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“I cannot believe you’re angry about this!”
Donna was near-fuming herself, and had half a mind to put her hood back up and start walking through the snow in the opposite direction. She didn’t care where it took her, really, just away from him so long as he was being totally unreasonable.
So maybe she hadn’t expected immediate joy when the time had finally come to summon him back to the Oodsphere. Truthfully, she’d expected a lot of shocked “Whats” and staring, which had happened. But now once the surprise had worn off, it seemed he wasn’t happy to know she was alright at all.
“Of course I’m angry!” The Doctor shouted back at her. “Who wouldn’t be angry? You ate all of my cereal and faked your death for three years!”
“Sure, you get to be angry about fake-dying and bloody cereal, because your mind-wipe plan was so much better, was it?” She snapped, pleased to note he flinched and took a step backward.
“Donna–”
“I said no, and you were gonna do it anyway,” she said, and was ashamed to hear the waver in her voice. She used the fluffy trim on the end of her coat sleeve to wipe at her eyes. “So- so yeah, when Ood Sigma showed up and offered a third option, I took it. Sue me.”
The righteous indignation in his eyes had been utterly doused, yet still he argued, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She winced. It had been the one part to not sit well with her this whole time. The Ood had implanted false memories in the Doctor’s head to make him think Donna had actually died and that he’d dropped her off with her family to explain the lack of a body once she’d gone with them. Only the promise from Ood Sigma that it was a temporary measure had allowed her to go through with it.
“The treatment they wanted to try, no one knew whether it was gonna work. It was a total experiment.” She’d spent the better part of it in dreadful pain and telepathically induced comas on and off, which she didn’t think she ought to tell him just now. “It wouldn’t have been good for you to see that. It would’ve killed you not being able to do anything–”
“I thought I killed you.”
Donna’s mouth snapped shut. She looked at him, really looked at the lines on his face and the bags under his eyes, how red-rimmed they were and the near-sickly pallor.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she told him.
The Doctor looked away, a bitter smile curling his lips as he shook his head. “Of course it was. If I’d just regenerated – if I hadn’t been so vain, thought myself so clever–”
“Then the TARDIS and I would’ve burned in that incinerator,” Donna pointed out. “Look, the metacrisis had to happen. We were always heading for it, like you said. Wanting to live as you are doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“You wouldn’t say that about me now,” he confessed to the snow. “There’s things I’ve done – that I’ve almost become – since you were gone, and- and–”
“Oh, Spaceman.” Donna took a step nearer, closing some of that awful distance between them. “Tell me you haven’t been all on your own. You need someone.”
“I needed you, and I thought you were dead because of me.” He met her gaze at last, and the sheer depth of despair there was enough to break her heart. “How could I just go on traveling with someone else, Donna? I loved you.”
Her breath hitched at hearing the past-tense. She should have realized this was bound to break them, one way or the other. Even if she’d been cured of the metacrisis, even if she’d missed him every day of the last three years so much it felt hard to breathe sometimes.
Donna’s head bowed. “But not anymore.”
She missed his eyes widening, but not the panic in his voice. “What? No, Donna, that’s not what I meant. I just…”
He reached out slowly, stopping just short of her like he was afraid. Donna took his hand and heard him suck in a breath. She was having to blink rather heavily to keep her vision clear and felt ridiculous for it. They’d held hands an innumerable amount of times. But not in so long. Slowly, she lifted his hand and laid it against her cheek, not even caring that it felt like ice out here in the cold. It was him.
“You’re really here,” he breathed. “You’re safe. You’re alive.”
“Yeah. And I’m not going anywhere,” Donna promised. “Can’t ever get rid of me for too long, Time Boy.”
Slowly, a smile – and a real one at that – spread over his face, chasing some of that pain and weariness away. It wasn’t perfect, but they both knew healing took time.
It didn’t stop him from drawing her into his arms, and Donna felt her eyes close as she held on tight as she possibly could. He wasn’t the only one who needed this desperately.
“I never want to get rid of you,” he told her before pressing his lips to her hair.
Donna smiled, hands rubbing up and down his back. They stood like that for a long time, slowly melting into each other, relearning how they fit together. She could stay like this for another three years if it was possible.
“Donna?” He asked, voice soft in her ear. She could only hum vaguely in acknowledgment. “Why did you take the cereal?”
It took her a while to gather her thoughts beyond missed you, love you to respond. “Well, Ood Sigma didn’t know how long it’d take, and I didn’t know if they’d have a stove or anything. So I thought, you know, pack dry foods that are gonna last – Oi, are you laughing at me?”
He was. She could feel his body trembling with the effort to hold it in, but he let it burst from him now that he’d been caught.
She pulled back to fix him with a look but found she couldn’t hold it when faced with the joyful grin on his lips. The Doctor seized her face between both hands and kissed her deeply, and it wasn’t fair how even after all this time she could get so lost in it, heart pounding and mouth opening eagerly to his.
He pulled back panting, and rasped, “That’s my Donna.”
She kissed him till her lips were numb, whether from the cold or him was anyone’s guess, then finally went home to the TARDIS, arm in arm with her Spaceman. Even if they didn’t immediately leave the Oodsphere.
Three years was a lot to make up for.