A/N: Hello! This fic is based off something I found while poking around on the internet, so all credit for the idea goes to whoever came up with it.
Disclamer: I own NOTHING Doctor Who and all of it's charecters belong to the BBC
A woman whose hair was once a vibrant red lay in her bed on what she knew would be the day she died. She could feel it. She hadn't lived a spectacular life, but it had been good. She had a husband once, but he was now long gone. Two children, and five grandchildren, who wouldn't make it. It had been a good life, but she knew that today it would end.
She almost sighed. She wished she could've done more. Throught her audlt life she had always had a naging sense that she was missing something, that she wasn't doing enough. And sometimes she heard words, snippets of conversatons that she knew shold mean something, but she couldn't place her finger on. She once told he grandfather this, before he passed away, but he just said that it was probably nothing and quickly changed the subject. It had confused her, but she never brought it up again.
She had horrible headaches too. She didn't think much of it, but they were bad, and sometimes left her in bed for days. Now that she thought of it, she felt that feeling, that feeling like she was missing something, more when she was having a headache. And sometimes, maybe once or twice in her life, she had heard fragments of a conversation between her mum and her grandad, something about aliens. The aliens weren't the strange part, grandad went on and on about those. The strange part was that her mum actually seemed to be listening and concerned for Donna's health.
Looking back on it, Donna's adult life had been rather strange, just in ways one doesn't particularly notice. Like when there were twenty six planets in the sky. Of course it was obviously some sort of mass shared hallucination, but shouldn't she remember hallucinating?
Donna wondered if this was when she was supposed to realize the meaning of life or her divine purpose. "I'm even rubbish at dying" Donna thought bitterly. She could never do anything right. Even though her marriage was happy, she couldn't help but think that he wasn't as good as someone else. Of course she had no idea who, and she couldn't tell these things to her husband. After all how do you tell your husband "I love you, but I think I'm more in love with someone I can't even prove the existence of."
Donna sighed out loud this time. Meaning of life? Was she supposed to ponder the philosophical musings of how incredibly strange her adult life had been? Was that seriously what the universe waned her to realize after all of these years of living? She supposed that it must be struggling because of how unbelievably nothing her life had been. She guessed that every average person did at least one amazing thing in their life, but nope, not Donna. She had never done anything special. Ever.
Donna stared to wonder when she was actually going to die. After all, there are only so many ways to think about how unbearably strange and boring her life had been. Of course she would've loved to live on and see new things, go new places, but this was it. She just knew it.
So she lied there, pondering whatever the universe wanted her to ponder. And she never thought about death. She didn't wonder where she would go. She wasn't sure if it was because she didn't care or it was just another one of her particular oddities.
Then a man walked in. He was wearing a bow tie and a jacket, and tears glistened in his eyes. She opened her mouth, possibly to give this man a piece of her mind, but closed it.
"Hello, old friend." The man said with a hint of melancholy in his voice. Before Donna could do anything, the man put his fingers on her temples and she remembered. She remembered Pompeii and the Ood, she remembered Sontorans and the giant wasp. And she remembered why she had to forget.
"Thank you, Doctor." Donna whispered, knowing that she had little time left.
"Remember River Song?" The Doctor asked. Donna nodded. "I married her."
Donna smiled. Finally, she knew it had to end.
"Goodbye, Doctor." And with those words, she died.
The Doctor, refusing to let himself cry in such a public place, walked outside. His blue box was waiting for him, just like it always had. He would go forward a few days and go to her funeral. There he would let himself cry because he would fit in. He would just be another mourner. And all of the others who were there would not know how truly amazing she was. Only him. And with that, he left.