(Doctor Who/Star Wars) A Force to Be Reckoned With for xover_exchange
Title: A Force to be Reckoned With
Author: hobbit_eyes
Fandoms: Doctor Who/Star Wars
Characters Anakin Skywalker, Yoda; Donna Noble, Tenth Doctor
Pairings: None
Rating: PG
Word count: 6,074
Spoilers: Set between episode 2 and 3 of the prequel trilogy (but with references to events of the original trilogy), up to series 4 of Doctor Who
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Star Wars and Doctor Who belong to their respective creators
A/N: Thanks so much to reasonablycrazy for stepping in as a last minute beta and helping me to figure out what the hell to call it!
Summary: What do you do when you wake up in a space prison with no idea what's happened to your ride home? Well, it helps if there's a Jedi Knight in the next cell.
This was not the first time in her journeys with the Doctor that Donna had woken up somewhere she didn’t recognise, but this was by far the most boring room she’d ever done so in. As she sat up, she cracked her head on the low bunk ceiling above her. Cursing, she squinted in the bright lights that had flared into life at her movement, and looked around.
The room was so small that this only took a moment, so she did so again, to be thorough. No, it really was as plain as it had looked the first time round - smooth black walls, the edges of a door barely visible in the far wall, the only furniture the bunk she was lying on. She groaned. Other than weird minimalists, there was only one kind of person who got put in rooms like this, and they didn’t get put there on personal preference.
“Great. I’m in a cell,” she said to herself. “Where’s that skinny alien when you need him?”
Just to check, she got up to test the door. Not only was it locked, she couldn’t see any kind of handle on her side of the door. Was the Doctor in another cell like this, maybe just next door? She looked up in the upper edges of the room, to the dark corners, and spotted what she’d been searching for - a small vent to let air in. Nowhere near as big as all those space films would have you think space vents were, but big enough.
She’d seen this trick on some news story about prisoners of war - or maybe it was a Hollyoaks Christmas special - where people locked up communicated by banging on the pipes connecting their cells. By perching on the edge of the bunk, she could just about reach it, and she started hitting it. It was only when she’d done a lot of banging that she realised this was no way to communicate. She didn’t even know bloody Morse Code, for Christ’s sake.
In exasperation, she just yelled, “Hey! Doctor! Are you there? Can you hear me?”
There was silence. With a sigh, she started to climb down from the bunk, when she heard a voice come floating back down the vent towards her.
“Hello? Who’s that?”
She scrambled back up. “Doctor? Is that you?”
“No, sorry. Who are you?”
“I’m locked up. Can you get me out?”
“No, I’m locked up too.”
“You haven’t seen this man around anywhere, have you? Tall, skinny as a weed, brown suit? Runs around a lot. Blue box. Weird screwdriver thing with a blue light at the end.”
“Can’t say I have.”
“Oh. So what are you in for?”
She thought she heard a chuckle from the other end of the vent. “Excuse me?”
“You know. What did they get you in for? I can’t really remember, you see. I mean, I remember me and the Doctor getting here, and him chatting to the locals, but they seemed to get pretty angry pretty sharpish - just want to check if I’m locked up because he offended some diplomat, or just saying a bad word, or what.”
“Well - I’m in here for high treason against the leader of this world, due to be executed in the morning.” Donna’s stomach turned over. “Does that help?” added the voice.
Donna had to step down off the bunk and sit down on the edge of it. “Oh God, what’s the Doctor done now?”
“Hello? Hello? Are you all right over there?”
“Yeah, just great,” yelled back Donna, resting her head in her hands.
“If it helps,” called the voice, “you won’t be getting executed tomorrow, I’m the only one on the schedule. They’re getting quite a few people in to watch it, apparently.”
“You sound awfully upbeat about it!”
“Oh, they won’t manage to kill me. I’m a Jedi Knight. I’ll just get to escape at last.”
Donna didn’t particularly care if he was a Jedi Knight or a jelly baby, if he couldn’t get himself out of his cell there wasn’t much chance he’d be able to get her out of hers. She had to find some other way to get out of here, and to get back to the Doctor, wherever he’d put himself.
She patted her clothes, but once again, she’d failed to wear something with pockets. She looked once more around her cell, running her hands over the walls, but there was nothing to use there. She returned to the door and felt around the edges, but there was no chance of prying it open or bashing it down. She sighed. Back to the old standby, then.
She started hammering on the door and bellowing at the top of her lungs. “Oi! Let me out! I don’t know what I’m doing in here! You can’t be locked up if you don’t know what you did!”
“You can here,” came the other prisoner’s voice unhelpfully.
Donna ignored him and banged hard on the door a few more times, and suddenly the door went completely transparent. She took a step back in surprise - it was like it had completely disappeared, if not for the faint reflection of herself she could just see in it - and on the other side was, well, an alien, and one of the most alien-looking aliens she’d seen in all her travels so far. And she’d seen the Ood. It was green, with big black eyes and weirdly bug-like face, and she tried not to pull a face.
“What are you shouting about?” it demanded.
She pulled herself up to full height, and adopted the voice she had perfected from years of dealing with bosses who weren’t too bothered by temps, since they weren’t going to be around for long. Reasonable, assertive, with only the mildest hint of threatening so that they’d never be able to pin anything on her in court. “You’ve locked me up and I don’t know why. I demand to know what I’ve done wrong, what you’re planning to do to me, and where the Doctor is.”
“You were found in a restricted area.”
“Are you serious? It was an accident. The Doctor practically lives in restricted areas. Talk to him.”
“There are no excuses. The punishment is death.”
“Death? You can’t execute us, we didn’t know! It didn’t look restricted - there wasn’t even a sign! You have to have a sign!”
The alien was unmoved. “It is martial law. You will be executed two days from now.”
His hand moved to the wall where she assumed the un-transparent-the-door-button-thingy was, and quickly shouted, “Wait!” It paused, and waited expectantly, while she struggled to make her brain work. The Doctor had tried so hard to teach her to listen rather than just shout at everything, and this is what she had to do hear - listen, and use what she’d heard. What had she heard? Jedis, restricted, war -
She lowered her voice and leaned as close to the door as she could get. “I have information about the Jedi Knight in the next cell,” she said.
It was a long shot, but given that the alien didn’t immediately walk away, she had to assume she was on the right track. “He is to be executed tomorrow already,” it said.
“About allies of his. Other, er, knights.”
“What information?”
She shook her head. “I can’t tell you in here - that vent leads to his cell, he can hear everything I say. He might figure out lies if he knows what I’m telling you in advance.”
The alien considered, then nodded. “I will escort you to another room. Then you will tell me what you know. Stand back from the door and put your hands behind your head.”
She did as it said, and while it did something to the door to open it, she tried to figure out what the next step of her plan was. It felt like it was a good plan, if only she knew what the rest of it was. And, she thought as the alien opened the door and waved her out with a gun, she had to work it out soon.
Out of the door, walking ahead of the alien down the corridor, there was still no sign of that all-important next step. Given they were planning on executing her in two days anyway, she doubted it’d be averse to shooting her if she tried to attack it. But it looked pretty puny - skinny limbs - so she might be able to get the drop on it if there was some kind of distraction. Great idea, Donna, she thought to herself, Now you’ve just got to count on some kind of distraction showing itself in the few seconds left before you get to whatever interview room you’re heading for and are forced to make stuff up about - oh, what were they even called? Jemis? Hedis? Jellies? Oh, that’s just great...
Her thoughts were interrupted by a loud, mechanical squealing coming towards her from behind. Before she could turn, there was an ‘oof!’ from the alien as something crashed into it, and it staggered forwards into her. She spun round as fast as she could and managed to grab the laser gun from its flailing arms as it fell forwards to the ground. She had a moment of panic as she held it - she couldn’t exactly use it, but what else could she do here? - before she noticed that, to her massive relief, the alien had knocked itself out on the wall of the narrow corridor as it fell.
She looked up from the alien to her unexpected saviour, and blinked. It was a little robot, like a blue and white pedal bin on wheels. And it was bleeping at her expectantly.
“What,” she said, “the hell.”
The robot bleeped again, and wheeled back and forth, nudging the alien’s body with its wheels.
“It’s not dead! It’s just knocked out. Uh - and thanks, I guess.”
It just whistled aggressively and rammed it even harder.
“Do you not have an English mode??” It bleeped in what sounded to her very aggressive tones. Evidently not. She looked down at where it was nudging, and spotted what looked like a card attached to its belt. An access card? She pulled it off, and the robot whistled in a much more encouraging way. It span on its wheels and trundled away down the corridor.
“Hey! Where are you going?” she yelled after it, and its head span round to face her in a way that reminded her unnervingly of The Exorcist. But it whistled in a friendly way again, and trundled off again. She guessed she had to follow it.
It looked like it was leading her back to her cell, but it stopped at the cell adjacent to it. The Jelly Knight’s? She looked down at the robot again, and it whistled. She took that as confirmation, and shrugged, inserting the access card into the tiny slot by the door. With a pleasant beep, it slid open. Beyond was a cell which was absolutely identical to hers, except for the one major difference of the inhabitant. If her cell had contained a young man clad in - was that dark leather? Seriously? - sprawled as the very vision of nonchalance and relaxation on the bed, she would have noticed.
His face blanked in astonishment at the sight of her, and he sat up. “Who are you?”
“I’m Donna Noble, I’m here to rescue you!”
He still looked baffled. “You’re who?”
“Oi, you don’t need to sound so surprised! I’ll just go and close your door behind me, shall I?”
“No - wait - sorry, you’re from the cell next door? How did you get out? And in here?”
“Oh. I shouted a lot, it’s how I do most things.” There was a loud bleeping from behind her knees, and she allowed, “All right, this little robot helped a bit as well. Now are you coming or not?”
He leaped to his feet and followed her out into the corridor, and they hurried along as quietly as they could. “Sorry,” he said, “I just wasn’t expecting - who are you?”
“Donna, I said. Human. And I don’t actually know how to use this, so I don’t know if you want it,” she added, hefting the laser gun over to him.
“Anakin Skywalker.” He looked a little awkward, and not just about the gun that she’d thrust into his hands. “Do you mind if I ask - do you know where you’re going?”
“To get out?” They both stopped in the corridor. “Uh - no idea, actually, do you?”
He nodded. “Back this way,” he said, gesturing with his head, and they set off again in the complete opposite direction to where Donna had been going, the robot still trundling along behind them.
“So is that your robot?”
“Oh - yes, R2-D2.”
“Was that a space word?”
“It’s his name. R2-D2.”
“Oh. Right. It has a name. Of course.” Anakin held up a hand and stopped, and she waited behind him. Just in the distance round the corner, she could hear footsteps, but they quickly receded from hearing. They set off again. “And you’re Anakin Skywalker - a, what was it? Jelly Knight?”
“Jedi Knight.” He looked confused over his shoulder at her. “You haven’t heard of us?”
“Let’s say no. Is that, like, a rank?”
He looked even more surprised than when she’d showed up at his cell door, but was at least polite enough to try to hide it this time. “We’re the guardians of the Republic. We are the ones gifted in the ways of the Force.”
“Ah, I see. No, wait, no I don’t. What?”
“Where are you from? Are you from beyond the Outer Rim, or something?”
“Hey! Are you calling me backwards or something?”
“I wasn’t meaning to be rude,” he said quickly, with a panicked look in his eyes almost pleading Oh God I wasn’t being rude please don’t hurt me, “I was just wondering where you could be from that you hadn’t heard of the Jedi Knights.”
“Oh. VERY far away. Very. Like, your concept of very far? Further than that.”
He chuckled. “I don’t know, my concept of far is pretty far.”
“Farther than that.”
“Farther than Tatooine?”
“I don’t know where that is. But I’m assuming yes. Where are we, come to think of it?”
“You’re not serious. You have no idea where you are?”
“No, I’m asking because I want you to think I’m clueless, it’s such an attractive trait. Give me a break, would you?”
“You’re in the Black Zone of the Si’Klaata Cluster, just a few parsecs from Kessel. This is a Separatist-funded mercenary operation based on an asteroid, monitoring shipping activity in the area. They don’t want to prosecute smugglers making the Kessel Run, they want to intercept their cargo.”
There were far too many words in his explanation that sounded like gibberish, and she suspected that even if he told her what they all were, she’d still have no idea where she was. So she just nodded, and said, “So what did they get you for?”
“Well, I’m here to stop them, obviously.”
“Obviously. So what’s the plan?”
He peered around a corner. “They’ve taken my lightsaber. I’m not sure where it is. I need to find it, then I can get us out of here.”
“What’s wrong with the gun?”
“The what?” She gestured. “Oh, the blaster.” He grinned. “You definitely haven’t met a Jedi before. Right, I think the guard operations room is just down this corridor through that door. Moment we step in there, there’ll be fighting, so you’ll just need to stay back, and - what?”
She’d ignored him and stuck her head round the corner as well, to check out this door. “Isn’t there a way round? Or, I don’t know, one of those massive vents?”
“No.” He looked at her again, utterly baffled. “A vent? What would give you that idea?”
“Nothing,” she said, a little sulkily. “Just trying to contribute. Isn’t there anything we can do other than shoot everyone?”
Anakin considered. “Well, I suppose I could think of something.”
“Would you?”
He turned the corner and set off down the corridor, so abruptly that it took her a moment to hurry after him. She couldn’t decide whether he was impulsive or just a bit rude. Stopping at the door, he looked as though he was listening for a moment, though she had no idea what he could be hearing. “Yes, this’ll be fine,” he said, “Stay here.”
Before she could even ask what he meant by that, he was off again, opening the door with the access card and waltzing in quite calmly. She heard raised mechanical voices and was about to follow him to yank him back, to smack some sense into his ridiculous head, when blaster fire erupted in the small room, and she had to throw herself to the side of the corridor and crouch down with the robot to avoid being hit by any stray shots. She tried to see round the edge of the door, but could only see laser bolts flying around the room, and heard large amounts of crashing metal and explosions. Finally it quietened down, and when she pulled the door slowly open, white smoke crawled out into the corridor. She stepped in and tried to see through the haze.
Anakin Skywalker was standing right in the middle of what appeared to a major operations room, and she saw the smoke was coming from several smashed consoles and some twisted remains of metal on the floor, which she slowly realised had once been robots as well. “You did all this?” she managed.
“Without a blaster,” he said, beaming, throwing it back to her. “Since you asked so nicely.”
“But - how?”
He shook his head. “You seriously don’t know about Jedi, do you?”
“No! Why do you keep saying that like it’s such a big deal? I know loads of people who’ve never heard of you Jelly Knights.”
“Jedi.”
“Whatever, are you, like, magic or something?”
“Something. Now come on, I need to find my lightsaber, check the storage units.”
He began pulling open doors and pulling out shelves, while she gingerly moved some robot wreckage aside from another unit. “What am I looking for?” she asked.
“It’s - uh - look, I’ll know it when you find it. Just don’t turn it on.”
“It has an ‘on’ button?”
He paused. “Maybe I should look. You take the blaster and keep an eye out.”
He searched the entire room, but didn’t find it. “Right. Next place to look will be the main control room. R2, check the computer, check the layout.”
“Can’t you just get another one?” asked Donna.
“I’d rather not,” said Anakin delicately. The little robot trundled up to one of the few intact panels remaining and, with a whirring bleep, connected to it. On the console appeared a plan of what she assumed was the base, and she saw it was arranged like spokes on a wheel. Anakin looked at it closely and nodded.
“Main control room is down one of these other arms, branching off the central dock. We can go there, you can get a ship fired up while I deal with that, and we can get out of here.”
Ignoring the fact that she was expected to get a ship ‘fired up’ for the time being, she said, “Can you droid find anything on there?”
“Pretty much.”
“Can he look for another prisoner? Would have been caught same time as me, probably listed as the Doctor or John Smith or James MacCrimmon - or any number of names, to be honest, but probably Doctor.”
R2 bleeped, and she saw lists of names scrolling down the screen, too fast for her to read. It finally read ‘ERROR’, and R2 bleeped in disappointment.
“He’s not listed,” said Anakin.
“But he’s got to be! Any prisoner taken in at the same time as me, scheduled to be executed the day after tomorrow -”
“He’ll have searched for that.” R2 bleeped again, and Anakin nodded. “We must be the only two prisoners here.”
“But that’s impossible. He wouldn’t have left me here.”
Anakin shrugged. “Maybe he already escaped. Maybe he’s trying to get you out. But whatever he’s doing, let’s focus on not going back to the cells, shall we? I don’t know if you’ve noticed we’re in a bit of trouble, but -”
“Can you drop that attitude, please? I know I don’t know what a Jelly monk is or a Kessel run, but this is not my first rodeo, I have broken out of space prison before, OK? I’ve faced Sontarans, and lava monsters, and giant freaky space spiders, and I can deal with this, all of this. What I can’t deal with is the Doctor being I don’t know where. He’s - he’s my ride home.”
Anakin inclined his head. “Then we’ll try to find him. But for now, we need to keep moving.”
As if in agreement, an alarm started blaring above their heads. “Come on, let’s go,” said Anakin, any sympathy in his tone replaced by all business, and with a wave of his hand, the main outer door slid open. He disappeared through it in a swirl of his dark clothes, the little robot hot on his heels, leaving Donna to run after him going, “Wait, was that magic too?”
They made it down the corridor without coming across any trouble, and found themselves in the space dock - a room so massive that Donna could barely comprehend it, filled with spaceships of all shapes and sizes. Anakin seemed to know where he was going, weaving between some very shiny models in pursuit of his own, and she couldn’t quite stop herself from looking everywhere amongst these ridiculously futuristic machines for the small, wooden blue box. But there was no sign of it, and Anakin reached a yellow speeder.
“This was my ship,” he said, “There’s room for you two. Get in there and get her started, I’ll be back in a minute.”
“‘Get her started’?” Now had come the time to address this issue. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“It’s really quite intuitive. Just look in the cockpit, and -“
“Maybe for you, space boy, I can’t even tell which end’s the front.”
“Oh come on -”
“Is it the pointy one?”
“Fine. Just get in - R2, you get aboard as well, perform system checks. I’ll be back.”
Before she could argue more, he’d run off again. He had far too much energy, she thought to herself, but resignedly pulled herself up into the spaceship and had a look at the controls. R2 bleeped, having manoeuvred himself into a special slot in the wing, and to her astonishment, writing appeared a display in the cockpit. She couldn’t read it for a few seconds, but then the TARDIS translator circuit finally seemed to kick in.
“The take-off circuits have been disabled? Can’t you fix them?”
More bleeps.
“Well, what can I do about it?”
Bleep bleep.
“Go after him? Ha, your master just ran off into a whole mess of angry guards. I’m not going after him into that mess.”
Bleep bleep bleep.
“I know I’ve got a blaster, but I don’t want to kill -“
Bleep bleep!
“... well, why did nobody tell me it had a stun setting??” She looked down at the blaster and, with some more directions from R2, was able to flick a couple of dials and - hopefully - put it onto the ‘stun’ setting. She groaned.
“Oh, god. Donna to the rescue then, I suppose.”
She slid down off the speeder again and made her way towards the corridor which Anakin had last disappeared down. It looked almost identical to the last - did this base come out of an unoriginal kit in a box, or something? - and soon the resemblance became uncanny as she started to come across more twisted, smoking heaps of metal that had previously been robots.
She rounded a corner and was met with an impressive sight. Anakin was surrounded by yet more wreckage, and was sending droids flying into each other and the walls with resounding crashes with just small flicks of his fingers. He seemed to be managing fine on his own, despite R2’s protestations, until several of those green insect aliens stepped out from a doorway further down the corridor. Stopping in his tracks and seeing them, Anakin froze, momentarily lost of any ideas of what to do.
“Hands up, Jedi,” she heard them order, and she realised they hadn’t spotted her as far down as she was yet. She knew she only had a second, so she sent up a prayer to whichever gods might be listening - preferably ones with the ability to send sharpshooting skills - and leaped out from her hiding place and started firing.
She had to give Anakin credit, he had killer reflexes. The second she started firing, he sprang up into the air, grabbed a ceiling fixture and clung on. Good thing too, given she’d decided to go for quantity of shots over quality, and just fired wildly down the corridor. All of the aliens dropped, and she stood there, gasping for breath as though she’d punched them all out herself, as Anakin fell back lightly to the floor and turned to face her, looking impressed despite himself.
“Lucky I sensed you were there,” he said, “Or I’d be drooling on the floor with them.”
“Oh, please, stop, your gratitude is overwhelming, I’m blushing.”
“I could have gotten out of it.” Seeing her face, though, he acquiesced. “But thank you for the thought.”
“The thought. Tell you what, sunshine, next time I’ll just think about saving your ass and stay back at the ship.”
“All right, you’ve made your point, thank you. Let’s keep moving, shall we?”
“Can you seriously not just get another lightsaber in a shop?” She hurried after him. “Oh, but by the way, R2 was saying something about your take-off circuits being disabled - we’ll need to do something about that.”
Anakin groaned. “Classic technique. There’ll be some kind of authorisation code. I’ll look on the computers in the main control room...”
“If you manage to leave any intact...”
“What was that? I can’t hear you over the sound of utter corridor destruction.”
“Hey, when in Rome, do as the apparently batshit crazy Jelly knights do.”
“Jedi!”
Their argument was interrupted by more wailing alarms, and the sound of hurrying footsteps towards them. All humour gone from his face, Anakin turned to look at her gravely. “Can you cover us? We get to the control room, I can handle things from there, but you need to cover our backs.”
She nodded. “Yes. I know how this works now.”
“They might not be shooting to stun.”
“I wasn’t planning on getting shot anyway.”
His serious face broke into a smile. “We have that in common. Ready?”
She didn’t get the chance to answer, as guards started pouring into the corridor behind them and firing their blasters at them. Ducking instinctively, Donna realised most of the their shots were going wide, and concentrated on just hurrying after Anakin and sending the occasional series of blasts back behind her to keep them at a distance. Smoke filled the small corridor, caustic metal smoke which burned her throat and her eyes, and the sound of the blasters and shouting rung in her ears. The corridor seemed endless, corner after corner as Anakin led them deeper and deeper in, and with the guards getting closer, it seemed impossible that they could make it out of there. Donna realised she was still counting on the Doctor for a last-minute save, but wasn’t quite sure what his entrance cue would be. She was starting to get a very, very bad feeling about this.
“You’d better be damn good with that lightsaber!” she yelled over her shoulder, “Because I don’t see how we’re getting back to the ship without it!”
“Oh, don’t worry, I am!” he shouted back - even racing ahead of impossible odds under heavy fire, he still sounded cocky - “One of the best swordsmen in the galaxy - and once we get into this control room here, we’ll be safe...”
They reached the main door she assumed was the control room, and felt a surge of relief as he flicked his hand to open it - relief which immediately sank and got stomped on at the sight within. More guards, lots of them, all armed, all pointing their weapons at the two of them. Even as they stared, the guards behind rounded the corner that had been separating them, and lined up behind them to prevent their escape. Mouth dry, Donna turned to Anakin. “Plan B?”
Anakin just shook his head. They were absolutely surrounded, and had no choice but to put their hands in the air. “Hey,” said Donna consolingly, “We made it pretty far.”
Anakin just sighed in exasperation. “If I had my lightsaber... there was this one time I was with Obi-Wan, we were in a far worse fix than this -”
Donna was distracted by another insect-faced alien suddenly pushing past her, running in to the main control room and talking very quietly, very frantically into the ear, or general ear-region, of another, the guard with the biggest blaster who seemed to be in charge simply for that merit. The mood of the guards instantly changed, and suddenly they were all lowering their weapons. Donna and Anakin looked at each other. “What-”
They heard more footsteps in the corridor behind them, and Donna was astonished to see all of their green insect-faced aliens beyond putting down their blasters and raising their hands as even more white-clad troopers appeared and entered the control room. Within seconds, they had complete control and command of the place, and they hadn’t even raised their voices. She looked up to Anakin to see if he had any more understanding of this than her, and saw that while he looked confused, he at least looked relieved as well. So these were good guys, at least.
“What’s going on?” she hissed.
“Clone troopers,” he said, as if that would explain everything. “But how-?”
“Sorry for the delay!” This time it was Donna’s turn to look relieved and Anakin’s to feel utterly lost as a certain familiar tall, skinny man in a brown suit pushed his way through the clone troopers and the aliens towards the pair of them, big grin in its usual place in his big stupid face, which Donna had never been so happy to see nor ever wanted to punch so hard as in that moment. “The Maw black hole cluster plays merry hell with the TARDIS, doesn’t know if it’s coming or going. And it’s a pretty long trip from Coruscant with reinforcements, I can tell you.”
Donna just threw her arms around him and hugged him fiercely. “In a minute I’m going to make you tell me what the hell those words are,” she said into his suit, “but right now I’m so bloody glad to see you. Where the hell have you been?”
“Sorry, I went and escaped last night, but I didn’t have time to rescue you then. So I popped off in the TARDIS and fetched these guys. I knew I could make it back in time for your execution, I had hoped to make better time than this...”
“Who?...” said Anakin bewilderedly.
“Oh, hello! I’m the Doctor.” A little awkwardly, since he still had Donna determinedly squeezing the breath out of him, the Doctor reached round and shook Anakin’s hand.
“Who’s that?”
“Oh blimey, that’s a big question,” said the Doctor with relish, “I guess I’m a traveller, an adventurer, an investigator, a helper -”
“He’s my ride,” interrupted Donna, releasing him.
Anakin nodded. “Ah.”
“And I also happen to have some useful contacts at the Jedi temple - one of the perks of having an honorary degree there, you see.” He waved around at all the clone troopers. “Amazing what can be pulled together quickly in an emergency, isn’t it? Back in England you’re lucky if you can get a teabag.”
“You - managed to get all this together?” said Anakin disbelievingly.
“Weeell... me and an old friend.” He winked at Donna. “A very old friend.”
From behind the Doctor stepped out a tiny, wrinkly green alien, so bizarre to Donna’s eyes that she almost yelped, but quickly suppressed it at the look of surprise and respect that appeared on the young Anakin’s usually incorrigible face. “Master Yoda!” he said in astonishment. “I wasn’t expecting -“
“Just happened to be passing, I was,” said the tiny green alien, and it took Donna a moment to put the sentence back together. “With two hundred clone units. Very convenient, it was.”
“Yes, but, that is, I had the situation under control - it was just that Obi-Wan got detained on Coruscant, and -“
“And a good thing not here he was, hmm?” observed the small green alien, taking what looked to Donna to be a metal candlestick holder out of his robes and holding it out to Anakin with a gentle smile. “Have a few things to say to you about losing your lightsaber, he would.”
“Ah.... yes... but only if he finds out about it, right, Master Yoda?” said Anakin hopefully, and Yoda just chuckled quietly as he walked away again to check on the troopers. Anakin glanced back at Donna and saw her pulling a face. “What?”
“Did... someone leave him out in the sun too long, or something?”
Anakin looked offended. “Master Yoda is a great Jedi, and nearly nine hundred years old. I don’t know anyone who could look much better at that age, can you?”
Donna determinedly avoided meeting the Doctor’s gaze and kept her face blank. “No, you’re quite right, of course. I guess we should be going.”
“Oh! Already?” Anakin looked surprised, and for a moment, Donna got a glimpse at the young man he must really be behind the bravado and the cockiness - and he really was very young. She looked at him surrounded by all the green aliens, the clone troopers, and saw that this was just a normal day for him, despite his youth. Poor kid, she thought. She had the urge to take him away from all this before it ruined him forever.
“Yeah,” said the Doctor, “It’s kind of our thing. Keep moving. Don’t hang around.” Donna elbowed him. “Except in exceptions,” he added, “That being why they’re called exceptions, of course.”
“But we should leave you all to deal with this,” said Donna, “You can stop, er, smugglers or anti-smugglers stopping the smuggling from... that place to... that other place, the very important thing you’re here for, yes.”
To her surprise, Anakin bowed slightly. “Thank you for rescuing me, Donna Noble. I apologise if I was rude at any point.”
Donna tried to be gracious. “You were rude at a lot of points. But... I can’t really judge for that.” She stuck out a hand. “Look after yourself, Anakin Skywalker.”
He shook it with his own - mechanical? He had a mechanical hand all this time and she never noticed? What was wrong with her today? - hand. The Doctor just nodded in a friendly way towards him, then they made their way back through all the clone troopers, who were starting to gather the guards into easily movable groups, and the midget green alien Yoda, who nodded to the Doctor as a respected equal, and back out again into the vast space port. There, to Donna’s great relief, the familiar blue box was waiting with the door just a little open. She was about to collapse back through the door when she noticed the Doctor looking back towards the corridor, frowning slightly.
“What?”
He turned to face her. “That was Anakin Skywalker?”
“Yeah. You know him?”
“He... becomes pretty famous.”
“Oh! What does he do?”
The Doctor seemed to consider his answer. “He helps defeat an evil empire and save the galaxy.”
“Oh! Cool!” Donna beamed. “And I saved him today. Me! Technically, that means I saved the galaxy. Indirectly.” She turned and strode triumphantly into the TARDIS, calling over her shoulder, “That still counts, right?”
The Doctor just stood and shook his head. “I really can’t take you anywhere.”
-END-
Author: hobbit_eyes
Fandoms: Doctor Who/Star Wars
Characters Anakin Skywalker, Yoda; Donna Noble, Tenth Doctor
Pairings: None
Rating: PG
Word count: 6,074
Spoilers: Set between episode 2 and 3 of the prequel trilogy (but with references to events of the original trilogy), up to series 4 of Doctor Who
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Star Wars and Doctor Who belong to their respective creators
A/N: Thanks so much to reasonablycrazy for stepping in as a last minute beta and helping me to figure out what the hell to call it!
Summary: What do you do when you wake up in a space prison with no idea what's happened to your ride home? Well, it helps if there's a Jedi Knight in the next cell.
This was not the first time in her journeys with the Doctor that Donna had woken up somewhere she didn’t recognise, but this was by far the most boring room she’d ever done so in. As she sat up, she cracked her head on the low bunk ceiling above her. Cursing, she squinted in the bright lights that had flared into life at her movement, and looked around.
The room was so small that this only took a moment, so she did so again, to be thorough. No, it really was as plain as it had looked the first time round - smooth black walls, the edges of a door barely visible in the far wall, the only furniture the bunk she was lying on. She groaned. Other than weird minimalists, there was only one kind of person who got put in rooms like this, and they didn’t get put there on personal preference.
“Great. I’m in a cell,” she said to herself. “Where’s that skinny alien when you need him?”
Just to check, she got up to test the door. Not only was it locked, she couldn’t see any kind of handle on her side of the door. Was the Doctor in another cell like this, maybe just next door? She looked up in the upper edges of the room, to the dark corners, and spotted what she’d been searching for - a small vent to let air in. Nowhere near as big as all those space films would have you think space vents were, but big enough.
She’d seen this trick on some news story about prisoners of war - or maybe it was a Hollyoaks Christmas special - where people locked up communicated by banging on the pipes connecting their cells. By perching on the edge of the bunk, she could just about reach it, and she started hitting it. It was only when she’d done a lot of banging that she realised this was no way to communicate. She didn’t even know bloody Morse Code, for Christ’s sake.
In exasperation, she just yelled, “Hey! Doctor! Are you there? Can you hear me?”
There was silence. With a sigh, she started to climb down from the bunk, when she heard a voice come floating back down the vent towards her.
“Hello? Who’s that?”
She scrambled back up. “Doctor? Is that you?”
“No, sorry. Who are you?”
“I’m locked up. Can you get me out?”
“No, I’m locked up too.”
“You haven’t seen this man around anywhere, have you? Tall, skinny as a weed, brown suit? Runs around a lot. Blue box. Weird screwdriver thing with a blue light at the end.”
“Can’t say I have.”
“Oh. So what are you in for?”
She thought she heard a chuckle from the other end of the vent. “Excuse me?”
“You know. What did they get you in for? I can’t really remember, you see. I mean, I remember me and the Doctor getting here, and him chatting to the locals, but they seemed to get pretty angry pretty sharpish - just want to check if I’m locked up because he offended some diplomat, or just saying a bad word, or what.”
“Well - I’m in here for high treason against the leader of this world, due to be executed in the morning.” Donna’s stomach turned over. “Does that help?” added the voice.
Donna had to step down off the bunk and sit down on the edge of it. “Oh God, what’s the Doctor done now?”
“Hello? Hello? Are you all right over there?”
“Yeah, just great,” yelled back Donna, resting her head in her hands.
“If it helps,” called the voice, “you won’t be getting executed tomorrow, I’m the only one on the schedule. They’re getting quite a few people in to watch it, apparently.”
“You sound awfully upbeat about it!”
“Oh, they won’t manage to kill me. I’m a Jedi Knight. I’ll just get to escape at last.”
Donna didn’t particularly care if he was a Jedi Knight or a jelly baby, if he couldn’t get himself out of his cell there wasn’t much chance he’d be able to get her out of hers. She had to find some other way to get out of here, and to get back to the Doctor, wherever he’d put himself.
She patted her clothes, but once again, she’d failed to wear something with pockets. She looked once more around her cell, running her hands over the walls, but there was nothing to use there. She returned to the door and felt around the edges, but there was no chance of prying it open or bashing it down. She sighed. Back to the old standby, then.
She started hammering on the door and bellowing at the top of her lungs. “Oi! Let me out! I don’t know what I’m doing in here! You can’t be locked up if you don’t know what you did!”
“You can here,” came the other prisoner’s voice unhelpfully.
Donna ignored him and banged hard on the door a few more times, and suddenly the door went completely transparent. She took a step back in surprise - it was like it had completely disappeared, if not for the faint reflection of herself she could just see in it - and on the other side was, well, an alien, and one of the most alien-looking aliens she’d seen in all her travels so far. And she’d seen the Ood. It was green, with big black eyes and weirdly bug-like face, and she tried not to pull a face.
“What are you shouting about?” it demanded.
She pulled herself up to full height, and adopted the voice she had perfected from years of dealing with bosses who weren’t too bothered by temps, since they weren’t going to be around for long. Reasonable, assertive, with only the mildest hint of threatening so that they’d never be able to pin anything on her in court. “You’ve locked me up and I don’t know why. I demand to know what I’ve done wrong, what you’re planning to do to me, and where the Doctor is.”
“You were found in a restricted area.”
“Are you serious? It was an accident. The Doctor practically lives in restricted areas. Talk to him.”
“There are no excuses. The punishment is death.”
“Death? You can’t execute us, we didn’t know! It didn’t look restricted - there wasn’t even a sign! You have to have a sign!”
The alien was unmoved. “It is martial law. You will be executed two days from now.”
His hand moved to the wall where she assumed the un-transparent-the-door-button-thingy was, and quickly shouted, “Wait!” It paused, and waited expectantly, while she struggled to make her brain work. The Doctor had tried so hard to teach her to listen rather than just shout at everything, and this is what she had to do hear - listen, and use what she’d heard. What had she heard? Jedis, restricted, war -
She lowered her voice and leaned as close to the door as she could get. “I have information about the Jedi Knight in the next cell,” she said.
It was a long shot, but given that the alien didn’t immediately walk away, she had to assume she was on the right track. “He is to be executed tomorrow already,” it said.
“About allies of his. Other, er, knights.”
“What information?”
She shook her head. “I can’t tell you in here - that vent leads to his cell, he can hear everything I say. He might figure out lies if he knows what I’m telling you in advance.”
The alien considered, then nodded. “I will escort you to another room. Then you will tell me what you know. Stand back from the door and put your hands behind your head.”
She did as it said, and while it did something to the door to open it, she tried to figure out what the next step of her plan was. It felt like it was a good plan, if only she knew what the rest of it was. And, she thought as the alien opened the door and waved her out with a gun, she had to work it out soon.
Out of the door, walking ahead of the alien down the corridor, there was still no sign of that all-important next step. Given they were planning on executing her in two days anyway, she doubted it’d be averse to shooting her if she tried to attack it. But it looked pretty puny - skinny limbs - so she might be able to get the drop on it if there was some kind of distraction. Great idea, Donna, she thought to herself, Now you’ve just got to count on some kind of distraction showing itself in the few seconds left before you get to whatever interview room you’re heading for and are forced to make stuff up about - oh, what were they even called? Jemis? Hedis? Jellies? Oh, that’s just great...
Her thoughts were interrupted by a loud, mechanical squealing coming towards her from behind. Before she could turn, there was an ‘oof!’ from the alien as something crashed into it, and it staggered forwards into her. She spun round as fast as she could and managed to grab the laser gun from its flailing arms as it fell forwards to the ground. She had a moment of panic as she held it - she couldn’t exactly use it, but what else could she do here? - before she noticed that, to her massive relief, the alien had knocked itself out on the wall of the narrow corridor as it fell.
She looked up from the alien to her unexpected saviour, and blinked. It was a little robot, like a blue and white pedal bin on wheels. And it was bleeping at her expectantly.
“What,” she said, “the hell.”
The robot bleeped again, and wheeled back and forth, nudging the alien’s body with its wheels.
“It’s not dead! It’s just knocked out. Uh - and thanks, I guess.”
It just whistled aggressively and rammed it even harder.
“Do you not have an English mode??” It bleeped in what sounded to her very aggressive tones. Evidently not. She looked down at where it was nudging, and spotted what looked like a card attached to its belt. An access card? She pulled it off, and the robot whistled in a much more encouraging way. It span on its wheels and trundled away down the corridor.
“Hey! Where are you going?” she yelled after it, and its head span round to face her in a way that reminded her unnervingly of The Exorcist. But it whistled in a friendly way again, and trundled off again. She guessed she had to follow it.
It looked like it was leading her back to her cell, but it stopped at the cell adjacent to it. The Jelly Knight’s? She looked down at the robot again, and it whistled. She took that as confirmation, and shrugged, inserting the access card into the tiny slot by the door. With a pleasant beep, it slid open. Beyond was a cell which was absolutely identical to hers, except for the one major difference of the inhabitant. If her cell had contained a young man clad in - was that dark leather? Seriously? - sprawled as the very vision of nonchalance and relaxation on the bed, she would have noticed.
His face blanked in astonishment at the sight of her, and he sat up. “Who are you?”
“I’m Donna Noble, I’m here to rescue you!”
He still looked baffled. “You’re who?”
“Oi, you don’t need to sound so surprised! I’ll just go and close your door behind me, shall I?”
“No - wait - sorry, you’re from the cell next door? How did you get out? And in here?”
“Oh. I shouted a lot, it’s how I do most things.” There was a loud bleeping from behind her knees, and she allowed, “All right, this little robot helped a bit as well. Now are you coming or not?”
He leaped to his feet and followed her out into the corridor, and they hurried along as quietly as they could. “Sorry,” he said, “I just wasn’t expecting - who are you?”
“Donna, I said. Human. And I don’t actually know how to use this, so I don’t know if you want it,” she added, hefting the laser gun over to him.
“Anakin Skywalker.” He looked a little awkward, and not just about the gun that she’d thrust into his hands. “Do you mind if I ask - do you know where you’re going?”
“To get out?” They both stopped in the corridor. “Uh - no idea, actually, do you?”
He nodded. “Back this way,” he said, gesturing with his head, and they set off again in the complete opposite direction to where Donna had been going, the robot still trundling along behind them.
“So is that your robot?”
“Oh - yes, R2-D2.”
“Was that a space word?”
“It’s his name. R2-D2.”
“Oh. Right. It has a name. Of course.” Anakin held up a hand and stopped, and she waited behind him. Just in the distance round the corner, she could hear footsteps, but they quickly receded from hearing. They set off again. “And you’re Anakin Skywalker - a, what was it? Jelly Knight?”
“Jedi Knight.” He looked confused over his shoulder at her. “You haven’t heard of us?”
“Let’s say no. Is that, like, a rank?”
He looked even more surprised than when she’d showed up at his cell door, but was at least polite enough to try to hide it this time. “We’re the guardians of the Republic. We are the ones gifted in the ways of the Force.”
“Ah, I see. No, wait, no I don’t. What?”
“Where are you from? Are you from beyond the Outer Rim, or something?”
“Hey! Are you calling me backwards or something?”
“I wasn’t meaning to be rude,” he said quickly, with a panicked look in his eyes almost pleading Oh God I wasn’t being rude please don’t hurt me, “I was just wondering where you could be from that you hadn’t heard of the Jedi Knights.”
“Oh. VERY far away. Very. Like, your concept of very far? Further than that.”
He chuckled. “I don’t know, my concept of far is pretty far.”
“Farther than that.”
“Farther than Tatooine?”
“I don’t know where that is. But I’m assuming yes. Where are we, come to think of it?”
“You’re not serious. You have no idea where you are?”
“No, I’m asking because I want you to think I’m clueless, it’s such an attractive trait. Give me a break, would you?”
“You’re in the Black Zone of the Si’Klaata Cluster, just a few parsecs from Kessel. This is a Separatist-funded mercenary operation based on an asteroid, monitoring shipping activity in the area. They don’t want to prosecute smugglers making the Kessel Run, they want to intercept their cargo.”
There were far too many words in his explanation that sounded like gibberish, and she suspected that even if he told her what they all were, she’d still have no idea where she was. So she just nodded, and said, “So what did they get you for?”
“Well, I’m here to stop them, obviously.”
“Obviously. So what’s the plan?”
He peered around a corner. “They’ve taken my lightsaber. I’m not sure where it is. I need to find it, then I can get us out of here.”
“What’s wrong with the gun?”
“The what?” She gestured. “Oh, the blaster.” He grinned. “You definitely haven’t met a Jedi before. Right, I think the guard operations room is just down this corridor through that door. Moment we step in there, there’ll be fighting, so you’ll just need to stay back, and - what?”
She’d ignored him and stuck her head round the corner as well, to check out this door. “Isn’t there a way round? Or, I don’t know, one of those massive vents?”
“No.” He looked at her again, utterly baffled. “A vent? What would give you that idea?”
“Nothing,” she said, a little sulkily. “Just trying to contribute. Isn’t there anything we can do other than shoot everyone?”
Anakin considered. “Well, I suppose I could think of something.”
“Would you?”
He turned the corner and set off down the corridor, so abruptly that it took her a moment to hurry after him. She couldn’t decide whether he was impulsive or just a bit rude. Stopping at the door, he looked as though he was listening for a moment, though she had no idea what he could be hearing. “Yes, this’ll be fine,” he said, “Stay here.”
Before she could even ask what he meant by that, he was off again, opening the door with the access card and waltzing in quite calmly. She heard raised mechanical voices and was about to follow him to yank him back, to smack some sense into his ridiculous head, when blaster fire erupted in the small room, and she had to throw herself to the side of the corridor and crouch down with the robot to avoid being hit by any stray shots. She tried to see round the edge of the door, but could only see laser bolts flying around the room, and heard large amounts of crashing metal and explosions. Finally it quietened down, and when she pulled the door slowly open, white smoke crawled out into the corridor. She stepped in and tried to see through the haze.
Anakin Skywalker was standing right in the middle of what appeared to a major operations room, and she saw the smoke was coming from several smashed consoles and some twisted remains of metal on the floor, which she slowly realised had once been robots as well. “You did all this?” she managed.
“Without a blaster,” he said, beaming, throwing it back to her. “Since you asked so nicely.”
“But - how?”
He shook his head. “You seriously don’t know about Jedi, do you?”
“No! Why do you keep saying that like it’s such a big deal? I know loads of people who’ve never heard of you Jelly Knights.”
“Jedi.”
“Whatever, are you, like, magic or something?”
“Something. Now come on, I need to find my lightsaber, check the storage units.”
He began pulling open doors and pulling out shelves, while she gingerly moved some robot wreckage aside from another unit. “What am I looking for?” she asked.
“It’s - uh - look, I’ll know it when you find it. Just don’t turn it on.”
“It has an ‘on’ button?”
He paused. “Maybe I should look. You take the blaster and keep an eye out.”
He searched the entire room, but didn’t find it. “Right. Next place to look will be the main control room. R2, check the computer, check the layout.”
“Can’t you just get another one?” asked Donna.
“I’d rather not,” said Anakin delicately. The little robot trundled up to one of the few intact panels remaining and, with a whirring bleep, connected to it. On the console appeared a plan of what she assumed was the base, and she saw it was arranged like spokes on a wheel. Anakin looked at it closely and nodded.
“Main control room is down one of these other arms, branching off the central dock. We can go there, you can get a ship fired up while I deal with that, and we can get out of here.”
Ignoring the fact that she was expected to get a ship ‘fired up’ for the time being, she said, “Can you droid find anything on there?”
“Pretty much.”
“Can he look for another prisoner? Would have been caught same time as me, probably listed as the Doctor or John Smith or James MacCrimmon - or any number of names, to be honest, but probably Doctor.”
R2 bleeped, and she saw lists of names scrolling down the screen, too fast for her to read. It finally read ‘ERROR’, and R2 bleeped in disappointment.
“He’s not listed,” said Anakin.
“But he’s got to be! Any prisoner taken in at the same time as me, scheduled to be executed the day after tomorrow -”
“He’ll have searched for that.” R2 bleeped again, and Anakin nodded. “We must be the only two prisoners here.”
“But that’s impossible. He wouldn’t have left me here.”
Anakin shrugged. “Maybe he already escaped. Maybe he’s trying to get you out. But whatever he’s doing, let’s focus on not going back to the cells, shall we? I don’t know if you’ve noticed we’re in a bit of trouble, but -”
“Can you drop that attitude, please? I know I don’t know what a Jelly monk is or a Kessel run, but this is not my first rodeo, I have broken out of space prison before, OK? I’ve faced Sontarans, and lava monsters, and giant freaky space spiders, and I can deal with this, all of this. What I can’t deal with is the Doctor being I don’t know where. He’s - he’s my ride home.”
Anakin inclined his head. “Then we’ll try to find him. But for now, we need to keep moving.”
As if in agreement, an alarm started blaring above their heads. “Come on, let’s go,” said Anakin, any sympathy in his tone replaced by all business, and with a wave of his hand, the main outer door slid open. He disappeared through it in a swirl of his dark clothes, the little robot hot on his heels, leaving Donna to run after him going, “Wait, was that magic too?”
They made it down the corridor without coming across any trouble, and found themselves in the space dock - a room so massive that Donna could barely comprehend it, filled with spaceships of all shapes and sizes. Anakin seemed to know where he was going, weaving between some very shiny models in pursuit of his own, and she couldn’t quite stop herself from looking everywhere amongst these ridiculously futuristic machines for the small, wooden blue box. But there was no sign of it, and Anakin reached a yellow speeder.
“This was my ship,” he said, “There’s room for you two. Get in there and get her started, I’ll be back in a minute.”
“‘Get her started’?” Now had come the time to address this issue. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“It’s really quite intuitive. Just look in the cockpit, and -“
“Maybe for you, space boy, I can’t even tell which end’s the front.”
“Oh come on -”
“Is it the pointy one?”
“Fine. Just get in - R2, you get aboard as well, perform system checks. I’ll be back.”
Before she could argue more, he’d run off again. He had far too much energy, she thought to herself, but resignedly pulled herself up into the spaceship and had a look at the controls. R2 bleeped, having manoeuvred himself into a special slot in the wing, and to her astonishment, writing appeared a display in the cockpit. She couldn’t read it for a few seconds, but then the TARDIS translator circuit finally seemed to kick in.
“The take-off circuits have been disabled? Can’t you fix them?”
More bleeps.
“Well, what can I do about it?”
Bleep bleep.
“Go after him? Ha, your master just ran off into a whole mess of angry guards. I’m not going after him into that mess.”
Bleep bleep bleep.
“I know I’ve got a blaster, but I don’t want to kill -“
Bleep bleep!
“... well, why did nobody tell me it had a stun setting??” She looked down at the blaster and, with some more directions from R2, was able to flick a couple of dials and - hopefully - put it onto the ‘stun’ setting. She groaned.
“Oh, god. Donna to the rescue then, I suppose.”
She slid down off the speeder again and made her way towards the corridor which Anakin had last disappeared down. It looked almost identical to the last - did this base come out of an unoriginal kit in a box, or something? - and soon the resemblance became uncanny as she started to come across more twisted, smoking heaps of metal that had previously been robots.
She rounded a corner and was met with an impressive sight. Anakin was surrounded by yet more wreckage, and was sending droids flying into each other and the walls with resounding crashes with just small flicks of his fingers. He seemed to be managing fine on his own, despite R2’s protestations, until several of those green insect aliens stepped out from a doorway further down the corridor. Stopping in his tracks and seeing them, Anakin froze, momentarily lost of any ideas of what to do.
“Hands up, Jedi,” she heard them order, and she realised they hadn’t spotted her as far down as she was yet. She knew she only had a second, so she sent up a prayer to whichever gods might be listening - preferably ones with the ability to send sharpshooting skills - and leaped out from her hiding place and started firing.
She had to give Anakin credit, he had killer reflexes. The second she started firing, he sprang up into the air, grabbed a ceiling fixture and clung on. Good thing too, given she’d decided to go for quantity of shots over quality, and just fired wildly down the corridor. All of the aliens dropped, and she stood there, gasping for breath as though she’d punched them all out herself, as Anakin fell back lightly to the floor and turned to face her, looking impressed despite himself.
“Lucky I sensed you were there,” he said, “Or I’d be drooling on the floor with them.”
“Oh, please, stop, your gratitude is overwhelming, I’m blushing.”
“I could have gotten out of it.” Seeing her face, though, he acquiesced. “But thank you for the thought.”
“The thought. Tell you what, sunshine, next time I’ll just think about saving your ass and stay back at the ship.”
“All right, you’ve made your point, thank you. Let’s keep moving, shall we?”
“Can you seriously not just get another lightsaber in a shop?” She hurried after him. “Oh, but by the way, R2 was saying something about your take-off circuits being disabled - we’ll need to do something about that.”
Anakin groaned. “Classic technique. There’ll be some kind of authorisation code. I’ll look on the computers in the main control room...”
“If you manage to leave any intact...”
“What was that? I can’t hear you over the sound of utter corridor destruction.”
“Hey, when in Rome, do as the apparently batshit crazy Jelly knights do.”
“Jedi!”
Their argument was interrupted by more wailing alarms, and the sound of hurrying footsteps towards them. All humour gone from his face, Anakin turned to look at her gravely. “Can you cover us? We get to the control room, I can handle things from there, but you need to cover our backs.”
She nodded. “Yes. I know how this works now.”
“They might not be shooting to stun.”
“I wasn’t planning on getting shot anyway.”
His serious face broke into a smile. “We have that in common. Ready?”
She didn’t get the chance to answer, as guards started pouring into the corridor behind them and firing their blasters at them. Ducking instinctively, Donna realised most of the their shots were going wide, and concentrated on just hurrying after Anakin and sending the occasional series of blasts back behind her to keep them at a distance. Smoke filled the small corridor, caustic metal smoke which burned her throat and her eyes, and the sound of the blasters and shouting rung in her ears. The corridor seemed endless, corner after corner as Anakin led them deeper and deeper in, and with the guards getting closer, it seemed impossible that they could make it out of there. Donna realised she was still counting on the Doctor for a last-minute save, but wasn’t quite sure what his entrance cue would be. She was starting to get a very, very bad feeling about this.
“You’d better be damn good with that lightsaber!” she yelled over her shoulder, “Because I don’t see how we’re getting back to the ship without it!”
“Oh, don’t worry, I am!” he shouted back - even racing ahead of impossible odds under heavy fire, he still sounded cocky - “One of the best swordsmen in the galaxy - and once we get into this control room here, we’ll be safe...”
They reached the main door she assumed was the control room, and felt a surge of relief as he flicked his hand to open it - relief which immediately sank and got stomped on at the sight within. More guards, lots of them, all armed, all pointing their weapons at the two of them. Even as they stared, the guards behind rounded the corner that had been separating them, and lined up behind them to prevent their escape. Mouth dry, Donna turned to Anakin. “Plan B?”
Anakin just shook his head. They were absolutely surrounded, and had no choice but to put their hands in the air. “Hey,” said Donna consolingly, “We made it pretty far.”
Anakin just sighed in exasperation. “If I had my lightsaber... there was this one time I was with Obi-Wan, we were in a far worse fix than this -”
Donna was distracted by another insect-faced alien suddenly pushing past her, running in to the main control room and talking very quietly, very frantically into the ear, or general ear-region, of another, the guard with the biggest blaster who seemed to be in charge simply for that merit. The mood of the guards instantly changed, and suddenly they were all lowering their weapons. Donna and Anakin looked at each other. “What-”
They heard more footsteps in the corridor behind them, and Donna was astonished to see all of their green insect-faced aliens beyond putting down their blasters and raising their hands as even more white-clad troopers appeared and entered the control room. Within seconds, they had complete control and command of the place, and they hadn’t even raised their voices. She looked up to Anakin to see if he had any more understanding of this than her, and saw that while he looked confused, he at least looked relieved as well. So these were good guys, at least.
“What’s going on?” she hissed.
“Clone troopers,” he said, as if that would explain everything. “But how-?”
“Sorry for the delay!” This time it was Donna’s turn to look relieved and Anakin’s to feel utterly lost as a certain familiar tall, skinny man in a brown suit pushed his way through the clone troopers and the aliens towards the pair of them, big grin in its usual place in his big stupid face, which Donna had never been so happy to see nor ever wanted to punch so hard as in that moment. “The Maw black hole cluster plays merry hell with the TARDIS, doesn’t know if it’s coming or going. And it’s a pretty long trip from Coruscant with reinforcements, I can tell you.”
Donna just threw her arms around him and hugged him fiercely. “In a minute I’m going to make you tell me what the hell those words are,” she said into his suit, “but right now I’m so bloody glad to see you. Where the hell have you been?”
“Sorry, I went and escaped last night, but I didn’t have time to rescue you then. So I popped off in the TARDIS and fetched these guys. I knew I could make it back in time for your execution, I had hoped to make better time than this...”
“Who?...” said Anakin bewilderedly.
“Oh, hello! I’m the Doctor.” A little awkwardly, since he still had Donna determinedly squeezing the breath out of him, the Doctor reached round and shook Anakin’s hand.
“Who’s that?”
“Oh blimey, that’s a big question,” said the Doctor with relish, “I guess I’m a traveller, an adventurer, an investigator, a helper -”
“He’s my ride,” interrupted Donna, releasing him.
Anakin nodded. “Ah.”
“And I also happen to have some useful contacts at the Jedi temple - one of the perks of having an honorary degree there, you see.” He waved around at all the clone troopers. “Amazing what can be pulled together quickly in an emergency, isn’t it? Back in England you’re lucky if you can get a teabag.”
“You - managed to get all this together?” said Anakin disbelievingly.
“Weeell... me and an old friend.” He winked at Donna. “A very old friend.”
From behind the Doctor stepped out a tiny, wrinkly green alien, so bizarre to Donna’s eyes that she almost yelped, but quickly suppressed it at the look of surprise and respect that appeared on the young Anakin’s usually incorrigible face. “Master Yoda!” he said in astonishment. “I wasn’t expecting -“
“Just happened to be passing, I was,” said the tiny green alien, and it took Donna a moment to put the sentence back together. “With two hundred clone units. Very convenient, it was.”
“Yes, but, that is, I had the situation under control - it was just that Obi-Wan got detained on Coruscant, and -“
“And a good thing not here he was, hmm?” observed the small green alien, taking what looked to Donna to be a metal candlestick holder out of his robes and holding it out to Anakin with a gentle smile. “Have a few things to say to you about losing your lightsaber, he would.”
“Ah.... yes... but only if he finds out about it, right, Master Yoda?” said Anakin hopefully, and Yoda just chuckled quietly as he walked away again to check on the troopers. Anakin glanced back at Donna and saw her pulling a face. “What?”
“Did... someone leave him out in the sun too long, or something?”
Anakin looked offended. “Master Yoda is a great Jedi, and nearly nine hundred years old. I don’t know anyone who could look much better at that age, can you?”
Donna determinedly avoided meeting the Doctor’s gaze and kept her face blank. “No, you’re quite right, of course. I guess we should be going.”
“Oh! Already?” Anakin looked surprised, and for a moment, Donna got a glimpse at the young man he must really be behind the bravado and the cockiness - and he really was very young. She looked at him surrounded by all the green aliens, the clone troopers, and saw that this was just a normal day for him, despite his youth. Poor kid, she thought. She had the urge to take him away from all this before it ruined him forever.
“Yeah,” said the Doctor, “It’s kind of our thing. Keep moving. Don’t hang around.” Donna elbowed him. “Except in exceptions,” he added, “That being why they’re called exceptions, of course.”
“But we should leave you all to deal with this,” said Donna, “You can stop, er, smugglers or anti-smugglers stopping the smuggling from... that place to... that other place, the very important thing you’re here for, yes.”
To her surprise, Anakin bowed slightly. “Thank you for rescuing me, Donna Noble. I apologise if I was rude at any point.”
Donna tried to be gracious. “You were rude at a lot of points. But... I can’t really judge for that.” She stuck out a hand. “Look after yourself, Anakin Skywalker.”
He shook it with his own - mechanical? He had a mechanical hand all this time and she never noticed? What was wrong with her today? - hand. The Doctor just nodded in a friendly way towards him, then they made their way back through all the clone troopers, who were starting to gather the guards into easily movable groups, and the midget green alien Yoda, who nodded to the Doctor as a respected equal, and back out again into the vast space port. There, to Donna’s great relief, the familiar blue box was waiting with the door just a little open. She was about to collapse back through the door when she noticed the Doctor looking back towards the corridor, frowning slightly.
“What?”
He turned to face her. “That was Anakin Skywalker?”
“Yeah. You know him?”
“He... becomes pretty famous.”
“Oh! What does he do?”
The Doctor seemed to consider his answer. “He helps defeat an evil empire and save the galaxy.”
“Oh! Cool!” Donna beamed. “And I saved him today. Me! Technically, that means I saved the galaxy. Indirectly.” She turned and strode triumphantly into the TARDIS, calling over her shoulder, “That still counts, right?”
The Doctor just stood and shook his head. “I really can’t take you anywhere.”
-END-