A/N: Alright! So i have edited this thing three times. I said it was done, and then I kept going. Lol, but I'm so delighted to be back! I'm trying to do this at least in a kind-of timely manner, minimally two weeks per chapter. This one is taking longer cause I'm sick and my fever is really beating me down. Hopefully I get faster as I go, ha. I'm gonna stretch my abilities and see where it takes me.
I have a headcanon that might not be that reliable, and I think that I might be really butchering cannon. (Oh god I'm going to have to do research lol) I could just be taking a knife to it all. I'm sorry If I am and you despise that, I really would appreciate a Beta but I've got nothing right now, ha.
Thank you for reading! I hope you enjoy it!
Oh, and please review! I really appreciated hearing what you guys thought! It really cheered me on when I thought I wasn't doing a good job. Thank you emrynsigma I'm really glad you like it so far! And thank you MageVicky for enjoying the first chapter!
Chapter two: dream on, Dream on
"Run!" The Doctor shouts, bolting down the hill, the deep snow slowing them down as they flee out of the forest.
Donna is right next to him, wearing a long red dress and coat that she has hiked up showing her running shoes underneath. The Doctor is wearing a Santa Claus outfit, both of their red outfits standing out in the crowd and the Doctor is even wearing a fake beard as they flee. Everyone else is wearing faces of pure anger, dozens of men and women with weapons- the hoard calling for the travelers spleens. They sprint back to the TARDIS at full speed, neither looking back at the chasing crowd.
"This way, go this way! Left!" The Doctor hollers as they enter the town, running down the alleyways. Donna turns left and down some steps.
"No! Your other left!"
"What do you mean other!?" Donna shrieks, ducking on instinct- and barely avoids a bolt of yellow lasers that explodes over her head. Gasping, she turns her back to the angry crowd that appears around the corner. "Your sense of direction is getting worse!" she howls, bolting back.
The Doctor quickly yanks a present out of the bag slung over his shoulder, hurling it at the closest blue man's face. It explodes with a bright flash and confetti, the man shrieking and falling back into the crowd behind him, slowing down the others. This gives Donna and the Doctor the opening they need, starting to run away again. The angry mob is getting closer, bigger, and the two time travelers bolt down the old brick roads and across the alleyways, back to their ship.
The yells promising death and pain, and a possible jury duty are right at their heels, making them go faster. People with guns and makeshift weapons steam through the streets, everyone not part of the mob ducking for cover. They get across town square in seconds- and they don't stop sprinting until the TARDIS door slams shut behind them.
Both of them lean against the door and railing out of breath, the sound of loud banging right outside.
"Never ever ever," Donna huffs, glaring at him. "Are we visiting this place again. Ever!"
"Well," the Doctor begins to say, "Just because most of the children are on the naughty list, and the adults, and the elderly, and their pets- you know, this plan sounded much better in my head." and yes, the planet Krampus in the Revolutionary era had turned out to be a bad idea, but it wasn't his fault they were off by three centuries! Dropping the sack of Christmas presents he goes to say more, when everything shifts. In a blink, the Doctor is no longer in his ship.
Instead he is on Gallifrey.
"Amazing! My doooolly." A little girl squeals seem right next to his ear, the girl holding a doll above her head, its' polished clockwork parts shining in the light. "Thank you!"
The Doctor looks around at the fuzzy nature of the room, the dullness, and he sits on the steps of a long staircase. Instead of floundering he pulls his child, his youngest back securely in front of him and pulls out a comb. He blunders through getting his daughter's soft but thick hair in the stylish buns before they have to leave, the father and daughter sitting in a dimly lit room. The little girl was giggling uproariously, the glass doll lighting up with blinking light in her hands as she flopped it around.
"She's getting more of a handful." his wife's voice complains from the other room, and the Doctor frowns.
"Well she is growing," the Doctor utters under his breath; he remembers this. This day. What a fine memory, today was the academy ceremony. This wasn't their first, nowhere near Theia's first, nonetheless his wife never enjoyed these years of development. Any inconvenience at the last moment wasn't appreciated. Truthfully, if she could loom all the children mentally matured, he surmised she would. "Good old growth spurts, killer that." He slides the comb through the toddler's hair, Theia, his little Theia had certainly gotten her fussing from her mother.
He hadn't enjoyed this day the first time around, too busy with traditions.
"Oh, come on now. No no no." she is wiggling, unable to sit still as he hunches down, and the hairtie between his teeth muffles his voice.
He keeps his eyes on his little girl, not noticing his wife coming down the stairs, or how she shifts behind him as she gets closer. The woman transforms into a blonde. Her tongue is resting on her teeth and her eyes are alight with gold, a devious smile as she looks over at him. It was Rose's face, young and vibrant and so so human- before she mutated again. Her skin darkens as she steps closer, her facial structure morphing into a beautiful Martha. Then, as she wraps him in a hug and shuffles into his side, she becomes his friend, the redhead Donna.
The Doctor blinks, frowning slightly as he looks between his daughter and Donna. His daughter's chestnut hair, and Donna's red.
Suddenly they're in the snow, standing inside a Christmas tree farm and dressed from head to toe in thick coats.
"Over here over here! Come find me!" His youngest cheers, the little girl's tiny red boots dashing across the snow.
"Let's go space man!" Donna and Theia's laughter fills the area as the three of them throw snowballs at each other, the Doctor cheering. He ducks, a snowball sailing over his head as he gears up again, laughing as he catches Donna and is ready to throw a handful of snow down the squawking woman's coat, when he stops.
"Wait, no I'm sorry?" The Doctor breathes incredulously as Donna calls him to join in again.
He turns around in a circle, noticing that suddenly all of the trees in the farm have Christmas decorations on them- each one a blazing red and orange hue. Oh, it was this planet now? There was nothing significant here, why would he-
A merry jingle fills the air.
Then he is laying down on a long chair in only swim trunks, relaxing on the beach with a fruity drink in one hand. He shakes his head to catch himself and looks to his side. Ood Sigma is sitting in the other chair. The Ood has his own fruity drink in his free hand, his orb lighting up, and the Doctor hears his dead wife's voice.
He looks to the side, in the sand is a written message, to himself it seems.
Are you in there?
Ah, that would explain it. He was lucid dreaming, not that uncommon. How long has he been asleep?
"Huh, look at that." The Doctor says with conviction, taking in the tropical island beach as they soaked up the sun.
"This isn't the place to go." The orb lit up again, "Time Lord?"
"Yes, well. Give me a moment." he takes a sip of his drink. "Ooh, strawberry."
"Is it almost time, Dad?" The Doctor looks up at the question and Jenny pops out of the water, startling him. She calls from the ocean, smiling brightly as she pulled her goggles off her head, the top of her body shooting up from the waves, the water gold around her.
A gunshot rings out. And Jenny is gone.
The Doctor flinches before going stiff, his face darkening.
"I get it now." he says seriously, sliding the pair of sunglasses over his eyes. His deepest subconscious nightmares are leaking through. This wouldn't do.
"Sending a psychic message inside of a dream, complicated stuff. Bit rude, you've turned my frontal cortex into a conference call." he takes a sniff of his fruity drink, before calling out, "You're rifling through my cerebellum without a proper channel, scrambling everything up. Just in luck that I'm good or none of us are getting out of this, not without going brain dead."
He sticks a finger in his mouth before holding it up to the wind. "Whoever you are you should have done more research. You're not doing a very good job- slight digitization of the third wheel effect, no sense of smell, the neural input is delayed, and if I had to guess how someone broke through the TARDIS shields and sent me a signal, as weak and floppy as it is you're using a large conduit."
The world goes unnaturally quiet as the Doctor puts down his drink, the clink of the glass onto the small table loud. Oh now they want to be quiet?
"Well. What do you want? You're turning both our brains into goop, it better be important!" He calls out into the air and waits, before getting no reply. The Doctor scowls, looking behind him at the ground where Dream Donna and Dream Theia are still playing in the sand, building a snow castle with his daughter's laughter, it was…
That was… wait.
"Oh you stupid, old man." he murmurs. He's thick, definitely thick. He looks over, catching a smiling face of Theia in the corner of his eye… but instead of smiling his daughter was simply staring at him.
No. No, he hadn't thought of his children in a long time. Refused to. So why, then, oh why would he dream about them?
The simple and clean answer is he wouldn't.
"Doctor?" Dream Donna calls, confused. "Doctor are you there?"
He looks down, away, he couldn't look at her, and dream Donna lowers her hand, her face going blank and she drops the snowball on top of the sandcastle. The little girl, his daughter's face slides off of her, now in her place was a child he's never seen before, her gray-brown eyes filled with tears. She is covered in ash, head to toe.
"Hello." he keeps his voice light, gentle, and he looks intently at the small dirt covered girl.
"Hello." she parrots back, and talking looks like it hurts to do, her little fingers crinkle into the fabric of her clothes, her breathing uneven.
"I've never liked people rooting around in my head, so I was a tad mad, but that's alright," he gets up, looking her over while throwing out his last theory. Why would anyone send a child's consciousness in a message?
The beach dissolved around them, the sky darkening as he walked towards her. Her face scrunches up, and she is clearly upset and hurt.
"What's your name? Can you tell me?" He is standing right across from her, the girl looking up at him, but he can't make out any defining factors. Her clothing is too mangled, covered in dirt and caked mud, her hair indistinguishable, and he can't make out her species. "What do you want? I can help, I promise. Do you know how you got here?"
"Oi!"
The Doctor jerks violently, falling off the pilot seat he had been sleeping on.
"What! What it is! What?" He shoots up from the ground, awake as he looks around wide-eyed.
Donna is standing there by the console of the ship. Her hands are on her hips and her makeup is expertly done.
He had fallen asleep while making repairs, strange.
"What in the world are you doing? You said our next stop's Mardi Gra? A whole planet that knows how to party? What are you..." she trails off, watching incredulously as he quickly slicks his hair back, his eyes darting around the console room. "Oh my days, were you asleep? The big bad spaceman needs sleep. Were you taking a cat nap?"
She is wearing new clothes, having changed after a wash. She even bandaged her fingers- having just come back from a world of talking hats, having promised her the trip since the beginning, and she had picked up a stylish Stetson first thing, and almost lost a finger.
"What? No," he says quickly, "No. No no I was taking a voicemail."
She is still cross with him as her eyes narrow- the look she was giving him. Ah yes, that one. He had forgotten to explain first that the hats were carnivorous before they visited. Ah, whoops. And now he had a giant bruise on his arm from how hard she hit him when she lost a couple inches of hair as they sprinted back to the TARDIS. Now was not the time to explain a telepathic based psychic message via inner-dream-messaging, she'd probably wallop him.
"Oh, is that something you do often?" Donna says sarcastically before moving on. She didn't just spend an hour in a half on her makeup for nothing. "Can I drive this time?"
Oh no. The Doctor grimaces, looking at his poor ship and then back at Donna when suddenly, before he can answer his front pocket begins to burn. He squawks and violently twists away from the heat, quickly he pulls his psychic paper out of his jacket, scrambling to get the smoking black leather wallet away from him.
"What! What's happening?"
"Ahh, ah ah!" He hisses and flips it open, dropping it from the heat- And the white paper was scribbling out over and over as it flopped onto the floor facing upwards.
ANSWER THE TELEPHONE ANSWER
ANSWER
THE
TELEPHONE
"What's going on?" Donna asks as the squabbling continues, literal steam coming off the paper, and most of the words a watercolor mess, before they turn their heads in union at a ringing echoing through the room.
They look over at the TARDIS entrance door …to hear the ringing of the police box phone rattling the wood.
"What?" The Doctor squawks over the loud ringing. "It-It can't do that! I mean-" he thinks back to the one time it might have done that. "It shouldn't do that!"
"Hold on? That one's real?" Donna points at the door, concerned as the Doctor tries and fails to pick up the still smoking physics paper.
Someone… Someone out there had contacted the Doctor by physic dream, by telepathic message and now literally by contacting his TARDIS. The Doctor swallows heavily, his eyes darting back and forth.
"Well," she trails off as the Doctor makes no move towards the sound. "are you going to answer it?"
"But…what?" The Doctor looks lost, "What? It's not hooked up to anything! And we're inside the vortex, we're not in any localized fields- it can't do that!" The Doctor yells, waving his hands around in anger as the ringing continues. And he would have kept shouting over the ringing, if Donna hadn't rolled her eyes and gone to get it herself.
"Wait! Donna!" But she is already opening the door, grabbing the phone and pulling it into the TARDIS. There's a click on the other side as she holds it up to her ear.
"Hello?"
(Cue Doctor Who opening theme song)
(Woo oo ooo, do do do)
(Dum dum dum, dum dum dum)
(Dum dah dah dah dah dah)
(Woo oo ooo, doo doo doo ooo)
A/N: I Know. I'm stupid. But that was fun.
Next time on "The Source" We're back at UNIT and who called the Doctor?
Watching a toddler in a pastel red dress and a pair of blinking light up shoes merrily around a pristine military installation corridor, owning the place, is memorial for everyone.