stargateficrec | Adventure Awaits, by kateandbarrel • (G)

Show: Atlantis / Doctor Who

Category: Crossover, gen
Characters: Donna Noble, Team
Warnings: none
Words: ~7300
Author's Journal: kateandbarrel (?)
Author's Webspace: kateandbarrel
Link: Adventure Awaits

Summary:
Donna Noble gets a new otherworldly job: as Elizabeth Weir's administrative assistant on Atlantis, in the Pegasus Galaxy.

Why This Must Be Read:
Another brand-new story out of Crossworks - and one that's a bit out of my usual orbit, as I am primarily an SG-1 geek as opposed to an Atlantis expert. This, however, struck me as a really thoughtful slice-of-life piece featuring a post-Doctoral Donna getting used to her next offworld assignment. In that respect, it's very much Donna-centric, and told specifically from her POV - what we get of the Atlantis team is filtered almost though not completely through that lens. Of the SGA team, we see most of Weir and John Sheppard, though there are nice moments featuring various other team members. And the climax involves Donna on a field mission, in which her newfound fascination with the Ancients converges in an unexpected way with her memories of past adventures. (This last may well be Jossed by the end of the year, but since when do we let that sort of thing ruin a really well-written fic?)

[ETA: Authorship now revealed! I note that while there are a DW journal and a Tumblr page under this username, the DW journal is blank and the Tumblr appears long inactive.]

Snippet of Fic:
Donna set aside her tablet - she obviously wouldn’t get much done with John around - and folded her hands on the table. “What do you know about the Ancients?” she asked.

John was surprised by her question, and eventually set his sandwich down as he thought. “Well, I know they’re a bunch of pompous jerks. And they’re still around. Up there, somewhere.” He swirled his finger around vaguely at the air. “They watch everything that happens here, and they don’t lift a damn non-corporeal finger to help.”

Donna glanced upwards briefly, at nothing, before looking at John again. The Ancients were endlessly fascinating to her, in a way that the Doctor had been. For a brief moment she’d wondered if he’d been one, but the Ancients weren’t eternal beings, and they had proven themselves to be terrible at time travel (something the Time Lords tended to be pretty good at, hence the name). No, they weren’t related, but something about them was still familiar. Donna knew there was a lot of information locked away in her brain. Many memories had returned, but there were huge gaps, and especially nothing remained of the time she was the DoctorDonna. Still, something about the Ancients made her pause.