Hello everyone! While this is not my first ever fanfiction, it's my first Doctor Who fanfiction. (And my last fanfiction was years ago. We don't talk about it. I was young and thought I was a much better writer than I actually was.) This is intended as a series of interconnected "Sorta" drabbles. Near the end they really aren't drabbles any more. I do not own Doctor Who or anything affiliated with Doctor Who.
Allons-y!
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There are days that Donna remembered, if only for a moment. It happened so often that Wilf and Sylvia had learned to recognize the signs—a pause in a sentence, a stare into the distance, a word or sentence that just pops from her mouth that was beyond Donna's understanding—and distract her long enough so she could forget again. They sometimes wondered if it would be more merciful to simply let her remember and then at least she would die in the knowledge of all she was and could have been. But only sometimes. Most of the time they patiently and lovingly let her forget.
She found a bracelet in a bottom drawer one morning not long after her wedding. It's a bracelet that she remembers wearing when she was young, but one day it got lost. She'd searched for weeks to find it, but in the end had just given up. She'd woken up to find it on her nightstand one morning, not that her Mum had believed her. Sylvia thought Donna had stolen it from a girl named Brandy Wilson down the street—the initials BW had been on the bracelet—and had marched her down to return it, scolding her all the way. It had only been when both Brandy and her mother had sworn up and down that the bracelet didn't belong to them that Sylvia relented and allowed Donna to keep it. Years later, Donna decided to wear it again.
She talked about having children with Shaun one day. She's getting older, as much as it pains her to admit, and she would like to have a child before it got to the point that it would be too dangerous for her or the baby. Shaun brushed her off, which hurt, but Donna didn't forget about it. She wrote baby names in a little book she kept by her bedside. She read through it one day and couldn't remember why she had circled the name Martha.
Her marriage to Shaun didn't last. Wilf told her that she woke up one morning to find him gone. Sometimes she thinks she remembers Shaun coming towards her, a gun in his hand, the gun literally made of his hand—living plastic, her mind supplies before it goes blank—demanding to know the secrets her mind hid. Sylvia tells her that she's just being silly. Donna agrees. Shaun just packed up and left her, she thinks. The day that he left though, she remembers a handsome man in an old fashioned coat talking to Sylvia and Wilf. Donna didn't stay for the conversation—she had been too busy crying—but she heard him say that the Auton had been taken care of and that Donna had been Retconned. What she did remember was the look on the man's face when he looked at her, it had been full of sorrow and his eyes had been filled with unshed tears. He left without talking to her, but he did hug Sylvia and Wilf. Her mum had called him Captain.
She wants to travel now, something that she had always been interested in, yet never had the time before. She finds it strange though, what had always been a want for travel has become a need. Sylvia calls it wanderlust, but that's not what Donna calls it. She calls it adventure, brilliance, and wonder. She never wants to stop. One day, she ends up in New York City, in a beautiful graveyard. It's in that graveyard that she finds a tombstone that makes her stop in her tracks. A note of absolute mourning trills through her. She doesn't know why the names of Rory and Amy Williams affect her so much—the part of her mind that sounds like a man murmurs something about "retroactive recognition of events through a temporally complex feedback loop" before her mind goes blank—but she stands there crying for no reason. She slips the bracelet off of her wrist and places it on top of the grave as a tribute before walking away. She doesn't see the man in the bowtie pick up the bracelet and stare at her in wonder.
She had her baby, in the end. This was strange, because Donna could not remember actually doing anything that could result in a baby. (Her mind voice said it was wisps of the vortex coalescing into a stable form that was safe for Donna's body. This was swiftly forgotten.) When she had mentioned that fact to Sylvia in hopes her mother could have an explanation, all Sylvia had done was make a joke about contacting the Vatican about the Second Coming. Donna wasn't privy to the frantic, whispered discussions between Sylvia and Wilf in which they debated over calling the Doctor. Finally, they assumed as Donna had did, that the baby was the result of a one night stand that Donna had done while drunk. They quietly ignored the fact that Donna didn't drink at all anymore.
The family had been on a trip out of the city when Donna had started labor. As a result, Donna had her daughter in a strange military base in the middle of nowhere, which was ideal for no one, but was still better than the car. The baby had been delivered by a very young doctor, Dr. Smith-Jones, who had seemed very uneasy around Donna. She barely spoke throughout the entirety of Donna's labor and delivery, directing questions towards Sylvia and Wilf whenever possible. Despite this odd behavior—behavior that would have angered one—Donna liked her doctor. As uneasy as Dr. Smith-Jones had been towards Donna, Donna had been completely at ease with Dr. Smith-Jones. The only time she had not felt this was the moment the doctor had placed her shrieking daughter in her arms. Donna had for the first time looked straight into the young woman's eyes and immediately had grown dizzy. They had almost pulled away the baby to work on Donna but then all the monitors went silent. Whatever that had ailed her was gone. She never noticed her temperature readings on the medical monitors around her; she was so focused on her child. For that brief time, her temperature had soared far above what was healthy or safe for a human being.
A law clerk on the base had helped with the birth certificate. Since Donna had not been expecting to have her baby while on holiday—the baby was born a full three weeks before her due date—she had not brought her little book of baby names. That extremely patient law clerk had waited for an hour of Donna, Sylvia and Wilf hemming and hawing over names. At long last, Donna went with Wilf's suggestion, a name that seemed to make him sad, but at the same time happy. The middle name had been Donna's own idea, a name that had come to her in a dream. She pictured a blonde woman running and another blonde girl flipping through laser beams before that thought was wiped away by looking at her newly named little girl. It was a good name she thought; Rose Jennifer Noble was a very good name.
Wilf had spoiled Donna growing up, and he intended to do the same thing with little Rose. It seemed like every day Donna woke up to find a new little toy lying next to Rose in her cot. In fact, it felt like sometimes that the only thing Donna herself had supplied in the room was Rose and the cot. She'd found that cot in her seventh month of pregnancy and had fallen in love with it entirely. It was big enough that it would still be able to serve as a crib until Rose was old enough to move around independently. It had a mobile that had tiny planets moving around in orbits while it played a song that seemed infinitely familiar to Donna, but she could never place. It was secondhand, yet still in good enough shape that it seemed like new. It was the bluest of blues she had ever seen. She thought Rose rather liked it too. Sometimes at night, Donna would come in and just watch Rose sleep, her hand absent-mindedly tracing intricate circular designs into the blue wood.
It was on one of Wilf's "Let's spoil Rose" trips to the store that Donna decided to come along with him, if only to limit the damage he could do. It was much harder than she thought it would be. Rose had a bad habit of reaching out of her pram to grab toys off the shelves, sometimes pulling whole lines of them off as she went. Most toys she would be able to get out of Rose's curiously strong grasp, there were a few however, that she just tapped on Wilf's shoulder, pointed to whatever Rose was playing with/destroying and gave him a look that said quite plainly that he was paying for that. It was down an aisle filled with robotic dogs that she bumped into the man demonstrating them. The man took one look at Donna and at Rose gnawing at the ear of a stuffed rabbit and backed away subtly, adjusting his bowtie. Donna didn't notice him quickly remove his name tag and drop it to the floor. Wilf, however, did. Donna did notice the man's voice crack when he asked for Rose's name, but didn't think much of it. He looked about twelve after all. Maybe his voice was just changing. She chatted with him a minute and let him show off the toy dog to Rose. She missed the smile he gave Rose when she had shrieked in delight and threw the rabbit at him in sheer excitement. Donna did scold Rose for that, but only halfheartedly as the man picked up the rabbit and made it dance on the tray in front of Rose. She moved on to the next aisle as Wilf picked up the name tag and handed it to the Doctor. Donna tactfully ignored the tears in Wilf's eyes when he joined them next, sensing he didn't want to talk about it.
Rose was three when Donna found her old bracelet—the one she could have sworn she had left on a grave in New York—next to Rose's "big girl bed". The BW initials seemed larger and more luminous than Donna remembered. Rose had taken one look at the shiny bracelet and had fallen in love, half asking and half demanding that her mother give it to her. After extracting a promise that Rose never put it in her mouth and that she be careful with it, Donna let her have the bracelet. She found Rose two hours later, the bracelet half dangling from her lips. Rose was always putting things in her mouth and licking anything she could. The bracelet was taken away with the result of a huge temper tantrum. Later, after Rose tearfully cuddling with her mother, terrified that Donna didn't want to be her friend anymore, Donna let Rose have the bracelet again. That was the beautiful thing about her daughter, Donna thought, Rose had never once doubted that Donna would still love her after a fight, she only wanted to know if her mummy could still be her friend. It was a nice change, considering Donna's own relationship with her mother. While it wasn't as bad as it had been, Donna had spent much of her childhood and adulthood wondering if Sylvia loved her.
Rose was four when Donna realized how truly intelligent her daughter was. Rose had always been advanced for her age, but Donna had never seen the true extent of Rose's intelligence. She knew Rose could read, she had been reading Dr. Seuss ever since she was two, but Donna had believed that while Rose's reading level was high for her age, it was not exceptional. That was until she walked in on Rose reading Harry Potter to her dolls, complete with individual voices for the characters. (They were all similar to each other, Donna would later admit, but she could tell Rose had been putting effort into making a difference between the characters.) The reading was smooth and clear, and every now and then Rose would stop, not to sound out a word as Donna would expect, but to giggle at a pun she had read or a joke she understood. She clearly understood each word she was reading. Donna had then run down the hallway to her bedroom to grab a stack of random books—Donna had six bookcases double stacked with books in her room, she had picked up a keen interest in everything written a few years prior, even if she didn't know why—and entered Rose's room with the books. Trying to keep her voice calm, she asked Rose to open to the center of any book and read her the first paragraph. She wanted to make sure first that Rose had not simply memorized passages of Chamber of Secrets. It was a science textbook borrowed from the Uni student three doors down. In three pages about cellular biology, Rose only stumbled over two words, deoxyribonucleic acid and mitosis, which she had pronounced as meiosis. The next book was a French book. Rose read six pages perfectly. She read an entire chapter of an engineering book. Donna just sat, gob smacked at her daughter. On a hunch, Donna scheduled an IQ test for Rose. It came back so high that the psychologist administering it made her take it again, sure that there had been a mistake. There had been a mistake with the scoring, they found out.
The second test came back even higher.
Rose was seven the day she came home from school and told Donna about the aliens she had seen that day. Donna hadn't seen them; she had been laid up in bed all day with a migraine. Everyone else had seen them; their huge ship had hovered over London for hours until they went away suddenly. Rose told her about the blue box she had seen at her school, the box that hadn't been there the day before and had disappeared not long after the aliens did. As Rose told her all of this, Donna felt her migraine returning stronger than it had been before. Sylvia interrupted Rose before she could tell Donna about the strange man in the black leather jacket and the blonde girl she had seen go into the box. Donna's migraine went away.
When Rose was eight, she became very sick. There were large swathes of the year that she spent in the hospital, nobody was sure what was wrong with her, only sure that there was in fact something wrong. Donna asked for every test imaginable, every test she had ever read about, every test she could possibly conceive thought of. Over the course of that year, Rose was tested for cancer, genetic diseases, psychiatric disorders, the whole lot. There was one dark period where the police investigated Donna, suspecting she was making Rose sick to attract attention to herself. This was eventually set aside when testing concluded that Rose had no medication other than what was given to her by doctors or poisonous substances in her body. One day, Rose went missing from her hospital room. They all searched for hours until they found Rose unconscious in her bed, the sheet and blanket neatly and lovingly tucked around her. After that day, Rose was completely healthy, except for an odd golden gleam in her eyes that Donna could sometimes see out of the corner of her own eyes. The gleam itself faded in a few days, the dreams Rose was having stopped a few days after that.
The police eventually released the security camera tapes to Donna in hopes that she would recognize the person who had carried Rose out of her room and then had brought her back. The man had been careful to never show his face, but she recognized him as the handsome man in the coat who had shown up the day Shaun left her. Something told her not to say anything. Rose's intelligence grew even more after that day.
Rose was ten when she became interested in Donna's missing years. All Donna had been told was that she had been in an accident and her memories of two years were unlikely to ever return. Rose wanted to know why her mother couldn't remember, she asked relentless questions about the accident and where Donna had been working and how she could just lose two years of her memory and nothing more. She had done her reading and amnesia didn't work like that. After Donna developed what she called a bad stutter under the onslaught of questions, Wilf pulled Rose aside and told her that she was to never ask Donna about that time again. The uncharacteristically harsh words from her great grandfather stopped Rose cold. After Donna went upstairs to lie down, Rose noticed a hand-shaped burn on the sofa from where Donna had grabbed it. That scared her more than Wilf's words had done. Rose never mentioned the missing years to Donna again.
Wilf died the year after that. It threw the house into a whirlwind of grief, effecting Rose the worst. Previously a vivacious and bubbly girl, she became sullen and withdrawn from everyone else save Donna. It was at the funeral that Donna saw a man that she dimly recognized. It was a man wearing a bowtie and a Stetson; he stood near the back, partially hidden by a tree. He was talking softly to Rose, and for the first time since Wilf had died, she saw her daughter smile. Rose showed him her bracelet and he grabbed her hand to take a closer look. He then gave Rose a hug that lasted until he raised his eyes and caught Donna staring at them. He quickly let go of Rose and told her something. She nodded, ran back over to Donna and flung herself into Donna's arms, effectively distracting her enough for the man to walk away unseen. When Donna heard a grinding sound a few minutes later, she mumbled the word Doctor so softly that even she didn't hear it. Hours later, Rose discovered what looked and felt like sunburn in the shape of a hand on her shoulder. It was exactly where Donna had been gripping her.
Six years after that, Sylvia died. Once again, Donna found herself standing in front of an open grave, staring into the ground that would soon welcome her mother. Donna recognized the man this time and so did Rose. He seemed just as young as he had the time before, but there was lightness to him that had not been present before. A young woman with brown hair and wearing a red blouse stood next to him. She smiled at Donna and Donna felt herself smiling back. They stayed the entire funeral and when it was over Rose wandered over to them. Donna stayed where she was, looking at the coffin and the sickly green tarp that lay under it. They would lower the coffin later when no one was around and Donna wasn't ready for that. Sylvia had outlived most of her friends, the only people who attended had been Donna, Rose, the preacher and the strange couple. She had nowhere to go and she didn't want her mother to be gone just yet. Donna finally moved when the cemetery workers had not unkindly told her that they needed to lower the casket and that it wasn't best if she watched. It was then that she realized she had no idea where Rose was.
Rose stayed missing for three days, after which she breezed into the house with a healthy tan and a smile on her face. The resulting fight—the anger born out of Donna's intense worries—was the worst she and Rose had ever had. Rose was seventeen, she wasn't of age yet and she had no right to just leave like she had, Donna argued. She called it selfish, just leaving her like she had. Rose had countered that she was old enough to make her own decisions. She refused to tell Donna where she had gone. Rose then ran out of the house and slammed the door. Donna let her go for all of an hour before the guilt and the worry overwhelmed her. Donna drove around all night searching for Rose, never noticing the police box tucked neatly away in the alley near her house. Rose slinked back into the house the next morning and hugged Donna sobbing. Donna let herself forget her anger and just stood holding her daughter, whispering that she forgave her and that, yes, she would still be Rose's friend.
Two years later, when Rose was nineteen, she moved out of Donna's house. She had decided to use her trust fund to start travelling. Donna worried until Rose told her that she had two friends who were perfectly willing to let her travel with them. Through the next years, Rose would come home to Donna, bringing with her strange gifts from her travels. They were unlike Donna had ever seen, metal that felt soft, jewelry that had intricate and thoroughly alien designs on them, a rock that Rose called Bazoolium that was hot when it was sunny and cold when it would rain, all sorts of beautiful and amazing things that Donna treasured.
One day, Donna got sick. It was a dull ache in her bones at first, something that she brushed off as the advance of age. She lost her appetite, which was just as well because she wanted to lose weight. It was when she fell down the stairs and broke a hip that the doctors found out was wrong with her. Donna had cancer and it was advanced far enough that they didn't give her long to live. She called Rose immediately and she was home the next day.
It took a month in the end. Rose was there by her side the entire time. Donna was the one though, who fussed over her, insisting that Rose sleep in a proper bed, that she would be fine long enough for Rose to get some sleep. She saw glimpses of Rose's friends and finally learned the woman's name. Clara. Beautiful name, really. She saw the man peek into the room every now and then; ducking out every time he saw that Donna had noticed. She found it more amusing than irritating. She didn't know his name, but he looked just the same as ever.
It was a Saturday night the night Donna Noble died. Rose was asleep in the hospital bed opposite her's, which was just as well. Donna didn't want her only daughter to watch her die. As her breathing slowed and her vision began to dim, the man entered the room and took her hand. "Hello Donna," he said, "I'm the Doctor." Her mind swam with memories of time long since passed and she looked up at the Doctor, her eyes hazy with tears.
A golden light suffused her skin, a glow light enough to rouse Rose from her slumber. Sparks flew off of Donna's skin. Her mind supplied a thought and for once she didn't forget it.
Regeneration.
The Doctor smiled.
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Well, that was fun. To head off any questions you might have: Yes. Rose Noble is a Time Lady. Donna is her only genetic parent, Rose was formed to stabilize the energy left in Donna after her mind wipe. This is why she was sick when she was eight. Eight years old is when they would look into the vortex on Gallifrey, I've added my own spin that because Rose was born of the Vortex she would not be fully stable until she looked into it. Otherwise, the same would have happened to her as nearly happened to Donna in Journey's End. Jack took her to the Doctor so she could stare into the Heart of the Tardis.
The thing that was causing the burns whenever Donna started to remember was the fires of regeneration. They were clearly hot enough/violent enough to cause the Tardis Console to explode during The End of Time so I figured they could easily cause burns.
A special No Prize goes to anyone who figures out why that Bracelet keeps popping up.