Fic: Metronome
Title: Metronome
Rating: G. I don't think there even be swears.
Characters/Pairings: Donna, Ten
Spoilers: Seat after OodSphere.
Summary: In the quiet spaces inbetween, the Ood are singing.
“Did I ever mention how much I like your hair?”
Donna gives him this funny look and the Doctor can feel thespaceman martianboy alienfreak on the tip of her tongue. He looks away, almost embarrassed. “Just wanted to say,” he says, trying to remember which co-ordinates he had been programming in, “really like it. Very red. And shiny.”
“Thanks,” she tells him, a little later on. She’s brought him a cup of tea and he can’t help but notice that she’s looking at him rather speculatively and slightly above eye level. “Bit less product’s what you need though. Bet it feels really hard and spiky.”
“Actually it’s pretty soft.” He inclines his head a little. “Feel if you like.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. “You just drink your tea, sunshine.”
He listens to her leave. The pace of her steps, his beat as he sings under his breath.
+
Donna finds her sleep disturbed, night after night. She finds herself sitting in front of her dressing table mirror brushing her hair and hearing the echo of alien song. Back and forth, back and forth, all along the walls of her mind.
Sometimes she tries to hum along with it, but she can never quite carry the tune.
+
“Your lot, were they all like that then, telepathic?”
He looks the sort of thoughtful Donna’s learned to recognise as how much of the truth can I get away with? “More or less,” he says. “Some better than others. I was always considered pretty good.”
“Course you were.” But she speaks lightly and with a smile. “D’you always hear everyone else’s thoughts though? I mean, you don’t, like, eavesdrop on me or anything do you?”
“Why? Got any guilty secrets?”
“You gonna give me a straight answer or not?”
“No, Donna, I’m not spying on the inside of your head. I wouldn’t even if I could, which I can’t, not without physical contact and even then, you’d notice. Okay?”
“Okay,” she says. “Well, that’s good then. So when you were in my head, was that... was that weird? I mean, what with me being an alien, to you?”
He shrugs. “I’m used to humans.”
“Sounds like you’re saying you’re used to cats.” He gives her a look, and she raises her eyebrows, not wanting to disappoint him, and says, “That what I am to you? Some great big talking cat that can make you cups of tea?”
“Don’t,” he says severely, “be so ridiculous.”
+
She wakes up and there are tears in her eyes and of course it’s the song of course it is but she can’t remember dreaming and even if she could what’s wrong with that? Two hundred years enslavement and she’s complaining because she’s had a couple of nights’ bad sleep? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
When she falls asleep again, the world is not as cold as she remembers and her eyes are shining red.
+
The ship’s alive. Donna doesn’t mind so much when she wakes up in the morning, desperate for a good cup of coffee and finds the kitchen opposite her bedroom, but twenty minutes spent searching for the console room would be enough for her to start yelling, if she hadn’t already learned that was precisely the sort of reaction that caused the TARDIS to show off its perverse sense of humour.
So she keeps walking and, sooner or later, finds a door that stands invitingly ajar.
She looks up at the ceiling, and mutters, “This had better be good.”
+
The Doctor finds her by following the sound of a piano. There’s no style to the play, no skill; the melody echoes through the corridors, awkward and childish. It stops when he taps open the door to the music room.
Donna pulls the piano lid down and turns around on the little stool. “You gonna laugh at me then?”
The Doctor shakes his head, suddenly uncomfortably aware that he’s invaded her privacy.
“I take it all these instruments are yours. You must play a lot.”
“Recorder,” he says. “Harp. Alright on the trombone. The violin, badly. But only because I was pretending to be Sherlock Holmes.”
“Isn’t he fictional?”
“Yes. Sometimes. What were you playing?”
“I was trying to remember the Ood song. Wouldn’t matter if I got it right though, still wouldn’t be the same.”
She sounds wistful enough for him to take a hesitant step forward. “I could...” he tries to offer but she shakes her head.
“No,” she says, and she’s quite certain, “if I find it, I want to do it myself.”
+
She wakes up screaming. She could feel it, the second brain in the back of her throat, suffocating her and she had to get it out had to and it choked burning her as she coughed and coughed and coughed...
She gets up, grabs a dressing gown and finds the kitchen, opposite her bedroom. She makes a pot of coffee and takes deep breaths. She understands fear a little better now, and she can deal with this. It isn’t even real, after all.
“I find that hot chocolate usually works better.”
Donna jumps, raises her mug of fresh coffee accusingly as she glares at the silhouette in the doorway.
“Or warm milk,” it continues, “if you can stomach it. How much of that stuff do you drink a day anyway? It’s no wonder you have nightmares.”
“They’re not nightmares.”
“They’re upsetting you, whatever they are,” says the Doctor, fetching the milk from the fridge. He pours himself a glass then passes it to Donna for her coffee.
“It’s just singing,” she says, “that’s all. Just singing.”
“It was never just singing to them.”
She feels a stab of anger. Patronising git, she thinks. “I know that. But it’s not them singing now, is it? It’s my subconscious dealing with it all. That’s normal, isn’t it? Can’t whisk a girl away for adventures all through in time and space and not give her a couple of bad dreams, what with all the terrible things going on out here.”
She almost makes it, but just at the end she hears her voice crack and she can’t say any more because if she does, she’ll cry. And she’s not going to do that.
She picks up her coffee and she goes back to her room.
+
“That’s not a real sky, is it? There is no way that is a real sky.”
“Sort of depends what you mean by real,” says the Doctor. It’s the most impressive garden inside the TARDIS that he could remember the location of and they’re taking a stroll along the marble paths, round the great fir trees and pines and redwoods, over a little wooden bridge standing astride a small river (he’s always meant to find out where it goes, never found the time) and round to the picnic bench sitting at the edge of the (suspiciously perfectly trimmed) hedge-maze.
“You could spend a lifetime in this ship exploring.”
“Yeah, may have done that actually. I mean, not one lifetime, not all at once, but adding all the time up probably comes to a hundred years, at least. And there was this one time that Romana and I got trapped in an interstitial bubble for... you’re not listening to a word I’m saying are you?”
Donna grins, pretends he’s right. “What’s in the centre of the maze?” she asks.
“Dunno. It’s been a while. Probably a rather uncomfortable seat. Or a fountain. It might very well be a fountain.”
“Come on then.” Her enthusiasm for even such a trivial exploration as this is more than enough to tempt him, so he lets her take his hand and she guides him around one hedge after another. It’s only when the unreal blue sky begin to fade to an equally unreal red and unreal stars are threatening to appear that he realises they may have a problem.
“Um... Donna...”
“Yeah,” she says, resigned. “I know. Want some chocolate?” She pulls a bar of Dairy Milk out of a pocket and the Doctor looks at it suspiciously.
“That’s mine.”
“Yes. But since it was sitting in your coat pocket being uneaten, I thought I might make better use of it. You want a square or not?”
He accepts, chews thoughtfully and says, “What we really need is some hedge cutters.”
“I think you might be missing the point of a maze.”
“Don’t like them much. Got lost in a really nasty one once, full of stuff trying to kill me.”
Donna’s eyes roll and he smiles as she says, “Why am I not surprised?”
They find the centre, sooner or later. There’s an apple tree sitting there, small and gnarled; an old, hardy thing with its red fruit sitting plump on the branches.
“It’s autumn in here?” asks Donna sceptically.
The Doctor shrugs. “Guess so.”
They sit beneath the leafy branches and munch on apples; there’s a breeze overhead and they can hear the sound of the river running nearby. There’s silence between them, and it’s not uncomfortable. Donna closes her eyes and she can feel the song, beating in time with her heart.
“Now,” says the Doctor, “I don’t suppose you can remember the way out?”
+
“D’you just sit here in the dark at night or something?”
“Night in the TARDIS is entirely arbitrary. Coffee, I take it?”
“I guess.”
“Want the lights on?”
“It would make you seem slightly less creepy, yeah.”
She blinks in the blank white light and when she can finally see, it’s the Doctor’s face staring at her, frowning. “Creepy? Really?”
“You know, I don’t know whether you’re an insufferable egotist or your skin’s just made of wet paper hankies. Is that my coffee you’re not making?”
He’s busy for a few minutes but the mug he puts down in front of her looks distinctly uncoffee-like. “Hot chocolate.”
“Not what I wanted.”
“Try it, it’s quite good. Might help you sleep too. I can add some cream if you like, or marshmallows. I’ve got little pink ones in the cupboard.”
She tries the hot chocolate; it tastes alright. “You must have nightmares too,” she says.
He shrugs, tries to look nonchalant. It’s not very convincing.
“Bet they’re a lot worse than mine and all.”
He sits next to her, all skin and bones and barely covered by thin cotton pyjamas and that threadbare dressing gown. She wonders what the monsters see when they look at him.
“It’s not a competition,” he says. “And it’ll get easier.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
He sounds sincere, and, right now, that is enough.
+
The singing doesn’t end; it never ends. She’s not mad though, and that’s always something of a relief. She likes to think it’s the sound of life, of meaning, the sadness and the joy of being reaching out so far in opposite directions that it was tearing her apart to hear them both at once.
But it’s quieter now, gentler. She listens, and she knows she’s alive.
She doesn’t think about what it could mean if it stops.
Rating: G. I don't think there even be swears.
Characters/Pairings: Donna, Ten
Spoilers: Seat after OodSphere.
Summary: In the quiet spaces inbetween, the Ood are singing.
“Did I ever mention how much I like your hair?”
Donna gives him this funny look and the Doctor can feel thespaceman martianboy alienfreak on the tip of her tongue. He looks away, almost embarrassed. “Just wanted to say,” he says, trying to remember which co-ordinates he had been programming in, “really like it. Very red. And shiny.”
“Thanks,” she tells him, a little later on. She’s brought him a cup of tea and he can’t help but notice that she’s looking at him rather speculatively and slightly above eye level. “Bit less product’s what you need though. Bet it feels really hard and spiky.”
“Actually it’s pretty soft.” He inclines his head a little. “Feel if you like.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. “You just drink your tea, sunshine.”
He listens to her leave. The pace of her steps, his beat as he sings under his breath.
+
Donna finds her sleep disturbed, night after night. She finds herself sitting in front of her dressing table mirror brushing her hair and hearing the echo of alien song. Back and forth, back and forth, all along the walls of her mind.
Sometimes she tries to hum along with it, but she can never quite carry the tune.
+
“Your lot, were they all like that then, telepathic?”
He looks the sort of thoughtful Donna’s learned to recognise as how much of the truth can I get away with? “More or less,” he says. “Some better than others. I was always considered pretty good.”
“Course you were.” But she speaks lightly and with a smile. “D’you always hear everyone else’s thoughts though? I mean, you don’t, like, eavesdrop on me or anything do you?”
“Why? Got any guilty secrets?”
“You gonna give me a straight answer or not?”
“No, Donna, I’m not spying on the inside of your head. I wouldn’t even if I could, which I can’t, not without physical contact and even then, you’d notice. Okay?”
“Okay,” she says. “Well, that’s good then. So when you were in my head, was that... was that weird? I mean, what with me being an alien, to you?”
He shrugs. “I’m used to humans.”
“Sounds like you’re saying you’re used to cats.” He gives her a look, and she raises her eyebrows, not wanting to disappoint him, and says, “That what I am to you? Some great big talking cat that can make you cups of tea?”
“Don’t,” he says severely, “be so ridiculous.”
+
She wakes up and there are tears in her eyes and of course it’s the song of course it is but she can’t remember dreaming and even if she could what’s wrong with that? Two hundred years enslavement and she’s complaining because she’s had a couple of nights’ bad sleep? Stupid, stupid, stupid.
When she falls asleep again, the world is not as cold as she remembers and her eyes are shining red.
+
The ship’s alive. Donna doesn’t mind so much when she wakes up in the morning, desperate for a good cup of coffee and finds the kitchen opposite her bedroom, but twenty minutes spent searching for the console room would be enough for her to start yelling, if she hadn’t already learned that was precisely the sort of reaction that caused the TARDIS to show off its perverse sense of humour.
So she keeps walking and, sooner or later, finds a door that stands invitingly ajar.
She looks up at the ceiling, and mutters, “This had better be good.”
+
The Doctor finds her by following the sound of a piano. There’s no style to the play, no skill; the melody echoes through the corridors, awkward and childish. It stops when he taps open the door to the music room.
Donna pulls the piano lid down and turns around on the little stool. “You gonna laugh at me then?”
The Doctor shakes his head, suddenly uncomfortably aware that he’s invaded her privacy.
“I take it all these instruments are yours. You must play a lot.”
“Recorder,” he says. “Harp. Alright on the trombone. The violin, badly. But only because I was pretending to be Sherlock Holmes.”
“Isn’t he fictional?”
“Yes. Sometimes. What were you playing?”
“I was trying to remember the Ood song. Wouldn’t matter if I got it right though, still wouldn’t be the same.”
She sounds wistful enough for him to take a hesitant step forward. “I could...” he tries to offer but she shakes her head.
“No,” she says, and she’s quite certain, “if I find it, I want to do it myself.”
+
She wakes up screaming. She could feel it, the second brain in the back of her throat, suffocating her and she had to get it out had to and it choked burning her as she coughed and coughed and coughed...
She gets up, grabs a dressing gown and finds the kitchen, opposite her bedroom. She makes a pot of coffee and takes deep breaths. She understands fear a little better now, and she can deal with this. It isn’t even real, after all.
“I find that hot chocolate usually works better.”
Donna jumps, raises her mug of fresh coffee accusingly as she glares at the silhouette in the doorway.
“Or warm milk,” it continues, “if you can stomach it. How much of that stuff do you drink a day anyway? It’s no wonder you have nightmares.”
“They’re not nightmares.”
“They’re upsetting you, whatever they are,” says the Doctor, fetching the milk from the fridge. He pours himself a glass then passes it to Donna for her coffee.
“It’s just singing,” she says, “that’s all. Just singing.”
“It was never just singing to them.”
She feels a stab of anger. Patronising git, she thinks. “I know that. But it’s not them singing now, is it? It’s my subconscious dealing with it all. That’s normal, isn’t it? Can’t whisk a girl away for adventures all through in time and space and not give her a couple of bad dreams, what with all the terrible things going on out here.”
She almost makes it, but just at the end she hears her voice crack and she can’t say any more because if she does, she’ll cry. And she’s not going to do that.
She picks up her coffee and she goes back to her room.
+
“That’s not a real sky, is it? There is no way that is a real sky.”
“Sort of depends what you mean by real,” says the Doctor. It’s the most impressive garden inside the TARDIS that he could remember the location of and they’re taking a stroll along the marble paths, round the great fir trees and pines and redwoods, over a little wooden bridge standing astride a small river (he’s always meant to find out where it goes, never found the time) and round to the picnic bench sitting at the edge of the (suspiciously perfectly trimmed) hedge-maze.
“You could spend a lifetime in this ship exploring.”
“Yeah, may have done that actually. I mean, not one lifetime, not all at once, but adding all the time up probably comes to a hundred years, at least. And there was this one time that Romana and I got trapped in an interstitial bubble for... you’re not listening to a word I’m saying are you?”
Donna grins, pretends he’s right. “What’s in the centre of the maze?” she asks.
“Dunno. It’s been a while. Probably a rather uncomfortable seat. Or a fountain. It might very well be a fountain.”
“Come on then.” Her enthusiasm for even such a trivial exploration as this is more than enough to tempt him, so he lets her take his hand and she guides him around one hedge after another. It’s only when the unreal blue sky begin to fade to an equally unreal red and unreal stars are threatening to appear that he realises they may have a problem.
“Um... Donna...”
“Yeah,” she says, resigned. “I know. Want some chocolate?” She pulls a bar of Dairy Milk out of a pocket and the Doctor looks at it suspiciously.
“That’s mine.”
“Yes. But since it was sitting in your coat pocket being uneaten, I thought I might make better use of it. You want a square or not?”
He accepts, chews thoughtfully and says, “What we really need is some hedge cutters.”
“I think you might be missing the point of a maze.”
“Don’t like them much. Got lost in a really nasty one once, full of stuff trying to kill me.”
Donna’s eyes roll and he smiles as she says, “Why am I not surprised?”
They find the centre, sooner or later. There’s an apple tree sitting there, small and gnarled; an old, hardy thing with its red fruit sitting plump on the branches.
“It’s autumn in here?” asks Donna sceptically.
The Doctor shrugs. “Guess so.”
They sit beneath the leafy branches and munch on apples; there’s a breeze overhead and they can hear the sound of the river running nearby. There’s silence between them, and it’s not uncomfortable. Donna closes her eyes and she can feel the song, beating in time with her heart.
“Now,” says the Doctor, “I don’t suppose you can remember the way out?”
+
“D’you just sit here in the dark at night or something?”
“Night in the TARDIS is entirely arbitrary. Coffee, I take it?”
“I guess.”
“Want the lights on?”
“It would make you seem slightly less creepy, yeah.”
She blinks in the blank white light and when she can finally see, it’s the Doctor’s face staring at her, frowning. “Creepy? Really?”
“You know, I don’t know whether you’re an insufferable egotist or your skin’s just made of wet paper hankies. Is that my coffee you’re not making?”
He’s busy for a few minutes but the mug he puts down in front of her looks distinctly uncoffee-like. “Hot chocolate.”
“Not what I wanted.”
“Try it, it’s quite good. Might help you sleep too. I can add some cream if you like, or marshmallows. I’ve got little pink ones in the cupboard.”
She tries the hot chocolate; it tastes alright. “You must have nightmares too,” she says.
He shrugs, tries to look nonchalant. It’s not very convincing.
“Bet they’re a lot worse than mine and all.”
He sits next to her, all skin and bones and barely covered by thin cotton pyjamas and that threadbare dressing gown. She wonders what the monsters see when they look at him.
“It’s not a competition,” he says. “And it’ll get easier.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
He sounds sincere, and, right now, that is enough.
+
The singing doesn’t end; it never ends. She’s not mad though, and that’s always something of a relief. She likes to think it’s the sound of life, of meaning, the sadness and the joy of being reaching out so far in opposite directions that it was tearing her apart to hear them both at once.
But it’s quieter now, gentler. She listens, and she knows she’s alive.
She doesn’t think about what it could mean if it stops.