Fic: A Change is as Good as a Rest
Sep. 26th, 2009 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
netgirl_y2kTitle: A Change is as Good as a Rest
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Rose/Donna
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3075
Summary: Now Rose had a half Time Lord - half human lounging on her sofa watching the X-Factor, and the heart of a TARDIS growing in an empty jam jar in her kitchen.
“Are you sure about this?” asked Rose, “About staying in this universe?”
The blue box containing the two Doctors dematerialised back to its home universe.
Donna shrugged, “Bit late to worry about that now. Anyway, I’ve got to stay somewhere while I grow a TARDIS of my own.”
*
Rose appreciated the absurdity of the universe.
She’d crossed an obscene number of parallel universes - including that weird one with all the squid - to get back to the Doctor. She'd found two Doctors, only to have them leave her on a beach in Norway, again. Because the dimensional walls were closing, yet again.
And now she had a half Time Lord-half human lounging on her sofa watching the X-Factor, and the heart of a TARDIS growing in an empty jam jar in her kitchen. This might actually turn out to be more interesting than going off with the Doctor.
Rose upended the kettle into the mugs and took the two coffees through to the living room, she handed one to Donna and sat next to her.
“On the X-Factor in this universe, when they get kicked off the show, they don’t just get kicked off the show?”
“They get deported to a small island in the South Pacific,” said Rose, who’d lived here for years and years and had given up trying to work out why this wasn’t illegal. “I know, it’s weird.”
“Funny, though,” said Donna.
“Donna,” said Rose, taking a casual sip of her coffee, “I’ve been meaning to ask, do you actually know how to grow a TARDIS?”
“Yeah,” said Donna, and laughed because she had as profound an appreciation of the absurd as Rose. “Actually, I do.”
“In a jam jar, in my kitchen?”
“I’m improvising a bit.”
*
Rose had never worked out why invading aliens always targeted Torchwood Tower. Why attack the head office of the single most well prepared and well armed alien fighting force this planet had to offer? This universe contained some not too bright aliens she'd always thought.
Donna had spent a solid week watching daytime telly, measuring the TARDIS heart with a ruler, and taking apart all the large electrical items in Rose's flat, then putting them back together just to prove that she could. Then she'd gotten bored and tagged along with Rose to work.
Rose supposed there were worse people than a sort of Time Lord to be with when the giant beavers attacked. Donna and Rose were creeping down the stairs, trying to reach the armoury, when two of the beavers stepped out in front of them. Rose had witnessed more than her fair share of alien invasions, and it was difficult to be scared of something that looked like it should be building a giant dam somewhere... then she got a look at the blasters they were each carrying. Ah.
“Oi,” said Donna, jabbing her finger in the chest of one of the aliens. Rose braced herself for death by alien blaster, but it didn’t come. Donna was still talking, there was a little bit of technobabble in there - something about a moldivian wave inducer - but mainly it was Donna admonishing the invaders.
They looked down at her. Their huge, brown, hard-of-thinking eyes creased in confusion. Rose started edging towards the armoury just on the off chance that telling alien invaders in a very loud and clear voice that you’d prefer they didn’t invade was actually as silly a plan as it sounded.
*
The TARDIS had outgrown its jam jar and had been transferred to a casserole dish. This was more hygienic than it sounded because Rose had never cooked a casserole in her life. The dish had been an overly optimistic gift from Jackie.
“I’ve moved the TARDIS,” Rose said when Donna wandered into the kitchen.
“Oh,” said Donna, not sounding particularly interested for someone who spent hours every day holding a measuring tape up to the ball of glowing stuff to see if it had grown at all. “Have you got any painkillers?”
“Middle drawer, below the cutlery. Headache?”
“Yeah,” Donna took the painkillers. “It’s all this thinking, I’m obviously not used to it.”
“Oh, hey, I meant to say, Pete says he’ll put you on the Torchwood payroll after all the help you were yesterday. They’ll even put you up in a flat. You won’t have to sleep on my uncomfortable couch anymore."
“Are you chucking me out?” Donna asked.
“No, course not.” Weird as it was, Rose really liked having Donna around. With Jake working in Cardiff, and Mickey back home she was feeling a little short of friends these days. And Donna was sort of like a flatmate. A loud flatmate who obsessively watched terrible soap operas and seemed determined to build a time machine out of Rose’s kitchen appliances, but all the same. “You have to stay long enough to put my microwave back together.”
*
“They didn’t want you to stay here,” Rose observed. She was on her lunch break and had come down to the archives to chat with Donna.
Seeing as she was on the payroll now Donna had thought she’d best come in to Torchwood and do some work. Pete had hired Donna with the expectation that she'd spend her days doing Time Lord things. Instead she was down in the Torchwood archives rearranging their filing system to resemble, well, a filing system.
“Where’s the paperwork from the beaver invasion last week?”
“It’ll be under I for Invasions-Comma-Alien. One of those filing cabinets over there. Seriously though, the Doctor, both of them, they didn’t exactly seem wild about the idea of you staying here.”
“I think the new one had imprinted on me a bit. You know, like a duckling.”
“And what about the real Doctor? He had a face like thunder too.”
“Yeah, well, he- hey, why is there Gfortizyy crystal in the middle of the X's?”
“Jake probably didn’t know how to spell it.”
Donna picked up the crystal, which promptly emitted a painfully high pitched shriek, which summoned its horrible creators through a spacial anomaly. And for a while Rose was a little too busy with black, slimy and toothy invaders to worry about why the Doctor hadn’t wanted Donna to stay in this universe.
*
“Did skinny boy ever tell you about the planet Fellspoon?” Donna asked. They were on the roof of Torchwood tower, along with the gadget Donna had constructed out of the colour photocopier, the laminator, three pairs of scissors and a 4H pencil. Rose was carrying a gun, just in case. But their unwelcome visitors were being sucked back through the anomaly.
“What about it?”
“Mountains that move, that’s all I’m saying.” Donna took Rose’s hand and pointed up at the stars. “It’s over there, at least that’s where it’s meant to be. Might be anything in this universe, I hope it’s got a beach. How do you feel about beaches, Rose?”
Rose felt pretty good about beaches. But to be honest she’d never given much thought to the stars in this universe until now, focused as she’d been on getting home.
“I like beaches.”
And that was that; invitation made and accepted.
*
Rose found Donna in the Torchwood canteen, demolishing a microwave. Rose’s microwave had been sacrificed last week in the cause of constructing a chameleon arch.
“What are you making?”
“A sonic, well, not a screwdriver, that sounds a bit blokey. But a sonic something anyway.”
“You could call it a sonic lipstick,” suggested Rose.
“Yeah, if I wanted to market it as a sex aid,” sneered Donna.
“That’s not a bad idea, we could make a fortune.”
“Oh, God, can you imagine his face.” Donna and Rose both burst out laughing at the thought of the Doctor’s expression if he knew they were using Time Lord technology to make a quick buck at Ann Summers parties. Suddenly Donna stopped, looking down at her half finished sonic whatever as though she hadn’t the foggiest idea what it was. She looked up at Rose, “Who the blinking hell are you?”
“What?”
“What am I doing here!?”
“Donna?”
And just as quickly as Donna had gone strange she relaxed, flipping her hair over her shoulder and pushing her chair back from the table. “Want a cup of tea? I’m taking apart the kettle next.”
*
It was Christmas day. Rose had grown to hate Christmas, or, as it was known in the rest of the galaxy, Let’s Invade the Earth Day.
Rose was pointing the laser she’d liberated from one of the guards at the door. Donna was jabbing at the transmat controls with her sonic-not-a-screwdriver-I-do-have-a-mind-of-my-own-even-if-some-of-the-Doctor’s-insists-on-hanging-around.
Something solid sounding thudded into the door and Rose hefted the laser. She’d never used one designed for a person with six arms before, and hoped she was at least right about which end was the dangerous one. Then Donna found whatever control she’d been searching for and they vanished from the godforsaken spaceship and reappeared in Rose’s kitchen. Which was by now bereft of almost everything apart from cutlery, which Rose was sure Donna would find a use for in her cobbled-together TARDIS if given enough time.
“Merry Christmas,” said Rose sarcastically.
“At least there were no giant spiders this time,” replied Donna
*
Rose was looking inside her fridge for milk, a task made more difficult by the fact that her fridge was now several times bigger on the inside. Donna had mentioned something about using it as a shell for the TARDIS, and something about transdimensional physics. Rose understood that much because it was the same theory the dimension cannon was based on. But then Donna digressed onto the importance of not letting the eggs in the fridge go off because it’d ruin the transcendental field. Rose had winced because most of the time Donna was just mouthy, curvy, funny Donna: the same woman Rose first met in that other parallel universe, albeit with a bigger brain. But sometimes she sounded so like the Doctor that Rose found it disturbing.
“Mum and Pete are going on holiday for a couple of days, so I’m having Tony here.” Rose changed the subject away from eggs and TARDISes.
“Great, I love kids.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I used to have two of my own.”
Used to. Rose’s heart broke a little. Donna caught the expression on her face and said, “No, it wasn’t like that. They didn’t die.” Donna laughed darkly. “They were never real.”
Rose gave up on her search for milk; she wasn’t going to be able to find any without stepping right inside the fridge anyway, and her mum had told her never to do that when she was a kid. She joined Donna at the kitchen table and Donna told her all about the library, about Lee and about her twins.
Rose took her hand and listened.
*
It was New Year's Eve. While both Rose and Donna hated Christmas, they’d been looking forward to New Years. They were supposed to be getting spectacularly drunk and making fun of people from the office. Instead they were trying to stop a spaceship crashing into the Atlantic and causing tsunami that would wipe out a chunk of Western Europe.
Tragedy averted, sort of. The ship was trapped in a time bubble half a mile above the ocean’s surface. They’d sort it out in the New Year, after the party.
Last New Year Rose had been working on the dimension cannon and she’d imagined that by now she would be back at the Doctor’s side. Instead she was more than a little drunk and snogging Donna Noble in a cupboard at her mum and Pete’s New Years Eve party. Still, mustn’t grumble.
“Hang on, stop,” Rose said, pulling back. “Is this because of the Doctor?”
“I’m not the Doctor. I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Donna said with a significant look down to where Rose had her hand down Donna’s top, cupping her breast.
Rose yelped and snatched her hand away. “I mean you’ve got part of the Doctor in your head, is that why you want to kiss me, because of him?”
Donna snorted with derision and for a moment Rose thought she was about to say something Doctorish, something about Rose’s tiny human brain, but instead she stuffed Rose’s hand back down her top and kissed her.
Right then, thought Rose, that sorts that out.
*
The morning after, Rose wasn’t sure what to say. Luckily, Donna did not share this problem. “Oh, my head. Morning, Rose. Have you seen my knickers? Stick the kettle on, would you? I’d murder for a coffee, my head’s thumping.”
“We haven’t got a kettle, remember? You took it apart last Wednesday, something to do with a Time Rotor.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ll go out for coffee. Knickers?”
“Front door, possibly hanging off the handle.”
“Right,” Donna left Rose’s bedroom in search of underwear. You had to admire that about Donna, she just fronted her way through awkward situations.
Rose leaned back against the pillow and closed her eyes against the oncoming hangover. She really should drink less. Or drink more. One of the two. She opened her eyes as she suddenly remembered the spaceship suspended in time over the Atlantic Ocean.
*
Their second attempt at safely landing the alien spaceship was going rather better than the first. Rose was more prepared, which was to say armed. She pointed her gun at the crew of the ship while Donna talked.
“You’ll cause a tsu... tsu...tsu...t-t-t-t-”
“Donna!”
“Oh, God!” Donna doubled over, clutching her head.
“What have you done to her?” Rose demanded. She couldn’t get any closer to Donna without taking her eyes off the crew.
Donna was bent over, hands braced on her knees, mumbling. “No, no, not now. Please not now.”
Rose pulled her mobile from her pocket and dialled the office. This had moved a bit beyond just her and Donna. They needed backup. She just hoped that whatever the aliens were doing to Donna wouldn’t get any worse before it got here.
*
The ship had been brought under control and they’d returned to London. Rose was so busy wondering why six aliens of different species might want to crash a ship into the ocean, and filling in forms in triplicate that it took her a while to notice Donna hadn’t returned to Torchwood tower with them.
She found her back at the flat, sitting at the kitchen table next to the bigger-on-the-inside fridge where the heart of the TARDIS was glowing softly.
“Are you okay? What did those aliens do to you? How come it didn’t work on me? Come on, you’re supposed to be the clever one.”
“I’m not clever.”
“Yeah? You've managed to build a TARDIS out my kitchen appliances because you’re just that thick.”
Donna didn’t as much as smile. “It won’t work. I thought that a TARDIS would stop it, or at least postpone it. But what do I know? I’m just a temp with a temporary brain transplant.”
“What are you going on about?”
“I’m going to die.” Donna gave Rose a small smile. “But it’s alright.”
Rose laughed. She didn’t know what getting hysterical was going to accomplish, but seeing as Donna had gone round the twist she might as well join her. “Of course it’s not alright. What are you talking about?”
“I can’t exist. Half Time Lord-half human, I’m not possible. My synapses are burning up. Being in this universe helped me, you helped me. Thank you. Goodbye.”
“You can’t just drop dead in my kitchen! We’ll go to Torchwood, we’ve got suspended animation units, they can-“
“No. It’s either this or I erase my own memories.”
Rose took a moment to process what Donna had just said, then another moment. “Well, do that, then.”
“And go back to being just a human!”
“The rest of us manage!”
“What am I supposed to do, then, be the Torchwood secretary?” Donna shouted.
Rose was about to shout back when Donna clutched her head and nearly fell out of her chair. She grabbed Donna and steadied her. “Remember that parallel world, yeah? The one where we met. You weren’t a Time Lord then and you saved the world.”
“By jumping in front of a truck.”
“It worked, didn’t it? Donna? Donna, please...”
Donna groaned and opened her eyes with some difficulty. “I’m going to be a bloody good Torchwood secretary.”
“You bet.” Rose blinked tears away. “When the giant beavers invade again, we’ll be able to find the anti-giant beaver weapons in the right cupboard.”
“Goodbye.” Donna closed her eyes, and Rose leaned in and kissed her quick and hard. “Rose?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m trying to give myself selective amnesia without turning my brain into swiss cheese. Which is something the human brain isn’t usually capable of.”
“Right. Sorry.”
This time when Donna closed her eyes, she slumped unconscious onto the kitchen floor.
*
Rose had managed to manhandle Donna from the kitchen floor onto the couch. She’d been unconscious for almost twelve hours. Rose had used the time to look at the almost TARDIS. She was pretty certain she could finish it. A few years ago she wouldn’t even have attempted it, but since then she’d designed and built a dimension cannon almost single handed. It might always be a bit rickety and occasionally spit up kitchen appliances, but it would work.
“Where the hell am I?” Rose went through to the living room to see Donna sitting up and looking around with confusion and anger.
“Donna-”
“Who are you? How do you know my name?”
“My name’s Rose. Rose Tyler. I’m your... friend.”
“Right,” Donna dragged the word out. “Friend, kidnapper, same thing.” She jumped up and looked desperately around, presumably for the door.
“Look, you can leave, I won’t try and stop you. Just before you go, do me a favour, go into my kitchen and open the fridge.”
“You’re a nutter.”
“Please, and then if you don’t want to stay you can go.”
Donna must have decided that there was no harm in humouring Rose if it got her out of this situation. She pushed past her and Rose heard the sound of the fridge/TARDIS door being opened.
“Oh. My. God.”
Rose smiled. “Fancy a coffee?”
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Rose/Donna
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3075
Summary: Now Rose had a half Time Lord - half human lounging on her sofa watching the X-Factor, and the heart of a TARDIS growing in an empty jam jar in her kitchen.
“Are you sure about this?” asked Rose, “About staying in this universe?”
The blue box containing the two Doctors dematerialised back to its home universe.
Donna shrugged, “Bit late to worry about that now. Anyway, I’ve got to stay somewhere while I grow a TARDIS of my own.”
*
Rose appreciated the absurdity of the universe.
She’d crossed an obscene number of parallel universes - including that weird one with all the squid - to get back to the Doctor. She'd found two Doctors, only to have them leave her on a beach in Norway, again. Because the dimensional walls were closing, yet again.
And now she had a half Time Lord-half human lounging on her sofa watching the X-Factor, and the heart of a TARDIS growing in an empty jam jar in her kitchen. This might actually turn out to be more interesting than going off with the Doctor.
Rose upended the kettle into the mugs and took the two coffees through to the living room, she handed one to Donna and sat next to her.
“On the X-Factor in this universe, when they get kicked off the show, they don’t just get kicked off the show?”
“They get deported to a small island in the South Pacific,” said Rose, who’d lived here for years and years and had given up trying to work out why this wasn’t illegal. “I know, it’s weird.”
“Funny, though,” said Donna.
“Donna,” said Rose, taking a casual sip of her coffee, “I’ve been meaning to ask, do you actually know how to grow a TARDIS?”
“Yeah,” said Donna, and laughed because she had as profound an appreciation of the absurd as Rose. “Actually, I do.”
“In a jam jar, in my kitchen?”
“I’m improvising a bit.”
*
Rose had never worked out why invading aliens always targeted Torchwood Tower. Why attack the head office of the single most well prepared and well armed alien fighting force this planet had to offer? This universe contained some not too bright aliens she'd always thought.
Donna had spent a solid week watching daytime telly, measuring the TARDIS heart with a ruler, and taking apart all the large electrical items in Rose's flat, then putting them back together just to prove that she could. Then she'd gotten bored and tagged along with Rose to work.
Rose supposed there were worse people than a sort of Time Lord to be with when the giant beavers attacked. Donna and Rose were creeping down the stairs, trying to reach the armoury, when two of the beavers stepped out in front of them. Rose had witnessed more than her fair share of alien invasions, and it was difficult to be scared of something that looked like it should be building a giant dam somewhere... then she got a look at the blasters they were each carrying. Ah.
“Oi,” said Donna, jabbing her finger in the chest of one of the aliens. Rose braced herself for death by alien blaster, but it didn’t come. Donna was still talking, there was a little bit of technobabble in there - something about a moldivian wave inducer - but mainly it was Donna admonishing the invaders.
They looked down at her. Their huge, brown, hard-of-thinking eyes creased in confusion. Rose started edging towards the armoury just on the off chance that telling alien invaders in a very loud and clear voice that you’d prefer they didn’t invade was actually as silly a plan as it sounded.
*
The TARDIS had outgrown its jam jar and had been transferred to a casserole dish. This was more hygienic than it sounded because Rose had never cooked a casserole in her life. The dish had been an overly optimistic gift from Jackie.
“I’ve moved the TARDIS,” Rose said when Donna wandered into the kitchen.
“Oh,” said Donna, not sounding particularly interested for someone who spent hours every day holding a measuring tape up to the ball of glowing stuff to see if it had grown at all. “Have you got any painkillers?”
“Middle drawer, below the cutlery. Headache?”
“Yeah,” Donna took the painkillers. “It’s all this thinking, I’m obviously not used to it.”
“Oh, hey, I meant to say, Pete says he’ll put you on the Torchwood payroll after all the help you were yesterday. They’ll even put you up in a flat. You won’t have to sleep on my uncomfortable couch anymore."
“Are you chucking me out?” Donna asked.
“No, course not.” Weird as it was, Rose really liked having Donna around. With Jake working in Cardiff, and Mickey back home she was feeling a little short of friends these days. And Donna was sort of like a flatmate. A loud flatmate who obsessively watched terrible soap operas and seemed determined to build a time machine out of Rose’s kitchen appliances, but all the same. “You have to stay long enough to put my microwave back together.”
*
“They didn’t want you to stay here,” Rose observed. She was on her lunch break and had come down to the archives to chat with Donna.
Seeing as she was on the payroll now Donna had thought she’d best come in to Torchwood and do some work. Pete had hired Donna with the expectation that she'd spend her days doing Time Lord things. Instead she was down in the Torchwood archives rearranging their filing system to resemble, well, a filing system.
“Where’s the paperwork from the beaver invasion last week?”
“It’ll be under I for Invasions-Comma-Alien. One of those filing cabinets over there. Seriously though, the Doctor, both of them, they didn’t exactly seem wild about the idea of you staying here.”
“I think the new one had imprinted on me a bit. You know, like a duckling.”
“And what about the real Doctor? He had a face like thunder too.”
“Yeah, well, he- hey, why is there Gfortizyy crystal in the middle of the X's?”
“Jake probably didn’t know how to spell it.”
Donna picked up the crystal, which promptly emitted a painfully high pitched shriek, which summoned its horrible creators through a spacial anomaly. And for a while Rose was a little too busy with black, slimy and toothy invaders to worry about why the Doctor hadn’t wanted Donna to stay in this universe.
*
“Did skinny boy ever tell you about the planet Fellspoon?” Donna asked. They were on the roof of Torchwood tower, along with the gadget Donna had constructed out of the colour photocopier, the laminator, three pairs of scissors and a 4H pencil. Rose was carrying a gun, just in case. But their unwelcome visitors were being sucked back through the anomaly.
“What about it?”
“Mountains that move, that’s all I’m saying.” Donna took Rose’s hand and pointed up at the stars. “It’s over there, at least that’s where it’s meant to be. Might be anything in this universe, I hope it’s got a beach. How do you feel about beaches, Rose?”
Rose felt pretty good about beaches. But to be honest she’d never given much thought to the stars in this universe until now, focused as she’d been on getting home.
“I like beaches.”
And that was that; invitation made and accepted.
*
Rose found Donna in the Torchwood canteen, demolishing a microwave. Rose’s microwave had been sacrificed last week in the cause of constructing a chameleon arch.
“What are you making?”
“A sonic, well, not a screwdriver, that sounds a bit blokey. But a sonic something anyway.”
“You could call it a sonic lipstick,” suggested Rose.
“Yeah, if I wanted to market it as a sex aid,” sneered Donna.
“That’s not a bad idea, we could make a fortune.”
“Oh, God, can you imagine his face.” Donna and Rose both burst out laughing at the thought of the Doctor’s expression if he knew they were using Time Lord technology to make a quick buck at Ann Summers parties. Suddenly Donna stopped, looking down at her half finished sonic whatever as though she hadn’t the foggiest idea what it was. She looked up at Rose, “Who the blinking hell are you?”
“What?”
“What am I doing here!?”
“Donna?”
And just as quickly as Donna had gone strange she relaxed, flipping her hair over her shoulder and pushing her chair back from the table. “Want a cup of tea? I’m taking apart the kettle next.”
*
It was Christmas day. Rose had grown to hate Christmas, or, as it was known in the rest of the galaxy, Let’s Invade the Earth Day.
Rose was pointing the laser she’d liberated from one of the guards at the door. Donna was jabbing at the transmat controls with her sonic-not-a-screwdriver-I-do-have-a-mind-of-my-own-even-if-some-of-the-Doctor’s-insists-on-hanging-around.
Something solid sounding thudded into the door and Rose hefted the laser. She’d never used one designed for a person with six arms before, and hoped she was at least right about which end was the dangerous one. Then Donna found whatever control she’d been searching for and they vanished from the godforsaken spaceship and reappeared in Rose’s kitchen. Which was by now bereft of almost everything apart from cutlery, which Rose was sure Donna would find a use for in her cobbled-together TARDIS if given enough time.
“Merry Christmas,” said Rose sarcastically.
“At least there were no giant spiders this time,” replied Donna
*
Rose was looking inside her fridge for milk, a task made more difficult by the fact that her fridge was now several times bigger on the inside. Donna had mentioned something about using it as a shell for the TARDIS, and something about transdimensional physics. Rose understood that much because it was the same theory the dimension cannon was based on. But then Donna digressed onto the importance of not letting the eggs in the fridge go off because it’d ruin the transcendental field. Rose had winced because most of the time Donna was just mouthy, curvy, funny Donna: the same woman Rose first met in that other parallel universe, albeit with a bigger brain. But sometimes she sounded so like the Doctor that Rose found it disturbing.
“Mum and Pete are going on holiday for a couple of days, so I’m having Tony here.” Rose changed the subject away from eggs and TARDISes.
“Great, I love kids.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I used to have two of my own.”
Used to. Rose’s heart broke a little. Donna caught the expression on her face and said, “No, it wasn’t like that. They didn’t die.” Donna laughed darkly. “They were never real.”
Rose gave up on her search for milk; she wasn’t going to be able to find any without stepping right inside the fridge anyway, and her mum had told her never to do that when she was a kid. She joined Donna at the kitchen table and Donna told her all about the library, about Lee and about her twins.
Rose took her hand and listened.
*
It was New Year's Eve. While both Rose and Donna hated Christmas, they’d been looking forward to New Years. They were supposed to be getting spectacularly drunk and making fun of people from the office. Instead they were trying to stop a spaceship crashing into the Atlantic and causing tsunami that would wipe out a chunk of Western Europe.
Tragedy averted, sort of. The ship was trapped in a time bubble half a mile above the ocean’s surface. They’d sort it out in the New Year, after the party.
Last New Year Rose had been working on the dimension cannon and she’d imagined that by now she would be back at the Doctor’s side. Instead she was more than a little drunk and snogging Donna Noble in a cupboard at her mum and Pete’s New Years Eve party. Still, mustn’t grumble.
“Hang on, stop,” Rose said, pulling back. “Is this because of the Doctor?”
“I’m not the Doctor. I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Donna said with a significant look down to where Rose had her hand down Donna’s top, cupping her breast.
Rose yelped and snatched her hand away. “I mean you’ve got part of the Doctor in your head, is that why you want to kiss me, because of him?”
Donna snorted with derision and for a moment Rose thought she was about to say something Doctorish, something about Rose’s tiny human brain, but instead she stuffed Rose’s hand back down her top and kissed her.
Right then, thought Rose, that sorts that out.
*
The morning after, Rose wasn’t sure what to say. Luckily, Donna did not share this problem. “Oh, my head. Morning, Rose. Have you seen my knickers? Stick the kettle on, would you? I’d murder for a coffee, my head’s thumping.”
“We haven’t got a kettle, remember? You took it apart last Wednesday, something to do with a Time Rotor.”
“Oh, yeah. I’ll go out for coffee. Knickers?”
“Front door, possibly hanging off the handle.”
“Right,” Donna left Rose’s bedroom in search of underwear. You had to admire that about Donna, she just fronted her way through awkward situations.
Rose leaned back against the pillow and closed her eyes against the oncoming hangover. She really should drink less. Or drink more. One of the two. She opened her eyes as she suddenly remembered the spaceship suspended in time over the Atlantic Ocean.
*
Their second attempt at safely landing the alien spaceship was going rather better than the first. Rose was more prepared, which was to say armed. She pointed her gun at the crew of the ship while Donna talked.
“You’ll cause a tsu... tsu...tsu...t-t-t-t-”
“Donna!”
“Oh, God!” Donna doubled over, clutching her head.
“What have you done to her?” Rose demanded. She couldn’t get any closer to Donna without taking her eyes off the crew.
Donna was bent over, hands braced on her knees, mumbling. “No, no, not now. Please not now.”
Rose pulled her mobile from her pocket and dialled the office. This had moved a bit beyond just her and Donna. They needed backup. She just hoped that whatever the aliens were doing to Donna wouldn’t get any worse before it got here.
*
The ship had been brought under control and they’d returned to London. Rose was so busy wondering why six aliens of different species might want to crash a ship into the ocean, and filling in forms in triplicate that it took her a while to notice Donna hadn’t returned to Torchwood tower with them.
She found her back at the flat, sitting at the kitchen table next to the bigger-on-the-inside fridge where the heart of the TARDIS was glowing softly.
“Are you okay? What did those aliens do to you? How come it didn’t work on me? Come on, you’re supposed to be the clever one.”
“I’m not clever.”
“Yeah? You've managed to build a TARDIS out my kitchen appliances because you’re just that thick.”
Donna didn’t as much as smile. “It won’t work. I thought that a TARDIS would stop it, or at least postpone it. But what do I know? I’m just a temp with a temporary brain transplant.”
“What are you going on about?”
“I’m going to die.” Donna gave Rose a small smile. “But it’s alright.”
Rose laughed. She didn’t know what getting hysterical was going to accomplish, but seeing as Donna had gone round the twist she might as well join her. “Of course it’s not alright. What are you talking about?”
“I can’t exist. Half Time Lord-half human, I’m not possible. My synapses are burning up. Being in this universe helped me, you helped me. Thank you. Goodbye.”
“You can’t just drop dead in my kitchen! We’ll go to Torchwood, we’ve got suspended animation units, they can-“
“No. It’s either this or I erase my own memories.”
Rose took a moment to process what Donna had just said, then another moment. “Well, do that, then.”
“And go back to being just a human!”
“The rest of us manage!”
“What am I supposed to do, then, be the Torchwood secretary?” Donna shouted.
Rose was about to shout back when Donna clutched her head and nearly fell out of her chair. She grabbed Donna and steadied her. “Remember that parallel world, yeah? The one where we met. You weren’t a Time Lord then and you saved the world.”
“By jumping in front of a truck.”
“It worked, didn’t it? Donna? Donna, please...”
Donna groaned and opened her eyes with some difficulty. “I’m going to be a bloody good Torchwood secretary.”
“You bet.” Rose blinked tears away. “When the giant beavers invade again, we’ll be able to find the anti-giant beaver weapons in the right cupboard.”
“Goodbye.” Donna closed her eyes, and Rose leaned in and kissed her quick and hard. “Rose?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m trying to give myself selective amnesia without turning my brain into swiss cheese. Which is something the human brain isn’t usually capable of.”
“Right. Sorry.”
This time when Donna closed her eyes, she slumped unconscious onto the kitchen floor.
*
Rose had managed to manhandle Donna from the kitchen floor onto the couch. She’d been unconscious for almost twelve hours. Rose had used the time to look at the almost TARDIS. She was pretty certain she could finish it. A few years ago she wouldn’t even have attempted it, but since then she’d designed and built a dimension cannon almost single handed. It might always be a bit rickety and occasionally spit up kitchen appliances, but it would work.
“Where the hell am I?” Rose went through to the living room to see Donna sitting up and looking around with confusion and anger.
“Donna-”
“Who are you? How do you know my name?”
“My name’s Rose. Rose Tyler. I’m your... friend.”
“Right,” Donna dragged the word out. “Friend, kidnapper, same thing.” She jumped up and looked desperately around, presumably for the door.
“Look, you can leave, I won’t try and stop you. Just before you go, do me a favour, go into my kitchen and open the fridge.”
“You’re a nutter.”
“Please, and then if you don’t want to stay you can go.”
Donna must have decided that there was no harm in humouring Rose if it got her out of this situation. She pushed past her and Rose heard the sound of the fridge/TARDIS door being opened.
“Oh. My. God.”
Rose smiled. “Fancy a coffee?”