Doctor Who Fan Fiction ❯ Donna and Ten - The Inbetweens and backstories ❯ Chapter Four ( Chapter 4 )

'Oi, you two. You're just mad. Do you hear me? Mad! And I'm going to report you for madness,' the plucky journalist called to them as she ran away from Adipose Industries.

 

'You see, some people just can't take it,' Donna said with a smile. She'd finally found the Doctor.

 

'No,' the Doctor agreed.

 

'And some people can. So, then. TARDIS! Come on.' Their reunion had been as mad and as dangerous as their first meeting, and she loved it. She'd never considered herself to be brave, but, like her mother, if someone jumped the queue at the supermarket, she was up for a fight. And tonight, it had been like that, with that Miss Foster trying to turn people into little fat aliens, nobody did that in her town.

 

When they got to the alleyway where he'd parked the TARDIS, she stopped and looked on in amazement. 'That's my car! That is like destiny. And I've been ready for this.'

 

She opened the boot of the car, and started taking out bags and suitcases. 'I packed ages ago, just in case. Because I thought, hot weather, cold weather, no weather. He goes anywhere. I've gotta be prepared.'

 

She started loading the Doctor with her luggage. 'You've got a . . . a hatbox,' he observed, he'd never had a companion that had a hatbox before.

 

'Planet of the Hats, I'm ready. I don't need injections, do I? You know, like when you go to Cambodia. Is there any of that? Because my friend Veena went to Bahrain, and she . . .' She saw his face and stopped talking. 'You're not saying much.'

 

'No, it's just. It's a funny old life, in the TARDIS.' After losing Rose, and then having Martha flirting with him, he didn't know if he could take anymore `domestic'.

 

'You don't want me,' Donna said sadly, after all she'd done to try and find him.

 

'I'm not saying that,' he started to explain.

 

'But you asked me,' she complained. 'Would you rather be on your own?' He must have gotten used to travelling on his own after losing Rose, she thought.

 

'No . . . Actually, no . . . But the last time, with Martha, like I said, it . . . it got complicated, and that was all my fault, I just want a mate.

 

Donna was shocked. 'You just want to mate?'

 

'I just want a mate!' he said hurriedly.

 

'You're not mating with me, sunshine!' A young, fit man, travelling on his own, he must be sexually frustrated.

 

'A mate. I want A mate,' he reiterated.

 

'Well, just as well, because I'm not having any of that nonsense,' she said defiantly. 'I mean, you're just a long streak of nothing . . . you know, alien nothing.'

 

The Doctor mentally breathed a sigh of relief. 'There we are, then . . . Okay.'

 

'I can come?'

 

'Yeah. Course you can, yeah. I'd love it,' he said with a grin.

 

'Oh, that's just . . .' She was so excited, and relieved at the same time, she nearly hugged and kissed him, when she realised that she'd overlooked one little detail. 'Car keys.'

 

'What?'

 

'I've still got my mum's car keys . . . I won't be a minute.' She ran out of the alleyway onto Brook Street. The Doctor started taking her luggage into the TARDIS, including the hatbox.

 

Donna took out her mobile and phoned her mum. 'I know, Mum, I saw it, little fat people. Listen, I've got to go, I'm going to stay with Veena for a bit.'

 

'It was in the sky!' Sylvia exclaimed.

 

'Yeah, I know, spaceship, but, I've still got the car keys. Look, there's a bin on Brook Street, about thirty feet from the corner. I'm going to leave them in there.'

 

'What . . . a bin?' Sylvia asked in confusion.

 

'Yes, that's it, bin.'

 

'But you can't do that,' she said in complaint, what was she thinking?

 

Donna rolled her eyes. 'Oh, stop complaining. The cars just down the road a bit. Got to go . . . really . . . got to go, bye.'

 

'But Donna, you can't . . .' Donna hung up the call. Would her mum be able to find the keys? She'd better have a backup plan for her she decided, and went to a crowd of people at the police cordon, where she spotted a blonde woman in a nice blue leather jacket.

 

'Listen; there is this woman that's going to come along. A tall blond woman called Sylvia. Tell her that bin there, all right? It'll all make sense. That bin there,' she said, pointing to the bin before heading back to the alleyway.

 

'Off we go, then,' she said

 

'Here it is . . . the TARDIS. It's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside,' he said trying to give her the sales pitch.

 

'Oh, I know that bit, although frankly, you could turn the heating up.'

 

'So, whole wide universe, where do you want to go?'

 

'Oh, I know exactly the place.'

 

'Which is?'

 

'Two and a half miles that way.'

 

'Hmmm, okay then, two and a half miles that way it is.' He started the time rotor, and they felt a gentle swaying sensation as the TARDIS moved through conventional space, before coming to a stop.

 

'There you are then,' he said, nodding at the doors.

 

'Wha? I just open the doors?'

 

He smiled at her. 'Yeah . . . off you go.'

 

She walked down the ramp, pulled the door open, and gasped in amazement. There, stretched out before her was the London nightscape, a spider's web of amber street lights, the white and red moving lights of vehicles, and subtle shades of light from the windows of houses. And on the dark allotment, on the hill by their home, was the dimly visible outline of her grandfather.

 

She saw him look in her direction, and then stoop down to look through his telescope. She started waving, a wave that wouldn't stop, she was SO happy. She saw him hop from leg to leg in excitement and punch the air, was that a whistle and cheering she could hear? He was as happy as she was that she had finally found the man she was looking for.

 

After having a little wave at the man he was sure he'd seen in a little kiosk, selling newspapers, the Doctor went back to the console and activated the door lock mechanism, and started to put the TARDIS into the Vortex. As he made his way around the console, he nearly tripped over Donna's luggage.

 

'Blimey, we'd better find you a room to put all this stuff in before I trip over it and cause a paradox.'

 

'How many rooms have you got in this thing?' she asked him, looking around the console room and spotting an opening into a corridor beyond.

 

'No idea . . . hundreds of years of living here, and I've never counted,' he said with a cheeky smile. 'There's plenty of guest rooms though, so let's see what the TARDIS has got for you.'

 

'What'cha mean, `see what the TARDIS has got for me'?'

 

He picked up some of the cases and waggled his eyebrows. 'You'll see, c'mon.'

After Donna had settled into her room on the TARDIS, which looked just like her bedroom back home, they had a cup of tea in the kitchen, before heading back to the console room.

 

'So . . . where do you want to go for your first trip?' he asked with raised eyebrows.

 

'I don't know, what do you recommend?'

 

'Oof,' he said, rubbing the back of his neck. 'There's the whole of time and space to choose from . . .' He was trying to think of somewhere where he hadn't taken Rose. He'd already tried visiting their old favourites with Martha, and that hadn't ended well.

 

Donna remembered that her dad used to say `veni, vide, vici,' when he came from a football match where West Ham had won. 'What about ancient Rome, y'know, when all those ruins weren't ruins?'

 

Ah, that was awkward. He'd done ancient Rome with Rose, when Mickey had found a statue of the goddess Fortuna in the BritishMuseum that was modelled by Rose. But, there again, Donna didn't seem to have a crush on him, in fact she didn't seem to have a romantic bone in her body, so maybe ancient Rome would be okay.

 

'Er, yeah . . . okay, ancient Rome. Why not?' As long as he avoided the year 120, they should be fine. He set the coordinates, and flew the TARDIS to Rome, in the year 79 AD . . . or so he thought.

 

The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS, and lifted a cloth that was draped over a pole, separating the alcove from the street.  'Ancient Rome,' he said with a big grin, walking down the street. 'Well, not for them, obviously. To all intents and purposes, right now, this is brand new Rome.'

 

'Oh, my God, it's, it's so Roman,' Donna said, looking around. She stopped and smiled at him. 'This is fantastic.' She hugged him around the neck, and he had a little laugh.

 

'I'm here, in Rome . . . Donna Noble in Rome. This is just weird, I mean, everyone here's dead.'

 

He looked around at the bustling people. 'Well, don't tell them that.' When he turned back to her, she had her head on one side, looking past his shoulder.

 

'Hold on a minute, that sign over there's in English.' She was reading an advertising board, painted on the side of a barrow which said `two amphorae for the price of one'.

 

'Are you having me on? Are we in Epcot?' she asked him, feeling disappointed that they weren't actually in ancient Rome.

 

'No, no, no, no. That's the TARDIS translation circuits, just makes it look like English . . . speech as well. You're talking Latin right now.'

 

'Seriously?'

 

'Mmm.'

 

'I just said seriously in Latin.'

 

'Oh, yeah,' he said with a grin.

 

'What if I said something in actual Latin, like veni, vidi, vici? My dad said that when he came back from football. If I said veni, vidi, vici to that lot, what would it sound like?'

 

'I'm not sure,' he said with a frown. He'd never heard how he sounded to others when the TARDIS translated. 'You have to think of difficult questions, don't you?'

 

'I'm going to try it,' she said with a hint of mischief in her voice. She ambled over to a fruit seller, who had a barrow in the street.

 

'Afternoon, sweetheart. What can I get you, my love?' That was weird, he sounded just like a Cockney barrow boy in Spitalfields Market.

 

'Er, veni, vidi, vici.'

 

'Eh? Sorry?' he said, looking puzzled. And then he did something that any Cockney barrow boy would do when confronted with a foreigner, he started to speak slowly, enunciating each word, in the mistaken belief that it would somehow translate what he was saying. 'Me no speak Celtic . . . no can do, missy.'

 

'Yeah,' she said, in a way that inferred that he was a Denarius short of a full Sestertius.

 

She walked back over to the Doctor. 'How's he mean, Celtic?'

 

'Welsh . . . You sound Welsh . . . there we are, learnt something,' he said, and they wandered off down the street.

 

Donna was looking at all the citizens, dressed in robes and other, well, Roman looking clothing. 'Don't our clothes look a bit odd?'

 

'Nah. Ancient Rome, anything goes. It's like Soho, but bigger.' The city was used to travellers from far off lands, and different styles of dress were not uncommon. He remembered when he'd been here with Rose, or to be more accurate, would be here with Rose in thirty nine years time; he'd worn a plain white tunic so that he would blend in with the crowd and try and find the sculptor of the statue of Fortuna.

 

'You've been here before then?'

 

'Mmm, ages ago,' he told her, meaning ages ago in his personal timeline, not in Earth history timeline. It was all a bit timey-wimey.

 

'Before you ask, that fire had nothing to do with me . . . well, a little bit. But I haven't got the chance to look around properly.' Today he was a tourist, and he wanted to enjoy a bit of sightseeing. 'Coliseum . . . Pantheon . . . Circus Maximus, you'd expect them to be looming by now. Where is everything?' he asked as they walked through an archway onto another street. 'Try this way.'

 

They were on a wider street now, and they could get a look at the surrounding scenery. 'Not an expert, but there's Seven Hills of Rome, aren't there? How come they've only got one?' Donna asked.

 

At that moment, the ground started to tremble.

 

'Here we go again,' one of the market traders called out, hanging onto his cart.

 

Donna started to put two and two together. 'Wait a minute, one mountain, with smoke, which makes this . . .'

 

The Doctor added them together and made four. 'Pompeii . . . We're in Pompeii . . . And it's volcano day.'

 

 

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"Oh great!" the Doctor thought, as he led Donna into the Pyrovillian escape pod. "That's another fine mess the TARDIS has gotten me into". The Pyroviles, were a silicon based life form that had lain dormant under Mount Vesuvius for thousands of years, after crash landing. The dust of their bodies was like individual cells, which had invaded the bodies of some of the local carbon based lifeforms, transforming them into Pyroviles.

 

'Could we be any more trapped?' Donna said as he sonicked the door shut. One of the Pyroviles breathed fire on the pod, and the interior got a little uncomfortable. 'Little bit hot.'

 

The Doctor was examining the control panel of the pod. 'See, the energy converter takes the lava, uses the power to create a fusion matrix, which welds Pyrovile to human. Now it's complete, they can convert millions.'

 

'Well can't you change it, with these controls?'

 

'Of course I can,' he said with urgency in his voice. 'But don't you see? That's why the soothsayers can't see the volcano . . . there is no volcano. Vesuvius is never going to erupt. The Pyrovile are stealing all its power. They're going to use it to take over the world.'

 

'But you can change it back,' Donna said, more of a statement than a question.

 

'I can invert the system, set off the volcano, and blow them up, yes,' he said, and then stopped. He'd been in a situation like this before, when he'd been a renegade, and the decision he'd made nearly destroyed him. It was only the love of a pink and yellow girl that had saved him.

 

He looked into her eyes, trying to convey the horror of the situation. 'But, that's the choice, Donna. It's Pompeii or the world.'

 

'Oh, my God.' She certainly got the full horror of it all. She wondered how he lived with himself when he had to make decisions like this.

 

'If Pompeii is destroyed then it's not just history . . . it's me.' His voice sounded ancient and weary, his eyes looked beyond the walls of the pod, beyond time itself. 'I make it happen,' he realised.

 

'Doctor, the Pyrovile are made of rocks. Maybe they can't be blown up,' she said worriedly.

 

He knew better. 'Vesuvius explodes with the force of twenty four nuclear bombs, nothing can survive it.' There was something else, something he was reluctant to mention, after all, it was only her first trip. 'Certainly not us.'

 

Donna swallowed, her breath caught in her chest as her heart missed a beat. Oh God, this was nothing like having a go at a queue jumper in Tesco. There again, maybe it was, just on a different scale. An insensitive bully is an insensitive bully no matter what. When the stakes were this high, someone had to make a stand, she just hoped her mum and granddad would be proud of her.

 

'Never mind us,' she said in a quiet, resigned voice.

 

He stood there, just staring into her eyes. At that moment, she reminded him so much of Rose. 'Push this lever and it's over . . . Twenty thousand people,' he whispered as he put his hands on the stone lever.

 

Donna put her hands over his, and they looked at each other. He suddenly had a flashback of a memory . . . or was it a flash-forward of a premonition? It was difficult to tell when your life didn't follow a linear path. He was standing in front of an ornately crafted box, with his hand on a big red button. Two other people were with him, he couldn't see their faces, but he knew they were familiar.

 

[`Pretending you weren't the Doctor, when you were the Doctor more than anybody else.']

 

[`You were the Doctor on the day it wasn't possible to get it right.']

 

[`But this time . . .']

 

`[You don't have to do it alone.']

 

They put their hands on his, to ease the burden of what he was about to do.

 

[`Thank you,'] he had said.

 

[`What we do today is not out of fear or hatred. It is done because there is no other way.']

 

[`And it is done in the name of the many lives we are failing to save.']

 

The memory, premonition was gone and forgotten as quickly as it had arrived, and looking away from each other's eyes to the lever, they pushed it down.