Title: The Little Picture

Author: Emmylou

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: BBC owns everyone and everything. I am happy to let them keep ownership if they continue this trend of bringing certain people back.

Summary: Donna gets mixed up with another evil alien that’s only after her body. She needs to find the Doctor, fast. How hard can it be? Rose/Ten.

A/N: Sorry for the wait for this one. I had some ‘I’ve just taken on a big project, I can’t do this’ jitters, and suddenly lost all ability to write.

---

“Donna? What are you doing here? You better have that three-hundred you owe me…”

Donna wanted to slap Nerys in her smug sneering face, but she needed someone who could drive and Nerys lived the nearest to the university.

“You gotta come with me,” she panted. “Something weird is going on!”

Nerys’s sneer got deeper. “Something weird happens to Donna, what a shocker that is. How much have you had to drink?”

“Nothing! Well – just a few-”

The door slammed.

Donna’s face twisted in indignation. She hadn’t expected much from Nerys, but she was damned if she was going home. She needed the Doctor, and to find him, she needed a car.

She looked at her watch. The X Factor highlights were just starting. Nerys never missed it.

“NERYS, OPEN THIS DOOR RIGHT NOW! I CAN STAND OUT HERE YELLING ALL NIGHT IF YOU WANT!”

A minute passed. Time for a change of tactics.

“ALRIGHT – LET’S SEE HOW YOUR NEIGHBOURS LIKE HEARING ALL ABOUT THE TIME YOU GOT SO DRUNK YOU STRIPPED OFF AT YOUR WORK CHRISTMAS PARTY AND GAVE HER BOSS A LAP DANCE, SHALL WE?!”

The door was yanked open. Nerys appeared, pinked cheeked and enraged. “Fine! But just shut up!” she hissed.

---

“You want to go to the police station?” asked Nerys once they were inside her Mini Cooper (with a fluffy pink steering wheel cover that made Donna want to vomit).

“Nah – need you to help me find an estate,” said Donna, who’d had quite a long and breathless jog to Nerys’s flat to think up a plan. “Can’t remember what it was called. Middle of London. Bit dingy looking.”

Nerys gaped at her, and Donna was pleased she’d waited until they were already in the car before mentioning it.

“You’re expecting me to help you find a block of dingy flats in the middle of London?” she asked incredulously. “Oh yeah – after that I’ll drive you up to Wales to look for that sheep you petted once when you were six.” Nerys ranted. “It’ll take us all night! I thought you said you’d been attacked?”

“I HAVE!” yelled Donna. “And there’s this man who can help – only I don’t know where he is or how to find him and the only place I remember him saying he’d ever been was this block of flats. So I need to find it because someone there might know how to contact him.”

She turned to Nerys desperately. “Look - I know we don’t get on. But we’re cousins, and right now I need help-”

“I’ll say you do,” muttered Nerys.

“Look – just for once in your life will you stop being petty and grow up!” snapped Donna. She took a deep breath and looked imploring across to the driver seat. “Look, I’ve been attacked and I’m scared – alright? And I’ve got no one else to turn to right now. Just you and him. Please help me find him.”

Nerys sighed. “I might have known there’d be some bloke in it somewhere,” she muttered.

But she started the engine.

----

Two hours later and it was nearly midnight. Nerys, was yawning into her hand every couple of minutes and Donna was only kept from doing the same by a determination not to give Nerys an excuse to take her home.

“We’ve been through every possible place on the A to Z,” sighed Nerys. “And all to find a place that this bloke may or may not have visited once, to speak to some people that may or may not have known a family he was there with, and who may or may not know how to contact him. This is stupid. And you said that he’d been there about three years ago. Who’s going to remember a bloke they saw once three years ago?”

Donna whipped her head up from the A to Z she was scanning using the weak car light.

“Believe me – you don’t forget this guy,” she insisted. “He stands out.”

“Well how would I know?” snapped Nerys. “You won’t tell me who he is or how you know him or how he can help!”

Donna turned on her. “BECAUSE YOU’D THINK I WAS INSANE!”

She’d had enough. Right now she needed support from someone, anyone. The last time she’d had any unconditional help or support had been with the Doctor. Ever since then it had been accusations (“Something must have made Lance run off like that,”) and disbelief (“Uni? You?”)

Nerys was no match for Donna in the yelling department, but she had a fair try. “I ALREADY THINK YOU’RE INSANE! AND I’M TEN SECONDS FROM KICKING YOU OUT OF THE CAR AND LETTING YOU WANDER THE STREETS – ALRIGHT?!”

“ALRIGHT!” Donna yelled back, not because it was a good reply, but because she was angry and scared, and aliens were about to destroy the earth.

“SO TELL ME!”

“FINE!”

They both reeled back, breathing in, ready for the next round. Donna realised that she had no reply. Nerys seemed to have the same problem.

Both of them burst into tears, and grabbed each other in a wet, sobbing hug. They’d never actually yelled at each other before, just backstabbed and bitched. The air suddenly felt a lot clearer.

“I’m sorry!”

“Me too!”

“I won’t kick you out of the car!”

“I know you won’t!”

“I’m sorry for flirting with Lance!”

“I’m sorry for telling Chris that you were thirty-nine!”

The pulled away and smiled weakly. “So who is this guy?” sniffed Nerys after they’d used up the last of a handbag sized packet of tissues.

“You won’t believe me,” sighed Donna. “But you’ll just have to try. He’s an alien – let me finish- called ‘the Doctor’. He kind of…accidentally abducted me on my wedding day. He tried to get me back, but these aliens were after me. They’re the ones who set the bauble things off.”

Nerys blinked, clearly struggling with an answer. Donna held up her hand. “You don’t have to say you believe me. Just help me find the flats and then I’ll be able to prove it.”

---

“Are you sure that this is the one?” asked Nerys for the hundredth time.

They’d finally narrowed it down to the right area using landmarks and Nerys’s good sense of direction. By that point it had been three am and they’d napped in the car and eaten breakfast in a café while waiting for morning, when they could start knocking on doors.

“Yes I’m sure,” said Donna, who wasn’t.

She rapped on the pane of glass in the door. A tall unshaven man in a t-shirt advertising Smirnoff Ice answered.

“Scuse me – I’m looking for someone and I’m wondering if you can help?” began Donna.

The man’s faced twisted with distaste. The door slammed.

“That must have been the fifteenth. They probably think we’re coppers,” hissed Nerys. She was not happy to be stood in a graffiti covered, chav ridden hellhole (as she had described it). Nerys did not like apartment blocks unless they were the sort with buzzers preventing unsavoury people getting in.

“Well I don’t have a better idea, do you?” snapped Donna.

They rang the next doorbell. A miserable looking teenage boy with lank hair and a faded gothic hoodie answered. “What?” he grunted.

“I’m looking for someone -” began Donna. The teenager began to slam the door, but Donna was waiting for it. She grabbed his shirt. “NO YOU DON’T!”

She yanked him over the step and held him fast.

“We’re looking for a tall skinny bloke who used to come to this estate. Wore a brown pinstripe suit with trainers and had stupid sideburns, had this weird blue box too.”

The teenager pulled a face. “Why are you asking me? It’s our flat he robbed!”

“What?” asked Nerys sharply. “He robbed your flat? When?”

“Don’t you coppers talk to each other?” spat the teen. “Last week. We come home from the football and find this guy in our flat – he’d torn it apart. He threatened my dad.”

“That doesn’t sound like him!” protested Donna with an imploring look at Nerys, who just shrugged back. “What did he say when he threatened your dad?”

The teenager shrugged. “He just started yelling, like all ‘how dare you move in here!’ and stuff. He held this stick thing up and started demanding to know what had happened to all the stuff that had been in the flat. We didn’t know and my mum started crying and told him to just take what he wanted, and then he said sorry and ran off.”

The teenager finally managed to wriggle free of Donna’s grasp and returned back inside, slamming the door behind him.

Donna sunk to the ground. This was it. Her one chance of getting hold of the Doctor was gone.

“Maybe we can knock on some more doors?” suggested Nerys timidly. “Or-”

“No,” said Donna in a hoarse voice.

“Don’t say that,” wheedled Nerys. “Maybe-”

“Maybe nothing. If he was here, he’s gone now. And there are still aliens trying to take over the world.”

Nerys frowned. “Are you sure there was more than one? You didn’t see any more, did you?”

“Well, yeah, but there are bound to be more,” Donna said.

“Yeah but,” Nerys popped her gum, “you only saw one, right? He’s not going to be taking over the world by himself.”

Donna rose to her feet, annoyed. What did bloody Nerys know about anything? “Look, how many aliens have you been abducted by?” she demanded. “Hmmm, let me think, NONE. I have had genuine alien experience. I’m practically an expert! And I have no idea how to find him, so how the hell would you?”

Nerys’s sneer returned. “Well I may not be Little Miss. Martian, but I do work for the council. So you can stay here and reminisce about being probed or whatever, but I’m going to the office and finding out what happened to the previous residents and what happened to their stuff. Maybe I’ll be able to find him that way. And when I do I’ll beg him to abduct you again and not bring you back.”

She turned and stalked off. Donna scowled and trotted after her.

---

Donna had always had the standard British perception that the council was a bunch of useless retards, but she had to admit that although the office looked scarily overworked and was badly decorated, the computer system looked extremely advanced.

“Is it okay for me to be in here?” she asked.

Nerys shrugged. “It’s the weekend, only a few people here anyway.”

She logged on and began tapping away while Donna fiddled with her teddy bear collection next to the monitor.

“Right,” said Nerys triumphantly. She tapped the screen. “Current occupants at that address Dean and Sarah Plough, including one minor who was probably that unwashed cretin who answered the door. They’re late with their payment too.”

“Who lived there before?”

Nerys tapped away again. “A Jacqueline Tyler and Rose Tyler.”

Donna’s heart fluttered. Rose! “What happened to them?” she demanded.

Nerys frowned. “Ah…they were reported as missing, believed dead after Canary Wharf.”

“Right…” said Donna to herself. “That makes sense. He said he’d lost a girl named Rose but why would he go back now? If he wanted her stuff he could have gone back afterwards, right? What happened to the stuff?”

Nerys shrugged and opened another screen. “Here we go…most of the valuables were taken by the bailiffs to pay back the bills that had occurred before they were classed as missing. There was no will under either name. Ah! A cousin of Jacqueline Tyler’s claimed back the photographs and personal documents. He had the correct identification to do so.”

“Maybe the Doctor claimed it,” said Donna hopefully. Maybe he’d listed a phone number! “What name was the claim under?”

“Jack Harkness,” said Nerys. “Mean anything to you?”

Donna sighed. A tiny picture was attached to the photocopied ID. It was a handsome man, but it wasn’t the Doctor.

Nerys logged off and they both left the building feeling very low. “I suppose you’ve proved that the council aren’t a useless bunch of tossers that couldn’t find their own backside with a map,” said Donna as they wandered across the car park.

“Well my work is done,” said Nerys sarcastically. They stood outside her mini for a moment and she ran a hand though her blonde hair. “What are you gonna do?” she yawned.

Donna shrugged. It was boiling hot, she was sweaty and her only sleep had been in a tiny car seat. “Go home. Go back to university on Monday. Maybe I can figure out what’s going on without the Doctor.”

She sounded about as hopefully as she felt. If she couldn’t manage basic physics, how would she manage advanced alien?

“I’ll drop you off,” said Nerys. “And if you’re going to get abducted again, let me know, right? I want that three-hundred back before you do.”

---

Monday rolled around again, bright, humid, and hot.

Donna had spent the weekend cooped up in her flat with the curtains drawn, fans blaring and stripped down to her underwear. She’d scoured the internet to find out all she could about Hamlin Pest Control and had to admit that nothing screamed ‘alien invaders’ about the website. Maybe Rich had been a one off, like the Doctor. Maybe he hadn’t meant any harm.

Maybe she’d imagined the whole thing.

Now she was fully dressed and braving the unusually hot September once more. Whatever happened to good old British rain?

She walked across the campus – noting the Hamlin Pest Control van parked outside and deciding to check it out at lunch – and sunk into a sticky plastic seat in the lecture hall.

She took out her pencil case, folder, and lucky teddy, pretending she couldn’t hear the jibes. She prayed to whatever god might be listening for no more Donna-Speak and didn’t even look up until the lecturer spoke.

“Good morning! Let’s get down to it shall we? Physics!”

Donna’s head snapped up.

There, about to teach a class, as bold as you please, was the Doctor.

---

A/N: Okay, so it was a long wait, but please don’t hate me. I had such a hard time with this one. I gave up totally in fact, and doomed this fic to my ‘never going to be completed’ file. I hated Donna. I hated the Doctor. I hated bloody Nerys (hopefully you didn’t).

It was only some serious arse-kicking on my own part (and a few kind words from Genne) that got me going again, so all I can say is ‘I’m sorry for the wait, but at least I didn’t give up’.

Now the Doctor and Donna are reunited, things will be better.

And yes, this fic is totally AU after ‘Voyage of the Damned’ (another reason I nearly gave up – it was so much better than my Stowaway fic and I felt embarrassed for having wrote it)

Really needing some feedback now, even if just to get me going again.