Fic/One-shot: Here
Title: Here
Rating: PG
Genre: angst cushioned by fluff, friendship
Characters: Ten.2 (Marvin :D), Donna!, Rose, mentions of Ten.
Summary: Just some catchin’ up and a coming of age needing to be done.
Ignores EoT completely.
A sequel to Gone, which anubischick threatened asked me to write, as well as bas_math_girl .
Warning: 1 curse word, MarvinAngst, implications towards the end. Oh, and the entire fic is kind of bipolar.
Spoilers: JE
Words: 3612
Disclaimer: I throw my fics up in the air-some-times, sayin’ ayoooo, I do not own
A/N: So sorry for the long wait, I’m still very unsure of this fic. *lacks imaginative scifi explanations* Also great thanks to anubischick & bas_math_girl for helping in that department. ♥ and of course to monkeysrule13 for enduring lengthy paragraphs of IMs & huddycrazy1331 for her genius instruction. xD YOU MY CREW.
It’s been a year since he started his new life with Rose, exactly a year. A year from entering the world in a new body, a year that wretched day where he’d lost half of his being.
He had expected to spend this day alone, away from everyone and everything. He expected to be sad.
But today, that is not quite the case. It’s far from it.
The Doctor wakes up as if it’s the first time he’s actually been awake in months. He lies there in his bed, remembering, yes, this is the day. But he feels entirely different things. At the back of his mind, he swears he can hear someone laughing, and it’s not him.
He hasn’t gotten schizophrenia, has he?
The Doctor still keeps his self-promise in taking this day alone. He heads for Bad Wolf Bay, where the skies are always gray and the tides are always calm. But not today. Why?
He sits on the far side of the shore on the dry sand, which is farther up than it usually is. Nothing seems to make proper sense right now. Something’s just not right! There’s nothing wrong, and that’s just it.
No, he couldn’t have gotten over everything that quick, overnight. He’s felt nothing but emptiness since the day Donna broke from him. He grew used to feeling nothing, too.
His train of thought is interrupted when there’s a loud grumble in the sky, and suddenly the clouds were gathering and lowering itself near the shore. Wind gusts and sand swarms around him and he covered his face so it’s not stabbed by millions of tiny grains.
There’s a roar and crash and everything eventually calms down almost instantaneously. The Doctor falls forward and spits away sand and shakes it from his hair. “What in the--?!”
He suddenly looks up at the water, and all is tranquil and grey and calm as it was before-except there’s an unexplainably impossible ginger splashing about on the shore.
He can hear her. Holy shite, he can hear her. He can hear the buzzes of frustration and irritation and he can hear her cursing and telling herself to never come near random suspicious vortexes on the ground, he can hear her laughing at herself because she feels so silly acting like she can’t swim in extremely shallow water. He can hear her.
The Doctor watches her crawling out of the water, spitting and coughing out the salty water and strands of wet hair that plastered on her cheeks and to her mouth.
She stops in her tracks when she looks up to find him, staring at him with equal disbelief.
It was like the first day she came to him, except they’re shocked beyond logic for completely different reasons.
“No…” she gasps.
“Yes…” The Doctor’s dropped jaw closes into a wide wondrous grin, and he nods. “Oh, yes!”
Donna reciprocates his expression and was going to get up until a mischievous tide rushes behind Donna and knocks her over and nearly brings her back into the sea.
“Bloody-“ she cursed as she shakes her wet and seaweed-ed hair from her face, spitting out more overpowering salty water.
The Doctor can say nothing but laugh as he stands to pick her up and embraces her with all his might, making sure that it’s completely real. It is. He knows it is, he can hear her confirming it in her mind. He can feel the grains of sand embedded onto her hair brush onto his cheek. He can feel her heart race and combined with his beating, they form the familiar feel of two hearts.
“Ohh, Donna! Donna Noble!” He beams, tears glistening madly in his eyes, not letting go of her salty sandy hug. “You never stop surprising me.”
“And you never stop feeling like a twig!”
It’s got to be real. Most definitely has to be.
And it is.
They’re sitting outside of his house on the porch bench with cups of tea, sand gone from uncomfortable places and dry. They drink and talk, even though they don’t need to. They could sit silently and have the best conversation all of time, but he wants so badly to hear her voice.
“How’d you get here?” is his first question.
“What, you want me sent back already?”
“No!” He answers a bit too quickly and Donna just hides her chuckle and sips her tea.
“I’d got a new job at London real estate where Canary Wharf used to be. There was a floor there, where people would see this flat vortex on the ground. It looked like it would suck everything right in but everyone would be able to walk right above it as if it were flat tile. I, however…”
“Fell in?”
“I do have the habit of falling into trouble, both figuratively speaking and not, of course,” she grins then resumes her explanation. “I think it has to do with the fact that I’ve got… oh, what did he call them? ‘Void stuff?’ Yeah, those. No idea why I landed on the bay, though, or why I’m not floating around possibly dead in the Void.”
“Well you’re not, so,” he says, at a loss of words and still too affected by the fact that right in front of him is the Donna Noble, savior of the Universe, in one piece. One wonderful impossible piece.
“I need to get back.” And tt takes that many words to ruin that and his expression fades.
“I see.”
Donna sees his gaze fall to the floor. “I’m sorry, if I could stay, you know very well that I would.”
“Take me with you then.”
He wasn’t supposed to say that. But he’s serious.
She didn’t expect him to make such a request-not even a request, more of a demand. Of course, though, she should have seen it coming. He inherited much of her.
“Well, but,” she stammers. “What about Rose?”
“Take her, too.”
Donna says nothing because she can’t really find a way to respond to that.
The Doctor catches himself and wipes off the determination on his face. “I’m sorry. I just…” he sighs and Donna looks at him with eyes full of sympathy.
“I never knew what happened to you,” is all he says after a moment of choosing from a sea of possible words.
Donna tightens her mouth as she looks off into the horizon in front of her, recalling that day. “It was killing me. But I’m obviously not dead, so he wiped everything clean, had to take it all away.” After a sigh and a short silence, she continued. “Then I wake up one day and everything’s clear, no intense geniusness, though. Kind of want it back, not knowing which plug goes where when putting in a new telly gets me bothered,” Donna snorts a laugh.
He missed that snort, as strange as that would sound if he had ever said it aloud. “Are you happy over there?”
Donna looks at him, her wide grin shrinking to a modest smile. “Yeah.”
“You don’t seem like you mean that.”
“No use lying to you, is there?”
“Nope,” he says and pops the ‘p’. “Cause I see and hear everything up here,” he taps his temple with his finger and she rolls her eyes while smiling.
“So,” she says in another energy, moving on. “How about you, ex-spaceman? Are you happy here?”
No. Well yes. Well no. Yeah, no. “Yes.”
Liar. “That’s good.”
“Rose and I have been working in Torchwood,” he says.
“How’s that boat sailing?”
“Nothing better than the thrill of death biting at your feet,” he grins.
“I meant you and Rose,” she playfully smacks his arm.
“Oh.” The Doctor exhales and leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “It was rough at the start, but she’s really grown now.”
There’s a soft nostalgic, recalling smile upon his face, sitting there in the silence of his remembering.
“I was put here to be changed. That’s like me, isn’t it? To play God and decide who is stuck where,” he laughs sardonically to himself. “But both of us needed changing. The only difference is that she’s been able to change without my help. I’ve not been much of that to her. She’s been so careful for me, so much that I feel like the girl in the relationship…”
Donna laughs at him. “You might as well be!”
“Oi!” Oh, he hasn’t said that in a long while, and it reminds the both of them their first “oi” fight on the TARDIS.
“Now, Doctor, don’t tell me you’ve inherited my insecurity, too.”
“But I did.”
“Well it’s fun being human, isn’t it?”
“It’s a flippin’ party,” he says sarcastically, but with a smile at her.
They laugh and tell old jokes, some that make the Doctor’s tea travel up his nasal passages and some that just make him shake his head and say “No. Just, no. Don’t do that.”
“Oh,” Donna sighs to ease the pain in her stomach and the endorphins rush through. “I really wish I could stay.”
“Why don’t you?” He asks ever so hopefully, knowing so well that she’ll say no.
“I can’t,” she says sorrowfully. “I shouldn’t have to explain why.” Cause she couldn’t.
The emotions of her honest plead set into his mind and he merely looks down and nods. “Alright then,” he huffs as he stands up and extends his hand to her, his fingers wiggling for her to take. “Before you’re stuck here forever like me.”
“For Pete’s sake, this isn’t a prison,” she mutters and when he gives her a stare she just giggles.
He takes her by the hand back to the bay, walking at a pace where they didn’t take too much of a dial-up speed, but didn’t take their possible final moment in a stride. The whole trail, Donna is talking of all sorts of silly things with resonating laughter. He does so along with her, even when all the Doctor can really hear are her cries of despair inside her soul.
They reach the bay, and it’s almost about to rain.
“That should’ve been a two-way wormhole,” he begins to explain. “And once you go back through it, it’ll close up permanently. You’ll be right where you were.”
“I don’t have to fall back into the water, do I?”
“Naw, just walk through it.”
“Well,” she sighs. “Ocean legs, here I come.”
She takes a step forward but turns back to face him. She tucks her hands in her jacket pockets to hide the fact that they’re trembling. Her mouth opens and her tongue shifts around to speak, but she doesn’t. She says nothing to him, nothing at all but she thinks it. He hears it loud and clear, he feels it simple and honest. He can see it gathering in her eyes and dripping off her eyelashes.
He reaches for her and casts her in his arms, and she leans into for what she thinks will be the last in a very long time.
“Likewise,” he says above a whisper, meaning to say it a bit louder but ending up having it lost in his throat.
He pulls back a little to plant a kiss on her forehead and she tries to do the same, but her height only lets her reach his nose. She blinks away the tiny droplets of tears and pats her face dry with her sleeve, giving him her best farewell smile.
“Take care, yeah?” She says, messing up his hair with her hand and he rolls his eyes with a smile in response.
Donna lets go of his hand, turning away with her head held high as she walks off into the soft tides, the water embracing her feet and seeping into her socks, and in a moment, she’s gone.
Knowledge never really did drive him; he knows that once she passed she would be gone and the hole would be closed like fillings in a cavity. He knows it but that doesn’t stop his feet from moving forward to where she faded from his vision and from the face of this earth, hoping that the same will happen to him and he’ll find her standing on the same ground as him. But it doesn’t.
So he heads home, hands in his pockets, a weight in his chest.
He finds Rose sitting and waiting at the porch where he and Donna just were, the cups of tea washed and put away.
“Rose,” he says, meaning to ask a question but he doesn’t know what.
She gives him a look of sympathy and sadness for him. “Was that her?” she asks.
He sighs and wipes imaginary dirt off his chin with his hand, taking a seat next to her on the bench.
“Yeah.”
Rose nods and looks off into the horizon, the noon masked by rainclouds. “I saw the both of you here when I came,” she says after a short silence.
He looks at her, worried what she may say next.
“At first I couldn’t believe it,” she smiles. “Like you, I thought she was lost, too, but. Miracles seem to happen, don’t they?” She faces him and sees his expression, calm but stunned.
“What’s that face for?”
“Oh, um, nothing. Go on?”
She shrugs it off and looks back in front of her. “I didn’t want to bother the two of you. You looked so happy.”
The Doctor leans back on the back of the bench, his elbow propped up on the wooden arm of it, his hand holding his face as he recalled that yes, he was happy.
Rose rises to enter the house and he doesn’t know whether she’ll be back out or whether he should go in too. But shortly, she comes out with a dimensional transporter and places it in his hand, it’s familiar big yellow button hastily cleaned of the film of dust that had collected on it.
“What is this?” He asks with a puzzled expression, knowing very well what it bloody is but not knowing why it’s being given to him.
“I kept it in case of an emergency. I think this is an emergency.”
He stands and gives it back to her, or rather shoving it back to her hands. “No, I… I can’t. This isn’t… I don’t…”
“Yeah, lovely reasoning. But no, use it.” She grabs his hand and forces it open and places it there.
He’s speechless and it’s not like his verbal constipation was going to work.
Rose gives him a smile that’s supposed to tell him it’s okay, but it weighs down into a bittersweet look. “She’s like family to you, isn’t she? Isn’t that right?” He nods.
“Then go get what’s left of your family back. Doctor, I’ve never had your mind in my head, but I don’t need that to see that you need her and not me.” The last few words were the sound of her heart breaking but still trying to keep it together.
The Doctor stares at her hard and intently. “You understand that if I leave, I leave for good.”
She presses her lips together and nods, looking away from him. “Yeah.”
“Are you sure?” He asks.
“Yes.”
“Really sure.”
“Yes.”
“Rose, are you completely, entirely, sure?”
“Oh, stop it will you? My answer’s not going to change.” She gives him a rather Jackie-esque smack on the arm. “You know very well,” she starts reluctantly, trying to say this as correctly as possible. “This was never meant to be. Not with you…not with him.”
He can’t say anything back to that. Not even the real Doctor would have anything to counter. So he submits and takes her hand as they walk back to the bay, small drops of drizzling rain tapping on their skin and clothes.
The walls aren’t down anywhere else but where the wormhole existed, and time was running out before it was going to be closed up entirely.
He finds himself standing where he was only a while ago, trying to step through and follow her. He has the chains of the transporter wrapped around his fingers, Rose’s hand in the other. He sees a reflection of him and Donna at this precise situation but he’s in the wrong position.
Rose feels loss when he lets go of her hand but no more when he embraces her tides of gratitude.
“I love you,” he says, with all the truth he can muster. Cause he did, regardless of what type of love it was. With that, he kisses the top of her head, and turns to step into the skinny layers of saltwater and foam.
The Doctor turns around to face her, waving his hand for a farewell, his smile bittersweet. She shares his expression and she blows a kiss with both her hands before he salutes and presses the yellow button. In a bright white flash, he’s off.
~
She sat there for a long time. Her shift is over and she could go off and tell everyone that the mysterious floor containing the giant hole that scared everyone was gone and work would resume without fright. But she just sits there. She just feels like it.
No, that just wasn’t it. Right after she’d returned, it didn’t feel like home. Not after seeing him again, not after having the chance to be herself again. At the beginning she stayed because she had the tiniest hope that he would follow her.
Now, it’s more than a hope. It’s a prickling feeling that forced her to stay where she was. A feeling that told her to wait, that something was going to happen.
And something does.
A man with soggy shoes matching the condition of hers flashes into existence, and she doesn’t know whether to beat him upside his head for actually coming or getting the biggest papercut in the universe and hugging him. So she does both.
~
They’re lying next to each other on the grass, watching the stars appear on the dimming sky.
“How am I going to explain to mum without her jumping to a billion wrong conclusions?”
“Dunno,” he says absently.
“Did you even think this through.”
“Not…entirely.”
Donna shrugs and sighs a tiny smile. “Guess I can’t complain.”
“Better not,” he chuckles. “I’m kind of stuck here forever.”
“Watch it, you’re stuck by choice!”
“Stuck, nonetheless.”
“Cheek!” Donna rolls her eyes and ignores that and grabs hold of his hand in effort to not smack him instead.
There’s a moment of no talking as she looks at the sky and he peeks into her thoughts. She’s thinking of the day she last watched the open skies for a blue box zipping by, the memory of telling Wilf to call for her once he saw it.
“Did you ever see him again?” he asks.
“No,” she answers in a quiet, longing voice. Then her nostalgia turns into pangs of despair and insecurity.
“Oh, naw, now Donna, don’t be like that.”
“You!” she begins to scold as turns her head to face him. “I might as well not say anything at all if you’re going to look into my head all the time.”
“I’m sorry, but Donna, really.”
She sighs. “Really, what.”
“If he knew you were right here, if he knew he had the chance to see you and if he knew you’d recognize him without your head imploding. He’d tear the universe apart to get to you.”
“And how would you know that?”
“Well,” he starts as he sits up into a crisscross position facing her. He sticks out his index finger to count: “One, I’m him, duhhh.”
Donna laughs at both the obviousness of his answer and his very well done ‘duh.’
“And two. Because I’m him, I still have that connection with him. Like the one I have with you. In fact, it’s been louder since I got here… bloody oaf thinks too much…With things like that it gets harder to tell which thoughts are mine and which thoughts are his, though it should be a given because his most of the time have zip to do with what’s going on.”
“The point, Doctor,” Donna impatiently cuts in and he makes a face and sticks his tongue out at her playfully.
“My point is… Donna, he thinks about you all the time. Even right now at this very moment.”
He says that with his voice so true she can’t insist that it’s not.
“He’s never been the same since he let you go. He loved you so much, Donna-still does…. And… so do you.” His face lights up at what he realizes.
“Oi!” Donna lightly whacks his knee. “Stop that! You weren’t supposed to hear that or see that, or, whatever!”
“Well excuse me,” he mocked. “You’re the one screaming it out at the top of your internal voice! And all those visuals…”
“No, shush!” she tries to be stern and unforgiving but she smiles and laughs despite herself.
“Never knew the both of you would have such pornographic thoughts,” he teases.
“What!” She exclaims a little bit too loud. She knew her own thoughts were close to clean and he was just joking with her, but the Doctor’s? “He what?!”
“Donna! Calm down, I’m not serious!” He laughs at her sudden snap.
“Better not be! Or I’ll make you help me find him to jump him.”
“Jump his bones, what?”
“No!!”
And their laughter could be heard as little echoes through the night, carrying on to even the most distant universes, ringing of two particular humans who were never going to be apart.
Endd.
Rating: PG
Genre: angst cushioned by fluff, friendship
Characters: Ten.2 (Marvin :D), Donna!, Rose, mentions of Ten.
Summary: Just some catchin’ up and a coming of age needing to be done.
Ignores EoT completely.
A sequel to Gone, which anubischick threatened asked me to write, as well as bas_math_girl .
Warning: 1 curse word, MarvinAngst, implications towards the end. Oh, and the entire fic is kind of bipolar.
Spoilers: JE
Words: 3612
Disclaimer: I throw my fics up in the air-some-times, sayin’ ayoooo, I do not own
A/N: So sorry for the long wait, I’m still very unsure of this fic. *lacks imaginative scifi explanations* Also great thanks to anubischick & bas_math_girl for helping in that department. ♥ and of course to monkeysrule13 for enduring lengthy paragraphs of IMs & huddycrazy1331 for her genius instruction. xD YOU MY CREW.
It’s been a year since he started his new life with Rose, exactly a year. A year from entering the world in a new body, a year that wretched day where he’d lost half of his being.
He had expected to spend this day alone, away from everyone and everything. He expected to be sad.
But today, that is not quite the case. It’s far from it.
The Doctor wakes up as if it’s the first time he’s actually been awake in months. He lies there in his bed, remembering, yes, this is the day. But he feels entirely different things. At the back of his mind, he swears he can hear someone laughing, and it’s not him.
He hasn’t gotten schizophrenia, has he?
The Doctor still keeps his self-promise in taking this day alone. He heads for Bad Wolf Bay, where the skies are always gray and the tides are always calm. But not today. Why?
He sits on the far side of the shore on the dry sand, which is farther up than it usually is. Nothing seems to make proper sense right now. Something’s just not right! There’s nothing wrong, and that’s just it.
No, he couldn’t have gotten over everything that quick, overnight. He’s felt nothing but emptiness since the day Donna broke from him. He grew used to feeling nothing, too.
His train of thought is interrupted when there’s a loud grumble in the sky, and suddenly the clouds were gathering and lowering itself near the shore. Wind gusts and sand swarms around him and he covered his face so it’s not stabbed by millions of tiny grains.
There’s a roar and crash and everything eventually calms down almost instantaneously. The Doctor falls forward and spits away sand and shakes it from his hair. “What in the--?!”
He suddenly looks up at the water, and all is tranquil and grey and calm as it was before-except there’s an unexplainably impossible ginger splashing about on the shore.
He can hear her. Holy shite, he can hear her. He can hear the buzzes of frustration and irritation and he can hear her cursing and telling herself to never come near random suspicious vortexes on the ground, he can hear her laughing at herself because she feels so silly acting like she can’t swim in extremely shallow water. He can hear her.
The Doctor watches her crawling out of the water, spitting and coughing out the salty water and strands of wet hair that plastered on her cheeks and to her mouth.
She stops in her tracks when she looks up to find him, staring at him with equal disbelief.
It was like the first day she came to him, except they’re shocked beyond logic for completely different reasons.
“No…” she gasps.
“Yes…” The Doctor’s dropped jaw closes into a wide wondrous grin, and he nods. “Oh, yes!”
Donna reciprocates his expression and was going to get up until a mischievous tide rushes behind Donna and knocks her over and nearly brings her back into the sea.
“Bloody-“ she cursed as she shakes her wet and seaweed-ed hair from her face, spitting out more overpowering salty water.
The Doctor can say nothing but laugh as he stands to pick her up and embraces her with all his might, making sure that it’s completely real. It is. He knows it is, he can hear her confirming it in her mind. He can feel the grains of sand embedded onto her hair brush onto his cheek. He can feel her heart race and combined with his beating, they form the familiar feel of two hearts.
“Ohh, Donna! Donna Noble!” He beams, tears glistening madly in his eyes, not letting go of her salty sandy hug. “You never stop surprising me.”
“And you never stop feeling like a twig!”
It’s got to be real. Most definitely has to be.
And it is.
They’re sitting outside of his house on the porch bench with cups of tea, sand gone from uncomfortable places and dry. They drink and talk, even though they don’t need to. They could sit silently and have the best conversation all of time, but he wants so badly to hear her voice.
“How’d you get here?” is his first question.
“What, you want me sent back already?”
“No!” He answers a bit too quickly and Donna just hides her chuckle and sips her tea.
“I’d got a new job at London real estate where Canary Wharf used to be. There was a floor there, where people would see this flat vortex on the ground. It looked like it would suck everything right in but everyone would be able to walk right above it as if it were flat tile. I, however…”
“Fell in?”
“I do have the habit of falling into trouble, both figuratively speaking and not, of course,” she grins then resumes her explanation. “I think it has to do with the fact that I’ve got… oh, what did he call them? ‘Void stuff?’ Yeah, those. No idea why I landed on the bay, though, or why I’m not floating around possibly dead in the Void.”
“Well you’re not, so,” he says, at a loss of words and still too affected by the fact that right in front of him is the Donna Noble, savior of the Universe, in one piece. One wonderful impossible piece.
“I need to get back.” And tt takes that many words to ruin that and his expression fades.
“I see.”
Donna sees his gaze fall to the floor. “I’m sorry, if I could stay, you know very well that I would.”
“Take me with you then.”
He wasn’t supposed to say that. But he’s serious.
She didn’t expect him to make such a request-not even a request, more of a demand. Of course, though, she should have seen it coming. He inherited much of her.
“Well, but,” she stammers. “What about Rose?”
“Take her, too.”
Donna says nothing because she can’t really find a way to respond to that.
The Doctor catches himself and wipes off the determination on his face. “I’m sorry. I just…” he sighs and Donna looks at him with eyes full of sympathy.
“I never knew what happened to you,” is all he says after a moment of choosing from a sea of possible words.
Donna tightens her mouth as she looks off into the horizon in front of her, recalling that day. “It was killing me. But I’m obviously not dead, so he wiped everything clean, had to take it all away.” After a sigh and a short silence, she continued. “Then I wake up one day and everything’s clear, no intense geniusness, though. Kind of want it back, not knowing which plug goes where when putting in a new telly gets me bothered,” Donna snorts a laugh.
He missed that snort, as strange as that would sound if he had ever said it aloud. “Are you happy over there?”
Donna looks at him, her wide grin shrinking to a modest smile. “Yeah.”
“You don’t seem like you mean that.”
“No use lying to you, is there?”
“Nope,” he says and pops the ‘p’. “Cause I see and hear everything up here,” he taps his temple with his finger and she rolls her eyes while smiling.
“So,” she says in another energy, moving on. “How about you, ex-spaceman? Are you happy here?”
No. Well yes. Well no. Yeah, no. “Yes.”
Liar. “That’s good.”
“Rose and I have been working in Torchwood,” he says.
“How’s that boat sailing?”
“Nothing better than the thrill of death biting at your feet,” he grins.
“I meant you and Rose,” she playfully smacks his arm.
“Oh.” The Doctor exhales and leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “It was rough at the start, but she’s really grown now.”
There’s a soft nostalgic, recalling smile upon his face, sitting there in the silence of his remembering.
“I was put here to be changed. That’s like me, isn’t it? To play God and decide who is stuck where,” he laughs sardonically to himself. “But both of us needed changing. The only difference is that she’s been able to change without my help. I’ve not been much of that to her. She’s been so careful for me, so much that I feel like the girl in the relationship…”
Donna laughs at him. “You might as well be!”
“Oi!” Oh, he hasn’t said that in a long while, and it reminds the both of them their first “oi” fight on the TARDIS.
“Now, Doctor, don’t tell me you’ve inherited my insecurity, too.”
“But I did.”
“Well it’s fun being human, isn’t it?”
“It’s a flippin’ party,” he says sarcastically, but with a smile at her.
They laugh and tell old jokes, some that make the Doctor’s tea travel up his nasal passages and some that just make him shake his head and say “No. Just, no. Don’t do that.”
“Oh,” Donna sighs to ease the pain in her stomach and the endorphins rush through. “I really wish I could stay.”
“Why don’t you?” He asks ever so hopefully, knowing so well that she’ll say no.
“I can’t,” she says sorrowfully. “I shouldn’t have to explain why.” Cause she couldn’t.
The emotions of her honest plead set into his mind and he merely looks down and nods. “Alright then,” he huffs as he stands up and extends his hand to her, his fingers wiggling for her to take. “Before you’re stuck here forever like me.”
“For Pete’s sake, this isn’t a prison,” she mutters and when he gives her a stare she just giggles.
He takes her by the hand back to the bay, walking at a pace where they didn’t take too much of a dial-up speed, but didn’t take their possible final moment in a stride. The whole trail, Donna is talking of all sorts of silly things with resonating laughter. He does so along with her, even when all the Doctor can really hear are her cries of despair inside her soul.
They reach the bay, and it’s almost about to rain.
“That should’ve been a two-way wormhole,” he begins to explain. “And once you go back through it, it’ll close up permanently. You’ll be right where you were.”
“I don’t have to fall back into the water, do I?”
“Naw, just walk through it.”
“Well,” she sighs. “Ocean legs, here I come.”
She takes a step forward but turns back to face him. She tucks her hands in her jacket pockets to hide the fact that they’re trembling. Her mouth opens and her tongue shifts around to speak, but she doesn’t. She says nothing to him, nothing at all but she thinks it. He hears it loud and clear, he feels it simple and honest. He can see it gathering in her eyes and dripping off her eyelashes.
He reaches for her and casts her in his arms, and she leans into for what she thinks will be the last in a very long time.
“Likewise,” he says above a whisper, meaning to say it a bit louder but ending up having it lost in his throat.
He pulls back a little to plant a kiss on her forehead and she tries to do the same, but her height only lets her reach his nose. She blinks away the tiny droplets of tears and pats her face dry with her sleeve, giving him her best farewell smile.
“Take care, yeah?” She says, messing up his hair with her hand and he rolls his eyes with a smile in response.
Donna lets go of his hand, turning away with her head held high as she walks off into the soft tides, the water embracing her feet and seeping into her socks, and in a moment, she’s gone.
Knowledge never really did drive him; he knows that once she passed she would be gone and the hole would be closed like fillings in a cavity. He knows it but that doesn’t stop his feet from moving forward to where she faded from his vision and from the face of this earth, hoping that the same will happen to him and he’ll find her standing on the same ground as him. But it doesn’t.
So he heads home, hands in his pockets, a weight in his chest.
He finds Rose sitting and waiting at the porch where he and Donna just were, the cups of tea washed and put away.
“Rose,” he says, meaning to ask a question but he doesn’t know what.
She gives him a look of sympathy and sadness for him. “Was that her?” she asks.
He sighs and wipes imaginary dirt off his chin with his hand, taking a seat next to her on the bench.
“Yeah.”
Rose nods and looks off into the horizon, the noon masked by rainclouds. “I saw the both of you here when I came,” she says after a short silence.
He looks at her, worried what she may say next.
“At first I couldn’t believe it,” she smiles. “Like you, I thought she was lost, too, but. Miracles seem to happen, don’t they?” She faces him and sees his expression, calm but stunned.
“What’s that face for?”
“Oh, um, nothing. Go on?”
She shrugs it off and looks back in front of her. “I didn’t want to bother the two of you. You looked so happy.”
The Doctor leans back on the back of the bench, his elbow propped up on the wooden arm of it, his hand holding his face as he recalled that yes, he was happy.
Rose rises to enter the house and he doesn’t know whether she’ll be back out or whether he should go in too. But shortly, she comes out with a dimensional transporter and places it in his hand, it’s familiar big yellow button hastily cleaned of the film of dust that had collected on it.
“What is this?” He asks with a puzzled expression, knowing very well what it bloody is but not knowing why it’s being given to him.
“I kept it in case of an emergency. I think this is an emergency.”
He stands and gives it back to her, or rather shoving it back to her hands. “No, I… I can’t. This isn’t… I don’t…”
“Yeah, lovely reasoning. But no, use it.” She grabs his hand and forces it open and places it there.
He’s speechless and it’s not like his verbal constipation was going to work.
Rose gives him a smile that’s supposed to tell him it’s okay, but it weighs down into a bittersweet look. “She’s like family to you, isn’t she? Isn’t that right?” He nods.
“Then go get what’s left of your family back. Doctor, I’ve never had your mind in my head, but I don’t need that to see that you need her and not me.” The last few words were the sound of her heart breaking but still trying to keep it together.
The Doctor stares at her hard and intently. “You understand that if I leave, I leave for good.”
She presses her lips together and nods, looking away from him. “Yeah.”
“Are you sure?” He asks.
“Yes.”
“Really sure.”
“Yes.”
“Rose, are you completely, entirely, sure?”
“Oh, stop it will you? My answer’s not going to change.” She gives him a rather Jackie-esque smack on the arm. “You know very well,” she starts reluctantly, trying to say this as correctly as possible. “This was never meant to be. Not with you…not with him.”
He can’t say anything back to that. Not even the real Doctor would have anything to counter. So he submits and takes her hand as they walk back to the bay, small drops of drizzling rain tapping on their skin and clothes.
The walls aren’t down anywhere else but where the wormhole existed, and time was running out before it was going to be closed up entirely.
He finds himself standing where he was only a while ago, trying to step through and follow her. He has the chains of the transporter wrapped around his fingers, Rose’s hand in the other. He sees a reflection of him and Donna at this precise situation but he’s in the wrong position.
Rose feels loss when he lets go of her hand but no more when he embraces her tides of gratitude.
“I love you,” he says, with all the truth he can muster. Cause he did, regardless of what type of love it was. With that, he kisses the top of her head, and turns to step into the skinny layers of saltwater and foam.
The Doctor turns around to face her, waving his hand for a farewell, his smile bittersweet. She shares his expression and she blows a kiss with both her hands before he salutes and presses the yellow button. In a bright white flash, he’s off.
~
She sat there for a long time. Her shift is over and she could go off and tell everyone that the mysterious floor containing the giant hole that scared everyone was gone and work would resume without fright. But she just sits there. She just feels like it.
No, that just wasn’t it. Right after she’d returned, it didn’t feel like home. Not after seeing him again, not after having the chance to be herself again. At the beginning she stayed because she had the tiniest hope that he would follow her.
Now, it’s more than a hope. It’s a prickling feeling that forced her to stay where she was. A feeling that told her to wait, that something was going to happen.
And something does.
A man with soggy shoes matching the condition of hers flashes into existence, and she doesn’t know whether to beat him upside his head for actually coming or getting the biggest papercut in the universe and hugging him. So she does both.
~
They’re lying next to each other on the grass, watching the stars appear on the dimming sky.
“How am I going to explain to mum without her jumping to a billion wrong conclusions?”
“Dunno,” he says absently.
“Did you even think this through.”
“Not…entirely.”
Donna shrugs and sighs a tiny smile. “Guess I can’t complain.”
“Better not,” he chuckles. “I’m kind of stuck here forever.”
“Watch it, you’re stuck by choice!”
“Stuck, nonetheless.”
“Cheek!” Donna rolls her eyes and ignores that and grabs hold of his hand in effort to not smack him instead.
There’s a moment of no talking as she looks at the sky and he peeks into her thoughts. She’s thinking of the day she last watched the open skies for a blue box zipping by, the memory of telling Wilf to call for her once he saw it.
“Did you ever see him again?” he asks.
“No,” she answers in a quiet, longing voice. Then her nostalgia turns into pangs of despair and insecurity.
“Oh, naw, now Donna, don’t be like that.”
“You!” she begins to scold as turns her head to face him. “I might as well not say anything at all if you’re going to look into my head all the time.”
“I’m sorry, but Donna, really.”
She sighs. “Really, what.”
“If he knew you were right here, if he knew he had the chance to see you and if he knew you’d recognize him without your head imploding. He’d tear the universe apart to get to you.”
“And how would you know that?”
“Well,” he starts as he sits up into a crisscross position facing her. He sticks out his index finger to count: “One, I’m him, duhhh.”
Donna laughs at both the obviousness of his answer and his very well done ‘duh.’
“And two. Because I’m him, I still have that connection with him. Like the one I have with you. In fact, it’s been louder since I got here… bloody oaf thinks too much…With things like that it gets harder to tell which thoughts are mine and which thoughts are his, though it should be a given because his most of the time have zip to do with what’s going on.”
“The point, Doctor,” Donna impatiently cuts in and he makes a face and sticks his tongue out at her playfully.
“My point is… Donna, he thinks about you all the time. Even right now at this very moment.”
He says that with his voice so true she can’t insist that it’s not.
“He’s never been the same since he let you go. He loved you so much, Donna-still does…. And… so do you.” His face lights up at what he realizes.
“Oi!” Donna lightly whacks his knee. “Stop that! You weren’t supposed to hear that or see that, or, whatever!”
“Well excuse me,” he mocked. “You’re the one screaming it out at the top of your internal voice! And all those visuals…”
“No, shush!” she tries to be stern and unforgiving but she smiles and laughs despite herself.
“Never knew the both of you would have such pornographic thoughts,” he teases.
“What!” She exclaims a little bit too loud. She knew her own thoughts were close to clean and he was just joking with her, but the Doctor’s? “He what?!”
“Donna! Calm down, I’m not serious!” He laughs at her sudden snap.
“Better not be! Or I’ll make you help me find him to jump him.”
“Jump his bones, what?”
“No!!”
And their laughter could be heard as little echoes through the night, carrying on to even the most distant universes, ringing of two particular humans who were never going to be apart.
Endd.