"Shaun!" She struggled through the door, huge and pregnant and swollen ankles all over the place. He'd just popped out, then, like it was nothing, and her nearing eight months pregnant, what did he think he was doing? "Shaun, where are you?"
Sudden pain searing across her belly. She leaned against the wall, gasping for breath. "Sh-Shaun!" she cried again. He wasn't home, she knew that. No one was home, not since her mother'd moved away. Gramps was at work, Shaun was out, Mother was in Leeds — who was here to help Donna Temple-Noble? No one, as usual. She was on her own, for another bloody day.
The pain again. She couldn't breathe, couldn't see it hurt so much. Something was wrong, it was too soon, she didn't have a mobile. Curse her own idiocy, how could she have left it at the other house again, this pregnancy was making her even more forgetful than normal and—
The pain, worse and worse and lasting longer and she was falling, trying to angle herself up to protect the baby, the baby!
She opened her eyes. Arms around her, cradling her, in the hallway where she'd fallen. Everything was blurry, pain ripping her apart. "Shaun, thank god, hurts—"
"Shh, Donna, shh. I'm here. I'm…Well, I guess I'm a doctor."
"Just what I need, eh?" she said through clenched jaws, it hurt, everything hurt so much.
"Now, Donna, you've got to stay calm, all right?" His face swam into view. No one she knew, she'd have remembered a face like that, all heavy brow ridge and ridiculous hair. A sudden break in the pain.
"Are you wearing a bowtie?" She didn't know why she asked that, she always did daft things when she was scared, just like three years ago when she'd thought the neighbors had turned into Prime Minister Saxon and had run out into the alley like a lunatic.
He laughed, this doctor, and said, "Yes, bowties. They're cool."
"That's a laugh, I haven't seen a bowtie in—" Pain, everywhere and everything hurt and it wasn't supposed to hurt this much, she didn't think it was anyway, and oh god the fear rising up in her, what if she died right here in the hall with the baby and a strange man in a bowtie, what then?
"Here, Donna, all right, you're fine. The baby's a little early, is all, and I've called an ambulance for you, and you're going to get through this, I promise you."
She was so afraid, it all hurt so much. "How do you know," she sobbed, couldn't see anything anymore, pain all over.
"I know. Trust me, I know that you're going to be all right, and this baby, well." He paused, and she tried to hold back a scream, a sob, something. "This baby is a very important person, you know." He put a hand on her belly. "This baby is…is destined, I guess you could say, meant for something great. Something really fantastic, no, brilliant."
"Do I know you?" Another daft question, why did she always ask daft questions in the middle of serious situations. First the bowtie and now this.
"No," he said, and if she hadn't been distracted by another searing shock of pain she'd have thought he sounded devastatingly sad. "No, you don't know me at all."
Blackness again, and next thing she knew she was at a hospital with a nurse telling her to push, dammit, and then the baby and Shaun and Gramps and Mum all the way from Leeds, and somehow she never got around to telling them about the doctor who'd called the ambulance for her, the doctor she didn't know at all.