AN: Phew! I decided to not put this on hiatus, after all. Too invested in it. So, I did look all over the DVD box, but it doesn't say anywhere that I own Doctor Who. Sigh. Ask me after I've murdered Steven Moffat.
Also, I didn't mention this, but this story is simply stuffed with Journey's End spoilers. Don't wanna be spoiled, don't read, yeah?
Enjoy!
Donna spent half an hour just looking up his name on her search engine, finding shady links, none remotely close to him (even though the man with whom he shared a name, and whose Facebook page she had stumbled upon, was really quite attractive). In exasperation, she closed all but one tab and added the word 'Torchwood' to her search. The first thing that came up was Torchwood's website.
Now, why hadn't she just thought of that earlier?
She clicked on the link, feeling her heart sink when she found it required a password.
Without even noticing it, she felt her fingers hit the keyboard and punch in 'TARDIS'. The page opened up, the banner stating 'Welcome to Torchwood'. She let out a quiet whoop. How had she ever survived all her life without Time Lord instincts?
Swiftly, she looked up his name on the website, finding what she believed to be his phone number in no time. She punched the number into her phone, pressing the call button. The answer came almost right away.
"Captain Jack Harkness, Torchwood, at your service," the man on the other end of the line purred. She rolled her eyes at the familiar tone, and at the odd power that Jack was, for lack of a better word, gifted with – he made literally every sentence that came out of his mouth sound suggestive.
"Save the flirting, you twit. It's Donna. I want you to tell me everything you know about—"
"Donna?" Jack cried, interrupting her. "Donna Noble? We thought you were as good as dead - or human, whatever – when the Doctor wiped your mind after your brain started frying! How'd you get out of that?"
Donna scowled. "Oi! If you'd just let me speak, I could tell you how this happened. Are you going to?"
"Sure. Spill the beans."
Donna silently wondered how the hell one could say a sentence that involved a gas-inducing vegetable and make it sound like it came straight out of a porno flick.
"There isn't much to spill. I just sort of ran into a Weeping Angel and the Time Lord voice in my head saved my life—"
"Youran into a Weeping Angel? And survived?" She couldn't see him, but she was sure that Jack was spreading out his arms in complete incomprehension.
"Shut up and stop interrupting me! Anyhow, I looked at it and it gave me back my memories and then there was another Weeping Angel and it made someone disappear and—" she stopped for a quick breath, starting to speak even louder when Jack started to interrupt her, "—and they stared at each other and apparently, they can't move when they do that. So," she practically shouted before he could interrupt her again, "I need you to tell me everything you know about the Weeping Angels."
"Weeping Angels, Weeping Angels," Jack hummed, the rustling of paper being heard over his voice. "Don't have much about them, here. You'll be the third person to live to tell the tale. Congrats."
"Who're the other two?"
"The Doctor and Martha. The Angels sent them back to 1969 and they had this girl send them the TARDIS from the present, talking to her through movie Easter eggs. Pretty ingenious idea, really."
"So, what do you know about them?"
"Well, not much. We kind of have to trust everything the Doctor says, if we want to have more than one sentence of information." He paused. "Well, we know that if anything living, including themselves, as you've learned, sees them, they literally turn to stone. If nothing's looking at them, they can move at lightning speed, and if they touch you, they send you back to any random place in time. Kind of brings a whole new meaning to 'touched by an angel', huh?"
Donna scowled, getting up and starting to pace. "D'you think, if they touched someone, and an attraction field popped up somewhere in space and time, your travelling could be… redirected?"
"That's probably possible, but don't go getting ideas. It's not a theory that's been tested. Unless some really powerful, ancient force came into play, I doubt anything could stop you from being shipped off to the past."
"Yeah, yeah."
A long silence on both ends of the line sunk in.
"Oh, and Donna?"
"What?"
He paused, and she could almost hear him smiling.
"If you do anything stupid—"
"It's not stupid, it's bloody brilliant. And it's going to work, you hear me?" Donna snapped, wondering how Jack could doubt her. "Trust me. I'm part Doctor."
"I was going to say, before you interrupted, if you do anything stupid, tell the Doctor I say 'hi'."
"I don't know whether I could say it like that. Would make me sound like I want to sleep with him. See you around, you prawn."
"See you in hell."
Click.
She muttered Jack's name a few seconds after he hung up, followed by a long silence.
"I guess that settles it, then."
All was quiet, in the park, except for Donna's uneasy breaths.
It was as her inner Time Lord voice had predicted – the Angels had not moved an inch since the afternoon. She took a step, for a second, wondering if she wouldn't rather be the Angels' staring contest's audience of one.
No, she told herself, she couldn't. She had to find the Doctor. So, what, if she ended up in 1930 instead of in the TARDIS, attracted by Huon particles she still had in her (obviously, if she apparently glowed gold, she had more than enough)? 1930's fashion was nice.
(The Great Depression wasn't, but she was willing to overlook that.)
She sighed, silently said goodbye to the twenty-first century in case she didn't come back around, and stepped between the Angels, closing her eyes.
She screamed.
Traveling through time and space without a ship, she decided, felt a lot like being pulled through an extremely narrow subway tube filled with jagged, white-hot rocks. She certainly wouldn't be pulling that one again for a while.
She thought, when she opened her eyes, once, that she caught a flicker of an empty field going on for miles, a scarecrow somehow waving at her in the distance, before she blinked, and, with a burst of golden dust, opened her eyes to a familiar aqua and copper glow.
She'd made it! She was inside the TARDIS! She almost let out a little squeal of excitement, until she saw a sight that completely crushed her mood.
There was another Donna, not two feet away from her, and the Doctor was peering straight at them both – no, glaring would have been a better word choice - with a cold look that sent chills down her spine.
"Oi!" the Donnas and the Doctor cried out in unison, looking at each other.
"Oh, not this," the Doctor snapped. "Haven't any of you read the Shadow Proclamation's Act on Duplicity? You're not allowed to fraudulently make me believe she died. I know she's alive. I saw her very recently. Now," he continued, walking over to where they were and kicking the TARDIS door open to a gorgeous nebula, "leave. Go on, both of you!"
"Oh, no, you don't!" Donna – the Donna who had just been touched by a Weeping Angel just to get to her Doctor – stormed over to the Doctor. "I took huge risks to come here, and now you're telling me to go home? I can't go home, Doctor! Don't you understand? After all we've done…" She shook her head, disgusted. "I don't know who 'she' is, and I've never read an act from the Shadow Proclamation in my life, nor do I know what it is, but I do know you ought to stop being daft and recognize me already!"
The Doctor, unfazed by the fact that Donna's face was now inches away from his, pulled out his sonic screwdriver and began to silently wave it over Donna.
"Stop beeping me!" Her shriek fell on deaf ears, and the Doctor did the same thing to the other Donna, poking both of the Donnas around and scowling. Finally, his face lit up, and he briskly walked out of the control room, only to promptly come back with a large bottle of transparent liquid, unceremoniously dumping half of its contents onto Donna's head, much to her protest.
"Oh my God, that's vinegar! The smell's never going to come out! You're going to regret that, time boy!" Her screaming was, once again, ignored. She followed him, but the only thing he did was empty the rest of the bottle onto the pseudo-Donna's head, making the real Donna get a glimpse of how ridiculous she must have looked.
Well, she wasn't worrying about that, so much as the fact that the other Donna was disintegrating before her eyes, screeching.
"Slitheen," the Doctor mumbled. "Disintegrate at the touch of acid."
Needless to say, watching oneself disintegrate is not an experience Donna now wished on anyone.
In the time for her to get lost in her thoughts, the Doctor had already gone back to the control panel, staring at the touch screen, and his eyes slowly lighting up before he ran up to Donna and engulfed her in a hug, laughing and not seeming to care about the vinegar all over her.
"Donna Noble, you are absolutely brilliant," he half-shouted. "Brilliant! Human and Time Lord – that's what the scan says! You got the Time Lord part of your brain to get out of its dormant state. How did you even get here?"
Donna stepped away, chuckling. "Let's not get vinegar all over you, Martian." He shrugged, showing he had absolutely no concern for staining the pinstripe suit he wore just about all the time. Or maybe he had different suits, all identical? It was one of those things that the Doctor kept a mystery for reasons unknown and completely confusing to anyone but himself. "I hitched a ride with a Weeping Angel," she stated simply, feeling proud of her successful gamble. "Figured the few Huon particles left in me might redirect my trajectory to gravitate and ultimately land near the heart of the TARDIS. It was a bit daft, now that I think back, I could have landed in the TARDIS from nine-hundred years ago, or on any old TARDIS in Gallifrey, or in a parallel universe—"
"Well, it worked, didn't it?" The Doctor, she realized, would not let his parade be rained on. She tried another angle.
"By the way, how long has it been, since you last saw me? The whole memory-wiping, post-Dalek invasion thing you had going on there. Also, what kind of name is John Smith? Come on. Who actually names their child John Smith?" She rolled her eyes at him.
"I'll have you know," the Doctor retorted, one eyebrow raised, "I chose that when there were only a handful of John Smiths on Earth. Oh, and it's been—" he checked his watch, "—four human hours since the end of the Dalek siege. Hence, about an hour since I wiped your memory." He scowled. "Yeah, I never realized that. How did you remember everything that fast without having your brain implode? And how did you figure everything out within the hour? I'm impressed, honestly."
Donna let out a sound of surprise. "An hour? I guess I didn't win out the battle with that git alien statue entirely. It'd been a year since I'd seen you."
Worry flashed across the Doctor's face. "Any headaches? Weird stuttering? Mind blanks?"
"Oi! Calm down, none of those have actually happened. Why is it more worrying for Donna-from-the-future than it is for Donna-from-an-hour-ago?" She scowled, her brain now filled with questions. "Why was that Slitheen pretending to be me, earlier? Who were you referring to when you were saying that she was trying to convince you that someone was dead? What's going on?"
The Doctor frowned, thinking for a minute, before pathetically replying.
"Donna, go take a shower."
"But—"
"I don't want the TARDIS to smell like vinegar the rest of the week. She'd never forgive me. So go on! To the shower," he insisted, practically shooing her out of the control room.
Donna stomped away to her old room, promising herself that she'd get to the bottom of this, and she'd do it soon.