Fic: (Donna/Gene) Spectacular Views
Title: Spectacular Views
Author: intrikate88
Rating: PG
Fandom: Doctor Who/Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes
Spoilers: For Journey's End, Life on Mars (entire series)
Summary: “Sometimes I think I can see everything,” is the first thing Donna says to Gene when he finds her on the roof of the police building.
“Sometimes I think I can see everything,” is the first thing Donna says to Gene when he finds her on the roof of the police building. Gene wonders how long ago it was Annie said Sam tried to jump from this very ledge, thinking he’d get back to some other time he claimed was his own- years it’s been, now. But Gene’s wife just sits there, staring out over Manchester.
“From up here, you probably can. Question is, why would you want to? I see everything too, that’s why you say I drink too much.”
“You do drink too much,” Donna throws back, her hair whipping around her face, “which I say because you fall asleep outside our front door at two in the morning.”
“Only the once.”
“Twice,” she corrects. Gene sits down next to her. She doesn’t hang her legs over the ledge, but he does; she only tucks her knees against her chest. She shivers, and without a word, Gene shrugs out of his brown coat and holds it out to wrap around her.
“Hardly as if you can’t put away your fair share.”
“And I can make it home after,” she adds, huddling deeper into the coat.
“Care to tell me why you’re up here?” Gene asks her after a moment. "An' more importantly, when you're going to be coming down?"
“Because sometimes you need to see everything just as much as you need to see one thing at a time, right?” she responds, and Gene gets the impression that she’s talking with a different audience in mind, or perhaps no audience at all. Invisibility tends to chafe, he finds.
“Almost liked it better when you were passin’ comment on my drinking. I’ve got Tyler downstairs cryin’ about sirens in his head and you up here pretending to be some bloody druid and I’m afraid I will have to demand someone start making sense around here!” He drops his tone a fraction. “And between you and me, Ginger-girl, I don’t believe that will ever be Tyler.”
He was pleased to note Donna’s eyes flicker back from a focus on the indistinct middle distance.
“Pro’ly not,” she agreed. “No, it’s just- you know that man I traveled with, the Doctor?”
“The time-traveling one with the blue box.” His tone is carefully neutral.
“Yeah. Well-when we went somewhere, it was always right in the middle of something. Something that mattered, like Agatha Christie disappearing, or some planet about to revolt, and we could see where things were goin’ wrong, since we were on the outside. We could help fix things, and then just leave after, without figuring out how to make it work better later on. We’d go to the next place. Each place, like a story with an end. But when you have to stay in one place like everyone else then you have to focus on the little things. You don’t know what’s going to matter, or if there’s an end to stories.”
“That’s a bit deep for a Tuesday afternoon,” Gene comments, trying to light a cigarette and failing the first three tries. The fourth try works, and the lit end crackles and burns brightly in the stiff breeze.
“So it’s like being pulled in two directions, seeing the world in both ways,” Donna goes on, ignoring him. “’Specially since I remember all his life, too.”
Gene knows this is the case. He also knows he has been told he never wants to know how it happened that she got the Doctor’s memories. He thinks one day he might ask, nonetheless. “Yeah, well, life changes. You adjust. No matter where you come from.”
Donna reaches for his hand and squeezes it briefly. “You’re right,” she says softly. “Sometimes I forget.”
“Course you do. But that’s what you’ve got me for,” he replies, with all the humility natural to his character. “Doesn’t explain what you’re doing up here.”
“Sometimes the friends you used to spend time with drop by your new house. I’m waiting for one of those.”
“Up here?”
“Where else?”
Gene senses he's getting his own version of the Deep Inner Gaze, pondering where in the bloody hell his wife is getting all this from, when she suddenly leaps up, striding away from the edge. "Now, wait now-“ he stutters, but she doesn't pay any attention to him, and he climbs to his feet.
Only to nearly fall back and off the roof when a flash of unnatural light turns every shadow light and every deeper shadow the darkest black. Blinking the neons from his burned retinas he realizes there is now a third person on the roof. A girl. A blonde girl- woman- not bad looking, from the little he can make out- and she's talking to Donna.
"Who's he?" the blonde woman asks, nodding towards Gene.
"Gene bloody Hunt, an' you're standing on the roof of my police station, so I think-"
"My husband," Donna says. "As I was saying, Rose, you don't know me. Yet. You're from my past, I'm from your future. And even though you're actually in the right universe, neither of us has been born yet. But I also know you're looking for the Doctor, and I know why."
The girl crosses her arms. "Tell me something," she says. "Tell me anything. Tell me that you're not takin' the piss and I've really got somewhere. Been travelin’ a while."
Donna smiles. It's almost a sad smile, Gene thinks. "Bad Wolf," she enunciates. "You remember, don't you? Not all of it. He took that out of you, but- Rose, you can get that part of yourself back. It's dangerous. But without that path you'll never find him."
Rose, if that's her name, looks somewhat shaken. “No,” she says, “no, that’s-that’s not something anybody knows about. Nobody.”
“It was the message you gave to me to let the Doctor know you were looking for him,” Donna says. “You know it. He knows about it. So I know.”
Gene takes a step closer to his wife; Rose takes a step back. “What are you?” she asks, and Gene could have echoed the sentiment.
“I was… a focal point, I suppose. Some place where things come together. Maybe I still am, or maybe I just see where they come together. That’s how I saw you coming here today, and-Rose, you have to keep traveling. It all hinges on this.”
“I know.” Rose wraps her arms around herself, turning sharply from Donna and looking out over the rooftop, over the city. “God, I know.”
She wheels around sharply and looks back and Donna, then at Gene. "D'you know what that's like?" she demands. "What I have to go through. Every night I look up at the sky in this telescope I have in my bedroom, and every night, more stars, they're gone. Just gone."
"My gramps did that. He was one of the first to realize when it started happenin' here," Donna added. "You'll meet him. I think you'll like him. But you'll never meet him if you don't... listen. You just- I don't know. Rose. I wasn't there- not the- oh, dammit, I know things the Doctor knows. That's all you need to know, right now. And he didn't know what path you took back. But you know it, somewhere deep down in you, if you're still carrying that Bad Wolf. The Time Vortex won't let go of you so easily."
"I met a werewolf," said Rose. "He saw the Bad Wolf in me. I couldn't."
Gene feels the irritation rising in him, like heartburn. It isn't fair- he gives Donna so much, he thinks. He never thought that a wife, a house, was the life for him. He was the bitter copper who drank too much and smoked until the world stank and worked long hours. And dammit, he would be that man, because the city was just waiting to take down any man that didn't show a solid front. Just waiting for a weakness, for a wondering about the other side- he'll never know what madness took his brother and made him think he could handle the drugs but Gene won't fall for it. He won't wonder about other worlds, because this one is more than enough. And here is another world, that refuses to wonder about him. His very own wife- she is another world, not letting him in. And it isn't fair, by any count.
"Donna," he enunciates. "Will you please explain where this woman came from. What she's talking about. Bloody werewolves. This is a police station, not a... poet's pubcrawl."
"Not now, Gene," Donna says, tiredly. Her eyes are dark, and she doesn't look like herself- too pale, too... bony, almost, except definitely she hasn't lost any weight (she'd kill him if she knew he thought that.) "I only have a few minutes, here." Gene doesn't want to see that look in his wife's eyes, because he knows that it isn't hers. It's that other man's, and Gene doesn't want to meet him. Not now. That's a man that's seen worlds die.
"Not now, Gene," Donna repeats, her voice tired and still not hers. Gene is suddenly tired, too, tired of this other world that she can't share with him and he doesn't know if he wants her to but he almost wishes they could. "Rose. The path is there. The Doctor showed me how to drive the TARDIS, did you know that? I- no, of course. He did. And for some reason he told me a bit of how the Time Vortex works. It's only a little that I understand, most of the time, because I can’t know too much- but I know about the random choices, the calls that bring him places. They all leave marks, and holes, and I’ve found ways to them. You can track all of those, now that you're here. Now that you've made a way through."
"He taught you how to drive the TARDIS?" Rose demands, and Gene feels like a shred of normality has returned to this circus. It's the same tone Donna used when he wouldn't let her drive the Cortina. "I never got to drive it. I didn't even think he really knew how, for all the time he spent with her."
"He failed his driving exam," Donna admits, and the two women exchange wry looks.
"I think I knew that," says Rose. "So I should keep going, then. There's hope."
"Look for me. You'll find me," Donna tells her.
"And what do I do then?"
"You'll kill me."
The wind whips across the roof of the building. Bad weather is coming, Gene can see; there are black clouds to the south, with the possibility of lightning. It's a storm of massive proportions and he doesn't know how long it will take for it to chase them off this roof. How does his wife get killed by this woman, he wants to know, he wants to know so much. Murder, he knows. Murder, he can deal with. He solves them, like he’s never been able to solve his wife.
"There is no other option. You'll see, when you’re there, Rose. I'm sorry, so very, very sorry. And when the time comes... but you just have to keep going. You have to find me, in that place where the Doctor is dead. It isn't here, not in this world, so don't worry. But keep looking. It’s all just beginning.”
"And you?" Rose says, softly.
"I'll be fine." Donna brushes her hair out of her face. Gene jams his hands into his pockets. "That part of the story, it's over, for me. I've already seen what happens."
"And does it end happily ever after?"
"Nothing ever does," Donna tells her. "We never end." Rose takes a step forward, reaching for Donna, and it's as if she is walking through a doorway, for suddenly she is gone. Gene blinks, because even while Donna has told him for years that her life was so very strange, he still doesn't see it himself. Even when he does. Donna turns towards him, and now her eyes are too light, too blank: still not hers.
“The layers of the human mind rest on several layers of consciousness but these can be split and fractured even further by a traumatic event,” she begins, walking towards him, speaking normally, and then faster, and faster, “and-and-and while this isn’t the violent dissociation experienced by-by” -she gasps- “those suffering with-Gene-I think I went too far-I think I need the Doctor--“
“Well, I could poke and prod around a bit and we could pretend I am one,” he says gruffly. “You actually askin’ for my help, ginger girl? ‘S not my dimension, is it?” He catches her as she stumbles against him, the brown coat still around her shoulders and falling forward to brush against his arm. “And as for your Doctor, he can stop muckin’ about in your head, making you think you’re him. Married you, not that bloke, I’m not some bloody-“
“Yes, yes, I know you aren’t,” snaps Donna.
He pulls the coat to better cover her, then wraps his arms around her, just as the first drops start to fall. “You need me, I’m here. You’re here. Not off in some other world getting yourself killed. So pay attention.” He leans back, holds up a finger. “Right now, you’re here. 1976. On a damn rooftop getting wet.” He holds up another finger. “Two. You’re a housewife whose husband drinks too much and works too late, and this is a subject of much gossip and commiseration amongst those women you work with. And those women I work with, which I don’t very much appreciate. Three. You have an unsatisfying job as a secretary in a solicitor’s office, yet for some reason thrive there.”
“Four, I have a completely impossible husband.”
“Which makes me sound like an excellent match for someone who is pretty damn impossible herself, don’t you think?”
“Yes, but don’t get too pleased with yourself. ‘S’my job to keep you from actually exploding with pride, you know.”
He snorts. “Don’t see the point of false modesty, myself. C’mon, let’s get you off this roof. You need some whiskey in you.” Gene thinks about the blonde woman he just saw appear and vanish. “I need some whiskey in me. It’ll bring us back to earth.”
“Yes,” Donna agrees fervently.
He doesn’t move towards the door yet. “You said that woman is going to kill you, Donna, in that future you come from,” he says, his voice low.
“Yes.” She takes his hand. “It happened. It happens.”
“Generally, Gin’, I try to stop people killing other people. Or at least sort it out after. Except I don’t think you want me to do that in this particular situation.”
“You can’t. An’ I wouldn’t let you if you could. I chose that life, then, and I’m choosing this one now. Can’t have one without the other, don’t you get it?”
“If you hadn’t told that girl to do it-“
“Then I wouldn’t be here now. Then nothing would be here now. Rose told me what I needed to do, to carry a message to the Doctor, to stop the world from fallin’ apart. And in another world, I died. But not in this one.”
“And that means there’s no murder to solve.”
“There’s nothing to solve at all,” Donna says, and looks up at him. “Solving something-me-that would make you happy, wouldn’t it?” Gene doesn’t answer, because they both know he doesn’t need to. She sighs. “Fine. If you explode with pride, it’s not my fault. That girl there, Rose? She’s going to save the universe. All the universes. Because I was there, clearing the path for her. But a human can’t do what I have to, not without havin’ her brain melt on the first try. ‘Cept I’ve got someone to keep me together.” When Gene doesn’t immediately brighten up, she prods him in the gut. “That would be you. By the way.”
“Huh,” Gene says. “You're not half flattering. You trying to get more pocket money out of me?"
"Yeah, right, it was your enormous fortune I married you for," she retorts.
He doesn't take the opportunity to make a sharp remark back, but looks sideways at her, huddling there under the shelter of his coat. "The whole universe, eh?"
"Several of them, in fact." Donna looks up at him as he straightens a little more, gets that arrogant lift to his chin that she knows so very well, and has slapped him for, on occasion.
"Sounds about right," he says, with enough self-satisfaction to inflate a hot air balloon. "The Gene Genie, savin' the world and keeping scum off the streets."
"Oh, shut up, you." Rolling her eyes, Donna pulls open the door downstairs. "Your woman needs whiskey."