lizbee | FIC: Motherf***ing Snapes On The Motherf***ing Astral Plane (Ten/Snape, Donna, PG-13)

Title: Motherf***ing Snapes On The Motherf***ing Astral Plane
Summary: It's not easy, being a Snapewife. Especially when you have to juggle your astral marriage with your career as Last of the Time Lords.
Rated: PG-13
Notes: Begun for the

churchontime challenge "the Doctor marries someone on the astral plane". Pwned by deadlines. Rose undefeated from the ashes with a dose of extra crack supplied by

cesario. Spoilers for fandom_wank and Deathly Hallows. Quotes a small portion of LadyDarkness's astral marriage vows. The original wank can be found here.

Motherf***ing Snapes On The Motherf***ing Astral Plane
by LizBee

"What," said Donna, "is that?"

She was standing in the middle of the console room -- what had previously been the console room, base of operations for travel, adventures and arguments. Right now, it looked more like a teenager's bedroom, if the teenager was an emotionally disturbed goth with a desperate crush on a puffy, middle-aged Englishman.

The Doctor was busy with a black candle, melting the wax into improbably ornate patterns. "What?" he said.

"Let me guess," said Donna, "we're going to see the Cure, Morrissey's an alien, and you're getting in the mood for stopping his invasion."

"What?" said the Doctor.

"No, I've got it, planet of the Anne Rice fans!"

"What?" said the Doctor. "Ow!" He scraped a layer of rapidly-hardening wax off his thumb. "That hurt," he added, sucking on the offending digit. Donna averted her eyes.

"Wait," she said, looking more closely at the clippings, photos and print-outs that covered the time rotor, "okay, now that's really weird. You -- I mean -- that's Professor Snape, isn't it? Greasy hair, hooked nose, hates small speccy wizard boys--"

"'S not greasy," said the Doctor around a mouthful of thumb, "and it's an aquiline nose."

"Pudgy, isn't he?" Donna added, "anyway, what's he doing all over the console room? How are we supposed to travel the universe if you've got fictional character pin-ups all over the place? Ooh, what's this?"

Her hand closed around a sheet of paper covered in ornate calligraphy. "Don't touch that!" said the Doctor, but it was too late, she was already reading.

"'Dear Severus,' -- what? I knew you were barmy, Doctor, but -- 'This is my way to let you know I still live by the Vows I pledged to you' -- you know you have a capital 'V' there, right?"

"It's poetic," the Doctor muttered.

"'I still am so faithful to you' -- okay, that doesn't scan. Not to mention it's a big fat lie, I saw the way you were talking to that squid woman the other day--"

"The Kalmar people are very tactile -- that was a platonic gesture of--"

"--Grabbing your bits with a tentacle? Come on, Doctor, you might be crazy, but I'm not an idiot."

The Doctor, wisely, said nothing.

"So," said Donna when she'd read the rest of the page, "you're marrying a fictional character on the astral plane."

"It was a very common practice among my people," the Doctor lied. "My dead people. My dead people who died and left me all alone--"

One of Donna's better traits was that she was totally immune to emo Time Lord guilt trips.

"That's crazy," she said. "In fact, you're absolutely bonkers, and if you don't blow out those candles and clear off the console, I'll -- I'll," she faltered, unable to come up with a sufficiently terrible threat. "It's a bleeding fire hazard," she said.

"You just don't understand my love," the Doctor told her.

"No," said Donna. "Thank God." She sat down, still clutching the Doctor's love notes. "Now, are you going to go back to normal -- normal for you, I mean -- or do I have to tape over your video of Truly Madly Deeply?"

"No!" cried the Doctor, too quickly. Donna smirked.

"So how'd you get into this, anyway?" she asked. "Isn't it a bit beneath the dignity of the great and powerful last of the Time Lords?"

"I'll have you know that we Time Lords practically invented fandom," said the Doctor. "Why, Rassilon himself wrote the first Kirk/Spock slash, and Omega responded with the first Mary Sue. Every young Time Lord went through an initiation -- we were shown an abyss, a fracture in reality that contained all the breadth and power of time and space and Rule Thirty-Four -- that is, we had to look at fanfiction.net and watch our childhoods crash and burn before our eyes."

"You know, I'm really not drunk enough for this conversation," said Donna.

"Anyway, I was on the run from some flesh-eating aliens who had developed a taste for Gallifreyan flesh, and I decided to lead them into a cinema, since they have no night vision to speak of so the dark and light and sound would be confusing -- anyway, I ended up in an otherwise-empty theatre, and once I'd reduced the aliens to a pile of dust, I figured I might as well stay and watch the movie. It was Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. And it was terrible."

"Right."

"But there was Snape! All dark and brooding, and he was evil but he was redeemed -- so I found the books, actually I skipped forward a few years and got all seven, plus the encyclopedia, and read them. And it was wonderful."

"Okay," said Donna, "so out of one of the richest, most detailed fictional universes to appear in the last couple of decades, you decide to become psychotically attached to the evil, greasy git who bullies kids."

"He's just misunderstood!" the Doctor snapped. "Harry was a nasty little brat who never gave him a chance -- and he didn't mean to be evil, he was just young and misguided, and sure, he destroyed part of the universe, but anyone can make a mistake--"

"Which book did he destroy the universe in?"

"You know, in the illustrations for the first few American editions, he had a little goatee."

There was silence as Donna processed this information.

"So," she said at last, "you ... write fanfic?"

"My AU about how Sirius and Snape were secretly friends until Snape turned evil and Sirius left England to go traveling but eventually they met again and fought a lot and sometimes teamed up to fight evil and eventually Snape was redeemed and they fell in love has over five hundred reviews!"

For the first time in her life, Donna was speechless.

"I also wrote a genfic where Ginny left school and became a waitress, until Snape made her his apprentice and they blew stuff up together."

"That's ... almost in character. Comparatively." Donna contemplated the wax-covered chaos before her, and rallied. "But there's no way I'm going to let you scamper off and marry your favourite fictional sociopath -- and if you really think he's whispering poetry in your Martian ear while you sleep, let me tell you, mate, we're going straight home and I'm ditching your skinny arse and getting a real job."

The Doctor looked appropriately chastened. He even took down some of the more pornographic fan art.

Deep within her magnificent chest, Donna's heart softened.

"Tell you what," she said, "how about we find a nice, non-central room for this shrine -- somewhere out of the way--" where the TARDIS could conveniently lose it, she promised silently -- "and then we'll have an adventure--" on a planet where they'd never heard of the damn wizard books -- "and put it out of our minds for a bit."

The Doctor nodded.

Still, as he removed the pictures, something compelled her to say, "Harry can't have been that awful to Snape. I mean, he named his kid after the man."

The Doctor rounded on her, a millennium of power and pain and gravitas in his face.

"The epilogue," he hissed, "isn't canon."

"Right. Of course. Don't mind me, then."

When she was sure he was properly distracted, she slipped away, down to the library. Almost lost beneath a pile of AOL sample disks from 1996 was a computer, a sleek, wafer-thin Mac with the passwords for most major military organisations and corporations saved in its browser.

And, of course, the Doctor's fanfiction.net account.

Donna smiled as she opened wank_report.

end