Fic: [Ashes to Ashes/Doctor Who, Gene/Donna] Some Other Year (4/6).
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 Four
For here am I sitting in a tin can, far above the world.
Planet Earth is blue, and there's nothing I can do.
-David Bowie, "Space Oddity" (1969)
*
"What was that all about, then?"
They had returned to the TARDIS. Gene had taken over both seats on the bench by the console, looking somewhat antsy at letting someone else drive, even if it was a time machine. The Doctor also did not look very much at his ease. Both were men with a deep and meaningful connection to their vehicles.
"Sarah? Oh, she's an old friend. Old, old friend. Well, not that old, not yet. Fact, she's just about to meet me for the first time tomorrow, so we're both very young, actually. And it turns out that my remembering traveling with her was the reason she met me in the first place. And that is a very good thing, do you know why?"
"I do not, in fact." Gene felt about his person for a flask.
"It means that we're doing things that have already happened. Whatever's gone weird with time, we've ended up in the right places to do the right things, not making things worse."
"Oh?" Gene said. He located his flask and drank deeply. "An' how did Sarah end up then? Crazy? Dead? Launching herself from one universe to the next? Or did you go for variety with this one?"
"She's fine, brilliant! Successful journalist, I think she wrote a series of sci-fi novels, lives in London, occasionally saves the world. Nothing happened to her."
"Look at me in the eyes and repeat that," Gene challenged. "Think you're the first bloke to tell me 'Oh, guv, no, I had nothin' to do with how that girl ended up'?"
"She's fine," the Doctor repeated, leaning against the console and still for once. His eyes were shadowed. "We traveled, eventually I had to take her home, she always had a career and a life and I knew she'd be happy. Saw her again when she was thirty years older and living alone and it turned out she never quite learned how to live without the traveling. Seems I passed it on, not knowing how to have an ordinary human life." He paused. "And don't think you can distract me from how I saw you snogging Donna! I told you not to talk to her." He stared at Gene a little more closely. "Say, why's your shirt buttoned wrong?"
"Ho, mate, if you don't know that then I know a good many brothels that will be our next three stops!"
"Oh for the love of-" The Doctor cut himself off by rubbing his hands across his face. "All of space and time at risk, we're trying to keep paradoxes from swallowing the known universe, and you're- you're-"
Gene leaned back and propped his feet up on the console.
"All that talk of understanding the need to serve the laws of time with a few exceptions that equate to professional courtesies? What part of the metaphor is this, favours you get from-"
"If that sentence ends with you callin' my wife a prostitute I will punch you in that big gob of yours so hard you'll be talkin' out of the back of your neck."
The Doctor rubbed the back of said neck wearily. "Alright, the metaphor breaks down, then. Like the universe will if you walk right into paradoxes."
"That reminds me, about the time Donna had her legs wrapped around my head-"
"I am actually considering throwing you out the door into the time vortex. Right now. I actually would."
"-she mentioned that there was a paradox around Tyler. She was investigating it, trying to catch it when it happens."
The Doctor stopped attempting to decide what to do with the mallet he had grabbed. "What? She picked up on that?"
"That, and she knew you had brought your space box to town, and that I wasn't the 1973 Gene Genie."
"She KNEW you were out of your time and she still-"
"It's my manly appeal," Gene informed him. "Can't keep the women off me."
But the Doctor was already pondering something else, or, more probably, working very hard at ignoring him. "I saw the paradox too, which is the weak point where the universe begins to fragment. We know the paradox didn't occur originally, but time is still in flux at that particular place in time."
"This is gen'raly the point at which someone suggests going to the scene of the proposed crime an' catching the villain in the act. Can't tell you how many times my DIs tried to go and arrest some bloke for something he's going to go do twenty years in the future, an' better yet, try to pretend to me like that's not what they're doing. Bit too much of a head start, if you ask me."
The Doctor pulled a lever and grinned at him. "Isn't it good we don't have to wait around twenty years, then?" The grin disappeared. "And this time, if you happen to run into anyone familiar, don't- don't do anything. Especially if you meet yourself. It could be very, very bad. Don't touch him. "
"What, touch 'im like I did Donna? Look, I'm not the skinny poof with the hair around here. An' besides, even if I did, wouldn't be anything more than a wank, would it?" Gene polished the toe of his boot on his trouser leg and watched the Doctor's eyes glaze over.
"...So, Gene, how would you like to land in the middle of the Battle of Hastings? Get sewn into the Bayeaux Tapestry? Because I think we're passing by it right now and I AM THROWING YOU OUT THE DOOR-"
*
All they found were two envelopes, held to the door of the community centre with thumbtacks. The envelopes flapped in the wind, looking very vulnerable to the rain that was threatening to start at any moment, and a name was scribbled on each in black ink. There was evidence all around of a party held previously: bits of paper streamer swept to the side of the pavement, a few empty cans, the butt-ends that never seemed to get swept away. They'd parked the TARDIS around the side of the centre, where most of the cars had left treads in the mud the day before. Beyond that, there was a wood that looked denser than Gene remembered it.
The Doctor tore both envelopes down, and tossed the one labeled 'Gene' at his companion, with ill grace. They had Had Words, and egos had been prodded unkindly, Gene had lit a cigarette and the Doctor had tried to jam it down his throat in the desire to convey that there would be no smoking inside, no matter what Gene's current cultural norms said. In the end, the TARDIS, though large enough to possibly hold small universes as well as Donna's entire wardrobe, was not quite large enough to civilly contain the two men. Something small and glass had tinkled brokenly across the floor when the Doctor landed his ship, and without a word or glance at Gene, he had stalked outside.
"Well, what does yours say?" Gene demanded of the Doctor, motioning towards his letter.
The Doctor looked unhappily unable to find any reason why he shouldn't share it. "What time do you call this, then?" he read aloud."I managed the paradox around Sam without any assistance, thank you very much. I also found a trail to the next paradox planned, since this one failed- and it involves Sarah Jane. Trust me, he's not going to leave her alone." The Doctor's mouth set briefly in a thin, hard line. "If you can land the TARDIS anywhere near the right place, meet me in London on the tenth of October, 1981. You were wondering who put a dent in the eighties?"
"She says the same thing about my driving," Gene commented, inserting a finger under the flap of his envelope and carefully detaching the glue.
"Anything useful in yours?" the Doctor asked, not concealing his impatience.
Gene drew the note out and unfolded it slowly. The familiar writing felt so incongruous, here; it was something reserved for grocery lists and recipes, not for wild chases across time, dragging him through places he had been sure he'd never see again.
This is the second bloody awful note I've written to you today, but at least you're getting them a dozen years apart, or however long it's been. It's a good thing you didn't arrest Vic Tyler today; that was never meant to happen and you don't know how bad it would have been if it had. I know nothing makes sense, but I promise I'll explain everything to you and the Doctor when you get to London, or someone will. Just keep following me, you're on the right path. All my love, forever, Donna
Gene coughed. "We're supposed to keep following her," he said, folding up the note.
"Anything else?"
Looking away from the community centre and at the woods, Gene remembered the chases through the trees, checking his gun over and over again and looking for the flash of red that would mean he had found Annie. He answered, "Mentioned something about Vic Tyler, a gang boss who escaped us in 1973. Donna left that day, too. Wasn't the first time she'd gone, but it was the first time she'd thought she might not come back. She usually just had to leave for a few days to visit her mum when she felt a migraine coming on, but that time she was gone a fortnight, and she chose to leave." He paused. "I knew she couldn't stay forever, just never thought she really would leave me for good. Right up until she did."
The silence that followed that statement, honestly not meant as anything more sentimental than a slightly bitter remembrance of past disappointment, caused Gene to look around at the Doctor, who was staring at the ground fixedly. "Yeah, you never do."
Gene looked away, not wanting to talk about it. Talking about the past wasn't his way, not unless it was immediately relevant to a case, and most everything he had said so far had been. "You never talk about Mrs Hunt," Bolly had said once, and he had replied "No. I don't," because that was really all there was to be said. Same when she asked about Tyler: "Sam Tyler was my friend. Sam Tyler died. End of." Gene wasn't about to go spilling feelings to the Doctor just because they had some sort of shared tragedy or what have you. He remembered all that had happened the night Donna was talking about, all on his own, on that night back in 1973 when he failed to arrest Vic Tyler.
He was a little bit pissed. Just a little bit. Still fine to drive home from the pub. Tyler had departed for that armpit of a flat of his, Ray and Chris had headed out for, they said, places more likely to contain women. Gene did not pass comment, as what they did with their private time and cash of low denomination was their business. Despite the escape of Vic Tyler, he was in a good mood. It had started out as a desperately cheery sort of one; after all, they had managed to bungle arresting one of the biggest crime bosses in the city, and if he had the good sense to stay out of town, there was still a sudden power vacuum to deal with. And Tyler was in an odd mood that affected them all. But as the pints became empty glasses filling their table it was a bit more easy to accept that it hadn't all been a loss. Vic Tyler had depended on secrecy; he'd never work in Manchester again, with everyone knowing his face. They'd stopped him, and they'd stopped the pornography business he'd run, stopped the killings. Stopped him from beating or killing Annie, who, even though she was a bird with a loud mouth who didn't have the sense to stay out of the force, was still a bird under his protection and he'd be damned if he let anything happen to her.
Speaking of birds with loud mouths, he was looking forward to getting home to his. This thought was deeply intertwined with the rumbling in his stomach. He parked in the street and stumbled out, imagining what Donna may have prepared for supper. He put the key into the front door lock, and that was when he realized the light in the front room wasn't on, even though it was already dark out. He couldn't hear the telly blaring out the news through the crack in the door. Something wasn't right.
His hand rested lightly on his gun as he quietly opened the door and stepped inside, even though he knew it was just as likely that Donna had left his supper on the table and gone out with friends. He sniffed. No smell of cooking lingered in the air. He paused; no, he couldn't hear any noise, or movement, or breathing. He was alone in the house. He took his hand off his gun, and removed his coat, hanging it on the hook beside the door.
There was no supper left for him. He checked all around the kitchen first. It was possible, of course, that Donna hadn't made him anything before going out. But he had called her earlier and she had said she was going by the shop on the way home and she didn't know yet what she'd make.
She had left him again. Gene knew what this all added up to. He rubbed a hand over his face.
He headed upstairs, to their bedroom. He wished he could be angry, like other husbands presumably were allowed to be when their wives ran off. He wished she could just be an ordinary running-off type of wife where they could have a row and that would be the reason and he could bring her back with an apology. He wished that he had been with her and not Sam Tyler when whatever had caused her to leave had happened, because he knew she risked burning her brain up every time she really remembered everything, and so she would leave for somewhere she might be alright. She'd been alone, when it all came on.
At least this time he hadn't found her on the floor, golden sparks dancing across her face as she lay there unconscious next to the bed, and some sort of pressure heaving itself against his own brain as he leaned over her. He'd taken her to hospital that time, where they'd hooked wires to her head and said she was having a migraine, and decided the glow of whatever it was escaping her skull was jaundice. She hadn't woken up for three days. When she had, she first didn't remember him. Then she'd blinked hard, and didn't remember the twenty-first century. He'd taken her home.
Gene looked around the bedroom, checked the wardrobe. None of her clothes were missing, which didn't really mean anything. She had other clothes, in 2008 at her mother's house. Looking further, he found a note tucked under the lamp on the bedside table. He sat down on the bed to read it.
I have to go. Wish I could stay but I can't. I'm sorry. I don't know if I'll ever be able to come back. I love you. -Donna
For two weeks he worked late, staying in the office until late in the night with his bottle of whisky. People left him food on his desk when he wasn't looking, and he ate it. Nobody asked him what had happened. Ray was a bit quieter for once, Sam was morose and directionless and not noticing much anyway, and Annie gave him little relieved smiles when he came back to work with clean clothes on. He kept Donna's note in his pocket, occasionally drawing it out to check and see if the words had changed. They never did, but Donna could go back and change the past, couldn't she?
She didn't change the past, and the folds of the note grew more worn and grimy.
Then one day he looked up from some crime photos and there she was, wearing the same green dress he had seen her in the morning before she left; she had a grin tucked up into the corner of her mouth until she sniffed and made a face. "How long has it been since you last showered? You don't half stink, this lot in here is hardly a paragon of freshness but I still don't see how they're putting up with you."
"My wife's been off with all her fancy friends, couldn't be arsed to do the laundry," Gene countered, knowing his tone didn't match the relief on his face.
"Alright, alright, now she's back, let's get you home. For a shave, too, I'm not kissing you like that, I'll look like I was trying to snog a hedgehog. Bandages everywhere. Come on, we're leaving."
"I have work to do," he protested, but only for appearances.
Donna lifted her eyebrows, and strode over to the cubicle door. She yanked it open and stuck her head out. "Oi! Anyone here have a problem with the guv skivin' off to go home with his wife?"
"No!" CID chorused, and in some cases added, "Oh my god, please take him before he fumigates us all."
"Will you lot keep the city safe and prevent scum from approaching here, this noble barricade erected against the tide of evil?"
"Yes!" CID chorused, although some gave a hearty "Wut?" instead, and a good eighty percent began laughing and repeating the word erect.
"That's settled, then," Donna said, turning back to Gene.
He was already standing, coat on and keys in hand. They were serenaded with vulgar suggestions and not a few illustrative gestures as they left together. Donna grinned and answered an emphatic confirmation of every one of them. Gene felt his mouth pull into a smile: God, how he loved this beautiful, rude, ginger woman.
"We need to talk," Donna said, later that evening, as they ate supper.
"'S'what we've been doing," he replied. "Besides, isn't that the line you're supposed to say before you leave your husband, not the other way around?"
"Yeah, it is. When have we ever done the usual, at, say, any point in our marriage?"
Gene pondered this. "Sixteenth of May, 1971. In the backseat of the Cortina."
"Wasn't that the time I got taken hostage and you had to dress up as a nun? It doesn't count."
"You may have a point. So. Talk."
Donna sighed. "When I left this time, I didn't go to Mum's house. I went to see... oh, someone you haven't met yet. Another person like Sam, who's gone back in time after something, er, happened to her. She's quite pretty, by the way, I don't blame you."
"Blame me for what?" Gene was mystified.
"Alright, I do blame you, fine! Despite the fact that it's after I've left you for good and despite Shaun and- and- and this is absolutely not the way I wanted this conversation to go and nobody should ever time travel because it completely destroys their ability to have one bloody linear thought."
"I've known a good many blokes who've never had a linear thought even without time travel," Gene assured her. "And I think I am being very calm and rational when I graciously allow you to pick if you are first going to explain about who Shaun is, or why you believe you are leaving me for good."
Donna got up, and returned to the table with scotch and a glass. She sloshed a generous helping out for him. "Here."
"Will it help me?"
"No, but it'll help me. Drink up. One day I'll leave you and I won't come back."
"You keep saying these words..." Gene replied, indistinctly. He swallowed a burning mouthful like it was water, and waited for it to hit his stomach, to travel his veins in a warm embrace. It wasn't happening anywhere near fast enough.
"I can't really tell you very much," Donna said, studying the wood table as she picked at its grain with a fingernail. "There's a reason I'm here. Lots of reasons, really. There are so many timelines, all twisted, and I have to hold some together and pick some apart..." Her voice took on a dreamlike quality as she started to withdraw into the shining depths of her head.
Gene set his glass down loudly. "Enough with the vague hints and prophetic natterings, Lady Cassandra, and get to the point."
"Met Cassandra once, what a woman," Donna said, her eyes unfocused. She blinked. "No. That was the Doctor. I wasn't there yet. Pompeii."
"You can't leave me," Gene told her.
"I already did, though," Donna answered wearily. "You see all of time, happening at once, and right now but years from now I've already left you."
"When?" Gene asked. "When are you going to leave me and move on with this Shaun bloke?"
"Oh, no, that already happened."
"Already happ- already happened in the sense that all time happens at once sort of nonsense?" It felt like he had jumped into a shallow pond and found it to be actually the depth of the North Sea and just as chilly. There was no place to stand with any confidence.
"No, in the sense that I married him about... oh, a month ago, in my timeline. I was going to tell you sooner, only things came up and I had to leave."
Gene swallowed the entirety of the contents of his glass in one gulp and poured himself another healthy helping. Not only was the metaphorical pond actually a sea, it had monsters in its depths. "Why don't we leave aside all that and you tell me more about this Shaun." For some reason Shaun sounded very much like shit.
Donna leaned forward, a sad smile on her face. "When I'm living here, real day-to-day living, I don't remember anything after 1973. I don't remember going to high school in the nineties, or what happened in- well, it's all like a dream. The kind that you don't remember in the morning except for that bit about the carousal and the running.
"The times I spend back home, I remember even less. Mum and Granddad try not to remind me of anything about the Doctor, because- my headaches are even more dangerous there." She frowned. "I don't think I'm very happy there, really. I think Granddad knows that, and it kills him that he can't bring the Doctor back and fix everything. And then Shaun came along. He's nice, he's an artist. Got a few pieces up in galleries, just small ones. I guess everything I forgot, the wedding with Lance and being married to you, being happy; it just all came together and we decided to get married. Only I didn't go back home in order. I went back after the wedding. So I had to marry him, or there would be problems."
"Have to shag to save the world?" Gene asked rudely.
"Um," said Donna. "Yes, probably. Sorry?"
Gene stood suddenly, and turned to the wall. His hand curled, itching to punch a hole in it. Wanting to put a hole in more than just the wall. "I should find your Shaun and let him know exactly who is your husband. Make it real clear to him. With a board with a nail in the end of it."
"He's currently six months old!"
"All the better!"
"It was an accident!"
Gene looked back at her. "How soon is it 'til you think you're leaving for good? Next week?"
Donna appeared nonplussed by the unexpected return to the original topic of conversation. "Not for years, far as I know."
"Good," Gene said. "Because we're not talking about it anymore right now." He grabbed his coat. "Don't wait up for me."
Two days after that, he stopped talking to her only in monosyllables and requests for supper, stopped sleeping on the couch. "It was a shit note you left me," he informed her.
"I had to run! I didn't know how long I had before the- you and- well."
"Was still a shit note."
"Yeah. It was shit."
"'S'pose I can't blame you. If you didn't remember anything and married Shaun. Just so long as you always come home to me." He paused. "I knew when I asked you to marry me that we'd never have the reg'lar sort of problems that other people have. Just what I get for being the time traveler's husband, that's all."
"Get a copyright on that idea before whatshername, Audrey Niffenegger gets her hands on it," Donna advised. "I told Agatha Christie about Murder on the Orient Express and what'd I get for it? Oh, and I didn't sleep with Shaun, so you can stop worrying about that. I never felt right about it, an' I married and met him all out of order anyway, so I didn't."
"Oh. That's that sorted, then," Gene said, feeling slightly unbalanced, and it was.