He bounds through the crowds that have appeared seemingly out of nowhere, long coat flapping behind him. Someone shouts at him as it whips past their legs but he's too focused to notice.
Donna.
She's here, somewhere. She has to be. They're all here, they're all saved.
He tries his best to ignore the angry red marks encircling his wrists, the smell of burnt metal that lingers where the handcuffs had dug into his skin.
(He finally reaches his sonic, after all that, stretching his long legs out and dragging it back to him to unlock the cuffs. Too late. She's gone and he couldn't save her and now he's lost in the ruins of a woman he doesn't know but is supposed to. Sometimes this life, this life of a time traveller, that's what River had said - this life gives him a headache. Too wibbly-wobbly. Never in the right order.)
Donna.
Everyone here in the Library seems to be in rather a good mood. He wonders about that. If he'd just spent the last hundred years as formless data after running for his life from shadows that eat people, he thinks he'd be more than a little upset. But everyone here seems at worst, confused and frustrated, at best, smiling and laughing as if nothing had happened.
He's not sure of the reason for their good mood, but it gives him a little comfort knowing at least Donna won't be bad off. She'll be her grinning sassy self and they'll soar off into the stars, leaving this godforsaken place behind.
Except he's wrong. He's oh so wrong and he does not like being wrong.
Because there's Donna, and she doesn't look at all different or a day older, but the look on her face.
He stops in his tracks. Because he knows that look too well.
She's lost everything.
She's whirling in place, grabbing at strangers, asking them something he can't hear, desperately searching for what, he doesn't know.
Eyes wide, he half-whispers, "Donna..." and even across the room she seems to hear him, and turns and sees him and her entire expression crumbles and she sobs and runs through the crowd to him and falls into his chest, grasping at his arms like she's going to fade and disappear.
"Doctor, he'' gone, they're all gone and I can't - I can't - he's gone, I can't find them, it wasn't real, none of it was real, my - oh, Doctor, my children, they weren't real, please tell me he's real -"
It's a litany of desperate, lost grief, and he wracks his brain attempting to understand as he holds her.
What had Lux said? CAL was dreaming. Dreaming of a normal life, with a lovely dad. Computers can dream, he knows that well enough, especially if they're based off actual human minds like Charlotte's. But then she saved them, crammed thousands of pieces of human data in her mind, in the computer core, for a hundred years, until they were finally released.
A hundred years as data fragments in a computer. Charlotte was dreaming. Everyone here is happy, not screaming.
Like they've just woken up from a pleasant dream.
Unless of course, he thinks, they realized it was a dream while they were in the dream. What would have happened then? What if they realized it was a dream but then they couldn't wake up from the dream? He thinks again of Cal, dreaming of a normal life with a lovely dad. A dad, a dad who doesn't actually exist. She invented him, invented him to give herself a normal life while she was stuck in a computer core, invented a normal life so she could keep dreaming.
She had 4,022 living minds stuck in her mind, trapped in the life she had imagined for herself, and she needed to keep them dreaming.
Everyone here is happy and not screaming because they had been dreaming of a normal life, normal families and jobs and Christmas dinners that didn't actually exist.
Donna is crying for her children, but Donna doesn't have children.
Donna invented children.
He wants to smack himself in the face when he realizes he's underestimated his companion, again. Donna's a time traveler now. Of course she would have realized it was a dream. She would have realized it wasn't real and then those children and that normal life she had invented for herself would have disappeared because she wouldn't have been able to hold onto them anymore. And then she would have been stuck, trapped in a dream she couldn't escape. And that's not a dream, that's a nightmare.
And he holds her a little tighter when he realizes how much that hurts.
She tells him when she calms down, explains how Miss Evangelista had shattered the illusion and how Dr. Moon had tried to trick them into believing the dream-time was normal but how it never felt right to her but she knows she's not that smart so she tried to get used to it. (He disagrees, thinks Donna's a lot smarter than she thinks but he doesn't push it.)
And she tells him about Lee.
The perfect man, she says. She has red eyes and tear tracks on her face and she tells the Doctor how she promised him she'd find him. She knows the children weren't real, she knows that because she saw the evidence, but Lee was special, unique. He had a stutter, she says. There wasn't anyone else like him. And the Doctor, never one to give up hope, agrees. Donna deserves that much. They'll search for him.
And they do. Donna searches the crowds. The Doctor talks to the newly reappeared front desk people, the library director, sonics the computers so he can widen the parameters to the entire planet. But the computer doesn't register individuals, just how many life forms it can see. Heat signatures, nothing more. It can't see a face or hear a stutter. And Lee was in a dream. Donna never met him in real life; there's no biological print from a touch or a kiss to trace. Despite that, he's the Doctor; he doesn't give up.
But Donna, a human who's already had her perceptions of reality shaken, starts to. He can see it in the slump of her shoulders, the dullness creeping into her eyes. With each person she passes that isn't the man she loves, the cracks in her resolve begin to appear. She begins to second-guess herself. Maybe she did invent him. The perfect man. He doesn't want to tell her she's right, but the losses are starting to get to him, too.
Eventually they make their way to the side of the room, just watching the crowds go by as the teleport begins to speed people back to their homes. Maybe they'll catch him as he steps up to a teleport, but...
He leans against the hard wood wainscoting as Donna comes back from another pass through the crowd.
"No luck?" he says, trying to keep the despair from coating his voice.
Donna, voice steady and unbroken, says, "There wasn't even anybody called Lee in the Library that day." She looks tired. She's given up.
The Doctor has lived for over 900 years. He remembers when he used to fight, fight without end, fight without giving up and never letting others give up either. But he's older and wiser now. As much as he hates it, he knows that sometimes hope can be far more painful than giving up.
"Doctor...let her go."
He shakes the image of stardust from his mind and blinks the burn of loss away.
So he doesn't push it. He just stands still next to his companion, and resolves to be whatever she needs him to be so she can get through the pain.
"I made up the perfect man," Donna says with a sigh, not meeting his eyes, and in that sigh the Doctor knows that she believes it now. "Gorgeous, adores me, and hardly able to speak a word." She pauses, and the Doctor wishes he could put his fingertips to her temple and figure out what's going through her mind. Eventually she wrinkles her brow and asks rhetorically, "What does that say about me?"
"Everything," he responds, blurting it out before his stupid slow brain can catch up and tell him not to say anything.
Donna shoots him an insulted look, and he mentally backpedals. He didn't mean it that way, he almost never means it the way it comes out, he knows Donna will only take it as a hurtful remark when he means it as an observation of her personality and the things she needs as a human being and...
Stars above, just apologize.
"Sorry, did I say everything? I meant to say nothing. I was aiming for nothing, accidentally said everything..."
His regret comes out as not much more than whoops, I put my foot in my mouth again, but it doesn't seem to bother Donna any more than the entire day has. Normally she'd give him a tongue-lashing at his insensitivity; he recalls their second meeting with fondness.
"You just want to mate?!"
Now...she's just...defeated. Tired.
It stings, a little.
"How about you, are you all right?"
And once more, the human race never fails to surprise him. Drowning in her own pain, and Donna Noble asks him if he's all right.
The smell of the burnt metal against his wrists invades his nostrils again, coats the roof of his mouth, and he resists the urge to rub the skin there.
"Oh, I'm always all right," he tells her. The lie mixes with the sharpness of the burnt metal and bitterness floods his overactive senses.
Something like knowledge comes over Donna's expression and she asks pointedly, "Is all right special Time Lord code for...not really all right at all?"
"Why?" he replies as casually as he can.
"Because I'm all right too."
He hides a sad smile, cursing his transparency, and finally turns away from watching the teleport and toward his fiery companion. The same sad smile hides just behind the twist of her mouth.
He nods his head back towards the door. "Come on," he says, and she takes his arm and they leave the Library and its forests behind.