Scenes from a Time Travelling Life
by Nope (LJ | e-mail | comment)
Art by attempt-unique (LJ | e-mail | comment) and Neth Dugan (LJ | e-mail | comment)
PART THREE: DONNA
Tick. Tick. Tick.
The indicator was stuck again. Stupid car. It hadn't been the same since Sylvia Noble had insisted on getting rid of that sat-nav thing. Donna glared at the dash. Granddad had been weird about it, so she guessed he and her mother had come to words (and quite possibly blows, she wouldn't put it past her mother), but they both refused to talk about it. Bad as each other, really. She wiggled the wheel a bit and then, when that had no effect, tried banging on the dash with her fist. Should keep a hammer in the car; that would keep it right.
The engine coughed pathetically as she tried to pull away; the car trundled into the junction and came to a halt. Horns started blaring behind her. The indicator kept ticking, although it couldn't seem to make its mind up if it wanted her to go left or right. Donna turned the engine off, took a deep, calming breath, turned the engine back on, let the breath out when it caught, and then wound the window down, leant her head out and yelled "Oi! Keep your bloody hair on!" She grinned at the fresh round of horn blasts and edged the car forward, ignoring the people trying to go around her.
London beeped, roared, rumbled, ticked, spluttered, coughed, clattered, and rang all around her, mostly because you couldn't shove that many people in that small a space without them getting on each other's nerves as much as humanly possible. Donna supposed she would miss it if it was gone, or she was, but sometimes she could do without it. She could definitely do without this car. Transport that ran smooth, was it really too much to ask for?
Another half-a-mile of confusing the hell out of other motorists by indicating every direction at once and Donna made the mistake of thinking she would actually get all in the way into work, at which point the engine promptly stalled again. Cursing, she managed to wrestle the car to the curb -- okay, onto it, but whatever -- and hit the hazard lights, which just turned off the indicators all together.
It was seriously way, way, way too early in the day for this.
Horns sounded again as vehicles either edged cautiously around her (cars), slammed past so close she could feel the car shake (bikes, taxis), or just simply stared down the opposite lane until they were let through (buses, coaches, women doing the school run). Great. Just great. Donna dug in her purse for her mobile. Her mother would moan. Well, no, she wouldn't, because she'd been acting weird ever since Veena had been talking about planets in the sky. Sylvia would just get all pursed-lipped and twitchy-eyed and Donna really wasn't one for passive-aggressiveness. Aggressive-aggressive she could do, like when, for instance, someone tapped on her window while she was trying to dig the AA card out of a glove compartment filled with star charts ("Thank you, Granddad!") and she slammed the central locking on and snapped out "I have mace!" before she'd even thought of looking.
The man -- black, late twenties / early thirties, shaved stubble for hair and beard -- just grinned in an easy-going sort of way. He looked relaxed but alert, in a way that made Donna briefly think of soldiers and then of this nice Irish policeman she'd dated (shagged) once (well, twice, well, five times) except he turned out to be a mechanic, and Donna was pretty sure you didn't get crime-fighting mechanics. If you did, she'd certainly missed out.
"It's probably your electrics," he said, showing her his card. "Pop the bonnet; let me have a look."
The card said his name was Ricky Simmonds and he worked for Clancy's Garage, although his van (parked behind her, blocking the whole pavement, so now they were angering pedestrians and drivers) was blue, not the white she'd expect, and unmarked.
"Come on," Ricky cajoled. "No fee. It'll save on your insurance."
"Is this some kind of scam?" Donna said. "I have mace!"
"Really?"
Donna waved her key-ring spray-can at him. "It's pepper spray. It'll still bloody hurt, though."
"Fair enough." Ricky grinned. "It's not a scam."
"Is it a come-on?" Donna asked. "Because I've got no use for a man who reckons he can sweep me off my feet just by doing stuff for me. The last one stiffed me at the altar."
"I'm pretty sure I'm never going to do that," Ricky said.
Cars beeped as they worked their way by, traffic slowly increasing. Donna glared at them, sighed, and turned back to Ricky. "Go on, then. Do your mechanical thing." After a bit of rummaging, she found the lever that unlocked the bonnet and it popped up a couple of inches. Ricky walked around and pushed it the rest of the way up, blocking Donna's view. She considered leaning out of the window to watch, but a taxi rushing past close enough that her wing-mirror wobbled decided her against it. Drumming her fingers on the wheel occupied her for all of thirty seconds, and pointlessly redoing her make-up took care of another minute; after that she just fidgeted, bored, while occasional clanks, bangs and muffled curses came from in front of her.
It felt like a long time, but it was probably only five minutes or so (four minutes, twenty-eight seconds) before the bonnet went back down and Ricky was wondering up to her window, wiping his hands on an oily rag (really, doesn't that just make them dirtier?) and looking smug.
"Go on then," he called. "Give her a go."
Donna gave him a dubious look, but she turned the keys. The car started instantly and smoothly, practically purring. The indicators stayed off (and came on correctly, and went off again). Even the electric windows worked.
"Told you," Ricky said.
"Not bad," she agreed, matching his grin.
"Someone's done a right botch job on that engine. I reset the contacts, and the alternator needed a--" In the face of her polite blank look, he broke off. "...if I told you, would you even begin to understand?"
"Probably not," said Donna cheerfully. "Can't even get my DVR to work properly. I tried to get it to record Doctors last week; I get fifteen hours of Home and Away and a documentary on the Richard Hawkings fellow instead. Home and Away, can you believe it?"
"I've always been a Westenders man myself," Ricky said. "Or even Eastenders, which is obviously what I meant to say there. Here, look, that was only a stopgap thing. You really need to get the whole engine overhauled. Needs a bit of work. Here--" He offered her his card again. "We're open all hours."
Donna nodded, cracking the window enough so she could take the card. "So it is a scam. 'Needs a bit of work.'"
"That's not a scam," Ricky said, affronted. "Customer service is what it is. That's, like, marketing."
"Like drug peddling," Donna suggested. "First hit's free."
"Yeah, you got me. You've seen through my cunning plan." He grinned. "I get the engine running for nothing and then, six months from now, you beg to buy a Ferrari."
"Like I'd drive a Ferrari," Donna scoffed. "I'd get something vintage, twenties style. Or a Limo and have someone else drive me around." A bus blared past, drowning out his reply, but she smiled anyway, mostly because he had a cute grin. "Thanks. Thank you -- for fixing the alternating contact thingies."
"No problem," he said. "Give us a call if you want the car looked at properly. Or any garage, get a second opinion, see how much better our quotes are."
He grinned, and she laughed, nodding, and he gave a little wave as went back to his van. Flicking the indicators on (hah, take that) Donna pulled out into the traffic. Glancing up at the rear-view mirror, she noticed him watching her go, sat still in the cab of the van. There was something about his expression, almost sad, but sunlight turned the window opaque before she could make it out and, anyway, she needed her gaze on the road ahead, because black cabs just drove wherever they liked.
"Keep to your own bloody lane!"
It turned out that Ricky had fixed the horn too. Brilliant!
Technically, Donna worked for a quasi autonomous non-governmental organisation, commissioned by Health and Wellbeing Directorate as part of some Social Services Oversight thing on behalf of the British Medical Association and, if you tried, you could fit a few dozen more groups in there, but in practice Donna was still basically a temp. She went into a hospital (or a hospice, health trust, nursing home, et cetera, et cetera), collated all their records together, and boiled them down into a nice neat package of summaries and statistics. Every few weeks, she was moved onto the next et cetera, and she did it all over again.
Sometimes, it meant people got extra money, which was nice. Sometimes it meant they got visits from the tiny, sharp-eyed accountant and then fired for hiring fifty janitors with the same name which was occasionally satisfying but often depressing. And sometimes the people fudging the employee records were the people who really needed the money and were being refused it for stupid reasons, like there being no profit in poor, sick people, which wasn't nice at all, and so, sometimes, Donna's reports were not quite so thorough as she could have made them. Anyway, once they stopped being sick, there was a good chance they would also stop being quite so poor, which meant more taxes, so, really, she was helping the government out and not actually aiding and abetting fraud. It was just a story really, with words and numbers, yes, but she'd always had an eye for the little details and there were ways and ways a story could be told.
Pain sparked in the back of her head, and she rubbed her temples with the heels of her hand until it went away. Another commonality of these places was the tendency for the records offices to be pokey little holes with dingy, flickering lights and not enough sockets. Heartswood was the worst, grim, dreary and enclosed, like they had gone out of their way to make it as small as possible on the inside. Someone had decided to put forty-watt bulbs in sockets designed for a hundred or try and force strip lighting on circuits that had been in place since electricity had been invented (discovered), which meant you spent all your time straining to see. No wonder she kept getting headaches. No bloody medical benefits either, which was clearly someone having a laugh.
She'd tried co-opting one of the empty wards, but the administrator, a droopy little man with no chin whose name she could somehow never remember, had ever so apologetically explained they were being held for some big high military muck-a-mucks and couldn't be used. When she'd gone ahead and used them anyway, a much less apologetic woman in a Captain's hat had ordered her out and posted guards to keep her out, as if Donna didn't know when she wasn't wanted. Admittedly, often when she did know, she kept on anyway, but it was the principle of the thing.
Still, that had been a few weeks ago, now (seventeen days) and she was almost done with the records. The hospital kept them surprisingly well, a military holdover, perhaps; they made for rather depressing reading. The mental health trust that occupied the non-yes-sir-salute-sir-have-a-gun-sir part of the building did their best, but staff turnover was something rotten and they kept losing patients to Care in the Community schemes. As far as Donna could see, all Care in the Community got you was no care and no community, and she'd tried explaining this to Nameless the Administrator once. He'd just sighed and told her that she was missing the big picture. The whole NHS was a teetering pack of cards, wobbling all over the place. Just fixing one card would bring the whole thing down.
Donna personally thought one card was a good place to start. It gave you something to help hold up the next card you fixed.
Her headache was still lingering a little, and she decided to go and get herself a hot drink from the vending machine. The best bit about hospital 'coffee' was that it was so incredibly bad it motivated you to get your work done faster so that you could go home and have a proper cuppa. Also, it made you not want to drink coffee, like aversion therapy, so she had cut down majorly from when she was having three a day (stupid Lance), although possibly that was another source of the headaches. Doctors surrounded her; she really should ask one of them about the effects of caffeine withdrawal.
Searching through her purse for change occupied Donna on the walk -- she had no idea why she'd bought something with so many pockets, she could never find anything -- so she barely noticed the lights flickering, nor the woman standing by the vending machine, looking up at them. When she reached up to put a coin in the machine, though, she noticed a cup already waiting to be collected, steaming slightly.
"Is this yours?" Donna asked.
The woman turned slowly to face her. She was attractive, in a pale, washed out sort of way. Donna thought that maybe she had seen the woman before, perhaps in a poster or on a TV screen; she was vaguely familiar. It was hard to tell. The woman's blonde hair, tied up haphazardly, stuck up or flopped down at random, and, this close, the blue jacket and sharp red high-heels she wore couldn't disguise the green hospital gown. For one thing, the colours clashed dreadfully.
"The coffee," Donna clarified, when the woman continued to look blankly at her. "Not that you can really call it coffee."
The woman considered this. "Why not? Does it object?" she asked. Received pronunciation, what they used to call BBC English, vaguely posh but tied to no particular place: a woman from anywhere.
"I would," Donna said, just to fill the gap. "Call a shovel a shovel, I say."
The woman smiled faintly. "I'm sorry," she said. "I don't remember names."
"Donna," Donna supplied. "Donna Noble. I'm a temp here."
"Aren't we all?" the woman asked, her gaze drifting away from Donna. "All just here to go."
You could say little to that; at least, little that wasn't along the lines of "Cheer up, emo kid," which wasn't appropriate when addressing someone who potentially was clinically depressed. Donna offered the woman the coffee again instead. She accepted with a bland smile and almost inaudible thanks. Donna started feeding change into the machine to get her own.
"What brings you here, then?" Donna asked, and then winced, because that was just as bad.
"I found a world in a wardrobe and they made me part-Queen of the Quadripartite," the woman explained, in a quite reasonable tone. "They broke the lion on a slab but he came back again. They all came back again." She sipped her coffee and then pulled a face. "Oh, that really is dreadful."
"Sorry," said Donna. "I did say." Her own cup dropped into the holder. The vending machine shuddered and click-click click-clicked. "This lion," she said, "his name wouldn't have been Aslan, would it?"
"Aslan?" the woman asked with a polite smile.
"You know," Donna said, waving a hand vaguely, "like in the film. Narnia and all that."
"Narnia." The woman smiled a bright, dazzling thing. "Do you know, I think I might be Susan."
"Hello, Susan," Donna said promptly, and they exchanged smiles. Twin streams filled her cup. "I went to see Prince Caspian with a few of my mates. Not to sound like a dirty old woman or anything, but that Caspian was a nice bit of jail-bait totty."
Susan nodded and said, "They dammed the Volga. The sea is shrinking."
"That's progress for you." To be honest, Donna had no idea what that had to do with anything, but she'd read somewhere that you were supposed to humour mad people. On the other hand, was it that you weren't supposed to humour them?
"Everything progresses," Susan agreed. She sipped her coffee and pulled a face again.
The vending machine spat milk-substitute into Donna's cup.
Susan sighed. "We were gone for so very long, you know, but it was only a day when we got back -- or did we leave for a day and return in a year? So much time, and so very little time at all. They all left."
Donna nodded in what she hoped was a sympathetic way, and worked her coffee out of the machine's clutches. It was hot enough to steam and warm her fingers through the thin plastic, but not proper boiling. Health and safety regulations, probably: wouldn't want people scalding themselves and then suing the NHS. Could you sue them for crimes against taste?
The silence got longer, and she groped around for something to say. "Terrible weather, lately."
"Avant nous, le dÉluge," Susan said, smiling a little. She lifted her cup, tilted her head back, drinking the rest in one, long, swallowing gulp, before handing the cup back to Donna who was too surprised not to accept it. A slow drip of coffee ran from the corner of Susan's mouth to her chin. "I have to go. It's almost time for his return."
Susan strode abruptly away with unexpected speed and a strange sort of unsteady grace, so that the hospital robe swirled around her and her heels beat out an imperfect rhythm on the vinyl floor tiles: ta-ta-tah-tap, ta-ta-tah-tap...
Donna frowned after her until she'd vanished through the far doors, and then looked down at the coffee cups in her hand. After a second, she put her filled cup into Susan's empty one, and chucked both into the handy bin. Turning the other way, she came face to face with the chinless administrator, darting out of a side-door and into the corridor, and they both jumped.
"Ms. Noble!" he said. "I'm dreadfully sorry!" He pulled a handkerchief out, patting at his forehead. "Oh, dear me. What a morning!"
"You seem a bit out of sorts," said Donna.
"First the military people phone in to say we're to receive some hush-hush arrivals, and now I'm afraid one of our long stay guests has gone off by herself and the orderlies don't seem to grasp that, while we are certainly not a prison, we really shouldn't be allowing potentially delusional patrons to wonder off into a building full of medicines and dangerous equipment and--"
"Alright," Donna interrupted. "Best to keep breathing, eh?"
"What? Oh, yes, quite right, quite right." He dabbed at his forehead again.
"Now, this patient of yours--"
"Guest," he corrected, "please."
"This guest," Donna said. "Blonde woman, about yay-big, coat and gown, calls herself Susan?"
"That sounds like her," he agreed. "I don't know about the Susan part. Last week she was Lenore. I've been reading these papers on the formation, acquisition and choice of personal address -- the things we ask people to call us, or we call ourselves, you understand. Well," he added, "obviously you're not a doctor, so-- I say; are you all right?"
Donna nodded. "Fine, thank you."
"Headache? You were rubbing your--" He waved his hand vaguely at head height.
"It's been on and off all day," Donna said. "But, no, listen, this woman, I've seen her, just now. She went down that way. You only missed her by seconds."
"Oh!" He beamed. "Thank you! That way?" He started to head towards the doors, and then turned back. "If your head gets too bad, please, take the rest of the day off. Paid, of course."
Donna shook her head. "No, really, I'm fine--"
The overhead lights all went out. Donna blinked in the vending machine glow. She was promptly half-blinded as they came back on, blazing. Red-hot nails of pain hammered themselves into her skull.
"I don't believe it," whined the administrator. "I've told them and told them to fix those generators, I really have."
The lights flickered, and buzzed, and flickered.
"Yeah," said Donna. "You know what? I think I will go home, thanks."
He nodded sadly. "Yes, I thought you might. I would too, if I could. No rest for the wicked, I suppose. Toodle-pip."
It was a testament to the pain in her head that Donna was actually opening the door to her home before it occurred to her to wonder who said 'Toodle-pip' these days. Thankfully, her mother was out, and her grandfather took one look at her and insisted she go and have a nice lie-down, and he'd come up later to bring her a cup of tea. Shutting the curtains, she hung up her jacket and stretched out on her bed in the murky half-light, closed her eyes, and finds herself walking down a grass-lined avenue between thick green hedges that stretch above her. Big, bright flowers skirt the base of the living walls and they start to wiggle and sing as she passes. She can't hear them, but she knows they are singing. Through the green, she catches glimpses of something blue. There is a light flashing. Every time she tries to turn towards it, the path takes her away.
It's not a maze, she thinks, it's a labyrinth. There is only one route, and it always leads to the centre.
She turns left, always left.
There are two men, twins, she supposes, one in brown and one in blue but otherwise the same. They are in the path, arguing with each other. She can't hear the words, but she can see their hands fly and their faces gurn. When they see her, they both stop abruptly, and then one grins and the other looks sad, like those masks they have at theatres, dramedy and coma.
Charlie Chaplin waddles by. He has thin squares of processed cheese on his shoulders.
That's just derivative, she says, except she can feel the words on her lips but not hear them in her ears, which are still there, she checks. The twins in their twee suits both try to talk but they're doing dumb and dumber and she can't seem to make out what they're trying to mouth and they don't seem to follow her hand gestures. The flowers are all melting into the hedges, the hedges into the sky. The twins take her hands, one each, and take each other's hand, how that even works she has no idea, can't even program her VCR, not that she has one, because she just grabs all her shows off the torrent sites and watches them with the adverts cut out on her granddads laptop (still no webcam) and this sentence is too long. The twins take her hands, is the point. And they run.
Fast as they can, just to stay where they are.
The blue thing glints through the green. Glint, glint, glint, glint. They run, and it glints. It glints, and they run. Donna trips over a clockwork mouse with a charred nose. The twins fall away and she runs, oh, how she runs, but they never get closer, and now she can hear something but it's just the pounding of her heart in her ears.
A girl comes towards, dressed up in finery, with a pinafore over it. It's Alice, she thinks. Alice in her crown, except that's from Looking Glass not Wonderland, which is poor continuity. You have to keep track of these things or suddenly you have facts and figures scattered all over the place and dates and times and hospitals are being closed and doctors go missing and someone puts a big dent in the nineteen-eighties, which certainly wasn't her, no, sir.
The twins are arguing again, and her heart's pounding in her head, and she tries to point them towards Alice, but they don't seem to care, they don't seem to see, and for all Donna shouts, she lets out not a single word, just a sound, the ringing sound of her hearts, deep and boom-chiming, and she thinks, no, hang on, that's a bell, someone is ringing the doorbell. Groggy, Donna pushed herself up. The pain in her head had faded, mostly, but her tongue felt thick in her mouth and her muscles ached. The dregs of her dreams kept catching on her thoughts, sending them off at confused tangents. Stumbling a little in the half-dark, she let herself out of the room and padded down the stairs. Her grandfather was coming along the hall.
"I'll get it, sweetheart," he said. "It's probably just your mother, forgotten her keys again. You go rest."
"I'm feeling much better," insisted Donna, dodging past him to reach for the latch. Really, she just needed something to clear out the cobwebs and she would be fine; a bit of gossip or some new shopping catalogue or maybe that fit man with the strange American accent that had come to clean out their gutters that one time. "It's--"
She blinked at empty space.
"Donna!" exclaimed a young voice, and she looked down to find a short teenager in black and red robes looking up at her from under a mess of mousey-brown hair.
"That's me," she said. "Are you collecting for something?"
"I'm Dennis Creevey," he said portentously, "and I need you to help me save the world."
There was an expectant pause.
"If this is a religious thing, I have to say, up front, that we're all Methodists, and we don't hold with any of that cult malarkey," Donna said.
He frowned at her. "I don't think there are any horses involved, juvenile or otherwise!"
It was Donna's turn to stare. "Are you having me on?"
"No!" Dennis insisted. "The Doctor and I took the TARDIS to Terminus and there was some kind of transtemporal event and--"
Something white went off in Donna's head, then black, then red. While she was distracted, Dennis pushed himself past her, still talking, although Donna could only make out words here and there, corridor, and hospital, yellow pages, numbers and run. Wilf was talking over the top of it, louder and harder than she could remember; trying to make Dennis stop, make him leave.
"Stop it!" she yelled at the both of them. "Just stop it!"
They both looked at her in surprise.
"I don't know what your game is, sonny Jim, but--"
"It's Dennis," he said, "Dennis Creevey. We've met before, but you don't remember, but I need your help, because I'm stuck in the wrong century and I'm already here, probably, except if I am, I'm probably a decade older than I am now, and Blinivictual's Limitation Effect--"
"Blinovitch," Donna heard herself correct, as if from a great distance.
"No, no," Wilf said. "You can't tell her, not about him, not about any of it! You don't understand!"
"It's okay," said Dennis, rummaging in his pockets, "because, right, I have this!" He pulled out a glowing gold vial. "It's neuroenhancer! It buffers your system against neurological shock, allowing you to contain a multi-dimensional consciousness safely in your otherwise mostly human brain without it electrocuting itself and melting out of your ears and things! And I can re-modify your memory afterwards!"
"You -- are -- bonkers!" Donna forced out.
Her heart was beating in her head again. It was hard to breathe. The whole house was tilting in a very disconcerting manner. She pushed past the both of them, stumbling into the kitchen. The headache was back and it had brought all its friends and they were having a right rave-up inside her skull and, oh, god, she'd almost married a man who was having an affair with a giant spider-woman. The room went out from under her, and only her grandfather's presence of mind kept her from hitting the floor.
"Look what you've done," Wilf cried.
It sounded like he was a long, long way away. Had she gone under with Agatha Christie? There was a buzzing. Wasps or Dalek-treads? She couldn't think. She couldn't breathe. Parched, drying out, burning up, her head too small, too much in it, thick, she was thick, old and thick and full of stuff and stars and nonsense and she couldn't, she couldn't, and there were voices and someone was fumbling a glass against her lips, cool, so cool, and she swallowed and swallowed and swallowed until she was sure she would drown in the cool water and the bright song and the endlessly liquid light.
Clancy's garage was a small, backstreets sort of place. It made pretence at security, what with the CCTV camera and the padlock on the chain, but since the chain was hanging off an already open door and the garage was one, large, open space, it was hardly worth it. There was nothing to stop anyone who put their mind to it from just wandering right up to the man with his head inside the bonnet of a black SUV and making him bang his head by unexpectedly yelling, "Oi! Mickey the mechanic!"
"Ow! What?" He turned around, rubbing his head, and did a classic double take and gape. "Donna Noble!"
"Ohhh, yes!" she crowed.
"Did you come about your car?" He managed a smile. "I can fit it--"
"Bollocks to the car!" She grinned at him, flushed and full of life. "You know what they say about this world?"
He frowned at her. "No, what?"
"It. Is. Defended!"
Slowly, he began to grin.