Disclaimer: all I own here is some angst but at least it's all my own this time.
A/N: encouragement by both Noliee (on AO3), and stinabeena; and written for the hc_bingo challenge prompt "shipwrecked".
Drifting and Waiting
Part 1: Out of the Darkness
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It had been a long, exhausting night. As Donna stood by the window, looking at nothing in particular to while away the time waiting for her son to regain consciousness, her thoughts inevitably turned towards the Doctor.
She often thought about how the Doctor coped without his precious ship, the TARDIS, being close by. Even on Krop Tor, orbiting the K37 Gem 5 black hole, he had been determined to climb down a good ten miles and retrieve it from the depths of goodness knew where.
The upshot of this was, as plain as day, he couldn't physically bear to be parted from the old girl. All of which rather made it strange that he had expected his duplicate to be able to easily be wrenched away from the TARDIS and dumped on a planet in an alternate dimension. Love conquers all, they might say, but it hadn't cajoled the Doctor into staying there on Pete's World, so why had he thought it was perfectly acceptable to leave their son there?
True, he had an essential part of her DNA in the mix, but at the time Rose had been told the duplicate was exactly the same as the Doctor, but with a human heart. Some things just didn't add up; and the greatest puzzle of all for Donna was the fact the Doctor hadn't taken into consideration how much of a dilemma being away from the TARDIS would be for someone born there and who, you could argue, was not only formed and nurtured by the TARDIS, but also contained an element of her too.
Yes, Donna would have definitely argued her son was part of the TARDIS when she had last been onboard, if it hadn't been for the fact that the Doctor's mind was taking over her head and threatening to smash it to smithereens.
With all these thoughts whirling around her mind, she stopped looking blankly out of the hospital window at the urban scene outside, and turned to consider the clinical room inside. They were still in Intensive Care, facing a few more hours until they could be moved to a more normal ward. Hooked up to monitors, an IV, and breathing apparatus, was the body of her son. At least they had removed the bulky tube down his throat and replaced it with a thin oxygen tube via his nose. The x-ray and MRI scans had shown extensive fractures throughout his body, but she had begged them to leave any casts until later. Even the nurses had been sceptical of this, let alone the consultant, so they had compromised with frequent checks to see if her son was in pain or suffering further problems from internal bleeding.
He looked so small, frail and delicate as he lay in a drug induced coma. Well, the staff thought it was such a coma, but she knew better. The drugs had probably already been worked completely out of his system and his natural Gallifreyan healing instinct had kicked in to return his body to its previous pre-trauma state.
Yet another thing to gloss over, hide the information about, and conceal any leakage to the outside world. Thank goodness she had an experienced ally who knew the ropes where all the paperwork was concerned.
Jack had already been up to take over security measures, offering support, waylaying the consultant, schmoozing the nurses, and had been an absolute star. He was currently getting them both a much needed coffee from a vending machine in the corridor outside.
The Jack that had entered the hospital emergency room a couple of hours beforehand was not the same Jack she had met just before they'd landed on the Crucible. No, this Jack had been through a great deal more loss in his life and had had some of his chirpiness stripped away. Such a shame. Martha had told her a lot about Jack, so Donna had been a little saddened and disappointed that she hadn't seen him in full flirt, as it were.
Still, he had gamely laughed at her feeble joke that the Doctor might turn up on their tenth wedding anniversary married to another woman. She suspected that he had run into Professor River Song already, and that that was what kept him so firmly away from them.
I mean, who needed a dumpy ex-temp type of wife when you can have a real and proper university professor with real technical qualifications and miles more confidence than Simon Cowell? Obviously not him. Or anyone else, for that matter. Not since Shaun Temple had wisely scarpered out of her life; but it had been nice being the centre of his world for a brief few months. Time and taste wait for no man, if you'll pardon the deliberate misquote. Jack had laughed at that joke too.
The darkness outside was starting to lighten. Stray beams of sunlight were peeping over the edge of the horizon.
Her gaze and thoughts landed fondly back on her son, and she couldn't resist caressing his cheek or sweeping his fringe out of his unseeing eyes. Both of them were shipwrecked on this planet but at least this time they were together and had each other for support. The yearning of the stars still hurt but they were coping, gradually, with that.
"Mum," a sleepy voice mumbled.
She was over by his side in a shot; just in time for Jack to re-enter the room holding two cups of coffee and hear him. "Is he awake?" Jack wondered in amazement.
"Looks like it," Donna confirmed, and then focused her attention on the figure in the bed. "Shhh! You're supposed to be asleep, letting all that Time Lord healing take place," she tenderly soothed him.
"Then get rid of all this," he retorted as fervently as he could in his feeble state. His fingers plucked at the oxygen tube, trying to dislodge it. "It's stopping the natural process."
"Let us do that," she offered, slapping away his hand. "Jack will help me. Kids, eh?"
That gained her a gentle smile, which she suspected was relief.
It was as they removed the very last wire and Jack finally got his chance to hand over that anticipated coffee that a familiar wheezing and whirring sound sprung up, along with a mini whirlwind.
"Trust him to turn up when all the squeamish stuff has ended," she jested, swiping a stray lock of hair out of the way; and waited for the Doctor to make his normal dramatic entrance.