DW Fic - No Looking Back Part VI
Title: No Looking Back 6/6
Author: katherine_b
Rating: PG
Summary: Donna Noble meets a man who calls himself John Smith.
Characters: The Doctor, Donna Noble
Part VI
"What did you want again?" asks John as he pulls on his coat.
"Hob nobs," Donna reminds him. "Chocolate and orange ones."
"Fanastic!" John grins, and Donna arches an eyebrow at him.
"You reckon you're getting one?" she demands. "Dream on, chum!"
"Finder's fee." He smirks and is gone before she can reply.
She chuckles and turns back to dusting, slowing working her way around the room - and coming to a stop in front of the table near the door where she and John usually leave their keys and odds and ends from their pockets.
Something round and silver gleams in the bottom of the bowl.
For a moment Donna stares blankly at the object before reaching out and wrapping her fingers around it. The fob-watch settles into the palm of her hand, and Donna backs up against the solid wooden door beside her.
I've never seen this before, is the one coherent thought she manages to frame.
Yes, you have.
The whisper in the back of her mind causes Donna to draw in such a sharp breath that it makes her dizzy. She breathes out more slowly, her fingers curling around the smooth, cool object in her hand.
Air whispers from between her lips, almost as if it wants to take every last bit of her energy with it, and her eyes are fixed on the watch, which glows gold under her touch.
The edges of the world begin to flicker and darken, and it is only as Donna is about to pass out that she realises it is not the watch that is glowing gold.
It's her.
* * *
Donna Noble, the most important woman in the universe, lies face-down on the floor and giggles.
It’s shock, she tells herself firmly, even as tears form in her eyes. No surprise there, not least because she’s just had Time Lord energy yanked violently out of her head and into the watch that is now clutched, silent and dormant and silver, in her hand. And also because she could either laugh or cry, and she doesn’t want to do the latter. Not yet anyway. She can’t shake the conviction that there will be more than enough tears in her future.
She pulls herself into a sitting position and stares down at the fob-watch with its dormant Time Lord consciousness nestled quietly inside, thinking back over her relationship with this incarnation of the Doctor. All those jokes about time travel and spacemen and ships: her Time Lord subconscious bleeding through, or his? She will never know.
After a moment, when the feeling of nausea has completely subsided, she slides the watch into her pocket and gets to her feet. As she straightens up, she finds herself face-to-face with a picture of herself and the man she has called her boyfriend for the past five months.
“John Smith,” she murmurs to herself, stroking her finger down his image, her mind full of the memories of his future. Then she musters a wry, bitter smile. “Didn’t I say that was a rubbish name?"
She picks up his thin leather wallet, which is lying on the table. As she prepares to open the familiar object, her mind flashes back to her memory of the directive she saw written there, the words that kept her from calling in anyone to help him. Now she understands why her first instinct had been that the writing was feminine, not that of a man.
All right, old girl, she thinks, her fingers curling around the leather, tell me where you are.
Opening the wallet, a half-smile appears on her face at the words she finds written on the psychic paper in the same script she saw on that day: Downstairs in the alley.
“I’m coming,” she says aloud, but her steps are heavy as she grabs her keys and heads out of the flat.
The door to the TARDIS is standing open when she enters the shadowy alleyway. She enters the massive space and gazes thoughtfully around at the interior. It’s all so different from when she was last here, filled with geometric circles rather than organic coral arms.
For a moment she flips through her store of the Doctor’s memories, and only now does she realise that he has no recollection of his ship changing from that used by his previous incarnation to the design it has now. He has played no role in, so perhaps it is her task instead.
The remnants of the DoctorDonna lingering in her mind allow her to find the setting that adjusts the ship’s appearance and she flicks through a variety of desktop themes until she finds the only one she knows intimately from her own experience. The TARDIS gives a happy-sounding trill as the space around her clicks into the familiar design.
Donna steps back from the console and looks down as her foot touches something soft. She find herself standing on a puddle of clothing that she recognises, at least in part, from the Doctor’s memories.
Reaching over, she picks them up, holding them to the light so that she can see the damage that the regeneration caused to the now-ragged vest that the Doctor in his eighth body had worn so grandly. Here too are the shirt, its collars and cuffs worn almost beyond recognition, ragged pants, and lastly the belt that the unnamed non-Doctor had worn across his chest like a perverted medal of honour. The only man who ever possessed the Doctor’s body that seemed willing to carry ammunition.
With a shudder, she drops the objects down a convenient hole that the TARDIS has opened in the floor, but as she does so, she realises that two objects from the Warrior’s wardrobe are not here in the TARDIS.
Those boots. That jacket.
Now Donna understands why John seemed so strangely desperate to have them repaired, to wipe away the traces of the man he had been for so many millennia on Gallifrey. The Chameleon Arch that Donna can see hanging up near the ceiling may have made the man forget the reason for his feelings, but it could not erase them altogether.
Donna knows that the hard step, that of bringing all that pain and fear back to the Doctor, to make him adopt that mantle once more, is her responsibility.
For a moment she wonders if she is up to it, but then she shakes her head and allows herself a small laugh. Her very existence in this time and place tells her she must have succeeded. The only question is exactly how she has - or rather, will - achieve it.
Her confidence boosted by this timely and necessary realisation, she heads out of the TARDIS and back onto the street.
She meets John - she can’t think of him as the Doctor, not yet - at the corner, and while he grins with obvious delight at the sight of her, he also looks slightly sheepish.
“They didn’t have any Hob Nobs,” he admits. “I wasn’t sure what else to get you. We can go back though!”
“No.” Donna grabs his hand, turns him to face her, and gently places both hands on his chest. Under her right hand his heart beats steadily, but there is only the regular rise and fall of his breathing on the other side. For a second Donna relives in her mind the rush of power that comes with the restarting of a second heart. She almost envies the Doctor the chance to experience it himself.
“Donna?” John’s voice is full of tender concern and she looks up to see the sudden flare of anxiety in his blue eyes. “What is it?”
For a moment Donna stares at him, her eyes studying his face, knowing that it will be the last time he will look at her like this. The last time he will love her. From now on, he will only hate her for what she is about to make him do, and the very thought breaks her heart. Still, she does what she must and swallows the emotion that threatens to bring her to tears.
“Come with me,” she orders gently.
The door of the TARDIS creaks open under her hand and she leads him inside, unable to enjoy the moment in which, as she and all of his other companions have done before, he takes in the impossibility of the ship’s interior. She is too afraid of the moment when she will have to face his anger and fear.
“What is this place?” he demands at last.
“It belongs to the Doctor.” She eyes him as she makes this pronouncement, but it prompts no reaction from John.
“Who?” he asks, his eyes still travelling around the coral-themed interior.
She stifles a sigh. “The man in your nightmares,” she replies, and at once she has his full attention.
"What do you mean?" he demands suspiciously.
Donna reluctantly releases her hold on his hand and presses a button on the TARDIS console. A blue light flickers on the far side of the space and a chorus of voices make an announcement in unison: "Prepare to create emergency program one. Select current appearance."
The form of the hologram flickers, and Donna can recognise features from the first ten incarnations of the Doctor's body, including, rather to her surprise, the Warrior. She lets the system move on to the next body and then calls "Stop!"
"Who's that?" John demands sharply, his eyes fixed on the blue figure in the leather jacket, but when she looks in his direction, she can see that he already knows the answer. He is just fighting that knowledge.
It breaks her heart that she has to force such an unpalatable truth on him.
"It's the Doctor," she says at last. There is an agonishing pause. "It's you."
"No," he barks at once. "No, it's not."
Ready to record emergency program one announces the hologram, its voice identical to the one that has just spoken. Donna depresses the button and the hologram fades. John stares at the space where his doppelganger stood for a moment before turning to Donna, a sneer on his face.
“You seem to know so much,” he snaps, “I can’t help thinking that this - Doctor - is you!”
Donna smiles bitterly. “I was once,” she replies. “He made me that.”
“He turned you into a monster!” comes the low growl in response, and she knows from the expression in his eyes that he is reliving the worst moments from the nightmares that showed him the Doctor’s life.
“No.” Donna closes the small gap between them, watching John’s chin lift as if trying to find a way to escape her. Something inside her dies a little at this clear sign of how any feelings he had for her have been swamped by his terror, but she forces herself to go on. “Not a monster. Nothing evil. No, he turned me into the only person who could save him and save the whole universe.”
John is silent, tense and so full of anger and fear that Donna can feel her heart breaking. For him and for herself.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” she promises, her voice full of passion and promise. “Not of him. Not of the Doctor.”
“Are you afraid of the Doctor?”
“No.” Donna shakes her head, smiling a little. She closes the gap between them, smoothing her hands down the leather lapels of his jacket, before looking up into his face. John’s face. A face she can so easily remember belonging to the Doctor she never met. “No,” she repeats, “I’m afraid for him.”
“And why?” he demands almost resentfully, bitter at her emotions for this other man, this stranger she so clearly wants him to become.
“Because he tries so hard to protect people,” she says, trying to utter words that she hopes will pierce the fog that will descend on this time and somehow carry through to the Doctor in his future, “and sometimes, because he mistakenly thinks that’s for the best, he does it by being alone - and that is something he should never, ever be.”
John takes a step back so that her hands fall away from him, and she can see the bitterness in his eyes, the resentment at what she so obviously wants him to do and to be.
“You said you ‘were’ the Doctor,” he says, and it is clear that he is trying to change the subject, to bring the subject back from him to her, to get away from his own fears. “What happened?”
His pain is so palpable that Donna’s heart bleeds and she allows him this moment of respite, however brief. Instead she reaches into her pocket and draws out the fobwatch. It is warm, both from her bodyheat and because of the once-dormant Time Lord consciousness that is slowly waking up instead it. She holds out her hand, her palm flat and facing up, the watch lying on it.
“It’s in here,” she tells him, and see him take another step away, both from her and from it. “The parts of me that were the Doctor,” she goes on. “The parts that had been suppressed and I had been forced to forget, until today. Then,” she hurriedly swallows a lump in her throat, “when it was needed, it came back. Out of me and into this,” she adds, gesturing at him with the watch that John Smith always claimed was a family heirloom. “Saving my life.”
"It's just a watch," protests John feebly.
"No." Donna shakes her head. "No, it's not." A whisper assails her ears and she listens to it before continuing, "The Doctor - his mind - is in here. And he's talking to you."
Hold me.
The sharp whisper echoes through the TARDIS. A trace of glistening gold seeps out of the silver case, flickering around Donna for an instance before wafting in John's direction. He flinches, another step moving him back until he bumps into one of the newly-formed coral struts. He ducks away from the solid structure, staring around himself in a hunted manner, and when he cannot find an escape, like a trapped animal, visible anger flares up inside of him instead.
“I - I don’t understand.” Heat and venom are all too audible in his voice. “That thing - it's just a watch! For telling time! That's all! Just time!"
"Exactly." Donna nods. "Time. Time Lord. The perfect hiding place."
He looks as if he would like to swipe the watch out of her hand and smash it on the floor. Then a light suddenly fills his face as an idea clearly strikes him.
"You!" Finally he takes a step towards her instead of away, his index finger stabbing at her in the air. "You could do it! You could become the Doctor again! You could open that watch, absorb that consciousness, and take that on again."
"And yet you know what has to happen," she reminds him, knowing that the essence of the Time Lord is being absorbed into him."How it happens. So," she sighs, "you know why. Why it can't be me. Why it has to be you, Doctor."
He flinches, but does not verbally protest, which Donna takes as a positive sign.
"Why?" he asks in a pain-filled whisper. "Why are you doing this to me, Donna? Don't," he flinches, "don't you love me?"
She finally moves, walking towards his, closing the distance between them. "I have to," she says at last, offering the hand on which the watch is lying.
Hold me.
His hand covers hers, his fingers embracing not just the watch but her hand, too. His grip is so tight that she could not escape if she wanted to. His eyes bore into hers and her mind whirls as she wonders what he is thinking. He leaves her in no doubt.
"At least," he says passionately, "I won't have to be alone this time."
The lump that has been building in her throat dissolves and tears fill her eyes. "Doctor," she replies, and while her memory is full of the the other times she has used that name, she wonders if this will be the last, "I'm sorry."
"Why?" he demands angrily, impatiently, and his grip on her hand means the edge of the watch digs into her palm.
"You'll forget me," she confesses as the first tear slips down her face, "like I forgot you."
"Why?" he growls again, and in that moment, with fear quivering in her stomach, she has a sudden sympathy for all of those who will come up against this version of the Doctor.
She lifts their joined hands so he can see the glowing gold cloud around his fingers. "One Time Lord consciousness," she explains, feeling time slip away, "and you go back to being you, back to being the Doctor. All you lose is your human emotions. But two," with her free hand she taps her own temple, "and you’ll forget everything since you began the process of turning yourself into a human. Me." Tears course down her cheeks as she stares into his eyes. "Us. Everything."
The shock of this causes his hand to fall away from hers, and as she relaxes her fingers, the watch springs open. The gold stream rushes out, wrapping itself around him, and Donna stumbles away to safety, finding herself near the ship's exit. She can no longer bear to look and turns away to see her own shadow, thrown sharply by the light of the process happening behind her, stretching out over the white doors.
"Donna." His voice is faint, the human emotions she has fallen in love with fading, but he forces out the words, "Am I going to see you again?"
She smiles bitterly, hating how much of her best moments come from his forgotten memories of her. "If I'm lucky," she tells him, and then she wrenches open the door and all but hurls herself out onto the street, away from him and his future without her.
As soon as the door clicks shut behind her, she can hear the grind and whine of the dematerialisation sequence. By the time she turns around, sobbing so bitterly that her chest burns, the TARDIS is already fading away. She reaches out for it, but it is already gone.
It takes her a moment to registers the hands resting on her shoulders, the long fingers curled around her upper arms. She turns and he wraps his arms around her, murmuring her name as she buries her face in his chest. She looks up into the face of the Doctor with whom she first saw the wonders of the universe.
“He never remembered me.”
“And I never forgot you,” he promises, stroking her cheek with his thumb. “Never, ever.”
For a moment she studies his face, hunting for the trace of the man who was her lover in the man who was her best friend. The features are wrong, too fine, but she stops when she gets to his eyes.
Brown, yes, not blue, but the emotion, the shadows, the hint of danger, that's where she finds him. Her fingers curl around cotton, not leather, when she takes hold of the lapels on his jacket. And his lips are those she remembers from the Edison kitchen, not her bed.
But as he kisses her with as much passion as she is kissing him, she finally understands that John Smith is not lost to her forever.
And that is the moment when she realises that none of this should be happening and she breaks the kiss with almost shocking abruptness.
“But how do you remember?” she demands, prodding his chest with one finger. “I mean, this whole relationship with John wasn’t a fixed point in time, so you wouldn’t know you had to give me the lottery ticket at the wedding to make sure the marriage didn’t last so I would be at the pub celebrating my divorce on that night.” She stops short, realising that she may have said too much about his future, but he gives her a reassuring nod.
“Except now I know I have to,” he promises her as he covers her hand with his and gives her fingers a reassuring squeeze. “I will. And gladly so. Of course, you’ll have to stay hidden in the TARDIS. Can’t confuse things by you being there twice. Not to mention that your mother would never forgive me. And really,” he pulls a face, “if I could have one mother who didn’t want to slap me...”
Donna impatiently interrupts his babbling. “That still doesn’t explain how you remember!”
“I met someone,” he tells her. “Gangly bloke in a bowtie. I think that’s what he was wearing anyway. It was a bit dark in the alley, so I can’t be certain. We - butted heads a little, but he showed me what I needed to see.”
“Which explains the bruise.” And Donna smiles as the Doctor attempts the impossible task of trying to look at his own forehead.
“I was hoping it had faded,” he grumbles, brushing his fingers over the yellowed skin. “Still,” he goes on briskly, “once he finally remembered, he knew he had to make sure I was in the right place at the right time. This place. This time.”
“So what’s happened to him?” Donna asks anxiously. “The future you. If he forgot this, and you forgot this, what made him remember? Is he in danger because of this? Can he even exist in the same way if I’m with you when I wasn’t before? What’s happened to him now you both remember it?”
“I don’t know.” The Doctor takes her hand, nodding at his TARDIS, which is parked nearby. “Let’s go and find out.” Then he grins at her, his wildest, most John-like expression. “Right after we buy you that packet of chocolate and orange Hob Nobs anyway.”
Author: katherine_b
Rating: PG
Summary: Donna Noble meets a man who calls himself John Smith.
Characters: The Doctor, Donna Noble
Part VI
"What did you want again?" asks John as he pulls on his coat.
"Hob nobs," Donna reminds him. "Chocolate and orange ones."
"Fanastic!" John grins, and Donna arches an eyebrow at him.
"You reckon you're getting one?" she demands. "Dream on, chum!"
"Finder's fee." He smirks and is gone before she can reply.
She chuckles and turns back to dusting, slowing working her way around the room - and coming to a stop in front of the table near the door where she and John usually leave their keys and odds and ends from their pockets.
Something round and silver gleams in the bottom of the bowl.
For a moment Donna stares blankly at the object before reaching out and wrapping her fingers around it. The fob-watch settles into the palm of her hand, and Donna backs up against the solid wooden door beside her.
I've never seen this before, is the one coherent thought she manages to frame.
Yes, you have.
The whisper in the back of her mind causes Donna to draw in such a sharp breath that it makes her dizzy. She breathes out more slowly, her fingers curling around the smooth, cool object in her hand.
Air whispers from between her lips, almost as if it wants to take every last bit of her energy with it, and her eyes are fixed on the watch, which glows gold under her touch.
The edges of the world begin to flicker and darken, and it is only as Donna is about to pass out that she realises it is not the watch that is glowing gold.
It's her.
* * *
Donna Noble, the most important woman in the universe, lies face-down on the floor and giggles.
It’s shock, she tells herself firmly, even as tears form in her eyes. No surprise there, not least because she’s just had Time Lord energy yanked violently out of her head and into the watch that is now clutched, silent and dormant and silver, in her hand. And also because she could either laugh or cry, and she doesn’t want to do the latter. Not yet anyway. She can’t shake the conviction that there will be more than enough tears in her future.
She pulls herself into a sitting position and stares down at the fob-watch with its dormant Time Lord consciousness nestled quietly inside, thinking back over her relationship with this incarnation of the Doctor. All those jokes about time travel and spacemen and ships: her Time Lord subconscious bleeding through, or his? She will never know.
After a moment, when the feeling of nausea has completely subsided, she slides the watch into her pocket and gets to her feet. As she straightens up, she finds herself face-to-face with a picture of herself and the man she has called her boyfriend for the past five months.
“John Smith,” she murmurs to herself, stroking her finger down his image, her mind full of the memories of his future. Then she musters a wry, bitter smile. “Didn’t I say that was a rubbish name?"
She picks up his thin leather wallet, which is lying on the table. As she prepares to open the familiar object, her mind flashes back to her memory of the directive she saw written there, the words that kept her from calling in anyone to help him. Now she understands why her first instinct had been that the writing was feminine, not that of a man.
All right, old girl, she thinks, her fingers curling around the leather, tell me where you are.
Opening the wallet, a half-smile appears on her face at the words she finds written on the psychic paper in the same script she saw on that day: Downstairs in the alley.
“I’m coming,” she says aloud, but her steps are heavy as she grabs her keys and heads out of the flat.
The door to the TARDIS is standing open when she enters the shadowy alleyway. She enters the massive space and gazes thoughtfully around at the interior. It’s all so different from when she was last here, filled with geometric circles rather than organic coral arms.
For a moment she flips through her store of the Doctor’s memories, and only now does she realise that he has no recollection of his ship changing from that used by his previous incarnation to the design it has now. He has played no role in, so perhaps it is her task instead.
The remnants of the DoctorDonna lingering in her mind allow her to find the setting that adjusts the ship’s appearance and she flicks through a variety of desktop themes until she finds the only one she knows intimately from her own experience. The TARDIS gives a happy-sounding trill as the space around her clicks into the familiar design.
Donna steps back from the console and looks down as her foot touches something soft. She find herself standing on a puddle of clothing that she recognises, at least in part, from the Doctor’s memories.
Reaching over, she picks them up, holding them to the light so that she can see the damage that the regeneration caused to the now-ragged vest that the Doctor in his eighth body had worn so grandly. Here too are the shirt, its collars and cuffs worn almost beyond recognition, ragged pants, and lastly the belt that the unnamed non-Doctor had worn across his chest like a perverted medal of honour. The only man who ever possessed the Doctor’s body that seemed willing to carry ammunition.
With a shudder, she drops the objects down a convenient hole that the TARDIS has opened in the floor, but as she does so, she realises that two objects from the Warrior’s wardrobe are not here in the TARDIS.
Those boots. That jacket.
Now Donna understands why John seemed so strangely desperate to have them repaired, to wipe away the traces of the man he had been for so many millennia on Gallifrey. The Chameleon Arch that Donna can see hanging up near the ceiling may have made the man forget the reason for his feelings, but it could not erase them altogether.
Donna knows that the hard step, that of bringing all that pain and fear back to the Doctor, to make him adopt that mantle once more, is her responsibility.
For a moment she wonders if she is up to it, but then she shakes her head and allows herself a small laugh. Her very existence in this time and place tells her she must have succeeded. The only question is exactly how she has - or rather, will - achieve it.
Her confidence boosted by this timely and necessary realisation, she heads out of the TARDIS and back onto the street.
She meets John - she can’t think of him as the Doctor, not yet - at the corner, and while he grins with obvious delight at the sight of her, he also looks slightly sheepish.
“They didn’t have any Hob Nobs,” he admits. “I wasn’t sure what else to get you. We can go back though!”
“No.” Donna grabs his hand, turns him to face her, and gently places both hands on his chest. Under her right hand his heart beats steadily, but there is only the regular rise and fall of his breathing on the other side. For a second Donna relives in her mind the rush of power that comes with the restarting of a second heart. She almost envies the Doctor the chance to experience it himself.
“Donna?” John’s voice is full of tender concern and she looks up to see the sudden flare of anxiety in his blue eyes. “What is it?”
For a moment Donna stares at him, her eyes studying his face, knowing that it will be the last time he will look at her like this. The last time he will love her. From now on, he will only hate her for what she is about to make him do, and the very thought breaks her heart. Still, she does what she must and swallows the emotion that threatens to bring her to tears.
“Come with me,” she orders gently.
The door of the TARDIS creaks open under her hand and she leads him inside, unable to enjoy the moment in which, as she and all of his other companions have done before, he takes in the impossibility of the ship’s interior. She is too afraid of the moment when she will have to face his anger and fear.
“What is this place?” he demands at last.
“It belongs to the Doctor.” She eyes him as she makes this pronouncement, but it prompts no reaction from John.
“Who?” he asks, his eyes still travelling around the coral-themed interior.
She stifles a sigh. “The man in your nightmares,” she replies, and at once she has his full attention.
"What do you mean?" he demands suspiciously.
Donna reluctantly releases her hold on his hand and presses a button on the TARDIS console. A blue light flickers on the far side of the space and a chorus of voices make an announcement in unison: "Prepare to create emergency program one. Select current appearance."
The form of the hologram flickers, and Donna can recognise features from the first ten incarnations of the Doctor's body, including, rather to her surprise, the Warrior. She lets the system move on to the next body and then calls "Stop!"
"Who's that?" John demands sharply, his eyes fixed on the blue figure in the leather jacket, but when she looks in his direction, she can see that he already knows the answer. He is just fighting that knowledge.
It breaks her heart that she has to force such an unpalatable truth on him.
"It's the Doctor," she says at last. There is an agonishing pause. "It's you."
"No," he barks at once. "No, it's not."
Ready to record emergency program one announces the hologram, its voice identical to the one that has just spoken. Donna depresses the button and the hologram fades. John stares at the space where his doppelganger stood for a moment before turning to Donna, a sneer on his face.
“You seem to know so much,” he snaps, “I can’t help thinking that this - Doctor - is you!”
Donna smiles bitterly. “I was once,” she replies. “He made me that.”
“He turned you into a monster!” comes the low growl in response, and she knows from the expression in his eyes that he is reliving the worst moments from the nightmares that showed him the Doctor’s life.
“No.” Donna closes the small gap between them, watching John’s chin lift as if trying to find a way to escape her. Something inside her dies a little at this clear sign of how any feelings he had for her have been swamped by his terror, but she forces herself to go on. “Not a monster. Nothing evil. No, he turned me into the only person who could save him and save the whole universe.”
John is silent, tense and so full of anger and fear that Donna can feel her heart breaking. For him and for herself.
“You don’t have to be afraid,” she promises, her voice full of passion and promise. “Not of him. Not of the Doctor.”
“Are you afraid of the Doctor?”
“No.” Donna shakes her head, smiling a little. She closes the gap between them, smoothing her hands down the leather lapels of his jacket, before looking up into his face. John’s face. A face she can so easily remember belonging to the Doctor she never met. “No,” she repeats, “I’m afraid for him.”
“And why?” he demands almost resentfully, bitter at her emotions for this other man, this stranger she so clearly wants him to become.
“Because he tries so hard to protect people,” she says, trying to utter words that she hopes will pierce the fog that will descend on this time and somehow carry through to the Doctor in his future, “and sometimes, because he mistakenly thinks that’s for the best, he does it by being alone - and that is something he should never, ever be.”
John takes a step back so that her hands fall away from him, and she can see the bitterness in his eyes, the resentment at what she so obviously wants him to do and to be.
“You said you ‘were’ the Doctor,” he says, and it is clear that he is trying to change the subject, to bring the subject back from him to her, to get away from his own fears. “What happened?”
His pain is so palpable that Donna’s heart bleeds and she allows him this moment of respite, however brief. Instead she reaches into her pocket and draws out the fobwatch. It is warm, both from her bodyheat and because of the once-dormant Time Lord consciousness that is slowly waking up instead it. She holds out her hand, her palm flat and facing up, the watch lying on it.
“It’s in here,” she tells him, and see him take another step away, both from her and from it. “The parts of me that were the Doctor,” she goes on. “The parts that had been suppressed and I had been forced to forget, until today. Then,” she hurriedly swallows a lump in her throat, “when it was needed, it came back. Out of me and into this,” she adds, gesturing at him with the watch that John Smith always claimed was a family heirloom. “Saving my life.”
"It's just a watch," protests John feebly.
"No." Donna shakes her head. "No, it's not." A whisper assails her ears and she listens to it before continuing, "The Doctor - his mind - is in here. And he's talking to you."
Hold me.
The sharp whisper echoes through the TARDIS. A trace of glistening gold seeps out of the silver case, flickering around Donna for an instance before wafting in John's direction. He flinches, another step moving him back until he bumps into one of the newly-formed coral struts. He ducks away from the solid structure, staring around himself in a hunted manner, and when he cannot find an escape, like a trapped animal, visible anger flares up inside of him instead.
“I - I don’t understand.” Heat and venom are all too audible in his voice. “That thing - it's just a watch! For telling time! That's all! Just time!"
"Exactly." Donna nods. "Time. Time Lord. The perfect hiding place."
He looks as if he would like to swipe the watch out of her hand and smash it on the floor. Then a light suddenly fills his face as an idea clearly strikes him.
"You!" Finally he takes a step towards her instead of away, his index finger stabbing at her in the air. "You could do it! You could become the Doctor again! You could open that watch, absorb that consciousness, and take that on again."
"And yet you know what has to happen," she reminds him, knowing that the essence of the Time Lord is being absorbed into him."How it happens. So," she sighs, "you know why. Why it can't be me. Why it has to be you, Doctor."
He flinches, but does not verbally protest, which Donna takes as a positive sign.
"Why?" he asks in a pain-filled whisper. "Why are you doing this to me, Donna? Don't," he flinches, "don't you love me?"
She finally moves, walking towards his, closing the distance between them. "I have to," she says at last, offering the hand on which the watch is lying.
Hold me.
His hand covers hers, his fingers embracing not just the watch but her hand, too. His grip is so tight that she could not escape if she wanted to. His eyes bore into hers and her mind whirls as she wonders what he is thinking. He leaves her in no doubt.
"At least," he says passionately, "I won't have to be alone this time."
The lump that has been building in her throat dissolves and tears fill her eyes. "Doctor," she replies, and while her memory is full of the the other times she has used that name, she wonders if this will be the last, "I'm sorry."
"Why?" he demands angrily, impatiently, and his grip on her hand means the edge of the watch digs into her palm.
"You'll forget me," she confesses as the first tear slips down her face, "like I forgot you."
"Why?" he growls again, and in that moment, with fear quivering in her stomach, she has a sudden sympathy for all of those who will come up against this version of the Doctor.
She lifts their joined hands so he can see the glowing gold cloud around his fingers. "One Time Lord consciousness," she explains, feeling time slip away, "and you go back to being you, back to being the Doctor. All you lose is your human emotions. But two," with her free hand she taps her own temple, "and you’ll forget everything since you began the process of turning yourself into a human. Me." Tears course down her cheeks as she stares into his eyes. "Us. Everything."
The shock of this causes his hand to fall away from hers, and as she relaxes her fingers, the watch springs open. The gold stream rushes out, wrapping itself around him, and Donna stumbles away to safety, finding herself near the ship's exit. She can no longer bear to look and turns away to see her own shadow, thrown sharply by the light of the process happening behind her, stretching out over the white doors.
"Donna." His voice is faint, the human emotions she has fallen in love with fading, but he forces out the words, "Am I going to see you again?"
She smiles bitterly, hating how much of her best moments come from his forgotten memories of her. "If I'm lucky," she tells him, and then she wrenches open the door and all but hurls herself out onto the street, away from him and his future without her.
As soon as the door clicks shut behind her, she can hear the grind and whine of the dematerialisation sequence. By the time she turns around, sobbing so bitterly that her chest burns, the TARDIS is already fading away. She reaches out for it, but it is already gone.
It takes her a moment to registers the hands resting on her shoulders, the long fingers curled around her upper arms. She turns and he wraps his arms around her, murmuring her name as she buries her face in his chest. She looks up into the face of the Doctor with whom she first saw the wonders of the universe.
“He never remembered me.”
“And I never forgot you,” he promises, stroking her cheek with his thumb. “Never, ever.”
For a moment she studies his face, hunting for the trace of the man who was her lover in the man who was her best friend. The features are wrong, too fine, but she stops when she gets to his eyes.
Brown, yes, not blue, but the emotion, the shadows, the hint of danger, that's where she finds him. Her fingers curl around cotton, not leather, when she takes hold of the lapels on his jacket. And his lips are those she remembers from the Edison kitchen, not her bed.
But as he kisses her with as much passion as she is kissing him, she finally understands that John Smith is not lost to her forever.
And that is the moment when she realises that none of this should be happening and she breaks the kiss with almost shocking abruptness.
“But how do you remember?” she demands, prodding his chest with one finger. “I mean, this whole relationship with John wasn’t a fixed point in time, so you wouldn’t know you had to give me the lottery ticket at the wedding to make sure the marriage didn’t last so I would be at the pub celebrating my divorce on that night.” She stops short, realising that she may have said too much about his future, but he gives her a reassuring nod.
“Except now I know I have to,” he promises her as he covers her hand with his and gives her fingers a reassuring squeeze. “I will. And gladly so. Of course, you’ll have to stay hidden in the TARDIS. Can’t confuse things by you being there twice. Not to mention that your mother would never forgive me. And really,” he pulls a face, “if I could have one mother who didn’t want to slap me...”
Donna impatiently interrupts his babbling. “That still doesn’t explain how you remember!”
“I met someone,” he tells her. “Gangly bloke in a bowtie. I think that’s what he was wearing anyway. It was a bit dark in the alley, so I can’t be certain. We - butted heads a little, but he showed me what I needed to see.”
“Which explains the bruise.” And Donna smiles as the Doctor attempts the impossible task of trying to look at his own forehead.
“I was hoping it had faded,” he grumbles, brushing his fingers over the yellowed skin. “Still,” he goes on briskly, “once he finally remembered, he knew he had to make sure I was in the right place at the right time. This place. This time.”
“So what’s happened to him?” Donna asks anxiously. “The future you. If he forgot this, and you forgot this, what made him remember? Is he in danger because of this? Can he even exist in the same way if I’m with you when I wasn’t before? What’s happened to him now you both remember it?”
“I don’t know.” The Doctor takes her hand, nodding at his TARDIS, which is parked nearby. “Let’s go and find out.” Then he grins at her, his wildest, most John-like expression. “Right after we buy you that packet of chocolate and orange Hob Nobs anyway.”