A/N: A while ago, when A Noble Little Girl was just a brain child, I wrote a oneshot. This is it.
No, I don't own Amy Pond, the Eleventh Doctor, Donna Noble, the TARDIS, Rory Williams, or Shaun Temple. Or Doctor Who, or BBC. If I did, I'd make Moffat jump off of a building for a change. See how he likes it.
"Doctor!"
The Doctor looked up from the screen, turning around. Amy stood behind him, hands on her hips.
"I've been calling your name for over an hour! Got lost in the TARDIS." She flipped her red hair over her shoulder. "What've you been up to that's so fascinating?" She peered over his shoulder, trying to get a peek at the screen.
He leaned back, his tweed jacket concealing whatever he had been looking at. "Sorry I didn't hear you. Oh, I've just been, um, watching something." He gulped. "Someone."
Amy laughed and tried to push the Doctor aside. "Who've you been watching? A secret crush?"
"Um, no." He shook his head definitively. "Certainly not."
"I'll bet. I'll take a look, thanks." Amy stopped shoving the Doctor for a second, and when he relaxed, she pushed him aside to look at what had been entrancing the Doctor.
A ginger-haired woman, maybe in her mid-thirties, sat on a small bed in a small room, knees curled up to her chest. Amy couldn't hear a thing, but she could guess the woman was crying. The image was a little dark, but Amy couldn't tell if that was because of the screen or of nightfall.
"Who's that?" Amy asked pointedly. The Doctor said nothing, eyes fixated on the screen again. "Doctor, who's that woman?"
Amy looked back at the woman, fascinated. The redhead was still crying, head on her knees, unheard sobs racking her body. The bedsheets were crumpled around her, and a man's thick jacket was spread across her broad shoulders.
Looks like something Rory would wear, a little scrappy, a little tacky, Amy thought vaguely, a slight smile coming to her lips. But when the thought repeated in her head, the smile faded.
Her brain started working at lightning speed. That couldn't be...could it?
"Doctor, is that...is that me?" Amy asked quietly. "Is that me in the future?"
"No, that's not you at all," the Doctor said reassuringly, but kept his eyes glued to the screen. "She's just someone who knew me once. She's fallen on a spot of bad luck."
"How so?" Amy was relieved that the woman wasn't her and had nothing to do with her, but was now entranced by this mystery woman.
"Well, from what I understand, she's pregnant, and her husband left."
"How do you get all that from a silent video?"
"Oh, it's not silent," he said. "I turned down the volume." He motioned to a little knob on the side of the screen.
"Why'd you turn it down?" Amy reached for the knob, but the Doctor stopped her hand.
"I couldn't bear hearing her cry."
"Oh." Amy looked back at the screen.
The woman had stopped wailing, evidently, and had uncurled her legs, leaning back on her hands to stare at the ceiling. It almost looked like she was staring right at them, or through them; her wet blue eyes were stern, even in grief.
"What's her name, Doctor?"
"Whose name?"
"The woman's name. What is it?"
The Doctor sighed. "Donna. Donna Temple-Noble, or I guess just Donna Noble now that Shaun's left. And she was once the most important woman in the universe."
"Once?" Amy cocked her head. "Why once?"
"Well, she sort of forgot." The Doctor's guilt-ridden face turned alabaster.
Amy could tell she was treading on uncomfortable ground, so she didn't ask why. "She's pretty," she said at last. "Bet she'd be fun."
"She didn't think she was pretty, or special, or any of that nonsense," the Doctor replied, a bit of color returning to his face. "She was always on about how she wasn't as important as I said, but she was wrong." He ran a hand through his staticky brown hair. "I've never seen her this sad before. She was always sharp-tongued. We actually got into a lot of fights, her and I, but at the end of the day, we were the best of mates."
Donna and the Doctor. Donna and the Doctor. The phrase rolled over and over in his mind, old wounds beginning to reopen.
"That baby she's gonna have. Is it...?"
"Her husband's?" Amy nodded, and the Doctor thought for a moment. "I don't think she knows. I don't know if it is or if it isn't."
"And this is happening right now?" Amy's hand wandered to the knob, hovering in front of it.
"Yeah, right now, today, this very moment." The Doctor placed his hand on the volume knob. When Amy placed hers lightly on top, they turned it up together.
Donna's breath hitched in her throat, stray sobs still escaping. She stood up decidedly, sock feet padding dully across the thin carpet. She picked up a mobile from the dresser, punched in a number, and waited.
"Hello?" she said shakily after a moment's pause, her voice grainy over the recording. "Mum, it's Donna. No, you can't talk to him. He...he left, Mum." She held the mobile away from her ear, as a quiet but steady stream of shrieks arose from the phone.
After a few seconds, Donna put the phone back to her ear. "He left while I was sleeping, Mum. Didn't even say anything to me. We'd been rocky for a while, but I had thought we were fine. Something I'd told him. Why'd he leave?" She bit her lip. "Erm...he left because I was...because I found out I'm...I'm pregnant. And I'd told him last night, and now...he knows I'm pregnant." She whispered the word hoarsely. "Mum, please. Mum? Mum?" The low groan of an ended call bit across the recording.
In a sudden fit of anger, Donna pitched the phone across the room, where it crashed into the closet door, leaving a small dent in the old wood. She sprinted to the bed and fell backward onto it, sobbing again.
Immediately, the Doctor turned the volume down again, till Donna's sobs were silent once more.
"She never had the best relationship with her mum," the Doctor remarked sadly. "Sylvia was always a little too harsh." He rubbed his chin in thought, before crossing his arms on the tabletop and letting his head drop onto them. "Now Donna's having a baby and she won't even have her own mum there for her."
Amy's mind was elsewhere. "Doctor...if Donna saw you today, she wouldn't remember you...would she?"
"Nope," the Doctor replied, voice muffled by the sleeves of his jacket. "She forgot everything about me and the TARDIS. And I looked different when she knew me. Different body." He straightened up, chuckling slightly. "She used to go on about me being skinny as a pole. Called me a long streak of alien nothing once."
Amy sighed. "Doctor, there's nothing you or I can do."
"And therein lies the good part."
"How is that good?" Amy looked confused, kneeling next to the Doctor's chair. He turned away from the screen, facing Amy and ruffling her red hair absently.
"Oh, Amy," he muttered. "I can't just swoop in and save the day all the time. I have to stop being Superman."
"But you make people better."
"And I can just as quickly make them worse."
"Curse of a Time Lord, Doctor?"
"Nail on the head, Pond."