Chapter Text
how long did it take you
to realise you’re not like the rest?
pulling strings, and killing things
while wearing your sunday’s best.
—breaking even, larry and his flask
The Discworld. It was what you got when you gave a tired, overworked and underpaid prop assistant a budget of ten pounds and some dried-out modelling clay, and said, I don't care how you do it—get me a universe on my desk by this time tomorrow.* It was almost a completed project, except the clay's crumbling around the edges, time had been stretched a bit too thin in places, and really, the elephants? Well, suppose that's what you got with a shoestring budget. It'd have to do.
The Doctor could appreciate a universe like that, if the visits were entirely on his terms. Generally, they were. Travel between universes had always been difficult, but after the wounds from the Last Great Time War had faded into permanent and somewhat hypertrophic scar tissue, it was, for all intents and purposes, impossible for the Doctor to travel beyond his native universe.
It wasn't like he tried very often to leave his universe. He liked his universe. It made sense to him. He understood its physics, its denizens, the peculiarities of its temporal vortex. He'd been to the farthest reaches of space and the deepest corners of time, and occasionally, outside of it, but it all still had a logic to it. Order and Rationality, even if it was a bit bent and occasionally unstable.
Still, some things in the universe remained completely unpredictable. For all the mysteries he’d unravelled, for all the impossible things he’d seen, he doubted he would ever fully understand the way Donna Noble’s mind worked.
'I'm not getting you another coffee machine,' the Doctor said, quite firmly. The TARDIS was parked, so to speak, in the time vortex. No current destination, though he had been thinking of visiting the shimmering tide pools of the Ilikoic coast. He'd yet to bring it up to Donna. The not-day was young, after all, and Donna was still in her pyjamas.
'But it'd fit right there, ' Donna insisted, pointing at the console, 'between the whotsit and the thingy.' She was his travelling companion, best friend, and swift-kick-up-the-arse lying in wait for when he inevitably acted like a 'right idiot,' as she put it. 'And then we could come in after running away from—from some alien trying to turn us into goo, or whatever, and we could have a coffee right here.'
He stood his ground quite magnificently against Donna Noble, the queen of arguments. 'Hot, acidic liquids in the console room, with all the delicate circuitry? What's wrong with the one in the kitchen?'
'Nothing! It's just—'
The TARDIS lurched. Not just the usual sort of lurch, the kind that rattled the railings and sent the odd spark from the console. No, this was a full-bodied, stomach-in-throat plunge , the kind that made every atom in the Doctor’s body momentarily question its commitment to staying attached to the others.
Donna grabbed onto the console's edge with both hands. 'Oi! What did you do?'
'Me?!' The Doctor was already dashing around the controls, flipping levers, twisting dials, and generally trying to make it look like he had the situation under control. 'I didn’t do anything! This—' The entire TARDIS jolted violently to the left. Donna yelped as she was nearly thrown off her feet. '—is external!'
The hum of the engines became a strangled, protesting whine.
'What does that mean?'
The Doctor checked the monitor, then frowned. Then squinted. Then looked again, as if a third glance would make the information any less ridiculous. 'Temporal storm. Huge one. Proper vortex-wide, history-spilling-all-over-the-place, make-sure-you-pack-a-sou'wester sort of storm—'
'A what?'
Another wrenching pull, and suddenly the floor wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Donna hit the grating with an oof. The Doctor landed half-sprawled on the console. The room groaned, warning lights flaring red.
'Wait, wait, I might be able to—' he said, frantic, pulling at levers, twisting dials, but the TARDIS lurched again, throwing him off balance. His fingers scrabbled for purchase as the floor tilted beneath them.
‘Doctor!’ Donna yelled, bracing herself against the nearest railing. ‘Tell me this is normal!’
‘Define normal!’ he shot back, one hand gripping the console while the other flew over switches, desperate for control. ‘Because if you mean “is this how time storms usually behave?” then the answer is no! This is very much not normal!’
The time rotor flared violently, flickering between shades of gold and deep, unsettling red. The air crackled with static, the kind that made the hairs on Donna’s arms stand on end. Around them, the TARDIS groaned—an aching, wounded sound, nothing like the reassuring hum she usually carried.
The Cloister Bell tolled. A deep, doom-laden toll echoed through the room, the kind that suggested things were about to go very wrong, very quickly.
'Okay—' The Doctor ducked down, grabbing at one of the console's coral struts. 'New plan: hold onto something.'
The TARDIS gave one last, bone-rattling jolt—then with a noise that sounded suspiciously like it was complaining , it plummeted downwards, downwards, downwards—
There was an almighty crash, and everything went dark.
***
A slow, rhythmic creaking filled the air, the kind of sound a ship makes when it settles uneasily on a rocky shore. Somewhere in the dim, emergency-lit haze, a cable dangled from the ceiling, swaying slightly, the occasional spark flickering at its end. The scent of ozone and something vaguely metallic lingered in the air.
Donna groaned. Her cheek was pressed against the grating. She blinked, disoriented, then pushed herself upright with a wince.
The console was still standing, though dim and eerily quiet, save for the faint hum of the emergency power struggling to hold things together. No cheerful time rotor glow. No comforting hum of a ship that always, somehow, felt alive.
Something was very, very wrong.
'Doctor?'
Silence.
Donna forced herself up onto her hands and knees, unsteady, and scanned the room. Her head was still spinning from the crash, but that didn't matter, not now.
Then, she saw him.
The Doctor lay sprawled on the grating a few feet away. One arm was flung outward, the other curled awkwardly beneath him, his coat twisted beneath his ribs. For a terrifying second, he looked—
No.
He was breathing. Shallow, uneven, but breathing.
'Doctor?' she called again, but this time, her voice was sharper, edged with rising panic. She crawled over to his side, hands moving instinctively. He wasn’t cold, colder than usual, at least. His pulse was there, steady beneath her fingertips. No blood, no bruises that she could see. No obvious injuries at all. 'Doctor,' she tried again, quieter this time. Almost afraid. She squeezed his arm, firm, grounding. 'Come on, sunshine, time to wake up. You’re scaring me here.'
A shuddering breath left his lips. His fingers twitched weakly, curling against the grating. 'Donna?' he rasped.
Relief flooded through her. 'There you are, you great big space idiot. Are you okay? What was that?'
He sat up, wincing. 'Hadn't felt a storm like that before,' he muttered, rubbing his temples, voice low and strained.
Donna watched him warily. He looked off —not just in pain, but disoriented in a way that didn’t sit right. His usual post-crash routine was all bravado, shaking off injuries like they were nothing, grinning through the pain with a 'that was a bit of a ride, wasn’t it?' But there was no grin now. No quip.
'Doctor?' she pressed, softer this time.
He didn’t answer immediately. His gaze flickered toward the console, and his face faltered. 'Oh,' he breathed, barely more than a whisper, 'oh, my poor ship.'
And then—then—Donna realized what had been wrong this whole time. The silence. It wasn't just the usual parked-in-the-Vortex, engines idling quiet. This was like a void in the air, like a heartbeat that had simply—stopped.
The Doctor’s fingers twitched against the grating before he pushed himself up, slow and unsteady. He moved like every inch of him ached, but still, he hauled himself to his feet. For a moment, he just stood there, swaying slightly, blinking as if trying to clear his head. Then, without a word, he staggered toward the console.
'Hey, take it easy,' Donna warned, scrambling up after him. He either didn’t hear her or ignored her, his hands already moving over the darkened controls, pressing buttons, flipping switches. Nothing responded. Not even a flicker.
His jaw tensed. 'Come on, old girl,' he murmured under his breath, so soft Donna barely caught it. 'Give me something. Anything.'
Donna swallowed thickly. There was a distant sadness in the Doctor's eyes, a kind of vulnerability that she wasn't sure she'd seen in him before. 'Is she…'
'She's… dormant,' said the Doctor.
Dormant?' Donna echoed, frowning. 'What, like… asleep?'
He let out a long breath, tilting his head back, eyes flicking toward the ceiling as if searching for an answer in the darkness above. Finally, his shoulders dropped a fraction. 'I don't know, I-I can’t feel her,' he admitted, quiet, reluctant, almost hesitant, as if he can't quite believe it himself. 'The–the bond. It’s gone.'
That stopped her short. 'The bond?' she repeated.
'The pilot-bond,' he said, voice tight, like the words were difficult to force out. His hand made a twisting motion by the side of his head to emphasize the point. 'You know, the–the psychic link between us.'
Donna stared at him, processing. She’d heard the Doctor talk about the TARDIS like an old friend, like it was a living thing, full of personality and quirks. She’d always thought of the TARDIS as just a spaceship, albeit a pretty damn extraordinary one. But this was something else, something utterly alien to her.
A silence stretched between them, thick and unnatural. The air inside the TARDIS felt—hollow, as if the walls had been stripped of something vital. Donna could almost feel the emptiness pressing in, like stepping into a house long abandoned, where the absence of life lingered heavier than dust. The emergency lighting flickered. Somewhere behind them, metal creaked softly, settling like old bones shifting in the dark. The TARDIS wasn’t dead, not yet, but it wasn’t quite alive either.
The Doctor stood motionless for a beat longer, his fingertips ghosting over the unresponsive controls. His throat worked around something unsaid, something too raw to voice. Then, with a sharp breath, he squared his shoulders and turned toward the doors. 'Right,' he said, his voice brittle-bright. 'We're not going to get anywhere, just standing here moping. Let's see where we've landed.'
The doors let out a reluctant creak as the Doctor opened them, almost as if they were protesting the motion.
Donna wasn't sure what she was expecting to see beyond the doors. An alien jungle, hot, humid, thick with vines and scuttling things. A lifeless asteroid in the depths of space. Or—maybe, nothing at all, just an endless black void.
What she got was worse.
It was quite clearly a city of some kind. The streets outside the TARDIS were a tangled mess of crooked buildings leaning precariously over twisting alleyways, their upper stories practically shaking hands across the narrow gaps. Smoke curled from a hundred chimneys, swirling into the already smog-heavy sky, while a hundred different voices fought for dominance in the air. Vendors bellowed about their wares, carts rattled over uneven cobblestones, and somewhere in the distance, someone was either being murdered or greeting an old friend with extreme enthusiasm. Coming from the stillness of the TARDIS, the sheer chaos of it hit her like a wall.
Then there was the smell—Oh God, the smell. A London girl all her life, Donna had become accustomed to the usual choking scents of a city—smog, petrol fumes, damp concrete, piss, overflowing bins—but this was another beast entirely. Woodsmoke and sweat, thick and cloying. The greasy tang of roasting meat, if it was meat. The unmistakable reek of stagnant water reminiscent of a sewer drain—the river.
The TARDIS had landed on a bridge, overlooking what could, in theory, be classified as a body of water. It oozed more than it flowed, its surface barely rippling. It was textured, like porridge laid out overnight, and if that porridge had been made with muddy bog water. The stench from it was eye-watering. A foul, clinging dampness rose from it, carrying a cocktail of decay, chemicals, and things best left unexamined.
Donna swore, recoiling as if she'd been slapped. She yanked her jacket over her nose, but it didn’t help—the smell clawed its way in, thick and inescapable. Even the Doctor grimaced.
He stepped out onto the cobbles first, walking over to the stone wall. He tapped at the stones a few times, as if he expected them to give him some sort of answer. 'Ankh-Morpork, he murmured, almost reverent. He looked down at the sluggish river, then up toward the dreary, smog-leaden sky. He let out a slow breath, then, quieter this time—'We're in Ankh-Morpork.'**
*A small island community off the coast of Kythia had a creation myth that closely followed this description. Their holy men still had yet to decide on what exactly a props assistant was, given that they had no concept of intentional deception and therefore no concept of theatre. They did not, however, consider this to be a serious obstacle to observing their faith.
**It was possible to recognise the city by its smell-scape alone. That particular odour of the river Ankh was hard for anyone to forget. It burnt itself into one's olfactory cells, until they were emptying their pockets in an attempt to get it to leave them alone. Even if a lucky coin appeased the stench long enough that the olfactory cells could make a run for it, they never quite recovered from the traumatic experience.