fic: revolution -- part three

[thirty2flavors]

Title: Revolution (3/3)
Rating: PG
Genre: Some fluff, some angst, some humour. Standard fare, really.
Characters/Pairings: Ten2/Rose, alt!Donna, with guest appearances from the rest of the Tylers and Jake
Spoilers?: Through season 4
Summary: It's been a year to the day since Rose and her part-human Doctor wound up in Norway.
In this chapter: The Doctor feels guilty, Donna feels furious, and Rose attempts to keep the peace.
Excerpt: "“Like your mum did it with a Martian or something?”"

Author's note: This turned out a bit angstier than I previously anticipated, as well as longer. Also, more than a month between updates FAIL, I apologize, my excuse is that I had to write something for a fic exchange. And also I just suck.


As before, this is set in the same universe as Gingerbread, which introduces this version alt!Donna.

Previous Chapters: Part one is here, part two is here.


The Doctor was fairly certain he’d never been more uncomfortable. Not in this one-year-old body, anyway, and that counted the time he’d walked in on Jackie and Pete… well, doing things he’d really never wanted to walk in on Jackie and Pete doing.

Donna was wearing that look of sympathy again, and this time he knew why. It was the why that made him uncomfortable, more than any blatant pity could; he was used to pity, even if he didn’t like it. He wasn’t used to pity for a story that wasn’t true.

He hated lying to Donna. With his first Donna, it would have been a pointless exercise; she had an uncanny knack for wrangling truths out of him that he didn’t even admit to himself. With this Donna, though, it was necessity, and he tried to remind himself of this necessity even as he listened to her condolences over a family he’d never had.

The problem wasn’t just that he wasn’t strictly human. The problem was that he wasn’t strictly human and a good portion of his physiology came from a species that had never existed in this universe. The problem was that he came from a different universe in the first place, he had a millennium of memories in a one-year-old body, and somewhere on the other side of the void there was a man with his face, traveling time and space in a ship that used to be his.

Well, that, and once upon a time he was a hand in a jar.

Even to his own ears, the story sounded a little mental. Worse was that he knew Donna, and Donna, for all her brilliance and acceptance, liked proof.

Which was precisely what he couldn’t give her.

She couldn’t feel the beat of a binary vascular system where there wasn’t one. Telling her he could read timelines would sound like a shoddy impersonation of a hotline fortuneteller. Taking her to see what looked like nothing more than a lump of rock and proudly announcing it to be his future time machine and space ship would do nothing to convince anyone of his sanity.

He had his word alone, and it wasn’t as though that would have any value after he explained that he’d been lying for six months. The other Donna had leapt from a car on the motorway in a show of faith; she’d stuck by him even though their first trip had forced them to play executioner to twenty thousand people. Finding that kind of unshakeable (and undeserved) trust a second time seemed vastly unlikely, and the Doctor was hesitant to try his luck.

So he lied and let her call him Johnny and hoped this Donna wasn’t as good at reading him as the old one had been. It had worked, so far, but as the lie got more and more complex, its expiration date seemed closer and closer.

“…and don’t be angry with Rose for telling me,” Donna was saying, still making her way through awkward condolences over the family he’d never had. “I asked – it wasn’t her fault.”

Not quite able to restrain a snort, the Doctor tugged on his ear. “Ohhh, I dunno, I’d say it’s partially her fault.”

“It’s not,” Donna insisted, and then her expression had softened into that horrible look of pity again. “Listen, Doctor, I get why you wouldn’t have talked about it, and I’m sorry for bringing it up now –“

“It’s fine,” he said, perhaps a little too quickly, not quite meeting her eyes. “Really. Don’t worry about it. Meant to tell you.”

She gave a sincere, sympathetic smile that made his stomach squirm uncomfortably. “I just want you to know you can trust me.”

The Doctor wondered if Donna was using a teleprompter. He also wondered if the person in control of that teleprompter had a personal vendetta against him.

“I do,” he said, and meant it as best he could under the guise of John Noble.

“Quite right too,” said Donna, her grin broader, now, and less pitying. She jerked her head towards the kitchen and started down the hall. “C’mon, I’ve stolen you long enough. Don’t you want to hear more about Jackie’s carpets?”

The Doctor stayed rooted to the spot, staring at the wall where Donna had just been. That was that, he supposed. Minor crisis averted. With any luck Donna would bring up the missing Noble family as infrequently as his companions brought up the Time War, wary of playing Minesweeper with volatile memories. It wouldn’t be a hard role for him to play, certainly. With his trademarked brand of evasiveness it would be a long time – if ever – before Donna honed in on the clinical description of his supposed memories, the way Joan had.

If he worked it out, if he tried, it wouldn’t be difficult to hammer out the minutiae of John Noble’s life or to stick to them. With a self-awareness John Smith had lacked, he could conceivably play the part for as long as Donna knew him. Compared to most of the things he’d done in his life, being John Noble barely registered as a challenge.

When he failed to follow her, Donna paused at the end of the hallway, wheeling around. “Johnny? You coming?”

“That’s not my name.” He’d said it before he even knew why.

Donna raised her eyebrows. “What?”

“‘John Noble’, that… that’s not my name.”

She stared at him, nonplussed.

The Doctor took a breath. “Well, not really, not my real name, anyway. ‘Course, that is what it says on my driver’s license and birth certificate and oooh, even my library card, but as those are fake in the first place – well, the library card’s not, I suppose, I really did go get a library card, signed a little form and everything –”

“What the hell are you on about?” Her eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Are you drunk?”

“What? No!” Off to a spectacular start, then. He scratched his jaw with one hand. In for a penny, and all that. “I think there are some things I need to tell you, Donna.”

I am absolutely going to regret this, he thought.

--

“You mean like… an immigrant or something?”

The Doctor stared at her across the Tylers’ coffee table, his look of confusion mimicking hers. “An immigrant? No.” He tilted his head for a second, seeming to consider. “Well, technically speaking, yes, I suppose, but that’s not what I mean.”

That, Donna thought, was the answer she’d been afraid of. She stared at him. “You mean…” She trailed off, unsure of how to finish that sentence. Green? Tentacles? Torchwood and flying saucers and a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away?

“Yes.”

“Right,” was all she could think of to say, and she said it slowly, hoping that by the time she was done perhaps the situation would make some sort of sense. It didn’t.

The Doctor leaned back in his chair, and Donna noted that he at least had the sense to look uncomfortable with his own delusions. “Specifically, half-alien.” He paused. “Maybe two-thirds.”

“Half-alien,” she repeated. A skeptical eyebrow rose of its own accord. “Like your mum did it with a Martian or something?”

He grimaced, and Donna thought it was highly unfair of him to look at her like she was the mad one.

“No, not like that.” He paused, apparently considering how to explain what it was like, and then eventually settled on, “It’s… complicated.”

“Oh. Well. ’Course it is,” said Donna. And then, “are you sure you’re not drunk?”

A long, weary sigh escaped his lips. “I am not drunk, Donna. It’s the truth.” And then – because clearly he didn’t sound insane enough, yet – he added, “While we’re at it, I’m also from a parallel universe.”

She waited quite patiently, really, but a punch line failed to present itself. Frowning, she peered around the room. “Is this a joke? Is there a hidden camera in your hat or something?”

Looking as though he’d forgotten he was wearing it in the first place, the Doctor pulled the birthday hat off his head and tossed it onto the table. It did very little to lend to his credibility, Donna thought.

“No cameras.” He leaned forward, elbows on his on his knees, imploring her with those ridiculous big eyes of his. “I know it sounds absolutely mental, Donna, but it’s true, all of it, and I need you to believe me.”

In the months she’d known him, Donna thought she’d gotten a fairly good measure of the Doctor. She fancied that she could read him well, could tell when he was being sincere and when he was only playing along, could tell what lines with him you could cross and what lines you couldn’t. She’d seen him ecstatic and energetic, furious and frightening.

She’d never seen him pleading.

She watched him, and she frowned. “You really believe what you’re saying.”

“Yes.”

“That you’re part-alien.”

“Time Lord,” he said, leaning back from her and looking suddenly exhausted. “Part-Time Lord. A nearly-extinct race from a different universe.”

“Right,” she said slowly again, leaning back. “And your family, were they… part-Time Lord too?”

“Oh, no, no, no, that was just a story.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Rose, she made all that up. No house fire, no sister. Not her finest lie, actually.” He gave her a strange sideways smile, as though this was a good thing.

Donna nodded, not bothering to mask her disbelief. Was this how he’d coped with losing his family, escapism beyond anything she’d seen before? That could happen, couldn’t it? You heard about that, sometimes, people devastated by grief shutting themselves out from reality. Was that why Rose had looked so uncomfortable with the question, why the subject had never been broached before? She’d been right to assume his eccentricity sprung from something more, but how much more?

She didn’t know how to respond. Did she play along or did she question him?

“You think I’m insane,” he said quite plainly.

Donna figured it was probably best not to answer that. “And Rose knows about this?”

The Doctor nodded. “They all do – Rose and her family, even Jake.” When she said nothing, he sprung to his feet with the enthusiasm of an escapee. The suddenness made Donna flinch. “Good point, actually,” he said briskly, “let’s get Rose. Rose!”

He left a stunned Donna in his wake, staring at the evacuated chair. She’d known since the Vitex Christmas party that the man was a little mad. She’d sensed the way he’d always seemed to linger on the fringe of society, out of place even amongst other Torchwood employees and alien fanatics. Had it always been like that, or had something snapped a fragile tether to reality?

Not a minute later he was back, tugging Rose along with him. The pair was wearing matching looks of anxiety, and Donna searched Rose’s face for something to confirm her suspicions. She found nothing concrete.

Rose, for her part, nudged the Doctor back into his chair and took up perch on the arm. Without prompting, she looked at Donna and said, very seriously, “he’s telling you the truth, you know.”

“I see.” Donna let her gaze drift from Rose to the Doctor. Something in his posture reminded her of the way children look when their parents talk with their teachers – awkward and uncomfortable and very much wishing the ground would swallow them whole. “And are you a... Time Lord as well?”

“No,” answered Rose, and Donna wasn’t sure if she was meant to be relieved or surprised. Then Rose added, “But I am from a different universe. Different Earth, different London.”

If the denial hadn’t surprised Donna, the confession did. She often counted on Rose to be the voice of reason, to use her sway with the Doctor to ground him. It took both of them, sometimes, and while truthfully Donna got on better with the Doctor, she and Rose were usually a united front.

“My mum is, too,” Rose went on. “Not dad, though. Technically I’m the daughter of a different Pete Tyler.”

Donna looked from one face to the other, searching for some suggestion of mirth or dishonesty. She couldn’t seem to find any; Rose held her gaze evenly, and the Doctor seemed particularly fascinated with a spot on the coffee table.

“I know you don’t believe us,” Rose continued, shrugging. “S’all right, I don’t blame you, really, it sounds mad.”

“Little bit, yeah,” Donna sneered.

“You knew something was wrong, though,” Rose went on. “That’s why you asked me. You could tell…” She trailed off, one hand gripping at the air as she struggled to find the words.

“That I’m rubbish as a human?” the Doctor suggested, speaking for the first time since he’d returned with Rose in tow. He looked up at Rose and made an expression that looked as though it was meant to be a grin but came out closer to a grimace. “Martha said that once. She was right, really.”

Rose made to say something, but Donna beat her to it, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.

“I thought there was no Martha.” Honestly, did they think she was thick?

“She wasn’t my sister,” said the Doctor wearily. “She was just a friend.”

Donna laughed. “She from another universe, too?”

The Doctor stayed quiet, and Donna figured that was as good as a confession. Looking alarmed, Rose placed a hand to rest on his back and addressed Donna.

“Thing is, though, Donna, think about it. You read the magazines. Five years ago, Jackie Tyler comes back from the dead – shows up out of nowhere with a daughter no one’s met before.” She raised her eyebrows. “All those stories, all that speculation, none of it ever really made sense, did it? None of that ever really clicked because it wasn’t the truth. This world’s Jackie died all those years ago; when Mum and I came here, she filled the gap and Dad made room for the daughter he’d never had. My other father – my proper father, from back home, he died when I was just a baby.”

Coming from Rose didn’t make it sound any less mental.

The Doctor spoke again, the pleading back in his tone and in his eyes, making Donna shift uncomfortably. “Everything you’ve seen since you met us,” he said, “all those things – you’ve adapted, you’ve handled it all brilliantly. What makes this too hard to believe?”

“What makes this too hard to believe?” she repeated, and then laughed derisively. “What makes this too hard to believe?”

Neither Rose nor the Doctor answered her, and a thick, uncomfortable silence descended on the room like fog. Rooms away, she could hear the distant chatter of the remaining Tylers and Jake, discussing logical, rational things like carpets, and she felt a flicker of envy.

What made it too hard to believe was the concept that the man she’d become such fast friends with wasn’t even a man at all. What made it too hard to believe was the idea that after six months of absolutely the most bizarrely dangerous and fantastic friendship she’d ever had, she might know nothing about her friends at all.

“You lied to me,” she said at last.

“I’m sorry, Donna,” said Rose instantly, “I didn’t know what else to—”

“Not you!” Donna snapped instantly, then changed her mind. “Alright, yes, you, but both of you! If this is true, have you been honest with me about anything? Ever?”

The Doctor stared at his hands, looking remarkably like a chastised child. Rose shifted her weight on the arm of the chair, obviously ready to play peacekeeper.

“We wanted to tell you the truth, Donna, we did—”

“Oh, well as long as you thought about it.” She was distantly aware of speaking much louder than either of them was. “Why didn’t you, then, if you were losing so much sleep over it?”

Rose closed her mouth and looked at the Doctor, whose stare was still furiously trained on his hands. Donna was just considering smacking him to get an answer when he finally said, “I didn’t think you’d believe me.”

Donna raised her eyebrows. “What tipped you off?”

“I’m sorry, Donna,” he mumbled, “I just—” He broke off, rubbed his face with his hands and then transferred his vigil back to the tabletop. “I wanted to be your friend.”

“Why? Do I look particularly gullible or something?” She looked from the top of the Doctor’s head to Rose’s apologetic face and back again. “Did you spot me at that Christmas party and say, ‘oh, look, she looks daft, let’s see how long we can string her along for’?”

The Doctor’s head snapped up at that. “What? No!” He looked to Rose for assistance, but Rose, seeming to sense that this wasn’t her battle, stayed quiet. “It wasn’t like that, I promise you, I just missed—”

And then he abruptly snapped his mouth shut. Beside him, Rose looked more alarmed than before.

“Missed what?” asked Donna, looking from one to the other. When neither replied, she put more force into it. “Missed what?”

The Doctor’s hand flew to his hair, causing it to stick up in all sorts of strange angles. Rose chewed her lip, evidently trying to decide if this was her invitation back into the conversation. Donna wondered if they underestimated what a bad idea it was to add frustration to her fury.

“The other universe…” the Doctor began eventually, still looking anywhere but at Donna, “it… had its own Donna Noble.”

And though this universe’s Donna knew she was no genius, she was clever enough to see what that meant.

The betrayal that flooded her system as soon as she made the connection completely overshadowed any earlier traces of hurt. She sat up straighter, determined to mask the way she suddenly wanted to shake with anger. Of course, she thought. Really, it was probably the least mad thing they’d told her all day.

It explained everything – why he believed in her, why he seemed to understand her, why the Vitex heiress and her super-genius boyfriend had decided to befriend an accountant whose biggest accomplishment was winning the office’s Big Brother betting pool. It made perfect sense, and it made her sick.

She should’ve known, probably.

John Noble. Oh God, they hadn't been a couple?

“So that’s what you do, then,” she said finally, her voice even and measured despite the bitterness boiling beneath the surface. “You wander different versions of Earth until you find replacements.”

“No, Donna—”

“That what you’re gonna do with Rose? She gets hit by a truck some day, you gonna jump around until you find another one?”

The Doctor looked stricken. “No! I didn’t mean it like that—”

“Oh no?” Donna tilted her head. “Tell me, then, would you have befriended me if I hadn’t happened to be the carbon copy of some old friend of yours? If you’d never known her, would you have bothered to keep in touch?”

The Doctor opened and closed his mouth a few times, but no sound came out.

“That’s what I thought,” she went on. “See, I know you, Doctor, or John, or whatever your bloody name is – you make snap judgments about people based on your black-and-white moral code, God help anyone who puts a toe over that hypocritical line of yours—”

Rose frowned. “Donna, stop it.”

Donna glared. “Oh, don’t you start with me, Blondie! Your whole family, replacing whoever you’ve lost, how could you even do that?”

It seemed she hit a nerve; Rose’s expression snapped from apologetic and tentative to outright angry. “It’s not replacing! Are you telling me that if you wound up in a world where your dad was still alive—”

“Don’t you dare!”

“If you wound up in a world where your dad was still alive, you’re telling me you wouldn’t even consider—”

“No,” Donna snarled, “I wouldn’t, because he wouldn’t be my bloody father, now, would he?”

Rose lifted her chin higher, visibly nearing Donna’s level of anger. “It’s not like I chose to wind up stuck here!”

Donna opened her mouth to retort but paused, startled by the way that the Doctor – silent and distressed this whole time – seemed to utterly collapse into himself as Rose spoke. For all her anger, Donna had to admit he did an incredible impression of a kicked puppy, and against her will she felt a tug of sympathy.

It was a second longer before Rose noticed, but when she did the anger fell from her face in an instant.

“Doctor, I didn’t… I meant… I meant the first time,” she said softly, reaching to place a hand at his back again.

The touch seemed to snap him out of his reverie, and he straightened up, adopting an expression that Donna recognized instantly. It was the sort he wore when Rose or London or the world was in peril, the sort he used to appear collected even as he reached a state of internal panic. It was an artificial calm, but a effective one.

“I befriended you because I missed her,” he told her plainly, finally meeting her eyes. “I lied to you because I wanted to keep that friendship and I thought John Noble had a better shot at that than I did. I told you the truth because, like her, you’re a better friend than I deserve and it’s not fair – hasn’t been fair – that I keep the truth from you just because I like your company.”

For once in her life, Donna Noble had no idea what to say.

The Doctor let out a long breath, and Donna could see the beginnings of cracks in his mask of cool. “Donna was one of my best friends because she was brilliant and brave and compassionate and funny and brash and loud and she knew when I – when to stop me. I’m not your friend because you look like her or you sound like her, but because I see all of those things in you.” He was leaning forward again, much of the act falling away. “You weren’t a replacement or a stand-in or just a familiar face. If you never trust another word I say – and really I wouldn’t blame you if you didn’t – I need you to believe that.”

Donna held his gaze with a steely one of her own. He looked imploring and desperate, sincere – but hadn’t she always thought that before? Folding her arms across her chest, she sat back and sent a frustrated glare at the Tyler china cabinet.

The last six months had been mental, a flurry of party-crashing aliens and inaccurate paparazzi rumours and a frankly outrageous amount of running. Wherever they were from and whatever their real names were, the Doctor and Rose attracted danger like two oversized magnets. Life was safer without them, and simpler.

It was also much less fun.

“Right,” she said, fixing her sternest stare on the two, one accusatory finger pointed in the Doctor’s direction. “You don’t get to selectively tell me the truth based on what you think I’ll believe. That’s my choice, not yours.” The finger moved to encompass the both of them. “You lie to me again, either of you, about anything, and I will smack you back into that other universe, you got that?”

“Absolutely,” said the Doctor.

“’Course,” said Rose.

Donna lowered her finger, sighed in a manner that reminded her unfortunately of her mother, and stood up. She stuck her hands in her pockets and took a few steps towards the door.

“Well, I’m going to get another piece of cake, and then I expect the two of you have several long stories to start telling.”

From her perch on the armchair, Rose smiled, both apologies and forgiveness in the curve of her mouth. The Doctor looked up at Donna, blank faced, then virtually leapt out of his chair in order to crush her in a hug.

Donna was fairly certain the Doctor did more hugging than anyone else in any universe.

“Thank you,” she heard him whisper from somewhere in the vicinity of her right ear.

“Oh, get off me,” she said, but gave him a quick squeeze in return anyway.

--

“Why a surprise party?” the Doctor asked, not long after they’d stepped through the door to their flat.

Rose, busy rolling her neck and shoulders, opened her eyes to send him a quizzical look. “What d’you mean, why?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just... it’s a bit weird, isn’t it? You put on some paper hats – you lot do like paper hats, don’t you? – and you eat some cake and you sing a song just because someone’s older and it’s all very…”

“Human?”

He grinned at her sheepishly.

She laughed, shaking her head. Rubbish as a human, Martha might have said, and Rose supposed from an objective standpoint she was probably right; still, it wasn’t a human Rose had crossed worlds to get back to.

Which left an uncomfortable coil in her stomach. She tossed her hair behind her shoulders and inhaled.

“What I said about – about being stuck,” she began, “I—”

He lifted a hand to silence her, smiling softly. “It’s all right, Rose.”

“I’m happy,” she said anyway. “It’s – I thought I’d have to choose. Between you and my family. I was ready to choose. But this – this is better.”

“Rose,” he started to say, but Rose continued on.

“S’why I wanted to do this. You gave up everyone so I didn’t have to, and I just wanted…” She took a deep breath and ran a hand through her hair, tucking some behind her ear. “A year ago, on the TARDIS, it was so good to see you, both of you, with everyone there. You were always so lonely and I just… wanted you to know you’re not alone anymore and you’re never gonna be. And I don’t mean me, I mean Mum and Tony and Donna and Dad and Jake and—”

She was cut off by the Doctor closing the distance between them and locking his arms around her, lifting her off her feet in the sort of hug usually reserved for post-danger celebration. Squealing in delight, Rose looped her arms around his neck.

“Rose Tyler,” he announced as he set her down, his arms still wrapped around her, “you are fantastic.”

“Well, I try.” She stretched up to kiss him and grinned. “Happy birthday, Doctor.”

He nodded, giving the impression of serious consideration. “It has been, yeah. Good year, too. A few bumps, I suppose.”

“Nothing we can’t handle.”

“Absolutely.” He grinned. “Good year coming up, too. Great, even.”

“Yeah?” She slid her hands down from his neck to his chest, fiddling with the buttons of his shirt. “That an official Time Lord prediction?”

“Oh, yes.”