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“I thought we could try the planet Felspoon… just ‘cos,” Donna said in an amalgamation of his voice. She continued the verbose reasoning characteristic of him while she tended to the TARDIS console, using knowledge gleaned from his head. He’d tried to close off the mental union to protect her, but she wasn’t a separate being to him. The parts she carried in her were him, and it was killing her. A few scant hours before, she’d scarcely known how to wire a plug.
Now her neural pathways controlling speech were misfiring, causing her to repeat her words or find rhyming alternatives. Her motor functions simply couldn’t keep up with his mind, and it was painful to watch her pretend the way he did that everything was fine. When she doubled over the console, he approached her.
“Do you know what's happening?” he asked solemnly.
“Yeah,” she reluctantly admitted, keeping her eyes averted.
There had never been a Human-Time Lord metacrisis before, and Donna’s deteriorating state was the reason why. It wasn’t possible to fit a Time Lord mind into a human brain. It was like organ transplant gone horribly wrong. In an ideal world, he would have a Gallifreyan fob watch to hand and safely store the Time Lord consciousness inside, but they were all lost.
Davros’ words passed through his mind. How his companions all died because of him. How he corrupted them from having the one adventure he couldn’t have because they had gotten too close to him and his life. The last of the Time Lords. A history and suffering that shouldn’t be shared.
Donna was better off without him, even if she wanted to stay.
The best he could do was return her to an ordinary life, her mother and grandfather. He’d caused so much death. He didn’t want Donna added to that list. Even now she defiantly insisted she wanted to be with him for the rest of her life, travelling as the Doctor-Donna. Already her mind was robbed of its survival instincts, as that situation meant she only had minutes to live.
He stepped closer to her, placed his hands on her shoulders and looked into her eyes. She was confused between backing off from what she knew he was going to do, and easing the mental burden with their proximity.
“Oh, Donna Noble. I am so, so sorry,” he readily confessed. Hoping to reach what was left of her, he continued, “But we had the best of times. The best.” Then he whispered something seldom heard from his lips.
“Goodbye.”
He closed his eyes as he placed his fingers on her temple, hoping to drown out her mindless pleas to stop. When she was silent, she collapsed forward into his thin frame. He held her for as long as he dared, memorising her for the both of them, before lifting and carrying her to the medical bay.
Time was of the essence, and the TARDIS made the passages short. He gently laid her on the examination table and commenced a full body scan to check for any damage sustained from the Dalek conquest or his own presence. The monitor showed slight heat in her neural pathways, expected from the information overload. There was burned tissue in her chest and arm, from Davros’ lightning strike and touching the hand that created the human him. Superficial dermal damage from the usual adventure scrapes. An embryo in her uterus ready to implant into the lining.
“What?” escaped his lips. He reeled the scanner back to see he hadn’t misread that. How he and the TARDIS had missed it up until now was worrying, given the danger time travel posed to developing foetuses. He placed one hand on her temple to keep her unconscious and put the other within her hips on the off chance the machinery was at fault. As he felt for the life inside her, his hands became heavy with the realisation it was true.
Donna was pregnant.
But how? He frowned over the question for a moment and then mentally slapped his own forehead. But, of course, the metacrisis formed a two-way bridge, an exchange of biodata. A child conceived in metacrisis. The bio-signature wasn’t distinct enough from the Doctor-Donna for it to be detected.
He lifted his palm from her skin. Part of him wondered how many children he’d end up with because of his right hand. Part of him wondered the slap Donna would give him for their current orientation. It was always the mothers. Donna had made her own metacrisis, creating life from existing life and rooting it in the human way to be nurtured. While it was him that had felt the birth pains of his other self, he’d learned from their memories that she was the one that had felt his heart beat before he was born.
But he knew she couldn’t keep the child. It contained Gallifreyan genetics if not his own inherited memory, and even during pregnancy it would link with her mind, killing her by reaching out. It was bad enough leaving Donna in the care of her family protecting her from knowledge of him, let alone having an unexplained pregnancy and having to raise the child without either of its parents. He wondered if a virgin birth would validate Donna’s existence in Sylvia’s eyes. Equally badly, she could mention his involvement and end Donna’s life.
No, Donna definitely couldn’t keep the child. He wanted to be among the humans on Earth unnoticed, not revered as a God.
It wouldn’t be safe to keep the embryo on the TARDIS even in stasis. The genetic coding would still be unstable because of its complicated nature. Time travel ruled out River Song and fulfilling that particular pre-destination paradox. His mind ran through his adoptive family.
Sarah-Jane said she had a fourteen year old son, so she could have an addition to the family. But he couldn’t run from her ageing. Biologically her window for nurturing life within her had passed and he wouldn’t risk altering her natural rhythms to carry an embryo.
Martha was a prime age for reproducing with a window of opportunity with her doctorate completed… but her fiancée probably wouldn’t appreciate her carrying another man’s child. It might also give Martha herself the wrong impression about his feelings for her. No, he’d already asked too much of her.
Jack could carry to term. He mused it would stop Jack from using the vortex manipulator and perhaps give a child for him and Ianto Jones to raise as their own. It might even bridge the gaps in his own relationship with Jack with this act of trust. Still, he knew the foetus’ development would be sensitive to the Rift. He also knew Jack was the man that wouldn’t stay dead; a fixed point in time combined with a complicated event. If Jack died, the foetus would be deprived of sustenance. In resetting itself, Jack’s body might abort the foetus altogether.
As if sensing who he was thinking of, Donna sighed. He imagined the delight to Donna at Jack being the surrogate. He mused if her ideal world was her husband carrying the child so she could keep her figure in an otherwise ordinary life.
He was reluctant to admit that if the child stayed in this time and place, it would naturally seek out its mother.
He turned his mind to the world left behind. The embryo was small enough to fit through the remaining gaps between dimensions, and the other him would know what to do. It would be a chance to sustain life as atonement for genocide. Though he didn’t envy having to explain the family relations; whether Rose was carrying her lover’s child by another woman or perhaps his twin for simultaneous conception. It would probably fit in being ginger, too, with Rose’s dad. But in sending it, the other him would know something was wrong with Donna. The contact might make Rose optimistic about his return rather than accepting the gift, as Donna had put it, of matching lifespans. If he truly believed Rose understood him, she’d accept he couldn’t bear to lose her through forces beyond his control, having lost so much in his long life. This way, they only knew each other for a fraction of their lifetimes. There would be equality and maybe parallel if she continued to defend the Earth and have no room in her life for children. It wasn’t what he wished for her, but it was her choice.
Unbidden, Dalek Caan’s words filtered forward.
The Doctor and his precious children of time.
And one of them will die!
He had been so desperate to avoid the prophecy, thinking it was Donna. But he understood now. He had to remove all trace of the metacrisis – taking Donna’s memories, sealing the other him in a parallel world and killing the child. Here was Donna Noble, the most important woman in the whole of creation, who had convinced him with Jenny that embracing his children was worth the pain. And he could do nothing but destroy the lives he touched.
He would give the embryo a name before he said goodbye. Galaxies to chose from that Donna had saved, but it seemed apt to choose a Latin name from Earth that had their initials and meant ‘people army.’
He picked up a small medical transmat and removed Didi. He placed the glowing swirl of light on his palm in the faint hope of being within the fifteen hour regeneration cycle the embryo would be absorbed into him.
It didn’t recognise him.
Gradually the light faded, until it was just him and Donna in the room. He dried his eyes and cradled her head, prolonging her sleep until she could be healed and placed a safe distance from him, in such a condition she could never come back into his life and risk losing even more.
~~~~~