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In theory, Donna’s folding the laundry before she follows the rest of her family to bed. In practice, she’s watching an addictively awful reality show, enthralled by the endless string of terrible decisions being made. Or at least she is before the Doctor lets himself in through the back door, plops down next to her on the settee, and places a small box, neatly tied with a bow, on top of the pile of clothes.
“What’s this?” she asks.
“The way presents usually work is that you unwrap them to find out,” the Doctor says, looking entirely too amused with himself.
She swats him lightly on the arm and mutters “Smartarse,” just loud enough to be sure he hears her, but all it does is make him grin even wider. Still, she picks up the box and unties the bow.
Inside is a TARDIS key.
It looks just like her old one, silver and deceptively ordinary. “Thought it was past time you had one again,” the Doctor says, sounding casual, but when she looks up Donna swears there’s something nervous in his expression.
It’s daft, really - he lives in her back garden, for heaven’s sake - but Donna thinks she understands. She picks the key up, turns the cool metal through her fingers. “Thank you,” she says, her voice coming out quiet.
She's touched, not just by the key but also the presentation. It’s not that the Doctor isn’t usually good at gestures, because he is. They just tend to be big, showing-her-all-of-time-and-space type things. Hunting for the right-sized box and a pretty piece of ribbon, though, is new.
“Why the gift box?” she asks.
“Well, I didn’t get to do it properly the first time. Too busy saving the world, remember?”
Toxic smog and Sontarans, and the Doctor in the middle of it, beaming at her. Quite a big moment, really.
“I’m not getting sentimental this time, either,” Donna says, never mind that it’s already a lie. But she pulls her keyring out of her pocket and carefully slides the TARDIS key onto it. She looks back up at the Doctor once it’s secured, and is surprised to see a pained expression on his face.
“I hated taking it back from you after I wiped your memories,” he says. “It felt like stealing.”
“You had to,” Donna reminds him.
“Yeah,” he agrees, but he doesn’t sound reassured. “I can’t say I’m sorry for it,” he continues, and she knows neither of them are talking about her TARDIS key anymore, “because I’d do it again in those circumstances, every time. But I do regret that I had to do it against your wishes.”
They haven’t talked about her last moments in the old TARDIS console room, what he did to save her life. In her defence it’s been busy, what with getting their housing situation sorted, starting her job at UNIT, and explaining to Shaun and Rose about her time with the Doctor. But now, noticing the way he’s not quite meeting her eyes, it seems like an oversight.
“I wouldn’t expect you to apologise for it. You saved my life.”
“But you asked me not to. You begged me not to, and I did it anyway.”
“I’m glad you did, Doctor. If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have met Shaun, or had Rose. I wouldn’t be with you here, right now,” she says, nudging his shoulder. “But even if none of that had happened, even if I’d gone back to nothing more than pointless temp jobs and failed first dates, it would still be better than being dead.”
“That’s not what you thought at the time.”
“I was panicking, it wasn’t exactly a considered decision.” As if it possibly could have been when her brain was burning up, synapse by synapse. “It’s just… I finally wasn’t ordinary, silly Donna, and all I could think was that I didn’t want to give it up.”
“You were never either of those things,” the Doctor insists, and Donna can’t help but smile because of course he would say that.
“I was, though,” she disagrees. Brad and Angelina. Is Posh pregnant? X Factor, Atkins Diet, Feng Shui, split ends. Not that Lance had any room to criticise - being willing to feed humanity to a bunch of overgrown spiders is worse than any amount of tabloid nonsense - but he hadn’t been totally wrong. “Probably still am, a bit.”
She can tell from his face that the Doctor's getting ready to tell her how clever she is, but for once she doesn't need to hear it. “But you know what I've finally realised? Just about everyone's ordinary, that's what the word means. Most people are silly about something or another. And I ran around the galaxy with you, saving silly, ordinary people living their silly, ordinary lives, and I never for a minute thought it wasn’t worth it.”
He smiles at that, but there’s a faraway look in his eyes, just for a moment before he refocuses on her. “Reminds me of something I said a long time ago, that an ordinary person is the most important thing in creation. And I told your family that you were, you know,” he says. “After I erased your memories,” he explains off Donna’s confused look. “I told them what you had done, and what it had cost, and all the lives you had saved because of it. And I told them that you were the most important woman in the whole wide universe.”
She looks down, suddenly shy. It’s not even the words themselves - the Doctor’s told her she’s brilliant and important to her face often enough - but the context. She hadn’t thought of it before, but of course the Doctor must’ve explained what happened to her mum and grandad. This ancient and powerful and lonely alien, who usually dashes off to the next adventure, had sat, incongruous in their living room, braving her mum’s wrath to try and make them see what she had been like when she travelled with him.
And it worked; her mum has been gentler the past fifteen years. She’d attributed it to her breakdown, or, in her more generous moments, making Sylvia a grandmother, but now she thinks that the Doctor’s words must have had something to do with it.
“Thank you,” she tells him.
“Well, you were,” he says, shrugging like it’s not a big deal. “I thought they should remember that, if you couldn’t.”
She remembers it now. All of that knowledge, beautiful and burning inside her head. Planets and moons, kings and presidents, chemical reactions and mathematical proofs, art and music, past and present and future. It’s not just that she had finally felt smart, it’s that she had felt connected. Isn’t that what she had always wanted from all the tabloids and gossip and trends, to feel like she was part of something bigger than herself? And then she had been, not just as an observer or a tag-a-long, but in her own right. As the woman who saved the universe - all the universes - from the Daleks.
The Doctor’s watching her with something like guilt on his face, and she wonders if he’s about to apologise again for taking her memories. But instead, he asks, “Do you miss it?”
“What, the metacrisis? All things considered I like my brain not melting, actually -”
But the Doctor’s shaking his head. “No, I meant the travelling, the TARDIS, all of space and time. Because you’ve asked me if I miss it, but I didn’t ask if you did.”
“Sometimes.” I'm going to travel with that man forever, she had said to Martha, and she’d meant it. “I mean, I loved it. The adventure of it, getting to see more than one tiny corner of the universe, making a difference. Even the running, believe it or not,” she says with a grin. “But I get plenty of excitement and aliens and running at UNIT, plus something even better.”
“You can’t tell me the UNIT helicopter is better than the TARDIS -”
“No, you dumbo, I mean my family. I get to come home to an extraordinary daughter, a loving husband, and a wonderful grandfather. And Mum, but I suppose you can’t have everything,” she adds, which makes the Doctor snort inelegantly.
“And you,” she continues, serious again. “You know that, right?” she asks, because he has to. “It’s like I knew something was missing all those years, and it wasn’t aliens and spaceships and planets. It was you.”
His face does something complicated and vulnerable at her words, just for a second. “I thought you said you weren’t going to get sentimental.”
She laughs at that, if a bit wetly. “Oh, shut up,” she says, and pulls him in for a hug. It’s still a novelty, being able to do that again.
“I’m really glad I’m here,” he says when she lets go, and it’s clear how much he means it.
“Me too,” she says, and stands. “Goodnight, Doctor. And thanks again,” she adds, picking up the now-empty box before leaving.
In the morning, she discovers that all the laundry has been neatly folded.