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Donna Noble was not having a good day.
Granted, she still was getting used to the highs and lows of time-and-space travel. At least compared with the Doctor, she hadn’t been doing this for a long time, though she’d thought she’d been doing really well adjusting to Ood, and time travel, and Sontarans, and God knew what else they’d seen.
But no matter what species she was or how long she’d been in the TARDIS, a day beginning with not being able to read anything in her room that wasn’t hers from home nor anything else on board did not bode well. She examined the Agatha Christie book she’d gotten from the library and brought with her last night, and the label on the shampoo she’d found in the bathroom cabinet the first day she’d slept in her room, and the nameplate on her door. It was all either in a completely indecipherable and unfamiliar alien language or in that weird circular scribble that she occasionally had seen on the monitors in the console room or the sickbay.
What boded even worse than all of that, though, was coming face-to-face with her hyperactive skinny alien of a best friend in the console room and not being able to understand a word he was saying.
And he was absolutely saying words. In fact, he was obviously saying many of them to her specifically. Right before he began his rambling, he’d caught her eye and given her one of those bright, slightly manic smiles that meant ‘I’m excited to see you and now I’m going to drag you into some kind of adventure’.
She’d met Golden Retrievers less excitable.
That smile was about the only form of communication from him she’d been able to parse, though. The rest of it was gibberish, right down to the cadence of his speech. She had to admit, though, it was actually quite lovely. Compared to the way it normally sounded when he was speaking English, his voice seemed musical, almost singsong, but in a fluid way. It seemed to compliment the background hum of the TARDIS. Definitely his native language, just like the monitors.
No matter how nice it was or how familiar it was to him, though, she couldn’t understand a word of it, and that was very much out of the ordinary.
Something had gone wrong, and she needed the pinstriped stick insect in front of her to realize that.
“Doctor?” she asked, hoping to stop him long enough to realize the problem. That was, after all, pretty much her job these days. But he kept talking and flitting around the console room anyway, pressing levers and buttons and acting all the world as though everything were completely fine. To be fair, if she hadn’t been listening to him, it would probably appear the same to her — everything looked normal, lighting, coral, round things on the wall, greenish rotor going up and down in the center of the console.
But, as far as she knew, he should be the one noticing this before she did — it was his ship and his language, for God’s sake.
“Doctor! Listen to me!”
Nothing.
So Donna ran after him. Plan B it was, then. If the Racnoss incident had taught her anything, it was that sometimes he got so into his own head that wouldn’t listen to anything less than a slap, and she was not afraid to dish one out when he needed it.
Right on cue, though, the TARDIS made a wheezing sound, followed by a loud thud, and the last thing that went through her mind before her forehead made contact with the edge of the console was that the time ship had had the same idea she did.
—
When she blinked her eyes back open, she was sprawled out on the cold grating of the console room floor, the world slightly blurry and fuzzy around her. The Doctor was kneeling over her, in almost double vision but not quite. He was holding something to her forehead, which felt sticky and wet and was stinging like anything. She could feel her hair glued to the edge of the spot with what she realized was blood. The sensations combined made her want to scream.
She reached to bat his hand away, but he grabbed her hand with his other one and said something that she still couldn’t understand beyond a concerned tone. That landing definitely didn’t knock anything back into place for any of them, then, least of all her. The familiar frustration began to bubble up again.
“Doctor. I can’t understand you.”
His eyes went wide, and he started talking very quickly again while digging through the medical kit next to him. Both hands fiddled with something on her forehead for a moment, and then there was a bright bluish light shining directly in her eyes. Him and that bloody sonic. He could shove it up his…pain stabbed through her eyeballs. Despite how dizzy it was making her, Donna had just enough strength to squeeze her eyes shut and push the instrument out of her face.
The Doctor said something chastising and held her head in place. She rolled her eyes, earning herself a stab of pain from inside her skull and another indecipherable reprimand from him. She bristled.
“It’s not me! You’re talking in a completely different language, you idiot.”
He shook his head and said something else that made it clear he didn’t believe her, and then helped her to her feet. The room spun around her, and she groaned at the lightheadedness that accompanied the motion.
He said something, his tone back to concerned and gentle, and wrapped an arm around her upper back to steady her. She leaned on him, feeling a bit spacesick.
“You have got to stop doing this,” she gestured to the room at large to try and stop herself from falling over again. “I don’t know how the TARDIS isn’t sick of your awful piloting by now.”
Another string of words and a slightly affronted look came from the Time Lord currently keeping her upright.
“What? You do this kind of thing all the time, and you don’t understand me right now anyway.”
He met her eyes, pointed at himself, and then her, and then her, and then himself again.
“What’s this, charades?”
She could have sworn she heard the ship make a noise that sounded an awful lot like a laugh, and then there was a door right in front of them. He ushered her into the medbay — she could’ve worked that one out if she tried, even with the non-translated door — and sat her down on a bed.
Donna immediately turned that position into a horizontal slump, the sheets soft against her cheek. Her head was spinning, and she hated this place anyway. The room was cold, clinical, better than the hospital back home, but not by much. Honestly, no matter how often he said he wasn’t a medical doctor, she still thought sometimes he tried to bring her in here a bit too often.
The Doctor was suddenly back at her side, hands full of stuff, glasses perched firmly on his nose, and talking a million kilometers an hour. In his element, probably, having something or someone to fix. She didn't even want to try to work out whatever it was he was saying this time. She suddenly felt foggy, exhausted, as though they’d been running forever and were safe now. The bed really was soft, and she could go for a nap right now…
He held up an instrument and pointed to her head, then fit it over her head gently, still talking, then shook her shoulder. If the cadence in which he was speaking was of any indication, he said her name in that drawn out tone of his, probably trying to get her to stay awake.
Everything had to be so difficult with him. Even small things like staying awake. She forced her eyes back open, watching him as he pressed a button on the scanner and stared at the circular results on the screen.
“At least those are supposed to look like that,” Donna noted lazily, talking not so much to talk as much to try to keep her eyes from drifting shut again. “Everything else isn’t.”
The Doctor turned back to her with his brow furrowed, running a hand through his hair. She may not have understood the words coming out of his mouth at the moment, but his body language when he was saying “What?” was unmistakable, speaking English or not.
“Everything looks like that today,” she waved a hand towards the monitor screen he was looking at. “Books and everything. Can’t understand a bloody word.”
It took a second, but his face lit up, and he concentrated for a second.
“Oh, of course! Donna, you’re brilliant!”
It was disorienting hearing him finally speaking in English again, and she squeezed her eyes shut against the last of the headache throbbing against her skull. “Why? How am I understanding you now?”
He grinned, and took the scanner off her head, sticking it haphazardly back in the cabinet where he got it from. God, for someone who had so much random stuff hanging around, he was disorganized sometimes. “You were right, it wasn’t you. I thought you were just confused from the concussion, but it was the translation matrix! Must’ve been damaged at some point, maybe when we crashed, meant you couldn’t understand me like you usually can.”
“No, it was before that. I woke up and everything was all circles. I tried to tell you.” She blinked, and looked up at him again. “You didn’t answer me.”
“Hmm?” He was digging for something else now, only half listening to her again.
“You weren’t speaking English before.”
He grinned and tapped his head. “Don’t need the translation circuits for that.”
“…you speak English?” Oh, she was going to kill him. He could understand her the whole time.
The tap turned into an ear scratch. “Well, several Earth languages, yeah. There’s a few I’m a little rusty on, and I’m sure there’s ones I don’t know. Comes in handy if I’m not in range of the TARDIS. But like I said, if I’d known it wasn’t the concussion…” The Doctor finally pulled out another piece of equipment from yet another cabinet. “I can patch up that cut, too, if you like. Doesn’t exactly look comfortable.”
She gave him half a smile. “Might as well. Since we’re here.”
They were silent as he ran the dermal regenerator over her forehead, one hand gently bracing her cheek.
“It was nice,” Donna finally said, when he was finished.
“Hmm?” He wiped away the blood from her forehead with a warm cloth. She sighed as the hair finally came loose from her skin.
“The language you were speaking. Are you always talking in it?” She wasn’t sure if it was the best choice of words, since she knew it was a touchy subject at best for him, but it was true.
He looked at her, his eyes holding the grief they always did when his home came up. “High Gallifreyan,” was all he said.
“It sounded beautiful. Like music.”
“I had a friend once who said it sounded like a nursery rhyme,” the Doctor said, though, by the tone of his voice, it sounded like the unnamed friend hadn’t been much better off than Gallifrey had been.
Donna didn’t push either way, but he seemed to force himself to brighten up after a second or two. “Anyway! You’ll probably have a bit of a headache for a few more hours, but the worst of the concussion and the cut are all sorted.”
“And the TARDIS?” She yawned, right on cue. God, she was going to need a nap today. The concussion must’ve taken more out of her than she thought.
“I’ll fix her up while you’re resting. Come on,” he led her out of the medbay.
“Don’t mother hen me, Spaceman.” Donna rolled her eyes at him as she spoke, privately relieved that she stayed upright and completely conscious this time, and resolved to go find some very specific language books in the library after he’d left.