Steady as the Beating Drum

Chapter 6: The Doctor Loses His Patience

X

Donna felt an overwhelming pain in her heart; grief and loss with which she was unfamiliar. It was a fresh wound in her psyche, ripping her apart and making tears well and burn in her eyes. Whoever this was, he was important. He was everything. 'The Doctor' was someone she clearly cared about very deeply and yet she wasn't sure if he was even real! Perhaps someone she knew in the year she forgot? What fresh hell was this?! Loving a dream. Well, bollocks to that! Her patheticness had reached a new level, clearly and Donna was not comfortable with heights.

"Donna," a familiar voice beckoned from behind her closed eyelids. "Donna, are you alright?"

Her eyes fluttered open, to be met with a face haloed in fluorescent light. He had a long skinny face and a pointy chin, his hair stuck up in the front in messy brown disarray and his big brown eyes were staring at her worriedly. She had the sense that she knew him.

"Oi, hands!" she shrieked, once she found her bearings. She scrambled away from Dr. Smith's boyfriend with frantic desperation.

"I wasn't-!" Joshua groaned, rolled his eyes and rubbed his face. "You hit your head Donna. I was just making sure you were okay."

"Sure you were, mate."

Joshua sighed and got to his feet. He then bent down to try and hoist her to her feet. From this vantage point Donna could see how tall he was, and looking up at him like this triggered something in her memory. "Oi! Hands I said!"

"I'm trying to help you," he grunted, still tugging.

"Skinny streak of nothing that you are, what do you think you're goin'a do?"

Donna got to her feet and brushed herself off. Her pantsuit was wrinkles and covered in dirt from the unvacuumed carpet.

"What are you even doing here?" she demanded and glanced at her wristwatch. It read five o'clock. "Did I sleep the whole day away?" Donna directed the question at Jane, much to Joshua's exasperation.

"I would not call passing out and having a seizure 'sleeping'."

"Yeah, well who asked you?!" Donna threw this rejoinder over her shoulder as she gathered her things.

"Come on then," Joshua lay a hand on Jane's shoulder and grabbed Donna's elbow. "Lets get you some coffee, and I'm not taking no for an answer."

Something about a man getting her coffee struck an uncomfortable chord with Donna, but still the inexorable pull of her boss' boyfriend's fussing ensured that Donna could not turn down the offer.

X

Meanwhile, the Doctor had at the very least discovered what was happening. Not- as per usual- it helped him solve anything. "We're stuck in a quantum helix."

"You could just say time loop," Martha said with a roll of her eyes. "I've seen Groundhog Day."

"No, a time loop is something totally different."

"How?" cut in Mickey.

"Shut up, I'm trying to explain. We're still moving forward, but time is twisting in a sort of coil. We're reliving the same day but the days themselves did actually happen. Time is still moving, except in this spot. The three of us, with traces of time energy-"

"From travelling on the Tardis," Mickey deduced.

"-are the only ones aware of it."

"So what do we do, Doctor?"

The Doctor pursed his lips into a thin, wrinkled line. He narrowed his eyes as he stared at empty space thinking. "Has anything come through the rift since you've been stuck?"

Martha and Mickey exchanged looks and simultaneously shrugged at the Doctor. "Sort of," Mickey mumbled. This elicited a very dramatic eyeroll and six skinny feet of indignant Gallifreyan pushing past them to leave the Tardis.

"Times like this, I miss Clara." He said out loud for the first time since she'd left.

"Times like this remind me of why I left," sighed Martha as the door closed between them. "They also remind me of why the prat needed me." She grinned gaily at her husband and nudged her head at the exit. His answering nod and grip on her hand made her heart race with excitement as they left the Tardis to once again run with the Doctor.

X

Donna didn't know how it had happened, but she was sitting across from her boss (and probably best friend)'s boyfriend and laughing harder than if she were watching Graham Norton. He may have been a tosser, but he was a funny tosser.

"And then she goes, 'Will you take a look at the tile grating in our bathroom? You'll absolutely die!'"

"No." she laughed. "I've never met a man who went so far as to pretend they were gay to not sleep with me. Had a couple boyfriends who actually were though. You sure you're not?"

"You wouldn't mind breaking it to Maisie for me would you?"

Donna laughed so hard she almost choked on her coffee. Some dribbled down her chin and down her shirt. "Oh shit."

"Here," Joshua reached out with a napkin and dabbed at her chest, much to her wide-eyed consternation. He didn't even seem to register the action as odd. It didn't feel like a come-on?

She coughed and snatched the napkin from him, dabbing at the stain herself. She hurriedly changed the subject. "Is Jane always this way?"

The girl was sitting between them silently staring at her iPad, with earphones in.

"Yeaaaaaah," he replied with a sigh. "Kids, amirite?"

Donna patted the girl's knee in sympathy. Jane looked up for a confused moment before returning to her movie.

"Anyway, is everything alright with you Donna?" he laid his hand over hers and looked at her with empathetic eyes. And for once, Donna honestly believed someone cared about the answer beyond reasons of pity.

Her whole manner deflated. "Y'know, as alright as they can be."

"Do you want to tell me about it?" He looked like the man in her dream, the one she trusted to find her and save her in that strange room that reality could not touch. His big sad eyes were familiar in a way that not many things in her life were these days. And his need to help was a salve.

And just like that the floodgates opened. "It started a couple years ago. I woke up to find a year had passed and I couldn't remember any of it. And everyone just kept looking at me with these sad eyes like 'poor pathetic Donna'-"

…

"-And sometimes I just know things that I should have no way of knowing. Like once, when I was still with Shaun, he pointed out this article in the paper about lady Vikings. And I was all "so wot?" and he said "I dunno, s'just interestin' that's all" and it was the weirdest thing but I could swear I'd already known that! I thought maybe there had been a series about it on the telly but when I googled it later- nothing! Isn't that-"

…

"-So I've been on medication for ADHD, depression, bipolarity, sleeping pills, and sometimes I feel like it hurts more than it helps y'know?"

…

"When I was out, I had this dream. I was in a strange room and a man was there. I think he was my friend. I think I knew him once."

…

For the next few weeks Donna and Josh met on Tuesdays and Thursdays for after-work tea or lunch, always chaperoned by the sensory-deprived Jane. She rarely spoke more than a word to either of them during these excursions, so it was as if it were just the two of them.

They had developed an easy rapport; jumping back and forth between teasing and chatting. He made her laugh and he was a good listener.

And who was Donna to turn her nose up at a friend when these days she had so little in common with the ones she'd had before?

X

The Doctor stood in front of the rift with Mickey and Martha in his wake. He had been rambling on to himself for a solid fifteen minutes and had not bothered to explain a word to his two former companions. His only acknowledgement of their existence were occasional mumblings about unobservant apes. If he only bothered to ask them…

Mickey sighed, tapped his foot and checked his watch. Any second now.

Martha abruptly called the Doctor.

"What is it now?" he asked, deigning to try to hide his annoyance at least a little for Martha's sake. He was determined to not be as much of a twat to her as he had been last time. He stopped pacing and gesticulated at her wildly with impatience. "Well?"

All of a sudden a hunk of metal shot out of the Vortex and hit the Doctor in the back of the head.

"12:47 and twelve seconds. Like clockwork."

Next time: The Doctor and co. explore the quantum loop and Donna faces a moral quandary...

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