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Title: Touch of an Angel 3/3
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
katherine_b
Rating: G
Summary: Donna thinks she may have found a silver lining in the darkest cloud.
A/N: Written for the fifth Travellers’ Tales with the prompt ‘halo’
Part III
On the other side of the TARDIS doors, the Doctor hears a faint gasp that he recognises as coming from Donna. He hauls open the doors to find himself face-to-face with the Angel – which is glowing gold, the energy it absorbed from Donna rippling over the frozen stone surface.
Relief floods through him as he sees that the cables, still slung around the Angel, are also pulsing with energy. If one Angel still has the wires around them, he reasons, the others will too.
He throws the doors closed and runs up to the console, sending the TARDIS back to the original pace it had materialised in the room. Then he races back down the ramp and once more opens the doors.
The Angels haven’t moved.
What’s more, they’re still entangled in the wires – and all four are glowing and pulsing as the deadly Time Lord radiation flows through them.
Their bodies twitch and tremble, and since the Doctor knows that they physically can’t move while he’s looking at them, he’s aware that it’s the energy making them shake.
Then there is a low rumble, and at the same instant a high-pitched shriek. Lines begin to appear on the smooth surface, cracks that leech along the stone, widening and growing with every passing second.
A roar fills the room, and the Doctor instinctively ducks as the four stone figures shatter into a million pieces.
Stone shards bounce off the TARDIS force-field, rattling back against the wall like hail, and the wire falls to the floor of the cellar with a whipping sound that echoes off the concrete walls with their chipped and flaking paint as the Angels disintegrate in front of his eyes.
“Brilliant!” he exclaims as he looks down at the four piles of dust on the floor where the Angels had been mere seconds earlier.
His voice echoes around the console room – and reminds him that he’s alone.
And the next thought, or perhaps one that comes at exactly the same instant, is that, somewhere out there, Donna is waiting for him.
“Well, get on with it, Spaceman,” he can imagine her saying as he steps out of the TARDIS and fishes in his pocket for some tubes to store the remains of the Angels. “You think I’ve got all the time in the world or something? I’m not the one who’s going to live forever, you know.”
He carefully scoops the minute stone particles into the unbreakable glass containers and then ducks back into the TARDIS to find a home for them in one of the stasis cupboards. That will keep them from somehow rebuilding themselves over time and posing a renewed threat to the Universe.
Coming back out into the cellar, he peers around the room, hunting for anything that might have been left by his companion at some indeterminate point in the past.
“Come on, Donna,” he mutters as he peers through the dim light, “don’t make this so difficult for me!”
He catches himself looking for something new, a part of the room that wasn’t there before the Angels were destroyed, recognising his mistake.
He should be looking for something that’s always been there instead!
Rolling his eyes at his own idiocy – Call yourself a Time Lord! – he tries to decide what might have attracted Donna’s attention and been chosen by her. He’s not even sure exactly what message she might choose to leave, so he ends up running his hands over numerous pieces of furniture (incidentally getting the occasional splinter poking into him) in the hope that he will be able to feel an engraving that his eyes might not be able to make out.
He can’t see any marks that might be messages written into the dust and dirt on the floor or the walls, so he heads up out of the cellar into the house.
His own message to Sally Sparrow screams at him from the wall as he enters the room that looks out onto the garden where he first saw one of the Angels. Wondering if Donna might have been inspired by his handwork, he tears the rest of the paper off the walls, but finds nothing.
Sighing in aggravation, he turns away, although he does allow himself a final glance out of the window, just to check that the garden is empty of statues.
He knows how much Donna would love the furniture, covered with cobwebs and dust, evidence of the abrupt manner in which the owners disappeared. She has a thing for period pieces, so he meticulously checks every chair, table, sideboard, and anything else he stumbles across.
During his search, he finds evidence of a number of people who, like Sally and Kathy, came to investigate this apparently haunted mansion. Bags and notes and pens are in little piles, collecting dust and cobwebs, their owners long since gone.
The Doctor can only be glad that no more belongings are to be added to the pile.
He returns to the room where his own words are written on the wall. Thoughtfully he closes the portable DVD player on which Sally's notes told him his own message had been played. The chaotic state of the room suggests that a confrontation with one of the Angels too place here.
It’s while he is idly gazing at the bold letters written on the wall, however, that he realises what he’s doing wrong now.
In all of his attempts to imagine where Donna Noble might have chosen to leave the message that would summon him, he had forgotten one vital thing – the meta-crisis.
He was trying to imagine what Donna might have chosen, while he should have remembered that she now views the world in the same way that he does. She would have chosen a way to leave her message that she would expect him to pick up on at once.
And as his eyes once more trace his instructions to Sally, a grin forms on his face and he spins around, scanning the sonic across each of the other three walls, using the beam to search below the layers of paint and paper for anything written there.
Nothing in here, but he can understand why she chose not to leave it in this room. She wouldn’t have expected him to be so silly as to go hunting through the house for her note when there’s a far more sensible place for it.
He heads back down to the cellar with a feeling of certainty.
A patch of crumbling paint that he recalls seeing when he and Donna had first arrived here recurs to him now, and he knows that Donna will have thought of it too.
The sonic lights up the writing as clearly as if he had physically stripped off the paint. He can’t help chuckling a little at the ‘Right here, right now’ line, remembering their time in the 1920s, before casting an eager eye over the line of numbers, knowing exactly what Donna wants him to do.
He throws himself back into the TARDIS, the slam of the door echoing around the large space, and is at the controls before the sound completely dies away. With a sense of relief and triumph, he sends the TARDIS into the vortex, waiting impatiently for it to cover the countless distance. The landing, he has to admit, is less than perfect.
A roar from outside shakes the TARDIS and the Doctor races down the ramp, all-too-familiar fear thrilling through him.
Sticking his head outside, his eyes widen at the sight of a massive dinosaur, which has brought down its prey and is now beginning to tear it apart with its huge jaws. If Donna is out there somewhere...
He shudders and begins thinking frantically of a way to get out there safely and find her – only to feel the TARDIS give him the equivalent of a mental slap upside the head. He ducks back inside his ship to check the numbers he put into the console.
“Yep,” he says slowly out loud as he corrects the error he made in transposing two numbers, “don’t think I’ll mention this to Donna.”
He pops back to 2008, just to make sure he’s definitely got the numbers right this time, and then once more sends the TARDIS into the vortex.
Anticipation wriggles in his stomach as his thoughts fly ahead even of the speeding blue box. He wonders how Donna will look, whether she will have waited long to send for him, and what she might have done in the meantime.
In the darkest corner of his mind, he lets himself remember Kathy Nightingale, how she had ended up marrying the first man she found when she ended up in the 1920s. He can’t help wondering whether Donna might have done something similar, and perhaps is only summoning him now because she has some news for him, or just because she promised she would, and he knows she’d never break a promise.
And if that had happened...
You’d be happy for her, he tells himself sternly. Just like if she’d found Lee at the Library.
He forcibly turns his thoughts away from that direction and all of those possibilities, instead checking his destination for the umpteenth time.
And this landing, he makes sure, just in case anyone should be watching, is perfect.
His path to the door is rather slower than before, unaccountable nervousness raging inside him, and he opens the door, peering out into the dim light of the basement, which he recognises at once as belonging to Wester Drumlins. It’s a little cleaner than his visit there in 2008; the ground, when he steps onto it and closes the door behind him, is not covered in dirt and dust.
“What kept you, Time Boy?” a voice demands impatiently, and he spins around.
She’s sitting cross-legged on a box, a sixties-style flashlight held in her lap making her hair glow like a halo around her head, but her clothes are the same as those she had been wearing when he last saw her. His eyes study her face in the dim light. She doesn’t look any older, and a weight lifts off his shoulders.
“Am I late?” he asks, somewhat inanely.
Donna snorts in obvious indignation, as if his question isn’t even worth bothering about.
“When did you expect me to get here?” he asks anxiously, wondering what other error he had made in the details he gave to the TARDIS, and worrying just how long she’s been sitting there for. Just how mad she has the right to be with him, and how she might punish him later.
Donna rolls her eyes as she gets up off the box, collects her jacket and crosses the floor to stand in front of him. “Twenty minutes ago! Do you know how long that feels when you can sense the passing of every single fraction of a second?” She points an accusing finger at him. “You owe me for that, Spaceman!”
He’s already grinning so hard that his cheeks ache and can only chuckle at this ending. “Anything,” he says simply. “Name it and it’s yours!”
“Well, quite frankly,” Donna gently prods him in the ribs, a light dancing in her eyes, and he knows she’s suppressing an answering grin with difficulty, “considering you can’t even obey a simple note, I think you should let me drive from now on.”
Author:
katherine_b Rating: G
Summary: Donna thinks she may have found a silver lining in the darkest cloud.
A/N: Written for the fifth Travellers’ Tales with the prompt ‘halo’
Part III
On the other side of the TARDIS doors, the Doctor hears a faint gasp that he recognises as coming from Donna. He hauls open the doors to find himself face-to-face with the Angel – which is glowing gold, the energy it absorbed from Donna rippling over the frozen stone surface.
Relief floods through him as he sees that the cables, still slung around the Angel, are also pulsing with energy. If one Angel still has the wires around them, he reasons, the others will too.
He throws the doors closed and runs up to the console, sending the TARDIS back to the original pace it had materialised in the room. Then he races back down the ramp and once more opens the doors.
The Angels haven’t moved.
What’s more, they’re still entangled in the wires – and all four are glowing and pulsing as the deadly Time Lord radiation flows through them.
Their bodies twitch and tremble, and since the Doctor knows that they physically can’t move while he’s looking at them, he’s aware that it’s the energy making them shake.
Then there is a low rumble, and at the same instant a high-pitched shriek. Lines begin to appear on the smooth surface, cracks that leech along the stone, widening and growing with every passing second.
A roar fills the room, and the Doctor instinctively ducks as the four stone figures shatter into a million pieces.
Stone shards bounce off the TARDIS force-field, rattling back against the wall like hail, and the wire falls to the floor of the cellar with a whipping sound that echoes off the concrete walls with their chipped and flaking paint as the Angels disintegrate in front of his eyes.
“Brilliant!” he exclaims as he looks down at the four piles of dust on the floor where the Angels had been mere seconds earlier.
His voice echoes around the console room – and reminds him that he’s alone.
And the next thought, or perhaps one that comes at exactly the same instant, is that, somewhere out there, Donna is waiting for him.
“Well, get on with it, Spaceman,” he can imagine her saying as he steps out of the TARDIS and fishes in his pocket for some tubes to store the remains of the Angels. “You think I’ve got all the time in the world or something? I’m not the one who’s going to live forever, you know.”
He carefully scoops the minute stone particles into the unbreakable glass containers and then ducks back into the TARDIS to find a home for them in one of the stasis cupboards. That will keep them from somehow rebuilding themselves over time and posing a renewed threat to the Universe.
Coming back out into the cellar, he peers around the room, hunting for anything that might have been left by his companion at some indeterminate point in the past.
“Come on, Donna,” he mutters as he peers through the dim light, “don’t make this so difficult for me!”
He catches himself looking for something new, a part of the room that wasn’t there before the Angels were destroyed, recognising his mistake.
He should be looking for something that’s always been there instead!
Rolling his eyes at his own idiocy – Call yourself a Time Lord! – he tries to decide what might have attracted Donna’s attention and been chosen by her. He’s not even sure exactly what message she might choose to leave, so he ends up running his hands over numerous pieces of furniture (incidentally getting the occasional splinter poking into him) in the hope that he will be able to feel an engraving that his eyes might not be able to make out.
He can’t see any marks that might be messages written into the dust and dirt on the floor or the walls, so he heads up out of the cellar into the house.
His own message to Sally Sparrow screams at him from the wall as he enters the room that looks out onto the garden where he first saw one of the Angels. Wondering if Donna might have been inspired by his handwork, he tears the rest of the paper off the walls, but finds nothing.
Sighing in aggravation, he turns away, although he does allow himself a final glance out of the window, just to check that the garden is empty of statues.
He knows how much Donna would love the furniture, covered with cobwebs and dust, evidence of the abrupt manner in which the owners disappeared. She has a thing for period pieces, so he meticulously checks every chair, table, sideboard, and anything else he stumbles across.
During his search, he finds evidence of a number of people who, like Sally and Kathy, came to investigate this apparently haunted mansion. Bags and notes and pens are in little piles, collecting dust and cobwebs, their owners long since gone.
The Doctor can only be glad that no more belongings are to be added to the pile.
He returns to the room where his own words are written on the wall. Thoughtfully he closes the portable DVD player on which Sally's notes told him his own message had been played. The chaotic state of the room suggests that a confrontation with one of the Angels too place here.
It’s while he is idly gazing at the bold letters written on the wall, however, that he realises what he’s doing wrong now.
In all of his attempts to imagine where Donna Noble might have chosen to leave the message that would summon him, he had forgotten one vital thing – the meta-crisis.
He was trying to imagine what Donna might have chosen, while he should have remembered that she now views the world in the same way that he does. She would have chosen a way to leave her message that she would expect him to pick up on at once.
And as his eyes once more trace his instructions to Sally, a grin forms on his face and he spins around, scanning the sonic across each of the other three walls, using the beam to search below the layers of paint and paper for anything written there.
Nothing in here, but he can understand why she chose not to leave it in this room. She wouldn’t have expected him to be so silly as to go hunting through the house for her note when there’s a far more sensible place for it.
He heads back down to the cellar with a feeling of certainty.
A patch of crumbling paint that he recalls seeing when he and Donna had first arrived here recurs to him now, and he knows that Donna will have thought of it too.
The sonic lights up the writing as clearly as if he had physically stripped off the paint. He can’t help chuckling a little at the ‘Right here, right now’ line, remembering their time in the 1920s, before casting an eager eye over the line of numbers, knowing exactly what Donna wants him to do.
He throws himself back into the TARDIS, the slam of the door echoing around the large space, and is at the controls before the sound completely dies away. With a sense of relief and triumph, he sends the TARDIS into the vortex, waiting impatiently for it to cover the countless distance. The landing, he has to admit, is less than perfect.
A roar from outside shakes the TARDIS and the Doctor races down the ramp, all-too-familiar fear thrilling through him.
Sticking his head outside, his eyes widen at the sight of a massive dinosaur, which has brought down its prey and is now beginning to tear it apart with its huge jaws. If Donna is out there somewhere...
He shudders and begins thinking frantically of a way to get out there safely and find her – only to feel the TARDIS give him the equivalent of a mental slap upside the head. He ducks back inside his ship to check the numbers he put into the console.
“Yep,” he says slowly out loud as he corrects the error he made in transposing two numbers, “don’t think I’ll mention this to Donna.”
He pops back to 2008, just to make sure he’s definitely got the numbers right this time, and then once more sends the TARDIS into the vortex.
Anticipation wriggles in his stomach as his thoughts fly ahead even of the speeding blue box. He wonders how Donna will look, whether she will have waited long to send for him, and what she might have done in the meantime.
In the darkest corner of his mind, he lets himself remember Kathy Nightingale, how she had ended up marrying the first man she found when she ended up in the 1920s. He can’t help wondering whether Donna might have done something similar, and perhaps is only summoning him now because she has some news for him, or just because she promised she would, and he knows she’d never break a promise.
And if that had happened...
You’d be happy for her, he tells himself sternly. Just like if she’d found Lee at the Library.
He forcibly turns his thoughts away from that direction and all of those possibilities, instead checking his destination for the umpteenth time.
And this landing, he makes sure, just in case anyone should be watching, is perfect.
His path to the door is rather slower than before, unaccountable nervousness raging inside him, and he opens the door, peering out into the dim light of the basement, which he recognises at once as belonging to Wester Drumlins. It’s a little cleaner than his visit there in 2008; the ground, when he steps onto it and closes the door behind him, is not covered in dirt and dust.
“What kept you, Time Boy?” a voice demands impatiently, and he spins around.
She’s sitting cross-legged on a box, a sixties-style flashlight held in her lap making her hair glow like a halo around her head, but her clothes are the same as those she had been wearing when he last saw her. His eyes study her face in the dim light. She doesn’t look any older, and a weight lifts off his shoulders.
“Am I late?” he asks, somewhat inanely.
Donna snorts in obvious indignation, as if his question isn’t even worth bothering about.
“When did you expect me to get here?” he asks anxiously, wondering what other error he had made in the details he gave to the TARDIS, and worrying just how long she’s been sitting there for. Just how mad she has the right to be with him, and how she might punish him later.
Donna rolls her eyes as she gets up off the box, collects her jacket and crosses the floor to stand in front of him. “Twenty minutes ago! Do you know how long that feels when you can sense the passing of every single fraction of a second?” She points an accusing finger at him. “You owe me for that, Spaceman!”
He’s already grinning so hard that his cheeks ache and can only chuckle at this ending. “Anything,” he says simply. “Name it and it’s yours!”
“Well, quite frankly,” Donna gently prods him in the ribs, a light dancing in her eyes, and he knows she’s suppressing an answering grin with difficulty, “considering you can’t even obey a simple note, I think you should let me drive from now on.”
crappy
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