Chapter Text
There were many things the Doctor would not discuss. Donna Noble was keeping a list. Rose Tyler. The Time War. Gallifrey. Anything that involved emotions and, or, his past.
Now, for the first time since she had met the Time Lord, Donna thought she might understand why.
To save the world, she, Donna Noble, an unemployed temp from Chiswick, had just sacrificed twenty thousand people.
There was a disconnect in her brain that separated her action from historical fact, and she didn’t know what she felt. Pompeii, all those families, had been dead for a thousand years in her mind, even before she had helped the Doctor blow up Vesuvius.
And, she thought, she might have been able to deal with that. If it hadn’t been for the children.
Donna did not want to think about how many children were part of that twenty thousand. The dozen they had passed as they charged back to the TARDIS were more than enough to give her nightmares for life.
Which was why she was pacing the corridors of the TARDIS in leggings and sweater despite aching with exhaustion. Sleep, when it had finally claimed her, had lasted approximately an hour and nothing in the universe would make Donna close her eyes again tonight.
The Doctor slept only on rare occasions, and so, Donna told herself, he was bound to be up and doing something somewhere. The console room, however, had been empty, and so had several other rooms along the long corridor.
Donna made her way to the library where he could sometimes be found silently brooding, and was surprised to find another door on the corridor that she was sure she hadn’t seen before. She frowned at the door as she passed, then stopped and went back to it, frowning more deeply.
Donna looked up at the ceiling and spoke to the TARDIS, realising she was adopting the Doctor’s ways.
“Is this something you do? Pop up new rooms whenever you feel like it?”
Donna looked at the door again. A deep blue, heavy, wooden door, like you might find in a stately home. Oversized and ostentatious. Foreboding.
“Or whenever he needs it.” Donna added more quietly.
The only areas of the TARDIS the Doctor had expressly forbidden Donna to go alone were in what he called the ‘habitat zone’, but she knocked anyway and the door opened at her touch.
“Hello?” she called. “Doctor?”
The room was long and narrow, like a gallery, with blue panelled walls, but no paintings. A huge arched window dominated the far wall, artificial moonlight streaming through. Under the window stood a single chair, the old-fashioned type which Donna had seen in the stately homes she’d been dragged to as a child.
She stepped inside, letting her eyes adjust to the dimmer light. The walls, she realised, were not blank at all, but covered in chalk, the same circular swirls of the TARDIS controls. Gallifreyan, Donna surmised, and something in her gut made her wary.
The writing seemed to start at the door and work its way around the room, arrows pointing back to one central panel that looked to Donna like a list. Last item underlined half a dozen times. The writing scrawled down the walls and onto the floor, growing more frantic with drawings and things that might have been equations.
“Everything alright?”
Donna jumped.
The Doctor’s voice sounded strange to her, but she couldn’t quite pinpoint the emotion.
“Couldn’t sleep,” she said, following the writing across the floor and back up the wall, the shiver of discomfort growing. “Are you? All right?”
Donna stared into the shadows at the far end of the room, trying to discern the Doctor from the chair he sat in. He was utterly motionless, only the outline of his arms visible against the light.
“Me? I’m fine.”
The voice did not sound fine.
Donna walked across the room, stepping carefully around the chalked words and symbols.
“Been busy?”
She heard him take a sharp breath.
“Just... working something out.”
“Looks complicated,” said Donna, approaching the chair slowly.
The Doctor didn’t reply. Most of his face was in shadow, but his cheek and lips glistened in the moonlight. Donna reached out to touch his shoulder.
He flinched away and tried to hide it by leaping to his feet, but he stumbled back on the chair and finished leaning against the window, wet face and red eyes painfully clear.
Donna stared at him, surprised and withdrew her hand.
“I’m fine,” the Doctor repeated.
Donna eyed him with evident disbelief, noting the pallor of his skin, the darkness of his expression, the dark patches on his collar where tears had soaked into the blue shirt.
He wiped his face with his sleeve and inhaled hard, as though he could summon energy from the ether and bounce back into life.
“Sure, you look fine,” Donna said sarcastically. “In a pig’s eye. Unless this is your audition for Eastenders.”
A snotty little laugh escaped him.
It was hard to know what to say. Everything she could think of seemed so silly and trivial; whilst everything about the Doctor and this room seemed full of grave import.
“Did you run out of wall?” she asked awkwardly.
He turned his back to the light again, hiding his face in shadow.
Donna tried again.
“What were you doing?” she asked gently.
That sharp breath again, and he hung his head.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Just nothing. Nothing important. Just sums. Just... counting.”
And Donna didn’t ask any more, because she could take a pretty good guess and instinctively knew that to push now might just break him. She could see it in the tears and the furious, desperately sad eyes. In the sag of his shoulders as he stood, desolate, looking on his works.
He carried the weight of the entire universe on his shoulders, silently and alone, because the truth behind those radiant smiles was too painful to share.
“It’s not your fault,” Donna whispered. “None of it.”
He sniffed and wiped his face again with his shirt.
“Come here,” she said, and held out her hand to him.
The Doctor took her hand and allowed himself to be drawn into a hug. This was different. Rose only had to smile and he could move on to some new adventure. Martha would have sat him down and made him talk. Donna just wrapped her arms around him and held him.
She didn’t offer platitudes, because this could never be ‘all right’. Instead, she held him tight, letting him take whatever comfort he could get.
In that moment, he nearly told her what he had counted. Nearly told her the number, out loud, in words she would understand.
Because, if anyone would ever understand, it would be Donna Noble.
Instead, he hugged her tight and said.
“Donna Noble, I think it’s time you saw your first alien landscape!”