The Doctor was apprehended at once by a young woman. "Have you seen a girl, blue coat, short bleached hair?"
"No, sorry," he said, remembering another girl in a blue coat, who was certainly not the one the woman meant.
"Well, if you see her, can you give her this? It's hers," the woman said, and thrust a pen into his hand.
"But I--" he began, but she'd already gone. He stared at the pen, frowning, then put it in the inside pocket of his suit jacket. With a sigh, he stepped into the lift.
Just as the doors closed, Donna came down the stairs to get a coffee. She vanished through the door as a girl in a leather jacket, her peroxide-blonde hair falling not quite to her shoulders, walked into the building.
"You haven't seen a glass-and-steel pen, have you?" she asked the nearest person.
"Nope," said the man, shaking his head. "Sorry." He hurried along, his trainers squeaking on the waxed floor. She followed him with her eyes, frowning slightly. Who wore trainers with a suit? Honestly.
In the back of her mind, a voice said, You know someone who wears trainers with a suit, but she shook her head, pushing it away impatiently.
She would just have to search for her pen from the top up. She got into the lift.
Donna walked back out with her coffee as the doors slid shut again. She climbed the stairs again, both annoyed that the lift was still busy and glad for the excuse to get some exercise. It wasn't like she had to do much working as a temp. She was a secretary, for God's sake. She sat at a computer and typed things up.
She sat down at her desk. She'd only gotten the job because one of the secretaries had gone on vacation without telling a soul and they'd needed someone to replace her quickly. The worst bit of it was, she'd come a few days later and the backwork was killing her.
Someone came down and handed her some papers to type up. She set to work. It was a few pages, but it wouldn't take her long. After all, she was Donna Noble, best temp in Chiswick.
Ten minutes later, she'd finished, and ran upstairs to give the printed copies to the man who needed them.
As she vanished into the stairwell, the lift arrived and the doors slid open. The Doctor walked out and put a sheet of paper on the empty chair. He wasn't bad at sneaking around, pretending he worked here. Anyways, from what he'd heard, this place lost and hired workers so fast no one would ever know, even without the help of the psychic paper.
He hoped whoever sat at this desk wouldn't look too carefully. The survey he needed typed up wasn't an ordinary company survey, after all. The only temp he knew was probably pretty far from the standard, so he was probably safe...
He clenched his teeth and shut his eyes tightly. He just had to go and think of that, didn't he? This seemed to be a nasty day for not-remembering.
It was then, as he cast around for anythign to take his mind away from it, that he realized he'd left that odd pen on the desk, and so, rather than waiting for the lift, he took the stairs.
He had been trying to hack into the network, but even his sonic hadn't found the right codes yet. The girl in the blue jacket saw this as she noticed her pen sitting on the desk. Ah! There it was. She came over, glanced at the screen, wondered for a moment who on Earth would be hacking into the network, and decided to give them a hand. She pointed the pen at the screen and clicked the button. The glass glowed green, and a single beam of light shot into the black screen. The image rippled, the changed.
Behind her, Donna ran into the lift, her sloppy ginger ponytail flouncing as she sprinted through the doors. She had the nasty feeling she would already have more papers to type up, and she had to keep up, or she would certainly never catch up
The Doctor reached the top of the stairs just as the doors slid shut over Donna Noble and the girl walked casually away.
A/N: I'm sure you all know already who the girl in the jacket is. :P But what's she doing here? How did she get back? What's going to happen to Donna? Will the three of them ever actually see each other, instead of just missing each other? Does this remind you way too much of Partners in Crime? Do I ask too many rhetorical questions? Find out later today on DDWFFBC! Reviews are my payment for this, you know!
~DH~