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Donna's still angry with the Doctor for nearly getting himself killed, but what starts as a discussion about giving the Sontarans a chance soon veers off in an unexpected direction when he happens to mention his grand-daughter.
Blimey, though, the pictures that brings to mind. A hall full of wellies, their wackiness of design in inverse ratio to their size. Alien broad beans sprouting on kitchen paper on the windowsill. Silly magnets on the fridge. Oh, but those were the good bits, weren’t they?
She hasn’t finished with him yet. As soon as they’re back in the TARDIS, just the two of them waiting for Martha to come and say goodbye, she slaps him again. Harder, this time.
“Don’t you ever do that again!” she yells.
“Do what?” he says, rubbing his cheek, not looking at her, knowing exactly what kind of thing she’s going to say.
“Go off and get yourself killed without even asking! You didn’t give us a choice! Don’t we matter – the people who care if you live or die? Don’t we matter more than some honour thing you’ve got going with a chavvy bunch of baked-potato-head aliens?”
Apart from thinking that’s the best description of the Sontarans he’s heard for quite a while, his overwhelming feeling is a reluctance to get into a big philosophical debate about choice and self-determination. Oh, and he’d quite like a shower as well.
“It isn’t just about me,” he says. “I don’t do things like that to make a big gesture.”
“You bloody do, space boy!”
“Hang on a minute,” he interrupts. “Haven’t finished yet. Choice is one thing. Punishment is another. It might seem unbelievable from your perspective, but there are lots of crimes out there worse than turning your entire planet into a battery farm. I’m not condemning a species to death for that.” He feels suddenly exhausted, almost too exhausted to keep his eyes open. This is where it always kicks in, when everything goes quiet and you’ve time to think about how it could have all turned out.
“In fact,” he continues, “I don’t like condemning a species to death for anything. What I do believe is that if you decide to behave like A, then eventually B will happen. Those that live by the sword die by the sword. You have to believe it’s possible for people to change, or why bother?”
“You really think they’re going to change?” She’s looking at him like he’s some kind of tree-hugger and she’s probably more or less right. “When they’ve been fighting a war for thousands of years? Get a few women on their planet, then it might change.”
He sighs. “I dunno, Donna. But there’s always a chance. I couldn’t live with myself if I hadn’t offered them that.”
“You wouldn’t have to. You’d be dead, you daft git.”
She can call him any name she likes because he knows that’s not the whole story of the way she feels about him. But he’s still starting to feel annoyed with her – maybe because he’s knackered, or maybe because she’s right, this does need talking about and he’s never cared much for doing that.
“What’s the alternative?” he asks. “Do I get to choose who lives or dies? What does that make me?”
She’s turning that over in her mind and she doesn’t throw it back at him for a minute. “Isn’t that what your people did? They must have been so powerful, kind of like gods…”
“Didn’t do them any good. They all died. Probably because they did think they were gods until it was too late.” Oh Rassilon, he really doesn’t want to go into all this now. Hurry up, Martha. Maybe he could talk her into some nice pleasure trip, just the three of them unwinding a bit. That’d be nice. Martha never used to get into heavy stuff like this, probably because if she’d listened to the answers he’d have wobbled on his pedestal a bit.
No chance of that with Donna, though. If there were any pedestals in their friendship, he was still crawling about on the metaphorical floor trying to drag himself up onto one.
“I still hate the thought of you dying on your own,” she says. Oh, that’s what all this was about. Rose would have been the same. Even Martha, probably. It wasn’t exactly logical.
“That’s nice, but it’s not worth you dying for,” he points out. “What good would that have done?”
“I dunno,” she falters, “it’s just, nobody ought to have to face that on their own.”
“I’m used to it,” he explains.
“That says more about your life being wrong than anything else,” she says.
Fair enough. Still, it’s not as if there are any other lives he could obviously be living right now.
“Your life’s very precious to me,” he declares. “Don’t go reading anything into that,” he adds, stabbing a warning finger in her general direction. “I’d say it about anyone I travelled with, probably about any human anywhere. Now, where d’you fancy going next? I thought, maybe…”
“What is it with you and this planet, anyway?” she buts in. “Did you always like coming here and saving it, or was that just after you lost your own?”
“Oh, long before that,” he says, not really concentrating because he’s busy looking up the co-ordinates for Midnight, or maybe Barcelona? “Came here years ago with Susan. My grand-daughter.”
Then her jaw hits the floor and he realises he’s made a mistake. “Your what?” she squeaks. “You had kids?”
“I said grand-daughter.”
“And where did she come from?” Donna demands. “Did you find her under a gooseberry bush?”
He’s about to say they didn’t have gooseberry bushes on Gallifrey, which is true as it happens; they had satterberries and you could make a wonderful cordial out of them. Orange-coloured, of course, and he can taste it in the back of his throat along with memories of lounging about when he should have been revising for his exams at the Academy. But – well – he supposes it’s a reasonable question for a human to ask.
He reaches up and scratches an itch he doesn’t actually have on the back of his head. “We didn’t really do families,” he explains. “Not the way you lot do. Reproduced, of course, but it wasn’t a personal business.”
“You mean you cloned people?” she asks, looking a bit disgusted.
“No!” he protests, indignantly, because cloning was far too vulgar for Time Lords to use as a means of reproducing. “When you reached maturity you donated your DNA – nothing special about that, it was just like registering to vote – and whenever the population dropped below a critical point – not that it did very often ‘cos we lived for ages – the Chancellry Committee for the Maintenance of Future Generations decided the optimum mix of characteristics and grew a few hundred babies. Had nothing to do with the little blighters until they turned seven and they were ready to be educated. It was all done by incubator.”
“And that wasn’t cloning?” She blinks her eyes and smiles at him sweetly.
“Well, we didn’t call it that,” he protests. “And we certainly didn’t go around invading other people’s planets and messing about with the atmosphere to do it!” He doesn’t mention the time they messed about with the breeding planets of the Monan Host and they ended up running eight different timelines concurrently. That was all an unfortunate accident, anyway.
“And did you get any paperwork, to show which little baby had a bit of you?” she asks.
“Oh, for goodness sake!” he snaps. “It wasn’t Disneyland, you know. We’d evolved far beyond regarding children as an expression of our individual identity.”
“So this grand-daughter of yours,” she goes on. “How did you know who she was?”
He wishes Martha would hurry up and get here so he could change the subject. This is getting to be a very complicated conversation. “She sought me out,” he says, at last. “Technically, our children were entitled to do that, though in practice very few of them bothered.”
“Trust her to be different,” says Donna. “Ran in the family, did it?”
“Could say that.” He’s showing a quite unnecessary interest in the gravitic anomalizer by this time and wondering why the settings on the videophone seem a bit off. It’s almost like there’s a bit of Void stuff on them. Must be imagining things.
“What happened to her?” Donna asks. “Is she still down there on the Earth, somewhere?”
He sighs and looks up at the struts for a while because, to be honest, he’s not feeling particularly good about what he’s about to say. He always meant to look Susan up – even got as far as setting the co-ordinates, more times than he could count, but it would have involved apologising for locking her out of the TARDIS that day she left to get married, just because he was upset and he didn’t want her to know. And he’s always been crap at apologising. Also, the chances that she and David might have needed him to stick around and help out with their kids or something were higher than he’d been particularly comfortable with. As was the chance that they were both dead within two years. What you didn’t know couldn’t hurt you, he’d always maintained.
Besides, as he’s already informed Donna, Time Lords don’t really do families. Didn’t – sorry.
“Oh,” Donna says, to his relief. “There I go. Foot in mouth disease.”
“She isn’t here, anyway,” he says, quietly. Now how’s this for contrariness? Now that she’s going to drop the subject, he feels like talking about Susan. There’s just something about Donna that does this to him. The other day he felt like talking about Rose. And before that, Gallifrey. Things it took him months, if not years, to talk about pre-Donna.
Still, if she found out he’d left his own grandchild to fend for herself in a post-Dalek-Invasion wasteland, she’d probably want to go home – and not just for a visit, either.
“I could see you with kids,” she remarks, tipping her head over to one side and smiling at him a bit like Rose used to do. “Apart from the death wish and the commitment-phobia, anyway.”
He can’t help chuckling at that. She’s got him nailed there. “What else is there?” he asks. “Those are pretty big issues.”
“You’d be fun,” she says. “You’re a big kid yourself half the time. You’d sneak behind their mother’s back and let them pig out on Ben and Jerrys. You’d teach them daft songs that drove everybody mad. You’d get covered in glitter and glue and put on plays and make mobiles of star systems millions of light years away.”
“I don’t think so, somehow,” he says, shaking his head. Blimey, though, the pictures that brings to mind. A hall full of wellies, their wackiness of design in inverse ratio to their size. Alien broad beans sprouting on kitchen paper on the windowsill. Silly magnets on the fridge. Oh, but those were the good bits, weren’t they? There weren’t many of those, really. Most of it would be horrendous.
“Don’t you ever miss all that?” she asks.
“Nope,” he says rapidly - and honestly, as it happens. “You can’t miss what you never had. My life’s perfect by most people’s standards. No ties, no mortgage, no bills to pay. Go wherever you like, whenever you like. Dream come true, Donna. Last thing I’d want to do is spoil it all with a family.”
So why is he thinking about Rose saying, “Another Tyler on the way,” and the way that made him feel, for one brief moment?
Bloody terrified, that’s how it made him feel. Anyway, she’d never lie to him. What would be the point? She’d know he’d do something incredibly dangerous and make two universes collapse if she told him something like that.
So naturally, she wouldn’t. Lie to him, that is.
Donna just sits there looking smug for a moment, and then she says, “All it would take is a few of your cells. Bit of a fingernail, a few hairs. You ever thought of that?”
“I don’t know what you’re going on about,” he lies.
“Somebody could clone you. How’d you know? They could do it because you’re a cool guy – not that you are – you’re just a twig with an explosion in a spring factory on top – or they could even make an evil you. The kind of enemies you have, it’s bound to happen sooner or later.”
“I’d know,” he says.
“Would you?”
“I’d sense it. Now stop it – you’ve been watching too much television.”
“Oh, he fobbed me off with that excuse once,” says Martha, coming in.
“Thought you’d never get here!” he exclaims. Never before has he been so relieved to see Martha Jones. If he has anything to do with it, that subject won’t be coming up again for a very long time.
But as it turns out, of course, the TARDIS has other ideas.