The Queen of Sheba

By TwinEnigma

Warnings: Pete's World, References for Rise of the Cybermen, Doomsday, Runaway Bride, Partners in Crime, Voyage of the Damned, Blink, Journey's End, Stolen Earth etc.

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who, unless I am secretly a timelord, which I am clearly not, and I make no profit off my scribblings.

Donna Noble was not sure if she was lucky or flat out cursed.

She'd never liked the ear pods – she had a very good cell phone, thank you, sir – and her grandfather positively hated the stupid things. Her mother's pair had somehow conveniently been misplaced – no small feat, mind – after their last rather lengthy discussion on the merits of certain jobs and such went tits up. And really, that had been incredibly cathartic, seeing her mother run all over the place looking for them when they were, in fact, probably at the bottom of the sewer by that time. But then John Lumic went clear off his nut and, next thing her family knew, they were dodging those awful Cybermen things.

And really, she had no idea where she'd managed to find the lorry or how she'd managed to get it started, but by the time things had calmed down and those blasted tin men started shutting off, she'd somehow managed to leave a swath of Cyber-carnage across half of Chiswick that was considerably impressive even by military standards. Still, she was alive and so was her family, so she supposed that was all right.

Then she got a job at H. C. Clements. A temp thing at the time, though they were considering more permanent positions – but who wasn't these days, after the Cybermen? And that's where she met Lance.

That big, bloody idiot, Lance.

Oh, so she'd fallen arse over tit for him on her first day, but that was nothing compared the sheer unmitigated disaster their wedding had turned into. First, her mother was a nightmare, secondly, she teleported into a bloody basement with giant spiders in it, thirdly, she was chased by homicidal robotic Santas and, lastly, Lance turned out to be working with the spiders.

Typical.

Torchwood showed up late, somewhere after the point she found a lead pipe and a valve for a water pipe she only later learned lead into the Thames. Really, it was quite simple: spiders drown in water. Flood the place, good as new!

Okay, that plan did have some flaws, but what was she supposed to do when confronted by a huge alien spider that thinks she's dinner on the food chain? Sit around and wait for a rescue? Not bloody likely.

The whole thing was hushed up, she was sent home with a pill she could take to blot out the whole experience and a nice Torchwood bloke who assured her it was safe. She told him to shove his pill up his arse and went on her honeymoon anyway. She deserved it after all that.

Several months later, she and her father were out to lunch and her father started having some heart troubles, so they'd stopped in to the nearest hospital for a look. Next thing she knew, they were on the moon, trapped with a crazy vampire and alien rhinos, who had to be about the biggest dumbos this side of the universe. Honestly! The hospital's got dozens of floors and rooms a space vampire could hide in! But shove everyone in the cafeteria and that thing's got to get hungry after a bit. And if it wouldn't be too much trouble, return us to earth when you're done, thank you!

Why they listened to her was beyond her, but that night, when everyone was back on earth, and the reporters had started calling, she'd somehow gone from the crazy woman who was going to get all of them killed by yelling at the alien rhinos to bloody Supergirl, complete with several conflicting accounts of her phenomenal strength or ingenuity. One bloke even suggested she was an alien herself! Asked if she'd regenerated or something weird like that, which she'd never quite understood (until very recently, she failed to understand why that particular part of the story always sent Rose Tyler in Research into fits of giggles).

Torchwood visited her again and this time offered her a job – only after they'd established she was, in fact, thoroughly human. Something about their London branch having been invaded by Cybermen and vanishing – she'd apparently missed hearing about what happened to them because she was enjoying her honeymoon-turned-holiday.

To this day, Ianto Jones winces when she cracks her knuckles (even though she'd apologized a dozen times since then).

She'd drifted then, from job to job, but that rather unfortunate incident with the moon was off-putting to potential employers. Run over a couple of Cybermen with a lorry while you're fleeing for your life in an incident you don't even remember and you're usually forgiven for it. Rescue a hospital full of patients on the moon by stating the obvious and you're a loony.

Of course, that was before the alien version of the Titanic nearly crash landed on London. Torchwood, naturally, had issued a statement from their Cardiff branch, but not everyone was stupid enough to believe the fairy tale they concocted for the barely-averted disaster.

The Health and Safety job was about the only thing she could manage to scrounge up, far beneath her prospects, but that was fine. It was a pretty good job, too. She got to put her brain to some good use, doing fact checking and such, and it involved a lot of field work. And there were absolutely no aliens or secret government agents involved.

Well, at least until Adipose Industries.

The whole thing was fishy from the get-go, a weight-loss drug that took off exactly so much fat and had no side-effects. She did some digging – well, she tried to at any rate. Both she and this reporter, Penny, got caught and were not so politely told to get out and stop snooping around. Not that it'd stop either one of them, though, and she'd even managed to lift that Foster woman's pen before things went mad (best pen she'd ever had, really, very wizard, and she could see why Foster liked it).

Torchwood apparently had been monitoring the place, too. Their team burst in, all waving their guns and threatening, and the whole thing just went to pieces. She and Penny ended up running for their lives and hiding in a maintenance cupboard while they fought it out. Penny was completely hysterical by this point, so she slapped her, accidentally knocking her into the secret backup alien computer and giving them both a good scare. From there, it was a simple matter of ripping out wires and finding something to short them with. Those necklaces Adipose Industries were giving out proved to be very good for that. Later on, she learned that they'd managed to inadvertently hack the system and shut it off rather than short it out, but that was the end of another job.

By that point, Donna decided the universe was trying to tell her something. She joined up with Torchwood, promptly spent her first day dealing with an alien invasion, and saved the day with a bit of string, some batteries and a bit of wire. It was actually a yo-yo she bought in the toy shop across the street so that Mickey could cannibalize it for the parts to their alien-busting doodad, but by the end of the week the story had already mutated into something quite bizarre. Things had a habit of doing that around here.

Over the course of the next few years, she runs into more aliens, saves the day with obvious mundane things like common sense and math, and her reputation mutates further. Such as that one time with the supposedly evil statues that made people disappear: under observation, they seemed to be harmless enough stone, but they had some time-traveled victims who had evidence to the contrary, including some warnings about how they moved when you weren't looking. She took a bit of Spock to the first one she saw and when the rubble didn't move after not looking at it, the rest of her team followed suit. Subsequent retellings replaced the stone-shattering doohickey with a drill, a sledgehammer, and her right fist, in that order. The latest variation had her yell at it until it destroyed itself.

She'd discovered it was a bit of a game for the other members of Torchwood to tell her embellished tale to the newbies and see how many bought it. In the face of some of the things they'd seen, little stupid games like this were life-savers. Similar stories followed Mickey around like a cloud, though she'd never have suspected he really was from a parallel universe – she'd always thought it was part of the myths surrounding him (though she'd let him have it when he admitted he was the same guy in the hospital who'd asked if she was a regenerating alien). Still, it made sense somewhat, given he'd sometimes cock up his history so badly that the only explanation besides coming from a different Earth was brain damage.

When the Cybermen were finally defeated and the rift sealed, business went back to normal. Mostly. Pete Tyler came back with a fully grown daughter and the parallel version of his wife. She didn't interact with them overtly much even after the girl came to work for Torchwood. Research was not her department – the last alien computer she touched had been at Adipose and that had been something of a harebrained 'shut off the glowing alien computer before it kills us' thing. However, she did see Rose Tyler around occasionally, usually when some form of wacky alien was attempting to invade and they needed a more diplomatic approach, or around the office during break. Poor girl looked lost half the time and Mickey pointed out it was because she'd lost the love of her life, this doctor fellow, on the other world.

There was all kinds of chaos in the interim – aliens were fleeing the darkness, stars were going out, and they had no idea what was causing it.

And then came Sarah Jane Smith and her neighbors, who had uncovered a time-warping alien in their local fairground. Said alien, Eve (really, very Biblical), explained that reality itself was collapsing everywhere, in every time and everything was going to disappear if someone didn't do something. From there on out, everyone's priority in Torchwood was to essentially find a way back to Rose's doctor. It was a crapshoot, the walls of reality were collapsing, and even if the jumpers hurt the atmosphere, there wouldn't be a planet (or much of anything, really) if they didn't find this doctor, so they went ahead with using the jury-rigged amalgam of a machine to punch through.

When the stars started returning, there was a massive 'we're still alive' party. She couldn't remember any of it past a certain point, though, and a sleeper cell of invading aliens decided to take advantage of the situation the next morning. It was a bit of a trick with the hangovers, but they'd managed to drive them back with a couple of giant magnets, several cans of Dr. McShane's Nitro-9a, a forklift, and a sonic doodad cooked up by Dr. Sato that turned out to be very good at opening doors.

Needless to say, that event mutated into a highly entertaining tale.

And shortly after that was when their new, new, new consultant clocked in for the first time – the Spaceman, also known as the Doctor, Destroyer of Just About Everything Including Your Toaster.

He was not what anyone expected in the least. Oh, no doubt that he was clever, but he was a complete and utter disaster magnet with a child's attention span and a tremendous gob. He was just as likely to talk your ear off as he was to save your arse and always had a habit of cutting it a little too close for comfort. And sometimes he just didn't even go in the right direction at all – like the time with the giant lizard! He just started walking off on his own in the complete opposite direction and that mission only got worse from there on out. She had to free herself, avoid certain maiming, get a crossbow and take care of it on her own (admittedly, there was this other thing going on at the time that could have been just as equally damaging, but still... she had yet to forgive him for literally leaving her hanging like that).

And all this led to her current situation.

"Could you just... you know, tell them we're related?"

She stared.

"Please?" the Doctor begged, pouring on the totally innocent face that always promised disaster. "It's just for today, until they're gone!"

"And why should I do that? What's the point?" she asked. "And why me?"

"Well, see, the representatives always check the species and Earth, good old Earth, is supposed to be full of humans – not that it is completely – but the thing is, it'd be very, very bad if they had cause to think I'm not entirely human, so to speak, since in theory I might be smuggling you lot information and my species doesn't exactly exist here," he babbled off in response and then hurriedly added, "Also we sort of share a bit of DNA, sort of. Maybe just enough. People seem to mistake us for siblings already! Anyway, if you say we're related, then they scan you and you're human so they don't scan me and take me away, which would upset Rose and, well, she's never been one to back down..."

"Back up, Alien Boy! What did you just say?" she demanded, jabbing a finger at his chest. "We share DNA?"

"Well, yes, but an instantaneous biological metacrisis is very complicated," he started, now looking more than a little alarmed. "But, basically, you're sort of... like my mother, in the extremely loose, convoluted sense of the word -"

"Oi, dumbo! Do I look like I'm old enough to be your mother?" she shouted.

"Well, technically, I was born two months –"

"I'll technical you in a minute, Spaceman!"

"Sorry! Sorry!" the Doctor said hastily, backing off a bit. "But they're not going to like it if they find out I'm an alien, not one bit, and it'll be bad – more Judoon, not to mention, I'll end up in prison somewhere – so, Donna, please help me with this?"

She let him sit in the adorable puppy gaze of doom stage for three minutes.

"Fine," she relented, throwing up her arms. "I'll tell them you're my half-brother."

"Oh, Donna Noble, thank you!" he shouted, practically burying her in a delighted hug. "You're brilliant!"

"Oi! Personal space!" she yelled, and he bounced back, grinning sheepishly and stuffing his hands in his pockets like a child.

"I mean it," he said, still grinning like a madman. "You really are."

She glared at him and then sighed, turning away. "I think I'll tell them you were dropped on your head as a baby."

"Oi! Watch it, Earth Girl!"

Yep, definitely cursed.

AN: The universe insists there's a power vacuum. Someone always steps up. Pete's World Ace and Sarah Jane Smith decided they wanted casual mention.

Sorta linked to Amarantos, but equally can stand alone.