Out of Tune 3/5 (G) - Spoilers to JE - Ten/Rose/Jack/Donna
AUTHOR :
sensiblecat
IMAGE: fizzling whizbee
WORDS: 4512
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.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
She’d unquestioningly offered herself up to him and that crazy existence because it was the only life that they could share and that was all that mattered. But that was no longer the case.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
ROBERT FROST
Jack was busy with his headset catching up on Torchwood stuff when the Doctor came crashing into the control room and almost fell right over him.
“Hey! Look where you’re going!” he exclaimed.
“I lost him!” fretted the Doctor, apparently oblivious. “He tells me something like that and then just vanishes!”
“Gotta go, Ianto,” said Jack. “Something’s come up.”
The something was the Doctor babbling apparent nonsense and whirling around the place in a state of ineffectual anxiety.
“What happened?” Jack asked.
“Jack, we have to get over there, now!” cried the Doctor, hammering on the controls.
“Now hold on a minute,” Jack cautioned “This is another universe you’re talking about, not just stepping out to Wal-Mart or something. What’s the rush?”
“Bad Wolf!” cried the Doctor
“Bad Wolf?” repeated Jack. He’d spoken with Rose once or twice about Satellite Five and the reasons he couldn’t stay dead any more. Someone had to do it, and the Doctor had made damn sure there was never time for that person to be himself. But he hadn’t been expecting that particular revelation to worry the Doctor this much.
“She has the right to know what happened,” he pointed out.
That didn’t go down too well. “Wait a minute. Did you know about this? What did you tell her?” the Doctor demanded.
Jack honestly thought the Doctor might pick him up and shake him for a moment. He hadn’t seen him so rattled since that nice old Professor turned out to be the Master. “Just tell me what the problem is!” he demanded.
“She can’t age!”
“She…what?” Jack was momentarily lost for words. How the hell had Rose hidden that from him - or, for that matter, from the Doctor? Wouldn’t she have felt wrong to him, the way he had? Besides, how long ago was all that business now? Rose was barely out of her teens - he remembered them celebrating her twentieth birthday together on the TARDIS, and how she’d remarked that Jackie would have forty fits if she knew what they’d got up to.
He thought back to the very different woman who’d returned to fight the Daleks two years ago. All that girlishness had disappeared. Whatever had happened to her over in the parallel world, Rose Tyler had gotten older, and it had showed.
A disturbing thought struck him. The Rose he’d known back then hadn’t had a vicious bone in her body, but she’d been through a hell of a lot since and it would be natural for her to blame the Doctor over here for some of it. What if she was lying?
He dismissed the idea almost immediately. She wouldn’t be that cruel. He’d talked with her a few times and her devotion to her own Doctor had shone through everything she’d said. No, he simply couldn’t imagine the two of them cooking up that story to get this Doctor back. It was too damn dangerous for one thing - he’d tear the universe apart to get back to her and sort it out, once he knew. Look at the state of him now.
The Doctor stabbed at the air, tugged at his hair, drummed his fingertips on the console, but nothing could contain the nervous energy inside him. “It’s the Time Vortex, Jack! Has to be! Why didn’t I see it? And now I’ve left her with him and he’s going to die.”
“What - you’re saying Rose is a fixed point in time, too? Then why didn’t you sense it?” asked Jack. “You did with me; that’s why you ran away.”
“Don’t start all that again!” Suddenly, the Doctor stopped, his frantic motion halted, or at least contained. “Wait a minute. That’s a very good question. If she can’t age, why didn’t I notice?”
“Precisely. You were together for a year. Love might be blind, but that’s ridiculous.” And anyway, thought Jack, there was a time when I thought you loved me, though maybe not the same way. He pushed that aside, focussing on the current dilemma as he so often did. “You know, when she was over here before she didn’t look twenty years old to me.”
“True.” The Doctor breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief. “Nope, she’d aged. Definitely. But he said she hadn’t. And then I lost the link, damn it…I was all over the place and he’s not strong enough to keep it going on his own.”
“What did he actually say?” Jack asked.
“That she hadn’t aged a day. He was absolutely clear on that point.”
“Hasn’t aged a day since when?”
“Well, since he first saw her. What would be the point in him telling me something I already knew?”
“Then how do you know it’s the Bad Wolf?” Jack continued. “Think of all the stuff that was going on at the time. You aborted a regeneration right in front of her - turned all that energy back onto the hand. Enough of it to change Donna into half a Time Lady and grow another you. What if it affected Rose as well?”
The Doctor threw his arms round him - Jack got the feeling that he’d have collapsed with relief without someone to hold him up. “Oh, yes! That’ll be it! A tiny little bit of the Vortex left inside her, dormant until something happened, and then - bam!” He was well away now, that gleam in his eyes, and his words tumbling out at a mile a minute. Jack didn’t even try to interrupt. “Three of you,” said the Doctor. “Standing there! Just standing there watching - yes! And we all thought it was the hand, but what if it wasn’t? What if you absorbed it?” He stood right in front of Jack now, his fingers dramatically splayed in front of his face to underline the point. “All that lovely Vortex energy - it could do anything. But then there’s you! What about you?”
Jack shrugged. “Been eating a lot of bananas lately. Other than that…well, I guess I’ve already had my turn. And I had the psychic shields up, trying to protect the women.”
“Always the gentleman,” agreed the Doctor. “Oh, what a muddle. What a horrible, lovely muddle! Good thing I’m brilliant at sorting out muddles. All we have to do is get everyone together again and reverse it and then…oh, hang on.” More hair-pulling followed. “That doesn’t work, does it? We needed all those things to defeat Davros. So now they’re locked in time. Can’t go back and undo them.”
“Maybe it’ll reverse when you regenerate next time around?” Jack proposed.
“Could be.” The Doctor nodded. “Just imagine, if I took all that lot into myself. I could end up ginger!”
“Would it kill you to stop being self-centered for a minute?” scolded Jack. “Now listen. We have a Donna development.”
“Donna development,” the Doctor repeated, rolling the consonants around his mouth with relish. “Oh, I like that. Particularly if it’s a Doctor-Donna development. Delightful, delicious, de-”
“Less of the Cole Porter stuff, okay?” warned Jack. “I just took a call from Wilf. Donna saw that show tonight.”
“Which one?” asked the Doctor. “ ‘Anything Goes?’ Some lovely stuff in that.” He started twirling around the console, something Jack was in no mood to appreciate. ‘Night and day, you are the one…’”
Great, thought Jack. I’m looking for the Defender of the Universe and I get Fred and Ginger. “No, the Prom. The one with the Torino piece.”
“That was on TV?” The Doctor stopped, one foot archly raised in mid-pirouette. He wobbled slightly as he waited for a reply.
“Yes, and there you were in the TARDIS. Donna saw the whole thing.”
“Conducting my symphony?” The Doctor preened a little. “My premiere was on TV? On a Saturday night?”
“You must be the biggest egotist that ever lived,” Jack complained. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Oh dear, I wiped every trace of myself and the TARDIS from Donna’s mind and then she sees it on prime-time. That just might have some consequences.’”
“Oh.” The Doctor was instantly sobered. “I see what you mean. Suppose I said I was sorry?”
“It’s a bit too late for that,” said Jack. “Donna’s vanished.”
******
Rose sat by the bed, listening to the Doctor’s laboured breathing and occasionally wiping beads of sweat from his forehead. He was running a fever, she suspected; his hair was lank and plastered to his scalp. The night nurse had been in and given him a shot of paracetomol to lower his temperature, but still she suspected it would be a long night. Then, as she so often had before, she’d go into work in a daze of exhaustion and try not to obsess about how he was doing. And so it would go on, until the day came when he wasn’t there at all.
Almost daily she relived the moment at Bad Wolf Bay when she’d still been trying to get her head around the TARDIS actually being there on the beach when the Doctor turned from her without a word of farewell, abandoning her to the happy ending he’d devised. For the first few months, accepting the man now before her had taken an act of will, a constant turning away from all thoughts of unfaithfulness and what might have been. It had taken them months to trust each other enough to become lovers - precious time wasted that she now bitterly regretted. That seemed to be the pattern of their lives together - brief, tantalising glimpses of happiness punctuated with long, grinding deserts of dashed hopes.
But her love for this man had crept up on her, unnoticed, until one day she’d realised that losing him would be the worst thing she could imagine happening. His illness had revealed qualities that the original of him had lacked - patience, gentleness, humility and, running through it all, a quiet but steely courage. Now it was hard for her to decide which time of her life had been happiest - the endless game of hide-and-seek aboard the TARDIS, with the Doctor retreating from her whenever they came too close, or the bittersweet but constant companionship they now shared.
“Oh, you silly old thing,” she murmured to his sleeping form. “Why did you have to go and tell him?” Of course, the other Doctor had panicked as soon as Bad Wolf was mentioned, the psychic link had faltered and failed, and her own Doctor had made himself dangerously weak trying to re-establish it. But at least they knew that the concert plan had worked; Jack had found him again. She’d tried calling Jack, but the atmospheric conditions had to be exactly right for the connection to work, and she’d failed to get through. All they could do now was wait. She was getting good at that.
In all the excitement and tension of setting this meeting up, she’d overlooked one important point. Now, as she sat here with her concentration battered by hope and worry, it struck her for the first time. She was going to see him again - her first Doctor. And she wasn’t sure whether she’d want to slap him or snog him. He’d chosen this destiny for her against her will, before she had a chance to protest - and that would never change. He’d never declare his love for her, or stop blaming himself for every bad thing that had happened to his people and his travelling companions. Keeping her mouth shut as she watched Davros press those buttons had been so difficult, but she’d had to do it. Whatever transpired, the Doctor’s old enemy mustn’t realise just how much she meant to him.
That was the life she’d gone back to. Running, fighting, ducking, weaving, always just a step away from complete destruction. The days when the stakes were only herself and the Doctor were the good ones. Most of the time it was the fate of planets. He must be exhausted beyond words, but how could he ever stop, or even rest? Rose had seen what the world would be like without the Doctor - bad enough to rewrite time and bring him back from the dead.
And she’d unquestioningly offered herself up to him and that crazy existence because it was the only life that they could share and that was all that mattered. But that was no longer the case. Now she’d tasted everyday, human happiness with a Doctor who could offer her that particular forever - occasionally grudgingly and with a longing gaze at faraway stars, but the relief of not risking your neck every day made up for a bit of monotony, and she was getting old enough to understand that. Her body was younger than her mind, which was thirty-ish and beginning to resemble her mother’s more often than she’d like.
Even as she hated his arrogance and high-handedness and refusal to let mere human beings ask the questions, Rose understood the sacrifice the Doctor had made to give her that future, and the cost of it. When her new Doctor had told her he’d never be able to continue travelling with Donna, Rose had wept for days. She knew that, after what Davros had told him, if he lost Donna he’d be more likely to travel and brood alone than to replace her.
Who’d hold his hand now? Her hands were filled with someone else, and that was what he’d wanted. On paper, it looked like the perfect solution, but in reality it had been an uneasy compromise, fragile as spun sugar, and seeing him again might break it apart completely.
Rose looked again at the man who lay, tossing and turning, on the bed before her, and a horrible thought refused to leave her mind.
Now that he knows I won’t wither and die, how much will he care about him?
******
“You told us she’d be safe!” Sylvia Noble spat the words at them, her face contorted with loathing. “Hadn’t you put us through enough without telling us lies?”
“Now come on,” Wilf interjected. “We’d all be slaves of that Dalek lot if it wasn’t for the Doctor, and you could tell he did his best. He didn’t want anything to happen to her, any more than we did.”
“Then why did you take her with you?” Sylvia fired at the Doctor.
Wilf came to his rescue again. “She’s a grown woman, love. She made her mind up and that was that. And I’ve never seen her as happy as the day she went with him. Now calm down - he’ll find her and get her back, won’t you?”
“I will,” said the Doctor. “I promise you that.”
Sylvia stomped off into the kitchen, muttering about his last promises being broken. Jack sat down on the sofa, a gesture that immediately seemed to establish him as the leader of the group. “Okay,” he began. “Let’s run through the sequence of events tonight. When did you notice Donna becoming distressed?”
“Well, you see, that’s the odd thing about it,” Wilf began, at his usual leisurely pace. “She wasn’t upset, so much as determined. Soon as that funny piece of music came on…”
“The Torino Scale?” the Doctor interrupted.
“I think that was it - the one with no proper tune. You know this modern stuff. Well, she said she’d a bit of a headache and Sylv went out to fetch her pills, and then she started scribbling stuff down in a notebook. I thought it was another of her stories, but when I looked at it I saw it was calculations - pages of ‘em - and she hardly knew her tables when she was in school. She got an E in Maths for her GCSE.”
“These calculations,” said the Doctor. “Have you got them handy?”
“Just a sec.” The Doctor was almost ready to spontaneously combust as Wilf got up, searched for his glasses, crossed the room, mumbling all the while, and finally located a notebook, which he eventually handed over to him. The Doctor donned his spectacles and began to examine it. “But this higher differential calculus!” he exclaimed. “And she’s working in ten dimensions - this is beyond any human level! I’m having a bit of trouble following it myself.”
“There’s a confession, coming from you,” Jack declared.
“That’s nothing - wait until you see the stuff she started doing when your music of the universe came on,” said Wilf. “Something about having to make them fit together - I couldn’t even start to follow it - she reckoned if you played the two pieces as the same time something would happen - and then she started rewinding the DVD and double tracking it - I dunno where she gets all that stuff from. Before she met you, Doctor, she couldn’t rewire a plug.” He shook his head in bafflement. “You should have heard the racket.”
“You got the recording?” the Doctor asked.
“I can do better than that,” Wilf announced, swelling with pride. “Never knew a line of music ‘til tonight, that girl. But look at this!”
“Blimey!” gasped the Doctor, as Wilf fetched a second notebook. “That’s the most complex musical notation I’ve seen since - wait a mainute - it’s the Gallifreyan tonal scale! I was working on seven tones, he was using ten - put them together and you get the music of the Time Lords. We used to use this stuff to - Yes! That’s it!”
He was on his feet now, humming melodies under his breath and sweeping his arms through the air, using the sonic screwdriver as a baton. “If I can just get the resonances right…” he muttered. “Oh, but this is brilliant! Donna Noble, you are amazing. ‘La Donna Nobile,’ that’s you. Musical genius! Jack, get me a tape of that Torino stuff. Let’s see what happens when we play the two together. I’ve got an idea…”
Wilf looked doubtful. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he warned. “That’s what she was doing when she disappeared.”
****
A sudden flash of light filled the control room of the little TARDIS, making Rose jump and turn round to see what was going on.
“Oh no, not this again!” a familiar voice complained. “Where the hell am I?”
Rose gaped at the red-haired woman who’d just appeared in front of her. “Donna…” she said, weakly, unable to believe her eyes.
“I said, where the hell am I?”
“You’re in the TARDIS.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“Hush, you’ll wake him up.” Rose gestured towards the Doctor, fitfully sleeping on the bed they’d had made up for him in the control room. “Donna, I haven’t the foggiest idea how you got here, or even if you remember who I am…”
“Course I do! I’m not stupid. Rose Tyler, from the parallel world. Oh Gawd, is that where I am now? A parallel world? How did that happen?”
“I’ve no idea,” Rose confessed. “Maybe he can tell you, when he wakes up…”
Donna blinked, held a hand to her forehead and seemed to gather her wits. “That’s not him, is it?” she asked. “Can’t be the Doctor. He never used to sleep.”
“He’s not been well.” Rose sighed. “And anyway, this isn’t the same Doctor. This one’s human.”
Donna moved towards the bed and looked at the Doctor, her face filled with sorrow and dismay. Rose saw something she’d heard about from the Doctor many times, but not really witnessed herself - how compassionate Donna Noble could be.
“That’s him? That’s the Doctor?” she gasped. She sat down and stroked his face. “What’s wrong with him? He was always skinny, but now there’s nothing left of him. He looks terrible! How long’s he been like this?”
“Years,” Rose said. “Do you remember how the two of you were like one person? The Doctor-Donna? Well, when you went home he began to get sick. It’s that Time Lord brain - his heart can’t cope with the demand on his blood supply. The tiniest little thing just wears him out.”
“Oh my God, Doctor…” Donna took his limp hand, the bluster gone from her voice. “Doctor, it’s me. Donna. Remember? Doctor. Donna. Friends…”
There were so many questions Rose longed to ask. Was it true that her memories had been taken away, as they’d suspected? How did she come to be here - and did Jack or the other Doctor know? But for the moment, she could only watch this unexpected, hopeful, intimate moment between the two of them and wonder at the lack of jealousy she felt.
Donna moved her hands to his chest. “But he’s got two hearts, hasn’t he? He’s the Doctor.”
Rose shook her head. “No, just the one. That’s the whole problem.”
“But that’s disgusting!” cried Donna. “Wait a minute. There are two hearts. One here, one here…”
“That’s the one they transplanted,” Rose explained. “It didn’t work. They could never get them both going at the same time. And then they tried…”
Donna wasn’t listening. “Well, you’re not dying on me, mate!” she exclaimed. “You got that?” Rose watched in horror as Donna’s hands began to bang up and down rhythmically on the Doctor’s chest.
“Stop it! You’ll kill him!” she cried. “He’s too weak…”
The Doctor gasped and opened his eyes. “You fixed my hearts!” he cried, his whole face brightening in a delighted smile. “Ba-ba-BOOM-bah!” He took in a deep, noisy breath and before Rose could intervene he was sitting up. “How did I manage with just the one?”
Donna laughed and threw her arms around him. “I dunno!” she grumbled, in feigned irritation. “Turn my back on you for one moment and you fall apart. Better not turn sideways - they’ll report you as a missing person. Got any pizza in this place?”
He licked his lips. “You’re right. I could murder a pizza. Extra pepperoni. How about it, Rose? And can we have those little balls of garlic bread with cheese on top?”
****
Outside the Nobles’ house, the Doctor sprinted towards the TARDIS, his coat billowing behind him in the night breeze as Jack struggled to keep up with both the speed of his running and the pace of his conversation.
“It’s like this,” he gabbled. “There’s a kind of code that opens up the portals between universes - it’s all to do with this music of the spheres. You have to come at it from two separate directions, you see - and that’s why it needs two Time Lords because only Time Lords can think in that tonal signature. And that’s it - and of course when she remembered the TARDIS Donna’s brain unlocked that, and she must have seen there was a way through.”
“How’d she know where to go?” asked Jack breathlessly.
“Instinct.” The Doctor was back in the control room, frantically entering what Jack could only assume were co-ordinates. “Her subconscious mind remembered her link with my other self - it’s strong enough to pull her across the Void, particularly if he’s in some kind of trouble…”
“Will she be all right?” Jack asked, wondering whether he actually wanted to travel to a parallel world right now, and deciding that choice had already been made on his behalf.
“I don’t know - and that’s why we need to hurry,” the Doctor said, as he threw his body weight behind a lever. “The longer she’s left with those memories unlocked, the more likely she is to burn up. I’ve fed the data into the TARDIS navigational systems and we’ll just have to hope - hang on. Could be quite the ride!”
Jack braced himself against the nearest strut. “Did you know there’s a bit missing from this one?” he asked.
“Oh, that explains it!” cried the Doctor. “Another TARDIS! I suppose I ought to be cross but you can’t help admiring their ingenuity. That’s the Time Lord bit, of course. Well, that makes it all perfectly simple. Piece of cake, really. I wonder where that phrase came from?”
Jack’s reply went unheard as half the console exploded.
“Steady on, old girl!” the Doctor said. Jack could have sworn he was enjoying this. “Nearly there now.”
“Wherever ‘there’ is,” muttered Jack. The remaining lights went out and he briefly lost consciousness as he slammed into the console barrier.
“Whoops!” the Doctor exclaimed, cheerfully. “Anybody there?”
The answering voice made both of them cheer, inwardly at least. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s rude to materialise inside someone else’s immature TARDIS?” it protested. The edge was slightly taken off his indignation by the fact that the speaker’s mouth appeared to be full.
“Told you we should have got a stuffed crust!” said Donna. “Turning out to be quite a party, this is!”
“Donna!” the incoming Doctor cried, in delight. “I thought I’d never see you again!”
“I don’t know what you did to my head,” said Donna, “but for some reason I thought I’d made you up. I even wrote books about you.”
“I know.” He smirked. “Read one of them. It’s quite good. Couple of little things you didn’t quite get right, but….”
“Do the fanboy bit later,” ordered Jack. “You’re supposed to be checking these two out in case their memories burn them up or something.”
“Good point,” he agreed. He looked around for the first time. “You cheeky pair, nicking the old girl’s coral like that. Nice little place you’ve got, though. Lighting’s a bit off, but it might just be my eyes. He blinked and looked at Rose for the first time. “Hello.”
“Is that all you can say?” Rose gasped. “Hello?”
“What did you want me to say?” he asked, with an uncertainty that was most unlike him.
The pause that followed drew the second Doctor into the conversation. He stood aside, his expression uneasy. Without looking at him, Rose moved closer and grasped his hand. Their fingers intertwined and she slowly moved her thumb up and down his index finger. He tightened his grip on her, almost imperceptibly, in response.
The original Doctor waited for her reply. Five years ago, on a deserted street in the middle of a war, there’d been no such hesitation. Their joy at seeing one another again would have lit up a solar system. But things had changed. Jack wondered if his friend fully appreciated that.
The Doctor cleared his throat. “Rose Tyler…” he began hoarsely.
It was the moment Rose had been waiting for, and now it was here she wasn’t sure she wanted it. Jack was beginning to wonder if he could go through this again. These two would be the end of him.
“Bit late for that kind of thing now,” Rose said briskly.
Right before his eyes, Jack watched his Doctor’s hearts break all over again, and wondered whether it would ever stop.
sensiblecat
IMAGE: fizzling whizbee
WORDS: 4512
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.
Chapter One
Chapter Two
She’d unquestioningly offered herself up to him and that crazy existence because it was the only life that they could share and that was all that mattered. But that was no longer the case.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
ROBERT FROST
Jack was busy with his headset catching up on Torchwood stuff when the Doctor came crashing into the control room and almost fell right over him.
“Hey! Look where you’re going!” he exclaimed.
“I lost him!” fretted the Doctor, apparently oblivious. “He tells me something like that and then just vanishes!”
“Gotta go, Ianto,” said Jack. “Something’s come up.”
The something was the Doctor babbling apparent nonsense and whirling around the place in a state of ineffectual anxiety.
“What happened?” Jack asked.
“Jack, we have to get over there, now!” cried the Doctor, hammering on the controls.
“Now hold on a minute,” Jack cautioned “This is another universe you’re talking about, not just stepping out to Wal-Mart or something. What’s the rush?”
“Bad Wolf!” cried the Doctor
“Bad Wolf?” repeated Jack. He’d spoken with Rose once or twice about Satellite Five and the reasons he couldn’t stay dead any more. Someone had to do it, and the Doctor had made damn sure there was never time for that person to be himself. But he hadn’t been expecting that particular revelation to worry the Doctor this much.
“She has the right to know what happened,” he pointed out.
That didn’t go down too well. “Wait a minute. Did you know about this? What did you tell her?” the Doctor demanded.
Jack honestly thought the Doctor might pick him up and shake him for a moment. He hadn’t seen him so rattled since that nice old Professor turned out to be the Master. “Just tell me what the problem is!” he demanded.
“She can’t age!”
“She…what?” Jack was momentarily lost for words. How the hell had Rose hidden that from him - or, for that matter, from the Doctor? Wouldn’t she have felt wrong to him, the way he had? Besides, how long ago was all that business now? Rose was barely out of her teens - he remembered them celebrating her twentieth birthday together on the TARDIS, and how she’d remarked that Jackie would have forty fits if she knew what they’d got up to.
He thought back to the very different woman who’d returned to fight the Daleks two years ago. All that girlishness had disappeared. Whatever had happened to her over in the parallel world, Rose Tyler had gotten older, and it had showed.
A disturbing thought struck him. The Rose he’d known back then hadn’t had a vicious bone in her body, but she’d been through a hell of a lot since and it would be natural for her to blame the Doctor over here for some of it. What if she was lying?
He dismissed the idea almost immediately. She wouldn’t be that cruel. He’d talked with her a few times and her devotion to her own Doctor had shone through everything she’d said. No, he simply couldn’t imagine the two of them cooking up that story to get this Doctor back. It was too damn dangerous for one thing - he’d tear the universe apart to get back to her and sort it out, once he knew. Look at the state of him now.
The Doctor stabbed at the air, tugged at his hair, drummed his fingertips on the console, but nothing could contain the nervous energy inside him. “It’s the Time Vortex, Jack! Has to be! Why didn’t I see it? And now I’ve left her with him and he’s going to die.”
“What - you’re saying Rose is a fixed point in time, too? Then why didn’t you sense it?” asked Jack. “You did with me; that’s why you ran away.”
“Don’t start all that again!” Suddenly, the Doctor stopped, his frantic motion halted, or at least contained. “Wait a minute. That’s a very good question. If she can’t age, why didn’t I notice?”
“Precisely. You were together for a year. Love might be blind, but that’s ridiculous.” And anyway, thought Jack, there was a time when I thought you loved me, though maybe not the same way. He pushed that aside, focussing on the current dilemma as he so often did. “You know, when she was over here before she didn’t look twenty years old to me.”
“True.” The Doctor breathed a heartfelt sigh of relief. “Nope, she’d aged. Definitely. But he said she hadn’t. And then I lost the link, damn it…I was all over the place and he’s not strong enough to keep it going on his own.”
“What did he actually say?” Jack asked.
“That she hadn’t aged a day. He was absolutely clear on that point.”
“Hasn’t aged a day since when?”
“Well, since he first saw her. What would be the point in him telling me something I already knew?”
“Then how do you know it’s the Bad Wolf?” Jack continued. “Think of all the stuff that was going on at the time. You aborted a regeneration right in front of her - turned all that energy back onto the hand. Enough of it to change Donna into half a Time Lady and grow another you. What if it affected Rose as well?”
The Doctor threw his arms round him - Jack got the feeling that he’d have collapsed with relief without someone to hold him up. “Oh, yes! That’ll be it! A tiny little bit of the Vortex left inside her, dormant until something happened, and then - bam!” He was well away now, that gleam in his eyes, and his words tumbling out at a mile a minute. Jack didn’t even try to interrupt. “Three of you,” said the Doctor. “Standing there! Just standing there watching - yes! And we all thought it was the hand, but what if it wasn’t? What if you absorbed it?” He stood right in front of Jack now, his fingers dramatically splayed in front of his face to underline the point. “All that lovely Vortex energy - it could do anything. But then there’s you! What about you?”
Jack shrugged. “Been eating a lot of bananas lately. Other than that…well, I guess I’ve already had my turn. And I had the psychic shields up, trying to protect the women.”
“Always the gentleman,” agreed the Doctor. “Oh, what a muddle. What a horrible, lovely muddle! Good thing I’m brilliant at sorting out muddles. All we have to do is get everyone together again and reverse it and then…oh, hang on.” More hair-pulling followed. “That doesn’t work, does it? We needed all those things to defeat Davros. So now they’re locked in time. Can’t go back and undo them.”
“Maybe it’ll reverse when you regenerate next time around?” Jack proposed.
“Could be.” The Doctor nodded. “Just imagine, if I took all that lot into myself. I could end up ginger!”
“Would it kill you to stop being self-centered for a minute?” scolded Jack. “Now listen. We have a Donna development.”
“Donna development,” the Doctor repeated, rolling the consonants around his mouth with relish. “Oh, I like that. Particularly if it’s a Doctor-Donna development. Delightful, delicious, de-”
“Less of the Cole Porter stuff, okay?” warned Jack. “I just took a call from Wilf. Donna saw that show tonight.”
“Which one?” asked the Doctor. “ ‘Anything Goes?’ Some lovely stuff in that.” He started twirling around the console, something Jack was in no mood to appreciate. ‘Night and day, you are the one…’”
Great, thought Jack. I’m looking for the Defender of the Universe and I get Fred and Ginger. “No, the Prom. The one with the Torino piece.”
“That was on TV?” The Doctor stopped, one foot archly raised in mid-pirouette. He wobbled slightly as he waited for a reply.
“Yes, and there you were in the TARDIS. Donna saw the whole thing.”
“Conducting my symphony?” The Doctor preened a little. “My premiere was on TV? On a Saturday night?”
“You must be the biggest egotist that ever lived,” Jack complained. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Oh dear, I wiped every trace of myself and the TARDIS from Donna’s mind and then she sees it on prime-time. That just might have some consequences.’”
“Oh.” The Doctor was instantly sobered. “I see what you mean. Suppose I said I was sorry?”
“It’s a bit too late for that,” said Jack. “Donna’s vanished.”
******
Rose sat by the bed, listening to the Doctor’s laboured breathing and occasionally wiping beads of sweat from his forehead. He was running a fever, she suspected; his hair was lank and plastered to his scalp. The night nurse had been in and given him a shot of paracetomol to lower his temperature, but still she suspected it would be a long night. Then, as she so often had before, she’d go into work in a daze of exhaustion and try not to obsess about how he was doing. And so it would go on, until the day came when he wasn’t there at all.
Almost daily she relived the moment at Bad Wolf Bay when she’d still been trying to get her head around the TARDIS actually being there on the beach when the Doctor turned from her without a word of farewell, abandoning her to the happy ending he’d devised. For the first few months, accepting the man now before her had taken an act of will, a constant turning away from all thoughts of unfaithfulness and what might have been. It had taken them months to trust each other enough to become lovers - precious time wasted that she now bitterly regretted. That seemed to be the pattern of their lives together - brief, tantalising glimpses of happiness punctuated with long, grinding deserts of dashed hopes.
But her love for this man had crept up on her, unnoticed, until one day she’d realised that losing him would be the worst thing she could imagine happening. His illness had revealed qualities that the original of him had lacked - patience, gentleness, humility and, running through it all, a quiet but steely courage. Now it was hard for her to decide which time of her life had been happiest - the endless game of hide-and-seek aboard the TARDIS, with the Doctor retreating from her whenever they came too close, or the bittersweet but constant companionship they now shared.
“Oh, you silly old thing,” she murmured to his sleeping form. “Why did you have to go and tell him?” Of course, the other Doctor had panicked as soon as Bad Wolf was mentioned, the psychic link had faltered and failed, and her own Doctor had made himself dangerously weak trying to re-establish it. But at least they knew that the concert plan had worked; Jack had found him again. She’d tried calling Jack, but the atmospheric conditions had to be exactly right for the connection to work, and she’d failed to get through. All they could do now was wait. She was getting good at that.
In all the excitement and tension of setting this meeting up, she’d overlooked one important point. Now, as she sat here with her concentration battered by hope and worry, it struck her for the first time. She was going to see him again - her first Doctor. And she wasn’t sure whether she’d want to slap him or snog him. He’d chosen this destiny for her against her will, before she had a chance to protest - and that would never change. He’d never declare his love for her, or stop blaming himself for every bad thing that had happened to his people and his travelling companions. Keeping her mouth shut as she watched Davros press those buttons had been so difficult, but she’d had to do it. Whatever transpired, the Doctor’s old enemy mustn’t realise just how much she meant to him.
That was the life she’d gone back to. Running, fighting, ducking, weaving, always just a step away from complete destruction. The days when the stakes were only herself and the Doctor were the good ones. Most of the time it was the fate of planets. He must be exhausted beyond words, but how could he ever stop, or even rest? Rose had seen what the world would be like without the Doctor - bad enough to rewrite time and bring him back from the dead.
And she’d unquestioningly offered herself up to him and that crazy existence because it was the only life that they could share and that was all that mattered. But that was no longer the case. Now she’d tasted everyday, human happiness with a Doctor who could offer her that particular forever - occasionally grudgingly and with a longing gaze at faraway stars, but the relief of not risking your neck every day made up for a bit of monotony, and she was getting old enough to understand that. Her body was younger than her mind, which was thirty-ish and beginning to resemble her mother’s more often than she’d like.
Even as she hated his arrogance and high-handedness and refusal to let mere human beings ask the questions, Rose understood the sacrifice the Doctor had made to give her that future, and the cost of it. When her new Doctor had told her he’d never be able to continue travelling with Donna, Rose had wept for days. She knew that, after what Davros had told him, if he lost Donna he’d be more likely to travel and brood alone than to replace her.
Who’d hold his hand now? Her hands were filled with someone else, and that was what he’d wanted. On paper, it looked like the perfect solution, but in reality it had been an uneasy compromise, fragile as spun sugar, and seeing him again might break it apart completely.
Rose looked again at the man who lay, tossing and turning, on the bed before her, and a horrible thought refused to leave her mind.
Now that he knows I won’t wither and die, how much will he care about him?
******
“You told us she’d be safe!” Sylvia Noble spat the words at them, her face contorted with loathing. “Hadn’t you put us through enough without telling us lies?”
“Now come on,” Wilf interjected. “We’d all be slaves of that Dalek lot if it wasn’t for the Doctor, and you could tell he did his best. He didn’t want anything to happen to her, any more than we did.”
“Then why did you take her with you?” Sylvia fired at the Doctor.
Wilf came to his rescue again. “She’s a grown woman, love. She made her mind up and that was that. And I’ve never seen her as happy as the day she went with him. Now calm down - he’ll find her and get her back, won’t you?”
“I will,” said the Doctor. “I promise you that.”
Sylvia stomped off into the kitchen, muttering about his last promises being broken. Jack sat down on the sofa, a gesture that immediately seemed to establish him as the leader of the group. “Okay,” he began. “Let’s run through the sequence of events tonight. When did you notice Donna becoming distressed?”
“Well, you see, that’s the odd thing about it,” Wilf began, at his usual leisurely pace. “She wasn’t upset, so much as determined. Soon as that funny piece of music came on…”
“The Torino Scale?” the Doctor interrupted.
“I think that was it - the one with no proper tune. You know this modern stuff. Well, she said she’d a bit of a headache and Sylv went out to fetch her pills, and then she started scribbling stuff down in a notebook. I thought it was another of her stories, but when I looked at it I saw it was calculations - pages of ‘em - and she hardly knew her tables when she was in school. She got an E in Maths for her GCSE.”
“These calculations,” said the Doctor. “Have you got them handy?”
“Just a sec.” The Doctor was almost ready to spontaneously combust as Wilf got up, searched for his glasses, crossed the room, mumbling all the while, and finally located a notebook, which he eventually handed over to him. The Doctor donned his spectacles and began to examine it. “But this higher differential calculus!” he exclaimed. “And she’s working in ten dimensions - this is beyond any human level! I’m having a bit of trouble following it myself.”
“There’s a confession, coming from you,” Jack declared.
“That’s nothing - wait until you see the stuff she started doing when your music of the universe came on,” said Wilf. “Something about having to make them fit together - I couldn’t even start to follow it - she reckoned if you played the two pieces as the same time something would happen - and then she started rewinding the DVD and double tracking it - I dunno where she gets all that stuff from. Before she met you, Doctor, she couldn’t rewire a plug.” He shook his head in bafflement. “You should have heard the racket.”
“You got the recording?” the Doctor asked.
“I can do better than that,” Wilf announced, swelling with pride. “Never knew a line of music ‘til tonight, that girl. But look at this!”
“Blimey!” gasped the Doctor, as Wilf fetched a second notebook. “That’s the most complex musical notation I’ve seen since - wait a mainute - it’s the Gallifreyan tonal scale! I was working on seven tones, he was using ten - put them together and you get the music of the Time Lords. We used to use this stuff to - Yes! That’s it!”
He was on his feet now, humming melodies under his breath and sweeping his arms through the air, using the sonic screwdriver as a baton. “If I can just get the resonances right…” he muttered. “Oh, but this is brilliant! Donna Noble, you are amazing. ‘La Donna Nobile,’ that’s you. Musical genius! Jack, get me a tape of that Torino stuff. Let’s see what happens when we play the two together. I’ve got an idea…”
Wilf looked doubtful. “Oh, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” he warned. “That’s what she was doing when she disappeared.”
****
A sudden flash of light filled the control room of the little TARDIS, making Rose jump and turn round to see what was going on.
“Oh no, not this again!” a familiar voice complained. “Where the hell am I?”
Rose gaped at the red-haired woman who’d just appeared in front of her. “Donna…” she said, weakly, unable to believe her eyes.
“I said, where the hell am I?”
“You’re in the TARDIS.”
“You’re kidding me, right?”
“Hush, you’ll wake him up.” Rose gestured towards the Doctor, fitfully sleeping on the bed they’d had made up for him in the control room. “Donna, I haven’t the foggiest idea how you got here, or even if you remember who I am…”
“Course I do! I’m not stupid. Rose Tyler, from the parallel world. Oh Gawd, is that where I am now? A parallel world? How did that happen?”
“I’ve no idea,” Rose confessed. “Maybe he can tell you, when he wakes up…”
Donna blinked, held a hand to her forehead and seemed to gather her wits. “That’s not him, is it?” she asked. “Can’t be the Doctor. He never used to sleep.”
“He’s not been well.” Rose sighed. “And anyway, this isn’t the same Doctor. This one’s human.”
Donna moved towards the bed and looked at the Doctor, her face filled with sorrow and dismay. Rose saw something she’d heard about from the Doctor many times, but not really witnessed herself - how compassionate Donna Noble could be.
“That’s him? That’s the Doctor?” she gasped. She sat down and stroked his face. “What’s wrong with him? He was always skinny, but now there’s nothing left of him. He looks terrible! How long’s he been like this?”
“Years,” Rose said. “Do you remember how the two of you were like one person? The Doctor-Donna? Well, when you went home he began to get sick. It’s that Time Lord brain - his heart can’t cope with the demand on his blood supply. The tiniest little thing just wears him out.”
“Oh my God, Doctor…” Donna took his limp hand, the bluster gone from her voice. “Doctor, it’s me. Donna. Remember? Doctor. Donna. Friends…”
There were so many questions Rose longed to ask. Was it true that her memories had been taken away, as they’d suspected? How did she come to be here - and did Jack or the other Doctor know? But for the moment, she could only watch this unexpected, hopeful, intimate moment between the two of them and wonder at the lack of jealousy she felt.
Donna moved her hands to his chest. “But he’s got two hearts, hasn’t he? He’s the Doctor.”
Rose shook her head. “No, just the one. That’s the whole problem.”
“But that’s disgusting!” cried Donna. “Wait a minute. There are two hearts. One here, one here…”
“That’s the one they transplanted,” Rose explained. “It didn’t work. They could never get them both going at the same time. And then they tried…”
Donna wasn’t listening. “Well, you’re not dying on me, mate!” she exclaimed. “You got that?” Rose watched in horror as Donna’s hands began to bang up and down rhythmically on the Doctor’s chest.
“Stop it! You’ll kill him!” she cried. “He’s too weak…”
The Doctor gasped and opened his eyes. “You fixed my hearts!” he cried, his whole face brightening in a delighted smile. “Ba-ba-BOOM-bah!” He took in a deep, noisy breath and before Rose could intervene he was sitting up. “How did I manage with just the one?”
Donna laughed and threw her arms around him. “I dunno!” she grumbled, in feigned irritation. “Turn my back on you for one moment and you fall apart. Better not turn sideways - they’ll report you as a missing person. Got any pizza in this place?”
He licked his lips. “You’re right. I could murder a pizza. Extra pepperoni. How about it, Rose? And can we have those little balls of garlic bread with cheese on top?”
****
Outside the Nobles’ house, the Doctor sprinted towards the TARDIS, his coat billowing behind him in the night breeze as Jack struggled to keep up with both the speed of his running and the pace of his conversation.
“It’s like this,” he gabbled. “There’s a kind of code that opens up the portals between universes - it’s all to do with this music of the spheres. You have to come at it from two separate directions, you see - and that’s why it needs two Time Lords because only Time Lords can think in that tonal signature. And that’s it - and of course when she remembered the TARDIS Donna’s brain unlocked that, and she must have seen there was a way through.”
“How’d she know where to go?” asked Jack breathlessly.
“Instinct.” The Doctor was back in the control room, frantically entering what Jack could only assume were co-ordinates. “Her subconscious mind remembered her link with my other self - it’s strong enough to pull her across the Void, particularly if he’s in some kind of trouble…”
“Will she be all right?” Jack asked, wondering whether he actually wanted to travel to a parallel world right now, and deciding that choice had already been made on his behalf.
“I don’t know - and that’s why we need to hurry,” the Doctor said, as he threw his body weight behind a lever. “The longer she’s left with those memories unlocked, the more likely she is to burn up. I’ve fed the data into the TARDIS navigational systems and we’ll just have to hope - hang on. Could be quite the ride!”
Jack braced himself against the nearest strut. “Did you know there’s a bit missing from this one?” he asked.
“Oh, that explains it!” cried the Doctor. “Another TARDIS! I suppose I ought to be cross but you can’t help admiring their ingenuity. That’s the Time Lord bit, of course. Well, that makes it all perfectly simple. Piece of cake, really. I wonder where that phrase came from?”
Jack’s reply went unheard as half the console exploded.
“Steady on, old girl!” the Doctor said. Jack could have sworn he was enjoying this. “Nearly there now.”
“Wherever ‘there’ is,” muttered Jack. The remaining lights went out and he briefly lost consciousness as he slammed into the console barrier.
“Whoops!” the Doctor exclaimed, cheerfully. “Anybody there?”
The answering voice made both of them cheer, inwardly at least. “Hasn’t anyone ever told you it’s rude to materialise inside someone else’s immature TARDIS?” it protested. The edge was slightly taken off his indignation by the fact that the speaker’s mouth appeared to be full.
“Told you we should have got a stuffed crust!” said Donna. “Turning out to be quite a party, this is!”
“Donna!” the incoming Doctor cried, in delight. “I thought I’d never see you again!”
“I don’t know what you did to my head,” said Donna, “but for some reason I thought I’d made you up. I even wrote books about you.”
“I know.” He smirked. “Read one of them. It’s quite good. Couple of little things you didn’t quite get right, but….”
“Do the fanboy bit later,” ordered Jack. “You’re supposed to be checking these two out in case their memories burn them up or something.”
“Good point,” he agreed. He looked around for the first time. “You cheeky pair, nicking the old girl’s coral like that. Nice little place you’ve got, though. Lighting’s a bit off, but it might just be my eyes. He blinked and looked at Rose for the first time. “Hello.”
“Is that all you can say?” Rose gasped. “Hello?”
“What did you want me to say?” he asked, with an uncertainty that was most unlike him.
The pause that followed drew the second Doctor into the conversation. He stood aside, his expression uneasy. Without looking at him, Rose moved closer and grasped his hand. Their fingers intertwined and she slowly moved her thumb up and down his index finger. He tightened his grip on her, almost imperceptibly, in response.
The original Doctor waited for her reply. Five years ago, on a deserted street in the middle of a war, there’d been no such hesitation. Their joy at seeing one another again would have lit up a solar system. But things had changed. Jack wondered if his friend fully appreciated that.
The Doctor cleared his throat. “Rose Tyler…” he began hoarsely.
It was the moment Rose had been waiting for, and now it was here she wasn’t sure she wanted it. Jack was beginning to wonder if he could go through this again. These two would be the end of him.
“Bit late for that kind of thing now,” Rose said briskly.
Right before his eyes, Jack watched his Doctor’s hearts break all over again, and wondered whether it would ever stop.