Work Text:
Donna sighed. The Doctor was roaming around the console room blathering on about the marvellous wonders of the marvellous wonderful human race. Again.
‘—not only spread out all over the galaxy, but everything with them! All the marvellous, wonderful cultures and languages and ideas and creativity and religions—’
‘Yeah, yeah. Actually, I’ve been wondering.’ Donna waited for the Doctor’s brain to catch up with his ears.
If he looked quite surprised to be interrupted during one of his rambles so lengthy that they could make the breadth of time and space boring, he looked even more surprised that she had been paying attention. ‘What?’
‘Yeah, I sometimes have questions, okay? How do the religions of the future human race change? I mean, it’s not all built around the changing seasons and life all being on Earth once we get off Earth, is it?’
Delight beamed from his goofy grin. Donna, informed by experience, held on to the console railing. This turned out to be not quite so wise a move as one would have thought, because instead of leaping about trying to get them to the Planet of the Hats or something, the Doctor strode over to Donna and gripped her shoulders.
‘Donna,’ he breathed. ‘Let’s get us some floofy dresses!’
In the TARDIS wardrobe, the Doctor took the opportunity to pin Donna under a mounting pile of floofy dresses, robes, coats, animal costumes, something that smelled foul, and more besides as he went off on another long monologue. This one was actually interesting. It was about New Judaism, and how it had begun to flourish peacefully out among the stars. Not very far from Earth, relatively speaking, was Planet Purim.
‘So, essentially,’ said Donna, emerging from the pile, ‘it’s a planet dedicated to putting together baked goods and gift baskets while playing dress up?’
‘While celebrating the survival of the Jewish people! On an interstellar scale!’
‘Well, at least we’ll be able to get you out of that suit.’ Donna smirked. The Doctor’s eyes widened. ‘I mean! Not like that! The smirk wasn’t – you’re a Martian!’
‘I know, it’s okay. I’m still not actually a Martian though.’ He pointed behind himself and started to trot off. ‘I’m going to go find a costume now, far, far on the other side of the wardrobe room, so see you later.’
Pushing that little moment out of her mind, Donna decided to have a look around for a costume. The thing about travelling through time and space was that, without history and context, you could be anyone. But everyone everywhere would still try and fit you into their planet’s existing ideas of what people could be like. You were always dressing up as someone else, whether you liked it or not. Donna liked the idea of a dress-up planet, of intentionally putting on a show, and celebrating who she could choose to be. Too much of this hopping about the universe was transforming her beyond her control.
‘What do you think, girl?’ Donna asked the TARDIS. There was a rustle and a whirl, and the clothes shifted around. Before she could see what the TARDIS had produced, she was rudely interrupted.
‘Donna! Donna, are you done? I’ll show you a suit.’ The Doctor looked rather pleased with himself. He was dressed in skin-tight yellow-brown spandex, over the top of which was a giant triangular costume with a reddish section in its middle. ‘Look, look, it’s a hamentaschen!’
‘I have no idea what that is, but what I see is a very skinny spaceman in a very silly costume.’
‘It’s traditional.’
After even the inhabitants of Planet Purim laughed at the Hamentaschen Doctor – and they must have seen a lot of ridiculous costumes over the centuries – he went back to the TARDIS to sulk.
Donna, meanwhile, had decided to do something a bit different. No loud voice, afraid she wouldn’t be heard. No running down corridors after the Doctor. She set off into a world of costumes to spend an afternoon by and as herself. All celebration and survival. Sometimes, rather than the whole of time and space, you needed a little of both, sans pastry spacemen.
Some delicious hamentaschen about to be baked. Photograph by meganknight.