"This," said Donna, who'd never had a thought in her life that she didn't feel the immediate need to vocalise, "is getting silly."
The other three occupants of the TARDIS stared at her.
"Well, it is."
And it was; having one wedding interrupted by a mad alien with a magic blue box was the sort of thing that could happen to anyone, two and it started to look like a pattern.
"So are there a lot of you then?" Donna asked.
"A lot of us?" asked the young blond man irritability. He would have been quite good looking if not for the fact that he was clearly a lunatic, he appeared to be wearing orange striped pyjama bottoms and a bit of celery.
"Mad aliens who travel round in weird blue boxes calling themselves the Doctor and interrupting peoples weddings."
The lunatic looked Donna up and down carefully as if straining to remember her from somewhere, she self consciously smoothed down her wedding dress, thankfully less elaborate than the first one, and picked a twig out of her hair.
He opened his mouth, then seemed to think better of speaking and shook his head slightly. He turned away and jammed a straw hat onto his head, adding to his harmless lunatic look. It occurred to Donna that perhaps she might have done better to stay with the carnivorous plants.
"Tegan and Turlough will explain everything to you, Donna. I think I'd better go and have a word with your fiancé."
"Be careful," she warned him, "he seemed hungry."
She turned to face the two people she'd been left with, one was a bloke in a blazer who looked like he'd gotten lost on his way to a school disco and the other was a woman wearing dangerously high heels and a leather mini skirt that she didn't really have the legs for. Donna felt no twinge of hypocrisy judging the woman despite the fact that she was wearing a ripped and mud streaked wedding dress. She didn't feel able to hazard a guess at which one was Tegan and which was Turlough, so she just stared at them waiting for the promised explanation.
It was the bloke who spoke up first, "Do you do this a lot then, flee through the jungles of Paraguay from carnivorous flora you promised to marry?"
Before Donna could point out, loudly, that she hadn't know he wasn't human the woman gave a bark of laughter, "You'll have to ignore Turlough, he's an alien."
Donna shrugged, "who isn't these days."
"I'm not," the woman, Tegan, answered. Donna felt an immediate kinship with the woman, who despite not having moved on fashion wise since the mid nineteen eighties was human, and as such was probably not going to try and kill her.
"You've met the Doctor before?" Turlough prompted.
"Never seen him before in my life, although last Christmas I did meet this weird bloke who called himself the Doctor, he nearly got me eaten by a giant spider."
"Well, that certainly sounds like the Doctor," Turlough concluded.
"It wasn't a tall bloke wearing a twelve foot scarf was it?" Tegan asked.
Oh, God, how many of these Doctors were there. "No, he looked like..." Donna thought about the best way to describe the Doctor, "Imagine a really good looking weasel in a suit."
"Same Doctor, he can change his face," Tegan said, obviously relishing knowing something the other two didn't.
"He can change his face to anything." Donna thought about the implications of this, "and he chose weasel boy and the mad greengrocer?"
At that moment the mad greengrocer himself poked his head into the TARDIS, "Donna, I think perhaps you'd better come out here and have a word with your fiancé, he doesn't seem keen on taking no for an answer.
Donna followed the Doctor out into the oppressive heat, standing next to the TARDIS was Matt, although now she thought about it his name probably wasn't Matt, it wasn't a very carnivorous plant sort of name.
The Doctor gave a charming smile, despite the fact that his celery was wilting in the humidity.
"Donna, if you'll just tell this nice flesh eating plant that you've changed your mind about marrying him this will all be over."
"Donna..." Matt reached out to her. Now that she looked properly he did have a bit of a green tinge to his skin that she'd never noticed before, she shied away from him.
"Now be reasonable, it's not as though I lied to you. I never said that I was human and I never promised that I wasn't going to kill and eat you on our honeymoon."
"Oh, that makes me feel much better."
"Does it?"
"No! You said you were a tree surgeon!"
"Well, I was half right," Matt said with a grin, had his teeth always been so pointy?
Donna belted him across the face with a resounding crack. He flinched sideways then lunged forward with a snarl. His body, shimmering and flickering became bigger and greener, thick vines snaking down his arms and legs.
One of the creepers lashed out and caught the Doctor across the cheek; he took Donna's arm and guided her back inside the TARDIS, "Time to beat a hasty retreat I think."
Once the attacking foliage had been beaten back with a hat stand and the doors closed the Doctor turned to Donna, "can we offer you a lift anywhere?"
"Home, Chiswick," Donna answered. She'd had enough of travelling, really she should have gone to the Costa del Sol which had been her first idea, but no she'd had to do some proper travelling. And where had that got her, nearly hitched to a homicidal tree surgeon, that's where.
"I think we can manage that," the Doctor answered.
"You're lucky it's nowhere near Heathrow," Tegan said with a smirk in the Doctors direction, "he's got a blind spot when it comes to Heathrow."
"Yes, well..." the Doctor trailed off.
Donna slumped into a chair in the corner of the console room, Tegan and Turlough standing nearby. It seemed like the Doctor, when not pining after women named Rose, was fond of alliteration in his TARDIS.
"Here we are, Chiswick." the Doctor flicked a switch and the TARDIS doors opened revealing a perfectly ordinary London street.
"What will you do now?" he asked her.
When the other Doctor had asked her that question Donna had announced big plans to change her life, to walk this earth. And that had brought her nothing but trouble.
The trick, obviously, was to start small, "I am going to go for a drink."
"I'll join you," Tegan invited herself along.
"I will too," so did Turlough, "Doctor?"
The Doctor looked at them as though the idea of Donna, Tegan and Turlough in a twenty first century pub was mildly blasphemous.
---
"How old are you?" the bouncers question was addressed to Turlough.
"Seventy three," he replied.
"Yeah, right, on your bike mate." he stepped in front of the door to stop Turlough from passing into the pub after Donna and Tegan.
"See you back at the TARDIS, Turlough," Tegan called over her shoulder.
Donna marched up to the bar, "a double gin and tonic and a bottle of red wine."
"I drink white."
"And a bottle of white," Donna concluded.
The barman wisely resisted the urge to pass comment on Donna's bedraggled appearance or Tegan's anachronistic clothing as he poured the drinks.
"Where exactly do you think I'm keeping money?" Donna demanded, spreading her arms wide and giving the barman a good look at her torn white dress when he told her the price of the drinks.
The barman was about to remove their drinks to under the bar when Donna grabbed him by the collar.
"I have been stuck in South America for no passport and no money for months, I nearly got married off to a talking plant and Tegan is the first person I've met in ages who isn't an alien. Now, give me my drink!"
The barman shot an alarmed glance in the direction of the bouncer, who despite having dealt easily with football hooligans and stag parties looked off into the middle distance and pretended he hadn't noticed. The barman, who could recognize overwhelming odds when they had him by the scruff off the neck, gave up the drinks.
Donna picked up the gin and tonic and one of the bottles of wine and marched over to a corner table. Tegan picked up the other bottle and made to follow her, the barman looked at her strangely.
"I live in a police box with a cricket obsessed Time Lord who I think spends his free time plotting ways to get me killed and a man who's been wearing the same school uniform for six months now."
"I'll open two more bottles."
---
"I nearly married a shape shifting tree."
"I was once hypnotised by a space pirate queen."
"My last fiancé was having an affair with the empress of the giant spider people."
"I've been possessed by a giant snake. Twice."
"Yeah, alright, you win."
"This is a very depressing game."
---
"I used to be an air hostess."
"Used to be?"
"I got fired."
"How come?"
"I couldn't stand all that forced cheerfulness."
"You should try being a temp; they expect you to be surly and hung-over."
---
"Then he made it snow and asked me if I wanted to go with him, after he'd nearly got me killed ten or twelve times and spent the entire day talking about his ex."
"Bloody typical of the Doctor, that. Except for the ex thing, that's new."
"And I reckoned that sounded way too dangerous and decided I was going to travel the Earth by myself for a bit."
"Good idea."
"Flipping rubbish idea, you spend much time on earth these days? It's full of pickpockets, and airport security and man eating plants who decide that they're going to marry you."
"Have we run out of wine?"
---
Two bottles of wine later and Tegan appeared to be bitching about her ex-girlfriend, and Donna was reconsidering her opinion of Tegan's legs.
"She left just because we happened to stumble across a futuristic plague hospital. Dumped for a space station full sick people, that's me."
"You have nice legs," Donna observed through a haze of wine. "I wish I had the legs to wear a skirt like that."
"I'm sure you do," Tegan tipped drunkenly forward and committed some slightly indecent fumbling trying to get a look at Donna's legs through the ruined wedding dress.
"Hey, you two want to take that outside," the barman interrupted. Donna and Tegan looked up at him, cross and confused.
"Also, we're closed now."
Donna and Tegan looked around the deserted pub and realised he was right. They got up and headed out, Tegan paused to snatch up the bottle of wine, then she realised it was empty and put it down.
---
Donna's day had vastly improved. Considering that she had spent most of the morning struggling through the South American jungle on the run from intelligent plant life, finishing up the day kissing a leggy Australian outside a London pub was a significant step up.
They were sadly interrupted by jeering from a group of drunk men on the other side of the street.
"Do you live nearby?" Tegan asked.
"Yes...no, bugger. I gave up my flat when I went travelling. Where do you live?"
"Brisbane."
"Oh."
"There's always the TARDIS."
"How'd you think your Doctor would feel about that?"
Tegan grinned, "I think if he ever found out he'd turn strange and amusing colours."
"Sounds like a plan."
---
The next morning Donna stepped gingerly out of Tegan's bedroom. Her head was throbbing, her mouth was dry and there was a large bruise exploding on her hip from where she bumped into the ridiculously sharp edgy of the console while searching for the zip on Tegan's skirt.
The TARDIS corridors were an unreasonable bright white, the sooner the Doctor got around to redecorating the better. She was concentrating on remembering her way back to the console room and making sure that her dress was decent given the fact that she hadn't been able to find her underwear so she didn't see Turlough until she'd almost walked into him.
"Good morning," he said, leaning against a wall and sipping from a mug of tea. He looked like he had an A-level in advanced smirking.
"Morning," she mumbled, walking past him and crossing her arms across her chest, trying to make it less obvious that she wasn't wearing a bra.
"Before you go there's a bra caught on the console that you might want to pick up on your way out."
Donna glared at him.
---
"Good morning, how are you feeling?" the Doctor said in an inappropriately cheerful tone as he slid out from underneath the console.
"Fine," said Donna, shoving the bra, which turned out to not actually be hers, behind her back.
"Good, good," said the Doctor diving back under the console.
Donna hit the control which opened the door, which fortunately was both large and red for memories sake, and was halfway out onto the street when she turned around.
"Oi, Martian Boy?"
The Doctor sat up, narrowly avoiding thwacking his head on the underside of the console. He looked at Donna as though he wasn't entirely convinced she was addressing him.
"You could ask more than once. In case I was wrong the first time, you could ask me again."
And with that she strode out of the TARDIS and was round the corner and halfway down the next street when she heard what sounded like a mix of nails on blackboard and foxes mating, the sound that she'd come to associate with the TARDIS leaving.
---
Having no money, or for that matter underwear, Donna was forced to walk all the way to her parents house. By the time she got to the end of their street she was cold, miserable and had blisters. And she honestly wasn't sure if she was cheered or depressed by the presence of a blue police box on the street corner.
The TARDIS door opened and out stepped the Doctor, her Doctor, weasel featured and skinny as a rat. She'd never been so pleased to see anyone in her life.
"I still have a bra of yours in here somewhere," he said with a smirk.
"Ow," Donna slapped him on the shoulder as she pushed past him into the warmth of the console room, "Welcome aboard, of course."