Fic: Experimental Science
Title: Experimental Science
Author: Corona
Fandom: Doctor Who
Character: Donna Noble
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,520
Disclaimer: In no way mine or anything to do with me. I own nothing.
Summary: Donna thinks she's just about back to normal.
AN: written for still_brilliant prompt #13 "Her big time lord brain keeps sneaking through despite the mindwipe. Donna develops a knack for fixing electronics and inadvertently makes a time travel device/teleport/intergalactic telephone out of kitchen appliances."
Donna thinks she's just about back to normal.
Though there's still a bit of patronising smugness in some people when they talk to her. A smugness that isn't deserved because, though her memories of the past year or so may be a little hazy, it's not like she's brain damaged. It's not like she's having to learn how to talk again or anything like that. She's got a few gaps but that's to be expected when you bang your head that hard apparently. And the weird flashes, the moments where she'll stop in the middle of doing something absolutely certain she should be somewhere else, doing something else.
The doctor had told her those were to be expected too, to not worry about them.
It was just her brain trying to put pieces of memories together, pieces that were too broken to fit.
He'd said they'd work that out themselves eventually, and either just disappear or remain as a word, or a colour, or a place she couldn't quite remember.
Nothing to worry about.
Nothing at all.
Which doesn't stop everyone from panicking every time she goes out to see what the temp agency has to offer, or pops out to buy milk. As if she's going to be kidnapped if she goes past the doorstep. Honestly Donna doesn't remember the accident but it can't have been that bad. They didn't have to shave her head and do brain surgery or anything, in fact she doesn't even have a scar.
So now, instead of being out somewhere worrying people into an early grave, she's stuck on the sofa trying to watch a DVD from Blockbuster, and have a conversation with Melanie at the same time about how you don't have to be in prison to go stir crazy.
Only the DVD won't play and she forgot to make a coffee while she was in the kitchen and this day just gets better and better.
"Hang on the DVDs having a moment-"
Donna tucks the phone between her ear and her shoulder and pokes at the eject button. Which does nothing, absolutely nothing. She doesn't even get any protesting 'no you can't have your bloody DVD back' noises.
She reaches behind her for the remote, scattering apples all over the carpet in the process.
"I know but she's clearly a lying cow, I saw her eating half a 500 gram bar of Cadbury's Caramel on her way back from work- I know, I know."
She gets no joy from the remote either. The DVD player is flatly refusing to do a damn thing.
"Screwdriver," she says quietly and the word vibrates at the back of her mouth like it's something important.
Melanie makes a noise on the other end of the phone, something bewildered.
"What?- No, no nothing I was just muttering. But I don't know why she even bothers pretending. It's a complete waste of effort, and chocolate if she's just going to cry about it later."
The top comes off the DVD player and slides aside with no effort at all, exposing the inside and while part of her is bewildered at the mess that you need just to make a DVD work, there's another part that thinks 'yes, we can have this.'
"I know, the girl's got a mouth on her, you should have heard what she said to Carol the other day. Honestly I thought she was just going to throw her drink all over her. Would have served her right too. Would have wrecked the top she was wearing too, horrible beige thing, completely monstrous."
A fork comes in handy for sliding the pieces apart. She can see what the problem is, cheap rubbish really, but god forbid her mother actually pays out a bit extra for a change.
God forbid she get something that works for more than five minutes at a time.
Donna pushes the phone under her chin, talking into the mouth piece with both hands full and it's a bit fiddly but it's not like she isn't used to all that plastic and metal and shiny parts. She's barely concentrating because Melanie's telling her about how woman past a certain age shouldn't wear hot pants and tights without expecting to be mercilessly ribbed for all eternity. Unless she has an arse that looks like it was created by two horny glass blowers, which Donna agrees is more an accident of genetics than something you acquire like great shoes.
And no that wasn't licence to be filthy.
At all.
Though if the conversation does drift somewhere briefly distracted, while she picks apart metal and uses one of her mother's best knives to unscrew...something, well that's not entirely her fault. She nearly cuts herself when something flies across the room and pings into the wallpaper but it's alright because she doesn't need that bit anyway and someone will hoover it up later when they stick the extension under the couch.
She does break a nail pulling the remote apart, the crack of plastic loud enough to briefly jar all conversation to a stop.
"No, I just broke the remote is all, stupid thing."
But it turns out the inside doesn't have the right parts at all, or the right parts but in the wrong shape, so she fishes in-between the sofa cushions until she finds the one for the Sky box. One of the buttons comes off when she prises it apart.
Perfect, the knife will really do as a screwdriver when there's absolutely nothing else available.
She'll have to use a screwdriver next time though.
And why is a screwdriver so important, it's not like she has bags of experience unscrewing things, she doesn't have a secret engineering side that involves a vast quantity of screwing and unscrewing.
And that isn't a licence to be filthy either.
You can tell she isn't used to this, because she's lost two nails in ten minutes.
"Yeah, yeah I'll talk to you tomorrow...bye." Donna dumps the phone back in its cradle and looks down.
The DVD player's insides are neatly pieced together in front of her knees.
They look like nothing that's ever going to play a DVD again.
"What the-?"
She's made...something, though god knows what. It looks like a mess but it's whirring away to itself. What used to be the DVD's laser is skipping back and forth across the top, and underneath the machine is quietly clicking away to itself.
"Bollocks," she says feelingly.
Because she has no bloody idea at all how to rebuild a DVD player and three remote controls.
"I'm going to be expected to pay for that."
***
When she comes back later the whole lot has gone, and no one says a word about it. Not a single word.
***
It gnaws at her, that silence. Like she'd imagined the fact that she'd pulled half the electronics out onto the living room floor and made...something. And now the world was carrying on as if it had never happened.
Until eventually over the steam of a cup of tea she has to say something.
"Gramps, you didn't see a big chunk of parts of the DVD player did you. Only I could have sworn-"
"Oh that, that's been broken for ages, I don't know why you bothered trying to fix the thing." He wraps his hands around his own mug and smiles at her.
Donna thinks if she can just get a look at it, if she could just see it again she'd know what it was supposed to be.
"Where did you put it all?"
"I threw it out, not much use all in bits was it?"
"No," Donna says and she stares into her tea. "No, I suppose not."
He catches her shoulder and kisses the top of her head.
***
Donna's been staring at the ceiling for the last two hours.
She doesn't sleep as much as she used to.
The clock reads 3:16am, which is seven minutes later than the last time she looked.
She exhales, more frustrated than tired, and turns over for the seventh, eighth, fifteenth time? There's an itch inside her head that she just can't get to. No matter how much she concentrates she just can't grasp it, there's some memory there, something important.
It's like knowing you've forgotten to do something all the time, but having no grasp of what it is or when she needs to do it.
All the time, all the damn time. It's like going mad.
Though contrary to the doctor's opinion she doesn't need medication or therapy she just needs to remember.
That's all it is, and the amount of times she's been caught scowling into mid-air she's amazed her mother hasn't phoned for someone to come and take her away by now. But she just gives her this look, this weird, confused, sympathetic look which does more to make the frustration worse rather than better because the last time her mother looked like that - the last time she looked like that someone had died and the fact that that's the way she looks at her now.
Gramps doesn't look at her funny.
But he looks at her in a way that's not quite the same. The curl of his arm round her shoulders firmer, and it stays for longer, hand gentle the back of her hair like he can protect her from something.
Though it doesn't stop her from leaning in to it and hugging him as hard as she dares.
She exhales again because there isn't a hope in hell she's actually getting to sleep any time soon.
"Sod it."
The duvet ends up trailing on the floor and Donna makes her way downstairs, pyjamas fluffing up the carpet in little trails.
She turns the kitchen light on, grumbles under the flare of brightness, and flicks on the kettle without looking at it.
She pays no attention whatsoever while she makes her cocoa, fingers fiddling in the open cutlery drawer while she stirs it with a spoon.
...
The next time she looks at the clock it's 4:27 and she seems to be on her third cup of cocoa.
It'll be her last too because the kettle is in pieces.
Most of the kettle is in pieces.
The rest of it is -.
She's made something again.
Something tall and messy and utterly bewildering, dangling with wires and levers and cutlery- cutlery for god's sake!
"I'm going mad," Donna says quietly and she's amazed her voice isn't higher, isn't more hysterical, because she thinks the situation deserves a little hysterical at this point. "Completely mad."
Though it isn't as terrifying as she'd thought it would be. Mostly because it's four in the morning and though she's clearly suffering from some terrible compulsive need to build things that has to be better than hearing voices that tell you to kill the neighbours. In fact building things is almost friendly in comparison, and if that's all that there is, if that's the only weird quirk to her accident, or whatever than she should be grateful.
Even with the ridiculous amount of money she's apparently going to spend on kettles, microwaves and DVD players.
She fiddles with the wheels and buttons that are showing on the top of the machine. Some bastard mixture of the inside of a whisk and most of the microwave. There's part of a calculator out of the kitchen drawer too.
She stares at it for a long time, drinks a mouthful of her cocoa, too damn hot and not strong enough, and stares at it some more.
"Screw it," she says finally and plugs it in.
The LCD lights up, scrolls numbers across its surface and then the whole thing starts to hum very quietly. Whatever it is, it apparently works.
As long as it doesn't work on exploding.
Donna sets her cocoa down and shakes her head.
"But what do you do?" She asks it; the stupid thing doesn't reply, obviously.
It's not the end of the world.
She could have come out like that woman in America who started speaking French.
French.
"Hello, can anyone hear me?"
Donna blinks.
There's a voice in the machine. Rambling off coordinates in a tone that's high and panicked, rough in a way that suggests it's been calling for some time.
Donna's first thought is that she's accidentally picked up some police band or breakdown service. That she's hearing the frustrated call of someone stuck by the side of the road somewhere.
There's a crackling hiss in the background, that flares and pops every fifth word and she knows that sound in a way that makes her take a breath and lean in just a little closer.
"Can anyone hear me, please respond."
Donna's fingers are very slowly going white on the side, cocoa steaming and hot against the backs of her knuckles, though she doesn't feel it.
A flickering display comes up on the LCD that used to be the microwave and Donna knows that whoever is on the other end isn't by the side of the road, at least not any road anywhere close. That's a hell of a lot further away than the AA service generally let you call out.
That's the K system, binary, fourteen planets-
She doesn't know how she knows that.
She doesn't know why she knows that.
"This is Captain Byrne of the Eurida. My engine is damaged and I'm in a decaying orbit around KNP7 with no manoeuvrability, repeat no manoeuvrability. If anyone can hear me please respond!"
Donna shakes her head, fingers hovering over the buttons, her scowl has turned into a frown.
Because she thinks for one moment she's hovering between something...and something else.
And she doesn't know which way to tip.
"Please, someone!"
Donna flips the switches up without thinking about it.
"Eurida are you using a Mark 5 or a Mark 6 engine?"
"Oh thank the gods! I've got a Mark 5, but I've got no response from my console."
"That's good, Mark 5's have emergency shut down protocols and a whole range of back-ups and redundancies. You're going to have to give me your angle and spin."
Calculations flash up on the LCD of her machine and Donna not only understands them, she can see everything in her head, a model of curves and lines decorated with math that's changing and flexing with every new orientation, and it's all going on behind her eyes.
And it's terrifying.
And familiar in a way that makes her want to touch...everything.
"What's your name?"
Donna blinks, fingers going still on the side, she's completely thrown because that's something completely different, that this man billions of miles away wants to know her name.
And for one painful second she's terrified to give it.
"Donna," she says quietly. "My name's Donna."
"Donna, I'm very glad to hear someone on my communications, I thought they were damaged too."
"They are," Donna says quietly. "I picked up your internal audio and patched into it."
"Can you help me Donna?"
Donna shakes her head but her mouth is already moving.
"Tell me exactly what you're looking at."
"I'm in a decaying orbit and I've sent a distress beacon but no one will be here for hours, I don't have hours-"
There's a catch of breath that sounds painfully human, though Donna knows it can't be, because people aren't in space, people don't have spaceships, or any of the technology that's keeping this strange faraway ship flying.
"What's your engine status?"
"Damage to the internal electronics, I've lost half my coolant and I've burned out a coil."
"Any spares."
"No, and the emergency thrusters were hit when I came through the asteroid belt, I can't manoeuvre, and I'm worried about life support."
"First we're going to worry about fixing your orbit, KNP7 is not a nice place to try an emergency entry, too much electromagnetics in the atmosphere, you'll be torn to shreds." Donna can hear herself talking. She can feel herself talking but she has no idea where it's coming from. "Give me an equipment manifest and I want everything, right down to what you've got in your pockets and any souvenirs you picked up on the way."
He does, a slow competent list that Donna transcribes as fast as she can on the back of an Indian Restaurant pamphlet that came through the door yesterday.
"Perfect," she snaps, connecting four items with a thick black line. "We're going to mock you up a new coil. It won't take full power and you won't be able to run it for long since you have no coolant, and you won't be able to jump anywhere but it'll do you well enough to fix your orbit. And we're going to do it in exactly seventeen minutes, which is about two minutes less than the time it will take the atmosphere to start ripping panels off of the bottom of your ship. But cutting it close is still a win, right, you're going to get a warm arse but you're going to be fine."
There's a huff of amused but worried air through the machine, and Donna can almost hear the nodding on the other end.
"Tell me what to do."
And she does, she's not sure how but she does and she's afraid to stop for breath in case the stream of words falls into pieces. But she understands what she's saying, which sounds insane because it's all gobbledygook and science fiction but she knows what she's saying. She knows what she's making and even Byrne is making relieved enthusiastic noises through the link/phone?/comm? So he knows what she's making too.
And she's almost lost in that strange flow of enthusiasm and competence when there's a sharp repetitive blaring noise, tinny and awful through the space between them.
It throws her out of her sentence, and she's a second away from asking what the hell is going on when Byrne says.
"My life support is venting."
But she knows, she can hear the computerised voice trilling the warning in the background, she's heard the overrides Byrne is trying to use a hundred times and she's done this -.
No she hasn't, she's never done this, she's never done anything like this.
"What do I do?!"
She can't remember.
And for the first time it sends a cold finger of horror through her because she needs to remember this, she needs to know this. If she gets this wrong he'll die, he'll poison himself on coolant fumes or choke on his own carbon dioxide.
"Donna, what do I do?"
'I don't know,' she wants to shout. 'I'm a temp I type for a living and I have no idea what I'm doing. I have no idea what's going on.'
The only reason she knows she's not dreaming is that her heart is thumping so fast she can see her own pulse and there's cocoa soaking into the edge of her sleeve where she's been rotating her mug too fast to hold its contents.
"Donna? Are you still there?"
'You don't have to remember,' her brain tells her calmly. 'You don't have to remember, just fix the problem.'
"Shut doors between front and rear. You're going to run your remaining atmosphere back through the tanks, shut off both your back sections, you won't need them, and you can breathe what's between the deck plates for..." She does the calculations, a lightening fast reflex that she's too slow to wonder at and too confused to question. "Two hours and sixteen minutes, as long as you promise not to do anything strenuous."
"The electronics aren't connected here."
"You're going to pull up the floor section and reconnect all the hoses manually."
Byrne makes a noise which sounds a lot like a laugh.
"That's going to involve a little bit of exertion?"
Donna laughs, presses her hands together and feels herself trying to shake to pieces. She takes a breath and refuses, flatly refuses to let it happen.
"Now this is where it gets complicated. I'm going to tell you exactly how to do an atmospheric conversion, and you're going to make yourself a new life support system and it's going to be fantastic."
***
An hour later Donna has stopped shaking and Byrne is in contact with his rescue ship.
Donna now knows the names of all his husbands and wives and the names of all his children, she knows that where he comes from the grass is purple and it's so warm that rain never hits the ground. She knows that he's an explorer, and that he'd never been as certain that he was going to die as he'd been today.
Donna's cocoa has gone cold.
She pours it in the sink and then very carefully switches off the machine.
It's heavy and it digs into her ribs when she slots it under her arm and very carefully carries it upstairs.
She slides it under the bed and throws her gym bag over it before getting back in herself.
She sleeps just fine.
Author: Corona
Fandom: Doctor Who
Character: Donna Noble
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,520
Disclaimer: In no way mine or anything to do with me. I own nothing.
Summary: Donna thinks she's just about back to normal.
AN: written for still_brilliant prompt #13 "Her big time lord brain keeps sneaking through despite the mindwipe. Donna develops a knack for fixing electronics and inadvertently makes a time travel device/teleport/intergalactic telephone out of kitchen appliances."
Donna thinks she's just about back to normal.
Though there's still a bit of patronising smugness in some people when they talk to her. A smugness that isn't deserved because, though her memories of the past year or so may be a little hazy, it's not like she's brain damaged. It's not like she's having to learn how to talk again or anything like that. She's got a few gaps but that's to be expected when you bang your head that hard apparently. And the weird flashes, the moments where she'll stop in the middle of doing something absolutely certain she should be somewhere else, doing something else.
The doctor had told her those were to be expected too, to not worry about them.
It was just her brain trying to put pieces of memories together, pieces that were too broken to fit.
He'd said they'd work that out themselves eventually, and either just disappear or remain as a word, or a colour, or a place she couldn't quite remember.
Nothing to worry about.
Nothing at all.
Which doesn't stop everyone from panicking every time she goes out to see what the temp agency has to offer, or pops out to buy milk. As if she's going to be kidnapped if she goes past the doorstep. Honestly Donna doesn't remember the accident but it can't have been that bad. They didn't have to shave her head and do brain surgery or anything, in fact she doesn't even have a scar.
So now, instead of being out somewhere worrying people into an early grave, she's stuck on the sofa trying to watch a DVD from Blockbuster, and have a conversation with Melanie at the same time about how you don't have to be in prison to go stir crazy.
Only the DVD won't play and she forgot to make a coffee while she was in the kitchen and this day just gets better and better.
"Hang on the DVDs having a moment-"
Donna tucks the phone between her ear and her shoulder and pokes at the eject button. Which does nothing, absolutely nothing. She doesn't even get any protesting 'no you can't have your bloody DVD back' noises.
She reaches behind her for the remote, scattering apples all over the carpet in the process.
"I know but she's clearly a lying cow, I saw her eating half a 500 gram bar of Cadbury's Caramel on her way back from work- I know, I know."
She gets no joy from the remote either. The DVD player is flatly refusing to do a damn thing.
"Screwdriver," she says quietly and the word vibrates at the back of her mouth like it's something important.
Melanie makes a noise on the other end of the phone, something bewildered.
"What?- No, no nothing I was just muttering. But I don't know why she even bothers pretending. It's a complete waste of effort, and chocolate if she's just going to cry about it later."
The top comes off the DVD player and slides aside with no effort at all, exposing the inside and while part of her is bewildered at the mess that you need just to make a DVD work, there's another part that thinks 'yes, we can have this.'
"I know, the girl's got a mouth on her, you should have heard what she said to Carol the other day. Honestly I thought she was just going to throw her drink all over her. Would have served her right too. Would have wrecked the top she was wearing too, horrible beige thing, completely monstrous."
A fork comes in handy for sliding the pieces apart. She can see what the problem is, cheap rubbish really, but god forbid her mother actually pays out a bit extra for a change.
God forbid she get something that works for more than five minutes at a time.
Donna pushes the phone under her chin, talking into the mouth piece with both hands full and it's a bit fiddly but it's not like she isn't used to all that plastic and metal and shiny parts. She's barely concentrating because Melanie's telling her about how woman past a certain age shouldn't wear hot pants and tights without expecting to be mercilessly ribbed for all eternity. Unless she has an arse that looks like it was created by two horny glass blowers, which Donna agrees is more an accident of genetics than something you acquire like great shoes.
And no that wasn't licence to be filthy.
At all.
Though if the conversation does drift somewhere briefly distracted, while she picks apart metal and uses one of her mother's best knives to unscrew...something, well that's not entirely her fault. She nearly cuts herself when something flies across the room and pings into the wallpaper but it's alright because she doesn't need that bit anyway and someone will hoover it up later when they stick the extension under the couch.
She does break a nail pulling the remote apart, the crack of plastic loud enough to briefly jar all conversation to a stop.
"No, I just broke the remote is all, stupid thing."
But it turns out the inside doesn't have the right parts at all, or the right parts but in the wrong shape, so she fishes in-between the sofa cushions until she finds the one for the Sky box. One of the buttons comes off when she prises it apart.
Perfect, the knife will really do as a screwdriver when there's absolutely nothing else available.
She'll have to use a screwdriver next time though.
And why is a screwdriver so important, it's not like she has bags of experience unscrewing things, she doesn't have a secret engineering side that involves a vast quantity of screwing and unscrewing.
And that isn't a licence to be filthy either.
You can tell she isn't used to this, because she's lost two nails in ten minutes.
"Yeah, yeah I'll talk to you tomorrow...bye." Donna dumps the phone back in its cradle and looks down.
The DVD player's insides are neatly pieced together in front of her knees.
They look like nothing that's ever going to play a DVD again.
"What the-?"
She's made...something, though god knows what. It looks like a mess but it's whirring away to itself. What used to be the DVD's laser is skipping back and forth across the top, and underneath the machine is quietly clicking away to itself.
"Bollocks," she says feelingly.
Because she has no bloody idea at all how to rebuild a DVD player and three remote controls.
"I'm going to be expected to pay for that."
***
When she comes back later the whole lot has gone, and no one says a word about it. Not a single word.
***
It gnaws at her, that silence. Like she'd imagined the fact that she'd pulled half the electronics out onto the living room floor and made...something. And now the world was carrying on as if it had never happened.
Until eventually over the steam of a cup of tea she has to say something.
"Gramps, you didn't see a big chunk of parts of the DVD player did you. Only I could have sworn-"
"Oh that, that's been broken for ages, I don't know why you bothered trying to fix the thing." He wraps his hands around his own mug and smiles at her.
Donna thinks if she can just get a look at it, if she could just see it again she'd know what it was supposed to be.
"Where did you put it all?"
"I threw it out, not much use all in bits was it?"
"No," Donna says and she stares into her tea. "No, I suppose not."
He catches her shoulder and kisses the top of her head.
***
Donna's been staring at the ceiling for the last two hours.
She doesn't sleep as much as she used to.
The clock reads 3:16am, which is seven minutes later than the last time she looked.
She exhales, more frustrated than tired, and turns over for the seventh, eighth, fifteenth time? There's an itch inside her head that she just can't get to. No matter how much she concentrates she just can't grasp it, there's some memory there, something important.
It's like knowing you've forgotten to do something all the time, but having no grasp of what it is or when she needs to do it.
All the time, all the damn time. It's like going mad.
Though contrary to the doctor's opinion she doesn't need medication or therapy she just needs to remember.
That's all it is, and the amount of times she's been caught scowling into mid-air she's amazed her mother hasn't phoned for someone to come and take her away by now. But she just gives her this look, this weird, confused, sympathetic look which does more to make the frustration worse rather than better because the last time her mother looked like that - the last time she looked like that someone had died and the fact that that's the way she looks at her now.
Gramps doesn't look at her funny.
But he looks at her in a way that's not quite the same. The curl of his arm round her shoulders firmer, and it stays for longer, hand gentle the back of her hair like he can protect her from something.
Though it doesn't stop her from leaning in to it and hugging him as hard as she dares.
She exhales again because there isn't a hope in hell she's actually getting to sleep any time soon.
"Sod it."
The duvet ends up trailing on the floor and Donna makes her way downstairs, pyjamas fluffing up the carpet in little trails.
She turns the kitchen light on, grumbles under the flare of brightness, and flicks on the kettle without looking at it.
She pays no attention whatsoever while she makes her cocoa, fingers fiddling in the open cutlery drawer while she stirs it with a spoon.
...
The next time she looks at the clock it's 4:27 and she seems to be on her third cup of cocoa.
It'll be her last too because the kettle is in pieces.
Most of the kettle is in pieces.
The rest of it is -.
She's made something again.
Something tall and messy and utterly bewildering, dangling with wires and levers and cutlery- cutlery for god's sake!
"I'm going mad," Donna says quietly and she's amazed her voice isn't higher, isn't more hysterical, because she thinks the situation deserves a little hysterical at this point. "Completely mad."
Though it isn't as terrifying as she'd thought it would be. Mostly because it's four in the morning and though she's clearly suffering from some terrible compulsive need to build things that has to be better than hearing voices that tell you to kill the neighbours. In fact building things is almost friendly in comparison, and if that's all that there is, if that's the only weird quirk to her accident, or whatever than she should be grateful.
Even with the ridiculous amount of money she's apparently going to spend on kettles, microwaves and DVD players.
She fiddles with the wheels and buttons that are showing on the top of the machine. Some bastard mixture of the inside of a whisk and most of the microwave. There's part of a calculator out of the kitchen drawer too.
She stares at it for a long time, drinks a mouthful of her cocoa, too damn hot and not strong enough, and stares at it some more.
"Screw it," she says finally and plugs it in.
The LCD lights up, scrolls numbers across its surface and then the whole thing starts to hum very quietly. Whatever it is, it apparently works.
As long as it doesn't work on exploding.
Donna sets her cocoa down and shakes her head.
"But what do you do?" She asks it; the stupid thing doesn't reply, obviously.
It's not the end of the world.
She could have come out like that woman in America who started speaking French.
French.
"Hello, can anyone hear me?"
Donna blinks.
There's a voice in the machine. Rambling off coordinates in a tone that's high and panicked, rough in a way that suggests it's been calling for some time.
Donna's first thought is that she's accidentally picked up some police band or breakdown service. That she's hearing the frustrated call of someone stuck by the side of the road somewhere.
There's a crackling hiss in the background, that flares and pops every fifth word and she knows that sound in a way that makes her take a breath and lean in just a little closer.
"Can anyone hear me, please respond."
Donna's fingers are very slowly going white on the side, cocoa steaming and hot against the backs of her knuckles, though she doesn't feel it.
A flickering display comes up on the LCD that used to be the microwave and Donna knows that whoever is on the other end isn't by the side of the road, at least not any road anywhere close. That's a hell of a lot further away than the AA service generally let you call out.
That's the K system, binary, fourteen planets-
She doesn't know how she knows that.
She doesn't know why she knows that.
"This is Captain Byrne of the Eurida. My engine is damaged and I'm in a decaying orbit around KNP7 with no manoeuvrability, repeat no manoeuvrability. If anyone can hear me please respond!"
Donna shakes her head, fingers hovering over the buttons, her scowl has turned into a frown.
Because she thinks for one moment she's hovering between something...and something else.
And she doesn't know which way to tip.
"Please, someone!"
Donna flips the switches up without thinking about it.
"Eurida are you using a Mark 5 or a Mark 6 engine?"
"Oh thank the gods! I've got a Mark 5, but I've got no response from my console."
"That's good, Mark 5's have emergency shut down protocols and a whole range of back-ups and redundancies. You're going to have to give me your angle and spin."
Calculations flash up on the LCD of her machine and Donna not only understands them, she can see everything in her head, a model of curves and lines decorated with math that's changing and flexing with every new orientation, and it's all going on behind her eyes.
And it's terrifying.
And familiar in a way that makes her want to touch...everything.
"What's your name?"
Donna blinks, fingers going still on the side, she's completely thrown because that's something completely different, that this man billions of miles away wants to know her name.
And for one painful second she's terrified to give it.
"Donna," she says quietly. "My name's Donna."
"Donna, I'm very glad to hear someone on my communications, I thought they were damaged too."
"They are," Donna says quietly. "I picked up your internal audio and patched into it."
"Can you help me Donna?"
Donna shakes her head but her mouth is already moving.
"Tell me exactly what you're looking at."
"I'm in a decaying orbit and I've sent a distress beacon but no one will be here for hours, I don't have hours-"
There's a catch of breath that sounds painfully human, though Donna knows it can't be, because people aren't in space, people don't have spaceships, or any of the technology that's keeping this strange faraway ship flying.
"What's your engine status?"
"Damage to the internal electronics, I've lost half my coolant and I've burned out a coil."
"Any spares."
"No, and the emergency thrusters were hit when I came through the asteroid belt, I can't manoeuvre, and I'm worried about life support."
"First we're going to worry about fixing your orbit, KNP7 is not a nice place to try an emergency entry, too much electromagnetics in the atmosphere, you'll be torn to shreds." Donna can hear herself talking. She can feel herself talking but she has no idea where it's coming from. "Give me an equipment manifest and I want everything, right down to what you've got in your pockets and any souvenirs you picked up on the way."
He does, a slow competent list that Donna transcribes as fast as she can on the back of an Indian Restaurant pamphlet that came through the door yesterday.
"Perfect," she snaps, connecting four items with a thick black line. "We're going to mock you up a new coil. It won't take full power and you won't be able to run it for long since you have no coolant, and you won't be able to jump anywhere but it'll do you well enough to fix your orbit. And we're going to do it in exactly seventeen minutes, which is about two minutes less than the time it will take the atmosphere to start ripping panels off of the bottom of your ship. But cutting it close is still a win, right, you're going to get a warm arse but you're going to be fine."
There's a huff of amused but worried air through the machine, and Donna can almost hear the nodding on the other end.
"Tell me what to do."
And she does, she's not sure how but she does and she's afraid to stop for breath in case the stream of words falls into pieces. But she understands what she's saying, which sounds insane because it's all gobbledygook and science fiction but she knows what she's saying. She knows what she's making and even Byrne is making relieved enthusiastic noises through the link/phone?/comm? So he knows what she's making too.
And she's almost lost in that strange flow of enthusiasm and competence when there's a sharp repetitive blaring noise, tinny and awful through the space between them.
It throws her out of her sentence, and she's a second away from asking what the hell is going on when Byrne says.
"My life support is venting."
But she knows, she can hear the computerised voice trilling the warning in the background, she's heard the overrides Byrne is trying to use a hundred times and she's done this -.
No she hasn't, she's never done this, she's never done anything like this.
"What do I do?!"
She can't remember.
And for the first time it sends a cold finger of horror through her because she needs to remember this, she needs to know this. If she gets this wrong he'll die, he'll poison himself on coolant fumes or choke on his own carbon dioxide.
"Donna, what do I do?"
'I don't know,' she wants to shout. 'I'm a temp I type for a living and I have no idea what I'm doing. I have no idea what's going on.'
The only reason she knows she's not dreaming is that her heart is thumping so fast she can see her own pulse and there's cocoa soaking into the edge of her sleeve where she's been rotating her mug too fast to hold its contents.
"Donna? Are you still there?"
'You don't have to remember,' her brain tells her calmly. 'You don't have to remember, just fix the problem.'
"Shut doors between front and rear. You're going to run your remaining atmosphere back through the tanks, shut off both your back sections, you won't need them, and you can breathe what's between the deck plates for..." She does the calculations, a lightening fast reflex that she's too slow to wonder at and too confused to question. "Two hours and sixteen minutes, as long as you promise not to do anything strenuous."
"The electronics aren't connected here."
"You're going to pull up the floor section and reconnect all the hoses manually."
Byrne makes a noise which sounds a lot like a laugh.
"That's going to involve a little bit of exertion?"
Donna laughs, presses her hands together and feels herself trying to shake to pieces. She takes a breath and refuses, flatly refuses to let it happen.
"Now this is where it gets complicated. I'm going to tell you exactly how to do an atmospheric conversion, and you're going to make yourself a new life support system and it's going to be fantastic."
***
An hour later Donna has stopped shaking and Byrne is in contact with his rescue ship.
Donna now knows the names of all his husbands and wives and the names of all his children, she knows that where he comes from the grass is purple and it's so warm that rain never hits the ground. She knows that he's an explorer, and that he'd never been as certain that he was going to die as he'd been today.
Donna's cocoa has gone cold.
She pours it in the sink and then very carefully switches off the machine.
It's heavy and it digs into her ribs when she slots it under her arm and very carefully carries it upstairs.
She slides it under the bed and throws her gym bag over it before getting back in herself.
She sleeps just fine.