New DW fic - She Never Really Forgot Part 1
So this is my first attempt at a Doctor Who fic. It's a story I've had bubbling in my head for a long time and I thought it was time I shared. Please let me know what you think!
And, er, look what I got:
Title: She Never Really Forgot 1/15
Author: KB
Rating: PG
Characters: Donna, Doctor, Sylvia, Wilf and other new people in their lives
Disclaimer: Ownership? Er, no. Not a snowflake’s chance in Vesuvius on Volcano Day.
Spoilers: All of Season 4
Summary: Donna’s life following the events in Journey’s End.
A/N: Can you call it a fixit fic if it was never really broken?
Chapter I - The Sad Goodbye
It’s the Doctor’s gentleness that surprises Donna most. She goes limp in his arms and feels as he holds her to him for a long moment. His twin heartbeats thud erratically in her ears and she can feel his body shaking. She can even feel the turmoil in his mind as he tries to convince himself that he’s done the right thing; that there is no other way.
That’s the hardest part of it. She knows there’s no other way either. Unlike the Doctor, however, Donna knows that what he did was not to wipe her memories, but instead to place a barrier around the Time Lord part of her consciousness so that it becomes more manageable. Her moments of stammering, her violent protests and tears, have given her those valuable few seconds that ensure she won’t lose all of the memories of her time with the Doctor or the knowledge that the metacrisis has beamed into her mind.
“Oh, Donna.”
His voice is a pain-filled whisper above her head. It takes all her self-control not to respond, but she’s already seen in his mind that he’s expecting her to be unconscious for hours. If she doesn’t go along with that, she’s afraid he will try to wipe her mind again before she can explain, and she knows that a second attempt will succeed where the first failed.
He lifts her in his arms - stronger than she would ever have believed from the long streak of alien nothing that he is - and carries her into the depths of the TARDIS. Third door on the left. He lowers her onto the bed and then she hears his feet on the metal floor as he steps away.
Knowing that she still can’t move without giving the deception away, Donna turns her thoughts to the second mind tucked away behind the wall that the Doctor’s actions have created. With that in place, she can investigate a little without it overwhelming her, and the first thing she realises is that there isn’t one mind in there - there are two.
‘Who are you?’ she thinks, trying to project the thought in the direction of the other thought pattern, which is strangely measured and regular, unlike that of the Doctor, which constantly shoots off in a thousand different directions at once.
And then she understands.
This is the TARDIS, which has such a strong connection to the Doctor, and now Donna realises why the Doctor speaks to the machine in the way he always does.
No, it isn’t just ‘the machine’. It’s definitely a ‘she’. There is something indefinably feminine about the constant stream of words coming from that mind. Donna smiles to herself and wonders if she can communicate with it.
But how do you address a machine?
‘TARDIS.’
There is no obvious reply, but Donna thinks that the run of ‘thoughts’ has slowed down a little. Perhaps it’s listening to her?
‘Please,’ she goes on, hoping fervently that the machine will understand ‘I need some time in here without the Doctor before we get back to Earth.’
She almost holds her breath, waiting for a response. She knows that the Doctor is still standing beside the bed, and then she feels him sit next to her, the mattress bending beneath his weight. There is no change to the steady run of the machine’s ‘thoughts’. Perhaps the TARDIS can’t understand her, even if she does have the Doctor’s mind.
‘Please!’
It’s a final thought, thrust out in desperation, and the ship suddenly responds. The whole room lurches sharply to the left, and the Doctor is flung to the floor with a yell. He grabs at the blankets on which Donna is lying and she watches through her lashes as he pulls himself to his feet.
With one final glance in her direction, he leaves the room, and Donna is on her feet almost before the door has closed behind him.
“Thanks, girl,” she murmurs to the ship, locking the door and then casting an eager eye around the room.
The first thing that catches her eye is a small box standing on the lower shelf of her bedside table. This has all the stray bits and pieces that she has collected during her travels, and which she has been unable to find a home for anywhere else. Opening the lid, she paws through the contents, eventually finding a slim, black item that she quickly slips into the inside pocket of her coat. Definitely sleek, and the former property of Matron Cofelia of the Five-Straighten Classabindi Nursery Fleet. Intergalactic Class. Donna had fished it out of the bin where the Doctor threw it, and kept it for who-knew-what situation. Well, now she knows.
Closing the box, she turns to the rack containing her necklaces and picks up the one on which she has strung the TARDIS key. That slips over her neck and she tucks the key under her shirt.
Donna is about to lie back on the bed when she catches sight of a small red book and snatches it up, tucking it into the pocket of her coat and hoping that the Doctor won’t notice. She knows he will have to carry her off the TARDIS and he mustn’t know that she was ever conscious. Too much weight or bulky objects in her pockets would be a major clue.
“Diary!”
That’s the other thing. The diary she’s kept since coming on to the TARDIS. A small green book, and, when she filled that one, a blue book. Not that she ever managed to write much in that one, because she got it the day before they went to Midnight, and there was almost no time for writing between the end of that trip and their visit to the markets of Shan Shen, where she met that fortune teller.
Donna rummages through two boxes at the bottom of her wardrobe, finding the green book, which she tucks into the other pocket of her coat, but unsuccessful in her hunt for the blue version. Not that it matters much, as it’s all but blank, except for her name, which is written on the inside front cover, and the black lines and squares she drew on it in imitation of the outside of the TARDIS, as well as a brief summary of what the Doctor told her he experienced on Midnight. She doesn’t really want to remember that anyway.
A blue book. Black lines and squares…
Donna drops onto the bed, her mouth open in shock. Why had she never thought of it before? Of course, that was the reason River Song knew her name, and why that diary seemed so hauntingly familiar - it was hers! And she isn’t going to find it now because she has to leave it behind for River to find in the future. A fixed moment in time. Now Donna knows exactly what that meant.
The sound of a hand on the doorknob makes Donna flop back onto the bed and pull up her legs, trying to get back into the position the Doctor placed her.
“Not now,” she hears the Doctor growl at the door - or the TARDIS - and then comes the familiar buzz of the sonic screwdriver being used against the lock. Donna shuts her eyes just in time, as the door is opened a few seconds later.
His footsteps cross the room and his hand gently smooths her hair.
“You’re home now, Donna.” His voice is soft as he reaches down and slides his arms beneath her shoulders and under her knees. “Home forever…” His voice trails away and he lifts her into his arms. Her head rolls onto his shoulder and she can hear his hearts beating unevenly in her ear.
It’s only when she feels a single tear drop onto her cheek that she wants to move, to tell him that there is another way out. But she can feel his mind closed against her and knows that he would never believe her. It’s almost ridiculous how much she wants to change what’s happening, and yet at the same time she knows how fatal the results would be if she tried.
His pain sears her mind as he crosses the short stretch of ground to the front door and, unable to hold her up and ring the doorbell, lowers them both to the ground before knocking loudly to alert Wilf and Sylvia to their presence.
The next few moments are a hurried blur of recriminations being yelled at the Doctor by Sylvia until Wilf finally stops her, and of Donna being carried up to her bedroom by the Doctor and placed gently on her bed. She nearly opens her eyes when she hears the door shut, but she can sense how close the Doctor is and realises that he’s still standing next to the bed. His feet are almost silent on the carpet and then his face is warm near hers as he touches his lips to her forehead. A tear drops onto her skin and he brushes it away. Then she knows he has turned away and the door of the room opens and closes, marking his departure.
“At last,” she breathes, sitting up and stretching.
She has time now to arrange things. The first is her phone, sitting on the bedside table where she left it by accident on the day she went to Adipose Industries for the final time. The battery is completely flat by now, but that’s a good thing. It means that it won’t accidentally ring or make any other sounds while she’s pretending to use it.
Donna fishes her diary and the red book out of her pockets. The diary goes on her table, but she flips through the other book. It’s a small photo album, full of pictures she’s taken during the few times that she and the Doctor hadn’t been running for their lives. There they are on the purple beaches of Hackiton-8, where she discovered that this incarnation of the Doctor didn’t like fish. Eating or swimming with them. There they are in the library of the TARDIS, checking details in the Doctor’s Agatha Christie collection to see if they can match up what had happened at Lady Eddison’s house with what Agatha had written in later years. And then there’s the photo that the Doctor took without Donna’s permission, of her being embraced by the children on the Island of Caxerow. Being her first adventure after the Library, the sight of the children had made her feel extraordinarily motherly.
Wiping away a tear that has begun making its way down her cheek almost unnoticed, Donna puts away the book, takes out the sonic pen and places it on her diary, and then smooths her hair before opening her phone. Standing in the middle of the room, she closes her eyes and focuses on the mind held back by the wall built by the Doctor.
His memories of her are not difficult to find, as they are foremost in his mind at that moment. But these are the way she is now, how she’s saved the world and what they’ve done recently. For his memories of how he had seen her in the past, she has to dig a little deeper.
Now this really is painful! She watches images of herself as she was during her first time on the TARDIS, when she was due to marry Lance, cringing at what she had been: her carry-on about the mundane lives of herself and her friends, not to mention the latest reality program or what this-or-that celebrity was up to. Donna sends a swift prayer up to whatever deity might be listening that she doesn’t have to go back to being that person again, except for one brief moment right now.
“Asleep! On my bed! In my clothes! Like a flippin' kid! What d'you let me do that for?” She barely waits for an answer, prattling on as she turns to the Doctor. Putting out her hand for him to shake, the only way to maintain her composure is to avoid looking into his eyes. “Don't mind me. Donna.”
In the kitchen, she babbles mindlessly into the phone, drawing on her own memories and those of the Doctor to act as if she’s never changed. It’s only when she hears his footstep in the doorway and his voice that she falters.
“Donna. I was just going.”
“Yeah, see you.”
More meaningless words into a silent phone, all the time praying for the sound of the front door to close behind him. In the end, even without hearing him leave, she flees back up the stairs, shutting her door and rushing to the window in time to see the TARDIS disappear.
In her mind, she feels as the Doctor stands at the console of the TARDIS, staring into nothing, and she wants to nag him for not changing out of his soaking wet clothes. Then she realises that the cold dampness she feels isn’t coming from the Doctor, but from her own shirt, which is being drenched by the rain of tears that stream from her eyes.
Next chapter: Trying To Move On
And, er, look what I got:
Title: She Never Really Forgot 1/15
Author: KB
Rating: PG
Characters: Donna, Doctor, Sylvia, Wilf and other new people in their lives
Disclaimer: Ownership? Er, no. Not a snowflake’s chance in Vesuvius on Volcano Day.
Spoilers: All of Season 4
Summary: Donna’s life following the events in Journey’s End.
A/N: Can you call it a fixit fic if it was never really broken?
Chapter I - The Sad Goodbye
It’s the Doctor’s gentleness that surprises Donna most. She goes limp in his arms and feels as he holds her to him for a long moment. His twin heartbeats thud erratically in her ears and she can feel his body shaking. She can even feel the turmoil in his mind as he tries to convince himself that he’s done the right thing; that there is no other way.
That’s the hardest part of it. She knows there’s no other way either. Unlike the Doctor, however, Donna knows that what he did was not to wipe her memories, but instead to place a barrier around the Time Lord part of her consciousness so that it becomes more manageable. Her moments of stammering, her violent protests and tears, have given her those valuable few seconds that ensure she won’t lose all of the memories of her time with the Doctor or the knowledge that the metacrisis has beamed into her mind.
“Oh, Donna.”
His voice is a pain-filled whisper above her head. It takes all her self-control not to respond, but she’s already seen in his mind that he’s expecting her to be unconscious for hours. If she doesn’t go along with that, she’s afraid he will try to wipe her mind again before she can explain, and she knows that a second attempt will succeed where the first failed.
He lifts her in his arms - stronger than she would ever have believed from the long streak of alien nothing that he is - and carries her into the depths of the TARDIS. Third door on the left. He lowers her onto the bed and then she hears his feet on the metal floor as he steps away.
Knowing that she still can’t move without giving the deception away, Donna turns her thoughts to the second mind tucked away behind the wall that the Doctor’s actions have created. With that in place, she can investigate a little without it overwhelming her, and the first thing she realises is that there isn’t one mind in there - there are two.
‘Who are you?’ she thinks, trying to project the thought in the direction of the other thought pattern, which is strangely measured and regular, unlike that of the Doctor, which constantly shoots off in a thousand different directions at once.
And then she understands.
This is the TARDIS, which has such a strong connection to the Doctor, and now Donna realises why the Doctor speaks to the machine in the way he always does.
No, it isn’t just ‘the machine’. It’s definitely a ‘she’. There is something indefinably feminine about the constant stream of words coming from that mind. Donna smiles to herself and wonders if she can communicate with it.
But how do you address a machine?
‘TARDIS.’
There is no obvious reply, but Donna thinks that the run of ‘thoughts’ has slowed down a little. Perhaps it’s listening to her?
‘Please,’ she goes on, hoping fervently that the machine will understand ‘I need some time in here without the Doctor before we get back to Earth.’
She almost holds her breath, waiting for a response. She knows that the Doctor is still standing beside the bed, and then she feels him sit next to her, the mattress bending beneath his weight. There is no change to the steady run of the machine’s ‘thoughts’. Perhaps the TARDIS can’t understand her, even if she does have the Doctor’s mind.
‘Please!’
It’s a final thought, thrust out in desperation, and the ship suddenly responds. The whole room lurches sharply to the left, and the Doctor is flung to the floor with a yell. He grabs at the blankets on which Donna is lying and she watches through her lashes as he pulls himself to his feet.
With one final glance in her direction, he leaves the room, and Donna is on her feet almost before the door has closed behind him.
“Thanks, girl,” she murmurs to the ship, locking the door and then casting an eager eye around the room.
The first thing that catches her eye is a small box standing on the lower shelf of her bedside table. This has all the stray bits and pieces that she has collected during her travels, and which she has been unable to find a home for anywhere else. Opening the lid, she paws through the contents, eventually finding a slim, black item that she quickly slips into the inside pocket of her coat. Definitely sleek, and the former property of Matron Cofelia of the Five-Straighten Classabindi Nursery Fleet. Intergalactic Class. Donna had fished it out of the bin where the Doctor threw it, and kept it for who-knew-what situation. Well, now she knows.
Closing the box, she turns to the rack containing her necklaces and picks up the one on which she has strung the TARDIS key. That slips over her neck and she tucks the key under her shirt.
Donna is about to lie back on the bed when she catches sight of a small red book and snatches it up, tucking it into the pocket of her coat and hoping that the Doctor won’t notice. She knows he will have to carry her off the TARDIS and he mustn’t know that she was ever conscious. Too much weight or bulky objects in her pockets would be a major clue.
“Diary!”
That’s the other thing. The diary she’s kept since coming on to the TARDIS. A small green book, and, when she filled that one, a blue book. Not that she ever managed to write much in that one, because she got it the day before they went to Midnight, and there was almost no time for writing between the end of that trip and their visit to the markets of Shan Shen, where she met that fortune teller.
Donna rummages through two boxes at the bottom of her wardrobe, finding the green book, which she tucks into the other pocket of her coat, but unsuccessful in her hunt for the blue version. Not that it matters much, as it’s all but blank, except for her name, which is written on the inside front cover, and the black lines and squares she drew on it in imitation of the outside of the TARDIS, as well as a brief summary of what the Doctor told her he experienced on Midnight. She doesn’t really want to remember that anyway.
A blue book. Black lines and squares…
Donna drops onto the bed, her mouth open in shock. Why had she never thought of it before? Of course, that was the reason River Song knew her name, and why that diary seemed so hauntingly familiar - it was hers! And she isn’t going to find it now because she has to leave it behind for River to find in the future. A fixed moment in time. Now Donna knows exactly what that meant.
The sound of a hand on the doorknob makes Donna flop back onto the bed and pull up her legs, trying to get back into the position the Doctor placed her.
“Not now,” she hears the Doctor growl at the door - or the TARDIS - and then comes the familiar buzz of the sonic screwdriver being used against the lock. Donna shuts her eyes just in time, as the door is opened a few seconds later.
His footsteps cross the room and his hand gently smooths her hair.
“You’re home now, Donna.” His voice is soft as he reaches down and slides his arms beneath her shoulders and under her knees. “Home forever…” His voice trails away and he lifts her into his arms. Her head rolls onto his shoulder and she can hear his hearts beating unevenly in her ear.
It’s only when she feels a single tear drop onto her cheek that she wants to move, to tell him that there is another way out. But she can feel his mind closed against her and knows that he would never believe her. It’s almost ridiculous how much she wants to change what’s happening, and yet at the same time she knows how fatal the results would be if she tried.
His pain sears her mind as he crosses the short stretch of ground to the front door and, unable to hold her up and ring the doorbell, lowers them both to the ground before knocking loudly to alert Wilf and Sylvia to their presence.
The next few moments are a hurried blur of recriminations being yelled at the Doctor by Sylvia until Wilf finally stops her, and of Donna being carried up to her bedroom by the Doctor and placed gently on her bed. She nearly opens her eyes when she hears the door shut, but she can sense how close the Doctor is and realises that he’s still standing next to the bed. His feet are almost silent on the carpet and then his face is warm near hers as he touches his lips to her forehead. A tear drops onto her skin and he brushes it away. Then she knows he has turned away and the door of the room opens and closes, marking his departure.
“At last,” she breathes, sitting up and stretching.
She has time now to arrange things. The first is her phone, sitting on the bedside table where she left it by accident on the day she went to Adipose Industries for the final time. The battery is completely flat by now, but that’s a good thing. It means that it won’t accidentally ring or make any other sounds while she’s pretending to use it.
Donna fishes her diary and the red book out of her pockets. The diary goes on her table, but she flips through the other book. It’s a small photo album, full of pictures she’s taken during the few times that she and the Doctor hadn’t been running for their lives. There they are on the purple beaches of Hackiton-8, where she discovered that this incarnation of the Doctor didn’t like fish. Eating or swimming with them. There they are in the library of the TARDIS, checking details in the Doctor’s Agatha Christie collection to see if they can match up what had happened at Lady Eddison’s house with what Agatha had written in later years. And then there’s the photo that the Doctor took without Donna’s permission, of her being embraced by the children on the Island of Caxerow. Being her first adventure after the Library, the sight of the children had made her feel extraordinarily motherly.
Wiping away a tear that has begun making its way down her cheek almost unnoticed, Donna puts away the book, takes out the sonic pen and places it on her diary, and then smooths her hair before opening her phone. Standing in the middle of the room, she closes her eyes and focuses on the mind held back by the wall built by the Doctor.
His memories of her are not difficult to find, as they are foremost in his mind at that moment. But these are the way she is now, how she’s saved the world and what they’ve done recently. For his memories of how he had seen her in the past, she has to dig a little deeper.
Now this really is painful! She watches images of herself as she was during her first time on the TARDIS, when she was due to marry Lance, cringing at what she had been: her carry-on about the mundane lives of herself and her friends, not to mention the latest reality program or what this-or-that celebrity was up to. Donna sends a swift prayer up to whatever deity might be listening that she doesn’t have to go back to being that person again, except for one brief moment right now.
“Asleep! On my bed! In my clothes! Like a flippin' kid! What d'you let me do that for?” She barely waits for an answer, prattling on as she turns to the Doctor. Putting out her hand for him to shake, the only way to maintain her composure is to avoid looking into his eyes. “Don't mind me. Donna.”
In the kitchen, she babbles mindlessly into the phone, drawing on her own memories and those of the Doctor to act as if she’s never changed. It’s only when she hears his footstep in the doorway and his voice that she falters.
“Donna. I was just going.”
“Yeah, see you.”
More meaningless words into a silent phone, all the time praying for the sound of the front door to close behind him. In the end, even without hearing him leave, she flees back up the stairs, shutting her door and rushing to the window in time to see the TARDIS disappear.
In her mind, she feels as the Doctor stands at the console of the TARDIS, staring into nothing, and she wants to nag him for not changing out of his soaking wet clothes. Then she realises that the cold dampness she feels isn’t coming from the Doctor, but from her own shirt, which is being drenched by the rain of tears that stream from her eyes.
Next chapter: Trying To Move On