Out of Tune 2/5 (G) - Spoilers to JE - Ten/Rose/Jack/Donna
AUTHOR :
sensiblecat
IMAGE:
red_temptation
WORDS: 4571
CHARACTERS: Ten, Rose, Donna, Jack
RATING: G
SPOILERS: Up to and beyond Journey's End. Includes "Music of the Spheres", from the recent BBC Proms Concert.
The characters and situations portrayed are the property of the BBC and no personal profit or plagiarism is intended.
Quotation from "The Dormouse and the Doctor" by AA Milne.
SUMMARY: Two years after the events of JE, the Doctor's speedily-implemented solutions seem to be unravelling. His other self is dying and it seems that only Donna can save him. But will that put her own life at risk?
Chapter One
“You were born in battle. Full of blood and anger and revenge.”
Journey’s End
Blood. Anger. Revenge. There wasn’t much you could do to express any of those things when you were stuck in bed all day. And the only battle that mattered now was living versus dying, every day he hung on a miracle in its own right. He was more likely to sit contemplating his mortality with an imaginary skull in his hand than to go out avenging people. Which was just as well, probably, because the only person he felt angry enough to murder was himself, and he was a whole universe away.
In this universe, Francis Bacon had written “Hamlet” and the Beatles had never existed, so he was free to claim wonderful lines like, “Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox,” as his own work if the fancy took him. He wished he could tell John (or was that one Paul?) how perfectly those words expressed his usual state of mind.
He thought about death a lot. His own, mostly. He knew himself well enough to be certain that his other, 100% Time Lord self would never, for a moment, have paused to consider how terrifying the prospect of your immanent, painful, undignified demise was when you’d spent your life expecting to regenerate under all but the most desperate circumstances. Oh, it wasn’t that he hadn’t been faced with life-threatening situations. But most had been while he was thoroughly wrapped up in some kind of adventure. He’d never had to sit around wondering if he’d taken all his pills and whether to call for someone to escort him to the loo. He was pretty sure that his original self would be having a miserable existence somewhere, but at least he wouldn’t be helpless and bored.
It was an odd feeling, knowing yourself through and through, but as a different person. He supposed it was character development of a sort. Like meeting someone with all your personal failings and realising, for the very first time, how infuriating you could be. You’d resolve to change, maybe you’d even succeed, but that annoying character would still be out there making your mistakes and refusing to acknowledge the fact - and you would want to shake him until his teeth fell out.
Being sick had taught him all the things he’d run around the universe for 900 years rather than learn. How to sit still and appreciate small changes in the view. How to be humble and accept kindness with grace. How to be patient and find ways to fill long uncharted vistas of time. How to live with the indignity of bedsores and acknowledging that someone loved you enough to dress them. And the pointlessness of wasting a short life loathing yourself and despising others for loving you.
Every single day, he and Rose found something to laugh about. That alone amazed him. It was real, genuine laughter, not the spiky sort that covers up the fact you’re screaming inside and on the road to madness. Funny, that it had taken his body falling apart to stitch his head back together. He wished the other him could hang out with him for a while. It would do him good.
Rose had nicknamed him “The Dormouse” after the little character in the AA Milne rhyme who was comforted by the view of geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue). Between themselves, he was always the Dormouse and his alter-ego continued to be The Doctor, that officious character who:
….said, "Tut! It's another attack!"
And ordered him Milk and Massage-of-the-back,
And Freedom-from-worry and Drives-in-a-car,
And murmured, "How sweet your chrysanthemums are!"
When his wheelchair was delivered and they'd both been trying not to feel miserable, he'd saved the situation by trilling, “Ooh, freedom from worry and drives in a car!” Before long they were quoting whole verses of the poem to one another, and soon moved on to “Can I have some butter for the royal slice of bread?”
“I bet the other one of you’s not having this much fun,” she sometimes said, as they sat together watching a sunset like a couple of old fogies, or relaxed beside the lake in the enormous garden of the Tyler mansion. (He’d become expert at stone-skimming from a sitting position).
He’d had his first heart attack at the most intimate and human point possible, as if to confirm that this awkward attempt to stuff two species in one frail body was doomed to failure. Since then she’d lain with him, night after night, stroked his hair, moulded his body against her back in the way he most loved and whispered in his ear that it didn’t matter as she pleasured herself again and he struggled not to weep with despair and frustration. Because he was human now, he could understand what she must be sacrificing, how difficult all those months of extended foreplay on the TARDIS must have been for her - yet all her hugs had been straightforward and generous, a complete gift of herself, holding nothing back.
And that was the pity of it all. She deserved so much better, his beautiful Rose who had suffered so much. He was not second best, but he’d happily have settled for being just as good - as things had turned out, he didn’t even have the ability to give her that. They’d had such plans - to build their new TARDIS, to travel, to have fun, to breathe and play and grow without the crushing burden of saving a broken universe - because, wonderfully, this one seemed to have figured out how to get by without his constant attention.
There had always been the ghost of his first self behind her eyes - he knew that because he carried his own ghost. He was not simply The Doctor - he was half of the DoctorDonna; he went through life feeling as if some of his limbs were missing. His mind scanned the universe for the consciousness that would complete his own, but only a muffled echo of it remained. Of all the mistakes his other self had made, that one disturbed him most, because he knew exactly what must have happened. Donna had had her awareness of her true identity hidden from her, because it disturbed the convenient portioning off that fooled the Doctor into thinking he’d engineered a solution.
He’d stopped trying to do that kind of thing now. Being human had taught him that life was complicated, messy and frequently without any neat resolution. Not only were happy endings extremely rare, but in most cases it was remarkably difficult to pinpoint when a human’s story did end, short of their sadly premature death. He’d never really grasped that before, because Time Lords had had the power and authority to escape untidiness, first by purging their own planet of it and then by constant movement. Humans couldn’t do that; they had to live with their contradictions. That was why they created such compelling works of art. All the best ones were an attempt to reconcile opposing forces, to create harmony where there had been discord. If you didn’t hear the discord in the first place, there was a Baroque emptiness to your compositions; they had only a mechanical beauty.
In that spirit, he’d taken to composing music. There were all kinds of subtleties in human music that he’d never heard on his home world, even though Gallifrey had boasted the heptodecatonic scale and whole libraries had been devoted to analysing the mathematical complexity of the Time Lords’ musical compositions. Gallifrey had had the ultimate in virtuosity - fugues that threatened to topple into infinity as they lifted the listener through level after dizzy level of development. But humans had jazz, improvisation, grace notes and glissades - quirky little complications that ensured a piece of music turned out slightly differently with each new performance.
He’d dabbled in composition before, but his tunes had never quite sprung to life, despite the impressive complexity of the Gallifreyan tonal scale. Now, with his uncomplicated human ears, he could hear all the interesting bits. He longed to link that to his Time Lord knowledge and create the ultimate music, one that conveyed both the pattern and the emotion, a true music of the spheres, including the response of the observer as well as the glory of what was observed. Perhaps the only way to really achieve that was to write two symphonies in two different universes and try to find a way to play both of them together.
When Rose came home from work and he heard her footsteps outside, knowing that she was coming straight in to see how he was, without even pausing to take her coat off or pour herself a drink, his head was full of music, the music she deserved, this woman who could span two universes. A melody that no orchestra would ever be able to play.
“Love you,” she said, bending down to kiss him.
His head shifted against the pillow and his hand closed over hers. They looked at each other, whole worlds in their eyes.
“Love you too,” he said.
He would not let her lose him. Somehow, he would find a way.
****
I’d never been more terrified in my whole life. Not even when I first found myself inside his spaceship. He’d just blasted a robot Santa to smithereens and now he was hanging out of the door of his freaky blue box, driving it with a piece of string between his teeth and expecting me to jump.
“I’m in my wedding dress!” I yelled. As if he hadn’t noticed.
“Yes! You look lovely! Now come on!” he shouted back.
“I can’t do it!” I said frantically. I couldn’t believe I’d be able to get across the gap between us wearing the stupid thing. Or that he’d maintain exactly the right speed. I’d end up in the middle of the motorway getting run over.
Then, suddenly, his voice completely changed. “Trust me,” he said. And I did trust him, instantly. I just knew, somehow, he did stuff like this all the time - that was his life and that was why he was on his own - who’d want to share a life like his?
The Doctor stopped reading, laid down the manuscript and shielded his eyes from the penetrating gaze of Jack, now sitting opposite him in the library. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach, gone whining into a corner like a hurt puppy. Jack, mercifully, stayed silent, just watching him.
He’d expected reading Donna’s book to be a painful experience, but he’d still not been prepared for such an immediate encounter with her. Back it all came, more clearly than ever: the tone of her voice, the look in her eyes and the journey she’d taken that Christmas Eve, from indignation to compassion and beyond. It had been like seeing a new human being emerge from a chrysalis before his eyes - in the middle of all his pain, she’d reminded him such things were possible. She’d given him hope - just the frailest, fraying thread of it, but it had been a start.
And she’d trusted him. Here it was, in her own words.
“Is that what you said to her? Your friend - the one you lost?”
I didn’t know how to ask him something that obviously hurt so much, but it was really important to me at that moment to know if she was dead. And he must have realised this, because he told me she wasn’t. “She is so alive!” he said. “Now jump!”
I think it helped to have something else to think about, because I did jump, and I landed right on top of him. I’d stopped expecting to die because I was too busy thinking about this other woman - his friend - though I’d a feeling she was a lot more than that - who hadn’t died. I wondered what he’d done to make sure she’d lived. Whatever it was, it was breaking his heart. I didn’t care if he was an alien, I knew grief when I saw it.
I wondered if he was lying to me. I could quite easily imagine him lying to protect me, so I wouldn’t freak out thinking he’d managed to kill off the last person he’d been with. But this wasn’t the time to discuss it, because I noticed there was smoke pouring out of the controls. “Your ship’s on fire!” I gasped, wondering if things could get any worse.
“I know,” he replied. “The funny thing is, for a spaceship, she doesn't really do that much flying. We'd better give her a couple of hours to cool down.” I could hardly see him through the smoke by now and the fact he’d said “a couple of hours” barely registered with me, even though it meant we’d missed the wedding, once and for all, and until an hour ago that’d been the only thing that mattered to me.
But the thought of being incinerated or choking to death does wonders to change your priorities. He pulled out a fire extinguisher and for some reason that made me crack up laughing…”
He stopped again, this time with a smile on his face. The whole adventure had had an element of farce about it that she captured very well. And he saw himself through Donna’s eyes - awkward, skinny, baffling, grieving - and, in some indefinable way he couldn’t quite deny - human and in dire need of a friend.
All that travelling, saving the universe, having adventures here there and everywhere, and now here he was, right back where he’d started that Christmas. Alone and trying to pretend he preferred it that way. Moving on, he read their odd little conversation on the rooftop. She’d remembered it better than him. He’d forgotten he’d gallantly lent his jacket to her and bio-damped her with a ring (not that it had done much good, in the end).
But there were things he did remember. The way he’d tried to talk about the Tylers and got it all wrong. “I had this friend. She had this family.” That wasn’t the correct way to describe it but he didn’t know a better one. To do that, you had to be inside the human race, and he wasn’t. He’d had the feeling, even then, that if she hung around he might be able to talk about it properly, something he needed to do, though it scared him as much as jumping into the TARDIS had terrified her.
She’d understood him. Known when to say something and when to shut up. She could laugh at herself even as her heart was breaking. He could relate to that. She challenged him without seeming to demand anything at all. And she’d trusted him, as long ago as that first day. Known he was capable of lying, but trusted him when it mattered the most.
He missed her. Even more than Rose in some ways. At least he knew - well, he had known - well, assumed, until tonight, that Rose was happy. Still Rose. He’d done the right thing. Donna was different. He’d let her down; now he dreaded to think of the reception he’d get if he went back and admitted what he’d done to save her.
Underestimated her, that’s what he’d done. The Donna shining through these pages was the woman he remembered and had, in a sense, come to love. A much simpler kind of love than loving Rose, because it didn’t seem to involve him trying to be human. When the humans on Midnight had ganged up on him and almost shoved him off their ship for being different, Donna’s arms had closed around him afterwards and he’d felt completely accepted. It wasn’t that Rose hadn’t accepted him, but somehow he’d never been able to accept her accepting him. He’d always been so certain that she wanted what he couldn’t give.
He returned to Donna’s manuscript. The moment when he’d been ready to wipe out the Racnoss and destroy himself, overwhelmed by the floodtide of grief. That was when she’d held out a hand, a thread of hope, and it had been his turn to trust her - and in the changing of a moment he’d spared the Earth so much. He’d thought she’d never know. Possibly she wouldn’t. Jack hadn’t said how complete her recall of events was, and whether she’d remember the alternative timeline when he’d let himself die.
“When he said ‘Gallifrey’ I realised how alone he was. He was just a step away from giving up. It’s easy to look back and think I knew that moment was important. I did, but I didn’t stop to think about it. I was scared of what he could do if there wasn’t anybody there to stop him. It never crossed my mind, not even for a minute, that it might be me. But watching the look in his eyes through that torrent of water was like looking into the depths of an abyss, somewhere you’d never want to go.
Then, in a moment, it was all over. He changed completely, like someone had flicked a switch. ‘Come on,” he said, “it’s time I got you out.” I didn’t know whether he meant the Empress or me, but all that mattered was he was okay. The Doctor was in again.
But the thought that I might have done that shocked me to the core. I wanted to get home, to be a million miles away from him at that moment.”
“You okay?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered, as truthfully as he could. “Probably not.”
Jack sighed. “You know, in some ways she was the best thing that could have happened to you.”
“Yeah,” was all he felt able to say.
Jack waited a while until he got a grip on himself again. “And you threw her away,” he added. “Keep doing it, don’t you?”
“I threw her away to save her life.”
“There were other ways. Is it really that difficult for you to ask for a little help?”
He got up, stuck his hands deep into his pockets and paced the room. “She can’t publish this, of course. You must know that.”
“Why not?” Jack folded his arms and outstared him. “Who’ll believe a word of it?”
“We’d know it was true.”
“And that’s what you can’t live with?” probed Jack.
That angered him. “Come on! How am I ever going to have any credibility after this? Not that it matters to me. But the Universe needs me. I need to be strong. I can’t go around letting people think I’m…”
He stopped abruptly. Jack rose from his chair and came over to him. When he wrapped him in a hug, the Doctor didn’t protest. It had gone past that. He knew that, even though he couldn’t see the words on the page, Jack had read that story with him, recognised exactly where he was up to from the look on his face and the little ways he’d shifted position or caught his breath. That was how well the man knew him; the definition of a friend. He pushed them away, but they just kept coming back for more. All of them had stood together in this very ship, shoulder to shoulder, the new Children of Time - and then he’d dismissed them one by one, walked away because he couldn’t deal with them and what they were to him.
Old Wilf had known. What a wise old chap he was. He’d seen through the whole façade and offered him something he’d been too exhausted to reject; the promise of a nightly blessing. He’d said just enough, no more. When he thought about Wilf, he could see where Donna had got her best qualities from.
And it wasn’t only Donna he was missing.
“You really think there’s a way back?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Jack. “Our files are full of cases like hers. The Time Lord bit’s tricky, but she hasn’t remembered that yet. It’s probably better if you’re around when that happens.” After a moment he added, “Both of you.”
“Will you help me?” he asked.
“Consider it done,” replied Jack. “What’s the plan?”
“First, there’s someone I need to talk to.”
*****
He was scared of looking up his other self. He’d never liked revisiting old companions. It threatened to disturb his reassuring picture of them all leading fantastic lives. He’d wanted the very best for Rose, not a dying man with a brilliant mind trapped in a decaying shell of a body. It sounded more like Davros than himself. Better not to go there.
But he owed it to Donna to find out as much as possible about the options available before he approached her. That meant discovering all he possibly could about his other self’s state, particularly when his physical problems had started and whether he felt psychically whole without Donna’s presence in his mind. He suspected the answer was no.
He settled himself in the Zero Room. Minimal distraction was important, particularly if his human form was too weak to sustain the link for very long. Every time they did this, he risked shortening his life even more, so it had to be done carefully and to maximum effect.
Those were the sensible reasons, at least. There were others. The thought of encountering Rose again, even by proxy, was enough to bring the Doctor out in a cold sweat. How she must hate him, after he’d trapped her with this decaying copy of himself and vanished before she could reject her appointed role as babysitter. He hadn’t even left them with a TARDIS, and he didn’t like to think about the struggle he’d have had to adjust to a sedentary life. In theory, love conquered all. In practice, however, he’d rarely lived out that assumption.
“Oh well,” he told himself, severely, “What’s well begun is half done.” He opened his mind; immediately he felt the delicate but unmistakable brushing of a Time Lord consciousness against his own.
“Missed you,” he said.
“You only had to ask,” came the reply.
“Thought you might not want to be disturbed,” he prevaricated. “Newlyweds like you.”
“What made you think we’d marry? I’m still you. Well, sort of. I suppose if we’d ever managed to come up with a bizarre enough way to do it, one that would have freaked Jackie out enough…”
“Ah, good old Jackie. How’s she doing?”
“Not so bad. And you?”
“Heard you aren’t so well.”
“I asked about you.”
“Oh, I’m all right. Same old TARDIS. Same old life. Last of the Time Lords.”
“Travelling with anyone these days?”
“No.”
“How long’s it been?”
“Just over two years.”
“You must be crawling up the walls by now.”
“Oh, you know me.” He laughed weakly. “Well, of course you do. You are me. If we don’t know ourselves…”
“Self-knowledge was never our strong point. I’ve learned more about myself stuck here in bed than I did in centuries of knocking around the universe.”
“Oh, that’s because you’re with Rose.”
“No, it’s because I can’t run away.”
“Why’d you want to run away? You’re with Rose.”
“You ran away from her often enough.”
“Only three times. Once on Satellite Five, once at Canary Wharf and…well, you know about the last time.”
“I know about every time. No wonder you’ve gone all this time without talking to me.”
“That supposed to be funny?”
“Not really.”
They fell silent. For now, it was just pleasant to bask in the embrace of another Time Lord intelligence. There was something strangely calming about this one. An acceptance of the inevitable that poured balm on his chronically restless soul. Perhaps he should get sick more often. All those Victorian novels where rebels found tranquillity through the School of Pain - he’d dismissed them as Christian propaganda. Too readily, maybe.
He pulled himself back to reality. They had a situation on their hands, a problem that he owed it to Rose to solve as best he could. And he could start by facing it head on.
“I can’t see you yet,” he said.
“Oh, I’m not much to look at these days.”
“I’d still feel better if I could,” he insisted.
There was a sigh across the Void. “Okay, I’ll try. It’s pretty exhausting for me, projecting the energy, but I’ll give it my best shot.”
He was sitting in a wheelchair. Him - a wheelchair. And so thin, almost as if a breath of wind would blow him away. He wore a grey sweatshirt, falling in folds over wasted limbs and his eyes looked enormous in his pale face. But somehow, the smile was the most heart-rending thing of all.
“I did warn you,” said his other self.
“Rassilon,” he murmured. “What have I done?”
The man in the wheelchair replied without bitterness or hesitation. “You made me,” he said. “Made me to wither and die, and all for nothing as it turned out.”
“But I tried to do the right thing,” he stammered, fighting not to turn away from him. “I couldn’t promise her forever…”
“No. That’s what she couldn’t promise you.”
“Same thing,” he blustered.
“Not at all. It’s completely different. And the worst thing about it is you were wrong. There was something you completely overlooked.”
“I was busy.”
“Aren’t you going to ask what it was?”
He could feel his mouth twisting into a frown, his teeth grinding together. Who was he, this person who presumed to tell him how he should live? He wasn’t even a true Time Lord. Not that he’d ever listened to his own people, if he could help it. But at least they’d had the right to lecture him.
“Well, aren’t you?” the other man persisted.
“What what was? Do you have to be so cryptic?”
He laughed. “Oh, yes. Textbook enigmatic, that’s me. Remember the old Face of Boe? How Jack spun us that line about turning into him? It might even end up being the truth. I don’t think I’ll be around to know one way or the other.” His eyes were boring into his soul, and the Doctor shrank from whatever was to come.
“But Rose might,” the man in the wheelchair finished.
The realisation of what was being said slammed into the Doctor at once, upending his whole view of reality. Deny it though he might, he knew exactly what his other self was telling him. He’d have run to the end of the universe to avoid it, if he hadn’t already been there and found out it didn’t help.
“Oh no,” he gasped. “No, no, no…Not that. Anything but that! It can’t be!”
“Oh, but it can,” said his other self’s voice. “Now you know why I had to find you again. It’s the one thing you never stopped to think about, isn’t it?”
And two words, destined to follow him wherever he tried to run, flashed up, projected onto a wall in his mind. Everywhere he looked, they were there. He would never outrun them. A power had been unleashed, and he could not contain it. It created itself.
Bad Wolf.
The other Doctor spoke. “Rose hasn’t aged a day,” he said. “We think she never will.”
sensiblecat
IMAGE:
red_temptation
WORDS: 4571
CHARACTERS: Ten, Rose, Donna, Jack
RATING: G
SPOILERS: Up to and beyond Journey's End. Includes "Music of the Spheres", from the recent BBC Proms Concert.
The characters and situations portrayed are the property of the BBC and no personal profit or plagiarism is intended.
Quotation from "The Dormouse and the Doctor" by AA Milne.
SUMMARY: Two years after the events of JE, the Doctor's speedily-implemented solutions seem to be unravelling. His other self is dying and it seems that only Donna can save him. But will that put her own life at risk?
Chapter One
“You were born in battle. Full of blood and anger and revenge.”
Journey’s End
Blood. Anger. Revenge. There wasn’t much you could do to express any of those things when you were stuck in bed all day. And the only battle that mattered now was living versus dying, every day he hung on a miracle in its own right. He was more likely to sit contemplating his mortality with an imaginary skull in his hand than to go out avenging people. Which was just as well, probably, because the only person he felt angry enough to murder was himself, and he was a whole universe away.
In this universe, Francis Bacon had written “Hamlet” and the Beatles had never existed, so he was free to claim wonderful lines like, “Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox,” as his own work if the fancy took him. He wished he could tell John (or was that one Paul?) how perfectly those words expressed his usual state of mind.
He thought about death a lot. His own, mostly. He knew himself well enough to be certain that his other, 100% Time Lord self would never, for a moment, have paused to consider how terrifying the prospect of your immanent, painful, undignified demise was when you’d spent your life expecting to regenerate under all but the most desperate circumstances. Oh, it wasn’t that he hadn’t been faced with life-threatening situations. But most had been while he was thoroughly wrapped up in some kind of adventure. He’d never had to sit around wondering if he’d taken all his pills and whether to call for someone to escort him to the loo. He was pretty sure that his original self would be having a miserable existence somewhere, but at least he wouldn’t be helpless and bored.
It was an odd feeling, knowing yourself through and through, but as a different person. He supposed it was character development of a sort. Like meeting someone with all your personal failings and realising, for the very first time, how infuriating you could be. You’d resolve to change, maybe you’d even succeed, but that annoying character would still be out there making your mistakes and refusing to acknowledge the fact - and you would want to shake him until his teeth fell out.
Being sick had taught him all the things he’d run around the universe for 900 years rather than learn. How to sit still and appreciate small changes in the view. How to be humble and accept kindness with grace. How to be patient and find ways to fill long uncharted vistas of time. How to live with the indignity of bedsores and acknowledging that someone loved you enough to dress them. And the pointlessness of wasting a short life loathing yourself and despising others for loving you.
Every single day, he and Rose found something to laugh about. That alone amazed him. It was real, genuine laughter, not the spiky sort that covers up the fact you’re screaming inside and on the road to madness. Funny, that it had taken his body falling apart to stitch his head back together. He wished the other him could hang out with him for a while. It would do him good.
Rose had nicknamed him “The Dormouse” after the little character in the AA Milne rhyme who was comforted by the view of geraniums (red) and delphiniums (blue). Between themselves, he was always the Dormouse and his alter-ego continued to be The Doctor, that officious character who:
….said, "Tut! It's another attack!"
And ordered him Milk and Massage-of-the-back,
And Freedom-from-worry and Drives-in-a-car,
And murmured, "How sweet your chrysanthemums are!"
When his wheelchair was delivered and they'd both been trying not to feel miserable, he'd saved the situation by trilling, “Ooh, freedom from worry and drives in a car!” Before long they were quoting whole verses of the poem to one another, and soon moved on to “Can I have some butter for the royal slice of bread?”
“I bet the other one of you’s not having this much fun,” she sometimes said, as they sat together watching a sunset like a couple of old fogies, or relaxed beside the lake in the enormous garden of the Tyler mansion. (He’d become expert at stone-skimming from a sitting position).
He’d had his first heart attack at the most intimate and human point possible, as if to confirm that this awkward attempt to stuff two species in one frail body was doomed to failure. Since then she’d lain with him, night after night, stroked his hair, moulded his body against her back in the way he most loved and whispered in his ear that it didn’t matter as she pleasured herself again and he struggled not to weep with despair and frustration. Because he was human now, he could understand what she must be sacrificing, how difficult all those months of extended foreplay on the TARDIS must have been for her - yet all her hugs had been straightforward and generous, a complete gift of herself, holding nothing back.
And that was the pity of it all. She deserved so much better, his beautiful Rose who had suffered so much. He was not second best, but he’d happily have settled for being just as good - as things had turned out, he didn’t even have the ability to give her that. They’d had such plans - to build their new TARDIS, to travel, to have fun, to breathe and play and grow without the crushing burden of saving a broken universe - because, wonderfully, this one seemed to have figured out how to get by without his constant attention.
There had always been the ghost of his first self behind her eyes - he knew that because he carried his own ghost. He was not simply The Doctor - he was half of the DoctorDonna; he went through life feeling as if some of his limbs were missing. His mind scanned the universe for the consciousness that would complete his own, but only a muffled echo of it remained. Of all the mistakes his other self had made, that one disturbed him most, because he knew exactly what must have happened. Donna had had her awareness of her true identity hidden from her, because it disturbed the convenient portioning off that fooled the Doctor into thinking he’d engineered a solution.
He’d stopped trying to do that kind of thing now. Being human had taught him that life was complicated, messy and frequently without any neat resolution. Not only were happy endings extremely rare, but in most cases it was remarkably difficult to pinpoint when a human’s story did end, short of their sadly premature death. He’d never really grasped that before, because Time Lords had had the power and authority to escape untidiness, first by purging their own planet of it and then by constant movement. Humans couldn’t do that; they had to live with their contradictions. That was why they created such compelling works of art. All the best ones were an attempt to reconcile opposing forces, to create harmony where there had been discord. If you didn’t hear the discord in the first place, there was a Baroque emptiness to your compositions; they had only a mechanical beauty.
In that spirit, he’d taken to composing music. There were all kinds of subtleties in human music that he’d never heard on his home world, even though Gallifrey had boasted the heptodecatonic scale and whole libraries had been devoted to analysing the mathematical complexity of the Time Lords’ musical compositions. Gallifrey had had the ultimate in virtuosity - fugues that threatened to topple into infinity as they lifted the listener through level after dizzy level of development. But humans had jazz, improvisation, grace notes and glissades - quirky little complications that ensured a piece of music turned out slightly differently with each new performance.
He’d dabbled in composition before, but his tunes had never quite sprung to life, despite the impressive complexity of the Gallifreyan tonal scale. Now, with his uncomplicated human ears, he could hear all the interesting bits. He longed to link that to his Time Lord knowledge and create the ultimate music, one that conveyed both the pattern and the emotion, a true music of the spheres, including the response of the observer as well as the glory of what was observed. Perhaps the only way to really achieve that was to write two symphonies in two different universes and try to find a way to play both of them together.
When Rose came home from work and he heard her footsteps outside, knowing that she was coming straight in to see how he was, without even pausing to take her coat off or pour herself a drink, his head was full of music, the music she deserved, this woman who could span two universes. A melody that no orchestra would ever be able to play.
“Love you,” she said, bending down to kiss him.
His head shifted against the pillow and his hand closed over hers. They looked at each other, whole worlds in their eyes.
“Love you too,” he said.
He would not let her lose him. Somehow, he would find a way.
****
I’d never been more terrified in my whole life. Not even when I first found myself inside his spaceship. He’d just blasted a robot Santa to smithereens and now he was hanging out of the door of his freaky blue box, driving it with a piece of string between his teeth and expecting me to jump.
“I’m in my wedding dress!” I yelled. As if he hadn’t noticed.
“Yes! You look lovely! Now come on!” he shouted back.
“I can’t do it!” I said frantically. I couldn’t believe I’d be able to get across the gap between us wearing the stupid thing. Or that he’d maintain exactly the right speed. I’d end up in the middle of the motorway getting run over.
Then, suddenly, his voice completely changed. “Trust me,” he said. And I did trust him, instantly. I just knew, somehow, he did stuff like this all the time - that was his life and that was why he was on his own - who’d want to share a life like his?
The Doctor stopped reading, laid down the manuscript and shielded his eyes from the penetrating gaze of Jack, now sitting opposite him in the library. He felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach, gone whining into a corner like a hurt puppy. Jack, mercifully, stayed silent, just watching him.
He’d expected reading Donna’s book to be a painful experience, but he’d still not been prepared for such an immediate encounter with her. Back it all came, more clearly than ever: the tone of her voice, the look in her eyes and the journey she’d taken that Christmas Eve, from indignation to compassion and beyond. It had been like seeing a new human being emerge from a chrysalis before his eyes - in the middle of all his pain, she’d reminded him such things were possible. She’d given him hope - just the frailest, fraying thread of it, but it had been a start.
And she’d trusted him. Here it was, in her own words.
“Is that what you said to her? Your friend - the one you lost?”
I didn’t know how to ask him something that obviously hurt so much, but it was really important to me at that moment to know if she was dead. And he must have realised this, because he told me she wasn’t. “She is so alive!” he said. “Now jump!”
I think it helped to have something else to think about, because I did jump, and I landed right on top of him. I’d stopped expecting to die because I was too busy thinking about this other woman - his friend - though I’d a feeling she was a lot more than that - who hadn’t died. I wondered what he’d done to make sure she’d lived. Whatever it was, it was breaking his heart. I didn’t care if he was an alien, I knew grief when I saw it.
I wondered if he was lying to me. I could quite easily imagine him lying to protect me, so I wouldn’t freak out thinking he’d managed to kill off the last person he’d been with. But this wasn’t the time to discuss it, because I noticed there was smoke pouring out of the controls. “Your ship’s on fire!” I gasped, wondering if things could get any worse.
“I know,” he replied. “The funny thing is, for a spaceship, she doesn't really do that much flying. We'd better give her a couple of hours to cool down.” I could hardly see him through the smoke by now and the fact he’d said “a couple of hours” barely registered with me, even though it meant we’d missed the wedding, once and for all, and until an hour ago that’d been the only thing that mattered to me.
But the thought of being incinerated or choking to death does wonders to change your priorities. He pulled out a fire extinguisher and for some reason that made me crack up laughing…”
He stopped again, this time with a smile on his face. The whole adventure had had an element of farce about it that she captured very well. And he saw himself through Donna’s eyes - awkward, skinny, baffling, grieving - and, in some indefinable way he couldn’t quite deny - human and in dire need of a friend.
All that travelling, saving the universe, having adventures here there and everywhere, and now here he was, right back where he’d started that Christmas. Alone and trying to pretend he preferred it that way. Moving on, he read their odd little conversation on the rooftop. She’d remembered it better than him. He’d forgotten he’d gallantly lent his jacket to her and bio-damped her with a ring (not that it had done much good, in the end).
But there were things he did remember. The way he’d tried to talk about the Tylers and got it all wrong. “I had this friend. She had this family.” That wasn’t the correct way to describe it but he didn’t know a better one. To do that, you had to be inside the human race, and he wasn’t. He’d had the feeling, even then, that if she hung around he might be able to talk about it properly, something he needed to do, though it scared him as much as jumping into the TARDIS had terrified her.
She’d understood him. Known when to say something and when to shut up. She could laugh at herself even as her heart was breaking. He could relate to that. She challenged him without seeming to demand anything at all. And she’d trusted him, as long ago as that first day. Known he was capable of lying, but trusted him when it mattered the most.
He missed her. Even more than Rose in some ways. At least he knew - well, he had known - well, assumed, until tonight, that Rose was happy. Still Rose. He’d done the right thing. Donna was different. He’d let her down; now he dreaded to think of the reception he’d get if he went back and admitted what he’d done to save her.
Underestimated her, that’s what he’d done. The Donna shining through these pages was the woman he remembered and had, in a sense, come to love. A much simpler kind of love than loving Rose, because it didn’t seem to involve him trying to be human. When the humans on Midnight had ganged up on him and almost shoved him off their ship for being different, Donna’s arms had closed around him afterwards and he’d felt completely accepted. It wasn’t that Rose hadn’t accepted him, but somehow he’d never been able to accept her accepting him. He’d always been so certain that she wanted what he couldn’t give.
He returned to Donna’s manuscript. The moment when he’d been ready to wipe out the Racnoss and destroy himself, overwhelmed by the floodtide of grief. That was when she’d held out a hand, a thread of hope, and it had been his turn to trust her - and in the changing of a moment he’d spared the Earth so much. He’d thought she’d never know. Possibly she wouldn’t. Jack hadn’t said how complete her recall of events was, and whether she’d remember the alternative timeline when he’d let himself die.
“When he said ‘Gallifrey’ I realised how alone he was. He was just a step away from giving up. It’s easy to look back and think I knew that moment was important. I did, but I didn’t stop to think about it. I was scared of what he could do if there wasn’t anybody there to stop him. It never crossed my mind, not even for a minute, that it might be me. But watching the look in his eyes through that torrent of water was like looking into the depths of an abyss, somewhere you’d never want to go.
Then, in a moment, it was all over. He changed completely, like someone had flicked a switch. ‘Come on,” he said, “it’s time I got you out.” I didn’t know whether he meant the Empress or me, but all that mattered was he was okay. The Doctor was in again.
But the thought that I might have done that shocked me to the core. I wanted to get home, to be a million miles away from him at that moment.”
“You okay?” Jack asked.
“I don’t know,” he answered, as truthfully as he could. “Probably not.”
Jack sighed. “You know, in some ways she was the best thing that could have happened to you.”
“Yeah,” was all he felt able to say.
Jack waited a while until he got a grip on himself again. “And you threw her away,” he added. “Keep doing it, don’t you?”
“I threw her away to save her life.”
“There were other ways. Is it really that difficult for you to ask for a little help?”
He got up, stuck his hands deep into his pockets and paced the room. “She can’t publish this, of course. You must know that.”
“Why not?” Jack folded his arms and outstared him. “Who’ll believe a word of it?”
“We’d know it was true.”
“And that’s what you can’t live with?” probed Jack.
That angered him. “Come on! How am I ever going to have any credibility after this? Not that it matters to me. But the Universe needs me. I need to be strong. I can’t go around letting people think I’m…”
He stopped abruptly. Jack rose from his chair and came over to him. When he wrapped him in a hug, the Doctor didn’t protest. It had gone past that. He knew that, even though he couldn’t see the words on the page, Jack had read that story with him, recognised exactly where he was up to from the look on his face and the little ways he’d shifted position or caught his breath. That was how well the man knew him; the definition of a friend. He pushed them away, but they just kept coming back for more. All of them had stood together in this very ship, shoulder to shoulder, the new Children of Time - and then he’d dismissed them one by one, walked away because he couldn’t deal with them and what they were to him.
Old Wilf had known. What a wise old chap he was. He’d seen through the whole façade and offered him something he’d been too exhausted to reject; the promise of a nightly blessing. He’d said just enough, no more. When he thought about Wilf, he could see where Donna had got her best qualities from.
And it wasn’t only Donna he was missing.
“You really think there’s a way back?” he asked.
“Sure,” said Jack. “Our files are full of cases like hers. The Time Lord bit’s tricky, but she hasn’t remembered that yet. It’s probably better if you’re around when that happens.” After a moment he added, “Both of you.”
“Will you help me?” he asked.
“Consider it done,” replied Jack. “What’s the plan?”
“First, there’s someone I need to talk to.”
*****
He was scared of looking up his other self. He’d never liked revisiting old companions. It threatened to disturb his reassuring picture of them all leading fantastic lives. He’d wanted the very best for Rose, not a dying man with a brilliant mind trapped in a decaying shell of a body. It sounded more like Davros than himself. Better not to go there.
But he owed it to Donna to find out as much as possible about the options available before he approached her. That meant discovering all he possibly could about his other self’s state, particularly when his physical problems had started and whether he felt psychically whole without Donna’s presence in his mind. He suspected the answer was no.
He settled himself in the Zero Room. Minimal distraction was important, particularly if his human form was too weak to sustain the link for very long. Every time they did this, he risked shortening his life even more, so it had to be done carefully and to maximum effect.
Those were the sensible reasons, at least. There were others. The thought of encountering Rose again, even by proxy, was enough to bring the Doctor out in a cold sweat. How she must hate him, after he’d trapped her with this decaying copy of himself and vanished before she could reject her appointed role as babysitter. He hadn’t even left them with a TARDIS, and he didn’t like to think about the struggle he’d have had to adjust to a sedentary life. In theory, love conquered all. In practice, however, he’d rarely lived out that assumption.
“Oh well,” he told himself, severely, “What’s well begun is half done.” He opened his mind; immediately he felt the delicate but unmistakable brushing of a Time Lord consciousness against his own.
“Missed you,” he said.
“You only had to ask,” came the reply.
“Thought you might not want to be disturbed,” he prevaricated. “Newlyweds like you.”
“What made you think we’d marry? I’m still you. Well, sort of. I suppose if we’d ever managed to come up with a bizarre enough way to do it, one that would have freaked Jackie out enough…”
“Ah, good old Jackie. How’s she doing?”
“Not so bad. And you?”
“Heard you aren’t so well.”
“I asked about you.”
“Oh, I’m all right. Same old TARDIS. Same old life. Last of the Time Lords.”
“Travelling with anyone these days?”
“No.”
“How long’s it been?”
“Just over two years.”
“You must be crawling up the walls by now.”
“Oh, you know me.” He laughed weakly. “Well, of course you do. You are me. If we don’t know ourselves…”
“Self-knowledge was never our strong point. I’ve learned more about myself stuck here in bed than I did in centuries of knocking around the universe.”
“Oh, that’s because you’re with Rose.”
“No, it’s because I can’t run away.”
“Why’d you want to run away? You’re with Rose.”
“You ran away from her often enough.”
“Only three times. Once on Satellite Five, once at Canary Wharf and…well, you know about the last time.”
“I know about every time. No wonder you’ve gone all this time without talking to me.”
“That supposed to be funny?”
“Not really.”
They fell silent. For now, it was just pleasant to bask in the embrace of another Time Lord intelligence. There was something strangely calming about this one. An acceptance of the inevitable that poured balm on his chronically restless soul. Perhaps he should get sick more often. All those Victorian novels where rebels found tranquillity through the School of Pain - he’d dismissed them as Christian propaganda. Too readily, maybe.
He pulled himself back to reality. They had a situation on their hands, a problem that he owed it to Rose to solve as best he could. And he could start by facing it head on.
“I can’t see you yet,” he said.
“Oh, I’m not much to look at these days.”
“I’d still feel better if I could,” he insisted.
There was a sigh across the Void. “Okay, I’ll try. It’s pretty exhausting for me, projecting the energy, but I’ll give it my best shot.”
He was sitting in a wheelchair. Him - a wheelchair. And so thin, almost as if a breath of wind would blow him away. He wore a grey sweatshirt, falling in folds over wasted limbs and his eyes looked enormous in his pale face. But somehow, the smile was the most heart-rending thing of all.
“I did warn you,” said his other self.
“Rassilon,” he murmured. “What have I done?”
The man in the wheelchair replied without bitterness or hesitation. “You made me,” he said. “Made me to wither and die, and all for nothing as it turned out.”
“But I tried to do the right thing,” he stammered, fighting not to turn away from him. “I couldn’t promise her forever…”
“No. That’s what she couldn’t promise you.”
“Same thing,” he blustered.
“Not at all. It’s completely different. And the worst thing about it is you were wrong. There was something you completely overlooked.”
“I was busy.”
“Aren’t you going to ask what it was?”
He could feel his mouth twisting into a frown, his teeth grinding together. Who was he, this person who presumed to tell him how he should live? He wasn’t even a true Time Lord. Not that he’d ever listened to his own people, if he could help it. But at least they’d had the right to lecture him.
“Well, aren’t you?” the other man persisted.
“What what was? Do you have to be so cryptic?”
He laughed. “Oh, yes. Textbook enigmatic, that’s me. Remember the old Face of Boe? How Jack spun us that line about turning into him? It might even end up being the truth. I don’t think I’ll be around to know one way or the other.” His eyes were boring into his soul, and the Doctor shrank from whatever was to come.
“But Rose might,” the man in the wheelchair finished.
The realisation of what was being said slammed into the Doctor at once, upending his whole view of reality. Deny it though he might, he knew exactly what his other self was telling him. He’d have run to the end of the universe to avoid it, if he hadn’t already been there and found out it didn’t help.
“Oh no,” he gasped. “No, no, no…Not that. Anything but that! It can’t be!”
“Oh, but it can,” said his other self’s voice. “Now you know why I had to find you again. It’s the one thing you never stopped to think about, isn’t it?”
And two words, destined to follow him wherever he tried to run, flashed up, projected onto a wall in his mind. Everywhere he looked, they were there. He would never outrun them. A power had been unleashed, and he could not contain it. It created itself.
Bad Wolf.
The other Doctor spoke. “Rose hasn’t aged a day,” he said. “We think she never will.”