having absorbed the excess Time Lord energy and allowed his mother to recover her memories in safety. “That knowledge,” he adds. “It was too early for that.”

“No,” she agrees. “I think it came from the person I was when I was with you.” She brushes a kiss against his mouth. “The trust I have in you,” she adds, and he smiles, unable to help kissing her back.

“How did your family react?” he asks when he can speak again.

“I think Mum always thought it was yours,” Donna says thoughtfully. “That was why she was so upset.”

“But you’d been back for months,” the Doctor objects, irritated by the fact that Sylvia always thinks the worst of him. “Did it not occur her to wonder why none of you had noticed anything before?”

“Well, I suppose she thought an alien pregnancy would be different from a human one,” she replies, although her fingers resume their smoothing gesture as if trying to calm him.

“I imagine she was disappointed when he was born without tentacles,” he says acidly, nodding at Adam.

Donna chuckles, and the sound causes the worst of his irritation to ease. “She wasn’t keen on his two hearts we saw on the first ultrasound,” she admits. “Especially when I admitted that you had them as well.”

“What?” The Doctor suddenly sits upright. “He was born with two hearts? Time Lords are born with one – the second one comes with the first regeneration.”

“He’s always had two,” Donna corrects. “My best guess was that, that having to absorb the Time Lord consciousness from me, the only way he could survive the shock of it was to regenerate before he was even born.”

He nods slowly, itching to examine his son more closely and determine what other non-human features he might share with his father, but he knows that doing so would upset Donna, so he decides to wait until she’s asleep.

“So once he was consciously able to absorb the Time Lord energy and regenerate,” he says thoughtfully, “you remembered everything? Right away?”

“Some things,” she agrees, sliding her free hand down from his chest to entwine with the fingers of his hand that had been laying on her knee. “You,” she adds, and he sees the colour flush in her cheeks that makes him suspect what she had remembered first.

“The dream world,” he suggests, seeing as she nods.

“Why d’you think that came back first?” she asks curiously. “I’ve wondered about it. It seems a really strange thing for me to remember at the beginning.”

“I think that was him.” The Doctor nods at Adam. “I imagine he thought it was important for you to understand where he came from. I’m only guessing,” he goes on, although he’s actually pretty certain that his thoughts are correct, “but the idea of being pregnant to someone you didn’t know or couldn’t remember would be pretty scary. And the dream world was complete, as far as it went,” he continues, warming to his subject. “You didn’t really need any outside knowledge to make sense of it. In fact, we were stripped of that knowledge completely – and yet look what happened.”

“We misinterpreted things,” she says in mildly mocking tones. “We misread what had actually happened and twisted it into other things. We made emotions out of things that had never really been like that.”

“You don’t seem to be objecting to it that much,” the Doctor points out, although he knows she’s teasing him.

She smiles and tightens the arm around his back in a makeshift hug.

“It did make it a bit weird, though, when I started to remember the way it really was,” she admits as she rests her head against his shoulder. “But by then,” she goes on, sighing slightly, “I’d admitted to myself how I really felt about you. It was too late to go back. And there was our son.” She nods at Adam and then looks up to meet his gaze. “How could I not love you when you’d given him to me?”

“I still wasn’t there though,” the Doctor says in tones of profound regret. “I wasn’t there to share in the excitement and anticipation with you. I wasn’t there when he was born. I wasn’t there to help you care for him.”

She reaches up to rest her index finger against his lips. “No guilt,” she reminds him. “You promised. I don’t blame you. You came as soon as you could – as soon as you knew it was safe for me.”

“Just because you won’t let me feel guilty about it doesn’t mean I can’t regret missing it,” he replies, resting his head against hers.

“Well then,” Donna frees herself from his embrace and crosses to where Adam is lying in his new bed. The baby smiles as his mother picks him up, and Donna is also smiling as she returns to the couch and lays the boy gently in his fathers arms before resuming her place beside him, “we’ll just have to make sure,” she goes on, “that next time, whenever that happens, you are.”

He swallows an inconvenient lump in his throat and smiles at his son before glancing at Donna. “Definitely,” he vows.

“And you can have indefinite nappy-changing duty if you like,” she adds teasingly.

He laughs and, with his free arm, pulls her into a hug.

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