The road less travelled...

Title: Dona nobis beatitas Chapter 4/?
Author: katherine_b
Rating: PG
Summary: The Doctor turns teacher.
Characters: Donna and the Doctor (Ten)

Part VI

The Doctor only notices later that, after their time on Midnight, at least when they’re alone, Donna no longer speaks to him in English. It’s as if she knows that Gallifreyan will make him feel more secure somehow.

He is reaching across the console to check the stability of a toggle switch as part of his standard maintenance when he feels something poking into him from the inside of his coat and digs around in his pocket, finally producing a small velvet box.

For a moment he frowns at it, considering whether to open the doors of the TARDIS and fling this object into the vortex.

But in the end he decides he ought to let Donna decide whether she wants the small gift that he bought her from Midnight and so he goes to find her.

After all, it’s been a few days since their visit to that place and perhaps she’s begun to recover from it in the same way he has.

He finds her in the kitchen, busy at the stove, and he can’t help grinning at the sight of a small pile of banana peels on the counter.

“Cake?” he says hopefully.

“Muffins,” she replies, turning around to grin at him. “Banana and chocolate chip. Since you finished the last of the others last night.”

“If I’d known you were waiting for me to finish them to make more, I’d have eaten them faster,” he tells her obligingly.

She chuckles and scoops a small amount of the mixture up with a spoon, turning around to pop it into his mouth.

“Did you want me for something?” she asks as she gets out another spoon and begins doling out the mixture into the greased tray.

“Want – ? Oh, yes!” The Doctor gives the spoon a final lick to make sure there’s no lingering mixture and is about to toss it into the sink when he catches Donna’s eye and meekly puts it into the dishwasher instead. Then he pulls the small box out of his pocket and holds it out. “I got this for you on Midnight before – you know – it all went…”

“Pear-shaped,” she offers helpfully, drying her hands before taking the box. “Thank you.”

“But if you decide you don’t want it,” he goes on quickly, before she can open it, “because of, you know, where it came from, I’ll understand! Really! In fact, I was thinking we might go somewhere I can buy you something with a few less bad memories. How would…?”

“Doctor!” she says in sharp tones and he stops talking abruptly. “Let me look at it first,” she says with a small smile. “I can’t decide whether I want to keep it or not if I haven’t seen it, can I?”

“Well, I thought you might think,” he says slowly, giving an awkward tug to his hair, “that, because it came from there…”

“Oh, it’s beautiful,” Donna interrupts, having opened the small box.

The crystal inside is shaped into a delicate flower and reflects the overhead light, sending beams of light across the room.

“Six petals,” she says, counting quickly. “Is that like a version of the four-leaf clover or something?”

“Actually, I got it because I thought it looked like the Flowers of Remembrance we used to have on Gallifrey,” he replies. “I’d forgotten about them when we were talking about death rites after Messaline, but when I saw it at the shop on Midnight, I thought you might like something that could almost have come from Gallifrey.”

She gently strokes one of the petals with her index finger and then lifts the gleaming flower out of the small box with the short loop of wire attached to the back in some mysterious manner.

Turning her back on him, she pulls her hair aside, revealing the small catch of the necklace she is currently wearing.

“Could you undo that for me?”

“Of course.” He loosens the catch, snagging both ends of the chain between his fingers until Donna can take it from him and loop the chain through the back of the crystal. The next moment, the flower is sitting at her neck and she is reaching up to touch it so that the movement makes the object cast reflective spots on the walls.

“So you had flowers on Gallifrey,” she says quietly.

“Uh, garden, remember?” The Doctor jerks his head in the direction where he last found his greenhouses. “I showed that to you on your first night on the TARDIS.”

“But you told me the plants came from different places you visited,” she reminds him. “I took that to mean that Gallifrey didn’t have flowers and things.”

“Oh, it did,” he assures her, taking her hand and preparing to lead her out of the room.

“Wait, let me put these in the oven first,” she stops him, breaking away from his hold so that she can slide the four heavily-laden muffin trays into the oven. Setting the timer, she turns back to him. “All right then, come and show me your Gallifreyan natives. Apart from you, of course,” she adds teasingly. “But I get plenty of chances to see a timelordius swellheadidness in his natural environment, better known to the rest of the universe as ‘running for his life’.”

“Oi!”

“Oh, come on or we won’t have a proper chance to look around before the muffins will be ready!”

He gives up, rolling his eyes as he leads her in the direction of the TARDIS garden. When he opens the doors, he is greeted by the same smell of soil and freshness that always pervades this room. Out of the corner of his eye, he watches as Donna inhales deeply and he smiles as he leads her over to the corner where he transplanted the variety of plant life from his home planet.

“Oh, these are from Gallifrey?” Donna sinks to her knees in front of a bed of flowering plants, lightly brushing her hands over the petals and bending low to inhale the delicate perfume.

The Doctor kneels down beside her, plucking a leaf and breaking it in half so that she can smell the scent of the sap.

“Perennials,” he tells her, adding, with a wry smile, “luckily.”

“A plant that, with the right care, could live forever, from a race of beings obsessed with time,” she teases, nudging him with her elbow. “Why am I not surprised?”

He grins, nudging her back, before moving away to tend to some plants that have caught his attention.

“Do plants have a song?” she asks suddenly, and he glances over his shoulder to see her looking at him curiously.

“You mean like the Ood song?” And when she nods, “All living things have a song, Donna.”

“You can hear it?”

“That’s how I know when to come here and spend some time taking care of them.” He grins as she moves across to help him. “Otherwise, as you said when you were being so rude about my housekeeping, I’d never get a chance to go off and save planets because I’d be here all the time.”

“So,” she says lightly after he points out which plants are weeds and need to be removed, “you know you told me you could get me something else if I didn’t like my Midnight crystal?”

“Mmm?” he says, somewhat distractedly, as he tries to untangle a briar from one of his favourite flowers. “What about it?”

“Where were we going to go?”

“A planet called Shan Shen.” He pulls the tangle away and resettles the plant’s leaves. “Why?”

“Well,” he looks up in time to see the grin on her face and the teasing expression in her eyes, “is there a rule that says we can’t go there anyway?”

* * *
The Doctor stares at nothing in particular.

Everything has happened so fast.

Not just the DoctorDonna’s deterioration, which was tragically inevitable, but it seems as if they hadn’t even had a chance to catch their breath since arriving at Shan Shen.

For a moment, he lets himself remember how much he had loved showing Donna the bright, colourful, cheerful markets he had always enjoyed.

His mind wanders through the joyful reunions that have taken place since then.

But when it gets to the painful part, after the intrusion of the Daleks, he slams that process shut and refuses to look anymore.

Instead he leaves the console room, heading into the space below, wandering aimlessly through the empty rooms.

Eventually he winds up in the library.

And there, lying on the coffee table, are the rolls of parchment, pens and books that they had been using to write down some of the stories that the Doctor remembered so fondly from his childhood.

He stares blankly at the collection, which he knows had been scattered messily about the place when he left the room after Donna last went to bed on the TARDIS. Now the former mess is stacked together as neatly as if someone had been playing a game of Tetris.

Only Donna Noble could create such order out of chaos.

His breath catches, pain burning like a fire in his throat and in his eyes.

One harsh, raw sob breaks from him, and then he roars like an animal in pain, hurling himself at the table and flinging everything into the blazing fire that the TARDIS instantly lights in the hearth for him.

Tongues of flame lick their way along the edges of the books, greedily consuming the paper, but the heat causes one of the rolls of parchment to peel back a little so that he can see the smooth, even lines of Gallifreyan in his writing and, beneath them, the slightly shaky versions in Donna’s handwriting.

He suddenly lunges forward and snatches the scrolls from the fire.

The books – the last texts from Gallifrey – sink into ashes, but the parchment is almost untouched.

Carefully, reverently, the Doctor carries it back to the coffee table and unrolls the various pieces of parchment.

He uses the bottles of ink and coasters to keep them flat and steps back to stare at the writing, able to see the gradual improvement in Donna’s skills, until her writing is almost indistinguishable from his.

Almost viciously wiping the tears from his cheeks, he goes to find a frame he can use to preserve this.

The only written evidence in the Universe of the brilliance of Donna Noble.

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