#2: Empty Rooms
The Doctor was busy, tinkering with something in the console room. For the first half-hour or so Donna had hung around, asking questions, but then he got annoyed with her and told her to find something else to entertain herself with.
Shrugging, she left and headed down one of the corridors. Passing the bathroom, the kitchen and the library, she found a corridor of rooms. When the Doctor had shown her around earlier, he'd told her not to go into those rooms… but then, he wasn't here, was he?
She went up to the first door and carefully turned the handle. Inside was a fairly ordinary looking bedroom – bed, wardrobe, a mirror, some shelves. Stepping inside, she found that the wardrobe was full of clothes – some of which would have fit a child, others designed for an adult woman. The shelves held a mix of books, some children's stories at one end and dry-looking scientific textbooks at the other. Looking around, she spotted a notebook left on the bedside table. It was filled with notes and doodles, and on the inside front cover was the name Susan Foreman, written in a young girl's neatest handwriting. Donna wondered who Susan Foreman had been – judging from her room it looked like she'd grown up in the TARDIS. Putting the notebook down, she found an old black-and-white photograph, showing a teenage girl with dark hair standing with an old man. She could see the TARDIS in the background. On the back was written "Grandfather and Me, 76 Totter's Lane 1963". Seeing the TARDIS in the picture was a surprise… "No way…" she murmured to herself. "He couldn't be…"
She quickly replaced the picture and left the room. She walked a little further down the corridor before choosing the next room to enter. This one was, quite frankly, a tip. There were clothes scattered over much of the floor. This room, unlike the last, had a large desk, which was covered with a variety of long-unused chemistry equipment. There was a large container labelled "Nitro-9: Highly Explosive" on the floor nearby. Donna had no idea who this room had belonged to… but they worried her. As she was leaving, she saw a battered leather jacket hanging up by the door. The jacket had several patches sewn onto it for decoration, and across the back was one word: ACE, in curling capital letters.
Apparently that was who had slept there.
The next room proved equally interesting, for a different reason. It was (slightly) neater than Ace's, with the clothing heaped in a pile in one corner. There were a couple of pink-and-purple cushions on the bed, and little decorative touches scattered around that told her this room had definitely belonged to a girl. There were a few photos blu-tacked to the wall – the same blonde girl appeared in all of them, while the other people were a middleaged blonde woman (probably her mother), some other young people of about the same age, and the Doctor. That photo was a surprise. The Doctor looked completely different – the same face, but he seemed to be almost glowing with happiness. She knew enough about his 'friends' to know that this must be Rose's room.
The room next to Rose's was neater. This time the wardrobe held a man's clothes – mostly shirts and tailored trousers, with the odd tshirt or pair of combats. And, oddly, what looked like an old RAF flight suit. There weren't many personal items in this room, though there was a long-abandoned piece of alien tech lying on the floor in pieces, as if the room's owner had been working on it and hadn't been able to finish before he left. She found one other interesting thing – an old identification card, with the name Jack Harkness, which told her that the card's owner had been in the RAF in 1941. At least that explained the flight suit.
As she left, she decided that she wouldn't look at any of the other rooms. The furniture in the four she had looked into was covered with dust – clearly the Doctor hadn't been into any of those rooms for a long time. Maybe the reminders of his old friends were too painful for him.
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