Chapter 1
The Doctor felt the TARDIS shake in the usual uncontrollable way and kicked a large lever in the corner while punching the screen of his universe-nav repeatedly with his left fist. Donna sat in the corner, her eyebrow raised.
"Is this how you always get around?" she asked scathingly, in her Londoner's accent as she slid across the floor of the dysfunctional blue police box.
"Yes. Isn't it fantastic?" asked the Doctor as he threw a hammer at a button on the ceiling.
"No. It's mad!" Donna said, a little frantically.
"Alright, keep your wig on!" yelled the Doctor over he chorus of sirens and bleeps that made up the usual cacophony of the TARDIS. Then all went silent and there was a sharp jolt as they hit the ground causing Donna, the Doctor and a whole lot of junk go flying into the air and land with a bump.
"Excellent," the Doctor said, kicking the door open and walking out, leaving his assistant to disentangle herself from a mass of squiggly wires that didn't seem to be connected to anything at all.
Outside the walls of the TARDIS the air was fresh and clean like nowhere that Doctor had ever been before. He closed his eyes and felt a soft breeze play across his face. All around him were thousands and thousands of enormous trees for miles in every direction going so far into the distance that he couldn't see anything else. No buildings. No animals. No people. Nothing but trees as far as the eye could see. This unnerved the Doctor. Nothing but trees? This couldn't be right…
"And where, exactly, are we?" Donna asked, her eyebrows both raised now so high that you couldn't see them for her fringe.
"Earth." The Doctor said. "Earth, year ninety-nine trillion and sixteen. But it shouldn't look like this… Earth was meant to be destroyed way before this… that's why they created New Earth…" as he said this he heard a cracking of twigs behind him and he turned quickly around to see what it was creeping up on him and Donna. He didn't turn quickly enough, but he saw the corner of a trench coat whisk rapidly around the trunk of an enormous oak tree. He called out,
"Hello? Who's that?" but all he got in reply was a further crunching of leaves and a light smattering of swearwords. He motioned silently to Donna along the lines of 'You go that way, I'll go the other way,' and made his way as quietly as possible around the vast trunk of the tree. He was met, on his way round, by an elbow in the face. He felt his nose crunch and he doubled over, pinching the bridge of his nose, groaning. Then he heard a dull thud and then his assailant fell down to the ground, knocking him slightly in the process. He straightened up to see Donna clutching a limb from one of the trees. She shrugged.
"I can hit girls," she said, nodding down to the unconscious body on the ground. It was a woman in a careworn coat identical to the Doctor's and the rest of her clothing was roughly woven from hemp and Hessian. She carried pruning shears in her clenched fist. Her brown hair fell across her face obscuring her features. She had a rapidly swelling bruise on the back of her neck.
"Was it necessary to be quite so violent?" the Doctor asked, picking the woman up in his arms and carrying her back to his time machine.
"Yes," Donna said, bluntly, throwing the branch aside and following the Doctor.
"She'd busted YOUR nose and I wasn't going to give her a chance at breaking mine. I like my nose."
"Really?" The Doctor said incredulously. Donna crossed her arms looking scandalised. "Sorry," he said, contritely. He rummaged around in a drawer and pulled out a bottle and pulled the stopper out, waving it under the nose of the unconscious woman. "Smelling salts," he explained to Donna, "Nicked them off Emily Pankhurst right before SHE nicked my laser spanner…" Donna just nodded through all of this. She'd been with the Doctor long enough to know that when he rambled on it was best to nod politely and think happy thoughts. The brown-haired woman started to come around. She sat up, registered her surroundings and pointed her pruning shears at the Doctor like a knife.
"Get away from me whoever you are, I'm armed," she said.
"With a gardening implement? Ooh, I'm really scared." Donna said, condescendingly.
"You should be… a scythe is a gardening implement…" the woman said, standing up. She had a clean-cut southern English accent.
"Yeah, but that thing ISN'T a scythe, it's just a big pair of scissors!" Donna laughed.
"Don't patronise me, they're more impressive than they appear," the woman said, and as she did so, she pressed a button causing the shears to emit a high pitched squeaking noise which set Donna's, and the Doctor's, teeth on edge.
"Alright, alright, stop." The Doctor said. The woman obliged, turning the squeaking off. "Now, where did you get that?" The Doctor asked, nodding at the shears.
"They're mine. An old friend made them for me. A long time ago."
"I know he did. And, if you are who I think you are, he gave them to you on your wedding day," said the Doctor, a distant memory dawning on him.
"Maybe," the woman said, a little hopefully.
"And, if you are who I think you are, his name was The Doctor," the Doctor continued.
"Yes," the woman whispered.
"And, if you are who I think you are…"
"Doctor?" the woman said, dropping the shears with a clunk.
"Healer?" the doctor replied, a smile widening across his face. The woman nodded. They walked towards each other and hugged tightly, tears running down the woman's face. As they embraced Donna's voice yelled from the corner of the room,
"Will someone please tell me what is going on?"
Thank you for reading! Please review or Puck will do bad things to you. And you don't want that happening… he's green. Plus, he may not be able to open his mouth but he has a very sharp head…