Chapter Two
Not Ginger

Donna Noble- brash, gobby Donna Noble- was not a woman rendered speechless so easily. Ask anyone in her family, or her former bosses, or that infuriating check out man she can never avoid at Tesco, or even Nerys. She was unflappable, absolutely unsurpassable in her courage. Whenever the world conspired against her, delivering impossible circumstances to her front door like unwanted Valentine's candy grams, she bravely faced them with a holler and a shout. Words were her safety net. Her sword. Words kept her calm, balanced. And yet, suddenly finding herself slack-jawed in the presence of a brand new man wearing her best friend's suit, this marked the second time in but a few minutes the words waiting on her tongue merely evaporated away.

"Am I ginger?" he asked, and while what she'd just payed witness to a moment ago- the Doctor's limbs consumed in fire, burning up until he was replaced with this gangly, floppy haired chap, like a phoenix- was wild beyond belief, there was no other man he could be. Only the Doctor was mad enough to scare them all half to death with a mortal injury and then bounce right back up with a grin and a bleedin' non sequitur.

If she weren't so busy being befuddled as to how all of this happened, she'd slug him for that.

"Well, am I?" he prompted again, regarding all of them in their ceaseless, wide-eyed confusion as if they'd dribbled on their shirts.

For all that she knew, in her surprise she did just that.

Sluggishly, she found her tongue again. "You're kidding me. You just transformed into a completely different person, and that's the first thing you ask?"

"It's important!"

"N-no- sorry," Rose spoke up, her arms hugging herself. "It's still all sort of... brown."

"Really? I'm not even a bit auburn?"

"No. If anything, it's gotten darker."

The Doctor's brow plummeted in heartbroken despair. He waved his hand as if he were swatting away this news of disappointment. "Well, that's rubbish. I've had brown hair for centuries now."

"Doctor," Donna began slowly, chewing her words, "why exactly do you want to be ginger, anyways?"

"Because gingers are so cool!" he enthused, a gleeful grin spread across his boyish face. "It's the rarest hair color in the universe! To be ginger, you need not just one, but two copies of the MC1R protein, one from each parent." He began to pace around the center console as he lectured, physically punctuating his sentences with a full-fingered flap and a flourish. "It's so rare that it only occurs naturally in about two percent of bipedal hair-covered creatures, and as of yet I haven't actually been lucky enough to win that genetic lottery. So far my various bodies have, together, represented every hair color except this one, and at this juncture I'm on my knees begging for something different."

She squinted at him. No doubt about it, she absolutely believed this was her best friend standing before her, but she still didn't know what to make of this entire situation. It was all so weird. Sure, she'd watched a human turn into an Ood, but that was different; she didn't personally know the man. And she supposed there would always be things that she couldn't fully grasp about the Doctor's nature, him being alien. Distinctly unlike her.

One thing remained constant, however: he still talked utter nonsense at near impossible speeds. After a brief moment of reflection, she gathered her thoughts to form a suitable reply to his harebrained plight.

"Then why don't you just dye your hair ginger, you dumbo?"

"I thought about that once, but I couldn't," he said seriously, his hand balled up at his chin. "It felt like cheating."

"Doctor," Jack interrupted their mindless chitter-chatter. "You said earlier that this wasn't supposed to happen? What'd you mean?"

His smile quickly evaporated, dragging most— if not all— of his post regenerative insanity with it. He almost seemed somber now as he slumped into the jump seat. The three of them surrounded him in support.

"I was trying to stop the energy from going all the way," he said, wearily rubbing his temples. "I thought if I could use just enough to heal myself, I could siphon the rest off into my severed hand, and-"

Rose pointed at the glass and metal container sitting at the foot of the console. "And that hand, is that your-?" Donna followed her finger as she spoke, making note of the limp hand suspended inside, cocooned by a bubbly liquid still glowing with an aura of gold.

"My severed hand, from the sword fight on Christmas Day?" the Doctor completed. Her head bobbed down, once. "That's the one. I thought, siphon the excess into a convenient bio receptacle, then, with a pinch of luck, maybe I wouldn't change. Guess I was too late."

Donna rest her hand on his shoulder as she saw his expression sour with a dash of... oh, what would that sort of complex emotion be called? Existential panic? Nevertheless, she could tell he was drowning in a maelstrom of 'what-ifs' at the moment, and if there was one thing she'd recently learned not to tangle with, it was a big 'what-if.' She glanced from Jack, leaning like a show boy against one of the coral struts, to Rose— flanking the Doctor's other side, her eyes still tear-stained and hollow— and finally, back at him. Dealing with strong emotions was never his strong suit, was it?

"You're alive, at least."

The Doctor's lips turned up a trace as he looked at her, but it was clearly a forced smile. A pained smile. "Yeah... Yeah, I am. True."

"And I'm so thankful for that."

All the lights in the TARDIS switched off with a dull hum as the conversation lulled. The Doctor's gaze snapped up to check on the time rotor's state. What was wrong? Was it because of the regeneration? She never did like it much when he regenerated in here, poor girl. But seeing its soothing cyan glow dim alongside the rest of the lights, his hearts stuttered. No. No, not now, please not-

No no no no-!" he shouted, launching himself out of the jump seat. He skid across the grated floor panels, almost tripping over these new, unfamiliar feet as he crossed towards the console. Quick manipulation of the materialization lever and a few other choice dials told him everything he needed to know, confirmed each fear festering within his mind. "It's the Daleks! They've found us, and shut off all our systems, like a sort of... chronon loop!"

"Well, what can we do?" Donna asked, a spike of trepidation making her go rigid.

Immediately after she spoke, the entire TARDIS jolted. Everyone reached for the first stable handhold they could find, Rose and Jack wrapping their arms around one of the coral pillars. The ship continued to rock for a few seconds before leveling out. Even so, he had a sinking suspicion they were still in motion. He probably wouldn't have had a chance in Skaro's tombs at sensing such negligible movement on a normal day. Considering this, he was actually lucky to have recently regenerated. It was well documented that the Time Lord nervous system switched into overdrive within the fifteen hours after, with every sense heightened to perfection as means of defense. An evolutionary advantage, if often times an inconvenient one. (Heightened touch and sight and hearing was all fine and dandy, but smell? His keen awareness of others' timelines? Such excessive input of information after regeneration's already ample shock was enough to leave him disorientated and a bit giddy, and he generally spent the majority of his energy during this stage in smothering those more disruptive senses.)

However, what these stimuli were telling him now— the buzz of electric energy from the Daleks' chronon loop riding along his skin, the sickeningly sterile scent of Dalekanium, and the stable, continuous vibrations of his ship in motion shooting dart-like through his bones— was that Davros was pulling them out of Earth's atmosphere and to their base at the center of the 27 planets.

Jack leaned back on one of the pillars, visible worry creasing his brow. "Well, assuming there's no avoiding a confrontation now, what do you suggest? Doctor?"

Despite the grim circumstances, he couldn't keep his smile at bay.

Doctor.

After his last go, the fact that his friends were referring to him as Doctor already was quite comforting.

"Well," he said, and reached to flick a long strand of hair out of his eyes with a degree of annoyance, "if the Daleks are transporting us somewhere, then we certainly can't decline their invitation, now can we?"

"There's a massive Dalek ship at the centre of the planets. They're calling it the Crucible. Guess that's our destination."

"Now... You said these planets were like an engine, at the Shadow Proclamation," Donna said. "But what for?"

Almost organically, all three of them turned to Rose, who stood at the far edge of the group and hadn't spoken up in a while. Her skin looked ashen, and her cheeks were damp. The shadows below her eyes were pronounced, and it was obvious that she was actively resisting tears. His fault, he tried not to remind himself.

"Rose?" he asked, taking a few cautious steps towards her. Her face softened at his attention, but even still her features were frosted in a web of sorrow. "Can you tell us what it was like in Pete's World? It's set a few years beyond ours. What's out there?"

She swallowed, and after a pregnant pause, spoke. "It's... the darkness."

"The stars were going out," Donna added.

"One by one," she continued, her shaky voice strengthening. "We looked up at the sky and they were just dying. Basically, we've been building this travel machine, this... dimension cannon, so I- I could come back. Anyway, suddenly, it started to work and the dimensions started to collapse. Not just in our world, not just in yours, but the whole of reality. Even the Void was dead!"

The Doctor met her reddened eyes, his focus wavering as all of Rose Tyler's potential timelines spooled out before him like unraveled ribbons. All of them. Every heartbeat and every daydream, every triumph and every tragedy, from the time of birth to the occasion of her— No! He slammed a door in his mind, pushing his heightened time sense into submission. It left him quite dizzy. All he wanted to focus on right now was this Rose, and this Rose's voice carried so much fear. Palpable. He was sure the others felt the clear shift in atmosphere as well.

"Something is destroying everything," she stated resolutely.

Donna shifted. "In that parallel world, you said something about me?"

"The dimension cannon could measure timelines, and it's- it's weird, Donna, but they all seemed to converge on you."

"But why me? I mean, what have I ever done? I'm a temp from Chiswick!"

The scanner's alarm sliced through the relative silence of the ship, ringing uncomfortably in the drum of his ears and only serving to worsen his growing headache. It was a relative silence because their attempts at discussion were successfully staving off how truly vacant the TARDIS would feel otherwise. In truth, he never stopped to appreciate how soothing his Old Girl's hum was until it stopped. Now, why was that?

"Well then," he said, attempting to mask his dizziness by leaning his arms on the console in the most casual manner he could portray. "I guess this means we're about to have a- a little tryst with... with the Da-"

His words caught in his throat, exhaustion rippling through him like tidal waves as his vision grew momentarily dark. Returning to awareness, he discovered himself being lead towards the jump seat by all three friends. Within, his double pulse raced rampant. Did... did he nearly pass out? No, no, he couldn't—

A uncomfortable tickle ran up the back of his throat. He involuntarily arched his back into the sturdy cushion, and coughed up a sum of excess regenerative energy, the portion expelled out of his blood stream and through his lungs after all cells had been properly repaired and replaced. It floated towards the upper atrium of the TARDIS in swirling, dainty tendrils. Jack, Rose, and Donna all watched soberly as it eventually dissipated in midair.

"I can't go out there," he realized, the blinding truth of the matter impacting him like a boot to the face. "I- I can't leave the TARDIS."

"Why not?"

"Because? Because, if they got their hands on me in the state I'm in right now, they'd have disastrous power! Rose," he said, loosely grasping her arm like a lifeline as he felt his hold on consciousness weakening. "It's like the pilot fish. Remember those pilot fish? Listen, you can't let them find me in here! I'll try to shield myself, but that's no guarantee that- that..."

Just before he blacked out and his left heart stopped beating, the last five or so minutes of his memory replayed at rapid. Every decision, every footstep, every word. Briefly, he wondered what might have been, every turn or flip of the dial in time's enigmatic design. Every possibility, an infinitude of them.

But mostly, he wondered where he'd gotten it wrong.