InsaneJournal

Who: The Doctor and Donna Noble
What: Putting two very Time Lord brains to work.
When: BACKDATED. Sometime last Saturday.
Where: In the TARDIS, then maybe outside of it somewhere. How’s that for vague?
Warnings: None, unless you count technical jargon that no one will understand.



It seemed like forever since Donna and the Doctor had been sitting in the TARDIS, trying to figure out all of these patterns and numbers. There were charts, and Donna was sure that she’d scribbled on more paper than was absolutely necessary. They’d been trying to figure out a way to get out of here, to let everyone go home but it was turning into being useless. The whole thing was a mess really. They were missing something, but Donna didn’t know what it was. She’d been in the other room making tea, taking a break when she had an idea. A faint glimmer of an idea, but maybe that was all they needed. Pouring tea for the both of them, she took the cups into the other room where they had been working.

“Doctor,” she began, handing over his cup of tea. “What if we’ve been looking at this all wrong. I mean we’re using all of these patterns to try and find a way to some kind of portal or transmat whatever to take us all home, right? But the points where the trucks come in and out, they have to pass through something keeping us inside. But maybe it’s not inside the world that we’re thinking of. Maybe .. maybe, I don’t know. We need to scale it down a bit.”

The Doctor, who was lying on his stomach on the TARDIS floor, looked up as Donna returned, reaching up to take the mug she was passing him. He frowned at her for a moment, glasses slipping partway down his pointed nose as he took a sip. “You mean... just the city?” He checked, before placing the steaming mug down on a pile of paper and propping himself up on his elbows.

“You think if we scale everything down, pull in the parameters and adjust the limits and... oooh.” His mind was doing that thing again, the thing that he’d missed so much when he was human, where his thoughts bounced and tumbled and sparked and fizzed. His face pressed into a thoughtful frown, the Doctor grabbed a scrap of paper with several graphs sketched onto it, flipping it over and starting to draw. Two axis, which should really be in three dimensions, but never mind. You couldn’t have anything, and the main console was busy calibrating anyway so a pen and paper would have to do for now. Lovely. Better to do things the old fashioned way, anyway. The very old fashioned way.

He finished, drawing a sweeping curve with a flourish and dragging the tip of the pen cautiously across the paper to read off the graph. The Doctor paused tongue wedged thoughtfully against his teeth before...

“Ooooooooh!”

“Exactly, I mean I guess we need to get whatever’s blocking us in to be gone, and we can try to poke holes in it, but I think everyone’s tried that,” Donna mumbled in between sips of her own tea. She had missed her thoughts racing around and around like that after she had been human. “If we can get that forcefield down, or whatever it is that’s blocking us in, maybe then we can find a way out.” Whether it was actually them trying to find a vortex or a transmat that would take them home, or whether it was something actually on this planet, she didn’t really know. They could get to that when they figured out how to get out of the city.

Picking up a piece of paper, the one that had the map of the city, she made little dots of where the weak spots in the forcefield were. Where those trucks came in and out. Clearly they could get out, so how could they? Maybe not even through the weakspot.

“Maybe we could.. wait, you’ve tried to get the TARDIS to materialize around the city right? But the forcefield prevents you from doing that..” she sighed a bit. “If you can’t go through something, you have to go around, or under or.. move it. I don’t know if tunneling would work, but why couldn’t we just.. shrink the damn thing, or move it somehow?”

“Maybe...” The Doctor dragged the single word out, pushing his glasses up his nose as they threatened to slip off completely. “Maybe we need to find out where it’s being generated before we can work on moving or adjusting it. And if it was me I’d generate it somewhere outside and then just refract the signal to position it over the city. And whoever’s in charge is just as clever as me. Maybe. A bit. They’re very clever, anyway, so I think...”

He paused, tip of his tongue now poking out of the corner of his mouth, brow pulled down into a frown. The Doctor was a bit of a fanboy when it came to their Collector. But how could he not be? Look at what the man/woman/whatever had created here! It was genius! Probably insane, and almost definitely a criminal. But still. The Collector was clever, and the Doctor loved clever.

“What if we try and find the frequency of the shield?” he checked. “It’ll be in the results Parker picked up. Every frequency has a beginning and an end, and nothing spans an entire spectrum. It’s impossible. It’s physics. I think. Well, normally. Well, it doesn’t happen often. And you have to be very paranoid or very careful to cover every single wavelength in every reality and universe. So if we can find a frequency gap where the shield doesn’t exist and adjust the TARDIS’ flight parameters... We could skirt around the edge of the time vortex, where the universes are the least stable. We could get through there.”

The Doctor looked up from where he’d been writing, scrawling incomprehensible notes on a scrap of paper. With a jolt, he realised he’d been writing in Gallifreyan, a swirl of script that looped in a giant set of circles. Luckily the TARDIS could translate for anyone who needed it. He slid it towards Donna, his eyes suddenly bright, tapping the biro thoughtfully against his front teeth as he waited for her opinion.

It wasn’t that Donna wasn’t a fangirl of the Collector. In that whole brilliant sort of way, she could admire something like this. Not to mention that as much as she complained about being here, it was probably better than being back home without any of her memories. So right now she was ambivalent about the person. Him or her or whoever it was. However that didn’t mean that she didn’t want to get the hell out of here, or at least she wanted to help everyone else get out of here.

“You’re right, it’s definitely being generated from outside because I think we would have found it by now if it was inside,” unless it was cloaked, like the TARDIS was supposed to be. “You think we could really slide through and open it up enough to get out?” She wasn’t quite sure, but there really was only one way to figure that out. Even if the translation wasn’t working in the TARDIS, she could have read his writing, thanks to her awesome Time Lady brain.

Putting her teacup down, Donna nodded her head. “All right, let’s go find that frequency and see if we can open it up and go through. We need coordinates. Let’s park the TARDIS near one of the weak points and see what’s what, shall we?” they could look at numbers and charts all they wanted, but being near the weak spots might actually give them a clue.

The Doctor didn’t reply, was too busy barrelling to the console and firing up the TARDIS. Within moments the grinding pulse of the machine was sounding out, the lights flaring and flickering with each surge of power as the whole room gave an almighty jolt, leaving the passengers stomachs in the vicinity of their eardrums as it rushed through space.

It was less the two minutes before the blue police box appeared at the very edge of the city, the same exact spot where Parker and the hijacked van had chosen to leave. They balanced awkwardly a few feet from the shield, the various instruments in the TARDIS going mad at being so close to the huge band of energy that stretched around the city.

The Doctor ignored the lights flashing and the things beeping, pulling his glasses off and slipping them into his breast pocket. Instead the screwdriver was in his hand a second later, and he tossed it casually over to Donna, not bothering to watch as it arched through the air towards her. “You go scan the shields,” he told her, his face lit blue by the light of the console as he pulled on a piece of rope that dangled from the console. “I’ll have the results sent back here to take a look at them.”

Putting down her coffee cup, Donna took that as a resounding yes and got up to her feet. By the time they got to the edge of town, she was trying not to fall over as usual. One of these days she was going to make this thing land properly. Once she straightened herself up, she went to look at the scanner and check out all of the dials that were going nuts. She caught the screwdriver without really even looking at it. “Will do,” she told him and then headed out the doors.

Being out near the shields, there was this buzz in her head. Like being near something that was giving off an incredible magnetic field and it just hummed inside her head. It was a big maddening, so she thought it was best to do this quickly before she passed out or something. She adjusted the settings on the screwdriver to what she needed and then gave it a whirl. She looked for the weak point in the field and hoped that all the readings were going to the Doctor.

Once she was done, Donna headed back into the TARDIS, feeling much better. “That thing gives you a wallop of a headache, I swear. All right, what’s it look like?”

The Doctor shot Donna a huge grin the moment she reappeared. It did give you a terrible headache, that much was true. Why else would he have sent her out? The readings tumbled onto the screen in a long stream of numbers, yet another graph plotting itself on one of the panels as the digits scrolled past. It was a second, spent awkwardly with the Doctor chewing on his bottom lip, hand hovering over a button, before he shouted.

“AHA!” He brought his hand down with a crash that caused the TARDIS to whine in protest, stopping the numbers in their tracks. The Doctor was suddenly bouncing on the toes of his converse, long limbs springing and full of energy. “There! There is it! Oh, you beautiful little thing! Look at you! Oh, well done. We’re good. We’re very, very good.” He spun from one end of the console to another, wrenching on various bits and bobs, making lights flash and the usually dulcet tones of the ship to increase both in volume and pitch. Within moments the room was shaking, lights flashing, the floor pitching.

“Donna! Hold onto something.”

There was another dramatic lurch, more violent and painful than anything that had come before, a moment where the whole ship seemed to snag on something. Then, finally, a bang like someone punching through a drum, a wild tilt to one side, the feeling of falling...

Then it was over.

The Doctor was on his feet in a moment, bounding neatly over K-9 and the mess that a moment ago had been a rather well organised console room. He grabbed Donna’s hand, wrenching her to her feet and catapulted to the door. The Time Lord seized the handle, wrenched the door open, and immediately squinted in the harsh, white sunlight that poured through, carried on some invisible breeze. There was a very long silence.

“Oh, Donna.” He squeezed her hand gently, the grin on his growing into something, if possible, even giddier than it had been. “Look at that!”

Right, send out the ginger because you didn’t want to get a headache. If she had known that was what he was doing, she would have shoved him out of the TARDIS doors and onto his ass. Ungrateful. Really. When he grinned at her, she glared at him, “Oi, watch your cheek or you’re going to get slapped. I didn’t go out there for my health you know.” Of course he knew, he was such a bastard sometimes. Though for some reason they all put up with it. Well, she didn’t so much, but she was refraining from hitting him.

Glancing over at the console, she saw what he was talking about and then her eyes lit up. “Oh yes that’s brilliant. That is.. that’s it! We are really really good, aren’t we?” Of course they were. It was the DoctorDonna after all. She held onto the console as the TARDIS lurched and spun around and dematerialized. It still felt like being tumble dried. Going through the actual forcefield was something all right. Some part of her didn’t actually believe they’d done it.

Just like that she was on her feet, being yanked towards the door. Though she would have protested, she was too excited. The light made her squint, but it was easy to adjust her eyes. “Holy..” she trailed off, glancing around. She squeezed his hand in return and her whole face lit up. There was grass, lots and lots of grass, and a road as far as the eye could see. Then there were these rocks that seemed to just be carved, as if the city behind them had been carved out of them long ago and these were the traces of what used to be. Someone shaped these things, but not in such a very long time.

“We did it, Doctor. We’re out..” she laughed and then turned around to hug him tightly.

The Doctor couldn’t keep his smile from cracking his features stupidly, his eyes shining, his whole being buzzing with some triumphant, giddy energy. They had done it! They were out. Well, not out out but away from that horrible city with its walls and shields and its awful, awful constrictions. After so long crammed into one place he felt half mad with joy just to be somewhere, anywhere that wasn’t Colligo. He hugged Donna back hard, almost lifting her up his feet before he was grabbing his coat and shrugging it on over his suit, letting it flap behind him as he barrelled out into the road that led across endless green.

He skidded to a halt, pausing to reach down and pluck a blade of grass from the earth, slipping it between is lips and chewing thoughtfully. “Carbon, Nitrogen - ooh. A lot of nitrogen. Hydrogen, oxygen... Carbon and nitrogens about thirty to one. That’s a good ratio. This is good!” He reached down, scooping up and handul of dirt and pouring it into his pocket, before picking up a chip of the rock that had been quarried away around them. No point exploring if you didn’t take souvenirs, after all.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” he asked Donna, straightening up. And it really was. The field itself was a bright, dewy green, rolling gently with the curve of the slope. The sky was a perfect, uninterrupted blue, with the sun a single bright orb balanced straight above them, lighting everything with gold. This was why he loved finding new places. This was why he loved travelling. This was what he had missed all these months. This rush, this thrill. God. He loved it.

“Why would you keep people trapped in one tiny, minuscule, baby city when there’s all this?”

Inhaling a large breath of fresh air, she exhaled and hugged the Doctor back even tighter. They were out of that stupid bubble that was holding them in. “We have a whole planet to explore. A whole bloody planet,” she gushed. The whole thing was completely amazing, she didn’t want to go back to Colligo, not for a while at least. Donna followed the Doctor towards the grass and leaned down to run her hands through the blades of grass. Souvenirs, right. That was good. She glanced around to see if there was anything she could take with her.

“Come on, let’s go take a look at those rock cliffs,” she nudged him a bit and then started off towards where the huge rocks seemed to be carved by something. Maybe there were caves. Oh she hoped there was caves. “You know, I think I see a body of water further away.” Perhaps normal humans couldn’t see it, but she could almost taste the sea water, like they weren’t all that far away from the ocean. “Can you imagine if there’s a beach?” Oh now that sounded heavenly.

She wasn’t sure how long they would have until someone tried to stop them, or if they would, so she started to climb, glad that she was wearing pants. It wasn’t an actual climb, there were paths carved into the cliffs to walk. “It seems like someone might have lived here a long time ago.”

A whole planet to explore. After so long cooped up the idea almost made him dizzy. Stupid, crooked grin still in place, the Doctor shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his coat and mooched along after her, bouncing a little on the balls of his feet to determine the composition of the earth beneath him. There was rock a few metres below, probably the same type that made up the quarry a they were approaching. The Time Lord realised Donna had overtaken him, and jogged a few long strides to catch up. When she spoke, his tongue swiped briefly over his lips, tasting salt in the air. She was right. There was saltwater nearby.

“Do you remember when we spent that weekend on the diamond beach in the Epsilon Aurigae system?” he asked, and then they were clambering up a gentle upwards path cut into the rock, and he paused, squinting a little in the sun and running a sensitive, long-fingered hand over the surface. There was a lot of weathering, which means these hadn’t been cut recently. Definitely not in the two years people had been in the city... And looking back at the grassland, the Doctor’s sharp eyes picked out the variation of grasses and the occasional rivets and lines in the earth.

“That was farmland once,” he told Donna, the tip of his tongue poking out in a thoughtful habit. “And the rock. Rock’s very... rocky. You can tell things from rock...” He swept a digit across, rubbing the grains of dust he collected between the pad of his finger and thumb. “I wonder what happened to them.”

More importanly, he wondered if there were any real locals left.

Just the idea that there was a whole planet to explore made Donna want to bounce up and down like she was a teenager. She was a bit too hyper for her own good, something she attributed to him, since she had rarely been this hyper before her metacrisis. Their metacrisis. Her fingers brushed over the rock, and she leaned in to smell it. “Very rocky. It smells almost like.. of course I remember that beach, I got a sunburn that lasted for two weeks. That’s the last time you let me out of the TARDIS without sunblock, yeah?”

Oh right, she’d been about to say something when the Doctor had distracted her with thoughts of the beach. “It smells like those volcanoes on the Eye of Orion. Like the ruins there.” It was odd, since she and the Doctor had never actually gone there together, but she still knew what it smelled like, what it was like being there. She hoped it wouldn’t creep him out too much.

“Well if you want a cheap guess, I’d say the madman or woman that’s been keeping us, probably had something to do with it. But who knows. That’s why we should go and see.” And finally she got herself into one of the entrances. “We still need to find a way to move the forcefield. Because we can’t take everyone into the TARDIS and then squeeze through again. That’s a lot of people.”

The Eye of Orion... The Doctor was lost in his own memories for a moment, something he found happening more and more these days. Perhaps he was getting old. Or perhaps it was being stuck in that city with very little to distract him, watching students drool into their textbooks with their eyes all unfocused. But he was out now. They were out... And these rocks really did smell like the mountains in the Eye of Orion. How strange. Sometimes he forgot how much Donna knew these days, how many of his experiences she shared.

“Too many,” he agreed. Donna was worming her way into one of the cracked entrances in the rock, and the Doctor rolled his eyes and pushed his own skinny body in after her, finding them standing in a dark, humid cave, sunlight strobing through the gap they’d just entered through, highlighting the dust that was dancing in the air. The Doctor paused, then stepped towards one of the walls, where the light revealed a few dusty paintings scrawled crudely over the rock. Old paintings. Very old.

“Ooh!” He reached out, touching one with the tip of his finger, “Look at these!”

Even though they shared all of those memories, Donna still felt like she was feeling them for the first time when she actively thought about them. The memories just kind of surfaced when she needed them, but being here on those rocks, she felt like it was the first time being at the Eye of Orion. The first time here as well. She could just about hear him roll his eyes as she went in and beckoned him to follow. Anything to get him motivated and to stop being distracted.

She had been looking at something else when he caught her attention and she wandered over. “Good grief, will you look at that..” she reached out to touch one as well. “These have to be hundreds of thousands of years old.” Considering the way the paint had been made and the way it had been on the actual walls, it was definitely old. She didn’t see any signs of life though, no bones or anything.

“I wonder what that’s suppose to be..” she pointed to one of the little drawings that showed something large, like an animal but it didn’t look like any kind of animal she’d seen. And apparently she’d seen quite a few.

“I don’t know...” The Doctor mused in his own thoughtful tone, his head tilting curiously as he examined the etching on the wall. There were a hundred million things that it was like, but nothing that it actually was. And that was annoying. But it was a new planet and there was plenty of time for exploration. Not as much time as he would have had if the TARDIS could move though time here, of course, but time enough.

“We can come back. I’ll take a proper few reading and have K-9 and Jenny take a look.” He felt momentarily bad that Jenny wasn’t here with them. She was his daughter through and through, as long as it had taken him to accept it, and she’d have loved this. He’d definitely take her out tomorrow. Or whenever he got the TARDIS’ shields recharged enough to stand passing in and out of the city again. He had a funny feeling his darling ship was going to be in a bad mood once they got home.

“Come on,” he turned swiftly away from Donna and the painting, pausing the grin back at her from just inside the opening off the little cave. “We’ve got a whole planet to explore. Chop chop!”

The thought that there might not be something to compare this to was something that made Donna excited. After the Doctor had seen everything and the fact that nothing surprised him very much meant that nothing surprised her. This was a bit surprising, and so she was loving it. She was more determined than ever to get that stupid forcefield down so that everyone could come and see it all. There would be so many people who would want to take a look around. The whole planet.

“Good idea, I’m sure Jenny will kill us both for being out here without her. And Rose. And Jack and.. everyone else we’ve left behind.” Oops. Well it was too late to do anything about it. They’d just have to keep on going. She reached for her phone and took a picture of all the rocks and things and then headed back down with him. “I can’t wait to smell the ocean. Just don’t let me stay out there too long or I’ll get all sunburned, all right?”

Once they were down out of the caves, they headed back to the TARDIS. Unless they were going to walk, but then she’d have to change her shoes.

Together, they slipped into the small, blue police box, the confined space of the doorway spreading out into the main console room, and the Doctor chucked his coat carelessly over the one of the shining banisters before bounding up the steps, swinging around to face the console, and dragging a lever down.

Out in the cool green of the meadow, the warped throb of the vanishing TARDIS was quickly replaced with the sound of wind, sending grass swaying over the uninhabited plane.