Credit to Lindsay the narwhal, who said, "I think it would be cool if Donna somehow found that guy from the library episode again. I'm a total wedding crasher lol." My immediate response was, "I can't do that. We've already seen her marry Shaun Temple." Later, it occurred to me…. Who gives a frack about Shaun Temple?
Also, a lot of credit and huge thanks (again) to LostInWho, who beta-read this entire thing and fixed a hundred thousand problems that I had completely overlooked. Thank you, LostInWho!
Finally, fair warning: This fic works fine as a stand-alone, but it is technically a sequel. All you have to know is that in Chapter 1, we begin with the Doctor, Rose, Donna, and Shaun Temple (Donna's bridegroom from The End of Time) all traveling together, angst-free and memories intact. If you want to know how Donna got her memories back and what Rose is doing here, the fic that precedes this is available on my page. If you don't care how we got to this point (and it's really not necessary to understand this story), then by all means, read on!
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Prologue
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Setting: Christmas Day, Chiswick, 2009
Shaun Temple woke up on Christmas day blissfully unaware that aliens existed. Maintaining this ignorance throughout his morning routine wasn't difficult at all – he had coffee, put on a blue polo shirt, and changed the oil in his car, all without seeing any signs of alien life.
Sometime after 1:00, he drove his fiancée to see her family and exchange presents. He happily missed the dimensionally transcendent blue box materializing in the street outside, and didn't notice when his soon-to-be grandfather-in-law disappeared for the rest of the afternoon.
The weird feeling of turning into a Master clone at about 3:30 caused him no small amount of alarm, but pretty soon he'd been changed back, and what with his brain cells rewiring themselves again to their original state, he remembered none of it. All seemed to be well.
At about 4:00, his comfortable obliviousness was put to the real test when a massive worldwide earthquake coincided with a giant burnt orange planet appearing in the sky. For a moment, his happy certainty about humanity's solitude in the universe seemed to be in grave jeopardy. What could possibly explain this? Could he really be seeing what looked like evidence of… of…?
Heroically, he clamped down on such thoughts and waited out the crisis until the planet was gone and he had a chance to think things through. There had to be a reasonable explanation for this. Massive orange planets were certainly out of the ordinary, but earthquakes weren't unheard of. Maybe a gas leak caused by the earthquake had led to some sort of mass hallucination. Yes, that was it. It was obvious, really, when you thought about it.
His worldview thankfully secure again, he waited for his fiancée to reappear from wherever she'd gone off to. Another Christmas full of the strange but perfectly understandable had passed, and he was nearly home safe.
That is, naturally, when Donna came back and ruined everything.
[Roll credits, play opening theme song.]