Donna Noble'll have a salute (thenoblewoman) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2012-08-05 21:03:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, donna noble, tenth doctor |
Who: Tennyson Who (The Doctor), Donna Noble
What: Reunions!
When: Backdated to Friday
Where: In the middle of the road.
Ratings/Warnings: None, but there is excessive yelling and silliness inside
Status: Complete
It was early, by the Doctor’s standards, but he hadn’t been able to get back to sleep after Pompeii. When he’d read about others referencing these dreams, he hadn’t imagined they’d be so vivid. Even worse, they felt real; not dreams, but memories, and stuck in his mind as if they belonged there. He felt guilty over a decision he’d never made, a decision to save countless lives at the cost of thousands. It was something at once monumental and petty, that he carried with him the lives of thousands dead and all it became now was a sleepless night and a dark dream.
And Donna had been there to shoulder the guilt with him.
She stuck in his mind as well, but that was less surprising. Even an idle thought about Donna Noble tended to stick in the mind; she had that kind of personality. He saw now why she followed him online the way she did; they had... something, something he wasn’t sure if he could define yet, but he’d seen her off in his mind half-sure he’d never see her again, yet there she was, bouncing across space and time.
Aaand there was time travel.
That was an odd one. Not enough warning there.
So big were his thoughts that he almost plowed through the next red light. As he liberally applied his brakes, the Doctor reflected, not for the first time, that his brain was going to get him into trouble someday.
It was the end of the week, which Donna took as a blessing. It meant, if nothing else, that she'd have two days in a row to sleep late, do nothing, and, most importantly, not work a boring job. In high enough spirits for the eight AM morning rush, she sipped coffee from a travel mug and listened to the radio while waiting on the light to turn and letting her mind wander.
Or she would have if not for the screech of tires from two lanes away. Donna frowned and glanced over at what might have been a near-accident if the driver hadn't stomped on his brake when he had.
And that would have been it... Donna's morning might have been entirely ordinary had she not, for no other reason than that she could, looked twice.
The car that had nearly gone through the light stuck out a bit further than it should have, but this made it easier for Donna to see the driver. There he was in his wild-haired, suited glory. Her Doctor. The Doctor.
Donna had to rub her eyes to make sure she wasn't seeing things. Gaping openly, she spoke to herself, "No way." She might have continued to stare if not for the fact that, unnoticed by her, the light had turned and the car behind her had started honking. Shaken out of her reverie, Donna shouted at the person behind her, not caring that they couldn't hear, "Oh shut it!" and then drove with purpose. She was going to catch up with her Doctor. Or maybe die in a car accident. One of those, certainly.
The Doctor didn’t have a destination in mind. He often didn’t. In this part of California, it was easy enough to just start driving and eventually find a sign that read, “Museum of Celebrity Faceprints, 20 Miles,” or, “Two Exits Away: A Celebration of German Taco Engineering,” and that would be the Doctor’s day. He wasn’t looking to take his mind off of the dream--well, no more than he was ever looking to distract himself from his own thoughts--but he was prepared to admit that he wasn’t opposed to the idea. Tempting as it was to entertain thoughts of Donna Noble and the creation of the world and Time Itself, it kept leading back to Volcano Day.
Still, though. Time...
Just as the Doctor could devolve into a Timey-Wimey mass of thoughts, a horn blaring behind him made him jump. He couldn’t make out the driver in his rearview mirror, but he could tell she was in a hurry to get where she was going. Evidently. He shifted lanes to let her pass, then gave her the “go-ahead” wave.
She shifted lanes to get behind him.
“Bloody Americans!”
Donna, meanwhile, was having a conversation with herself questioning the eyesight of the Doctor. How couldn't he see her? It was like he was trying to annoy her on purpose. She kept her swearing to a minimum until he moved out of her way. Then, she soured.
"Are you blind?" she shouted at him, paying very little attention to the people around them that she must have been annoying or the lives she might have been putting in danger with her somewhat reckless driving. "Idiot!"
For the briefest of moments, Donna let herself doubt her eyes. It was an easy enough thing to mistake. And there was no going around it, really, Donna wanted to catch up with the Doctor. She might have just been seeing what she'd wanted to see. But she wasn't quite ready to give up. She tried another approach.
Instead of getting behind him, Donna shifted back into another lane. She did her best to keep up with him, which wasn't very hard, as she was willing to break some laws to get her way, and pressed hard on her horn. Trying to keep her eyes both on the Doctor and on the road, Donna waved with one hand to try and get his attention. "OI! SPACEMAN! LOOK THIS WAY," she shouted.
His other self was used to the strange. Come to that, he was used to the strange. He supposed that road rage was banal by his standards, but it was still outside of his comfort zone. His initial plan had been to just ignore the crazy person, but now she--possibly--was following him. He changed lanes again, putting a convertible between them, but a red light stopped his getaway.
The Doctor gave some thought to running it, but then he turned to look at his pursuer in case he had to describe her to a police sketch artist later. “What do you--wh... what?”
It was Donna. “What?”
Donna Noble.
"Finally!" Donna shouted, all but jumping out of her seat in victory. This was followed almost immediately by a moment of uncertainty. So she'd been right, that was lovely, but what was she supposed to do next? Would he even really recognize her?
She supposed she'd worry about that later.
It took her all but a moment to become animated again. Grinning widely, she waved a hand and said, "Doctor!" in a way she hoped he could understand between their closed windows and the convertible that sat between them.
Donna.
He’d known she was around, of course. In general. When he woke this morning, he’d meant to contact her, but what kind of message would that be? Good morning, I had a dream where we killed a few thousand people, and you watched me doom a lost race to extinction. How are you? Somehow the words hadn’t come out right. He’d been planning on writing her this afternoon.
And she was there. “Donna?” he said. She couldn’t hear him, clearly. But speaking aloud made him feel marginally less crazy than just mouthing at her. “What are... how are... what?”
Oh this was just brilliant. Even if he was confused and she came off looking like an utter loon, Donna couldn't help but celebrate quietly in the back of her brain. There was just something about the Doctor that made her feel cheerful, hopeful, even in the face of some of the darker dreams she'd had.
It was that he was familiar and a friend. Even though Donna liked California well enough, it hadn't transformed into home as magically as she'd liked to imagine. The Doctor, though. She'd had just a few dreams about him and she felt as though he was one of her oldest friends. It sounded crazy, but Donna couldn't help how she felt.
"I was driving to work," Donna said, mimicking the words to make them a bit clearer, "and I saw you!" She laughed. "This is mad!"
The absurdity of watching a woman mime driving a car while sitting in front a steering wheel aside, the Doctor was glad to see her. Happier than he’d have thought, really, all things considered. He didn’t carry burdens alone with Donna around, if only because she wouldn’t let him.
Possibly it was unfair to assume that was always the case, based on two experiences with an illusory version of her. Even so.
The light changed colors, and the two of them drove onward, trying to keep more or less in the same position. Fortunately, the very next light was changing to red when they came to it, and he looked back to Donna and said, “Were you looking for me?” doing his best to mime it as he went, which got a very strange look from the person in the convertible between them.
“No. Well, yes, but not today!” Some of that was probably going to be lost on the Doctor, but Donna was so elated to see him that she wasn’t really caring one way or another. “Work, remember? I save searching for the weekend, typically.” Oh. Work. Donna stopped for a moment and realized she was going to have to call them at some point if this went on for too long. But with a nearly perfect attendance record (one day off to nurse herself back to health after a hangover aside) she wasn’t too concerned.
“But oh my God, you look exactly the same. Still a skinny thing in a suit!” Donna was all but ignoring the man in the convertible between them, but he wasn’t ignoring her. With a genuinely confused look on his face, his attention went from Donna to the Doctor and back again, as though he were trying to piece their conversation together. Or figure out whether they were actual crazy people. Maybe both. “Why are you so hard to find on the Internet, by the way?” Donna asked, too excited about the prospect of talking to the Doctor to stop now, even with the language barrier. “You really don’t have a Facebook? Who doesn’t have a Facebook these days? My mother has a Facebook.”
The Doctor-Donna dynamic was a powerful thing, but not so powerful that it stopped him replying to her long, rambling thought process with a sincere, “What?”
Donna began her pantomime again, more slowly this time, but he waved her message away and gestured towards a nearby Tim Horton’s, indicating that they should just pull over and talk there. She gave him a confused look, so he indicated the restaurant again. She shrugged and mouthed, “What?” Well, knowing her, she’d probably shouted it, but either way, it didn’t quite carry the communicative properties she was going for.
With a roll of his eyes, the Doctor grabbed his phone and sent Donna a private message via the network that read, Why don’t we just meet over there? then held up his phone and gestured at it pointedly.
"This is how car accidents happen, you know!" Donna said in an only mildly cross sort of way. She checked her phone, trying to be safe about it, and got the message. Her eyes went from road to screen to road to the Doctor, whom she gave a thumbs up. By this point, the convertible that had been sandwiched between them had driven off in fear of one of the two being distracted enough to careen into him.
It took just a few moments to move a few lanes over and find a spot, which Donna took to be some sort of blessing from the Heavens. Because she'd been farther away, though, she finished closing up her car after he did. Suddenly nervous, because it seemed so much weighed upon this moment, Donna held onto the steering wheel of her parked car and took a very deep breath.
Then, in a fluid motion, she was out of the car and grinning at a stranger who wasn't a stranger and shouting, "Doctor!" When she was close enough, she hugged him.
“Donna Noble!” Whatever else he would have said was cut off by the young lady throwing herself into his chest and squeezing. There was a part of him to whom Donna was still a stranger from the internet who seemed to know him a bit too well, but that voice was a quiet one. He was happy to see Donna, thrilled to have just stumbled across her.
He found that he’d missed her, which didn’t really make sense. In his mind, they’d just been together. Strange, that.
“Funny old world, our just happening across each other,” he said when she released him enough for him to speak. “Not that you’ll hear any complaints from me. Still though. Then again, the sheer unlikelihood of two Britons of a shared parallel reality just happening to stumble across each other millions of miles from home--well, it’s nice to see you, anyway.”
Donna kept the Doctor at arm's length. It was an utter invasion of privacy that he, thankfully, didn't seem too bothered by. When he spoke, she kept her eyes on his face and when he finished, she took in the sight of the rest of him. He looked just like in the dreams, except he might have been missing something manic from his eyes. The fact that he seemed more a person wasn't something Donna could dwell on in the moment, but later it might occur to her... after they'd parted ways and the high of reuniting with him had faded.
"Doctor." Donna said his name again, beaming just a bit. "This is brilliant!" She laughed and then added, in a bit of a rush, "I'm probably coming off as a bit crazy right now, but I swear I'm not. You'll understand when you start dreaming." Donna was still under the assumption that the Doctor hadn't had any dreams about her. That is, until she realized that he was looking at her as though she were at least vaguely familiar. "Then again. Did you-" she cocked her head to the side comically, "Wait do you remember me? You recognized me, didn't you?" Her eyes narrowed and her voice took an edge. "You remember me?" Because she was fair and thoughtful, she gave him the benefit of the doubt and didn't hit him straight away.
It had been hard to reconcile the two different versions of Donna he had in his mind: there was the mouthy, demanding, rage-filled bride with the heart of gold, and there was the compassionate, kind destroyer of Pompeii. Having two different versions of the same person in his mind had been problematic. Seeing Donna in person took care of that.
“How else would I have recognized you? And what the hell is a face book, by the way?”
Before she could really stop herself, she’d slapped him on the arm. It hadn’t been especially rough, though, just something that needed to be done and, once out of her system, wouldn’t happen again. Probably. At least until he did something stupid. “You were supposed to tell me when you had dreams!” she said, a bit of bass in her voice. “Honestly.” Once she’d yelled at him, though, she cooled suddenly. She couldn’t be cross with him for long. She’d missed him too much.
Giving him a look, she said, “You don’t know what Facebook is? Really? Even my gramps knows about it, and he doesn’t touch computers.” A pause. “You really must have been away for a while. It’s a social networking site. And,” she added, reminding herself of priorities, “not important. How are you?”
“I got up this morning and took a drive. I didn’t have a chance to tell you yet. You people with your internet.” Someone who knew the Doctor--that is to say, Tennyson Who--extremely well might have noticed the subtle signals of misdirection that he employed. There weren’t any of those people left, though. He had started to contact her, but hadn’t known how to begin. As a rule, he didn’t reach out to people, much less about things like this. He needed to poke it with a stick to see what happened before he would trust anything that life presented him.
He ignored the Facebook discussion in favor of more important things. “I’m intrigued by this alternate world of ours. Yeah, everyone has one, blah blah blah, but ours doesn’t seem to operate by the same rules as this one. Which makes you wonder how much you get to toy around with physics until it breaks.” He paused. “D’you fancy a donut? I just pulled over here because it’s close, but come on. I’ll buy you a terrible breakfast.”
"Oh, I dunno," Donna said, taking a step toward the Tim Horton's. "Seems like there are a few weird ones out there. Aliens. Heroes. Things like that." Aliens and heroes didn't equal out to time traveling adventures, but they couldn't really be sure the extent of what people dreamed. Though it seemed the online community was bursting with people who were willing to share details of the things they dreamed, there were always people who kept things close to the chest. "Don't think I've heard of any other time travelers, but still."
The pair brushed past a woman who caught the end of Donna's sentence and gave her a weird look. Donna bit back a grin. As they slid up to the counter, Donna turned to the Doctor and asked, "So. What'd you dream about? Did you see- that'll be a toasted bagel with butter and a caramel latte with extra caramel, on his card, thank you -" she spoke to the woman behind the counter and then to the Doctor again, "Have you seen an Ood yet? I thought that was pretty wild."
The Doctor ordered his breakfast, which came, as advertised, piping hot and remarkably Canadian. “That’s my point, though. Some people come from a place as mundane as here, some come from a place where the world can fall away when you walk into a Police Box.” Strange pieces of knowledge had carried across the ether, like the fact that you don’t build a TARDIS, you grow one. Tempting as it might have been to turn his knowledge of quantum physics to tearing the universe in twain, he would have to wait.
For now.
“I had a dream about you. Two dreams, actually. The first was your wedding. We fought a--” The Empress of the Racnoss, the last brood mother of a dying and savage race-- “spider woman. At the end, I offered to take you with me into the universe, and you said no. Glad you changed your mind.”
Donna took her coffee and her bagel and headed to a table, keeping her eyes on the Doctor. They narrowed when he mentioned the wedding and she felt something strange bubble up in her stomach. Anxiety, maybe. She wanted to ask who she'd been marrying, but held onto that question for the moment. "I don't remember any spider women," she said as she took a seat. "But I do remember other things. I've had a few dreams now, not all of them with you, but most of them about you in one way or another."
She hesitated for a moment, not sure if she should spill every detail or save them for when he remembered. But then she thought about it for a quiet moment over her latte and realized that she'd want him to share things she couldn't remember. "We saw the creation of the Earth together. I remember that. And then there was Pompeii. We got a song sung to us by the Ood... they're a race of aliens. Funny looking, but nice. And cryptic." She paused. "There are some others, but those are the big ones. I had a newer one where I was looking for you, posing as a government official and getting into trouble because I figured you wouldn't be far off." If it was weird that she was telling a stranger that she had a number of dreams that revolved around him, Donna didn't let it show. She shrugged. "You'll probably get more soon. They've been coming to me quickly."
“Saw the creation of the world. That was during the wedding escapade. The Time Lord and the Runaway Bride. The ship that was at the center of the world, that ship belonged to the spider woman. And I remember Pompeii.” Her memories didn’t seem to be as detailed as his. He wondered what she remembered about it. He remembered her wondering about the way the TARDIS worked, and being impressed with her. That was why he loved humans--that is, why the other Doctor loved humans--because even after nine hundred years bouncing through time and space, they still thought of questions he hadn’t asked.
Or did she remember the danger? Or pulling the lever with him? He decided not to voice the question, and instead said, “I personally resent the implication that I get into trouble that often. It’s completely accurate, but still.”
Her lip curled into a smirk. "I was going to start doing the same thing here. Thought I might just run into you if I looked up alien encounters on the Internet and investigated for long enough." This was something that, perhaps, Donna shouldn't have shared. It was personal and just a bit embarrassing, but she found she didn't mind being so honest with him. This wasn't the sort of thing she'd tell anyone else, though, aside from maybe Rose, who could understand where she was coming from. "Probably for the best it didn't get to that." She smiled.
"Come to think of it," Donna murmured with furrowed brow. "I do remember being in a white dress when we were floating about in space. And I was upset about something but..." she drifted off, thoughtful. Then she turned her attention back to the Doctor. "It's weird, because once I've had the dreams, the memories stick. But they're still like dreams, so sometimes things go fuzzy. I'll forget details when I wake up or sometimes a dream will start in the middle of things. Like, I remember being in Pompeii and being in this... ship thing... and it," she hesitated, "well, things were a bit serious and we thought we were going to die." Donna's voice grew low. Pompeii wasn't exactly a happy memory, but it didn't depress her thoroughly. They'd done what they'd had to, after all, and Donna held onto that fact tightly in order to keep going. "And we had to make that awful choice. I remember all of that, but I don't remember how we got to the planet with the Ood, or that I was getting married in that other dream. Or to whom, for that matter."
“His name was Lance. He was... all wrong for you. All for the best that you didn’t end up with him, really.” Sold the human race to its death without a thought for the suffering it would bring. “He was a bit rubbish.” When he mentioned the man’s name, he saw a look pass across Donna’s face. Several, in fact. It wasn’t a look of someone remembering something from another life; it was a pained look from this one. Her thumb brushed across her ring finger. The look passed, and her face returned to very nearly normal, though it had a falsely bright look to it.
He sipped his coffee and changed the subject. “So there are others who seem to know me that I just haven’t come across yet. That Rory fellow seemed a bit forward.”
It was disheartening to hear that Donna had made the same mistake in two different universes, but she didn't dwell on the thought of Lance for long. She'd save that for later, when she was alone and feeling vulnerable. The brightness in her eyes turned genuine when the topic changed. "There's a little group of us, yeah. People who travel with the Doctor in the TARDIS. Rose Tyler, Rory and Amy. There are others, too. " She hesitated for a moment, "Other Doctors, I mean. Other... versions of you." She tried not to wince because it sounded so weird and failed.
“That’s interesting.” He held a coffee stirrer to his lips. “Alternate realities? We are time travelers, possibly alternate timelines? Or the same timeline, just further back or forward? Hm.” It certainly was a quandary, but it was one to be dissected later. “I don’t remember any of them. Well, I remember a Rose. I think I met you after losing her. Somehow. She was...” Somewhere else. The Doctor had a bad track record when it came to the women he loved. Made him wonder if he or Donna would one day wake up with a story about how he’d failed her. “Well, she wasn’t around anymore. No Rory or Amy, though. Lots of memories in nine hundred years of life, I’ll probably have a few dreams coming to me.”
“Not alternate realities. Well.” Donna considered things for a moment. “Maybe. I was talking with one of the other yous. Ears. His name is Liam Smith.” She smiled. “He said that he had dreams of being the same person but with different faces, which makes me think you... can change your form. I don’t know how or why. You might want to ask him about it. The other one’s Bowtie, his name is Troy Smith. I haven’t had dreams of either of them, just you. And as far as they’ve told me, they haven’t had dreams about me.”
Leaning her face onto her hand, she almost laughed. “It’s like a puzzle, isn’t it?” She had the distinct feeling that he liked solving puzzles and she was interested to hear how he’d piece things together and what sort of story they would tell.
“It is! I do love a good puzzle. Enjoy a bad puzzle sometimes. Just a general puzzle enthusiast. I have to wonder about your friends--Ears and Bowtie, you said? Unkindly, I might add?” Were they future versions? Past versions? Both? Neither? He’d find out one of these days. Maybe the other TARDIS denizens would have the answer.
“It may be that they just haven’t had dreams of you yet. After all, I don’t remember Rose yet, save for the name.” Or he was the only one that knew her because he failed her, too.
Hmm. Bad train of thought. He redirected it. “You said you remember fighting the Pyroviles, meeting with the Ood... I wonder if those events were in close proximity. From a temporal perspective. I mean, our personal timeline, rather than the universal one. It seems like the TARDIS didn’t drop us where I meant for us to go all of the time. Or any of the time.”
“The Smiths,” Donna corrected, grinning. It occurred to her suddenly that she wasn’t sure if they were related. That would be weird. Not that there was anything about the entire situation that wasn’t weird. “You’re the Hair.” She couldn’t quite help letting that one out and made a gesture with her hands that was meant to mimic his hair. They couldn’t do it justice, of course.
“I don’t know if there’s any way to tell when each dream happens in the timeline. But I’ll try to be aware of the little details and see if there’s any way to tell from my perspective. And,” she said, “I think it dropped us off in good places. More or less.”
“It took us where we needed to be,” he agreed. “Blowing up Pyroviles is preferable to waking up to a world where humanity was extinct. But I think my goal for the day was a trip to Rome, maybe stop by the Senate and watch a debate. Have you ever seen Parliament shouting each other down? Bit like that, ‘cept with knives.” He ignored the comment about his hair, but he did brush his fingers over it self-consciously.
He glanced at the spot on his wrist where his watch would be, if he wore a watch. “Am I keeping you? Weren’t you going somewhere when I pulled you over?”
Donna clapped a hand over her mouth in surprise. "Oh damn it!" She glanced up to a clock behind the counter. "Work." In a moment, she had her cell phone out and was going through her contact list. "I'm not going to make it in on time." In spite of herself, she could feel a bit of a grin on her face.
“Nothing for it, then. Oh, I know what to do.” He leaned in, a serious look suddenly on his face. “I know a museum that’s going through a change in exhibitions. I also know that they have been suffering some severe cutbacks in their budget, and have trimmed their security. Half of the security cameras are dummies. How would you like to go looking for trouble?” His mock-serious look turned into smirk.
Donna watched him as he spoke, grinning back once he'd started to smirk. "So this is how you're like? Different universe, different species, and still impossible?" She gripped her phone and pressed a button. "Just give me a minute to call them and let them know I've come down with a sudden bug." She rose before he could protest, looking about as excited as a kid in a candy store, and walked to the door, dialing work and trying very hard to not be so excited as to sound it over the phone. That wouldn't be very convincing, her telling them she'd gotten sick on the way to work with a big grin in her voice.
When Donna hung up the phone, the Doctor was already leaning against a wall, waiting for her. “Not impossible,” he said. “Never impossible. Just very, very unlikely.”