"It's a brain. A hind brain. ...born with a secondary brain... you cut that off, you wouldn't be Donna anymore."
"Like a lobotomy."
"The circle must be broken... the circle must be broken..."
"The subconscious reaching out."
"Funny thing, the subconscious... takes all sorts of shapes... revenge... anger..."
"Yeah, very you... always a death at the end."
"One will still die..."
"Binary, binary, binary, binary, binary, binary, binary, binary - I'm fine!"
"I want to stay."
"...I can't go back. Don't make me go back. Doctor, please, please don't make me go back!"
He's inside her mind.
She doesn't want him there.
She is too weak to fight.
As everything slides away into darkness, she can hear the Ood sing.
"Doctor, Donna, friends."
But not anymore.
"The circle must be broken."
"The subconscious reaching out..."
"Revenge..."
"Anger..."
Revenge...
Anger...
Revenge...
When she wakes up, she has a headache something awful. But what really disconcerts her is that her fists are clenched and trembling, her jaw constricted, and the strangest feeling of fury is sitting on her chest.
It's unlike her. In her daytime life, she really cares very little about much else than her friends, the newest celebrity gossip, and annoying Nerys. But sometimes when she wakes up in the morning, the remnants of another life, darkness and ash and fire, cling to her mind. She has this strange feeling of loss.
She shakes her head to clear it and pulls off her nightgown, throwing it in a heap on the floor. Who cares? She spends almost half an hour picking out an outfit; looks are important, and she has hardly any nice clothes. She walks down the stairs by rote, her eyes on her cell phone.
"Good morning," her mother says, trying to be nice but very out of practice. She glances at her for a second; lately her mother has been acting odd, like she's trying to establish a connection; well, too late. She doesn't reply.
"Good morning, love," her grandfather interrupts the awkwardness. She smiles gratefully and hugs him. Behind her, her mother tries not to cry. She doesn't notice.
She sweeps out the front door. A lone man walking by does a double take. She glares at him, and he blushes and walks quickly on. As she heads to work, people stop to stare. A woman says to her daughter, "See her? She's confident. Not so hard, is it?"
She doesn't realize how long her strides are, or how high she holds her head, or the queenly sternness with with she fixes people, the self-assuredness that makes people instinctively listen to her. She wonders why people are staring at her. Does she have something on her face? She knows she's ugly, but she's never gotten looks like these before, except from the creeps on the corner. She gives the fat woman on the bus her signature glare, and the woman turns beet red and buries her face in her newspaper.
When she gets home from work, she flops down on her bed and stares at the ceiling. Her head is pounding. It does that often, now. She knows she should probably go downstairs and grab a Tylenol, but she is tired, so tired. She doesn't know why she is alive, and she doesn't particularly want to be. There is something she is missing. She sighs, knowing that everyone feels like this sometimes, and pulls her pillow over her head.
She didn't mean to fall asleep, but the next thing she knows she wakes up screaming.
She's not screaming with fear, but rage, more rage than she knew she could hold, and her body feels weak and fragile before the fire of her mind. It takes her a few minutes to notice that she is pounding the walls with her fists, howling with fury at someone she can no longer remember. Someone has ripped her open, turned her inside out, and taken out all the best of her, and she wants it back. She wants it back. Her eyes and lungs feel hot and the roots of her teeth burn. She begins to sob, not knowing where all this despair and pain has come from.
Her grandfather's hands are on her back, frantically trying to calm her down. "Donna! Donna, what's wrong?" She turns and buries her face in his chest, unable to say anything.
It takes a few minutes before her parents are able to calm her down. She sits at the dining table, a mug between her hands, staring into space.
Sylvia Noble and her father Wilf watch nervously from their kitchen as their child and grandchild, respectively, stares off into what seems to be an unimaginable mental distance.
More than anything else, they want to help, to know what's wrong, but they are too petrified of what too many questions could do to her. They each stand all too still, somehow believing that any motion could set her mind aflame.
The words come out of Donna's mouth without her really thinking about them. Something seems to enthrall her in times like these, more and more often. The strangest part of it is that she doesn't mind, because the strong woman who takes hold of her inside and steers her quietly, with a sense of purpose she has somehow lost, feels to be more her than she is.
How this is possible, she doesn't know. She accepts it, does not question, and is unaware of how this detachment saves her life many minutes out of the day. So she speaks, or lets the woman within her speak; it's the same to her, really.
"Granddad, what does it feel like to kill?" she asks absentmindedly.
Her grandfather reacts, horrified, at the question. She fails to notice, too intent on the empty spaces within her.
Kill who? asks the Donna-half of Donna.
The man who took you away from me, the strong, confident, angry half - the Doctor-half, though she does not know it - replies.
But I'm right here, she points out, confused. She just barely registers that her mother is now crying, her grandfather holding her gently and trying to be reassuring while staring helplessly at his grandaughter, who stares ahead of her in a trance with eyes he does not know.
True enough, the Doctor-half answers happily, almost smugly, before her voice changes with bitterness and repressed rage. Yet, you don't know who I am.
Who are you? the Donna-half asks timidly, and she is surprised and afraid because she has never been timid, and now it seems that all the stubbornness and fight has gone out of her.
I am your strength, the power inside of you, the one he tried to take away, is the Doctor-half's response. It rings true instantly, and she accepts it. But she has the feeling there is more the woman is not telling her. She begins to question, tries to dig, to remember.
There is a short flash - a man in a blue suit, staring at her concernedly. "You really don't believe that, do you? All that attitude, all that lip - all that anger, she adds silently - 'Cause all this time, you think you're not worth it. I can see, Donna, what you're thinking."
Her head begins to ache and burn, and she can feel a sudden burst of panic from the strong woman. "Don't! Don't - don't do that."
Why not? the Donna-half asks petulantly.
If you remember now, your mind will burn and you will die. He took that too, because I - because he is a self-indulgent coward who never saves the people who matter. The woman's bitterness is palpable. But he will pay, dear Donna-half. He will pay.
