Fic/One-shot: A Wrinkle in Time
Title: A Wrinkle In Time
Rating: PG
Words: 3583
Characters: Doctor (an incarnation past 11th, and for some reason I imagine Tim Roth), a descendant of Donna, Donna
Warning/Spoilers: This is set after EoT. and well, most of the DW series as we know it. Mentions of character death, some suggestive stuff, some curse words, and sarcasm
Summary: Sophie Temple-Noble meets the Doctor.
Disclaimer: All I own is the food I provide for the plotbunnies.
A/N: This was supposed be just a little cliché “How did you first fall in love with blah blah blah” drabble, but eh, muse took me by the neck.
The title is totally stolen from the novel by Madeleine L’engle. It’s also a very, very bad pun.
A/N2: I'd like to give big thanks to the lovely beautifulntime for being a beta for this story. :D
He was looking through a thin scrapbook when I first met him. He was sitting alone in the library where Dad had taken me every week or so to have quiet reading time. I was about seven, the age where I couldn’t help talking to strangers despite Mum and Dad always telling me not to. I knew one day I would regret it, but that day wasn’t the case.
“Whatcha reading?” I asked him in my library voice.
He looked at me with friendly eyes. Extremely aged, but friendly. “My old friend’s scrapbook that she left behind,” he replied with a smile, then flipped a page and looked fondly at it. “Poorly made, if you ask me. She was never much of an artist.”
“Can I have a look?” I asked.
He looked rather surprised at my request, but then pulled up a chair next to him and I eagerly made myself comfortable on it. He flipped to a certain page, as if the rest were things he wanted to keep to himself, and then slid the book on the table so we both were looking.
“That’s her,” he said, pointing to a picture of a pretty woman with red hair.
I could’ve sworn I’ve never seen her before, but she looked familiar to me. She looked…
“That’s my Nanna!” I exclaimed, and multiple people immediately shushed me. I blushed but then repeated in a much quieter voice, “That’s my Nan!”
At first he gave me a bewildered look. His old friendly eyes glistened and I didn’t really know what that meant. I wouldn’t know until I’d meet him again, nine years later.
And at first, I was confused with his surprise, but in a moment it dawned on me. “You’re the Doctor,” I said to him, hardly above a whisper.
To me, it felt like the whole world stopped. This was the man of legend. This was the man who had saved us more than had Dad’s hot dinners. This was the man that my Nan used to know so long ago. And it took me a few years, but I realized that this was the man who took away so much from her.
“Oi,” Dad called to me in a loud whisper as he came by. “What did I say? Oh, sorry if she’s been a bother,” he said to the Doctor, the man who Dad thought was just some innocent bloke.
All he did was smile and whisper back “oh it’s fine” and the like.
As we left I was about to tell Dad everything, but then I looked back at the Doctor and he gave me a smile with a finger over his lips. So I never spoke of it since.
Nearly a decade later, Nanna Donna passed. She was ninety-two.
I was still dressed all in black, walking around alone. I didn’t feel like being with anyone. I already missed her. I missed her sarcasm and her witty jokes about Dad, I missed the stories about her granddad and parents when they were still with her. I missed her hugs, her wonderful company, everything. Perhaps the only thing left off the list was whenever I was tempted to tell her that I talked to the Doctor that one day. I was going to, when I knew she was going to die. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that to her.
I was going to start crying then and there in the middle of the street, but something in an alleyway caught my eye. It was bright blue. It was the first time I’d ever seen it. I’m certainly hoping it won’t be my last.
No one noticed me as I shrank away into the alley, approaching the police box. I placed a hand on it, and it hummed with vibration, alive.
I did a rather risky thing. I opened the door and took a step inside.
The Doctor was there. He looked up from his table of buttony thingies and looked at me with a confused, almost angry face. Then he looked into my eyes, at my black clothing, and instantly softened his expression.
“Hey, come in.” He welcomed me as if I were a frequently returning guest to his home.
I shyly made my way in. It was flippin’ bigger on the inside. No one told me that bit. Nan probably would’ve, but…
I took a look at his clothes. All black. “You went, too.”
He nodded. “Had to.”
I gave a meek smile, a sad one actually. “Sophie,” I said, and held out my hand. “Since you didn’t catch my name nine years ago.”
He shook it with a smile, as if he already knew my name. “The Doctor. But you knew that. And this is the TARDIS. Say hello to Sophie, old girl! This is Donna’s granddaughter. Would you believe it? She’s even got her hair.” He looked up at his ship and suddenly a happy hum was heard emanating from the tall walls.
The TARDIS. What a beautiful thing. I bet she (so it has a gender…) missed Nanna, too.
The Doctor chuckled, and then made his way to a corner, lifting up a large tile from the floor to reveal transparent cabinets. He tapped on each one, looking for a certain one in particular. He gave a profound “aha!” when he found it. He beckoned for me to come along with him, and I knelt beside him.
He lifted the lid and took out a shoebox. The brand was something alien.
“Here,” he said, handing it to me. “They’re not actually shoes, sorry. I don’t know your size.”
“Eight and a half,” I answered, joking. “What’s this then?”
“Well, open it.”
So I did. There was the same messily-crafted scrapbook, and it was thicker than before, as if half of it had been torn off but stapled back together. There were a few trinkets, a gold necklace that looked like a pill, and a…
“You were married to her?” I asked in shock, pulling out the gold band.
He laughed. “No. That’s a biodamper.”
“Oh.” Whatever that meant.
“Though, you know. I would’ve, eventually. I think.”
That’s when I knew what those sparkling eyes meant.
“She was my best mate,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow. “Am I supposed to take that literally, or…?”
“No!” He blustered. “No no no no. No.”
“Alright then, good. Can’t see my Nanna like that anyway.” I shuddered, and we laughed and calmed down all in a moment. “But you did love her.”
He nodded.
“I never got the whole story,” I said. “The parts important to Nanna, anyway. How’d you meet her?”
He smiled, as if he’d been waiting to tell this story to someone for years. “She was supposed to get married to some bloke. Not your granddad, just this other dishonest, conniving cad. He nearly fed your Nan to giant spiders! He lied to her and broke her heart. But you know Donna. Remarkably strong.”
“Yeah,” I agreed fondly.
“She zapped up right in this ship, though my old girl’s interior was a bit different. Oh, and did your Nan hate me! Slapped me right in the face -I liked that face, too, so much younger than this one-within the first few minutes of knowing her. She had quite a hand on her! A mouth, too. Could shout at you for other galaxies to hear. I’m surprised I’ve not gone deaf.”
I chuckled. That was my Nan for you.
“I asked her to come travel with me that night. She said no.”
“But she obviously regretted that, didn’t she?”
“Quite. She found me again after this Adipose incident. It’s pretty rare for someone to actually find me like that. The only two people who have done it were Donna and her granddad. And now you, I suppose. I’m starting to think my destiny is linked with Noble blood. All I know is that it can’t be coincidence. There are no coincidences in this universe, Sophie, remember that.”
“Will do,” I said. Then I asked probably the dumbest question there was for me to ask. “Do you miss her?”
He laughed at me, a kind of laugh that said “well no shit, Sherlock” but also had a tinge of sadness. “Yeah. I do. Horribly, and I try to not think about her, but Donna is too hard to ever, ever forget. You know, I had a wife, once. Even with her I found myself mindlessly talking about Donna. Bad move, sort of. I once accidentally called her Donna when we-”
“Don’t want to hear it. Please.”
“Right... Sorry.”
I forgave him quickly for nearly scarring me. “Could you tell me more about Nanna when she was with you?”
“Ohhh, yes. She was just this completely, gobsmackingly brilliant woman. She never believed me when I told her. That stubborn ‘un! Kept me in check, stood up for herself. And then she saved the entirety of creation. She outdid me! She’s why you’re here right now, in more ways than one. Really, she was…amazing.” And then his fond smile dropped down. “Too amazing for her own good, actually.”
“I’m sorry you had to do that,” I told him with all the honesty I could muster. No one ever told me how or why he’d done that to my Nan. That made me start to hate him a little a few years back, when I’d be left to think about it.
He gave a wan smile. “It was either that blasted mindwipe or she’d die. And then you wouldn’t be here. And I quite enjoy your company, Sophie, so all the more reason.”
Awfully good point. “I wish someone had told me that bit.”
He frowned. “It must have been a big burden to you and your family. Especially to you, since no one told you the whole story. You were left wondering.”
“Yeah. Thank you, for taking the time to tell me this. I was afraid no one would have.”
“As if my connection with the Nobles could let that happen,” he laughed.
I shuffled around the items in the shoebox, picking some other stuff up and examining them. But I always found myself looking at that ring.
“How’d it happen?”
“How did what happen?”
“You know, that realization that you wanted to one day slip a real ring on Nanna’s finger.”
The Doctor chuckled. “Well, that’s a hard one. I’ve fallen in love with Donna lots of times. Each time a bit more, as cliché as that sounds.”
“Well, when was the first?”
He sighed with another reminiscent smile of his, bringing his legs up to hold against his chest.
“On the first day I knew her, actually. When she’d said no. Why, you’re thinking? ‘Cause when she told me no, she told me to find someone. She told me to go out and find someone who would stop me when I got too reckless. And that, Sophie, was when I was one hundred and twenty percent sure she was special and that she’d be special to me one day. For multiple reasons. One of them is that she was right, and she dared to be right. Another was that when she said no, when she refused to go with me, she wanted nothing from me to but for me to find someone to keep me in check, to make sure I wasn’t doing something stupid, to take care of me, and to make me happy. She didn’t care if it wasn’t her. She just wanted that for me. Funnily enough, it did end up being her! The universe, it does funny stuff sometimes.” He mockingly shook his fist at the air.
I smiled genuinely for the first time in the past few months.
“I wish I had known her during that time,” I said.
Then we exchanged a knowing look, silence trailing behind my words. No words were said, because they weren’t needed.
“Nah,” I finally answered. “I can’t.”
“Good. I’m not allowed to travel on anyone’s personal timeline and meddle with it, anyway. You’re far too young, too! Blimey, how old are you? Like… twelve?”
“Sixteen! And why’d you offer it then?”
“I didn’t! You’re just hearing voices in your head.” He smirked with a bit of cheekiness. Oh, I could see why Nanna would want to slap that. Even though it was supposedly a different face. But I could also see why she would adore it.
I checked my watch. It was nearly sundown.
“You’ve got to go, don’t you?” he said. It was probably the most depressing thing I’ve heard since I was told Nanna was dying.
“Yeah. It’s getting late. Mum and Dad will be even more upset than they already are.” I put the lid back on the box and handed it to him.
“Oh, no.” He pushed it back into my hands. “It’s yours. I’m giving it to you.”
“But…”
“I already had my share of Donna. She’s written some things in that scrapbook, too, things you might want to read, ‘cause this little collection is all you’re going to get of my Donna.”
“Hey now, she doesn’t belong to you,” I joked.
He laughed, saying “I wish,” and with that he escorted me outside.
“How about I walk you home?”
I nodded. “Would you…want to stop by Nanna’s grave?”
He frowned. “For what?”
“I don’t know. To talk to her alone or something.”
The Doctor chuckled at me. “She can’t hear me.”
“Exactly. Which is why now you can do it without being creepy or her head exploding. So yes?”
He shrugged. “All right…”
It took me a few days to realize that he was just humoring me.
We walked to the cemetery, and the skies were slowly deepening in their blue. We reached Nanna’s grave, the flowers still fresh on the foot of the headstone.
The Doctor stared at it for a while. Then he took his cold hands out of his pockets and sat down in front of the stone with legs crossed as I stood watching him get comfortable with his very best friend.
He stared at her engraved name as if it were her eyes and smiled. He said nothing at all, but just sat there and stared. He occasionally laughed to himself.
“Did she say something funny?” I said with slight sarcasm.
“Yeah,” he sighed nonchalantly. I’ll never quite begin to understand him.
“Sophie!” A distant voice called. It was Mum in the car.
“Well,” I sighed. “This is goodbye, Doctor.” I waited for an answer, but he was too distracted with Nanna.
“Oi!” I reached over and messed up his hair.
“Hey! What?” he turned. “Oh. Right, sorry.” He stood to face me properly. “I guess this is goodbye, Sophie! For now I suppose. You take care of this, yeah?” He tapped on the lid of the shoebox in my arms.
“Yeah,” I said to him, smiling back.
“Sophie!” Mum called. She would’ve tried to run me over at this point.
“Bye, Doctor.” I gave him a hug (an awkward one ‘cause the box was in the way, oh, Nanna Donna, bless you), and as I walked to Mum’s car, he sat back down in front of Nanna and continued to talk to her.
“Who was that?” Mum asked with concern and suspicion.
Dad looked at the tiny figure by Nanna’s grave. “Looks oddly familiar, that bloke…”
Mum made an irrelevant comment about how on earth could Dad see that, but I just smiled.
“That’s the Doctor,” I told them.
They turned in their seats to look at me, eyes slightly wide, then at each other.
“Oh,” Mum said. “Good to see him well, I suppose.”
Then we drove off, and I just sat in the back, my hands protectively over the shoebox. If anyone else besides Mum or Dad asked, they were just shoes. Because Nanna was just Nanna to the world. But I knew, and the Doctor knew, that she was so much more.
A week before Donna’s death…
It was midnight. She ought to be asleep, but Donna, still stubborn as ever, couldn’t. She had now such a limited time to be awake anyhow. Why waste it on sleep?
She sat up in her bent hospital bed with aged, thick papers in her hands. She found this a few days ago. It was why she was dying. Well, it was speeding it up. She was getting old anyhow.
A dark figure emerged into the room, and pulled up a chair by Donna’s bed.
“You’re quite sneaky, aren’t you?” the person asked.
“Yeah,” Donna sighed, knowing exactly who it was despite the voice being so different. “You didn’t think of this, did you?”
The Doctor chuckled. “No, I didn’t.”
“I was wondering when you’d find the other half. Must have taken you years.”
“Yeah, actually. That note you stuck to the end! Oh, you were so clever. ‘So when you finally get over me and all that, I have the other half of this thingy. See me if you want it. And screw timelines.’ When did you ever have the time to devise this?”
Donna gave a weak smile. “I’m old. I forgot. Don’t make me recall.”
“Fine. Still pretty damn clever, though. Risky and having the chance of never working out, but clever. I admire you, Donna Temple-Noble.”
“Oh, shut up, Spaceman.” Saying that name again felt so good. “Could you turn the light on? I’d like a good look at your new face.”
He did so and then sat back down where he was. “Well? How d’you like it? Not as young as the one you always saw, but I rather fancy this one. Especially the nose.”
Donna did something of a giggle, and laid her palm on the Doctor’s cheek. She sighed, tears welling up in her not-as-old-as-his eyes. “I missed you. And that’s not fair. I had to wait, what, fifty, sixty years to see you again? It’s probably been only five for you.”
“No, shhh, don’t think about that,” he said tenderly, mostly because she was right. “I’m here now.”
“I s’pose.”
They spend a moment looking at each other, and he thumbed her old hand that rested on his face. They savored the silence, partly because Donna would begin to hurt if she talked too much.
“You know,” he began, “I met your little granddaughter a few days ago. Well, nine years ago your time.”
“Sophie?”
“So that’s her name? I didn’t ask when we met.”
“Rude as always.”
“Yeah,” he beamed. “She was a real sweetheart. She saw me looking at this.” Out of his jacket he pulled out the other half of the scrapbook. “She recognized your photo right away.”
Donna smiled. “The gift’s been spoiled, then. I wanted you to stitch this back up together and give it to her after you’re done sleeping with it for the next thousand nights.”
Oh, Donna. She knew how much he adored her. And she made a hell lot of fun of him for it. All in good nature, though. She loved him too.
“I have a note for her in there, so you better not keep it ‘til she’s my age or I’ll haunt you.”
“I promise!” He laughed at the thought of Donna’s ghost stalking him throughout the rest of his Time Lord life.
“I’ll be joining everyone up there soon. Gramps and Nan, Mum and Dad, and my Shaun. Do your other selves go up there, too? How many Doctors have there been since I left?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Lost count. Quite a few. The one after you was bonkers! I fancied me some bow ties.”
“But you hated bow ties.”
“I know. It was appalling.”
“What are you into now?”
“Fedoras. I just don’t have mine right now. It’s rude to wear hats indoors.”
Donna sighed. “Dork, as ever.”
“Oi! They’re stylish.”
“Yeah, next you’ll be donning skinny jeans. Honestly.”
“Well…”
They laughed, but Donna couldn’t as hard as she used to and just put her energy into smiling as widely as she could.
“Oh, Donna,” he said, holding her hand. “You were happy, weren’t you?”
She nodded. “Yeah. So you’re forgiven, I suppose.”
He kissed her hand and laid it back on his cheek. “That’s good. You’ll kill me into a regeneration if you’d told me otherwise.”
“Fine then, I don’t forgive you and I bitterly despise you. Hurry! Let that face change to something a bit better to look at.”
“Oi! I like this face!” he said in mock defense, chuckling. “Oh, Donna, I love you.”
“Sorry, Doctor, but alas I’m a married woman. Or was,” she teased. “But okay, I’ll admit it once before I go. I love you too. Always have. While I still remembered, anyway.”
Donna winced in pain.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s my head. That and I think I’m using my voice more than I should,” she said, now in a whisper. “You’d better go. Knowing you, you’re not even allowed to be here.”
He smirked. “Too well, Donna, too well.”
She rolled her eyes with a smile, and he kissed her forehead. That was the last time Donna would ever see him, and the last that the Doctor would ever see of her.
That is, if he followed the rules.
End.
Rating: PG
Words: 3583
Characters: Doctor (an incarnation past 11th, and for some reason I imagine Tim Roth), a descendant of Donna, Donna
Warning/Spoilers: This is set after EoT. and well, most of the DW series as we know it. Mentions of character death, some suggestive stuff, some curse words, and sarcasm
Summary: Sophie Temple-Noble meets the Doctor.
Disclaimer: All I own is the food I provide for the plotbunnies.
A/N: This was supposed be just a little cliché “How did you first fall in love with blah blah blah” drabble, but eh, muse took me by the neck.
The title is totally stolen from the novel by Madeleine L’engle. It’s also a very, very bad pun.
A/N2: I'd like to give big thanks to the lovely beautifulntime for being a beta for this story. :D
He was looking through a thin scrapbook when I first met him. He was sitting alone in the library where Dad had taken me every week or so to have quiet reading time. I was about seven, the age where I couldn’t help talking to strangers despite Mum and Dad always telling me not to. I knew one day I would regret it, but that day wasn’t the case.
“Whatcha reading?” I asked him in my library voice.
He looked at me with friendly eyes. Extremely aged, but friendly. “My old friend’s scrapbook that she left behind,” he replied with a smile, then flipped a page and looked fondly at it. “Poorly made, if you ask me. She was never much of an artist.”
“Can I have a look?” I asked.
He looked rather surprised at my request, but then pulled up a chair next to him and I eagerly made myself comfortable on it. He flipped to a certain page, as if the rest were things he wanted to keep to himself, and then slid the book on the table so we both were looking.
“That’s her,” he said, pointing to a picture of a pretty woman with red hair.
I could’ve sworn I’ve never seen her before, but she looked familiar to me. She looked…
“That’s my Nanna!” I exclaimed, and multiple people immediately shushed me. I blushed but then repeated in a much quieter voice, “That’s my Nan!”
At first he gave me a bewildered look. His old friendly eyes glistened and I didn’t really know what that meant. I wouldn’t know until I’d meet him again, nine years later.
And at first, I was confused with his surprise, but in a moment it dawned on me. “You’re the Doctor,” I said to him, hardly above a whisper.
To me, it felt like the whole world stopped. This was the man of legend. This was the man who had saved us more than had Dad’s hot dinners. This was the man that my Nan used to know so long ago. And it took me a few years, but I realized that this was the man who took away so much from her.
“Oi,” Dad called to me in a loud whisper as he came by. “What did I say? Oh, sorry if she’s been a bother,” he said to the Doctor, the man who Dad thought was just some innocent bloke.
All he did was smile and whisper back “oh it’s fine” and the like.
As we left I was about to tell Dad everything, but then I looked back at the Doctor and he gave me a smile with a finger over his lips. So I never spoke of it since.
Nearly a decade later, Nanna Donna passed. She was ninety-two.
I was still dressed all in black, walking around alone. I didn’t feel like being with anyone. I already missed her. I missed her sarcasm and her witty jokes about Dad, I missed the stories about her granddad and parents when they were still with her. I missed her hugs, her wonderful company, everything. Perhaps the only thing left off the list was whenever I was tempted to tell her that I talked to the Doctor that one day. I was going to, when I knew she was going to die. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do that to her.
I was going to start crying then and there in the middle of the street, but something in an alleyway caught my eye. It was bright blue. It was the first time I’d ever seen it. I’m certainly hoping it won’t be my last.
No one noticed me as I shrank away into the alley, approaching the police box. I placed a hand on it, and it hummed with vibration, alive.
I did a rather risky thing. I opened the door and took a step inside.
The Doctor was there. He looked up from his table of buttony thingies and looked at me with a confused, almost angry face. Then he looked into my eyes, at my black clothing, and instantly softened his expression.
“Hey, come in.” He welcomed me as if I were a frequently returning guest to his home.
I shyly made my way in. It was flippin’ bigger on the inside. No one told me that bit. Nan probably would’ve, but…
I took a look at his clothes. All black. “You went, too.”
He nodded. “Had to.”
I gave a meek smile, a sad one actually. “Sophie,” I said, and held out my hand. “Since you didn’t catch my name nine years ago.”
He shook it with a smile, as if he already knew my name. “The Doctor. But you knew that. And this is the TARDIS. Say hello to Sophie, old girl! This is Donna’s granddaughter. Would you believe it? She’s even got her hair.” He looked up at his ship and suddenly a happy hum was heard emanating from the tall walls.
The TARDIS. What a beautiful thing. I bet she (so it has a gender…) missed Nanna, too.
The Doctor chuckled, and then made his way to a corner, lifting up a large tile from the floor to reveal transparent cabinets. He tapped on each one, looking for a certain one in particular. He gave a profound “aha!” when he found it. He beckoned for me to come along with him, and I knelt beside him.
He lifted the lid and took out a shoebox. The brand was something alien.
“Here,” he said, handing it to me. “They’re not actually shoes, sorry. I don’t know your size.”
“Eight and a half,” I answered, joking. “What’s this then?”
“Well, open it.”
So I did. There was the same messily-crafted scrapbook, and it was thicker than before, as if half of it had been torn off but stapled back together. There were a few trinkets, a gold necklace that looked like a pill, and a…
“You were married to her?” I asked in shock, pulling out the gold band.
He laughed. “No. That’s a biodamper.”
“Oh.” Whatever that meant.
“Though, you know. I would’ve, eventually. I think.”
That’s when I knew what those sparkling eyes meant.
“She was my best mate,” he said.
I raised an eyebrow. “Am I supposed to take that literally, or…?”
“No!” He blustered. “No no no no. No.”
“Alright then, good. Can’t see my Nanna like that anyway.” I shuddered, and we laughed and calmed down all in a moment. “But you did love her.”
He nodded.
“I never got the whole story,” I said. “The parts important to Nanna, anyway. How’d you meet her?”
He smiled, as if he’d been waiting to tell this story to someone for years. “She was supposed to get married to some bloke. Not your granddad, just this other dishonest, conniving cad. He nearly fed your Nan to giant spiders! He lied to her and broke her heart. But you know Donna. Remarkably strong.”
“Yeah,” I agreed fondly.
“She zapped up right in this ship, though my old girl’s interior was a bit different. Oh, and did your Nan hate me! Slapped me right in the face -I liked that face, too, so much younger than this one-within the first few minutes of knowing her. She had quite a hand on her! A mouth, too. Could shout at you for other galaxies to hear. I’m surprised I’ve not gone deaf.”
I chuckled. That was my Nan for you.
“I asked her to come travel with me that night. She said no.”
“But she obviously regretted that, didn’t she?”
“Quite. She found me again after this Adipose incident. It’s pretty rare for someone to actually find me like that. The only two people who have done it were Donna and her granddad. And now you, I suppose. I’m starting to think my destiny is linked with Noble blood. All I know is that it can’t be coincidence. There are no coincidences in this universe, Sophie, remember that.”
“Will do,” I said. Then I asked probably the dumbest question there was for me to ask. “Do you miss her?”
He laughed at me, a kind of laugh that said “well no shit, Sherlock” but also had a tinge of sadness. “Yeah. I do. Horribly, and I try to not think about her, but Donna is too hard to ever, ever forget. You know, I had a wife, once. Even with her I found myself mindlessly talking about Donna. Bad move, sort of. I once accidentally called her Donna when we-”
“Don’t want to hear it. Please.”
“Right... Sorry.”
I forgave him quickly for nearly scarring me. “Could you tell me more about Nanna when she was with you?”
“Ohhh, yes. She was just this completely, gobsmackingly brilliant woman. She never believed me when I told her. That stubborn ‘un! Kept me in check, stood up for herself. And then she saved the entirety of creation. She outdid me! She’s why you’re here right now, in more ways than one. Really, she was…amazing.” And then his fond smile dropped down. “Too amazing for her own good, actually.”
“I’m sorry you had to do that,” I told him with all the honesty I could muster. No one ever told me how or why he’d done that to my Nan. That made me start to hate him a little a few years back, when I’d be left to think about it.
He gave a wan smile. “It was either that blasted mindwipe or she’d die. And then you wouldn’t be here. And I quite enjoy your company, Sophie, so all the more reason.”
Awfully good point. “I wish someone had told me that bit.”
He frowned. “It must have been a big burden to you and your family. Especially to you, since no one told you the whole story. You were left wondering.”
“Yeah. Thank you, for taking the time to tell me this. I was afraid no one would have.”
“As if my connection with the Nobles could let that happen,” he laughed.
I shuffled around the items in the shoebox, picking some other stuff up and examining them. But I always found myself looking at that ring.
“How’d it happen?”
“How did what happen?”
“You know, that realization that you wanted to one day slip a real ring on Nanna’s finger.”
The Doctor chuckled. “Well, that’s a hard one. I’ve fallen in love with Donna lots of times. Each time a bit more, as cliché as that sounds.”
“Well, when was the first?”
He sighed with another reminiscent smile of his, bringing his legs up to hold against his chest.
“On the first day I knew her, actually. When she’d said no. Why, you’re thinking? ‘Cause when she told me no, she told me to find someone. She told me to go out and find someone who would stop me when I got too reckless. And that, Sophie, was when I was one hundred and twenty percent sure she was special and that she’d be special to me one day. For multiple reasons. One of them is that she was right, and she dared to be right. Another was that when she said no, when she refused to go with me, she wanted nothing from me to but for me to find someone to keep me in check, to make sure I wasn’t doing something stupid, to take care of me, and to make me happy. She didn’t care if it wasn’t her. She just wanted that for me. Funnily enough, it did end up being her! The universe, it does funny stuff sometimes.” He mockingly shook his fist at the air.
I smiled genuinely for the first time in the past few months.
“I wish I had known her during that time,” I said.
Then we exchanged a knowing look, silence trailing behind my words. No words were said, because they weren’t needed.
“Nah,” I finally answered. “I can’t.”
“Good. I’m not allowed to travel on anyone’s personal timeline and meddle with it, anyway. You’re far too young, too! Blimey, how old are you? Like… twelve?”
“Sixteen! And why’d you offer it then?”
“I didn’t! You’re just hearing voices in your head.” He smirked with a bit of cheekiness. Oh, I could see why Nanna would want to slap that. Even though it was supposedly a different face. But I could also see why she would adore it.
I checked my watch. It was nearly sundown.
“You’ve got to go, don’t you?” he said. It was probably the most depressing thing I’ve heard since I was told Nanna was dying.
“Yeah. It’s getting late. Mum and Dad will be even more upset than they already are.” I put the lid back on the box and handed it to him.
“Oh, no.” He pushed it back into my hands. “It’s yours. I’m giving it to you.”
“But…”
“I already had my share of Donna. She’s written some things in that scrapbook, too, things you might want to read, ‘cause this little collection is all you’re going to get of my Donna.”
“Hey now, she doesn’t belong to you,” I joked.
He laughed, saying “I wish,” and with that he escorted me outside.
“How about I walk you home?”
I nodded. “Would you…want to stop by Nanna’s grave?”
He frowned. “For what?”
“I don’t know. To talk to her alone or something.”
The Doctor chuckled at me. “She can’t hear me.”
“Exactly. Which is why now you can do it without being creepy or her head exploding. So yes?”
He shrugged. “All right…”
It took me a few days to realize that he was just humoring me.
We walked to the cemetery, and the skies were slowly deepening in their blue. We reached Nanna’s grave, the flowers still fresh on the foot of the headstone.
The Doctor stared at it for a while. Then he took his cold hands out of his pockets and sat down in front of the stone with legs crossed as I stood watching him get comfortable with his very best friend.
He stared at her engraved name as if it were her eyes and smiled. He said nothing at all, but just sat there and stared. He occasionally laughed to himself.
“Did she say something funny?” I said with slight sarcasm.
“Yeah,” he sighed nonchalantly. I’ll never quite begin to understand him.
“Sophie!” A distant voice called. It was Mum in the car.
“Well,” I sighed. “This is goodbye, Doctor.” I waited for an answer, but he was too distracted with Nanna.
“Oi!” I reached over and messed up his hair.
“Hey! What?” he turned. “Oh. Right, sorry.” He stood to face me properly. “I guess this is goodbye, Sophie! For now I suppose. You take care of this, yeah?” He tapped on the lid of the shoebox in my arms.
“Yeah,” I said to him, smiling back.
“Sophie!” Mum called. She would’ve tried to run me over at this point.
“Bye, Doctor.” I gave him a hug (an awkward one ‘cause the box was in the way, oh, Nanna Donna, bless you), and as I walked to Mum’s car, he sat back down in front of Nanna and continued to talk to her.
“Who was that?” Mum asked with concern and suspicion.
Dad looked at the tiny figure by Nanna’s grave. “Looks oddly familiar, that bloke…”
Mum made an irrelevant comment about how on earth could Dad see that, but I just smiled.
“That’s the Doctor,” I told them.
They turned in their seats to look at me, eyes slightly wide, then at each other.
“Oh,” Mum said. “Good to see him well, I suppose.”
Then we drove off, and I just sat in the back, my hands protectively over the shoebox. If anyone else besides Mum or Dad asked, they were just shoes. Because Nanna was just Nanna to the world. But I knew, and the Doctor knew, that she was so much more.
A week before Donna’s death…
It was midnight. She ought to be asleep, but Donna, still stubborn as ever, couldn’t. She had now such a limited time to be awake anyhow. Why waste it on sleep?
She sat up in her bent hospital bed with aged, thick papers in her hands. She found this a few days ago. It was why she was dying. Well, it was speeding it up. She was getting old anyhow.
A dark figure emerged into the room, and pulled up a chair by Donna’s bed.
“You’re quite sneaky, aren’t you?” the person asked.
“Yeah,” Donna sighed, knowing exactly who it was despite the voice being so different. “You didn’t think of this, did you?”
The Doctor chuckled. “No, I didn’t.”
“I was wondering when you’d find the other half. Must have taken you years.”
“Yeah, actually. That note you stuck to the end! Oh, you were so clever. ‘So when you finally get over me and all that, I have the other half of this thingy. See me if you want it. And screw timelines.’ When did you ever have the time to devise this?”
Donna gave a weak smile. “I’m old. I forgot. Don’t make me recall.”
“Fine. Still pretty damn clever, though. Risky and having the chance of never working out, but clever. I admire you, Donna Temple-Noble.”
“Oh, shut up, Spaceman.” Saying that name again felt so good. “Could you turn the light on? I’d like a good look at your new face.”
He did so and then sat back down where he was. “Well? How d’you like it? Not as young as the one you always saw, but I rather fancy this one. Especially the nose.”
Donna did something of a giggle, and laid her palm on the Doctor’s cheek. She sighed, tears welling up in her not-as-old-as-his eyes. “I missed you. And that’s not fair. I had to wait, what, fifty, sixty years to see you again? It’s probably been only five for you.”
“No, shhh, don’t think about that,” he said tenderly, mostly because she was right. “I’m here now.”
“I s’pose.”
They spend a moment looking at each other, and he thumbed her old hand that rested on his face. They savored the silence, partly because Donna would begin to hurt if she talked too much.
“You know,” he began, “I met your little granddaughter a few days ago. Well, nine years ago your time.”
“Sophie?”
“So that’s her name? I didn’t ask when we met.”
“Rude as always.”
“Yeah,” he beamed. “She was a real sweetheart. She saw me looking at this.” Out of his jacket he pulled out the other half of the scrapbook. “She recognized your photo right away.”
Donna smiled. “The gift’s been spoiled, then. I wanted you to stitch this back up together and give it to her after you’re done sleeping with it for the next thousand nights.”
Oh, Donna. She knew how much he adored her. And she made a hell lot of fun of him for it. All in good nature, though. She loved him too.
“I have a note for her in there, so you better not keep it ‘til she’s my age or I’ll haunt you.”
“I promise!” He laughed at the thought of Donna’s ghost stalking him throughout the rest of his Time Lord life.
“I’ll be joining everyone up there soon. Gramps and Nan, Mum and Dad, and my Shaun. Do your other selves go up there, too? How many Doctors have there been since I left?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Lost count. Quite a few. The one after you was bonkers! I fancied me some bow ties.”
“But you hated bow ties.”
“I know. It was appalling.”
“What are you into now?”
“Fedoras. I just don’t have mine right now. It’s rude to wear hats indoors.”
Donna sighed. “Dork, as ever.”
“Oi! They’re stylish.”
“Yeah, next you’ll be donning skinny jeans. Honestly.”
“Well…”
They laughed, but Donna couldn’t as hard as she used to and just put her energy into smiling as widely as she could.
“Oh, Donna,” he said, holding her hand. “You were happy, weren’t you?”
She nodded. “Yeah. So you’re forgiven, I suppose.”
He kissed her hand and laid it back on his cheek. “That’s good. You’ll kill me into a regeneration if you’d told me otherwise.”
“Fine then, I don’t forgive you and I bitterly despise you. Hurry! Let that face change to something a bit better to look at.”
“Oi! I like this face!” he said in mock defense, chuckling. “Oh, Donna, I love you.”
“Sorry, Doctor, but alas I’m a married woman. Or was,” she teased. “But okay, I’ll admit it once before I go. I love you too. Always have. While I still remembered, anyway.”
Donna winced in pain.
“What’s wrong?”
“It’s my head. That and I think I’m using my voice more than I should,” she said, now in a whisper. “You’d better go. Knowing you, you’re not even allowed to be here.”
He smirked. “Too well, Donna, too well.”
She rolled her eyes with a smile, and he kissed her forehead. That was the last time Donna would ever see him, and the last that the Doctor would ever see of her.
That is, if he followed the rules.
End.