Whilst I'm Cleaning...
A fix-it that's been sitting on my laptop for a couple of months that I thought I might as well rid myself of.
Title: Ever After is a Matter of Relativity
Rating: PG
Pairing: mostly gen
Summary: Time is malleable, it can change and it can adapt.
Disclaimer: Is not mine.
Ever After is a Matter of Relativity
-
Time is malleable, it can change and it can adapt. The only thing is this: reality follows suit. You can’t change time without changing time. The flutter of a butterfly’s wings can cause a storm thousands of miles away. One word, one moment off, and wars can be ended, stars can collide, civilisations toppled, lives saved and lost, millions of times over. One woman, first and last of her kind, a theoretical impossibility with worlds inside her head that were burning her, with time and space and knowledge and sadness; one woman who should have burnt, was always meant to burn:
One woman lived.
-
She’s just an ordinary person, you see.
-
After the whole world briefly loses its marbles over some botched military something or other --
(‘Don’t be silly, Liza, the amount of energy required to reverse the effects of gravity and take Earth out of orbit while our moon maintains a fixed position and then put it back again would be astronomical! Not to mention the stabilisation of the atmosphere and heat and lig-I do so understand what I’m saying. Right, just because you spent you’re entire education perving on Mr. O’Donnell... You did so! I did not! He was a prick! I was-‘)
-- Donna decides that she should try for one of the positions at King’s College so she could be taken seriously. It doesn’t seem quite her own thought, somehow, but she does it and does well in the interviews.
She becomes a historian, because she wants to, and they put her on an accelerated course (it has nothing to do with your age Ma’am, we aren’t implying that in the slightest, it’s just... you’re a bit advanced-academically-we thought you’d prefer a challenge.)
-
Unfortunately the BBC is slightly less enthusiastic about a history program on Literary Throughout The Ages that regularly uses words like epistolatory and dithyramb and shag.
-
Mum sometimes doesn’t know quite what to say to her, and she seems to worry an awful lot about Donna’s sudden interest in facts and time and exactly why the red wire needs to connect to that thing there, Gramps, no, to the left, so that the impulse can be carried to the right bit of the engine.
Gramps, though, smiles like he’s been given the bank records for a large increase in his pension (he hasn’t, yet, Donna’s waiting for his birthday.) He says that he thinks she’s brilliant and when she first hears it neither of them can figure out why she starts to cry.
-
She gets very good at ignoring the way her mind seems to steer clear of certain thoughts and memories like they’re toxic. She swears up and down that she went into Uni because her life was so dull she couldn’t remember doing anything beyond the routine for whole years at a time. She ignores that even the routine is blurred at the edges, like a dream, as if those years never even existed.
-
One evening, on her way home from the shops, she is walked into by a man with bad hair and a long scarf.
“Watch it, mate,” she demands, angry mostly because she was composing an essay in her head that she’s now mostly forgotten and it’s that time of month.
He blinks at her, rubbing his cheek, which has the faint pink outline of a delicate hand on it.
“I don’t suppose you’ve seen my friend. She’s quite noticeable, if you felt an extreme and inexplicable dislike for a short woman passing you by than that would probably be her,” he stops and really stares at her, as if she’s something new and fascinating. “Do I know you?”
“No and no,” says Donna and shifts the bags to her other hand.
He continues to stare at her with his strange eyes before walking off without another word.
“Nice to meet you too!” she yells after him, giving him the finger because, really, what sort of chemist runs out of painkillers when they’re most needed? Probably it’s his fault. Somehow.
-
On a whim Donna teaches herself Latin.
It takes her three days.
-
She rarely gets sick and thus accumulates enough sick days to take them all to France to see some of the castles and museums and galleries that she’s read about. It is, she tells one of her mates that works at the local deli, nothing to do with the fact that she’s always thought French was verbal sex.
She manages to lose Mum and Gramps at the Louvre and sets off to find the sort of bar where a French poet would spend his time, waiting for a mysterious and seductive redhead to turn up.
Instead of falling desperately in love and getting married to a Frenchman, she sits next to a skinny, tipsy bloke that sounds a bit Scottish and familiar (looks it too) in a pub and listens to him talking about his totally ordinary job, on Earth, as a merchant banker, since he’s a human. She tells him more about herself than she’s told anyone else, because she’s had a couple of champagnes and he looks like he’s interested, for some reason, in why she thinks Stalin is such a cock. Eventually the conversation fades and he sits, frowning at his drink.
“You alright?” he asks, abruptly interrupting his own melancholy silence.
“Yeah,” she says and mostly believes it. “You?”
He smiles a bit and looks down, “Don’t know,” he admits at last. “I will be,” and downs his beer like it proves something.
-
It’s after that when Donna decides she needs to talk properly about the mess inside her head.
-
“Dr. Donna,” says Donna with a forced but warm smile on her lips and a hand outstretched to shake.
The young girl, or perhaps she isn’t young - something about the eyes - starts and frowns. Her hair’s pulled back and she’s sitting behind the desk like it doesn’t belong to her.
“Pardon?” she murmurs, she bends the paper in her hand, in and out, like a snake.
“I have a doctorate in history,” she says, “my title is Doctor but my last name’s a bit pretentious. Didn’t they put it in?” she takes the file from the woman’s hands, “the cocks!” she adds quietly with a frown and corrects it with the pen she borrowed from a hotel. One of the really nice ones: lovely, even ink distribution.
“No. Sorry, I didn’t know. Your records haven’t been updated for years. I didn’t-not to sound rude, but when did you return to University?”
“Hardly returned,” says Donna with a grin and a waggle of her eyebrows, “First time round I spent a week and decided academia was all well and good but clubbing was better. Dropped out and all. Unfortunately my feminine wiles aren’t enough to get me in as often anymore. I got bored.”
“So you decided to go back. Just because.”
“It’s hardly unheard of.”
“No, I didn’t mean it like that. Um. Is there anything in particular you wanted to talk about? Or would you rather leave that till later?”
Donna frowns and looks to the side. Her earlier bravado is wearing thin and by God she didn’t miss this atmosphere. Everything is tinged with sickness, and there’s an echo, in the air, of missed opportunities. As if time-this is why she needs be here. Time isn’t anything other than humanity’s attempt at measure, at control, a false pretence of comprehension.
“Not today.”
Martha Jones nods and tells her about her husband like they’ve been friends all their lives.
-
“How come you’re not married?”
“Not everyone can find themselves a fit bloke that’s as good as Jesus, Dr. Jones, even if he has an unsatisfactory last name. ‘Sides, if I tried to marry I’d probably pick some homicidal lunatic.”
-
When her grandfather dies Donna goes to a pub and drinks enough scotch to half-way forget him. She doesn’t remember much of the night, or the week really, except for being hugged by someone she didn’t know and laughing at a pair of dirty converses, propped on the bench in front of her.
-
She stops seeing Martha on a professional level and they become friends which seems to make the younger woman extremely happy. She introduces Donna to a friend, Jack, who is American and charming and attractive and taken. She also meets Sarah Jane Smith, who is older than her and has brilliant taste in men and gossip. She’s a reporter, for a local newspaper and plays golf on the weekends. When Sarah Jane tells her this, Jack starts to laugh.
They talk about intelligent things and understand her history jokes. Donna ignores the migraines she always seems to get following such occasions, because they’re worth a bit of pain.
-
Her friends seem to be a bit accident prone, and she loses count of the bruises and limps and winces. When they’ve mellowed in drink and easy conversation Donna sometimes thinks she can see ghosts in their eyes, too, like all the horrors she reads about could only just scratch on what they’ve seen.
Like maybe they could understand what it’s like to wake up screaming with nightmares so vivid you could swear they were memories.
Not that Donna’s experienced in such things.
-
The migraines continue and she gets an MRI, courtesy of Martha, who seems to have a lot of connections for a small scale psychologist.
Then she gets a blood test.
Then she gets a lumbar puncture.
She begins to worry.
-
It turns out she has brain cancer.
Inoperable.
-
“I’m going to die,” she says, staring at her too-skinny hands. “Aren’t I?”
Martha is standing to the side, a white coat on and a clipboard in her shaking hands. Jack’s on the chair beside the bed, holding a cold coffee and staring at Martha openly. Mum’s downstairs eating hospital sandwiches and probably trying not to cry.
“It’s funny,” she continues, “I always thought I’d travel for a bit. Before. Meet new people, see new places. I thought maybe I’d be good at travelling.”
“Yeah,” mumbles Martha.
Donna closes her eyes.
“I want to talk to Mum.”
They both leave.
-
Donna opens her eyes and finds a face hovering above them.
“Hello Donna Noble,” it says.
“What day’s it?” she asks, because hospital monotony has blurred them all in her head. She’s too tired to think beyond the little things, now, so she treasures them.
“One of millions,” it says then pauses and the eyebrows furrow, “well trillions of billions of millions. More, if you count the days on different planets.”
“You’re not helping, Doctor,” says Martha’s voice somewhere in the distance.
“Oh. Right. Yes. Well,” a hand appears and brushes through the already mad hair atop the face. “You see, Donna Noble, you’re A Bit Special. Quite unique really. We have reason to believe that maybe there’s a cure for you, according to your DNA, which is a sight for sore eyes like you wouldn’t believe. Well, maybe you would believe. Anyway, first I want your permission.”
Hope, foreign and frail, blossoms in her chest.
“You want my permission to save my life?” she says, maybe a bit sarcastically. There’s a crooked grin in response.
A chuckle, (Sarah Jane’s?) rings out in the room.
“I’m not going to do anything unless you say I can. It’ll hurt. And maybe possibly not quite work.”
She closes her eyes. “I’m a big girl, I can take it.”
“Yes then?” the face whispers. She can feel the breath on her forehead.
“Yes.”
Something bright and golden flares in Donna’s mind, burning and burning and burning:
She dies.
-
“Stand back,” the Doctor advises, hands held up a bit, as if he’s not quite sure where to put them, and a brilliant smile on his face.
And the room is bathed in golden light.
-
In millions of other realities, in millions of other times and ways, Donna Noble died to the DoctorDonna and travelled time and space for all of eternity and was with the Doctor forever.
In one reality she didn’t and, after awhile, she slapped the Doctor’s cheek.
Because he deserved it.
-
“You cock,” bellowed Donna, same as she always was and may have never been.
“I saved your life!” whimpered the Doctor, sitting on her legs and rubbing madly at his sore cheek.
“No, you made me forget everything because you were a bit scared that maybe you’d guessed it wrong and I didn’t get the regenerating half of your DNA.”
“You both had one heart!”
“Oh I am sick to death of your discrimination against-”
“Donna, seriously, please-”
“Cancer, Doctor! Cancer! If I hadn’t of remembered then I wouldn’t have known how to regenerate! I would have actually died!”
“Well there’s no-”
“Dead!”
“Yes, thanks Donna, I did get that bit. Can we please be happy that you’re fine?”
“I’m not fine! I’m an alien. I have you, in my head, thinking that the pinstripes are really quite fit! I hate the pinstripes! Why are they pinstripes? What’s it got to do with pins? Is it that they’re-”
-
Time is malleable and what it once was will be forever giving way to what it is now. Every second, every action, every moment, every word, all adding up to the infinity. One woman lived, when she would have been less and more than that in death. In life she kept her soul, every atom and thought and insecurity that was uniquely hers survived.
Around her time changed and folded and grew, it wasn’t what it had been and everywhere changes spread. Adventures were had and tears were cried and a long forgotten song rang out in the snow-capped mountains.
-
“Home,” says the Doctor, standing barefoot in the console room of the TARDIS.
“Yeah,” sniffs Donna as she wipes at the her mum’s lipstick, smudged against her cheek.
-
(“You alright?”
“’m brilliant. You?”
“Yup. Me too. To Poosh?”
“To Poosh.”)
-
fin
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