Steady as the Beating Drum
Chapter 15: A Piece of the Tardis' Mind.
x
Tears welled up in the Doctors eyes and fell into Donna's red hair, which seemed a lot less brilliant now. A little more gray, a little less alive.
He saw it, when her heart stopped beating. The void in her chest had been blown wide open; there was no shielding himself from the sight.
He barely felt his own singeing pain, so focused was he on Donna's last moments, but as the last of her breath left her body he could stave it off no more. He screamed, in sorrow, misery and agony. He called her name, surely the universe had some miracles left for Donna, it owed her its existence after all.
And when that brief window of bartering and deniability closed, he was left with acceptance.
And with that acceptance came the warm glow of regeneration. He breathed it in and hoped that with this change, the pain he was feeling would pass or dull.
Only, the glow wasn't coming from him.
From Donna's lips the golden dustmite breeze of new life wafted into the air. It circled around them both like a warm embrace and soon the woman herself was glowing.
With a start, her eyes flew open, revealing whirpools of white light. They were so bright that the Doctor had to shield his face.
"Donna?!" he yelped in shock.
She was still prone in his lap. She raised her head and stared unseeingly at the wall of the cell. Delicately, she raised a hand stained by blood and black soot and rested it over the hole in her heart. She then placed it over his, where the ray had gone right through her, into him. The golden waves of her regeneration passed into him. "S'just a scratch," her coarse throat allowed.
He could feel himself being fixed. "Donna, no."
"D'nt tell me wha't'do." She grunted before being thrown backwards in a seizure. She screamed as she changed. The process took so long, from the outside looking in.
Within moments she went slack. The Doctor caught her shoulders before she could hit the ground. He held her the way he would a newborn, supporting her neck in the crook of his elbow with delicacy.
He chuckled to himself. She was still a ginger.
From afar he could hear the wheezing of the Tardis. The sound seemed to jostle Donna from her faint. Her eyes blinked open to reveal blue-green irises. Her forehead creased in pain as she squinted against the light and sat up. She looked around to find herself perched in the Doctors lap and immediately seemed to draw on a deep reserve of energy; she scrambled to her feet.
The Doctor had to laugh then. Donna, who bad previously been quite tall, now stood at just under five feet. Familiar eyes in an unfamiliar face glared up at him in response to the snort he let loose.
"Come on," said the Doctor. "She's waiting."
Donna nodded slowly. She had no clue what in the world was going on. The past weeks were an inexplicable whirlwind of mind invasion, false memories and confusion.
There were three things Donna Noble knew to be true:
She had somehow been stuck on earth for two years, with no memory of her life aboard the Tardis.
The Master had somehow made her believe he was the Doctor and had unlocked and modified her memories.
This old man, though not the Doctor she had known, was indeed the same person.
"Who's waiting?"
"The Tardis."
Donna blinked. "What's a Tardis?"
Just then they had rounded the corner outside the small cell. A blue police box stood in the very center of the room. There was only one workin light in the anteroom of Torchwood and it was right above the blue box. It bathed it in a strange eerie light and cast a long shadow behind it.
"You don't remember the Tardis?" the Doctor asked, surprised. "What did you think we travelled the universe in?"
"Vortex manipulator." Donna breathed, suddenly questioning all her memories, not just her recent ones.
The Doctor scoffed, "I promise, the Tardis is far better than that."
With tentative steps, as if approaching a wild animal or something sacred, Donna moved towards what was apparently something called a Tardis. She circled it and cautiously grazed her fingertips along the walls. Something incomprehensible reached out t her and tickled her mind.
"Time and Relative Dimensions in Space. Gotcha." A pause. "Tardis. Lovely." Donna wrapped her arms around the familiar box. She made quite a sight, trying to stretch her short little arms around the frame. "Hi there Old Girl, how could I have forgotten you?" she whispered reverently, on the brink of tears. The door swung open of its own accord and Donna took tentative steps into the softly lit control room. "Did you miss me Darling?" This time the warm fingers of the Tardis' mental faculties felt more like a caress, like they were wiping away the cobwebs and dust to uncover something important. Something lost and forgotten.
The Doctor followed her inside.
"Doctor."
"Yes Donna, what?"
"I thought… I didn't realize… I forgot…"
Horror stricken but relieved beyond measure the Doctor turned and grabbed Donna by her shoulders. "What? What did you say before? About the Tardis?"
She shoved him. Hard. "You bastard! You no good, slimy git. You left me. You took away my memories. You took everything from me! How dare you." The blows landed swiftly and stung.
"And I'd do it again!"
There was a long cold silence that stretched out into forever. "Doctor, I am going to say something that I have never said to you before. You are a self-centered, egotistically psychopath."
A deep breath to gather muster for her oncoming tirade. "You go around the universe believing that you are the last word on justice and morality; you're just a man. A man who took away my right to choose. For a year I was the person who stopped you when you needed it. For one year of my life you relied on me to help you make the hard decisions that needed to be made and the one time I needed you to listen to me the most; that's when it doesn't matter what I say? You fucking bastard, I hope you rot!"
"You don't mean that."
"I really do."
"I'm sorry." He said.
"I don't believe you."
"I'm sorry for that too…"
"Yeah well. Everybody's sorry."
The Doctor rubbed his brow. Frustration wrinkled his forehead and exhaustion weighed on his shoulders. "I never stopped looking you know- for a way to fix you. I kept thinking, 'I'll find a way, I'll swagger back into her life and make it all better just as soon as I find out how' and I was so convinced I would. The more time passed the more I realized that there was no way. Donna Noble, you're going to die."
"I-" Donna looked up at the rafters of the Tardis, searching for a way to explain something she didn't fully understand. "I'm really not."
"You are. You remember. And your mind is going to burn."
She rolled her eyes. She couldn't stand the apologetic look on his face. "Sorry, did you not see the whole regeneration thing that just went down?"
The Doctor eyed her carefully for a moment and then sprung into action. He grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her in the direction of the medbay.
Donna wrenched her wrist from his grip and hugged herself, uncomfortably. "I'll just follow you, shall I?"
The Doctor paused and stared but soon nodded and moved on to more pressing matters than Donna's discomfort.
It took roughly 20 minutes for him to scan her, probe her, stick a few needles in her (each of which he had to argue, beg and bluster for her to agree to).
"So somehow I'm a Time Lord."
"Somehow you're a Time Lady." He confirmed while pacing.
"Care to explain, or do you have a spare minute so I can yell at you some more."
"Apparently the genetic transfer was a little more complete than we originally thought. Your regeneration also likely burned off the excess time energy. What's the square root of pi?"
"How the hell should I know that?"
"And no more Time Lord mind." He paused to finally look at her, "Donna, you shouldn't have done what you did."
"Which part?" she demanded while stubbornly crossing her arms.
"Do you realize what you've done? You gave me some of your regeneration energy to fix me. That probably cost you any future regenerations! Who knows if you even had any in the first place!"
"Well rest assured, I wont be doing it again!" she spat, "not now that I know what you did."
"What? Saved your life? Made it so you could be normal? Well sorry." He waved his hands around his head in an exaggerated manner. "What was I thinking, making sure you lived a full healthy human lifespan. Shame on me!"
"I TOLD YOU NOT TO!"
"WELL YOU WERE WRONG TO!"
"THAT'S NOT FOR YOU TO DECIDE!"
"IT WAS, ACTUALLY! I WAS RESPONSIBLE FOR YOU. I KNEW BETTER WHAT WAS COMING. DON'T PRESUME THAT I DIDN'T THINK ABOUT WHAT IT WOULD MEAN!" The wind was soon gone from his sails. "I did what I did because I cared about you. I couldn't let you die."
"Apparently I wouldn't have!"
"I DIDN'T KNOW THAT!"
"It doesn't matter. I am a grown ass woman and I made my choice." Her shoulders slumped. "Everything that I was, was gone. Just like that. I was worse for it."
"I don't know what you want me to do." Grumbled the Doctor. He sat down on the medical bay's patient bench and kicked his feet back and forth.
"I want you to take me home."
The Doctor did not know what was going on in his head. But what he knew was this:
The once physically affectionate Donna now winced at his touch.
She was withdrawn and quiet. These patterns broken only by vitriolic outbursts.
Donna Noble no longer trusted him.
"Donna, you're a different person now. Your family won't recognize you. You can't go back to your job. You need a new identity…"
"I don't care, I'll figure it out."
"We need to figure it out together."
"No. We do not." Donna pressed her lips into a thin line and looked away. "Take me home. Now."
The Tardis landed on the Noble's front lawn early the next morning. Donna stepped out and did not look back.
The telltale wheeze of the Tardis' breaks grinding alerted her to the Doctor's departure.
There were a lot of things Donna needed to think about, chief of which was how to explain the events of the past few weeks to her family.
There were so many questions left unanswered. Would she regenerate again when she eventually died? Would she grow old? What was she going to do next, with no identity, job or life?
A ringing from her pocket startled her. She pulled out her mobile and didn't look at the screen before answering. "Donna Noble," she said. But she did not much feel like her. Donna Noble was another person entirely.
Shaun's voice on the line made her grind her teeth. Not. Now.
"You know what Shaun. FUCK OFF." She shouted 'who is this?' she heard him ask before pressing the 'end call' button.
In her anger, she stormed up her front steps and was about to knock when she caught her reflection in the window set into the door. It was dark on inside and bright on the out, making it an almost perfect mirror.
She looked like a completely different person. Traces of herself could be seen in the hair and about the eyes, but she would never be recognizable. She was plump and short. Her chin had a cleft in it and she had very high cheekbones. Her eyebrows were darker than the shoulder length halo of orange around her head. Her nose was short and button-like, dusted with freckles.
She raised her fist to knock instead. But couldn't.
What was she supposed to do? She hated this life, how was it going to be better now? She had died and it was going to change nothing? She'd changed species and what. She was going to go on as if that hadn't happened?
What were her choices, really. There weren't many. None were ideal.
She wished, desperately, that he'd just waited until her mind burned and she'd regenerated then. They could have gone on like they always had, travellng the universe and saving worlds together. She could have protected him. They could have continued their life together aboard the Tardis; a real forever.
Instead he'd shown her that she could never really trust him to make a decision that difficult. Or rather, to not make a decision; it was supposed to have been hers.
She tried to knock again, against the regret, but the image of her mother and grandfather's lack of recognition when they saw her made her feel so ill.
The life that she wanted, the life she had had and her choices now were so similar, but poisoned by the actions of one of the people she loved most.
With a sigh, Donna sat down on her front steps to wait-
No. That was wrong. She wasn't waiting. She was thinking.
a/n: Next chapter's the epilogue! Thanks so much for reading everybody. My heartfelt gratitude and appreciation will be expressed in a longer note at the end of the next chapter.
As always, your thoughts and constructive criticism are always appreciated!