Work Text:
Donna Temple Noble sat on her grandfather’s hill, waiting for the stars to come out. June had been cool so far, and an all right breeze rippled the skirt of her dress as she sat back in her folding chair. “You’re gonna think I’m crazy, Gramps.”
“I never!” Wilf insisted. Technically it wasn’t Wilfred Mott’s hill, he only pitched his tent and his telescope on the hill that climbed from his daughter’s back garden.
Donna twisted her wedding ring round her finger, watching it shine in the dying evening light. “We’ve always talked about silly things, you and me, all sorts, but have we ever discussed reincarnation? Like, do you actually believe in reincarnation?”
Wilf cocked his head. After a second, his hand flew up, rubbing at the back of his neck, like he’d just recalled he had a crick. He pushed out a laugh. “Like them Buddhists believe, you mean? Like a man could just die and come back all over again in a new body, with a new face? I can’t say as I know anything about that.”
Donna shrugged, twisting her ring another turn. “But it’s not so crazy, right? With everything else that goes on in the world, believing something like that, it wouldn’t be so bad, would it?”
“Of course not, sweetheart,” Wilf said. But he shrugged. A shrug wasn’t really an ‘of course’ gesture, was it now? “You believe anything you like.”
“It’s just--something happened the other day. And you’re gonna think it was ridiculous. That I’m ridiculous.”
“Go on,” Wilf said, watching her face very intently now.
Donna looked the other way and sighed. “Only I was watching telly with Shaun, and this program came on about Pompeii, in ancient Rome, and the volcano and everything. And I just felt like--they showed this market, and my heart just sort of--it twisted. Like they were people I knew. Isn’t that strange?”
“You’re a good person is all,” Wilf said. “You’ve got a kind soul. You always have. No matter what that Mr. Haverdale in Year 8 said.”
Donna snorted. “But it wasn’t like that, Gramps. It was more like--it felt familiar. It felt like--well, like grief. Like real, actual grief. Like I’d been there. I can’t explain it any other way. But I think maybe I was there. In another life.”
“Well,” Wilf said carefully. “I mean, you could have been, right? In another life? Who knows?”
“Then again,” Donna said. “Fountain Six search engine commercials make me tear up these days, so what do I know?”
“Oh, yeah. They’ve got some good ones,” Wilf agreed. Light was draining steadily from the sky now. The first stars were winking into view, but instead of bending to his telescope, Gramps kept on studying her face.
“What?” Donna said, hurriedly dabbing at the corner of her mouth. “Have I got a crumb or something? You’re just thinking to mention it now?”
“No, no, it’s not that,” Wilf said hurriedly. “It’s just--I’m just wondering--is everything okay, sweetheart? Only you and Shaun just moved into that lovely new house, and here you are on a Saturday night. You just seem--”
“I’m all right, Gramps. Really,” Donna said. “We’re just settling in, is all. And it’s Shaun’s roleplay night.”
“Donna Noble!” Wilf said. “I appreciate you’re a modern and progressive woman in a modern, progressive marriage, but I don’t know what to say to that.”
“With his mates, Gramps. It’s a game.”
“Oh,” Wilf said, dropping his shoulders. “But you didn’t want to play?”
“Course I do,” Donna said. “But I’m not gonna tell him that until the third or fourth week. Then I can use the guilt to make him bend the rules in my favor. Just a tiny bit.”
“Oh, well, that’s all right then!”
Wilf laughed, and Donna laughed harder, and for a moment it was just like it used to be. But Gramps was still watching her face more than the stars, and a few minutes after that, Donna’s mother Sylvia came up the hill from the house with tea and biscuits for them both. The good biscuits. After nine P.M. If Donna hadn’t known better, she’d have been certain her mum was an alien imposter.
It didn’t used to be like this. Gramps used to be all smiles and laughter when Donna was around, the one person in her life she felt like she never disappointed, no matter what she did, while nothing was ever good enough for Mum. Now Gramps acted like Donna was made of Mum’s best china, while Mum was… nice. When did the whole world turn upside down? Right about the time everyone said Donna slept through planets in the sky, it seemed.
What could that possibly have been about? And what else did she miss?
***
When Donna got home that night at nearly half past ten, Shaun’s mates’ cars were still lined up in the driveway, so she went in the back door and up the back stair, avoiding the dining room where the boys and Indira would still be playing. Then she changed into her sweats, her vest with the lights on, and her trainers and slipped right back out the back again, going for a run.
When had Donna become a woman who runs? She didn’t know that either. She used to be the first to make fun of her mates for running, flapping her elbows and telling Nerys she looked like a chicken with a nervous disorder and why would anyone do that to themselves? And here Donna was, out for a jog in the dark like some kind of weirdo health nut.
She didn’t always run at a set time of day, and some days she didn’t run at all. She didn’t have a regular route, and not just because the neighborhood was new. Sometimes she made it as much as four days without running at all. But the longer she went without, the more anxious she started to feel. Like something was coming for her, and she needed to be ready. Like her life could depend on a good sprint at a moment’s notice. How silly was that?
But she never ran scared. When Donna was out, her feet finding their rhythm on the pavement, she never felt like anything was chasing her then. Quite the opposite, in fact. She breathed in, and out, and in again, and felt the night air draw in around her like a big fluffy blanket.
A big, fluffy, entirely nonsensical blanket. When had running become a source of comfort?
Let it go, Donna. It doesn’t work half so well if you’re gonna go thinking about it, she reminded herself. Just run. You’re all right. Run.
***
A few weeks later, that feeling of being chased cornered Donna in her home office. She’d been out to run just that morning, but it caught her anyway. It was not the first time Donna had found herself quietly shaking, struggling for breath when writing an email. But it was the first time Shaun came home and found her. The first time he, apparently, texted Wilf.
The first time Gramps came over on a Sunday morning with a business card in his hand.
“Shaun said he got home, and you’d turned on every light in the house and thrown all the blinds open wide,” Wilf said, from his seat at her kitchen table.
Donna went for nonchalant. “So? Is wanting a little light a crime now? I don’t appreciate being the subject of gossip, you know. Not even for my two favorite people in the world.”
“A little flattery will get you, well, very much farther than it should with me. It’s in the Grandparents’ Code, that is, so I’m only doing my duty. But right now I’m worried, darling. You don’t have to be brave with me, you know. You can just tell me. What happened the other day?”
Donna sighed, and turned back to the sink. She’d been doing dishes when Gramps came in. They had a dishwasher, of course. Nice one, top of the range, or so the man at the shop had said. But they always said that, didn’t they? And it may have been the most expensive dishwasher she’d ever owned, but given her history with similar machines at Mum’s, she still wasn’t quite ready to trust a dishwasher to get all the sticky food bits off without a little help.
So she focused on the plate in her hands, working the sponge at a bit of egg. “I’m all right, Gramps. Really. I just came over silly for a minute.”
“Just the minute before Shaun came home?”
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“And all those lights, and the windows and everything, all that in a minute?”
Donna scrubbed harder. “More or less.”
“Hogwash,” Wilf said, rapping his knuckles on her kitchen table for emphasis. “I know when you’re fibbing, my girl, I always have.”
Donna flipped him a grin over her shoulder. “My secondary school diary says otherwise.”
Wilf raised his chin. “I would never stoop to reading a young person’s diary. But I would like it known, for the record, that I was fully aware of your frequent abuse of that tree outside your room.”
“You never!” Donna protested. “If you’d known, then Mum would’ve known, and if Mum would’ve known she’d have chopped it down herself.”
“It was me knowing what kept your Mum from finding out! Or did you think the squeaky hinge on that window oiled itself twice a month?”
Donna froze with a plate halfway to the stack. That window had squeaked. Except when it didn’t, about every other week.
“Thanks, Gramps,” she said quietly.
“You’re quite welcome,” Wilf said. “Now what was it got to you the other day?”
Donna scrubbed a glass, worrying the ring of juice around the bottom until it dissolved away. “It was nothing. I was replying to an email, from Shaun. He’d asked what groceries we needed.”
“And?”
“And I thought, I just had this thought. What if I write this email, and I walk outside and I get hit by a bus, and this email is the last thing Shaun or anyone ever hears from me? Like I said, silly.”
“It don’t sound so silly to me. Lots of us think that sometimes. Wonder what people’ll remember when we’re gone,” Wilf said.
“Don’t you start!”
“And you always did like to have the last word. Might as well make it a good’un.”
“Oy!” Donna said.
Wilf smirked, but it quickly faded. “How often do you find yourself thinking like that?”
Donna reached for a bowl. She couldn’t even see any food sticking on this one, just a bit of cereal milk that rinsed right out, but she scrubbed at it anyway. “Not that often. Maybe, like, one in twenty emails?”
And she knew, she knew he was going to ask. “How many emails a day do you write? For your job?”
“Maybe twenty,” Donna said softly.
“Oh, luv…” Wilf breathed.
Donna slammed the bowl onto the stack on the counter, waiting to all go in the dishwasher at once at the end. Hard enough that she immediately picked it up again to make sure she hadn’t cracked it. “It’s fine! I’m all right. It’s not that big a deal, Gramps. Emails are just so-- They sit there. When someone’s gone, you’re still carrying all those emails and texts and voicemails around with you. Anything you haven’t deleted, they’re just right there. Like ghosts.”
When she set the bowl on the stack again, it rattled. Her hand was shaking. When had she started shaking again? She snatched a dish towel from the oven door, squeezing her hand dry and holding on.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Gramps standing up. “Don’t, just don’t!” she ordered. “Sit!”
“Yes ma’am.” Wilf sank back down, but that look on his face only got worse.
Donna kept squeezing the towel, thinking of her Dad. That’s why she kept obsessing over ghost emails, wasn’t it? Because of Dad? It had to have been. “I just hate the thought that the last thing anyone might have to remember me by is a flipping grocery list. Low fat yogurt! Ice cream! Grapes, NO SEEDS! Honestly, whose terrible idea was grapes with seeds still in? But that could be that. Could be me. Just ‘ice cream,’ echoing into eternity.”
Wilf shuddered. “That’s awful, sweetheart.”
Donna dropped the towel and turned back to the dishes. “It’s not. It’s really not that bad. Silliness. I’m over it.”
“And the lights, and all the windows?”
She shrugged. “Even sillier. Don’t worry about it!”
“‘Course I worry. I always worry. That’s also in the Code. Which is why--I think maybe it’d be good for you to talk to someone.”
Donna glanced back, and saw he’d set that business card flat on the table. The card that had been in his hand since he arrived. The one they’d both very carefully avoided acknowledging til now.
“Got someone in mind have you?” Donna said, digging her sponge between the tines of a fork.
“A friend--well, a friend of a friend, if I’m being honest--she suggested a therapist. This lady’s very good, she said. Well, that’s good, I said, nothing but the best for my Donna--”
“So I’m going to skip right past the part where you’re obviously not calling me koo-koo crazypants,” Donna interrupted. “Counseling’s very good for some, I’m sure. But really, Gramps! I’m all right!”
“You keep saying that--”
“Yes! I do! People tend to repeat true things. Especially when certain other people aren’t listening!” She turned up the water pressure, trying to dislodge a particularly stubborn bit of vindaloo residue. Shaun had snuck down for a snack last night. Again. “But what could I possibly need counseling for? My extremely fulfilling marriage to my wonderful husband? Our big, beautiful new house? My relationship with my sweet, caring, elderly grandfather?”
“Oy! Not so much of the elderly,” said Wilf. “I’m not saying as you have a bad life, of course you don’t! But you’ve still--you’ve still been through so much, these last few years. What with your first fiance being killed by--being killed like he was. And losing your Dad, and then--well, everything. Life’s not easy for anyone. So if you need to talk to someone--”
“Life’s not easy?” Donna said, setting the fork aside in triumph and moving on to a spoon. “We won the lottery, Gramps! We literally won the lottery, on a triple rollover!” She looked back then, watching Wilf deflate.
“I know. I know you’re doing well. I just thought--”
“I know,” she said. “And I appreciate it. I love you, Gramps.”
“Love you too, sweetheart.”
He didn’t say another word about the therapist that day, though he left her business card on the table.
After Gramps went home, Donna stared at it a full ten seconds, before dropping it in the bin.
***
A month later, on a Friday night after work, Donna was out at the shops when she heard a woman’s panicked voice calling, “Ella? Ella Louise! Ella!”
Donna’s stomach twisted like a bow tie prepping itself for a black-tie ball, but quite reasonably, she assumed the problem was simple empathy. Tossing the dress she’d been waffling about over her shoulder like a cape, if superheroes left the hangers in, she marched right over to the woman. “You all right, luv?”
“No, no I’m not. Only I can’t find my little girl--” the woman said, her whole body vibrating.
Donna caught the woman’s shoulders, giving them a gentle squeeze. “We will. I’ve got you. She’s probably only playing hide and seek. Oy! You, come here!”
The last was not shouted in the face of the anxious mother, nor was it thrown after a child. It did an excellent job of summoning the shop lad from three aisles away.
Better yet, he was wearing a headset. Donna didn’t even bother explaining to the lad what was going on before snatching off the microphone clipped to his shirt, pressing the button, and announcing to every employee in the building, “Code Adam! Attention all employees, we have a Code Adam!”
“Ma’am, give that back!” groused the lad, snatching back his mic. “And what the heck--”
“Ma’am, is it?” said Donna.
“--is a Code Adam?” the lad finished.
Donna blinked. “They have that in America.” When had she been shopping in America? Never mind that now. “It means we have a missing child. So listen up!”
Donna reached for the shop lad’s microphone again, only this time he batted her hand back, and by now a middle aged woman with a gold star on her name badge and the distinct class of tired eyes common to retail managers was striding over, waving for Donna’s attention.
“Ma’am--” Gold Star began.
“Now they’re all saying it,” Donna muttered.
“I appreciate that the customer is conditioned to believe they’re always right, but you can’t just commandeer an employee’s microphone and order my staff around--”
Donna cut her off. “Perfect! Then you do it! We need employees blocking all the exits, making sure nobody leaves with a child matching this description--” The mother had her phone out now, looking for the best picture to show them, but Donna put a hand over the screen. “Don’t worry about that, luv. She’s going to have to describe your little girl over the headset for everyone anyway. So you just tell us: what’s her hair like? Skin color? What’s she wearing today?”
“Right,” the mother said. “She’s--she’s--”
The lights clicked on in Gold Star’s exhausted eyes then. Instantly, she thumbed her own microphone. “Listen up, everyone, we have a lost child. I need employees at every exit, whoever’s nearest, making sure no one leaves with a child matching the description I’m about to relay to you…”
***
Three minutes later, the whole thing was over.
Once Gold Star had confirmed the exits were covered, she and the rest of her staff spread out, combing the store alongside Donna and the girl’s mother. It was Donna who found the little one, hiding inside the circle of a rack of out of season coats at 50% off. The girl was young enough to find the whole thing terribly funny, right up until the moment Donna coaxed her out of the forest of coats and called her mum over. The instant the little girl saw her mother’s tight red face and open arms, she started to bawl uncontrollably.
The mother ran to her, and hugged her tight, stroking her hair. “Ella! I thought I’d lost you! Don’t you ever scare me like that again!”
Happy ending. It was over. But for some reason, Donna’s stomach twisted again, tighter than before.
Half in a daze, Donna waved one last time at the very relieved mother and made her way to the registers, unslinging the dress from her shoulder. She still wasn’t sure about it. She hadn’t even tried it on. But she could always return it.
As the cashier rung up her purchase, Gold Star appeared at Donna’s side, her expression shifting between annoyed and embarrassed before settling on relieved. “You really took charge with all that. God. But it all worked out, didn’t it?”
Donna looked over at her, but Donna’s eyes weren’t quite focusing right. “I’m sorry?”
“Thank you,” Gold Star said. “I’m trying to say thank you. Also--can I vote for you?”
“You what?”
“Are you running for office? I thought you might be.”
Donna half smiled. “No, no. Not me.”
She handed over her card, paid for the dress, and managed to stumble out to her little blue car.
Where she sat sobbing, thinking about that little girl called Ella, for a full thirty minutes before she could even turn the key.
***
When she got home that night, Shaun noticed she was quiet. Donna was never quiet. Shaun quietly texted Wilf. Gramps came over, and for a little while Donna distracted herself from the knot in her stomach by being furious with them both instead.
“I’m all right! Won’t you both give it a rest!”
But Wilf left the business card with Shaun this time, and while Donna could easily have taken it out of his wallet in the middle of the night and tossed this one away too--Shaun slept like a rock, while Donna hardly slept a wink that night--she didn’t.
Instead, on Monday morning, she called the number.
***
When it came time for Donna’s first session with Dr. McCormack, Wilf insisted on coming along. He’d even booked himself a session right after hers.
“You didn’t have to do that, Gramps,” Donna told him on the drive over. “I appreciate the solidarity, but I’m all right, really.”
“It wasn’t that, luv!” Wilf said. “I’ve got me own things, ‘aven’t I? I’ve lived a life. I’ve seen things. It’ll be good for me!”
“You’re the happiest soul I know! What’ll you and the poor woman even do for fifty minutes? You’ll be paying good money to play cards and have a laugh!”
Wilf shrugged. “There are worse ways to spend an hour.”
They parked the car, took the elevator up, and sat in the waiting room for about five minutes before Dr. McCormack came out. As she got up to follow the therapist in, Wilf squeezed Donna’s arm. It did nothing to dispel the tension gripping Donna’s shoulders, seeming to shove her down into what seemed like it should have been a quite comfortable chair.
She twisted her ring, and the therapist asked if she could start by asking Donna some questions. Donna nodded and kept twisting straight through them.
The woman asked why Donna had decided to come see her, and Donna explained about the funny turns she’d been having sometimes, seemingly ever since everybody else saw those planets supposedly appear in the sky. Dr. McCormack asked if Donna had been under any stress.
“Not really,” Donna said.
But when Dr. McCormack asked about grief and loss, Donna found herself going further back, even before the planets. She talked about Dad. She talked about Lance, her unfortunate rotter of a first fiance, killed on what was supposed to be their wedding day.
“What happened?” Dr. McCormack asked, and if that wasn’t genuine sympathy it was a remarkable impression.
“There were terrorists,” Donna explained. “It was in the news and everything. Lance and me, we both worked at H.C. Clements at the time, and they had these government contracts, and apparently secrets of all sorts locked up in the basement. So the terrorists--not foreigners, it wasn’t like that, don’t get the wrong idea--they dressed up like Santas, ‘cause it was Christmas, and they kidnapped me. I missed the church and the wedding and all, but I got away and made it to the reception, and they came after us there. They wanted Lance or me to open up the basement and let ‘em at the stuff. I guess Lance had told them he could do it, or get me to do it. Thought he’d get a cut or something?”
Truth be told, that whole day was a bit fuzzy, honestly. You think something like that would be more memorable. But she’d been through a lot that Christmas, and if the papers said it was terrorists, then that must have been what it was. Not that Donna felt like telling more truth than she already was.
“And what happened then?” Dr. McCormack asked.
“The terrorists, they had these--god, it sounds so ridiculous when I say it out loud--these flying remote control Christmas ornament bombs? They made a right mess, right in the middle of what was supposed to be my party. But the DJ, he did something with the speakers, got them to broadcast some kind of awful feedback noise, and it stopped the rest of the bombs. I think? I was mostly focused on making sure the kids were okay.” Dr. McCormack nodded. “But then Lance said we had to go, that we had to go check on something in the basement at work. At that point, I didn’t even know about the government contracts. But I believed him, more fool me. And we got down there. And they killed him.”
“I’m so, so sorry,” Dr. McCormack said. “How did you get out?”
“I--I think it was that DJ again. He’d seen Lance and me leave, and he’d noticed something was off, and he followed us, and called the police, I guess? And the funny thing was, I never even got his name. I can’t even remember his face properly. Saved my life, and I can’t even remember what he looked like. How awful am I?”
Dr. McCormack said something else, which Donna didn’t quite hear, and had to ask her to repeat. The whole first half hour passed like that, with Dr. McCormack just asking one question after another. Donna felt like she was being calibrated. She didn’t love it.
Finally, when it seemed like Dr. McCormack’s well of ‘standard’ questions had at last run dry, Donna sat back, folding her arms across her chest. “Well, go on then. Have at it.”
“Excuse me?”
“Isn’t this the part where you tell me all the ways I’m looking at my life wrong? Or just snap at me to ‘stop it!’?”
Dr. McCormack grinned. “I suppose I could do that. Do you want that?”
“Not really, no,” Donna said.
“So what do you want out of this?”
“I don’t know! I thought I was paying you to tell me things! What do you want from me?”
“Nothing at all,” Dr. McCormack said, and shrugged. “I’m really just here to listen.”
Donna opened her mouth to snap back. Then she thought better of it, and closed it again.
Then she said, “I can really just talk? About anything?”
So she did.
***
When Donna was done, she returned to the waiting room and got out her phone, and Wilf went in, as promised.
The first thing he did once the door was closed, before he’d even sat down, was to ask, “Is this room secure?”
“As in, from prying eyes and ears?” Dr. McCormack asked.
“Exactly. Only I wouldn’t put it past my Donna to be up against that door with a water glass right now.”
“Utterly,” Dr. McCormack promised. “This office is absolutely soundproof and bug-proof, with tech I’m told isn’t available anywhere else on this planet.”
Wilf dropped heavily into the chair. “Well. That’s a relief.”
“You said on the phone that Donna traveled with the Doctor, but that at the end of her time in the TARDIS he was put in the position of having to wipe her memories of their time together in order to save her life?”
“That’s right,” Wilf said. “He said if she remembers at all, even a little bit, there’s just too much in her head, and she’d burn up. So she can’t! Whatever we do, whatever you can do for her, only it can’t make her remember.”
“I understand,” Dr. McCormack said.
“Do you? D’ya think you could explain it to me, then?”
Dr. McCormack chortled. “It’s obvious you care for her very much. She’s lucky to have that in her life, to have such a strong support system. I truly believe we can help her deal with what’s been bothering her, and without her consciously remembering anything that would hurt her.”
“But isn’t she already? I mean, the things she’s been saying--the things that have been setting her off of late--they all sound a lot like stories she used to tell me before. That’s what’s got me so worried.”
And he laid it all out for Dr. McCormack. Donna watching a program about Pompeii on the telly and thinking she was reincarnated, only Wilf knew she and the Doctor had actually visited ancient Pompeii, and on Volcano Day no less.
Donna turning all the lights on in her house, which had to be because she and the Doctor had once had to run from the Vashta Nerada, flesh-eating beings that lived in shadows. Beings that had killed a young woman, and the young woman’s spacesuit had held on to a copy of her mind in something called ‘thought mail’ for several minutes, long enough for Donna to have one last conversation with the poor thing, until all it could say was ‘ice cream’ over and over.
Donna helping to find that lost little girl called Ella at the shop, and sobbing and not knowing why, only Wilf knew Donna’s own mind had been trapped in a computer for what felt to her like years, where she married and had a life and two children, and one of them was called Ella.
“So you see? It’s all coming back,” Wilf said. “And we’ve been so careful, her mum and me. We never talk about it, any of it. But I’m afraid it’s just not enough.”
Dr. McCormack bit her lip. “I can’t pretend to be an expert on any technique or device the Doctor could have used to erase Donna’s memories. But from everything you’ve said, and everything I know of the Doctor, I’m optimistic that nothing’s gone wrong with that process. I think there may be a simpler explanation for what Donna’s going through now.”
“Oh?”
“Our brains form connections between different pieces of information as we encounter them. This is something researchers in trauma therapy in particular have been aware of for quite some time--that even if we’re repressing a particular memory, those connecting pathways are still there.”
“So you don’t think she’s remembering at all, really,” Wilf said, nodding. “It’s just her brain making connections to her feelings, even if she doesn’t know why.”
“That’s my theory, yes. And sometimes with repressed memories, there’s actually added stress, as the subconscious fears remembering something we want to forget. And that’s something I can help her with, without digging up anything she shouldn’t or doesn’t want to remember. Even if the stress itself never goes away completely, I can help her to develop coping mechanisms to use when these feelings come up.”
“Sounds good,” Wilf said. “You really think that’ll work?”
“I do.”
“Well, thank you. Thank you so much.” Wilf blew out all the breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. “Still, can I just say--you make it all sound so ordinary, but I’m still really glad as she’s got you to talk to. Someone who knows about all this. When I received the letter from that Sarah Jane Smith, with your cards, she said it’d make all the difference, and she was right. Said she makes an effort to track down anyone she can who’s been off with the Doctor and send ‘em your way.” Dr. McCormack only nodded. “Can’t really talk about other clients, I s’pose. I get it, I get it. But thank you.”
***
Donna’s steps bounced on the stairs down to the carpark. Like she was a little lighter than when she’d gone up.
Well, it would feel like that, she thought. That’s just gravity, isn’t it?
She turned on Gramps with a grin. “So, what did the two of you talk about?”
“I don’t have to tell you that!” Wilf said.
“Naaah. But you’re gonna anyway.”
“Yeah, well, this and that. Y’know. It was personal trauma, wasn’t it? Palestine. Losing your Gran. Star Trek getting cancelled.”
“Wasn’t that in the 1970s or something? And it came back!”
“Sixties. And it wasn’t the same.”
Donna rolled her eyes. “But really though?”
“Really though. You tell me first. How was it? What’d you think of her?”
Donna pursed her lips and cocked her head to one side. “It wasn’t so bad. Not like I expected at all. I thought--I thought I’d go in there and she’d try to fix me or something. But she was just there to listen. I’m not used to people volunteering for that.”
“I always listen, sweetheart, don’t I?”
“People who aren’t you and Shaun, then!” Donna said. “I dunno. It was nice.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Maybe Donna wasn’t actually all right. After all that talk, maybe she could admit that, to herself if not to Gramps exactly. Maybe there were things in her life that were never really going to make sense exactly. But maybe they didn’t need to for her to get better.
Ten steps from her little blue car, Donna spun about in a circle for no good reason. Just to feel the skirt of her dress swish. It was the dress she’d grabbed the other day at the shop.
She didn’t think she’d return it after all.
END