Brilliance
In the end, it is something simple.
Out window shopping with Gramps, she passes a shop with crystals and jewelry, and a white orb catches her eye. Its opalescent gleam makes it look like it's lit from the inside, and the wooden carved hand on which it rests is so familiar that she says out loud, "It's just like an Ood communication sphere."
Her grandfather catches his breath, and clasps her elbow, but her mind is already swirling, reeling, adding up all the other little reminders: spiders and constellations and old dusty books, laughter and danger and running and fingers on her temples, imploring her to forget. But she can't, and she won't. Not this time.
"I remember."
Gramps' grip on her elbow tightens even as her knees buckle and she's pulling him down, down, her head exploding in a wash of color, of pain.
Water swirling around her sopping wedding dress, volcanic ash darkening the sky, choking fumes and giant wasps and gleaming Daleks and the team of pilots, flying an unlikely ship across a less likely tear in the fabric of time.
And that man. Her alien, her brother, her half-son, all wild hair and wild eyes and excitement and desperation. And grief, grief when he looked at her the last time she knew him. Grief when he left her kitchen that time she did not.
"Bloody space boy," she gasps, "not giving me a choice about it."
Gramps speaks from through the haze gathering around her, his voice breaking. "He's like that, he is."
"I saved the Universe," she tells him, and she knows it is true. She's no temp from Chiswick. She's part Time Lord. She's the DoctorDonna, liberator of the Ood, center of alternate timelines, defeater of the Dalek Empire, catalyst of the metacrisis, friend and companion of The Oncoming Storm.
"I was magnificent."
"Still are," Gramps whispers.
And there it is. Because if he'd given her a choice, which he bloody well hadn't, she'd rather know that then live a thousand years not knowing. Not knowing him. Not knowing herself. The colors behind her eyelids are blossoming into white-hot embers, dazzling like the diamonds of Midnight, dazzling like the moments she was really alive, fully engaged, completely brilliant.
"Hold on, Donna," Gramps is saying, but she can barely hear him, his voice drowned by the pounding in her ears, like the thrum and whine of an engine, sounding all around her, a TARDIS landing and coalescing, enfolding her and the memory and the pain and the dim and fading world.