Ten Years After the Journey's End (1/1)
A coda to the Emotional Baggage series
SUMMARY AND SPOILER WARNINGS: Exactly what it says on the tin. Starts the minute JE ends, and I can't say more without spoiling somebody.
Thanks to RTD for the emotional assault course. I borrowed his characters and have tried to return them with canon intact. I'm working through the stages now and so far I've done Denial, Anger and Bargaining. This one is Acceptance, just about!
Credit is also due to The Time Traveler's Wife by Audery Niffeneger - I borrowed a character or two.
He’s off into the Vortex faster than you could say, “Her name was Rose,” and that’s exactly how he wants it, because nobody can reach him up there.
Or so he thought.
He’s off into the Vortex faster than you could say, “Her name was Rose,” and that’s exactly how he wants it, because nobody can reach him up there.
Or so he thought. But he’d forgotten about Martha’s phone. He leaves it for a few rings, just sits staring at nothing in particular. Hard to believe that, just a few hours ago, this place was packed to the rafters. Feels like something from another world. Another him.
So there he is, feeling his skin prickle a bit as the fibres of his wet shirt dry out across his back. But then it’s like he hears a voice behind him, saying “Oi, Space Boy, don’t yer legs work any more?” and duty gets the better of him - doesn’t it always? He just hopes he isn’t being summoned to a tedious UNIT debriefing - he’d not get through it without losing his temper about that bloody suicide key of theirs.
Anyway, it isn’t UNIT as such. Just Martha, sounding ridiculously perky for someone who almost ended the world earlier that day. Resilient creatures, human beings. Long as you don’t go messing with their brains.
“TARDIS,” he yawns, poking at his red-ringed eyes.
“Is Donna there?” she asks, and goes on without waiting for an answer (that used to be his trick, didn’t it?) “See, I just called her home and got her mother - well, I assume that’s who it was. And she was a bit funny, to be honest, said there was nobody called Donna lived there and slammed the phone down on me. I wondered if I’d got the number wrong?”
“See, there’s someone I’d like you both to meet…” she goes on.
She’s giggly because the somebody’s Tom, her fiancée. He’s been granted a few days’ leave to catch up with his folks after recent events. His first reaction’s to say he’s not in the mood, but someone seems to dig him in the side and say, “Don’t be so daft, you emo git, it’s your family and that’s all there is to it.”
So he says yes - in fact, he nips across to Africa to pick Tom up because most of the flights are grounded (all that atmospheric excitation) and the guy’s only got four days. And by the time they gets back to Martha’s place, there’s Tish and Mickey, who are already well on the way to becoming an item, it seems; even Francine is almost nice to him. (He doesn’t ask where Martha’s dad is). Jack drops in, just back from using his charm on UNIT to persuade Martha’s boss to release her to Torchwood. Seems a shame not to include Sarah Jane, so he picks her and the boy up, too. Might as well get everyone together to brief them about the Donna situation, after all.
Jack’s not impressed - he thinks they could have tried something less drastic, but Retcon’s a pretty blunt instrument, so what does he know?
They drink to absent friends. It’s a fairly bearable evening, he thinks, as these things go.
Jack comes back with him and insists on staying the night. He’s so grateful he doesn’t know how to say thank you, so he doesn’t.
*******
Next morning, he rings Wilf Mott to apologise. Diplomatically, Wilf tells him where the allotment is. Soon he’s dropping in two evenings a week, when he knows Donna’s safely out of the way at night school catching up on some A levels she missed. She passes them with flying colours and gets a place at Roehampton to study teaching and Children’s Literature - oh, how he wishes he could give her a hug the day he gets that news.
Talking of education, Sarah Jane invites him round for tea to discuss Luke’s future (and to try - successfully as it turns out - to rope him in as a Trustee of the Harriet Jones Memorial Foundation).
Luke’s a problem, all right. Socially he’s barely in his teens, having been adopted as an ectogene, but he’s so bright he could study Astrophysics with Stephen Hawking and still be bored to tears. He doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere.
“Reminds me of someone I know,” Sarah Jane remarks, handing him another cup of tea.
“Oi!” he says, half-heartedly. “Watch it, Girl Reporter.”
He knows when he’s losing an argument. And it’s time he found another travelling companion. He thinks he’ll take a break from young ladies for a decade or two.
Would’ve been nice if Romana had been around to help with the maths, but you can’t have everything, can you?
********
Donna’s loving college, working three nights a week in a pub to pay the rent. It’s worth every penny, she tells Wilf, to get away from her mother. (“Children’s Literature! Why don’t you read some real books?” Sylvia demands, picking up the latest Mills and Boon romance).
The Doctor pauses halfway through thinning out Wilf’s carrots and silently cheers for Donna. Wilf tells him there’s a young man moving in with Donna next week and that’ll help with the finances. He’s nice, a bit shy, but then he’s got a terrible stammer.
“Aye, aye - what are you looking so pleased with yourself about, Doctor?” asks Wilf, smiling and handing him a steaming mug.
“Oh, nothing,” he smiles. “Went to the 51st century a few weeks ago. Young Luke needed to take some library books back.”
********
It’s time for the annual - more or less - Team TARDIS reunion. Great to see all those familiar faces around the console. He even got Wilf along to the last one. Sometimes there’s more pilots than stations, and they have a laugh and do a few laps of the nearest galaxy cluster for luck. They used to travel in time, until that business with Caesar’s wife when the Doctor had to rescue Jack from the arena.
Jack fancied himself as a gladiator. So did several other people.
Anyway, at this get-together Jack says, “There’s someone I know who’d like to meet you.” It turns out to be a rich American widow, Clare Abshire De Tamble.
Soon his life is punctuated with regular visits to Chicago. Clare’s late husband, Henry, was one of the first humans to be diagnosed with Chronological Displacement Disorder; it’s either a genetic anomaly or the next stage in the evolution of the human species, depending on your point of view.
It’s a horrible thing to live and die with, though. Talk about testing a relationship to the limit. The sufferer travels back and forth through his own timeline, involuntarily and repeatedly (usually arriving naked and getting arrested - that’s how Jack got interested, probably). Henry died young, as most of them do - worst of all, he knew the precise date and manner of his death. He left a teenage daughter, conceived out of timestream, who soon seems more at home in the TARDIS than most other places. This suits Luke just fine.
The Doctor likes Clare; she seems to have the loyalty of Rose, the courage of Martha, the directness of Donna and the intelligence of River Song all rolled into one, and the months they spend in each other’s company launching the CDD Research Foundation are the closest he’s come for some time to having a romantic fling. But it’s going nowhere - on either side - because Clare was a one-man woman and that man’s gone. She knows she’ll see Henry one more time - he told her that in a letter just before he died. It won’t be until 2053 but, as far as Clare’s concerned, she’s still married to him.
Fair enough.
*******
He’s never been much good at weddings, particularly his own, but he seems to be attending more and more of them as the years go by. Martha and Tom, Jack and Ianto, Mickey and Tish, Maria and Clyde. He works the crowd, laughing and saying, “Come on, you!” to people he’s not seen for a while and pulling them into hugs. And he’s all right. Not just Time Lord All Right, but really.
He might, just might, occasionally think about the one phone call he longs for, but won’t ever get, but he doesn’t dwell on things. Sarah Jane was right all that time ago. He’s never been as lonely as he thinks he is.
The one wedding he can’t show up at, of course, is Lee and Donna’s. He daren’t risk it, but he has a session with Wilf and the photos later on. Sylvia wants to sell up, Donna’s moved out (or rather, got married - she’s not lived at home for years now). Wilf’s not quite sure what’ll happen if she does get around to it.
“Well, you can’t live in the shed up here,” the Doctor says. “You’re getting a bit long in the tooth for that. Fancy seeing some new stars?”
It’s the obvious solution. Sylvia keeps his bed made up and her mouth shut. Old Wilf’s having the time of his life.
********
“There’s someone here wants to meet you,” Jack says, on the phone. Turns out she was driving an unlicensed space shuttle when it crash-landed in Cardiff Bay. Jack’s traced it to a planet called Messaline and the Doctor doesn’t like the relish in his voice when he describes the pert young pilot to him.
The Doctor’s down in the Hub, his coat flapping like the wings of an avenging paternal angel, within minutes.
But that’s another story.
*******
Donna gives birth to twins halfway through her MA in “The English Tradition of Fantasy and Myth in Young People’s Fiction.” Reading between the lines, the Doctor can tell life’s not easy, though she’s not complaining. Lee doesn’t earn much, the flat’s too small for the four of them and really he’d like to leave his job and be a full-time house-husband.
Donna’s beginning to wonder whether to accept the inevitable, drop the MA and go back to temping while they pay their debts off.
“Says she’ll pick it up later,” Wilf says.
“She must be nearly forty,” the Doctor remarks. “Later might be too late.”
“She’s only lasted this long because she wants to show her mother she can stick at something,” Wilf remarks.
The Doctor frowns a little and he’s quiet for a few minutes. “Does she still do the Lottery?” he asks. “Always did believe in fate and all that hocus pocus, silly girl.”
“Oh aye,” Wilf replies. “Same numbers every week. Regular as clockwork.”
The Doctor nips off in the TARDIS for a few minutes and returns with a few numbers scribbled on a bit of paper. He hands it to Wilf, who winks and puts it in his pocket.
“Tell her to try these next week,” the Doctor suggests.
After that, there’s no stopping Donna. She’s running the Schools Library Service for the whole of London by the time she’s forty-five. Likes the hours. Gives her plenty of time to travel. Eventually they rent out the house for a year, buy a temperamental dark blue camper van and go around the world. The kids can speak four languages by the time they get back.
******
It’s ten years, almost to the week, since the memorable day Donna Noble saved the whole of creation and the Doctor lost both his best mate and the love of his life. If anyone had told him, when he was standing outside the Nobles’ house in the rain, what enjoyable years they’d turn out to be, he’d have been very surprised. Almost as surprised as he was to find himself in the same body. He must be slowing down in his old age.
He keeps worms in the tank where the hand used to be. Donna would have relished that joke.
One day he’s on his own in the TARDIS when the phone rings. He puts it on visual and whoops of joy from both ends of the connection ring around the control room.
“Blimey! Look, Rose! I’ve done it. Actually done it - isn’t that brilliant?” cries a cheerful Cockney voice. “Told you, once we reversed the sonic polarity of the voidal flux feedback…”
“You haven’t changed a bit,” the Doctor tells them. It isn’t quite true, as it happens. His other self’s starting to thin out a little on top and he’s ditched the sideburns, saying they start looking a bit silly once your hair’s turning white.
But he still wears a suit - a brown pinstripe, of course. He’s not as skinny as he used to be. Rose has toned down the makeup and the shape of her face has changed, but her smile could still light up a whole string of worlds. She’s smiling right at him.
Blinking back a tear or two, she asks if he’s all right. For once he answers truthfully and her beautiful eyes soften in relief. He realises she’s been carrying that burden since the day they parted and wonders, guiltily, whether he should have made more effort to contact her. His love for her is undimmed, unrequited and still unspoken, yet none of that has turned out to be incompatible with a happy and fulfilling life. If that isn’t a miracle, given his state of mind ten years ago, then he doesn’t know what is.
Now he looks at the little lines around her mouth and her eyes and wonders whether worry or laughter put them there. A bit of each, probably. There’s so much to tell him. She keeps having to slap down his other self to get a word in edgeways, but she can twist him around her little finger and it’s a joy to watch. What a difference from the awkwardness on the beach all that time ago.
“Happy?” he asks her.
“Yeah. What about you?”
He smiles. “Yes, I’m happy.”
She’s not quite convinced. “Sort of?”
“Nope,” he insists. “I’m happy happy.” That was her gift to him, the capacity for happy-happiness. He came out of the transaction every bit as rich as her.
They’ve almost finished their TARDIS. They’ve found a stable portal across the Void and that’s just brilliant because, as a matter of fact, there’s someone they think he’d like to meet.
She’s rude and ginger and three weeks old.
Of course, they’ve called her Donna.
SUMMARY AND SPOILER WARNINGS: Exactly what it says on the tin. Starts the minute JE ends, and I can't say more without spoiling somebody.
Thanks to RTD for the emotional assault course. I borrowed his characters and have tried to return them with canon intact. I'm working through the stages now and so far I've done Denial, Anger and Bargaining. This one is Acceptance, just about!
Credit is also due to The Time Traveler's Wife by Audery Niffeneger - I borrowed a character or two.
He’s off into the Vortex faster than you could say, “Her name was Rose,” and that’s exactly how he wants it, because nobody can reach him up there.
Or so he thought.
He’s off into the Vortex faster than you could say, “Her name was Rose,” and that’s exactly how he wants it, because nobody can reach him up there.
Or so he thought. But he’d forgotten about Martha’s phone. He leaves it for a few rings, just sits staring at nothing in particular. Hard to believe that, just a few hours ago, this place was packed to the rafters. Feels like something from another world. Another him.
So there he is, feeling his skin prickle a bit as the fibres of his wet shirt dry out across his back. But then it’s like he hears a voice behind him, saying “Oi, Space Boy, don’t yer legs work any more?” and duty gets the better of him - doesn’t it always? He just hopes he isn’t being summoned to a tedious UNIT debriefing - he’d not get through it without losing his temper about that bloody suicide key of theirs.
Anyway, it isn’t UNIT as such. Just Martha, sounding ridiculously perky for someone who almost ended the world earlier that day. Resilient creatures, human beings. Long as you don’t go messing with their brains.
“TARDIS,” he yawns, poking at his red-ringed eyes.
“Is Donna there?” she asks, and goes on without waiting for an answer (that used to be his trick, didn’t it?) “See, I just called her home and got her mother - well, I assume that’s who it was. And she was a bit funny, to be honest, said there was nobody called Donna lived there and slammed the phone down on me. I wondered if I’d got the number wrong?”
“See, there’s someone I’d like you both to meet…” she goes on.
She’s giggly because the somebody’s Tom, her fiancée. He’s been granted a few days’ leave to catch up with his folks after recent events. His first reaction’s to say he’s not in the mood, but someone seems to dig him in the side and say, “Don’t be so daft, you emo git, it’s your family and that’s all there is to it.”
So he says yes - in fact, he nips across to Africa to pick Tom up because most of the flights are grounded (all that atmospheric excitation) and the guy’s only got four days. And by the time they gets back to Martha’s place, there’s Tish and Mickey, who are already well on the way to becoming an item, it seems; even Francine is almost nice to him. (He doesn’t ask where Martha’s dad is). Jack drops in, just back from using his charm on UNIT to persuade Martha’s boss to release her to Torchwood. Seems a shame not to include Sarah Jane, so he picks her and the boy up, too. Might as well get everyone together to brief them about the Donna situation, after all.
Jack’s not impressed - he thinks they could have tried something less drastic, but Retcon’s a pretty blunt instrument, so what does he know?
They drink to absent friends. It’s a fairly bearable evening, he thinks, as these things go.
Jack comes back with him and insists on staying the night. He’s so grateful he doesn’t know how to say thank you, so he doesn’t.
*******
Next morning, he rings Wilf Mott to apologise. Diplomatically, Wilf tells him where the allotment is. Soon he’s dropping in two evenings a week, when he knows Donna’s safely out of the way at night school catching up on some A levels she missed. She passes them with flying colours and gets a place at Roehampton to study teaching and Children’s Literature - oh, how he wishes he could give her a hug the day he gets that news.
Talking of education, Sarah Jane invites him round for tea to discuss Luke’s future (and to try - successfully as it turns out - to rope him in as a Trustee of the Harriet Jones Memorial Foundation).
Luke’s a problem, all right. Socially he’s barely in his teens, having been adopted as an ectogene, but he’s so bright he could study Astrophysics with Stephen Hawking and still be bored to tears. He doesn’t seem to fit in anywhere.
“Reminds me of someone I know,” Sarah Jane remarks, handing him another cup of tea.
“Oi!” he says, half-heartedly. “Watch it, Girl Reporter.”
He knows when he’s losing an argument. And it’s time he found another travelling companion. He thinks he’ll take a break from young ladies for a decade or two.
Would’ve been nice if Romana had been around to help with the maths, but you can’t have everything, can you?
********
Donna’s loving college, working three nights a week in a pub to pay the rent. It’s worth every penny, she tells Wilf, to get away from her mother. (“Children’s Literature! Why don’t you read some real books?” Sylvia demands, picking up the latest Mills and Boon romance).
The Doctor pauses halfway through thinning out Wilf’s carrots and silently cheers for Donna. Wilf tells him there’s a young man moving in with Donna next week and that’ll help with the finances. He’s nice, a bit shy, but then he’s got a terrible stammer.
“Aye, aye - what are you looking so pleased with yourself about, Doctor?” asks Wilf, smiling and handing him a steaming mug.
“Oh, nothing,” he smiles. “Went to the 51st century a few weeks ago. Young Luke needed to take some library books back.”
********
It’s time for the annual - more or less - Team TARDIS reunion. Great to see all those familiar faces around the console. He even got Wilf along to the last one. Sometimes there’s more pilots than stations, and they have a laugh and do a few laps of the nearest galaxy cluster for luck. They used to travel in time, until that business with Caesar’s wife when the Doctor had to rescue Jack from the arena.
Jack fancied himself as a gladiator. So did several other people.
Anyway, at this get-together Jack says, “There’s someone I know who’d like to meet you.” It turns out to be a rich American widow, Clare Abshire De Tamble.
Soon his life is punctuated with regular visits to Chicago. Clare’s late husband, Henry, was one of the first humans to be diagnosed with Chronological Displacement Disorder; it’s either a genetic anomaly or the next stage in the evolution of the human species, depending on your point of view.
It’s a horrible thing to live and die with, though. Talk about testing a relationship to the limit. The sufferer travels back and forth through his own timeline, involuntarily and repeatedly (usually arriving naked and getting arrested - that’s how Jack got interested, probably). Henry died young, as most of them do - worst of all, he knew the precise date and manner of his death. He left a teenage daughter, conceived out of timestream, who soon seems more at home in the TARDIS than most other places. This suits Luke just fine.
The Doctor likes Clare; she seems to have the loyalty of Rose, the courage of Martha, the directness of Donna and the intelligence of River Song all rolled into one, and the months they spend in each other’s company launching the CDD Research Foundation are the closest he’s come for some time to having a romantic fling. But it’s going nowhere - on either side - because Clare was a one-man woman and that man’s gone. She knows she’ll see Henry one more time - he told her that in a letter just before he died. It won’t be until 2053 but, as far as Clare’s concerned, she’s still married to him.
Fair enough.
*******
He’s never been much good at weddings, particularly his own, but he seems to be attending more and more of them as the years go by. Martha and Tom, Jack and Ianto, Mickey and Tish, Maria and Clyde. He works the crowd, laughing and saying, “Come on, you!” to people he’s not seen for a while and pulling them into hugs. And he’s all right. Not just Time Lord All Right, but really.
He might, just might, occasionally think about the one phone call he longs for, but won’t ever get, but he doesn’t dwell on things. Sarah Jane was right all that time ago. He’s never been as lonely as he thinks he is.
The one wedding he can’t show up at, of course, is Lee and Donna’s. He daren’t risk it, but he has a session with Wilf and the photos later on. Sylvia wants to sell up, Donna’s moved out (or rather, got married - she’s not lived at home for years now). Wilf’s not quite sure what’ll happen if she does get around to it.
“Well, you can’t live in the shed up here,” the Doctor says. “You’re getting a bit long in the tooth for that. Fancy seeing some new stars?”
It’s the obvious solution. Sylvia keeps his bed made up and her mouth shut. Old Wilf’s having the time of his life.
********
“There’s someone here wants to meet you,” Jack says, on the phone. Turns out she was driving an unlicensed space shuttle when it crash-landed in Cardiff Bay. Jack’s traced it to a planet called Messaline and the Doctor doesn’t like the relish in his voice when he describes the pert young pilot to him.
The Doctor’s down in the Hub, his coat flapping like the wings of an avenging paternal angel, within minutes.
But that’s another story.
*******
Donna gives birth to twins halfway through her MA in “The English Tradition of Fantasy and Myth in Young People’s Fiction.” Reading between the lines, the Doctor can tell life’s not easy, though she’s not complaining. Lee doesn’t earn much, the flat’s too small for the four of them and really he’d like to leave his job and be a full-time house-husband.
Donna’s beginning to wonder whether to accept the inevitable, drop the MA and go back to temping while they pay their debts off.
“Says she’ll pick it up later,” Wilf says.
“She must be nearly forty,” the Doctor remarks. “Later might be too late.”
“She’s only lasted this long because she wants to show her mother she can stick at something,” Wilf remarks.
The Doctor frowns a little and he’s quiet for a few minutes. “Does she still do the Lottery?” he asks. “Always did believe in fate and all that hocus pocus, silly girl.”
“Oh aye,” Wilf replies. “Same numbers every week. Regular as clockwork.”
The Doctor nips off in the TARDIS for a few minutes and returns with a few numbers scribbled on a bit of paper. He hands it to Wilf, who winks and puts it in his pocket.
“Tell her to try these next week,” the Doctor suggests.
After that, there’s no stopping Donna. She’s running the Schools Library Service for the whole of London by the time she’s forty-five. Likes the hours. Gives her plenty of time to travel. Eventually they rent out the house for a year, buy a temperamental dark blue camper van and go around the world. The kids can speak four languages by the time they get back.
******
It’s ten years, almost to the week, since the memorable day Donna Noble saved the whole of creation and the Doctor lost both his best mate and the love of his life. If anyone had told him, when he was standing outside the Nobles’ house in the rain, what enjoyable years they’d turn out to be, he’d have been very surprised. Almost as surprised as he was to find himself in the same body. He must be slowing down in his old age.
He keeps worms in the tank where the hand used to be. Donna would have relished that joke.
One day he’s on his own in the TARDIS when the phone rings. He puts it on visual and whoops of joy from both ends of the connection ring around the control room.
“Blimey! Look, Rose! I’ve done it. Actually done it - isn’t that brilliant?” cries a cheerful Cockney voice. “Told you, once we reversed the sonic polarity of the voidal flux feedback…”
“You haven’t changed a bit,” the Doctor tells them. It isn’t quite true, as it happens. His other self’s starting to thin out a little on top and he’s ditched the sideburns, saying they start looking a bit silly once your hair’s turning white.
But he still wears a suit - a brown pinstripe, of course. He’s not as skinny as he used to be. Rose has toned down the makeup and the shape of her face has changed, but her smile could still light up a whole string of worlds. She’s smiling right at him.
Blinking back a tear or two, she asks if he’s all right. For once he answers truthfully and her beautiful eyes soften in relief. He realises she’s been carrying that burden since the day they parted and wonders, guiltily, whether he should have made more effort to contact her. His love for her is undimmed, unrequited and still unspoken, yet none of that has turned out to be incompatible with a happy and fulfilling life. If that isn’t a miracle, given his state of mind ten years ago, then he doesn’t know what is.
Now he looks at the little lines around her mouth and her eyes and wonders whether worry or laughter put them there. A bit of each, probably. There’s so much to tell him. She keeps having to slap down his other self to get a word in edgeways, but she can twist him around her little finger and it’s a joy to watch. What a difference from the awkwardness on the beach all that time ago.
“Happy?” he asks her.
“Yeah. What about you?”
He smiles. “Yes, I’m happy.”
She’s not quite convinced. “Sort of?”
“Nope,” he insists. “I’m happy happy.” That was her gift to him, the capacity for happy-happiness. He came out of the transaction every bit as rich as her.
They’ve almost finished their TARDIS. They’ve found a stable portal across the Void and that’s just brilliant because, as a matter of fact, there’s someone they think he’d like to meet.
She’s rude and ginger and three weeks old.
Of course, they’ve called her Donna.