Authors Note- I forgot to mention, Chapter One takes place on May 30th 2028

-The TARDIS, going to Earth on February 20th 2010-

The Doctor was completely and utterly smashed. Today he'd gone through 10 banana daiquiris, 6 hypervodka shots and one box of red wine, to be exact.

Time Lords have excellent liver function, for your information.

So it was somewhat understandable (but not necessarily excusable) that he had done something so incredibly and amazingly idiotic, thoughtless and stupid.

He'd managed to go to a time about a year after he left Donna.

In his drunken state he'd managed to delude himself into thinking that he could just watch her from the side, to only see how she faired without any memory of him, of time and space flowing fluidly through her brain, of being the Doctor-Donna, the most important woman of all time.

He'd vaguely wondered over the ensuing months whether being half Time Lord had affected her at all…of course she would have barely any mental side affects, she might be a bit cleverer, but nothing more, he'd seen to that.

Unfortunately, there was no way to completely wipe her Time Lord mind. He had removed any vestige of their time together, any memory, any feeling, anything that could awaken that great and terrible knowledge dormant in her head, so beautiful and awful that her all too human brain couldn't take the strain. Yes, better to have her be so much less then to have her be so much more for all too short a time.

His wonderful, glorious Donna had died that day.

But it would be nice…to see her face, to hear her laugh, and her yell, to watch her be alive.

Whenever he drank that question always popped into his mind he always racked his mind endlessly. What could I have done? To keep her here? To not have lost her like Rose, like Jenny, like so many others…

If he had been in love with Donna like he had been with Rose it might have been easier…but that was the problem, he didn't love Donna, not like that. She was like his best friend, almost like a sister who was constantly putting him in his place. It was so refreshing to travel with Donna, their relationship wasn't fraught or complicated the way it had been with Martha or (let's be honest) Rose. She was just his friend…and he found that was what he needed all the time, a friend who was sometimes just as dependant on him as he was on her.

He'd never thought that losing that friend in such a final manner could destroy him so completely.

-London, England, Earth, February 20th 2010-

In theory, Donna Noble should have been happy. She had a new boyfriend whom she had met working at some medical offices in London. He was a surgeon, young and promising and he was completely infatuated with her.

In theory, Ms. Noble should have been quite happy indeed.

The only problem was that she wasn't.

Donna was bored. She was young enough (or at least could pass for it), and quite good-looking if she did say so herself. So naturally, she wanted to enjoy the entertainments that were meant for the young and good-looking, or at the very least, brazenly confident.

However, you see, the problem lied in that Ms. Noble was seeing the theoretically perfect Dr. Daniel Russell.

The problem was that Daniel, however attractive on paper, had a very strict formula for dates that went like this: Dinner at a lovely restaurant followed by a stroll through the park and being walked to the door for a peck on the lips.

This was all flattering and very romantic the first three times. By this point (3 months later) Donna suspected that the 'perfect' doctor was not quite so incredibly proficient after all.

Not to mention the fact that dating a doctor was far from all that it was cracked up to be; his schedule was incredibly sporadic, she always felt that ever so predictable date would have been a tad bit more romantic after only one cancellation or (God forbid) without a single pager interruption.

She sighed when his number came up on her caller id just after she had finished her hair, she could already hear the rushed apology and the cancellation.

After Donna hung up her phone and began to undo her hair she considered quitting her job as a temp and considered a career as a phone phycic.

Just as she finished undoing her hair Donna got a text from her friend Nerys, inviting her on a girl's night out to a hot new club in the city. Donna spared a glance at her sweats drawer and was just about to reply with a quick 'no' when she saw herself in the mirror, she wondered what had happened to the woman of only a few months before who would have jumped at the chance to go to one of a hottest spots in London. That Donna wouldn't be deterred by a boyfriend canceling on her, and she sorely missed that old Donna and intensely wanted to get her back. She grabbed her phone with a newfound vigor and promptly shot off an enthusiastic 'yes' while her eyes traveled past her sweats drawer and lifted to the one that contained a pair of tight black jeans…