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Sylvia nearly drops her house keys in shock when she enters the living room in the morning and finds them slumped over each other on the couch. Donna’s lying sprawled against the cushions, the Doctor’s head is on her lap, and they’re both snoring.
And more than that, they look…. peaceful. Tension creases smoothed away, furrows unfolded, tight mouths slack.
Ignoring the disgust rising like bile in her throat, Sylvia moves soundlessly to the kitchen.
When the two wake, there is a single steaming cup of coffee on the counter. Sylvia pushes the cup towards Donna, holding the Doctor’s gaze in challenge; instead of rising against her, the Doctor turns to Donna and asks for water.
"You don’t like the Doctor?” asks Donna. The sun beats down on them both, startlingly bright for an autumn afternoon, and she pushes herself back on the linen lawn chair, digs her heels into the grass.
Sylvia sniffs. Despite the sun, the air is still bitterly cold.
The Doctor in question is currently at the opposite end of the garden, patiently helping Rose rehearse her lines for her school play.
“Mum,” Donna says, and she turns, and there’s a sort of question in her eyes, demanding recognition, demanding answers.
“No,” Sylvia replies, curt. “I don’t like the Doctor.” Then, before Donna can ask her anything else, she stiffly gets to her feet and leaves.
That evening, Sylvia knocks on Rose’s shed door.
“Come in,” calls Rose.
It’s warm inside the shed and smells too strongly of glue, and Sylvia’s lips purse into a thin line before she remembers to smile.
“What are you working on?” she asks, and she’s careful to keep her voice kind, because she can be kind, she can be understanding, she can be the person she never could be for Donna.
Rose lifts a shoulder, scooches her chair back to reveal her current project all splayed out on the desk. “Just a plushie.”
“Not one of those aliens, is it?” It comes out sharper than expected, and Sylvia bites her tongue, internally wincing.
Rose doesn’t seem to mind. She shrugs again, says, “Yeah, I guess.”
Sylvia frowns then, properly. “It’s not good.”
“What isn’t?”
“This”—she waves her hand—“alien business.”
“I don’t think it’s too bad,” Rose says. Oh, but she doesn’t know. She doesn’t know.
“Listen here, Rose,” Sylvia says, and she grabs one of her hands with both of hers. Something tacky—glue, no doubt—gets on her skin. Dutifully ignoring it, she says, “You don’t need the Doctor. The Doctor can’t give you anything we can't.”
“The Doctor could give me the stars,” Rose says, as though to be purely contradictory, and Sylvia bites back the immediate knife-sharp protest pushing against her teeth.
“The Doctor really can’t,” Sylvia replies.
Rose looks away. “I know. I've been told already.”
Sylvia drops Rose’s hands in shock. "What?”
“The Doctor already said the Doctor can’t take me.”
“Why?” Sylvia asks, suspicious.
“The Doctor didn’t say,” Rose replies. She picks up her needle and pinches together the cloth of her plushie. “You could ask, though. You were mentioned, I think.”
The Doctor is in the kitchen, looking for all the world like a homeless elder—albeit a well-dressed one—helping Shaun make dinner.
“You," Sylvia spits.
The Doctor turns to her, a near comical expression of shock scrawled over that horribly familiar face. “Sorry?”
“You,” she says again, crooking a finger. “No, not you, Shaun. You keep cooking. But you— follow me.”
She leads a bewildered Doctor into the hall.
“What is it?” asks the Doctor, genuinely confused. “What has happened?”
Sylvia opens her mouth to reply, and a hand grabs her forearm.
“Mum,” Donna says, carefully inserting herself between her and the Doctor. “Let’s leave the poor Doctor alone.”
“I have questions,” Sylvia hisses. “I have concerns.”
“I’m sure,” Donna soothes. Sylvia searches her face. It’s—it’s different, somehow, now that she has her memories back. Bolder, but no, that’s not right; she’s always been bold. Even with the forgetting, that was never something that went away. No, it’s…
Donna tugs, gently, and just this once, Sylvia relents and lets herself be guided away.
“Really, Mum,” Donna says as soon as they’re out of the Doctor’s earshot. “Why don’t you like the Doctor?”
Sylvia sniffs. “No reason.”
“It’s getting ridiculous,” Donna continues.
“It’s fine.”
“It’s not.”
“It’s fine,” Sylvia says, and she glares hard at her daughter, picking out the flaws, plucking out the faults. Her mouth opens, ready. She closes it, silent. Then, before she can say anything else and push Donna away—again—she sweeps past her, storms through the kitchen, pushes aside a still-bewildered Doctor, and strides out the door into the nippy evening chill.
She comes back, of course. She always does. What else is she to do?
The next time she speaks to the Doctor, it’s the Doctor who makes the first move.
“Sylvia,” says the Doctor, throat clearing, a horrible phlegmy sound, and they both wince at the same time and stare at each other afterwards. The Doctor offers a smile, and Sylvia returns a scowl.
“Have I done something?” asks the Doctor.
“Well, yes,” Sylvia agrees. She leans against the hallway wall. “Yes, Doctor, you have done something. It wasn’t enough to corrupt my daughter—no, you had to infect my granddaughter, too.”
“I told her it’s a bad idea,” the Doctor says, as if that makes anything better.
Something wicked and sharp rises jagged in her chest. She jabs her finger down the hall and hisses, “You all but killed her. Do you know how she suffered after you took her memory? How we all suffered?"
And oh, but the Doctor’s flinch is so vindicating! She watches the Doctor splay shaking palms against the wall, face twisting and going pale.
“I know,” says the Doctor.
“She nearly died because of you,” Sylvia continues with a bite of savage retribution.
The Doctor’s eyelids flutter and pull shut. “I know.”
“If you’d never entered her life, she wouldn’t have had to—”
“I know—”
And—
And—
And that’s a tear, right there, tracking thin and glistening down the Doctor’s cheek. Guilt tongues at the back of Sylvia’s throat. She clenches her fists. She says, “You should leave before you ruin her life again,” and this time the words are hollow.
Eyes still closed, the Doctor nods and breathes out. “I should.”
“Good. Glad to know we’re on the same page.” She backs up and inches away, unable to tear her gaze away from the shaking alien in her daughter’s house. Her stomach is twisting, and it's all wrong, it's all wrong, it's all—
“Where’s the Doctor?” Donna asks just before dinner starts, stiffening, concern clipping the edges of her words. “Where’s Rose?”
“I don’t know,” Sylvia snaps when Donna pins an accusatory stare on her. “I don’t know.” And it’s the truth, it really is. She hasn’t seen the Doctor since she turned her back and left.
“I’m going to find them,” Donna says. She pushes away from the table and starts down the hall, and Sylvia calls after her, and she doesn’t reply. Sylvia chases her, then, because who knows what will happen if—or when—she rounds the corner, disappears from sight?
They hurry into the darkened backyard and Donna studiously ignores her as she knocks on the shed door.
“Come in,” calls Rose, and Donna opens the door, and Sylvia peers over her shoulder, and—
There’s the Doctor, expression carefully blank, features lit blue by the humming silver screwdriver pointed at the plushie in the Doctor’s lap.
“Doctor,” Donna says. The relief in her voice is a physical thing, something with weight and movement, and it nearly blows Sylvia over. (She knew, she knew, of course she knew. But fifteen years is a long time to remember.)
“Donna,” the Doctor says, twisted with guilt, and Sylvia closes her eyes, rocks backwards.
“What’s wrong, Doctor?” asks Donna, and Sylvia takes another step back. This isn’t for her. This isn’t where she’s meant to be. The shed door closes with her still in the cold dark yard, and she gazes unthinkingly at its chipped blue exterior. Now things are normal again. Her on the outside, and oh, but it rankles. She heads for the house.
“Why did you do that?” Donna demands after dinner. It had been a tense meal. Quiet. Sylvia had met Donna’s gaze over the table, and Donna had jerked her chin towards the porch, and now they are back in the cold.
The stars are out. To anyone else, they might even be beautiful. Sylvia, for her part, does her best to ignore them and all the secrets they hold.
“Do what?” she asks, and it comes out bitter even though she tries to smile.
“Say those things to the Doctor.”
“I only told the truth,” Sylvia retorts.
Donna’s eyes are sun-bright and space-cold, and there it is: the change. It's the look, like she knows something Sylvia will never understand. Slowly, words lacing over brittle anger, Donna says, “Never say that to the Doctor again. Actually, never say anything like that to anyone ever again.”
Wordlessly, Sylvia crosses her arms.
“Say it, Mum.”
“Fine,” Sylvia snaps. “I won’t say anything like that again.”
Donna has yet to soften. Sylvia can feel her pulling away, slipping like wind through her fingers. “And apologize.”
“Sorry,” Sylvia says, if only to get her to stay even a second longer.
“Not to me.”
And so later, she corners the Doctor. The Doctor looks at her, wary, and Sylvia tilts up her chin and says, “Sorry,” and the Doctor exhales and stays silent.
It takes a week before they have another conversation.
“Your granddaughter is amazing,” the Doctor says earnestly. One of those weird born-of-fat alien plushies rests atop the Doctor’s lap, squished tight between white-knuckled hands.
“Isn’t she just?” Sylvia agrees. She eyes the plushie and the Doctor’s fingers loosen somewhat. After a quick glance around the living room, Sylvia makes up her mind and plops herself down on the couch beside the Doctor. “We need to talk.”
“We rather should.”
“I don’t want Rose to end up hurt,” Sylvia says, and that’s the crux of it, really. The people around the Doctor end up hurt, again and again and again, and it seems only she knows.
Yet—the Doctor nods. “I agree.”
“You—” Sylvia blinks. “You agree?”
“Yep,” says the Doctor, head tipping up towards the ceiling. “I agree.”
“Oh,” Sylvia says. “So… no more adventures, then?”
“Probably not.” The Doctor pauses. “Well, at least not for a while.”
“Oh,” Sylvia repeats. She glances over at the Doctor, and the Doctor’s mouth twitches upwards.
“Can we truce, at least?” asks the Doctor. “Given that we have a shared interest.”
“This doesn’t mean I like you,” Sylvia warns.
“That doesn’t matter. Truce?”
Sylvia hesitates. She carefully regards the Doctor’s outstretched pinky, then the Doctor’s earnest expression.
“This doesn’t mean I like you,” she says again, and she links their pinkies together.
The next time she finds Donna and the Doctor wound around each other in sleep, passed out together on the living room couch, she makes two cups of coffee instead of one.