The Doctor and Donna were unceremoniously dumped outside the gates of the castle. Donna was (mostly unsuccessfully) trying to stop herself from laughing at the way he'd landed nearly flat on his face in the dirt, when really she should have been showering him with what the Doctor believed to be much-deserved sympathy. She did, however, offer him a hand getting up.
"Good thing they got so sick of the sound of your voice that they didn't even care about punishing us anymore," she said. "We might have been stuck in there forever otherwise, don't you think? Even if we'd managed to get past those guards, that place was seriously a maze and a half."
The Doctor pointedly ignored the insult, even though he thought he had a great voice, actually. It was one of his better ones, even. Instead, he looked around them, noting that there were two distinct paths leading away from the fortress. The Doctor, unfortunately, had come down with a mild case of unconsciousness prior to them having been brought (or dragged, really) to the castle, so nothing about their surroundings rang any bells for him. He'd only woken once they'd already been in the dungeon for quite some time, according to Donna; the enforcers who'd captured them hadn't seen fit to hit her over the head with a really very large stick (for no reason whatsoever, or so the Doctor would maintain to the death).
"Do you remember which way they brought us?" the Doctor asked.
"I was kind of busy trying to plan a way to escape that would let me cart your deadweight across the countryside, actually," Donna said. "Besides, it all looks the same. Blade of grass, another blade of grass, and another – they're not exactly sign posts, are they?"
The Doctor, who could have recalled the whole area in his mind with much greater accuracy and detail than any photograph, had he been awake to see it in the first place, thought that that was debatable. He said nothing of the sort aloud.
"We could always go back in and ask for directions," Donna said, only partly sounding as if she was joking.
"Missing those shackles already?" the Doctor asked teasingly.
"They were nicer than most of the ones we get chained up in. And there was that one guard with the shorter beard... 'Course, I'd have needed to shove him into a shower first."
The Doctor shook his head fondly. "I think the castle was south of the TARDIS," he said.
"Which way's south?" Donna asked.
The silence hung between them, self-explanatory.
He'd had a perfectly serviceable universal compass device in his left pocket he could have used. However, that would have required the prison guards to not have emptied out the Doctor's jacket while he'd been out of it. At least Donna had clearly had a laugh at the looks on their faces when they'd realised how he'd managed to defy their laws of physics by keeping that much stuff in there at once.
"Maybe we should just flip a coin or something," Donna finally suggested.
"Donna," he said, "I can navigate using mathematical formulae based on the position of the stars and the given gravitational pull of the planet. I hardly need to leave this sort of thing up to pure chance."
"It's daylight," Donna reminded him. "Even your super alien eyes can't see the stars now."
The Doctor frowned. "Well, no, but I can also use our surroundings to figure out the correct direction. No matter how emphatically humans from the 33rd century might try to patent it, moss growing on the north side of trees is universal, you know. Well, mostly."
Donna crossed her arms and looked pointedly around them at the grassy plains. Not a tree in sight. Right.
The Doctor sighed, pouting. "Also," he said, "I don't have any coins."
"Tightwad," Donna said.
"They took everything out of my pockets!" he insisted defensively.
Donna laughed. "Like there was any money in there to begin with."
The Doctor couldn't really argue against that.
"That way," Donna suddenly said, pointing. She sounded remarkably sure, the Doctor thought.
"You remembered something?" the Doctor asked.
"Not really," Donna said. "But that's the direction the sun's going, and that whole 'walking into the sunset' cliché thing must've come from somewhere, right? Fifty-fifty chance it's the right way. If not, once the stars come out you can put all those Time Lord skills you keep going on about to work anyway. Besides, it'll give us something to do other than hang around out here waiting to be caught again."
"So you want us to just wander around on a strange plant with no real idea which way we should be going, just based on what you read in a couple of train station romance novels?"
"I know," she said, "you must be rubbing off on me."
The Doctor grinned.
Donna set off down the path, silently insisting on leading the way.
"Come on, then, skinny boy," Donna called back to him, not turning around.
The Doctor refused to admit, even in his own head, that he jumped into action on command.
Still, he knew he wasn't fooling anyone.
~Fin~