(no subject)
Because Your Special
A Lot of Doctors in Space
He was standing on bloody air-floating in the middle of open space-on absolutely nothing! His feet were firm on something, like a solid nothingness, and he didn't bobble or waver like he was flying or hovering. It was almost as if there was some transparent magic-carpet beneath his feet.
The Doctor smiled up at her, a daft, pleased, arrogant grin. He had one hand in his pocket and the other was lightly swirling the air at his side with his sonic remote in smooth deliberate motions. "Coming then? Unless, I dunno, you've had enough adventure for one Christmas holiday?"
"Of course not, you idiot Martian," Donna retorted, recovering quickly from any compassion she'd felt when she thought her James Bond had committed violent dramatic suicide. Oh, this alien-man could make her angry. She leaned over the edge of the balcony, resting her belly on the cold marble, and stared down at him. "It's safe then…?"
"Donna…" He pocketed his sonic-screwdriver and then offered her a hand, strong and certain. It seemed to almost glow blue in the bright moonlight. "Trust me."
Donna kicked off her heels, although the marble tiles of the balcony were chilly against her bare-feet, she was not going to jump onto some invisible thing of unknown size with wobbly heels. She sat on the edge of the balcony, swung her legs carefully over the side and shivered slightly from the height or, possibly from the faint sea-breeze. She stared down at her friend. He seemed barely visible far below her pale toes. It was maybe three feet to six feet down to the Doctor. Donna wasn't sure, she'd never been good with actual distances but-if she'd had a ruler or a bit of a string, a pencil and a notepad, she could have figured it out-she was good at numbers. But however far the Doctor was, the ground was far below. From the balcony, she was at least six stories from the distant grassy ground.
Donna looked at the Doctor. He made her crazy. Absolutely crazy.
"Alright, Aladdin, but I ain't singing 'A Whole New World' with you." She dropped from the balcony.
There was a moment of absolute terror, but it was the confident fear that Donna had experienced on a roller-coaster, or when her Dad had tossed her into the air as a child. The sort of free-falling joy that went on for a mere second and then ended at the last possible second. She never doubted he'd catch her.
"Aladdin? I met him once, skinny little bloke with bad hair, and a greedy kleptomaniac. Found a nasty Grask stopped up in a large cask. The wretched thing soon convinced him it was a good spirit…" As his northern voice rambled on about the familiar child's story, his strong hand reached behind Donna's back, and pulled her closer. She assumed it was because she had landed too near the invisible edge, wherever it was, for the very next second, his comforting hand was gone and he was off muttering again. "Lovely set up, force-field slows down the speed of incoming missiles-so they cause less damage-only in this case, we were the missiles. If the balcony'd been a bit closer, we'd have less time to decelerate and splatted quite nicely-or broken a few bones…Look! A door."
He was fiddling at an invisible wall, patting it with one hand and scanning it with his sonic screw-driver. "Ah! A little jiggery-pokery…" There was a metallic snapping sound, a pale slit of light in the air, and a high-pitched hiss of air. A faint aroma seeped into the night air, something like spicy cinnamon and mustiness.
"Is this the…space-ship, then?"
"Fantastic, isn't she? Did I tell you, it's a Star-Charger from the 61st century?"
"Yeah. Fantastic." She smiled sarcastically.
He, however, was entranced in prying the door open, he failed to notice it. Pulling the door back with energetic glee, he winked over his shoulder at her before vanishing into the odorous cinnamon Star-Charger. Donna picked her way over the invisible…wing, wincing slightly every time her barefoot found a hard invisible bolt or weld.
"Donna!" He popped into view in the doorway, his shaved head aglow with warm light from the ship.
"Coming, coming," she tripped over the last few inches of transparent metal and was pulled into the warm ship.
The interior was sort of glorious, if one liked old beautiful things in deep vibrant colors. Soft oriental carpeting warmed Donna's feet. Beautiful renaissance paintings hung on chestnut-colored paneling next to tasteful modern art posters and Victorian silhouettes. It looked like there was a row of bookcases deep down the hall and a cozy pairing of leather couches next to a shiny tea-set.
"It's like a luxury-cruise or something."
"Trust Huddle to take the classic lines of something unique and wonderful, and turn it into something he thinks is cozy from his own preconceptions and biases."
Donna wasn't sure she understood what on earth he was jabbering about now. So she offered calmly, rubbing her feet into Huddle's nice plush carpet, "Home sweet home."
He shook his head and muttered something under his breath about stupid humans. She followed him deeper into the ship, into a gleaming control center that looked rather like the bridge of that famous can't-sink-sunk ship in that movie with Leonard Di Caprio. Donna admired a portrait of a Victorian gentleman with a little golden plaque beneath that read 'Benjamin H.S. Huddle, the Seventh'.
"Doctor, my dear boy, are you in the irresponsible habit of breaking into everyone's manor? Uninvited, unannounced and without a calling card?" A silvery voice came from out of the corner. A man with a pipe was sitting under a large tiffany-lamp with an over-sized book on his lap. With his curling mustache, tiny gold-rimmed spectacles, sharp-looking dressing robe and paisley-patterned cravat, and the cane resting on his arm-chair, he was the very picture of a Victorian gentleman at rest.
"Huddle." The Doctor's voice was a mixture of venom and irritation.
"Is that all you have to say, when bursting in on a gentleman in his unmentionables?" He self-consciously pulled his ankles beneath the chair. Donna could see he was wearing some sort of thermal or flannel-underpants. "And dragging such a young and innocent waif in your wake?"
The Doctor stared at him, face blank. "Okay," He licked his lips before turning his attention to the glittering control panel, suppressing something of a laugh, "you mean Donna…?"
"Not funny, James Bond." Donna said sharply and offered her hand to Huddle. "I'm Donna Noble."
"The name of a great Lady," He said softly, taking her hand gently, "It is a pleasure to meet you. What an enchanting outfit."
"Thanks." She said, softly, smirking slightly to herself. She checked on James Bond to see if he was noticing how a real gentle-man should act.
But, unfortunately, her friend was pecking at the control panel in the front of the space-ship, face bent low over the blinking lights. "Ah! Temporal manipulations everywhere in the area. Should have expected that. Coming from the ocean. That's not so…expected."
"A time-ship in the water?" Huddle supplied, eyes locked on Donna and kissing her hand gently. "I detected it when I first arrived for the guild-meeting. But, since I assumed it was a guild member's craft, I gave it no mind, Doctor Who-"
"Why do you keep calling me that?"
"We have a lot of Doctors in space, its only natural you should have a surname…even if it was created by myself."
"Egotistical explorers. The Doctor is it. Just the Doctor. Have to keep explaining myself to the idiot humans…" The Doctor tapped at the console and paid Huddle no more mind.
"It'll take the old boy-and I do mean old boy-quite a while to sift through all the sensor data. And, I, obviously must change so that I am more presentable for a lady's presence, please excuse me." He moved from his arm-chair, tucking the robe around him, "Make yourself at home. The small wooden box in the wall can make you some rather delicious neo-tea, if you would like… or feel free to explore my fine-art galleries. I have rather impressive collections."
"I'm sure I'll manage to keep myself entertained." She said cheerily, forcing herself to smile. All she really wanted to do was crawl into her bed and wrap the covers around her ears and dream of something normal. Adventure was fine, and all, sometimes even exciting, but Donna assumed people were more happy about it when they'd slept within the last nine or ten hours and hadn't experienced the plane-ride from the depths of hell. Not to mention everything else.
"Sensor data?" She said quietly, leaning over James Bond's back, and staring at the little colored numbers on the white screens. Really big numbers with a lot of points and strange characters between them. Donna was good with numbers, but it didn't look like she could be much help here.
"Don't try the neo-tea." He glanced up at her, eyes distant as if still focusing on the numbers dancing about his head, "It tastes rather like raxacoricalfalipotorious swamp water."
"Seriously?" She asked, but he was back into his work.
Uninterested in art or swamp-flavored tea, Donna sat in Huddle's recently vacated chair and pulled the still-open heavy book onto her lap. It was a beautifully illustrated version of that old book, The Time Machine, and the pictures shimmered with some-sort of alien light. Carefully tapping at the image, Donna activated something and a three-dimensional image popping with color projected itself from the book. It was better than a pop-up book, but same basic concept. Funny to think of that dignified old gentleman reading a pop-up book before bed.
Donna yawned and flipped to the next page.
"Oi…" Donna gasped, eyes popping open at the sudden sharp thwack of something heavy on metal. She didn't know where she was and for a moment was afraid the plane was going down and she'd drown or be burnt like her Mum's toast…But, apparently she was still dreaming because she was inside the Titanic and her tall friend from the bar was standing against a wall, arms crossed and staring at her.
"You dropped Huddle's book."
"The what…?" Donna mumbled. When she dreamed about James Bond, that usually wasn't what he said to her. Then she noticed the pop-up book on the floor, half-open like a decrepit teepee and the three-dimensional projections crushed against the metal tiles. "Oh….so you're finished with data sensors?"
"Sensor data. Yep. Off to bed now, I think. Don't often wait to solve mysteries until morning but you look awful, no matter what Huddle says."
"What does Huddle say?" Donna asked automatically, replacing the fallen book on its stand and rising from the chair. She crossed the floor to her friend and rubbed at her eyes and the bridge of her nose.
"That you look like a flame-haired angel."
Donna snorted. "That's nice of him." Untrue, she added mentally, but nice.
"He's gone to bed, himself. Didn't want to speak to me anyway, so no point in him staying up if you're asleep." The Doctor untangled his arms and began walking towards the door to the open sky again.
"He lets you play with his space-ship while he's in bed…?" Donna asked, lurching after him rather stupidly. Her feet had fallen asleep and she blinked against even the dim-lights of the ship's hallway.
"Of course. I'm the Doctor."
"Yeah." Donna supposed she was supposed to have a better, more dramatic reaction to that. But there did seem to be "a lot of Doctors in space" as Huddle put it. Donna followed her friend outside the ship's door and onto the invisible wing again. "How we gonna get up to the balcony again?"
"Thought about that. Jiggery-pokery and…" he wandered into the middle of nothingness and aimed his universal screwdriver at the transparent floor. The Doctor motioned her over. "…new knowledge of star-cruiser tech. Careful, the edge is to your right, Donna."
Donna walked in a careful straight path to him, ignoring the sharp bites and scrapes to her toes as she crossed over to him. She hopped onto his shoes. "My feet are cold."
"Why do all you human women have to be so sensitive?" He muttered, wrapping an arm about her waist and directing a sonic-blue blast of some sort to the floor. The invisible wing, or at least a section of it, rose into the air until they were even with the balcony. He boosted Donna to the railing, where she sat, feeling rather drained and blank, as he scrambled, after a few unsuccessful attempts, up after her.
"You all right?" He said, rather breathlessly.
"Me? Yeah."
James Bond twisted his remote universal sonic-thing in the air over her abandoned heels and then latched them onto her feet. They were surprisingly warm. She supposed it was because he'd flashed blue-light on them…which did something…apparently.
The Doctor removed his leather jacket and put it on her shoulders, lifting her up from her sitting position and guiding her inside the hotel. "You've gotta walk to you room now, Donna."
Donna jerkily moved down the corridors, blinking to keep her eyes open. They took an elevator down, she thought, and then some stairs up and walked around in circles for a bit, and then the Doctor unlocked her door and gently shoved her in.
"Nice of you to walk me home, James." She said, managing to fall onto her bed rather than the floor. Donna laid there, vaguely aware that she was wearing a very expensive, very wrinkled dress, with a tight hair-pin embedded in her skull and open-toed heels dangling from her now toasty feet.
Someone tugged off her shoes, rummaged in her suitcase and made some nervous, uncomfortable sighs and "tsks" and, moments afterwards pulled a pair of fluffy pink socks on her feet. Donna rolled over, and stared dazedly into the Doctor's face.
"…James?"
"Right, then, that's all I'm doing." He said defensively, tucking a blanket around her feet and pulling it to her chin. "If you want to change into your nightdress, you'll have to do it on your own."
"…Are you gonna go again?"
"Go where, Donna?"
"Traveling in time and space with Rose."
"Yeah. Probably. Unless I get murdered by Daleks or something and never pick her up from holiday."
Donna turned on her side, pulling a pillow from its blanket-enfolding prison and yawned dramatically. "Good night, James."
"Donna…I was going to ask…" His hand touched her hair, softly, almost like her Dad's touch. Donna felt safe-even with everything that had happened today-and relaxed even more. The Doctor sighed softly, "Don't worry about it, eh? It can wait until morning."
Donna heard him leave and settled farther down into the plush mattress and lovely sweet-smelling pillow. Her last thought, vague and half-formed, was that whoever Rose was, she was a rather lucky person.