Disclaimer: I own nothing; for fun, not profit; etc.
Spoilers: Everything with Donna up to The End of Time. And one line from The Pandorica Opens.
Notes: I recently brought myself to watch the Donna-less specials, and was a little surprised at how much The Waters of Mars in particular screamed of Donna's absence, from the reference back to Pompeii (both the inevitability of trying to change the events surrounding it and Donna's plea to "just save someone") to the appearance of the Ood at the very end to that very telling last scene with Adelaide.
Once upon a time there was a man, and God brought forth woman to make her his equal, and she challenged him as he challenged her, and God saw that it was good.
(In the beginning:
"No," says Donna Noble, soft and definitive.)
The Doctor, in his infinite wisdom, had once decided that life would be much easier if romantic entanglements were not allowed to complicate it. There had been Rose, and there had been Martha, and he'd loved them both, but not as they'd wanted to be loved.
But there had been a woman between the two, and he'd put a ring on her finger in a mock ceremony on top of a building overlooking London. Already in a ruined wedding dress with the veil torn off, she'd boldly said, "For better or for worse."
She leaves his life of her own volition, but will see him again. After all, her journey is a neat one, circular; and as she'd fought him coming into his life, she'll do the same leaving it.
(In the end:
"No, please," begs Donna Noble.)
oOo
Once upon a time there was a very powerful man. God created Eve from his rib to make her his helper and he loved her all the days of his life.
"What do you need?" Donna had asked him the second time they'd met, apropos of their entire relationship in so many ways. She'd been calm and calming, efficient in her words and actions, and so very full of compassion and care.
The Doctor never entirely made a secret of the extent to which he thoroughly adored Donna Noble, and why should he have? The only person who didn't seem to realize it was Donna herself, and he'd tell her she was brilliant and amazing and lovely as many times as it took to make her understand it for herself. It disconcerted him that she would lump herself among the general masses, among people of little to no consequence in the grand scheme of things, when she meant so much to him.
But more than that, she glowed so brightly on the edges of his perception of the universe, like she was the sun hovering in the moments between darkness and dawn, or a flame the moment the match was struck. Potential practically exuded from her mind and pores so that he could feel it and taste it heavy in the air around her, and could only wonder at how she could possibly not from her position, the epicenter, the eye in the oncoming storm. She was meant for something, to be sure.
She was marvelous, and it made his hearts swell just to look at her.
"What do you see when you look at me?" she asked him once over morning tea and toast, not long after she'd come aboard the TARDIS as a proper resident. Her jim jams were pink and fuzzy, and she wore a pair of fluffy white slippers to protect her feet from the metal gratings; and it amused and heartened the Doctor no end that she was comfortable enough in her new home already to come to breakfast in such a ruffled state.
Her question wasn't entirely unexpected, but he felt the urge to run away from it with a joke nonetheless.
"You say you can see everything that was and is and will be, or all the possibilities at least. Can you see what's in store for me?"
The Doctor sighed, resigned to answer the question. "Not as such," he said, running a hand through his hair. "It's not really a question of seeing. I'm hardly a visionary. If I tried, and focused on you specifically, I could sense thousands, if not millions of variations on your life. Or more accurately, I think I could. For a very few people, the possibilities are far fewer, because they are cause or are otherwise intertwined in certain fixed points that simply are: can't be changed without triggering some catastrophic consequences."
Donna frowned a bit, and waved the marmalade spoon at him. "D'you mean you're not trying in general, or that you're actively trying not to? Look at my future like that, I mean."
Again, the Doctor sighed. "I try not to with people who are close to me. It's less complicated that way."
"I suppose it is," Donna replied softly, and he could see her trying to imagine how it would be to know when and how a friend was going to die, or even how it might happen. "Some secrets better left untouched, yeah?"
"Some surprises best left for the universe," he agreed. "Else could you imagine how boring my life would be?"
She smiled a bit at that. "This life?" she said, looking around the TARDIS. "Never."
(But:
"You scare me to death!"Donna had told him the first time he'd met her, exhilarated and terrified and high on adrenaline, the cold making her pale and freckled skin pink in the snow he'd made, and she almost glowed in her wedding dress: a proper fairy tale heroine, if a little worse for the wear.)
oOo
Once upon a time there was a wizard: there are pictures of him, always with a woman learning at his feet or walking in step with him. She could enchant him into a tree, and in some stories she does. But not this story.
("I hate wizards in fairy tales,"River Song will tell him, a lifetime into his future. "They always turn out to be you."
But that is another story entirely.)
Sometimes the Doctor thinks about medieval tapestries and Romantic paintings, and pictures an old man and a young woman in a forest, surrounded by magic and enchanted by it all. There might be a castle in the distance, a reminder that the world does not solely consist of the otherworldly and preternatural, but is also ugly and terrible at times. For now though, heis content to pretend otherwise, shunning knowledge of what he knows is still coming.
But she has always had more practical sense than him.
"I think you need someone to stop you,"Donna said, ready to slip out of his life painlessly and fairytale-like, eyes soft and snow in her hair; and he had understood her, but not agreed with her. A year later there was ash in her hair, and she smelled of sulphur, and she'd been desperate: "Please," she begged him for the first of two times. "Just save someone."
"Little people," he'd said to Adelaide, thinking Yuri and Mia, of Pompeii; imagine you were in Pompeii and pyroclastic flows overwhelming an ancient city, of little people surviving and thriving in Rome and reshaping their lares into the forms of him and Donna Noble.
But Adelaide isn't a little person, not even sort of, and it's marvelous.
Look, Donna, he might have said had she been there, look; I can save them all.
(November twenty-first, 2059. There's snow and silence. No one knows what to say, and there's a chill in the air that has nothing to do with the wind or the snow. They look at him with big eyes like refugees who know they aren't supposed to be alive. He crushes a snowflake between his thumb and forefinger, and frowns at the non-novelty.)
oOo
One day the wizard makes a mistake, and people die. God asks, "Where is your brother?" and he replied, "Am I my brother's keeper?"
"Oh, we're not married," Donna said the sixth time they were mistaken for a couple, and the Doctor once again puzzled over why this had always been such a problem with Donna, and no one else.
"Not even sort of," he contributed helpfully.
"Never. I think I'd rather die."
Harsh words, but Donna had been prone to hyperbole at least as long as he'd known her, and so he didn't take them to heart.
There was a moment on the Crucible when he recalled this moment, the humorous set of her lips and the quirk of her eyes. He hadn't seen it, hadn't seen the glow or Donna rising, but she spoke with his words and acted on his knowledge, and her expression was the same. It was appropriate, a crucible within a Crucible: she burned from the inside. Hot to touch, handle with care. The Doctor Donna.
She was marvelous, but wrong; and it broke his hearts.
Tonight he's hearing the gunshot go off in Adelaide's home, vomiting up all the power he'd never had, and all the death he couldn't get to stop clinging to him. He can see the blue flash when he closes his eyes, and he gags on the suicide he'd forced down her throat, on words he'd never had forced on him, Turn right and change the world!
No, Adelaide had said, and her vehemence had not shaken him; but -
Turn left, and unholster your weapon, place yourself in front of a speeding van. Turn left with calm resigned grace, the weight of time resting on your shoulders with the utter certainty that there is nothing else that can happen until this does. Turn left and wrench the stars and all of time back into alignment with an almighty, silent scream. Turn left, left, and save the world.
("I need - "he'll start to say to Wilf in an unremarkable café, one in a billion just like it, but she's right there, and the familiarity of her presence even through distance and glass is like a bullet to his heart. But still she glows bright with everything she could yet be, even after all she was, and he can hardly take his eyes off of her because it's as beautiful as ever. He can see her, hear her, and he needs – )
oOo
One day there is death, too much to comprehend. God waits, and asks, "Where is your brother?" The wizard replied, "Am I not God?"
(This is not the moment he falls:
The Time Lord Victorious, he describes himself to Adelaide, a sort of mad jollity padding the steel in his voice, fluff juxtaposed directly to substance.
Adelaide's eyes are hard, and do not reflect his. If she's afraid of him, she does not show it. "And there's no one to stop you?" she states more than asks.
"Not anymore," he grins. Oh, that's mad; that's good!)
There's Ood Sigma at the end of Adelaide's abandoned street, her death shunted to the side of the scene and neatly contained in her living room, her limp finger still on the trigger. He doesn't go in to confirm it; he doesn't need to; he can't. But there's music on the air, wistful and heavy and joyful all at once. Its familiarity is like coming home to something that no longer exists, and though the Doctor cannot define it, it hits him like a wave and drives him to his knees, even as an incongruous fear creeps cold-like around him.
And there's a single name in it all which swirls, wordless, in all the crescendos and diminuendos; and the Doctor experiences it, knows it, in the graceful spilling of emotion and psychic phantasmagoria so indelibly intertwined with it. There's shame, too, in the telling.
The Doctor can only ask, "Is it my time?"
But Ood Sigma disappears with something like disappointment leaving a vacuum of stillness and the pervading feeling of approaching or encroaching death, a brave woman lying two minutes dead in a lonely alien space, her brains blown out by her own hand, willing to do what he'd refused, and resigned to face what he so desperately fears. This is Adelaide Brooke's legacy to him. It's a challenge, a setting of the bar, an entirely humourless Do you dare?
The Doctor says, "No."
His body demands sleep that night despite his best intentions to avoid it, and he falls into a fitful slumber. He dreams of a holy bride, of OodSong, of fire and ash and heat and hands covering his own on levers that end Pompeii, and brilliant hair lit red and gold in a coronal silhouette like unassuming blazonry cresting a hill at dawn, or a phoenix at the moment of death. He dreams of No, please, don't make me go back, and You can stop now, and I'm not having any of that nonsense, reproving blue eyes boring into his soul so that his whole being aches with it, and he wakes with her name on his lips, whispering I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
(This is the moment he fell:
"Oh, Donna Noble," the Doctor says. "I am so sorry."
There is terror growing stark in her eyes and cutting through her voice, and when it occurs to him sometime later to wonder about it at all, he will never understand why she doesn't fight his embrace even as his fingers creep up to her temples.
He'll almost remember a whisper of a memory in his mind before he'd taken it from her:
"I don't need anyone."
"Yes, you do."
And this is Donna Noble's legacy to him.)