Fic: Operation Awesome 6/6
TITLE: Operation Awesome, 6/6
Rating: PG
Main characters: entire casts of SJA & Torchwood, the Doctor, Martha, Donna; cameos by other new and old school characters
Spoilers: SJA-S1; TW-S2; DW-S3, Journey's End
All characters licensed by the BBC. This is not an authorized tie-in.
Who_Daily; T3; Sonic: a href="http://neadods.livejournal.com/727822.html#cutid1">Operation Awesome 6/6 by lj user="neadods"> (casts of all shows | PG | Spoilers: SJA-S1; TW-S2; DW-S3 through Journey's End)
Chapter 1: The Gathering
Chapter 2: The Operation Begins
Chapter 3: First Steps
Chapter 4: The Fateful Fete
Chapter 5: Scenes From a Salvation
Chapter 6: All Things End
If he made any more loops back on this timeline, the Doctor was going to have to start writing himself notes just to remember when he'd been. His ears were still smarting from the simultaneous dressings-down Sarah Jane and the Brigadier had given him - her for betraying to the Brig that she knew he'd helped her career; him for considering a phone call or two "rescuing" anything. "It's what friends do for each other," Lethbridge-Stewart had pointed out to him. "You're not so alien that you don't understand that."
It turned out that Sarah Jane's extended, unexplained absence had given her the same reputation as Donna for unreliability, a reputation the Brigadier cleared up by dropping a few words in a few influential ears about her being sidetracked on hush-hush jobs for UNIT - which was, as the Brigadier pointed out, mostly the truth anyway. One of those friends had given Sarah Jane a second chance, and that was all she had needed.
It was all Donna had needed too. Oh, there had been an alternate timeline, one in which her explosion at that first fundraiser had blown up only in her face. Donna hadn't done well after that, not well at all, despite the help from the rest of his companions. But who better than a Time Lord to know how to tweak a timeline? Humans were a bit sheeplike, it had to be admitted even by their biggest admirers, and it had taken only one person standing up for her to shift not just the mood of the room, but Donna's entire fate.
Too impatient to wait for time to unfold, he'd been making little hops into the future to see how things were going. Right now, he was lounging on the jumpseat, feet up on the silent TARDIS console as it refueled at the CARDIFF rift, reading a newspaper from five months in the future of when he was now. Donna was going to be so irresistibly… Donna. When the anti-modified-food group would challenge the Centre again, she would invite their leader to have his choice of meals in front of the television cameras: either a plate of Professor Jones' marvelous mushrooms, drought-resistant rice, and blight-resistant tomatoes, or an traditional meal of unadulterated food -- roasted insects washed down with cow's blood and milk.
And she would keep him - a stolid, well-fed, middle-class man from Surrey who probably thought chicken vindaloo was exotic - in front of the cameras for hours, haranguing him about how safe their food was and how many people it could feed, until he would get so hungry that he had to choose something. Sarah Jane was going to write a particularly scathing article about how he was making yummy noises while he wolfed down the very things that he was trying to prevent anyone else from eating.
Without even a warning knock, the TARDIS door swung open and Jack ushered Gwen, Ianto, and Mickey inside. "Oi!" the Doctor shouted in protest, balling up the newspaper and tossing it away before any of them could see the anachronistic headlines. He'd been planning on being social after he'd caught up on his reading. Now he was planning on taking Jack's key away.
"It's raining," Jack said grimly.
"And rain in Britain is so unusual that it's worth breaking into my TARDIS?" the Doctor snapped back.
"It is when it's only falling on your ship. Except it's not falling, it's rising upwards," Ianto told him.
"The Judoon!" The Doctor pounced on the controls, trying to get the TARDIS into flight, but he was too late. There was a huge jolt that had everyone hanging onto the nearest thing for dear life, and the Doctor could feel the TARDIS shifting as it was moved. "Why are you here?" he shouted at Jack. "Why did you bring them into danger?"
Jack and Mickey were battling their way across the shuddering deck to the console, taking up the positions they had before, when they flew the Earth back home. "Martha told me about what happened at the hospital," Jack explained. "Donna told me about the Shadow Proclamation and how you ran off. When we saw the rain, we figured you were going to be called on the carpet."
"I can handle it," the Doctor said angrily. "After 900 years, I don't need your help."
"As I understand it," Ianto calmly replied, only his white knuckles showing how tightly he was clinging to the support strut, "your main experience with law enforcement is jailbreaking on a million planets."
"More than tha - I repeat, I don't need you. None of you should be with me."
"Still traveling alone and feeling sorry for yourself?" Jack was looking at the monitors. The Doctor knew he couldn't read Gallifreyan, but he would recognize galactic coordinates. "I'm probably pushing 900 myself by now, and I know all about the Shadow Proclamation. Plus, I know what they do when they catch someone who's run away from them."
"From experience, no doubt. How many warrants do they have out on you?"
"None in this time period," Jack replied cheerfully. "But my experience and her linguistic abilities" - he pointed at Gwen - "should sort everything out."
"What, you speak Judoon?"
"Nope." Gwen sounded pretty cheerful for someone with a death grip on the railing. "I speak copper."
***
If Donna hadn't met Gwen, the Doctor reflected later, she needed to.
Gwen hadn't even waited for the pleasantries, not that anything was going to be pleasant with an armed guard at the door to his ship and more guns pointing at them all the way to the leader's office despite his protests. The moment they'd walked through the door, Gwen had taken the offensive. Without so much as a greeting, she'd demanded to see the other woman's authorization, accused her of violating a dozen Earth laws (the Doctor was pretty sure she'd made some up on the spot), laid down a formal protest against "the conscription of our ally against his conscience and the unlawful attempt to seize his proprietary tools, i.e., one TARDIS," questioned the Proclamation's jurisdiction over the citizens of Earth (the Doctor was a bit horrified to realize that he was being included in that), and, as the leader of the Proclamation started spluttering objections, smoothly shifted gears into mentioning that he had accomplished the Proclamation's goal of solving the case of the missing planets, returned them all to their proper locations (including the ones the Proclamation was no longer searching for), and had punished the planetnappers - without endangering a single Proclamation officer. Which was, Gwen pointed out, actually stabbing her finger into the leader's chest, better than the Judoon had done when they broke the alien embargoes surrounding Earth and endangered many human lives in their search for the haemovore… another case the Doctor had successfully solved on behalf of the Proclamation.
Still not letting the leader get in a complete word edgewise, Gwen summed up by demanding that the Shadow Proclamation drop all warrants on the Doctor or claims to his TARDIS, obey restrictions on sending Judoon to Earth "until such time as my planet is accustomed to and has in place regulations for regular interstellar traffic," and - the Doctor thought this was a particularly nice touch - "supply copies of all paperwork to that effect to be filed with the proper Earth authorities for alien intervention, defined as Torchwood and UNIT."
"Are all human females this… forceful?" the leader of the Proclamation asked him, looking as if she'd bitten something sour. "Or do you simply enjoy loud companions?"
"I am not his companion, I'm the Torchwood law enforcement liaison," Gwen snapped. "If you do not recognize my authority, Torchwood is prepared to do whatever is necessary to protect its homeworld and its allies."
The Shadow Proclamation proved itself unfamiliar with Torchwood when nobody burst out into hysterical laughter. Still, there was only one thing a group as honor- and rule-bound as the Proclamation could do… make them sign piles of paperwork and, with gritted teeth, clear the Doctor's record.
"That wasn't so bad, was it?" Mickey asked cheerfully as they staggered back to the TARDIS, each one carrying an armload of copies.
"It was easier to just run," the Doctor grumbled.
"But this way, we aren't collateral damage," Jack pointed out. Noticing the Doctor's expression, he added, "Now don't get all emo on us again!"
"Emo! I am never-"
"Yes you are," Mickey said. "All the time. And now you're worse with this whole 'I ruin people's lives' thing you've got going."
The guard was gone, but the Doctor's arms were too full to reach for the key. Eyeing the door speculatively, he tried snapping his fingers.
Half the double doors creaked open a crack. Not a big welcome, but one that was good enough for him to shoulder inside and drop his papers on the jumpseat. When Mickey dropped off his load, the Doctor whispered in his ear, "Mickey, would you really say that Rose was better off having known me? With everything that happened? What she felt, was that love or obsession?"
Mickey stared back into his eyes, not angry, not sad, just calm and a little bit resigned. "Doctor, did she ever tell you about Jimmy?"
"Who?"
"Jimmy. The boy she left school for. Because with Rose... she thinks love means always being with someone. Forever, no matter what. Her mum always went on about her dad, and it, like, gave Rose this complex. The way you show someone you love them is to give up everything to be with them and never leave unless you're dead. Obsession? Think about Jackie leaving her little baby to go after Rose across the dimensions. That's what she taught Rose love is." Mickey glanced away, but not before the Doctor caught the flash of pain. "I thought... I thought if I showed that kind of devotion, Rose'd eventually pick me." When he looked back again, there was no emotion at all, just a simple statement of fact. "If it wasn't you, it would have been someone else. It wasn't ever gonna be me. And she wasn't ever gonna leave whoever she chose. That's just the way she is."
Jack had been arranging Gwen and Ianto around the console, explaining how to operate their section. Before Mickey took his place, he added, "You of all people ought to know nothing lasts forever. So enjoy what you've got when you've got it."
The Doctor looked at them, eagerly waiting for him to start the TARDIS - so human, so eager, so limited.
So embarrassingly right about things sometimes.
It had gone better with Gwen to deal with the Shadow Proclamation. It was nice to have the console room full of people. Maybe that's what he needed to do - have a group here again, instead of just one companion. For a moment he toyed with accidentally-on-purpose not going straight back to Cardiff, but kidnapping was wrong.
Tempting. But wrong.
Time to enjoy their company in the timeless here and now. And when they were gone, as they inevitably would be, he could go back to working on ways to fix Donna. Their determination was infectious. There was a way, there had to be one!
***
Donna was having the time of her life. As a Board member, she was finally one of the ones who got to do the exotic travel, checking in with Centre branches and related groups around the world. The science gave her a headache, but the food! The sights! The shops! It was a bit mean, but she liked to remind Mum what she'd said about what a waste her silly job at the hippie centre was just before she gave her a silk kimono, or handpainted ceramics, or a cashmere scarf. (She'd never admit it to anyone, but she'd actually asked to go on that fact-finding trip to Germany just so she could get Gramps a top-of-the-range telescope.)
But the oddest souvenir she ever brought back was from that three-month trip to the American midwest.
***
The welcome-home party was stuffed so full of friends and business acquaintances that it took her almost an hour just to properly greet everyone. She was just coming up on the last group of people and realized as she got closer that it was her friend Ianto, and her (ex but he didn't know it yet) lover Jack, and Tish's sister whatsherface, and that journo who liked to cover her events, Sarah something. They were talking to a skinny boy in a suit, and for a moment something tickled in the back of her memory, something about a man in a suit and trainers, but it was gone the next minute. After the first few years, it had become impossible to keep track of anyone but her biggest donors and closest friends.
"…said she has a big surprise," Ianto was saying.
"Ours is bigger." Jack rubbed his hands together in anticipation.
"You're absolutely sure this is going to work this time?" Tish's sister asked nervously.
But the boy had seen her and turned to smile. Donna noted the fine lines at the corners of his eyes. Not so young, then. Just clinging onto his youth with those silly shoes, like men who wore ties with cartoon characters on them.
"Donna Noble!" he said happily. "I hear you're saving the world."
"I do my bit," she replied with satisfaction.
"Donna," Sarah started tentatively, "If there was something valuable you'd lost a long time ago and you got the chance to get it back, would you want to give up everything to have it?"
Donna snorted. "Is this one of those stupid interview questions, like 'what kind of tree do you want to be'?"
They all looked at each other unhappily, as if the silly question was somehow important, but before anyone could say anything else, eight-year-old Dakota squirmed through the crowd and came to stand before her. "Miss Donna, Miss Donna! Can I have a shandy? Uncle Peter says I have to ask you cos he doesn't know what it is."
"Yes, you may have a shandy as soon as you properly greet my friends," Donna told her in that parental tone that was coming all too easily.
Unabashed, Dakota turned and waved to the adults gawping at her. "Hi, everyone!"
Donna put her hand on the girl's head. It was the first time she was going to say it in public to people she knew, and it was scary and thrilling all at once to hear the words come out of her mouth. "Everyone, this is my daughter Dakota."
Surprise she expected, but why did they all look so horrified?
"Dakota's a pretty name," Sarah said, squatting down to the girl's eye level. "Is that where you were born?"
"Yup! But when mommy and daddy were in the car crash, I went to go live with Uncle Peter in Idaho."
"My mummy and daddy were in a car crash when I was about your age," Sarah mused. "I went to live with my Auntie."
"Does she like people? Because Uncle Peter always says he never knows how to deal with people. We didn't go see anyone or talk to anyone or nothing." Dakota twisted her fingers together, squirming a bit. "He just told me to go to school or run away and play while he was working on his potatoes."
Donna started stroking Dakota's hair. "Everywhere I went in America, they told me, 'You've got to talk to Doctor Grenhope. Grenhope knows exactly what you need.' But every time I called for an appointment, he put me off. They said he'd never talk to me. That he never came to any conferences and it was next to impossible to even talk to him on the phone." She smiled. "Well, you can imagine what I did."
"You marched right in and demanded that he talk to you face to face," the skinny man said, grinning at her with… was that pride? It looked like the expression on her own granddad when he'd heard the story.
She nodded. "I marched right in and demanded that he talk to me face to face. And instead of the terror of biologists everywhere, it turns out that he's a very lovely, very shy man who does just fine when he's not in a crowd. I went back every day after that, and we got to talking about all sorts of things. When I chased off a couple of geeks who'd been bothering him, he said what he needed was someone to handle all his public appearances, and I said why not me, and… well, we've seen a justice in America, but Mum wants a big church wedding and Peter said okay as long as he only had to say 'I do.' It's next month. I'm sending the invitations out tomorrow." She turned to Dakota. "You go tell Uncle Peter that I said it was okay to have a little shandy."
They all watched the little girl dodge through the crowd until she found a middle-aged man sitting in the corner, half hidden by Wilf. He looked over at Donna, who smiled and waved. When he smiled back, it transformed his face into something handsome and joyful.
"Gorgeous, adores you, and hardly ever speaks a word," the skinny guy mused. "The perfect man."
"Oi, watch it, sunshine!" Donna turned to Sarah, who was straightening back up. "To answer your silly question, Miss Smith, I have everything I ever wanted right here, right now, and I wouldn't give up a thing. Not for the crown jewels. You can print that."
They all watched as Wilf whispered something into Dakota's ear, jerking a thumb in their direction. The little girl's eyes went wide.
"What's he telling her?" Jack asked.
Donna snorted. "Some story. He likes to make up stories for her about aliens and other silly things. She says he made her promise not to tell me any of them." She took a drink. "It's good for her, actually, feeling she has a little secret all her own. Her life has been hard. She and Gramps adore each other."
"I can imagine Sylvia's face when she's called 'grandma!'" the skinny man laughed, and Donna had drunk just enough that she wouldn't wonder until later how he knew about her mother.
She saw him once more, just a flash of him, waving from across the floor at the wedding reception, but by the time she worked her way though the large crowd of well-wishers, he was gone.
She never saw him again. But that didn't matter, because he wasn't important enough to remember anyway.
EPILOG 1: 35 Years Later
Humans can live happily, but they can't live ever after.
Donna leaned against the window of the bus, looking not out at the scenery, but back on endings. Gramps had gone long ago. One of the last things he'd told her was that his greatest joy was seeing her so happy. Donna and Peter had funded an entire astronomy station in his name.
Mum had gone her own glum way too, eventually. Donna always wondered if it was wrong that she missed her grandfather more than her own mother. Sylvia had always been more of a horrible warning than a shining example.
Donna had tried to heed that warning, and had been as loving and supportive to Dakota as she could be. Little Dakota, long since grown up and moved away and working on her own family. Gramps had lived just long enough to see her pregnant for the first time, and he'd been fit to burst. "You tell that baby," he'd ordered cryptically. "You tell that baby all the stories I told you. Promise me!"
Dakota had laughed and promised. The first one was a girl, and they named her Donna. They hadn't named her after Dakota's real mother, but after her. Oh, it made her so proud! The next, a boy, always complained about being named Wilf instead of Peter, like his younger brother.
Peter… two years gone now, and she still missed him. For so long, when she was young, she had felt all alone, but until now she had never been alone.
A flash of light caught the corner of her eye. That lorry was going way too fast! It wasn't going to stop in ti-
People were screaming. People were moaning. She was lying on the ground, trying to figure out which one she was doing when two heads blotted out the sun. Jack? That couldn't be Jack, no, not her beautiful Jack, impossible, she hadn't seen him in years and he didn't look a day older. And some skinny boy in a suit, holding a hypodermic.
"…sure this is going to work?" couldn't-be-Jack asked.
"Regenerations are triggered by the lindos hormone," the boy was babbling. "The metacrisis may have given her the rest of what she needs to regenerate if we can get enough lindos into her system. If we're wrong, it won't make a difference anyway." For a moment he looked into her eyes, and he looked so sorrowful that Donna would have raised a hand to him, but her arms weren't moving. "Your neck is broken," he said sadly. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. But this might help." Over Donna's incoherent noises, he pushed the old-fashioned needle in just at the base of her neck.
For a long moment they all just stared at each other. Jack was patting her hand and she could see it but not feel it and that terrified her.
Then electricity arced across that hand and Jack flinched away and the boy got up and backed away, and it hurt, it hurt worse than the accident, it seemed like current was crawling across her skin and she was on fire from the inside out and she could feel it now, she could feel every fingernail and toenail ignite, and, and…
In the very last moment, she remembered everything.
EPILOG 2: Cardiff , 3005
Inside the TARDIS, a ginger-haired man in a denim jacket watched a young woman lowering the Chameleon Arch carefully over her dark, elaborately styled hair.
"Donna, are you sure?"
"It's been fun, Doctor, it has. Being Doctor-Donna again, I can't tell you what that's meant to me. But in the end, I'm only human. I had a wonderful life as a human. I'm ready to go back now."
"You're sure this will work?"
"I programmed it myself, of course it will work! Think I trust your Time Lord butterfingers near my brain again? I'm going to remember everything - my first life, my life here, everything - but I’m going to be human again."
He made a scoffing noise.
"Oi! Don't knock my species or I'll knock you!"
"Donna, what will I do without you?"
"Go and find Jack for a pity shag and a trip 'round Neptune." At his bereft expression, she softened. "Find someone new. You need that, Doctor. Not just a companion, but a new companion. Fresh point of view. Keeps you from going stagnant in here." She winked. "Besides, I'm about to go find Jack and keep him very busy."
"But so far in your future?"
"He's immortal. He'll be there. Left a message for him, didn't we?" Again, she became soothing at the look on his face. "I don't want to be too close to my own time. I died there. I don't want the temptation to find old friends, go to all the old familiar places. Jack 'n' me, we'll be fine. Keeping your knowledge, aren't I? We'll be fantastic."
She threw the switch.
***
Dawn Evans was ushering the children to the park for their weekly storytime when she saw a stranger on her hands and knees by the rock Linda liked to sit on.
"Can I help you?"
The woman jumped up, dusting off her trousers. "No, that's okay. I sma- I dropped something and was just picking up the pieces."
"It's storytime," Linda announced with all the gravitas of a six-year-old. "Would you like to hear a story?"
"That's all right, I'm waiting for someone. Really, I don't want to interrupt."
"Is this yours?" Paul asked, holding up something tiny. "It looks like a hand to an old-fashioned watch."
"Yes it is, very good," the woman said uncomfortably.
"Did you break a watch?" Little Meg had to pull her thumb out of her mouth to ask the question, followed by the inevitable, "Why?"
"Because sometimes, old times are over and shouldn't come back," the woman said, taking the thing from Peter and backing away. "Honestly, I don't want to be a bother. I'll go wait somewhere else."
"It's okay," Dawn said. "If you don't mind children's stories. Which one do you want to hear?" she asked the brood.
"Great-Great-Grandma! Great-Great-Grandma!"
"You tell stories about your own family?" the woman asked.
Dawn laughed. "This family does. My great grandda' passed this one down like it was some big secret that the family had to remember. He said he got it from his great-grandfather… who probably made it up to sound important. All we know for sure that's true is that the Daleks really did steal Earth at some point in the last millenia."
She had turned back to keep Linda from tugging on Meg's hair, and didn't see the woman freeze behind her. Hurrying to get them all involved before she had to break up another spat, Dawn started, "Your great-great-great-great grandmother was named Donna. And do you know what Donna did?"
Three voices chorused, "SHE SAVED THE WORLD!"
"That's right! Once upon a time, there were evil, evil monsters named Daleks..."
***
"Donna? I'm sorry I was late, there was a ... you're crying. If you changed your mind, I'll call the Doctor..."
"No. It's okay, Jack." A soggy giggle. "It's more okay than you know. C'mon. The Earth doesn't save itself, you know."
The End
As usual, please hit me with any concrit you feel this needs. It's going to be polished up and put on Teaspoon and linked on the Donna comms... at some point soonish.
Rating: PG
Main characters: entire casts of SJA & Torchwood, the Doctor, Martha, Donna; cameos by other new and old school characters
Spoilers: SJA-S1; TW-S2; DW-S3, Journey's End
All characters licensed by the BBC. This is not an authorized tie-in.
Who_Daily; T3; Sonic: a href="http://neadods.livejournal.com/727822.html#cutid1">Operation Awesome 6/6 by lj user="neadods"> (casts of all shows | PG | Spoilers: SJA-S1; TW-S2; DW-S3 through Journey's End)
Chapter 1: The Gathering
Chapter 2: The Operation Begins
Chapter 3: First Steps
Chapter 4: The Fateful Fete
Chapter 5: Scenes From a Salvation
Chapter 6: All Things End
If he made any more loops back on this timeline, the Doctor was going to have to start writing himself notes just to remember when he'd been. His ears were still smarting from the simultaneous dressings-down Sarah Jane and the Brigadier had given him - her for betraying to the Brig that she knew he'd helped her career; him for considering a phone call or two "rescuing" anything. "It's what friends do for each other," Lethbridge-Stewart had pointed out to him. "You're not so alien that you don't understand that."
It turned out that Sarah Jane's extended, unexplained absence had given her the same reputation as Donna for unreliability, a reputation the Brigadier cleared up by dropping a few words in a few influential ears about her being sidetracked on hush-hush jobs for UNIT - which was, as the Brigadier pointed out, mostly the truth anyway. One of those friends had given Sarah Jane a second chance, and that was all she had needed.
It was all Donna had needed too. Oh, there had been an alternate timeline, one in which her explosion at that first fundraiser had blown up only in her face. Donna hadn't done well after that, not well at all, despite the help from the rest of his companions. But who better than a Time Lord to know how to tweak a timeline? Humans were a bit sheeplike, it had to be admitted even by their biggest admirers, and it had taken only one person standing up for her to shift not just the mood of the room, but Donna's entire fate.
Too impatient to wait for time to unfold, he'd been making little hops into the future to see how things were going. Right now, he was lounging on the jumpseat, feet up on the silent TARDIS console as it refueled at the CARDIFF rift, reading a newspaper from five months in the future of when he was now. Donna was going to be so irresistibly… Donna. When the anti-modified-food group would challenge the Centre again, she would invite their leader to have his choice of meals in front of the television cameras: either a plate of Professor Jones' marvelous mushrooms, drought-resistant rice, and blight-resistant tomatoes, or an traditional meal of unadulterated food -- roasted insects washed down with cow's blood and milk.
And she would keep him - a stolid, well-fed, middle-class man from Surrey who probably thought chicken vindaloo was exotic - in front of the cameras for hours, haranguing him about how safe their food was and how many people it could feed, until he would get so hungry that he had to choose something. Sarah Jane was going to write a particularly scathing article about how he was making yummy noises while he wolfed down the very things that he was trying to prevent anyone else from eating.
Without even a warning knock, the TARDIS door swung open and Jack ushered Gwen, Ianto, and Mickey inside. "Oi!" the Doctor shouted in protest, balling up the newspaper and tossing it away before any of them could see the anachronistic headlines. He'd been planning on being social after he'd caught up on his reading. Now he was planning on taking Jack's key away.
"It's raining," Jack said grimly.
"And rain in Britain is so unusual that it's worth breaking into my TARDIS?" the Doctor snapped back.
"It is when it's only falling on your ship. Except it's not falling, it's rising upwards," Ianto told him.
"The Judoon!" The Doctor pounced on the controls, trying to get the TARDIS into flight, but he was too late. There was a huge jolt that had everyone hanging onto the nearest thing for dear life, and the Doctor could feel the TARDIS shifting as it was moved. "Why are you here?" he shouted at Jack. "Why did you bring them into danger?"
Jack and Mickey were battling their way across the shuddering deck to the console, taking up the positions they had before, when they flew the Earth back home. "Martha told me about what happened at the hospital," Jack explained. "Donna told me about the Shadow Proclamation and how you ran off. When we saw the rain, we figured you were going to be called on the carpet."
"I can handle it," the Doctor said angrily. "After 900 years, I don't need your help."
"As I understand it," Ianto calmly replied, only his white knuckles showing how tightly he was clinging to the support strut, "your main experience with law enforcement is jailbreaking on a million planets."
"More than tha - I repeat, I don't need you. None of you should be with me."
"Still traveling alone and feeling sorry for yourself?" Jack was looking at the monitors. The Doctor knew he couldn't read Gallifreyan, but he would recognize galactic coordinates. "I'm probably pushing 900 myself by now, and I know all about the Shadow Proclamation. Plus, I know what they do when they catch someone who's run away from them."
"From experience, no doubt. How many warrants do they have out on you?"
"None in this time period," Jack replied cheerfully. "But my experience and her linguistic abilities" - he pointed at Gwen - "should sort everything out."
"What, you speak Judoon?"
"Nope." Gwen sounded pretty cheerful for someone with a death grip on the railing. "I speak copper."
***
If Donna hadn't met Gwen, the Doctor reflected later, she needed to.
Gwen hadn't even waited for the pleasantries, not that anything was going to be pleasant with an armed guard at the door to his ship and more guns pointing at them all the way to the leader's office despite his protests. The moment they'd walked through the door, Gwen had taken the offensive. Without so much as a greeting, she'd demanded to see the other woman's authorization, accused her of violating a dozen Earth laws (the Doctor was pretty sure she'd made some up on the spot), laid down a formal protest against "the conscription of our ally against his conscience and the unlawful attempt to seize his proprietary tools, i.e., one TARDIS," questioned the Proclamation's jurisdiction over the citizens of Earth (the Doctor was a bit horrified to realize that he was being included in that), and, as the leader of the Proclamation started spluttering objections, smoothly shifted gears into mentioning that he had accomplished the Proclamation's goal of solving the case of the missing planets, returned them all to their proper locations (including the ones the Proclamation was no longer searching for), and had punished the planetnappers - without endangering a single Proclamation officer. Which was, Gwen pointed out, actually stabbing her finger into the leader's chest, better than the Judoon had done when they broke the alien embargoes surrounding Earth and endangered many human lives in their search for the haemovore… another case the Doctor had successfully solved on behalf of the Proclamation.
Still not letting the leader get in a complete word edgewise, Gwen summed up by demanding that the Shadow Proclamation drop all warrants on the Doctor or claims to his TARDIS, obey restrictions on sending Judoon to Earth "until such time as my planet is accustomed to and has in place regulations for regular interstellar traffic," and - the Doctor thought this was a particularly nice touch - "supply copies of all paperwork to that effect to be filed with the proper Earth authorities for alien intervention, defined as Torchwood and UNIT."
"Are all human females this… forceful?" the leader of the Proclamation asked him, looking as if she'd bitten something sour. "Or do you simply enjoy loud companions?"
"I am not his companion, I'm the Torchwood law enforcement liaison," Gwen snapped. "If you do not recognize my authority, Torchwood is prepared to do whatever is necessary to protect its homeworld and its allies."
The Shadow Proclamation proved itself unfamiliar with Torchwood when nobody burst out into hysterical laughter. Still, there was only one thing a group as honor- and rule-bound as the Proclamation could do… make them sign piles of paperwork and, with gritted teeth, clear the Doctor's record.
"That wasn't so bad, was it?" Mickey asked cheerfully as they staggered back to the TARDIS, each one carrying an armload of copies.
"It was easier to just run," the Doctor grumbled.
"But this way, we aren't collateral damage," Jack pointed out. Noticing the Doctor's expression, he added, "Now don't get all emo on us again!"
"Emo! I am never-"
"Yes you are," Mickey said. "All the time. And now you're worse with this whole 'I ruin people's lives' thing you've got going."
The guard was gone, but the Doctor's arms were too full to reach for the key. Eyeing the door speculatively, he tried snapping his fingers.
Half the double doors creaked open a crack. Not a big welcome, but one that was good enough for him to shoulder inside and drop his papers on the jumpseat. When Mickey dropped off his load, the Doctor whispered in his ear, "Mickey, would you really say that Rose was better off having known me? With everything that happened? What she felt, was that love or obsession?"
Mickey stared back into his eyes, not angry, not sad, just calm and a little bit resigned. "Doctor, did she ever tell you about Jimmy?"
"Who?"
"Jimmy. The boy she left school for. Because with Rose... she thinks love means always being with someone. Forever, no matter what. Her mum always went on about her dad, and it, like, gave Rose this complex. The way you show someone you love them is to give up everything to be with them and never leave unless you're dead. Obsession? Think about Jackie leaving her little baby to go after Rose across the dimensions. That's what she taught Rose love is." Mickey glanced away, but not before the Doctor caught the flash of pain. "I thought... I thought if I showed that kind of devotion, Rose'd eventually pick me." When he looked back again, there was no emotion at all, just a simple statement of fact. "If it wasn't you, it would have been someone else. It wasn't ever gonna be me. And she wasn't ever gonna leave whoever she chose. That's just the way she is."
Jack had been arranging Gwen and Ianto around the console, explaining how to operate their section. Before Mickey took his place, he added, "You of all people ought to know nothing lasts forever. So enjoy what you've got when you've got it."
The Doctor looked at them, eagerly waiting for him to start the TARDIS - so human, so eager, so limited.
So embarrassingly right about things sometimes.
It had gone better with Gwen to deal with the Shadow Proclamation. It was nice to have the console room full of people. Maybe that's what he needed to do - have a group here again, instead of just one companion. For a moment he toyed with accidentally-on-purpose not going straight back to Cardiff, but kidnapping was wrong.
Tempting. But wrong.
Time to enjoy their company in the timeless here and now. And when they were gone, as they inevitably would be, he could go back to working on ways to fix Donna. Their determination was infectious. There was a way, there had to be one!
***
Donna was having the time of her life. As a Board member, she was finally one of the ones who got to do the exotic travel, checking in with Centre branches and related groups around the world. The science gave her a headache, but the food! The sights! The shops! It was a bit mean, but she liked to remind Mum what she'd said about what a waste her silly job at the hippie centre was just before she gave her a silk kimono, or handpainted ceramics, or a cashmere scarf. (She'd never admit it to anyone, but she'd actually asked to go on that fact-finding trip to Germany just so she could get Gramps a top-of-the-range telescope.)
But the oddest souvenir she ever brought back was from that three-month trip to the American midwest.
***
The welcome-home party was stuffed so full of friends and business acquaintances that it took her almost an hour just to properly greet everyone. She was just coming up on the last group of people and realized as she got closer that it was her friend Ianto, and her (ex but he didn't know it yet) lover Jack, and Tish's sister whatsherface, and that journo who liked to cover her events, Sarah something. They were talking to a skinny boy in a suit, and for a moment something tickled in the back of her memory, something about a man in a suit and trainers, but it was gone the next minute. After the first few years, it had become impossible to keep track of anyone but her biggest donors and closest friends.
"…said she has a big surprise," Ianto was saying.
"Ours is bigger." Jack rubbed his hands together in anticipation.
"You're absolutely sure this is going to work this time?" Tish's sister asked nervously.
But the boy had seen her and turned to smile. Donna noted the fine lines at the corners of his eyes. Not so young, then. Just clinging onto his youth with those silly shoes, like men who wore ties with cartoon characters on them.
"Donna Noble!" he said happily. "I hear you're saving the world."
"I do my bit," she replied with satisfaction.
"Donna," Sarah started tentatively, "If there was something valuable you'd lost a long time ago and you got the chance to get it back, would you want to give up everything to have it?"
Donna snorted. "Is this one of those stupid interview questions, like 'what kind of tree do you want to be'?"
They all looked at each other unhappily, as if the silly question was somehow important, but before anyone could say anything else, eight-year-old Dakota squirmed through the crowd and came to stand before her. "Miss Donna, Miss Donna! Can I have a shandy? Uncle Peter says I have to ask you cos he doesn't know what it is."
"Yes, you may have a shandy as soon as you properly greet my friends," Donna told her in that parental tone that was coming all too easily.
Unabashed, Dakota turned and waved to the adults gawping at her. "Hi, everyone!"
Donna put her hand on the girl's head. It was the first time she was going to say it in public to people she knew, and it was scary and thrilling all at once to hear the words come out of her mouth. "Everyone, this is my daughter Dakota."
Surprise she expected, but why did they all look so horrified?
"Dakota's a pretty name," Sarah said, squatting down to the girl's eye level. "Is that where you were born?"
"Yup! But when mommy and daddy were in the car crash, I went to go live with Uncle Peter in Idaho."
"My mummy and daddy were in a car crash when I was about your age," Sarah mused. "I went to live with my Auntie."
"Does she like people? Because Uncle Peter always says he never knows how to deal with people. We didn't go see anyone or talk to anyone or nothing." Dakota twisted her fingers together, squirming a bit. "He just told me to go to school or run away and play while he was working on his potatoes."
Donna started stroking Dakota's hair. "Everywhere I went in America, they told me, 'You've got to talk to Doctor Grenhope. Grenhope knows exactly what you need.' But every time I called for an appointment, he put me off. They said he'd never talk to me. That he never came to any conferences and it was next to impossible to even talk to him on the phone." She smiled. "Well, you can imagine what I did."
"You marched right in and demanded that he talk to you face to face," the skinny man said, grinning at her with… was that pride? It looked like the expression on her own granddad when he'd heard the story.
She nodded. "I marched right in and demanded that he talk to me face to face. And instead of the terror of biologists everywhere, it turns out that he's a very lovely, very shy man who does just fine when he's not in a crowd. I went back every day after that, and we got to talking about all sorts of things. When I chased off a couple of geeks who'd been bothering him, he said what he needed was someone to handle all his public appearances, and I said why not me, and… well, we've seen a justice in America, but Mum wants a big church wedding and Peter said okay as long as he only had to say 'I do.' It's next month. I'm sending the invitations out tomorrow." She turned to Dakota. "You go tell Uncle Peter that I said it was okay to have a little shandy."
They all watched the little girl dodge through the crowd until she found a middle-aged man sitting in the corner, half hidden by Wilf. He looked over at Donna, who smiled and waved. When he smiled back, it transformed his face into something handsome and joyful.
"Gorgeous, adores you, and hardly ever speaks a word," the skinny guy mused. "The perfect man."
"Oi, watch it, sunshine!" Donna turned to Sarah, who was straightening back up. "To answer your silly question, Miss Smith, I have everything I ever wanted right here, right now, and I wouldn't give up a thing. Not for the crown jewels. You can print that."
They all watched as Wilf whispered something into Dakota's ear, jerking a thumb in their direction. The little girl's eyes went wide.
"What's he telling her?" Jack asked.
Donna snorted. "Some story. He likes to make up stories for her about aliens and other silly things. She says he made her promise not to tell me any of them." She took a drink. "It's good for her, actually, feeling she has a little secret all her own. Her life has been hard. She and Gramps adore each other."
"I can imagine Sylvia's face when she's called 'grandma!'" the skinny man laughed, and Donna had drunk just enough that she wouldn't wonder until later how he knew about her mother.
She saw him once more, just a flash of him, waving from across the floor at the wedding reception, but by the time she worked her way though the large crowd of well-wishers, he was gone.
She never saw him again. But that didn't matter, because he wasn't important enough to remember anyway.
EPILOG 1: 35 Years Later
Humans can live happily, but they can't live ever after.
Donna leaned against the window of the bus, looking not out at the scenery, but back on endings. Gramps had gone long ago. One of the last things he'd told her was that his greatest joy was seeing her so happy. Donna and Peter had funded an entire astronomy station in his name.
Mum had gone her own glum way too, eventually. Donna always wondered if it was wrong that she missed her grandfather more than her own mother. Sylvia had always been more of a horrible warning than a shining example.
Donna had tried to heed that warning, and had been as loving and supportive to Dakota as she could be. Little Dakota, long since grown up and moved away and working on her own family. Gramps had lived just long enough to see her pregnant for the first time, and he'd been fit to burst. "You tell that baby," he'd ordered cryptically. "You tell that baby all the stories I told you. Promise me!"
Dakota had laughed and promised. The first one was a girl, and they named her Donna. They hadn't named her after Dakota's real mother, but after her. Oh, it made her so proud! The next, a boy, always complained about being named Wilf instead of Peter, like his younger brother.
Peter… two years gone now, and she still missed him. For so long, when she was young, she had felt all alone, but until now she had never been alone.
A flash of light caught the corner of her eye. That lorry was going way too fast! It wasn't going to stop in ti-
People were screaming. People were moaning. She was lying on the ground, trying to figure out which one she was doing when two heads blotted out the sun. Jack? That couldn't be Jack, no, not her beautiful Jack, impossible, she hadn't seen him in years and he didn't look a day older. And some skinny boy in a suit, holding a hypodermic.
"…sure this is going to work?" couldn't-be-Jack asked.
"Regenerations are triggered by the lindos hormone," the boy was babbling. "The metacrisis may have given her the rest of what she needs to regenerate if we can get enough lindos into her system. If we're wrong, it won't make a difference anyway." For a moment he looked into her eyes, and he looked so sorrowful that Donna would have raised a hand to him, but her arms weren't moving. "Your neck is broken," he said sadly. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. But this might help." Over Donna's incoherent noises, he pushed the old-fashioned needle in just at the base of her neck.
For a long moment they all just stared at each other. Jack was patting her hand and she could see it but not feel it and that terrified her.
Then electricity arced across that hand and Jack flinched away and the boy got up and backed away, and it hurt, it hurt worse than the accident, it seemed like current was crawling across her skin and she was on fire from the inside out and she could feel it now, she could feel every fingernail and toenail ignite, and, and…
In the very last moment, she remembered everything.
EPILOG 2: Cardiff , 3005
Inside the TARDIS, a ginger-haired man in a denim jacket watched a young woman lowering the Chameleon Arch carefully over her dark, elaborately styled hair.
"Donna, are you sure?"
"It's been fun, Doctor, it has. Being Doctor-Donna again, I can't tell you what that's meant to me. But in the end, I'm only human. I had a wonderful life as a human. I'm ready to go back now."
"You're sure this will work?"
"I programmed it myself, of course it will work! Think I trust your Time Lord butterfingers near my brain again? I'm going to remember everything - my first life, my life here, everything - but I’m going to be human again."
He made a scoffing noise.
"Oi! Don't knock my species or I'll knock you!"
"Donna, what will I do without you?"
"Go and find Jack for a pity shag and a trip 'round Neptune." At his bereft expression, she softened. "Find someone new. You need that, Doctor. Not just a companion, but a new companion. Fresh point of view. Keeps you from going stagnant in here." She winked. "Besides, I'm about to go find Jack and keep him very busy."
"But so far in your future?"
"He's immortal. He'll be there. Left a message for him, didn't we?" Again, she became soothing at the look on his face. "I don't want to be too close to my own time. I died there. I don't want the temptation to find old friends, go to all the old familiar places. Jack 'n' me, we'll be fine. Keeping your knowledge, aren't I? We'll be fantastic."
She threw the switch.
***
Dawn Evans was ushering the children to the park for their weekly storytime when she saw a stranger on her hands and knees by the rock Linda liked to sit on.
"Can I help you?"
The woman jumped up, dusting off her trousers. "No, that's okay. I sma- I dropped something and was just picking up the pieces."
"It's storytime," Linda announced with all the gravitas of a six-year-old. "Would you like to hear a story?"
"That's all right, I'm waiting for someone. Really, I don't want to interrupt."
"Is this yours?" Paul asked, holding up something tiny. "It looks like a hand to an old-fashioned watch."
"Yes it is, very good," the woman said uncomfortably.
"Did you break a watch?" Little Meg had to pull her thumb out of her mouth to ask the question, followed by the inevitable, "Why?"
"Because sometimes, old times are over and shouldn't come back," the woman said, taking the thing from Peter and backing away. "Honestly, I don't want to be a bother. I'll go wait somewhere else."
"It's okay," Dawn said. "If you don't mind children's stories. Which one do you want to hear?" she asked the brood.
"Great-Great-Grandma! Great-Great-Grandma!"
"You tell stories about your own family?" the woman asked.
Dawn laughed. "This family does. My great grandda' passed this one down like it was some big secret that the family had to remember. He said he got it from his great-grandfather… who probably made it up to sound important. All we know for sure that's true is that the Daleks really did steal Earth at some point in the last millenia."
She had turned back to keep Linda from tugging on Meg's hair, and didn't see the woman freeze behind her. Hurrying to get them all involved before she had to break up another spat, Dawn started, "Your great-great-great-great grandmother was named Donna. And do you know what Donna did?"
Three voices chorused, "SHE SAVED THE WORLD!"
"That's right! Once upon a time, there were evil, evil monsters named Daleks..."
***
"Donna? I'm sorry I was late, there was a ... you're crying. If you changed your mind, I'll call the Doctor..."
"No. It's okay, Jack." A soggy giggle. "It's more okay than you know. C'mon. The Earth doesn't save itself, you know."
The End
As usual, please hit me with any concrit you feel this needs. It's going to be polished up and put on Teaspoon and linked on the Donna comms... at some point soonish.