Fic: Starting Over 5/6 (Donna, Martha, Jack, Ten) [PG]
Title: Starting Over (5/6)
Author: hence-the-name
Characters Donna, Jack, Martha, Ten
Pairing: Jack/Ten
Rating: PG
Spoilers: All of New Who and Torchwood. Takes place after Journey’s End.
Summary: The TARDIS lands in Cardiff with a mysteriously ill Doctor on board.
A/N: Once again, my thanks for my readers' patience with the delay between chapters. Between my schedule and this particular muse--which won't leave me alone but also won't let me pin it down--it's been slow going. And yes, I really am dragging this out for one more chapter...but it really will be the last. :) Thanks to everyone who's still reading--I hope it's been worth the wait!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
The light flowed out of the Doctor and into Donna, through her, tingling along each nerve and synapse, flinging open doors and passageways and leaving the pieces of the last two years scattered along the corridors of her mind, still muddled but finally all the pieces were there again: Lance and Egypt and Adipose, Pompeii and 1926 and extonic sunlight, Rose Tyler and Martha Jones, Sontarans and Unit and Torchwood, Jenny-and through it all, the Doctor. Always the Doctor, taking her hand, clasping her in a hug, grinning that manic grin of his and telling her she’s brilliant. It coursed through her and then suddenly, it was gone. Donna’s body went slack with the abruptness of its loss.
Hands caught her as she fell forward and she came to rest against a bony shoulder clad in light blue. “I’ve got you,” a voice said above her. The Doctor’s voice. Without realizing it she had caught hold of his upper arms and was clutching at him for dear life. “It’s all right.” He stroked her hair. She rested there, trembling and listening to the steady double beat of his hearts.
After a few moments he drew back, holding her by the shoulders and slouching a little so he could look at her face. He had slid from the bed down to the floor, where they sat facing each other. She scrunched her eyes shut and then blinked a few times.
“Doctor?” she asked.
His face broke into a grin. “Yep,” he responded.
Donna took a closer look at him, pale and hollow-eyed. “You look awful,” she told him. He laughed, his eyes crinkling.
“Yep,” he agreed, squeezing her shoulders. His grin widened. “You look brilliant.”
“I-” Donna’s hands flew to her face in sudden horror. You’re regenerating, the Doctor had told her. She looked down at herself, then grabbed a piece of her hair and pulled in front of her face to look at it. She dropped it, sagging with relief. “I look the same.”
“’Course you do, yeah,” the Doctor agreed. “Partial regeneration, that’s all. Only fixed what needed fixing. Brilliant.” He grinned again.
She smiled weakly back. She still felt shaky, as if her thoughts might lose their footing and start tripping over each other any minute. She raised a hand to her forehead, feeling panicky at the thought of losing it all again.
“Donna?” The Doctor’s voice went sharp with sudden worry. She felt his hand on her wrist. “What is it?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I just-” She lowered her hand so she could look at him through the tears that were gathering behind her eyes. “Am I going to be all right?”
He sat back on his heels. “Can I see?” he asked, raising his hands and gesturing.
Donna couldn’t help it; she shrank from him, remembering what he had done-what he had had to do-the last time he had been in her head. Hurt flashed in his eyes at her flinch, but he clamped down on it quickly and waited, patient. Finally Donna nodded, and he leaned forward and set his fingers on her temples, gently touching her mind with his. Donna closed her eyes and held her breath.
In another moment, he was crushing her in another hug. Donna opened her eyes, surprised. Her arms came tentatively around him. “Am I all right, then?” she asked.
“Oh yes!” he cried. He let go of her long enough to pull her to her feet before he threw his arms around her again. “Better than all right. Brilliant. Molto bene!” He let out a delighted laugh, pulling back again to grin at her.
Donna smiled back, and then she slapped him.
“Oi!” he yelped, cupping his cheek.
“That’s for leaving,” she said, shaking a finger in his face.
He opened and closed his mouth a few times, still rubbing his cheek. “I had to,” he said. “The metacrisis would have killed you if you had remembered.”
“You might’ve stayed around for a few days. Instead, it almost killed you.”
He didn’t have an answer to that. He looked away, his hand moving to the back of his neck.
After a moment Donna relented and pulled him into another hug. “It’s good to be back,” she said.
She could feel the tension drain out of him. “It’s good to have you back,” he replied, and wrapped his arms around her. He hung on like a drowning man, as if this was the only way he could be sure she was really here, really all right. Donna could feel him trembling against her. “I’m sorry,” he said into her hair. “I’m so sorry, Donna. There was nothing else-”
“Shh. I know.” It would have to be enough for now, Donna thought, rubbing his back. There would be time for the rest.
“Um.” Behind them, Jack cleared his throat, startling them both. They separated and turned toward him and Martha. “Sorry,” Jack continued. “But what exactly is going on?”
***
There was a long silence. The Doctor looked at each of them in turn and then away without saying anything. He sat back down on the edge of the bed and scrubbed his hands over his face and through his hair.
After another moment Martha crossed the room and checked the readings on the monitors above him, still recording his vital signs. “That’s all back to normal,” she said, relief in her voice. She sat back down on the stool near the bed. “What happened? That light, it looked like-”
“Regeneration,” the Doctor finished for her, nodding.
“And youhave your memories back?”
Donna looked at the Doctor in surprise. “You lost your memories?” she asked.
He nodded and waved his arms about in a vague explanatory gesture. “Long story. Neurons got scrambled with all that excess energy about.” He tapped his temple and grinned up at her. “All back now.”
“And you?” Martha asked Donna.
She nodded, sitting down beside the Doctor on the bed. Jack stayed standing, arms crossed and leaning one hip against the counter. “So what happened?”
They all looked at the Doctor.
He looked at the three of them as if he would rather do anything than explain what had just happened in terms they could understand. He scrubbed his hand over his face again and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “The metacrisis worked three ways,” he began. “There was Donna, and the other Doctor-and there was also me.” He looked at Donna. “I thought I was feeling the TARDIS dying, but I was really feeling the metacrisis. If I had realized...” He trailed off.
“The metacrisis was unstable,” he continued. “The human brain isn’t meant to handle a Time Lord consciousness. It was killing her, so I had to-wipe her mind.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “There was nothing else I could do. After we took you back to Cardiff and took Rose-home-you just started unraveling. It was happening so fast-” His voice trembled and he cut off before it broke. “It was all I could do,” he repeated.
Donna shuddered, remembering, and then she thought about what it would have been like if it had been the Doctor who had started to unravel, and what she would have done. She reached over and squeezed his arm. “I know,” she said. He looked at her and gave her a fragile little smile.
“What I didn’t realize,” the Doctor said when his voice was steady again, addressing her, “was that the residual energy from my regeneration-what I didn’t siphon off into my hand and which I should have reabsorbed-was actually building. You and the other Doctor were connected to each other, and I was connected to you both. When Davros shot you and woke the Time Lord part of you, it woke something in me, too. You couldn’t produce your own regenerative energy, but I could produce it for you.” He grinned suddenly, still overwhelmed at having her back.
“So you-what? Recharged me? Like a battery?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” he agreed.
“Will it happen again?”
He blinked, his grin fading. “What? No, I don’t think so. Why would it?”
“It’s like you said: I can’t produce regenerative energy. So if I’m like a battery that needs charging up, will you need to do it again?”
“Oh.” He shook his head. “No. What I did, I just had to lock every thing away. It was all tangled up together, Time Lord and human. When you regenerated, they split apart. Much more precise. The Time Lord part of you is safe now.”
“So I’m all right?” Donna asked, for the second time.
The Doctor grinned again, exuberant. “Right as rain.”
“So let me get this straight,” Jack said suddenly. They all turned to him. “You dropped us off in Cardiff”-he gestured toward Martha-“and then you took Rose and the other Doctor home”-he looked sharply at the Doctor-“and after that, you wiped Donna’s mind and dropped her at home. Does that sound about right?”
The Doctor looked uncomfortable. He tugged at his ear, avoiding Jack’s gaze. “Um, yeah. I suppose. About right.”
Martha shot Jack a warning look, but if he noticed, he ignored her.
“You took Rose home.” His tone was flat, but Donna could hear the tension beneath it.
The Doctor nodded, still avoiding Jack’s gaze. “I did, yeah.”
“To London.”
The Doctor looked at his hands and didn’t respond.
“I want to hear you say it.”
He looked up, suddenly all steel. “Say what?”
“You took her back to the parallel world. Say it.”
“Jack-”
“Say it!”
There was a long, tense pause, and then the Doctor said, very quietly. “I took her back to the parallel world.”
Jack barked a short, bitter laugh. “Of course you did. Is that what she wanted? Did you even bother to ask?” He didn’t give the Doctor time to respond. “Why would you? You know best. Rose builds a dimension cannon to get back to you and you just dump her back on the parallel world like it doesn’t mean a thing. Like she doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Jack,” Martha said.
“Did you dump him there, too? Hm? Two birds with one stone?”
“What else would you have me do?” the Doctor retorted. He surged to his feet, staring Jack down. “There couldn’t very well be two of me running around.”
“No,” Jack agreed. “One of you is more than enough.” At that, the Doctor seemed to deflate a little. Jack, if he noticed, gave no sign. “You’re an idiot,” he continued. “And an asshole. She came back for you.”
“He is me. Don’t you see, Jack? He’s me, and he can give her everything I can’t. A normal life.”
“She doesn’t want a normal life.”
“Then she doesn’t have to have one. But now she can. She doesn’t have to choose.”
“Because you chose for her.”
“There was nothing else I could do!”
“You could have let me say goodbye!” Jack’s hand came down hard on the countertop. He glared at the Doctor with tears standing out in his eyes. He drew a ragged breath. “You aren’t the only one who loves her, you know.”
The Doctor opened his mouth to respond and then closed it without saying anything. He held his body rigid to keep from trembling. Jack wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and turned away, taking a few steps back toward the center of the room.
“All right,” Martha said into the silence. “That’s enough.” She turned to the Doctor. “You need to rest.”
“I’m fine.”
Martha exchanged an exasperated look with Donna. “Less than an hour ago you had a fever of fifty-three, and you just gave all your healing energy to Donna. Even you can’t recover from something like that instantaneously.”
He didn’t answer. He hadn’t taken his eyes from Jack, who still stood with his back to them.
“I think we could all do with some rest,” Donna said, catching Martha’s eye and nodding toward Jack and the doorway. Martha shot the Doctor one more worried look, then nodded.
“Fine,” she said, addressing Donna. “We’ll be in the kitchen if you need us.”
“She’s right,” Donna said when they had gone. The Doctor looked at her and blinked as if he were coming out of a trance, his eyes slowly coming into focus. The last time she had seen him looking so fragile and exhausted had been after he got off that bus on Midnight. She nodded toward the bed. “Go on. Lie down.”
“I don’t need-”
She gave him a light shove. He staggered and sat down heavily, looking up with her with an indignant scowl.
“If you’re half as exhausted as you look, you need sleep,” Donna told him firmly.
“I slept all day!”
“Delirious with fever. You need rest, Doctor. Rest,” she repeated.
He glared at her for another moment and then, all at once, he seemed to deflate. His shoulders fell, and he bowed his head, hiding his face in his hands.
“He’s right,” he said, his voice muffled.
Donna sighed. “Only half,” she said.
He looked up at her.
“You’re an idiot sometimes, but you’re not an arsehole.”
That garnered a hint of a smile. Donna pulled the cover back and patted his leg. “In,” she ordered, and after a moment, he obeyed, settling on his side with his hands tucked under the pillow. Donna covered him up and took a seat on the stool. His eyes were wide open, staring past her with a bleak expression. She ran her fingers through his hair.
“I didn’t think,” he sighed. “I just knew that if I didn’t do it quickly, I wouldn’t have been able to walk away.”
“I know,” Donna responded, remembering that day on the beach-only yesterday, for him.
They were silent for a few moments. Then, very quietly, the Doctor asked, “Did I do the right thing, Donna?”
Donna paused for a moment, thinking. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I don’t think you did the wrong thing.” She resumed stroking his hair. “But you can’t undo it. All you can do now is go forward.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
They were silent for a few minutes. Donna found the switch and dimmed the lights, but as the minutes ticked by he didn’t show any signs of relaxing. His eyes stayed open, staring off into the middle distance while Donna smoothed his hair. Eventually she asked, “Do you want me to get Martha? She could give you something to help you sleep.”
“No,” he said quickly, shaking his head. “I don’t want- Just-talk to me?”
Donna looked at him quizzically. “All right,” she agreed. “What about?”
“I don’t know, just-anything. Tell me about your granddad. Tell me about-” his voice caught. He looked up at her, looking panicky. “Just stay. Please.”
Oh, Donna thought, understanding. “I’m not going anywhere,” she told him. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
“I know. I just-”
“Shh. Close your eyes. I’ll tell you about the first time Granddad thought he saw an alien.”
A smile touched his lips. He closed his eyes, and Donna told him that story, and about how badly Granddad had wanted to become an astronaut, and how many nights Donna had sat up with him to look at the stars, until the tension drained out of him and his breathing deepened and evened out, and Donna fell silent, finally becoming conscious of another presence in the room. Jack was standing by the door, his hands in his pockets, looking a little sheepish.
“Hey,” he said, keeping his voice low. He crossed the room and joined her by the bed, watching the Doctor sleep.
“Mind if I sit with him for a little while?”
Donna hesitated.
“I won’t smother him with a pillow or anything,” he assured her.
“Tempting as it is,” Donna said with a hint of a grin.
He smiled. “Sometimes,” he agreed.
Donna got up. “Are you all right?” she asked before she left.
Jack shrugged. “Are you?”
After she had gone, he stood by the bedside for several moments, unmoving. All day, he had had to keep his distance from him when all he wanted to come close, to offer the comfort of a hug or an arm around his shoulders, and then the knowledge of what the Doctor had done had kept him away like the opposite end of a magnet. He sighed. “You bastard.”
He unlaced his boots and climbed carefully over the Doctor’s sleeping form to lie down beside him, fitting his body against the Doctor’s. He breathed in the scent of his hair and felt the rhythm of his hearts and told himself he would just lie there for a little while. It wasn’t long before he was asleep, too.
Chapter 6
Author: hence-the-name
Characters Donna, Jack, Martha, Ten
Pairing: Jack/Ten
Rating: PG
Spoilers: All of New Who and Torchwood. Takes place after Journey’s End.
Summary: The TARDIS lands in Cardiff with a mysteriously ill Doctor on board.
A/N: Once again, my thanks for my readers' patience with the delay between chapters. Between my schedule and this particular muse--which won't leave me alone but also won't let me pin it down--it's been slow going. And yes, I really am dragging this out for one more chapter...but it really will be the last. :) Thanks to everyone who's still reading--I hope it's been worth the wait!
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
The light flowed out of the Doctor and into Donna, through her, tingling along each nerve and synapse, flinging open doors and passageways and leaving the pieces of the last two years scattered along the corridors of her mind, still muddled but finally all the pieces were there again: Lance and Egypt and Adipose, Pompeii and 1926 and extonic sunlight, Rose Tyler and Martha Jones, Sontarans and Unit and Torchwood, Jenny-and through it all, the Doctor. Always the Doctor, taking her hand, clasping her in a hug, grinning that manic grin of his and telling her she’s brilliant. It coursed through her and then suddenly, it was gone. Donna’s body went slack with the abruptness of its loss.
Hands caught her as she fell forward and she came to rest against a bony shoulder clad in light blue. “I’ve got you,” a voice said above her. The Doctor’s voice. Without realizing it she had caught hold of his upper arms and was clutching at him for dear life. “It’s all right.” He stroked her hair. She rested there, trembling and listening to the steady double beat of his hearts.
After a few moments he drew back, holding her by the shoulders and slouching a little so he could look at her face. He had slid from the bed down to the floor, where they sat facing each other. She scrunched her eyes shut and then blinked a few times.
“Doctor?” she asked.
His face broke into a grin. “Yep,” he responded.
Donna took a closer look at him, pale and hollow-eyed. “You look awful,” she told him. He laughed, his eyes crinkling.
“Yep,” he agreed, squeezing her shoulders. His grin widened. “You look brilliant.”
“I-” Donna’s hands flew to her face in sudden horror. You’re regenerating, the Doctor had told her. She looked down at herself, then grabbed a piece of her hair and pulled in front of her face to look at it. She dropped it, sagging with relief. “I look the same.”
“’Course you do, yeah,” the Doctor agreed. “Partial regeneration, that’s all. Only fixed what needed fixing. Brilliant.” He grinned again.
She smiled weakly back. She still felt shaky, as if her thoughts might lose their footing and start tripping over each other any minute. She raised a hand to her forehead, feeling panicky at the thought of losing it all again.
“Donna?” The Doctor’s voice went sharp with sudden worry. She felt his hand on her wrist. “What is it?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I just-” She lowered her hand so she could look at him through the tears that were gathering behind her eyes. “Am I going to be all right?”
He sat back on his heels. “Can I see?” he asked, raising his hands and gesturing.
Donna couldn’t help it; she shrank from him, remembering what he had done-what he had had to do-the last time he had been in her head. Hurt flashed in his eyes at her flinch, but he clamped down on it quickly and waited, patient. Finally Donna nodded, and he leaned forward and set his fingers on her temples, gently touching her mind with his. Donna closed her eyes and held her breath.
In another moment, he was crushing her in another hug. Donna opened her eyes, surprised. Her arms came tentatively around him. “Am I all right, then?” she asked.
“Oh yes!” he cried. He let go of her long enough to pull her to her feet before he threw his arms around her again. “Better than all right. Brilliant. Molto bene!” He let out a delighted laugh, pulling back again to grin at her.
Donna smiled back, and then she slapped him.
“Oi!” he yelped, cupping his cheek.
“That’s for leaving,” she said, shaking a finger in his face.
He opened and closed his mouth a few times, still rubbing his cheek. “I had to,” he said. “The metacrisis would have killed you if you had remembered.”
“You might’ve stayed around for a few days. Instead, it almost killed you.”
He didn’t have an answer to that. He looked away, his hand moving to the back of his neck.
After a moment Donna relented and pulled him into another hug. “It’s good to be back,” she said.
She could feel the tension drain out of him. “It’s good to have you back,” he replied, and wrapped his arms around her. He hung on like a drowning man, as if this was the only way he could be sure she was really here, really all right. Donna could feel him trembling against her. “I’m sorry,” he said into her hair. “I’m so sorry, Donna. There was nothing else-”
“Shh. I know.” It would have to be enough for now, Donna thought, rubbing his back. There would be time for the rest.
“Um.” Behind them, Jack cleared his throat, startling them both. They separated and turned toward him and Martha. “Sorry,” Jack continued. “But what exactly is going on?”
***
There was a long silence. The Doctor looked at each of them in turn and then away without saying anything. He sat back down on the edge of the bed and scrubbed his hands over his face and through his hair.
After another moment Martha crossed the room and checked the readings on the monitors above him, still recording his vital signs. “That’s all back to normal,” she said, relief in her voice. She sat back down on the stool near the bed. “What happened? That light, it looked like-”
“Regeneration,” the Doctor finished for her, nodding.
“And youhave your memories back?”
Donna looked at the Doctor in surprise. “You lost your memories?” she asked.
He nodded and waved his arms about in a vague explanatory gesture. “Long story. Neurons got scrambled with all that excess energy about.” He tapped his temple and grinned up at her. “All back now.”
“And you?” Martha asked Donna.
She nodded, sitting down beside the Doctor on the bed. Jack stayed standing, arms crossed and leaning one hip against the counter. “So what happened?”
They all looked at the Doctor.
He looked at the three of them as if he would rather do anything than explain what had just happened in terms they could understand. He scrubbed his hand over his face again and leaned forward with his elbows on his knees. “The metacrisis worked three ways,” he began. “There was Donna, and the other Doctor-and there was also me.” He looked at Donna. “I thought I was feeling the TARDIS dying, but I was really feeling the metacrisis. If I had realized...” He trailed off.
“The metacrisis was unstable,” he continued. “The human brain isn’t meant to handle a Time Lord consciousness. It was killing her, so I had to-wipe her mind.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “There was nothing else I could do. After we took you back to Cardiff and took Rose-home-you just started unraveling. It was happening so fast-” His voice trembled and he cut off before it broke. “It was all I could do,” he repeated.
Donna shuddered, remembering, and then she thought about what it would have been like if it had been the Doctor who had started to unravel, and what she would have done. She reached over and squeezed his arm. “I know,” she said. He looked at her and gave her a fragile little smile.
“What I didn’t realize,” the Doctor said when his voice was steady again, addressing her, “was that the residual energy from my regeneration-what I didn’t siphon off into my hand and which I should have reabsorbed-was actually building. You and the other Doctor were connected to each other, and I was connected to you both. When Davros shot you and woke the Time Lord part of you, it woke something in me, too. You couldn’t produce your own regenerative energy, but I could produce it for you.” He grinned suddenly, still overwhelmed at having her back.
“So you-what? Recharged me? Like a battery?”
“That’s one way of putting it,” he agreed.
“Will it happen again?”
He blinked, his grin fading. “What? No, I don’t think so. Why would it?”
“It’s like you said: I can’t produce regenerative energy. So if I’m like a battery that needs charging up, will you need to do it again?”
“Oh.” He shook his head. “No. What I did, I just had to lock every thing away. It was all tangled up together, Time Lord and human. When you regenerated, they split apart. Much more precise. The Time Lord part of you is safe now.”
“So I’m all right?” Donna asked, for the second time.
The Doctor grinned again, exuberant. “Right as rain.”
“So let me get this straight,” Jack said suddenly. They all turned to him. “You dropped us off in Cardiff”-he gestured toward Martha-“and then you took Rose and the other Doctor home”-he looked sharply at the Doctor-“and after that, you wiped Donna’s mind and dropped her at home. Does that sound about right?”
The Doctor looked uncomfortable. He tugged at his ear, avoiding Jack’s gaze. “Um, yeah. I suppose. About right.”
Martha shot Jack a warning look, but if he noticed, he ignored her.
“You took Rose home.” His tone was flat, but Donna could hear the tension beneath it.
The Doctor nodded, still avoiding Jack’s gaze. “I did, yeah.”
“To London.”
The Doctor looked at his hands and didn’t respond.
“I want to hear you say it.”
He looked up, suddenly all steel. “Say what?”
“You took her back to the parallel world. Say it.”
“Jack-”
“Say it!”
There was a long, tense pause, and then the Doctor said, very quietly. “I took her back to the parallel world.”
Jack barked a short, bitter laugh. “Of course you did. Is that what she wanted? Did you even bother to ask?” He didn’t give the Doctor time to respond. “Why would you? You know best. Rose builds a dimension cannon to get back to you and you just dump her back on the parallel world like it doesn’t mean a thing. Like she doesn’t mean a thing.”
“Jack,” Martha said.
“Did you dump him there, too? Hm? Two birds with one stone?”
“What else would you have me do?” the Doctor retorted. He surged to his feet, staring Jack down. “There couldn’t very well be two of me running around.”
“No,” Jack agreed. “One of you is more than enough.” At that, the Doctor seemed to deflate a little. Jack, if he noticed, gave no sign. “You’re an idiot,” he continued. “And an asshole. She came back for you.”
“He is me. Don’t you see, Jack? He’s me, and he can give her everything I can’t. A normal life.”
“She doesn’t want a normal life.”
“Then she doesn’t have to have one. But now she can. She doesn’t have to choose.”
“Because you chose for her.”
“There was nothing else I could do!”
“You could have let me say goodbye!” Jack’s hand came down hard on the countertop. He glared at the Doctor with tears standing out in his eyes. He drew a ragged breath. “You aren’t the only one who loves her, you know.”
The Doctor opened his mouth to respond and then closed it without saying anything. He held his body rigid to keep from trembling. Jack wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and turned away, taking a few steps back toward the center of the room.
“All right,” Martha said into the silence. “That’s enough.” She turned to the Doctor. “You need to rest.”
“I’m fine.”
Martha exchanged an exasperated look with Donna. “Less than an hour ago you had a fever of fifty-three, and you just gave all your healing energy to Donna. Even you can’t recover from something like that instantaneously.”
He didn’t answer. He hadn’t taken his eyes from Jack, who still stood with his back to them.
“I think we could all do with some rest,” Donna said, catching Martha’s eye and nodding toward Jack and the doorway. Martha shot the Doctor one more worried look, then nodded.
“Fine,” she said, addressing Donna. “We’ll be in the kitchen if you need us.”
“She’s right,” Donna said when they had gone. The Doctor looked at her and blinked as if he were coming out of a trance, his eyes slowly coming into focus. The last time she had seen him looking so fragile and exhausted had been after he got off that bus on Midnight. She nodded toward the bed. “Go on. Lie down.”
“I don’t need-”
She gave him a light shove. He staggered and sat down heavily, looking up with her with an indignant scowl.
“If you’re half as exhausted as you look, you need sleep,” Donna told him firmly.
“I slept all day!”
“Delirious with fever. You need rest, Doctor. Rest,” she repeated.
He glared at her for another moment and then, all at once, he seemed to deflate. His shoulders fell, and he bowed his head, hiding his face in his hands.
“He’s right,” he said, his voice muffled.
Donna sighed. “Only half,” she said.
He looked up at her.
“You’re an idiot sometimes, but you’re not an arsehole.”
That garnered a hint of a smile. Donna pulled the cover back and patted his leg. “In,” she ordered, and after a moment, he obeyed, settling on his side with his hands tucked under the pillow. Donna covered him up and took a seat on the stool. His eyes were wide open, staring past her with a bleak expression. She ran her fingers through his hair.
“I didn’t think,” he sighed. “I just knew that if I didn’t do it quickly, I wouldn’t have been able to walk away.”
“I know,” Donna responded, remembering that day on the beach-only yesterday, for him.
They were silent for a few moments. Then, very quietly, the Doctor asked, “Did I do the right thing, Donna?”
Donna paused for a moment, thinking. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “But I don’t think you did the wrong thing.” She resumed stroking his hair. “But you can’t undo it. All you can do now is go forward.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
They were silent for a few minutes. Donna found the switch and dimmed the lights, but as the minutes ticked by he didn’t show any signs of relaxing. His eyes stayed open, staring off into the middle distance while Donna smoothed his hair. Eventually she asked, “Do you want me to get Martha? She could give you something to help you sleep.”
“No,” he said quickly, shaking his head. “I don’t want- Just-talk to me?”
Donna looked at him quizzically. “All right,” she agreed. “What about?”
“I don’t know, just-anything. Tell me about your granddad. Tell me about-” his voice caught. He looked up at her, looking panicky. “Just stay. Please.”
Oh, Donna thought, understanding. “I’m not going anywhere,” she told him. “I’ll be here when you wake up.”
“I know. I just-”
“Shh. Close your eyes. I’ll tell you about the first time Granddad thought he saw an alien.”
A smile touched his lips. He closed his eyes, and Donna told him that story, and about how badly Granddad had wanted to become an astronaut, and how many nights Donna had sat up with him to look at the stars, until the tension drained out of him and his breathing deepened and evened out, and Donna fell silent, finally becoming conscious of another presence in the room. Jack was standing by the door, his hands in his pockets, looking a little sheepish.
“Hey,” he said, keeping his voice low. He crossed the room and joined her by the bed, watching the Doctor sleep.
“Mind if I sit with him for a little while?”
Donna hesitated.
“I won’t smother him with a pillow or anything,” he assured her.
“Tempting as it is,” Donna said with a hint of a grin.
He smiled. “Sometimes,” he agreed.
Donna got up. “Are you all right?” she asked before she left.
Jack shrugged. “Are you?”
After she had gone, he stood by the bedside for several moments, unmoving. All day, he had had to keep his distance from him when all he wanted to come close, to offer the comfort of a hug or an arm around his shoulders, and then the knowledge of what the Doctor had done had kept him away like the opposite end of a magnet. He sighed. “You bastard.”
He unlaced his boots and climbed carefully over the Doctor’s sleeping form to lie down beside him, fitting his body against the Doctor’s. He breathed in the scent of his hair and felt the rhythm of his hearts and told himself he would just lie there for a little while. It wasn’t long before he was asleep, too.
Chapter 6