Forever
Title: Forever
Characters: Donna, Doctor, River
Summary: When you're a meta-crisised human that's been dropped back home, you're not supposed to be in the TARDIS kitchen making tea. Apparently. But Donna never does anything by the book.
Rating: G
Word Count: less than 3500
Disclaimer: Nope.
A/N: Despite the evidence to the contrary I don't mind River Song. Except for her annoying tendency to go 'Spoilers! Spoilers! Spoilers!' but I guess if you've had a Timelord lording (har har, see what I did there?) it all over you for years and years, you take what little revenge you can get.
Also, it's a bummer when the story decides it wants to be told in present tense and you've already written 3/4 of it in frigging past tense.
You shouldn’t be here! is perhaps not the worst sentence to hear early in the morning. There are probably a million sentences that are worse one could be told while stirring milk into one’s tea. Why aren’t you dead? might be considered worse. On Donna’s list, this is closely followed by Morning, plumpy!, which is how Lance had always greeted her. Back then she had thought it was his cute, little nickname for her. Now she thinks he might not have cared enough to give her a cute or loving nickname.
Yes, all things considered, there are certainly sentences out there that are far worse than You shouldn’t be here! Yet, the voice that delivers the sentence makes it sound bad enough to push it up the list; maybe not to the top but certainly into the top five.
Donna carefully lays the spoon on the counter top. The click of cutlery on wood echoes unnaturally loud around the room. She turns slowly and eyeballs the streak of nothing that holds on to the doorframe for dear life and regards her with something akin to shock.
“I’m sorry?” she says.
The man opens and closes his mouth several times but no sounds come out.
She lets her hand trail slowly atop the counter until it meets with something hard and heavy. She lifts it up and glances at it briefly. A frying pan. Good. She lets a glittering, hard smile slip onto her face.
“Who are you?” she demands to know. “And what are you doing in my kitchen?”
“I heard noises and wanted to see - Donna,” he says her name immeasurably gently, “this is not your kitchen.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. This,” she breaks off, for the first time noticing that she is in an unfamiliar room. Spinning around, trying vainly to find anything that resembles her kitchen, she comes to face him again and finishes, “Is not my kitchen.”
“No,” he says, still in that gentle voice as if she is a shy animal he is afraid of scaring.
“No, it is not,” she repeats numbly. Suddenly, she is scared. “But why do I know that the cups are in that cupboard and that your secret stash of Cadbury’s is in that one over there behind the mouldy pot that you say is a scientific experiment and I think you’re just too lazy to do the washing up? Why do I know this when I don’t know you?”
He looks unhappy and lost for words. Donna has the feeling this is a fairly unusual state of being for him. Oh, not the unhappiness - he’s a drama queen, her mind whispers - but he doesn’t strike her as the type that's usually lost for words.
She connects the dots. “I don’t know you. I think I have never seen this room before. Yet, I know my way around here well enough that I can make a cup of tea with this metal-y thing that looks like a dentist’s drill. Has this anything to do with the time I can’t remember?”
“Yes.” The sound is broken as if, before making it out of his mouth, it had to force its way past several shards of glass that have ripped it to shreds.
The frying pan drops to her side. With a few quick steps she is in front of him and hugs him. After a surprised, slack moment, he hugs her back, tentative, careful as if he fears she might vanish any moment.
When she steps back, she says, “You looked like you needed one.”
His eyes are suspiciously bright.
“Oh, Donna!” With a rush, his arms encircle her again and he crushes her so hard to his bony, lanky chest that she is pretty sure she hears one of her ribs crack. “Donna,” he says again, though it is muffled as he buries his head in her hair and her neck. “Donna. Donna. Donna. Donna.”
He seems to be stuck in a loop but his voice transports all the words, he can’t say and Donna understands them. I’m sorry. I missed you. It wasn’t the same without you. Don’t leave.
She stands in a strange kitchen - TARDIS kitchen, her mind whispers - and hugs a man she has never seen before but who speaks her name as if the world might end were she to let go.
“You’re a skinny mess, Doctor,” she tells him. “I’ve no idea what I’ve done while I was here but it must have been pretty amazing deducing from the reception I get.”
He abruptly holds her at arms’ length and looks at her earnestly. “You have no idea how amazing you are.” Then he does a double take. “You said my name.”
“What?” Donna goes over what she has just said. “Doctor? That’s your name? What kind of name’s that? That’s a profession, not a name.”
“You have no idea how often I hear that.” He sighs.
She grins. “Well, if you travelled with me then you must have heard it fairly often.”
“Not after the initial meeting,” he says. “You only asked the important questions.”
Donna raises an eyebrow.
“And incidentally,” he says loftily, “You travelled with me, not the other way around.”
The second eyebrow joins its brother up on high. “Is that so?” she says pointedly. “What was I? The plucky, young girl who helps you out?”
“Donna,” he says. His tone has changed. “You shouldn’t remember all that. What happened? Why are you here?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I went to bed at home last night. I woke up here at the table and made myself a cup of tea. Then you barged in.”
“Maybe you sleep-walked onto the TARDIS,” he thinks out loud. “Well, that’d be partly my fault, I guess. I shouldn’t have parked her in Chiswick. I knew I shouldn’t have. But I wanted to know how you were doing.”
“I’ve never sleep-walked in my life. But I must have. I don’t remember how I got here.” She smiles at him. “Checking how I’m doing? Underneath all that Lord-of-Time stance, you’re really just a big, ol’ softie, aren’t you?”
The Doctor doesn’t answer. It was a rhetorical question anyway. He says, “Let’s go to the infirmary. I want to check if everything’s all right. Wouldn’t want a repeat of last time, would we?”
“I’m fine. I don’t really remember. It’s more that I know some things if I don’t concentrate on them,” she says but follows him anyway. He seems pretty anxious to run a couple of tests.
After nearly two hours in the infirmary, she corrects herself. He is very anxious to run every test in every freaking book there ever was and then some. She is getting impatient. “Doctor, are you done yet?”
He turns to her and to anyone else he wouldn’t seem concerned but Donna knows him too well. She knows him so well that she doesn’t need her memories to read him like an open book.
“What’s wrong?” she asks quietly.
He stands in the middle of the room, which suddenly seems to dwarf him, and looks at anything but her.
“Doctor,” she prods him.
He closes his eyes and exhales slowly. His face screws up, trying to bottle the emotions inside.
She understands. “I’m not going to be okay. Is it that? Only, more and more memories come back and I guess sooner or later, they’re going to overwhelm me. How much time have I left?”
“A couple of hours,” he says and his voice holds once more the brittle tone that got shredded by shards of glass.
She nods to herself and then claps her hands once, loudly. The Doctor winces at the sudden explosion of sound.
“Fine,” she says. “Couple of hours. Can you do anything about it?”
The misery written on his face nearly breaks her heart. “I could try to wipe your memories again but other than that...”
“Then you’ll wipe my mind again,” she says briskly. “Oh, not yet, Spaceman. We have a few hours left and we’ll put them to good use. First, I want you to stop looking like a tragic, consumptive Regency heroine. Then, we’ll sit down and you’ll tell me what you’ve been up to. Your stories had better be good and not full of moping, understood?”
“But I’ll have to wipe your mind again.”
“Doesn’t matter. I want to hear them anyway.”
The Doctor’s smile is as brittle as his voice, but he leads her to the kitchen, makes them tea and tells her his stories. She listens, makes comments, rakes him over the coals for a few things and makes him laugh about himself. It does him good.
After a few hours though, their time is up. Her brain is overheating. He can tell by the way she thinks about everything she says before opening her mouth; by the way she controls her voice to form the words she wants to speak. He takes her hand and squeezes it. She squeezes back and smiles feebly. “I thought it would be easier, going back, but it’s harder than I imagined. To let it happen again. I thought I was prepared for it this time.” She labours over every word.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she says quickly and snaps her mouth shut, as it wants to repeat the last word. She continues after a moment, “What did I say about the tragic, consumptive Regency pose? Come on, Timeboy, we haven’t got all day.”
He gives a short bark of laughter. “No, we haven’t.” Cupping her face in his hands gently, oh so gently, he says, “I miss you every day.”
She smiles at him, “I miss you, too. Even when I don’t know it.”
He takes her memories away.
*
The Doctor walks along the corridor and doubles back. “Donna?”
Donna is standing in his kitchen with her back to him, drinking tea. This is impossible. He is not in Chiswick anymore. He sends a sharp thought to his ship. If she has gone and decided independently on a destination again, he is going to rewire her whole circuitry. In answer to his thought a panel slides away from the wall, giving him access to a screen that confirms they haven’t moved. They are not in Chiswick. They are roughly three galaxies away from Chiswick. He looks into the kitchen again where Donna is now facing him with a befuddled expression, her cup of tea in one hand and the frying pan in the other. He wonders about the frying pan. It isn’t as if she hasn’t her right hook to see her through any trouble.
“Who are you?” she demands to know. “And what are you doing in my kitchen?”
“Look around you,” he says. “This isn’t your kitchen.”
Her eyes widen as she looks around. He sees the sudden fear in her eyes when she fires questions at him, “Where am I? Why am I here? What did you do?”
He speaks soothingly. He doesn’t want to scare her any further. “You’re in my kitchen. I don’t know why you are here. From the look of it, I’d say you wanted a cup of tea. I didn’t do anything.”
She lowers the pan. She has apparently decided she can trust him. She shouldn’t. He wiped her mind. Twice. Yet, he is incredibly glad that she still does. He doesn’t question his feelings. They are muddled enough without him consciously poking around in them.
“How did you get in here?” he asks instead.
She is uncertain and the uncertainty frightens her. He can see that but he needs an answer. She shouldn’t be on his TARDIS in a galaxy far, far away. She should be safe at home on Earth.
“I don’t know,” she says and her eyes roam from one corner of the room to the other. “I went to bed at home and I woke up at the table there.” She points to the kitchen table.
The first time, she came to him, she had no idea how she’d done it either. He steps into the kitchen and takes her hand. “Come,” he says gently. “We’ll find out what’s going on here.”
He leads her to the infirmary and runs a few scans for Huon particles. It is a wild shot in the dark and he is none too surprised when there are none. He still grumbles at the readout. What good is modern technology if it can’t tell him what’s wrong with his best mate?
“Doctor?” she asks from the examination bed. “You’re not going to put me through another two hours of tests, are you? It wasn’t particularly exciting the first time round.”
He whirls around in surprise. She is remembering again. That is not good. That is not good at all.
He can feel her eyes on him as he wears a path in the floor trying to come up with a magic solution. Her eyes never leave him but he doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t want to see the acceptance in her face. But Donna hasn’t ever stopped saying what needed to be said because he doesn’t want to hear it.
“Doctor,” she says gently. “I’m fine with it. We’ll have a couple of hours before it all goes pear-shaped and then you’ll wipe my mind again. It is a couple of hours, right?”
He looks at the monitor and nods. “A couple of hours. Yes.”
“Well, I was here two weeks ago. At least, for me it was two weeks. How long has it been for you?” she asks.
“Longer,” he says. “A few months.”
She jumps from the bed, grabs his hand and tows him out of the infirmary. “Thought so. Bet you haven’t been eating properly either. Come, I haven’t had breakfast, yet. You can join me and tell me everything that you did since you saw me last.”
He does. They sit in the kitchen, have breakfast and between mouthfuls he tells her of his adventures, she tells him of her life in Chiswick and they fight over whether he’s allowed to dip his fingers in the marmalade. He claims he is as it is his TARDIS and his marmalade. She slaps his hand and tells him that she doesn’t want his Martian spittle anywhere near the best marmalade within a radius of five galaxies. He would pout but he is too happy.
The inevitable happens. The dam in her head that is keeping the tide at bay is breaking. They look at each other and with a heavy heart the Doctor wipes his friend’s mind for the third time.
*
He can never tell when Donna might visit. He has taken to calling it ‘visiting’. He thinks she subconsciously hones in on the TARDIS whenever the walls in her mind are close to breaking. He still hasn’t found out how she manages to transport to the ship though. In those rare moments when he is absolutely honest with himself, he admits that he has stopped looking for an answer to that question. He fears she will not come again if he solves the problem. He fears it more than he admits even in those few and far in between moments when he is honest with himself.
Furthermore, during her fourth visit Donna puts her foot down when she finds herself strapped to the examination bed for an interminable time again. It detracts from their time together and she is really fed up with the infirmary. The Doctor agrees.
With Donna’s sixth visit they find out that time holds no sway over her. He is in the seventh century when he finds her in the kitchen that is now firmly hers, stirring the tea the TARDIS has thoughtfully provided for her. Two visits later, Donna has to put her foot down again because her ability to follow him through time has the Doctor dragging her to the infirmary the moment she lowers the frying pan.
Though he loves that she is still in his life in a way, he hates wiping her memory every time.
The repeats don’t make it easier.
*
River Song thinks she might never get used to being on the TARDIS. It is amazing! There are so many mysteries hidden in the ship’s depths. River wishes she’d have time to field an expedition to unearth or rather untardis a couple of them. Today though, she contemplates a mystery that is in plain sight.
Right next to the control room is a kitchen. It has no door. It is always there. It never changes place, which is extraordinary. River knows that the TARDIS loves to change the location of the rooms. After all, the ship has played a little far-and-lose with River’s own room a couple of times. There are only two rooms that are ever fixed. The control room is extraordinary enough, she understands the need to have it fixed somewhere, but the small room beside it is only a very ordinary, if slightly old-fashioned kitchen. Well, ordinary as far as ordinary goes on a TARDIS. Whenever she goes past it, she sees a steaming mug of some hot beverage sitting on the kitchen table.
She never sees the Doctor use the kitchen. In fact, he was in a bit of a quandary at one time. Regenration-blues, he calls it. He was in dire need of life-saving tea (literally life-saving, he explained later) and rushed off to make some. Instead of using the kitchen that was just one door away, he ran down several corridors to go to the other kitchen, the one they always use. (He never explained that.)
Frankly, she wonders why the kitchen is always there when nobody ever uses it.
She enters the room of her curiosity at a brisk pace but slows to a stop once inside. Now that she is in the room, she feels foolish. She doesn’t know what she expected. Maybe that the kitchen was only a hologram and the real room behind the holographic field would hold the wonders of the universe. She doesn’t know why but she feels a little let down when the kitchen turns out to be what it always appeared from the outside: a very ordinary, if slightly old-fashioned kitchen.
She approaches the table cautiously and eyes the steaming mug. When nothing explodes in her face, she leans a bit closer and takes a whiff of the aroma coming from the beverage.
“Tea,” she exclaims, surprised. She peers into the mug and adds, “With milk.”
She takes a small sip and grimaces, “Too much milk.”
Before she can put the mug back on the table, the Doctor skids to a stop in the doorway. He must have been running really fast, she concludes, because he is out of breath. She has never seen him out of breath before.
His face falls when he sees her. His eyes slide to the mug in her hand and his face closes off as if someone has drawn the blinds. He strides into the kitchen, takes the mug out of her unresisting hands, empties it into the sink and cleans it with great care. She has never seen him doing the washing up either. He opens one of the cupboards, puts the mug away and stands there for a few seconds, completely still, his hands on the closed cupboard doors. Then he sighs, pats the wall and says to his ship, “She’s not coming today.”
River thinks she hears despondency in his voice but when he turns to her, his features are still schooled in a blank mask.
“We don’t use Donna’s kitchen,” he says in a flat, emotionless voice and strides out of the room.
River dares to breathe again. Who is this woman for whom the TARDIS and her driver keep a cup of hot tea ready at all times? She hurries after him. “Who is Donna, Doctor?”
“She was the most important woman in the universe.” The answer is almost torn from his lips rather than given freely.
River winces. He isn’t happy with her questioning, she can tell, but she couldn’t stop even if she wanted to. She has been curious about the kitchen for so long, neither his short, sharp answer, nor his forbidding tone of voice intimidate her. “Was? Is she dead?”
“She died almost 30 centuries ago.” His eyes stare into a distance that is more than space and time. “Such a long, long time ago.”
“But if she’s dead, why...” she falters.
He turns to her and there is something in his eyes she has never seen before. “She always comes back,” he says. “She promised me forever.”
Characters: Donna, Doctor, River
Summary: When you're a meta-crisised human that's been dropped back home, you're not supposed to be in the TARDIS kitchen making tea. Apparently. But Donna never does anything by the book.
Rating: G
Word Count: less than 3500
Disclaimer: Nope.
A/N: Despite the evidence to the contrary I don't mind River Song. Except for her annoying tendency to go 'Spoilers! Spoilers! Spoilers!' but I guess if you've had a Timelord lording (har har, see what I did there?) it all over you for years and years, you take what little revenge you can get.
Also, it's a bummer when the story decides it wants to be told in present tense and you've already written 3/4 of it in frigging past tense.
You shouldn’t be here! is perhaps not the worst sentence to hear early in the morning. There are probably a million sentences that are worse one could be told while stirring milk into one’s tea. Why aren’t you dead? might be considered worse. On Donna’s list, this is closely followed by Morning, plumpy!, which is how Lance had always greeted her. Back then she had thought it was his cute, little nickname for her. Now she thinks he might not have cared enough to give her a cute or loving nickname.
Yes, all things considered, there are certainly sentences out there that are far worse than You shouldn’t be here! Yet, the voice that delivers the sentence makes it sound bad enough to push it up the list; maybe not to the top but certainly into the top five.
Donna carefully lays the spoon on the counter top. The click of cutlery on wood echoes unnaturally loud around the room. She turns slowly and eyeballs the streak of nothing that holds on to the doorframe for dear life and regards her with something akin to shock.
“I’m sorry?” she says.
The man opens and closes his mouth several times but no sounds come out.
She lets her hand trail slowly atop the counter until it meets with something hard and heavy. She lifts it up and glances at it briefly. A frying pan. Good. She lets a glittering, hard smile slip onto her face.
“Who are you?” she demands to know. “And what are you doing in my kitchen?”
“I heard noises and wanted to see - Donna,” he says her name immeasurably gently, “this is not your kitchen.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. This,” she breaks off, for the first time noticing that she is in an unfamiliar room. Spinning around, trying vainly to find anything that resembles her kitchen, she comes to face him again and finishes, “Is not my kitchen.”
“No,” he says, still in that gentle voice as if she is a shy animal he is afraid of scaring.
“No, it is not,” she repeats numbly. Suddenly, she is scared. “But why do I know that the cups are in that cupboard and that your secret stash of Cadbury’s is in that one over there behind the mouldy pot that you say is a scientific experiment and I think you’re just too lazy to do the washing up? Why do I know this when I don’t know you?”
He looks unhappy and lost for words. Donna has the feeling this is a fairly unusual state of being for him. Oh, not the unhappiness - he’s a drama queen, her mind whispers - but he doesn’t strike her as the type that's usually lost for words.
She connects the dots. “I don’t know you. I think I have never seen this room before. Yet, I know my way around here well enough that I can make a cup of tea with this metal-y thing that looks like a dentist’s drill. Has this anything to do with the time I can’t remember?”
“Yes.” The sound is broken as if, before making it out of his mouth, it had to force its way past several shards of glass that have ripped it to shreds.
The frying pan drops to her side. With a few quick steps she is in front of him and hugs him. After a surprised, slack moment, he hugs her back, tentative, careful as if he fears she might vanish any moment.
When she steps back, she says, “You looked like you needed one.”
His eyes are suspiciously bright.
“Oh, Donna!” With a rush, his arms encircle her again and he crushes her so hard to his bony, lanky chest that she is pretty sure she hears one of her ribs crack. “Donna,” he says again, though it is muffled as he buries his head in her hair and her neck. “Donna. Donna. Donna. Donna.”
He seems to be stuck in a loop but his voice transports all the words, he can’t say and Donna understands them. I’m sorry. I missed you. It wasn’t the same without you. Don’t leave.
She stands in a strange kitchen - TARDIS kitchen, her mind whispers - and hugs a man she has never seen before but who speaks her name as if the world might end were she to let go.
“You’re a skinny mess, Doctor,” she tells him. “I’ve no idea what I’ve done while I was here but it must have been pretty amazing deducing from the reception I get.”
He abruptly holds her at arms’ length and looks at her earnestly. “You have no idea how amazing you are.” Then he does a double take. “You said my name.”
“What?” Donna goes over what she has just said. “Doctor? That’s your name? What kind of name’s that? That’s a profession, not a name.”
“You have no idea how often I hear that.” He sighs.
She grins. “Well, if you travelled with me then you must have heard it fairly often.”
“Not after the initial meeting,” he says. “You only asked the important questions.”
Donna raises an eyebrow.
“And incidentally,” he says loftily, “You travelled with me, not the other way around.”
The second eyebrow joins its brother up on high. “Is that so?” she says pointedly. “What was I? The plucky, young girl who helps you out?”
“Donna,” he says. His tone has changed. “You shouldn’t remember all that. What happened? Why are you here?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. I went to bed at home last night. I woke up here at the table and made myself a cup of tea. Then you barged in.”
“Maybe you sleep-walked onto the TARDIS,” he thinks out loud. “Well, that’d be partly my fault, I guess. I shouldn’t have parked her in Chiswick. I knew I shouldn’t have. But I wanted to know how you were doing.”
“I’ve never sleep-walked in my life. But I must have. I don’t remember how I got here.” She smiles at him. “Checking how I’m doing? Underneath all that Lord-of-Time stance, you’re really just a big, ol’ softie, aren’t you?”
The Doctor doesn’t answer. It was a rhetorical question anyway. He says, “Let’s go to the infirmary. I want to check if everything’s all right. Wouldn’t want a repeat of last time, would we?”
“I’m fine. I don’t really remember. It’s more that I know some things if I don’t concentrate on them,” she says but follows him anyway. He seems pretty anxious to run a couple of tests.
After nearly two hours in the infirmary, she corrects herself. He is very anxious to run every test in every freaking book there ever was and then some. She is getting impatient. “Doctor, are you done yet?”
He turns to her and to anyone else he wouldn’t seem concerned but Donna knows him too well. She knows him so well that she doesn’t need her memories to read him like an open book.
“What’s wrong?” she asks quietly.
He stands in the middle of the room, which suddenly seems to dwarf him, and looks at anything but her.
“Doctor,” she prods him.
He closes his eyes and exhales slowly. His face screws up, trying to bottle the emotions inside.
She understands. “I’m not going to be okay. Is it that? Only, more and more memories come back and I guess sooner or later, they’re going to overwhelm me. How much time have I left?”
“A couple of hours,” he says and his voice holds once more the brittle tone that got shredded by shards of glass.
She nods to herself and then claps her hands once, loudly. The Doctor winces at the sudden explosion of sound.
“Fine,” she says. “Couple of hours. Can you do anything about it?”
The misery written on his face nearly breaks her heart. “I could try to wipe your memories again but other than that...”
“Then you’ll wipe my mind again,” she says briskly. “Oh, not yet, Spaceman. We have a few hours left and we’ll put them to good use. First, I want you to stop looking like a tragic, consumptive Regency heroine. Then, we’ll sit down and you’ll tell me what you’ve been up to. Your stories had better be good and not full of moping, understood?”
“But I’ll have to wipe your mind again.”
“Doesn’t matter. I want to hear them anyway.”
The Doctor’s smile is as brittle as his voice, but he leads her to the kitchen, makes them tea and tells her his stories. She listens, makes comments, rakes him over the coals for a few things and makes him laugh about himself. It does him good.
After a few hours though, their time is up. Her brain is overheating. He can tell by the way she thinks about everything she says before opening her mouth; by the way she controls her voice to form the words she wants to speak. He takes her hand and squeezes it. She squeezes back and smiles feebly. “I thought it would be easier, going back, but it’s harder than I imagined. To let it happen again. I thought I was prepared for it this time.” She labours over every word.
“I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she says quickly and snaps her mouth shut, as it wants to repeat the last word. She continues after a moment, “What did I say about the tragic, consumptive Regency pose? Come on, Timeboy, we haven’t got all day.”
He gives a short bark of laughter. “No, we haven’t.” Cupping her face in his hands gently, oh so gently, he says, “I miss you every day.”
She smiles at him, “I miss you, too. Even when I don’t know it.”
He takes her memories away.
*
The Doctor walks along the corridor and doubles back. “Donna?”
Donna is standing in his kitchen with her back to him, drinking tea. This is impossible. He is not in Chiswick anymore. He sends a sharp thought to his ship. If she has gone and decided independently on a destination again, he is going to rewire her whole circuitry. In answer to his thought a panel slides away from the wall, giving him access to a screen that confirms they haven’t moved. They are not in Chiswick. They are roughly three galaxies away from Chiswick. He looks into the kitchen again where Donna is now facing him with a befuddled expression, her cup of tea in one hand and the frying pan in the other. He wonders about the frying pan. It isn’t as if she hasn’t her right hook to see her through any trouble.
“Who are you?” she demands to know. “And what are you doing in my kitchen?”
“Look around you,” he says. “This isn’t your kitchen.”
Her eyes widen as she looks around. He sees the sudden fear in her eyes when she fires questions at him, “Where am I? Why am I here? What did you do?”
He speaks soothingly. He doesn’t want to scare her any further. “You’re in my kitchen. I don’t know why you are here. From the look of it, I’d say you wanted a cup of tea. I didn’t do anything.”
She lowers the pan. She has apparently decided she can trust him. She shouldn’t. He wiped her mind. Twice. Yet, he is incredibly glad that she still does. He doesn’t question his feelings. They are muddled enough without him consciously poking around in them.
“How did you get in here?” he asks instead.
She is uncertain and the uncertainty frightens her. He can see that but he needs an answer. She shouldn’t be on his TARDIS in a galaxy far, far away. She should be safe at home on Earth.
“I don’t know,” she says and her eyes roam from one corner of the room to the other. “I went to bed at home and I woke up at the table there.” She points to the kitchen table.
The first time, she came to him, she had no idea how she’d done it either. He steps into the kitchen and takes her hand. “Come,” he says gently. “We’ll find out what’s going on here.”
He leads her to the infirmary and runs a few scans for Huon particles. It is a wild shot in the dark and he is none too surprised when there are none. He still grumbles at the readout. What good is modern technology if it can’t tell him what’s wrong with his best mate?
“Doctor?” she asks from the examination bed. “You’re not going to put me through another two hours of tests, are you? It wasn’t particularly exciting the first time round.”
He whirls around in surprise. She is remembering again. That is not good. That is not good at all.
He can feel her eyes on him as he wears a path in the floor trying to come up with a magic solution. Her eyes never leave him but he doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t want to see the acceptance in her face. But Donna hasn’t ever stopped saying what needed to be said because he doesn’t want to hear it.
“Doctor,” she says gently. “I’m fine with it. We’ll have a couple of hours before it all goes pear-shaped and then you’ll wipe my mind again. It is a couple of hours, right?”
He looks at the monitor and nods. “A couple of hours. Yes.”
“Well, I was here two weeks ago. At least, for me it was two weeks. How long has it been for you?” she asks.
“Longer,” he says. “A few months.”
She jumps from the bed, grabs his hand and tows him out of the infirmary. “Thought so. Bet you haven’t been eating properly either. Come, I haven’t had breakfast, yet. You can join me and tell me everything that you did since you saw me last.”
He does. They sit in the kitchen, have breakfast and between mouthfuls he tells her of his adventures, she tells him of her life in Chiswick and they fight over whether he’s allowed to dip his fingers in the marmalade. He claims he is as it is his TARDIS and his marmalade. She slaps his hand and tells him that she doesn’t want his Martian spittle anywhere near the best marmalade within a radius of five galaxies. He would pout but he is too happy.
The inevitable happens. The dam in her head that is keeping the tide at bay is breaking. They look at each other and with a heavy heart the Doctor wipes his friend’s mind for the third time.
*
He can never tell when Donna might visit. He has taken to calling it ‘visiting’. He thinks she subconsciously hones in on the TARDIS whenever the walls in her mind are close to breaking. He still hasn’t found out how she manages to transport to the ship though. In those rare moments when he is absolutely honest with himself, he admits that he has stopped looking for an answer to that question. He fears she will not come again if he solves the problem. He fears it more than he admits even in those few and far in between moments when he is honest with himself.
Furthermore, during her fourth visit Donna puts her foot down when she finds herself strapped to the examination bed for an interminable time again. It detracts from their time together and she is really fed up with the infirmary. The Doctor agrees.
With Donna’s sixth visit they find out that time holds no sway over her. He is in the seventh century when he finds her in the kitchen that is now firmly hers, stirring the tea the TARDIS has thoughtfully provided for her. Two visits later, Donna has to put her foot down again because her ability to follow him through time has the Doctor dragging her to the infirmary the moment she lowers the frying pan.
Though he loves that she is still in his life in a way, he hates wiping her memory every time.
The repeats don’t make it easier.
*
River Song thinks she might never get used to being on the TARDIS. It is amazing! There are so many mysteries hidden in the ship’s depths. River wishes she’d have time to field an expedition to unearth or rather untardis a couple of them. Today though, she contemplates a mystery that is in plain sight.
Right next to the control room is a kitchen. It has no door. It is always there. It never changes place, which is extraordinary. River knows that the TARDIS loves to change the location of the rooms. After all, the ship has played a little far-and-lose with River’s own room a couple of times. There are only two rooms that are ever fixed. The control room is extraordinary enough, she understands the need to have it fixed somewhere, but the small room beside it is only a very ordinary, if slightly old-fashioned kitchen. Well, ordinary as far as ordinary goes on a TARDIS. Whenever she goes past it, she sees a steaming mug of some hot beverage sitting on the kitchen table.
She never sees the Doctor use the kitchen. In fact, he was in a bit of a quandary at one time. Regenration-blues, he calls it. He was in dire need of life-saving tea (literally life-saving, he explained later) and rushed off to make some. Instead of using the kitchen that was just one door away, he ran down several corridors to go to the other kitchen, the one they always use. (He never explained that.)
Frankly, she wonders why the kitchen is always there when nobody ever uses it.
She enters the room of her curiosity at a brisk pace but slows to a stop once inside. Now that she is in the room, she feels foolish. She doesn’t know what she expected. Maybe that the kitchen was only a hologram and the real room behind the holographic field would hold the wonders of the universe. She doesn’t know why but she feels a little let down when the kitchen turns out to be what it always appeared from the outside: a very ordinary, if slightly old-fashioned kitchen.
She approaches the table cautiously and eyes the steaming mug. When nothing explodes in her face, she leans a bit closer and takes a whiff of the aroma coming from the beverage.
“Tea,” she exclaims, surprised. She peers into the mug and adds, “With milk.”
She takes a small sip and grimaces, “Too much milk.”
Before she can put the mug back on the table, the Doctor skids to a stop in the doorway. He must have been running really fast, she concludes, because he is out of breath. She has never seen him out of breath before.
His face falls when he sees her. His eyes slide to the mug in her hand and his face closes off as if someone has drawn the blinds. He strides into the kitchen, takes the mug out of her unresisting hands, empties it into the sink and cleans it with great care. She has never seen him doing the washing up either. He opens one of the cupboards, puts the mug away and stands there for a few seconds, completely still, his hands on the closed cupboard doors. Then he sighs, pats the wall and says to his ship, “She’s not coming today.”
River thinks she hears despondency in his voice but when he turns to her, his features are still schooled in a blank mask.
“We don’t use Donna’s kitchen,” he says in a flat, emotionless voice and strides out of the room.
River dares to breathe again. Who is this woman for whom the TARDIS and her driver keep a cup of hot tea ready at all times? She hurries after him. “Who is Donna, Doctor?”
“She was the most important woman in the universe.” The answer is almost torn from his lips rather than given freely.
River winces. He isn’t happy with her questioning, she can tell, but she couldn’t stop even if she wanted to. She has been curious about the kitchen for so long, neither his short, sharp answer, nor his forbidding tone of voice intimidate her. “Was? Is she dead?”
“She died almost 30 centuries ago.” His eyes stare into a distance that is more than space and time. “Such a long, long time ago.”
“But if she’s dead, why...” she falters.
He turns to her and there is something in his eyes she has never seen before. “She always comes back,” he says. “She promised me forever.”