Author's Note: You guys ... I don't even know. I started writing Kurt/Wincest, and then, for whatever reason, I had to write this and get it out there. I don't know what this is. It's awful, but I kind of like it? This will be a two-shot.
Disclaimer: *taps microphone* "Hello, Kurt Hummel here. Sadly, gleefulmusings does not own me. I wish that he did because he recognizes that I am the most awesome character ever created - bar Cordelia Chase - and he never writes me as a dependent victim. Instead, he writes me as the badass I totally am and gives me really hot guys like Sam and Mike and Puck, not Fraggle Rock refugees whose hair looks like it was left in a waffle iron for too long. So, here, please enjoy more of my fabulousness. Thank you, and god bless."
Donna walked the TARDIS in search of the Doctor, an occurrence which had increased in frequency this past week.
She knew from experience that he wasn't necessarily hiding from her, but from the world, the one that existed in his head; the one to which she was sometimes afraid she might lose him.
The last time he had done this was the week of Rose's birthday. Knowing that, she had suspended her usual abrasiveness and gave him a free pass. She wasn't much one for handholding and talking things out. Sometimes you just needed to be alone. The Doctor had and she respected that.
But, as she had noted, that had been months ago, not a year, so whatever had brought about this need for solitude, it wasn't Rose's birthday.
Something else, then. She knew the Doctor had had other companions. Had had children and grandchildren. He didn't talk about them often and she didn't press.
Still, she was worried. She hadn't seen him in three days and, though she didn't quite know how, this was different. The atmosphere in the TARDIS wasn't the same. There was the elation and loss and regrets she had come to associate with Rose, but this was more. This felt like missed opportunities and failure and a deep sadness.
And she could feel it, could all but taste on the air, and if it was affecting her this much, she couldn't imagine what it was doing to the Doctor.
She huffed, bit her lip, and shook her head. He'd eluded her again. She sighed and decided to make one more circuit before calling it a night. If he wanted her, he knew where to find her.
She took a step forward and suddenly the floor beneath her lighted with an arrow.
Raising a brow, she took another step and then another, until yet another arrow appeared, this time pointing down the hall to her left.
She smiled and patted the wall. "Thanks, old girl."
The TARDIS offered a soothing if sad whirl in reply.
As she made her way, she realized she had never before stepped foot in this part of the ship. In fact, she didn't even remember it being here. Had she really missed it these past months, or had it been hidden? If so, who had hidden it? The Doctor? Or the TARDIS?
She noticed the door at the end of the hallway had light peeking out from beneath it. She nodded to herself, took a deep breath, and strode toward it, knocking when she reached it and throwing it open.
She looked around in confusion.
Whose room was this?
Everything was white. Blindingly so.
If not for the few splashes of color - a throw rug here, a decorative pillow there - she would have thought she was in an operating room. As it was, she felt slightly nauseated. There appeared to be no delineation between the walls and the ceiling and floor. She pressed a palm to her temple.
It was so ... sterile. And cold. Clinically so.
Who on earth could enjoy such austerity?
She looked to her left and saw the Doctor sitting in a gorgeous Queen Anne chair upholstered in royal blue velvet and mahogany woodwork. She knew her mother would have ridiculed such a chair while being insanely envious it was not in her possession.
She frowned when she noticed the Doctor clutching a highball glass half-filled with an amber liquid. She didn't know the Doctor to drink.
"Doctor?" she said with noticeable apprehension.
"You shouldn't be here," was the soft - and cold - reply. "This is not your room."
Oh, no thank you. She was not about to put up with his maudlin nonsense. If there was one thing she truly disliked about him, it was his mood swings. Sometimes she honestly wondered if he was bipolar. Between the mania and deep depressive episodes, she had learned to walk on eggshells those first weeks, but then he had stabilized and become rather enjoyably, if a tad, well, insane.
Obviously he had slipped back into melancholy and, as his best friend, it was up to her to snap him out of it. Right!
She charged over and sat herself down on the bed, blinking slowly when she felt the quality of the thread count of the comforter.
And why was this not in her room again?
"Do not sit there," he hissed.
She turned toward him and gave him a most unimpressed look. "Listen to me, you skinny streak of bacon!" she barked. "You disappeared on me three days ago and from the look of that suit, the bags under your eyes, and your greasy hair, you certainly haven't been spending that time bathing. What the hell is going on and why is this room so bleeding white?"
He said nothing. He did not look at her.
She was being ignored.
No one ignored Donna Noble.
"Don't you sit there and pretend I'm a statue!" she thundered. "What is wrong with you?" She sighed as he held his silence. "Look, I'm concerned, all right? The last time you were like this was during Rose's birthday. If this is something like that, then fine, I'll leave you to your thoughts, but not until you convince me that you're not going to do something stupid like lock yourself in whatever this place is until these very white walls start turning gray."
Still he said nothing, merely taking a sip from his glass and staring a picture frame in his other hand.
Knowing she would find answers only by looking for them herself, she stood and crossed toward him before moving behind his chair and staring down.
The picture was large and professionally matted, the frame pewter with a slightly encroaching patina. The picture was of Rose, an older man she didn't recognize, and a young boy whom she also did not know.
"So this is about Rose," she murmured.
"No," the Doctor said, taking another sip. "Not this time. She's a part of it, but not the reason."
"Who are they?" she asked softly.
"The bloke is me, the previous me, before I regenerated."
Donna arched a brow. She never would have correlated the man sitting before her with the man in the picture. They looked absolutely nothing alike, shared not a single facial characteristic and were completely different body types. Granted, she didn't know much about regeneration, so she wasn't really sure why it happened, how it worked, or the results.
Rose looked young here, younger than the majority of the pictures the Doctor had once reluctantly shown her. She knew that Rose had been nineteen when she had started traveling with the Doctor, so Donna supposed she was about that here, perhaps twenty.
It always struck her that Rose appeared to be a most ordinary girl - pretty, certainly - but Donna had seen dozens of girls in London who looked like Rose Tyler. Still, Rose had a quality, a sparkle in her eyes, a knowing look, a fun-loving spirit that appeared even in pictures. She was extraordinary in all her ordinariness.
The roots, though. And the eyebrows. Donna was glad Rose had eventually taken herself to a salon.
Rose was grinning at the camera, that enormous smile that could light the world, her tongue poking out between her teeth and curling up toward her cheek. There was so much joy in that smile, so much laughter and cheer, such a love of life, that Donna couldn't help but be infected by it. She could understand why the Doctor missed this girl so much. She herself would very much have liked to have met Rose even once.
The Doctor, the Old Doctor, had piercing steel blue eyes - stormy, like the Atlantic - and a receding hairline and some truly enormous ears, but he was quite handsome. Ruggedly so. Broad-shouldered but lanky, he had gorgeous skin, an aquiline nose, prominent cheekbones, and facial lines which suggested an almost-permanent scowl.
He wasn't scowling in the picture, however, but it wasn't quite a smile, either. It was close-lipped and tight, but filled with contentedness. His arms were around the waist of the boy - who truly was a gorgeous child - his chin resting on the boy's slender shoulder. Rose's arm was looped through the boy's and she was hanging off him, laughing about something. The boy, however, though his hand rested atop Rose's own, had eyes only for the Doctor.
Such eyes. Donna had never really their like before. At first she thought it must have a been a trick of the camera, but no. His eyes were truly that amazing. Blue and green and gold and gray all at once. An amazing color for eyes which looked so mercurial and intelligent and loving.
Dark, shiny hair which had obviously been well-cared for; colorful clothes of which Donna had not seen outside a fashion magazine; absolutely flawless pale skin which she could not help but envy; and bee-stung lips which curved upward in an impish smile that was adorable and yet, somehow, sarcastic.
"His name is Kurt," the Doctor whispered.
Donna said nothing but noted the present tense. She supposed it was good that the boy, this Kurt, wasn't dead.
"He traveled with me and Rose." He blinked. "And Jack. For a time."
Her eyes slowly panned from the picture to him, though she could only see the back of his head, which she preferred from the empty look in his eyes.
"You three look very close," she said cautiously. "Happy together."
"Oh, yes," the Doctor said lowly. "We were very happy. For a time. And then he left me."
She frowned. She couldn't imagine a person willingly leaving the Doctor. She knew she never would. She knew Rose would never have, but her choice had been taken from her. As for Martha, well, she had needed to leave to find herself.
"How old was he?" she asked. "He looks quite young."
The Doctor chuckled and she was struck by how dark it sounded. "Fifteen, though he acted much older. He had never really been allowed to be a child, you see, and while he could sometimes be immature, he was one of the most stalwart, dependable people I have ever known." He set his jaw and turned his head. "And then one day I looked and he was gone."
"Why?" asked a flabbergasted Donna. "Why did he leave?"
The Doctor gave a gusty sigh. "Rose was much different with him, you know, with that other me. They were much like how you and I are together. Best mates through everything. My Rose is brave, but his Rose was fearless. My Rose was humane, but his Rose was humanity itself. I'd never before met someone who had only one heart but let it bleed for the entire universe. She was so young, but so wise.
"Oh, she left him to his solitude when he required it, but then, when she decided he'd had enough, she'd swan in, saying something ridiculous or wearing something ridiculous or singing something ridiculous and, somehow, everything was right again. She kept the darkness at bay. Much better than I'm able to do for myself now.
"She saved him, you know, saved me. Somehow, through some marvelous twist of fate, he came across her after the Time War, after he had regenerated. She healed him. She stood at his side always, regardless of circumstance. She defended him to everyone, would brook no bad word about him, though he was a true dick on occasion, especially to her."
He barked out a pained laugh. "She never put up with his nonsense and could deliver one hell of a good bollicking when necessary. Oh, you'd have loved her, Donna. You and she are kindred spirits."
She smiled and gripped his shoulder.
"I ruined her. I became this and we fell in love and my loving her made her vulnerable. She was still strong, still brave, but I wasn't. I never told her. Even at the end, I never told her. I was too afraid. And I destroyed her.
"Suddenly she had bravado where there had once been confidence. Suddenly there was caution in word and thought, when previously she had spoken only blunt, unflinching truth. Suddenly there was realization that I wasn't him. She had gained a soul mate but lost her best friend. She never allowed herself to mourn him."
She swallowed heavily and looked away. "And Kurt?" she prompted.
"Oh, Kurt," he said, shaking his head. "Kurt was a surprise, even more so than Rose. So incredibly innocent and, at times, terminally naïve. Oh, but his voice! His voice, Donna! He would open that mouth to sing and it was the most beautiful sound in the entire universe, more brilliant even than the Ood. He didn't sing often and never in front of us, we always had to catch him on the fly.
"One night Rose was a having a nightmare, screaming and crying in her sleep. I walked toward her room, but he got there first. I watched as he sat next to her on her bed, holding her hand and running his fingers through her hair, and then he started singing. It was beautiful. It was so beautiful. I don't even remember the song, but I suppose it doesn't matter now anyway. He chased her nightmare away. He was good at that sort of thing.
"He is frighteningly intelligent for a human. Not merely intellect, though he has more than his share of that, but an unparalleled ability to look at something or someone and know."
"Know what?"
"Everything. Everything. He would take one look at you and know everything about you. Your strengths, your weaknesses, and how to exploit them for his good or yours. Kurt was highly skilled in manipulation, but he was never malicious. He had just been so hurt so often and for so long, he kept people not at arm's length, but entire continents."
"Hurt by what?" she demanded. "He was a child! What hurt him? Who hurt him? Why wasn't he protected? For that matter, where were his parents in all of this?"
He didn't answer and lapsed into silence.
She knew better than to repeat the question. Or, perhaps, she didn't truly want to know the answer.
"Rose helped him," he finally said, "as she helped me. That is her gift: emotional intelligence. She understands you better than you will ever understand yourself. Once that enormous heart of hers decides to make room for you, she will never let you go. You never want her to let you go."
He took another sip and forcefully cleared his throat. "Like Rose loves me, Kurt loved him."
Donna's eyes bulged and she released a breath she hadn't realized she was holding. "And...and did he love Kurt?"
"Yes. Very much." He let the picture drop from between his fingers onto his lap. "Nothing inappropriate happened, of course, but he wasn't afraid to tell Kurt. They were willing to wait, to see if this was the life Kurt would want for himself after he had finished growing up. The other me would have waited forever for Kurt."
Donna's eyes stung for no reason she could understand.
"I have his memories, his thoughts and feelings, but I'm not him. He had no regrets where Rose and Kurt were concerned, whereas I have many. They knew he loved them."
"When did he leave?" she asked.
"Right after this," the Doctor muttered, his hand flailing over his body. "After I changed. After he died. That's how Kurt saw it, you see, as a death. I sometimes wonder if Rose felt that way, too, but she never told me one way or another and put it out of her mind soon enough. Although, when it first happened, she did ask if I could change back. She never brought it up again, but sometimes I would see her looking at me and know she was imagining him in my place.
"I was still recovering and Kurt left. I was unconscious in Jackie Tyler's flat in London, the Sontarans were invading, Rose was trying to hold everything together, and Kurt just left."
"He left while you were unconscious?"
"He was sixteen by then. He told Rose that he couldn't bear to look at me, that though I was still the Doctor, I wasn't his Doctor. And he needed to grieve for his Doctor."
Donna said nothing, but she could understand Kurt's position. He had watched the man he loved disappear from existence and then someone completely different arrived to take his place. But no one could take his place, and Kurt knew that.
"The only time Jackie Tyler ever made sense was when she told Rose that, while Rose loved the idea of the Doctor, of who he was and what he represented, Kurt had loved the man. That's how Kurt saw me, saw him, as a man. Not the Doctor, not an alien, not a Time Lord, but a man. The man he loved."
"And the man he lost," she said softly.
The Doctor closed his eyes. "I know, and I understand, I do. He was so young and the other me was just gone. Kurt didn't even have the chance to say goodbye. They didn't have the chance to say goodbye to each other. He wasn't with us when I changed. Honestly, I don't know if that was a good thing or a bad one.
"I know he was hurt and felt abandoned. He understood better than Rose that the other me, while part of me, was not me and was gone for good. He left so he wouldn't fall apart in a world that already was. Rose stayed to keep me together. Sometimes I wonder who made the wiser choice."
"Do you love him?"
"I will always love him. I will always love all of you."
She ignored the skip in heartbeat. "Are you in love with him?"
"I honestly don't know. I miss him. I ache for him. I love him. And I hate him."
"Why now?"
"Today is his birthday."
"How old is he?"
"In his original timeline, he will turn eighteen in approximately four hours, thirteen minutes. Due to his time in the TARDIS, his physical body is slightly older."
"You never heard from him again?"
"No, but Rose did. Kurt was alone for much of his life. His mother died when he was a very young child, and while he and his father loved each other fiercely, they were not particularly close. Rose became his family. She was his surrogate mother, his favorite aunt, and his big sister all rolled into one. He had lost the other me; he couldn't lose her."
"They kept in contact. They even met up a few times. Once I tried to tag along, but he somehow knew I was coming before we even arrived. He never showed up. He called Rose to apologize and when she heard his tears, the agony he still bore, she couldn't help but forgive him. Neither could I."
"Does he know?" Donna asked. "Does he know Rose is ... lost?"
The Doctor was silent for a very long time.
"After it happened, I went to him. I parked the TARDIS outside of his school and waited for classes to end. I was at the other end of the football field. I saw him walking out the doors, holding the hand of a stupidly cute tow-headed lad with enormous lips and eyes only for Kurt."
He paused.
"Kurt had found someone else, but it wasn't the same. Looking at him, I could see that it wasn't the same. It wasn't that he had settled, it wasn't even that he had moved on. It was that life had moved on and that was the end of it.
"He knew I was there. He released the boy's hand and slowly turned in my direction. I know there is no way he could have seen me, not really, certainly not my face, but he knew I was there. And I knew that he knew. About Rose, I mean. It was all there on his face. It's so interesting, that face. He has an amazing poker face. He can stare unflinchingly at anything or anyone and betray not a modicum of emotion.
"But when you know him, when he lets down his walls just long enough for you to get a peek at who is really is, it's all there on his face, plain for you to see. He knew and he hurt and it started all over again, because that's all I've ever brought him, Donna: pain and grief."
"I don't think that's true at all," she gently argued. "Whether it was you or the other you, you brought him love and so did Rose. That's why he grieves, Doctor, because both of you changed him forever. He grieves because he remembers. He grieves because, though you both might be lost to him, you live on in him, so the other you never truly died and Rose isn't gone. You loved him and he loved you, and you and Rose made him better. He knows that. I'm sure Rose does. So should you."
He reached up and patted her hand. "I'd like to be alone now, please."
She left him to his thoughts.
The next day, it was as though none of it had ever happened.