A/N: Look at the things I can get out when I'm supposed to be studying for midterms! Brilliant, isn't it? Not that this is the best thing I've ever written - it's more like an extended drabble than anything else, and not a fantastic one, either. But it did please me to write some Donna, so here you go.
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"Her name was Rose."
- The Runaway Bride
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On the day after Christmas, Donna waits until her parents are distracted by the television set before she turns on the computer in her room. She is not exactly sure what it is she is looking for – a name, certainly, but more than that, a story. A sad story, she expects, although she can't quite accept that. The Doctor might be wonderful and terrible, but she doesn't think he leaves behind a lot of sad endings.
The name "Rose" brings up too many vague results. "The Doctor and Rose" brings up too few. When she searches for the Doctor by his name alone, she finds sites devoted to a mysterious entity – her spaceman, but not her spaceman, and she wonders if perhaps the Doctor is a part of some Martian association. No – not Martian, she remembers. Calligraphy – no, Callifrey – she tries variations on the spelling but there's no way to know if she even remembers the name properly.
It is a long, tiring search, and it's only after she's given up and laying in her bed that Donna remembers something else the Doctor had said. Something about last Christmas, and… a spaceship in the sky. She rolls out of bed and switches the computer back on, and when she enters this into the search bar she finds pictures – hundreds of blurred pictures that could have been photo-shopped, except the Doctor seemed to think that it was real. And if the Doctor said it was real, Donna believs it was. All the same… "To think I missed that," she whispers, and her heart skips in her chest.
Over the next few days, she remembers something else the Doctor had mentioned – a battle or something. She brings it up casually to her mom, and receives a lecture on paying less attention to stories and more attention to finding a real job. But when she asks her old granddad, he tells her in great detail about all the news reports and ghosts and strange metal men that cumulated in the Battle of Canary Warf. And Donna takes this and returns home, and sees from her computer that her granddad was right. But – people were killed – and at once her mind flies back to the Doctor's sad face and the great sadness in his voice as he tells her that his friend was lost.
And that's when she finds it; the small, black text, one name among many, a list to remember the dead. There is only one Rose on the list, a Rose Tyler, and directly above is listed a Jacqueline Tyler. Donna wonders if they were sisters or mother and daughter, and she wonders if she will ever know. She could – the internet is a huge resource, but Donna doesn't quite have the strength to learn any more. What good could it do, knowing any more about a tiny name in a list of many, a name that could cause the Doctor so much grief?
He'd said Rose was still alive, but judging from his face, she was as good as dead now, and Donna no longer has the heart to find out why.
So she sits in her computer chair for a very long time, staring at the screen as she remembers the spider-woman's screams and the Doctor's face. She remembers the robots and the blue box and the sight of the Earth forming right before her eyes. And then Donna closes the browser and opens a new one, and in the search bar types in five letters.
Egypt.