"What do you mean; you're not sure it was my dream? Who else's could it have been?"
Donna's tone was one of anger, but the Doctor could detect the tell-tale tremor which meant that she was disguising her fear and concern. He placed his hands on her shoulders and held her gaze.
"It's alright Donna. You're safe."
"Stop avoiding the question, spaceman."
The Doctor grinned sheepishly. "Can't get anything past you, can I? The thing is Donna; you're a Time Lady now."
"Yes, I know. What of it?" Her impatience was starting to show.
"Well, in order for you to receive such detailed images, whoever was sending them would have to be broadcasting on a very specific wavelength, for lack of a better word. If you were still human, it could have been anything, flotsam and jetsam floating around on the psychic plane. As it is, this would seem to suggest... But no, it's impossible. Unless... No, it can't be. It can't!"
Donna sandwiched his face between her hands and forced him to look directly at her. "Doctor. What is it?"
Reluctantly and still disbelieving, he answered "It's... It would have to be... Another Time Lord."
Donna's voice took on a sympathetic tone "That's impossible, my love, you know it is."
"Well, that's the thing. It's not. At least, not completely. There was this one time..."
The look on his face was one Donna recognized. It was the same one he wore when he talked about the Time War, or about any of the people he had loved and lost.
"What happened, sweetheart?"
"Donna I... I can't. I just can't. Please don't make me talk about it." His voice broke as he begged her, and his eyes grew suspiciously bright. Donna felt her hearts constrict in her chest at the obvious anguish her lover was experiencing. Making a decision, she scooted herself backwards so that she was propped up against the head of the bed and held out her arms to him.
"Come here, love."
Once the Doctor was happily nestled in into her arms, she pulled away a little so that she could look him in the eye and said "I understand if you don't want to talk about what happened, my love, but I think it's important that I know. We need to get this dream thing figured out. So… can you show me instead?" She reached out and brushed his left temple with her fingertips.
The Doctor returned her gesture reflexively, but drew his hand back reluctantly. "I... Donna, are you sure? These memories, they're not... pleasant."
She brought her other hand up to rest on his right temple and gazed unflinchingly into his eyes.
"I'm sure."
When he still made no move, Donna rolled her eyes and gave a mental push, immersing herself in his memories.
Images flashed through her mind, almost too quickly to comprehend; until she reached a seething morass of memories tinged with red and all somehow focused around one word, 'Master'.
With mounting horror, she watched as her lover and best friend was tortured, humiliated and abused by the man who was once his childhood playmate, his first love. She wept with him for the boy the Master had been- gentle, loving Koschei, who had died the day the Master was born.
Looking further back, Donna saw how the Master had escaped the Time War by disguising himself as a human- a disguise so thorough that he had even fooled himself. She saw how Martha Jones had inadvertently caused him to open the watch containing his Time Lord consciousness. She saw how he had stolen the TARDIS and used her to create a horrifying paradox allowing for the literal decimation of the human race. She felt the Doctor's pain as he listened helplessly to his ship's mental screams as she was mutilated. She felt his guilt at what he had asked Martha to do for the sake of the world. She felt his anguish when his one-time lover refused to regenerate out of pure spite.
Pulling herself out of his mind with a gasp, Donna saw that the Doctor was sitting hunched over with his head bowed, his shoulders shaking with silent sobs.
Wordlessly, she pulled him into her arms and began to stroke his wild hair soothingly. Upon finding himself safe and warm in his lover's embrace, the Doctor released his tenuous self-control and began to cry in earnest, heaving, ragged sobs shaking his slender frame and tears streaming down his cheeks as he clutched Donna desperately, pressing his face into the side of her neck.
Donna was crying too, the horror and tragedy of what had befallen her lover having broken through her considerable reserve. She hid her tears from him, knowing that he would only blame himself for them. When she felt that he was beginning to calm, she sniffed surreptitiously and wiped her face on her sleeve.
Pulling back from her, the Doctor sniffed mightily and said "Sorry."
Donna whacked him lightly on the forehead. "That's the last time I want to hear you apologize for showing your emotions. Out there, you can pretend it doesn't hurt, you can be the Oncoming Storm lord the Lonely God or whatever it is you're calling yourself now, but not here. Not with me. Please."
He smiled softly, amazed that this wonderful, understanding and forgiving woman had chosen to be with him in spite of his flaws, in spite of all the terrible things he'd done. "Thank you, my love."
She smiled back at him "Anytime."
The next morning, Donna and the Doctor awoke refreshed, both of them feeling quite content after their late-night communion. They sat facing each other across the kitchen table, each with their hands wrapped around a hot mug of strong tea. Taking a fortifying sip of her beverage, Donna spoke.
"So, whoever it was that sent me that dream" Nightmare, she corrected mentally "do you really think they could be a Time Lord?"
The Doctor closed his eyes briefly before answering "It's entirely possible, assuming anyone else managed to escape the way... well, to escape, at any rate. The problem with that theory is that I seriously doubt that anyone else would have tried. They were all so loyal, so obedient. I can't imagine that they would have even wanted to desert Gallifrey."
"Well they can't all have been like that, look at you" Donna teased him "Surely there must have been others."
"Well, maybe." The Doctor admitted reluctantly. "I certainly didn't know everyone on the planet."
"Either way, we have to find them. Surely anything powerful enough to fool us into thinking it's a Time Lord is worth as much attention as an actual Time Lord?"
"True."
Donna stood, pushing her chair backwards with a squeal. "Well then, skinny boy, we'd better get cracking, hadn't we?"
"Indeed we had. Come on then, Donna, allonsy!"
The two of them walked briskly from the kitchen to the console room, which had been placed conveniently across the hall. The Doctor sent a wordless thank you to the TARDIS for accommodating the urgency of their mission. As they approached the centre console, Donna asked "Will she be able to get a location from the psychic imprint of my dream, or do we need more information?"
"No, the dream should definitely be enough, with the amount of power it had behind it. She's a clever old girl. Aren't you? Yes you are!" He stroked one of the coral beams before giving it an exaggerated kiss. Donna rolled her eyes.
"Sometimes I think you like your ship more than you like me."
The Doctor wrapped one arm around the pillar and embraced Donna with the other. "I love our ship exactly as much as I love you, and she loves both of us. Don't you girl?"
The background humming of the TARDIS increased in pitch and volume until it sounded almost like a purr, and Donna melted.
"Aww, and I love you both too. So much." She gave the Doctor a quick peck on the lips and the TARDIS a vigorous pat. "Now, let's get this show on the road."
She moved over to the other side of the console and placed both her hands on a flattened area of coral which had presented itself rather conveniently when she had realized that she would need to enter into full telepathic communion with the ship. Reaching out mentally, she expanded her link with the ship until she was fully immersed in her consciousness.
Connecting with the TARDIS felt a little strange, but right somehow, Donna decided. The ship's mental landscape was utterly different from anything she had experienced before- massive and all-encompassing with little to no understanding of the passage of time. She felt herself falling, spiralling, buffeted by currents and eddies in the vastness in which she found herself. Before she had time to feel afraid, something caught her, steadied her and set her down on a solid surface.
Opening her eyes, Donna found herself in a small, comfortably furnished parlour room, complete with an open fire and pleasantly squashy looking couches. Seated rather primly in an armchair by the fire was a stately woman in a royal blue silk robe, cinched at the waist with a wide silver sash. She wore her dark, curly hair pinned up in a style which would have been elegant, had it not been in the process of springing loose.
As Donna took in her surroundings, the woman leapt from her seat and ran across the room to embrace her. The air was forcibly expelled from her lungs as the blue-silver-black whirlwind slammed into her. As she struggled to catch her breath, the woman babbled excitedly "Goodbye! No. Sorry. Hello! It's you! You're here! It's been so long since anyone came to visit me, and now you're here and you're going to find her and bring her home and oh, I've been looking forward to this so much!"
Finally regaining her ability to speak, Donna interrupted hurriedly "Sorry, what? Who are you? I'm supposed to be talking to the TARDIS. And what do you mean 'find her'? Find who?"
The other woman giggled. "I am the TARDIS, silly! As to the other..." She bit her lip "I can't tell you. Don't worry, you'll find out soon enough."
As much as Donna hated to be kept in the dark, she knew that foreknowledge could be particularly dangerous in a case like this one, and accepted that the TARDIS knew what she was doing.
"Okay then, I need to give you the psychic imprint of the dream I had. Er... how are we going to do this?"
"Oh, don't worry about that. I've got it already. Really, you bipeds are so easy to read. I've extrapolated the space-time co-ordinates; just get Himself out there to pilot us to the set destination."
As the room around her began to fade, Donna heard the TARDIS call out "and tell him to stop hitting me with that damned mallet!"
Donna opened her eyes in the console room to find the Doctor pacing nervously. As soon as he saw that she'd come back to herself, he ran over and wrapped himself around her, clinging like a limpet. "You were gone ages."
"Oh, don't be a child. I wasn't more than ten minutes, you big dumbo."
"Felt longer to me." He mumbled. "So, what did she say? Did she get the co-ordinates?"
Gently extricating herself from his arms, Donna answered "She's got them, they're entered and set, all you have to do is fly there."
"HaHA, excellent! Well done old girl!"
As the Doctor began to whiz around the console, pulling levers and flicking switches, Donna remembered something "and she says to stop hitting her!"