Held in Trust: Chapter 9
Title: Held in Trust (9/?)
Characters/Pairings: Duplicate Tenth Doctor/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Most chapters Teen (Adult chapters noted as such)
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
Summary: An Alt!Ten, Rose and Alt!Donna Adventure! Join our heroes as they investigate a mysterious man from the future, an apocalyptic death cult, and the wonders of the internal combustion engine. Romance, action, adventure, sci fi, occasional smut Donna being awesome, as usual all par for the course.
A/N: Sequel to The One True Free Life. It's not entirely necessary to have read that, but if you're finding yourself at any point going, "Huh?" it's just probably something that was explained in that story.
Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8
It took Rose an agonisingly long time make her way to the coat closet without being spotted by anyone who might impede (or forbid) her egress. Her skin prickled with both fear and anticipation--a feeling that in her more self-reflective moods she'd identified as being that which made her feel most awake and alive. She pushed the unsettling possibility that she was in fact relishing the fear of harm coming to a friend out of her mind, in order to concentrate on slipping past the catering staff and her own family members.
By the time she was able to dart through the sea of cars unnoticed, long minutes had passed and she braced herself for the Doctor to be gruff and impatient.
All of the excuses she'd hastily prepared for her tardiness escaped silently in to the night along with the little white clouds of her breath as she rounded the far side of the Doctor's car to find him huffing in the cold and buttoning up a blue suit jacket over a maroon t-shirt.
"It's bloody freezing out here," he remarked, as if nothing at all were unusual or amiss, as if the fact that he'd been made to shave and get a hair cut in preparation for the party wasn't adding to the eerie deja-vu effect. "What?"
Rose realised with embarrassment that she'd stopped approaching, stopped dead in her tracks really, and her mouth hung open rather unattractively.
"Sorry," she said, shaking her head from side to side. "It's just...your suit."
"I know!" he enthused, as he crouched down to lace up his trainers again. "I mean, I couldn't go traipsing about in my Sunday best, could I? This was still hanging up in my old room. Mind you, it is a bit more snug in the waistband than I remember."
Rose looked down at her cocktail dress and distressingly expensive heels nibbling on a fingernail (manicured, Moonstruck Mauve).
"Nice for you, I guess. If I wind up turning my ankle, I'm going to make you carry me on your back for the next three weeks. Forget crutches."
As she turned to get in to the passenger side, she found a brown paper bag thrust towards her. Opening it up and peering inside, she looked down on to a neatly folded pair of trousers, a hoodie and trainers.
"These aren't mine," she said, taking each item out and inspecting them.
"Your mum's." The Doctor continued to rummage around in the boot, placing unidentifiable item after unidentifiable item in to his pockets.
"You just went foraging about in mum's closet unattended? You're braver than I thought. Speaking of," Rose cautioned, looking back towards the house, "we should probably make ourselves scarce if we want to make a clean getaway."
"How much hot water am I going to be in, d'you reckon?" he asked, shutting the boot and fishing his keys out, which proved to be a more protracted process than normal.
"About as much as you always are. Are we ready, then?" She settled herself in the passenger seat and began to awkwardly change clothes. "To Donna,allons-y!"
"Quite," he said darkly, putting the keys in the ignition. "To Donna."
***
"So, what brings you here to us?"
Donna sat in an extremely uncomfortable folding chair in a circle with three other new Church members, being gently scrutinised by two others whom she assumed must be more senior students of the man they referred to by the single--and rather unusual--name of Gliese.
Each new recruit in turn told typical tales of life in the modern British Republic--loved ones upgraded, survivor's guilt, feelings of emptiness and loneliness, the alienation of the computer age, and a general hunch that there must be something Out There. Something better. Something more meaningful.
A mousy young woman with a pixie haircut described an encounter she'd had with what the Church members insisted be referred to as the Other Beings. She described a UFO seen as she drove along a country road, and the peace that the vision had brought her. She felt sure, she said, that the Other Beings had plans for our planet and its inhabitants. They would save us from ourselves, from the horrific inhumanity we so regularly visit on our fellow humans, and from our propensity to destroy the very things that give us life.
An older gentleman from Yorkshire talked about his daughter, killed in the Cybus massacre, and how he still received visions from her regularly. She told him that peace would only come to him--to everyone--when beings from the stars came and showed us the way. She was so beautiful, he said, eyes red-rimmed and full. She was so beautiful and kind, just a teenager but already showing signs of the great woman she was destined to become. And then just like that, taken from him, taken clean out of the world. We don't deserve the likes of her, he said. Not until we embrace the wisdom of the Other Beings, as she instructed. And perhaps, if he could help bring about their arrival on Earth, they'd grant him the ability to see her--truly see her--once again.
When it came to be Donna's turn, she rattled off the fabricated personal statistics that Rose had made her memorise, but found that didn't quite match up with the stories the others had offered. She took a deep breath, and told the truth.
"I'm a temp, in London. I live with my mum, but we don't really get on. My dad, he...it was Cybus. All my life it's like I've been the understudy in a play of my own existence. It's like someone else is playing me, somewhere on a stage I can't see, and getting the flowers and the applause. Not me--never me. I got so used to that, figured it was for the best, that I'm not really worth much anyway. I convinced myself I was happy--who wants that kind of attention anyway? But I wasn't. Not really.
"Until I met...until I communicated with an Other Being. It was just an accident really that I ever met him, but we talk and it's like he knows what's in my head better than I do. He said to me once, 'You shout at the world because you think that no one's listening. But you're special, and you've always been special. There's no need to shout because the world is just waiting for you.' He told me to come here, so here I am. I don't want to be an understudy any more. I want to be part of something important. My friend, he believes I can be, and he helped me to believe it too."
The memories swam in Donna's frontal cortex. There was something important, something she had to tell the Doctor, but the knock-out drug she'd apparently been administered with her evening tea had made everything all mixed up and scattered behind a scrim of confusion. With some more time, she'd remember, she was sure. And then the Doctor and Rose would arrive and pluck her from this mess, she'd tell them what they needed to know and they'd all just get on with the business of sorting it all out and doing what needed to be done.
More time. She had to stall for more time.
"Why isn't anyone allowed to see you?" She surreptitiously attempted to get glimpses through the gaps in the blindfold, unsuccessfully.
"My friends see me," Gliese answered calmly.
"What, are you all disfigured? I promise I won't laugh."
He chuckled softly, perhaps genuinely amused by Donna's suppositions. "You can think what you will."
"Oh, I know! You're not waiting for the Other Beings because you are one! Are you all green and scaly or something?"
"Would that frighten you?" he asked evenly, and Donna heard his voice move as he took up a new position to her left.
"No, just curious," she answered casually, shrugging.
"I thought not. I heard a tape of you, talking at the introductory session. I always listen in, to identify those who may make dependable companions. I had thought that you might, actually," he said as an aside. "Your friend, do you see him?"
I wouldn't mind seeing him right now, she thought.
"Yes, of course I see him. What d'you think, I made him up? All the people here who say they've had these experiences, do you actually believe any of them?" she asked acidly.
"It's not really my place to judge. Who knows? I know just one thing, and that is that you are all human."
"Aha! So you're not human! I knew it! Come on, you can show me. Have you got three eyes? Blue skin? Tentacles? I think I'd quite fancy having tentacles myself. It would make tidying up the house go so much quicker."
"I assure you, I'm human too. You seem so eager to believe in the Other Beings." He sounded as if he almost pitied her.
"Not eager, it's just I'm...acquainted."
"Your friend," he said and she thought she could hear a bit of a sneer.
"Yeah, that's right," she answered back, defiantly.
"So, Doctor, what's a temporal failsafe?"
Donna crouched down behind a car, feeling more exposed than usual for her evening debrief.
"Oh, now that is interesting," the Doctor mused, largely to himself, and then fell silent.
Donna cleared her throat pointedly after a moment. "Care to share with the rest of the class?"
"Sorry," he muttered. "A temporal failsafe is a pretty simple strategy for making sure things happen the way they ought. Simple, that is, if you're often in the habit of time travel.Where'd you hear this?"
"Are you ready for a demonstration of how clever I am?"
"Always! Hang on, let me put you on speaker phone. Rose, are you ready to hear how clever Donna is?"
"'Course." Donna could now hear Rose in the background, amidst the sound of washing up being done.
"Sorry, I have to keep my voice down. I got caught earlier today checking a message from mum."
"Please do be careful," Rose's tinny far-away voice warned.
"Of course she's being careful. Go on, Donna. Let's hear further tales of your brilliance."
"Well, you know how I said they're like constantly making us do all these exercises--free writing, contacting the astral plane or whatever. I just write about the stuff we've seen and done and everyone thinks I've been possessed by a creature from the planet Zog , so it works out well." She paused to listen to the Doctor's comforting giggle. "Anyway, today when they passed out the note pads, I decided to try and see what had been written on it before. You know, like how they do on telly, rubbing a pencil so the impressions made through the paper come out?"
"Oh, that is rather good. Bravo," Rose interjected, and Donna felt a thrill of pride, like she did on the rare occasions when her own mum complimented her.
"So, that's where you read about this temporal failsafe?" The Doctor was all business now, and could be heard tapping his fingers on the table. "Did it say anything else?"
"Just some numbers, maybe dates and times."
The Doctor hummed and murmured to himself. "Yes, that'd make sense. Do you still have them?"
"'Course. What sort of spy would I be if I couldn't even manage that?"
Donna turned her head away from the sound of Gliese's voice, no longer feeling terribly cooperative--a mood at odds with her need to stall for time and keep up a conversation.
Temporal failsafe--that had been important, but she'd already told the Doctor about it, so that couldn't be what was causing this nagging sense of dread. She did, however, have the distinct impression that it had something to do with whatever it was that she'd not yet remembered. A temporal failsafe is a strategy to make sure things happen as they ought.
"How ought things happen for us, Gliese?" Donna remained turned away from him, but it's not like it mattered considering she couldn't look him in the eye anyway. "I take it you do know. So, enlighten me. Perhaps I'll make a dependable companion after all."
(To Chapter 10: The taste of paradox)
Characters/Pairings: Duplicate Tenth Doctor/Rose, alt!Donna, various Tylers and Motts, and several OCs
Rating: Most chapters Teen (Adult chapters noted as such)
Series: Part of the Morris Minor 'Verse
Summary: An Alt!Ten, Rose and Alt!Donna Adventure! Join our heroes as they investigate a mysterious man from the future, an apocalyptic death cult, and the wonders of the internal combustion engine. Romance, action, adventure, sci fi, occasional smut Donna being awesome, as usual all par for the course.
A/N: Sequel to The One True Free Life. It's not entirely necessary to have read that, but if you're finding yourself at any point going, "Huh?" it's just probably something that was explained in that story.
Previous Chapters: Prologue | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8
It took Rose an agonisingly long time make her way to the coat closet without being spotted by anyone who might impede (or forbid) her egress. Her skin prickled with both fear and anticipation--a feeling that in her more self-reflective moods she'd identified as being that which made her feel most awake and alive. She pushed the unsettling possibility that she was in fact relishing the fear of harm coming to a friend out of her mind, in order to concentrate on slipping past the catering staff and her own family members.
By the time she was able to dart through the sea of cars unnoticed, long minutes had passed and she braced herself for the Doctor to be gruff and impatient.
All of the excuses she'd hastily prepared for her tardiness escaped silently in to the night along with the little white clouds of her breath as she rounded the far side of the Doctor's car to find him huffing in the cold and buttoning up a blue suit jacket over a maroon t-shirt.
"It's bloody freezing out here," he remarked, as if nothing at all were unusual or amiss, as if the fact that he'd been made to shave and get a hair cut in preparation for the party wasn't adding to the eerie deja-vu effect. "What?"
Rose realised with embarrassment that she'd stopped approaching, stopped dead in her tracks really, and her mouth hung open rather unattractively.
"Sorry," she said, shaking her head from side to side. "It's just...your suit."
"I know!" he enthused, as he crouched down to lace up his trainers again. "I mean, I couldn't go traipsing about in my Sunday best, could I? This was still hanging up in my old room. Mind you, it is a bit more snug in the waistband than I remember."
Rose looked down at her cocktail dress and distressingly expensive heels nibbling on a fingernail (manicured, Moonstruck Mauve).
"Nice for you, I guess. If I wind up turning my ankle, I'm going to make you carry me on your back for the next three weeks. Forget crutches."
As she turned to get in to the passenger side, she found a brown paper bag thrust towards her. Opening it up and peering inside, she looked down on to a neatly folded pair of trousers, a hoodie and trainers.
"These aren't mine," she said, taking each item out and inspecting them.
"Your mum's." The Doctor continued to rummage around in the boot, placing unidentifiable item after unidentifiable item in to his pockets.
"You just went foraging about in mum's closet unattended? You're braver than I thought. Speaking of," Rose cautioned, looking back towards the house, "we should probably make ourselves scarce if we want to make a clean getaway."
"How much hot water am I going to be in, d'you reckon?" he asked, shutting the boot and fishing his keys out, which proved to be a more protracted process than normal.
"About as much as you always are. Are we ready, then?" She settled herself in the passenger seat and began to awkwardly change clothes. "To Donna,allons-y!"
"Quite," he said darkly, putting the keys in the ignition. "To Donna."
***
"So, what brings you here to us?"
Donna sat in an extremely uncomfortable folding chair in a circle with three other new Church members, being gently scrutinised by two others whom she assumed must be more senior students of the man they referred to by the single--and rather unusual--name of Gliese.
Each new recruit in turn told typical tales of life in the modern British Republic--loved ones upgraded, survivor's guilt, feelings of emptiness and loneliness, the alienation of the computer age, and a general hunch that there must be something Out There. Something better. Something more meaningful.
A mousy young woman with a pixie haircut described an encounter she'd had with what the Church members insisted be referred to as the Other Beings. She described a UFO seen as she drove along a country road, and the peace that the vision had brought her. She felt sure, she said, that the Other Beings had plans for our planet and its inhabitants. They would save us from ourselves, from the horrific inhumanity we so regularly visit on our fellow humans, and from our propensity to destroy the very things that give us life.
An older gentleman from Yorkshire talked about his daughter, killed in the Cybus massacre, and how he still received visions from her regularly. She told him that peace would only come to him--to everyone--when beings from the stars came and showed us the way. She was so beautiful, he said, eyes red-rimmed and full. She was so beautiful and kind, just a teenager but already showing signs of the great woman she was destined to become. And then just like that, taken from him, taken clean out of the world. We don't deserve the likes of her, he said. Not until we embrace the wisdom of the Other Beings, as she instructed. And perhaps, if he could help bring about their arrival on Earth, they'd grant him the ability to see her--truly see her--once again.
When it came to be Donna's turn, she rattled off the fabricated personal statistics that Rose had made her memorise, but found that didn't quite match up with the stories the others had offered. She took a deep breath, and told the truth.
"I'm a temp, in London. I live with my mum, but we don't really get on. My dad, he...it was Cybus. All my life it's like I've been the understudy in a play of my own existence. It's like someone else is playing me, somewhere on a stage I can't see, and getting the flowers and the applause. Not me--never me. I got so used to that, figured it was for the best, that I'm not really worth much anyway. I convinced myself I was happy--who wants that kind of attention anyway? But I wasn't. Not really.
"Until I met...until I communicated with an Other Being. It was just an accident really that I ever met him, but we talk and it's like he knows what's in my head better than I do. He said to me once, 'You shout at the world because you think that no one's listening. But you're special, and you've always been special. There's no need to shout because the world is just waiting for you.' He told me to come here, so here I am. I don't want to be an understudy any more. I want to be part of something important. My friend, he believes I can be, and he helped me to believe it too."
The memories swam in Donna's frontal cortex. There was something important, something she had to tell the Doctor, but the knock-out drug she'd apparently been administered with her evening tea had made everything all mixed up and scattered behind a scrim of confusion. With some more time, she'd remember, she was sure. And then the Doctor and Rose would arrive and pluck her from this mess, she'd tell them what they needed to know and they'd all just get on with the business of sorting it all out and doing what needed to be done.
More time. She had to stall for more time.
"Why isn't anyone allowed to see you?" She surreptitiously attempted to get glimpses through the gaps in the blindfold, unsuccessfully.
"My friends see me," Gliese answered calmly.
"What, are you all disfigured? I promise I won't laugh."
He chuckled softly, perhaps genuinely amused by Donna's suppositions. "You can think what you will."
"Oh, I know! You're not waiting for the Other Beings because you are one! Are you all green and scaly or something?"
"Would that frighten you?" he asked evenly, and Donna heard his voice move as he took up a new position to her left.
"No, just curious," she answered casually, shrugging.
"I thought not. I heard a tape of you, talking at the introductory session. I always listen in, to identify those who may make dependable companions. I had thought that you might, actually," he said as an aside. "Your friend, do you see him?"
I wouldn't mind seeing him right now, she thought.
"Yes, of course I see him. What d'you think, I made him up? All the people here who say they've had these experiences, do you actually believe any of them?" she asked acidly.
"It's not really my place to judge. Who knows? I know just one thing, and that is that you are all human."
"Aha! So you're not human! I knew it! Come on, you can show me. Have you got three eyes? Blue skin? Tentacles? I think I'd quite fancy having tentacles myself. It would make tidying up the house go so much quicker."
"I assure you, I'm human too. You seem so eager to believe in the Other Beings." He sounded as if he almost pitied her.
"Not eager, it's just I'm...acquainted."
"Your friend," he said and she thought she could hear a bit of a sneer.
"Yeah, that's right," she answered back, defiantly.
"So, Doctor, what's a temporal failsafe?"
Donna crouched down behind a car, feeling more exposed than usual for her evening debrief.
"Oh, now that is interesting," the Doctor mused, largely to himself, and then fell silent.
Donna cleared her throat pointedly after a moment. "Care to share with the rest of the class?"
"Sorry," he muttered. "A temporal failsafe is a pretty simple strategy for making sure things happen the way they ought. Simple, that is, if you're often in the habit of time travel.Where'd you hear this?"
"Are you ready for a demonstration of how clever I am?"
"Always! Hang on, let me put you on speaker phone. Rose, are you ready to hear how clever Donna is?"
"'Course." Donna could now hear Rose in the background, amidst the sound of washing up being done.
"Sorry, I have to keep my voice down. I got caught earlier today checking a message from mum."
"Please do be careful," Rose's tinny far-away voice warned.
"Of course she's being careful. Go on, Donna. Let's hear further tales of your brilliance."
"Well, you know how I said they're like constantly making us do all these exercises--free writing, contacting the astral plane or whatever. I just write about the stuff we've seen and done and everyone thinks I've been possessed by a creature from the planet Zog , so it works out well." She paused to listen to the Doctor's comforting giggle. "Anyway, today when they passed out the note pads, I decided to try and see what had been written on it before. You know, like how they do on telly, rubbing a pencil so the impressions made through the paper come out?"
"Oh, that is rather good. Bravo," Rose interjected, and Donna felt a thrill of pride, like she did on the rare occasions when her own mum complimented her.
"So, that's where you read about this temporal failsafe?" The Doctor was all business now, and could be heard tapping his fingers on the table. "Did it say anything else?"
"Just some numbers, maybe dates and times."
The Doctor hummed and murmured to himself. "Yes, that'd make sense. Do you still have them?"
"'Course. What sort of spy would I be if I couldn't even manage that?"
Donna turned her head away from the sound of Gliese's voice, no longer feeling terribly cooperative--a mood at odds with her need to stall for time and keep up a conversation.
Temporal failsafe--that had been important, but she'd already told the Doctor about it, so that couldn't be what was causing this nagging sense of dread. She did, however, have the distinct impression that it had something to do with whatever it was that she'd not yet remembered. A temporal failsafe is a strategy to make sure things happen as they ought.
"How ought things happen for us, Gliese?" Donna remained turned away from him, but it's not like it mattered considering she couldn't look him in the eye anyway. "I take it you do know. So, enlighten me. Perhaps I'll make a dependable companion after all."
(To Chapter 10: The taste of paradox)