They were back on Earth. Around them was still the signs of celebration; revellers in the distance shouting with joy. There was confetti stuck to their feet, and the sharp smell of fireworks muffled by the rain.
The Doctor and Donna stood on a darkened street, looking at a little Earth house. Perfectly normal, and inside it would be Donna's mother and Wilf, so worried, so anxious to see her...
But they still stood, and waited, watching as the moment slipped past them and away. The moment when Donna could change her mind and come back to the TARDIS slowly dimmed and became, inevitably, the moment of them saying goodbye instead.
"You look," she reached out and touched his cheek, damp from the rain, feeling the little bristle of his sideburn under her fingers. "You look like you could use a good cry."
The Doctor slumped, hands deep in his pockets, and just looked at her.
"Not for me," she amended. "But – I could give you one. It's not – not the bad sort of cry, really. I think it would do you a universe of good."
His mouth twisted a little, and then he managed to press out a smile.
"Maybe you're right."
"Well," Donna shook her head, letting the raindrops fly, "Eternity isn't heaven, you know. But it's sort of an – adjoining territory. There's a wall between eternity – and – some other place, where only the greatest go. And the Eternals know that, because they see them go through: the great of heart and spirit from all races. And when someone goes to that wall, and passes through, they never, ever come back."
She was trembling inside, knowing what she was about to tell him, knowing perfectly well how it would feel. "But y'see, sometimes? When people come to the wall, they leave a message, for those who might be coming after them. About, oh, waiting for people, or hoping to see them soon." She tilted her head to one side. "I couldn't really – look at the wall. Even the Eternals keep their distance from it. But I could see a – projection, of a copy, of a memory of the wall. And there was a message there. For you."
Her tears spilled over, as she leaned over and whispered the message into the Doctor's ear. Four words. And when she leaned back, his eyes were overflowing.
"Oh," he said, and then he couldn't say anything else but, "oh."
"You're welcome," she choked out.
He turned, and with quick steps went to the TARDIS, opened her doors, went to the control panel and took off, pressed his forehead to the control panel and bawled.
He cried: great lashings of tears that hurt like actual blows on his flesh. But she was right, she was so right, that most perfect Donna Noble, truly named: it hurt, and it was right, and it was what he needed.
He went on, through the Vortex, and cried.
Donna waited outside, listening to the last throbs of the departing TARDIS, wondering when she would see him again. See them, really. And when Wilf's hand came down on her shoulder, she turned to him with a smile.
"What's this, love, why are you crying?" he said.
She hugged him hard, and went inside with him, and explained in a few words about the wall, and the messages on it.
"And you gave the Doctor his message then? Was it – something private?"
"Oh, no. It was – written on the wall into Heaven, wasn't it? For everyone to see? And it wasn't very long, either. Just four words."
She swallowed, and rubbed her eyes with the back of her hand.
"Jamie sends his love."
And then she sobbed as well, sobbed and Wilf and her mother held her, and it was right.
She came home. She came back to gray pavements and blue skies, yellow sunlight and green grass fighting to grow. Back home. She embraced her family, all of them, hard.
She stayed in touch with the Doctor's other companions. Sarah Jane and her bright laughter; Martha and Mickey (she was the first to notice how they seemed to pay attention to each other when the three of them met, and she smiled inside and left a little early, to give them time to talk). And when she couldn't meet people face to face, she was always ready to phone them.
She was talking to Jack one day, and suddenly noticed how laboured his breathing was. He didn't sound ill, though.
"Jack," she stopped walking and ducked her face against her phone, lowering her voice, "what are you doing?"
"What do you think," he purred. "I'm praying."
"Oh, right." Praying to the God of Blood, of course, in the most literally hydraulic method available. "Most people pray with both hands, you know."
"Well, I could put you on speaker."
"Mr. Harkness."
She could almost hear him straighten at her tone. "Yes, ma'am?"
"I want you to get your hand out of your pants, finish this conversation and hang up. And then, then...then I want you to call me at home. Tonight. Elevenses. You see, Wilf has a webcam now."
"Ah." A world of promise in that sound. "Be seeing you, then."
"Just look at this," Donna's new boss said, furiously waving a newspaper under her nose too fast to read. "Just look at it!"
The rest of the staff bent their heads over their computers or their sewing machines and looked busy. It was a bridal shop, and Donna had been hired to help them adapt a notoriously balky new software package to their needs. And while she'd been at it, she'd made a few suggestions.
"You did this," he blustered on. "You told Annette to add this little concealed pocket to the dress, and then you hid a fiver in it! A fiver! And now this bride's in the paper, blathering that we give free money away!"
Donna took the paper out of her boss' shivering hands, and read it at a glance. The bride's car had broken down, and the chauffeur's phone hadn't been working, but she had found the fiver and hailed a cab and made it to the church on time. Just like in the songs.
She looked up at her boss with a smile. "She is in the paper, that's right. One hundred percent right. In fact, she's got the entire page to herself, and I must say, the dress looks great from that angle - really does a wonder for that chest of hers, don't it? - and there's the name of your shop."
"And?" he sneered.
"And you've just got yourself a full-page advert in this paper, very near the front, for a fiver. And considering who she's married to, it's likely to be picked up by the wire services."
He took back the paper, and read the name of the groom, and gulped.
"Would you like me stop by the bank on the way back from lunch, and get some crisp new bills?" she suggested sweetly.
"That," he ground his teeth. "that won't be necessary."
He went back to his desk, but by the end of the week he was convinced: the shop was booked solid with orders, copies of the photo had gone round the world, and there was even talk of a news report for the telly.
Donna was perfectly happy not to take credit, even while the seamstresses told her she was knocking herself down.
"If it keeps one bride from havin' to run round asking passing strangers for help," she said smoothly, packing up her desk on the last day, "it'll be worth it."
So Donna went on to her next job, and the next one. Nothing permanent, not yet, but she invested some of her salary into certain stocks, and rolled some of those earnings over into other long-term investments. She wrote a book about money management that didn't sell very well (she ended up releasing it for free on the Web, and made more off tips than she had in royalties), and a rather smutty fantasy novel that made ten times that.
She frightened her mother, sometimes: when she found her daughter typing faster than the eyes could follow, or suggesting they buy some knick-knack in a curio shop that turned out to be a valuable antique - and then Donna would slow down, take some time off between jobs, spend times just talking and gossiping and laughing.
Wilf was never frightened of her, and she loved him for it.
Then she got a very interesting inquiry….
"A think tank," said Mr. Cley, "is only as good as its glass is clear. Don't you agree, Miss Noble?"
Donna blinked at him, tall and perfectly dressed, his grey hair starkly outlined by the sunlight. He was the brightest thing in the ultra-slick, ultra-expensive office in a very expensive London building. Except for herself, of course, in a very nicely cut suit with just a hint of red in it to bring out her hair.
"Clear as in transparency of operations, processes, results? Everything out in the open, ready for review?" That would be the ideal, of course.
"Exactly. Exactly. Without the light, the whole system breaks down. But instead of murky water, you get murky minds. People following some cherished idea over and over again, hashing it down until it's useless, and blotting out any new ones. People who spend their time bickering instead of actually getting work done.
"I'm a very wealthy man, and I've devoted a portion of my wealth to setting up think tanks all over the world, to nourish new ideas. Their successes have been steady, but as they mature, they seem to stagnate. They need to be looked over, shaken up."
Donna twitched one eyebrow (the old Donna would have raised both). "Wash the windows?"
He narrowed his eyes at her. "Pretty much, yes. You're just the sort of person they won't be expecting."
"And what makes you think that I can keep up with all these bottled-up thinkers of yours?"
He tilted his head. "I read your finance book – it's clear that you have a good analytical mind. You have some very interesting recommendations in your resume. And I have other information sources as well."
If he was willing to admit that, then she was practically as good as hired. She decided to try just a tiny push back for information.
"Were there any other reasons, Mr. Cley?"
He stood and went to the window, looking out at it; the sunlight made the lines in his face look deeper, but only increased his overall aura of strength.
"Do you believe in dreams?"
"As in dreams being real? No." Psychic projections, maybe. Visions of other futures, other pasts – were not really dreams, now were they?
"I think of them as random number producers. A boil of images in our heads every night, which we can use as a mirror, bouncing our thoughts off in other directions...I dreamed of a red bird, and everywhere the bird went there was a little feather, that burst into flame. And the fire didn't consume, it gave light."
Donna kept her face in its standard that's-interesting expression, but inside she was sending a very rude thought at a certain white-clad Eternal who seemed to delight in sending her these little presents from afar. Still.
Still.
But it was the job of her dreams, really. Travel the world, meet new and exciting minds, influence them, guide them, show them how much higher they could fly.
Change the world, for the better.
NOTES ON THE TALE:
One of the most frustrating parts of writing an alternate universe is that you are often running some distance in time behind the 'real' timeline. In this story, I had Davros and his Eternal companions 'cut through' into this dimension.
The Eternals are from the Fifth Doctor episode 'Enlightenment'; Davros became an Eternal in my story "Doctor Who and the Exodus of the Daleks" with the Fifth Doctor as his opponent/accomplice.
Esselle is, in fact, the dreaded female Original Character; there are no female Kaleds in the original 'Genesis of the Daleks' from which Davros, Nyder and Ravon hail.
Chapter 4: 'I must self-exterminate. But I have no orders. But I must, I must' – a little Robot Monster homage.
Chapter 7 - "Who trusts?" He said those words as though they were an absolute, something that could not be questioned – a nod to "The Dosadi Experiment" by Frank Herbert.
Chapter 8 - The sword that Esselle beat Rose bloody with was part of the Rite of Ascension that made Esselle an Eternal; it would also have been used to cut the portal between dimensions in Chapter 1.
Chapter 10 – Donna of course knows very well the embarrassment of not having any pockets in one's wedding dress.