Character/Relationships: Donna Noble; mentiones of Donna Noble/Shaun Temple
Warning: This story features quite a lot of angst and emotional pain, but I promise there's a happy ending here.
A/N: I discovered Doctor Who quite late, and Donna's season was the first one I watched. Needless to say, I cried my eyes out because of "Journey's End". I never loved another character quite as much as Donna, although I liked Martha and Clara a lot. I wrote this short piece about two and a half years ago, but I've only recently decided to start posting my writings again.
So if there are any Donna Noble fans still out there, who are still a little bit unsatisfied about how her story ended – well, this is for you!
Also: disregard all knowledge of timey-wimey space science… This is not really canon-compliant.
Disclaimer: Nothing belongs to me.
The Stars In Her Eyes
(All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again.)
Donna Temple-Noble is seven months pregnant when her husband dies. The doctors mention a sudden brain aneurysm, but Donna is not paying attention; these people in white coats are just a background noise as she stares at the dead body of her husband of three years and wonders how it came to this.
There is a part of her, hidden away in her sub-consciousness, that wants to pick up the phone and call a doctor. She just doesn't know what kind of doctor, or why he – and she pictures a skinny man with crazy hair – would know more than the people dressed in white coats already standing beside her.
Her hands rest on her expanding stomach, comforting herself and her unborn child. It is the only thing keeping her upright and standing in that one moment, as the guilt crashes down around her and for some reason the only coherent thought she can form is this: "I killed him."
(It will take decades for her to understand how this could have been possible and that while it wasn't her fault, in the end it was indeed a part of her that killed him. After all, humans of that century were never meant to be around certain alien particles for too long.)
She gives birth to a baby boy only a few days overdue. Her family breathe an almost visible sigh of relief after the delivery. Donna knows that they worried for her and her baby after Shaun died, afraid she'd give up on her unborn child. But Donna is stubborn, and Donna is strong, even in the face of tragedy.
A part of her wants to name the infant Shaun in memory of his father, but she does not want to bestow the misery of the past unto him. So she settles for Joshua Wilfred Temple, the name she and Shaun had agreed on early on in her pregnancy.
(One day, she will remember why it felt like déjà vu to name her son Joshua.)
Josh is a sickly child and grows into a frail teenager. Like his mother, he regularly suffers from blinding migraines and sudden headaches. Doctor's appointments become routine for him early on, but Donna encourages him to live his life and despite his poor health, her son makes friends easily. According to his grandmother, he has inherited only the best attributes: Donna's outgoing personality, Shaun's intelligence and charm and the late Wilfred Mott's curiosity. While Donna can't really see much of herself in her son, she is not blind to his obvious smarts. The only reason he is merely good in school and not excellent are the many lessons he misses due to his health concerns. But Donna takes great care to remind him every day that she loves him no matter his grades, and that success is nothing without happiness.
(She won't know for many years to come why her son was so bright and intelligent, so much smarter than both his parents put together.)
Donna feels too young and too old at the same time, the day her son stands before her and confesses that he's going to be a father at 24. While she is overjoyed to become a grandmother and thrives at the prospect of seeing her grandchild grow up, she also knows that this is everything but planned. Josh's girlfriend Carin is 26, working in a marketing agency and they've only been together for two and a half years. Josh himself is just a few months shy of completing his second master's degree, but sometimes Donna feels like he has planned to stay in the safe world of academia forever. The baby changes things and her son finally leaves university to start working, vehemently refusing Donna's money now that he has a family to support. Ironically enough, even his degrees aren't enough to get him a job at short notice and so he finds himself tempting until a better opportunity comes along.
(Something tells her even then that his better opportunity will not be a mad man in a box.)
Donna is 62 years old when she holds her granddaughter for the first time. The girl – Alice – is barely twelve hours old and doesn't even blink up at her grandmother. The red-head carries the infant carefully to the large hospital window and gazes out into the darkened sky, lost in thought. She wishes she had a husband to share this moment with, or that Sylvia was still alive to meet her great-grandchild. She wants so badly to share this feeling with someone, wants to ask if it's normal that it feels like she has been here before.
(Alice is her first and last grandchild, but not the only granddaughter she remembers holding in her arms.)
The first time Donna Temple-Noble looks into the bright blue irises of little Alice, she sees the stars and the universe in them and smiles. She feels the red string of fate tie around a tiny hand and for one moment, the world is glowing golden and Donna knows. Her granddaughter is like her but better, and one day she will accomplish great and wonderful things beyond anyone's imagination.
But the revelation passes, and then Donna is just Donna, getting on in age without ever having done anything special in her life.
(But she has and she will again. The time is coming.)
History repeats itself and Donna is the only one left standing once more. Her precious, beautiful, wonderful son, passes away before he gets to witness his daughter's fourth birthday. Like his father's passing, his death is sudden and unexpected, resulting from a brain aneurysm. Donna stands strong for what is left of her family, lending support to a grieving widow that never got to say "yes" in the first place and a four year old. Fate, the red-head decides, really is a bitch.
(Donna, Fate decides then, will not be done for a long time.)
Alice grows up to become a beautiful and vibrant young woman. The girl, who is no longer a girl, has clearly inherited her father's intelligence and her grandmother's sharp tongue, even if no one can quite pinpoint where her linguistic aptitude comes from. Gone are the days when the young brunette would try to translate every name she heard in random languages, but occasionally she still calls Donna "Lady Time Lord", just to see the wide smile on her grandmother's face.
Donna herself is getting on in age, remarkably close to the big nine-zero and her already spotty memory – after all, who just forgets a whole year of their life? – turns a corner for the worse. The headaches have long since receded and she hasn't had a migraine in more than ten years. Her grief has been left behind and the woman who has outlived both her husband and her son is content and ready to go in peace.
Only days after Donna Temple-Noble turns 87 years old, her granddaughter meets an intriguing stranger and goes on a journey with him. Perhaps stranger is not the right term, for the man with the gray hair and the ancient eyes feels familiar to her. The first time Alice steps into a blue box that is bigger on the inside, she instantly feels at home and a part of her lights up in recognition. She feels the joy, grief and wisdom of 900 years all at once and becomes a paradox herself; the woman with the young mind and the old heart.
(Later, much later, they all will joke of how oblivious he was, not to recognize a human touched by time itself.)
Donna Temple-Noble is considered brain dead at 87. She is taken off life support by her almost daughter-in-law who, while grieving the loss, also rejoices that the old woman finally found peace.
Down in the hospital's morgue, a medical examiner closes a door and the world turns dark for one mortal woman. But like the phoenix from the ashes, golden light explodes unseen and the Lady Time Lord rises once more, full of knowledge, wisdom and memories.
Donna Temple-Noble dies at age 87.
The Doctor Donna is reborn.
A/N no. 2:
On the "Lady Time Lord" translation:
- Donna in Italian relates to "lady", according to freedictionary: "Used as a courtesy title before the name of a woman in an Italian-speaking area."
- Temple bears similarity to "tempus" in Latin, which means "time"
- Noble of course, can be tied back to nobility and thus "Lord"
"All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again." - Shamelessly stolen and adapted from Battlestar Galactica