Truth or Consequences (Doctor Who fic)
Title: Truth or Consequences
Author: Sue DeNimme
Characters/Pairing: Ten, Donna
Rating: G
Spoilers: S4 (Takes place between Midnight and Turn Left)
Word count: 2765
Summary: When she and the Doctor get themselves locked up -- again -- Donna sees an opportunity.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and its characters belong to the BBC. No copyrights were harmed in the making of this fanfic.
The moment Donna knew they were in trouble was not when the Vardinese police officers showed up in the town square. It was not when said officers zeroed in on the two time travellers, surrounded them with guns aimed, restrained them, and bundled them off, ignoring their objections. Nor was it when they were unceremoniously pushed into a cell without even being seen by a person of higher authority, or someone to represent their case.
The moment she knew they were in trouble was when the Doctor tried his sonic screwdriver on the door. Then on the two high windows. Then on the ceiling vent. Then the door again.
"Don't tell me it's deadlock sealed," she groaned, flopping down onto one of the two hard wooden benches set against the wall.
"Okay, I won't," the Doctor said, and went back to glaring at the door as if it had personally insulted him. Finally he shrugged, put the screwdriver back inside his jacket, turned and went to the opposite bench, settling there with a sigh. "Not to worry, I expect someone will see us soon and we'll get this straightened out."
She scoffed. "Yeaaahhhh. Because they've been so reasonable up 'til now."
He didn't deign to answer, but stretched out on the bench. It was just a little too short for his tall frame, and he shifted a few times, trying to find a slightly less uncomfortable position. From his grimace, it was obviously a losing battle. After a moment, he spoke. "Well, come on, then."
"Come on and what?"
"Ask me why we've been detained, since I obviously know everything about every law in every time period on every planet. Remind me that I told you how friendly the natives were, not to mention sophisticated, tolerant and welcoming of visitors. Point out that I'd said I was pretty sure I'd finally solved the deadlock problem. Take your pick. Or do 'em all if you'd rather."
Donna leaned back against the concrete block wall. "Sounds like you've covered it all already, so what's the point of me bothering?"
"Suit yourself."
She eyed the metal door. "Don't suppose the kick-the-door trick would work here."
"I don't recommend it. Not unless you fancy a broken leg. There's three locks in the door, each with three two-inch steel bolts. I heard them when it closed."
"Great," she sighed, and essayed a wry smile. "Suppose it's flattering, in a way. We must look really dangerous."
"We're strangers, Donna. The Vardinese really are a tolerant people in most historical periods, but every society goes through some amount of paranoia during times of change. We might have caught them in an era when they've only just achieved space flight and joined the interstellar community. Or perhaps there's a conflict going on that I wasn't aware of. Whatever it is, we'll find out soon enough."
Suddenly he paused, then exploded to his feet, his face turned upward as if he had spotted something on the ceiling. Donna couldn't help feeling her hopes leap up just a little. She'd never tell him, but no matter how much she might like to taunt him when things went wrong, somehow she still managed to maintain an almost frightening degree of faith in him and his ability to get them out of every mess he got them into.
Then she realized he was sniffing the air.
"Can you smell that?" he asked, looking down at her, his face scrunched up.
She tried, but couldn't detect anything other than dust, steel, and her own cologne. "Smell what?"
The Doctor whipped out his glasses and put them on, then stepped up onto the bench beside her, craning his face up toward the vent. Finally he looked down at her again. She wasn't sure how to read his expression; it was somewhere between grim and excited. "They're pumping something into the air in this room."
Fear surged in her chest. "They're gassing us?" She didn't question how he could smell it when she couldn't; she knew he had some senses that were keener than hers, and smell was one of them. "Oh my God!" Tears stung her eyes; whether it was from the fear or the gas, she had no idea. She tried to hold her breath, but ended up nearly hyperventilating instead.
"Donna!" The Doctor hopped down to the floor and grabbed her upper arms. "Donna, calm down! Look at me!" With an effort, she clamped down on her panic, forcing herself to face his intense brown gaze. "That's it. Listen to me. Now. There is definitely a gas being pumped into the room. And that is very, very good news."
"How is that good news?" She wiped at one eye with her hand, and glared at him.
"Because it's not a poisonous gas. It's veritium. A rare compound that's completely harmless to oxygen-breathing species. Donna, I want you to try something. Lie to me."
"What?"
"Veritium is like a... truth serum. It's impossible to intentionally tell a lie while under its influence. I want to see if it's taken effect yet. So, lie to me. Tell me the most outrageous whopper you can think of."
Donna didn't bother asking why. It was hardly the daftest thing he'd ever asked of her, after all. "Um... um... I'm an office temp." She stared at him, thunderstruck. It was as if her brain had ordered her mouth to say one thing, but her mouth had rebelled at the last nanosecond and said something completely different instead. The mundane truth instead of the fantastical off-the-cuff falsehood she had intended.
The Doctor nodded, as if that had been exactly what he was expecting. "Wasn't what you were going to say, was it?"
"No, I was going to say I was the Queen. Wait a minute, I said it that time!"
"Because that time you were telling the truth. You told me what you'd been going to say, instead of repeating what you did say. Try it again."
"Um, the moon is made of rock." She shook her head wonderingly. "That is so weird! I was going to say cheese."
The Doctor straightened. "Must be a pre-interrogation tactic," he mused. "Isolate the subjects, pump in the gas, let them breathe it in for a while, then question them. Which is why it's good news, because when they question us, we'll tell them the truth, they'll believe us, and we can be on our way." He grinned his widest, what-could-possibly-go-wrong grin.
She narrowed her eyes. "This gas... it wouldn't happen to work on Time Lords as well, would it?"
There was a pause, as if he was struggling inwardly, testing his own ability to lie. Then finally he said, sounding reluctant, "Yeah. Yeah, it does. That's how I recognized it. We used to use it in some of our ceremonies. Weddings, swearings-in, those sorts of things."
"Thought your people were telepathic. Wouldn't you be able to know that way if someone were lying?"
He shrugged. "Some were better at it than others. Some of us had barely any skill at all. It was a way of evening everybody up, ensuring complete trust on all sides."
Donna frowned. Something about the idea bothered her -- other than the whole situation. "Sounds like you weren't any better than that lot out there. Taking away people's choices when it ought to be their own decision whether they lie or not."
"Well, that was Time Lord society. We tended to be high-handed like that."
She gave a little snort. "Explains a lot about you, Spaceman."
"Yeah, probably." He sat down beside her. There was another short silence.
"So how long before they question us?"
"No idea. It might be a good while yet. They don't know how long it would take to affect us, so if I were them, I would err on the side of caution."
The longer silence that followed was possibly one of the most awkward ones Donna had ever experienced. For it occurred to her that this might be not only the perfect opportunity, but the one and only opportunity she might ever have to get some answers out of him, and be sure that they were real answers. Answers to questions that she had been dying to ask but had never quite worked up the nerve to do so.
She had thrown in her lot with him, hadn't she? Left behind security, home, family to go flying off into the unknown with an alien wanderer with little more to his name than a blue box and a planet's worth of mysteries wrapped in enigmas. He'd saved her life plenty of times, but she'd also saved his. Even if that weren't the case, she was his friend. That earned her the right to know at least a few more things about him than he'd been willing to share so far. Didn't it?
Like, who was he, really? What was his name and why did he hide it?
Why had he left his home planet? What role had he had in its destruction?
How had he lost his children? Who was their mother and what had happened to her? Had he loved her?
Had he loved Rose? What about Martha?
How did he feel about her, Donna? Did he really think of her as a friend, or was she merely an audience?
She snuck a glance at his profile. He was gazing ahead into space, with an expression that told her he knew exactly what she must be contemplating. His face was set, forbidding, and yet more vulnerable than she had ever seen it before, even on Midnight.
A place where he'd been robbed of choice, his voice ripped from him, twisted and used against him like a weapon, his body almost murdered.
She couldn't do that to him. Oh, he'd understand; he'd probably even forgive her. But she'd be like that thing on Midnight, taking advantage, stealing what she wanted from him, for no other reason than to satisfy her curiosity. Not exactly the same as the mental quasi-rape that he had suffered there, but did that make it all right?
She made a decision. Cleared her throat. Drew in her breath.
He turned and looked at her fully, his expression both resigned and expectant.
"What's your favorite color?" she asked.
***
"All in all, that wasn't too bad, really," Donna proclaimed as they left the Vardinese jail center with the police commander/magistrate's sincerest apologies and hopes that this incident would not color their impression of his fair planet still ringing in their ears.
"Nope, told you!" The Doctor strode along, hands in pockets, looking as smug as only he could. "Not bad people at all, the Vardinese. Just a bit... fond of overkill. In this century, anyway. You should see them a hundred years from now."
"Oh, do they get rid of that law against offworlders entering a nondesignated area of the town square without permission from the council?" For that, they had learned, had been the nature of their offense.
"Yep. Probably because sometime in the next decade an offworlder will cross into such an area to save the Regent's son from an assassination attempt."
"And you know that because that offworlder will be you, I suppose," she said drily, and instantly regretted giving him a chance to be any more pleased with himself than he already was.
"Right first time!" he beamed. "'Struth!" He stopped at a kiosk to buy a stick of something that looked a bit like candy floss, except it was actually foaming.
She rolled her eyes. "Will that gas have worn off yet?"
"Try it and see."
"The Doctor is a complete and utter git," she said, having mentally inserted "not" between "is" and "a". "Nope, still working."
"And Donna Noble is brilliant."
He really believed that, she realized. Or maybe just because she was still affected didn't mean he was too. At least, that was what the cynical voice inside her (which sounded uncomfortably like her mother) insisted.
"Thank you," he added after a moment, as they sat together on a low stone wall. And she couldn't miss the genuine warmth in his voice.
"Oh, just eat your candy floss," she grumbled, looking away to hide her blush. After all, she hadn't done anything praiseworthy today, just asked a bunch of inconsequential questions about favorite (and least favorite) colors and food and weather and movies until they were finally taken to the interrogator.
"Don't mind if I do." He took a big bite, and proffered the stick to her. She hesitated, then pinched off a fingerful and ate it. "Mm. Mind if I ask you something I've been wondering about?"
"All right," she said warily, taking another pinch.
"Why did you look for me?"
Donna sighed and leaned back on her hands. "Because the moment you got back into the TARDIS and zoomed off, I was sorry I hadn't gone with you. I wanted to call you back down and tell you I'd changed my mind, but you were gone. I felt like I'd had a chance to finally do something, I dunno, extraordinary with my life, and I'd thrown it away because I was afraid. Everything I did after that, even that trip to Egypt, seemed so... done. I didn't experience it, I just consumed it. Like a microwave dinner, wrapped up in a neat, safe little package. I followed all the directions, and I came home exactly the same as when I left. Before you, that would've been enough for me, but after you, it wasn't. Dunno if that makes any sense at all to you or not, but that's why."
He nodded silently. He had finished the candy floss, or whatever it was, and was now licking his fingers and lips free of foam.
"Can I ask you something?"
A cautious look came into his eyes, but he nodded again. "Only fair. Go ahead."
"After I found you again, why did you let me come with you?"
The Doctor wiped his fingers on his trousers. "Well... because you were right when you told me I needed someone. And because I was right when I'd said basically the same thing to Rose once. I'd forgotten it. Rather conveniently, because when I lost her... it hurt, Donna. It hurt so much." He paused, and drew in a breath. "You weren't wrong to turn me down when we first met, though. Because I wasn't ready then. I still wasn't ready when I met Martha, and I ended up hurting her too. I didn't mean to, but I did. Anyway... by the time we met again, it'd been some time for me, since Martha. I thought I might finally be ready. But do you want to know what made me decide?"
"What?"
"When you called me -- what was it? Oh yes, 'a long streak of nothing'. It had been a long time since anyone who wasn't trying to kill me had seemed to feel easy enough to say something like that to me. I liked it. I liked what it told me, that there was a good chance you wouldn't be hurt by me. And that the someone I needed was you, even if that wasn't what you meant at the time that you'd said it. I still think so." He cleared his throat. "Anyway, it was a bit of a leap, but I took it. And it's been good. Hasn't it?"
Donna thought back, to all the sad and frightening times as well as the funny and brilliant times, and smiled.
"Yeah. It's been good."
The Doctor stood up, and held out his hand to her. She took it.
"Where shall we run to next?" he asked as he helped her to stand.
"Surprise me," she said. And did not let go of his hand until they were back in the TARDIS.
~end