Like a pet, he names the other part of him made whole John. No last name, because that would make it hurt worse when he dies. John is confused and lonely and doesn't know what to do with himself, now that he's become a killer in the name of the greater good. His blue suit is covered in sand from where they said goodbye to Rose one last time, leaving her clutching her dimension cannon and all her abandoned memories. His face is covered in tears from losing his beautiful companion to a lifetime of forgetting just to live a lie. He never sees Martha or Mickey or Jack leave. (Everything is just too hard now, all these emotions crushing him so much. When did he start caring so much for these fleeting glimpses of lifetimes?)
What becomes evident soon after they leave Donna to her parents' care is this: there is only one person who can ever rebuild John and it isn't someone from another universe, equally lost and lonely, but someone who too has destroyed entire races for justice. In the raw hours after everything is over, the Doctor finds himself holding on to John with a tight embrace, afraid of losing him in his new home. The lighting in the TARDIS grows blue and subdued, even in the console room, and the Doctor can't pull himself away from himself to materialize out of the vortex.
John is the only thing he has left, a blue suited reminder of what the Doctor has become. The Doctor is the only person John has really known, except for Donna, and she's gone. For hours or days (no one can tell) they spend all their time together exploring the TARDIS with falsely fresh eyes, because if they act like they're busy they won't feel obligated to actually go anywhere. John loves seeing everything again from his new perspective, but the idea of the TARDIS being the only place he'd ever see until death scares him, and for some reason he keeps wondering when the Doctor is going to finally tell him he is never going to leave, he's just too important to lose.
(During the night cycle, the Doctor watches John sleep, forever wondering about his new body that makes it more imperative to sleep everyday. He imagines what it would be like to look inside someone half human and half Time Lord. Some nights, John feels the Doctor watching him and crackes open one eye to check that he's still there; the Doctor just smiles and reaches forward to ruffle his hair, his own hair. Sometimes he pulls away as if he is shocked. Sometimes he does not.)
After several days of nothing but cold tea and vapid shufflings, no one is more surprised than the Doctor when the TARDIS makes a surprise pit-stop on a familiar ice planet which looks like a woman, weeping. Women Wept, and soon the both of them are bundled up in some furry coats and hats they find in the wardrobe, ankle deep in snow and crunchy ice. The Doctor holds John's hand as they traipse through the pure white scenery, and John doesn't seem to mind. When they find a barren tree that has been completely frozen over, the Doctor's eyes come alive and he skips about the tree's trunk, tracing etchings from years ago with the tips of his gloved fingers.
"Amazing!" His breath escapes in faintly crystallized clouds of air. "This tree must have been very popular back in its day. Well, as popular as a tree with no leaves and all roots can be. But still! So many things carved into the bark! Look, someone made a love umbrella! Two of them, actually! Must've been tourists."
John touches the tree with one hand, ignores the one that looks like his handwriting because he knows it is, written to a woman whose ashes lie on a floating chunk of dead rock where Gallifrey once stood, and his hearts hurt in the effort. The Doctor notices the pained expression and says nothing, just takes the other man's hand into his again and squeezes it, hard.
"We can't keep on looking backwards forever," he said. "There's worlds out there, you know. People made of smoke and fire and farting aliens in flesh suits."
"Work to do." John smiles, and it never reaches his eyes. Just like the Doctor. "I remember."
They leave Women Wept the way they found it, for once. When the TARDIS dematerializes from the planet's surface, John remembers how much he missed that sound. It only takes a few seconds for the wanderlust to rush back into his veins with an unmatched tenacity. For the last time in his brief life, it scares him just a little. But then the Doctor gives John one of his classic manic grins, and he grins back, and it is wonderful.
("You're wonderful, did I tell you that yet?" the Doctor whispers in an low excited voice, running his hands through new but familiar hair and down the other man's strained neck, all the way across his warm bare chest.
"N-not nearly enough, alien boy," John says, then hisses as the Doctor presses one palm slowly into his chest, the cold flesh shocking against his own heat.
"You're part alien, too," the Doctor argues, and before John can apologize for the flicker of hurt that clearly passes across his friend's face, he bucks roughly against John's body. When the two of their bodies meet in the most intimate way possible, it is rough and hot and that's how both of them likes it, it's the only way they can hurt the other one without being expected to ever apologize.)
After Woman Wept, the Doctor and John start their travels over again as if nothing has changed and John is just another companion. When people see them, they are confused, and rightly so. The only thing at first that differentiates the two men is their suits; the Doctor keeps on his brown suit with matching duster, John his bright blue suit. Soon, John needs to tie back his hair since none of them are good barbers and the one person that would usually cut this incarnation of the Doctor's hair has gone back to her own universe with her fake husband and real daughter. So soon people call them the Doctor - with and without the ponytail. The Doctor has to start using Jamie McCrimmon as an alias again, now that he's traveling with the bona fide John Smith; however, the parallels between his lost Scottish lad and the super temp from Chiswick's fates are so strong that he soon switches to using Ian Chesteron (now that was a story with a happy ending).
Being human soon becomes overrated for a life of constant deaths and running away. The subway system of twenty-seventh century London is attacked by Cybermen, and the Doctor and John are able to flush the Cybermen out and back to their ships, although not soon enough to stop three people from being turned into cyber-humans. They are forced to stand attention as the local police kill what is left of the victims in their crushing metal suits. Back on Satellite Five during the Fourth Great and Bountiful Human Empire, someone tries to take advantage of a fixed and fragile point in human history in a bad way, and only John has the stomach to tell satellite personnel who the mole is, the Doctor watching with sad eyes as the humans he loves so much proceed to punish the spy by sending him out into space via an escape pod with no food or water or prospects. On a planet colonized by a group of humans so far away from home, John watches a young man cling to the outside of the city's main biodome, his helmet cracked and holes in his suit, and stands there as the stranger dies in one of the most horrible ways imaginable. He just moves on to helping the Doctor take down the nefarious regime that has sprung up in the city, never stops to think that he maybe could have saved that man from death. John never stops to think that there could be a different way to save people's lives, because if he does he'll never start up again.
When John missteps, he does it in the worst way possible. The Doctor leaves him alone in London's shopping center for a while to buy some more tea and biscuits for the cupboard while the Time Lord responds to a delayed SOS call from Torchwood. John can't help but think the Doctor is ashamed to be seen with him around Jack and the others, but quickly shrugs it off. If he doesn't think about it, it's not a problem. He's so busy not thinking about it that when he runs into Donna Noble at a clothing store, John doesn't think about Donna's synapses and how they might react to seeing a blast from a forgotten past until she's collapsed in his arms, golden tears running down her face as she cries about how hard she tried to remember and how much she hates him for taking her life away and John can't even bring himself to correct Donna about who he is. It's not until her heart beats for the last time and her final protest disappears on her lips that John whispers to no one in particular, "I'm not the Doctor you wanted. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."
The Doctor finds John minutes later, still in the same spot, and pushes aside a frantic shopkeeper without any warning so he can drag John's cold but still breathing form away from Donna's body (no, lifeless corpse). His face is a well-worn mask of emotionless rage until the second they enter through the TARDIS' doors, when the Doctor dumps John onto the floor of the console room and leaves him there as the oncoming storm retreats into the bowels of the ship. John will not see the Doctor's face again for weeks, and he does not try to find him, even when doubt plagues his mind over whether the Time Lord is even alive or not. John always knows that he'll come back eventually, in a truth he keeps locked up in his singular beating heart, because that is what he would do. So he waits patiently for the Doctor to resurface, all the while wondering how he's going to apologize for screwing up so badly.
At night, faces of those who had haunted his current incarnation drifts through John's subconscious, invading his dreams in every aspect. Rose Tyler stands atop the highest peak of Women Wept, her tears freezing in stardust-shaped imprints as they hit the ground. Mickey Smith is falling through the Rift, holding his arms out for someone to catch him, while a young French woman in skirts and make-up reaches out to grasp him on the other side. The Earth is barren and torn up by laser fire, but it's the Master who is walking the planet with his cocky little grin, Martha Jones watching him from the skies with a look of determination. The Titanic sinks over and over in an unending loop, but Astrid catches a ride away from it all on the arm of a Blitz-era captain who leaves a trail of broken hearts behind him. Donna Noble walks through the burnt dust of Gallifrey, holding hands and laughing with another blond goddess thought long dead to time. And then there is the Doctor, who stands alone in an empty void, and he looks at John with a pleading look.
"I'm sorry," he says. His voice echoes in the limitless chamber. "I didn't mean to make you like this. It's not your fault." He closes his eyes and bursts into flames that engulf him and start to change his entire physiognomy into something dangerous and twisted - and at that point, that is when John always wakes up, shaking and covered in sweat. No matter how many nights there are in which the dream comes to him, the vision of the Doctor apologizing to him always chills him to the bone.
When the Doctor comes back, they act as if he just disappeared to find something in the back recesses of the TARDIS' rooms. It's always so easy to lose something when there's infinite rooms to lose them in. He emerges with an old biodamper that has seen better days; he kneels and presents it to John in the traditional way. John finds that the biodamper slides easily onto his ring finger, and manages to smile before he is swept up into the Doctor's crushing embrace.
"With this ring," he murmurs into a sea of tailored brown fabric, "I thee biodamp." And with it, Donna's name is the first of companions past to be unanimously banned from utterance within the TARDIS' walls. It will not be the last.
Forgiveness for John's wrongs do not come easy. The Doctor becomes careless and forgets to include John in his world-saving schemes so that there are occasions where John has to save himself because the Doctor has forgotten all about him or where he is at the moment. When he narrowly avoids a sonic bomb meant to wipe out some nasty nanobots gone bad by ducking into a nearby shelter at the last second, John knows that he's not wanted anymore, especially in the TARDIS. He didn't just kill Donna. He killed the only person who could have held back the Doctor's self-righteous rage at the universe. But still, when the Doctor and John return to the TARDIS arm-in-arm as they do, John fakes a smile and a cheerful disposition (he's become very good at it, despite his human emotions aching to come to the surface) and that night when they make love, John calls out the Doctor's true Gallifreyan name while in the throes of ecstasy like a good boy and makes his lover smile darkly. He would know what the Doctor likes to hear, after all.
So they keep on traveling together, visiting strange worlds and saving lives across the universe. (Once, they land on Messaline and leave only seconds later. There are some places even the oncoming storm won't dare tread again.) It's dangerous work but it's easier when his companion is someone who knows what it's like and can understand why the Doctor does the things he does - even if he's a mirror image of the other man (John lost his ponytail to a green-colored volcano and it refuses to grow back). More and more often, however, John keeps getting hurt. It starts with scratches and cuts, then evolves into broken bones and strained muscles. All things that can easily be fixed back in the TARDIS' infirmary. That's when the Doctor notices how reckless the both of them have become, jumping into danger without second thought and putting themselves in harms' way with no back-up plan. John was supposed to be his back-up plan, but now he's become just another part of the Doctor. Sometimes, he feels like he's ended up traveling with himself, literally.
At night, in the dead quiet of the library, the Doctor formulates plans on how to get rid of John without going too far. He doesn't want a companion who knows more about him than he does; he certainly doesn't want one who is partially made up of the biodata of the late Donna Noble, especially considering what John did to her. Stupid, stupid, stupid, the Doctor curses at himself, mulling silently while John sleeps alone for the first time in months. Last week, they had failed to save an enslaved race of people from a nearby dictatorship, and had to run away to save their own lives. Days ago, a bomb went off in a refugee ship heading for Mars, and they could only manage to save one person in the TARDIS' force field before the ship burst into flames and ash. That person listened to John tell them how much better a life they can have on Mars now that they have been saved before running into what used to be Martha's room and blowing their brains out. Funny; Martha had been the one to tell the Doctor that he needed someone. So had Donna. Even Rose, in her own way, had told the Doctor that he needed a hand to hold - and hold him back.
John's hand would never hold him back. John is too used to death and it has clearly clouded his judgment. He is toxic, and the Doctor knows that he needs to dump the man someplace where he can only hurt himself and no one else. Or someone who could be hurt and still look after John through the years. He knows just the man for the job.
In the morning, the TARDIS lands right on top of the rift in Cardiff, only days after he'd left Jack back with Mickey and Martha. The Doctor can't help but grin at the sight of Jack, running towards the familiar wheezing groan of the machine with a spirited step and his greatcoat flapping behind him in the wind. The lack of any of his team mates being in tow gives the Doctor pause, but he shrugs it off as he exits the TARDIS, John following him in step.
When Jack sees the two of them he frowns, then grins. "So you guys came to take me up on that offer?"
"Oi!" says John, offended and yet a little flattered. The Doctor laughs and it sounds oddly unnatural. "We just came to recharge, that's all."
"And visit you, naturally," the Doctor butts in. "Making sure the boys and girls of Torchwood are working hard and not blowing Cardiff up. Say hello to the gang, nip around the corner to buy more biscuits from the grocery store, things like that. Maybe even stop a local alien invasion while we're in."
The Doctor and John exchange looks, and soon the Doctor has his arm slung around Jack's shoulder and the both of them are heading towards the Hub, the Doctor chattering in the immortal's ear about how much fun he had the last time he visited Cardiff. Jack manages to glance back to see John wave them off with a smile before heading off on his own way.
When the doors to the lift close behind them, Jack asks "Doctor? Are you and him -"
"Oh, he's just gone to the shops for a little pantry restocking. Nothing wrong with that, right?" Another laugh. "Besides, I came here to talk to you. He doesn't need to hang around me while we talk. Yep, it'll be better in the end if he gets more comfortable with the area."
As they descend into the heart of the Hub, Jack represses a shiver despite it being spring. He hasn't seen this look in the Doctor's eyes since they were on the Valiant together. He hasn't seen a look like that on anyone since last week, when the other Doctor wiped out the Daleks without hesitation. He wonders if letting the Doctor into their HQ wasn't a big mistake.
John finds himself at the local Asda, lurking down the sweets aisles searching for biscuits and maybe some chocolate bars, wondering why the Doctor rushed to get to Jack Harkness' company. As he grabs a couple of boxes of jaffa cakes, he starts considering the possibilities: alien threat; Torchwood's safety; Jack's finally getting married to Ianto; there's another crack between dimensions. Nothing is gelling, and without his normal Time Lord consciousness, John can't pick up on the problems of the local time lines like usual.
A familiar redhead brushes by him, and John chokes on air, wondering why the hell Donna Noble is in an Asda in Cardiff and not at home where she can not see him. She turns to look at him, brow quirked like she's thinking, and John's heart drops. Think fast, idiot, think fast. And then he realizes that he can do good, finally. Everybody lives, Donna! Everybody lives!
"Miss?" Donna gives him a look for calling her miss, but John continues. "I just wanted to let you know that I am a very dangerous man and that whenver you see me, you should run as fast as you can and never look back. Because I might kill you on accident."
Donna takes a big step back. The look of horror on her face is so devastating that John has to resist the urge to bundle her up in his arms and tell her he didn't mean it, that she is going to be all right in the end. But she won't, not if John doesn't finish his job. When she speaks, she is absolutely outraged. "The hell are you? Some kind of pervert?"
John frowns. "You don't understand. You have to run away from me, even if my suit is brown or blue or black, because you might die if you don't."
"You're a nutter! Leave me alone!" Donna turns to get away from the mad man in the blue suit, but he grabs her arm and keeps her in place for a fragile moment.
"You have to promise me. You're a wonderful woman and I can't let you die. You have to run from me!"
"Let me go and I'll run all right, straight to the police!" Donna twisted until she was free of John's grasp, then began running down the aisle away from him, trying to block out his shouts with her hands.
Alone again, John sighs, and stuffs another box of sugary things in his basket. Wonderful. And there was no way to see if she took his advice without telling the Doctor how badly he'd screwed up - and telling the Doctor he'd pulled a trick only a stupid ape would ever consider didn't rate very highly on his to-do list. He manages to leave Asda with his goodies and heads back to the TARDIS, thanking Lady Luck that Donna didn't think to give his description to the store police.
Back in the Hub, Jack and the Doctor are sitting on the couch and talking over cups of hot tea. Jack can't help but notice how tense the Doctor seems, that there's a wrinkle at his left eye that hadn't been there last time. Clearly a lot more time had passed for the Doctor than Jack, and he had not spent the time well. He wants to ask about Donna and Rose, but the look on the Doctor's face when he had slumped onto the couch answered all that he needed to know. Jack was glad that Gwen was on vacation and that Ianto was in the basement doing inventory. They didn't have to see the Doctor like this.
"Jack," the Doctor starts, "I know we haven't been on the best terms before. The whole Satellite Five thing, for one."
"Doctor, why are you bringing this up again?" Jack frowns. He blows weakly onto his cup of tea, watches the steam rise off. "Is this about what happened with the Crucible and the stars going out, and why you're with - well, yourself?"
The Doctor grins, teeth bared like a madman. "Nope. Well, sort of. Was just thinking that you can't run the Hub with three people, even if they're you and Ianto and Gwen, lovely people all around, I'm sure. You need extensive knowledge on the people and creatures who roam the universe, someone who knows the lingo and doesn't need a guidebook just to tell what is a dangerous weapon and what is a high-tech toilet seat."
"Someone like you?" Jack hazards. He winces as the Doctor leans forward, abandoning his cup of tea on a nearby coffee table so he can rest his hands on his legs as he looks Jack in the eye. It's hard not to notice up close that the Doctor smells like stale tea leaves and desperation.
"Someone who is me." The Doctor laughs. He's been laughing a lot lately, at different things. Right now it's at the prospect of a TARDIS without John, and a universe without two Doctors. Where he's the last of the Time Lords all over again. He laughs, and it's a terrible sound that spooks Jack like none other.
The lift doors open again and John pokes his head out. "Hello!" He sees Jack and smiles broadly. "Jack! Do you like jaffa cakes? I bought an extra box just for the three of us."
The Doctor waves John over to the couch. "Oh, Jack just loves jaffa cakes." He looks back at Jack and nods. "See? You've got a snack boy to go with your tea boy."
Jack stands up abruptly, holding a now cold cup of tea. He's no idiot, but he does know when he's being played for a fool. "John, excuse me, I need to have a private word with the Doctor." And with that, he grabs the Doctor by the wrist and drags him into his office, locking the door and closing all the blinds behind them. Jack doesn't have to shout to get his point across, and neither does the Doctor. John can't understand the conversation beyond their hushed murmurs but they sound angry, so he busies himself with setting out the cakes and some fresh cups of tea. The TARDIS key feels heavy in his pocket, weighing down the fabric. John sits down, closes his eyes, and thinks for what seems like the longest time about what he should do. About Donna. About the Doctor. About himself.
When the Doctor and Jack emerge from the office, exhausted and resigned, they find that John has disappeared, leaving only the food behind. The tea is still hot in their cups, freshly poured for what was going to be a friendly sit-down. Jack is ready to call up Ianto so they can find John when they hear it, a loud sound like someone scraping a key across a bare piano wire. Wheezing and groaning and singing at the same time.
By the time the Doctor, Jack and Ianto (who heard the noise from the basement) reach the street level of Cardiff, the TARDIS is gone. And, as they find out half an hour later, so is holidaying office temp Donna Noble.
Even without his time machine, the Doctor can feel the time lines start to shake and splinter under the weight of John's good intentions.
The last time he used the Chameleon Arch, it was to run away from someone who wanted to kill him just for being a Time Lord. A failed regeneration later, and John finds himself using the device to save someone who only half an hour ago had wanted to kill him in the aisles of a supermarket just for being a total nutjob. At least she tried to run, John reasons as he struggles to strap Donna Noble into the Arch's system. Donna, who is screaming and thrashing and crying out of desperation because she doesn't know that no one can hear her within the TARDIS' walls.
"Donna, I'm trying to save you," John says. He looks her in the eye as he talks, keeps his tone calm and cool. "Let me help you. You are a brilliant woman and I can't lose you a third time." Lucky for John, he still has a bit of the hypnotist's skill with him, and soon Donna is docile and willing and so very non-Donna that it only serves to make John work harder at fixing her brain. Being grabbed and shoved into a wooden blue box that ends up being bigger on the inside than the outside then seeing the man from earlier all served to half-prompt her brain into remembering that she has forgotten something; John works on borrowed time, against the atomic bomb of a clock that is ticking away in Donna's brain.
There's another headset for the Arch. He has already set the program a hundred times over in his head since the incident in the clothing store, writing in his head the code necessary to turn the device into a different kind of biology changer - and now it's been set in via the console, waiting for John to flip the switch once and for all. He has to mentally shoo away the image of the Doctor looking forlornly at him from the nothingness of space as he puts the other set on his own head, strapping himself in. It's going to hurt, but he doesn't care.
"If this doesn't work - Donna?"
"Uh-huh?"
"If you live and see a skinny guy in trainers and a brown suit? Tell him I really liked him." John grins. "He's not a bad guy, even if he tried to get rid of me."
"S-sounds like an idiot." Donna frowns, and it's kinda cute but definitely not her. John is going to fix that too.
"Oh, and this is gonna hurt like hell, so just hold on, Donna Noble." He reaches out and takes her hand. Despite herself, she squeezes it and manages to smile despite the fear running through her face.
When the Chameleon Arch activates, John and Donna both cry out in pain, and the heart of the TARDIS cries out with them. For a second, the ship disappears from the Vortex - it disappears from reality itself. A second later, it reappears in orbit above Earth, spewing streams of stardust from the box's light into space.
Donna Noble wakes up, head throbbing and limbs aching like she's run a marathon or five, and immediately slaps the nearest man who looks like that git the Doctor.
After they learn of John dragging poor Donna into a mysterious blue box only to disappear without a trace, the Hub is alive with activity, using all its available resources to track the TARDIS down. They even have to call Gwen in for an extra pair of hands, despite her being on vacation. Ianto notices the jaffa cakes and tea sitting out and says nothing. Since Jack's wrist space hopper is out of commission, there's no real tech in the Hub that can be used to bring back the TARDIS from its virtual limbo, but the main computer can at least be used to track where it is. For a while, they watch a tiny symbol of the TARDIS set against a black background, the generated co-ordinates indicating that it's technically nowhere at the moment.
The Doctor makes it his job to sit in front of the computer and watch the screen. He even tells the others they would do better just to continue their usual work and ignore him. Jack almost argues, but then a report comes in about a Weevil attack, and the Torchwood team are guiltily grateful for the distraction. As she suits up for work, Gwen glances at the Doctor and the grief evident in his features breaks her heart. When they leave, they don't say a word, even if they may feel like they're being kicked out of their own headquarters. Jack is the last one to vacate the premises, so he gives the Doctor a short squeeze of the shoulder, and the alien's body feels like stone.
In the high-roofed chambers of Torchwood, the Doctor is alone with only the pixelated symbol of his own ship to keep him company. Inside it is the human aspect of himself and his companion thought untouchable. And yet there they were, and the fact that he could not tell what John was doing with Donna in his time machine was driving him absolutely mad. He finds that just being away from John's side is ripping his mind in two, ironic as it sounds.
"John," the Doctor breathes. "You silly man. I was only going to make your life better. Keep you safe. Give you to someone who can appreciate you." These lies taste sweet on his tongue but go down rotten. He already feels silly begging a computer-generated image to come back to him. "You scare me and you shouldn't exist and you keep on making me run after you. You impossible thing." Rose Tyler crawling across space with a cannon. Martha Jones backpacking through a year that never came true. Donna Noble and a year of adventures she'll never remember. Now John and a life born from a metacrisis that defies all logic. It was becoming a familiar chorus: defy the Doctor's expectations, keep him on his feet.
"I never expected my own hand to get mad at me." He laughs, and it shakes from his fraying nerves. "I know I've screwed up. What am I supposed to do now? You take my TARDIS and my companion and except me not to be upset? Oh, I don't expect you to respond. Tea? No? Okay, well then. I couldn't leave you with Rose because I didn't want her living with a lie. I didn't appreciate how dangerous you really are."
I should have thrown out that hand. He lets the words die unspoken on his lips. It's too cruel, even if John can't hear him. The Doctor can't bring himself to regret accidentally giving life to John, no matter how troublesome it has become. And that's when the TARDIS blips out of existence. The sound shocks the Doctor enough to have him jump to his feet. When he recovers, the screen reads that the TARDIS is hovering in a patch of space directly above the Cardiff rift and the sight of such beautiful co-ordinates has the Doctor letting out a whoop of joy. His joy quickly disappears when the TARDIS goes out of range, and he realizes that John has made the ship virtually untraceable.
Even as his hands fly nimbly over the controls, the Doctor has the feeling that he'll only be able to find John and his TARDIS again when John feels like letting them meet again. He doesn't hear anything but the blood rushing between his ears in a sickening pound-pound-pound-pound like the sound of drums clicking against his brain.
The TARDIS lands with a soft thump in a field of bright green grass swaying innocently in the wind, the sky a bright mix of azure and indigo. There are trees covered in silver bark off in the distance. Donna is the first one to walk out the box's doors, taking slow steps like it's her first alien planet all over again. She breathes in the freshest air she's even experienced, and it leaves her light-headed - so she succumbs to her baser instincts, kicks off her heels and falls into a deep patch of grass only a couple of feet away from the TARDIS. For the first time since she forgot everything, Donna feels content.
John stands in the doorway, looking over the planet's surface with a surveying eye. He's been here before, back when he was blond and brash and in need of a break from the universe's stress. Funny how things come full circle like they do. He still can't help but go on a mini lecture amid all the natural beauty of the land. "And this is the planet Rilassari, one of the most relaxing in the universe. They say it's virtually impossible to be mad while on Rilassari, everything is so disarming and peaceful."
"Is that why you brought me here? So I wouldn't thump you again?"
John frowns. "Hey now! I came here for the both of us, actually. I think we both deserve a break." He lapses into silence, remembering how Donna reacted to having her memories back - and then learning that she was no longer part Time Lord. And then John was no longer part human. To feel the particles of time itself roar through his body again after the pain of turning into a pure Gallifreyan - that was only half the reward. The look on Donna's face as she realized all the adventures and moments she could remember new again - that was the other half.
"Oi!" Donna's voice shocks John out of his thoughts. "Get over here, alien boy, there's enough grass for everyone!"
With a grin, John steps out and lays himself down next to Donna, the green soft blades tickling what skin is exposed on his neck. "Yeah, I guess I am back to being alien boy, bona fide at that."
"You're not like the Doctor, though," Donna pointed out. "You're less loud and hyper, and you don't have all your emotions bundled up where no one can touch you."
"I guess being human for even a couple of months changed me. I'm physically a Time Lord but I'm still mentally human." John shrugs. "Good ol' John Smith, born from a hand in a jar and a very adventurous young woman."
"You're younger than me now!" Donna fake-shivers. "That's too icky to think about. You're even younger than my granddad now. At least you don't get carded."
"I may be only four months old, but I'm full of experience," John says, pouting, and it's enough to earn a soft punch in the arm from Donna. "I wonder if the Doctor's mad at me."
"You stole the TARDIS and me when you weren't supposed to. Here's a hint: he's probably not happy about it." Donna plays with a longish blade of grass, twisting it around her fingers listlessly.
"Oh, don't worry about it. He loves me."
"If we weren't on such a relaxing planet, I'd probably be shocked. Isn't that a little dodgy?"
John smiles. "He always needed someone who understood him. Who better than himself?" He sighs deeply. "Maybe we should go back and make sure he hasn't burnt down Torchwood Wales or something."
Donna can't help but grin, which John catches and lets out an "Oi!" which only serves to make Donna burst out laughing. "Don't even think about that Captain Harkness!" They seem to be enjoying themselves, so they don't really rush to leave, but let the atmosphere of Rilassari wash over them in calming waves. They lie shoulder-to-shoulder in a field of beautiful grass and let the wind rustle through their hair and for a moment they both feel that everything will turn out okay, in the end.
When they get into the TARDIS, before John sets the co-ordinates for Cardiff, he asks of Donna a big favor that he feels he'll never be able to repay in his lifetime: he hands her a metallic bottle from the bathroom and asks her to make him ginger.
John does not bother landing on top of the Rift. He's made it so that the TARDIS is undetectable, so he has the element of surprise on his side. Instead, he lands right in the heart of the Hub, setting off every alarm and klaxon siren in the building; wincing, he sends out a subwave signal from the TARDIS like a megaphone that quickly shuts off the noise, much to Donna's amusement. The amusement disappears when the scanner shows the Doctor standing in the middle of the room, staring at the blue police box with a stony expression.
"He's a bit frightening . . . " Donna trails off, looking nervous.
The other Time Lord reaches over and gives her hand a squeeze. "He's been through a lot since you left. We all have. Let's go see how he is." The doors open, and hand in hand they walk out together to face the wrath of a coldly angry god.
The Doctor sees Donna, and tears start to gather in his eyes. Then he sees John, and he looks aghast. "You - you didn't!"
John grins. "I did."
"No fair!" The Doctor stamps his foot. "You're ginger before I am!"
"And I helped," Donna teases, which only makes the Doctor's little temper tantrum worse. Despite that, she can't help but step forward and hug the Doctor as tightly as possible. "You idiot, I missed you without even knowing it."
"Yeah. Sorry about that." The Doctor took a step back from Donna's embrace and looked her over. "Any headaches? Burning synapses? Sudden loss of consciousness?"
Donna laughs. "No, Doctor, I'm fit as a fiddle. All thanks to John Smith back there." She sees the Doctor wince and wonders what she said wrong. "He fixed me with the Chameleon Arch."
The Doctor looks at her, then looks at John, and it hits him straight in the chest that there are now two Time Lords in the building, and Donna isn't one of them. His jaw drops. "You -"
John nods. "Donna is now all human. And I'm all Time Lord. A little switch in DNA is all it took to make things right." He grins. "Brilliant, right?"
In a flash, the Doctor turns from astonished to angry. He's in John's face shouting the loudest he ever has, ignoring Donna's presence at John's elbow. She starts backing away as the man turns more rageful. "What were you thinking? Stealing the TARDIS, kidnapping Donna, gambling both your lives on a piece of technology that isn't meant for that kind of thing? Do you think that's going to save her? Do you realize the terrible damage you've done to the time line? I'll be surprised if all of Cardiff doesn't burn down because you dared to swan off and do something so foolish! You're not a real Time Lord, you don't understand the implications your actions make on the fabric of reality!"
John shoves the Doctor back, and he falls on his ass with a yelp. "You hypocrite! Telling me I can't risk my life to save someone else's life when you do it all the time? If I made such a terrible mistake, where are the Reapers? The Chronovores? I'm just as Time Lord as you are now, so don't assume I haven't a clue how this works, okay?" He lets out a pained breath he never knew he'd been holding, and the tension simply drains from his body. "I - I just wanted to save Donna for once."
Donna reached out and took John's hand; it was cold in contrast to her own. She wonders idly if it was the hand he was born with. "Doctor, stop and think for one moment in your life. He saved me, even if he looked like a total crazy in the process. Where's the harm in it?"
The Doctor looks at Donna. When he answers, his voice cracks on her name. "Because he already killed you, Donna Noble. Then he crossed back into his own time line and stopped that from happening. You're supposed to die five months from now, in a clothing shop in Chiswick." Even over the sound of Donna's fearful crying for her life and John's constant mumbled apologies, he can hear the flapping of wings in the distance: winged beasts ready to devour the paradoxes now living within the Hub.
Of course, the TARDIS is deemed useless by the presence of the Reapers. It's become only an average police phone box - phone and everything. There seems once again to be nothing in the Hub that can protect them against creatures like them, and the Doctor suddenly realizes why Jack and his kind haven't come back yet. He swallows hard.
He ends up retreating into the Hub's basement, intent on finding anything to combat the Reapers, even when he knows only one thing will stop them - and that one thing was standing by John, asking him what the hell the Doctor meant by "he already killed you". When John explains how it happened, Donna slaps him. Then apologizes. Then slaps him again (and this one she does not take back).
"What the hell am I supposed to do now?" Donna asked quietly.
"You let us protect you," John answers. "As long as we can."
"Until when? Until those damn Reapers have mowed down all of Wales and then some? It's me they want, so I'll just hand myself over and it will end."
"Donna." John is close to tears. So much for classic Time Lord stoicism, he thinks to himself bitterly. "In order to mend the paradox and drive them away . . . you have to die."
Donna nods. "Yeah." She sounds scared. "I know. I think I've done this before, though. If it means saving you two and my family, though, what am I supposed to do? You should know better, alien boy."
"I know." John gives Donna one last hug. "You saved me, you know. I'm so sorry."
"Not making it easier."
"Sorry."
"John." Donna stands back and takes in John's features. "You look good as a ginger. Just wanted to let you know."
And with that, she squares her shoulders up, takes a deep breath, and walks into the Hub lift like someone marching to their own funeral.
"You're brilliant, Donna Noble," John calls out. "Most brilliant woman in the universe."
He can see Donna smiling through her tears. "Yeah, I'm pretty awesome," she says before the lift doors close between her and John for the last time. When the Doctor emerges from the Hub's basment ten minutes later, John is leaning against a very real looking TARDIS, looking still at the spot where Donna Noble said goodbye. He takes John's hand in his own, cold palms against cold palms, and they stand together in silence all in honor of a great woman.
Jack and his team comes back, freed from the paradox eaters, to find all alarms going off and the TARDIS along with its occupants missing. They end up eating John's jaffa cakes and trying to piece together what the hell just happened.
By itself, saving Donna Noble would not have caused the presence of Reapers. But the fact that it was caused by an impossible thing by the name of John Smith turned the whole situation on its head. Tricky thing, time. The Doctor wishes he could have said goodbye to Donna one last time, but it wasn't his to do. It was John's turn to say goodbye.
Funny how everything turned out: the Doctor was technically traveling with himself, only this "himself" was a different Time Lord version, more human than the Doctor, physically an alien but mentally just like the woman who helped him be born in the first place. And now he was ginger to boot, which was just mean if you asked the man who had been trying for red hair with each regeneration since he left Gallifrey the first time.
For the first time, the Doctor forgives John (although he can't yet forgive himself for the thousands of mistakes he's made). He forgets his scheme of leaving the man with Torchwood and starts treating him as a genuine companion. Even when they've both seen the universe, there are still so many wonders that take their breath away or make their blood freeze in its veins. The world is a wonderful place, thinks John, and I've got to experience it for two now. On occasion, he runs a hand through his red hair and smiles.
When night falls, John sleeps just for the fun of it. His dreams are no longer hellish nightmares of people long gone from his life, but a wide future where things are better. He shares the same bed with the Doctor, and they make love on good days and hold each other on bad days. When they stumble into nineteenth century London while on the trail of some very gassy Slitheen, they end up sharing a hansom cab with Oscar Wilde, who gives them a knowing look (well, they were holding hands, and the Doctor's sonic screwdriver was sticking out of his pants pocket at an odd angle, but still). In the twenty-first century, they catch a sight of a nearby newspaper and figure out why people had been asking if they were in their own Lib-Con coalition. They briefly stop holding hands so much, especially around certain politicians who fancy yellow ties.
When people ask, they trot out an old familiar line: "Oh, we're not together. No, not us." And then they go and clutch each other in the face of danger like back in the days of monochromatic adventures and young men in kilts. They are terrible liars when it comes to this kind of thing, after all. It doesn't help that many people see the biodamper on John's finger as a wedding band - and then make the logical assumption on who the lucky spouse is.
Still, even if the Doctor has forgiven him, and John has forgiven the Doctor for being an insufferable ass, one thing is painfully obvious - that nothing comes easy.
Luck runs out for everyone, even two mismatched Time Lords, and for them it starts to run out on a space freighter heading towards a nearby planet's surface at the kind of angle and speed that suggests a rough, deadly crash. They manage to knock the saboteur unconscious and send him with the rest of the ship's crew in an escape pod, except that it is the only escape pod on the ship and soon afterward the door to the room with the pod's control console is stuck closed from an electric shortage - and the TARDIS was about two rooms over. In short, the two of them were trapped unless they could think of something dangerous and clever. The Doctor huddles up by a panel of buttons next to the door, trying to get it fixed as usual via sonic screwdriver, while John ends pacing on the steel-paneled floors behind him, looking like he is about to blow a gasket from stress.
"Ngh." The Doctor winces as a spark leaps from the open panel to graze his cheek. "Maybe I should wear some anti-static gloves, these shocks are killing me."
"Maybe you should have kept that saboteur around, he seemed handy enough with dangerous electronics." There is an edge to John's voice.
"If you have enough time to complain about it, come over here and help me. Two Time Lords are always better than one, you know." The Doctor halfheartedly waves John over before resuming to the task at hand.
John really doesn't move to the Doctor's call. "Have you tried reversing the polarity?"
"Of course. First thing I did."
"Make a manual feedback so the door opens on a false command?"
"What? Of course! Don't be a backseat technician if you can't think of anything better?"
"Did you try blowing down the door with all that hot air?"
"Get over here already!" The Doctor starts poking his sonic screwdriver deeper into the mess of wires and equipment within the panel, and it's when John's shadow falls glumly over his hand that the tip of his device hits something electric and the force of high-amped sonic meeting high-amped electricity manages to blow back the Doctor about ten feet while opening the door with a shudder and a broken ping.
John manages to grab the Doctor (who has been knocked out by a support beam hanging out of the wall) by his bony shoulders and drag him across the floor all the way to the TARDIS' doors, where it is a mad fumble to get the key out, unlock the doors, and get inside and dematerialize before the entire ship goes kabloom - which it dioes only a handful of seconds after the blue box's outline fades away completely.
The Doctor comes to minutes later to find himself lying on a loveseat in the console room while John tends to the controls, checking that the ship was not damaged by the aftermath.
"Why is it that it's become easier to be more dangerous now?" John murmurs to himself; his voice drifting easily through the room and to the Doctor's ears. "We used to drag away our own companions for acting so reckless and nearly dying for us. Why are we doing it now?
"Because we can, naturally. Take risks, expose ourselves to danger without thinking." John is very good at answering himself, and the Doctor isn't fully conscious yet so he can't very well argue the fact. "We have lives to spare. Err, not many of course, but more than a human being has, which isn't saying much but it's still true. I'm not human anymore, so who knows? Maybe this time will be different."
The Doctor finds his voice. "This time?" He looks over at John, who is checking one of the panels on the console with eerie attention, turns around and gives the other Time Lord a crafty grin.
"We're the only ones. We can start over from this point, make everything better. Think how easily we defeated the Daleks and Davros! Cybermen! Slitheen! We could do so much more!" John throws his arms out. "We are the last of the Time Lords and the first of a new race of saviors for the universe!"
With shaky strides, the Doctor walks over to John and takes him by the shoulders, grasping him so hard that the other man's bones make indents in his palms. "Are you serious?" he shouts, face red. "We can't do that! We're better than what we destroyed - better than those hypocrites dead on Gallifrey - we can never go back to that, you understand? Just because we are the last of our kind doesn't mean we can go and re-do the mistakes of the old guard!"
John takes a step back, shrugging the Doctor's hands off with relative ease. He looks confused. "Isn't that what we've been doing the whole time - making the universe better? Gallifrey never cared about the good of others, but we do. We can use the power at our disposal to make terrible things like Daleks and Cybermen disappear, save so many lives. These aren't mistakes! We can do better this time!"
"No." In his mind, the Doctor feels his will slowly bending. He imagines companions lost or changed forever by the world from the follies of universal evil: Katarina; Adric; Peri; Ace; Martha - too many to name or even count. But it can't be right. "What can we do?" he whispers harshly.
"We can change the world." John takes the Doctor's hands into his, leans forward until their foreheads are lightly touching. "We can be victorious." The Doctor gasps and twists in his hands as John enters his mind roughly, then relaxes and sighs and images flow into his mind's eye - images of a universe where no one has to live in fear, no one has to suffer in silence, and words like "war" and "famine" belong better in an ancient history textbook. It is ideal and he wants it so bad he can taste it (sweet and crisp on his tongue). He wants to actually win, for once.
As strands of John's consciousness wrap themselves through the Doctor's minds, a feeling of unmatched lightness washes over his body and calms his quickly-beating hearts. His physical body is being led over to the nearby loveseat by John's guiding hands, settling into it until his head sinks back into the cushions, but his mind is spiraling into the stars like a starling, following the colorful trails left behind by John's own mind. He can see planets and galaxies and whole civilizations thought dead brought back to life through the other's eyes and it thrills at the core. John leans over and brushes a hand through the Doctor's unruly mane of hair, and it sends hot sparks through his spine. His fingers dig into the other's hips and as the Doctor bucks up to meet his companion's body, their consciousnesses start to intertwine like complex ribbons, crawling over each other at great lengths while physically their bodies strained to join as they frantically rubbed together through their clothes. Trousers and jackets and shoes are quickly discarded and tossed aside to the floor. Tongues run over bare skin covered in thin layers of sweat as John climbs up through the Doctor's cerebral cortex, systematically touching certain spots that have the Doctor moaning in ten different languages.
As John takes the other man's member in his hand and starts stroking it to rigidity, he finds the emotional core of the Doctor's mind, the part where all of his hopes and dreams and desires lay together and gives meaning to his actions. He plunges into it over and over, taking large tastes of the Doctor's true self while said man squirms under his fast-paced touch until finally climaxing in John's hand, shooting his seed on the man's stomach.
"John," the Doctor gasps. His breath comes out in short pants and his face is becoming shiny with heat, like he's just run a marathon. "Where do we start? Ah - when?" For the first time, he's asking John's opinion and he actually cares about it.
"Anywhere we want." John leans forward to try and kiss the Doctor's lips, but is pushed away and is greeted to a sly look.
"We can start after I finish you. What, did you think you were gonna top me forever, ginger boy?" The Doctor is soon straddling John from above, grasping the other man's hips as they grind and rut together, and he reteaches John how human beings make love because this will be the last time.
The planet Umziehen lays innocently in Mutter's Spiral, a whirling ball of rock and dust. This is back when the inhabitants started evolving their own systems to compensate for the high levels of salt in the atmosphere by drinking blood, before they turned from citizens of Umziehen to the planet-hopping Plasmavores, changing their shapes to drink the liquid that will keep them alive. This won't happen. It would have, but a blue police box materializes on the roof of the main government's building and stops everything.
Soldiers swarm the box, aiming high-powered rifles at the strange craft. Some of the foot soldiers quickly shift into more threatening visages, looking to scare the box into disappearing. Underneath their feet, scientists are scrambling to look the box up and find out what the hell is going on while aides are prepping a negotiator to come outside in an attempt to reason with the device. The President of Umziehen's republic is flying toward the center of all the action via copter, but air traffic is busy that morning and is a bitch to get through. There is no cohesive form of news broadcasting on the planet, so only civilians in the building's radius have an inkling of what may be going on.
For a brief moment, the Doctor considers turning on the TARDIS' outside speakers and making some sort of grandiose self-serving speech, explaining why the Umziehen planet is being targeted. Tell them the horrible crimes they will soon commit on millions of beings across the stars. Then he decides, no. The idea of rambling on over the PA does not appeal to him for once in his life. Besides, they have work to do. Umziehen is only a stepping stone on a grander sort of path to something better. The Doctor pulls a lever on a complicated device attached to the console, and the plan goes into action.
When the blue box begins emitting a strange downpour that only touches the roof of the ship, everyone thinks it has activated some sort of sprinkler system. And then the mystery sprinkler's range grows larger, going beyond the radius of the TARDIS in an ever-growing circle. A brave soldier steps forward in an attempt to examine the substance, then falls back as some splashes onto his face. As soldiers begin retreating back into the building, they see the fallen man's face is blistered and bloody from the rain. There is a forced evacuation of the government's headquarters, and they are able to wire the news to the President before realizing than an outside force has overridden the security system and opened all windows and vents. The killing water seeps into the building and does its damage to everyone inside, in only a matter of minutes.
The President, still in his copter, sees a hard dark rain approaching from the heart of the city. He smells it and tries to warn the shuttle's pilot, but they are soon in the thick of it. The rain burns through the roof of the copter and moments later it crashes into the ground and smoulders in the rainfall; no survivors. There are no survivors on the entire planet. Umziehen burns as the rain keeps falling. It has only been ten minutes since the blue box appeared and now there is nothing left.
Inside the TARDIS, John grins as he inputs a new set of co-ordinates into the console. "See? Highly concentrated sodium chloride with a splash of nitric acid for punch. No more Plasmavores."
The Doctor leans back against the railings, looking exhausted. "Where are we going next?"
John frowns. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah. Just tired." Even as he says it, it tastes like a lie. "So, what's the next place? Keep in mind nothing time locked for now, leave the tricky trips for later." He wonders how long until the TARDIS revolts against all this hopping around. Umziehen had been their third visit, after Varos in the 22nd century and Dallas, Texas in 1963.
"I was thinking a little jaunt to Scotland, say 1878. Torchwood Estate." There is a dangerous spark in his eyes as he speaks. "It's a year before the official birth of Torchwood, and we're going to stop it."
"What, by burning down the building?" The Doctor starts to pace around the room, lost in thought. "We'll definitely have to deal with the Brethren first, the werewolf too. Can't have the Queen bitten in the end. We'll have to make sure the Torchwood name doesn't live on in some other form, or else it'll just crop up in another place."
"The MacLeash Family," says John. "They own the Estate. They started it. We have to make them disappear."
"No, no, no, no," the Doctor says frantically, stepping down from the upper level of the console room to talk to John in closer quarters. "We can't condemn a whole family to death because of one organization. Can we? Sounds rather like killing a fly with a bazooka - a large time-stomping history-eating bazooka with teeth. You know, suddenly arson seems a rather cheery alternative, don't you think? We can even have a campfire-"
"You said you'd help me!" John roars. His face flushes all the way up to his red roots. "We have to do this, even if people die, because the positives outweigh the negatives!" He faces the Doctor and takes a step forward, which causes the Doctor to flinch minutely and step back.
"John. I do! We're doing this together, remember?" The Doctor offers John a weak smile, but it has no real effect.
"If we do this," John says, voice dropping darkly, "Rose lives. With us, not in the other world. We can get her back, see?" He smiles. "And we can save everyone else, and it'll be just like old times, a little family living in the TARDIS. You and me and Rose and Martha and Donna and Jack and Sarah Jane and Jenny and Reinette and Lynda . . . wouldn't it be nice?"
The Doctor sighs, starts rubbing his forehead as if irritated and not at all interested in John's words. He sticks his hands in his pockets and begins pacing again.
"Doctor?" John watches him, unmoving from beside the console.
"I'm thinking." His brow furrows in thought, mulling over the millions of possibilities running through his head. He had seen the new universe proposed by John in his head and he had taken a great big leap of faith thinking it would work. To hold his companions in his arms again, show them the stars like old times, keep them by his side until the very end - his selfish wishes almost come to fruition. There is only one problem and it is the same problem as before, back when he couldn't be held back. Now he wants to be free and finds himself butting into the same old obstacle.
"Doctor!" John comes round to where he's standing, face lit up. "I have an idea! If we go back to the Regent's-" He can see the Doctor's smile, his arm come casually around the shoulders of his blue suit, his face listening intently as he leans in, but he never sees the sonic screwdriver set to stun gun mode until it has zapped the back of his neck. He falls into the Doctor's arms, and hears him say how sorry he is before blacking out.
It feels like hours have passed when John comes to consciousness. The attack took him by surprise, so it takes him longer than usual to recover from the shock. Pain still ripples faintly through his neck, so he keeps his eyes closed and tries to focus on driving the pain away. All the while, he wonders where the hell he is, because it is certainly not the TARDIS: too cold; floor too hard; he always knows when he's been displaced from the old girl's body.
He opens his eyes and looks up. Across from him, on the opposite wall, is a large sign that is singed and battered but the red letters still read as clearly as they did when they were put there: BAD WOLF CORPORATION.
It's the Game Station. John is on the god damn Game Station. The pain in his body is replaced by fury, both at himself for being so easy and the Doctor for dumping him in this place of all the abandoned satellites in the universe. John manages to get to his feet before noticing the TARDIS key is missing from his pocket, and his fury quickly turns to sorrow. He wonders if it would have been more merciful leaving him behind with the exploding Crucible long ago, or on the beach in Norway with the Tylers, or even wiped clean like a slate ala Donna. The image of Donna breaks his hearts again and even ruffling his own red hair can't bring a smile to his face.
John starts wandering around the station, listening for some kind of voice or noise that would betray another person's presence. They probably all abandoned ship a good time ago, after the battle with the Daleks, after realizing that the satellite was pretty much unsalvageable. Maybe someone will come back and try to bring back the old glory of Satellite Five. Judging by the wear and tear on the equipment and the dust everywhere, John figures that would not be any time soon.
He stumbles into the room where he faced down the Dalek Emperor, back when he was short haired and wearing a leather jacket. It looks like a crew came in and salvaged all the useable parts from what was supposed to be his ultimate weapon against the Dalek fleet than never got used. Pity; he could have used some of it. He feels like he could use some of Rose's human ingenuity and bravery, the kind that absorbs the heart of a strange device just to save some alien man's life. John ends up sitting where the TARDIS once stood, except on a broken crate someone left behind in the shuffle. The screen where the Dalek Emperor taunted him from space is now powerless, but he still looks at it, wondering if he can jimmy the signal and use some reserve power left in the satellite to make it a broadcasting site one last time.
When he stands to take a stab at fixing the signal, pain runs through his left side and John hisses; it feels like half of his body is burning. The pain fades away into the background, but it is still there, and it haunts his every step as he walks to the broken control panel. He doesn't know how in the hell he can do anything without his (no, his) sonic screwdriver, but he doesn't have the luxury of time on his side. Not like he thought he did.
Luckily, however, he does have a standard non-sonic screwdriver, which after a few excruciating minutes unscrews the panel shielding, exposing the main motherboard amid a sea of wires and faintly flashing lights. Typical of this century. John moves to remove the device for closer examination when the pain returns with such force than it brings him to his knees, bumping his head against the bottom of the console as he falls. He stands woozily and sees in the blank reflection of the dead screen that there's a bruise on his forehead, a trickle of blood running down his neck, and his shoulder is twisted at an odd angle: not typical injuries for a simple fall-and-bump.
"No." John brushes his hand against his neck, smearing blood across the skin. "Not now." Visions of the Doctor, all smiles and energy, swim through his head. "Did he know?" Certainly not. Or else he would have never chucked him out. He weakly wonders if the Doctor was able to stop Torchwood from being born. For some reason, he is finding it difficult to gauge any current changes in his own time line; that and the wounds are enough to scare him.
When he moves his right hand back to try and resume work, it feels loose at the wrist, like his hand is about to fall off at the carpus and drop onto the floor in a dead hunk of flesh. "No! Why in the name of Rassilon can't I keep it together long enough to get - this - done?" John almosts slams his injured fist into the console until he realizes that might not be the best idea.
John starts again to try and re-work the satellite's signal with his one working hand, all the while painfully aware of the unpleasant sensations running through the injured side of his body. He realizes that taking his own advice on gloves would have been nice when the wires start shocking his fingers, leaving him with a very numb thumb and singed tips. An abandoned mobile phone from twenty years ago gets gutted and turns his once antique screwdriver into a partially sonic one that can call only 800 numbers. It's good enough for his purposes, and soon enough he's got all the essential parts of the console out and spread around him, ready to be fiddled with and rearranged into something more useful.
He spits out blood and it stains his pantleg, red turning black on dirty blue fabric. The accumulated dust and grime is starting to rub off on his clothes and hands. He sneezes, and the blasted screwdriver drops from his left hand which has gone numb; he tries slapping his hand against his leg, but it only registers halfway. The nerves in his hands are slowly going necrotic, and he's pretty sure both of them will become functionally useless in the next ten minutes.
In desperation, John reaches out mentally for the TARDIS; he gets back loud screeching and crying from the old girl's core, and as he frantically disconnects to keep himself sane, he realizes that the Doctor is still out there, alone, and dangerous. Someone has to stop him, someone who knows him better than he knows himself.
"Doctor, come back here and get me!" he shouts. The sound of his own voice reverberates in the hollowness of the satellite and bounces back to his ears, where it sounds more frightened than he wants to believe. John stumbles back against the console, crawls across the side of it until he bumps blindly into the wall. His right hand hangs uselessly by his side until he slams it into the nearest metal panel, and it is the absolute lack of pain that frightens him more.
"I don't want it to end like this!" John hits the wall again with his fist, feeling like a fool. He reaches up with his good hand at a sudden sensation to find his eyebrows completely gone; looking down, both hands' fingernails have cleanly disappeared. It always starts in small steps, he remembers. It doesn't happen very often but when it does, he has been lucky not to be around to see it end - but now his luck has run out.
A small pop sound from behind him sets the hairs on John's neck at end. It's followed by a short whoosh of air, and the sound of a pair of trainers hitting metal flooring. John turns around to see the most beautiful sight he's seen in days, if not since he was born: a young woman in a black Torchwood jacket with black gloves and faded blue jeans, flowing blond hair with dark roots framing a fair and familiar face, holding an even more familiar dimension cannon.
"Doctor?" Rose sounds both curious and confused. She probably did not expect the red hair, or the no eyebrows - or the fact that he wasn't the Doctor.
"Sorry, it's Handy." John waves his dead hand and it flops around on his wrist, looking close to falling plum off. "You can call me John now, my hands aren't in the best shape. Or, you know, the rest of me. Dying and all that."
"John." The look on her face is full of pity that John doesn't want, doesn't deserve. She reaches out and touches his face, brushing aside a limp lock of red hair from his vision. "What's happening? Where's the Doctor and Donna?"
"One's dead, the other's gone crazy. Go crazy guessing what happened to which." John winces. "Sorry."
Rose shakes her head. "I don't get it." She looks at his dead hand. "Why are you dying?"
"I'm not supposed to exist. This kind of metacrisis never happens. The Doctor thought that Donna was the only one at risk of dying from a metacrisis, but it's not true. I tried to reverse the process, make her human and me all Time Lord and it worked. It actually worked!" John grins. "Didn't think that would happen. Must have had good luck on my side."
"You're better than luck," Rose says, a small smile tugging at her lips. She tries to ignore the blood stains setting into his clothes, the scratches slowly fading into existence across his face and neck.
"Yeah, well . . . wasn't so lucky after all. I became a human consciousness in a Time Lord body. That hasn't really ended well. And now I'm a walking paradox coming to an end." He shrugs, and he feels one of his wrists fracture.
"Yeah. About that." That's when Rose slaps him across the face, hard. Her hand draws back spotted with blood. "What did you and the Doctor do?" she demands, voice now harsh. "Just because you're both Time Lords doesn't mean you have to act like complete idiotic asses!"
"What?" He realizes what she is talking about and a look of fear overcomes his features. "Yes, well. We tried our best, we just wanted to save the universe, you know? Nothing wrong with that, right?"
"John," Rose says, voice at an angry simmer, "when I tried to save my father, you said crossing our own time lines always brought trouble. Now you're doing it on a larger basis, and you expect me to forgive you?"
With this, she slowly unzips his jacket and holds it open so John can see the damage being done: her body is fading away. She quickly zips back up, face pale from exertion.
"The Doctor is killing me," Rose whispers, tears in her eyes. "He's killing everyone trying to save them." He then realizes what's been sewn into her clothes, that it's the only effective barrier keeping her alive.
John does the only thing he can do at the moment; he steps forward and kisses her softly on the head, feels her tears soak into the front of his suit. When she steps back, that's when he asks: "What's your plan?"
"We have to stop him." Rose holds up the cannon. "No matter what."
The Time Lord lowers his head in shame. "I helped him. I led him on."
"I'm not going to punish a dying man. That's too much."
"I love him." It takes too much effort than it should to say it aloud. "He helped make me, and I love him."
"Yeah. So do I." John looks up to see Rose smiling coldly. "We always hurt the ones we love." She gestures at the dimension cannon. "Help me use this to track down the TARDIS?"
John smiles back with the same amount of warmth. "Miss Tyler, I thought you'd never ask." So on the floor of the game station, they start on the cannon together, and he can see that Rose has certainly worked hard since last time they met. She handles the guts of the cannon with precision and skill, understanding John's instructions as he sits uselessly next to her, his own hands like blocks of wood compared to her own nimble natural tools. They discuss little but the task ahead, what Rose will have to do to stop the decay of all worlds - to stop the Doctor. Soon, the dimension cannon is not so much a world hopper but a precise slingshot from Point A to Point TARDIS - a slingshot that never misses.
"You only get one shot," he says, watching Rose stand with the cannon in her hands. She looks so small next to it, yet so strong; he envies her bravery in the face of possible disaster.
"Can't you come with me?" Rose asks. She's practically pleading with her eyes what words aren't enough to show.
"Sorry." The cannon's been fixed so that it can't be used more than once, can't be followed by any extra passengers. "Nope, this is a job for Rose Tyler, defender of the universe." John smiles, and it physically hurts to strain his face so much.
He's still smiling as Rose nods then fades away before his eyes as the cannon does its magic. Then the real pain starts. John drops to his knees and he feels one of his hearts slowly stop beating until it becomes just another dead lump of muscle in his chest. With only one heart supporting a failing system, he doesn't know how long he can last.
One last time, now that his body is done for John reaches out with his mind and feels the TARDIS', still scared but calmer than before. Old girl, I'm so sorry, this isn't the way I wanted it to end. She whispers back with songs of happier times and shows John the image of Rose, beautiful Rose, standing in the console room right before she uses the last vestiges of the cannon to shoot the Doctor with pure Vortex energy. He can see the tears running down her face as she scrambles to work over the different controls, sending the final message that the ship will ever deliver into one of the last patches of the untouched past.
The message cuts off as do the images from her mind, and John knows that the Vortex energy is now consuming the TARDIS' core even as the last chance for the universe travels through time to reach a familiar hand. He exhales, and suddenly the pain is gone. He looks down and sees that he is slowly fading away into nothingness.
"It worked," John croaks. "It worked!"
Time resets itself, and John Smith, ginger ex-human and full Time Lord extraordinare, has never existed.
On a cold beach on the shores of Norway, history is being rewritten. The half-human half-Time Lady Donna is watching as the Doctor says his last goodbye to one of the greatest loves of his current life.
"-Rose Tyler."
She looks at the Doctor, proper Doctor, and asks, "Yeah, and how was that sentence going to end?"
The Doctor tries not to look at the man in the blue suit as he answers, because he knows that whatever he does, there can only be one final outcome: him, alone, without either Rose or his other self. "Does it need saying?"
That's not good enough, not for her and what she's been through. She looks at the nameless new man. "And you, Doctor? What was the end of that sentence?"
He leans forward and whispers softly into her ear words that only moments ago he had been whispering into the ear of someone with which he shared more than a passing resemblance. Rose pulls him in close, kisses him long and sweet until the sound of the TARDIS fading away into space has them both jerking away from each other in surprise.
They watch it disappear until there's only the faint imprint of the bottom of a police box in the sand, and then he slips his hand into hers and they look into each other's eyes, searching for answers not easily found. He knows that before him lies a brand new life with a wonderful woman, but as John glances back to that familiar patch of beach, he wonders what would have happened if he had stayed behind.