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If this is the kind of nonsense that Donna’s somehow managed to miss out on every single time for the past fifteen years, she thinks she’d be quite pleased to go back to that constant oblivion, thank you very much.
She’s honestly not even sure why she’d decided to follow the Doctor up into the bloody spaceship he’s just thrown himself into, when she could just as easily have personally ensured that Rose and Shaun and her mother got far, far away from London. Come to think of it, she’s not entirely sure how she even knows this skinny streak of a man is called ‘The Doctor’ in the first place either, but she’s got other things to worry about at the moment.
Like the migraine that’s beginning to carve its way directly through her skull, for one. Unfortunately, they aren’t an uncommon occurrence—she’ll wake up from an already-forgotten dream, or look just a little too closely at one of Rose’s new plush toys, or spot an old public call box across the street and be halfway to it before realizing that she has no need to call the police, and even if she did, she has a mobile phone to do it from anyways—and then the next thing she knows her vision is swimming, her head is pounding, and it’s all she can do to just push herself through the rest of the day. A souvenir from that terrible year she has no recollection of, she supposes; of whatever had happened to her that was so devastating it’s left a blank hole in her mind and her heart ever since and her mother actually started being nice to her. They certainly haven’t done her any favors when it comes to actually keeping any of the jobs she’s managed to find for herself in the years since. At least the coffee incident had brought some novelty.
But it’s fine. It’s fine; she can push through, and… figure something out. Probably. She’d run up here so confident in her ability to help prevent the destruction of London that she never actually came up with a plan, and she’s only just now realizing it. Her sudden, inexplicable, unconditional trust of this complete stranger would be more concerning if either of them had time to wonder about that, but right now, they’ve got a city to save.
She bursts through the strange spaceship door just before it finishes closing, puts her hands on her knees to catch her breath as the Doctor whirls around to lock eyes with her, and stares in a shock she can’t quite understand as he screams.
He wants her out of here; she can deduce that much; but she doesn’t understand why. He doesn’t know her. (Does he?) He has absolutely no reason to care that she’s here. (Does he?)
And then the glass barrier shuts between them, and she can see the horror and the hopelessness dawn on his face, and she knows without even having to think about it that his expression matches her own.
Why does she suddenly feel like she’s supposed to care about him?
“...Look,” he says to her after a long, horrible pause. “I’m all out of tricks. Except for one.”
“Well, do it, then,” she says, because that much should be obvious.
“You and I can stop this,” he says. “Together.” He doesn’t look happy about it. He doesn’t look happy at all. “But it will kill you.”
“Okay.”
She’s a little taken aback by how quickly that response came out, until she realizes that she isn’t surprised, actually, and then she’s just taken aback by the fact that she was taken aback. There’s a… feeling, growing in her gut, that whatever she can do to help people, she has to. No matter what the cost is. It’s the same nagging feeling that had wormed its way into her mind the second she’d won the lottery, that hadn’t gone away until she’d donated it all to as many carefully-researched charities as she could. It just… seemed like what she was supposed to do. And now, whatever the Doctor thinks might work to save Rose feels like something that the Donna she cannot remember would want her to do as well. And even if it weren’t—it’s Rose. Donna would break the world for her, but she’ll just as readily save it, too.
“Donna.” He’s staring directly into her eyes, and she notes that his are wet. For some reason. “You’ll die.”
“My daughter is down there,” Donna says, and she begins to wonder whether her mind was made up about this from the moment she closed that door on Shaun and turned around to chase after the world’s most familiar stranger. “There are nine million people down there. This isn’t about me. Who cares about me?”
“I do,” the Doctor says, and Donna blinks at the blur in her vision, and realizes it’s not only coming from her mounting headache.
“Why? I’m—I’m no one.”
“No, you are not!” the Doctor practically shouts, and when he looks skyward and screams why does it have to be this, she’s all but certain that the blank hole in her heart has something to do with him. She only wishes she could have a little more time to determine why.
“…Just do it, you… spaceman,” Donna says, and doesn’t even question the nickname as it rolls off her tongue. “I don’t care what it’s going to be. Whatever you seem to think you owe me, this is it. Let me save my daughter.”
The Doctor looks at her. She glares back at him with all the force of a wrathful mother she can muster.
The Doctor takes in a shaking breath, and suddenly there is nothing else in this room—no countdown, no barrier, no impending doom. Just the Doctor and Donna, and something about that feels more familiar than it has any right to. He speaks a word, and something begins to… click.
Westerly.
“Well, how about that!” the Doctor says, hopping out of the TARDIS and throwing his arms out like he’s trying to bask in the glory of wherever they’ve landed more efficiently. “America!”
“America,” Donna repeats, stepping outside after him in an entirely more dignified manner. The air is crisp and cool, and smells of mid-autumn leaves. “I’ve never been to America.”
“Not a bad place for a holiday!” the Doctor says, spinning around with a flourish. “Now, where exactly are we—” His gaze scans the horizon, and locks itself onto a distant sign. “Ah! Rhode Island! They’ve got some lovely beaches there!” Her friend spins around again, this time to properly face her with one eyebrow quirked in the air. “Shall we?”
Donna shivers, and rubs at her bare arms. “Bit nippy for a beach vacation, though, wouldn’t you say?”
“Ah, you’ll be fine! Just bundle up!”
“I’ll bundle you in a minute—why would the TARDIS take us here, anyway?”
“You know something, Donna?” the Doctor says, inclining his head towards something behind her. “I think we just may be about to find out.”
Donna turns too, just in time to see the figure trekking its way up the hill towards them. Whoever it is is wearing a long cloak and a heavy hood, but even that is not enough to disguise the fact that they are absolutely not human.
Ah.
“Ah, hello!” the Doctor is already saying in that chipper tone of his, and Donna just smiles and waves already, because she knows he’s doing the same. “I’m the Doctor, this is Donna, and we’re just right pleased to be visiting here in—” she can practically feel him unsubtly craning his neck to get another look at the distant sign down by the road, without even looking— “Westerly, Rhode Island! What can we do for you today?”
Pelican, he says, and her jaw drops open as she tries to process the flashes of—memory? They must be—that are beginning to come. Dreams.
Donna wakes up.
Shaun is already out of bed, rifling through a dresser drawer, grumbling angrily under his breath. Even without the frequent yawns punctuating his barely audible rant, she can tell that he looks utterly exhausted.
That’s a little strange. Donna is absolutely the known insomniac between the two of them, and she’s just had one of the best sleeps of her life.
“Shaun?” she asks, rolling over to better face him. She’s still too comfortable to sit up just yet. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” he mutters, sounding not very alright at all. “Just that noise from the boiler. Kept me up all night. I already went in and checked; far as I can tell it’s not dangerous, but we should still see about calling someone in to get a look at it.” He pauses, and looks over his shoulder to meet her eye. “You were sleeping like a log, though. Are you all right? That really isn’t like you.”
Donna blinks. Now that Shaun mentions it, she does hear a strange… almost cyclical, humming-like sound? And he’s absolutely right that it must be coming from the little hall closet just on the other side of the wall, considering just how loud it actually is. That’s definitely odd. It’s exactly the sort of sound that should be irritating, and yet she finds it… soothing. Familiar.
“Yeah,” she says, because Shaun’s still staring at her. “I honestly didn’t notice it ‘til just now. It’s… I guess it just… sounded nice, if you’ll believe it?”
“Huh.” Shaun closes the drawer, and begins to put on his belt. “Well, I hope at least one of us got to have nice dreams last night.”
She… didn’t dream at all, actually, she’s pretty sure, which is certainly unusual. No weird aliens, or infinite libraries, or whatever else her mind just loves coming up with when she’s already had a hard day. Maybe that “guardian pelican” Rose had gifted her for her last birthday—one of the first plush toys she’d ever made, which now sits perched over the headboard as though it’s watching over Shaun and Donna— has finally done something for her after all. It’s a good pelican, honestly. Her daughter is so talented.
The lack of dreams is strange, but Shaun worries enough about her already, and her mother is even worse, so Donna sees no need to mention that part just now. “Yeah. Maybe all of Mum’s prattling about white noise machines isn’t completely ridiculous.”
Shaun’s eyebrows raise. “Well, we still need to call someone and get the boiler fixed.”
“Oh, definitely,” Donna agrees, even as she already begins to worry about how much whatever repairs are needed will cut into their monthly budget. “But you have an early shift, don’t you? I’ll take care of it.”
“Thanks, love,” Shaun says, adjusting his belt buckle and circling around the bed to reach the door. “I’ll make sure Rose is getting up and ready.”
“No fake ice cream for breakfast again,” Donna calls after his retreating form, just loudly enough to ensure Rose hears it too. “Just because it’s vegan doesn’t make it healthy!”
“Aw, Mum!” Rose’s voice complains from downstairs.
Donna smiles to herself, but just as quickly sits up enough to press her ear against the wall, a frown spreading across her face. She still cannot place what that particular machinery sound reminds her of, only that it somehow feels like home.
Tornado. A tear slips from one of his eyes. His words are slowing down. Clifftops.
She doesn’t quite remember the name of the planet they’re on. The Doctor had told her when they’d landed, but Donna had been rather distracted at the time by a sudden idea of how to get Nerys back for the latest rumor she’s caught wind of, and soon enough they were both distracted by the sudden whipping winds and shared feeling of impending doom. As one does. Typical day for the Doctor and Donna.
Of course it wasn’t a natural disaster, because that would be far too mundane. No, there had been a weather-controlling machine intended to help improve crop yields on this otherwise dying planet, and of course its trial run had spun wildly out of control and led to what would have easily been the most devastating storm Donna had ever witnessed in her life, were it not for her and the Doctor’s quick thinking and even quicker sprint through the mounting devastation towards the control panel. And now the planet is saved, and its denizens are free to rebuild, and Donna and the Doctor have found a nice view to enjoy from the top of the cliff the TARDIS is waiting for them on before they head off in search of their next adventure.
“Not a bad run, was it?” the Doctor says conversationally, as though they hadn’t both almost died getting flung twelve kilometers skyward in a swirling machine-generated vortex.
To be fair, it wouldn’t have felt like one of their adventures if they hadn’t. “I did enjoy the cows,” Donna agrees. “Or whatever those hooved creatures are called. They looked like cows.”
“Oh, I loved the cows,” the Doctor says.
“Did you now?”
“I loved them!”
Donna laughs, leaning back onto her hands to gaze up at the very strange clouds still dissipating across the sky. What passes for grass on this planet’s surface is not particularly pleasant to the touch, but she’s been traveling with the Doctor for long enough now that it takes quite a lot to bother her. Even the strange mechanical hum of the TARDIS, which once kept her up at night, has become so comforting that it now soothes her to sleep in seconds.
“So,” she says, turning her head to meet his eye and grinning right back at the goofy expression he makes. “Where to next?”
“Who knows!” the Doctor proclaims. “That’s the beauty of it all, isn’t it? We’ve been traveling together for what, a year now? We’ve barely begun! The whole universe is still at our fingertips.”
“And I would like to see as much of it as I possibly can,” Donna tells him. “No matter what it is.”
He smiles. “Sounds like you plan on staying for a good long while, then!”
“With you, Doctor? Forever.”
Donna Noble is not afraid. But if this takes any longer… she thinks she will be.
Andante.
He won’t look at her.
“Get on with it!” she begs.
Grief.
There’s a hole in Donna’s heart, and she’s not sure whether she’ll ever be able to mend it.
There’s also a hole in her desk now, because apparently spilling boiling hot coffee directly into an already overclocked computer is enough to actually set the stupid thing on fire. If Donna had to guess, she’d say her boss probably cares much more about that part than his employee’s years-old amnesia-induced grief. Prick.
She can’t even bring herself to be surprised when she’s fired—ha, now there’s a silly bit of irony that she’s sure somebody would get a good laugh out of, though she can’t quite think of who. Never mind the fact that she’d gotten the fire put out almost immediately, because if there’s one thing Donna Noble is good at, it’s keeping a cool head and taking swift and efficient action in any sort of crisis. It’s just a good thing that nobody had asked her why she’d looked like she’d somehow put out dozens of electrical fires before, because she has absolutely no idea. It’s like her body remembers skills her mind doesn’t. It’s certainly the most logical explanation for how she knows how to do so many things she is absolutely sure she’d never been taught.
But her boss doesn’t care about any of that either, just the expense of the ruined computer and the humiliation of the whole incident, and so by the time she is officially served her notice she’s already packed away her pens and sticky notes and the weird monster toy Rose had given her last month back into the box she hadn’t bothered to get rid of yet ever since landing this job in the first place. Her boss doesn’t even say anything, and she has no desire to defend herself, so Donna swallows her pride (and a couple of aspirin, because seriously, her migraines have been terrible lately—) and steps outside into the mid-morning light.
Losing her job just before Christmas is… well, it’s not ideal, but it wouldn’t be the first time either. She’s still going to get nearly two weeks’ worth of pay on Friday, after all, and it’s not like they’ll run out of food or anything within a few months. She’ll manage to figure something out. She’s just ashamed and maybe a little afraid at the thought of having to tell Shaun the news, even though she knows full well that he won’t have a single cruel word for her about it. Old habits die hard.
“Hated that job anyways,” she mutters under her breath, and begins marching with a purpose towards the bus stop.
Billions of kilometers away, the last Meep of Meepkind boards a spaceship, and sets meep’s course towards Earth.
Fingerprint. Susurration.
She’s never seen the Doctor cry—frankly, she wouldn’t be entirely surprised if she found out that Time Lords don’t have tear ducts, or something—but she can tell something is deeply wrong all the same. Wrong with him, that is. She’s definitely, definitely fine. Her brain isn’t skipping like a broken record. Her entire body doesn’t feel like it’s on fire.
Okay, so both of those things are complete lies, but admitting that means she has to accept it, and Donna Noble refuses to go down without a fight.
The look on her best friend’s face isn’t helping her conviction very much.
“Do you know what’s happening?” he asks, voice softer than she’s ever heard, and, well—their minds have melded as one, now. She knows everything he does.
“...Yeah.”
She knows everything he does, and so she knows before he even moves towards her that no amount of begging will convince him not to wipe her mind; to let her die with her memories and her dignity intact on one last journey through the cosmos, as she had always intended to go. She begs anyway.
“No,” she says. “No, no, no, NO—”
She draws in a heavy, shuddering gasp, and he finally meets her eyes.
Oh.
Oh.
That… explains a few things.
Sparrow, Donna softly whispers, matching the Doctor’s cadance, and she still doesn’t quite understand what these words are supposed to mean except that it’s something. Dance.
The countdown is barely a background noise at this point. The chamber they’re in is beginning to tremble with what can only be the force of the Meep’s ship about to take off and burn the entirety of London beneath their feet. The pressure in her head is so strong that she can barely feel anything else.
But none of that matters. Right now, they are the Doctor and Donna, and there is going to be hell to pay.
Mexico—
Donna throws up her hands, and the Doctor pauses.
…Binary, she says, and his face somehow manages to crumple even further, which is all the proof she needs that she’s on the right track. She’s put together how things had ended now, and, oh, they are going to have words about what he’d done to her once they’re finished here. Assuming she lives long enough, that is.
But she has to finish the phrase first. Angry as she is, she still feels she owes him that much. She won’t make him kill her a second time.
Binary, she says again, and the pain in her skull reaches a splitting crescendo, and as she stares at her greatest friend in the whole wide universe, stares at the silent pain written across his features so strongly she can practically feel it, she can’t help but think that at least it’s nice of him to heed her wishes now.
She can’t hear his whisper over the roar of blood in her ears, but she knows the shape of her name on his lips all too well.
Binary.
For a long, horrible moment—that might barely even be a moment at all—there is nothing. Just the electrical ticking of the countdown, and the headache still pulsing in her temples, and the Doctor staring at her as though she’s the most important woman in the whole wide world.
And then Donna offhandedly thinks, Well, at least I’ll get to die knowing who I am.
And then her mind explodes.
Right, so, technically speaking it doesn’t actually explode, per se, but it certainly feels close enough. The light that bursts from Donna’s body is blindingly bright, swirling tendrils of gold that feel more powerful than the sun itself, and the knowledge of the entire universe slams into her so strongly that her knees buckle from the force of it. She breathes in, and accepts it. She breathes out, and feels like she now holds the answer to every single question ever imaginable.
“Are you alright?” she can hear the Doctor calling from the other side of the glass.
Oh, yes. Forget the world; she’s the most important woman in the entire bloody universe.
Donna Noble is complete, and nothing will stand in her way.