The road less travelled...

Title: Dona nobis beatitas Chapter 2/?
Author: katherine_b
Rating: PG
Summary: The Doctor turns teacher.
Characters: Donna and the Doctor (Ten)

Part II

“You know,” Donna says suddenly, and he looks up from his work on the console to meet her gaze, “if you’d done more about teaching me Gallifreyan, you could have explained exactly what you meant and what you wanted me to do while I was stuck in the TARDIS on that Sontaran ship and no one would have been any the wiser.”

He arches an eyebrow. “You’re really serious about that, aren’t you? Learning to speak my language?”

“Absolutely.”

“Well, all right.” He smiles, feeling as if a little of the pressure that has been bearing down since Messaline has lifted. “We’ll start with individual words and some basic sentences. For instance,” he begins naming various parts of the console, surprised all over again at the ease with which she seems to pick up the pronunciation of the most challenging terms.

“You’re going to have to teach me some verbs, too,” she says in the end. “It’s a bit hard to make full sentences out of just nouns and articles.”

So when they are sitting in a small clearing in the middle of a peaceful forest on the ‘new world’ they have both decided is for Jenny, he begins to teach her basic questions and answers that come up so often in everyday conversation.

All the time, he marvels at the sound of Gallifreyan coming from someone other than himself. He knows that the TARDIS sometimes translates his companions’ speech into his native tongue to cheer him up, but this is the real thing and it feels almost indescribable.

“You’d better teach me one very important word,” Donna says suddenly in English.

He chuckles at the wry tone of her voice as he leans back against a tree. “What’s that then?”

“We-ell,” she begins teasingly, “it’s a word you use an awful lot…”

“I’ve already told you the word for ‘banana’,” he reminds her.

She rolls her eyes, fishing into the picnic basket and producing one of the yellow fruit, tossing it over to him.

“I didn’t mean that,” she retorts as he gleefully unpeels the banana and starts to eat it. “But if you don’t teach me the word for ‘brilliant,’ I might never know what you’re talking about!”

* * *
The next chance the Doctor and Donna have for some peace and quiet is after their time on the ‘new world,’ which turned out to be rather more dangerous than they had anticipated. The trees attempted to eat them and were only pacified by the contents of the picnic baskets Donna had fortuitously brought with them.

They haven’t spoken much since their return, but the Doctor is musing on Donna’s earlier words about loss, feeling the echo of that gentle touch on his chest above one of his hearts.

“Doctor?”

He looks up, shaken out of his reverie, to find her watching him, and he’s startled by the look of sadness in her eyes.

“What is it, Donna?”

“Can you tell me about – I mean, I’ll understand if it’s too hard.” She pauses for a moment, before hurrying on, “So just tell me to shut up if you want – but I was thinking about what you said after Pompeii, about living forever…”

He frowns a little as she stops speaking. “If what’s too hard?” he asks in the end.

“Well,” he notices that she is studiously avoiding his gaze, “I was wondering – what did death mean on Gallifrey?”

For a moment, he simply gazes at her, wondering how someone so sensitive to the feelings of others could possibly be so unsure of herself.

“Death,” he says in the end, trying not to think about specific people, “meant the sharing of knowledge. Just before they died, the person was hooked up the Matrix – the point of all knowledge on Gallifrey – so that their experiences could be valued by later generations.”

“That’s why you sometimes miss the little things, isn’t it?” she says thoughtfully, but with a nervous undertone to her voice, as if she’s afraid of offending him. “Because your people always thought of the greater good.”

“I suppose so,” he says in mild surprise, having never thought about it like that before.

“So there wasn’t a burial then?” she suggests after a moment of silence.

“I don’t know what happened to the body,” he’s forced to admit. “There were rumours that it was saved, to be used by other people who came later.”

“That’s why you took all that time to agree when they asked if they could give Jenny a proper burial.” Donna studies her hands, which lie in her lap, her fingers linked in an obviously nervous gesture. “Because the idea wasn’t natural to you.”

“The idea of her death wasn’t natural,” he reprimands, but without any viciousness in his voice. “But I suppose I hoped… if we waited…”

There’s a long silence, and the Doctor realises that Donna’s too afraid to say a word in case it upsets him.

“You have to understand,” he says in the end, “you won’t always find parallels to human society in the way Time Lords behaved. There was no such thing as a ‘family’ on Gallifrey, not the way you understand it on Earth. We could love – we did love! – but without the same bond that that represents among humans. The idea of the community of Time Lords was still greater than anything else.”

“And yet you ran away from it all.”

“I wanted to see what life was like beyond Gallifrey.” He sighs and then pats the back of the couch, along which his arm is stretched. “But I took some of Gallifrey with me.”

Donna sits in silence before an idea clearly strikes her and she smiles. “You were right.”

He arches an eyebrow. “Well, of course I was,” he says teasingly, hearing, from the tone of her voice, that she’s changing the subject, “but about what in particular?”

“When you told me it was beautiful out here.”

“Well, you were right, too,” he’s forced to concede. “It can be terrible sometimes, too. But there’s always something beautiful or good to look forward to.”

“That’s why you keep going.” Donna smiles at little, as if satisfied at having had that moment of understanding.

“It’s one of the reasons,” he agrees. “It was certainly the reason why before – before the War. But now,” a corner of his lip quirks a little, “to be perfectly frank, I don’t think I know how to stop!”

She chuckles in sympathy, and perhaps understanding.

“Tell me this, Donna.” He tilts his head slightly to one side and studies her. “Is there anything you regret about this – about coming to find me and travelling like this?”

Her eyes are suddenly wide with obvious concern. “I haven’t given you a reason for thinking that, have I?”

“Definitely not.” He shakes his head, hugging his knees as he looks at her. “But seeing Martha made me remember everything happened with her. I know she didn’t realize until it was almost too late about how bad it could be with me – and you did turn me down at first, if you remember. I suppose I wonder if, having changed your mind then, you might sometimes wonder if you made the right decision to come and find me.”

“But surely it meant that I had time to realize that this really was what I wanted,” she argues, but gently, as if wary of hurting his feelings. “That I came into this more aware of the dangers than most of the people you invite along. That I knew the bad parts as well as the good ones.”

“So you don’t have any regrets?” he asks hopefully.

“Actually,” his hearts drop into his stomach at her tone and he wishes he’d never brought up the question as she continues, “now that you mention it, just one.”

“Dare I ask what it is?”

She sighs a little, leaning forward in her chair, her elbows resting on her knees and her chin in her hands. “I wish we knew more about the places we visited.”

“Donna, we find out everything we can!”

“Oh, I don’t mean like that.” She grins a little as she sits back in the armchair. “I mean things like the history of a place – or a people. After the whole thing with Lance,” she sighs a little, but continues before he can interrupt, “I studied a lot, trying to learn all those things I was missing. One of the things I found I loved was history – learning about what had happened in the past and trying to understand how that affected what was happening in the present.”

“Brilliant,” he tells her, being careful to speak in Gallifreyan, and seeing the sparkle in her eyes as she clearly understands him, even as her cheeks redden at his compliment. “Absolutely brilliant!”

“Don’t you find it fascinating, though?” she demands with obvious impatience, and refusing to acknowledge his words. “Like with the seven-day war on Messaline. So much history, even in such a short period of time. I just find it incredible!”

“History’s not really a Time Lord thing,” he’s forced, almost reluctantly, to admit. “We were more interested in the present and the future. History was, it had happened, and there was no chance of it being changed.”

“But you developed time travel!” she protests. “Or Omega did. You told me.”

“Ah, but time travel was used to make sure that things didn’t change, not that they did.” He sighs somewhat ruefully. “That’s why the Time Lords never approved of what I did – because I did change things! Of course,” he adds grimly, “that never stopped them using me as a scapegoat when they actually wanted to change things that would help them.”

Lost in dark thoughts, it takes him a moment to realize that Donna hasn’t spoken since he fell silent. When he looks up at her again, she’s chewing her bottom lip and he can see the anxiety in her eyes that he knows always appears when she isn’t sure what to say or do.

With something of an effort, he manages to smile and sees her relax visibly as she realises that she hasn’t been the cause of his momentary gloom.

“You know, if you wanted to know about anywhere, we could always look it up.” He gestures at the neighbouring room, which houses the TARDIS library. “It’s not quite the Matrix, but it’s a pretty complete collection all the same.”

“Would it have history of the Sontarans?”

The Doctor feels his eyebrows shoot upwards and he stares at her in surprise. “The Sontarans?”

“Mmm hmm.” She nods, staring past him at the wall behind, her gaze thoughtful. “I suppose I want to know why! Why they are the way they are, why they want to wage war all over the Universe like they do.”

“Does it matter?” the Doctor demands, suddenly finding himself forced to reconsider his enemy in a way he has never done before and feeling more than a little discomfort in doing so.

“It does to me.” Donna frowns a little. “I could understand everyone else. We know all about the battle between the humans and the Hath. And as for the Adipose and Matron Cofelia, and the Pyroviles, and the Racnoss – they’d all lost their home planets and needed Earth to continue their species.”

“The Sontarans did, too,” he reminds her.

“But that wasn’t their primary purpose,” she contradicts him. “The use of Earth as a breeding planet for the Sontarans was a very small part of something much bigger. It was really just a – a jumping-off point.”

“What more do you need to know though?” he asks wonderingly. “What good would it do, even if you could find out the answers?”

“I just like knowing why,” she says with a shrug.

“Donna, it doesn’t matter why,” he proclaims at last, in exasperation. “The important thing is to give them a chance to change their minds and, if they don’t take it, to remove the threat!”

“How can you give them a chance if you don’t know what use they’re going to make of it?” she says at once.

There’s a long moment of silence.

“You can’t know that,” he admits softly. “Not all the time. Almost never, in fact. But,” he goes on before she can speak, “you also can’t assume that, just because they’ve behaved one way until that point, they will always imitate that behaviour later. For instance,” he speaks slightly faster, warming to his topic, “I was given directions by the Time Lords to go and destroy one of my oldest enemies before they came into existence. They had foreseen what this enemy would become and wanted me to change them in order to lessen the threat. But,” he finishes, remembering that time, “I couldn’t do it.”

“Because they could have become something better?”

“Yes, that too,” he replies. “But there was also the fact that even if that was unlikely – and, indeed, they did just what the Time Lords predicted - you cannot ever have complete evil without there also being some good coming from it.” He smiles a little. “In this instance, it brought nations and people together who would never otherwise have been natural allies.”

“Even a giant spider threatening the whole of Earth can have good consequences,” she suggests with a smile.

“Yes,” he agrees, smiling back at her. “Brilliant consequences.”

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