5x06: Emergency Temporal Shift
5x06: Emergency Temporal Shift
Donna sits up slowly, bruised and aching and trying to remember what's going on. She's in some sort of corridor, immaculately white and evenly lit. Somewhere far to her right there are windows, and the sky outside seems to be the wrong colour, although she can't quite figure out how. Now. What the hell is happening?
A short while ago she was at the Lawrence Berkeley lab, she knows that. She'd been poking about with the wires and the readouts, partly to look like a proper scientist and partly because she can now, all the bits of information packed into her brain that cause her to understand transduction and temporal flux and physics in six dimensions. She spotted something fascinating and peculiar in one of the readouts: just a funny little wiggle, indicating a sort of patch from another timeline, something the machine couldn't possibly have picked up because it shouldn't exist. So Donna fiddled with a few more wires until she had a hook on the bit of misplaced timeline, and all she'd really meant to do was get a clearer reading, but she must have overcompensated -- or the accidental bit of time is a lot bigger than it looked -- because rather than pulling information out, it had pulled her in, and --
What happened next?
She has a headache coming on, although thankfully it's not a keeping-a-Time-Lord-brain-inside-a-human-one headache. It's more a sucked-exposed-through-the-Vortex headache.
That's it. One moment in the lab and the next she was thin as string and a million disconnected atoms, avoiding by mere chance the snapping jaws of nothing, and flying through fire -- so much fire -- two planets decollapsing backwards and the friction of it, for a moment the whole of time and space in her head and she saw, saw her part in the pattern before Time snatched it back and she tumbled through the inexpert break-in and was spat out here on this shiny floor.
"Ow," Donna Noble announces decidedly, and hunches up, trying not to be sick.
She sits there not very long -- long enough to stop feeling in danger of illness, settling into the easing stages of dizziness and hurt -- and just as she's made up her mind to try standing up and exploring, a panel slides aside from the wall a few feet down from where she's sitting and someone steps through, the panel closing again behind him. A man in a frock coat, complete with cravat, and Donna thinks for a moment he looks a bit familiar. He spots her at once and comes over, crouching down next to her. "Are you all right?"
"Dunno," Donna says, and takes a deep breath. "I think so. Give me a moment." She looks up at him and immediately scoots backwards a little; he apparently has no concept of personal space. "Er. Building's all wrong, but I don't suppose it's around 1900?"
"Certainly not," he says. Light voice, also oddly familiar; blue eyes, polite and concerned. And he looks so tired. "5842, as a matter of fact." He considers. "Here, anyway. I'm sure it's 1900 somewhere. 5842.4 RE where you're sitting."
"RE," Donna repeats, with a sense of foreboding. She tries to stand. It doesn't work too well on a first go, and this strange bloke helps her up with such thoughtless concern that she can't bring herself to be annoyed. She half-stumbles down the corridor until she reaches the nearest window; hands gripping the sill, forehead pressed to what's almost certainly not glass. "Oh no," she breathes.
The sky is a brilliant deep orange, light refracted slightly out of real by the dome overhead. Stretching down in front of her lie the spires and streets of the Capitol, quiet and unmoving. Further out she can see the vivid red plains; the trees are bare, for the time of year, she supposes, and the distant glittering river frozen. At the edge of sight the mountains rise up, covered in snow. It's a hundred times more beautiful than she could have imagined with only a borrowed memory to compare.
Donna becomes aware that one hand is pressed over her mouth. She lowers it slowly. "You mean Rassilon Era. 5842.4, Rassilon Era."
"That's right," this -- Time Lord, maybe he's a Time Lord, Donna thinks through the buzz of panic in her head -- says, coming up to stand next to her. "Forgive me -- if you're all right, can you tell me how you came to be here?"
"Emergency temporal shift," Donna says, remembering Caan's words. His mad giggling. She shudders. "I -- I'm from another timeline, I shouldn't even ... be here ..." She trails off, struck by a sudden thought. Being pulled into the TARDIS -- meeting the Doctor again -- stopping the Daleks again through the creation of another Doctor -- so she had to meet him, had to have his brain, had to be sent home again to fetch the Master, had to remember again -- had to go after the Master in order to find his machine in order to end up here. All those bits of time, all those coincidences pulling her into this impossible place. Donna Noble the human Time Lord, in the middle of a time-locked war.
"Yes?" her companion prompts after a moment.
Donna takes a deep breath. 5842 -- fourteenth year of the War, by Time Lord reckoning. Well. For a while the War had always been, its effects rippling outwards so that even Gallifrey felt the echoes. Davros was thirteen years gone but the Daleks were rallying, hitting other targets in the Seven Systems. They weren't clever enough -- yet -- to find a way around the transduction barrier sheltering Gallifrey from attack. After Arcadia, they would. Just now, she -- no, the Doctor -- he was fighting the War in his own way, going where he could throughout time and space and stopping the Daleks -- trying to stop them -- before they took over planets, knocked entire timelines off course, dragged the universe that much closer to entropy. He was in the Citadel so much more then than he'd been since his second century; reporting to Romana, thank Rassilon, because in wartime all noninterference was out the window and the Council, by some miracle, agreed with her. But all this no longer was, is no longer clinical facts in Donna's head. Suddenly it is again happening now, and if noninterference is out the window -- if she's supposed to be here -- if --
"Take me to President Romana," she says.
"I'm still not quite sure I follow," the man admits. "Emergency -- You were catapulted through time and ended up here. That's astronomically unlikely." Then, abrupt about-face from pensive to decisive: "It's so unlikely it must be terribly important. Come on!"
"That's more like it," Donna mutters, although really it's a quicker response than she was expecting, at least to go by the Doctor's many, varied, and mostly negative opinions on the subject of Time Lords and relative efficiency. She follows her guide's velvet-clad back down the corridor -- through into a high vaulted room -- out and ducking through a narrow space lined with all sorts of electronics and blinking lights -- into another, interior corridor. The map in Donna's head offers up the hypothesis that they're heading in exactly the opposite direction to the Council chambers. Good: a private audience is probably best. Donna's entirely sure that a human Time Lord is not about to get a warm reception from most of her acquired cousins.
She's a bit nervous about meeting Romana, all the same. The Doctor files in her head offer up a multitude of opinions on the subject: admiration, fondness, regret. It's almost exactly like hearing all about a best mate's wonderful romance and spectacular breakup with some bloke, and then finding out you're supposed to go out to a business dinner with this bloke and pretend you don't know a thing. Only, Donna reflects, this time the business dinner is about the best mate. Right. All she needs to do is remember that Romanadvoratrelundar is Lord President of Gallifrey in wartime. That's more than enough.
Donna catches up with her guide as they pass through a wide room full of miniature silver-leafed trees in off-season bloom, a fountain burbling pleasantly at the centre. "By the way, how'd you know I was here?"
"Hm? Oh, sensors picked up a breach," he replies. "Human -- that's you, obviously -- but recognised. I was sent over because they thought you might be one of mine."
"One of yours," Donna repeats, with horrible creeping suspicion. The frock coat really does look very familiar ...
"Hm? Yes, I occasionally --" He breaks off, stopping in front of a door; a real door, this time, two-paneled and clearly delineated from the wall. "Here we are!" No one's standing guard. He knocks.
After a moment the one of the doors swing open, held by the Lord President. Donna recognises her at once: the most recent of the bodies the Doctor knew her in, but the least well-known; straight brown hair, sharp blue eyes and sharper cheekbones, a determined tilt to her chin. She's wearing not the robes of office but a twenty-first-century Earth skirt and blouse -- but then, Donna supposes, she's practical. Romana sizes her up and says, "You'd better both come in."
The room inside is fitted with a small conference table; the five walls sans doors are top-to-bottom plasma screens showing the schematics of various star systems. Donna walks over to one, looks at the clusters of dots. "Red for Time Lords, blue for Daleks," she murmurs.
Romana looks over at her sharply. "That's right." She closes the door. "Perhaps you'd like to sit down." When both her guests have done so, she turns to Donna's companion and says, "Now what's this all about, Doctor?"
The shock -- if there is a shock -- is a dull one; Donna's already half-guessed. The problem with all the Doctor's memories is that they come from the inside. At best she has a good idea what each of his bodies was inclined to wear -- a habit she might have found bewildering except that the catalogue of clothing comes with the understanding that it's the way he anchors himself to each new form -- and at worst, well ... the frock coat had looked familiar, anyway, but most of the memories offered up for the man he was during the Time War are either extremely vague or clinically sharp.
If Donna was ever here before, he certainly doesn't remember it.
She thinks all this listening with one ear as the Doctor leans forward and earnestly explains the circumstances in which he found Donna. Donna already knows what he's saying, and instead she watches him in fascination, this man who is the Doctor, without being the Doctor she met, while still absolutely being her Doctor, because she knows him. She watches the shapes his hands make in the air as he talks, quite as expressive with them here as he is in that later form; watches the way he does some strange impression of Schrödinger's cat as he sits there, absolutely in the moment, not there at all. Eight hundred years old (give or take) and still so young. Donna discovers she feels almost crushingly sorry for him.
Realising his attention and Romana's have both shifted to her, Donna snaps back into the present moment. "Right," she says, the Doctor's last comment catching up with her, "where I'm from, all this -- the War, everything -- it's all over, and time-locked."
Romana frowns. "What year are you from, by human reckoning?"
"Just left 2009," Donna says, already guessing where Romana's going with this.
"Humans aren't counted among the higher beings until the Great Exodus of 55,000," Romana says. "With very few exceptions --" she glances at the Doctor "-- humans are quite unaware of Time Lords, nor of this Time War."
"I know," Donna says. She glances at the Doctor again. "Look, could I -- I'm sorry, Doctor, really -- could I do this without him here? It's time-sensitive."
As soon as she says it she wants to swallow it back in: she'd only meant to be as accurate as possible, but her last phrase came out in Gallifreyan, time-sensitive not in the sense of needing to be done soon, but in a very particular way meaning volatile to timelines; handle with care. The Doctor and Romana are both looking at her with surprise, and she knows she's made an impression. That's hardly good; where before she guessed the Doctor merely failed to remember her, in among all the madness of the Time War, he can hardly do so now he's heard a human speak High Gallifreyan.
Still, the Doctor nods and stands, excusing himself politely, and slips out the door.
Romana fixes Donna with a steady look. "You'd better start at the beginning," she says, with a particular inflection: your beginning, not his.
Donna takes a deep breath and explains. She starts at the beginning, too, with her wedding; not all the details, just the Huon particles, and her meeting the Doctor, his future, her past. She talks about meeting him again. She talks about coincidences, and about the biological metacrisis. She doesn't mention Davros, or the Daleks. She starts to explain how she had her memory erased and went home, but hesitates.
"It's likely you've already broken a few causality laws telling me all this, let alone coming here," Romana says, a touch dryly; "What is it you don't want to tell me?"
"I don't have the timeline for this," Donna admits. "What's happened to the Master?"
Romana gives her a frankly surprised look. "I assume his bio-data is safely stored away in the Matrix, where it belongs."
Donna nods. "Well. Anyway the coincidences haven't stopped -- like something needed me to come here. The time I'm from, I said, the War's time-locked. But it's been broken through, not by me, and far as I can tell it's mostly jammed now." She spreads her hands. "I don't know if that means the outcome can change now, or if it just means I'm supposed to be part of events, but either way I think I'm supposed to be here." She twists her hands back together and stares down at them for a moment before she forces herself to look up at Romana again. "And either way I want to change it. No one wins. It's awful."
Romana doesn't suggest Donna might be lying. She merely nods and walks from Donna to one of the plasma screens, gazing in thought at one dot cluster and another. "The Doctor tries to stop this War in his own way," she says, seemingly to a schematic of the Lagoon Nebula. "It's certainly not a popular way. Sometimes I think it might work if more Time Lords were willing to try it -- but we tried to stop the Daleks once by taking care of the trouble before it began, and that certainly didn't work." She sighs and turns back to Donna. "The suggestion that with time even water can wear down stone is nothing but a lot of poetic nonsense to the Council. They'd like a real war with proper battles and tin soldiers, or they'd like nothing at all. And I know the Doctor can't stop this alone." A sudden smile lights her face, making her almost painfully pretty. "But you -- you're another Doctor."
"More or less," Donna says, with a sideways smile. "Donna Noble, by the way."
Romana laughs, a sudden strangely honest sound, and comes over to give Donna's hand a firm shake. "I'm extremely glad to meet you, Donna."
"It's a nice thought, anyway," Donna says, "but even if I've got the Doctor's brain I'm still human. I mean. I can die in space. I've only got the one heart. I haven't even got a sonic screwdriver. It's one thing being out there in space when you've got a proper Time Lord Doctor looking after you. I'm not quite the same."
"What if we evened the odds?" Romana asks, a speculative look in her eye.
"Well, if it comes to that, I could probably make a sonic screwdriver," Donna says. "Even the odds?"
Romana smiles. "Give you a TARDIS."
For a moment Donna just stares at her.
She feels her heart expanding with longing and hope and terror. All the bits of her that are the Doctor are crying out, Oh, please, yes, let me have her back; if she's honest, all the bits of her that are Donna wanted to travel with the Doctor forever, too. She first realised how much she regretted not going with the Doctor when she had the chance because she could remember, in such wonderful vivid detail, all the beauty and wonder and light of the forming Earth. The Doctor's wonderful -- even having his mind in her head hasn't done a lot to change that opinion -- but the vastness of the universe is really the thing that makes Donna want to keep traveling forever. Her own TARDIS.
"Oh yes please," she says, a bit more breathlessly than she intends to.
"You might only be able to use the physical interface," Romana says.
"Don't care!" Donna says. "Don't think so -- I mean, I haven't tried anything really telepathic yet, but I think I can -- but even if I can't, I don't care."
"You're quite like him," Romana says, a mild observation with an edge of amusement. "I think you'll get by."
"Can I -- pick one?" Donna ventures. "I know where the TARDIS bay is -- three levels down, it's no trouble." She drags in a breath. "And if there's a particular place you want me to go ...?"
"Not at the moment," Romana says; "Take any TARDIS that catches your fancy. It'll be logged as out, and I'll be able to contact you if I need to."
Donna feels a funny flare of resentment (at the beck and call of the Council in a mutter at the back of her head) but she ignores that as a bit of the Doctor's nonsense. "Thank you," she says with perfect sincerity. "Thanks, really."
"Of course." Romana goes to the door. "Good luck." She smiles again, that painfully pretty smile. "DoctorDonna."
Donna laughs a bit and goes out.
To her momentary surprise -- but of course -- just down the corridor she discovers the Doctor lurking by a potted plant. He tries to look as though he just happened to be there, but Donna rolls her eyes and goes over to him. "How much of that did you hear, spaceboy?"
He affects a look of great innocence. "Romana's private council? Not a word."
She sighs. "Well, you can at least help me pick out a TARDIS." She offers an arm. After a moment's hesitation, the Doctor takes it and they walk down together to the TARDIS bay.
Knowing and remembering, again, are not the same as seeing it. The TARDIS bay takes up an entire level, TARDISes spreading out for a half-mile in every direction. They're all on default settings here: economically small on the outside, smooth coral shells. Donna has no idea how to choose one, and knows better than to ask the man walking next to her; the Doctor chose one by racing into it and deadlocking the doors and throwing the brake. She's a little tempted to do the same, just to see if it works. Instead she wanders among the beautiful bits of coral, roughly the size of the Doctor's police box though far more elegantly shaped. She follows the small tickle growing in her mind, until it becomes impossible to ignore.
Donna finds herself standing in front of a TARDIS that looks much like all the others. This one's a pleasing yellowish pink. "Type?" she asks.
"It's an old one," the Doctor says, with audible amusement. "Type 85."
"Yeah, well, not as old as yours," Donna says, disentangling her arm from the Doctor's and walking up to rest a hand against the TARDIS' side. It shivers to life under her touch, old and curious, and Donna shivers too. A bit of the front slides away, just as the doors in the Citadel did, and Donna steps inside cautiously. The Doctor follows with rather more deference than she's used to.
This TARDIS is on default settings inside, too: smooth white floor, roundels in the walls that look a bit too much like Lego pieces for Donna's taste. She goes to the console, runs her hands carefully over it. The TARDIS hums, pleased.
"I think it likes you," the Doctor observes from the doorway. "A finicky old one like this, too."
"Yeah," Donna says. "Don't knock finicky." She moves to the monitor and starts scrolling through settings; it needs to look a bit different than this. First it does variations on the default theme -- different colour time rotors, that sort of thing. Different coloured rooms. It has one done up entirely in wood, which is silly, and one in leopard print, which makes Donna switch over very quickly. The one with all the ponderous stone and gurneys causes the Doctor to make an appreciative noise, but he has a bit of weird taste, this one. Finally Donna decides on a setting with curved cream-coloured walls, roundel-free, soft lighting, a carpeted floor with runner down to the door, and a central console near default settings, which at least makes the whole thing look a good deal less phallic. She grins and stands back and feels how pleased the TARDIS is at this choice, little neurons of approval sparking in her brain.
"So?" she says to the Doctor. "What do you think?"
"It's very nice," he says. He seems to mean it, too, which is a bit of a first.
"Anyway," she says. "I'd better be going. Come here." The Doctor hesitates for a moment. "Now."
He goes to her slowly, offers, "If you're here to change events, there's no harm --"
"And I can't be here to change them unless they already go the way they --" Donna hesitates, ends the sentence with the Gallifreyan word that means both have done and will do; is happening from two views. "You can't remember me." When he opens his mouth, probably to protest, she says, "You can't recognise me."
"But I quite like you," he says earnestly. "I could just -- make myself not remember until a specified time. That would do the trick."
"No," Donna says gently, stepping up to him and raising her hands to press her fingers to his temples. She has to blink a couple of times so that her vision won't traitorously blur. "I can't explain it, but this is justice, Doctor."
Carefully, in the way he knows best, she plucks herself from his mind. Not a suppression; not something dangerous. He just doesn't know who she is. She removes her hands and gives him a smile; he smiles back in faint puzzlement and wanders out.
Donna sighs and makes sure the door's locked behind him, then -- heart pounding a little too hard with nervousness -- walks around the console of her very own TARDIS, listening to the wheeze of its engines, and flies it out to the stars.
She goes first, briefly, to the sky above Meta Sigma Folia, and stands in the open door of her TARDIS, holding onto the lintel and watching bursts of starfire, white and gold and blue and green fireworks an hundred thousand miles across. After a bit they go blurry too; Donna swipes a hand across her face, and goes back to the console, and is about to pilot a course from anywhere to anywhere when a surge of energy makes itself known under her hands. She goes to the monitor to see what it is.
Instead she finds the Doctor's face peering at her; her Doctor, the one she just left, skinny and freckled and with that stupid, stupid hair. Donna grins. "Doctor?"
"Donna!" he says with delight. "Where are you? Are you all right?"
As if she hasn't had enough questions already today she can't answer. She takes a moment to think this out, and sets about not answering.
It's a good start.
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