metztlimoon | Fic # 2 Another Choice

Alternative version for the Doctor's decision at Journey's End.

Alternative choice

He knows she's drowning.

The flippant, desperate denial, the urgency. The fear of the inevitable, buried so he doesn't have to feel... only think.

She knows. The thing that's killing her is the thing that's letting her know.

“Don't make me go back....”

He looks at her, and he hates his pity.

“Please... I don't want to go back.”

She remembers who she was, and it breaks his hearts to see her realise where this is heading.

She's drowning in him (don't they all drown in him eventually?) scrabbling towards the surface like an unwanted, but faithful dog.

She doesn't care he's broken her. She only sees who she's become and the universe- for a moment, glimpsed in it's full glory.

“Doctor, Please. Don't make me go back.”

He can't see a choice. In a nanosecond he remembers how it feels to hold a slowly cooling body in his arms and he can't bear that pain again.

Damn it Donna, don't do this to me. I won't let you. I won't!

Because he's abandoned his ghosts behind on a parallel world, and he wants no more created today. Because she's only human, she hasn't the will to resist him. Because he's a Time Lord and he has the right to change time. Because History can be rewritten.

Because she'd be better off having never met him, living her simple human life.

And not being dead. Not being dead is good. Good for both of them.

As he touches her face, she's begging him. Her mind, pleading with him. Don't do this to me. Please. Don't do this to me.

I'm sorry. I'm so...

At he very last moment, he stops, his mind brushing the surface of hers, and listens. Actually listens to the woman who was nothing, and became everything.

He understands.

She collapses in his arms and he kneels with her, holding her against his chest. She's babbling rubbish, half conversations, and muddled equations. Her heart stutters against the strain, and she's trying to find the words as the synapses misfire and degenerate. He leans forward and up, activating the TARDIS to carry them to the last co-ordinates she had set before wrapping her once again in his arms.

“Donna,” he says, softly, as the TARDIS materialises. “We're here.”

She is so still he fears it's all too late, and all for nothing. He's shaking as he presses her hand into the side of her neck, searching for the faint and erratic pulse, and holding his breath until he finds it.

“Donna?”

He snaps his fingers, just once, and the doors open for them. Half crawling, he moves them both to the ramp, and settles her head against his shoulder. “Look, Donna. Look at the mountains.”

Her eyes are full of tears, and he gently brushes them from her face. She's beyond words now, and he wonders if she's beyond sight as well.

So he whispers softly; “Mountains that move as the wind catches them, beneath a sky the colour of grass. It will be summer soon, the birds are calling.”

She reaches for his hand. He wraps his fingers round hers and holds on, listening to her ragged breathing slowing and slowing and finally... nothing.

“You were ...” he says, his voice broken. “You were brilliant.”

For a long time after, it is only his tears that break the silence.