5x04: Daisy
Notes: The original and wonderful version of the story Donna tells can be found in the Three serial Time Monster. If you haven't seen/heard it, you really should.
5x04: Daisy
(The Vortex)
"Donna," the Doctor says.
He's practically humming with shock, and the TARDIS is humming with satisfaction. The Doctor can still sense another Time Lord out there, and he already knows, but he forces himself not to panic, makes himself watch as this human woman with all his thoughts in her head runs a proprietary hand over the console and pilots her easily into the liminal space between dimensions.
"Donna," he says, and she looks up at him with his own eyes and all the things that make her Donna Noble glowing through the edges, and she says, "Yeah, it's him."
"Right." The Doctor sinks down carefully on the no-longer-white chair near the console monitor. "So how --?"
"You burned him in the field behind my house, you prawn," Donna says, giving him a look that is definitely exasperated and maybe fond. "Talk about coincidences. I'm starting to think it was only the beginning."
"So you -- you had to go home," the Doctor says, and swallows hard. "If he was behind your house you had to find him there, and you had to be there to find him, so I had to take you back --"
"Doctor," Donna says, and he subsides.
Neither of them say any more for a long time. The silence stretches between them, punctuated only by the placid wheeze of the time rotor, until each second becomes a dragging agony. The Doctor opens his mouth. "I --"
"The way I see it," Donna overrides him, so gently it makes him wince a little, "you could've told me right off I wouldn't be able to handle a Time Lord brain very long. Then during all those goodbyes we might've come up with something."
"You didn't want to know," the Doctor says. It comes out accusing.
Donna's lips twist a little. "S'pose I didn't. That's how we take care of things, though, yeah? Ignore it long enough and it might go away."
The Doctor gapes at her. "Now that's just -- Donna, you're not telling me saving planets counts as ignoring things --"
"No," Donna says, still in that awful gentle voice. "Us, Doctor. Or, well, you. I get a big Time Lord brain I can't possibly handle and I hope maybe if I don't look too closely it won't be a problem. That's you."
"That's not --" the Doctor protests, but even in his own ears the indignation's a bit feeble.
"Yeah it is." Donna sits down on the edge of the console. "Now, I'm not saying you thought it, and, yeah, erasing it all was the only way you could be sure I wouldn't die, but I think you don't want someone who knows absolutely everything about you." She watches him expectantly for a moment, and when he says nothing, goes on, "But it's all packed away." For the first time a grin comes across her face. "I mean, 's not like I'm going to embarrass you with the story of that time Drax took the sub-dimensional transit coils and stuck them --"
"Oi!" the Doctor interrupts, sitting up straight. "If you're not going to tell the story don't tell the story! Especially that one." He subsides back in the chair. "And -- yeah. Don't do that. Really. Don't."
"Sorry," Donna says, not looking it, but a good deal of tension seeps from the air between them. "Really, I promise, I don't want to go through your thousand years of dirty laundry. Now! He can't have left the planet."
"Right!" the Doctor says, jumping to his feet and coming to stand next to her at the console. He ignores the knowing sideways look she throws him. "And he won't have stayed in Britain -- too many people would recognise him. Where else would he go? On this planet, Donna, what else would be --?"
"Funny?" Donna tilts her head, considering. "Can't you sense him?"
"Well, yeah, he's here and now but it's just one little planet," the Doctor says, "and, no offence, Donna, you're sort of whispering away there too, which gets everything a bit muddled."
"Build a new Zero Room if I'm so loud," Donna returns, disgruntled, and types in a command code for crosschecks between places on Earth the TARDIS has landed coupled with any encounters with other Time Lords. An excess of five thousand hits pops up; the Doctor slips on his specs and edges her out of the way, typing in a further command to eliminate all the hits for Great Britain. The list immediately narrows to around ninety. Not looking at Donna, the Doctor carefully filters out the counts the TARDIS has made for Romana, which leaves about sixty entries. Donna leans in to look them over. "San Francisco," she says, and blinks. "Uh, Doctor? All -- all the writing's still in Gallifreyan, isn't it?"
The Doctor double-takes. "I think it is, yeah." This realisation makes his chest feel a little funny, and the wry look on Donna's face comforts him. "So! San Francisco? Why do you say that?"
"Well, it would be funny," Donna says dryly.
The Doctor sighs and pockets the specs. "Yeah, you're right there. How does tomorrow morning sound? It'll give him enough time to get there."
"Right," Donna says, and together they dart about the TARDIS, three panels a piece and she's locked onto coordinates in half the time.
(Berkeley, Earth, 2009)
They emerge just off a bike path on a sunny field that slopes down to a road and what is recognisably a city. The Doctor frowns. "I don't think this is quite --"
"Hey," someone interrupts him. He turns to see a young woman who is at least half piercings eyeing the TARDIS with interest. "That was a seriously sweet trick. You an illusionist or something?" Before the Doctor can answer, a fluttering piece of paper is shoved into his hand. "Poetry reading Tuesday night. Bring your friend."
She wanders off before the Doctor can say anything to this, either. He turns to Donna. "What a peculiar person."
"Give me that," Donna says, snatching the flyer. "Telegraph Avenue. Doctor. San Francisco Bay, yeah. San Francisco, no." She looks over her shoulder at the TARDIS. "Think she did it on purpose?"
"Mm, possible." The Doctor looks around. It's a lovely day, students are sharing the wide lawn with a number of fearless squirrels, and the back of his head is full of singing conviction. "Probable, in fact. Sorry, where are we exactly? Berkeley? What's Berkeley have?"
"Besides hippies?" Donna shrugs.
"We're at the university -- oh!" He whirls on her with a grin. "Got it! Physics, Donna, the university has one of the best physics laboratories in the world!"
"Great," Donna says. "He's going to blow us all up. Well, let's go, then." She goes over to the nearest student sprawled out on a blanket surrounded by textbooks. "Excuse me? We're looking for the physics lab?"
The student rolls over and squints up at her. "You mean Lawrence?" He waves a hand. "Up the hill, east side of campus. You can't miss it. Just look for the big dome."
"Thanks," Donna says, and turns back to the Doctor. "That way. C'mon."
They set off in the general direction indicated. It's harder going than advertised, as seemingly every other building in the university complex seems determined to get in their way. Navigating this maze does provide a welcome distraction, though, as the humming awareness in the Doctor's head grows exponentially and the feeling trying to claw its way up inside him is steadily less easy to classify as hope, beginning the slow slide into terror. On the one hand, he was right after all: the Master wasn't about to die, not really, not after all this time. On the other hand, it marked the first time he was completely unable to get through to the Master at all; it might well continue that way. If he can't get the Master to see reason, to understand how everything's changed now --
"Hey," Donna says, elbowing him gently. The Doctor starts from his thoughts to see Donna giving him a wry look. She can probably guess what he's thinking. He looks away. "No," Donna says. "Stop that. Look at me, Doctor. Look at me."
He does, only a little unwillingly, and blinks in surprise. Donna's plucked a daisy from a nearby flowerbox, and is holding it out to him, pink-white and yellow and with one petal missing. "Donna, you shouldn't pick other people's flowers."
"Take it," Donna says, so he does.
"Thanks?" he ventures.
She rolls her eyes and resumes walking. "You can't possibly have forgotten this. Trust me. Filing system in my head? That's one of the items that's flagged important."
"Er." The Doctor catches up with her and tries to think of it. "International ... pick the Americans' flowers if you're in the United States day?"
"No." Donna glances at him and sighs. "All right. Let's jog that big brain of yours. I'm going to tell you a story."
"Donna ..." the Doctor protests halfheartedly, but she holds up a finger, so he just sighs and keeps walking, twirling the stem of the flower.
"Why do you save the world, Doctor? Really."
"Someone has to," the Doctor says; this is obvious.
"No," Donna says. "You save the world cos of that little daisy there. Or, well, not that one particularly. Just -- remember when you were young. Really young. The day you left Verity crying and went into the mountains."
"Donna --" the Doctor says again, his voice sticking a little this time.
"The suns were blinding over the Citadel," Donna goes on quietly; they've stopped, are standing together under a tree on a sloping sidewalk in an unfamiliar city, and Donna's looking at him but she's looking past him too, through centuries into half-dark places the Doctor can never return. "It soaked up all the light and the mountain was so grey. And you thought --" Her eyes snap to his and she stops.
"I know this part," the Doctor whispers.
"Then you'll remember the monk who lived on the mountainside," Donna says, her face sliding into a smile again. "You were crying too, and you asked what the point was, really. If this was really all there was. And that dear monk ..." She raises a hand and points to the daisy the Doctor's clutching, echoing the monk's gesture through all these centuries. "Yeah?"
The Doctor nods slowly. Urgency and fear are still tangled up together in his head, but Donna's watching him with such expectant earnestness. "I know the story, Donna." Remembers seeing how incredibly daisy-like the daisy was, the clearness of the air, the brilliant red-gold of the sunlight off the Citadel and the patches of snow on the mountains. It's always easiest to remember Gallifrey's beauty when he can't reach it.
"Not anymore you don't," Donna says. "I thought you did, really -- you took me to see the creation of the Earth, and it was wonderful, but -- I know --"
"Donna," the Doctor says, through clenched teeth now. "I want you to stop looking through my thoughts."
"I know what you've been through," Donna presses, "I know, Doctor, but you've got to remember all the wonderful things or when we find the Master, he'll --"
"Donna," the Doctor says again, grabbing her shoulders this time. "I'm all right, and no, it's not secret Time Lord code for anything. I'm fine."
It sounds stupid even to him, and the daisy's crushed against her jacket, but Donna nods, just nods and turns from him and keeps walking. The Doctor takes a deep breath and sets off after her. Mixed in with the panic now is something else, extra awareness of the city around them: sunlight on leaves, a hundred thousand heartbeats, the small grumblings of the faultline underfoot. He wishes Donna had said nothing, because it is beautiful, it is wonderful and vivid and small and important, and it all settles over him like a great weight. Donna has all his memories but when she saved herself she pared it down into human understanding, a human ability to process him. She means so well.
He plucks another daisy from a planter as they pass it, and threads it through the buttonhole of his suit jacket. Well. It's more stylish than celery, anyway.
A few minutes on they've risen above the noise of the city proper and arrived at one of the entrances to the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. There's a guarded little gate that leads inside, and a young man leans out to say, "Afternoon, folks."
"Afternoon," the Doctor says, pulling out the slightly psychic paper. "John Smith, visiting professor, and my assistant, Dr Noble."
The guard takes the slightly psychic paper and shines a little blue light at it, then hands it back with a nod. "Welcome to the lab. Hey, are you here with Professor Brooks?"
"Possibly," the Doctor says, scrunching his nose and shrugging. "English bloke? Nice suit?"
"That's him," the guard agrees. "You'll probably find him in lab three downstairs."
"Thank you," the Doctor says. "You've been extremely helpful."
They head inside. The sound of Donna's heels echo back at them, and after a moment she loops her arm through the Doctor's. "I didn't mean --" she starts, and the Doctor says, "I know," and Donna says, "Good," and they keep walking. Down a set of stairs, they're stopped by another guard, this one a bored-looking woman who looks like she won't tolerate any nonsense. Another flash of the psychic paper and a "Dr Smith, Dr Noble," gets them in through a set of doors sensibly labeled authorized personnel only.
"You might call yourself something else once in a while," Donna observes.
"Why?" the Doctor says, glancing at her. "I like it. Functional."
There's a loud bang just ahead of them, and a young woman who looks much like their earlier student encounter, mercifully sans the piercings and plus a lab coat, backs out into the corridor accompanied by a great deal of smoke. "Drat." She catches sight of Donna and the Doctor. "Oh, hi. Sorry about the mess. Technical difficulties."
"Yes, I can see that," the Doctor says, his eyebrows going up. "I don't suppose you know where we might find Professor Brooks?"
"Are you with him?" the young woman asks, her face lighting, and without waiting for an answer goes on happily, "I'm so excited to be working with one of the foremost temporal physicists in the world." She seems to realise she sounds like a textbook, and blushes a little, then hurries on, "I'm Shana Waldman; I'm working with him on this project. Well." She throws a rueful glance back into the room. "Trying to, anyway. He's a door down working on the equations, so I suggest you don't disturb him right now."
"Nah, don't worry, he's always pleased to see me," the Doctor says. At worst this Brooks won't be the Master after all, but while Berkeley is usually ahead of the game on nuclear physics, temporal physics is still a bit of a joke. That Shana's talking about it seriously bodes interestingly, if not necessarily badly. He exchanges a glance with Donna, who's thought it too and nods a little.
"Why don't you show me where you think your experiment might've gone wrong, Shana," she says, and pulls the student back into her lab. The Doctor smiles to himself, takes a deep breath, and goes one door down. He knocks.
"Not now, Miss Waldman!" comes the reply, faintly annoyed, in a voice the Doctor would recognise anywhere now. He opens the door, slips inside this new room, and shuts it.
"I'm not Miss Waldman."
The Master, lab coat a little absurd over his suit, whirls from the whiteboard on which he'd been writing, his face registering surprise for a brief moment before slipping into a mocking smile. "Doctor. Really, you're losing your touch."
"Oh, I dunno," the Doctor says, leaning back against the door. "One day? That's a bit better for me than eighteen months, don't you think?"
The Master purses his lips in mock thought. "Possibly," he concedes. "On the other hand, in days of old it was only the High Council that left mind-wiped humans scattered about like so much clutter. Speaking of, where's your charming mind-twin? Has her head exploded?"
"She's fine," the Doctor says steadily, and notes with some interest the flicker of -- relief? no, that's giving him too much credit; satisfaction, perhaps -- that crosses the Master's face at this news. "What's today's plan? Step down from ruling the world, I must say."
It's a cheap jibe, but it does the trick. The Master sneers and steps aside from the whiteboard. "I thought it might be fun to rip a hole in spacetime just where the Earth was."
"Why?" the Doctor asks, honestly floored by this. "You'd get sucked through along with the rest of the planet." He gives the Master a close look. "You know, there are easier ways to get my attention."
The Master laughs. "Don't flatter yourself." He tilts his head a little. "Anyway, you're assuming I want to live. Maybe I delight only in destruction."
"Yeah," the Doctor says, "sorry, you had your chance with that one. I'm still wondering, though, did you tell Lucy to shoot you, or did she do that cos she hated you?"
"It was entirely a shock to me," the Master assures him. "I had a biodata backup put on that ring the moment I ran for office, just in case Archangel wasn't a hundred percent and I found myself without a Toclafane." He grins again at that little joke. "I didn't want to get rid of this body, not when I'd have to go around reminding everyone who I was after that. I expected you'd go to all sorts of stupid lengths to find me. I also expected you to work it out, by the way, but I suppose you were too busy grieving." The grin widens. He shoves his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, takes them out again, taps the dry-erase marker against his thigh. "Was it good? Letting that last little bit of Gallifrey go? Telling yourself there was nothing you could have done?"
"No," the Doctor says, and swallows. "I hated it."
The Master considers. "So what now? 'Come with me?' Go on."
"Come with me," the Doctor says without hesitation.
"What did you say? We can fight our way across the universe?" The Master turns back to the whiteboard, uncapping his marker again, and scrawls on a blank space; not the geometry of Gallifreyan writing, but its transliteration into Earth's Arabic numerals, a careful equation of Time Lord concepts. The set for the word meaning travel, with the underlying idea of interference -- usually represented negatively, here inverted; the set for me, in the most arrogant of equations for the personal pronoun; the set for you, in the possessive, underlined, mine. The Master brackets them all neatly, adds an equals sign, and turns to the Doctor with an expectant look.
The Doctor sighs. "Can't we just talk?"
"Aren't we?" the Master asks mildly. He waggles the dry-erase marker in the Doctor's direction.
"You got my equation wrong."
The Master laughs. "Then assume this --" he taps me "-- represents the Doctor, and this --" pointing to you (mine) "-- is the Master. Does that satisfy?"
"Just -- will you come with me?"
The Master looks at him for a long moment, blank-eyed. Then he spins back to the board and writes, far more messily, the other side of the equation, this time in the wide scrawl of Gallifreyan geometry: the perfectly balanced concept of life/death, all by itself on the board, looking strange and alien next to all the little Earth numerals. He turns back to the Doctor.
"And where does Miss Noble fit into this equation?" he asks.
"I don't know," the Doctor admits; with a small, proud smile: "She's something new."
"Is she?" The Master's lips quirk slightly. "I thought she was a mirror."
"Stop it," the Doctor says. "Just -- please. Let's get away from this planet."
Another loud bang overrides whatever answer the Master has. He rolls his eyes, and is clearly about to say something disparaging about Shana when the rolling backwash hits them, a veritable flood of temporally-charged ions. The Master swears and darts past the Doctor to the door; they run together into the corridor and through to the laboratory room next door. Shana Waldman is standing alone in the middle of the room, stiff with shock.
"What happened?" the Master demands.
"I -- I don't know," she gasps. "Dr Noble said -- she said she could see where I'd gone wrong, and she rewired -- I don't know what she did but she powered it up and I said -- I said we should wait for you but she went ahead anyway and then she just vanished -- just -- a big bright light and she vanished --"
The Doctor runs to the bank of readout dials. It's painfully unsophisticated, but it hasn't blown any holes in spacetime. Still, the destination field is completely unspecified; as far as he knows, Donna has been ripped through the Vortex unprotected and could be literally anywhere.
He becomes aware of the Master looking at the readout over his shoulder. "Stupid," the Master says. "Donna Noble has your brain, all right."
"We need to find her," the Doctor says.
The Master looks at him for a long moment, thoughts on high speed. The Doctor realises he has an escape route right here, if Donna's already vanished, so it's to his great astonishment that the Master says, quite calmly, "The TARDIS can track her. What are we waiting for?"
We. It takes the Doctor a moment to process that he's not hearing the word in English, but in a nearly dead language of infinite complexity; we, the personal, you belonging to me; me belonging to you; both of us bound by Time together. The Master's face is set in stubborn challenge.
The Doctor swallows.
He says, in the same language, "Let's go."
Previous: 5x03: Scavenged Pieces | Next: 5x05: Three-Dimensional Chess
5x04: Daisy
(The Vortex)
"Donna," the Doctor says.
He's practically humming with shock, and the TARDIS is humming with satisfaction. The Doctor can still sense another Time Lord out there, and he already knows, but he forces himself not to panic, makes himself watch as this human woman with all his thoughts in her head runs a proprietary hand over the console and pilots her easily into the liminal space between dimensions.
"Donna," he says, and she looks up at him with his own eyes and all the things that make her Donna Noble glowing through the edges, and she says, "Yeah, it's him."
"Right." The Doctor sinks down carefully on the no-longer-white chair near the console monitor. "So how --?"
"You burned him in the field behind my house, you prawn," Donna says, giving him a look that is definitely exasperated and maybe fond. "Talk about coincidences. I'm starting to think it was only the beginning."
"So you -- you had to go home," the Doctor says, and swallows hard. "If he was behind your house you had to find him there, and you had to be there to find him, so I had to take you back --"
"Doctor," Donna says, and he subsides.
Neither of them say any more for a long time. The silence stretches between them, punctuated only by the placid wheeze of the time rotor, until each second becomes a dragging agony. The Doctor opens his mouth. "I --"
"The way I see it," Donna overrides him, so gently it makes him wince a little, "you could've told me right off I wouldn't be able to handle a Time Lord brain very long. Then during all those goodbyes we might've come up with something."
"You didn't want to know," the Doctor says. It comes out accusing.
Donna's lips twist a little. "S'pose I didn't. That's how we take care of things, though, yeah? Ignore it long enough and it might go away."
The Doctor gapes at her. "Now that's just -- Donna, you're not telling me saving planets counts as ignoring things --"
"No," Donna says, still in that awful gentle voice. "Us, Doctor. Or, well, you. I get a big Time Lord brain I can't possibly handle and I hope maybe if I don't look too closely it won't be a problem. That's you."
"That's not --" the Doctor protests, but even in his own ears the indignation's a bit feeble.
"Yeah it is." Donna sits down on the edge of the console. "Now, I'm not saying you thought it, and, yeah, erasing it all was the only way you could be sure I wouldn't die, but I think you don't want someone who knows absolutely everything about you." She watches him expectantly for a moment, and when he says nothing, goes on, "But it's all packed away." For the first time a grin comes across her face. "I mean, 's not like I'm going to embarrass you with the story of that time Drax took the sub-dimensional transit coils and stuck them --"
"Oi!" the Doctor interrupts, sitting up straight. "If you're not going to tell the story don't tell the story! Especially that one." He subsides back in the chair. "And -- yeah. Don't do that. Really. Don't."
"Sorry," Donna says, not looking it, but a good deal of tension seeps from the air between them. "Really, I promise, I don't want to go through your thousand years of dirty laundry. Now! He can't have left the planet."
"Right!" the Doctor says, jumping to his feet and coming to stand next to her at the console. He ignores the knowing sideways look she throws him. "And he won't have stayed in Britain -- too many people would recognise him. Where else would he go? On this planet, Donna, what else would be --?"
"Funny?" Donna tilts her head, considering. "Can't you sense him?"
"Well, yeah, he's here and now but it's just one little planet," the Doctor says, "and, no offence, Donna, you're sort of whispering away there too, which gets everything a bit muddled."
"Build a new Zero Room if I'm so loud," Donna returns, disgruntled, and types in a command code for crosschecks between places on Earth the TARDIS has landed coupled with any encounters with other Time Lords. An excess of five thousand hits pops up; the Doctor slips on his specs and edges her out of the way, typing in a further command to eliminate all the hits for Great Britain. The list immediately narrows to around ninety. Not looking at Donna, the Doctor carefully filters out the counts the TARDIS has made for Romana, which leaves about sixty entries. Donna leans in to look them over. "San Francisco," she says, and blinks. "Uh, Doctor? All -- all the writing's still in Gallifreyan, isn't it?"
The Doctor double-takes. "I think it is, yeah." This realisation makes his chest feel a little funny, and the wry look on Donna's face comforts him. "So! San Francisco? Why do you say that?"
"Well, it would be funny," Donna says dryly.
The Doctor sighs and pockets the specs. "Yeah, you're right there. How does tomorrow morning sound? It'll give him enough time to get there."
"Right," Donna says, and together they dart about the TARDIS, three panels a piece and she's locked onto coordinates in half the time.
(Berkeley, Earth, 2009)
They emerge just off a bike path on a sunny field that slopes down to a road and what is recognisably a city. The Doctor frowns. "I don't think this is quite --"
"Hey," someone interrupts him. He turns to see a young woman who is at least half piercings eyeing the TARDIS with interest. "That was a seriously sweet trick. You an illusionist or something?" Before the Doctor can answer, a fluttering piece of paper is shoved into his hand. "Poetry reading Tuesday night. Bring your friend."
She wanders off before the Doctor can say anything to this, either. He turns to Donna. "What a peculiar person."
"Give me that," Donna says, snatching the flyer. "Telegraph Avenue. Doctor. San Francisco Bay, yeah. San Francisco, no." She looks over her shoulder at the TARDIS. "Think she did it on purpose?"
"Mm, possible." The Doctor looks around. It's a lovely day, students are sharing the wide lawn with a number of fearless squirrels, and the back of his head is full of singing conviction. "Probable, in fact. Sorry, where are we exactly? Berkeley? What's Berkeley have?"
"Besides hippies?" Donna shrugs.
"We're at the university -- oh!" He whirls on her with a grin. "Got it! Physics, Donna, the university has one of the best physics laboratories in the world!"
"Great," Donna says. "He's going to blow us all up. Well, let's go, then." She goes over to the nearest student sprawled out on a blanket surrounded by textbooks. "Excuse me? We're looking for the physics lab?"
The student rolls over and squints up at her. "You mean Lawrence?" He waves a hand. "Up the hill, east side of campus. You can't miss it. Just look for the big dome."
"Thanks," Donna says, and turns back to the Doctor. "That way. C'mon."
They set off in the general direction indicated. It's harder going than advertised, as seemingly every other building in the university complex seems determined to get in their way. Navigating this maze does provide a welcome distraction, though, as the humming awareness in the Doctor's head grows exponentially and the feeling trying to claw its way up inside him is steadily less easy to classify as hope, beginning the slow slide into terror. On the one hand, he was right after all: the Master wasn't about to die, not really, not after all this time. On the other hand, it marked the first time he was completely unable to get through to the Master at all; it might well continue that way. If he can't get the Master to see reason, to understand how everything's changed now --
"Hey," Donna says, elbowing him gently. The Doctor starts from his thoughts to see Donna giving him a wry look. She can probably guess what he's thinking. He looks away. "No," Donna says. "Stop that. Look at me, Doctor. Look at me."
He does, only a little unwillingly, and blinks in surprise. Donna's plucked a daisy from a nearby flowerbox, and is holding it out to him, pink-white and yellow and with one petal missing. "Donna, you shouldn't pick other people's flowers."
"Take it," Donna says, so he does.
"Thanks?" he ventures.
She rolls her eyes and resumes walking. "You can't possibly have forgotten this. Trust me. Filing system in my head? That's one of the items that's flagged important."
"Er." The Doctor catches up with her and tries to think of it. "International ... pick the Americans' flowers if you're in the United States day?"
"No." Donna glances at him and sighs. "All right. Let's jog that big brain of yours. I'm going to tell you a story."
"Donna ..." the Doctor protests halfheartedly, but she holds up a finger, so he just sighs and keeps walking, twirling the stem of the flower.
"Why do you save the world, Doctor? Really."
"Someone has to," the Doctor says; this is obvious.
"No," Donna says. "You save the world cos of that little daisy there. Or, well, not that one particularly. Just -- remember when you were young. Really young. The day you left Verity crying and went into the mountains."
"Donna --" the Doctor says again, his voice sticking a little this time.
"The suns were blinding over the Citadel," Donna goes on quietly; they've stopped, are standing together under a tree on a sloping sidewalk in an unfamiliar city, and Donna's looking at him but she's looking past him too, through centuries into half-dark places the Doctor can never return. "It soaked up all the light and the mountain was so grey. And you thought --" Her eyes snap to his and she stops.
"I know this part," the Doctor whispers.
"Then you'll remember the monk who lived on the mountainside," Donna says, her face sliding into a smile again. "You were crying too, and you asked what the point was, really. If this was really all there was. And that dear monk ..." She raises a hand and points to the daisy the Doctor's clutching, echoing the monk's gesture through all these centuries. "Yeah?"
The Doctor nods slowly. Urgency and fear are still tangled up together in his head, but Donna's watching him with such expectant earnestness. "I know the story, Donna." Remembers seeing how incredibly daisy-like the daisy was, the clearness of the air, the brilliant red-gold of the sunlight off the Citadel and the patches of snow on the mountains. It's always easiest to remember Gallifrey's beauty when he can't reach it.
"Not anymore you don't," Donna says. "I thought you did, really -- you took me to see the creation of the Earth, and it was wonderful, but -- I know --"
"Donna," the Doctor says, through clenched teeth now. "I want you to stop looking through my thoughts."
"I know what you've been through," Donna presses, "I know, Doctor, but you've got to remember all the wonderful things or when we find the Master, he'll --"
"Donna," the Doctor says again, grabbing her shoulders this time. "I'm all right, and no, it's not secret Time Lord code for anything. I'm fine."
It sounds stupid even to him, and the daisy's crushed against her jacket, but Donna nods, just nods and turns from him and keeps walking. The Doctor takes a deep breath and sets off after her. Mixed in with the panic now is something else, extra awareness of the city around them: sunlight on leaves, a hundred thousand heartbeats, the small grumblings of the faultline underfoot. He wishes Donna had said nothing, because it is beautiful, it is wonderful and vivid and small and important, and it all settles over him like a great weight. Donna has all his memories but when she saved herself she pared it down into human understanding, a human ability to process him. She means so well.
He plucks another daisy from a planter as they pass it, and threads it through the buttonhole of his suit jacket. Well. It's more stylish than celery, anyway.
A few minutes on they've risen above the noise of the city proper and arrived at one of the entrances to the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. There's a guarded little gate that leads inside, and a young man leans out to say, "Afternoon, folks."
"Afternoon," the Doctor says, pulling out the slightly psychic paper. "John Smith, visiting professor, and my assistant, Dr Noble."
The guard takes the slightly psychic paper and shines a little blue light at it, then hands it back with a nod. "Welcome to the lab. Hey, are you here with Professor Brooks?"
"Possibly," the Doctor says, scrunching his nose and shrugging. "English bloke? Nice suit?"
"That's him," the guard agrees. "You'll probably find him in lab three downstairs."
"Thank you," the Doctor says. "You've been extremely helpful."
They head inside. The sound of Donna's heels echo back at them, and after a moment she loops her arm through the Doctor's. "I didn't mean --" she starts, and the Doctor says, "I know," and Donna says, "Good," and they keep walking. Down a set of stairs, they're stopped by another guard, this one a bored-looking woman who looks like she won't tolerate any nonsense. Another flash of the psychic paper and a "Dr Smith, Dr Noble," gets them in through a set of doors sensibly labeled authorized personnel only.
"You might call yourself something else once in a while," Donna observes.
"Why?" the Doctor says, glancing at her. "I like it. Functional."
There's a loud bang just ahead of them, and a young woman who looks much like their earlier student encounter, mercifully sans the piercings and plus a lab coat, backs out into the corridor accompanied by a great deal of smoke. "Drat." She catches sight of Donna and the Doctor. "Oh, hi. Sorry about the mess. Technical difficulties."
"Yes, I can see that," the Doctor says, his eyebrows going up. "I don't suppose you know where we might find Professor Brooks?"
"Are you with him?" the young woman asks, her face lighting, and without waiting for an answer goes on happily, "I'm so excited to be working with one of the foremost temporal physicists in the world." She seems to realise she sounds like a textbook, and blushes a little, then hurries on, "I'm Shana Waldman; I'm working with him on this project. Well." She throws a rueful glance back into the room. "Trying to, anyway. He's a door down working on the equations, so I suggest you don't disturb him right now."
"Nah, don't worry, he's always pleased to see me," the Doctor says. At worst this Brooks won't be the Master after all, but while Berkeley is usually ahead of the game on nuclear physics, temporal physics is still a bit of a joke. That Shana's talking about it seriously bodes interestingly, if not necessarily badly. He exchanges a glance with Donna, who's thought it too and nods a little.
"Why don't you show me where you think your experiment might've gone wrong, Shana," she says, and pulls the student back into her lab. The Doctor smiles to himself, takes a deep breath, and goes one door down. He knocks.
"Not now, Miss Waldman!" comes the reply, faintly annoyed, in a voice the Doctor would recognise anywhere now. He opens the door, slips inside this new room, and shuts it.
"I'm not Miss Waldman."
The Master, lab coat a little absurd over his suit, whirls from the whiteboard on which he'd been writing, his face registering surprise for a brief moment before slipping into a mocking smile. "Doctor. Really, you're losing your touch."
"Oh, I dunno," the Doctor says, leaning back against the door. "One day? That's a bit better for me than eighteen months, don't you think?"
The Master purses his lips in mock thought. "Possibly," he concedes. "On the other hand, in days of old it was only the High Council that left mind-wiped humans scattered about like so much clutter. Speaking of, where's your charming mind-twin? Has her head exploded?"
"She's fine," the Doctor says steadily, and notes with some interest the flicker of -- relief? no, that's giving him too much credit; satisfaction, perhaps -- that crosses the Master's face at this news. "What's today's plan? Step down from ruling the world, I must say."
It's a cheap jibe, but it does the trick. The Master sneers and steps aside from the whiteboard. "I thought it might be fun to rip a hole in spacetime just where the Earth was."
"Why?" the Doctor asks, honestly floored by this. "You'd get sucked through along with the rest of the planet." He gives the Master a close look. "You know, there are easier ways to get my attention."
The Master laughs. "Don't flatter yourself." He tilts his head a little. "Anyway, you're assuming I want to live. Maybe I delight only in destruction."
"Yeah," the Doctor says, "sorry, you had your chance with that one. I'm still wondering, though, did you tell Lucy to shoot you, or did she do that cos she hated you?"
"It was entirely a shock to me," the Master assures him. "I had a biodata backup put on that ring the moment I ran for office, just in case Archangel wasn't a hundred percent and I found myself without a Toclafane." He grins again at that little joke. "I didn't want to get rid of this body, not when I'd have to go around reminding everyone who I was after that. I expected you'd go to all sorts of stupid lengths to find me. I also expected you to work it out, by the way, but I suppose you were too busy grieving." The grin widens. He shoves his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, takes them out again, taps the dry-erase marker against his thigh. "Was it good? Letting that last little bit of Gallifrey go? Telling yourself there was nothing you could have done?"
"No," the Doctor says, and swallows. "I hated it."
The Master considers. "So what now? 'Come with me?' Go on."
"Come with me," the Doctor says without hesitation.
"What did you say? We can fight our way across the universe?" The Master turns back to the whiteboard, uncapping his marker again, and scrawls on a blank space; not the geometry of Gallifreyan writing, but its transliteration into Earth's Arabic numerals, a careful equation of Time Lord concepts. The set for the word meaning travel, with the underlying idea of interference -- usually represented negatively, here inverted; the set for me, in the most arrogant of equations for the personal pronoun; the set for you, in the possessive, underlined, mine. The Master brackets them all neatly, adds an equals sign, and turns to the Doctor with an expectant look.
The Doctor sighs. "Can't we just talk?"
"Aren't we?" the Master asks mildly. He waggles the dry-erase marker in the Doctor's direction.
"You got my equation wrong."
The Master laughs. "Then assume this --" he taps me "-- represents the Doctor, and this --" pointing to you (mine) "-- is the Master. Does that satisfy?"
"Just -- will you come with me?"
The Master looks at him for a long moment, blank-eyed. Then he spins back to the board and writes, far more messily, the other side of the equation, this time in the wide scrawl of Gallifreyan geometry: the perfectly balanced concept of life/death, all by itself on the board, looking strange and alien next to all the little Earth numerals. He turns back to the Doctor.
"And where does Miss Noble fit into this equation?" he asks.
"I don't know," the Doctor admits; with a small, proud smile: "She's something new."
"Is she?" The Master's lips quirk slightly. "I thought she was a mirror."
"Stop it," the Doctor says. "Just -- please. Let's get away from this planet."
Another loud bang overrides whatever answer the Master has. He rolls his eyes, and is clearly about to say something disparaging about Shana when the rolling backwash hits them, a veritable flood of temporally-charged ions. The Master swears and darts past the Doctor to the door; they run together into the corridor and through to the laboratory room next door. Shana Waldman is standing alone in the middle of the room, stiff with shock.
"What happened?" the Master demands.
"I -- I don't know," she gasps. "Dr Noble said -- she said she could see where I'd gone wrong, and she rewired -- I don't know what she did but she powered it up and I said -- I said we should wait for you but she went ahead anyway and then she just vanished -- just -- a big bright light and she vanished --"
The Doctor runs to the bank of readout dials. It's painfully unsophisticated, but it hasn't blown any holes in spacetime. Still, the destination field is completely unspecified; as far as he knows, Donna has been ripped through the Vortex unprotected and could be literally anywhere.
He becomes aware of the Master looking at the readout over his shoulder. "Stupid," the Master says. "Donna Noble has your brain, all right."
"We need to find her," the Doctor says.
The Master looks at him for a long moment, thoughts on high speed. The Doctor realises he has an escape route right here, if Donna's already vanished, so it's to his great astonishment that the Master says, quite calmly, "The TARDIS can track her. What are we waiting for?"
We. It takes the Doctor a moment to process that he's not hearing the word in English, but in a nearly dead language of infinite complexity; we, the personal, you belonging to me; me belonging to you; both of us bound by Time together. The Master's face is set in stubborn challenge.
The Doctor swallows.
He says, in the same language, "Let's go."
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