Chapter Text
I always thought I might be bad,
Now I’m sure that it’s true
Cause I think you’re so good,
And I’m nothing like you
Look at you go, I just adore you,
I wish that I knew
What makes you think I’m so special
***
”Oh, not again!”
Donna isn’t one for ironic twists of fate, never liked Looney Tunes gags with the coyote falling for his own traps, or ‘shocking’ plot twists she could see coming a mile away. They’re lazy plot devices and she’s tired of them.
But this?
The Doctor looks at her in what is very nearly a growling pout as they lean half-out of the TARDIS’ door together. “Stop laughing, this isn’t funny! Why do I become such a menace in the future?!”
All that does is make Donna double over in hysterics again. “That’s brilliant! Become?” She’s moments away from pointing and laughing at him, and he huffs.
“Try not to get kidnapped this time.”
“It wasn’t exactly a kidnapping, you know. I went pretty willingly. Unlike when we first met,” she replies with a dramatic, put-upon sigh that wouldn’t be out of place on a princess locked in a tower.
The Doctor scowls. “For the last time, I didn’t kidnap you! You appeared in the TARDIS and I brought ya back to earth right away!”
“Yeah, and then I got chased by robot santa!”
“That wasn’t my fault!”
“You made me jump into the TARDIS in the middle of moving traffic!”
“I was saving you!”
But Donna grabs her purse (it contains the usual items every space-traveling woman needs: a phone with truly universal roaming, various kinds of currency including sewing buttons, space mace, an actual miniature mace, and wallet size pictures of her and her idiot spaceman) and slings it over her shoulder. “Tell it to my defense lawyer.”
“You’re impossible,” he mutters, but a grin overwhelms his face, the tip of his tongue pressed to his teeth. It’s full of love and yearning and he’s so stupid it makes her so sick that she breaks into a smile just as big.
The Doctor hugs and leans back against the console, looking her up and down, and Donna feels a bit like a fly caught in a spider’s web, except she’s been in that web for years and has no plans of leaving. He points out the door to the blue dot in the distance and emphasizes, “I’m tired of rescheduling my life around the whims of me!”
“Well that i can understand, you are a pain to deal with,” she sympathizes with honey coating her voice.
The Doctor stares at her in total genuine shock, making her snicker. “How can you say that? I’m a delight!”
“Behave, I’ll be back in a tick.” She raises up on her toes and kisses his cheek, his whines following her out of the TARDIS’ weathered door.
Donna likes to think that, after two different incarnations of the Doctor other than her own, she’s gotten to be pretty good at meeting and explaining the situation to them. But she’s not quite sure what to say when she finally steps up to the door, knocks, and three companions step outside.
Not that she should, or even can, compare, but Donna immediately sizes them up. There’s a good looking tall bloke who looks a little nervous to see her, a pretty young woman at his side, and an older man trailing the back. None of them are her best friend.
“Uh, Doctor?” The young woman calls into the TARDIS, her eyes never leaving Donna, who bristles and stands up straighter under the scrutiny. She was there first, after all. “There’s a redhead here…and…she came out of another TARDIS?”
“What?!”
There’s a yelp, the sound of a lot of metal clanking and a beach ball bouncing behind the trio, and then a short woman with a neatly cut blonde bob bursts out from behind her friends, managing to almost knock all three of them over and halfway trip over nothing. Donna knows in an instant that this is her best friend, this is her spaceman (spacewoman?) and a smile grows over her face.
“Well, I’m sure you know the drill by now,” she chuckles, but doesn’t get any farther. The Doctor stares at her with an intensity that rings in her ears, but none of the anger and mistrust her eleventh self had. “Could you always…uh, do that?” She gestures, unsure how to politely reference the…change. She knows about regeneration, but not this much.
“Donna,” she manages. Barely. Her voice is clipped and her posture is painful to look at.
Donna has no time to dig her heels into the ground as this five-foot-nothing, multi-dimensional, two-thousand year old genius alien launches herself into her.
Donna blinks and sees a sky full of stars in front of her as the back of her head smacks into a tree, which is the only thing keeping her from landing flat on the ground. She stumbles, her arms instinctively coming around the Doctor, but with the height difference, instead of her shoulders or waist, she clasps hard around the Doctor's head.
A cold gasp of air shoots in the space between them, and Donna gets a good look at the Doctor as they stare at each other. She’s adorable, much in the same way that her Doctor is - all big-eyes and curiosity, a rounded face, and a much more colorful but still understated ensemble. She’s got bright, inquisitive eyes and energy thrums all through her body and lights Donna up like a kid before their birthday.
“Donna!” Funny, how the Doctor says her name the same way no matter the incarnation.
“I’m right here,” Donna says softly, only now noticing that she’s crying. This is ridiculous, I’ve *just* seen him, why am I crying as much as she is? And stars above, the is Doctor crying — shiny tears drip down the Doctor’s face as she frantically looks Donna all over, patting on her shoulders and sides. Donna begins to soothe, sensing the oncoming panic attack, “Doctor, breathe…respiratory bypass, remember?”
Finally, she smiles, and it’s blinding and brilliant. It reminds her of number eleven, with so much heart. “You’re…you’re really here! It’s you! I almost forgot that I’d see you again, and…and…” Her zipping hands finally land on Donna’s face. “You’re here. You came back…you’re still…” The Doctor laughs out a soft, teary sound before pulling Donna into another hug and burying her face into her neck. “Say something. Tell me what we last did together.” The please, please, is silent.
Donna pauses, thinking back — frankly, the last few days had been pretty lazy, or as lazy as they can be with the Doctor: they found the ball-pit room in the TARDIS and that took up a good two days…and then they needed another two days to rest sore muscles and mutually bitch at each other about how much it hurt. But the memory reminds her of a different, itchier pain: “Well, we went to a jungle planet just a week ago. We got bitten by those purple mosquito things the size of a plate that you swore were definitely, 100% extinct.” She playfully nudges the Doctor’s shoulder. “Those were awful! We welted up all over, remember, Doctor?”
Hearing her say ‘Doctor’ has the same effect as the first time, and the Doctor chuckles in soft, warm amazement before hugging her again. “Donna…Donna, you are brilliant.”
After wiping away some of the tears, Donna leans forward in the hug, drawn to a center of gravity somewhere between them - two souls with a connection long strained, but never cut. Never ever. “Missed me that much, huh?”
The laugh Donna expects doesn’t come, instead, the Doctor starts pitifully sobbing, into her dark jacket, falling apart tear by tear in those bright, beautiful eyes, and Donna’s breathing slows, the world slows down around them — she’s seen the Doctor weep, the Doctor cry, gasp for air and sob, but never crumble with this kind of ease and speed. It feels a little like the first time she saw her mother cry, at the small age of ten, and how alone, how suddenly responsible, Donna had felt.
That same responsibility settles over her now. “Doctor…Doctor, I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
The Doctor’s head shoots up. Her throat bobs with a dry swallow before shakily nodding. “Donna Noble…I’ve missed you…I’ve needed you.” She laughs a little now, but it’s brittle and kind of pathetic. “I’ve needed you for a long time now…where were you?”
Donna feels the indescribable urge to sit down on the dirt and hold her for a thousand years.
“Trying to keep your past skinny Martian hide out of trouble,” Donna murmurs. The Doctor pouts, like that’s not nearly good enough of a reason.
“I get into plenty of trouble now too, you know,” she points out. “I’ve needed a Donna Noble. Oh, we should carbon-copy ya! Ya can give the old me a Donna clone…hey, I never did show you that cloning planet, did I?” Donna snickers, and the Doctor breaks into a grand smile. “You’d love it! And they’ve even got a spa attached. I didn’t take ya to nearly enough spas, did I?”
“No, you didn’t,” Donna agrees. Past tense still tastes like blood on her tongue, but they can’t stop smiling at each other, and if she’s standing in it with the doctor, well, standing in a puddle of blood isn’t so bad, even if it’s her own.
”I’ll take ya now! And we should go to a beach!” The Doctor gasps and snatches up both of Donna’s hands. “We can wear matching swimsuits! And get a tan but leave things on our backs and get funny shapes in tan lines!”
“Oi, still ginger!” Donna points to her hair. “I’ll freckle all over!”
“I love your freckles!”
“You want them? You can have them!”
“Yes!”
They break out in laughter, the Doctor doubled over and falling into Donna’s arms again. The laughter feels wet and like a little river against her shirt. Over her shoulder, while rubbing up and down the Doctor’s back, the three companions are still looking at her with a mix of curiosity and judgment and a bit of fear, and Donna tightens her arms around the crying alien, letting her bury her face into her hair, just like her Doctor likes to do. There’s something defensive about it, but the instincts hold up far better than any embarrassment.
The Doctor looks down between them, and her erratic laughter gives way to soft, wet little sniffles. She rolls her shoulders back, breathes, and then puts on a show the likes of which Donna has never seen.
“Sorry fam!” She dislodges herself from Donna’s arms and then clenches her hand with the vigor of a kidnapper telling their victim to play it cool if they want to live. “It’s just…I haven’t seen her in such a long time! She was one of my companions a while ago, and my very best friend.” She pulls Donna forward a bit but also watches her feet as if worried she might trip, like a parent with a particularly clumsy toddler.
The young bloke offers a wave. “Uh, hello then. Sorry, the Doctor doesn’t talk much about her old companions. She said your name is Donna?” He seems to be the only one able to speak, as the girl and the older man are looking at the Doctor in tense, obvious concern. Donna’s pretty sure that the blatant display of distrust in her is on purpose. Fair, she supposes.
“That’s me,” she introduces, shaking his hand. She has to use her left one, as the Doctor silently refuses to let go of her right hand. As she shakes everyone’s hands, the Doctor’s eyes never leave Donna, with a sadness following behind her eye line, like this is truly the last time, like this is really it, the last time she’ll see her (she suddenly feels awful for River Song all over again.) Maybe it is. Donna wouldn’t know.
She doesn’t get that privilege.
The three second silence finally prompts the Doctor’s weak sense of social cues, and she startles, “Sorry, sorry! I don’t have my head on at all today! Ah, Donna, this is the fam! Yasmin, Yaz for short, Graham, Graham for short, and Ryan! Yaz, Graham, Ryan, this is Donna Noble, the most important, incredible woman in the universe! She’s my best friend, a fantastic backgammon player, and a good friend of Agatha Christie!”
Donna snorts. “Now that’s a resume.” It’s a lame joke, but the resulting joy on the Doctor’s face is so sudden and intense that she intends to make more lame jokes immediately.
The three companions all look pretty confused still, but Donna understands, especially in regards to Yaz and Ryan. She remembers poor Martha’s reaction to finding she’d been ‘replaced’.
Honestly, young people. So dramatic.
The Doctor moves on from introductions pretty quickly, and is already tugging her into the TARDIS while updating her on various adventures the group had been on lately. Donna should have put up more of a protest at being kidnapped, but really, the Doctor is so cute and pitiful this go around. She also reminds her the most of her Doctor, albeit lacking a bit of height.
Still, Donna notes, as she steps over the TARDIS doors threshold…there’s a stark difference between the clinginess and volatile waterworks of this Doctor and the last one, who had seemed almost stable. Those two seemed like he leaned on Clara like the last brick holding up a bridge, but nonetheless, stabally so. This Doctor was frantic in every movement. What happened?
Yaz frowns and keeps trailing a line between Donna and the door with her gaze. Protective, which Donna respects. “Doctor, doesn't she have to go back to the Doctor? I mean, her Doctor?”
But levers are already flying and the TARDIS whirs happily, and Donna chooses to ignore the other two asking questions in favor of looking at the gorgeous new interior of the TARDIS.
“Doctor, this is beautiful!” She trails her hand along the edge of the new console and wonders how she can suggest some of these tips to her Doctor without causing a paradox. Is there a TARDIS and Gardens magazine she can subscribe to? A newsletter or a TV show?
“It really is, I tell her all the time,” Graham remarks. Ryan shrugs and nods amicably.
“Thank you!” The Doctor beams. She elbows Donna lightly and points to the ceiling, noting different intricate details and carvings in the walls. Then, to Yaz, “Aw, don’t worry, Yaz! I’ve run into Donna a few times before like this, we just kidnap her for a wee bit and then bring her right back.”
Yaz’s eyebrows shoot up, understandably, at the word kidnapping. But Donna is a pretty fantastic kidnapping victim when it comes to the Doctor nowadays.
“You’re sure, right?” Yaz asks, gaze darting between the two of them, and this time, Donna can’t tell who she’s more worried for.
The Doctor pulls the last lever, and the TARDIS rocks like a tilt-a-whirl. Donna races for the coral that isn’t there and falls, but Yaz and Ryan steady her back to her feet. “
“Course I’m sure! Now, off to the planet of the hats! Y’know, again!” The Doctor’s tone is nothing but cheerful and shockingly ecstatic, but there’s a shift in the air that brokers an understanding that, disagreement is allowed, she won’t hear them out.
Still, all four companions share a look — there’s a camaraderie among them even with barely any words — with smiles and raised eyebrows but excitement running through the blood, it’s a look and a feeling Donna knows well, it reads clear across all their faces: “Here we go again!”
***
This Doctor is exhausting, as it turns out — insatiable energy intake, hungry for everything, can talk more than any Doctor she’s ever met, and surprisingly a fantastic arm wrestler. Donna gets to know the three companions well, and by the time the Doctor is dropping them back home on Earth, she’s come to adore the three of them, especially Ryan and Yaz, who give her warm hugs. All three of them are sweet and genuinely care for the Doctor, but her mother was right: when Donna noticed something, she wouldn’t let it go for life or death. Maybe that was why she had stopped noticing things for so long until she met the Doctor.
The three were absolutely lovely. Good dynamic, no teamwork issues, and the Doctor clearly loves them all.
Except…they all know nothing about the Doctor. Which, Donna muses from the other side of the console as the Doctor says goodbye to the fam, is pretty damn impressive considering how much the Doctor talks.
They have next to know idea about how regeneration works. About the Timelords. Clara. River. They have a vague idea that the Doctor is married and has lots of relationships before, but they all gave her blank looks when she mentioned Rose and River, or even freakin’ Madame De Pompadour! Donna heard that story at least five times in the first six months with the Doctor!
Donna knows the Doctor better than she knows herself. She knows that man’s soul inside and out, and he knows hers. And, as much as Donna would love to flatter herself, she wasn’t the only one. Rose and the Doctor were apparently inseparable. Martha, while painfully so and a little strained, still has a deep connection to the Doctor. Amy and Rory had a bloody guestroom for the git! And Donna had only needed one look at Clara and the Doctor together to know that, however they met their end together, it was probably as painful as regeneration — and River? She had only met that woman once and for barely ten minutes, but the haunted look in her Doctor’s eyes, and the light in the eleventh and twelfth’s when they talked about her? That woman was clearly magic where the Doctor was concerned.
But these three? She’s pretty sure they don’t even know what the Doctor eats for breakfast.
It’s not their fault, she’s pretty sure of that — she has watched as Yaz an Ryan both tried to get the Doctor to open up about a story or a part of her past, and the Doctor brushed them off with practiced ease. It was painful to watch.
Donna knows that half of her job as his best friend is to take care of him as he protects and shows her the universe.
She looks at this group who clearly adore the doctor but wonders if they’re either not trying hard enough to take care of the Doctor (again, doubtful, based on today,) or if she simply won’t let them.
The TARDIS doors shut, interrupting Donna’s theorizing, and the Doctor bounds back over to her.
“I like them,” Donna says lightly, and then she nudges her shoulder. “And by the way, you as a woman is frankly not that much different from the you I know. You’re better dressed, that’s for certain.”
The Doctor giggles and digs her chin into Donna’s shoulder and gives her a little side hug. “Oi, the pinstripes! I’ve tried to block out the memory,” she grumbles. Her nose scrunches just like her Doctor’s does. It makes Donna’s heart clench.
They chat — well, chat is a bit too small of a word for sitting and talking for about two hours. She’s parked the TARDIS in the vortex, and they talk about adventures, they spend a lot of time talking about the Doctor being a woman, and Donna cracks herself and the Doctor up by remarking several times what an improvement it is.
Sitting there, not even on an adventure but out of breath from laughter and the exhilaration that stems from their now centuries-long connection, with their backs against the TARDIS’ wall, floating in the vortex, the Doctor’s hand laced in hers, her now-blonde best friend tugs lightly, and shatters her heart:
“Ya…could stay.”
“Stay?”
Call it a hunch, but Donna doesn’t like where this conversation is going.
“Yeah…not forever, but…” she thumbs over Donna’s knuckles and squeezes. “…for a while? Like…a year?”
Donna stares at her. She thinks of big dark eyes and spiky gelled hair and long limbs in bed. “A year? I can’t leave the Doctor…him alone for that long!”
“He won’t even know,” she promises. She scoots on the floor closer to her. “I don’t, so he doesn’t remember anything from his end. Humans barely age from year to year! He won’t even realize!”
The Doctor scrambles to gather up Donna’s hands and hold them in hers against her chest. Their backs stay against the TARDIS, but their heads turn to face each other. “It would be incredible. We can see everything! Nothing…nothing bad will ever happen to you. We’ll have an amazing time, I’ll tell you all about Clara and the Timelords, we can explore every inch of the TARDIS together! For goodness sakes, Hamilton hasn’t even come out yet for you, you’d love it!”
Donna shakes her head, and her hands fall back, not to take them away from her but just out of reflex, but the Doctor tightens her grip like a boa constrictor. “Doctor…it…it feels wrong. That wouldn’t be fair to my Doctor!”
Shamefully, Donna does consider it. After all, it is still him, just in the future - the Doctor has already been through Donna’s whole run, and she’s asking for her now. She’d be denying her best friend for the past version…which she’s already experienced, so she still wants it anyway?
Shit, Donna thinks. No wonder River kept a diary. This is confusing.
And she looks at her best friend, sees her Doctor’s eyes in hers and knows that when she goes back she’ll see this Doctor’s eyes in his, and wonders if it’s possible to split her time between two celestial god-like aliens. She supposed there was nothing wrong with having different companions at the same time…though, if she knew the Doctor was off on a year-long adventure in what was only one second for her, she’d be pissed. Beyond pissed.
No…she’d be hurt. Betrayed. Like he was trying to live another life in between her heartbeats.
The decision is clear in her chest, and must be on her face too, because the Doctor’s eyes squeeze shut as Donna murmurs, “No. I can’t. It would hurt him too much…even if he didn’t know.” They’ve built up too much trust over their time together.
The oncoming storm. That was what he had once murmured into her shoulder while they snuggled, promising her he was dangerous, that he could, would, hurt her, was an irresponsible hurricane that could turn on a person in an instant. But she’d seen the Doctor in this so-called oncoming storm frame before. And it had never scared her.
But whatever passed over the Doctor’s face now, it was darker…drowned and drenched, like a black hole dripping its captured light into the rest of the universe. Incredibly powerful, beyond comprehension, but crying. Constantly crying.
“I am him, and I want you here now!”
Silence heavier than she’s ever felt before with her best friend squeezes between them, an unwanted partner, and suddenly, so many more people make themselves known in the space between them: the centuries, the faces the Doctor’s worn, the people she’s loved, and there in the middle is Donna’s fate, invisible to her but silhouetting a clear hole between them.
Donna’s lungs constrict like a sponge being squeezed. The inches between them feel like miles and all she can think is, This is it, this is how I lose my best friend.
But Donna Noble is not one to quit: unless it’s a job, sucky relationship, or a conversation with her mother. But never a friend.
The Doctor gasps as Donna reaches through the ghosts standing between them and pulls her into a hug so tight she can feel her best friend’s twin heartbeats pound against her chest.
“Tell me what happened.” The hand not clenching at the Doctor’s back starts to gently rub up and down, like she’d do for her baby cousin when she cried so hard she started hiccuping. Just like the Doctor is doing now. “Tell me what happened to them. To Clara and River and everyone else.”
The Doctor's arms come up and screw around Donna’s neck, and she breaks down, “They’re gone…they’re gone, Donna…I lost Amy and Rory, couldn’t even say goodbye, and River…R-River, I loved her so much…Donna, I really did…so much…and…and I got all the time I was going to get with her and we had a house for twenty perfect years and then I had to watch her leave because time is shitty and she had said one night so it could only be one night…and…and…” The Doctor’s words fall apart like glass shattering to dust.
Donna gasps. The diaries. The Doctor’s end caught up to River’s…it was a painful, cruel inevitability. To lose a soulmate backwards? And still have to say goodbye? It would be enough to shatter anyone.
“Oh, Spacegirl…”
The Doctor chuckles in wet, pitiful hiccups.
“What about Clara?”
The Doctor shakes her head. Stubborn.
“Doctor…”
“Gone.”
“Gone?”
“Gone.”
“Meaning?”
The Doctor looks at Donna like she’s climbed inside her body, torn out her hearts, crushed them, tried to put them back together, and placed them back, but she’s not sure if they’ll still beat. She fights with her throat and her eyes burn red as she chokes on the words, “I had to…we…I loved her. I needed her too much. We were…it…I had to wipe her m-memory but then she wiped mine instead and I couldn’t remember her until just before I regenerated and now she’s somewhere on her last heartbeat to go back and be killed by the Timelords.”
On ‘memory’, the Doctor stopped looking at her, not on a reflex, not because she couldn't bear it, but as a conscious choice to not see Donna’s eyes in that moment. Donna tries not to think too hard about that. Just imagines what they always said would happen if you step over the event horizon of a black hole. Just getting stretched thinner and thinner until you and space are one and the same.
”I’m sorry,” she whispers.
“I think they’ve got a support group about me,” The Doctor chuckles weakly, out of the blue. “I think Ryan and Graham have looked into it. Which is good, ya know…to deal with everything ya see out here. And me. I’m a handful, ya know.”
Donna bristles. A support group? Who organized that? She looks down at the Doctor, twiddling weakly with her thumbs and sniffling, the same Doctor who desperately wants companions, friends, people to love, and is already so burdened by guilt of the occupational hazards her friends will face on adventures, and what, someone decided that there needed to be a support group? Who let her find out about it? Didn’t the poor woman feel badly enough about people she’d lost?
She can’t leave her Doctor. She can’t. But if it were possible to tear herself in part, leave one part here and send the other back to him, to love and hold both of them at the same time, across time, she’d do it.
The Doctor breaks down into weak, tired sobs. Donna’s never been particularly telepathic, but even she can feel the wisps and tendrils of the Tardis trying to soothe her poor stolen Timelord, and, with one drop into the muddled puddle that is this alien connection, Donna feels a little pinch in her memory, like a prick in the back of her brain.
She remembers reading somewhere that if you don’t give your body time to rest, eventually, it will take it for you.
The realization hits her in the gut and aches immediately, and, Donna suspects, it will ache for the rest of her life.
The Doctor is dying.
The Doctor is running on steam, closing herself off and building walls so thick that soon they’ll fall and crush her, and Donna is already too late to stop it. Her time with her Doctor has already passed, and whatever she did with him, whatever comfort and love and protection she gave to him for however long she got with him, it wasn’t enough to stop this. Amy and Rory and Clara and River and the people Donna didn’t meet, all of them, all the people who loved the Doctor most, couldn’t stop it.
Maybe they all caused it. All of them, together, took too much of the Doctor’s hearts for themselves, by loving the Doctor and being loved too much.
This is destined to happen. More than a fixed point, there is nothing Donna can do. She’s temporary, just like always, and her impact at this company is minimal at best, thank you for your time, your check is in the mail.
But her best friend is sitting across from her, hunched over, tears slipping in aching silence down her rounded, reddened cheeks.
Her best friend is crying out for help and Donna is simply not enough. None of them are.
But Donna kneels across from her. This woman, this woman from the stars, who is going to shatter into stardust any moment now. She’s already too late to stop it, and nothing Donna does today or yesterday will stop this train from running off the tracks.
But that doesn’t mean anyone has to die when the train crashes. Donna can soften the blow.
The TARDIS is still until the walls crack with the Doctor’s resolve, and her silent exhaustion ripples around the two of them — her shoulders spasm and a soaked cough comes out and something like ‘ I’m sorry’ falls with it.
And yet she still won’t reach for her, won’t take her hands. Won’t ask for help.
So Donna does it for her.
Calloused palms against aching ones, Donna smiles at her and whispers, “One more adventure,” with a smile, bright not with cheer, but with fearless, bloody determination to give her best friend whatever she can give her now without betraying her past.
Maybe this won’t make any difference the moment Donna goes home.
Because maybe this is the end for the Doctor.
But, then again, it’s the end for Donna too.
The Doctor’s eyes, so ancient and so, so tired, flick up to her, and Donna smiles and welcomes her favorite alien, her soulmate in whatever way the universe wants to define that, into her arms. They may both be on borrowed time, but at least it’s still time.
Time for one more adventure.
***
A few days later, after an adventure full of treasure, some righteous ranting, lots of running, and matching swimsuits, Donna has agreed to one more sleepover - and, yet again, the Doctor’s head is pillowed on her thighs. She thinks of when the gangly-limbed one had done it. She thinks of the twelfth one hugging her and his long fingers clenching her back. She thinks of herDoctor, buried under her duvet, his cool legs tangled up with hers, murmuring bits and hints of his nightmares into her hair but oh, so much calmer when he has her in his arms than when he’s across the hall and alone.
Donna closes her eyes, and she can see all of them. Feel all of them. Feel every single one of the Doctors, all holding onto her. No matter the face, she loves them. And maybe that’s what this whole soulmate business is about. Face, gender, personality, one companion or three, no matter the centuries between them, the Doctor is her soulmate.
And the best part?
Here, she’s not a temp. As far as the Doctor's concerned, she’s forever.