The road less travelled...

Title: Finding A Way Home 2/4
Author: katherine_b
Rating: PG
Characters: The Doctor and the alternate Doctor
Disclaimer: If RTD and the Moff don’t want the spare Doctor, maybe I could have him?
Spoilers: Up to Journey’s End.
Summary: The other Doctor is feeling lost and in pain…

“You” and “idiot” are the first two coherent words he makes out.

Spoken in tones of detached and icy coldness.

Belied by the soft hum of welcome in the back of his mind that tells him exactly where he is.

“TARDIS,” he says thickly, his voice rough in his ears.

“Well, of course it is,” the Doctor snaps, giving a soft groan that sounds as if he’s dropped into a chair. “How else were you going to survive a trip through the vortex unprotected, you idiot?”

The man in bed doesn’t bother to ask how the Doctor found him. He knows that the disruption caused by someone passing through the loophole between the universes would have been sufficient to draw the Time Lord’s attention. Instead he reacts to the unfair accusation.

“Jack does it all the time,” he retorts, finally opening his eyes to the blinding white light of the TARDIS infirmary.

After several quick blinks, his vision slides into focus and he looks over to find the Doctor sitting nearby in that all-too-familiar brown suit. Blue shirt. No tie so that he can see the black undershirt. The Midnight outfit, he realises with an inward shudder.

“Need I remind you, Jack isn’t about to die trying it,” comes the steady reply. “But you…”

The last two words are spat out in furious tones, the like of which the other Doctor doesn’t remember having used since – well, since he was the Doctor, if he’s honest. The previous Doctor, the ninth incarnation, because he really wasn’t this tenth body for very long before the hand from which he grew was severed.

And yet he knows everything about him, which surpasses weird and goes straight to confusing. Or would be if he didn’t have the Doctor’s mind in his.

“This isn’t my fault,” he protests, struggling upright, but dropping back against the bed again as the room begins to spin around him.

“Then whose fault is it?” the Doctor retorts metaphorically, crossing the room and returning to the bedside a moment later with a glass of water. “Not even Jack’s stupid enough to try jumping between parallel universes – at least, I don’t think he is.”

“Wouldn’t put anything past him,” the other man quips, unable to help hearing Donna’s tones in his voice and seeing the Doctor flinch.

“Stop that,” comes the brusque order.

“I can’t.” He shrugs and quickly gulps down the water, not putting it past the Doctor to take the glass away from him before he can drink the contents. “It’s – she’s part of me.”

His human hearing can’t make out the incomprehensible grumbling from the Doctor, but the tone of disapproval – or unhappiness – is clear enough.

“Where is she?” he asks in the end, when it’s clear that the Doctor has no reply to make to his remark.

“What does Rose call you?” the Doctor asks in return, with an infinitesimal pause before and after the name that shows the pain he clearly still feels when using that name.

A wry smile curls his mouth. “MC,” he replies lightly, waiting for the inevitable question, but it never comes.

“Thought you’d be ‘the Doctor’ to her.” The carelessness in the Doctor’s tones is definitely forced, and suddenly, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, the other man can’t help feeling sorry for his progenitor.

“I’m not the Doctor,” he admits softly.

There’s a long pause.

“I’m not,” he repeats, understanding the sceptical look on the Doctor’s face. “I’m not you. I’m too human for that.” He arches an eyebrow. “Too many emotions. Side-affect of the metacrisis, I suppose.”

“Meta. Crisis.” A thoughtful expression appears on the Doctor’s face. “MC. That’s where it came from.”

“Ooh, you really are brilliant,” MC says sarcastically, rolling his eyes. “What took you so long, Doctor?”

The tension is fading out of the Doctor’s frame as this conversation continues, and a faint light that just might be humour dances in his eyes at this comeback.

MC hopes it is.

He doesn’t want the Doctor as an enemy.

“Those emotions don’t come from the metacrisis,” that man says suddenly. “They’re not from Donna.”

“You don’t know that,” MC insists. “You aren’t inside my mind.”

“No.” The Doctor shakes his head. “I’m inside my own. I know how I feel – that I let myself feel more than I ever did before, and it’s all because of Donna.”

“Where is she?” the other man demands again. “Is she here?”

“You’d know if she was.” The Doctor drops onto the end of the bed, narrowly avoiding MC’s feet, a tired, sorrowful look on his face. “Why else would you leave the parallel universe if there wasn’t a good reason – and what better reason than Donna?”

“She was in pain.” He stares at the tiny bruises and scars on his hands, evidence of the work it took to create the device that would shoot him out of the parallel universe, unable to look the other man in the face. “After you left us behind on the beach. Such terrible pain!”

He swallows hard, human tears pricking the backs of his eyes, before looking up again.

“And then it went away,” he continues softly, his voice a painful rasp. “So suddenly. So quickly. I wasn’t sure – I mean, I always hoped…” His lips twist humourlessly and a mocking laugh briefly escapes him. “That wonderful human trait – hope. Not a thing that a Time Lord ever needs, because he always knows. But I didn’t know. And I had to.”

“I know.” The Doctor raises a hand as if to place it on MC’s leg in a gesture of comfort, but clearly changes his mind and returns it to his lap. “She is alive,” he insists softly. “Alive – but different. Back to what she was. Same old Donna, just like when she appeared on the TARDIS the first time.” His lips twist. “Shouting at the world with no one listening. But she’s – happy.”

A heavy weight of pain thuds into MC’s stomach and he has to gasp for breath. Maybe he’s always known that she wasn’t dead – was it the human part of him that refused to let him believe it? – but somehow this is even worse than if the Doctor had dropped him off at a cemetery by a headstone with Donna’s name engraved on it.

“She’s alive,” the Doctor repeats softly, and MC wonders who he’s trying to convince that what he did was the best thing. “That she’s forgotten – it’s not the end of the universe.”

“She’s forgotten about us?”

MC looks up and, for the first time, meets the Doctor’s gaze. He knows his gaze is as icy as the Doctor’s tones were when he regained consciousness.

“She’s forgotten everything?!”

“She had to,” the Doctor snaps, standing up, but his head is bowed with obvious guilt and misery. “Would you rather she was dead?”

“For Donna, that would be like being dead! No – worse! Much worse!”

Throwing back the blanket, MC is on his feet before he’s aware of it. He can’t help straightening himself to his full height so that he’s an inch or two taller than his doppelgänger, whose emotional burden is displaying itself in the way his shoulders have sunk. For probably the only time in their lives, the Doctor is feeling a source of guilt that MC has no reason to share, but it evokes no sympathy in the half-human man.

“She begged you, didn’t she?” he demands between clenched teeth. “Begged you not to send her back.”

“She didn’t know…”

“Of course she knew!” MC rolls his eyes. “Your mind in hers, and her own brilliance – how could she not have known?!”

“Don’t.” The Doctor’s voice is choked. “Just – don’t.”

“Who am I – Jack?” MC demands metaphorically, continuing, with fury edging his tones. “Don’t talk to me like that – like I’m him! Like I’m a child who doesn’t understand the burdens of a great and mighty Time Lord. Like you spoke to Jenny when you tried to suggest that she wouldn’t understand either. I’m you! In this respect, I’m you and I do understand!”

“I suppose you’d just have left her to die there!” The Doctor turns on him, fists clenched at his sides. “That’s your solution, is it? Let her collapse and die on the floor of the TARDIS in all that terrible pain. Have to go back and tell Wilf that his precious granddaughter died because you – I – didn’t look after her well enough!”

“I wouldn’t have sent away the one person who was keeping her mind together,” MC replies softly, but his tones are the threatening ones that the Doctor uses when he gives an enemy one last chance. “We both know,” MC continues, “why she didn’t begin to break down until after you deserted us. You hated the fact that, while she loved you – oh, not like that! – she needed me. You couldn’t bear it. In some part of your soul, you decided it was better to give her up altogether than have to watch us. You couldn’t bear to share Donna with anyone – even another version of yourself!”

“You killed people!” The Doctor has turned away again, fists pressed against each other perhaps afraid that his hands will do damage to the only other person on board the TARDIS. “You destroyed – ”

“I destroyed the Daleks because it was what Donna would have done.” MC has to fight to keep his own temper.

“She didn’t though.”

“Because she’s never killed before.” MC pauses for an instant to give his words – the words he’s wished he could say for so long – more weight. “The only part of me that could kill came from you.”

“She killed the Vespiform.” The Doctor’s tones are uncomfortable, evidence of how hard this conversation is hitting home. “She killed…”

“…an insect.” MC nods as the Doctor comes to that realisation and stops short. “For her, that’s all she could see it as, because she’s never seen the Silfrax galaxy and hasn’t come to know what the Vespiform are really like. Not like we have.” He pauses as the Doctor gives a miniscule, subconscious nod, before continuing, “But Donna tried to stop you from killing the Racnoss. A spider. So you can’t justify your behaviour on those grounds.”

“I don’t have to justify anything!”

“You don’t have to – but you’re trying to! You’ve been trying to justify what you did to all of us, ever since you left Sarah Jane and Martha and Jack and Mickey in the park. But you can’t, because you know – you’ve always known – what the consequences of your actions are.”

“I don’t want to hear any more from you!”

“Well, you won’t have listened to anyone else!” MC said knowingly, sitting back on the edge of the bed, his arms folded over his chest.

It’s at this moment that he sees the state of his clothes. The jeans and pullover that Rose gave him to wear instead of the blue suit have been ripped and torn by the vortex.

He wonders for the first time what it says that Rose couldn’t bear to see him dressed in clothes belonging to the Doctor.

Now he fully realises that he’s made the right choice by being here.

“I suppose you’ve told them, have you?” he suggests in conversational tones, keeping a close eye on the Doctor’s reactions. “Jack and Martha and Mickey. Told them about Donna not knowing them anymore, how they mustn’t go anywhere near her in case she remembers. That remembering, even just for a second, could kill her.”

“Shut up!”

“I can take care of her,” he says pleadingly, changing tack, trying to find the right emotional button to push. “Even if she doesn’t remember anything, I can look after her without the dangers that you’d represent as the Doctor.”

“You don’t get to have Donna,” the other man snarls.

“Then help me,” MC replies in soft tones, knowing that he’s found what he was looking for. “There has to be a way – some way to give it all back to her, to let her remember.” He pauses for a fraction of a second. “To bring Donna back to us.”

“Us?” The Doctor rounds on him. “There is no ‘us’! There’s me – alone – and then there’s you and Rose.”

“No, there isn’t.” MC watches him with a steady gaze. “We both know that you closed the last gaps between the universes after you found me. Not even a flea could get through now. I can’t go back to Rose – and neither can you.”

“You left her behind!”

“Following in your footsteps,” MC says, unable to help the sarcasm that creeps into his voice.

The Doctor drops back into the chair he was sitting in when MC first opened his eyes. “What do you want from me?” he demands tiredly, unwilling or perhaps unable to argue the issue any further.

“I want her back,” comes the ready reply. “The Doctor – Doctors – and Donna in the TARDIS. Donna without the burden of a Time Lord’s mind in hers – and without the danger of dying at any instant.” He tilts his head slightly to one side, watching the Doctor in silence for a moment before continuing. “Donna with the best friend she ever had in her life, who gave her the chance to fulfil every bit of the potential that her grandfather always believed she had. The daughter Sylvia doesn’t have to feel disappointed in.”

“I suppose that’s why you programmed that to find her,” the Doctor says, nodding at the remnants of the leather strap and the mangled metal transport device lying on the small, wheeled table next to him.

“Of course,” MC says simply. “One set of buttons to get me to the correct universe, and the other set to detect her. To get as close to her as I could.”

“Nothing to get yourself back,” the Doctor says pointedly.

“My intention was, if at all possible, to make something in that universe that would allow me to do that.” He arches an eyebrow. “You’ve made that impossible.”

“Don’t blame me for this!”

“Why not?” A sad smile graces MC’s face. “You already are, so what difference will it make?”

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