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Westerly. Pelican –
“For better or for worse,” Donna promised the Doctor, the day she met him. The day he met her. She could have chosen any number of lines to make the joke, but she’d missed her own wedding, been kidnapped by flippin’ robot Santas, and jumped out of a taxi because this Martian without a name promised he would catch her.
A leap of faith.
Donna Noble didn’t believe in faith, or destiny. At least, not for people like her. But she’d jumped anyway because, because, because –
Because there was a robot Santa driving the taxi.
(She jumped. Time held them in balance. The Doctor caught her. He always would: for better or for worse.)
Dreams –
Donna Noble was thirty seven when she walked down the wedding aisle, for the first time.
She was the best temp in Chiswick – shorthand for temporary secretary, and she knew all about shorthand: she could type one hundred words per minute, and still have time for a laugh in between. Did that make her special? No, and she knew all about that, too.
Temporary wasn’t something she could run from: they kept her just long enough to find someone better, and sent her packing with just a box to fit her life in.
Little General, her father had called her as a child. Not Princess, or Cupcake, because fairytales weren’t for people like her either. She was too loud to ever be heard properly, too picky to ever be picked.
So. Lance Bennett. She wasn’t meant for a fairytale wedding, but her mother was right. It was time for her to do something with her life, and Lance had made her coffee once, and she’d made him laugh. He’d made her laugh, and remembered her name, and it was easy, wasn’t it?
It was simple: love.
She had fallen in love with all her friends, even Nerys who drove her up the wall most days. Because Donna was too opinionated to do anything by halves, too loud to love any other way, except this: unapologetically and wholly and bluntly.
Donna Noble was thirty seven when she walked down the wedding aisle, on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve, because she hated Christmas and all the forced cheer and the fake presents, and she was ready.
Her next great adventure.
(She was ready. The universe listened, and time understood.)
Tornado –
“I really do remember, though,” the Doctor says. “Every second with you.”
You need someone to stop you, Donna had told him once.
“It killed me,” the Doctor says again, and again. “It killed me.” More than a metaphor, more than a truth. “It killed me.”
He doesn’t look at her, the way you can’t look at the sun. Too bright, too beautiful. Too holy, in a universe full of gods. He doesn’t look at her, but he remembers this, too. Every second, every moment in time, especially this, especially now.
Clifftops –
Lance had wanted a ticket out of this small, boring world. Donna couldn’t blame him: she knew what it was to want more of the world, to want to get out of her mother’s house, and out of her own self.
“Human?” the Doctor had asked Donna what she was.
“Yeah.” She’d stared out into the nebula in front of them, her wedding dress a pure white. “Is that optional?”
The Doctor had stared at her. “It is for me.”
Lance had never loved her, and was that any surprise? Yes, it was, because Donna had loved him. No, it shouldn’t have been, because she wasn’t anyone special.
But the Doctor had drained the Thames for her, had known her less than half a day, and had somehow decided she was worth saving. ‘Who is that man?’ her mother had asked at the wedding reception, and Donna couldn’t answer. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
Fairytales, after all, weren’t for people like her.
ADVICE AND ASSISTANCE OBTAINABLE IMMEDIATELY, the spaceship door said. Bigger on the inside: it might have phased other people, but Donna had grown up reading about worlds inside a wardrobe, and she knew better than to fall for it.
And yet, the Doctor had made her bride and widow and unemployed temp all in one evening, and still had time to show her the beginning of the Earth while they were at it. Dust and rock and gas, in the light of an indifferent sun.
“He deserved it,” Donna tried to tell the Doctor. Lance deserved his fate, for hurting her. “No,” she regretted it, the very same second. “He didn’t.”
Hadn’t that been why Donna had stopped the Doctor from drowning the Racnoss? No one deserved to be punished for being who they were: the Empress was only trying to save herself, Lance was only trying to find himself, and Donna – Donna was only trying to deserve herself.
“Basic atmospheric excitation,” the Doctor explained as he made it snow on Christmas. Just for her. Just for her, as if her wedding dress still wasn’t soaked through what was left of the Thames. As if he hadn’t just stood there in a burning building as the world fell apart around him. “What will you do with yourself, now?”
“I don’t know,” Donna answered. “Travel?” She’d need a new job and some money, but it tasted true the moment she said it. “See a bit more of Planet Earth. Walk in the dust – just go out there.” Not as a temp, or a bride, or anyone’s but her own. “And do something.”
“You could always,” the Doctor offered, a whole universe full of hope. “Come with me.”
Somewhere through all the running from aliens, Donna had lost her veil entirely, and she didn’t want it back. But –
“No.” Donna shook her head.
The Doctor blinked at her, too quick to be anything but a lie. “Okay.”
“I can’t,” Donna tried, as gently as she could, because she’d lived a lifetime being told no.
“No,” the Doctor agreed, all that hope traded for brittle courage. Brave, the way Gramps was brave not for himself, but for the family. “That’s fine.”
The snow crowned her, and him. So painfully ordinary: it almost made him human, it almost made her special.
“No, but really,” Donna said, because she was selfish enough to want him to stay, just a little longer. This Doctor, who’d compared her to a pencil in a mug and wouldn’t stop bleeping things with his Martian screwdriver – this Doctor, who’d saved her anyway when he could have walked away, who’d stayed even through her temper and her sharpness. “Everything we did today – do you live your life like that?”
The Doctor smiled. Bright, the way a candle flickered. “Not all the time.”
“I think you do.” Donna didn’t let him hide behind a veil, either. “And I couldn’t.”
“You’ve seen it out there.” The Doctor looked up into the night sky, the same way he’d watched the Earth come to life. “It’s beautiful.”
“And it’s terrible.” She looked at him. “That place was flooded, and burning, and they were dying,” Donna remembered, because it was her job to remember. Favorite coffee order, which letterhead to use, what number to call the helpline. “And you stood there like – I don’t know.” She shook her head. “A stranger,” and she laughed, because she didn’t know what else to do, except to make light in the dark. “And then you made it snow. I mean – you scared me to death.”
The Doctor turned to look at her again. “Right,” he said, still trying to catch up with her, still searching for an answer she’d already given.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do, though,” Donna relented, tipping her head toward the window, where they could see her parents waiting inside. She hated Christmas, but she hated being alone more. “Christmas dinner.”
It was simple, after all: love.
No, not that kind of love. Not even friendship, not yet. It was just the kind that came with an open hand and an easy smile. That quiet understanding between two not-quite-strangers, that twilight where knowing slipped into caring.
The Doctor didn’t do Christmas dinners, not anymore, and Donna understood. Her Gramps didn’t do fireworks anymore, either.
“Am I ever going to see you again?” Donna watched the Doctor slip into the TARDIS, the wooden door creaking as it let the light spill out from it.
For a heartbeat, the Doctor smiled. Bright, the way dawn lit the world. “If I’m lucky,” he answered.
“Just – ” Donna found her own smile. “Promise me one thing.” The golden bio-damp ring was still on her hand: for better or for worse. “Find someone.”
The Doctor shook his head. “I don’t need anyone.”
“Yes, you do.” Didn’t they all? “’Cause sometimes I think you need someone to stop you.”
She watched it sink into him before that brittle smile was back. Cheerful, for all the same reasons Donna was loud: to drown out all the fear, the shame, the regret forcing them to run faster.
“Thanks then, Donna,” the Doctor said, a proper farewell. “Good luck,” he added, more gently. “And just – be magnificent.”
(She dreams, sometimes, that she’s done the most wonderful things and seen most terrible things. She dreams, sometimes, of a smile and a voice and a light brighter than dawn – and she let it slip away, every time.)
Andante –
“It’s nine million people. Who cares about me?”
“I do.”
Grief –
Six billion people in the world, and she’d found the Doctor again. Destiny, some might say, but Donna preferred to call it determination and sheer stubbornness. Fate had no business telling her what to do, not when she’d been in a time machine.
Not when she had glimpsed the universe for what it was: messy and ordinary and terrible and indifferent and wonderful –
“It’s a funny old life in the TARDIS,” the Doctor hesitated, just outside that blue door.
Donna blinked. Oh. She knew this part well enough. Temporary, remember? “You don’t want me.”
She’d missed her chance, like she always did, like her mother always said: too old to ever make anything of herself, too thick to make the right choices before it was too late.
“I’m not saying that!” the Doctor protested.
“But you asked me,” Donna said, because the universe might not care for her, but she cared for the world. For him. “Would you rather be on your own?”
“No,” the Doctor answered, scratching the back of his head, as if he was still trying to figure her out after all this time. “Actually, no,” he repeated. “But, the last time, with Martha – it got complicated. That was all my fault.” He looked old, so, so old and tired that the stars looked young. “I just want a mate.”
“You just want to mate?” Donna shouted, because no skinny Martian was going to –
“I just want a mate,” the Doctor tried –
“You’re not mating with me, sunshine!”
But friends. She could do friends.
She’d had enough of weddings and terrible men for the moment, enough of her mother trying to turn her into someone she couldn’t be.
The TARDIS doors swung open.
ADVICE AND ASSISTANCE OBTAINABLE IMMEDIATELY, it promised. For better or for worse, Donna had promised, and –
“Whole wide universe,” the Doctor said, looking at her past the engine’s column of light. “Where do you want to go?”
(There were no guide books, when travelling with the Doctor. There were only fixed points in time. Things they could change, and things they couldn’t: and things they wouldn’t change – not for the whole wide universe.)
“Best fifty five seconds of my life.”
Fingerprint –
“Time Lord,” she had tried to piece his name together, as Vesuvius shook in the distance and children laughed in the market. “Like that makes you in charge?”
“Time Lord,” the Doctor agreed, “TARDIS,” he pointed out. “Yeah.”
Donna put her hands on her hips. “Donna,” she said, because this was her world. “Human.” Powerless and insignificant but by God she’d shout loud enough to be heard at last. “No.”
That’s how I see the universe, the Doctor had explained, every waking second I can see – what is, what was, what could be, what must not.
“That’s the choice, Donna.” They stood at the heart of Vesuvius, as time waited for them. A small death, or a big one. “It’s Pompeii, or the world.” They stood there, the Doctor turned judge and jury and executioner all over again. “If Pompeii gets destroyed, then it’s not just history. It’s me.”
What happens here must always happen.
All the children, running around in the markets, all the life they’d never get to see. Twenty thousand people, hanging in the balance, and –
Do you live your life like that? Hadn’t Donna asked, hadn’t Donna known when she’d turned down the Doctor’s offer, that first time? The universe was a terrible, terrible place, and she was so small, in the dust and rock and gas of all of time and space.
But this was the choice: her, or her world.
Her, and her world.
“Nevermind us,” she told the Doctor.
He looked at her, half-startled. As if she was the answer to some prayer. As if she was still worth saving, after all this time. But there were no gods, here – there was only them, and a world already doomed.
“Push this lever and it’s over.” The Doctor put his hand over metal and stone. “Twenty thousand people.”
There was nothing young about this Doctor, there was only everything haunted and haunting.
She put her hand over his.
It wasn’t easy: courage.
The Doctor looked at her, half hoping she might stop him. Half hoping for mercy, for forgiveness. It’s not just history. It’s me. But this was her choice too: she wouldn’t let him spare her from it.
The volcano erupted.
Ash, like snow, over the city. Basic atmospheric excitation. Her red hair crowned in grief and the Doctor tugged at her hand, running, running, running back to the TARDIS as children screamed and mothers begged and fathers clung to gold that did them no good.
There wasn’t any higher power here, there was just them, just time, ticking, ticking, gone.
The Doctor dragged her into the TARDIS, a spaceship big enough to fit the entire galaxy, and slammed the door shut on the burning city.
“You can’t just leave them!”
Donna had made her choice: twenty thousand people for the world. But didn’t she still have a choice, now?
Wasn’t that the thing about time?
Each moment was the choice, the test, the step.
“Doctor.” She marched toward him, Hippocratic Oath turned into hypocrisy. Not on her watch, not in her name. “I’m telling you: take this thing back!”
He made no move, he made no sound.
He looked at her – not quite a god, not quite the opposite – and she made herself look back. Made herself understand what she’d done.
“It’s not fair,” Donna said.
“No,” the Doctor agreed. “It’s not.”
“But your own planet.” She shook her head. What had the choice been, then? How many had he been willing to trade, for Gallifrey? “It burned.”
How many would she have been ready to give up?
“That’s just it – don’t you see, Donna?” he slammed his hand over the metal of the ship. “Can’t you understand?” Nine hundred years old, all pretense stripped away. “If I could go back and save them, then I would, but I can’t.” What happens here must always happen. “I can never go back. I can’t.”
Do you live your life like that?
She couldn’t, either.
(A lifetime later, he’d regenerate into someone new, someone old, someone borrowed. A face to remind him of a hand outstretched, and a fate outlived. The Doctor had his TARDIS for something blue, for vows he still had to keep, and when he looked into the mirror, he made himself remember everything she couldn’t. He made himself remember everything she was and wasn’t and would be and always had been – time had its own laws, its own fixed points to anchor it in reality. And the Doctor? The Doctor had Donna, to hold him to his mark.)
Susurration –
“If she ever remembers me,” the Doctor told Sylvia Noble, as he carried her daughter home, “her mind will burn, and she will die.”
There are worlds out there, he tried to tell Donna’s grandfather, safe in the sky because of her. People, living in the light, singing songs of Donna Noble. A thousand million light years away. Whole civilisations, who would remember all the brilliance she could never know – all the light, she had made into her own.
“And for one moment,” the Doctor said, “one shining moment.” He loved her, but not enough to let her choose. But too much, to let her die. “She was the most important woman in the whole wide universe.”
“She still is,” Sylvia Noble told him what she’d never told Donna. “She’s my daughter.”
I can’t go back, Donna had pleaded.
The Doctor met Sylvia’s gaze, and held her to her mark. “Then you should start telling her that.”
(Brilliant. Donna Noble had been brilliant, standing in his TARDIS in her wedding dress – human and flawed and beautiful for it. My best friend, he had called her, but for one shining moment, she had been his universe. Did that make him special? No, no. It only made him cruel. It only made him human, too.)
Sparrow –
Donna Noble was thirty nine when she walked down the wedding aisle for a second time. Shaun Temple, someone who found her funny and made her laugh. They bickered and he never called her brilliant, but he called her bright and dazzling and incandescent, and he made her feel special and she made him feel seen.
Some days, she tried to press against her dreams, to trace their outlines, to claw against that nagging sense of luck – like the universe was winking at her. Like the universe was laughing at her, one of those inside jokes she was to daft to understand, and had to pretend to laugh along with.
Most days, she watched the snow fall outside, dust and grain and water, and decided she still didn’t like Christmas.
One hundred sixty six million pounds.
A wedding gift, her Gramps had said, from your father’s friend.
She could have used it to go to a honeymoon in Egypt. Could have ditched the buses and the tour guides, and found themselves in the middle of the desert. All that dust and rock slipping into her shoes, falling on her hair –
She could have watched the moon rise over the golden horizon.
She didn’t. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t.
“Why?” Shaun asked, and her mother asked, and Nerys badgered. “Why?”
Because, Donna wanted to answer, but the answer slipped away from her, and no matter how fast she tried to run, she could never keep up with it. She could never be fast enough, but she could try to be kind enough. Because –
Dance –
The Doctor took her to the 42nd century.
A moon in the Horsehead Nebula, where humans had made a settlement deep in the snow. The Ood had lived there before people had come along to build a factory, a trade outpost where –
Oh.
“I want to go home,” Donna said.
It was easy, Donna thought, when the monsters were aliens who came from outside, and all she needed to do was make them leave her world alone. But what was she supposed to do when the monsters came from inside? When they were just as human as she was?
She’d do the same thing she always did.
Doctor, she told the Ood, Donna. Friend.
Doctor, she’d promised them, Donna. Friend.
And at the end of the day –
The Doctor gave her back her choice.
“Do you still want to go home?” he asked.
It wasn’t easy: courage.
But this wasn’t about that, was it? This wasn’t about her. There were better virtues than courage, and few vices worse than hope, and Donna saw the fractures in the ice. Donna saw the Doctor, for a moment, as what is, what was, what could be, what must not.
A glimpse in the melody of the song, chord progressions repeating themselves as surely as history did.
“No,” she told him.
There were still people to save, and moons to love, and lives to live, all as terrible as they were wonderful. She wasn’t anyone special, but she didn’t need to be, to do what she had done. She didn’t need to be, and the Doctor never asked her to.
So: no, she told him.
And this time, he listened.
(The Doctor had been accused of it before, and he would be again: he turned all his companions into soldiers, in the end – he brought them along, and they learned how to run faster, how to turn tool into weapon, how to fight for one more second to live, one more second to breathe. Ready to sacrifice themselves for the world. But not Donna: she was never good at following anyone’s orders. Not Donna, she turned herself into a Time Lord instead.)
She kissed him, once.
He tasted of anchovies and walnuts.
For better or for worse, she thought, and when she hugged him, he held onto her –
(Donna Noble wasn’t his impossible girl. Wasn’t his improbable fairytale. She was time, and relative dimension in space – TARDIS, for short. It means life. It means hope.
It means home.)
Mexico –
Donna Noble was selfish.
She was. She had been. She was human, after all. But –
“Thank you,” she told the Doctor. “Sometimes, I forget to say it, but – thank you.”
He waved it away as he always did.
There were days she let her fears get the better of her, her insecurities rising up and trampling everything else to the ground. Days when she had to admit she was wrong, when good wasn’t an absolute thing. When helplessness was an all-consuming thing, and love wasn’t an easy thing.
They were chased by vampires, by a living rainforest, by shadows in a library that was alive. There were Sontaran soldiers trying to bring more war to the Earth, a wasp in Agatha Christie’s mansion. The Doctor wasted time arguing about soldiers and guns, and Donna looked at the people, the secretaries, the quiet corners: she was the best temp in Chiswick because she remembered what others forgot.
Everything that ever happened and ever will be – Donna took the Doctor’s hand, and ran. Never as fast as light, but fast enough to feel the brightness of it.
“In the TARDIS,” he told her as the vampires closed in on them, “there’s a recorded message, in case of emergency.”
“A recorded message?” Donna wasn’t sure what that had to do with being eaten alive.
“Emergency Protocol One! If anything happens to me.” The Doctor didn’t spare her a glance, too busy trying to get the door behind them to open. “I’ve left instructions to get you home.”
No. She wasn’t having any of that nonsense. “Alright!” she shouted at the vampires. “The first one of you to try something gets a knee in the – ”
The vampires backed away slowly.
See: it was easy, again.
She didn’t need timey-wimey sonic screwdrivers.
“We’re not,” Donna told the Ood, and the vampires, and nearly all the aliens they met, “we’re not married.”
“Donna Noble,” the Doctor would still say sometimes, so loud she knew he meant it, so quiet she knew he believed it. “Absolutely brilliant.”
My best friend, the Doctor would call her. He would tell her of his past, of the people he used to call family: Rose Tyler who he fell in love with and Martha Jones who he couldn’t love back and Sarah Jane Smith who stopped waiting for him. I failed them, the Doctor said, and Donna didn’t ask him what it meant that he’d taken Rose to see the end of the Earth, and taken Donna to see the start of it.
“Sometimes I think there’s way too much coincidence around you, Donna,” the Doctor said. “I met you once, and I met your grandfather, and I met you again.” He looked at her like she was a miracle, and she looked at him like he was a memory. “In the whole wide universe: I met you for a second time.”
“Don’t be so daft,” she shook her head. She knew what she was. “I’m nothing special.”
“Yes, you are,” he bumped his shoulder against hers. “You’re brilliant.”
My best friend.
She didn’t ask him how long she had left with him: temp, she knew her job, but friend, she was learning her worth too.
(Donna died. She died, in that soothsayer’s tent. No Doctor to save her, just her own stubbornness, just her own strength. She’d died, and found her way back to him. Her way back to life. Her way back to herself.)
Emergency Protocol One.
It hadn’t been easy finding a time when the Doctor wasn’t in the TARDIS, but Donna stood in the light, and made the ship listen to her.
Thought I’d leave you a message, just in case I didn’t get the chance to say goodbye properly, she recorded herself. He was her best friend, too, and if anything happened to her, she wanted him to find his way home, too.
I just wanted to say that whatever’s happened, Doctor, I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. She managed a smile. For better or for worse, in sickness or in health. She’d never needed a marriage for her next grand adventure: she had only needed a little time, and the whole of space. I’ve had the time of my life, so no regretting stuff, right? I chose this.
Like I said that Christmas, find someone. Her voice turned quiet. I was wrong, what I said back then. You don’t need someone to stop you. He did, he did, but more than that, she saw the way he looked at her. Saw the way he picked himself back up, just to offer his hand to pull her up with him. Donna had seen him stop running. Had lived a life in a universe where the Doctor had died, and she knew: You need someone to remind you to keep going.
She couldn’t give him forever, but she could give him these moments.
It was easy: love. It was easy, when she didn’t need to be loud to be heard, anymore. But it wasn’t easy: being loved. Letting herself trust enough to be held, and yet –
Donna watched the TARDIS lights blink in and out of focus, recording her voice, recording her face – a slice of time, kept safe in its heart. That’s all I wanted to say, Donna said, and this time she remembered to add: Thanks, Doctor.
Subconscious infracutaneous retrofold memory loop.
The Daleks had stolen the Earth.
She stepped out of the TARDIS, and –
Her back slammed against the walls of the Dalek ship, a gunshot wound, a lightning shot fired at her heart, beating, beating, waiting.
Through the haze, she heard the Doctor call her name. He was trapped, and she was dying. Time was slowing, sluggish and loud and –
The Daleks were saying something, and the Doctor was shouting back, screaming. Grief, grief, this was the Doctor she’d first met, without anyone to stop him, anyone to remind him –
No, no, time wasn’t sluggish. She could feel it, could hear it, her eyes glowing golden as she blinked them open, words she shouldn’t know spinning in her mind. It stayed dormant, in my head, until the synapses got a little spark to kick them back into life. The TARDIS light, the lightning shot, turning her part Time Lord, part human. Doctor. Donna.
Destiny. A fixed point in time.
Twenty seven planets in the sky. The truth of it burned in the small of her spine, in the back of her mind. That’s the choice, Donna: her, and her world.
Best temp in Chiswick.
She flicked a switch.
The Daleks stopped firing.
The Doctor stared at her like she was impossible. “Why did we never think of that?”
Not impossible. Just brilliant. “Because you were just Time Lords,” she grinned back, so, so alive. “I could think of ideas you won’t dream of in a million years.”
Destiny, some might call it, but Donna could hear it, now. The song, the stars, the river of time flowing on and on and on. Everything that ever was and ever will be. The universe had been waiting for her, all along.
She was nobody special.
She was just the Doctor Donna, coincidence and choice so intertwined that she –
She couldn’t exist.
A Time Lord’s consciousness, and she had just the one heart. She had just the one life.
“Do you know what’s happening?” the Doctor asked her.
Her eyes burned. “Yes.”
My best friend. She swallowed, trying to hold on, but she couldn’t. She couldn’t, it was unravelling her at her edges, taking and taking and demanding more than she could give it – all that knowledge, seared into her mind with nowhere to go but her soul.
If he didn’t take it away from her, she would die.
If he took it away from her –
“I want to stay,” she tried to tell him. This was her choice. She didn’t want to go back to that old life of hers, to that old heart of hers – she’d learned so much, grown so much, loved so much –
“Look at me,” the Doctor stepped closer. An order, to the soldier she’d never been. “Donna,” a prayer, to the god she couldn’t be. “Look at me.”
“I was going to be with you.” She looked: at him, at them, at time – all the strands of it she could see, now. Fixed points. Destiny. Everything that ever was. “Forever.”
The Doctor nodded. “I know.”
It had been easy: loving. Her hand outstretched to take his, running and running, until she’d learned how to stop running away and start running towards. Home and warmth and laughter. Everything terrible and wonderful about the universe, all singing in her head, all screaming –
That’s the choice, Donna.
“I can’t go back,” she knew, his mind in hers, what he’d chosen. What he would always choose. “Don’t make me go back.” Time was slipping away from her, but this was her choice, not his. “Doctor, please.”
“Donna,” the Doctor placed his hand against her cheek, even as she tried to pull away, but she couldn’t, her mind already slipping away, her life giving in and her strength giving out.
“Donna Noble,” the Doctor said her name again, his thumb brushing against her temple. “I’m so sorry.”
“No,” she begged him.
“But we had the best of times,” he held her, and she saw it all flash past her, the same flash of light at the start of the universe. Her wedding, the volcano, the planets and the stars and the vampires and the Doctor’s hand in hers. The Doctor’s smile against her laugh. He held her, and she held back, clawing where he was letting go. “The best,” he said again, as if that was any apology –
As if that was any forgiveness.
“Please,” she didn’t know what else to say, what else to pray. “No.”
(This time, he didn’t listen.)
Binary –
She never needed marriage for her next great adventure – deep down, somewhere between dream and waking, she knew that to be true. But Shaun made her laugh, and Rose made her happy and terrified and worried and so, so very proud and –
It was getting easier: to love. To be loved.
Some days she woke up screaming from dreams she could never remember, as if someone else’s sadness had taken root in her. Other days, she smiled up into the morning sun, as if someone else’s hope had offered their hand to her, outstretched, waiting for her open palm.
Her Gramps stopped talking about the little green men, and Donna got a job, and lost it, and got a new one, and spilled some more coffee. And she had a life. A full life, a whole life, with fears she could call her own and grief she could name, and love she could hold without slipping away.
She had a life.
And when she looked over her shoulder, there was nothing.
Nothing, but a silly dream.
Binary. Binary –
“Why did this face come back?” Donna asked. “To say goodbye?”
The Doctor held her, with his new face. His old face. Memories blurred and time tangled between their tangled hands. Destiny. A fixed point. What happens here must always happen – a promise turned into fate. For better or for worse.
The metacrisis passed down to Rose.
Donna was ready, and the universe listened. And time understood.
“One last trip?” the Doctor offered.
“I would love to. But.” Donna pressed her hand against those blue doors. ADVICE AND ASSISTANCE OBTAINABLE IMMEDIATELY. She had turned him down once, before, because she’d been terrified. She turned him down now, because she’d let it go, hadn’t she? “I have got adventures of my own.”
She’d stopped running away. She’d built a life, here, with her mother who was learning, and her husband who was forgiving, and her daughter who was everything. Donna’s life was a small thing in the vastness and dust and rock of all of time and all of space – but she let the universe go, anyway. She let forever go, because tomorrow was promised to no one, not even the Doctor, but she could have today. She could have one heart, and one life, as long as it was hers.
(Doctor, the Doctor had said, as he’d regenerated from Scotsman to woman. As he’d given up that old face, that reminder of one life in Pompeii, and one choice in eternity – Doctor, I let you go.)
“You knew me by my wrist,” Donna would huff later on. “I thought I was going to die, and you knew me because my wrist had an extra 0.06 millimeters.”
“Obvious, really,” the Doctor tried to brush it off as he took out the trash. Second Thursday of the month was the Doctor’s turn, and Donna made sure he did it – no excuses about aliens on Mars or angels in Soho – he still owed her a hundred and sixty six million quid.
Donna stood between the Doctor and the door to the house. “You’re lying again.”
“Are you sure you wouldn’t like to visit Ancient Greece? Or the lost moon of Poosh?” The Doctor scratched the back of his neck. “Or we could pop by Mel’s place. Or Martha’s place. Say hello.”
“Martha’s a doctor.” Donna rolled her eyes. “She’s busy.”
“So am I!” But the Doctor glanced over her shoulder, where they could see Sylvia and Rose cooking a madras together through the window glass, where Shaun was calling UNIT’s insurance department to ask when their replacement television would arrive, and could they please not put any alien technology on it because one sonic device in the household was quite enough. “Donna,” the Doctor said.
“Yes, Spaceman?”
“You were too quiet.”
“What?”
The Doctor tipped his chin up toward the night sky. Here, in London, it was getting harder and harder to see the stars – light pollution blurring away the vastness of the universe – but some part of that dark from the edge of the creation still lingered. In their shadows, in their fears.
“You – the Not You – came in the TARDIS,” the Doctor confessed. “And didn’t say a word. Didn’t hug. Didn’t ask questions. It was – It wasn’t brilliant. Like you.”
The porchlight was golden all around them. There wasn’t any snow, this time: just them and the Earth.
“Brilliant,” Donna repeated.
“They couldn’t take that from you.” The Doctor looked back at her, honest at last. “No one can. Not even me.”
Donna shook her head. “You can stop apologizing.” She reached out, and squeezed his shoulder, smoothing out the fabric of his shirt there. A new one, bright pink, that Rose had gotten for him when they’d gone shopping together – just them girls. Of course, the Doctor hadn’t carried any money, but had at least sonic-ed their way out. “Or,” Donna suggested, “you can get me another lottery ticket.”
“How about,” the Doctor bargained, “I get you some of that Anteridean coffee you like?”
“Oi!” She tugged him inside the house. “No running off. You’re staying for dinner.”
“The TARDIS is a time machine.”
“And this,” Donna smiled, grabbing a bowl off the kitchen counter and shoving it into the Doctor’s hands, “is a bowl.”
“I can see that.”
“Can you?”
The Doctor stared at her for a moment, before his face broke into a replying smile. He curled his hand around the bowl and leaned forward to press a kiss over Donna’s temple, red hair blurring his vision. “Yes,” he promised. “Yes, I do.”
(He’d shown her the dark at the start of everything. At the end of everything. All that was terrible about the universe and the world. I don’t know if I can save you this time, he’d told her in the Toymaker’s realm, and she’d smiled at him, brilliant as ever: Maybe I’ll save you this time. But hadn’t she known? She’d saved him all the times before. She’d saved him, and she’d shown him all the light at the heart of everything.)
“Why did this face come back?” Donna had asked, but of course she figured it out first. Of course she understood, before he ever could.
“To come home,” she answered her own question.
Destiny. A fixed point in time. For better or for worse. This was his reward: the one adventure he could never have, sunrise after sunrise after sunset –
This was her reward, her memories whole and her family grown and her world safe. This was her choice: sometimes she took the Doctor to work, sometimes she took the TARDIS to work, and sometimes she didn’t work at all. She climbed up the hill to spread a picnic blanket over the grass, and she’d listen to her Gramps talk about little green men and – what was that? Doctor did you take Gramps to the lost moon of Poosh?
This was her choice, and wasn’t that the thing with time?
Every moment was the time. Seconds ticking up and down: too late or too soon or too slow or too fast – regrets and apologies and hopes and fears –
Every moment was the time, as long as you were there to live it.
(For one shining moment, Donna was the most important woman in the universe. But for all her shining moments, she was a citizen of the Earth.)
“Donna?”
“Yes, Doctor?”
“Thank you,” he said. “I forget to say it too, but – thank you.”
Donna let her head rest on his shoulder, as they sat on her rooftop and watched the sunset paint the sky in shades of pink and purples. “You’ve changed.”
“So have you.”
The Doctor tucked his smile against her hair. They’d run into the new Doctor a few days ago, bright and young and free and so, so full of wonder. The new Doctor had winked at the Doctor, and blew a kiss at Donna, before running off around the corner. Do you think we should help him? Donna had asked, and the Doctor had laughed: The world’s in good hands. The universe, too.
“It’s a small world,” Donna said.
“It’s more than that.” The Doctor held her close. “You’re more than that.”
“I know,” Donna promised, because these days, it was easier to trust. “So are you.”
He gazed down at where she still wore that biodamp ring from all those years ago, turned into a necklace and tucked beneath her shirt. He thought of her TARDIS key hanging right beside her house key, and her house key hanging beside his TARDIS key – in a keychain Rose had made for him, in the shape of a little gold star.
“I love you,” he told Donna. “I forget to say it too, but – I do.” He kissed the crown of her head, and the sunset crowned her in gold. “So much.”
She scrunched her nose, and elbowed him in the ribs. “Love you too, you daft Martian.”
(You don’t have to stay forever, Donna said, and the Doctor shook his head: I’ve never been so happy in my life. And wasn’t that the thing with time? I was going to be with you forever, Donna had told him once, but he took her hand now, and pressed a kiss over the back of it. Doctor Noble, the Doctor would answer when asked for his name, at Rose’s school play. No, no we’re not married, he’d announce to the world as Nerys squinted at him, but Donna’s my best friend in the whole wide universe.)
It would all have to end, one day.
But not today, not yet. There was a lifetime to be had, first.
There is a world to lived, first.
(There was a love to be held, first.)
He took her hand: Run.
She took his hand: Stay.
(This time. This time, he listened.)