Chapter Text
Donna Noble woke up slowly.
It was relaxing. Luxurious, even. She could spend a few minutes in bed, awoken not by the blare of her phone’s alarm clock or Rose shaking her awake from a dream she couldn’t remember but by the sunlight coming in through the blinds, and she didn’t even spend those minutes asking for another hour of sleep. Just… eyes closed, getting ready for the day.
Of course, this wouldn’t last forever. She was due to start with UNIT in just a couple weeks. She’d had a one-on-one with Kate, in non-life-threatening circumstances, and had been informed in no uncertain terms of the risks of the job. It would be stressful and scary and change the way she sees the world.
Stressful, scary, and lowers her faith in the workings of 21st century Britain? Three things that were already true of every job she’s had in her life. And Donna, in no uncertain terms, told Kate that she was damn ready… doubly so for that 120k salary.
She finally slipped out of bed, and headed downstairs… to find a stranger in her living room.
Shaun was already out driving for the day, and Rose’s school was back in session after holiday break, the Doctor could be in the TARDIS, or halfway across town, or…
Wait a minute. Blonde woman, strange clothing (where the hell did she get that coat, a thrift shop?), making herself some tea like she owned the place…
“Good morning!” the woman said brightly when she spotted Donna. “Want some?”
“Doctor?” Donna ventured.
“Yup, that’s me. Hmm, that came out a little weird, though… and it’s still happening. Is my voice usually in this frequency range? I mean, this sub-range of the human-audible frequency range… why are you looking at me like that?”
“Love, you need to take a look at yourself,” Donna said, and tipped her head towards the mirror next to the door.
The Doctor stepped over to the mirror, coming out from behind the counter and revealing the lower half of her outfit. Yeah; definitely the Doctor.
She(?) looked at herself in the mirror, looked back at Donna, shrugged, looked back to the mirror, looked back at Donna, and…
“Ohhhh. Oh. That’s… that’s new. I mean, it’s old, actually, this was my previous face, y’know, before the new-old one, but I guess this means….”
The Doctor took a step back, then another, and then a few more until she neatly fell back onto the sofa, hands in her lap and tails of her coat splayed across the seat, eyes pointed firmly at the wall in a faraway gaze.
“You didn’t even notice it this morning, right? So, not too bad…?” Donna asked, gently sitting down on the couch next to the Doctor.
“No, not bad, I suppose. Just… another new thing. Old faces, bigeneration… guess I’m breaking all the rules.”
“Mind telling me your pronouns, love?”
At that, the Doctor turned to Donna and smiled.
“With this face? She and her, please,” she said as if she were asking for her favorite ice cream flavor. “And, y’know, definite article.”
“Gotcha, The Doctor. So, did you regenerate with those clothes, or…”
She looked down. “Yeah, s’pose I must’ve. Like I did last time. I mean, with my old-new…-old face. But those clothes were a bit different; these are the same.”
Donna shook her head. “If you’re gonna be switching faces all the time I’m gonna need a list, or a chart, or something. Just to keep track. I suppose it’s too much to ask if you have a photo album?”
The Doctor put on a guilty face. “Not really my style.”
“Hold on; I’m going to text Kate.”
---
While the Doctor made a quick run to the TARDIS for something, Donna texted Kate about the situation and asked if she could pretty please have some pictures of all of the Doctor’s faces that UNIT knew about. Kate referred Donna to their resident Doctor expert, one Petronella Osgood, who immediately fulfilled the request via linking to an extensive album filled with old photos and blurry security camera stills, and was more than happy to narrow that down to just one good photo per face.
She had just pulled the pictures off the printer (and she’d used the good photo paper, too) when she heard the sound of… paper rustling?
Donna returned to the living room to find the Doctor, standing on the couch (with her boots still on), taping a large piece of white canvas paper to the wall.
“Oi, boots off the couch. Painter’s tape, though, that’s good.”
“‘Course, don’t want to ruin your new wall, y’just got it.”
The Doctor obligingly hopped off the couch, and helped Donna push it away from the wall so as to have better access to the canvas.
“So, this face of yours is a painter, or something…?” Donna asked, only for the Doctor to whip the photos from her hands.
“No, I’m doing a family tree! But just me. One-person family tree. Always wanted to do one of these. Also, not really a tree, more of a line… sort of. You wanted a chart, so I’m making a chart!”
At that, Donna just nodded, and wordlessly got some safety scissors for the Doctor to cut the photos out.
“Got any string?” the Doctor asked as she gratefully took the scissors. “Always wanted to do one of those pin boards.”
“Nuh-uh, no pins in the wall… but Rose has craft beads and glue.”
“Is she gonna be mad if I borrow them?”
“In exchange for a surprise aunt? No way.”
The Doctor beamed at that. “Aunt! I’ve never been someone’s aunt before. That’s brilliant!”
With that, the morning was dedicated to the Doctor’s impromptu arts-and-crafts project. Donna watched as photos of variable quality went up on the canvas, past faces of the Doctor that she’d never seen and yet rang with a familiarity all the same, the blazing memories still left in the back of her head resonating despite their illegibility.
While the Doctor worked with her hands, her motormouth continued chugging away, each photo accompanied by at least one anecdote from that era of her life. Something else about the exercise was ringing a bell in Donna’s head: something about telling your life story to your therapist, but making it fun, framing it differently, more hopefully. She didn’t know if that was just nonsense she’d heard off the telly or not, but she didn’t think it could hurt.
Amidst the silliness, some of the more serious ramifications of the Doctor’s cohabitation were starting to sink in, the month-long honeymoon period seemingly coming to a close. Already the Doctor had mentioned several bizarre foodstuffs she’d want to have on-hand if any of her old faces could possibly return; not to mention Donna needing to come up with some explanation as for the now rotating cast of strange medical professionals living out of her house.
At last, all fourteen photos had gone up; the canvas being more square- than line-shaped, the Doctor had put the first eight on a top row, then marked the line wrapping around to a bottom row with string. At Donna’s suggestion, she’d begun to list some of the friends she’d met in each stage of her life.
“Still two faces missing, though,” Donna commented.
The Doctor looked up. “Huh? Wha’dya mean by that?”
“Your… old-new-old face, and the new guy,” Donna said. For some reason, the Doctor almost looked relieved at that explanation.
“Yeah, I need the new chap, but the other one was my… tenth face, again.”
Donna counted the faces. “You mean eleventh?”
“Long story,” the Doctor said casually, not even looking up from where she was crouched and scribbling. “Didn’t count one for a while. I’ll, uh, tell you about it sometime.”
“Dearie, your old-new-old face looked good, but not this young,” Donna said, pointing to the tenth/eleventh face. “Maybe this current face is the exact same, but that one wasn’t.”
“Hmm,” the Doctor said. “I suppose.”
Then, the Doctor jumped to her feet. “Actually, that’s important. I need to see if I can change on purpose. And I need to see if I can change back. And I need to know if it’s a real, proper, total regeneration, or not; I couldn’t feel it ‘cos it was in my sleep. So if I try to change to my old-new-old face and can’t, then we might have a problem.”
Then, the Doctor closed her eyes and tensed up really hard.
“Is… is that how that works?” Donna asked.
“Shh. Trying to regenerate without actually regenerating. Harder than it looks.”
At that, Donna fell silent, doing her best not to wince at the Doctor, who looked for all the world like she was trying to poo standing up.
“Doctor, that’s not gonna work. Remember, with me and Rose? Just… letting go?”
The Doctor opened her eyes. “Right. Yeah. Just… letting go. Like Frozen.”
“You’ve seen Frozen?”
“Yeah. Bill made me watch it.”
Ah. Donna remembered that name from the Toymaker’s puppet show. She wasn’t going to pry.
“Okay, Doctor, big breath…” Donna said, and waved her hand towards herself. The Doctor obliged. “And… let it go.”
The Doctor exhaled. Nothing happened. She moved to speak, but Donna held out a hand.
“Not giving up after one try. Breathe in… and… let it go…”
The Doctor closed her eyes, exhaling, and as she did, a golden shimmer passed over her like flash paper, gently burning away one face to reveal another: the old-new-old face, the one they’d had the day before.
The Doctor looked down at his hand. Then, he ran his tongue over his teeth. Then, he looked at Donna.
“Whoa.”
Donna nodded her head a couple times in an impressed bounce. “Whoa.”
Then, Donna ran her hand along the Doctor’s sleeve. “So is this actually like, your skin?”
“Pffh. No. It’s my clothes.”
“You can make clothes appear… out of thin air.”
“I can rewrite the DNA inside every cell in my body and you draw the line at clothes?”
“If I take your coat off, and then you change, and then change back, do you grow another coat? Can you make infinite coats? Isn’t that… breaking the law of conversation of stuff?”
“It’s conservation of matter, and no, I can’t make infinite coats, and no, it’s not breaking the law, humans just don’t understand everything yet.”
“You said this was new, how do you know you can’t make infinite coats?”
At that, the Doctor glared at her, and very deliberately took off his coat, and handed it to her. Then, he closed his eyes, inhaled, and… changed. Not into a female face, but into that of a young, blond man, wearing… cricketing gear?
Furthermore, as he did, the coat in Donna’s hands vanished, burning away with the same gentle gold light.
The Doctor held out his hands. “There. Happy?”
“You can regenerate your clothes, and you can’t make infinite coats. Well. I’m glad we settled that,” Donna admitted.
“Right,” the Doctor said, then clapped his hands. “Well, now we know that I can sort-of control this. Now, what I think happened is that I’m somehow in a perpetual state of post-regenerative grace. Actually, I had a very talented friend who could do something similar, and I suppose I just… stumbled onto her technique.”
“Yeah, sure, one problem,” Donna said.
“Oh? What’s that?” the Doctor asked, looking back to her with a genuine look of worry on his face. Did the Doctor always have such impressive puppy-dog eyes?
“You’re borrowing Rose’s craft supplies.”
The Doctor frowned. “Oh, alright.”
Then, he changed, back into the female face… and then stumbled against the couch and fell over.
Donna instantly moved to catch her before she could bump her head against anything; instead, she moved the two of them around to sit on the couch proper.
“You alright? What’s wrong?”
The Doctor shook her head, breathing light. “Alright, just, don’t think I shoulda done that so many times so quickly.”
“Alright. Right, sorry… alright. Y’know, actually, maybe… you should just let it happen? As it happens?”
“As it happens?”
“Yeah! Your body knows what it’s doing. Your old face came back for a reason, this one probably came back for a reason, just… go with the flow.”
“Right. Go with the flow. I can do that. I’m great at that.”
“No you’re not.”
The Doctor met Donna’s eyes.
“Yeah. I’m not.”
“But you can learn!” Donna said, taking one of the Doctor’s hands. “It’ll be alright. It’s perfect, actually. You’re taking a break. You’re working things through. You’re resting. This is just a chance for you to come to terms with… all of you. It doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Unless it hurts…?”
The Doctor shook her head. “No, it doesn’t hurt at all. That’s how I know it’s different.”
Damn it, if that wasn’t the saddest thing Donna had heard all week.
“Okay. So. This face. Number,” Donna consulted the chart, “Thirteen?”
The Doctor shook her head. “Not a number. Don’t like the numbers. Just me.”
“Okay, Miss Stripes it is,” Donna said.
“That’s Mrs. Stripes,” the Doctor corrected with a smile.
Donna raised an eyebrow.
“Well, actually, if the TARDIS is the missus, then… hmm… I’ll have to think about it,” the Doctor mused.
“We can workshop it,” Donna agreed. “Now. Anything you want to do while you’re a woman again?”
“Nah, we both know that gender was never really a problem for me,” the Doctor waved her off, then had a second thought. “Actually, I just really, really want some custard creams.”
“That, I can do for ya.”