A/N: Much of the dialogue for the this chapter is adapted from the actual episode The End of Time.
Sound was coming from far away, at the end of a tunnel. Vibrations shaking the earth below her body resonated in her cochlea, vibrating her basilar membrane. In the spiral organ of Corti, hair cells were deflected and the resulting impulses passed through her spiral ganglion, along the afferent fibers of the cochlear nerve to the cochlear nuclei of her medulla. The information, lightening traveling from axon to dendrite and axon to dendrite, was carried to the auditory reflex center of the midbrain, the thalamus, and finally her primary auditory cortex. Providing conscious awareness of the sound.
Donna Noble opened her eyes.
Before she could fixate on such a weird dream, there was another vibration beneath her and then the sound coalesced together, suddenly making sense. They were explosions and they were getting closer.
Donna scrambled to her feet, and found she was off balance. Standing made her lean to the left. Not only that, but her whole body hurt, like an electrical burn covering the inside of her skin.
Another explosion had Donna reeling further to her left and she lost her footing, falling to her hands and knees. She stared at the rust-colored earth beneath her hands in confusion. Donna looked up.
"Oh. My. God."
The sky was filled with smoke and lavender colored clouds. What little of the sky she could see was pearly orange and so bright she had to squint. She could distinctly make out two suns in the sky behind the clouds, one small and white, the other much larger and red, looking angry behind the dark clouds. She felt overwhelmed, awestruck by the otherworldly sight. Oddly, it was a familiar feeling, like she had been in a similar situation before. Watching creation. But that was impossible.
She was kneeling in a hilly, desert landscape covered in red and gold sand. Some of the hills protruded high, the earth on top of them was dry and purple. Down the hill she was on, Donna saw three figures in strange, dark military uniforms running up towards her.
One was waving frantically. In her direction. He shouted something, but Donna couldn't understand it.
"Was that even English?!" she shouted, but there was another explosion in the distance and she couldn't even hear herself.
They were getting closer. Donna got to her feet, warily. The first one shouted again, still in a language she didn't know, but the meaning behind them seemed to make sense to Donna. Something like...Don't turn around! Run!
Donna turned around.
In the distance, the far distance, saucers in the sky were shooting silver and blue lasers at the desert below, billowing gold and red sand into the air. The whole landscape was catching fire, thick smoke filling the sky with more ominous looking clouds. Canons seemed to materialize on the ground below and shoot shadows at the flying saucers, swallowing them whole. Sleeker, more foreboding planes were shooting down the saucers from the sky. They seemed to make the air ripple.
A hand grasped her arm hard, spinning her around. Donna looked up at a handsome man of medium build and height, with striking blue eyes. He was anxious, trying to pull her away saying the worlds that translated Run, run! into her head.
"Let go of me!" Donna shouted at him, struggling.
"Oh, English?" said a tall second man with bright red hair, running up to join them while looking ahead at the approaching flying saucers.
"Seems like it," said the first.
"I told you she'd be here, didn't I say?! I did say!" said a third voice, this time female.
"Yes, you know everything, don't you?" said the second man towards the woman.
"Oi!" shouted Donna. "What's with the chatter?! Who are you people?! What is this place?!" She managed to get her arm free, but was only grabbed again.
"Donna Noble, I will explain everything, promise! But right now we're in a war zone and those saucers are about to set this whole plain on fire, so we have to RUN!"
They were running down the purple hill, Donna slipping on the sand. The two other strangers took up point behind them, looking warily at the sky.
"We really need to go faster, old boy-" said the woman.
"Not my fault she's not wearing proper shoes," the man on her arm answered.
"Now look here-" Donna started.
The man pulled out a strange tubular tool that glowed blue and made a bleeping noise, aiming it at her feet.
"There, now you won't slip on the sand anymore," he said.
"Did you just ruin my patent leather boots?! I love these boots!"
"No time for that, Noble, we've got to get one thousand kilometers that way, and we've got to do it now!"
They dashed down the hills and across desert valleys. Donna tried her best to keep up, even though she knew she was slowing them down. Her breasts and shins were getting sore from the running (an oddly familiar annoyance), but she tried to ignore it, tried going faster. The explosions were getting closer and she could see lights flashing around them from the lasers. One of them shouted something, sounding like they were in pain, but she wasn't sure which.
"Almost there-"
They were only crossing another plain when Donna felt something. It was thin air, but it felt like walking through gelatinous plastic.
"Scramble the signal, Katja!"
"Already am!" Donna saw the second man holding another tubular, glowing device, aiming it at the air behind them.
The saucers were still shooting lasers, but the sound of it all was muffled. Donna watched, baffled, as they flew overhead, still shooting, but the lasers never reached the ground.
"That should buy us approximately 16.43 minutes before the Daleks break through Katja's new signal. It should buy us plenty of time to get to the teleportation pad on the other side of the lake-" the first man said, his blue eyes sparkling, a smile on his face.
Donna wretched her arm out of his grasp and smacked him on his shoulder.
"Ow! Hey-"
"Are you enjoying this?! A bunch of UFOs are shooting bloody lasers at us, we're running for our lives, and you're enjoying this?! What the hell is this place anyway? It can't be Earth! Did you kidnap me to Mars?!" shouted Donna, throwing her hands in the air.
"This...this isn't Mars-" the woman said.
"I can understand the confusion though, Mars is the only red planet it her solar system-" the ginger man started.
"Donna-" the first man said, cautiously holding out his hands and approaching her. "You were the one complaining about your boots of all things-"
"And that's another thing! How do you know who I am?!" Donna demanded, backing away from them.
"Everyone knows who you are!" the woman said.
The second man was scanning her with the tubular device. "There's a lot of latent neural activity, but it's not conscious, probably labile from the shock. That might be why her memory isn't working. She also has a damaged ear drum, luckily it's not so bad she'll lose her hearing, but it's not good for her current equilibrium. But we won't know much until we get her to the Circle-"
"What the bloody hell do you mean 'circle'?!"
"My wife!" said the first man. "I mean...she's my wife. The Circle is my wife. She's a medical doctor and we need to take you to her."
Donna blinked. "Doctor..." she whispered, the word coming unbidden from her throat. She shook herself and stared at him. And then at the other two. They were all looking at her warily. "Who are you people?" she asked, confusion, fury, and exhaustion manifesting in her voice.
"Well...you probably won't be able to pronounce our real names, but I'm called Lamar. This is my sister, Halcyon-" He pointed to the short woman with large gray eyes. "-and my brother, Katjacrellvgynm, but we still call him Katja since...since he hasn't had a naming ceremony."
Donna looked at the tall young man Lamar pointed at. He was looking down at her, looking both sheepish and sad. "And I never will," Katja said. "But it's the name my mother gave me, so that's all right."
"We better get moving," Halcyon said.
"Right," Lamar answered, taking Donna firmly by the hand and setting a brisk pace.
"You're very lucky to be here, Donna Noble, not a lot of humans have gotten to see it. Over there is one of my favorite places here in the South, the large, golden Sea of Trepidity, and it had the most lovely little blue flowers blooming around the shore! It's full of molten rock and lava now, but it used to be full of singing fish. And let me tell you, they were beautiful. Delicious too-" Lamar said.
At the same time Katja was going on about the sky. "It's a shame you had to visit in the middle of a war, Donna, because the sky is usually the most striking thing! Bright golden orange with amazing aurorae displays of purple, green, yellow, just all the colors of the rainbow really! Scientists theorized that in ancient times, when we were evolving to what we are today, the charged particles are what gave us our telepathic abilities-"
Even Halcyon couldn't stay quiet while they were running for their lives. "I'm so glad you landed in the South, Donna Noble! If you landed up North towards the Capitol, we might never have reached you! The South is really superior in beauty anyway. That is, before it was on fire. It might still be, it's not like the North isn't on fire as well. Over there is Mount Cadon, it had some amazing backpacking trails, if you're into that kind of thing. Cadonflood River flows from there, and a bit down the river is Lungbarrow, that's home-"
After listening to them talk over each other, none of it making sense, and struggling because she could barely hear out of one ear anyway, Donna lost her patience. "Oi! Do all you Martians talk like this while running from laser shooting UFOs?! How is a person supposed to follow that incessant prattle?! More importantly, how do you aliens know my name?" Donna demanded, interrupting their daft and seemingly endless rambles.
"We're not Martians," Halcyon said. "And we know your name because you're the Most Important Woman in the Universe. Everyone here immediately knew your name when the Time Lock was infiltrated by the signal. Of course, not all of them knew you'd end up in the southern plains of Cadon." She grinned at Donna over her shoulder. "I did though."
"Careful, you'll end up like the Visionary," Lamar teased.
Halcyon made a face. "You take that back," she said.
Most Important what?! Ludicrous! Donna yanked her hand out of Lamar's grip. When he turned to protest, she pulled back and smacked him across the face.
Halcyon and Katja stared at her, stunned.
"What was that for?!" Lamar angrily demanded, rubbing his cheek.
"You bloody aliens kidnapped me!" Donna shouted. "Kidnapped me to fucking hell knows where on some godforsaken planet! Everything smells like sulfur and smoke and I'm so dizzy and I can't hear right! I want to go home!" Tears started falling and Donna wiped them away quickly. "My head hurts something fierce..." she trailed off, crying.
"We're trying to get you home, Donna," Lamar said. "But you're very sick and we need to help you. Quickly, before it's too late and you burn up or you're erased from existence with the rest of us and our planet."
Donna stared at him. "What planet is that exactly?"
Lamar smiled wanly. "This is Gallifrey, Donna Noble."
"COME ON!" shouted the Doctor.
The vinvocci couldn't help but express their exasperation over the Doctor's apparent ingratitude to their "quick rescue" as they untied him, but the Doctor didn't care. He was furious. Without listening to him, they transported him and Wilf to their ship and now thousands of missiles were going to be launched into space, destroying him before he could rescue Donna.
Not if he could help it.
As soon as his hands and feet were free, he jumped up and sonicked the engineering computer so the ship wouldn't put out their positional coordinates if hacked by a computer on Earth.
He turned to Addams. "Where's your flight deck?!" the Doctor demanded.
"But we're safe! We're a hundred miles above the Earth!"
"And he's got every missile on the planet ready to fire!" the Doctor shouted.
"Oh my goodness, we're in space! And my sweet girl is down there...Doctor..." Wilf said, the shock apparent in his voice.
"We're going to get her back, Wilf, but not before the Master finds us first if I don't get to the flight deck!"
"Follow me," Addams said, begrudgingly.
The Doctor turned to guide a stuttering Wilf away from the engineering deck. When they joined Addams and Rossiter, it looked suspiciously like they were getting ready to enter into hyperspace.
"We've got to close it down," the Doctor says, striding over to the navigational panel on the other side of the deck.
"No chance, mate. We're going home!" Rossiter said, putting the computers back together.
Addams was busy putting more pieces together. "We're just a salvage team! Local politics has got nothing to with us. Not unless it's a carnival. The sooner we get back to Vinvocci space, the better-"
"We're not leaving!" the Doctor shouted. And he used his sonic screwdriver to shut down their computers and their ship. A split second decision he hated making because it hindered his ability to get back to Earth.
Several minutes later, after everyone was reasonably sure the Master could not find their dead ship in the skies, Rassitor started to assess the damage. "The engines are burned out. All we've got is auxiliary lights-"
The Doctor marched up to Addams. "Let me see your transportation device," he said, pointing to her wrist.
"Joke's on you, mate, it stopped working. He must have destroyed the interface back on Earth," she said. "And I wouldn't help you anyway! We're stranded in space and it's all your fault! Idiot!" she said, and she marched away, Rassitor following.
The Doctor swallowed, mind whirring. He had no way to get to Donna, not at that moment. What else could he do?
"Wilf," the Doctor said, turning to the old man, "Do you still have your mobile?"
"I did remember to pick it back up, yes," Wilf answered, patting his pockets. "Here it is."
The Doctor accepted the phone. "Does it get satellite service?" he asked, using his screwdriver.
"I don't think so-"
"Now it does," the Doctor said. "I added a spacial pulse to your mobile to help us locate Donna's phone."
"But what if the Master has it instead?" Wilf asked.
"Then I'll have to defenestrate your mobile out the airlock and into deep space so he can't lock onto it," the Doctor said, pushing the call button for Donna's mobile.
He waited. But there was nothing.
"Doctor?" Wilf asked.
The Doctor pondered the implications. Donna's phone wasn't receiving the pulse. If Donna's phone was on Earth, it should be receiving the pulse. If Donna's phone wasn't on Earth...but how would that happen? The most likely scenario was Donna's phone was somehow destroyed since calling her grandfather.
"I've got to get back down there," the Doctor said, more to himself than to Wilf.
"I'll help you in any way I can, sir," Wilf said solemnly. "I want to know that she's safe," his voice broke on the last word.
The Doctor turned and looked at his friend. "If there's one thing I know about Donna, it's that she can do absolutely anything. She can take care of herself. I have faith that she can," the Doctor said, turning back to the window. The planet Earth was there, the brilliant blue marble he had loved for all the centuries of his lives. The Doctor thought of Donna's eyes.
"I know she will," he said.
"Gallifrey," Donna whispered the name both strange and achingly familiar. She looked around with new perspective. At the rust colored sand, the smoky atmosphere, the dead trees she thought once must have been covered in shining, silver leaves, the molten cracks in the planet's crust. "But...but it's burning-"
"Our planet is dying," Lamar said. "It has been burning for centuries in this never-ending war."
"No," Donna whispered, tears streaming down her cheeks. "Oh, my head!" she cried, lifting the heel of her hand to her forehead and pressing back, as if she could press the incoming migraine away.
Katja was scanning her again. "We need to start moving again, Donna, you're not well-"
"No!" Donna cried, struggling with a grief she didn't understand. A grief for a dying, beautiful red planet.
"Donna Noble, please," Katja said, grabbing her by the shoulders. "The metacrisis energy is consuming your body. We have to get you help. The Circle can do that, she has loads of experience." His face faltered. "I mean...not loads, there's never been a human-Time Lord metacrisis before, but she's clever, she can think of something."
Donna looked up at Katja. Many of the words he said were causing pinpricks in her headache, giving her a sense of awareness. Gallifrey. Metacrisis. Time Lord. And she wanted so desperately to know why, but the pain was clouding everything, making it hard to think. "It hurts so much. Sometimes all I can think about is the pain. And I can't remember what it was like before it was there. Like it's changed me, who I am."
Lamar approached them and raised his hand up to brush her hair away from her temple. "Maybe I can help," he said. His fingertips went to both sides of her face, along her temples and cheekbones. "May I?"
Unexplainable fear welled up in Donna chest. Her instincts were screaming at her to run away from Lamar. There was something about what he was about to do that she knew would feel invasive and it terrified her, but she couldn't remember why she knew that. Donna looked into his worried, blue eyes, pleading with her to trust him. They were so much older than he appeared, so alien, like they carried the universe inside of them. She suddenly had a sense of another pair of eyes looking at her from this position. Large, warm, brown eyes that she could drown in.
Eyes that made her want to run towards them, towards home. Eyes that made her want to run away, far away, and never look back at those eyes.
She quelled her fear.
"All right," Donna said.
She felt Lamar in her mind. He was a gentle presence and he seemed overly polite inside her head, like he didn't want to track in mud from his shoes. She felt him banking the fires in her mind until she didn't feel the burning anymore. But in the back of her thoughts, she felt the panic coming, the terrible fear of being invaded. She was suddenly, irrationally convinced he was about to take something from her, everything that made her happy.
Get out, get out, get out, get out, GET OUT!
She could feel how startled Lamar was in his own mind. Unbidden, she felt like a stranger in her own head, and somehow knew she was seeing his thoughts as well as hers. Suddenly, Donna got an image of a man with slicked back dark blond hair, hazel eyes, and chiseled features that reminded her of a silver screen old Hollywood actor. He was looking down at her, a ghost of a smile on his thin lips. She realized she was looking through Lamar's eyes as a child. Startled, she opened her eyes.
"That was weird," Lamar said. "I didn't know humans could do that. In fact, I was fairly certain they couldn't do that." He blinked at her. "Why did you pull that memory out of my head?"
"I-I didn't mean to."
"That's all right," Lamar said. "It was just my daft uncle."
"All right to run again, Donna?" Halcyon asked. "We've only got 4.32 minutes left before the Daleks can get through our dampening field."
"Yes, I think I can manage," Donna said, straightening. She took one more forlorn look at the burning planet around them. "I wish I could help save you," she said.
Lamar smiled at her. "You already have," he said.
They started running again. Halcyon, faster than her brothers, propelled ahead. Donna saw her stop and start pulling metal out of the sand, assembling the pieces into a large disk.
Before they could reach her, Katja stopped.
"Lamar-" he said.
"What is it, old boy, we're almost at the teleport-"
"Lamar...something is deconstructing the DNA helices in my cells." There was fear in Katja's voice.
Lamar took out his tubular device and started scanning his brother.
"What's going on?!" Halcyon called.
"Katja's been poisoned!" Lamar called back. He turned to Donna. "Donna, go to Halcyon, she can get you to safety!"
"What about you two-"
"We'll be along, don't worry," Lamar said.
"Oh no. I don't care for this self-sacrificing bullshit you've got going on. If I can help him, I'm going to help!" Donna said.
"Donna please!" Lamar said. "We will be right behind you! GO!"
Donna was suddenly being tugged from behind by Halcyon. "Don't worry, they're idiots, but they won't be dying any time soon. Trust me, I know," she said.
Donna reluctantly followed Halcyon. As soon as they were on the disk in the sand, with all the strange circular symbols on it, Halcyon pushed her to stand in the center of it. "Hold on!" she said, and she took out another of the tubular devices, aimed it at the disk, and the blue light came on.
And then Donna went completely blank.
"I've always dreamt of a view like that," Wilf said, gazing out the window at the planet below. "Every day I would dream of it, while looking through that telescope. Just yesterday I saw a shooting star streak across the sky and I thought that was a wonder! But now I'm too distracted to enjoy this. I keep thinking about Donna..." he trailed off.
The Doctor was working diligently on the wiring, trying to fix everything he destroyed in his haste to hide from the Master. He looked up over the rim of his glasses at Wilf when he said Donna's name. The old man was hunched where he was sitting, gazing out the window.
"There's England!" Wilf said suddenly, pointing. "My wife's buried down there. I might never visit her again now." He looked over at the Doctor. "Do you think he changed them? In their graves?"
The Doctor paused, hating the answer he had to give. "I'm sorry."
Wilf just shook his head. "No, not your fault."
"It's not your fault," Donna said on the rooftop, her white dress billowing around her ankles.
"Oh, that's a change!" the Doctor said, laughing a little.
The Doctor paused at the memory of the day he met Donna Noble. After he went through an emotional loss that was practically violent, Donna was suddenly in his life steering him straight. Also violently, but apparently that was what the universe thought he needed. But those words were one of the first glimpses he got of Donna's giving nature. The Doctor shook off his memories, twisting another wire with his long fingers.
He really was haunted by Donna.
"Isn't it?" he finally replied to Wilf. Everything was his fault. He was always hurting people just by being a part of their lives. He had hurt this whole planet because he was so wrapped up in humanity that all his enemies found him there, torturing him by torturing them.
Wilf chose not to answer him. Instead, he started talking about Earth's second world war, and the Doctor sighed, not wanting to hear about something that reminded him of the wars that destroyed his world, but he cared too much about Wilf not to listen.
"Yeah, you don't want to listen to an old man's tales, do you?" Wilf asked him, a small twinkle in his eye.
The Doctor could do nothing but smile. "I'm older than you."
"Get away!" Wilf said.
"I'm 906," the Doctor said, amused.
"What, really though?!" Wilf asked, still not believing.
"I don't look it now, but I've had aged bodies before. Long ago. Those were different days, when my...friends...were more active than I was running around alien planets. Because of my bad knees," the Doctor said, thinking of when he met Ian and Barbara. He was so young then but already so lonely, even before the war. He just wanted someone to stay. And then, when someone finally did declare they'd stay with him until the end, she was gone too-
"One of your other lives then, that you were talking about before, in the cafe?" Wilf asked. "Did you always have human friends with you?"
The Doctor shook his head. "Sometimes I didn't even like humans," he answered, thinking of his sixth incarnation. "Once I dressed like a Roald Dahl character and thought I was superior to everything and everyone." The Doctor thought he still had days like that. It was why he needed someone.
"Well, with nine hundred years! We must look like insects to you," Wilf said, interrupting his line of thought before he could get into another decent sulk, and possibly break the panel he was working on.
"I think you look like giants," the Doctor answered quietly. And it was true. The human race astounded him. Their lives were only a blink of an eye, but they excelled at it, curious, instinctual, adaptive creatures that they were. And every one he met seemed to teach him something, even when he was being arrogant or stubborn. They could overcome everything. They'd be there until the very end of the universe itself, still living, still adapting. Until all the stars went out.
Wilf was coming towards him then, his service revolver in his hand.
"I want you to have this-" he started.
"No," said the Doctor.
"If you take it, you could-"
"No," the Doctor said again, and then considered Wilfred Mott and the way his eyes were downcast, looking at the revolver in his hand, like he wasn't used to the weight of it.
"You had that gun in the mansion," the Doctor said, and Wilf looked up at him. "You could have stopped the Master there and then."
Wilf looked embarrassed, and he just shrugged. "Too scared I suppose."
The Doctor understood. Wilf was not a violent man. He probably never shot another soul in his life. "I'd be proud," the Doctor said.
"Of what?"
"If you were my Dad," the Doctor said. He felt the tears threatening again, but he smiled. It was easy to care for Wilfred Mott, the man who influenced parts of Donna's nature, the caring and generous parts. The man who Donna was so fond of, and who looked at the stars every night in her place because that was what she would have wanted. But it was also easy to care because Wilfred was who he was, and all this actions came from the love and wisdom in his heart.
"Now, don't start," Wilf said, "You said 'he will knock four times' and then you die. Well, that's the Master, isn't it?" Wilf tapped his temple. "The noise in his head. The Master is going to kill you."
"Yeah," the Doctor acknowledged.
"Then kill him first," Wilf said, offering the gun again.
"And that's how the Master started," the Doctor admonished, and Wilf lowered his hand again, shame in his eyes. The Doctor tried explaining that he wasn't innocent. He had seen wars as well, had brought down kingdoms, planets, galaxies. Manipulated people with into destroying themselves with his clever tricks.
"Sometimes I think the Time Lord lives too long," the Doctor said, acknowledging to himself his own deeply buried death wish. He looked over at Wilf and his revolver. "I can't, I just can't."
"If the Master dies, what happens to all the people?" Wilf asked.
The Doctor shook his head. "I don't know-"
"Doctor, what happens?" Wilf pressed.
"The template snaps."
"They go back to being human?"
The Doctor nodded.
Wilf's face crumbled. "They're alive? And human? Then don't you dare, sir!" Wilf said, angry and bitter, and so sad. "Don't you dare put him before them! Before my granddaughter! You said you'd take care of her!"
The Doctor flinched, looking away. He wished he wasn't feeling so raw about everything lately.
"And take this gun," Wilf said, taking the Doctor's hand and pushing the gun into it. "You take the gun and save your life. And please don't die," Wilf said, tears in his eyes, "You're the most wonderful man on Earth. I...I don't want you to die."
The Doctor knew that Wilf was speaking out of compassion and love, even desperation. But he couldn't return to the way he was. Not when he had worked so hard to become better.
"Never," he said, and pushed the gun away.
"A star fell from the sky."
Wilf, who was openly weeping at that point, gasped at the sound of the Master's voice. The Doctor was not surprised. He suspected he'd be found faster than he could get their ridiculously old engines back online.
"Don't you want to know where from?" the Master asked. "Because now it makes sense, Doctor."
"Wilf," the Doctor said, not looking at him, but staring straight ahead at the planet below. "What did you say earlier about a shooting star?"
"The whole of my life, my destiny. The star was a diamond. And the diamond was a white point star!" the Master said.
"White point star-" the Doctor mouthed the words soundlessly, staring ahead in growing horror.
"And I had all day and night to sanctify the gift. Now the star is ready and the time is right. They will join us tonight, returning the visit of some of their noble guests-"
"No!" the Doctor choked out, running his fingers into his dark hair and clenching the strands.
"What's he on about?! What's he doing?! Does he mean Donna-?"
The Doctor lunged for the gun. The weight of it in his hand was immediately familiar. He looked at it sitting comfortably in his hand and thought about the war, suddenly feeling like he never left that nightmare, like he's been at war ever since, and he'd never escape that reality.
"The Time Lords are returning," the Doctor said, leaping to his feet.
"That's good, isn't it?! I mean, that's your people-" Wilf said, getting up to follow him.
The Doctor knew that wasn't good at all. His people were broken, driven mad by endless war. And now they had Donna Noble.
"Allons-y, Wilfred Mott!" the Doctor called, running back to the flight deck.
to be continued...