Chapter Text
The Doctor had showered today with only minimal prodding from the TARDIS. He’d stood beneath the ceaseless streams of tepid water for what felt like hours but was only, his time senses told him, about fifteen minutes. He’d donned a suit, though he wasn’t entirely sure which one he’d grabbed. With a little more prodding from the TARDIS he’d even managed breakfast, if those horrible flavourless nutrient bars his people had so favoured counted as breaking his fast.
With no other excuse to avoid it, he stepped into the console room.
Had it always been so large? It seemed to yawn and gape, an echoing cavern of a space too empty for just him. The old girl’s hum changed for a moment as though offended by his thoughts, but as he put out a hand to the nearest strut, aiming to offer a half-hearted apology, her hum shifted again in an entirely different manner. It was, as best as he could approximate, a hiccup.
He paused as a beam of golden light appeared across the console and began to settle into the shape of a woman. His breath caught for half a moment as he hoped an unreasonable hope. But it wasn’t Rose, of course it wasn’t Rose. Rose Tyler was dead.
And there was a ginger in a white gown standing in his ship, and a rather shouty ginger, at that.
“Tell me where I am! I demand you tell me right now. Where am I?”
“Inside the TARDIS,” the Doctor said as steadily as he could given the circumstances.
“The what?”
“The TARDIS.”
“The what?”
“The TARDIS.”
“The what?”
He sighed, if only to break the monotony. They sounded like a scratched DVD. “It’s called the TARDIS,” he said, trying and failing to contain his irritation.
“That’s not even a proper word! You’re just saying things!”
And if she was going to be like that, he might as well start asking her questions, because clearly she didn’t know what to do with his answers.
“How did you get in here?”
She looked at him like he was dense. “Well, obviously, when you kidnapped me.” She rolled her eyes, then immediately stiffened as though realising something. “Who was it? Who’s paying you? Is it Nerys? Oh my god, she’s finally got me back. This has got Nerys written all over it again.”
“Who the hell is Nerys?”
“Your best friend.”
He blinked. She shouted a lot, but she hadn’t really said anything useful. He looked her up and down, trying to see if there was any sort of visual indication as to how she’d gotten here, but all he could see was her big white dress, her pinned white veil.
“Hold on, wait a minute, what are you dressed like that for?” he asked, hoping desperately that she was going to a fancy dress party or a cult initiation or something, anything but—
“I’m going ten-pin bowling. Why do you think, dumbo? I was halfway up the aisle.”
Immediately his right hand shot to his chest, clutching at the space where he knew Rose’s ring rested against his sternum, beneath his shirts and tie. On a thin chain there, right between his hearts, where Rose had always belonged.
Why, of all the possible things to appear on his ship, did it have to be a blasted bride?
But she was panicking now, the ginger, running towards the doors, and though he tried to tell her not to, he knew it was no use. She opened them and nearly lost her footing as she stared out into the nebula beyond.
“You’re in space,” he said, dragging a hand over his face. “Outer space. This is my spaceship. It’s called the TARDIS.”
“How am I breathing?” she asked.
Good. When she wasn’t shouting, she was clever.
“The TARDIS is protecting us.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m the Doctor. You?”
“Donna.”
“Human?”
“Yeah. Is that optional?”
“Well, it is for me.”
She looked a little faint, but she didn’t recoil in horror the way he half-expected her to.
“You’re an alien,” she said instead.
“Yeah.”
She frowned a little bit and shivered. “It’s freezing with these doors open,” she said, and so he closed them.
But none of it made any sense. There was no way a human being could lock itself onto the TARDIS and transport itself inside. He had extrapolator shielding. The assembled hordes of Genghis Khan couldn’t get inside, and while this Donna woman might shout for all of Eurasia, she didn’t strike him as a military genius.
He pulled an opthalmoscope from his pocket and held it up, peering into Donna’s eyes.
“Impossible,” he muttered, not seeing anything abnormal. “Some sort of subatomic connection? Something in the temporal field? Maybe something pulling you into alignment with the Chronon shell. Maybe something macro-mining your DNA within the interior matrix. Maybe a genetic—”
He was cut off when she slapped him across the face, a smack that would’ve made Jackie Tyler proud. His hearts ached more with the weight of that memory than his face did from the slap, though.
“What was that for?” he asked, more looking for a distraction than genuinely curious.
“Get me to the church!” Donna cried.
“Right! Fine! I don’t want you here anyway!” He stepped towards the controls and began calibrating coordinates. “Where is this wedding?”
“Saint Mary’s, Hayden Road, Chiswick, London, England, Earth, the Solar System!”
Blimey, she can roar, he thought. He wondered if perhaps she was the first human with a respiratory bypass, but before he could begin to contemplate the ramifications of that thought she was storming across the console room and grabbing a purple blouse draped over a railing.
“I knew it, acting all innocent,” Donna huffed, approaching him and holding the shirt out in front of him. Tears welled in his eyes as Rose’s perfume wafted towards him. “I’m not the first, am I? How many women have you abducted?”
This was not a moment when he could break down. This was not a person with whom he could break down. That person was dead and gone. He fought to keep his voice level as he said, “That’s my friend’s.”
Friend wasn’t an adequate word by any means, but it was the best he had. Lover, not yet and never-to-be. Fiancée, the same. Girlfriend? Too childish by far, too small. And any word that could truly grasp at her meaning to him was untranslatable to human ears.
“Where is she, then? Popped out for a spacewalk?”
He looked away, unable to meet her gaze as he said aloud for the first time, “She’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
“I lost her,” he said simply, and fixed Donna with a smouldering glare that told her to back down if she valued her wellbeing.
“Well, you can hurry up and lose me!”
The retort felt different this time, less sharp, more rote, as though Donna was used to wielding barbed words, used to fighting back. But after a moment she spoke again, her voice a little softer, a little pitying.
“How do you mean, lost?”
He plucked the blouse from Donna, fighting the urge to press his face into it and instead flinging it back through the doors that joined the console room to the rest of the TARDIS.
“Right,” he said firmly. “Chiswick.”
***
After a bit of chaos, after the traditional “bigger on the inside” meltdown and a few failed attempts to catch a cab and the discovery that it was Christmas Eve, he stood sonicking a cashpoint, clinging to the device as though the pressure was holding him together.
They’d rebuilt Henrik’s.
Sometime between when he’d blown it up in 2005 and now, they’d rebuilt Henrik’s.
For a brief moment he wondered if he’d landed on Christmas 2004, but no. The air tasted of 2007. London construction could work quickly when profits were on the line.
He gritted his teeth, stepped back with the money, hoped Donna hadn’t noticed his momentary lapse. But she’d run off, sliding into a taxi just as he caught track of the same droid Santas from the year prior, the pilot fish.
Something big was coming, but in the meantime Donna was in danger.
Jeopardy friendly, a voice rang out in his head. It didn’t sound like him, even his past self. It sounded, a little, like Rose.
He pushed the thought out of his brain as he called after Donna, then sonicked the cashpoint again to send a cloud of banknotes flying, obscuring him from the nearest Santas as he ran to the TARDIS. She was going to have to actually fly instead of dematerialising. She wouldn’t like it.
And indeed she didn’t, groaning the whole way and nearly taking the top off a few different cars. Sparks began exploding from the console and he had to use percussive maintenance a bit more strongly than he’d generally endorse, hammering the console until she began to comply. He pulled a lever into place and began tying a string around it to hold it steady, then threw open the doors, string in his teeth.
“Open the door!” he shouted to Donna, but it took a few times for it to get through to her.
“You’ve got to jump!” he called out to her, TARDIS bobbing unsteadily.
“I’m not blinkin’ flip jumping, I’m supposed to be getting married!”
It was no use—the robot Santa sped away and the Doctor yanked his string to urge the TARDIS after it, bouncing over cars and probably frightening a few motorists. It was unpleasant, but it worked—he was close enough again, maybe a metre and a half from Donna.
“Listen to me, you’ve got to jump.”
“I’m not jumping on a motorway!”
“Whatever that thing is, it needs you, and whatever it needs you for, it’s not good. Now, come on!”
“I’m in my wedding dress!”
He fought the urge to sigh. “Yes, you look lovely! Come on!”
That got through to her and she finally flung open her door. The Doctor braced himself against the doors and reached towards her.
She was poised and ready, but at the last moment Donna’s expression faltered. “I can’t do it,” she said.
“Trust me.”
“Is that what you said to her? Your friend? The one you lost?”
Her words twisted something painfully inside of him.
“Did she trust you?” Donna asked again.
“Yes, she did,” the Doctor said, “with her life. Now, jump!”
And finally, blessedly, Donna jumped, leaping across the gap and landing atop the Doctor. The TARDIS shut her doors and flew herself into the air, eager to land and rest her straining engines.
She landed them atop a nearby roof, where she coughed them out along with a fire extinguisher that the Doctor hastily began spraying inside at the console. Smoke poured from her doors and the Doctor soon gave up, grudgingly admitting to himself the old girl could fix herself up better if he wasn’t interfering. He sent her a telepathic wave of gratitude and a promise to top up her engines in Cardiff soon enough.
In the meantime, he still had Donna to attend to. They’d missed her wedding, as it turned out. The Doctor found he could relate, in a way. But unlike him, Donna could book another date. Still, she was miserable, and having someone else around who was miserable almost, sort of, helped.
Donna sighed. “Wish you had a time machine. Then we could go back and get it right.”
The Doctor flinched, not sure he ought to reveal any more about the TARDIS’s nature to her right now, not when he couldn’t help her really, given the timelines and all. What he could do, when she shivered, was shuck his jacket and drape it round her shoulders. He could be a gentleman, when he needed to.
“God, you’re skinny,” Donna said, though she did clutch at the lapels a bit to warm herself more effectively. “This wouldn’t fit a rat.”
He gave a weak smile and reached for the bio-damper in his pocket. “Oh, and you’d better put this on,” he said, holding it towards her.
“Oh, d’you have to rub it in?”
He frowned at the ring before him. “It’s not any easier for me,” he muttered. Then, louder, he explained, “Those creatures can trace you. This is a bio-damper. Should keep you hidden.”
She looked at him sceptically for another moment before snatching the ring and donning it on her right hand.
“How do you mean, not any easier for you?”
He hadn’t meant for her to hear that part, but clearly she had. He tried for about three quarters of a second to affect a nonchalant air, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to maintain it. Instead he looked out over the city as he replied. “That friend of mine… I was going to ask her to marry me.”
“Oh,” Donna said.
He half-expected her to go quiet, or to apologise, or even to start shouting at him again. Any one of those options would be agonising—stillness to contemplate his pain, pity to emphasise his pain, shouting to insult his pain.
But Donna surprised him. “So, come on then,” she said after a moment. “Robot Santas, what are they for?”
He looked at her, shocked, for only a moment before gathering himself and beginning his explanation. Somehow Donna had missed the Sycorax ship the prior year.
But his explanation quickly brought him back down memory road, talking before he knew what words were coming out.
“I spent Christmas Day just over there,” he said, pointing. “The Powell Estate, with this family. My friend, she had this family. Well, they were…” They were his family too, at the root of it, but the words lodged in his throat. He cleared it. “Still, gone now.”
“Your friend… fiancée… who was she?”
But that was quite enough of that for now, he decided. It was time to figure out why the robots wanted Donna.
***
The Doctor still hadn’t figured out what might possibly be important about Donna by the time she dragged him to her reception, but quickly those concerns were set aside as they entered the hall, where everyone was dancing and having a wonderful time until they noticed Donna.
Immediately everything stopped.
“You had the reception without me?” Donna boomed, hurt clearly colouring her voice. She was projecting it quite strongly, really, and the Doctor only noticed it wasn’t just more of his own grief by the faint tinge of embarrassment attached to it.
A man in a tux, presumably the groom Lance, stepped away from the pinched-faced blonde he’d been dancing with. “Donna, what happened to you?”
He didn’t seem too concerned, though, and the Doctor felt an insistent twinge of distrust. If he’d lost Rose like that, if she’d just disappeared with no warning, he’d have been tearing the universe apart to find her, not dancing with the nearest bridesmaid. Donna was shouty and a bit oblivious about the big picture, but she seemed genuine and kind enough behind all of that, and she was going through a major shock. She was probably perfectly lovely when she hadn’t had her world tipped on its head, and she deserved someone who cared enough not to party on without her.
“You had the reception without me?” Donna said again, disbelief and fury vying for dominance in her tone.
The Doctor poked his head out from behind her and introduced himself, hoping to lower the tension in the room, but it didn’t seem to work. Instead, Donna turned to him and said again, “They had the reception without me.”
“Yes, I gathered.”
The pinched-face blonde who’d been dancing with Lance spoke up. “Well, it was all paid for. Why not?”
Donna’s voice was tight as she said, “Thank you, Nerys.”
So this was the infamous Nerys. No wonder Donna had suspected her first.
But then Donna’s mum, a horribly rude pale-haired woman, began interrogating the bride, and Lance joined in, and suddenly everyone in the room seemed to be ganging up on poor Donna. She burst into loud sobs, and only then did the others quiet, rushing forwards to coo over her. Lance pulled her into a hug and everyone began to applaud, and from where Donna’s face peeked out over his shoulder, the Doctor saw her shoot him a wink.
Clever, clever Donna.
It seemed, for the time being, that he was trapped here. The TARDIS was still displeased with him and he had nowhere else to be and the mystery of Donna’s sudden teleportation remained and he was trapped at a wedding reception of all places.
The music was all terribly apt. He hated it. He couldn’t help but stare at Donna in her dress, spinning in Lance’s arms, and imagining that was Rose and him. He saw a flash of blonde hair and turned, remembering the feeling of Rose in his arms that first time after the Blitz, and again after the Coronation. Overhead the singer crooned a song that the Doctor might as well have penned himself.
I have wandered, I have rambled
I have crossed this crowded sphere
And I’ve seen a mass of problems
That I long to disappear.
Now, all I have’s this anguished heart,
For you have vanished too.Oh, my girl, my girl, my precious girl,
Just what is this man to do?
So reel me in, my precious girl,
Come on, take me home
‘Cos my body’s tired of travelling
And my heart don’t wish to roam.
It fairly ached to listen to, but between one painful memory and the next he managed to borrow a stranger’s phone and search up Donna’s employer, H.C. Clements. What he found twisted something in his soul even further: the sole proprietor was Torchwood.
Well, you took me in, you stole my heart,
I cannot roam no more
‘Cos, love, it stays within you.
It does not wash up on a shore.Then a fighting man forgets each cut,
Each knock, each bruise, each fall.
But a fighting man cannot forget
Why his love don’t roam no more.
He blocked out the noise as best he could, shutting away his memories of Rose for a moment and cornering the videographer and asking about the footage of Donna’s disappearance. As he watched the playback, however, memories of Rose assaulted him once more. Donna began to glow in a burst of golden particles and it looked for all the world like…
Rose’s strained, layered voice rang out in his mind. I am the Bad Wolf. I create myself.
But it wasn’t, couldn’t possibly be. He directed the cameraman to play it back once more, and this time he was thinking clearly enough to notice that it wasn’t the golden glow of the Time Vortex that had once clung to Rose Tyler’s very being. It was a different impossible phenomenon entirely. Huon particles.
Which meant the bio-damper would be useless at concealing Donna.
Not long afterwards, the robo-Santas and Christmas trees began attacking, though they’d upgraded a bit in the past year. Instead of spinning in razor-sharp circles, the trees’ baubles began to levitate into the air before exploding.
Donna impressed him again just as soon as he’d disabled the robots with a sonic blast, immediately directing people to help one another and even scolding him for his investigating.
“You’re a doctor,” she said. “People have been hurt.”
“Nah, they wanted you alive. Look,” he said, tossing her an unexploded bauble. “They’re not active now.”
“All I’m saying, you could help.”
Her words reminded him the tiniest bit of Rose, and he shook off the association. “Got to think of the bigger picture,” he insisted. “There’s still a signal.”
But it didn’t take him long to lose it. Still, he had a lead—H.C. Clements. Torchwood. He needed to go to Donna’s work.
***
Lance drove the Doctor and Donna to the office building, where it quickly became clear that somehow Donna had not only missed the Sycorax incident last Christmas, she’d also somehow failed to notice the entirety of the Battle of Canary Wharf. It stung him to know that anyone might’ve been oblivious to that day, that the worst day of his lives was just another Tuesday for this woman. But it couldn’t be helped, he supposed, and there were more pressing matters at hand.
“Somehow you’ve been dosed with Huon energy,” he explained. “And that’s a problem, because Huon energy hasn’t existed since the Dark Times. The only place you’d find a Huon particle now is a remnant in the heart of the TARDIS.”
He mindlessly did a demonstration with a pencil and a mug, but his thoughts were elsewhere. He’d never thought to scan Rose for Huon energy, never even considered it. He should’ve done, though. Her tests had seemed fine, but perhaps she was dying anyway. Maybe Huons impacted tensile grip strength. Maybe she’d’ve been able to hold on if he’d just run the right tests, found some solution.
He knew, somewhere deep down, that these thoughts were illogical, ridiculous. Rose hadn’t been full of Huon particles. She’d’ve died far sooner, would never’ve shown up as healthy. And it didn’t matter anyhow. She was dead all the same.
Going through the motions, he located a secret floor on the lift and tried to dismiss Lance and Donna.
“No chance, Martian,” Donna said. “You’re the man who keeps saving my life. I ain’t letting you out of my sight.”
They emerged in the sub-basement, a strange green glow the only light. And, as though waiting for them, three electric scooters stood just across the corridor.
They boarded their transport and set them going, but the scooters crept along so slowly that they might as well have just walked. After a moment or two, Donna began laughing riotously, and for a moment the Doctor felt his grief lift just a little bit as he began to laugh too. What an impossible, ridiculous situation. Rose would’ve loved it.
At the end of the corridor there was a bulkhead door that read Torchwood, and below that, Authorised Personnel Only. He took a moment to scope out their surroundings, wheeling open the door and climbing a ladder up until he could make out where they were. He almost laughed again at the sheer audacity of it, thinking back to the Nestene beneath the London Eye, because right now they were located just beneath the Thames flood barrier. Torchwood had snuck in and built a lab just underneath.
He made a mental note to run a scan sometime of the foundations of other London landmarks. He shuddered to think what must be lurking beneath Buckingham Palace.
Back below with Donna and Lance, the Doctor turned a corner and led them into a stunning laboratory where the robots, or whoever controlled them, had been using particle extrusion to manufacture Huon particles.
That was how Donna had gotten to the TARDIS. She must’ve been dosed up, because Huon particles were inert without a living catalyst.
“The wedding!” he exclaimed, thinking aloud. “Yes, you’re getting married, that’s it. Best day of your life, walking down the aisle. Oh, your body's a battleground! There's a chemical war inside! Adrenaline, acetylcholine. Wham! go the endorphins. Oh, you're cooking! Yeah, you're like a walking oven. A pressure cooker, a microwave, all churning away. The particles reach boiling point. Shazam!”
Donna slapped him right across the face. What was it about this face? Was it a particularly slappable face?
“Are you enjoying this?” she asked him, and he sobered once more. No, he wasn’t enjoying this, he couldn’t be. He’d gotten carried away in the momentary ecstasies of discovery, sure, but a woman’s life was at risk.
“Doctor, if your lot got rid of Huon particles, why did they do that?” she asked.
His voice was somewhere between a whisper and a croak when he replied, “Because they were deadly.”
“Oh my god,” she breathed, suddenly pale.
“I’ll sort it out, Donna. Whatever’s been done to you, I’ll reverse it. I am not about to lose someone else.”
But then the Empress of the Racnoss revealed herself, teleporting down from her spaceship and into the basement. She was monstrous, body like an enormous spider, head dotted with eyes, skin a blistered red. He’d heard of them in legends, the Racnoss, but they’d been gone for ages by the time he was Loomed.
“If you’re the Empress, where’s the rest of the Racnoss? Or are you the only one?”
“Such a sharp mind,” the Empress said, validating his suspicion.
“The last of your kind,” he said, feeling the words echo in his bones as he explained to Donna more about the Racnoss, what they did, what they ate.
Lance was displaying an uncharacteristic bravery, sneaking up behind the Empress with a fire axe, and as Donna kept shouting at the Empress to distract her, the Doctor felt a sinking feeling in his stomach as he put something together.
Lance pretended to swing, then stopped, laughing. The Empress joined in.
“I’m sorry,” the Doctor said softly, but Donna still didn’t get it, or at least she didn’t want to get it.
But Lance, it seemed, had had enough of his charade and was determined not only to reveal his betrayal but to revel in it, the disgusting scum of a man.
“God, she’s thick,” he said. “Months I’ve had to put up with her. Months. A woman who can’t even point to Germany on a map.”
“I don’t understand,” Donna said, tears in her eyes.
“How did you meet him?” the Doctor asked quietly, determined to help her understand but trying his best not to add any further embarrassment.
“In the office,” Donna said.
“He made you coffee.”
“What?”
“Every day, I made you coffee,” Lance interjected, wanting to be a part of the reveal.
The Doctor ignored him, focusing only on Donna. “You had to be dosed with liquid particles over six months.”
“He was poisoning me,” she said, finally realising.
His hearts, impossibly, broke a little more for her. He’d thought they were as broken as they could be, but it turned out there was still some empathy left. He almost loathed it.
“But I love you,” Donna said to Lance, voice cracking.
“That’s what made it easy.” He gave a nasty grin. “It’s like you said, Doctor, the big picture. What's the point of it all if the human race is nothing? That's what the Empress can give me: the chance to go out there, to see it. The size of it all. I think you understand that, don't you, Doctor?”
“Who is this little physician?” the Empress asked, finally growing bored with their domestics it seemed.
“She said Martian,” Lance said.
“Oh, I’m sort of homeless,” the Doctor said, really feeling the weight of the words as he said them. He’d been transient for a long time, long before Gallifrey had burnt, but he’d found a home in Rose, in the Tyler family, in the Powell Estate. That was all gone, now.
He tried to keep them talking, to figure out what exactly it was that they were drilling down to the molten centre of the Earth for, but it didn’t work.
“Kill this chattering little doctor man!” the Empress cried out.
“Don’t you hurt him!” Donna said, jumping in front of him and warming his hearts just that little bit more.
“No, no, Donna, it’s alright,” he said, but she was having none of it.
“No, I won’t let them!”
And this was what humans were, what he so admired about them. This bravery, this compassion, this protectiveness. Donna was what humanity ought to be, not Lance.
As the robot Santas under the Empress’s control cocked their weapons and aimed at him, the Doctor began to babble, just letting out a stream of words until he’d activated the Huon container just enough for the TARDIS to materialise around him and Donna. And immediately he dashed to the console, pressing buttons and pulling levers and sending them careening back through time.
He’d been to the end of the world, to numerous ends of numerous worlds, but he was about to watch the Earth’s genesis. His hearts clenched, thinking of Rose on Platform One, staring out at the rocks and dust that the Earth had become. He should have taken her here instead.
***
He opened the doors to the TARDIS, beckoning Donna over. It was so still here, so quiet. Well, all of space was quiet, but it was different now. Quiet perhaps because the only sentient minds he could sense were his own, his TARDIS’s, and, just very faintly, Donna’s.
“Come on. No human’s ever seen this. You’ll be the first.”
“All I want to see is my bed,” Donna groaned. He knew the feeling. He also knew it was the sort of feeling that was dangerous to indulge.
He guided her to the doors and she came with little resistance.
“Donna Noble,” he said, giving the moment the solemnity it deserved, “welcome to the creation of the Earth.” He paused a moment to let her take in the sight before her, the dusty infant sun in the distance. “We’ve gone back 4.6 billion years. There’s no solar system, not yet, only dust and rocks and gas. That’s the sun, over there. Brand new, just beginning to burn.”
“Where’s the Earth?” she asked.
“All around us in the dust.”
She took it in again and sighed. “Puts the wedding in perspective. Lance was right. We’re just tiny.”
“No, but that’s what you do. The human race makes sense out of chaos, marking it out with weddings and Christmas and calendars. This whole process is beautiful, but only if it’s being observed.”
It was part of why he’d taken companions with him on his travels, a large part of why he’d been drawn to Rose, the way she never seemed to grow tired of wonders.
“So I came out of all this?”
“Isn’t that brilliant?” he asked.
She gave a tiny nod, still watching. As one particularly large rock drifted past, she pointed to it. “I think that’s the Isle of Wight.”
He smirked a bit. If she was able to laugh already, that was good. She’d been hurt, but she was still standing. A bit like him, except nothing like him. She’d been innocent in all of this, just falling in love with a man who’d paid her a bit of attention, whereas the Doctor had practically dared the universe to destroy him, destroy all that mattered to him.
To keep his thoughts from spiralling any further in that dark direction, he spoke. “Eventually, gravity takes hold. Say, one big rock, heavier than the others, starts to pull other rocks towards it. All the dust and gas and elements get pulled in. Everything, piling in until you get—”
“The Earth,” Donna finished for him.
He gave her a small, pleased smile, before looking back out. “But the question is, what was that first rock?”
Donna pointed at something. “Look!”
It was a Racnoss ship, one of their classic seven-pointed stars he’d heard about in legends. “Hold on, the Racnoss are hiding from the war,” he said. “What’s it doing?”
“Exactly what you said,” Donna replied, gesturing out as rocks and dust began to accumulate on the ship’s spires, slowly coalescing into a single shape.
“Oh, they didn’t just bury something at the centre of the Earth. They became the centre of the Earth. The first rock.”
And just then a loud bang emitted from the console, and the Doctor threw the doors shut. It had taken the Racnoss less time than he’d hoped to reverse his little trick with the particles. They were summoning the TARDIS back.
“Can’t you reverse or warp or beam or something?” Donna cried.
And just as he was admonishing her for being a backseat driver, he realised she might be onto something. He pulled out Blon Fel-Fotch Passameer Day Slitheen’s extrapolator from where he’d stowed it beneath the grating.
“It can’t stop us, but it should give us a good bump!”
Good old Margaret the Raxacoricofallapatorian. He ought to check in on her one of these days, see if she was growing up any differently now.
The extrapolator worked, landing them in a corridor about two hundred yards to the right of the lab, but as he was explaining about the Huons, the robots quietly kidnapped Donna.
He managed to get the drop on one of the robots and borrow its disguise, mask and all, slipping quietly into the drill site in time to see the Empress purge the particles from Donna and Lance, who’d apparently been dosed as well. Both were suspended in a large web on the ceiling.
“My children, the long lost Racnoss, now reborn to feast on flesh!” the Empress cried, and the Doctor heard the distant sound of scuttling as the Racnoss hatchlings began to climb the drill shaft.
After Lance displeased her, the Empress severed the web and Lance fell down into the pit below, presumably to become a snack for the Racnoss—or, considering their ravenous appetites, more of an amuse bouche.
“My children are climbing towards me and none shall stop them. So you might as well unmask, my clever little doctor man.”
Ah. He’d forgotten to account for the Racnoss’s extra senses. “Oh well,” he said, shedding the mask and robe. “Nice try. I’ve got you, Donna!”
He sonicked the web, weakening it, but she began to panic.
“I’m going to fall!”
“You’re going to swing!” he said, recalling how Rose had once swung over the Nestene Consciousness to save his life. But it seemed he’d misjudged the length of the web, or perhaps its stretch capacity, because poor Donna swung indeed, but she swung right into the wall below the platform he was stood on. With a clang, she dropped to the floor below.
“Oh, sorry,” he said, wincing a bit.
“Empress of the Racnoss, I give you one last chance. I can find you a planet. I can find you and your children a place in the universe to coexist. Take that offer and end this now.”
“Oh, I'm afraid I have to decline.”
With a remote he’d nabbed earlier, he shut down the robots, but the Empress was undeterred. “Roboforms are not necessary. My children may feast on Martian flesh.”
“Oh, but I’m not from Mars,” he said. “My home planet is far away and long since gone, but its name lives on. Gallifrey.”
The Empress recoiled in horror as she realised who he really was, what he was really capable of.
“They murdered the Racnoss.”
“I warned you,” the Doctor said, pulling some of the Christmas tree baubles from Donna’s wedding reception out of his pocket. “You did this.”
And with a few flicks of his wrist, he sent some towards the Empress and a few towards the wall abutting the Thames barrier. Fires erupted and water burst in, flooding the vicinities, whirling down into the drill shaft where the Racnoss children lurked.
Another genocide. Another race destroyed. More children, murdered. This was what he was, who he was. He watched them drown, felt their screams in the marrow of his bones.
“Doctor!” Donna called out from somewhere below. She was soaked through, but still alive, still standing, even after everything that had happened to her today. “You can stop now!”
He blinked a bit, a bit frightened at the man he’d become. So quickly he regressed to exactly what he’d spent years trying to escape.
“Come on,” he said to her. “Time I got you out.”
***
He input her address in the TARDIS, parking the old girl just across the street, before scanning Donna over with the sonic.
“All the Huon particles have gone. No damage, you’re fine.”
“Yeah, but apart from that I missed my wedding, lost my job and became a widow on the same day. Sort of.”
Right. In all the fuss he’d forgotten about Lance. “I couldn’t save him,” the Doctor said apologetically.
“He deserved it,” Donna said stiffly, but her façade cracked a moment later. “No, he didn’t. I’d better get inside, they’ll be worried.”
“Best Christmas present they could have,” he said, thinking wistfully again about how Jackie and Mickey had been last year, with him and Rose finally back and safe and all of them together. But then something occurred to him. “Oh, no. I forgot you hate Christmas.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Even if it snows?”
He nudged the TARDIS, whose lamp went yellow for a moment before firing a thin bolt of energy into the sky.
“I can't believe you did that!”
He smiled, crossing his arms. “Oh, basic atmospheric excitation.”
“Merry Christmas,” Donna said.
“And you.” He looked up at the snow again. “So, what will you do with yourself now?”
“Not getting married, for starters,” she said, and he smiled a bit. “And I'm not going to temp anymore. I don't know. Travel. See a bit more of planet Earth. Walk in the dust. Just go out there and do something.”
And her answer reminded him so strongly of Rose that he couldn’t help the words that tumbled from his mouth next, as though she was the one doing the asking. “Well, you could always—”
“What?”
“Come with me.”
But she didn’t even hesitate. “No.”
“Okay.”
“I can’t.”
“No, that’s fine,” he said, wishing she’d just drop it so he could leave and go back to licking his wounds in private. It had been a rubbish idea to begin with, inviting someone else along. He was in no fit state to take on a companion, and really he’d feel guilty if he did, like he was somehow replacing Rose even though of course he wasn’t, because she was Rose and she was entirely irreplaceable.
“No, but really,” Donna continued. “Everything we did today. Do you live your life like that?”
“Not all the time,” he said, thinking back to a similar, opposing exchange when he’d first asked Rose along. Is it always this dangerous? she’d asked, and he’d given an honest response. Her eyes had seemed to light up more at the promise of trouble.
“I think you do,” Donna said, not unkindly. “And I couldn’t.”
“But you’ve seen it out there. It’s beautiful.”
“And it's terrible. That place was flooding and burning and they were dying, and you were stood there like, I dunno, a stranger. And then you made it snow. I mean, you scare me to death.”
“Right,” he said, hot shame filling his body. The one emotion he never tired too much to feel.
“Tell you what I will do, though. Christmas dinner. Oh, come on.”
He stiffened. “I don't do that sort of thing.”
“You did it last year. You said so. And you might as well, because Mum always cooks enough for twenty.”
He could tell she wasn’t going to take no for an answer, so he hedged. “Oh, alright then. But you go first. Better warn them. And don't say I'm a Martian. I just have to park her properly. She might drift off to the Middle Ages. I'll see you in a minute.”
He shut the doors and began to dematerialise, but Donna hadn’t fallen for his charade. She also, it appeared, had a transdimensional voice. He’d really ought to scan to see if she had a respiratory bypass, because that vocal power was beyond human capacity, he thought.
He rematerialised and popped his head out the door, looking at her with an eyebrow raised. “Blimey, you can shout.”
If she was offended, she didn’t show it. “Am I ever going to see you again?”
He smiled a bit. “If I'm lucky.”
“Just promise me one thing. Find someone.”
He shivered. “I don't need anyone.” It was a lie, and he knew it, and she knew it. He needed someone very particular, but she was dead. In Hell. Where he’d been careless enough to let her fall.
“Yes, you do,” Donna insisted. “Because sometimes, I think you need someone to stop you.”
“Yeah. Thanks then, Donna. Good luck. And just be magnificent.”
“I think I will, yeah.” Just as he was about to shut the door, she spoke again. “Doctor?”
“Oh, what is it now?”
Her voice was cautious this time, the way a veterinarian might address a wounded animal. “That friend of yours, that… fiancée. What was her name?”
A thin smile graced his lips. “Her name was Rose.”