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The Doctor regenerates. Halfway across space and time, Donna Noble begins to dream.
It’s not that she didn’t dream before, she knows that, technically, everyone dreams. But she’s never remembered her dreams. Well, almost never, but the few she did were so ordinary they might as well have not existed at all, stress dreams about being late for work or being naked, dreams so formulaic in their mundanity that they weren’t really worth remembering.
These were less dreams and more flashes. A landscape made of diamonds sparkling under the sun, an icy planet filled with singing, a starry sky that stretched forever and ever. Thinking about them made her feel sick in a way she couldn’t quite describe, like she was hot on the inside.
So she tries not to. She goes to her new secretary job and has dinner with her friends and at night she dreams the most wonderful dreams. Sometimes she catches herself starting a story and then stopping, confused, with no idea what she was about to say and a killer migraine. Sometimes, if she looks at something long enough and holds her thoughts at just the right angle, she has a moment where she understands exactly how it works and how to fashion it into any number of useful devices. Sometimes she will say something and Mum and Granddad will look at her in a strange sad way and she will ask them why and Mum mutter something about her father or Granddad will throw out some nonsense about what he saw last week. These moments make the hot feeling come back and so she tries not to think about them either.
But if Donna was anything, she was too curious for her own good.
She once saw a spy thriller where the rather attractive male lead had used a mirror to look around corners, and she finds herself navigating her mind the same way. Unable to look straight at these thoughts, she examines them in her periphery, thinking without thinking. She wonders how she learned to do that, and the hot feeling returns and with it the desire to look away, to forget. So she begins to look at that thought from around corners too.
Donna doesn’t know where all this curiosity came from. Except for the hot patches in her memory she cannot touch, she has always been ordinary to the point of boredom, to the point where she had somehow missed every alien encounter the world had gone through in the past ten years, as if they were somehow avoiding her. Scuba diving during the Cyberman Invasion, asleep during the planets in the sky, passed out in an alleyway when the news said everyone had turned into the same man. She didn’t even think she believed in all that anyway, I mean how could all that happen without her even knowing?
(Darkly, she remembers that there are things in her own mind that are happening without her even knowing)
Out of all the dreams, she is most afraid of the ones that don’t feel like they happened to her. Memories of things she cannot even describe, a child looking into a whirling vortex that curves in on itself over and over and over until she wakes up hotter than ever with a splitting pain in her head and her heart beating fast and irregular, four beats for every two. These she does not try to look at through the mirror around the corners of her mind; they feel like they do not belong to her.
In the end, what breaks her is almost laughable.
She is fighting with Nerys about Nerys’ wedding, something she seems to have taken as an opportunity to criticize everything about Donna’s own failed marriage to Lance, the creep who had vanished off the face of the earth. And she is talking about Donna’s disaster of a reception and Donna is explaining that, well, let her try to recalibrate a rubbish 3-generations-out-of-date alien controller with nothing but a sonic screwdriver and suddenly she is so so hot.
She remembers her wedding reception twice, once from the perspective of a woman who is not quite her and once from a man who definitely isn’t.
Then she remembers everything else.
And it’s all in front of god damn Nerys who thinks she’s having some kind of psychotic break and relishing every minute of it. No, Nerys, you stupid cow, she wants to yell, I’m actually two species and one and a half people shoved into one body and I’m mostly Donna but not all the way, not Donna enough to keep being Donna like this because god its hot, I feel like I’m burning up Nerys, it feels like I’m being turned inside out, I need to call Granddad, Wilf, Granddad? No, Wilf. Wait, is it weird to call him Wilf, Nerys? Am I still his granddaughter? I can’t think.
(it feels a little like regenerating, she both remembers and doesn’t)
The next few hours are a blur, an ambulance, a heart monitor beating in two time, running, always running, making it up the hill somehow and falling into Wilfred’s arms.
In a voice that’s not quite her own she says that this might be goodbye, well, goodbye for a little bit, you never really know with the way time and space curls up, and if she could just get these calculations right she would be back where she belonged, well, back where he belonged which meant she belonged, right? And he is holding her so so tight even though she knows she must be burning.
Here is what the Doctor never understood about Donna Noble: she was fundamentally changed by him way before that change was made physical. Donna became curious and open to wonder, and that didn’t go away with a memory wipe. She would have always reasoned her way here eventually; even without that little piece of him in her, they were the same in that regard.
Here’s another thing the Doctor never understood, or never wanted to think about: she had never wanted to forget. She would rather have died intact.
But what the DoctorDonna knew now, with years of forgetting on her back, was that she wasn’t ready to die.
She has Wilf/Granddad drive her to a spot she could feel pulling her, muttering directions as she keels over in the backseat, burning holes in the leather and glowing like a Christmas tree. They pull over in a small grove of trees by the mountainside, and she kisses him on the forehead with the emotions that came from a long life as Donna Noble and tells him not to come after her with all the self-sacrificing of the Doctor.
And then she walks to the small crack in space-time she felt from so far away and lets herself fall.
See, the DoctorDonna knew she couldn’t keep both minds. And she had tried plain humanity, oh she had tried it, and she couldn’t forget like that again. And she couldn’t lose those years as Donna, that pure wonder she had experienced. So she holds tight the core of both human and Time Lord, Doctor and Donna, as the vortex strips everything else away. She barely notices the burning stop, as her body finally does what it had been trying to the whole time, and regenerates.
A boy wakes up on Gallifrey. When he is old enough to see the vortex, he runs, as if he remembers somewhere deep inside how it had stripped him raw. When it is time to choose his title, a voice inside him whispers the Doctor and that’s what he becomes.
When he is old by human standards but far too young by Time Lord ones, he feels that deep desire to run and experience and steals a TARDIS, vanishing into the stars.
Years and years and eight bodies later, a retinal scan by the Master identifies him as half-human, which makes him feel hot inside, so he tries not to think about it.
After he loses Rose, devastated, something reaches across time and space and brings him a woman. Something in him twitches in remembrance, his hearts skipping a beat. But then she is gone and that is that, until she comes back again and again, as if the two of them were bound together by time and space.
Donna makes him feel complete. Not in the way of a lover, like Rose did, but in the sense of being perfect compliments. They just…work. They think in similar ways, tracing almost identical paths to Adipose industries until they finally collide again. They both notice how suspiciously the murder mystery mirrors one of Agatha Christie’s novels, and solve the crime together. In the Library, they are mirror images when Strackman Lux tries to give them a contract, ripping it up in perfect unison.
The Doctor sometimes thinks about the way the Ood talked to them. They had called them what translated to the Doctor Donna in English, but with his more subtle grasp on the Ood language the Doctor knew they had been using that phrase to refer not to the two of them together, but to them each separately. When Donna merges with his alternate self he thinks he understands.
(He doesn’t, not really)
And god he loves her so much, he’s never met anyone like her, he can’t let her die, so he makes her forget. Something in him tells him this has to happen, that she has to forget. He thinks this is the voice of his moral compass. In reality, it is the same sense that tells him which timelines can be crossed and messed with and which ones are fixed, telling him Donna must forget in order for him to live.
Later, he sacrifices himself for Wilf without a second thought. He doesn’t understand it; he tries to save innocent lives when possible but so many have died for him, what’s one more? But he feels a connection to this man so strong and fierce that he knows he has to save him. He tells himself it is the inherent value of human life, but feels that it is something more.
And when the consequences of that action finally catch up to him, the Doctor regenerates.
Halfway across space and time, Donna Noble begins to dream.