Some Lose Their Way
By eternitywaits
*Originally posted on LiveJournal November 7, 2009
The sky is groaning under the weight of black clouds, and thunder growls like a warning, or at least that's Donna's impression. She shivers and yanks her coat tighter. hurrying across the street corner as the wind tears at her hair, slashing damp red threads across her eyes.
By the time she hauls herself through the doors of the pharmacy, she's shaking with cold, and dripping muddy rainwater all over the floor.
"Umbrellas in the third aisle," one of the cashiers chirps.
"Oi, don't tell me what I'm here to buy!" she snaps. Then, frantically drawing her fingers through wet snarls of hair says, "sorry, I'm sorry. Look it's been a bad day, alright? Could you just - could you just point me to the Asprin, please?"
The girl nods, wide eyed and points towards the back of the shop. Donna sets off for it, shoes squelching on the tile floor. The florescent lights do nothing to help the lancing pain in her skull, neither does the cold, the wet or the howling wind which is just waiting for her to step back outside.
The various boxes of painkillers, cold and flu medicine, and God knows what else swim mockingly before her eyes. Sinus relief. Sore throat. Cough. She's getting dizzy just reading the labels. In the end she picks up as many boxes of Tylenol PM as she can carry. The promise of a good night's sleep is too desirable to ignore. She doesn't even remember what it's like to feel well rested, or healthy, or whole.
"Have a nice Christmas, ma'am," the check out girl calls after her as she gathers up her package.
"'Ma'am?'" Donna mutters, drawing her hood up around her face in the biting wind. "When did I become a 'ma'am?'"
A silver Mercedes slices past her, splashing ice-water all over her coat. "Hey! Watch it!" she shouts, the wind tearing her words away like she never spoke.
She teeters unsteadily on the ice-hard earth. The wind cuts through her hood, slicing into her already aching head and for a minute the whole of London reels sharply before her.
She isn't even aware she's falling, until hands reach out and catch her.
Reality rushes back, and Donna jerks upright, slapping the stranger's hands away. "Just keep your paws to yourself, mate! Got it?"
He has the expression of a deer caught in headlights. He raises his hands innocently. "Sorry, sorry, just trying to help. You looked...um, unwell."
"How I look is none of your concern, thank you very much!" His face is pale and the rain's plastered his hair against his forehead. Water is running in steady streams off his long overcoat.
"Donna are you alright?" he asks. "Please-"
Like a puppet being jerked by invisible strings, she swings back to him. "How do you know my name?" she screams, the words spilling out, scratching her throat raw.
"Donna, please, I just want to help you-"
"Like hell you do! I don't know who you think you are, mister, but- but-" her head is spinning, jumbled fragments of thoughts boil frustratingly close to the surface. Every inch of her body is screaming at her to do something, but she can't comprehend the signals - she doesn't know what.
"Who. Are. You?!"
The man looks at her with helpless confusion. His eyes are wide, entreating.
Recognition tingles in the back of her mind, and he snaps into place.
He is the man from the nightmares that leave her screaming in the darkness in the black of night. He is the man framed by explosions and gunfire and screaming voices - the cacophony of hell.
Her entire body trembling, she is distantly aware of her package of medicine falling to the ground.
*****
"Donna sweetheart, is that you?" her grandfather's voice fills the front hall.
The door rattles on its hinges behind her as she slides, crashing to the ground in a graceless heap. Her body spasms; she can't move, can't speak.
Five seconds later and he's kneeling beside her, cradling her in his arms. "Donna, what's the matter? What happened?"
"A man - I saw this man - oh God, it's so stupid, Grandad!" she gasps. She's drowning and she's struggling to breathe.
"I saw him and I thought he was - I don't know. I just had to get away from him! And it wasn't - he wasn't anybody, Grandad! He didn't do anything! But I - I couldn't -"
"Hush now. The main thing is that you're alright, isn't it, sweetheart? You just need a bit of a rest. that's all."
"No!" she says, jerking away from him. "No, you don't understand! Cause it's not normal, the way I've been acting. It's like I'm afraid all the time, and I can't even go out in the street! I think people are lookin' at me, and I know, I know they're not, cause why? Why'd they be looking at me? I'm nothing, I'm nobody, I'm just a temp - hell, I'm not even that anymore!
"I feel like I'm being pulled in every direction, and like I know something, something important, and there are things I need to be afraid of. And like, like I've lost something, Grandad," she slumps against the kitchen counter, rain dripping from her hair. "Something important."
She looks at him, and is torn to see her grandfather's eyes flooding with tears. He reaches out his hands for her, then hesitates. He looks so old, suddenly.
"I'm sorry, Grandad."
"No, no, sweetheart. It's not your fault."
"But this is what crazy people act like, isn't it?"
A wave of pain splits through her skull, dots of bright light dancing behind her eyes. She falls against the counter, trying to get a grip.
"Donna-" his voice is shaking. She can feel the skin on the back of her neck crawling. "Just, just stop thinking about it, okay, sweetheart?" is the last think she hears before everything goes black.
*****
In the dreams, Donna is running for her life.
Her heart is racing, her feet fly over uneven ground littered with smouldering debris. She hears the whine of missiles and then everything shakes, like someone's yanking the ground out from beneath her feet.
She falls fowards, slamming into dirt and rock and pieces of jagged metal and concrete. There's a sharp jabbing pain in her leg and she screams, but her cries are completely drowned out by the roar of the fires, the spray of machine gun bullets and the building behind her collapsing in on itself.
Pressing her forehead to the ground, she clenches her jaw against the pain. The smell of smoke fills her nostrils, and her eyes running.
Oh God, I'm going to die here, she thinks. "I don't want to die here!" she shouts, knowing it's pointless.
But then he's there, like he can always hear her no matter where she is or what's else is going on around them. She can't move her head enough to see his face, but he's wearing his blue suit.
"Good thing I'm here, then. And, I know I've said this before, but you sure can scream, Donna."
"Shut up and get me the hell out of here!"
"Right, oh right. I mean don't worry. I've got you."
*****
"These are the perpetrators," one of the shadows says. Its voice is thin and rasping like cobwebs.
Images of a man and a woman flicker and burn in the air, and the shadows watch. They meld and bubble and groan, slithering and coiling along the walls. They study the man and woman intensely, hissing and seething to themselves.
The man is tall and wears a long brown coat. The woman's most distinguishing feature is her mane of untamable red hair.
"These images are from Silicacres, mere hours before the destruction. But we all know their faces."
"What are their names?" hisses the darkness in a voice to throbbing and low for human ears to hear.
"The Doctor and Donna Noble. They are time travellers."
"Time Lords," a whisper echoes around the room, then a collective of whispers, worrying, teeth gnashing. Screams rise up from further quarters, like water droplets being wrung from a ragged cloth.
"Time Lords are supposed to be extinct."
"They will be difficult to find."
"Space and time are vast."
The voices pause awhile, calculating, weighing, reflecting.
"But the nightmares are vaster."
*****
"Did it hurt, when they cut into you? Did it feel like what you did to me?"
Donna sits up sharply, the room spinning. There's the crash of her lamp hitting the floor, the book that was open on her chest slides to the ground with a dull thud. The words of her dream echo on and on in the corridors of her mind, but she can't imagine who she would have said them to, or why.
*****
The next time she sees him its Christmas' Eve. Large wet flakes are tearing through the air in a whirlwind, falling in her hair and in her eyes. He spins around, grabbing her arms and for a second she has the strangest deja vu. It's a heady feeling, like the rush of vertigo.
"Are you asking me to dance?"
The words spill out of her lips as though mind and tongue are somehow two separate entities. She doesn't know where they come from. They belong to another time and place, where lights spun around them like the snow, but it wasn't so bitter, it wasn't so cold, and she was laughing.
She stares up into the stranger's eyes, there's pain there - it's so intense she tries to pull away, but he digs his long fingers into her shoulders with painful desperation.
"Donna, listen to me, please. You're in danger, and it's my fault. It's all my fault and I'm so sorry, I'm so, so sorry."
"I don't even know you."
"You're in danger. You can't stay here. You need to come with me-"
"Ha!" she laughs angrily, and forcibly pulls herself from his grip, leaving him clutching black threads from her coat. "You get away from me, then. Before I call the police."
"Donna, please!"
He's so pale. There are dark shadows under his eyes and there's something so terribly, horrible wrong with him that it chills her to the bone. She stumbles backwards, trying to pull her eyes off the frail figure.
"We did dance, Donna Noble. In the golden domes of Pieria. The Emperor had two hundred flying fish. Their colours shone like jewelry and they sang for us." His voice is breaking. "I told you my name."
"Well I don't know it now!" she shouts. "And I don't know from your crazy fish story, either, so get out of my life!"
She turns into the wind and begins running.
*****
In her dream, she's running over silver ice, with multi-coloured lights moving beneath the surface. "Doctor, they're coming!"
"Keep running, Donna! I'm right behind you!"
"And the nightmare?"
"Under control!"
He comes up beside her, sliding on the ice, flashing her a brilliant, reckless grin and reaches for her hand. She's breathless as their fingers lock together. The rainbow coloured lights are becoming frantic in their torrent, seeming to beat at the frozen waves.
The Doctor shakes a haphazardly cobbled together device at her that looks something like an old transistor radio. "This time it will definitely work!"
"I've heard that before, Spaceman!"
They reach the edge of the frozen sea and leap clear just as the massive sheets of ice crack and burst. They're knocked to the ground, and snow slides up Donna's sleeves. She huffs in irritation, flipping her hood back and rolling over, against the Doctor as they watch the lights shoot up into the black sky like orange, emerald and crimson stars. The sound of singing fills the air, sweet and high, bringing tears to her eyes.
"They're free, yeah?"
"Yeah. Free to soar wherever their fancy takes them. All across the universe."
"Just like us."
He looks at her, smiling."Yeah, just like us."
Snow and chunks of ice are falling all around them, but Donna doesn't pay it any mind. She watches the dancing lights, leaning her head against the Doctor's shoulder, trying to think of them as sentient beings made of light. It isn't too difficult, really. She's learned that life comes in all sorts of forms. They're like fairies, or angels.
"And those things that were keeping them trapped here, feeding off them? The nightmares?"
"Trapped in their own inter-dimensional prison," he says, shaking the little metal device for emphasis. "Sort of poetic justice, don't you think?"
Donna snorts, smiling at the lights up in the sky. "Hey, Doctor I've been wanting to do something for a while now."
"Oh?" he asks, propping himself up on his elbows and looking at her intently. "What's that?"
The next moment, she's kissing him, pressing him back into the snow, her hands trembling on either side of his face. And then, he's kissing back, his arms wrapping around her back, pulling her close, and everything is perfect. Everything is alright.
*****
She turns a corner sharply, and slams into his chest. "What? How? I left you two blocks back! How did you do get here?"
"Donna, listen to me!" he begs her. "We had it - we had everything. And then - you forgot. And it was my fault. But you were dying, and I couldn't - I couldn't let that happen. Not to you!" There's so much anguish in his voice, her head is swimming and she has no idea what he's talking about.
"Stay away from me."
"I can't. You're in danger."
"Yeah. From you!"
"No, Donna, wait-" he grabs her hand. Her fingers close around his on their own, like they've done it a million times before. She meets his gaze. It's ancient and terrible and full of pain and suffering.
"You have them, don't you? Nightmares? So horrible and vivid they keep you up at night?"
"Yeah. And you're in them!" she snaps, but she doesn't pull her hand away and she's not sure why.
"No, those are the good dreams. The memories, leaking through. The nightmares are the parts you don't remember, the parts that leave you feeling sick with terror and dread when you open your eyes, like this is all just another long shadowed corridor in a vision you can't separate from reality."
"Who are you?"
"I'm the Doctor. We traveled together, for a year. For more. In space time has little meaning. It was a lifetime. It wasn't long enough. We went to a beach where the sand was silver and the waves were emerald green and you told me you wanted to travel with me forever."
She searches his gaze. "I would remember."
"No," he says, and there are tears brimming in his eyes, "you wouldn't."
Running down main street, the snow stinging her eyes and soaking her face, she stops suddenly, shaking. Her heart is pounding so loud in her chest, and if she listens to it, she thinks she can hear a second heartbeat, like an echo, pounding rhythmically through her skull.
"You go backwards and forwards in time, that's the nature of the universe." His voice in her mind, in the dark pool of her memory, a memory she can no longer trust, no longer believe in. She runs her hands through her hair, trembling.
"Great big universe inside my head."
"And how does that feel?"
Oh God, it hurts.
"They came for me, first. I was easier to find," he says, reappearing at her side. Her own personal phantom, or demon, or angel.
"Stop it."
"I made you forget about me. About them. About everything. I thought it would be better that way. I thought it would save you, but I was wrong, because now they're inside your head, and what I did is falling apart around them, and - and-"
"What you did?" she asks, lowering her hands and staring at him evenly, for the first time. And there's something familiar to this as well. "What did you do to me?"
"I told you, Donna," he says, his eyes searching hers like he's looking for forgiveness. "I made you forget."
She slaps him.
The sound is loud in the suddenly deserted street and he blinks in pain. "You were dying," he says in a whisper. "I was scared."
"What are these things that are coming after me?"
"Nightmares. Shades, psychic entities, fragments of death and darkness. They had wrapped themselves around a planet like living midnight, their fingers in everything, in every heart and every mind.
"The planet killed itself. Every person, every animal, every plant, every thing, went mad, killed each other, killed themselves. The planet shrouded itself in cold and ice. Even their souls weren't spared - trapped against the rotten core of a planet hollowed like a corpse.
"We saved them - you and I. We set their souls free."
She watches him, trying to weigh his words, trying to read his expressions. Nothing makes sense, but nothing's made sense for a long time. "I couldn't do that," she says finally. "I'm not a hero."
"Donna Noble," he says quietly, "you're the most important woman in the whole of creation."
It's in the way he says it, the gravity in his posture, his tone. It reduces her to tears. She doesn't pull away when he draws her close to him, although she knows she should. It's mad. He's mad. But she's mad, too.
"We're all mad here."
"They're coming after you," he says, stroking her hair as she cries into his shoulder. "They found me on New Earth. Time Lord, you'd think I'd have some more tricks up my sleeve to get away. I guess I've been playing human for so long, I've forgotten how to be that. All I could think about was you. Maybe I let them take me. I'm tired of being a god. Tired of never being punished."
"They tortured you?" she sobs, clinging to his jacket. She looks up at him, her face running with tears.
"I told them where you were."
"Where you left me, stupid and ignorant and defenseless!" she shouts, punching him in the chest. He doubles over, so much weaker than she doesn't remember. The sharp gasp and rasping cough strike her in every way as so incredibly wrong.
The urge to comfort him, to touch him gently, to tell him everything will be alright, bubbles up from inside her, like a habit. "What did you do to me?" she asks again, knowing nothing he says will ever be enough.
The world hums and blurs, screaming at them for a second. The colours hiss and change, melding into spectrums so intense they make her want to claw her eyes out of her head. Distance and mass seem to invert and twist in on themselves. Reality is reduced to a tangled mess of wires.
Then, as suddenly as it began, the chaos ends and the universe straightens itself around them. Reality snaps back into place like the closing of a latch.
"What the hell was that?"
"You felt it, did you? A fracture in space/time. Only a Time Lord would sense it. You still have parts of me jumbled up in you."
She stares at him in wide-eyed confusion, but that's when her gaze falls to the body lying on the ground a few feet from them.
"Oh my God, who is that?"
The Doctor spins around. "No, oh no," he says, but she isn't listening.
"He wasn't here a second ago - no, she," Donna corrects herself, "she wasn't here-"
Donna is already pushing him aside as he tries to stop her with futile arms. The body is half buried in a snow bank and Donna falls on her knees beside the woman, scrabbling to pull her up.
"Hang on there! Doctor, or whatever your name is, call an ambulance! Well, don't just stand there, call for-" her voice ends in a choking gasp.
She's got the body in her arms now, and it's her face that stares up at them, the eyes wide and glassy with death. Her skin is the same slate-grey as the snow and her hair, what's left of it, is matted and black with congealed blood.
"They got you," the Doctor says, he sounds tiny and helpless. He runs his hands through his hair and walks back and forth, murmuring the same words over and over beneath his breath.
"But they can't - they can't have got me! I'm right here!" she says. She's shaking and she can't help it. She drops the body, twists in the snow to look up at him. "This hasn't happened yet. Doctor! Tell me what to do!"
"I don't know. I don't know. I don't know."
"Instantaneous biological metacrisis-"
"All the time lines converge upon you."
"You're Time Lord. Part Time-Lord."
"The Doctor Donna."
The words swirl in her head like a storm, memories igniting behind her eyes like lightning.
"I was pretending to be human for so long, I forgot how it was - how to be-"
"Time Lord - not human. Not anymore."
"Take my hand," she says slowly, standing. She calls him by name. The pain and sorrow fall away from his eyes instantly. It's like sunrise.
"You remember."
"I didn't burn up with the weight of universes."
"Donna," he says, and he's sorry, he's so, so sorry.
"I know," she says, "It's alright now." She extends a hand for him. "I remember now. I remember everything. I remember things that haven't even happened yet."
"Everything that was, everything that is, and everything that-"
"-ever could be," she finishes. "Yeah."
He takes her hand. The nightmare-ravaged body lying in the snow melts away, pulled back into the tidal flow of eternity by the spectral hands of the universe. The universe. It spins around them like the sea. She takes his hands and steps into the waves of time and space.
"I'm going to teach you how to be a Time Lord again," she whispers in his ear, and they disappear.
END.