Work Text:
somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and i—
i took the one less travelled by,
When Donna touches the Doctor’s severed hand something goes wrong, or not wrong, precisely, just different. It’s a blip, a glitch in the matrix of the universe, a reverse echo from long ago on the Doctor’s personal timeline, and it goes like this: out of a freckled, mad-haired man’s hand grows a big-eared man he once was.
He sits up with a gasp, and Donna stares at him in horror and confusion. “Who the hell are you?” she demands, all fire and rage in the face of her own fear, and isn’t she just fantastic.
“Oh, that’s nice,” he says, gruff and mocking and Northern, and oh, but he’d forgotten what it was like to be him. “Been travelling with me for months now, but a new haircut and you don’t recognise me anymore?”
“What, so you’re,” Donna says, and frowns as it starts to make sense, “You’re the Doctor?”
“Yep,” he says, and offers her a cheeky grin and a wave. “Hello!”
She shakes her head a little, and her eyes land on his crotch, and she says, “You’re naked.”
“Yep,” he says with the same grin, and then jumps up because the TARDIS grating’s been doing its best to permanently imprint itself on his backside and also, they seem to be seconds away from certain death. He triggers the dematerialisation sequence just in time, and not even the practised, instinctive way he does that seems to convince Donna that he really is the Doctor, and that makes him strangely proud of her.
He finds his clothes in the endless depths of the TARDIS wardrobe, and he even manages to dig up the red flashlight he used to wear when doing repairs, and Donna looks at him like he’s completely mad, which isn’t much different from how she usually looks at him. Except, she’s never looked at him.
“All better now,” he announces when he’s done fixing the interior of the TARDIS, and jumps down from his ladder. “Fantastic. Now, hush. No one knows we’re here, so we gotta keep quiet. Silent running, like on submarines when they can’t even drop a spanner. Don’t go dropping any spanners.” He gives her a stern look, and then breaks into a grin, spreads his arms and says, “Go on then, what do you think?”
“I think you’re bonkers,” Donna says, and she looks like she means it.
His face falls, and he asks, “Why? What’s wrong with this jumper?”
“Is that what Time Lords do?” she asks, horrified and shocked. “Lop a bit off, grow another one? You’re like worms!”
“Nah, I’m unique,” he says, and preens. “Never been another like me. ‘Cos all that regeneration energy went into the hand,” he holds up his right hand, which really is his hand and not the other him’s hand and he’s not sure how that works, but he’ll take it, and wiggles his fingers at her, “hello, but then you touched it and,” he clicks his fingers, “instant biological metacrisis. I grew out of you. Still, could be worse, considering.”
“Oi, watch it spaceman,” Donna says, and of course she’d latch onto the last bit and completely ignore the rest.
“Oi, watch it Earth-girl,” he retorts, and then pulls a horrified face. “I sound like you,” he says, and sounds disgusted.
“Oi!” she says, angry and fierce.
“Oi!” he replies, and sounds too much like her.
“Oi!” she says again, more angrily.
“Oi, spanners! Could I get some hush please?” he says, and she purses her lips and fumes at him silently. “Thank you. Must’ve picked up a bit of your voice, that’s all.” She relaxes fractionally, and then his expression changes to one appropriate when facing death in a dungeon in Cardiff. “Wait, hold on. No. Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
“What is it? What’s wrong?” Donna asks, gruff and worried at the same time.
“I’ve only got one heart,” he says, and looks and sounds completely horrified as he feels his chest. “This body only has one heart.”
“What?” Donna asks, and comes over to put a hand on his chest to feel for herself. “What, like you’re human?”
“Oh, fantastic,” he says, and sounds disgusted.
“Oi!” she says, looking offended.
“Oi,” he retorts, and it sounds a lot like he’s just saying it to be annoying.
“Stop it!” she hisses, and he just grins at her. She takes a deep breath, and gives him a dubious look and asks, “So you’re human now?”
“No,” he says, and realises it for the first time. “I’m part Time Lord, part human. Well, isn’t that wizard.”
“I kept hearing that noise,” Donna says, and pretends she doesn’t hear herself in the things he says, “that heartbeat.”
“That was me, yeah,” he says, and walks over to the console, dismissive. “My single heart. ‘Cos I’m a,” he stops, and scowls at his hands where they’re resting on the control panels, “I’m complicated. This moment must’ve rippled back through time and space, converging on you.”
“But why me?” Donna asks, like she really doesn’t understand.
He doesn’t look up from the monitor, and says, “’Cos you’re special.”
“Oh, I already told you, the other you,” Donna says, and sounds exasperated, “I’m not.”
“No, but you are. You,” he stops abruptly, and looks at her like he’s suddenly seeing her with perfect clarity. “You really don’t believe that, do you,” he says, and sounds faintly amused. “All that attitude, all that lip, ‘cos all this time you think you’re not worth it.”
Donna says, “Stop it.”
“Shouting at the world ‘cos no one’s listening,” he says, and it comes out much more condescending than he means it. “Well, why should they?”
“Doctor, stop it,” she says again, and Donna Noble should never sound so vulnerable.
“But look at what you did,” he says with a wide grin, proud and in awe of her, and then his expression changes to one of confused realisation. “No, it’s more than that. It’s like we were always heading for this. You came to the TARDIS, and you found me again, your granddad, your car. Donna, you parked your car right next to where the TARDIS was going to land. It’s like something’s been drawing us together all this time.”
“But you’re talking like destiny,” Donna says, and looks frightened. “But there’s no such thing, is there?”
They look at each other, worried and confused, and then he snorts and dismisses the thought with a careless wave of the hand. “Nah,” he says, “probably just coincidence.”
He made the mistake of believing in coincidence in the face of something so glaringly ominous once before, and he learned his lesson then, but he’s not about to tell her that.
*
It’s strange seeing them all again, or in some cases for the first time, through these eyes. He’d thought Jack and Rose would be the most difficult to face, or even Sarah-Jane and Davros; in the end, though, it’s Donna and Martha who are the hardest to look at.
He’s never seen them, never travelled with them, not this him, but he remembers it. He remembers Royal Hope Hospital and Shakespeare and Daleks in Manhattan and the Master, and he remembers how he sent Martha Jones to walk the Earth. He remembers Pompeii and the Ood and Agatha Christie and silence in the library, and he remembers how Donna Noble turned left. He even remembers New New York and the new new Doctor, and he remembers being him. He remembers all of it, all of them, and he still feels for them but he feels differently than he did when he was their Doctor.
It isn’t like regeneration, when he changes and becomes a new man who keeps his memories safely tucked away in the vast recesses of his mind. Instead it’s as though he’s regressed, changed back into the man he was veritable lifetimes ago, but with all the memories of and feelings for the people another man once knew and loved. It’s like degeneration, and it’s terrible.
“Is anyone gonna tell us what’s going on?” Rose asks eventually, and he barely glances up at her from where he’s flipping switches and pressing buttons while Donna launches into an explanation, but he can feel her eyes on him.
“So there’s three of you?” Sarah-Jane asks, and it’s a bit easier to look at her, because he might not know what it’s like to see her through these particular eyes, but he does know what it’s like to see her through a new man’s eyes.
“Three Doctors?” Rose confirms, and sounds beyond bemused.
“I can’t tell you what I’m thinking right now,” Jack says, and he can’t help grinning at that.
“There’s a time and a place, Captain,” he says mock-sternly, and only looks up long enough to see a once-familiar dimpled grin aimed at him and the badly hidden confusion on the other’s faces.
“Why’s it,” Rose says, and stops to clear her throat and bite her lip, “Why’s it you though?”
He shrugs, and grins, and says, “No idea.” A small smile spreads across her face, and she’s older than she was when he last saw her, and he remembers the burnt copper taste of her kiss perfectly. “I missed you,” he tells her, and he doesn’t think she understands.
*
Sarah-Jane is the first to say goodbye once they’ve saved the universe and are back on Earth, and she only waves at him before she’s out the door, but that’s alright; she never knew him like this. Martha’s next, and she walks over to shake his hand, though he can see it in her eyes that it doesn’t quite connect in her head that he’s the Doctor, too.
Jack tells her, “I’ll be right out,” and he and Martha have a silent conversation that consists mostly of raised eyebrows and wryly twisting mouths before she leaves them. Jack turns to him, and his grin doesn’t quite reach his eyes the way it used, and he says, “Guess this is it, huh?”
“Suppose so,” he says, and for a moment they just smile at each other, and there’s no real joy in it, but a lot of fondness.
“It was good seeing you again, Doc,” Jack says, and the words catch a little in his throat. He laughs awkwardly, and doesn’t quite manage to switch back into his usual mode of incessant flirtation and cheeky winks. “I mean,” he gestures, and can’t seem to find the words for what he’s trying to say.
“Come here,” he says, and takes Jack’s face between his palms, and kisses him. It’s no more than a press of slightly parted lips, a mirror image to the only other time they ever kissed, long ago and far in the future. It isn’t all that Jack ever wanted from him, but it’s something he’s wanted for most of his long life, and it’s something no other him could ever have given Jack. “I know, lad,” he says against Jack’s mouth, and he does.
Jack exhales shakily, and rests their foreheads together as his hands travel up leather-clad arms. “Oh, but I’ve missed you, you bastard,” he says with a wry, breathless grin.
“As you should,” he says, and squeezes the back of Jack’s neck before pulling away.
“Hey, don’t I get a kiss?” Rose asks with a sly grin as she comes up beside them, and out of the corner of his eye he can see Mickey saying goodbye to Jackie.
“Oh, come here,” Jack says, and with how widely they’re smiling at each other their faces must hurt.
Rose gestures to him, and bites her tongue, and says, “I was talking to him.”
They laugh, and throw their arms around each other, and it’s like it’s still just the three of them in the TARDIS, before the Game Station and Bad Wolf and the whipcord thin man with the wild hair.
Jack kisses Rose on the temple, and squeezes her tighter, and says into her hair, “Try to keep him out of trouble, yeah?”
“Oi,” he says, even as Rose nods and kisses Jack’s cheek before letting him go, “I can hear you, you know.”
They just grin at him, and then Jack turns more serious, and says, “I still wish I’d never met you, Doctor.”
“Liar,” he accuses, and Jack’s grin is half-cheek, half-guilt, and then he leaves with one last salute, and he’s never given Jack a mock-salute to see him off before. Rose stands next to him with their hands close, and they don’t touch.
*
The Doctor leaves them at Bad Wolf Bay in the parallel universe, and Rose is understandably reluctant to let him.
“No, but I spent all that time trying to find you,” she says, and doesn’t really manage to keep her voice from trembling. “I’m not going back now.”
“But you’ve got to,” the Doctor tells her, “Because we saved the universe, but at a cost. And that cost is him. He destroyed the Daleks, he committed genocide. He’s too dangerous to be left on his own.”
“Like that’s never happened before,” he says, and there’s Donna in the biting way he says it.
“Exactly,” the Doctor says, and it’s angry and unforgiving. “You were always born in battle, full of blood and anger and revenge.” He looks at Rose, and his face softens, and he says, “That’s me, when we first met. You made me better, you made him better. You can do it again.”
Rose just shakes her head, and screws her face up against the tears, and says nothing.
“Don’t you see what he’s trying to give you?” Donna asks, and gestures at him. “Go on, tell her.”
Rose turns around to face him, and she looks just as lost and sad as she did the last time she stood on this beach, and he wishes he knew how to make her better. “I’ve got all his memories,” he tells her, “I don’t look like him, but I remember being him. I’m still him, sort of. Except, I’ve only got one heart.”
She blinks rapidly, and says, “Which means?”
“I’m part human,” he says, and the urge to call her a stupid ape because he needs to spell it out for her is strangely absent. “Specifically the aging part: I’ll grow old and never regenerate.” She looks like she’s starting to get it, and so he blunders on, “Only got one life, me. I could, I don’t know, spend it with you, if you want.” He tries to make it sound like it doesn’t matter to him either way because it’s always been difficult to ask Rose Tyler to choose him, but human and stuck in a parallel world with no TARDIS or promises of faraway planets to take her to it’s almost impossible. He’s got nothing to give her except himself, and he doesn’t know if that’s enough.
Rose steps towards him, and asks uncertainly, “You’ll grow old at the same time as me?”
“Yep,” he says, and he knows his grin is ridiculous and doesn’t reach his eyes.
An answering smile tugs at the corner of Rose’s mouth, and she puts her hand on his chest above his crossed arms to feel his single heart beat against her palm. Somewhere in the crease between her eyebrows and the fluttering of her eyelashes he sees the possibility of a life he never could have had before: shared taxis and mortgages and grocery shopping and laundry, and spending the rest of his days with Rose Tyler. The prospect of it is more alien to him than anything with blue skin or tentacles would ever be, and it’s fantastic.
The ominous grinding sound the TARDIS makes is enough to make them all look around, and the Doctor almost sounds sorry when he says, “We’ve gotta go. This reality’s sealing itself off forever.”
The Doctor and Donna turn back to the TARDIS, and Rose goes after them and says, “But it’s still not right. Because you weren’t him anymore.”
“But he’s still me,” the Doctor says, and Rose doesn’t relent.
“All right,” she says, and he remembers the angle of her jaw and the look on her face so very well. “Both of you, answer me this. When I last stood on this beach, on the worst day of my life, what was the last thing you said to me?” They stand on either side of her, and say nothing, and she looks at the Doctor. “Go on, say it.”
He swallows, and says, “I said, ‘Rose Tyler’.”
She looks at him, expectant and desperate, and says, “Yeah, and how was that sentence going to end?”
He almost smiles at her, and it’s pained, and he asks, “Does it need saying?”
Rose looks at the Doctor for a moment, and then turns to him, and says, “And you, Doctor? What was the end of that sentence?”
He has to smile at her, all stubbornness and fierce determination, and for the first time he thinks he understands her. He understands that it does need saying, that telling her she’s fantastic and brilliant and a genius in the hopes she’ll simply know isn’t enough. He, the earlier him, with the leather jacket and the ears and just after the Time War, was broken, and she made him better, she made him love her. He, the other him, the one in the pinstripe suit, was born loving her, and he’ll die loving her. But Rose, she could die and never even know that, and he, with his worn trainers and allons-y, still wouldn’t be able to say it.
He, this him, who thinks and feels as he did when he’d only just met Rose in 2005 but has all the memories and experience of the man standing opposite him and that tiny spark of Donna Noble in his blood, understands what it is to be human, what it is to feel human, and that being human means he can give her what he otherwise never could have.
So he puts a hand on her arm and leans in to speak into her ear, and says it.
*
They watch the TARDIS dematerialise, and he takes her hand like he did long ago in the basement of a London shop, and she still tastes like burning stars. She leans her head on his shoulder, and he’d forgotten how her fingers feel tucked into the spaces between his.
“I missed you, too,” Rose says, and when she looks up at him and their eyes meet he thinks she understands.
and that has made all the difference.