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it's donna loving her husband AND her best friend hours. also fungus amongus.

@doctordonnaweek

Psychic massage feels mostly like a massage, but also a little bit like getting new glasses, or recovering from a cold. Knots of worry and unconscious ruts of thought have been worked out, but she also feels like her own brain is clear and crisp and colorful in a way she hadn’t known she was missing. She and The Doctor had ended up in the lounge chairs bordering a pool with elaborate fish towers showing off even more elaborate fish, like an aquatic hamster maze, and she’d been following one bright blue croissant-shaped fellow with an unhurried enjoyment she’s rarely experienced before. She’s not tired. She’s not worrying. She’s not impatient or swatting away guilt and insecurity. She just is, here with the fish and her best friend.

Said best friend had fallen into their own lounger like a dropped handful of sticks and has been lying boneless ever since. Donna is feeling a bit jelly-ish herself, if less like she’d been luxuriously flattened by a slow and thorough rolling pin, but he might be genuinely dozing. Or the trance/meditating thing he’d started around two months after moving in, something that had to do with Time Lord mental upkeep he’d obviously been neglecting for centuries. She’s never seen them do either in public before, nor even in private when they were first traveling together, and she savors the slow delight of it like a bed of coals, softly glowing.

Croissant-fish has done three lazy laps of the upper left corner of the maze and shifted completely into a smoothed, pale blue sickle when Shaun finds them. He’s rarely tense, except when trying to work self-checkout machines, but now he’s properly glowing. He’s beautiful, wearing a jumper she got him on his last birthday and at ease walking on an alien planet like they’ve encountered each other at the park. Noticing the Doctor makes him chuckle. Once he’s reached them, he brushes the top of the Doctor’s hair with his knuckles and leans down to give her a kiss.

“Hello, lovely,” she says once they’ve parted.

“Hello gorgeous,” he returns, sitting beside her and taking her hand.

Undignified mouth smacking on her right announces that the Doctor is stirring. He’s opted for less gelled heights in his recent hairstyles, but his hair is still spikey enough he looks like a baby bird in an awkward feather stage as he blinks, slow and a little out of sync, fighting to wake.

“Hello, sweetheart,” Shaun greets them, voice full of mirth.

The Doctor makes noises that may or may not contain words. Donna chuckles at him and flexes her hand in Shaun’s, admiring the strength of his fingers and the subtle shimmer on her nail polish.

“You have fun with your new mates?” she asks.

Shaun swings his legs onto the lounger, lies across her lap, and props his head up with his free hand on her other side. His jumper is remarkably snuggly. She pets it.

“Sure did,” he says. “They started having issues with atmospheric containment in the nitrogen sections, but it turns out Sorrister works for one of the companies that maintains the filtration system and they got it fixed right up.”

The Doctor, who’s been blearily studying Shaun’s position, decides he wants to join them. He peels himself off his lounger, one limb at a time, flops onto Donna’s, and arranges himself across her shins, cuddled right up against Shaun, with a sigh. Her legs are going to fall asleep quickly, but for now it’s like having a lap full of enormous cats.

They sit quietly for a moment before the Doctor mumbles, “This place has some of the best biome support infrastructure ever devised, I’m surprised they had atmospheric containment problems.”

“So was Sorrister!” Shaun says, “but it turns out they were having a bit of a fungal problem, and it got into the filters.”

“Some fungus,” Donna said, watching the fish again.

Shaun hums agreeingly. “Big teeth.”

She’s pretty sure the croissant fish is now doing a little dance with one of the two-headed shrimp things.

She blinks

The Doctor pops up, frowning and looking more awake.

“Teeth?” they ask.

“Oh yeah, big as anything,” Shaun confirms. “Ko Ta N knew a bit about Ramican containment, though, so we fiddled a little something up and took care of it.”

The Doctor is now fully awake. Shaun is quite pleased with himself, so Donna is mostly curious about what kind of fungus needs teeth and what for.

“By ‘Ramican,’” the Doctor says, with increasing urgency, “do you mean Ramicandelaberaceae, the fungal species that releases hyper-aggressive defensive spores when exposed to oxygen?”

“Yep! Some copper-sulfur spray and ultraviolet light got ‘em to calm down, and Ko Ta N got a job out of it. Did you know she used to have a nursery? Said she’d get us some cuttings.”

Donna is watching the one-alien show of the Doctor realizing someone else did their thing while they were doing the psychic equivalent of sunbathing on the beach. It’s entertaining. His eyebrows are even more expressive now than they used to be.

“We should invite her and her family to dinner,” she says.

Shaun hums. “She has something like six hundred and thirty kids,” he says. “But most of them are about the size of rice grains, so I bet we could work that out.”

“You fought an exposed colony of Ramicandelaberaceae with farming techniques and it worked?”

“It helps to have friends who work in different fields, Doctor,” Shaun says.

Donna covers her mouth to muffle her laughter.

The Doctor insists on seeing the evidence with their own eyes. The walk to the gardens bordering the nitrogen quarter is lovely, even with the Doctor vibrating with the urge to run ahead from his tether between them. The psychic massage apparently helped along the latent telepathic sense Donna suspects has been slowly strengthening in her mind over time. Between their clasped hands, she’s pretty sure she can feel his urgency bubbling over like a baking soda volcano.

Shaun guides them to the slightly scorched and stinky corner where the grand battle took place. The Doctor shoots off, scanning everything and talking to everyone. Shaun finds his new friends again and learns that Sorrister has gotten a raise, and Donna secures a promise from Ko Ta N to bring her family over for mushroom skewers. Rose arrives with her own group of new friends, and the Doctor adds urgent commentary to Shaun’s recounting of events.

Donna confirms the Doctor was meditating at the spa once they get back to the TARDIS, where they discover the center console has been ringed by purple cushioned benches overflowing with pillows. After everyone exclaiming over the TARDIS’s greeting of an enthusiastic lightshow and mechanical twittering, apparently because she also enjoyed the spa, Donna shoos him away from the controls and into the tide of pillows. He forges in, a child in a ball pit, and spends the entire ride home asleep on his belly, drooling and twitching like a dreaming dog. Rose entertains herself by constructing a pillow fort over their body.

#doctordonna week 23 #fics

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So he sleeps, or he tries to, at least; it makes Donna feel better, and he figures that what she doesn’t know about his general state of awakeness can’t hurt her.

Tonight, he’s actually dozing off, his eyelids fluttering shut as he curls in on himself. The noises of the TARDIS and the barely audible sounds of Donna’s breathing from the next room over lull him into rest, calming his perpetually shot nerves.

wrote this for days five and six of @doctordonnaweek (memory/change/help/friends). The Doctor is terrible at falling asleep and Donna's been having nightmares. post-the giggle (technically)

#doctordonna week 23 #fics

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By the way, fic writers! Here’s a reminder that there is a DoctorDonna Week collection on AO3 you can submit your works to! I’ve just gone in and approved all the ones in the queue and would be delighted to collect some more. Also, I apologise for not posting about day 6 earlier (and if I forgot day 5 as well… forgive me).

#doctordonna week 23

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doctordonnaweek-inactive · 5 months

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day 6 of doctordonna week: help/friends

he's doing so good you guys (x)

#doctordonna week 23 #art

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goodnight, fourteen. you’ve got a long journey ahead.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/52450579

#doctordonna week 23 #fics #do not know why the link isn’t working will try and fix it later

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echoes of a dream

written for @doctordonnaweek day 6: help/friends

also on ao3

Donna has nightmares about what happened in Shan Shen. Usually, the memories of her dreams fade within minutes of waking up, washed away by a warm cup of tea and a couple of deep breaths. That is, until she dreams about how she died.

On that night, she wakes with a shout. She's tangled in her blankets and her sleep shirt has shifted so that the collar is tight around her neck. She sits up and, after a brief struggle, manages to get the blankets shoved to the floor and her shirt adjusted. Even without the weight of her blankets, Donna still feels like she can’t breathe. In an attempt to calm her racing thoughts, she closes her eyes and takes stock of herself.

The side of her body feels bruised and there's a fear that sits heavy in her belly. There had been a truck. The deafening screech of tires on asphalt rings in her ears. She had been hit. She had been dying. No, she had died. That had been the only way to disrupt that timeline, she remembers, the only way to get herself, the other her, to turn left.

Unlike her other dreams, this nightmare is not fading from her mind. In fact, with every breath she takes, more memories of that universe come flooding in. The feeling of pain and fear will not let her go. Without thinking, Donna gets up and makes her way to the TARDIS kitchen. With shaking hands, she puts the kettle on.

Donna leans back against the counter and waits for the water to boil. The wall across from her fades from view and suddenly she is facing that godforsaken blue truck again. Tires squeal on the pavement as the driver tries to both stop and swerve to avoid hitting her. They aren't fast enough. There's a sickening thud and then she's on her back in the road, staring at the sky and the face of a young, blonde woman. Donna's thoughts spiral around one thing - dying, dying, dead, dying, dead, dead, dead -

"Donna?"

She blinks and suddenly she's back to herself, back in the TARDIS, with the Doctor in front of her and the kettle whistling shrill in her ears. The Doctor scans her face and by the small frown that tugs his mouth downward, he doesn't like what he finds there. He reaches behind her, removes the kettle from the burner and turns off the heat.

Donna takes that moment to wipe tears from her face. She knows she must look a mess, eyes red and puffy from crying. She rubs her cheeks harder, like she can wipe away that happened. The Doctor takes her wrists and pulls her hands away from her face.

"What happened?" he asks.

"Nightmare,” she says. “It was nothing." Donna pulls her hands free and turns to make that cup of tea. After a moment's hesitation, she pulls another cup out of the cabinet and makes one for the Doctor too.

Maybe it'll get him to stop asking questions.

He takes the tea but doesn't drink it. "Donna, I've been calling your name for five minutes. The kettle was going off and you couldn't hear it either.” His frown deepens. “You were miles from the TARDIS, weren’t you? Where were you?"

He isn’t demanding in his questioning, and Donna can’t help but notice that without his coat and suit jacket and tie, the Doctor looks so small, so human. He's standing in the middle of the TARDIS kitchen holding a steaming cup of tea and he’s trying to help, Donna just has to let him.

She takes a deep breath. "I died."

"What?"

"I dreamed about my death. In that alternate universe created by that blasted beetle." Her grip tightens around her cup. She forces herself to relax and take a drink. It's warm, comforting.

"You shouldn't remember anything from that universe, how-” the Doctor cuts himself off. “No, nevermind that, you died?" Donna looks down at her tea. "So did you." Her tears, which had slowed but not stopped, pick up again. They drip down her nose and her cheeks and into her cup.

"Donna..." The Doctor sets his cup down on the counter. He then gently pries her cup out of her hands and sets it down next to his own. He pulls her into a hug and Donna does not resist.

She fists her hands in the back of his jacket and sobs. She’s getting his shirt wet but she can't bring herself to care, not right now. Later, when she’s calmed down, she'll be embarrassed about it, but for now she cries and the Doctor holds her as tight as he can. He rubs one hand up and down her spine in a soothing gesture.

Even once her sobs have quieted, Donna does not pull away. She is reminded of Midnight, of the Doctor holding her this way because he had needed it. "In that universe, I turned right," she whispers into his shoulder. The Doctor continues rubbing her back. "I never made it to H.C. Clements. I wasn't there to stop you. You drowned under the weight of the Thames."

The Doctor takes a deep breath, like he's going to say something. Donna doesn't let him.

"Do you know how many people you’ve saved, Doctor? I know it weighs on you, how many people you've had to let die, but do you know how many more you've saved? Without you, the Earth became a horrible place. London choked, people dissolved into fat, everything you stopped happened. You've protected and saved so many lives."

Donna hears the Doctor sniff, and then he’s burying his face in her hair. “But I couldn’t protect you,” he whispers, and his voice is thick. “You said you died.”

“I did,” she confirms. “I had to. It was the only way I could make sure that I turned left. Nobody wants to remember what it feels like to die, but if I had to go back and do it again, I would.” Donna pulls back and looks him in the eye. “I would do it again, if it meant saving you.”

To that, the Doctor has no response. Donna likes to think it's because he knows arguing with her is a pointless endeavor. He searches her face for a moment. “I could block the memories again, if it would help?”

“Don’t you dare,” Donna says immediately. “Someone needs to remember what the world was like without you.”

Donna is no fool. She knows that there will be more nights like this, where everything she went through in that alternate universe bubbles up and she drowns in it, but for right now she is okay. She will make it.

She says as much to the Doctor. “Thank you.” Donna yawns and the exhaustion she had been fighting creeps into her bones. She lets the Doctor go and steps towards the door. “Goodnight, Doctor.”

The Doctor watches her go. “Goodnight, Donna,” he says.

#doctordonna week 23 #fics

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* crawls in * okay i know wednesday was yesterday but today all i've got is wips......

@doctordonnaweek

ood/odd

"So with a combination of these little friends and the readings I triangulated with the sonic screwdriver and my own contact with the Ood brain, I can construct - well, I say construct, it's a little bit of growing, a little asking, not too much construction in the end - I can create a sort of interim node for any Ood who need some help on the way back to the Ood Sphere. Or who want to stay out there, traveling! There's a whole big universe out there, if they have one of this with 'em, they can go wherever they want with all the support they need. Sort of like the TARDIS does for me!"

Donna is busy watching the hive, trying to recall the name of the guy who did all those splotchy pages the psychologists use on TV. She's tuned out the Doctor's whittering until he remembers she's a part of the conversation instead of a well-dressed stump. Her ears are well-trained, though, and perk up all on their own when they hear something juicy. Usually, it doesn't make beautiful space fruit sour in her mouth.

"Like the TARDIS does for you?" she repeats.

memory/change

"So where does the psychic part of the psychic spa happen?" Donna asks.

The Doctor looks at her, then around at the garden.

"This is a psychic spa, Donna," he says.

"Yeah?"

He gestures. Not towards anything she can tell, he just gestures, generally.

"Psychic spa."

"I heard you the first seventy-three times you've explained it to us since you got too excited and shorted out the pamph-wait."

Donna stops, pivoting on her heels and spinning him around so that they're facing each other.

"Doctor," she says, holding them firmly by the elbows, "did you take us. And our family. To a spa which is a living, psychic creature?"

#doctordonna week 23 #fics

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day 5 of doctordonna week: memory/change

binary binary binary

#doctordonna week 23 #art

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out of sight, out of mind

written for @doctordonnaweek day 5: memory/change

also on ao3

On Messaline, the Doctor had told Jenny that being a Time Lord was a sum of knowledge, a code, a shared history, a shared suffering. Before Jenny had died, he had begun planning how best to share his memories and that knowledge. Jenny would know the history of Gallifrey and their people. That dream had shattered like glass when that gunshot rang out.

Since then, he has given up on hoping for anything more. He is the last. The Doctor walks alone and the last memories of Gallifrey and Time Lords would fade into history with his death. He is fine with that, really, he has accepted it. So why is he so traitorously hopeful when Donna pops up from behind that console in the Crucible spouting technological jargon that only a Time Lord would know and ideas that only a Time Lord could begin to conceive of?

A two-way biological metacrisis. A human being with a Time Lord consciousness. It is brilliant, and of course it would be Donna at the heart of it all. For as long as they have been traveling together, the Doctor has known there was something special about Donna. In a universe as vast as the one they lived in, the Doctor had somehow met Donna twice. He had told her there was something binding them. Donna hadn’t believed him.

But now… now she is so much more than Donna Noble, the temp from Chiswick. Now she is Donna Noble, the most important woman in all of creation. She is the DoctorDonna, like the Ood had foretold. The Doctor is so proud.

The Doctor is so afraid.

Humans weren’t meant to hold a Time Lord conscious. The Doctor, however indirectly, would kill Donna if he didn’t act. All 900 plus years of his knowledge and memories would fry Donna's synapses like an egg in a hot pan. She would die, and it would be slow, and it would be painful.

That she had held up this long was a miracle in and of itself.

Without Donna, they would’ve all died to the Daleks. With Donna, the Doctor feels like his hearts are being shredded. He leans against a coral support and watches as Donna pilots the TARDIS. Round and round the console she goes, flipping a lever here, spinning a dial there, so much like him, and yet so different.

It would be like this, the Doctor mused. The universe would give him no breaks. Just when he had someone else, an equal to share his world with, to share his life with, all of it, no secrets, no lies, it would be taken from him. Donna could’ve traveled with him forever, and maybe it wouldn’t have been his forever, but it would’ve been her forever. It could’ve been enough.

But he wouldn’t let Donna end up like Jenny. Donna will live, no matter what.

“I thought we could try the planet Felspoon,” Donna says. “Just because. What a good name, Felspoon. Apparently, it's got mountains that sway in the breeze. Mountains that move. Can you imagine?”

Instead of answering, the Doctor asks, “And how do you know that?”

Donna grins at him. “Because it's in your head. And if it's in your head, it's in mine.” She turns away from him and continues to fiddle with the TARDIS console.

“And how does that feel?” The Doctor wonders, briefly, just how deep Donna has dug into his memories in the short time she’s had them. There hadn’t been much time on the Crucible, but now, with everyone dropped off and safe in their respective places, she has had nothing but time.

“Brilliant! Fantastic! Molto bene!” Donna exclaims. “Great big universe, packed into my brain.” She turns back to him. “You know you could fix that chameleon circuit if you just tried hot-binding the fragment links and superseding the binary, binary, binary,” Donna's smile fades and her face goes blank. “Binary, binary, binary, binary, binary, binary, binary, binary, binary, binary, binary-” she gasps and shakes her head, breaking off the loop.

The Doctor straightens and pushes off the coral support. He knew it was coming. That knowledge doesn’t make seeing his best friend in distress because of him hurt less.

“I'm fine,” Donna says, and then she changes the subject. “Nah, never mind Felspoon. You know who I'd like to meet? Charlie Chaplin. I bet he's great, Charlie Chaplin. Shall we do that? Shall we go and see Charlie Chaplin? Shall we? Charlie Chaplin?” She picks up a phone on the console and holds it up like she’s speaking into it. Donna puts the phone back into the cradle and continues her rambling. “Charlie Chester. Charlie Brown. No, he's fiction. Friction, fiction, fixing, mixing, Rickston, Brixton-" Donna cuts herself off with a gasp again. This time, she folds in on herself, panting.

Donna is holding her head. She hasn’t straightened from where she’s bent over the console. It must be getting unbearable, the Doctor thinks, as he steps closer. Sometimes his mind, all those memories, all that history and knowledge, gets to be too much even for him, so for Donna the pressure must be nearing excruciating levels. “Do you know what’s happening?” he asks, softly. He knows the answer before she speaks. If it was in his head, it’s in hers.

“Yeah,” Donna confirms. She straightens up but she won’t look at him.

“There's never been a human-Time Lord metacrisis before.” Now Donna turns to look at him. “And you know why.” The Doctor finds pieces of himself reflected in her eyes, sees all of his sadness and his guilt lining Donna's face. Does he look like that when he gets lost too deep in his mind? In the darkness that haunts Donna’s eyes, the Untempered Schism flashes, briefly, and he knows time is running short. The Doctor does not wish Donna to see the Schism, even in a memory.

“Because there can’t be,” Donna whispers. She sniffs and pushes herself away from the console. With her back to him, she walks around the console, flipping more levers as she does. “I want to stay,” she says and she’s back to avoiding his gaze.

He leans on the console next to her, getting close so she can’t ignore him. “Look at me,” he pleads. “Donna, look at me.”

She hesitates, like she’s fighting it, before she turns to him. “I was gonna be with you, forever.” There are tears building on her bottom lashes, but they do not fall.

“I know,” the Doctor whispers.

Donna takes a deep breath. “The rest of my life, traveling in the TARDIS. The DoctorDonna,” she smiles bitterly.

He continues watching her, but does not speak. There is only one way to save Donna at this point. To save her life, the Doctor has to take all her memories of him. All the ones she experienced herself, and all the ones that were leaking from the consciousness - his consciousness - that was embedded in her mind.

Something in his eyes must give his plan away, because Donna gasps. Fear and desperation flicker across her face. “No. Oh my god. I can't go back. Don't make me go back,” she pleads. She's backing away from him.

The Doctor straightens and places his hands on her shoulders. He hates this, hates that Donna is afraid of him, hates that he’s having to hurt yet another person he cares about.

“Doctor, please, please don't make me go back,” she begs.

“Donna,” he says and he still hasn’t let go of her shoulders. He knows that if he does she could run and if she runs, she will die. “Oh, Donna Noble. I am so sorry.” And he is. If there was anything else he could do to keep her safe and have her retain her memories, he would. He would have loved to have Donna by his side for so many more adventures. He would’ve let Donna travel with him for as long as she wanted or until she couldn’t anymore. “But we had the best of times,” he says.

They had helped each other become better versions of themselves. Once the Doctor removed all the memories of himself and their adventures, he knew he would be restoring the Donna Noble that he had first met. The Donna who felt useless and trapped in her life as she jumped from temp job to temp job. The Donna who projected being shallow and vain in order to hide the soft heart of gold inside.

He could only hope that the Donna he had come to know - the one who would sacrifice herself for someone she barely knew, the one who was so kind and so selfless, the one who had finally realized just how special she was - would come back eventually. The world deserved someone like that.

Donna closes her eyes and the tears finally fall.

“Goodbye,” the Doctor says, softly. Donna is protesting and pleading the entire time as he raises his hands to her face. He puts two fingers on either side of her temples, and he dives into her memories. Her mind is awash in shades of gray and the sadness that echoes burrows down to his bones. The Time Lord consciousness is there too, in the distance, burning bright golden and devouring everything in its path. There are so many memories to clean up and he has to be quick about it. If left alone for even another minute, Donna will burn.

He takes what he can, pulls those memories into himself and stores them somewhere safe in the back of his mind. What he can’t remove, those memories that are too intrinsically intertwined with the core of Donna Noble, he hides behind a wall, a mental block he builds in Donna's subconscious. It’s not perfect, it’s rushed and if prodded too heavily might crumble, but it will keep her alive. He starts to withdraw, but pauses as he considers something else.

Just in case, he adds a protective measure to that wall. If it comes under too much stress, a shockwave will be unleashed that will knock Donna unconscious and give the mental block a chance to restore itself. He leaves Donna's mind as gently as he can. In reality, only a few seconds have passed. Donna protests one more time before she collapses forward into his arms. He closes his eyes as he holds her and rests his chin on her head.

The Doctor lowers them both gently to the floor. He takes a moment to pull Donna’s memories to the forefront of his mind. He skims through them gently and sees himself through her eyes. All sharp angles and fast words and yes, he determines, he does look like that when he gets lost in his mind. Those observations don’t shock him - Donna had never been quiet about her opinion of him, but what does surprise him is the fond exasperation, the love that is infused in and attached to all of Donna’s memories of him.

From the amount of times they bickered, the Doctor had not expected Donna to feel this way. She had obviously liked him well enough, considering the fact that she stuck around, but this…this love is not fiery, it is not passionate. It’s not a romantic love, no – this love is soft and warm. It is security, it is trust, it is home.

He can’t stand to see anymore, can’t stand the way that warmth wraps around his hearts and chokes them. He puts all of Donna’s memories into a box, locks it up, and hides it away in the dark part of his mind. With a steadying breath, the Doctor opens his eyes, sets Donna down gently, and begins the process of getting her home.

The clouds are dark and thick when the TARDIS lands outside Donna's home. He carries her as far as he can before he collapses on the doorstep. He knocks once and hears a clatter as someone hurries to the door. It's Wilf who opens the door, and it’s Wilf who helps him carry Donna up the stairs to her room. The Doctor takes a moment to stand and look at her, to burn this image of her asleep and at peace into his memory before he heads back downstairs.

The Doctor settles heavily onto their couch and begins to explain what happened, to stress how important it is that Donna never remembers him. “For the rest of her life,” he tells them, “you can’t mention me or any of it.”

Sylvia and Wilf agree. “All those wonderful things she did…” Wilf begins.

“I know,” the Doctor replies. “But that version of Donna is dead.”

There is a pause as Wilf and Sylvia consider what he’s told them. “She was better with you,” Wilf says, and the Doctor inclines his head in agreement.

He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “I just want you to know there are worlds out there, safe in the sky because of her. That there are people living in the light, and singing songs of Donna Noble, a thousand million light years away,” he trails off, lost in memory for a moment. He snaps himself out of it and focuses back on Wilf and Sylvia. “They will never forget her, while she can never remember. And for one moment, one shining moment, she was the most important woman in the whole wide universe.”

“She still is,” Sylvia protests. “She's my daughter.”

And the Doctor can’t help the flash of irritation that Sylvia's words spark. Donna loves her mother, and Sylvia loves Donna, but Sylvia has never been particularly easy on Donna. At least not, when the Doctor was around. “Then maybe you should tell her that once in a while,” he snaps.

Sylvia is regarding him with an expression the Doctor does not recognize. “You love her,” she finally says. The revelation startles Wilf, who looks quickly between the Doctor and Sylvia.

The Doctor remembers the feeling that was woven into the fabric of Donna’s memories. “Donna is my best friend,” he says, and he knows it isn’t really an answer. “But she’s more than that she’s -” he cuts himself off and presses his lips into a thin line as he mentally flips through all the languages he knows to try and find a suitable description for what Donna was to him. Best friend worked, but it wasn’t enough. When he can’t find a suitable word, he scrubs his face with his hands and looks back up at Sylvia. “I would do it all again,” he says instead. “If it was between me or Donna, I would choose Donna, every time.”

Before Sylvia or Wilf can respond, they’re interrupted by Donna opening the door to the sitting room. The Doctor leans back and does not look at her. She complains about being left to sleep in her clothes, before she glances at him. “Donna,” she introduces herself, but she’s already more focused on her mobile.

The Doctor stands, forces a smile and offers his hand. “John Smith,” he says, and Donna shakes his hand, briefly, before leaving the room. The Doctor takes this as his cue to leave. Even though he’s not supposed to, he can’t help but stop in the kitchen on the way out. With Rose, he didn’t get a proper goodbye. Donna might not remember him, but he wasn’t going to repeat that mistake. “Donna?” he calls. She turns to him but she is clearly more focused on her phone call. “I was just going.”

“Yeah, see you,” Donna replies and then she turns away to continue her conversation without a backwards glance.

Just like that, Donna slips quietly out of the Doctor’s life, a sharp contrast to how quickly and loudly she had wormed her way into it.

It’s raining when the Doctor opens the door to leave. Wilf is right behind him. “This will happen for a while as your atmosphere settles,” the Doctor says. “But it will pass, everything does.” He takes a deep breath and turns back to Wilf. “Well, bye then, Wilfred,” he says as he steps out into the pouring rain.

“Doctor?” Wilf calls, and the Doctor pauses and turns back to him. “I'll watch out for you, sir.”

And the Doctor is so tired he can’t even bring himself to protest the use of the word sir. “You can’t ever tell her,” he repeats.

“I know,” Wilfred says. “But every night, Doctor, when it gets dark, and the stars come out, I'll look up on her behalf. I'll look up at the sky, and think of you.”

“Thank you,” he tells Wilf, and he means it. After all, the Doctor supposes that’s better than he really deserved to ask for, not after what happened to Donna and Martha and Rose. Everything he touched seemed to crumble under his fingers. Three times in a row, he had lost his friend, his companion, and the only connecting link was him. He had told Donna that he didn’t need anyone, when they had first met, and Donna had protested that he did.

Now, the Doctor wasn’t sure he could stand to try again. He turns and heads back to the TARDIS, pulls the door closed behind him, and sets off for the next world. In her memory, he will do what Donna had told him and he will keep going.

It’s all he can do.

#doctordonna week 23 #fics

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