The road less travelled...

Title: The Most Heeded of Doctors
Author: katherine_b
Rating: PG
Summary: “Illness is the most heeded of doctors; to goodness and wisdom we only make promises; pain, we obey.” (Marcel Proust)

Part III

Donna rubs a hand over her eyes and pries her lashes apart. They are coated with tiny ice crystals and she wipes them away as best she can, her skin feeling numb and her warmer fingers almost uncomfortably hot.

She looks up and realises that she can make out objects in the room.

The lamp beside her bed is glowing very faintly.

It takes her a moment to remember why this is a good thing.

She looks down to find that the Doctor is still lying beside her. His head seems to be turned in towards her more than she remembers, and she sees that his fingers are clutching loosely at the sleeve of her top.

More importantly, the colour in his face looks more natural, although she thinks he is still a bit pale; still, it's hard to tell in the dim light. The warmth of his body feels closer to his usual temperature. His breathing is soft and regular, and she feels his pulse to find that it is no longer bounding, although it still seems to be faster than she thinks is usual for him.

Donna gently frees herself from his relaxed hold and tucks pillows in behind him so that she can roll him onto his back. She manages to ease herself away without waking him up.

The cold hits her again when she stands up, but it's not as agonising as before. Donna brushes her fingers over the walls and realises that they are not frosted as they were. The floor, too, while still plain concrete rather than carpet, is also not rimed in white.

Going over to the table, Donna picks up one of the flashlights and turns it on. The lamp next to the bed fades to darkness, as if the TARDIS is doing her best, but doesn't have the strength to keep the light burning. Donna lightly touches the wall again.

“Thanks, old girl. I know you're trying.”

Donna peers into the cup of tea she had made what feels like a lifetime ago. The remains of it are frozen against the sides of the cup.

Sighing, Donna takes the ice-pick and turns to the two buckets on the floor, kneeling beside them with the saucepan on the floor next to her. She manages to break off several decent sized chunks of ice and picks them up with numb fingers, dropping them into the saucepan.

Staggering to her feel, she dumps the half-full pot on the table and then picks up the stove, giving it several hard shakes to warm up the gas enough for her to light it, just like the man in the shop had told her when she bought it. The stove lights more easily this time and she sets the saucepan on the hob with a sigh of relief.

While the water melts, Donna digs into her bag of camping supplies and barely suppresses a yelp of triumph when she finds an energy bar. Just the sight of it makes her stomach contract painfully and she wastes no time in tearing off the wrapper and cramming a large piece in her mouth.

Her mouth is so dry that she feels as if she’s going to be sick.

Spitting the mouthful back into her hand, Donna leans against the table as her stomach twists. Some of the ice has already begun to melt and Donna snatches up the saucepan, pouring the small amount of water into one of the empty cups and throwing it down.

Only a tiny amount makes it down her throat, but at least it quells the nausea.

Donna carefully puts the saucepan down on the hob and catches her breath.

Her head is pounding, both from the shock of the moment and from the cold, which she can feel creeping around her once more. While the ice continues to melt, she pulls on the t-shirts from the laundry-basket, wrapping one around her neck in the closest approximation she can manage to a scarf.

If the Doctor didn’t look so pale, she would probably take hers back, but she’s afraid of doing anything that will make him worse and possibly cause the temperature to plummet again.

The water boiling is one of the most welcome sounds she’s ever heard.

Rather than trying to pour the water out of the saucepan – she’s shivering and doesn’t exactly want to spill it everywhere, particularly not on herself – she compromises by dipping a cup into the hot water and pouring that into another cup which already has a tea-bag and some sugar in it. The milk is frozen and she can’t be bothered chipping any off so she decides to make do with black tea.

By the time she gets back into bed, the warm cup cradled in her hands, any residual heat is long gone. Donna tugs gently one the blankets until she finds one that isn’t completely wrapped around the Doctor and pulls it over until she can cover herself with it.

The Doctor moves as she does so, pulled over by the movement of the blanket. His head rolls across the pillow and comes to rest against her arm. He gives a sigh and seems to relax.

“Soppy Martian,” Donna murmurs, lightly smoothing down the tuft of hair poking out from beneath the beanie on his head.

The tea warms her up properly for the first time since she realised how badly wrong things were. Or perhaps it’s the warmth from the Doctor. Even as she sips her drink, she feels him move, bit by bit, inching ever closer to her. But it’s only when she leans over to put her empty cup on the bedside table and settles back against the pillow again that she realises quite how close he is.

His arm creeps across her, a heavy weight across her middle that is very reassuring. Although he’s warm, it’s not that dreadful heat that had been coming off him before. It's closer to her own body temperature, and even if that's not quite natural, at least he looks better.

The Doctor's head finally comes to rest on her chest, which she’s caught him ogling more than once in spite of his ‘just mates’ protests, and she rolls her eyes.

“Don’t get any ideas, sunshine,” she warns softly, even as she strokes her fingers across the exposed skin on the back of his neck before pulling up the blankets to tuck more firmly around him.

She doesn’t expect a response and isn’t too surprised when she doesn’t receive one. The flashlight she left on the table is not aimed directly at the bed so as not to blind her, which means that she can’t see the Doctor’s face clearly, but he feels so relaxed, lying against her, that she is almost positive he’s asleep.

The problem is, now she’s not distracted by cold and she isn’t thirsty, she realises that she’s still terribly hungry. In the light from the torch she can see the energy bar still lying on the table, and she can taste the remnants of it.

Donna’s stomach twists and gives a faint growl of protest. She knows the next stage will be nausea, and she had enough of that before. Besides, she can’t think of much worse than being sick with a toilet that can’t flush it all away.

“Sorry, Spaceman,” she says ruefully, gently beginning to ease him away from her.

He whimpers – at any other time, she would be amused at the thought of the great Lord of Time acting like a clingy child, but now she’s almost impatient at his actions – and his hold around her tightens.

Donna sighs in frustration. “Please, Doctor,” she whispers, resting her head against his, “I need you to let me go so that I can get something to eat – and maybe get you something as well when you’re feeling better.”

There is a moment of silence and then the Doctor sighs and gives a little wriggle. Donna looks down, but as far as she can see, his eyes are still closed.

“Please,” she says again, and wonders if she imagines the frown she seems to see on his face.

Finally his arm pulls back and he rolls over, away from her, grumbling something under his breath. Donna waits for a moment to see if he’s going to wake up properly, but when he doesn’t sit up or open his eyes, she gingerly gets out of bed and pads across the room to the table where she looks through the food she brought from the kitchen.

The butter is hard enough to bang nails in with, but Donna manages to scrape enough off with the knife from her camping kit to put in the frying pan. Once it melts, she adds some bread and fries it, eating the toast in small bits, interspersed with warm water so that she doesn’t choke on it like she did before. At the same time, she boils the kettle again and makes herself another cup of tea. Sipping the fragrant beverage, she tries to decide whether she wants to fry herself an egg or attempt to defrost some of the biscuits.

A noise from the other side of the room brings her up short.

“Doctor?” She turns and sees movement from beneath the heap of blankets. “Do you want a drink?” she asks, remembering her own thirst when she first woke up.

She takes the sound she hears in reply as confirmation and snatches the saucepan off the hob. Pouring the warm water into another cup, she adds a few ice-chips to cool it down and then takes it and the flashlight over to the bed.

The Doctor looks up at her from against the pillows. His eyes are heavy and there is more colour in his face than Donna is used to seeing, but at least he’s awake. He even manages a smile as she comes into view and she smiles back as she offers the cup.

He moves to sit up and flinches in apparent pain. Some of the heightened colour in his cheeks fades, and Donna puts the cup down on the bedside table before grabbing some of the pillows from around him. He uses her arm to pull himself into a sitting position and Donna is quick to stack the pillows as best she can with her free arm.

The Doctor collapses back against the heap of pillows once they have been haphazardly arranged, unable to hold back a groan as he does so. He lies there for a moment, his eyes closed, catching his breath, and his eyes are dark with pain when he finally looks up at her again.

“All right?” she asks, and when he nods, she picks up the cup again, offering it, with a half-teasing, “Shall we try that again?”

He takes it from her and says something in reply. At least, his lips move and sound comes out, so Donna assumes he’s speaking, but as he looks at her questioningly, she can only shake her head.

“Try English,” she suggests, pulling up a chair and sitting down beside the bed.

He arches an eyebrow and makes similar sounds, but she shakes her head again.

“English,” she repeats slowly and clearly, as if talking to an idiot.

His eyes flicker around the room, fixing, rather to her confusion, on a central empty space in the middle of the bedroom. He frowns a little, and she could almost swear he was trying to communicate with the TARDIS. The fear on his face a moment later confirms it in Donna's mind, and also tells her that the TARDIS isn’t talking back.

For the third time the Doctor’s lips move and he says something, and although Donna thinks it sounds different from his previous attempts, she still can't make sense of what he's saying.

Her own mounting anxiety mirrors that evident in his eyes.

Donna wants to reassure him, but she's seen for herself the way the TARDIS was unable even to keep a light burning. The fact that the power is still off, and the temperature isn't going up, and now even the translation circuits are clearly still not working only adds to her concern.

And then, even if she could find comforting words, Donna can't tell if the Doctor can actually understand what she is saying. For all she knows, he is as confused by her words as she is by his.

Is that what this strange, unknown illness has done to him? Stripped away his knowledge of languages as well as killing the TARDIS?

As the Doctor closes his eyes once more, Donna is left to wonder what else it might have done.

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