The road less travelled...

Title: Donna and the Doctor 1/2
Author: katherine_b
Rating: G
Summary: An almost-married woman called Donna Noble finds herself on board the TARDIS with a strange alien from a lost planet called Gallifrey. Now why does that sound familiar?
Characters: Ten, Donna
A/N: Requested (at last) by dana_cz, who pleaded: “if you're still taking timestamps, I'd love to see several months after the end A Time Of Endings. If you could make it a lil' bit shippy, you'd make me a very happy bunny.”
A/N 2: And really, this isn’t just a sequel to A Time of Endings, but to the whole rewrite of the four movies that I worked on for more than a year. Thank you so much to everyone for your wonderful, supportive comments over the whole time I’ve been writing it and I’m delighted it has lived up to (and hopefully exceeded) expectations. This universe is now an open sandpit for anyone who wants to play in it, but I would appreciate acknowledgement if you do.

Part I

The Doctor is working on the console when he feels the mental nudge from the TARDIS that something is wrong. He’s doing repairs he put off before, when he believed that he was being inevitably drawn to his own death. Perhaps it was childish, but he didn’t really see the point in fixing things when he wasn’t the one who would get the benefit of his work.

Still, that means he has to do it now, when he would rather have been taking Donna to all of the places he never had the chance to take her before.

“This better be important,” he grumbles as he pulls himself to his feet. “Last time, you just wanted to point out that I’d dropped a spanner – and I was aware of that already, thank you!”

He frowns as he receives a second nudge and returns the sonic screwdriver to his pocket as he idly shoves the cover back on with his foot.

“What is it then?” he demands as he leaves the console room, hearing the slap of his converse on the grating. He can smell the faintest scent of grease and oil, and the ship is still making the same faint ticking that first attracted his attention as she adjusts to his work.

He’s been paying much more attention to little things this like that since the narrow shave of avoiding regeneration. When the time does eventually come for him to give up this body and move onto the next one, he wants to have made the most of every single moment until that instant.

Donna’s begun to tease him about become even more self-obsessed than she thought he already was, but he’s noticed that she’s similarly attentive, even to things that she didn’t seem to notice before.

Speaking of Donna, as the TARDIS nudges him for a third time, he begins to think that whatever’s wrong most likely involves his companion.

Frowning, he heads into the lower rooms of the TARDIS, letting the ship itself guide him. He passes through numerous rooms where he would usually have expected Donna to be – the kitchen, the library, her room, his room, the swimming pool, the dining room – and even checks two of the maintenance rooms before feeling that the TARDIS is leading him elsewhere.

The next door he opens leads to the garden, and the sound of a muffled voice suggests he’s found the person he was looking for.

“Donna?” he calls somewhat hesitantly as he closes the door. “Are you busy?”

His ears detect a tiny sound that he’s certain haven’t come from any of the plants or from the automated watering system.

It sounds suspiciously like a sniff.

“Donna?” he calls again, taking a hesitant step forward. “Can I come in?”

“It’s your TARDIS, Spaceman,” comes the rapid reply, but the Doctor is quick to hear the traitorous tremor in Donna’s would-be hearty tones and he frowns as he follows the sound of her voice.

He finds her sitting on one of the large rock-like seats that have been placed close to the tiny waterfall that sends water down into a stream that meanders between the clumps of ferns and mosses in this area of the garden.

“What’s wrong?” he asks as he sits down on the roomy seat, which is actually much more comfortable than it looks, being well padded.

Donna shrugs, and he’s quick to place a hand on her shoulder to keep her from getting up or turning away.

“What is it?” he prompts anxiously. “Something wrong at home? Your Mum? Or Wilf?”

“Neither of them.” She shakes her head, and for the first time, the Doctor glimpses the look of misery in her eyes. “It’s Shaun,” she admits.

“Oh.”

The Doctor glances at her out of the corner of his eye, a feeling of uneasiness growing in him, although he’s not entirely sure whether it’s because he’s more afraid that Shaun is asking to join them or because Donna’s relationship seems to be in peril.

However he’s not left wondering for long.

“He’s met someone else,” Donna confesses with a sigh.

“But you’re engaged!” the Doctor protests, indignation swelling in him at the calm way Donna seems to be taking the news.

He’s puzzled when Donna shakes her head. “We agreed,” she says slowly, “that our engagement would be on hold while I was away with you. That when you and I came back to Earth, we’d reconsider.”

“Because of me?” The Doctor frowns. “Donna, you shouldn’t have done that!”

“It doesn’t matter now.” She stands up and covers the few paces to the small raised bank of the little stream. “There’s nothing I could do – except let him go, of course.” She heaves a shaky sigh, and he suspects there are tears in her eyes. “Maybe it wasn’t fair of me to ask him to wait.”

“He agreed,” the Doctor reminds her, remembering the expressions that had crossed Shaun’s face when he was talking with Donna, and the Doctor was waiting to see if she was going to travel with him again. “It wasn’t as if you told him what to do,” he goes on. “That wasn’t the sort of relationship you had – that he would have done anything you asked in order to keep you with him.”

“Like Lance and how I behaved with him,” she finishes, although he hadn’t been going to say that name. Still, it’s what he was thinking about.

For a long few moments, he watches her in silence, seeing as she stares blindly at the tumbling water in front of them, her right index finger and thumb smoothing the slight scar on the ring finger of her left hand that is the only indication of what happened to her in the Naismith mansion.

It’s been the equivalent of a few months since the events of that day. The Doctor has been careful not to mention Shaun, not wanting to put any pressure on Donna, who called her fiancée each time they came back to the TARDIS after their adventures. Because of the complexities of time-travel, that meant she sometimes called him several times on the same day, or it might be up to a week between calls.

And this is the result of that irregular contact and a prolonged period of separation.

“He didn’t think I’d mind,” she says suddenly, and he starts, brought out of his thoughts with a bound to look up and find her watching him.

“Why not?” he demands.

“He said he thought I’d moved on.”

The Doctor frowns a little, trying not to let any emotion show on his face as Donna comes back to the bench.

“What do you think he meant by that?” he asks gently, trying to crush the sudden flowering of hope in his chest.

However Donna’s next words quench that emotion instantly.

“I don’t know,” she admits with a sigh as she resumes her seat beside him again.

For a moment, he stares at her in silence as he feels disappoint settle deep in his hearts and sink like a weight onto his shoulders.

It’s taken all this time, but he’s finally allowed himself to realize exactly how much Donna Noble means to him.

He’s even wondered how he could bear having Shaun with them on the TARDIS when the time came.

And although that danger seems to be over, how can he possibly make things even more complicated for Donna by confessing how he feels about her?

He isn’t sure how long he’s lost in those impossible thoughts before he manages to focus on Donna again. She’s staring at the waterfall, the only source of sound in the room, and he can’t be surprised at the tears glistening in her eyes.

However she is quick to blink them away when he gently places a hand on hers, which are clasped loosely in her lap.

“I can take you back,” he offers hesitantly. “Back to Chiswick – to Shaun. Maybe, if you were there – well, you could try and save things. If that’s what you want.”

She manages an almost bitter laugh, easing her left hand out from beneath his fingers to splay it on her knee.

“I don’t even have an engagement ring anymore!” she reminds him in exasperated tones, although he suspects she's actually fighting back tears.

The Doctor stares down at the circle of reddened skin where the gold band with the Gallifreyan symbols had rested until he tore it off to keep her from being burned before looking up to find her eyes fixed on him.

“Why that ring?” he asks gently. “Most humans prefer diamonds or precious stones.”

“I don’t know.” She shakes her head, looking suddenly lost, turning away. “I just knew that it was important – like that book by Joshua Naismith that I gave Gramps. I remember deciding that the ring must have been a family heirloom because I couldn’t explain it any other way, and when Shaun asked which ring I wanted, I made up a story about why it was important – that it was a secret between Dad and me – because I was too embarrassed to admit that I couldn’t remember.”

“Is that how you got around the memory loss?” the Doctor asks sadly, although he isn’t overly surprised. “Making things up?”

“Ideas just sprang into my mind.” She sighs. “Stories, fully formed, as if someone was telling me. And once I’d thought of them, they always stuck.” Suddenly she looks up at him. “Like the way the TARDIS gave you stories when you were human.” Her eyes suggest a dawning realisation. “Is that what she was doing for me? Is that how the link worked?”

“It wasn’t meant to work like that,” he confesses, feeling as the TARDIS agrees with Donna’s suggestion. “But yes, that’s what happened.”

He longs to put his arm around her and hold her, to stroke her beautiful hair and try to offer some form of comfort.

Instead, all he can do is say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to be like that.”

“It’s not your fault.” She manages a sad smile. “It’s not as if there was another way. But,” she adds in suddenly horrified tones, “I didn’t realize until just now that Shaun must have known all this time that I was lying. He would have talked with Mum and Gramps and they must have told him the truth.”

“Probably,” he’s forced to agree, and he can’t help thinking that Shaun must have loved Donna a great deal to put up with what he would have realised very early on were made-up stories. “Although I wouldn’t call it ‘lying’,” he adds in an attempt to be reassuring. “If you lie, it’s usually a conscious decision, an intention to deceive someone – and you certainly didn’t set out to deceive Shaun!”

He expects Donna to say something else, but she remains silent and in the end, he’s the one who speaks.

“I don’t know if things would have been different if I hadn’t thrown that bio-damper away,” he admits.

“I wish it hadn’t been lost,” she agrees, her index finger stroking the burned skin, before she suddenly looks up at him, holding her hand up in demonstration. “What do you think when you see this scar?”

He can’t help but smile a little, although there is a torrent of conflicting emotions boiling inside him. Still, it’s an easy enough question to answer and he takes her hand in both of his, lightly stroking the reddened skin.

“I see the hand of the bravest woman I’ve ever met,” he tells her passionately. “A woman who put herself between a complete stranger and a group of robot troops with guns on the first day, and who has gone on proving her bravery every single day since then, as if she thinks there’s a danger I might one day forget how incredible she is.”

Donna’s head suddenly lifts and she looks him full in the eyes. There’s a strange expression lingering on her face, and he’s so busy trying to work out what it means that he doesn’t realize she’s moved closer until her lips are suddenly pressed against his.

He starts at the shock, his hearts suddenly thumping wildly beneath his ribs, but there is so much about this moment that he’s dreamed of that he forgets all of their conversations about ‘just mates’. He forgets that this is a woman who, until only a short time ago, was happily engaged. He forgets, too that, after Rose, he vowed he would never let himself love like this again.

He forgets everything other than that the woman he does love, and has loved for such a long time, is kissing him for only the third time in their lives.

And that this kiss is definitely not like either of the others.

His hand lifts to cradle the back of her head, her hair tangled around his fingers. Her lips are soft and warm against his, and he can feel the gentle, human heat radiating from her. His other arm begins to curl around her waist, to draw her closer to him…

And then, suddenly and sharply, she pulls back.

Her eyes study his face, even more searching and intense than before, and he draws back, swallowing uncomfortably.

“Wh-what was that for?” he asks in the end, when it doesn’t appear as if the painful silence is going to be broken by her. “Why did you kiss me?”

“I had to know,” she replies softly, looking away, “how you felt about me.”

Next Part