Fic: Footsteps In The Sand
Title: Footsteps In The Sand
Author: Corona
Fandom: Doctor Who
Word Count: 5481
Rating: PG-13
Character: Donna Noble
Spoilers: Season 4 finale
Rating: Disclaimer: In no way mine or anything to do with me. I own nothing.
Summary: It started at the end, because time had always had a peculiar fondness for the big finish; the twist ending and the dramatic rebirth.
AN: Written for
capn_mactastic who suggested the whole idea and made me want to write it. It was a hell of a lot of fun.
It started at the end, because time had always had a peculiar fondness for the big finish, the twist ending and the dramatic rebirth.
Time wasn't a law, it was elastic and forgiving. It could be written and over-written in a multitude of tones and colours. For one brief moment Donna had known that, she'd understood that. She'd breathed it in and held it.
In another life.
Now she was standing in Tesco's car park trying not to get absolutely soaked. She should have worn her other coat. She should have bought a brolly. Not that she had any free hands to hold one with.
Her hair was turning into some sort of flume that was doing nothing but sending water straight down her bloody neck and she suspected there was a hole in one of her bags. Knowing her luck she'd trail shopping all the way to the car, a line of cans and eggs and fruit that would leave her fuming and sick and wet to the skin.
To the skin.
The shopping survived as far as the car, only to scatter around in the passenger foot well, where she left it to make its own way. Knowing her luck she'd find half of it in a week when the car started to smell like rotting fruit.
Then Donna just sat there and dripped, scowling in the rear-view mirror and wondering what on earth possessed her to come out in this weather. No one came out in this weather unless it was to escape imminent flooding.
Still that was what the earth got for being wrenched out of its orbit she supposed.
It was the apocalypse everywhere.
Turned out planets didn't like not being where they thought they should be. Strangely enough.
She felt a little like that herself. Like she shouldn't be there. Like she'd been cut loose and dropped back into her old life. Tethers ripped away to drift in the wind. It had to be the weather.
She let her keys drop into her hand and started the car.
One last stop, one last drive through the mess that used to be the high street and she could go home. She was soaking wet already anyway.
She parked right outside, no one else was out in this, no one. She'd only come out herself because she couldn't bear to stay in the house a second longer.
Afternoons seemed to stretch into each other.
One long drag of endless time.
...
But time didn't let go easily and this time its tool was one Captain Jack Harkness.
Donna didn't remember his name then, she didn't remember his face, or his coat or the way he smelled when you dragged him close enough to squeeze the life out of him.
He was just an attractive man in a coat getting a little over-familiar. In the middle of the street, in the middle of the pouring rain. And it took her a minute to work out that it was a hug and not a sexual assault.
"Do I know you," she managed against the heavy wet material of his coat and hoped that her voice managed shocked and appalled rather than surprised bewilderment.
"Donna!" He said simply, like that was enough, like that was everything. Leaving her staring and shaking her head, not sure whether to be furious or not. Because she'd forgotten people. She knew she'd forgotten people. And there was a chance he wasn't actually a mad person but someone she knew, someone she'd known.
"Damn I didn't know you were here, you should have said something you should have stopped by." An eyebrow canted upwards in a way that was amused and filthy and slightly juvenile.
"Is the Doctor here, don't tell me you're back to save the world again, it's barely been a month."
"Look-" Donna started, lifting her head and taking a breath for whatever she was going to say. But then he was talking again, a crash of words and enthusiastic gestures that thundered over each other, words that connect to each other and spin something wholly amazing.
And he was smiling at her, smiling like the world might end.
Like the world might end.
Like the world-
...
And for the second time in a month someone caught her when she fell.
***
After that there was a discordant rush of images. Shouting and light and skin under her fingertips. Mixed up with the shuddering threat of hysteria and fury, and horrible terror.
And cold, long periods of cold where she could see the fractals through the ice, spinning slowly.
In one of those moments of white light and skin she reached up and caught it. Dragged herself up, and the fingers spasmed in surprise and grasped her back.
"Donna."
She knew that voice, smooth and familiar and beautiful and she squeezed harder than she should, tried to pull herself out of the ice, because she was choking on it.
"Breathe," Martha told her softly, and she was stronger than she looked, holding her up on bent arms and Donna thought that maybe that was a Doctor thing. Always stronger than they looked.
Donna could feel her own hair, wet against the back of her neck, trailing coldly over her shoulders.
"I was-" Donna stopped, the sentence falling into nothing when she forgot what she was going to say.
"Just breathe for a minute," Martha's voice was quiet, a smooth purr of sound. "We're going to fix it. We're doing everything we can."
Going to fix what? Donna couldn't remember. But that wasn't true because she also remembered everything. Except who she was, no she knew who she was...only she wasn't, or she shouldn't be. For one brief second she was two people, then five then ten. Ten people with the same face, and then one person with a hundred different faces and all of them screaming.
And then there was just Martha.
"It's going to be okay," Martha told her, hand wrapped round her arm, fingers tight enough that Donna could feel them through the cold.
But she knew Martha's face far better than she should. Donna knew that she wasn't half as confident as she sounded. Because there was a worried line between her eyebrows, a loose unhappy set to her mouth that told her Martha was trying, trying and still lost somewhere in the details.
And she knew, she knew....
"It's all in the details Martha Jones," she admonished.
The hand flexed on her arm and the last thing she saw was Martha's shocked face disappearing under the flow of ice.
***
The next time she woke up it wasn't Martha holding her but Jack, larger and warmer and not holding her down, or keeping her still but easing her upright, pulling her out of the ice like she didn't belong there any more. Like she could rejoin the living.
Her whole body protested but she went, she went clawing, fingers refusing to let go. She dug her hands into Jack's coat and let him pull her free. Then she let him hold her for a minute, all warmth and life and skin, while her feet tried to work out how to stand, how to be part of the world. How not to send her crashing to the floor.
She was still cold and unsteady and wearing a medical gown that was possibly the least flattering piece of clothing ever invented and she'd just been pulled from what was clearly cryostasis. A freezer drawer, a bloody freezer drawer!
It took an effort she instantly regretted to push Jack back half a step.
The room spun around her in a way she didn't approve of at all.
"It was freezing in there," Donna told him, half furious and half speechless at the sheer rudeness of locking her in a freezer.
In a freezer.
"You locked me in a freezer! A freezer!"
"Technically it's a-"
"Don't technically me, I know cryostasis when I see it. And one man's 'experimental cryostasis' is another man's meat freezer." Donna shivered on the edge of the drawer, too dizzy to stand by herself, and too proud and furious to take Jack's hand.
In fact she was more than tempted to reach up and slap him but her fingers didn't work right and her head ached like it had been dragged along the ground.
Her head was- too full.
"Oh," she said quietly.
She was alive and she was her. But she was also...still more than her.
Jack stood motionless, waiting against the side of the drawer.
"I'm still- it's in my head, I can still hear it." She swallowed. "So I'm still...I'm still going to die."
Jack pulled his hands out of his pockets and reached out, dragged a wheeled trolley within reach.
Very carefully he laid his hands on Donna's shoulders and eased her down into the curve of a metal chair. She was grateful for the gesture, though she couldn't stop herself from scowling. The metal was probably freezing but she barely felt it against her back.
"We don't think so."
"You don't think so?"
There was a scatter of coloured pills on the trolley's cold silver surface. A riot of colours and shapes and sizes. Some of them she knew for a fact were never intended for human metabolism
"We've been experimenting, Martha's been experimenting."
"On my brain, and I'm supposed to be happy about that how exactly."
"It was either that or leave you in the freezer." Jack leant forward, hands flat on the table. "And I was determined not to let that happen." Donna harrumphed quietly, but settled back into the chair, arms crossed.
"Tell me about the pills."
"There's a variety that are supposed to slow down or suppress brain activity, control telepathic function, brain growth, and some anti-anxiety and anti-psychotics..."
"Anti-psychotics?" Donna hoped her expression conveyed how unimpressed she was about that.
Jack raised an eyebrow.
"For a while you were a little agitated."
Which translated quite easily from Doctor-speak into 'completely and totally nuts.'
"Which ones did you give me?"
There was a pause.
"All of them," Jack said carefully.
Donna's brain flipped through the chemicals and their reactions and possible chain reactions and permutations in various doses. Then it did the equivalent of a slow whistle that she was almost certain she wasn't responsible for.
"Nice," she said smartly. "It's a wonder I'm not radioactive."
"You're not radioactive," Jack smiled, quick and effortless. "We checked. Though you are stable. Your brain waves are no longer trying to start an overture that you're not designed to play. You're not going to die."
He smiled at her, hands pushed into his pockets.
Donna took a breath, and then another. She was holding on to something that she was almost certain was a scream. Then she made a face, nodded jerkily.
"Well that has to be an improvement doesn't it. To my old life, or death or the freezer drawer. That cheeky little bastard I'm going to give him a piece of my mind when I see him."
She swallowed a laugh, because, of course, she already had.
"Him and his insistence on doing what he thinks is best," she said very quietly. For a long second she wanted to wallow in that sharp stab of betrayal. She wanted to be furious and full of it. She wanted to shout at someone, to hit someone, anyone.
But things weren't that simple...not any more.
She clenched her cold fingers until they prickled.
"As far as we can tell you've kept most of it, most of what you absorbed. Though some of it seems to have-" Jack made a gesture. "Sloshed over the side. But your head seems to be coping. It seems to be stable."
Donna eyed him.
"Is that a medical term is it? 'Sloshed over the side.'"
"It was more complicated when Martha explained it."
"I should hope so."
Donna breathed in the quiet for a long moment, and her brain was still, like a sleeping dragon, or a factory with the lights turned out. And she realised while she wasn't concentrating on anything at all. That Jack was different from the rest of the room. He was sharper, harder, he was an....
Immovable object.
She thought she knew where the words came from but they seemed to fit.
"You feel..." she searched for the word that best described what she felt when she looked at him. "You feel wrong."
Jack's smile tilted, then slid off of his face. He replaced it with something more real, something unhappy and wistful and lost. And for a second Donna knew him, or thought she did.
And then it was gone.
"Yeah, that part I know about."
***
Donna had wondered where Torchwood would keep a spare Time Lord, half Time Lord- accident of emergency genetics. Either way she didn't think they'd send her back home with a cup of coffee and half a plate of bourbons.
They didn't lock her in a cell, in fact the room Jack left her in was nice enough. It was somewhere in the basement. Donna was left staring at her boots, at the smooth brown leather crossed with brief random scuffs and wondering where she'd gotten them from. A catalogue she thought, but she couldn't quite remember which one.
Maybe the slosh wasn't all Time Lord after all. Maybe it really was just that, overspill of whatever floated to the top. Whatever was least important. Years worth of pointless TV shows, all the bad haircuts she'd had as a child, dentist appointments, favourite pop songs.
All the things she wouldn't care about losing.
But she can remember them, she can remember all of them.
Her head told her that she was thinking like a human. She told it to keep its big Time Lord nose out of it. She was going to compartmentalise in her own way thank you very much.
Donna Noble's brain did not put up with back seat driving.
At exactly two seventeen the cameras mysteriously went offline for maintenance.
She wandered, in no particular direction, in no particular direction that took her nowhere near the motion sensors or the infra red cameras, or the cells.
She wandered past a huge tunnel stacked to the roof with scavenged parts from a thousand ship crashes.
The piles of discarded metal said so many things now. 'I could be fixed, I'm just missing a wing, I'm still space-worthy, I burned up in re-entry, I could be recalibrated and used to level a city block.'
It was no longer science to Donna, it was pieces, pieces making wholes.
She stopped and wondered absently if that was how you'd see everything if you were were smart enough and you lived forever, or as good as forever. A universe made of pieces, to be put together if you only knew how.
Donna wandered on, she'd apparently developed a curious knack for wandering exactly where she needed to go.
A focused nosiness. Granted she'd never been exactly shy about other people's business but it had been more of a random affair. This was different, this was like she knew what was important and what wasn't. Time Lords apparently had a knack for getting into trouble because they were drawn to it.
Great big glaring trails in time that were the biological equivalent of a flashing neon arrow saying 'something interesting here, get stuck in, be prepared for running and screaming and explosions.'
The giant flaming arrow was currently hovering somewhere over a door that was triple locked, alarmed and wired for changes in air temperature.
It took her two minutes and twelve seconds to unlock, and two minutes of that was spent getting the cover off of the alarm system.
Torchwood really had no better a security system than the rest of the twenty first century had to offer.
Then it was just a door.
Donna pushed it open with a boot.
The room was dark but something was operating on low power. A quiet hum and a soft throb. She reached her hand out sideways, found the light switch exactly where she expected to.
Donna hadn't been the only one who survived. The solid broken tower of a Dalek shell sat in the middle of the room. Hooked in to six machines by a tangle of leads and tubes.
The Dalek's head was broken away.
But that happened long before the earth moved.
"I waited for you," a voice trilled, weak but amused and lilting. "You come in the dark, you come in the dark bringing the flavour of flesh and light and Time Lord."
Dalek Caan, that was his name though Donna couldn't remember whether she'd heard it as her, or remembered it as him.
The tentacles moved, weakly, several of them were red, peeling, moving in feeble twitches underneath bare leads that sparked.
"You were supposed to have died with all the rest," Donna said quietly.
"I am strange and wonderful," there was a tension under the words that Donna knew was pain. "I break all the laws of Dalek and time."
He laughed quietly, but it turned into a thin high squeal.
"I am unique." He added, slightly more quietly.
"You're a mess," Donna told him, and thought nothing of stepping close, of seperating the leads so she could see the shape of the Dalek beneath. The human part of her wanted to say 'squashed octopus' but the other part, the complicated older part wanted to say 'Dalek' and there was so much complex emotion laid over the word that for a moment she couldn't think at all.
Until she realised that none of it was hers.
"They've wired your life support up with shoddy connections."
"It burns," Dalek Caan admitted plaintively.
Donna opened both feeds wider and switched two of the leads over. The bare sparking one she dropped on the floor.
Caan stilled for a moment, before a slow exploratory flex of tentacles seemed to satisfy him.
"Doctor Donna, still walking the streams of time, still pressing and pushing at its careful weave."
"That's me, get me vertical and I'll have my fingers where they don't belong."
As if to prove it she separated two of his life support leads and followed them back to where they began.
"Oh that's just cheap, shoddy workmanship. Though why I expected better from Torchwood I have no idea."
She really would have liked a microprobe but she settled for sliding her little finger into the hole and dragging out the twin wires that controlled central flow.
"Are you learning how to be a Time Lord Doctor Donna."
She eyed him over the bulk of the field generator set on the base of his prison.
"They said some of it sloshed over the side when I was busy not burning out and dying horribly."
"Pain and loss can bring gain, gain and vision. Things you've been searching for will appear in that heart of suffering."
Donna's mouth drew into a thin line that couldn't help but be amused.
"You're really completely barking aren't you?"
"I am unique," Dalek Caan sounded both happy and satisfied by the prospect.
"That you are," Donna said carefully.
"You are unique also."
The two broken mistakes left over from the end of the world. Left without a side, adrift in time and space.
Left behind.
"Yeah, well sometimes the accidents work in our favour."
"The universe plans its accidents down to the tiniest detail." Dalek Caan moved in his shell, raw parts of tentacle shifting just barely.
"The universe is a smarter woman than I am then," Donna said quietly.
Caan seemed amused by the statement.
She straightened, stepped back, one hand on the door.
"Why are they keeping you here anyway?"
"I am Dalek, no matter how far my mind has traveled. I have seen things, I have been inside and outside time but I will always be Dalek. That is not an easy thing. Just as what you are is not an easy thing."
"But surely it would have been easier to just kill you," she said, because it was grisly but true.
"The one who hides his teeth behind a smile. He wishes to slice me into many pieces, ever smaller, ever more broken...."
Donna paused at the door, head turned back over her shoulder.
"Is that right, is that what happens?"
Dalek Caan was strangely still inside his shell.
"No," he said simply. And the soft trill of Dalek laughter followed Donna all the way back upstairs.
***
Jack found her an hour later in the sub-basement levels. Leant over the railing, staring into the depths. He came to stand beside her, hands pushed in his pocket, bare arm balanced on the metal.
"Didn't like your room I see."
"I don't much like small rooms anymore."
"With what's inside your head all the rules change."
Donna didn't want to go into that. She was still working it out herself, and the one person who could understand, who could see it...had left her behind.
"You've got a Dalek downstairs," she said instead.
"What's left of one," Jack admitted and there was a tone to his voice. A tone that swayed back and forth.
"You won't learn anything from him you know. He's not like the rest. Genetically, physically, mentally. He's a statistical anomaly even among the notorious statistically obsessed denizens of the universe."
Jack looked at her for a long moment.
"You're sounding like him again."
"And you're fascinated, I can see you over there being fascinated. Shame actually, I was quite fascinating all on my own."
"I bet you were," Jack said, and this time he wasn't lying.
Donna shrugged.
"Besides I do have bits of him in me- and you're going to pretend I never phrased it like that."
Jack laughed, leant on his arms on the railing next to her.
"What are you going to do with it?"
Jack didn't ask what she meant.
"I don't know."
He was lying again.
"Jack, Jack," she said clearly.
He pressed his lips together and shook his head.
"Don't do that, I can't lie when you do that."
"When I do what?"
"When you sound like him."
"Ah I think we're getting to the real heart of the problem here. Did I mention that I was quite fabulous all on my own," Donna smiled at him.
"You know what I'm going to do, you know and that's why you're standing here and working out how to tell me not to, working out how he'd tell me not to."
Donna harrumphed rather than admit that that was true.
"I think he'd just say 'Jack, no,' that always worked in the past."
Jack laughed.
"I think you have the same brain and I think it's way more than just knowledge. I think you're starting to see things like him. I think you're trying to work out how the long impassioned speeches on doing the right thing are supposed to start."
The Doctor was very fond of his long impassioned speeches on doing the right thing. Donna didn't think she'd be half as good at them. So she harrumphed instead, and she thought 'I can do this, I can do this and you can't stop me.'
Jack stared into the expanse of the lower hub. "If you like you can pretend we've done the impassioned speech part already, and I'm fairly sure you know what comes next."
Donna blinked, then drummed her fingers on the railing, because she did, she did know what came next.
Jack straightened, stretched, then fished a pen out of his pocket.
He lifted one of Donna's hands and flipped it over, wrote a number in smooth black ink across the tickly surface of her palm.
His hands were warm.
"That's Martha's number, if you need her."
Jack stretched again and disappeared out of Donna's field of vision.
She stared at the number.
Then there were hands on her shoulders, pressure and a lean of weight into her back.
"I have no doubt at all that you were fabulous Donna Noble, and you still are"
The door shut behind him with a clang, and she did nothing but breathe for a long time.
***
"What sort of name is Caan for a Dalek anyway," Donna said tartly. "Ever seen Star Trek?"
"I have seen many wander the cosmos."
"I'll take that as a 'no,' still there's time eh? Leaving us in the basement, the cheek of it. Half time Lord-" Donna stopped and pulled a face. "Eighty percent Time Lord, and I'm stashed in a basement like some mad unwanted wife."
She slid behind the console holding Caan in his stasis field and removed the lock. The quiet almost imperceptible fizz of the shield going down made Caan's tentacles draw back from the edge.
The reaction was even more pointed when Donna set a boot on the lip of his shell and pushed.
"Unexpected momentum!" Caan trilled in his peculiarly excited voice, his tentacles curling and contracting as Donna pushed him down the sloping ramp.
"Don't get used to it chum, your arse weighs a ton."
"I am made of stars and time," Caan professed. "As heavy as is necessary for momentum and protection."
Donna tossed her hair out of her face.
"Really? Because it feels a lot like cheap knock off space armour to me."
"I can survive in the cold heart of space." The words jiggled out of him when Donna rolled him over the grated flooring and there was an amusing irony to the whole situation that she suspected the Doctor would find absolutely hilarious.
No, she knew for a fact the Doctor would find it hilarious.
"Where are we going?"
"We're escaping," Donna told him. "Now keep your trap shut so we can do it quietly. Torchwood are out messing about with a crashed Imeem ship and with any luck all the formalities will keep them there all bloody afternoon."
Torchwood's corridors were narrow enough that more than once Donna pushed Dalek Caan into a wall. He didn't seem to mind though. Donna wondered exactly where Dalek ended and crazy began but he seemed to accept the whole thing with barely a twitch.
The huge tunnel full of spaceship parts was still there, and she'd already picked which one she wanted, sketched out the calculations in her head and made a list of parts to find. And a few extras that if they were lying around could prove unexpectedly useful.
Dalek Caan wheeled to a stop somewhere behind her. He was muttering something about birds and seasons that she was going to assume was some complex prophesy that she was going to ignore because she had more important things to worry about. Like power.
She didn't get as good at look at some of these as she would have liked. The engine she wanted was crushed beyond her capabilities here and she'd have to do everything the hard way.
She dug an arm into the stack of engine parts and pulled out something that looked like a stereo speaker. The Time Lord part of her went 'Ooooh.'
"Is it really smart to leave someone as suddenly clever as I am in an entire basement full of engine parts and broken shield technology?"
"I am incomplete," Caan said hopefully.
Donna lifted a finger up from where she was bent over the stack of manifolds, pointed it in the vague direction of Caan's body.
"You're not getting a head, or a sink plunger. I wouldn't feel comfortable having that thing pointed at me. Besides, crazy people don't get particle disintegration weapons. It's a new rule of mine."
"I am unique in my nakedness." Caan continued, and Donna knew that for wheedling no matter what mouth it came from.
"Do you think you could not call it nakedness."
"I am naked," Caan persisted.
Donna sighed.
"Fine you're naked, and I'm not looking."
"We are all naked."
"Speak for yourself. Right that's it, what am I missing- OH!"
She dragged a manifold that was the perfect shape out of the mess at her feet, stopping long enough to scoop up a handful of connectors and a big shiny wheel that she knew for a fact would be perfect for life support.
"I must bring my many false parts." Caan's tentacles stroked the leads keeping him alive.
"You don't need all of them, once the engines powered up I can wire you in."
"Holes in your knowledge. You are incomplete."
"And you're a squid," Donna countered.
Caan seemed amused, but he said nothing. He let her disconnect him and push him into the tilted ship section she'd chosen from the vast tumble of other ship sections.
"I am unsafe," Dalek Caan trilled.
"You're in a giant tin can, how much more safe can you get-" The tentacles flailed gently around his shell. "Fine I'll find a magnetic clamp somewhere."
It took twenty minutes to hook in the magnetics and another hour to finish life support and back-up life support because Donna was damned if she was going into space without one.
She'd let Caan loose with the computer programming, mostly because she didn't have time to do everything.
"I have calculated maximum thrust, a metal pirouette's of death and flame."
"That's nice for you, I suppose you want me to push you closer to the controls now then."
There was a swirl of tentacle.
"I am incapable of moving things with my mind," Dalek Caan pointed out in a voice that was far too full of glee and silliness.
"Funny," Donna said tartly. "But you realise I'm going to double check everything what with you being completely bonkers."
She moved behind him to hook him into the modified life support at the back of the cockpit.
"Take care!"
Donna folded her arms. "Do you want to do it yourself. You can't can you, because you've got no arms."
"Dalek's grew beyond them, manipulation tools were for-"
"People with fingers, people who built things. God forbid your race stopped wheeling around exterminating things for five minutes to reinvent the spanner."
Donna wiped a smudge off of her face and suspected she'd just added to the mess.
Caan lifted his tentacles, like a small child who wanted its jumper taken off and Donna shook her head and lifted the leads. They slotted in perfectly and Donna was glad about that. Because she wasn't used to feeling so certain that everything was where it should be, doing what it should be, and understanding and knowing wasn't the same as doing. It wasn't the same at all.
"Right you're all hooked up now. I've changed the feeds and had a quick poke through your fluid balance, give it a flail and see if it feels any better."
Caan obeyed.
"My manipulation is much improved. I can hold on to the stars."
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves eh?"
She pushed the lever, and on a hum of protesting metal and magnetism the two sides of the ship dragged themselves back together.
The life support, engines, shields and artificial gravity all came online in a flurry of switch flicks.
Donna was grinning so hard her face hurt.
"Am I good, or am I good."
"You are adequate," Dalek Caan waved a tentacle at her.
"Oi, easy sunshine, remember which one of us has the fingers."
Caan waved at her in quiet amusement.
"Won't be a Tardis," Donna said carefully. "But it will travel in space, we can work on the time part later."
Dalek Caan's eye moved over her work.
"Still," Donna drummed her fingers on a coil which she was almost certain came out of a Slitheen ship. "Prisoners can't be choosers eh?"
"We will escape into time."
"We'll buck the trend. Time Lord and Dalek, nearly Time Lord and Dalek anyway. There's space in the universe for two Time Lords now eh?"
"More than two," Dalek Caan added in what Donna liked to call his secretive burble. "More than two, there is still the Wren and the Rook."
"What have a told you about prophesising, what have I told you? Make sense or keep it to yourself."
The ship's lights came on full in a flickering cascade. Then the engine fired up, a rolling whine of sound and fury and promise. But Donna never worried that it wouldn't. Anyone could build a spaceship out of old parts of spaceship. It was like Scrapheap Challenge, only easier.
She grinned, fingers flicking towards herself.
"This is a face that builds spaceships, who knew."
"It is marvellous." Dalek Caan managed to suggest applause with his tentacles, even though Donna was almost certain he didn't know what applause was.
"Torchwood are going to notice us in about five minutes," Donna said casually. Her mouth pulled into something that really wanted to be smug. "Terrible shame we won't be here eh?"
Author: Corona
Fandom: Doctor Who
Word Count: 5481
Rating: PG-13
Character: Donna Noble
Spoilers: Season 4 finale
Rating: Disclaimer: In no way mine or anything to do with me. I own nothing.
Summary: It started at the end, because time had always had a peculiar fondness for the big finish; the twist ending and the dramatic rebirth.
AN: Written for
capn_mactastic who suggested the whole idea and made me want to write it. It was a hell of a lot of fun.
It started at the end, because time had always had a peculiar fondness for the big finish, the twist ending and the dramatic rebirth.
Time wasn't a law, it was elastic and forgiving. It could be written and over-written in a multitude of tones and colours. For one brief moment Donna had known that, she'd understood that. She'd breathed it in and held it.
In another life.
Now she was standing in Tesco's car park trying not to get absolutely soaked. She should have worn her other coat. She should have bought a brolly. Not that she had any free hands to hold one with.
Her hair was turning into some sort of flume that was doing nothing but sending water straight down her bloody neck and she suspected there was a hole in one of her bags. Knowing her luck she'd trail shopping all the way to the car, a line of cans and eggs and fruit that would leave her fuming and sick and wet to the skin.
To the skin.
The shopping survived as far as the car, only to scatter around in the passenger foot well, where she left it to make its own way. Knowing her luck she'd find half of it in a week when the car started to smell like rotting fruit.
Then Donna just sat there and dripped, scowling in the rear-view mirror and wondering what on earth possessed her to come out in this weather. No one came out in this weather unless it was to escape imminent flooding.
Still that was what the earth got for being wrenched out of its orbit she supposed.
It was the apocalypse everywhere.
Turned out planets didn't like not being where they thought they should be. Strangely enough.
She felt a little like that herself. Like she shouldn't be there. Like she'd been cut loose and dropped back into her old life. Tethers ripped away to drift in the wind. It had to be the weather.
She let her keys drop into her hand and started the car.
One last stop, one last drive through the mess that used to be the high street and she could go home. She was soaking wet already anyway.
She parked right outside, no one else was out in this, no one. She'd only come out herself because she couldn't bear to stay in the house a second longer.
Afternoons seemed to stretch into each other.
One long drag of endless time.
...
But time didn't let go easily and this time its tool was one Captain Jack Harkness.
Donna didn't remember his name then, she didn't remember his face, or his coat or the way he smelled when you dragged him close enough to squeeze the life out of him.
He was just an attractive man in a coat getting a little over-familiar. In the middle of the street, in the middle of the pouring rain. And it took her a minute to work out that it was a hug and not a sexual assault.
"Do I know you," she managed against the heavy wet material of his coat and hoped that her voice managed shocked and appalled rather than surprised bewilderment.
"Donna!" He said simply, like that was enough, like that was everything. Leaving her staring and shaking her head, not sure whether to be furious or not. Because she'd forgotten people. She knew she'd forgotten people. And there was a chance he wasn't actually a mad person but someone she knew, someone she'd known.
"Damn I didn't know you were here, you should have said something you should have stopped by." An eyebrow canted upwards in a way that was amused and filthy and slightly juvenile.
"Is the Doctor here, don't tell me you're back to save the world again, it's barely been a month."
"Look-" Donna started, lifting her head and taking a breath for whatever she was going to say. But then he was talking again, a crash of words and enthusiastic gestures that thundered over each other, words that connect to each other and spin something wholly amazing.
And he was smiling at her, smiling like the world might end.
Like the world might end.
Like the world-
...
And for the second time in a month someone caught her when she fell.
***
After that there was a discordant rush of images. Shouting and light and skin under her fingertips. Mixed up with the shuddering threat of hysteria and fury, and horrible terror.
And cold, long periods of cold where she could see the fractals through the ice, spinning slowly.
In one of those moments of white light and skin she reached up and caught it. Dragged herself up, and the fingers spasmed in surprise and grasped her back.
"Donna."
She knew that voice, smooth and familiar and beautiful and she squeezed harder than she should, tried to pull herself out of the ice, because she was choking on it.
"Breathe," Martha told her softly, and she was stronger than she looked, holding her up on bent arms and Donna thought that maybe that was a Doctor thing. Always stronger than they looked.
Donna could feel her own hair, wet against the back of her neck, trailing coldly over her shoulders.
"I was-" Donna stopped, the sentence falling into nothing when she forgot what she was going to say.
"Just breathe for a minute," Martha's voice was quiet, a smooth purr of sound. "We're going to fix it. We're doing everything we can."
Going to fix what? Donna couldn't remember. But that wasn't true because she also remembered everything. Except who she was, no she knew who she was...only she wasn't, or she shouldn't be. For one brief second she was two people, then five then ten. Ten people with the same face, and then one person with a hundred different faces and all of them screaming.
And then there was just Martha.
"It's going to be okay," Martha told her, hand wrapped round her arm, fingers tight enough that Donna could feel them through the cold.
But she knew Martha's face far better than she should. Donna knew that she wasn't half as confident as she sounded. Because there was a worried line between her eyebrows, a loose unhappy set to her mouth that told her Martha was trying, trying and still lost somewhere in the details.
And she knew, she knew....
"It's all in the details Martha Jones," she admonished.
The hand flexed on her arm and the last thing she saw was Martha's shocked face disappearing under the flow of ice.
***
The next time she woke up it wasn't Martha holding her but Jack, larger and warmer and not holding her down, or keeping her still but easing her upright, pulling her out of the ice like she didn't belong there any more. Like she could rejoin the living.
Her whole body protested but she went, she went clawing, fingers refusing to let go. She dug her hands into Jack's coat and let him pull her free. Then she let him hold her for a minute, all warmth and life and skin, while her feet tried to work out how to stand, how to be part of the world. How not to send her crashing to the floor.
She was still cold and unsteady and wearing a medical gown that was possibly the least flattering piece of clothing ever invented and she'd just been pulled from what was clearly cryostasis. A freezer drawer, a bloody freezer drawer!
It took an effort she instantly regretted to push Jack back half a step.
The room spun around her in a way she didn't approve of at all.
"It was freezing in there," Donna told him, half furious and half speechless at the sheer rudeness of locking her in a freezer.
In a freezer.
"You locked me in a freezer! A freezer!"
"Technically it's a-"
"Don't technically me, I know cryostasis when I see it. And one man's 'experimental cryostasis' is another man's meat freezer." Donna shivered on the edge of the drawer, too dizzy to stand by herself, and too proud and furious to take Jack's hand.
In fact she was more than tempted to reach up and slap him but her fingers didn't work right and her head ached like it had been dragged along the ground.
Her head was- too full.
"Oh," she said quietly.
She was alive and she was her. But she was also...still more than her.
Jack stood motionless, waiting against the side of the drawer.
"I'm still- it's in my head, I can still hear it." She swallowed. "So I'm still...I'm still going to die."
Jack pulled his hands out of his pockets and reached out, dragged a wheeled trolley within reach.
Very carefully he laid his hands on Donna's shoulders and eased her down into the curve of a metal chair. She was grateful for the gesture, though she couldn't stop herself from scowling. The metal was probably freezing but she barely felt it against her back.
"We don't think so."
"You don't think so?"
There was a scatter of coloured pills on the trolley's cold silver surface. A riot of colours and shapes and sizes. Some of them she knew for a fact were never intended for human metabolism
"We've been experimenting, Martha's been experimenting."
"On my brain, and I'm supposed to be happy about that how exactly."
"It was either that or leave you in the freezer." Jack leant forward, hands flat on the table. "And I was determined not to let that happen." Donna harrumphed quietly, but settled back into the chair, arms crossed.
"Tell me about the pills."
"There's a variety that are supposed to slow down or suppress brain activity, control telepathic function, brain growth, and some anti-anxiety and anti-psychotics..."
"Anti-psychotics?" Donna hoped her expression conveyed how unimpressed she was about that.
Jack raised an eyebrow.
"For a while you were a little agitated."
Which translated quite easily from Doctor-speak into 'completely and totally nuts.'
"Which ones did you give me?"
There was a pause.
"All of them," Jack said carefully.
Donna's brain flipped through the chemicals and their reactions and possible chain reactions and permutations in various doses. Then it did the equivalent of a slow whistle that she was almost certain she wasn't responsible for.
"Nice," she said smartly. "It's a wonder I'm not radioactive."
"You're not radioactive," Jack smiled, quick and effortless. "We checked. Though you are stable. Your brain waves are no longer trying to start an overture that you're not designed to play. You're not going to die."
He smiled at her, hands pushed into his pockets.
Donna took a breath, and then another. She was holding on to something that she was almost certain was a scream. Then she made a face, nodded jerkily.
"Well that has to be an improvement doesn't it. To my old life, or death or the freezer drawer. That cheeky little bastard I'm going to give him a piece of my mind when I see him."
She swallowed a laugh, because, of course, she already had.
"Him and his insistence on doing what he thinks is best," she said very quietly. For a long second she wanted to wallow in that sharp stab of betrayal. She wanted to be furious and full of it. She wanted to shout at someone, to hit someone, anyone.
But things weren't that simple...not any more.
She clenched her cold fingers until they prickled.
"As far as we can tell you've kept most of it, most of what you absorbed. Though some of it seems to have-" Jack made a gesture. "Sloshed over the side. But your head seems to be coping. It seems to be stable."
Donna eyed him.
"Is that a medical term is it? 'Sloshed over the side.'"
"It was more complicated when Martha explained it."
"I should hope so."
Donna breathed in the quiet for a long moment, and her brain was still, like a sleeping dragon, or a factory with the lights turned out. And she realised while she wasn't concentrating on anything at all. That Jack was different from the rest of the room. He was sharper, harder, he was an....
Immovable object.
She thought she knew where the words came from but they seemed to fit.
"You feel..." she searched for the word that best described what she felt when she looked at him. "You feel wrong."
Jack's smile tilted, then slid off of his face. He replaced it with something more real, something unhappy and wistful and lost. And for a second Donna knew him, or thought she did.
And then it was gone.
"Yeah, that part I know about."
***
Donna had wondered where Torchwood would keep a spare Time Lord, half Time Lord- accident of emergency genetics. Either way she didn't think they'd send her back home with a cup of coffee and half a plate of bourbons.
They didn't lock her in a cell, in fact the room Jack left her in was nice enough. It was somewhere in the basement. Donna was left staring at her boots, at the smooth brown leather crossed with brief random scuffs and wondering where she'd gotten them from. A catalogue she thought, but she couldn't quite remember which one.
Maybe the slosh wasn't all Time Lord after all. Maybe it really was just that, overspill of whatever floated to the top. Whatever was least important. Years worth of pointless TV shows, all the bad haircuts she'd had as a child, dentist appointments, favourite pop songs.
All the things she wouldn't care about losing.
But she can remember them, she can remember all of them.
Her head told her that she was thinking like a human. She told it to keep its big Time Lord nose out of it. She was going to compartmentalise in her own way thank you very much.
Donna Noble's brain did not put up with back seat driving.
At exactly two seventeen the cameras mysteriously went offline for maintenance.
She wandered, in no particular direction, in no particular direction that took her nowhere near the motion sensors or the infra red cameras, or the cells.
She wandered past a huge tunnel stacked to the roof with scavenged parts from a thousand ship crashes.
The piles of discarded metal said so many things now. 'I could be fixed, I'm just missing a wing, I'm still space-worthy, I burned up in re-entry, I could be recalibrated and used to level a city block.'
It was no longer science to Donna, it was pieces, pieces making wholes.
She stopped and wondered absently if that was how you'd see everything if you were were smart enough and you lived forever, or as good as forever. A universe made of pieces, to be put together if you only knew how.
Donna wandered on, she'd apparently developed a curious knack for wandering exactly where she needed to go.
A focused nosiness. Granted she'd never been exactly shy about other people's business but it had been more of a random affair. This was different, this was like she knew what was important and what wasn't. Time Lords apparently had a knack for getting into trouble because they were drawn to it.
Great big glaring trails in time that were the biological equivalent of a flashing neon arrow saying 'something interesting here, get stuck in, be prepared for running and screaming and explosions.'
The giant flaming arrow was currently hovering somewhere over a door that was triple locked, alarmed and wired for changes in air temperature.
It took her two minutes and twelve seconds to unlock, and two minutes of that was spent getting the cover off of the alarm system.
Torchwood really had no better a security system than the rest of the twenty first century had to offer.
Then it was just a door.
Donna pushed it open with a boot.
The room was dark but something was operating on low power. A quiet hum and a soft throb. She reached her hand out sideways, found the light switch exactly where she expected to.
Donna hadn't been the only one who survived. The solid broken tower of a Dalek shell sat in the middle of the room. Hooked in to six machines by a tangle of leads and tubes.
The Dalek's head was broken away.
But that happened long before the earth moved.
"I waited for you," a voice trilled, weak but amused and lilting. "You come in the dark, you come in the dark bringing the flavour of flesh and light and Time Lord."
Dalek Caan, that was his name though Donna couldn't remember whether she'd heard it as her, or remembered it as him.
The tentacles moved, weakly, several of them were red, peeling, moving in feeble twitches underneath bare leads that sparked.
"You were supposed to have died with all the rest," Donna said quietly.
"I am strange and wonderful," there was a tension under the words that Donna knew was pain. "I break all the laws of Dalek and time."
He laughed quietly, but it turned into a thin high squeal.
"I am unique." He added, slightly more quietly.
"You're a mess," Donna told him, and thought nothing of stepping close, of seperating the leads so she could see the shape of the Dalek beneath. The human part of her wanted to say 'squashed octopus' but the other part, the complicated older part wanted to say 'Dalek' and there was so much complex emotion laid over the word that for a moment she couldn't think at all.
Until she realised that none of it was hers.
"They've wired your life support up with shoddy connections."
"It burns," Dalek Caan admitted plaintively.
Donna opened both feeds wider and switched two of the leads over. The bare sparking one she dropped on the floor.
Caan stilled for a moment, before a slow exploratory flex of tentacles seemed to satisfy him.
"Doctor Donna, still walking the streams of time, still pressing and pushing at its careful weave."
"That's me, get me vertical and I'll have my fingers where they don't belong."
As if to prove it she separated two of his life support leads and followed them back to where they began.
"Oh that's just cheap, shoddy workmanship. Though why I expected better from Torchwood I have no idea."
She really would have liked a microprobe but she settled for sliding her little finger into the hole and dragging out the twin wires that controlled central flow.
"Are you learning how to be a Time Lord Doctor Donna."
She eyed him over the bulk of the field generator set on the base of his prison.
"They said some of it sloshed over the side when I was busy not burning out and dying horribly."
"Pain and loss can bring gain, gain and vision. Things you've been searching for will appear in that heart of suffering."
Donna's mouth drew into a thin line that couldn't help but be amused.
"You're really completely barking aren't you?"
"I am unique," Dalek Caan sounded both happy and satisfied by the prospect.
"That you are," Donna said carefully.
"You are unique also."
The two broken mistakes left over from the end of the world. Left without a side, adrift in time and space.
Left behind.
"Yeah, well sometimes the accidents work in our favour."
"The universe plans its accidents down to the tiniest detail." Dalek Caan moved in his shell, raw parts of tentacle shifting just barely.
"The universe is a smarter woman than I am then," Donna said quietly.
Caan seemed amused by the statement.
She straightened, stepped back, one hand on the door.
"Why are they keeping you here anyway?"
"I am Dalek, no matter how far my mind has traveled. I have seen things, I have been inside and outside time but I will always be Dalek. That is not an easy thing. Just as what you are is not an easy thing."
"But surely it would have been easier to just kill you," she said, because it was grisly but true.
"The one who hides his teeth behind a smile. He wishes to slice me into many pieces, ever smaller, ever more broken...."
Donna paused at the door, head turned back over her shoulder.
"Is that right, is that what happens?"
Dalek Caan was strangely still inside his shell.
"No," he said simply. And the soft trill of Dalek laughter followed Donna all the way back upstairs.
***
Jack found her an hour later in the sub-basement levels. Leant over the railing, staring into the depths. He came to stand beside her, hands pushed in his pocket, bare arm balanced on the metal.
"Didn't like your room I see."
"I don't much like small rooms anymore."
"With what's inside your head all the rules change."
Donna didn't want to go into that. She was still working it out herself, and the one person who could understand, who could see it...had left her behind.
"You've got a Dalek downstairs," she said instead.
"What's left of one," Jack admitted and there was a tone to his voice. A tone that swayed back and forth.
"You won't learn anything from him you know. He's not like the rest. Genetically, physically, mentally. He's a statistical anomaly even among the notorious statistically obsessed denizens of the universe."
Jack looked at her for a long moment.
"You're sounding like him again."
"And you're fascinated, I can see you over there being fascinated. Shame actually, I was quite fascinating all on my own."
"I bet you were," Jack said, and this time he wasn't lying.
Donna shrugged.
"Besides I do have bits of him in me- and you're going to pretend I never phrased it like that."
Jack laughed, leant on his arms on the railing next to her.
"What are you going to do with it?"
Jack didn't ask what she meant.
"I don't know."
He was lying again.
"Jack, Jack," she said clearly.
He pressed his lips together and shook his head.
"Don't do that, I can't lie when you do that."
"When I do what?"
"When you sound like him."
"Ah I think we're getting to the real heart of the problem here. Did I mention that I was quite fabulous all on my own," Donna smiled at him.
"You know what I'm going to do, you know and that's why you're standing here and working out how to tell me not to, working out how he'd tell me not to."
Donna harrumphed rather than admit that that was true.
"I think he'd just say 'Jack, no,' that always worked in the past."
Jack laughed.
"I think you have the same brain and I think it's way more than just knowledge. I think you're starting to see things like him. I think you're trying to work out how the long impassioned speeches on doing the right thing are supposed to start."
The Doctor was very fond of his long impassioned speeches on doing the right thing. Donna didn't think she'd be half as good at them. So she harrumphed instead, and she thought 'I can do this, I can do this and you can't stop me.'
Jack stared into the expanse of the lower hub. "If you like you can pretend we've done the impassioned speech part already, and I'm fairly sure you know what comes next."
Donna blinked, then drummed her fingers on the railing, because she did, she did know what came next.
Jack straightened, stretched, then fished a pen out of his pocket.
He lifted one of Donna's hands and flipped it over, wrote a number in smooth black ink across the tickly surface of her palm.
His hands were warm.
"That's Martha's number, if you need her."
Jack stretched again and disappeared out of Donna's field of vision.
She stared at the number.
Then there were hands on her shoulders, pressure and a lean of weight into her back.
"I have no doubt at all that you were fabulous Donna Noble, and you still are"
The door shut behind him with a clang, and she did nothing but breathe for a long time.
***
"What sort of name is Caan for a Dalek anyway," Donna said tartly. "Ever seen Star Trek?"
"I have seen many wander the cosmos."
"I'll take that as a 'no,' still there's time eh? Leaving us in the basement, the cheek of it. Half time Lord-" Donna stopped and pulled a face. "Eighty percent Time Lord, and I'm stashed in a basement like some mad unwanted wife."
She slid behind the console holding Caan in his stasis field and removed the lock. The quiet almost imperceptible fizz of the shield going down made Caan's tentacles draw back from the edge.
The reaction was even more pointed when Donna set a boot on the lip of his shell and pushed.
"Unexpected momentum!" Caan trilled in his peculiarly excited voice, his tentacles curling and contracting as Donna pushed him down the sloping ramp.
"Don't get used to it chum, your arse weighs a ton."
"I am made of stars and time," Caan professed. "As heavy as is necessary for momentum and protection."
Donna tossed her hair out of her face.
"Really? Because it feels a lot like cheap knock off space armour to me."
"I can survive in the cold heart of space." The words jiggled out of him when Donna rolled him over the grated flooring and there was an amusing irony to the whole situation that she suspected the Doctor would find absolutely hilarious.
No, she knew for a fact the Doctor would find it hilarious.
"Where are we going?"
"We're escaping," Donna told him. "Now keep your trap shut so we can do it quietly. Torchwood are out messing about with a crashed Imeem ship and with any luck all the formalities will keep them there all bloody afternoon."
Torchwood's corridors were narrow enough that more than once Donna pushed Dalek Caan into a wall. He didn't seem to mind though. Donna wondered exactly where Dalek ended and crazy began but he seemed to accept the whole thing with barely a twitch.
The huge tunnel full of spaceship parts was still there, and she'd already picked which one she wanted, sketched out the calculations in her head and made a list of parts to find. And a few extras that if they were lying around could prove unexpectedly useful.
Dalek Caan wheeled to a stop somewhere behind her. He was muttering something about birds and seasons that she was going to assume was some complex prophesy that she was going to ignore because she had more important things to worry about. Like power.
She didn't get as good at look at some of these as she would have liked. The engine she wanted was crushed beyond her capabilities here and she'd have to do everything the hard way.
She dug an arm into the stack of engine parts and pulled out something that looked like a stereo speaker. The Time Lord part of her went 'Ooooh.'
"Is it really smart to leave someone as suddenly clever as I am in an entire basement full of engine parts and broken shield technology?"
"I am incomplete," Caan said hopefully.
Donna lifted a finger up from where she was bent over the stack of manifolds, pointed it in the vague direction of Caan's body.
"You're not getting a head, or a sink plunger. I wouldn't feel comfortable having that thing pointed at me. Besides, crazy people don't get particle disintegration weapons. It's a new rule of mine."
"I am unique in my nakedness." Caan continued, and Donna knew that for wheedling no matter what mouth it came from.
"Do you think you could not call it nakedness."
"I am naked," Caan persisted.
Donna sighed.
"Fine you're naked, and I'm not looking."
"We are all naked."
"Speak for yourself. Right that's it, what am I missing- OH!"
She dragged a manifold that was the perfect shape out of the mess at her feet, stopping long enough to scoop up a handful of connectors and a big shiny wheel that she knew for a fact would be perfect for life support.
"I must bring my many false parts." Caan's tentacles stroked the leads keeping him alive.
"You don't need all of them, once the engines powered up I can wire you in."
"Holes in your knowledge. You are incomplete."
"And you're a squid," Donna countered.
Caan seemed amused, but he said nothing. He let her disconnect him and push him into the tilted ship section she'd chosen from the vast tumble of other ship sections.
"I am unsafe," Dalek Caan trilled.
"You're in a giant tin can, how much more safe can you get-" The tentacles flailed gently around his shell. "Fine I'll find a magnetic clamp somewhere."
It took twenty minutes to hook in the magnetics and another hour to finish life support and back-up life support because Donna was damned if she was going into space without one.
She'd let Caan loose with the computer programming, mostly because she didn't have time to do everything.
"I have calculated maximum thrust, a metal pirouette's of death and flame."
"That's nice for you, I suppose you want me to push you closer to the controls now then."
There was a swirl of tentacle.
"I am incapable of moving things with my mind," Dalek Caan pointed out in a voice that was far too full of glee and silliness.
"Funny," Donna said tartly. "But you realise I'm going to double check everything what with you being completely bonkers."
She moved behind him to hook him into the modified life support at the back of the cockpit.
"Take care!"
Donna folded her arms. "Do you want to do it yourself. You can't can you, because you've got no arms."
"Dalek's grew beyond them, manipulation tools were for-"
"People with fingers, people who built things. God forbid your race stopped wheeling around exterminating things for five minutes to reinvent the spanner."
Donna wiped a smudge off of her face and suspected she'd just added to the mess.
Caan lifted his tentacles, like a small child who wanted its jumper taken off and Donna shook her head and lifted the leads. They slotted in perfectly and Donna was glad about that. Because she wasn't used to feeling so certain that everything was where it should be, doing what it should be, and understanding and knowing wasn't the same as doing. It wasn't the same at all.
"Right you're all hooked up now. I've changed the feeds and had a quick poke through your fluid balance, give it a flail and see if it feels any better."
Caan obeyed.
"My manipulation is much improved. I can hold on to the stars."
"Let's not get ahead of ourselves eh?"
She pushed the lever, and on a hum of protesting metal and magnetism the two sides of the ship dragged themselves back together.
The life support, engines, shields and artificial gravity all came online in a flurry of switch flicks.
Donna was grinning so hard her face hurt.
"Am I good, or am I good."
"You are adequate," Dalek Caan waved a tentacle at her.
"Oi, easy sunshine, remember which one of us has the fingers."
Caan waved at her in quiet amusement.
"Won't be a Tardis," Donna said carefully. "But it will travel in space, we can work on the time part later."
Dalek Caan's eye moved over her work.
"Still," Donna drummed her fingers on a coil which she was almost certain came out of a Slitheen ship. "Prisoners can't be choosers eh?"
"We will escape into time."
"We'll buck the trend. Time Lord and Dalek, nearly Time Lord and Dalek anyway. There's space in the universe for two Time Lords now eh?"
"More than two," Dalek Caan added in what Donna liked to call his secretive burble. "More than two, there is still the Wren and the Rook."
"What have a told you about prophesising, what have I told you? Make sense or keep it to yourself."
The ship's lights came on full in a flickering cascade. Then the engine fired up, a rolling whine of sound and fury and promise. But Donna never worried that it wouldn't. Anyone could build a spaceship out of old parts of spaceship. It was like Scrapheap Challenge, only easier.
She grinned, fingers flicking towards herself.
"This is a face that builds spaceships, who knew."
"It is marvellous." Dalek Caan managed to suggest applause with his tentacles, even though Donna was almost certain he didn't know what applause was.
"Torchwood are going to notice us in about five minutes," Donna said casually. Her mouth pulled into something that really wanted to be smug. "Terrible shame we won't be here eh?"