Fic: [Ashes to Ashes/Doctor Who - Gene/Donna] Some Other Year (1/6)
Title: Some Other Year
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: This takes place post-"Journey's End" and pre-"The Waters of Mars" for the Doctor, and post-"The End of Time" for Donna. References to Old Who ("The Time Warrior" and the Seventh Doctor era) and all of Sarah Jane Adventures for Sarah Jane. Post-Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, though spoilers for A2A are fairly skimpy. Good lord these are involved shows.
Summary: Gene Hunt never knew the whole story behind Donna Noble's appearance in his life, and even less about her sudden disappearance; he thought he never would. But when a visiting stranger in a blue box appears in 1986, it seems like the perfect opportunity to get some answers. Or, perhaps, to get his wife back.
Third in a series, following (There is No) Modern Romance and Spectacular Views; it may help to read those first.
Warnings: Abuse of plot and Bowie lyrics, questionable language, Gene Hunt, boob gropage.
chapter one | chapter two | chapter three
chapter four | chapter five | epilogue
Chapter One
Ground Control to Major Tom, commencing countdown, engines on,
check ignition and may God's love be with you...
David Bowie, "Space Oddity" (1969)
Ashes to ashes, fun to funky, we know Major Tom's a junkie,
strung out on heavens high, hitting an all-time low.
David Bowie, "Ashes to Ashes" (1980)
*
When Gene Hunt saw the blue police box standing back in the alleyway between two buildings in Shadwell, he felt that he knew it instantly, and the man in the brown suit that stepped from it only added to the feeling. It was a magical sense of recognition, so much stronger than any type of deja vu. He felt as if he had been waiting to see this blue police box and the skinny man with the messy hair for years.
So that was why, when he saw the box, that Gene Hunt slammed down on the brakes of his Audi Quattro, reversed, leapt from the car, shouted, "You're nicked, chum!" and handcuffed the man, making it among the quickest arrival-to-incarceration times in the Doctor's history.
*
Two hours later, without anyone telling him precisely for what he had been detained, the Doctor was led from his holding cell. He had already mentally reviewed the eighties in his head, checking for any archaic laws he might have chanced to broken in such a flagrant fashion to merit such a rapid arrest, but couldn't come up with any. This exercise took him approximately three minutes and forty six point nine five two seconds, but he lacked total precise count of the time because he got distracted by a vibration from the street level that he wondered if it might have been Ace blowing something up (now that was an old memory.) Then for the next hour and fifty-six minutes and an irrelevant amount of seconds he sat outlining the calculations necessary to add another attic space to the TARDIS. Then the cell door finally opened.
"Guv wants to see you," remarked the stocky man standing there, seeming to acquire grim satisfaction out of chewing the end of a cigarette. "What'd you do, then? 'E didn't say anythin' to me."
The Doctor shrugged to indicate that, out of all the extraordinary things he knew in all the extraordinary worlds, this, unfortunately, was not one of them. The detective looked about to complain, but checked himself, and instead merely led the Doctor upstairs to an interview room in a sort of bemused, ill-natured silence. When he entered the room, Gene already sat there.
"DCI Gene Hunt," he introduced himself. The Doctor made no reply. "It is customary, I believe, to give your name in return."
"I was under the impression that you were quite certain of my identity. And possibly the reason for my arrest," the Doctor said, swinging himself into seat across the table from Gene.
"Leave us, Ray," Gene directed, and the detective left, closing the door a little harder than might have been necessary. Gene ignored him. "And you will answer me when I ask you a direct question, sir. What is your name?"
"John Smith," the Doctor answered.
"Wrong," returned Gene, with surprising vehemence. "Do you or do you not go about calling yourself 'the Doctor' and abducting young women from the streets of this city?" He consulted a sheet of paper lying on the table in front of him. "Donna Noble, Rose Tyler, and Martha Jones, among others, I'm sure. Those names mean anything to you?"
"I've met them," the Doctor allowed.
"Care to describe them for me?"
"Old enough to think for themselves."
"Really. Because I went round a few weeks ago to ask Jackie Tyler a few questions an' she's still up the stick. Donna, I'm assuming, is a particularly terrible five-year-old, because why should things ever change, and Martha's mum is unnatr'ly concerned about her readin' before she turns four. Somehow that strikes me as kidnapping."
The Doctor sighed. "It's obvious you know more about me than I've said. Would you care to get on with it and charge me with something? This is shaping up to be the most boring arrest I've ever experienced. Usually there are guns."
"Trust me, if you want your usual threats, there can be guns," Gene informed him.
"Yes, but I'm sure you lack the requisite tentacles. Mr Hunt, what is your problem with me?"
Gene lit a cigarette, looking as if he were pondering briefly the order with which to organize what he had to say. "My problem with you, Doctor, is that my wife disappeared six years ago, and I think you had something to do with it, since you had everything to do with the very fact she arrived here in the first place. My wife, Donna Noble Hunt."
Observing the silence that followed this announcement, Gene took a drag off his cigarette, and decided that the Doctor did not usually have to deal with being speechless, which made him a bit proud to have accomplished it. He gave The Silence another poke. "You ever meet Jackie Tyler? Hell of a woman, I'd met her before on... police business, but didn't need to tell her new husband that. Got quite the set of lungs on her, might almost match up with my Donna. Shame she ends up in another universe, but I didn't tell her that."
"This," stated the Doctor, "is. Not. Possible." He huffed a quick breath into his hand, then sniffed it; commented, "Maybe it was the mushrooms on Spondelaine, I knew it was odd, them sharing the mushroom crop with an outsider even if I did save their planet, I must be hallucinating-"
"You are neither the first nor the last to wish I was a hallucination," Gene answered, and leaned forward, close to the Doctor's face, "and though I may be the worst nightmare of a lot o' scum out there, I'm hardly a crop of bad mushrooms. You're awake, Doctor, and it's 1986, and even though you're about three years too late, I still expect you to account for the absolute plague of time travelers I've had come through here."
"What?!"
*
In the end, Gene decided to release him from the interrogation room, explained to his officers (with an especially hard look at Ray, who didn't deserve it whatsoever) that there had been a miscommunication about this fine DI from Westminster who had come over to look at some personnel files tangential to an investigation, grabbed the folders on Sam Tyler and Alex Drake, and marched out to Luigi's.
After Luigi brought beer for both himself and the Doctor, Gene spread the files on the sticky table. He didn't open them up yet, those sets of dates and photographs of people no longer around. "Where and when was the last time you saw Donna?" Gene asked.
"How much did she tell you?" returned the Doctor, gingerly sniffing his beer. "Or are we still under interrogation room rules?"
"We're under tell-Gene-Hunt-what-he-wants-to-know rules!"
"Alriiiight. As far as I can tell, in my personal timeline, which is about as linear as the Gordian Knot, it was four months ago that I left her at her house in Chiswick with no memory of ever traveling with me. That would have been... oh, sometime in 2008? In the summer, I think? I wasn't there long." He finally took a sip. "I must have accidentally left her somewhere just long enough to marry you, whilst she was with me. Odd, though, I would have thought she'd have mentioned it, quite the mouth she has on her."
"You didn't destroy her memories when you took her home," Gene informed him. "You locked them up, and you locked up the part of your brain that had got into hers and you told her mum and granddad never to let any of it out. Is this sounding familiar? You still think I'm making things up?"
The Doctor had his brown eyes fixed on Gene, all lightheartedness suddenly gone from them. "I'm really, really not. That metacrisis was burning her brain, Gene Hunt, and if you did anything to break down all the barriers I set up to keep Donna from killing herself to contain it, I will-"
"I saved her life!" Gene glared at all the heads that had turned to see who had raised their voice. "Whilst you just scarpered to find some new galaxy to stare at, some new girl to pick up, she came to me to keep from going the way of the exploding dog. Me. And I kept her alive for the eleven years we were married before she disappeared and I didn't know where in time I should even begin to look to find her."
"Seventeen years ago, then?" The Doctor wrinkled his forehead. "1969, that would be, huh. I was stuck in 1969 with Martha for a few months, not too long ago. How did Donna get there?"
"Bugger if I know." Gene drained a prodigious amount of beer in one gulp. "I think she was following you. Followin' some trail. Once said that she was some sort of 'focal point', whatever that is, seeing where things came together, and maybe she meant bits of time, too."
The Doctor looked lost in thought, for a minute. Visibly pulling himself out of it, he suddenly stabbed a finger at the files on the table. "These two. What do they have to do with anything?"
"Both mad as spoons, they were, but Donna was sure that Tyler was tellin' the truth. He said he was hit by a car in 2006, woke up in Manchester in 1973. Seeing as I got transfer papers from Hyde when he came to my station, he planned falling through time by accident rather well. He kept trying to find something that would send him home at first, but he settled down, married one of my WPCs, died in 1980. Just a bit before Donna disappeared for good." Gene flipped open Sam Tyler's file, glancing at the contents for only a second. They were bad Xerox copies that he had reacquired from Alex's flat, after an accident with the originals. A rather hastily constructed, flammable accident.
The Doctor drew in his breath sharply. "Who is this?"
"DI Sam Tyler. Who's he to you?"
"Someone I saw die. Another time traveler. Someone like me."
Gene frowned at him. "Donna had your brains in her head. She told me once, anything that was in your head, if it was in yours, it was in hers. She'd have seen him, known that. You sure Tyler wasn't this friend of yours?"
"He wasn't a friend." The Doctor said sharply. "Tell me about the other one. Alex Drake."
"Tyler died and Donna left in 1980," Gene resumed. "Donna had warned me about Tyler, said that he might not be the only other time traveler coming here. I get to be the lucky one they see when their life starts flashin' before their eyes, for some reason, 'cos Drake showed up in 1981, shoutin' the place down that she'd been shot and we were all constructs of her loony mind. Are all you time-travelers self-obsessed and loud?"
"Must be the sight of you," the Doctor informed him. "1973, 1981. 2006, 2008. What was significant enough about those dates to pull two ordinary people back in time, right at the moment of... their..." He pulled at his hair excitedly. "Deaths!"
The denizens of Luigi's swiveled, once again, to look. The Doctor did not notice. "The moment of their deaths! How could I be so daft-? But Donna, she saw it! She's clever, Donna is; clever and with my brain, didn't I tell you?"
"I told you, in point of fact," Gene rumbled. It was another thing to go unnoticed by the Doctor, who leapt from the table, the ends of his coat nearly dusting the folders from the top. Gene grabbed them up before they could be flung across the room. "Where are you off to?"
"We," the Doctor said, grinning, "are off to investigate a mystery. A murder mystery, perhaps."
"Right, then," replied Gene. "Finally, you start talking sense."
"Sense, to you? I should hope not."