Fic: (Donna/Gene) There is No Modern Romance
Title: (There is No) Modern Romance
Author: intrikate88
Rating: PG
Fandom: Doctor Who/Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes
Pairing: Gene Hunt/Donna Noble
Summary: Gene never knew how Donna came into his life, how she left it, or why, but for almost twelve years, they had so many moments, and sometimes he thinks that is how she would want him to think of her.
x-posted to donna_gene
(The End.)
Sometimes, when he allows himself to think about her, he wonders if she truly was the cause of all of his problems with these crazy people.
But then Gene pours himself another drink. Donna's gone now, no changing that.
--
"I'm from the future," insists this woman in front of him, this over-educated woman with so many angles that he can never approach her, It isn't as if he disbelieves her. After all, not the first time he's been told about this sort of thing existing. Being told what to believe, though-? Only he decides what he'll believe.
"I ask for the truth and you piss in my face." Gene Hunt isn't good at goodbyes and he'd swear a year of hearing Alex talk about how she was getting out of here didn't sound as much like farewell as this desperate statement did.
Point is, though, whether she's lying or the tape's telling the truth- he knows Alex doesn't trust him.
--
"Not askin' you to believe me," Donna retorts. "Don't matter, does it, if the first man's going to walk on the moon in a few months, or if the Beatles are goin' to give their last concert in a week, or even if you believe I went travelin' with a man who could go back and forth and sometimes sideways in time. What matters is that I need to trust someone, an' I trust you. I- see, I--" She pauses, and suddenly this strong-willed ginger woman who seems to fill every room by just walking into it... looks small, to him. "I'm not s'posed to be here, I'm not supposed to remember the traveling and the- this man I was with. Something happened, though, and he had to take that part of me away before it could-- could kill me. But now the memories are back, and everything else."
"The ones that'll kill you?" Gene looks at her, then down at the drink he's barely touched. He's known her a month, helped her get a job as a typist and refused to let her organize the CID records ("They are perfectly FINE, Donna!" "I'm sure there are planets out there with tiny, tiny people who would love to go hiking on those mountains of files if they weren't such an avalanche hazard!" "You should just be glad I can't be bothered to write reports on more than a quarter of those villains I send away!" "...you don't even do your paperwork?!" It had gone downhill from there, to stop shortly before he banned her from the building forever.) But he does know Donna Noble well enough to know she doesn't really hide the truth much. She might flirt, but in the end, she'll make it clear you can take her or leave her, just as she is.
Gene knows which option he'd rather choose.
"So if this thing in your head makes your brain drip out your ears and makes you pop in different places and times like a skint prozzy working a weekend of jobs, what d'ya want me to do about it?"
"Keep me remembering who I am, so he-- so that part of me can sleep," she tells him, not sounding like herself.
So Gene kisses her hard on the lips, right there at the pub in front of everyone. Chris and Ray at the next table start heckling in well-honed male tradition. "I have no idea what you're on about," Gene declares loudly, in a way that could be directed at his staff, or at Donna. But he gives her a little nod, because he wants her to know that whatever the hell is going on, he'll still want her exactly the way she is.
He proposes to her the day Neil Armstrong first sets foot on the moon.
--
Donna rarely talks about the future she already knows, and seems to have even less interest in the parts her own future she doesn't know. Sometimes she disappears for a week and even though there are Significant Whispers he ignores them, because he knows she's gone home- wherever that is. Somewhere south, sometime in the first decade and a half of the next century, using some road he could never imagine. Every time he comes home and finds her back, she's in bed nursing a migraine and she'll cling to him until she stops muttering sequences of numbers and strange names in languages he doesn't know. And then she'll say something about that life, and he'll piece together another part of this puzzle that is his wife.
He knows enough to look up Geoff and Sylvia Noble in Chiswick, almost two weeks after Donna disappears early in 1980. This time -he doesn't know how- he knows something's different. He drives his new Audi Quattro down to London, knocks on a door that Sylvia answers with a baby in her arms, and he invents a story about a string of burglaries and could he please come in and ask a few questions.
When he tells her to go upstairs and check her jewelry, she looks around for a place to set the baby down. Without quite knowing what he's doing, Gene reaches out. "What's her name?" he asks, the little bundle of infant filling his large hands. He knows the answer, but he needs to hear it anyway.
"Donna," Sylvia calls back, from halfway up the stairs.
He holds wee Donna up, their faces close, and she looks at him, completely unafraid. In fact, he thinks, she looks distinctly unimpressed.
It's a very familiar look.
She's got a little twist of fiery red hair and a frown on her lips, as if trying to figure out what he is. Then her eyes open very wide, and she- is that a hiccup? and pitches herself towards him. Gene barely has time to react, halting her lurch by catching her with his shoulder. Immediately, Donna snuggles there, curling up under his chin. "Yeah, make yourself at home," he mutters.
She coughs, and spits up a little, right down the front of his shirt. He thinks he should have expected that, as Sylvia descends the steps and confirms that nothing is missing.
"Good to hear," Gene says. He detaches the baby from his neck, looking at her one long second more before handing her back. "How old is she?"
"Almost two weeks," Sylvia says.
“She’s a special little girl,” Gene replies roughly, and leaves.
That night, Gene fills out the paperwork to transfer away from Manchester, away from Sam Tyler's pointless death, away from the flat to which he knows his wife will never return.
He never goes to the Nobles' house again.
--
"Sam's like me," Donna says one night in bed after a long evening out at the pub.
"Is it too much to ask that my wife refrain from lusting after my subordinates while actually in our marital bed?" Gene wonders in reply.
"Well. He's not a bad-looking bloke," she answers, eliciting a growl. "But I mean with not being in the right time. Anybody could see that, the way he looks at the world around him and doesn't fit. It's obvious, even without seeing what I can see."
"And what can you see of the man's future, oh my gypsy madam?"
She swats his arm. "Oh, shut up, I know you believe me."
"And think you're balmy."
"And think I'm balmy. Question is, should I try to do something about Sam?"
"Send 'im back from whence he came so he'll stop wasting my time acting like a poof, answering phones like a secretary and complaining I'm too rough with the bastards I bring in, you mean?"
"Yes," says Donna quietly, "that's about what I mean. I dunno if I could. But I might."
Silence hangs heavy in the darkness between them. Donna reaches for her husband's hand. "Nah," Gene says finally. "He's got a few things still to learn about police work. Be remiss in my duties as a DCI if I let him go home to the land of flying cars without figuring out how to be a proper copper."
"We don't have-" Donna starts, then stops herself. Gene smiles. She's told him there are no flying cars yet, but he'll never believe that. Instead, she says, "He's a pretty damn good copper already, from what I've seen. But I'm not even born yet, what do I know?"
"That's right, woman. Infant in the ways of the world, you are."
"Dinosaur," she scoffs back, good-naturedly.
"Shrew."
"Sexist, homophobic pig."
"Long as you keep cooking my supper, wife, I'll never have a phobia of home." He lets out a low chuckle. "Still, you might wind Tyler up a bit. Tell him you'll give him an eight-track to play on his pea-pod."
Donna has told Gene enough about the future to know exactly how he mangles it. "IPod. Gene, don't invest too much of your money in eight-tracks. I only know what those things are 'cos Gramps kept a few."
"Right, well, they'll be around for a little while, anyway. Keeping Tyler busy, that'll be-- oh, he'll be so paranoid."
"Gene?"
"Yeah?"
"His being here after a nearly fatal accident might be my fault. It’s- well, it’s how I managed to get here, an’ I think I might’ve somehow left a door open. And he might not be the last."
"So when coppers go down, I show up? Why's that?" he grouses.
"You won't be the first to ask."
--
It's all Alex's fault he can't stop drinking, Gene thinks. Woman can't set down a bottle of wine, and of course he can't let her think she can drink him under the table, can he? Man's got to have his pride-- he stumbles against his bed, hoping that if he lets himself fall, he'll land on it. He lands on some surface that seems mostly horizontal after a second, and decides he'll find out in the morning if it's the floor or not.
Gene dreams.
Sitting on a bench- Tube platform- Aldgate station. Some sort of sting is happening; he can see Chris trying to look inconspicuous in a very obvious way. He's reading a paper, and checks the date- 2 September 1997. Princess Di is all over it, something about a motor accident, but he doesn't pay attention. Instead, he glances up and across the tracks to the other platform.
There she is.
Except she looks so young, wearing a school uniform and standing with a few girls. It's been so long since he last saw her. And he is so much older now. (Sometimes he wonders if that's the worst part: that she is out there, in the very same city as he is. But she is not the same woman he married, and he is not the same man that offered her an umbrella and his heart.)
A train rattles past, pauses, then moves on. Donna is gone.
Gene wakes up with a pounding headache. He's in a foul mood that day, and nobody asks why.
--
It's pouring when he leaves CID that night in 1968, heading to join everyone at the pub after signing off on a handful of paperwork that no one will ever look at anyway, and that's why he's so surprised to see a woman stumble out of a doorway, right into his path. Anyone with good sense would be staying indoors. Gene looks the woman up and down: ginger, good- no, make that magnificent- figure, already sodden. "What would anyone but especially you be doing out on a night like this?" he demands, making room under his umbrella for another.
She accepts the shelter gratefully. "Jus' got into town, didn't expect it to be rainin' so much." Her accent is distinctly London. "Know any hotels nearby? I don't have any place to stay, yet. I, uh, usually don't arrange that stuff in advance."
"Doesn't look like you were prepared for anything at all, love."
"Didn't have much time, if you must know," she retorts. "Here, share a bit more of that umbrella, if you're going to make the offer."
"Only if I can buy you a drink before I point you to a hotel, otherwise you can wander around getting as wet as you please, and don't think I won't mind seeing that."
She puts on what he can tell she thinks is a coy face. "A'right," she purrs, "you can- hey, wait, why're you guessing I'm single, then?"
"Don't need to guess, as I happen to be the Detective Chief Inspector in this manor!"
"Ooh, innit that something. Then you can deduce what kind of drink I want, detective. I'm Donna, by the way, Donna Noble."
"Gene Hunt, and something sweet and fruity," he says, offering his arm. She takes it, huddling closer to keep dry in the downpour.
Later that night they'll both end up so pissed they forget his promise of a hotel (which is good since she has no money anyway) and she spends the night on his couch (after he invites her to make herself at home, and she promptly throws up, just barely missing the sleeve of his new brown coat.) They never actually get around to finding her a hotel.
But for now they are the only two people on the street on a rainy Manchester night, and when Gene looks back at the doorway from which Donna emerged, there's just a blank brick wall.
(Once upon a time, there was a woman, and she was very special indeed.)