My First Fanfiction
Jul. 15th, 2008 02:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodyrosemccoyThis is a short Doctor Who fanfixion piece that sprang into my head fully formed. I wasn’t actually going to write it—I never have posted fanfic before—but somebody asked me to when I gave them the synopsis, and what kind of person would I be if I disappointed random people on the internet? That’s right: the scummy unforgivable kind. So! My first fanfix meant for public consumption.
For the record, I got this idea in part from my own hard drive, which I have named the Teeny Tiny TARDIS because it's bigger on the inside. But the TEMP is a very handy plot device—the conflict practically writes itself!
For the record, I got this idea in part from my own hard drive, which I have named the Teeny Tiny TARDIS because it's bigger on the inside. But the TEMP is a very handy plot device—the conflict practically writes itself!
So yeah. Doctor Who fanfixion under the cut, in which I fix the end of Season 4 and drop hints at a spinoff series that only exists inside my own head. As Bean says, “sane people may feel free to ignore this.”
Also, I am convinced that their choice of footwear for Ten was made solely so that American fangirls could get a kick out of writing the word “trainers.” Because I do.
Also, I am convinced that their choice of footwear for Ten was made solely so that American fangirls could get a kick out of writing the word “trainers.” Because I do.
With one hand clutching the tubing that circled her shoulders like a harness, Donna inched through a cleft in the rocks under the caves of Traal. Up ahead she could see a dim, cold glow throwing shadows on the rock—promising that she would be able to hopefully stretch out of this absurd half-reclining position before too long.
Traal wasn’t the sort of planet Donna Noble usually visited. Donna liked a planet full of life—human or otherwise—better than this rocky, purplish expanse of dirt, scrubby plants, and dim caves.
Of course, that was partly because interesting things usually happened where there were large concentrations of life. Donna was drawn to situations like that—there was some sort of pull from them, a signal given off by things that needed her to fix them. It was a part of her newly added Time Lord consciousness that she hadn't counted on—but one that sure explained a lot about some of the travels she'd had before gaining this odd new half-Time Lord, half-human mind.
And now there was something on Traal that needed Donna Noble’s attention.
A few more feet and the shelf she was leaning on almost gave way. Donna nearly slipped, dislodging a bit of rubble that rattled into the chamber below her. She froze, heart pounding, waiting for a moment after the rattles died away. She took the time to scan the floor, to confirm what she had hoped—and indeed, little scratched out hollows dotted the uneven floor, each filled with three or four glowing green eggs.
Definitely enough life to make things interesting.
After a moment, she relaxed and continued, with slow, measured movements, to lower herself into the cave. This required finesse. Gently now … gently … toes first …
Her foot slipped. Her legs shot out from under her, and she thudded to the cave floor on her behind, a cascade of gravel tumbling down over her and coating her hair with dust. She gasped, hand going to the back of her head to check the harness, and pricked up her ears to listen for any response to the noise she’d made.
Finesse had never been one of Donna’s strong points.
She rose and padded over to one of those little hollows. The four eggs were about the size of her fist, and they were bumpy and leathery. Up close she could see that the glowing green was uneven—some specks on each shell glowed brighter than the rest of it. Four was about as many as she could fit in the little basket she was carrying. Perfect.
She knelt and reached for the first egg.
A roar filled the cavern.
Donna whirled. A huge tunnel on the other side of the cavern was shaking with the sudden movement of something—something big—blasting toward her. She could see an angry, smoky red light growing steadily brighter. The eggs were rattling in their hollows. She swept the four she’d been looking at into her basket. Lose the eggs and there’d be trouble—the sound was getting closer—don’t break the eggs—
And then, as she leaped to her feet, she saw the silhouettes running against that flaming light.
Donna stopped dead.
It was him. She recognized the shoes, the hair, and even that ridiculous screwdriver he was clutching, in an instant. And as his face turned toward her, she recognized the urgent expression—the one that said he was just steps ahead of death—just before his eyes met hers and that expression changed.
He skidded to a halt, and the girl behind him almost crashed into him. Her frightened eyes went from him to Donna to the fire-belching creature barreling down the tunnel toward them.
“Doctor!” she cried.
“You!” Donna bellowed.
“What?” he said—not to her, but to the universe in general.
“You,” Donna said, fear forgotten in a sudden rush of fury. “You—time-traveling—mind-stealing—git!”
The shock had cycled off his face now, replaced by brief alarm and now nothing but bafflement. “What?”
“You have a lot of nerve coming here,” Donna went on.
“What?”
“Doctor!” the new girl cried, tugging him forward. “It’s coming!”
He snapped to attention. The girl was pointing toward the cleft behind Donna and shouting something, but Donna didn’t hear quite what. She was paralyzed for a moment—until he dashed past her, and then she spun. “Oh, no, you don’t! You’re not going to run away from me now!”
Behind her, the beast thundered into the cavern. A deafening roar blew over the place, and great stalactites tumbled to the floor, crushing dozens of eggs when they shattered.
“This won’t stop it,” he was saying when she wedged herself in to follow them. “It’ll slow it down, but it’s still got the fire—and it can knock down solid rock—”
“Don’t change the subject!” Donna snapped. She absently held the basket out of the way of a huge claw that had jammed into the cleft next to her. “I’ve got a lot to say to you about the last time we met, Spaceman! How dare you just come barging into my head and stealing all my memories—”
A shuddering impact sent the rock heaving around them. The Doctor had to half-drag Donna out the other side before the cleft suddenly slammed shut with crushing force. “Keep running!” he shouted to the other girl.
“—and they were all my best memories! Where do you get off, Doctor I-Know-What’s-Best-For-Everybody?”
He was properly wild-eyed now. “Donna—”
Another impact. The entire cave wall behind them shuddered as they scrambled up the the rough tunnel.
“And it was such a sloppy job! That mind wipe didn’t last a week, you know? All it took was Shari saying that ‘the doctor said it was benign’ and I’m on the floor in her kitchen with Earl Grey tea all over my new jumper—”
“Donna—”
The wall behind them exploded, and the huge creature let out a triumphant bellow as it set out after them.
“—I liked that jumper! And the least you could do was ask if maybe I’d rather keep the good memories if they killed me! OY!” She fished an egg out of the basket and hurled it at him. It missed, hit a rock and splatted open. “Are you listening?”
He stopped again, and this time it was she who nearly collided with him. “Donna!”
“What?” She didn’t want to let him get a word in edgewise.
“Do you suppose we could talk about this later?”
She opened her mouth to reply, but before she could there was a sudden blow to her back. She sprawled forward, collapsing on top of him. It was a glancing hit, but she felt one of the harness tubes rupture, and suddenly her back was wet. The left one—it’d better be the left one, she thought vaguely. And the eggs—
Then she heard one more thunderous bang, this time from ahead. The beast behind her stopped its cacophony rather suddenly, and she felt it hit the ground with a crash like a small earthquake. More dust rolled over her.
She looked up.
The Doctor’s new companion stood there with a huge gun, looking a little shocked. She was still staring at the enormous, harpoon-like dart that had been in the gun, and now was embedded in the neck of the great beast.
“Jack wasn’t kidding about these,” she said. “It can knock a bugblatter beast out.”
The Doctor, however, wasn’t paying attention to her. He had disentangled himself from Donna, and now his gaze was on the torn tubing on her shoulder. Donna looked back at him steadily, arms folded. “Well?” she said.
“Oh, Donna,” he said. “I am so sorry.”
The anger returned. “Sorry? Sorry? You have a lot more groveling to do than sorry, Spaceman.” She was absently patting her pockets—where was that blasted tape? Her other hand was pinching the tube shut, keeping it from spilling more of the brown fluid.
He got to his feet and took an uncertain step toward her. She backed up, holding up the tape she’d found as if to ward him off. “Don’t you touch me!” The new companion was coming down the hill, and Donna gestured. “You come here, sweetheart. I hate having to reach around and up to tape this tube up.”
“It’s sticking into your neck!” the girl cried.
“Oh, don’t be such a sissy,” Donna said. “It’s tea.”
The Doctor slapped his forehead. “Of course! A cup of tea—just the thing to keep the senses up! Donna, you’re brilliant!”
“No thanks to you, if you’ll recall,” Donna pointed out.
He started circling her, muttering. “But that would only be temporary … how did you manage to stabilize yourself?” he asked, pulling out his glasses to see the full extent of her ingenuity—the wires and tubes connecting the little bit of hardware strapped between her shoulder blades to the base of her skull.
“Meet the TEMP,” Donna said to him, feeling a little burst of pride push in through the anger. “The Time-Lord External Memory Pod.” The girl had gotten the tube put together again, so Donna turned to display it. “It was the external memory drive for my computer. I modified it a bit—it needed to be a bit more sonic. Torchwood helped.”
His admiration seemed genuine. “An extra storage device for the rest of the Time Lord consciousness! Oh, that is beautiful.”
“It’s a little slapdash,” Donna admitted modestly. “I worked with what I had. I got the idea from the Ood and their external brains, and the ghosting technology in those space suits in the library—one good thing about it all coming back to me at once was that it was all right there for me to work with. Martha was brilliant about the implants, though. And I kept the tea because it seems to make the thought transfer smoother. I’ve been looking for some better parts as I travel.”
He circled back around to face her. His expression had changed again—back to the one of infinite regret she remembered all too well. “Donna—”
Donna couldn’t let him finish. “Oh no. Not this time, Sunshine. I am not going home and letting you erase the best part of my life again. What if you get it right this time?”
The regret was wiped off his face instantly, replaced by bafflement. “What? You can’t want this. You’ve got a computer drive and a bunch of tubes plugged into your head!”
She put the full force of her glare on him. “And maybe I’d prefer the tubes, Doctor Know-It-All?”
He blinked. Obviously that had never occurred to him.
“That’s right,” she said. “You never even asked, did you? Maybe you didn’t think of something like the TEMP, but you didn’t give me a chance to, either. No, you just snatched away the best part of my life, and sent me back to that dump to be stupid old Donna Noble, clueless file girl, for the rest of my life.”
“Doctor,” said the girl, eyeing the monster. It was starting to twitch.
“I was going to find a way to fix it,” he protested. “Something that didn’t involve tubes. It was going to be a surprise.”
“It flippin’ well would have been!” Donna exploded. “You’d just swan back in one day and wake me up and everything would be all peaches and cream and you’d have saved the day, is that it?”
He stared at his trainers. “Well …”
The beast began to snort a bit. The girl edged away.
Donna shook her head. “Thank you very much, Doctor, but I think I prefer the tubes.”
He looked back up at her with that big-eyed, tragic look she always suspected was completely sincere. “I was going to travel with you again.”
It was tempting. Donna almost melted right then and there. But she thought about all the things she’d done in the past few months—things she’d done without him, sometimes with companions and sometimes all on her own. It had felt somehow freeing to be the one in charge.
“We can still cross paths,” she told him gently.
“Doctor,” the new companion said as the monster grunted. “Maybe we should talk about this on the TARDIS? It’s just up here,” she added to Donna, gesturing vaguely. “He didn’t want me to have this tranquilizer in it, but I thought that if there was an emergency …”
“OH!” he said. “Right! Sorry, Donna, we’ve got a moon’s future at stake here. Well—a moon and a species. Well—a moon and a species and a new species.”
Then, finally, Donna remembered what she was doing. “The eggs!” She inspected the remaining ones in the basket. One had broken, but the others seemed intact. “Yeah, I’m working on that, too. I’ve got some equipment to take a look at these in my car. Come on, it’s up this way, too. Probably right next to the TARDIS, since I’m still Special Donna Noble, right?”
He was staring at her again. “Your car?”
“I worked with what I had,” she said defensively.
Then, for the first time here on Traal, a smile lit up his features—one of those smiles of joyful abandon that made the skinny git look almost handsome. He rushed forward and caught her up in a bear hug, lifting her off the rough stones. “Oh, Donna Noble, you are brilliant.”
“Oy!” Donna cried, squirming. “Mind the eggs!”
But once she had gotten the basket out of the way, she couldn’t help hugging back.
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Date: 2008-07-15 09:39 pm (UTC)And tea! *cackles* How positively British of you! :D
And I love this part: “OH!” he said. “Right! Sorry, Donna, we’ve got a moon’s future at stake here. Well—a moon and a species. Well—a moon and a species and a new species.” *sniggers* Straight from the source, eh? ;P
*sends cookies*
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Date: 2008-07-15 10:12 pm (UTC)I had to do one of his little "Well--" amendment speeches. They make me laugh every time.
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Date: 2008-07-15 09:46 pm (UTC)Also, TRAAL. YES.
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Date: 2008-07-15 10:14 pm (UTC)It had to be Traal.
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Date: 2008-07-15 11:05 pm (UTC)She could drive it to CARCELONA.
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Date: 2008-07-16 07:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-16 03:11 pm (UTC)Mind if I pimp this out all over the place, by the by?
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Date: 2008-07-16 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-16 08:35 pm (UTC)Also, YAY TRAAL! ALl the in-character stuff just makes me *sooo* happy.
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Date: 2008-07-17 08:43 am (UTC)I posited the idea as their meeting up while he was "being chased by a ravenous bugblatter beast or something" (and Donna completely missing the danger in favor of giving him a tongue-lashing). The identity of the monster seemed to amuse people enough that I stuck with it.
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Date: 2008-07-16 11:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-17 08:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-17 06:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-17 08:40 am (UTC)You're welcome to take this idea and run with it, if you want to see more. ;)
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Date: 2008-07-17 09:00 am (UTC)Ah, I'd love to but I don't write. Not well anyway! But thanks for the offer! (Maybe I'll keep it in mind.)
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Date: 2008-07-17 07:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-17 10:33 pm (UTC)You'd think she would want to armor the rig, though.
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Date: 2008-07-23 11:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-02-13 08:35 pm (UTC)