Unfinshed Symphony-Part One-DVD Version
What follows is a DVD version of the first part of our story. What I have done is add in some hyper-links to another comm so that if you had any questions about the creatures or names I used...you can click away and look it up there. I am going to alter the existing versions sooner or later...but this version will not only contain the links...but some notes about the story, where it could have gone and some rough drafts version...so if none of that appeals to you...don't bother :) This is just the same prelude as before...with some bells and whistles.
If you haven't read episode one yet...do not read this one !! It contains spoilers in the commentary...read these only after you are done...trust me
I will post the commentary in red...so you know what has and hasn't been added.
Whatsername-Part One
I wanted to start at Earth for a few reasons. One, the New Doctor's base since Nine seems to be Earth. I am sure it saves on money than having to create a world every week, but it also make him and the stories a lot more accessible. I brought him back also because I wanted to pick up where we left off. Almost like back tracking the story to before Journey's End...and then moving forward from there. I loathe changing someone else's story and there was no way I was just going to go and write a new version of the final episode with Donna. If I was going to fix her, it would have to be in continutity, at least as in continutity as fanfic can be.
Both hearts beat with trepidation as the TARDIS materialized in Cardiff. His mouth was dry and he felt just the slightest bit of moisture on his forehead. He smiled as he opened up the power cells before he stepped outside, most untimelordlike sweating is. He yanked open the doors and looked back to the console. He could see the pulsing blue lights indicating the TARDIS was soaking up the rift energy she used to travel with, no use in saving the world and not filling the tank at the same time.
He blinked twice against the midday sun and waited for Jack. Though he had no doubt he could penetrate the Ian Flemming like devices that guarded access to Torchwood's underground lair, he didn't feel like showing off just yet. Besides, he was worried.
Donna remembered. She remembered and she wasn't dead. That was in so many ways a bad thing he couldn't calculate it. Her mind should have been tapioca pudding by now, and not the good kind. The kind that ran noisily out of her ears as her eyes rolled up into her head and...
Stop.
I loved the fact that someone as smart as the Doctor can't help but go over all the worst case senerios in their mind at once. Every single thing that could go wrong, slip up, every image would be there. Somone like him would constanly be going through that in his mind and the fatalistic way he is sometimes, I can see it becoming a danger to consume him.
He closed his eyes tightly and forced his mind to focus. The Donna he had just gotten done talking to wasn't in pain, manic or even smart it seemed. He had asked her a few basic temporal question in which he got the typical, “What is this Weakest link ? GET BACK HERE !!” It was obvious she didn't remember being part time lord.
Bad bad.
“Doctor”, jack's voice was disturbingly close and he realized just how focused he had been in thought. “Jack !”, he said holding his hands out for a second and then regretting it immediately. Jack had a tendency of taking any form of affection, innocent or not and making it a bridge to 51st century foreplay. He felt Jack return the hug and then his hands start to wander downward.
It is hard to write a Jack sequence where flirting of some kind doesn't occur :)
“Ok”, he said taking a half step back from his old friend, “Donna ? Remember ?”
“You sir”, he said smiling, “Are an old fuddy duddy”
“And don't forget it. Take me to her”, again the seriousness was back and Jack understood. As he walked the Doctor over to the invisible lift began to lower them he remembered his warning's about Donna before he left last time. How she in no way could ever be reminded of her adventures and travels with the Doctor without losing her mind and life. It seemed cruel but as always, Jack had deferred to the Time Lord, he knew his stuff better than Jack ever did. But when she contacted him asking where the, “bean pole in a call box” had gone off to, he wondered if the Doctor had just wanted to get rid of her. After all, how much of THAT mouth could he endure.
I just thought someone like Donna would drive someone like Jack insane. Her mouth, her temper, her everything would just smash up against Jack's little bubble of control...
But as they descended into Torchwood's main chamber, he could see the seriousness on the Doctor's face and knew, this was trouble.
Bad bad bad.
“We ran her through an entire medical scan”, Jack began, “Martha scanned her from head to toe, but there is nothing wrong with her”, when the Doctor looked back to him Jack swallowed, “Well nothing we could find”
“She remembers me ?”, he asked rhetorically, “She remembers the TARDIS and traveling ? There is something very wrong” as the lift settled jack closed his mouth and led the way, there was no talking to the Time Lord when he was like this. They made their way down to Owen's....damnit....Martha's medical bay where Donna was sitting on the examination table, thermometer in mouth.
“Llllkkk hrrrr sskknnneee, I dooonooghhtt llkkkeee beeesss...”, she began to yell, with her mouth still closed.
The Doctor smiled, “Donna you are the only creature I know that can scream with it's mouth fully closed”, Martha smiled at the Doctor and pulled the sensor out of her mouth, “Don't be coy with me scarecrow, you just go on and leave me...”
“What's the square root of 23,122 ?”, he asked interrupting her.
“Don't you change the subject with some assine...”
“What is the farthest star from Slyther Prime ?”, he asked over her words again.
“How the hell am I supposed to know...”
“Where was the last place we visited ?”, he asked pulling out his glasses.
“You mean the Shadow Procedure place or the Shan Shen place with the that damned bug on my back ?”, the look on her face was pure Donna.
“Shadow Proclamation”, he corrected her, “Where did we go after that ?” He pulled out his stethoscope from his pocket and placed the ends in his ears.
“Well we left to go find....well to go trace...”, she stopped as her words faltered off, “...well we went somewhere ! And you left me !”, she said hopping off the table. The Doctor pushed her back on the table, placing the stethoscope over her heart, “Not yet”, he said in a tone she knew well. It was his no fun voice.
She took a deep breath and waited, he placed the end over her over breast and she grabbed, “No way no, this isn't a free show !”
“Donna I need to see how many hearts you have”, he pushed the stethoscope back onto her breast and she pulled it off again, “How many you reckon I have Twiggy ? I'm human !! HU-MAN !” she said screaming into the business end of the scope.
Which is kind of a cheat, since it didn't seem she had two hearts in the last episode of Dr. Who. I put that in there as the Doctor making sure, one she hadn't evoloved again and two, that she was indeed Donna.
The Doctor winced and pulled the device free of his now ringing ears, “Martha did you find anything ?”, he walked over to her, looking at the computer scans she had done over the past few days.
“Nothing Doctor”, she said moving aside quickly. He didn't notice but she almost fell over trying to get out of his way, she hated feeling this nervous around him. She was a damned medical doctor, served in UNIT as a medical officer, she had bloody well almost saved the world herself and still she felt like a 12 year old schoolgirl around him. It was hard not to be impressed by the Doctor. “As you can see”, she started hesitantly, “Everything checks out. I ran three CAT scans, a brainwave test, Jack even used a Bekaran deep-tissue scanner on her to see if she was really Donna. She's really Donna, Doctor” She swallowed hard as he read the streams of data she had accumulated over the last week. It would have taken a normal person over an hour to comb through them with a fine tooth comb, but as it was, the Doctor took less than a minute.
Martha's fumbling and her overall demnor around the Doctor always facinates me. Her character is a strong willed, independant woman. Yet when she is around The Doctor she feels like she is in school again. I believe Martha's feelings for the Doctor run deeper than she is willing to admit...something we go back to in Episode six where she gets married and has a talk with The Doctor.
“It shows an accumulation of Artron energy, larger than before”, he said taking his glasses off and pointing at a small scale.
This is part of the technobabble that sets up our problem. Arton energy was used in this manner in the Sarah Jane adventures and I loved it. The fact that time traveling would leave a trace on a person is just fantastic. It gives you a short hand way of tracking someone who has been out of time...Arton is a huge thing in the 7th episode as well where the Doctor uses it to track someone down.
“Before what ?”, Martha asked leaning into the screen and looking, “Sure she has an Artron build up, she traveled with you”
“Yes”, the Doctor said putting his glasses back on again, “But this level is higher than the last reading I took before I left her. Not by much, but it is larger. It should be smaller”
“Are you two going to tell me what the hell is going on or do I have to wait for the looker over here to explain it to me”, she said pointing at Captain Jack.
“You haven't been in the TARDIS in over two months your time”, he said moving back towards Donna with a hand in his pocket, “Your Artron reading should have decreased by some, not increased”, he took out his sonic screwdriver and adjusted it for several seconds. “My Art Carney readings ? What are you going on...”
The Doctor silenced her by pointing the device into her open mouth and activating it, the shrill whine overrode anything else that happened to fall out of her mouth at the time. Donna's eyes got wide as she realized she couldn't close her mouth and the whine got louder.
“You did a scan on her before you left”, Jack said under his breath as he got close to the Doctor, “Since when do you do that ?”
This was my nod that Donna leaving wasn't a normal occurance. The Doctor was taking a slight risk by just hoping she would never remember again. So he would have taken some proper scans in case he needed to refer back to them again. But of course, as with the Docotr, he simply memorized them instead of jotting it down. Cause he is so bloody smart.
The Doctor continued to look into Donna's throat, “Since now” He twisted the screwdriver and turned it off, “Definitely up”
“Did you hear a word I just said ?”, she bellowed.
The Doctor looked at her quickly, “No can't say I did” and back to Martha, “We need to get a better scan, something that can do a cellular residue indication along with neutrino imagining.”
Martha shrugged her shoulders, “Nothing like that down here, or in UNIT”, that she could say with complete certainty.
“Something that can scan her down all the way to the sub atomic level and back. And take each and every particle that's around her and put it back together”, he was more talking to himself than to the room. He had the same manic energy he possessed when trying to solve a problem. Like a living dynamo Martha always thought, charging itself up one rotation at a time.
“You can always take her to the future”, Jack offered, “Something like that would be rudimentary in my time”
I knew I wanted to get the Doctor to Sarah's, so I needed something that Sarah would have that no one else would. Mr. Smith came to mind instantly. And since I wanted to see the Doctor in just about every Sarah Jane Adventure I saw...I couldn't wait to put him in one now.
“No”, he shook his head quickly, “I can't risk running that this is just some kind of remission, exposure to the TARDIS could cause it to flare up again”
“Flare up ?”, Donna said jumping off the table, “What flare up ?”, she got into the Doctor's face, “Don't you ignore me, I know you aren't a real doctor so don't be going and saying I got a flare up !” The Doctor continued to pace the room oblivious but Donna wouldn't be stopped, “HEY !”, she said grabbing his shoulders and forcing him to look at her, “I am still alive ! I am a human being ! I am not a child or a dog !! Do not ignore me !!”
The Doctor continued to stare into her eyes and she thought for a second she had gotten through. And then he started to slowly smile, “A dog and a child...a scanner able to decompress sub atomic particles and a computer fast enough to put them back together”, he snapped his finger and looked at Jack, “We don't need to go to the future !”
“Then where ?”, Jack asked.
“We need to go to 13 Bannerman Road !”
To be continued...
That's part One...see you next time when the Doctor and crew get to Sarah's house...