Fic: [Ashes to Ashes/Doctor Who; Gene/Donna] Some Other Year (5/6).

[intrikate88]

Title: Some Other Year

Rating: PG-13

Spoilers: This takes place post-"Journey's End" and pre-"The Waters of Mars" for the Doctor, and post-"The End of Time" for Donna. References to Old Who ("The Time Warrior" and the Seventh Doctor era) and all of Sarah Jane Adventures for Sarah Jane. Post-Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, though spoilers for A2A are fairly skimpy but still include references up to 3x08 (though this universe deviates sharply to the left after 3x07).

Summary: Gene Hunt never knew the whole story behind Donna Noble's appearance in his life, and even less about her sudden disappearance; he thought he never would. But when a visiting stranger in a blue box appears in 1986, it seems like the perfect opportunity to get some answers. Or, perhaps, to get his wife back.
Third in a series, following (There is No) Modern Romance and Spectacular Views; it may help to read those first.

Warnings: Abuse of plot and Bowie lyrics, questionable language, Gene Hunt, boob gropage.

 

chapter one | chapter two | chapter three
chapter four | chapter five | epilogue

 

Chapter Five

I've heard a rumour from Ground Control, oh god don't say it's true.
They got a message from the action man,
"I'm happy, hope you're happy too. I've loved all I've needed to love."
-David Bowie, Ashes to Ashes (1980)

Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles, I'm feeling very still,
And I think my spaceship knows which way to go.
Tell my wife I love her very much. (She knows.)
-David Bowie, Space Oddity (1969)

*

"Do you remember anything significant? About the day we're trying to get to? Anything?"

 

"I'll recognize it when I see it," Gene said with some asperity, "1981 is when Bols- Alex Drake- arrived in my department, which I bet has a lot to do with the day Donna mentioned."

 

"It'll be a day significant to Alex," the Doctor said. "The day she made some choice, or a day someone died. Because- alright, every time you make a choice, the universe continues a certain way. But for some choices, ones where you could have chosen differently, another universe, another world, begins to exist. One where you made a that different choice."

 

"One of those is where Rose ended up, isn't it? Where you put her back? What difference made that one?"

 

The Doctor shrugged, hands very busily doing nothing in particular that Gene could see with the settings on the console. "For all we know that's the universe where Queen Victoria actually did get bit by the werewolf, infected her parliament, and the country converted to a presidency whilst the Brotherhood of the Wolf or whatever they called themselves accelerated technology so that computers and airships carried the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Could be anything. But see, some universes are just potentials, but some do happen. And if you were someone who could find those places and change them, direct them, you could make the universe a very bad place indeed."

 

Gene didn't say anything. Normally, this was the sort of conversation he would tune out, because it usually came from someone so short-sighted they couldn't see beyond their own problems of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Donna had explained very similar things to him several times, enough that he had a good idea how the universe worked, not that he'd ever say that. Manchester, London: those were his realms, not the depths of time and space. He'd deal with the villains he knew. Now, though, he was getting a worrying suspicion that all Donna's talk had been preparation for something. She knew he was coming.

 

The TARDIS landed, with a thump and a wheeze of engines. This time Gene was the first out the door, coming out onto a grassy hill, and striding up it to see from the highest vantage point. He could tell he was in London, but little more than that; the skyline looked about the same as it did in his own time. He looked back at the TARDIS as he said, "We're going to have to ask someone the date, or buy a newspaper, or however it is you-"

"You made it," said Donna, standing in the doorway of the TARDIS. "On the right day and everything!" She was hugging the Doctor, and Gene could see the grin he bore was near face-splitting.

"Oi, that's my wife, I get her first!" Gene strode back, and Donna detached herself from the Doctor to embrace Gene.

"Oh, hush, I know you've seen me today," Donna said.

"Just in passing. Doesn't count." He kissed her firmly on the lips.

"Look at you!" the Doctor was enthusing as they pulled apart. "You're finding tricks of time even I never knew, you're uncovering terrible plots, and your brain isn't imploding. That's Donna Noble all over, that is, I love it!"

"Got a lot of you in me too, now," Donna reminded him. "I see time looped all over the place, and I never can stand still." She looked at Gene. "Always leavin' without saying goodbye." As they heard the tone of a child's voice and a car engine starting somewhere over the hill, Donna looked that direction and said, "Come on. We have to be there." She led them up the top of the hill and sat, tucking her skirt under her. The Doctor dropped to the ground beside her, but Gene opted to stand.

A red balloon drifted into the air from behind a fence. A truck began moving across the road down below. "Time is in flux," the Doctor said, tilting his head as if he were listening to something. "The Trickster?"

Donna nodded. "In one future, Alex gets to the car on time, stops the bomb, saves her parents. Then in a few months Caroline Price keeps a boy from being sent to jail for because there wasn't enough evidence linking him to a murdered journalist. He kills four other women, including Sarah Jane Smith. You can guess what happens, without her to protect the earth. I saw it when the Trickster's Brigade brought me to that other world. Not a good time, let me tell you." Donna paused. "Where the Trickster doesn't interfere, Alex watches her parents die a second time, she can't stop anything."

For a moment, the world seemed to hiccup. The truck in the road reversed and advanced at the same time; a woman ran out from behind it; the blue car exploded, and the world settled back into focus. The smell of burning rubber and petrol drifted up towards them. "There," Donna said, "time is set, but that door of opportunity is still open. You two have to go, find the Trickster. Before he destroys reality from this fracture point."

"The Trickster, he's the one who cons people into making a different choice, yeah?" Gene confirmed.

"Yeah. Make that choice, the universe falls apart and he loves it. I should know, he basically destroyed the planet, first time I saw him. I had to die there just to set it right."

Gene remembered Rose, on the roof, and what Donna had told the girl. "Shouldn't be too hard, if you ladies have been goin' about punching him in the testicles. You coming with?"

"I'm from 1973, it's not the right time for me to go," Donna said. "I can't." She had her arms around her knees as she watched the burning wreckage of the car at the bottom of the hill. They weren't the only onlookers; off to one side, a young man was watching with horror and beyond him, Gene knew, was another version of himself, being clutched by the tiny daughter of Tim and Caroline Price. A furious scream was rending the air, and through the smoke, Gene could see DI Drake. Watching what happened this time around, knowing exactly what was happening, and why, was horrible; Gene finally, viscerally, realized why this Trickster fellow was worth Donna chasing after. Life was supposed to happen once, without reasons for the good things or the bad being given, and for the bastard to reverse all of that to give an irresistibly tempting choice -a dream, really- for his own ends? It was the worst sort of con job Gene had ever witnessed.

And he tried not to wonder what he would choose if offered a life where Donna never left him.

"Where are we going, then?" Gene said, his voice rough with too many long days without Donna, Sam, Alex.

"With me," said another voice, from behind them. Gene looked around.

"Are there supposed to be two of you?" he asked, in tones of one asking for purely scientific enlightenment.

"We're not even in the same fold of the universe, so it's not going to force a crisis," said the Donna that had been sitting with them. "And don't even bother asking about any other things that could happen if there were two of me in one place, 'cause they're not going to happen, alright?"

"You're the Donna who disappeared in 1980," the Doctor stated, looking at the second woman. She was not looking quite as healthy, or young.

"Isn't it 1980?" said Older Donna.

"Broadly speaking," hazarded the Doctor. He looked at the first Donna. "Hadn't we all better be on our ways?"

"Well, I'm off to 1953 to save Gene's arse," she said. "But you lot have all the time in the world."

"What?" roared Gene, and the world disappeared.

*

In the north of England, Gene had seen a few places he was certain counted as back of beyond and middle of nowhere, but now he knew what that really meant. The world around him had faded away like a series of bad Xerox copies, leaving... this. Whatever this was.

Gene's brain told him he was seeing white in all directions, but his actual vision told him he was looking at nothing at all. The nothingness space sucked at his eyeballs like the sensation of a missing tooth, and it made his eyes water, especially as his brain decided that so much white couldn't exist and started superimposing black clouds drifting over it. He blinked furiously, trying become accustomed to the place. He glanced sideways at the Doctor, who didn't appear to have very much of a problem. Damn his eyes.

And damn 1953. He'd like to believe he had no idea what Donna was talking about, but truth was, he could almost picture the Lancashire village, the Coronation bunting, the crowds, the one or two Magpie televisions bought down in London for the occasion. PC Morrison, Gene's mentor, disappointed at having to work on that day and looking for someone to buy him a celebratory drink or three. A busty woman with red hair whose face he couldn't remember drawing away the man handing whisky to Morrison. Morrison scowling, stomping away on their beat. He could see it all, his first week on the job.

There was a farmhouse nearby, a window smashed, a gate with the latch splintered, noise coming from inside. "Kids," Morrison muttered. "Teach 'em a lesson, eh, Hunt?"

Gene had nodded obediently; in his head, he was kicking down the door, striding in like some Western sheriff, hands on his guns. All the villains sneering at his entrance but that flicker of fear in their eyes, too. He wasn't some skinny ninteen-year-old streak of nothing, in his head. Kids, he thought derisively; yeah, they'd teach 'em a lesson.

Only there weren't kids. Just a man, with a shotgun, and Morrison was the first through the door. Poor bastard probably never even saw the bullet that killed him. But Gene did, and he saw the second one that caught him across the arm and drawn his own gun to fire back.

It was the first man he'd ever killed. Gene hadn't slept for a week. He was just a kid himself, and one offer of whisky had been all that stood between him and catching a bullet with his face.

He had never considered that it might have been one offer of whisky, and a wife he hadn't met yet.

 

As the world of London in October, 1981, faded away, Donna (with her hair still styled just the way it was the day she left him) had grabbed his arm, and the Doctor's, and pulled. The last thing Gene saw before the white tide swept over him was the younger Donna make a motion like she was parting a curtain and stepping through a doorway that wasn't there: her left foot disappeared last. Then it had all disappeared, all but the grasp on his arm.

 

"And where are we now?" he demanded, looking from the Doctor to his wife.

 

"Nowhere," said the Doctor in a strange voice. "Absolutely... nowhere."

 

"Alright, where's this Trickster fellow then?"

 

"Not even going to say hello, guv?" And there was Sam Tyler, sitting inexplicably in front of a chessboard and shaking his head. Gene was sure he hadn't been there before.

 

"And where have you been? Drowned your car like you asked when you were going weird about stars and people after you, then you didn't show up to work for six years, made us all think you were dead- if you needed a holiday, Tyler, you could have just asked. You know you get a week off and three gran's funerals a year." Well, Gene reflected privately, it wasn't as if he'd thought to have some sentimental speech prepared, after all.

 

"Good to see you too," Sam replied. "Missed your emotional outbursts. And, by the way, I am apparently dead, but the details are a tad fuzzy."

 

"Fuzzy?" Gene repeated. "How can that be fuzzy? What about Bolly, she around here too?" Gene looked around. The Doctor and Donna were no longer standing beside him. When he looked back, Sam and his chessboard had gone too.

 

"Looking for me?"

 

It wasn't Alex, not even close. The thing was dressed in some sort of cloak that looked like a nun's habit, and it looked sacriligous even to Gene, who was one of nature's born blasphemers. It had no face, no face at all, just an expanse of flesh with a gaping crater of a smile, lined with pointed teeth. That obscene mouth was laughing, and Gene needed no introduction.

"So you're the gutless ballsucking pinko sack-of-shit bastard who's been dumping a crowd of time travelers in my department. I should charge you with wasting police time, kidnapping, and pissing me off, for starters."

A laugh emanated from the creature, though it didn't move its mouth; those pointed teeth stayed together and visible through its parted (lack of) lips. Gene itched for a handy table to smash this thing's face into.

"So many angry words," crooned the Trickster. "So much bluster, for one who is so alone. Look around: where are all your time travelers now?"

"Yeah, and it looks like you're alone too. What kind of con game is that, all the best grifts work with two people, don't they?"

"I have my servants, the Pantheon of Discord," the Trickster hissed. "I have a foothold in every world, every change, every twist of the fabric of time. I am entropy, I am chaos, I am the heat death of the universe-"

"You're a bloke in a nun's frock," Gene interrupted. "No wonder Donna's blocked you out so many times, a little girl could do it if she just waited for you to get tired of your own voice."

"Perhaps you would take me more seriously if you knew I have your loved ones here in my realm... Alex Drake, Sam Tyler..."

"Yes, figured that-"

"Shaz Granger, Chris Skelton, Ray Carling, Annie Cartwright..."

"They have nothing to do with-"

"...the DoctorDonna, and the Doctor himself. All trapped here, forever, unless you agree to serve me."

"I don't serve anyone. Especially," Gene added, "not when they have hostages. You think this is the first time I've had friends taken hostage? You think that worries me? It doesn't worry me half as much as it ought to be worrying you, mate."

"You could have what you wanted so much, your wife returned to you. She balances on a knife's edge, the wire of possibility, here in my realm... I could make her forget that she ever came to you for more than survival. All I need... is your agreement." And with that, he held up a gloved hand, the black fabric textured with shadows that shifted across it, disconcerting for a place where light was everywhere. It was almost like a projection, those shadowy shapes, and it seemed to grow larger as the world became a maze of greys and then- then there were faces. He was standing in the kitchen of the house he and Donna owned in Manchester, seeing through his own eyes, yet seeing himself from the outside simultaneously. Donna stood at the sink washing up, and Gene was standing by the table, his hand resting on the back of a chair. On the table lay a newspaper, dated for 1980. It was months after Donna had left him, yet here she was.
 

 

And then the scene shifted, and they were signing a lease on a flat in London, Donna happy about a raise and being near things that were familiar, Gene grumbling about this southern shithole, Donna taking no notice of his grumbling which was as constant and comfortable as anything else between them. Another scene, Fenchurch CID and Ray, Chris, and Shaz, but no Alex. October 1981 comes and goes, and he reads in the news of a very public, explosive suicide of a magistrate named Price, but the next scene has Caroline Price, now dressed in sedate grey and a lingering sadness in her eyes, still plaguing his department with accusations of police brutality.
 

 

December 1982, and the birth of Donna and Gene's only child, a girl they name Rose because Donna really wants to, and Gene adds the middle name of Alexandra, because he feels he somehow should. Even though he never wanted a girl, he wanted a boy that he could teach to walk and grow strong in these streets he knows so well, Gene is instantly drawn to this tiny loud thing with a twist of red-gold hair on the very top of her head. He knows that he's going to teach her to be strong, too, but that no matter what, he'd give her life to defend her- and shoot down any other bastard who threatened her, more likely. Three years pass, and she's toddling around the police station being adored by Chris and Shaz, who did get married after all instead of their ridiculous falling-out, and staring in wide-eyed fascination at the pattern of black and white tiles on the ceiling. Her hair is still the same red-gold, wisping almost to her little shoulders, and even though Gene would never display sentimentality, would hardly ever bring his family life into his work, everyone can see how ferociously he loves little Rose, like a grumpy lion with a cub.
 

 

The years flit past like a flipped calendar, 1989 bringing a birthday party as the Berlin Wall is pulled apart on the telly in the background, Donna finding grey hairs in 1990, an awkward situation in 1991 when Rose brings home an eleven-year-old Donna Noble and they don't know quite how to explain why this is a problem. And in all of this, no mysterious vanishings, none of Donna's migraines. 

 

The life they always wanted, so real, in front of him.
 

 

"All I need is your agreement..." hisses through his head, as he looked at Donna and Rose on the sofa, watching a live performance of David Bowie on the television.

 

Gene didn't answer, and stared at this version of his wife that he had never been given an opportunity to see. They had never grown older together. I thought you died alone, a long, long time ago, sang Bowie.
 

 

"You need do nothing but say yes, and not only will your friends be released with no knowledge of how you denied saving them for awhile and risked their lives for your ridiculous sense of duty, this life will be the one you always had," the Trickster said.

 

Donna turned to him. "I love you," she said, without prompt, her voice overshadowed by the music: Oh no, not me, I never lost control. You're face to face with the man who sold the world. The music is all there is, all fading to blackness around him but the echo of the music and her statement. (I laughed and shook his hand, and made my way back home. I searched a foreign land, for years and years I roamed.) Gene finds his eyes filling in shadows as the world around him turns out to be blinding white again, and he could curse everything for denying him this life he should have had. Not that he didn't enjoy years of late hours and alcoholism and smoking far too many fags without Donna there to tell him not to, but it wasn't a life a man ought to live. The last strains of what he had seen before finally fell silent in his head. (I gazed a gazeless stare at all the millions here. We must have died alone, a long long time ago.)
 

 

"What is your answer, Gene Hunt?"

 

Donna loved him. She'd said it sometimes, though mostly it was one of those unspoken things that came as comfortably and routinely as the fights about his hours. She'd loved him, and she had needed him. She wouldn't have left if she hadn't had a damn good reason that she found bigger than her husband, and Gene thought that would have to be something important indeed. He'd do the same, he'd done the same. He couldn't count the amount of times he'd staked out some criminal's flat full of heroin rather than spend the night with his wife. She was important, and he had a job to do. He wouldn't be himself if he didn't do that job, no matter what the personal cost was.

 

Personal wasn't always the same as important.

 

"No," Gene said, looking at the space where the Trickster's eyes should be. 

 

"But that is your life! You would give that up, give up the lives of all who depend upon you? They follow you into endless risk, and you never look back to see if they can go where you lead them; how can you bear it?"

 

Gene jammed his hands in his coat pockets and felt about for his flask, the one that she had given him for the last birthday he'd celebrated before she left. "No. It's her life, their lives. Her choice to leave. Not mine to make for her. See, thing is, I think you're not really in a position to deal, are you? You're trapped here, wherever the hell this is and I do use that term with great consideration, same as us. You're looking for someplace out in the world too, only my Donna's plugged all the holes. You keep on dropping people in my station, trying to force them to make a choice that will let you in, but none of them do. Makes you about as effective as a busty prossie at a sodomites' convention, don't it?"

 

Shadows began appearing in the white expanse, ghosts of buildings and people. At first they looked like more optical tricks, but they remained static, if completely insubstantial. "In fact," continued Gene, "I'm thinking you've got no power at all. Because if you showed me one life if Donna went one way, and I came from another life, then we're somewhere in between those right now. But we won't be for long, since I just said I was going back to where I came from, utter crap though it is. You can't keep any of us here because it doesn't even have a possibility of not being nowhere, and you can't leave."

 

The shadows were thickening now, becoming the outlines of city skyline and slowly filling in. "And Bols thought I was the one trapping everyone in the past," he finished with a harrumph.

 

Then the world collapsed in on itself.

 

Comments

[theonlytwin.livejournal.com]

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

you made it work, you're making it all work, with bowie and timey and gene and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

you genius.

[intrikate88.livejournal.com]

Your excitement gives me warm fuzzy feelings inside! And no, I did not swallow a hamster. It took me a long damn time to plot all this out so the timey-wimey made sense, and it's really gratifying to have that appreciated. Thanks for continuing to read- the epilogue comes next!

[mickey-sixx.livejournal.com]

*EPIC FLAILS*

OMG I LOVE GENE'S RESONING AND AND AND 1953 AND AND AND ROSE ALEXANDRA AND AND AND DONNA.

*MORE EPIC FLAILS*

[intrikate88.livejournal.com]

:DDDDD

I AM GRINNING LIKE A MAD GRINNING THING.

This chapter took so long to write and so many revisions and then the finale came and jossed me on so many levels so there were even MORE revisions but it all is coming together and there's only the epilogue left. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU so much for having stayed with me, I'm thrilled you enjoy it so much, because I rather do too. :D

[bas_math_girl]

I have been following this story for a while now and absolutely love it!!
I especially love how you write Gene. :D

[intrikate88.livejournal.com]

Thanks for reading, and I hope you'll stick around for the conclusion next week! They're all challenging but very rewarding characters to write, and I really am gratified to know it's working for you.

[ninamazing.livejournal.com]

Oh. My. God.

DEAD. FROM. GENIUS.

♥♥♥♥♥♥

And the PERFECT Bowie song. Just the perfect one. YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU.

Makes you about as effective as a busty prossie at a sodomites' convention, don't it?

Your Gene is the best Gene.

[intrikate88.livejournal.com]

:DDDDDD

♥ ♥

So glad the overuse of Bowie works! I feel like the way the plotting in A2A is evocative relies heavily on Bowie's style and it felt necessary to utilize it all for something properly plotted. I don't know.

GOSH THANKS

[ebony-steinbach.livejournal.com]

THIS WAS AWESOME!!! I can see why this chapter took so long, especially with what's happened in the Ashes to Ashes finale, and the way you fit that into your story was lovely. I love the scene between Gene and the Trickster, but the part that makes me go all warm and fuzzy is how Donna saved Gene in 1953 in the quietest of ways. I have one question though ... what happened to Sam and Alex?

[intrikate88.livejournal.com]

Thank you! *blushes* Well, mostly it took a long time because I was out of town and then work was crazy. But anyway, the 1953 bit was all added in after I wrote the chapter, so I'm glad it looked fairly seamless.

As for Sam and Alex, you'll see in the epilogue!

[scribblingfemme.livejournal.com]

Wow, just wow. From the alternate timeline featuring Gene and Donna to Sam and the chessboard to Gene's line about the busty prossie.

This is just wonderful! I can't wait to see how it turns out.

[intrikate88.livejournal.com]

Thank you! Really happy to see that it all turned out well and people like this chapter; it was probably the most complicated to write and get all the storylines and emotional resonance straight. Stay tuned for the epilogue next week!