Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Donna Noble was the luckiest woman alive. After years of thankless jobs and worthless exes, she finally had a future: to be Mrs. Lance Bennett. How someone like her had caught the eye of a man as handsome and successful and charming as Lance was beyond her, but she’d done it and now was soon to be married.

She couldn’t remember the last time her mum had been so happy for her or invested in anything going on in her life. She’d gotten the church and the vicar and the reception hall all booked well in advance of the date, so everything was well in hand for when Donna and Lance headed to the register’s office.

Or at least, that was what Donna had thought.

“And you’ve a decree absolute for your prior union?” The clerk asked after reviewing their passports, driver’s licenses, and the details for St. Mary’s.

“Come again?” Lance asked politely while Donna frowned in confusion.

The clerk didn’t even blink. “Mrs. Noble’s decree absolute. She needs to provide it in order to move forward with giving notice of her second marriage.”

“My second— hold on, I’m not ‘Mrs’ anything just yet!” Donna said, forcing a laugh when really she wanted to demand what the hell this lady thought she was on about. 

But she tried not to do that sort of thing around Lance, not when bossiness had been an oft-cited trait that had led to prior boyfriends dumping her. 

“My name is Donna Noble because I’m the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Geoffrey Noble.”

“Yes, and the wife of Dr. John Smith,” the clerk replied. Then she gestured at the bulky computer that sat on the desk between them. “It says so right here.”

“Let me see,” Donna said, standing and walking around the desk to peer over the clerk’s shoulder. 

She’d pulled up a scan of some paper form, and there was her name and address and all her information filled out in some unfamiliar hand, along with far more sparse information on a supposed fiancé she’d never heard of before. 

“Alright, is this a joke?”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“No,” Donna said with a firm shake of the head. “You’re not allowed to claim you don’t know what this is when you’re the one insisting it’s anything. This can’t be mine! I mean, how old is it anyway?”

“It was filed in 1996, ma’am,” the clerk answered after consulting the screen briefly.

“But that’s a decade ago! I mean, I wasn’t even—” She didn’t like admitting to her age in front of anybody, let alone a man, though she supposed Lance would have been finding out today anyway. “I couldn’t have been more than twenty-six!”

The clerk remained unmoved. “That is over eighteen, ma’am.”

“I know that!” Donna snapped. 

She glanced nervously at Lance, who was watching the whole thing unfold with an uncertain look on his face. 

“Look, there’s got to be a mistake. I’d know if I was already married, especially to a doctor!” 

Depending on the type of doctor, Donna idly thought, her mum would’ve been even more thrilled about it than her engagement to Lance. 

“This doesn’t even look fully filled out, and I wasn’t here in 1996.”

“There’s a signature here that says you were.”

Donna squinted at it. It looked like her signature, but then it wasn’t as if her penmanship was totally unique, right? It was probably just a convincing forgery!

“Now, if Dr. Smith is no longer with us, you can just file his death certificate to proceed with this marriage,” the clerk was saying.

“You’re really not understanding. I’m not a wife or a widow. I’m just a woman trying to give notice of my first and only wedding,” Donna stated as clearly as she could make it. “Now can you help us or not?”

The clerk gave a bored sigh. “As I’ve said, you need to provide either a decree absolute or your first husband’s death certificate before you can move forward with giving notice for a new marriage. If you have neither, then there’s nothing more to be done here.”

Donna tried to be kind to clerks and other sorts of workers she encountered in her daily life, knowing just how awful such a job could be. But this woman was beyond testing her limits.

Perhaps sensing that, Lance stood just as she had opened her mouth again. “Thank you for your time today. I’m sure we’ll be back once we’ve gotten this all sorted out.”

“Can you believe her?” Donna whisper-shouted anyway as he guided her away from the clerk’s desk and back out to the Civic Centre’s car park. 

He’d driven since Donna was less familiar with this side of the borough. 

“Where does she think she gets off, telling me I’m already married? I think I’d know better than her!”

“What do you reckon it is, then? Filing error? They put it under the wrong Donna?” Lance asked. He hadn’t seen the scanned statement and form with all the details that matched up directly with her, after all.

“Or someone’s put her up to it,” Donna replied. Then she snapped her fingers. “Nerys! This has got to be Nerys. She’s still sore about me getting the better job after all.” 

Not to mention the better man, and Donna should have expected that she would stoop so low as to prevent Donna from getting him. She reached for his hands, which seemed to surprise him judging by his slight flinch. 

“Oh, what are we gonna do, Lance? If I have to tell my mum she’s wasted the deposit on the church and the reception hall— oh, and our tickets to Morocco! Did we get insurance for those? Oh, this is gonna ruin everything!” Her eyes welled up with tears. “I can’t believe we have to cancel!”

“Hold on, look, let’s not be too hasty about canceling,” her fiancé quickly said. “There’s every chance we get this sorted out in time. And if we don’t, we can just have the ceremony and reception and honeymoon anyway, and sort out the paperwork once we’re back.”

“But we won’t really be married without the paperwork,” Donna pointed out.

“So we have a smaller ceremony with just your family to make it official,” Lance said, and he sounded so sure about it all that she could feel herself calming.

“You really mean it? You still want to go through with it?”

“Well, I know you do, right?” He responded with a grin.

Donna smiled back, squeezing his hands tight. “Oh, Lance, I don’t know what I’d do without you!” 

Trust him to see their way through this! She really was the luckiest woman on Earth.

By mutual agreement, they kept this little issue with the register quiet, not wanting it to spoil their nuptials. Donna kept a close eye on Nerys as the weeks wore on to see if her friend would slip and reveal herself, but there was absolutely nothing. Nor was there anything remotely like a marriage certificate or decree absolute or death certificate in her or her family’s papers, and Donna combed through every last one of them to be sure. She’d known there wouldn’t be, and yet no matter how often she called to harangue the office about it they kept parroting back the same tired refrain that she needed the right form to declare herself properly unattached so that she could become legally attached to Lance.

Between wedding preparations and her grandad being hospitalized for the flu, Donna had to give up on calling the last week or so before the wedding. She was so busy with final dress fittings and tastings and sitting at her Gramps’ bedside that she almost clean forgot it was a problem at all. What did some strange bit of paper matter? She was still marrying the man she loved on Christmas Eve, no matter what anyone tried to throw in her path.

So of course, as Donna walked down the aisle in her wedding dress, her path itself was changed. To the strangest sort of room she’d ever seen in her life. And instead of her handsome groom smiling at her from the end of the aisle, some scrawny git was peering at her from across a strange machine like this was somehow her fault.

—

Donna couldn’t believe it. Was the whole universe conspiring to keep her from actually getting married? What had she ever done to it?

The strange man denied he’d kidnapped her or drugged her or that he even knew Nerys, and Donna swiftly located the exit. Or at least, what she’d thought would be the exit, but it opened out into outer space instead.

He said as much to her, and something about the matter-of-fact delivery or the bright and shining stars that seemed to surround them made her believe it, even if it should’ve been impossible. How had someone managed this? What sort of person could do that?

“Who are you?” Donna heard herself ask.

“I’m the Doctor,” he answered, and Donna’s breath caught in her chest. “You?”

She didn’t answer him, instead turning to look at him. “No, come on,” she said, shaking her head. He really had come right up behind her, and if she took a step back now she’d be floating off into space as mad as that seemed. “ You’re a doctor? Doctor what?”

“Nothing, just the Doctor,” he said, eyeing her warily like he expected her to start shouting again any minute. She was seriously considering it.

“No, but your name—”

“It’s just that. Just ‘the Doctor.”

“You’ve got to have another, though.” Like John Smith, maybe ?, Donna thought but couldn’t bring herself to say. She didn’t think she could bear it to be true right now. There was just too much going on.

He sighed. “Look, you’re human, I take it?”

That threw her a curveball of an entirely different sort. “Yeah. Is that optional?”

“It is for me,” he told her. “And that’s why I haven’t got a name like you’d expect. Just the Doctor.”

She was torn between relieved and unsettled staring at him. How could he not be human? He looked just like a human! Same number of eyes and ears and fingers, human hair and skin — was he seriously expecting her to believe aliens had freckles ? She could see them dotting his cheeks lightly with him standing this close.

But he proved himself to be an alien with how little he understood about Earth, once he’d finally brought them down to land nowhere near the church like she had demanded. His space ship was a box that claimed to be for the police and was way too small to fit all of that inside it, he didn’t carry any money at all, and he thought wedding dresses would have pockets. Donna thought she’d done the smart thing by getting herself a taxi and being rid of him, but the alienness of today was far from over when the driver turned out to be a robot underneath his Santa guise. She was fortunate the Martian came after her at all, even if his idea of a rescue needed serious work. Donna never would’ve believed she could make that kind of jump from a moving car!

They caught their breath on a rooftop, and he finally did everything right. Apologized — even if she could start to admit it all hadn’t really been his doing — consoled her, even placed his jacket around her shoulders to ward off the December chill. Donna wondered if she was just too exhausted and bewildered by everything that had happened to still be upset, or if the knowledge that it had all been a bit of pageantry anyway without their notice having been given was actually a boon to her now.

Then Dr. No-Name took out a ring and, in spite of herself, Donna’s heart did a little skip. “What—”

“You’d better put this on,” he told her.

“But- but we’re not— you said,” Donna sputtered.

“It’s just a bio-damper,” he clarified. “Those creatures can trace you, so wearing this should keep you hidden.”

“Oh,” said Donna, her face feeling sort of hot. Of course there was a logical explanation to it, as logical as anything involving robots and aliens could be. This couldn’t have anything to do with that erroneous record at the Hounslow Register Office. After all, she’d remember meeting a Martian like this even a decade ago! “That’s alright, then.” She offered him her hand, which he took with one while he slid the ring on with his other. Donna felt a sad sort of smile curve the corners of her lips upward; she was meant to have done this with Lance by now.

The Doctor couldn’t seem to help teasing her, though not unkindly. If anything, she thought he might be trying to make light of the moment for her sake. “With this ring, I thee biodamp.”

“For better or for worse,” Donna answered back, playing along. There was something easy about it. The pressure to not say or do the wrong thing was off, given she’d already thoroughly unimpressed him with all her carrying on. Yet he’d saved her anyway.

Then they got to know each other a little better. Well, he got to know her, at least. While he told her some about the robot Santas and the last time he’d come across them, he ignored her question about the friend and her family that he’d lost since last Christmas. For his part, he still seemed determined to get to the bottom of why this all had happened to her today and peppered her with questions about her job and her relationship with Lance.

“You don’t think this has to do with my wedding, do you?” Donna asked as he seemed to be about to get lost musing about H.C. Clement’s mission statement or something next. “Like they’re trying to stop it?”

He frowned. “Why would you think that?”

Donna considered telling him about the marriage she’d supposedly already had on file down at the register. Maybe whoever was controlling these robots had slipped it in there and then sent the robots after her when that hadn’t stopped her and Lance. That paper didn’t really have to be from 19-whatever-it-was. It could be a fake, just like John Smith was an absolutely made-up name. They’d probably just thrown ‘Dr.’ on it to make it less obvious.

But he’d already said it had nothing to do with her, really. She wasn’t important.

“I dunno. Suppose it doesn’t matter. They’ve succeeded either way. Come on, it’s time to face the consequences,” Donna decided, moving to get up. She never once questioned whether he was coming along or not. For not being important, he was sticking with her pretty well, at least.

Donna sort of wished they hadn’t gone back to the reception, first since it turned out everyone had decided to celebrate it without her — she got that Lance had recommended they keep on with it so as not to let her parents’ money go to waste, but nobody else knew that — and second because the ring her alien escort had provided her turned out to be useless for hiding whatever energy signal she was giving off so her friends and family came under attack. Tired of trying to run and hide from this, Donna went with the Doctor and Lance to H.C. Clement and all the way down to a hidden basement beneath the company containing a lab and a huge hole drilled deep, deep into the Earth.

It was there that she finally learned the truth about one of her would-be husbands if not the other.

Because rather than attack the horrific-looking spider creature before her, Lance just laughed and called her thick. In as soft a tone as he could make it, the Doctor explained that Lance must’ve been the one to put the Huon particles in her to begin with. All those coffees she’d thought him so nice for getting her, and he’d really been poisoning her.

“But, we were getting married,” Donna reminded him, as if that would suddenly turn him back into the sweet man who’d accepted her proposal.

“Well, I couldn’t risk you running off. I had to say yes,” Lance explained. “Nearly thought it’d all been ruined with that mess at the register’s office, too, and that’s why I told you not to cancel anything.” He smirked as if a thought had just occurred to him. “Actually, it’ll save me having to file anything to get myself fully rid of you now. A woman who thinks the height of excitement is a new flavored Pringle.”

He went on mocking her for a while, Donna too stunned to say anything except, “But, I loved you.”

“That’s what made it easy,” Lance confessed.

It was like her whole world had fallen apart. Donna didn’t even think twice before stepping between the Doctor and the robots the Empress of the Racnoss ordered to aim their guns at. He was the one person who’d shown her anything like kindness on what should’ve been the happiest day of her life, and what sort of life did she even have with a husband on paper she’d never asked for and a groom she actually wanted plotting to kill her?

But the Doctor had yet another trick up his sleeve, whisking them away in his strange ship again and taking her along to try and figure out the massive spider’s plan. Together, they watched the formation of her own planet, discovering how it had actually come together around a ship containing countless more of the Empress’s kind. All that was left of her kind, as Donna found out once she’d been recaptured and nearly fed to alien spider babies. But it was Lance who suffered that grisly demise instead. Even as horrid as he had turned out to be, Donna still screamed his name as he fell down the hole. She didn’t think she’d ever forget that sight, or the sounds of the Empress’s screams when the Doctor flooded the laboratory to stop her children from feasting on the Earth.

Those things were so fresh in her mind, in fact, Donna just couldn’t accept the Doctor’s offer to carry on in his spaceship. No matter how much his sad look hurt her heart. He’d snuck inside it over the course of this long, trying day, slipped inside the cracks that Lance’s betrayal had dealt to it. If anything, that scared her as much as the monsters and death she’d seen today. Donna moved quickly in relationships because men tired of her easily, but even she was more cautious than this about who she let close. After everything with Lance, Donna didn’t think she could handle that just now. Especially when she couldn’t say how she felt about what he’d done tonight. If it was the Racnoss or the Earth… but they had been children, all the same.

Donna still tried to ask him to stay a little longer, even though she knew it was a long shot. She’d wounded him with her refusal, and he no doubt wanted to be well and clear of her at last. But his answer when she asked whether she’d ever see him again surprised her: “If I’m lucky.”

Donna had thought herself lucky to be where she was at the start of today, and look how that had turned out? But maybe she still was; after all, she’d seen things today no one else would, and learned that there was far more to this life and this universe than she’d ever believed. She’d also realized that no marriage, whether filed with the register or not, had ever been worth sacrificing bits of herself like she had to a man the way she had tried to do for Lance.

She watched the blue box and the Spaceman inside it soar off into the stars, single once again and determined to make her own luck going forward.

Chapter Text

As fate would have it, luck seemed to elude Donna from that day on. She tried to make a go of traveling on her own, but even the picturesque pyramids of Egypt couldn’t compare to what she’d been through on that fateful wedding day. Maybe it was because the sights had only been half of the equation. She’d sent the other half along on his merry way, and while she knew why she had, she sort of wished she’d somehow given herself more time to decide. Because she was realizing that, could she do it all over again, she’d have given a different answer to that strange Doctor who’d turned up in her life just when she’d needed him.

Since she couldn’t get a do-over — at least she felt pretty sure even time travel didn’t work that way— she resolved to do the next best thing. Donna researched and worked her way into and out of all sorts of places, hoping that somewhere, some way she’d manage a repeat of what had happened to her two Christmases ago. With each dead end, she grew more and more discouraged, and yet there was something about this latest investigation at Adipose Industries that had her hopes up again. Almost like some unseen force in the universe was telling her this was it .

She even opened up to her Gramps about what she’d really been doing all these months, though of course he latched onto the most sensational bit. “Same old story,” he chuckled. “A man!”

“No, I don't mean like that. Anyway, it can’t amount to much, you know,” she reminded him.

Donna had finally confided in her family about the strange mixup at the register’s office after her dad had been diagnosed with the cancer that had taken him away from them far too soon. He’d told them all he had no regrets, except that he wouldn’t get to see her happily settled. 

Hoping it might give him some good humor if not comfort, Donna had taken his hand and revealed, “Well, as it turns out, I’ve already been married going on a decade or so, so no need to worry yourself there.”

That had of course caused a startled outburst from her mother, so Donna had then explained the whole thing. In a way, she’d waited for the right time; with them all so busy getting her father to treatments and then making sure he was comfy in his final days, it had left them precious little time to fuss about it. Donna still hadn’t gotten around to forcing the issue with the register to have the erroneous record finally removed, and most days she hardly even thought about it anymore, but her grandad’s teasing had brought it back to mind.

“Oh, right,” he agreed, drawing her back to the present. “Your mystery husband.”

“Yeah. But, unlike him, this man I’m looking for’s real. I've seen him. I've met him, just once, and then I let him fly away.”

“Well, there you are. Go and find him.” Like always, he encouraged her, and Donna felt herself taking heart.

He was right, of course, and, as if his words had been a cue, the very next night she finally found that Spaceman. He’d even landed his ship right by where she’d parked her mum’s car earlier in the day, and Donna couldn’t help exclaiming that it was like destiny. She was convinced that her destiny was to travel with him, anyway, or at least she was making it so. And he seemed pleased with that.

Even the one stipulation he insisted on that they be just friends and nothing more was perfectly suited for her. Technically she was already married, on paper anyway, so that all-pervading pressure to find herself a husband was finally off her shoulders. And since both her husband and her best friend seemed intent on leaving her to her own devices as far as romantic pursuits were concerned, it left her free to flirt her way across time and space with anyone that caught her fancy. She wasn’t on the pull exactly, but it was fun sometimes to play at it and see the sour look on the Doctor’s face.

Sure, it seemed to offend him, but only because of his ego, Donna thought at first. Gradually, she came to realize it had far more to do with loneliness. She could understand that. And truthfully, she never planned to leave him, even if she did find a way to get properly married. This life with him was better than the so-called married bliss that had been sold to her as a child.

Even on days when Donna was anything but happy.

They’d been aiming for ‘99 and Boleyn Ground so that she could finally settle an old argument with an Arsenal supporter she ran into sometimes at the pub, but instead of a pitch and stands the Doctor had landed them in the middle of a thicket in a windy heath somewhere. God only knew what year it was. Donna only paused her criticism of his navigational skills once she heard a pitiful cry coming from further in the undergrowth. She let go of the hand he’d offered to help her out onto the path he’d found and headed further in.

“Donna?” The Doctor called after her in confusion.

“There’s someone hurt or lost, I think. At least I heard — oh!” Donna parted some of the taller grass in front of her and came upon a strange little creature lying on its back. With dark fur on its head and shoulders and scales on its belly, she could ascertain it wasn’t any sort of native animal to Earth that she knew of. That was assuming they were even on Earth, even if the gloomy gray sky and the plant life surrounding them suggested it. Its eyes were bulbous and green, with almost a glow to them, and it cooed right at her when it caught sight of her. Its arms and legs kicked rather uselessly at its sides, and Donna realized it couldn’t support itself enough to stand.

“You’re a baby, aren’t you?” Donna asked, and it keened a little more. “Just a darling ! Come here, love.”

She scooped the baby alien up and made her way back towards the Doctor just as a roll of thunder sounded. “Oi, Spaceman! Think I found whatever the TARDIS brought us here for.”

His eyes widened once she emerged. “Donna, that’s a Mandrel!”

“Figures you know what it's called. And here I was thinking he could be Etoo — like a sequel to E.T., you get it?”

The Doctor didn’t laugh at her bad joke for once, eyes still fixed on the little alien in her arms. “Donna, you need to put it back now .”

She frowned. “What?” She frowned.

“The Mandrels are one of the universe’s toughest predators.”

“Oh, come off it. He’s just a baby. And he wasn’t in a nest or anything, so he must’ve been lost or abandoned. He’s helpless.” As if to emphasize the point, Etoo made another little squeak.

“Maybe so, but he didn’t come here all on his own.”

It was like he’d timed that. A roar sounded out from the foliage behind her, and the Doctor hurried to pull her behind him. A much larger version of Etoo burst through and locked its eyes right on them.

“And that would be mummy?” Donna guessed, a tremble in her voice.

“Yup.”

They ran for it. Even once Donna found a safe place to deposit Etoo off the main path, the adult Mandrel kept chasing them.

“Why’s she still angry? We gave her baby back!”

“Mandrels are always angry! And not very bright— she’s probably forgotten why she was chasing us in the first place,” the Doctor explained in a rush as he pulled her towards a road. There weren’t any cars about, but that probably had something to do with the heavy rain that had started to fall.

None of this hampered the alien predator on their tail, so they kept running down a couple streets and into another, smaller park.

“Poor Etoo! He probably wanted us to adopt him after all with a mother like that,” Donna gasped, a stitch starting to develop in her side.

The Doctor took them round a line of trees and doubled them back a bit to try and lose their pursuer. But a clawed arm cleaved through the trees and nearly got them, so they went off in a completely different direction towards some steps leading up to a building. It was a long, brick-and-concrete thing with loads of offices. If Donna had seen one, she’d seen them all. Luckily, this one was unlocked, and so they rushed inside. She caught herself on Spaceman’s shoulder and worked to get her breath back. His hand cupped her elbow like a reassuring anchor as his eyes scanned the grass beyond the glass doors they’d entered through.

“Think she saw us?” Donna asked.

“Not sure. We’d better find some additional cover just to be sure.” They clasped hands again and made together for one of the offices where a woman sat behind a desk. “Hello!” The Doctor greeted her brightly. “I hope you don’t mind if we pop in for a minute or so.”

The clerk peered at them. “Do you have an appointment?”

“Er, no.”

“We really won’t be a bother,” Donna told the woman while she accepted a handkerchief from the Doctor to try and blot the rain from her face and dripping fringe.

“Well, if you can be quick about it, I’ll see what I can do.”

“Oh, no, we just needed a place—”

“Otherwise you’ll have to leave and come back once you’ve called and scheduled a time,” she said right overtop like the Doctor hadn’t even spoken. It was rare someone could manage that, but this woman had the imperiousness of a particularly harsh school marm, and his jaw clicked shut. Wordlessly, he turned to Donna for guidance.

Normally, she loved a good argument, but it was never any fun with this type of person. And they really couldn’t afford getting on her bad side if they didn’t want kicked back out into the rain with the mother Mandrel so soon.

“Just let her start the form, then,” Donna muttered with a shrug. It wasn’t as if they were sticking around to file it.

“I’ll need to see your papers, first,” the clerk told them before the Doctor had gotten halfway across to her.

“Right. Here they are,” he said, withdrawing the psychic paper with a flourish. The woman scanned it, nodded, and jotted whatever it was she thought she was reading down.

Donna had sidled back up to the Doctor by then, and he surreptitiously passed her the psychic paper while the woman was looking down at her forms. When she looked back up, Donna held up the very same psychic paper the Doctor had already shown her, though whatever mental magic it worked seemed to cause the clerk not to notice.

Donna handed him back the paper and shivered in her wet clothes, which he noticed. The Doctor shrugged out of his jacket and gave it to her, so like the day they’d first met that she couldn’t help a fond smile that he returned.

“See if you can’t turn up a dog whistle in the pockets,” he advised her as she pulled it on and took a seat to give her legs a rest. “It should calm the Mandrel down once we go track it down.”

“I’d rather not,” Donna said, even as she knew they had to. Couldn’t exactly let it roam around loose, so close to a populated area.

“Lost your dog, have you?” The woman asked, eyeing Donna while Spaceman signed on the line she was pointing a finger at.

“Sort of,” Donna answered, not wanting to incite a panic by declaring a wild monster was on the prowl. “Could you point me in the direction of the loo?” She couldn’t exactly empty out dimensionally transcendental pockets in front of the clerk unless they wanted to answer a whole host of other questions.

“Just be sure to sign, first.”

“Yeah, fine.” Donna snagged the pen from the Doctor and scribbled her name down on the page, then followed the sign the clerk indicated for the toilet. These halls really did remind her of somewhere, but Donna had been in more offices in her career alone than most people ever saw in a lifetime. She took the opportunity to make use of the loo — it beat having to hold it if they couldn’t find their alien right away — but even after reaching into each pocket all the way to her shoulder, it didn’t seem the Doctor had a dog whistle on him. Just a recorder, and that was likely to put anyone in a rage let alone a monster.

A scream came from outside the building followed by a loud growl. Oh God, someone else had found the Mandrel.

Donna charged back down the corridor, almost colliding with the Doctor when he barreled out of the office they’d stopped in to hide, and then they were off running again. It turned out that, while a dog whistle would’ve been the most handy, the whistle Donna herself had perfected for years in the Chicken Run supporting the Hammers did well enough in a pinch to lure the Mandrel away from the poor shoppers who’d braved the rain. The universe liked to be funny like that.

It was only as the Doctor stood blocking traffic to get the Mandrel back across the main road they’d crossed that Donna noticed the road sign proclaiming it was the A3063. They’d been practically in her backyard this whole time, then! It was wild to think she’d gone years never knowing other life in the universe existed and now she was helping a Spaceman lure a wild alien and her baby back to his spaceship so they could get the pair of them back home. While they never did figure out just who had dumped the two Mandrels on Earth, they considered it a job well done once the pair were let back out onto their planet of Eden.

“Well done on the whistling there, Donna,” the Doctor praised her as he piloted them back into the Vortex.

“Yeah, well it’s a lucky thing we hadn’t led her too far from the TARDIS, or my lips might’ve gotten stuck in a permanent pucker,” she remarked, walking up the ramp towards him.

“Would that be a shame?” He mused, regarding her mouth.

Donna crossed her arms over her chest, and his eyes apparently caught that, too, for he gave himself a little shake.

“Wouldn’t! Wouldn’t that be a shame? That’s what I was saying, just— dropped the ‘n’t’. Tricky things, contractions…”

Donna rolled her eyes. Sure. More likely he’d been daydreaming about the quiet that’d come from her being unable to talk.

“Anyway,” the Doctor said, spinning a dial on the console with far more relish than was likely required. “Upton Park, wasn’t it?”

Donna shook her head. “Nah, think I’ve had enough of parks today.”

“Good thinking. Somewhere new, then!” And off they were, the strange morning they’d spent in Hounslow in —  well, some point in the 20th century, Donna was pretty sure — soon just one of many odd little incidents they got into as they went about the universe.

—

It was not for another several weeks that Donna was fated to realize their mistake. On a trip to a manor house in the 1920s, the Doctor made a snap decision to declare himself an officer of the law. “Chief Inspector Smith from Scotland Yard,” he’d said very quickly, then introduced Donna as some pretty little assistant of his, which had stolen her attention at the time.

After all the excitement, all the death, and all that they had talked about regarding Agatha and her legacy, Donna laid on her bed in the TARDIS going back through the day and doing her best to commit it all to memory, for Agatha’s sake since she’d never be able to remember it for herself. So much had happened, it was hard to believe they’d thought they would just be attending a simple garden party that morning. Hard to believe, too, that somewhere in the middle of it all she had kissed him.

Donna thought back to that moment, feeling heat bloom in her cheeks. It was embarrassing, sure, but she’d had precious little to work with as far as giving him a shock was concerned. What had shocked her more was that it hadn’t been the simple one-and-done smack of her lips against his that she’d planned. Most of that had been his fault, Donna reasoned to herself. If he hadn’t kept staggering into her like that, she wouldn’t have needed to keep her grip on him just to stop herself toppling backwards. 

Then he had sort of moved back, she granted him, and she’d kept holding his face between her hands — but she could’ve tripped if she hadn’t! She thought she had felt his hand brush her side like he’d thought about helping steady her, or maybe… but he’d been nearly dying, so she supposed she could forgive him not thinking all that straight.

He could’ve turned his head or stopped moving his own lips against hers any time he liked, but he’d waited until the last second to do either. It had seemed that way to her, at least, since the toxins had pretty forcefully expelled themselves from his mouth the moment he’d broken their lip lock. And that look in his eyes when he’d immediately fixed his gaze right back onto her, declaring he’d have to do it again? Donna shivered, wishing once again that the TARDIS had some proper heating. The Doctor had clarified what he’d really meant after, of course, and she could really only conclude that either the poisoning or the process of dispelling it had come with a side of temporary delirium. That had to be it, Donna decided as she tugged her blankets up a little further.

She’d had better snogs. Of course she had. But the fact that this one wasn’t the worst she’d had? With all those nuts and anchovies stuffed in his cheeks like he’d been storing them for winter? What were his kisses like when he was at his best, she couldn’t help wondering, a fluttering sensation in her gut at the thought that even Donna couldn’t kid herself into dismissing as just her stomach turning. It wasn’t disgust she was feeling, but rather nerves.

Right, nerves because she shouldn’t even be considering the idea! They were friends, and technically they’d been posing as coworkers in the 20s when she’d planted one on him. Lady Edison and her guests probably imagined Scotland Yard to be the height of unprofessional now. Donna snorted to herself, imagining what would happen if their host contacted the Yard to report their strange Detective Inspector and his assistant, only to find out that there was no Detective Inspector Doctor. No, hang on, Agatha and everyone had kept on calling him Doctor, but he’d said his name was—

Donna’s eyes widened as she sat up in bed. “Wait.”

She got out from under her covers and found her slippers in the dark, then marched back to the console room. “Why’d you use Smith?”

She’d caught him not in the middle of maintenance for once but instead in the midst of reorganizing his little floor cupboards. Digging through to find the future copy of Agatha’s book must have left him feeling inspired. He looked up with a puzzled pout. “What?”

“Smith. You said you were a Detective Inspector named Smith,” Donna reminded him. “Why?”

“Well, it’s a common name, at least in the English-speaking world,” he answered, going back to sorting some odds and ends. “It lets me get by without too many questions.”

“You’ve used it before, then?” Donna asked to confirm.

“Loads of times.”

“Yeah, where was that?”

His frown became even more pronounced. “Donna—”

She continued right on, though, an unshakeable certainty she knew exactly where this was leading at last setting deep in her bones. “Any names you pair with it while you’re at it? Like, I dunno, John for instance?”

“Yes,” he answered, eyeing her warily. “Generally John, yeah. Why the sudden interest?”

“Sudden?” Donna echoed. “Ha! I’ve only spent years — I can’t believe I just took your word for it!”

The Doctor abandoned any attempt at organization, instead dumping all the items into the open hatch and springing to his feet. “Are you planning to explain any of this? What exactly am I meant to have misled you about?”

She snagged the piece of grating that served as the lid to that particular cupboard from where he’d tossed it onto the jump seat and strode right up to him. “Your name , Inspector Smith! When we met, you told me you didn’t have any other name but Doctor—”

“And I don’t!” He quickly argued. “Not any that are really mine — Smith’s an alias, it’s not real.”

“Well it’s real enough for the register!” Donna shot back, shoving the bit of grating into his chest, which he barely caught, and stomping away from him around the console. She heard him slot the grating lid back into the floor and then hurry after her.

“Which register?”

“The one back home. In Hounslow.” Donna froze, and felt his hands just ghost over her shoulder blades as he narrowly avoided colliding with her back. A shudder went down her spine. “Oh my God, we were there.”

“In Hounslow? Well, that’s where your mum lives, isn’t it?”

She turned back around, shaking her head. “No, we went to the Civic Centre in Hounslow. I thought it looked familiar, but I’d only been the once before!” They’d gone in a different entrance than the one she and Lance had used from the car park all those years ago. The clerk’s desk had been in a different corner, and there may have been a paint job or two in the intervening years, but… how could she have been so thick ? “Did you leave that form with her?”

“With who?” Now when she peeked at him from behind the heel of her hand that she’d pressed to her forehead, he looked genuinely baffled.

Donna sighed. “Remember the Mandrel?”

Now his eyes lit up. “Right, mum and Etoo! I suppose that was in Hounslow, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, and there was a form you watched the clerk at the register fill out,” Donna elaborated. “Did you happen to read what it said?”

His head shook. 

“Well, I can tell you what it said. It said we’re married .” She gestured between them with a finger and watched his eyes pop wide open.

“We are?”

“Yeah, thanks to you not paying attention! I can’t believe you just stood there and let her sign us up for matrimony!” The smartest, most inquisitive man in the universe, and he hadn’t even thought to question it?

“You told me to!” Was his indignant defense.

“And you signed a fake human name so it’d actually go through,” she accused him. Whatever fancy IDs that woman had imagined were on the psychic paper had probably only speeded things along! “Why didn’t you just take the form when we left?”

He gave a bewildered shrug. “I didn’t know you wanted me to, you never said! And anyway, we had an incensed Mandrel to corral, so a little bit of paper wasn’t exactly high on the list of priorities. You signed it, too!”

She had, because she’d been distracted and tired and trying to blend in with their surroundings so she didn’t accidentally damage history — only she’d gone and made up her own history after the fact.

“But there should’ve been a fee,” Donna reasoned, grasping at straws to try and pull one that said this couldn’t possibly be it even when it was staring her in the face.

“Is that why she wanted money?”

Donna was sorely tempted to grab him by the lapels and shake him. “You paid it?”

“Well, you were taking a bit in the toilet, and she just kept looking at me — I thought maybe they were hard up for donations? There was a recession in the 90s, you know,” he told her.

“Yeah, Martian, I actually lived through that one,” Donna pointed out.

“Well, and, I only carry money lately since you insist on it,” he continued on. “Otherwise, I could’ve just told her no. How was I supposed to know it was a fee for getting married? Why do humans put a fee on everything anyway? It’s never even stopped you from entering recessions.”

“Will you forget the bloody recession?” Donna demanded. “We’ve got slightly more present concerns.”

“Do we?” He asked, and before she could soundly advise him that of course they did, he added, “The Hounslow Mandrels were weeks ago, and you haven’t brought it up til now. Why’s it suddenly a problem?”

“Because I didn’t realize what had happened until today,” she reiterated. Honestly, sometimes she had to wonder if he was even half as clever as he claimed. “I didn’t know you went by John Smith sometimes.”

“Then how’d you know I signed the form at the register with John Smith?” He asked like it was some sort of gotcha. “Come to think of it, how do you even know it was a marriage form if you didn’t read it, either?”

“Because I’ve read it before.”

“When?”

She stared at him. “Doctor, what was I trying to do when we first met?”

“…trying to get married?” He answered carefully, as though he suspected a trick question. She supposed in a way it was.

“Yeah, and when I went with Lance,” she paused, struggling to acknowledge how real and long ago that all was. “You know, my fiance at the time, I read our form when he and I were trying to register that wedding.”

“Oh! Our form got in first!”

Donna nodded. “Yeah, imagine my surprise being told ‘actually, Miss, says here you’ve already been married for a decade’ — I couldn’t exactly know I’d gone back in time in my future to do it.”

He was nodding along now. “Right, and you hadn’t even met me yet! Blimey, I’ve always said I’m rubbish with weddings — hold on, if you were already married, how come you were going through with the wedding to Lance?”

“Well it’d already been paid for. I was gonna sort the clerical stuff after. And Lance, he just wanted to keep me around long enough for the Racnoss, like he said. You never wondered about that?”

“Why should I have cared about what he said?” The Doctor asked with a dismissive sniff. “He was poisoning you. And if that wasn’t enough,” he added just when she was starting to feel fond of him again, “it turns out he was trying to marry my wife!”

The smile dropped right off her face. “Oi, don’t you start. This isn’t funny!”

“Of course it isn’t,” he agreed right away. “We’ve been married all this time, and you knew, yet you’ve never even gotten me an anniversary present. One would think you didn’t love me at all.” His injured tone wasn’t all that convincing when she could see his lips twitching with amusement.

“How would you like an annulment, then?” Donna returned with mock sweetness. 

That would take the wind out of his smug sails. She left him standing there and walked over to the input bar. 

“Come on, let’s head back to ‘96 and get this sorted.”

“Er, well, Donna,” he said, turning to follow her movement while he scratched at his cheek. “We can’t do that.”

“This is a time machine, isn’t it?” Even as she asked it, Donna thought she could remember something he’d told her once when they’d met. She paused with her hands resting over the keys. “Wait, you mean that ‘cos I read it when I did—”

“We can’t go back before that and change it,” the Doctor confirmed. “It’d be interfering with your personal timestream. And mine now, I suppose. Because you read that we were married, we got married. Because we got married, you read that we had. Sort of a Marriage of Paradox.”

“An ontological one,” she said, recalling the word he’d used to describe Jenny.

“Right,” he agreed with a nod. He’d sidled up beside her now. “So we’d have to go to your present and sort whatever you sort for this sort of thing there.”

Donna’s ideal vision of just popping back to that rainy day in Hounslow and ducking in just after they’d rushed out of there to snag that bit of paper was replaced by an image of them sat in an office, trying to explain how they hadn’t meant to be married for going on twelve years, honest. What sort of ‘unreasonable behavior’ could she even leverage as reasons for wanting to divorce? That he was too chipper in the morning when he brought her coffee? That his toes were cold whenever they shared a blanket to watch movies in his home theater room? That he gave her a heart attack every time he risked his life? It wasn’t as if she could claim he’d been stepping out on her — not that he would be since they were purely friends, but he’d yet to even look at someone else twice wherever they traveled!

So that only left physically separating for long enough to qualify for a legal separation, and that was the last thing Donna would ever do.

“Just forget it,” she sighed.

“You’re sure?”

“Well there’s not exactly one of us at fault if it was an accidental marriage.” It wasn’t like he’d tricked her. They’d been tricked together by a series of highly unlikely but not impossible coincidences, just like how they’d met and how they’d found each other again. “Anyway, it was a long day and I just can’t be bothered.” What had she been thinking, asking him to take them back home to deal with paperwork when she ought to be in bed? She wasn’t even properly dressed to go out.

“Alright,” the Doctor agreed easily enough, though as she moved to go back up the ramp that led deeper into the ship, he added almost hesitantly, “Donna, I’m sorry if this — well, I’m sure it caused you an awful lot of confusion.”

“Likewise, Time Boy.” She’d probably sounded half-mad when she’d first come in here ranting until she’d explained about the notice she had first read at the register. At least he didn’t seem to consider this mishap in poor form given his request to keep things uncomplicated between them. He’d had nothing to say on that score regarding their kiss earlier today, either, but Donna reckoned he’d deemed the circumstances extenuating enough.

Rather than return to dwelling on their kiss, Donna thought of the rest of the day, of Agatha, and a sudden realization made her snort.

“You know something? We actually got one over on the Queen of Crime herself today — she thought we were together but not married, and really this whole time it’s been the reverse.”

She thought he might have laughed at that, but the corner of his mouth only turned up in a slight smirk. “So it’d seem.” The Doctor walked around the console, fingers trailing over the various buttons and knobs without moving to actually use any of them before crossing behind the center column entirely. “Goodnight, Mrs. Noble.”

If the man who’d sworn all he’d wanted was a friend could see himself now, Donna wondered as she gave a bemused shake of the head and returned to her room. She supposed a human marriage was just a meaningless bit of paper to him. Something to tease her about when the mood struck him. Even if he’d seemed genuinely contrite for a moment there, like he really would have gone back to Hounslow and gone through a divorce if she’d asked it of him. Which only made it all the less likely she’d do it, really.

Of all the possibilities that had crossed her mind that day when she’d sat in the register office with her duplicitous fiancé staring at a paper that declared her intent to take another husband entirely, this had been nowhere on the list for a whole host of reasons. But the Donna of today couldn‘t really picture a better outcome. In fact, she sort of wished she could’ve realized the truth sooner, if only because then she’d have had a guarantee all those months she’d been searching for him that it really would turn out right in the end. Traveling with him was her destiny, and anyone who begged to differ could have a gander at the Hounslow Register’s records.

Donna could shrug off the shame of not being good at relationships; her romances had all been doomed to fail because she’d been meant to marry her best friend, and that was what everyone was saying was the sensible thing to do these days. 

Agatha had thought they were being sensible in not being married, but then she’d been hurting from her first husband’s betrayal and had Donna and the Doctor all wrong besides. They weren’t chasing each other — not anymore anyway now that she’d found him again — and her life was far more thrilling with him than apart. He seemed happy with the arrangement, too… for the most part.

That strange not-quite smile he’d worn at her joke about Agatha’s assumption was still fresh in her mind’s eye when Donna closed her eyes to finally try and sleep, though. Or Time Lords , he’d muttered only that morning while she’d been lamenting her options for a man, well before either of them had understood that had been predetermined already. That blazing look in his eyes in the manor house’s kitchen, the look that had nearly stolen her breath away…

They played with fate every time they traveled in the TARDIS. Halfway between waking and sleeping, Donna wondered if they’d only been brought back together so that fate might find a different way to tempt them for that choice.

Chapter Text

Whether it had been by choice or not, marriage did not change the traveling much, Donna was pleased to discover. They still explored new worlds and prevented plots in Earth’s past and future. This life they both so loved to take part in hardly changed. The introductions could become a bit of a sticking point now, though.

“Of course we have an exclusive package for couples,” a woman said at the ticket booth for an airship tour of the Iridescent Canyons of Kaelerfi that Spaceman had claimed were not to be missed.

“Well, we’re not a couple,” Donna told her.

“Right, we’re just married,” the Doctor added as though that clarified anything.

The woman’s three eyes flicked between them, a confused smile stuck on her face.

Donna sighed. “What comes in the package?” They might as well take advantage of the perks.

Almost anywhere they went now, he did that, or introduced them like, “I’m the Doctor, and this is my wife Donna.” If she’d made a new acquaintance on her own before rejoining him, it was, “Hello, I’m the Doctor, Donna’s husband.” And not in a joking way, either, just matter-of-fact. Which she supposed it was fact.

Donna had to assume he just liked reminding himself she had no plans of leaving for home anytime soon, since that had scared him before. Their marriage served as a guarantor. It wasn’t as if he took it any further than that, the occasional odd comment or look notwithstanding. She told herself to stop imagining what might happen if he did. He’d said he wouldn’t. She had thought she liked that about him.

The lack of expectation in their relationship, even now that it was a marriage, had seemed so freeing at the start. To know he liked having her around for who she was and not for what he might get out of her if he played his cards right? Donna couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so safe and able to be herself. She didn’t have to worry he’d leave her when he discovered how loud she could raise her voice or how quick she could be to temper or how obnoxious her laugh got. Donna should’ve realized that, deep down, that was what she’d been missing in her previous relationships no matter how appealing she’d found the looks of those other men. Attractiveness was about more than the physical, and the closer she became to the Doctor, the more his qualities both inside and out drew her in. She’d been denying it to everyone including herself, because the minute she admitted it his lack of expectation would turn from freeing to isolating. Unlike the intense but brief relationships she’d had and lost in the past, Donna couldn’t bear to have this slow-building and tender love in her heart rejected.

So like any vulnerability in her life, she turned it into a joke to prevent someone else from doing so first.

Sat at yet another candlelit table after he’d given the robotic hostess their names as Doctor and Mrs. Noble, she quipped, “You’ll have to watch yourself the next time we visit home, or my mum’s gonna think we eloped.”

He raised an eyebrow from behind his menu. “Haven’t we, in a way? Oh, they’ve got fresh-caught polvia in green sauce! You’re gonna love that.”

Pressed in close at his side under the console to watch him demonstrate a common bit of maintenance, Donna faked a put-upon sigh. “I suppose it’s good for me to learn all this if you ever leave me a widow.”

He flashed her bright smile. “Can’t imagine anyone better to inherit the TARDIS. I used to worry about that all the time when it was just me.”

Locked in their fifth cell of the month, she snarked, “You probably call this a honeymoon, don’t you?”

He slapped his hand to his forehead. “Honeymoon! I knew there was something about Earth weddings we’d skipped — er, but we probably had our reasons,” he added upon noticing her dropped jaw.

In these moments, Donna couldn’t get a read on him. Was he just trying to joke back with her? Normally, she could tell even if the humor didn’t land with her. But he couldn’t be serious about any of it. That was just her own wishful thinking wanting to believe he was. Because if he was serious, why wouldn’t he do anything about it?

Maybe the Doctor was happy to find himself in this accidental arrangement with her. Maybe he even loved her in his own, alien way. But he hadn’t asked her to be that sort of mate to him, and so there was no point hoping he might suddenly decide he wanted her as the other kind just because she’d been reconsidering the idea.

Donna chose to tap into her Britishness and carried on like nothing had changed. Laughed with him, ran with him, and tended to him with all the care a best friend would. That she was also his wife was irrelevant.

And that was all working just fine until Spaceman got a message on the psychic paper signed with hugs and kisses, and its sender greeted them in a silent library with a cheeky, “Hello, dears. How’s the family?”

Professor River Song had brought a whole team of archeologists along, but only she was acting like they were already old friends with her somehow. While the Doctor got short with some of the others for not listening to his warnings about the shadows, she seemed to seek out Donna’s gaze to share a knowing smile with, and even asked, “Think you could persuade him to play a little nicer?”

“Why should I? You lot are the ones who called us here without having a clue of what we’re supposed to be doing,” Donna said back, and River blinked in surprise. She supposed the woman thought her quick wit and charming smile won everybody over automatically.

Then once the woman set her crew a few tasks and the Doctor got to work on accessing a Library terminal, River turned to her and stated, “Seems we’d better see when we are in your schedule.”

“My what?”

“Haven’t you got it?”

Donna held her open palms out. “Do I look like I’m carrying one?”

A crease appeared in River’s brow as she frowned in puzzlement. “But if you haven’t… Doctor?”

He looked up and around at them. “Hm?”

“Care to join your missus and I for a moment?”

His eyes widened briefly while Donna felt her cheeks heat up. They’d been mistaken for a couple often enough, but never by someone who claimed to have some knowledge of them beforehand, even if Donna couldn’t work out how that was. Nevertheless, he bounded over, placing himself at Donna’s side. “Something you needed from us, Professor?”

“United front as always,” River remarked to herself, then reached out and grabbed his left hand. Donna couldn’t stop a frown at the action. So she had them pegged as a couple but thought nothing of getting personal with his digits right in front of his wife? The archeologist looked up from examining his hand with something like shock. “You must be so young.”

“I’m really not,” he answered back, frowning as well which made Donna feel better as petty as it was.

But River shook her head. “You’re younger than I’ve ever seen you.” She looked searchingly at first him then her.

“What do you mean?” Asked Donna. What was this woman going on about? She’d only first seen them today!

“Please, you must know me,” River implored them, and they shared a bewildered look. But they were soon distracted first by a strange little girl who appeared on the terminal for a short time and then by the sudden and grisly demise of Miss Evangelista. Donna couldn’t get that horrible echo of the other woman’s last words out of her head, so she stood there rather numbly while River got the Doctor a packed lunch to show them all what he thought they were dealing with.

But River soon sidled back up to her, eyeing her with some strange mix of curiosity and pity. “You haven’t traveled with him very long, have you?”

Donna tensed. “Long enough to know what I’m doing.”

River shook her head. “That’s not what I meant. Have you worked it out yet?”

Why did this woman’s questions make no sense? “Worked what out yet?”

“You and him.” She inclined her head towards where the Doctor was crouched down several feet ahead of them.

Donna narrowed her eyes at the other woman. “Don’t know what you’re talking about. I thought we were a united front?”

River’s lips curved up in a smile, but it seemed sad somehow. “You will be once you’ve realized. Just remember — it’s just as often about what the Doctor doesn’t say as what he does.”

“Oh, good one. Just what exactly makes you the expert on my own bloody husband?” Sure, their marriage was mostly a sham, but she wasn’t about to let that on when the professor already claimed to know so much.

“Spoilers. But it’s not just him I know,” River said, looking at Donna as if she could see right through her. “I know you think it can’t possibly be real, Donna, but it is. You just have to trust yourself.”

“Right,” said Donna, even though she hadn’t understood at all. “If we’re sharing wisdom today, my advice to you is make your pep talks a bit less cryptic, and you may actually help someone.”

She didn’t wait for River’s answer, instead marching over to crouch beside the Doctor and watch invisible shadows devour a chicken leg down to the bone in seconds. She really had her pick for pleasant conversations today.

When the Vashta Nerada latched onto another member of the crew’s shadow, the Doctor rushed her to the gift shop where she’d figured the exit might be. It was a teleport of some sort that he planned to use to send her back to the TARDIS alone while he continued to brave it out here with the others since the TARDIS wouldn’t let any of them in that way.

“You don't have a suit, so you're in just as much danger as I am and I'm not leaving you,” Donna argued.

“Donna, let me ex—”

“There’s nothing to explain!” She stepped one foot down off the teleport. “For better or for worse, Martian. It’s the one vow I’ve actually made you.”

He rushed from the control box to catch her by the arms before she could get any further. “Then let me make my own! Donna Noble, I vow to cherish and protect you, to care for you in every way you’ll allow, and to save you just as you’ve saved me.” His large, brown eyes were gazing up at her for once, and the sheer awe in them had her faltering a step back onto the teleport.

He released her and pointed the sonic back at the control box. Too late, Donna realized what he’d meant to do.

“Doctor—!”

Donna found herself waking up in hospital, the details of where and why a little hazy. Her attending physician, Dr. Moon, was a calming presence, but she wasn’t sure she cared for how invested he seemed to be in setting her up with someone. He was worse than her mum! She hadn’t minded bumping into Lee on their walk and making conversation — God knew there probably weren’t many people willing to be patient enough to listen through his stammer — but she didn’t need a date, so she didn’t know how she kept ending up on one. It was like she would blink and suddenly find herself by the lake or in a restaurant with Lee, and then she’d have to hurriedly make her excuses and scarper back off to her room. Dr. Moon would come to call and they’d talk through her difficulties, and Donna would almost forget what her trouble had been entirely. Then they’d all do the whole thing over again.

Donna wished she could put a finger on what kept her running away from Lee. He was nice, he was trying, and she’d always sort of wanted a husband—

“And if you’ll just sign here,” said a woman, sliding a statement across the desk towards her. Donna didn’t even remember having sat down in this office.

“What’s this?”

“It’s for your notice.”

“Notice?” Donna looked to her right, where Lee sat beside her with a smile, and then back down at the paper. That’s right, they were submitting their notice to be married. They weren’t getting any younger after all.

But Donna kept frowning down at the paper, overwhelmed by déjà vu. “I’ve done this before.”

“Wh-what, d-d-d-d’you mm-ean?” Lee struggled to ask. The woman at the desk just kept smiling blandly, like she didn’t know what to say to Donna throwing out such an unlikely scenario.

“I mean I’ve given notice. And I can’t give it again, I’ve tried that. They wouldn’t let me.” That’s what this clerk ought to be telling her right now, just like she had done that first time with, with some other man she couldn’t seem to come up with a name for. She didn’t think it mattered much. She hadn’t married him, either. “Because I was already married.”

“D-Donna?” Lee asked. He’d been practicing so hard to get her name right!

Donna took his hands. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why you’ve gotten dragged into this — whatever it is. You didn’t deserve that.” Then she got up from her chair and was walking into her room at hospital once again.

Dr. Moon was already there. It was like they were cutting out life’s idle moments. “You still won’t let go of those dreams of yours, will you? They’re only making it harder for you to fully integrate.”

“Integrate into what?” Donna wanted to know. “Who even talks like that? You sound like you’re in that Matrix film or something.”

Dr. Moon didn’t reply, because he flickered out of existence. He was replaced by some sort of projection of a skinny man in a blue suit, but all of him was sort of tinted blue. “No, the signal's definitely coming from the moon. I'm blocking it, but it's trying to break through.” He looked up and spotted her, his whole face lighting up with joy that made her heart leap up into her throat. “Donna!”

Before she could respond, he was gone and replaced by Dr. Moon, who chuckled with a hand laid on his stomach like he’d just had a spot of indigestion.

“Oh, the Doctor,” Donna realized, her memories of where she’d been and what she’d been doing before hospital coming back into sharp focus. Those weren’t the dreams, this place was. “I saw the Doctor!”

“Yes, you did, Donna,” Dr. Moon agreed. “And then—”

“No, just stop it, alright?” Donna said, backing away from him to the door. “You can’t keep making me forget. That’s my real life, my real husband. To hell with you!”

She was moved outside before she’d even finished turning to leave. What was it, then, some sort of magic? How did it seem to anticipate what she was going to do scarcely before she’d decided to do it?

A woman in a black Victorian dress and veil fell into step beside her. “You’ve figured it out, then?”

That voice was familiar, and that question… she’d been asked it, hadn’t she? In the Library. “Do I know you?”

“You knew the real me,” the woman answered, and it wasn’t River Song’s voice. “I’m just a copy. A rather poor one, I’ll admit.”

“Hang on, you’re her,” Donna realized, gooseflesh rising on her arms. “Miss Evangelista. But that can’t— I mean, I’m sorry, but you’re dead.”

“Yes, I am. In a way, we all are dead here. We are the dead of the Library.”

“Oh my God,” Donna breathed. “I’m really—?” That teleport, had it been broken? Had sending her through it somehow killed her? The Doctor had said he’d been doing it to keep her safe, and for a moment she even thought she’d seen the TARDIS console room flash into being before her eyes before she’d screamed and woken up here… but was here just whatever came next?

But she’d seen him. Just now, she knew she had. If he’d been fully real she might’ve thumped him for whatever he’d done to her instead of sending her back to the ship like he’d wanted. How did she get him back?

“You said ‘in a way’ I’m dead, but not really,” Donna said. “I’m just stuck wherever this is. How do I leave? I’ve got to get back to the Library.” Or back to wherever he was. She hoped he wasn’t still in that Library being hunted by the very shadows themselves, but somehow Donna knew there was a slim chance he’d left there without her. Not after that vow he’d made. “Where’s the teleports here?”

“I’m afraid there are none, Donna. This is cyberspace, there’s not exactly an exit sign.”

“Cyberspace? You mean we're online somehow?”

“You were uploaded directly to the data core,” Miss Evangelista told her. “My data ghost just caught in the WiFi. That’s probably why there were some transcription errors.”

“What do you mean, errors? Is that why you’re wearing that veil? Why are you trying to hide from me if you want to help?” Donna asked, reaching forward and lifting it a little. The disfigured features so unlike Miss Evangelista’s real face had her gasping and dropping it with shock.

“It’s not exactly me, is it?” Miss Evangelista asked dryly. “The errors also increased my IQ, which has helped me to see the truth of where we are. I am brilliant and unloved. It is curious to me that love is what allowed you to see past the programming.”

“Love?”

“Yes. Your love for the Doctor and the loyalty you feel to him and your marriage.”

Donna felt her cheeks heat up. Plenty of people had assumed she was with the Doctor, but no one had ever blatantly put a name to her feelings like that. “It’s not even real,” she muttered, turning her face away.

“It’s more real than a virtual reality.”

“If this really is all virtual, then where’s my body?” Donna asked, hoping to change the subject. “I mean, I feel real, but I have to physically be somewhere in the real world, don’t I?” Somewhere in the Library she was asleep and not blushing, she hoped.

“Your physical self is stored in the library as an energy signature. It can be actualised again whenever you or the library requires,” Miss Evangelista explained.

“And what if I require it now? How does it work?”

“It doesn’t,” came Dr. Moon’s voice from behind them. Donna and Miss Evangelista turned around to find him wearing a severe frown. “That function was disabled to protect all visitors.”

“Protect them? By tricking them into wasting their days away in here?” Donna demanded. “How does that protect anybody?”

“It was the only way.”

“The teleports would have been used by those attempting to evade the shadows, just like the Doctor tried to do with you, Donna,” Miss Evangelista pointed out. “Had they not been uploaded here, they would have perished.”

Okay, she could see how the system hadn’t been trying to hurt anybody, but another thought came to her. “They as good as perished to anyone who cared for them. These people have been trapped in here for a hundred years. Their lives and loved ones passing them by, never knowing what happened to them! They have got to be let out.”

Dr. Moon looked down, chastened. “Unfortunately, that capability has been compromised.”

“By who?”

“By CAL, I would presume,” Miss Evangelista said. “Isn’t that right?”

Before Dr. Moon could answer, the sky above them suddenly turned red and an alarm began to sound. “Oh, what has she done?” He turned as if to go.

“Wait!” Donna said, grabbing his arm. “You said we can’t leave here, that that’s been disabled by something. But you’ve got some control, haven’t you? Just let me out.”

“My primary function is to protect the Library and all its occupants,” Dr. Moon told her. “I cannot guarantee your safety if you were to be actualized.”

“Doesn’t seem like I’m that safe here, either,” Donna pointed out, gesturing to the sky. “But if I can get back out into the real world, I can tell the Doctor what’s happened. We can help. Please, this is my choice to make.”

He stared at her for a long moment. Donna wondered if perhaps his programming was buffering or something. But then he said, “Commencing download.”

A bright light nearly blinded her. Donna raised her arms to shield her eyes and found herself standing on the same teleport she’d been on when she’d last been inside the Library. Then again, she supposed she’d never left. “Okay, brilliant!” Now to find the Doctor, and to not get eaten along the way.

Donna picked her way quickly and carefully out of the gift shop and followed noises to a reception area where Lux was working at a terminal. He looked up and startled at the sight of her. “It’s you! Did he do it?”

“Did who do what?”

“Your husband, said he was gonna get everybody out of the data core to stop the self-destruct.” So they’d figured that bit out while she’d been away, then. That must’ve been when he’d beamed that image of himself into the virtual reality.

Given the lights were all still red and the alarm was still blaring, Donna felt it safe to assume he needed help even so. “Where’s that?”

Donna followed after Lux back to one of the reading rooms and waited impatiently for him to get some sort of door in the floor to open up, revealing a lift beneath. She stepped on it. “Keep going til you get to the center of the planet,” he instructed her. “I’ve got to prime more data cells!”

“Got it!”

The Library was massive, and with each level she passed through she hugged her arms tight to herself to make her shadow as small as possible and tried not to imagine the worst was waiting for her down there. Then Donna thought she heard a shout echo up the shaft the lift was traveling down: “You wouldn’t have a chance and neither would I!”

Her heart rate picked up, and Donna strained to listen as she willed the damn lift to go faster. What did River mean? Was that another voice she could hear? Was it the Doctor’s?

The platform started to slow even more, but Donna thought that might be because it was reaching its stop. She could hear River again more clearly now. “…you knew I was coming here. The last time I saw you — the both of you, I mean — you’d come to take me to see the Singing Towers of Darillium, to celebrate my professorship. I’d had the position for years, and you just said you’d gotten the date wrong. But I should’ve known by the way Donna cried.”

“Autodestruct in one minute,” a computerized voice stated calmly, as though it were the most ordinary sentence in the world.

Donna got down on hands and knees, trying to see if she could squeeze through the gap starting to open between the floor of her platform and the wall.

“I suppose you both must’ve known it was my time. Time to come to the Library. You even gave me your screwdriver.” River’s laugh sounded short and brittle. “That should’ve been the real clue.”

The gap was wide enough now but it was at least an eight-foot drop to the floor of the room she was descending into. Still, Donna got onto her stomach and started to slide herself out feet-first.

“There’s nothing you can do,” River told someone. Donna wondered if she could see her hanging half-off the platform.

But then the Doctor answered, “You can let me do this.”

Panicking, Donna let herself drop to the ground early, her left leg buckling when her ankle twisted in a funny way upon impact. She gasped and clutched at it, looking about wildly to try and spot the other two even as her eyes welled up with pain. All she found were tall banks of computer servers surrounding another fallen crew member.

River’s voice was coming from somewhere just around the corner from a row of server banks. “You’ll see me again. There’s so much to come for you. For you and Donna both.”

The computer had started counting down from ten. Donna forced herself back up to her feet and hobbled towards the voices.

The Doctor sounded like he was pleading as he said, “River, you broke your rules to tell me she was still alive so that I’d trust you. You knew exactly what that would mean to me. You asked about our family— ”

Donna rounded the corner and spotted the Doctor chained to a pole across the room while River sat in a chair with two power cables in her hands and some sort of headset on. “River, what are you doing? Don’t!”

“Hush now,” she told them both. “Spoilers.”

Heedless of any shadows, Donna limped two steps forward, but the cables River plugged together gave off a light even more intense than when she’d been downloaded out of the virtual world as the hum of the computers rose to an unbearable pitch. Donna staggered back, her leg giving out again, and crashed to the floor. Slowly, the hum died back down and the light receded.

“Donna! Donna, are you alright?” The Doctor called, and when she’d finally blinked the spots from her vision she could see he was straining desperately to try and reach her.

“Yeah, I am,” she called back. “But…”

As one, they turned stricken looks to the chair and what was left of River Song’s charred suit. Donna couldn’t believe it. How could River be dead? Everything she’d said to them about knowing them, except they’d lied about losing her scarcely after meeting her? Donna felt wretched recalling the short tone she’d taken with the professor all because she’d felt confused and unsure, when all River had done today was to try and help even at the cost of her own life.

The Doctor was still stuck to the pole. River had left both his and her sonic screwdrivers just out of his reach. By design, no doubt. Donna’s ankle throbbed with pain, so she crawled her way over to them, which forced the Doctor to finally drag his eyes away from the chair.

His brows, already furrowed with sadness, knit together even more with worry. “You’re hurt.”

“It’s not bad. Just a sprain, I think.” She picked up his screwdriver since she was more familiar with it and aimed it at the handcuff. It sprung open, and he circled his other hand around his wrist for a moment, rubbing at the reddened skin there.

“How did you get out before River made the transfer? Was everybody already out?”

She shook her head. “Just me. I don’t think the computer could’ve done everyone on its own.”

He slumped back against the pillar. “Then she saved the others. All four thousand and twenty-two people.”

Donna nodded.

“I didn’t mean for her—” he started, and his throat bobbed once as he swallowed. “I was gonna…”

It was so unfair to River, but Donna felt so relieved it hadn’t come to him doing it. Grateful to the other woman, too.

“Then it sounds like she saved four thousand and twenty-three,” Donna corrected. He met her eyes again and nodded once. “Who was she, Doctor?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think we’re supposed to know, yet.” He leaned forward and took up the other sonic, the one River had claimed he would give to her one day while Donna just cried. Couldn’t they have done any better than that?

“We should’ve given her more than a screwdriver.”

“We couldn’t have, not without changing River’s timeline. Unless—” He thumbed open a catch on the side, and his eyes widened. “No, Donna, you’re right! We did give her more.”

“How? What’ve we done?” Or would do? It only barely made any sense to her.

He flipped the sonic around to show her the green lights of a neural relay nestled inside the device. “Saved her.” Then he shot to his feet and bounded into the next room.

Donna struggled to her own feet, clenching her teeth to ignore her protesting ankle, and limped after him. He’d gone into a little room containing a single Library Node with the face of a little girl on it. With a start, Donna realized it was the girl they’d spoken to briefly on the terminal upstairs. The girl smiled as he plugged River’s neural relay into the data core.

“Will she want that?” Donna asked, using one of the server banks for support to keep most of her weight off her bad ankle. “When I was in there, it tried to convince me that was my real life and to do all these things it was nudging me towards. Like somebody was playing house with my life.”

“Oh, that was just because Charlotte had to forget that she was CAL when she uploaded everyone to keep them safe from the Vashta Nerada. She couldn’t process all those minds inside her memory banks consciously at once. So she put everyone in holding patterns while she went dormant. It’ll be different now. River will have the worlds of every single book ever written to explore in there.”

Donna nodded. She still wasn’t sure it was a life she would choose, but she could admit it felt better than them doing nothing for her.

The Doctor’s gaze had gone off into the middle distance during his explanation, but he seemed to come back to himself and refocused on her with a frown. “You shouldn’t be standing on that.”

He came towards her, and Donna reached an arm out to accept his shoulder for support. “I should be alright to get back to the TARDIS with some help. Just have to keep off this — oi!”

He’d chosen to ignore her assessment and scooped her up fully into his arms instead. Donna was forced to throw her own around his neck for balance. “This should keep you off it. I’ll behave!” He added with a huff as her good leg gave a final flail in protest.

“You, behave? That’ll be the day,” Donna scoffed.

He gave her a look and they stared at each other for a moment, faces very close, until Donna turned her head to look over his shoulder instead. The Doctor cleared his throat, then started walking to the lift.

She watched the one long shadow they cast on the floor. “How are we safe from the Vashta Nerada right now, anyway?”

“They’ve promised us a day’s time to get off the planet and leave them to their forests in peace.”

“Best we were off, then.”

“Right.”

The lift had long since finished coming down, so he stepped onto it and they started to rise back up to the floor it had come from. It was quiet, which was rare for them. Donna kept starting and stopping sentences in her head, none of them feeling adequate in the face of what they’d been through today, while the Doctor seemed content to hold her. And maybe that was just as much for his own comfort as hers, Donna realized. She rested her head against his shoulder and felt herself smile when his arms curled around her just that bit more.

The Library was packed with people once they reached the public floors. All the visitors CAL had saved, who could now finally go home because of River’s sacrifice. The Doctor wove around the queues people were forming to use the teleports, but as he passed by one queue a man turned to keep them in his sights. “D-D-Don-Donna!”

With a start, Donna realized it was the man she’d had to keep rejecting in the virtual world. “Lee!”

The Doctor had stopped, which wasn’t very helpful. Donna couldn’t exactly spur him on like a horse, though. “You two know each other?” He asked, looking from Lee to her with a puzzled frown. “Oh! You must’ve met inside the data core.”

“Yeah, it’s sort of a funny story,” Donna said when it was anything but. “Um, Lee, this is— well, it’s my husband.” She patted the Doctor’s chest and watched his frown turn to more of a bemused smile. She supposed she’d never done that before.

“Yes, hello! I’d offer you a shake, but as you can see Donna’s rather a handful— ow!”

She’d swatted at him this time. “You said you’d behave!”

“Come on, it was funny!”

“Yeah, I’m splitting my sides laughing.”

Poor Lee would’ve had enough trouble getting a word in edgewise between them even without his stammer, and the queue was moving him along besides. “Hu-huh-happy for y-you,” he managed with an earnestness that made Donna wish the virtual world had found him someone unattached so he had something to go home to after all these years.

“Oh, be well, Lee,” she called after him. Donna turned to murmur in the Doctor’s ear, “Can we go now? Please?” She didn’t want to linger and rub salt in the wound.

This close, Donna felt as well as saw the slight hitch in his breath. “Yeah, best to.”

The room they’d left the TARDIS in was empty and quiet. Donna started to dig into her jeans pocket for her key, but then the Doctor asked, “Donna can you try something for me? Can you snap your fingers?”

She gave him a quizzical look but did so seeing as there didn’t seem to be any harm in it. The TARDIS doors sprang open, bathing them in its warm, golden light.

“What? When’d you get that put in?”

A wistful, slightly awed smile rose on his lips. “Oh, someday.” He carried her up the ramp and set her carefully on the jump seat, then turned and snapped to close the doors again. Donna waited through the worst of the takeoff rattling, then used the railing to pull herself up to standing and start hopping towards the corridor that led further back into the ship.

“Stop that, you’ll just make it worse,” the Doctor scolded, rounding the console to cut off her escape.

Donna used her free arm to try and wave him off. “I’m not helpless. You don’t have to carry me everywhere.” Him sweeping her off her feet and stealing away down a TARDIS corridor was too close to some idle imaginings she’d had lately for comfort.

They compromised with her putting an arm around his shoulders and leaning most of her weight into his side while she hopped along towards the med bay. She could tell he didn’t approve of it, and he asked, “How’d you even hurt your ankle?”

“How else?” She pushed her fringe out of her eyes and glared at him. “Trying to get to you before you could do something stupid.”

“Oh.”

“So much for keeping me safe.”

He winced. “Donna, I’m sorry.”

“Sorry because you’ve realized you shouldn’t have done it or sorry because it didn’t work?” She wanted to know, and when he didn’t answer she knew which it was. Donna was glad they finally made it through the med bay doors so she could let go of him and make a final couple hops to the closest cot. “How exactly were you gonna make sure I stayed in the TARDIS anyway? Or was storing me in the Library catalogue until you could check me out again your plan all along?”

“No,” he said, with enough strength behind the word that she believed him. “No, I would’ve never done that to you on purpose, Donna.” With careful hands, he undid the laces on her shoe and removed it, then rolled her sock off her foot and her jeans up her leg. She hardly even felt a twinge of pain.

“But you knew I was in the data core,” she persisted nonetheless. “You were just surprised I’d gotten myself out early.”

“I didn’t know right away. All I knew was that the TARDIS hadn’t signaled that you’d been successfully teleported inside, and…” he trailed off under the guise of fitting some futuristic medical device over her ankle. But there was something haunted in his gaze where it stayed fixed on the machine as it worked.

“You said, River had to tell you I was still alive,” Donna repeated what she’d heard hesitantly. “You thought I’d died? Because you teleported me?”

“I didn’t think, I knew,” he disputed, then shrugged a shoulder as he added, “I thought I knew. Because I saw you.”

“In the data core? Yeah, I remember.”

“No, that was after River told me.” He finally lifted his eyes back to hers. “I thought you’d died because CAL put your face on a Library Node.”

Donna’s mouth fell open. “Oh God . But I didn’t donate it! That’s disgusting!”

It was how she honestly felt, she wasn’t trying to be funny. But she was glad to see his eyes crinkle slightly with amusement.

The device beeped, and he took it off. Donna gave an experimental roll of her ankle and felt no pain.

“All better?”

“Nearly,” she answered. He’d started to get up from the chair beside the cot, so Donna reached for his hands to stop him. “Spaceman? Promise you won’t send me away like that again. Whether it works like you meant it to or not. ‘Cos if you think you’re gonna save me by putting me somewhere else while you get yourself killed, you’re wrong.” If River hadn’t been there and willing to take his place, whatever her reasons for doing so… Donna could feel her eyes start to sting at just the thought.

His hands gripped hers tighter, fear in his eyes. “Donna—”

“I’m not saying I’d go take a long walk off a short pier,” she clarified. “But this life with you, it’s what I’ve chosen. And it’s the only way I really want to spend my life. But if you can’t handle what that means, I may as well have just taken up Lee on his offer in the data core.”

The Doctor’s eyebrows shot up his forehead. “He made you an offer?”

“The Library sort of set us up. Or tried to. But I—” Donna’s courage faltered a little, and she looked down at their hands instead. “I just knew there was someone else.”

“Oh,” said the Doctor, soft enough she could’ve imagined it. She didn’t imagine the way his thumbs caressed the backs of her hands, though.

So Donna screwed up the last of her nerve and asked, “Are we married?”

When she raised her gaze again, he was squinting at her in confusion. “Well, you’ve told me we are.”

Donna shook her head. “Not what I was asking.”

He let go of her and pulled out the sonic. “Are you sure you’re feeling alright? Maybe the actualization process caused some temporary amnesia—”

“Doctor,” Donna said, and he shut up. “I’m not talking about a paper, I’m not talking about a technicality, I’m talking about us.” She was tired of wondering. Time to find out if the impossible was real after all.

A few attempts stuttered out of his throat, not exactly like Lee but close enough Donna might’ve laughed were she not so deeply invested in his answer. “Well, I— I mean it isn’t, er— we- we don’t have to be,” he finished at about half his usual volume. Donna’s eyes fell shut. There it was. “If you don’t want to be.”

Except there it wasn’t . Because River was right; the Doctor never said what he was really feeling, not if he could help it. So what wasn’t he saying?

If she didn’t want to be married to him, they didn’t have to be. Nothing there about what he did or didn’t want, which meant he didn’t want to say. To her remark that they’d been married but not together when they’d met Agatha, he’d said it seemed that way. Which hadn’t actually been agreeing with her at all, had it? And all the places they’d been since, him cheerily introducing them as husband and wife without ever mentioning it had been a union of happenstance. Even before Donna had realized what they’d done at the Hounslow Register and people had assumed things about their relationship, almost always he had just said they weren’t married and had left the rest of the denials to her.

All River Song had had to do to gain the Doctor’s trust completely was promise him that Donna was alive, because of what that would mean to him, a meaning he had left unspoken but was nevertheless unmistakable. He had very clearly said he just wanted to be friends with her when she’d found him again, but in the face of everything that had followed Donna thought she could see the truth he’d been too guarded to actually admit aloud.

“When exactly did you change your mind?”

She opened her eyes in time to watch his go wide as he squeaked out, “What?”

“About just wanting a mate,” she elaborated, and his shoulders sagged at finally being caught. “When did you change your mind about that?”

“Oh, I dunno,” he replied, rubbing at the back of his neck and not looking at her straight-on. “Pompeii?”

“Are you joking?” Practically since they’d started!

“Well, it was only because you were so brilliant!” He retorted defensively. “You never gave in, and you pushed me to do more than I thought I could, and you— you didn’t leave me to make that choice alone , Donna. I could’ve loved you just for that.”

Donna pressed a hand to her mouth, hardly able to believe someone as amazing as he was could feel that way about her. That just being herself could mean so much to him.

“You’re funny and so quick and absolutely stunning— and you’d already said you were completely uninterested,” he continued. “I couldn’t believe my luck when you told me we’d somehow gotten married anyway!”

“And you just figured we’d carry on like that forever? Married without benefits?”

“Benefits?” He repeated, face scrunched up in confusion. Alien blokes were a whole new level of dense, weren’t they?

“Yeah, Spaceman. ‘Cos if you’d asked, you might’ve found I’m not as ‘uninterested’ as you’d think.”

She thought she could pinpoint the exact moment he got her meaning, as he went completely still. “Oh,” he said, and licked his lips. Donna dropped her gaze rather pointedly to watch it and the nervous gulp that followed. “Um,” was the next bit of eloquence his oh-so-advanced brain came up with. He leaned forward, and she scooted obligingly to the edge of the cot. The Doctor cupped her cheek with one hand but paused there, scanning her face for something. “It’s not just for the paradox, is it? Because whatever a paper or a professor says, time can be rewritten. You don’t have to—”

“Yeah, but I want to,” Donna said. “And it wasn’t anything else that convinced me.” Maybe they’d helped guide her way, but she’d chosen to seek him out for a second chance after turning him down when fate had first brought them together. These long weeks battling her feelings had only made them all the stronger by the time she’d admitted to them. She didn’t need luck when certainty settled deeper within her every second she spent staring into his wondering eyes. He’d said he couldn’t believe his luck, so she’d just have to give him something else to believe in.

Donna made another decision just then, to turn her face into his hand and kiss his open palm. He sucked in a breath, his free hand jumping from the frame of the cot to her thigh. “Come on, Doctor Noble,” Donna murmured, lips moving to the jumping pulse points at his wrist. “Or are you rubbish at this part of the wedding, too?”

Whether in answer to that challenge or because she really did have the wiles, he finally surged forward to meet her lips with his own. This time, Donna couldn’t have even recalled her past snogs to compare them to this one.

They’d gone in completely the wrong order for these things, but Donna thought this marriage might just be saved.

—

It was lucky they’d gotten things decided when they did. The next time they stopped home, Donna’s mother put them onto this strange reality program she’d been watching and the supposed hauntings had of course had their origins in something more alien. They’d gone undercover to investigate it, which had really just meant doing a test-run of debuting their marriage officially with her family.

Gramps had been pleased as punch, but of course her mum had her reservations. She at least waited to voice them until Justin and his film crew were gone and they’d finally left the dreadful ruins of the Manse behind for the old home in Chiswick.

“Well, suppose you two’ll be off, soon,” her grandad said as they all came in the front door.

“Yep,” the Doctor agreed readily, popping the ‘p’ with particular relish. It was good they’d gotten to the bottom of things with the haunting when they did, otherwise he might’ve gone spare stuck in one place and time for much longer. Donna didn’t much blame him, though.

“But I just don’t understand,” said her mum from where she was heading up the procession, and Donna tensed on instinct. Her instincts proved quite good. “Is your name really properly John Smith or did Donna just tell you about that mixup they’ve got on file at the register?”

“Well,” he said, looking back at her for guidance. Donna gave a minute shake of the head. Now was not the time to inform her mum of aliens, time travel, and the fact that her daughter had married a time-traveling alien. She wasn’t sure it was time to inform her of even one of those things let alone all three. “Bit of a coincidence, I suppose, but Donna and I reckon we can take advantage.”

She met his conspiratorial grin with a half-smirk. It was the best way of explaining it to her folks — even with what her grandad knew about the traveling, she thought he might still struggle with the finer intricacies of the ontological paradox — but Donna couldn’t help wishing sometimes that they hadn’t skipped so nonchalantly over that part. She supposed she’d had and wasted her one chance at a proper wedding ceremony with Lance, but it was one thing to know it and another to accept she had to give up on her girlhood dream. Not that she’d trade it for the dream she was living now.

“You can not,” her mother scoffed. “I mean, it’s not even a proper marriage. It can’t be!”

“The register seems to think it is,” Donna replied.

“As if they know anything. When exactly was the ceremony supposed to have been? I should’ve thought you’d at least be invited to that .”

Donna froze.

“You may have called them plenty, but those sorts of people won’t lift a finger unless you go down there yourself and raise Hell. You’d have time to do that if you weren’t off roaming about the country all the time.” Her mum made it to the kitchen where she started putting away all the cleaning supplies she’d brought with her to the Manse, or at least Donna assumed that’s what all the banging cupboards were about anyway. She still hadn’t moved from the hall. “You might want to think about clearing that mess up before you go starting another one.”

“What’s it really matter, hey?” Gramps asked. “These days, it’s just a bit of paper, innit? If they’re happy with it and say they’re married, what’s the harm?”

“No, but she’s right,” Donna breathed. “We’re not married.”

The Doctor had taken her grandad’s coat to hang up for him on one of the hooks in the hall, but it dropped from his grasp as he whipped his head towards her. “We’re not?”

All they’d done was submit the notice. But that didn’t automatically roll over to a legal union. They expired eventually, didn’t they? How could she have been so thick?

Theirs hadn’t expired, though, not according to the clerk who’d done her best to stymie her ill-fated wedding to Lance. So that meant…

Donna refocused on her crestfallen Spaceman. “Not yet. But that’s easily sorted.” She held a hand out, and he happily bounded towards her to take it.

“Cheers, you two!” Gramps’ well wishes saw them out the door.

“So,” the Doctor said, leaning into her slightly as they walked towards the TARDIS. “Back to 1996?”

Donna made up her mind quickly and gave his chest a light push. “Not so fast, Bridegroom. We can do that any time. And if I’m getting married for real, then I want a proper proposal.”

“A proposal?” His eyebrows knit together in indignation. “But you’ve already signed your intention to get married!”

“Then it had better be a bloody good proposal so I don’t cause a paradox turning it down, hadn’t it?”

“Don-naaa,” he groaned as he followed her up the ramp to the controls. The Doctor caught up her left hand and used it to spin her back to face him. She leaned her hip against the console and watched with some amusement and a slight thrill as he sank down onto a knee. “Seems to me I’ve given you your fair share of rings already,” he said, kissing first the embarrassingly large stone on her ‘engagement’ ring she’d worn for the cameras and then her knuckles.

Donna was determined not to waver, however. “Nice try, Martian. I want ones you didn’t give me for some scheme. Ones you picked for me besides, not just turned up in your storage.” She was tempted to start calling him Packrat, but she supposed for being nearly a thousand he was doing better than most hoarders.

He slumped forward in defeat, burying his face in the front of her tunic. Donna tutted and petted his hair a little. He was such a dramatic at times. Most times, really.

“Fine, Madame,” he sighed, breath hot on her stomach through the fabric, and it stoked a familiar heat within her as well.

“Anyway, I didn’t give you that ring you’ve got on. I want to do that, too,” she told him, and that caught his interest. He tilted his face up, a curious and even shy smile on his face.

“Alright.” The Doctor gained his feet and took her hand again, this time to draw the for-television rings off her finger and drop them into his pocket. He did the same with the one on his own hand. Donna bit her lip; she’d sort of liked wearing them and seeing him wear one all the same. But she wanted those rings River Song had been checking for to be real when they did meet her again, whenever that was.

“I’ll just have to catch you by surprise someday,” he said. “Can’t say when, that would spoil it.”

Donna narrowed her eyes. “You’re gonna make me wait, aren’t you?” He’d enjoy holding it over her head, no doubt. She should’ve reckoned on that.

His wicked grin promised as much. “Well, we can get to that anytime,” he echoed her own words back at her. The grin turned a touch more lascivious as he leaned in closer. “In the meantime, since we’ve been going in a rather non-chronological fashion, I thought we might skip to some honeymooning.”

Donna was sorely tempted to put a hand up between them just to keep him humble, but it had to be said occasionally he did have good ideas. So she wound one arm around his neck and reached the other back to pull the lever for takeoff. Their lips crashed together and their bodies rocked into each other as the ship shook and bumped its way through the Vortex.

That ‘bit of paper’, as her grandad called it, could get sorted out, finally, later in the past. For now, she and her husband could do a sight better than down the kerb outside her mum’s for their honeymooning.