The road less travelled...

Title: Dona nobis beatitas Part II
Author: katherine_b
Rating: PG
Summary: The Doctor still has a lot to learn.

Chapter 10

There's an unexpected and subtle change in the lighting of the companion hallway, as Donna has begun to call it to herself, when she hangs up the last portrait – Martha’s – on the door of the room that belonged to that young woman during her time on board the TARDIS.

The light strengthens a little, becomes brighter, and brings out the colours in the portraits that line the doors. It’s almost as if a sense of power, a burst of life, has exploded down the long space that has been miserable and lifeless for so long.

Clearly the TARDIS approves of the change that has taken place here.

“What is going on down there?” the Doctor’s voice demands impatiently, his concern clearly peaked by the behaviour of the TARDIS. “Donna, are you all right?”

“Better than all right!” she replies, excitement brimming in her at the thought of what he will say about her efforts. “Come and see!”

Hurried footsteps echo along the passageways, gradually growing louder, until the Doctor all but runs into sight.

He stops short at the realisation of where he is, but she sees his quick gaze travel to the first splash of colour – Susan’s picture – and a war of emotions is instantly at play across his features.

“Come here,” he orders softly, although his eyes never leave the image.

Donna takes some time to cross the distance between them, and before she reaches his side, he has moved on to the picture of Ian Chesterton on the opposite door.

Instead of taking his hand or sliding her arm around his waist, she moves back a little, leaning against the wall beside Susan’s door. It’s almost painful when she’s become so used to the feel of him beside her, touching her, but she knows she’s doing the right thing. Leaving him the space he needs, the time for his own thoughts and memories. A place for his grief, in which she has no right to intrude.

“Go and look at them,” she tells him. “I’ll be right here.”

He glances at her over his shoulder, as if making sure that she really means it, before turning back to Ian’s picture.

The doors stretch ahead of him down the hallway, each with their new, colourful adornment, and Donna knows that he will be some time.

She can’t be surprised when, glancing in the other direction, she sees for the first time the empty frames that line the two walls of the passageway heading back towards the console room.

Nor, as she looks down, can she react with anything but a knowing smile and a gentle touch of the TARDIS wall at the sight of a stack of pictures on the floor beside her. She bends down to turn them over, unsurprised to see the various faces belonging to the Doctor that she has been working on at the same time as the companions.

The first Doctor, as she hangs his picture, is surrounded by the new enemies he found when he left Gallifrey, as well as the belongings that seemed so uniquely his – the cane, the panama hat, the signet ring and all of the others.

Doctor number two, as she had begun calling him in her head, has a bow tie and tam o’shanter, as well as his shaggy coat and that everlasting recorder. He faces down ice warriors, the yeti, and so many others, and the UNIT logo sits proud in the bottom centre of the picture.

The dandy Doctor gazes placidly from the picture that makes much of his ruffled shirt and smoking jacket, bright yellow Bessie standing out sharply in the corner of the picture amid the somewhat more subdued hues of the Autons, the Silurians, the Sontarans and the Master.

A multi-coloured scarf frames the portrait of the fourth Doctor even better than the frame the TARDIS has provided can manage. She has to smile at her images of jelly babies scattered between a yo-yo with a tangled string, a large floppy hat, and the third version of the sonic screwdriver. Enemies cluster around the edges of the page, but they seem less threatening here, perhaps because of the toothy, confident grin on the Doctor’s face.

The fifth Doctor looks rather more pensive and thoughtful, and almost seems to gaze past Donna rather than at her. The cricket bat and ball occupy a corner, with several sticks of celery cheekily playing the part of stumps and the bails. The brainy specs seem to be gazing upon the image of Omega, which stands out clearly among the other clustered enemies.

Bright colours persist into the portrait of the sixth Doctor, the reds and greens almost dimming the gold of his curly hair. However there is a sense of darkness in spite of the brilliant tones. The enemies seem bigger here, the Valeyard almost matching the Doctor in size, while the Rani looms threateningly behind him.

Things are more cheerful for Doctor number seven, with interlinking question marks acting as a border, his trusty umbrella hanging off one at the top. Chess pieces are scattered along the bottom of the picture, and the Doctor is eyeing off Fenric in a clearly suspicious manner within the cluster of his opponents.

The eighth Doctor’s portrait makes much of his velvet coat, the blue of it acting as a sort of background. A fez is perched jauntily on his head and he almost seems to be smirking at the Zygons and others opposite him. While Donna has included part of a fobwatch in every picture of the Doctors, here she has drawn the entire object, which is attached to the button on the coat where it belongs.

Perhaps because he is the most recent of the past incarnations and so the memories are the most vivid, the Ninth Doctor’s portrait is the busiest. The enemies seem to cluster close to the man in the leather jacket – Gelth, Slitheen, the Editor and the Jagrafess, the Reaper and all of the others. However he also has many belongings around him – a wristwatch, a pack of playing cards, bananas, the psychic paper, and the fifth version of the sonic screwdriver. The Face of Boe is visible in the background.

After hanging the last of the nine portraits, Donna sees that the TARDIS has set a spotlight above each image, almost as if to highlight the many men who have been her master and driver since they were bound together countless centuries earlier.

It’s clear that the TARDIS is more than happy with Donna’s work, and she can only be pleased at that realisation.

Now she just has to draw him as he appears today.

After all, the frame is already waiting.

“Donna...”

The Doctor’s voice barely reaches her, but even from this distance, as she turns to where he is standing, Donna can see the pain on his face and hear it in his tones.

It’s not a surprise, of course. She’d always known, when she painted this blonde woman’s features, how much the mere existence of her portrait among all of these others would affect him.

In fact, when the idea first occurred to her, she muses as she crosses the distance to where he is standing, she’d dismissed the thought as almost cruel.

But then she found the other room and knew that the TARDIS had come to the same conclusion.

Jenny might never have been inside the TARDIS, but she would travel with them forever, at least in their hearts, if not by their sides.

Donna barely reaches his side before he wraps his arms around her, burying his face briefly in her shoulder and inhaling several shaky breaths. She rubs his hand soothingly over his back and gives him the time he needs before he raises his head.

“Thank you,” he gets out with visible difficulty.

She brushes the single tear off his cheek. “You’re welcome.”

He musters a feeble smile and as he loosens his hold on her, she reaches around to take his hand.

“Tea?”

“That would be lovely.”

A door at the end of the hallway closest to Jenny and Martha’s rooms, and which had only appeared a few seconds earlier, creaks open to show the kitchen. Donna glances back at the pictures she has just hung on the wall, but showing them to him can wait. For now, tea sounds like an excellent idea for both of them.

* * *
“Oh, this is where you are!” the Doctor’s voice exclaims, and Donna peeps over the top of the bundle of paper she is perusing to see him in the doorway.

She smiles and pulls her feet up so that there’s room for him to sit on the cushion at the end of the couch.

“I told you I was going to work,” she reminds him.

“What are you up to?” he asks as he drops into the spare space and, when she places her stocking-clad feet on his lap, obligingly begins rubbing her toes.

Then she sees his gaze fall on the pages in her hands and his eyes widen.

“Well,” she begins quickly before he can interrupt, “I was looking for a spare sheet of paper. My notebook is full,” she hurries on before he is able to speak, “and I needed to draw something. So when I remembered you had paper here – and you did tell me I could see what you were doing after you saw my pictures!” she finishes almost resentfully.

A faint smile – the first she’s seen since showing him the pictures in that hallway – appears on his face and he nods a little.

“I did,” he agrees. “So I can hardly be angry, can I?”

Donna sees that he’s still looking a little shaken from the emotions he experienced as a result of her portraits of the companions. Her task now, she decides, is to distract him from those thoughts as best she can.

“Did I ever tell you,” she demands, gesturing with the paper, “how bad your handwriting is?”

“I believe you might have mentioned it once or twice,” he says with a weak grin. “But you should already know what they say though. I mean, I did tell them to you before I started to write them down. Some of them anyway.”

“Why did you?” she asks thoughtfully. “Write them down, I mean. As I remember saying to you in the dim and distant past, I couldn’t imagine you being the type to spend hours sitting and writing – and this really must have taken hours!”

“I had hours,” he reminds her, his voice soft and carrying a hint of pain. “What else was I meant to do here without you?”

She sits bolt upright, staring at him, the pages falling into her lap, forgetting all about her attempts at distraction.

“What, you just threw your hands in the air and decided that was it?” she demands in disbelief. “The Doctor, the Time Lord from Gallifrey, the man who gets out there and interferes and sticks his nose in, and then invariably saves the day, decided he’d had enough and sat in here twiddling his thumbs?”

The colour burns in his cheeks, but he meets her gaze with an almost defiant look. “Of course not!” he retorts. “I did lots of things. But I had to stop sometimes, and,” he goes on in a tone that suggests he’s almost embarrassed to admit this, “I’ve got so used to having a human around who needs sleep that I’ve sort of fallen into the habit of stopping to eat and unwind. It’s probably good for me,” he admits, awkwardly rubbing his hands through his hair.

“You didn’t invite anyone else along?” she prompts, feeling suddenly sorry for him, because she knows how much he hates solitude when he has time for his thoughts to prey on him. “You were alone?”

He shrugs awkwardly, his gaze fixed on his fingers, which have resumed their pampering of her toes. “Not always,” he admits, as if worried that she’ll be upset. “I found people, you know, when I needed them.” He finally looks up, and there’s so much light and relief in his eyes that she feels the echo of it in her heart. “It wasn’t the same without you,” he adds softly.

She waits, sure that he’s got more to say, but not certain what she should ask to get the information out of him.

“I wrote those,” he says in the end, reaching out to touch the pages, “because it was important to me – because you’d suggested it.” His fingers suddenly cover hers. “And because, when I was writing them, I could imagine you were here with me, listening to me as I recited them. And then,” a brighter look appears on his face, “when I knew it was going to be okay, that you’d found a way to subvert the meta-crisis,” he looks somewhat sheepish, “if you hadn’t wanted to come with me, I thought maybe those stories might…”

“Change my mind?” she offers when he falls silent. She prods his stomach with her toe, trying to sound stern. “That’s blackmail, that is! Emotional blackmail.”

“Yup,” he agrees mildly, before suddenly clutching her feet in both hands, a pleading look on his face. “I would have done that and more – much more! Anything! – if it meant I got you back, Donna Noble.”

She wriggles her feet so that he releases his too-hard grip and then she sits up, moving along the couch so that she’s beside him and resting her head on his shoulder. His arm slides around behind her neck and he pulls her as close to him as he can manage.

“I’m not going anywhere,” she promises softly, resting a hand on his chest between his hearts. “And if you think I’d have knocked back another invitation – well, you’re even more daft than I thought you were when I first met you.”

He chuckles softly, resting his head against hers, his fingers stroking small circles on her upper arm. Listening to the Doctor’s hearts throbbing unevenly in her ear, Donna lets herself relax. Much as she loves the exploring of new planets, and even the running now that she’s got back some of the fitness she lost during their time apart, she can’t deny that these quiet times are almost certainly the most precious that she’s spent with this alien who is now one of the most important people in her world.

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