In the place that resembled Chiswick, but wasn't, Donna walked along the pavement her cheeks damp with tears. Though none of it was real, and Donna knew it, keeping calm and carrying on was more difficult than she had ever imagined. As she walked away from her parent's home she knew the man that looked like her father was dying on the kitchen floor with no-one to hold his hand. Every time she tried to push the thought to the back of her mind it surged back, a wave on a beach, washing the sand away from beneath her.

"Donna, I'm sorry, but you need to focus." The Doctor's voice, urgent and concerned, echoed in her ear.

"Shut it, Spaceman," she replied. "I'll do this my way."

The portion of the Doctor that was in her mind withdrew and Donna was alone in her thoughts. She stumbled along another street until she reached a second house, red brick from gravel drive to the slate roof. At the white UPVC door she lifted her hand, rapping twice on the stained glass pane. From inside came shuffling sounds, moccasins on carpet. The Yale lock twisted, the door opened. Wilfred Mott stood before her, wrapped up in a thick knitted sweater, mittens on his hands.

"Donna!" he cried out, a delighted smile creasing wrinkled cheeks. "What are you doing here love? I just got back from the stall..."

The man who was not her grandfather, but was a perfect replica to the last freckle on his face, saw the tears in her eyes. Reaching out he pulled her into a hug and she buried her face in his woolly shoulder, needing to believe, if only for a moment, he was real.

"Oh, Donna love, what's happened?"

Donna struggled against a sob, and he hurried her indoors. Warm air filled the house. A fire, freshly stoked, burned in the living room and in the kitchen the stove top kettle whistled.

Falling onto the old leather sofa, Donna dried her eyes on her sleeve. Inside her head she could feel the Doctor's frustration but ignored it. If there was any chance she could find her way back to the TARDIS Donna knew it could only come when she had control of her emotions.

Wilf brewed tea, placed two mugs on the hearth and took the seat next to his granddaughter. "Do you want to tell me about it, sweetheart?"

"Don't call me that," Donna's eyes flashed with anger. "This flaming game of yours… it's sick. You can make yourselves look like people I love as much as you like, but I will never believe you."

The Wilf duplicate adopted a look of injury. Donna shrugged it off.

"Don't pretend," she continued in a dull monotone. "It's insulting."

"Alright then," Wilf's hand dropped to his side. "I'm sorry, Donna."

A withering stare bore into the old man's blue eyes. Donna's jaw was set, teeth clenched.

"If you were truly sorry you would stop this," Donna sniped back. "The Aethini wouldn't know contrite if it turned around and bit you in the combined backside. Is this why the Time Lords locked you in those spheres? Did you mess with their heads too?"

Wilf's eyes flashed yellow. When he spoke the voice had changed, lowering into a tone she did not recognise.

"There was a war between our people," said the image of Wilfred Mott. "A disagreement over the terms of our existence grew… explosive. Some wished to adopt corporeal form, join together to create flesh bodies, other's wished to remain individual, operating as a cloud and in consciousness. The division caused conflict, and ultimately civil war."

"The other lot said there wasn't a war," Donna argued, hearing the Doctor say the same words in her head.

"Their terminology differed," his reply was slow. "They saw it as genetic cleansing."

Nausea rose in Donna's stomach and she felt the Doctor bristle.

"We could have helped," Donna stared at him. "If you'd just told us what was happening."

The man who was not Wilfred Mott shook his head, sadness filled his amber eyes. "We could not trust a Time Lord. We appealed for their help and were betrayed. Captured and held in the spheres for thousands of years.

"So you used us instead."

"It was unfortunate. Not all of us believed it was right, but the Elders… we were in their hands. It seems they were wrong in their assessment of the Doctor." The old man stood with stiff, uncomfortable movements, flexing his legs just as her grandfather would after sitting for too long.

"We could still try…"

His head shook and a faint shimmer of amber light rippled across his hand. "Too late for that."

"What do you mean?" The nausea made Donna light headed, and though the man before her was not her grandfather she could not bear to see him devoured as Ebun had been. "There's still time."

"You have been used as a trojan horse," he said with a wry smile. "There is no going back now."

"But…"

The old man smiled at her with her grandfather's lips and his sad, sad eyes. "I don't want you to see this. So you stay in here, by the fire. I'll pop over the road to Mrs Maitkin's and buy you a little time."

He turned to leave, hesitated, and stepped back, planting a kiss on her forehead which Donna accepted in a stunned silence.

"I know what you need to do, Donna, sweetheart, and you don't need any distractions. Save yourself, and that wonderful Doctor. The universe needs you both. We are old and tired, and our time has passed."

Before Donna could find her voice her would-be grandfather hurried into the hall. As he crossed the road, the front door swung shut, Yale lock clicking into place behind him. Pushing away the knowledge that across the street the man who looked like her gramps was disintegrating into a cloud of amber dust Donna took a shuddering breath and stared at the fire.

The Doctor's voice whispered in her mind, "These illusions are different from before. They are linked to your memories. Your perception of the people you love has changed the way they interact. It's like he was bound to respond to you like Wilf, he had to tell you the truth. He felt the need to protect you."

"If I wanted an explanatory lecture, I'd have asked." She growled at him, using anger to cover a surge of homesick sadness. "This needs to end. I can't… I don't think I can take much more."

"Then you need to try again," he replied. "Time is running out."

The nagging fear in her stomach agreed with the Doctor and though she said nothing, she knew he could feel it as well. With a sigh Donna stripped off her wet cardigan and, taking a blanket from the pile beside the sofa, wrapped herself in the fleece fabric.

Flames licked the black coals in the grate. Flashes of blue fire leapt from coal brickettes to warm the cheaper slack above. As the shivering stopped, Donna took a long, shaky breath and slid from the sofa to sit cross legged on the rug. She reached her hands to the heat and rubbed them together. Ice fingers ran through her skin and into her bones. Numb now, in every respect, she allowed the cloud of nothingness slip over her brain. She needed not to think, not to feel.

The fire crackled. Donna closed her eyes, focused on the sounds, and thought of nothing but the cool blue light of the TARDIS console hoping for a beacon to see her home.

The Doctor groaned as he regained consciousness. Every cell in his body ached. He lay in a curled ball of pinstripes and smoke. Feet pressed against one wall, head against another, knees and back against two more. Experimentally he wriggled his fingers, the sonic screwdriver dropped from his rigid grasp, clattering on the floor. The sound hurt.

A burnt electrical smell hung in the air. Sinking from the high ceiling, a cloud of thick smoke loitered above the floor. He inhaled and choked on the fumes, dragging himself upright using the walls as a brace. The world swam and his eyes streamed.

Wiping the tears from his face he studied the cell with a detached sense of self-satisfaction. He had forced the energy into a feedback loop, rendering the walls inert and safe to touch. It was unfortunate he had only had the idea as he was being electrocuted, but he had survived, almost unscathed. He examined his trainers, the soles had developed holes.

Despite the lack of energy in the walls had survived intact. The transparent panels were still in place, a hairline fracture in the corner of one seemed to be his only hope of breaking free. He retrieved the sonic screwdriver from the floor and clicked it twice before pointing it at the crack.

"If I can manipulate the structure of walls at the point of damage, I might be able to shatter the cohesion between the cells and open a doorway."

He blinked, realising he was talking to himself, and shrugged. The sonic screwdriver whirled but neither the rotation of settings nor the tapping it against his hand made any difference to the dimensions of the only flaw in the cell. With no other tools at his disposal the Doctor summoned up the courage and energy to punch the fracture line with his fist. With the limited swinging range for his arm it was hard to achieve any real power. He cried out in pain as the impact of his attack shot through his knuckles and up his arm, making no dent on the wall. Violence was not the answer.

He shook out his injured hand and nursed it against his lips for a few minutes before reaching into his pockets to see what other items he may have to aid his escape. Failing that, he would settle for something to keep boredom at bay. His trouser pockets produced a range of unhelpful items. Paperclips, the wing nut from a wind up giraffe he had been trying to fix for a week, wrappers from sweets he had tried two or three stops ago and a long piece of string which could, at a push, make a cat's cradle. Disappointed he reached for his jacket pockets. There was something bulking in the left seam, something in a bag. He pulled at it and the package slipped into view, the contents tipping onto the floor with a metallic clatter. It was the necklace that Donna had used to bring him out of the globe and back to the reality of the town.

He stared at it for a moment. The item was present in both realities, did that make it a constant? A tangible item? He crouched beside it and poked the silver chain with the end of his sonic.

"What are you?" he asked the chain. "Trans-dimensional shift enabled artefact? Psychic link to a specific place in space time? Garish silver chain left by someone's grandma with added hocus pocus?"

He flipped the sonic screwdriver and scanned the chain. "Whatever you were you don't have much power left, not enough to get me out of here. But, if I'm very clever, I can use your residual power to generate a hole in the illusion big enough to allow the TARDIS to break through."

The Doctor did his best to make himself more comfortable and started flipping through the settings on the sonic screwdriver searching for just the right harmonic to harness the chain's energy.

Fear held Donna's eyes locked closed. Frozen through to the bone, her teeth chattered, and she knew she was no longer sitting by the image of her grandfather's fire. Her throat was tight, and her heart ached, but she knew the Doctor depended on her. Taking a deep breath and forced open her eyelids. A dull blue light filtered up the walls and a gentle presence reached out to her mind, seeking to sooth and reassure. She was lying on a hard surface, staring up into a great arch of knotted organic matter that was a familiar and welcome sight. Donna's hands dropped from her stomach and onto metal grating, fingers locked through the holes, clinging to reality in desperate relief. It was the TARDIS, it had to be. Inside her mind the Doctor's voice reassured her.

"You've done it, Donna," he said. The tenderness in his tone made her eyes sting.

Donna struggled to her feet, tripping on something soft and dark that lay on the floor beside her. She looked down to see the Doctor's comatose body lying on the deck.

"We never left the ship."

"No," there was no surprise in his tone. "We've been in a dream world. That would explain a great deal."

"Do you mean none of it is real?"

"What is reality?" he countered, his tone dark. "My mind is being destroyed from the inside. We were both dying slowly without water or sustenance. Is that real enough for you?"

Donna bent and rested her icy fingers on the Doctor's neck looking for a pulse. His skin was warmer than hers and with the slow double beat detected she straightened and moved over to the console. With no energy left to speak she stood silent and waited for the Doctor's consciousness to take over. It took a moment for him to realise what she was doing.

"I can't control your body," he told her. "I'm sorry. You have to do this."

A soft sigh escaped her lips, and she nodded.

Step by step the Doctor talked her through the button pressing, dial turning and switch flipping. Though she could sense his enthusiasm Donna did not share it. Her mind was as numb as her body, she was simply going through the motions.

"Last one," he told her. "Turn that lever. Hold on to it, no matter what. It will resist. We've turned off most of the safety protocols to broadcast the oscillated sound and extend the TARDIS shields. I've had to change the plan a bit, seeing as my body is actually in here, not out there. I, well we, have done a scan of our bodies, yours and mine and..."

He caught a glimpse of her gaunt reflection in the display screen and paused.

"Ah… yes, sorry, a bit complicated. But essentially I have conducted an internal scan of the ship and of the life forms in it. You and I have Aetheni inside our minds. You only have a few, and they aren't thriving in the human brain. My body is teaming with them."

Donna's hand grasped the lever and pulled it towards her, ignoring the Doctor's explanation. All she wanted was for this to end. The lever, as the Doctor predicted, resisted. The consol hissed and steamed, a siren wailed. Pulled from her exhaustion by the sounds, Donna put her strength into holding the lever. From inside the console a fierce booming sound rattled the metal floor. A flash of light burst from the centre, a brilliant golden glow that Donna could not shut out even with her eyes screwed shut. The light spun through her head and millions of particles of gold shivered in the surrounding air. As they moved on she saw the same cloud swarmed around the Doctor his inert body filled with the light.

The lever fought harder against Donna's grip and in her mind she heard the Doctor telling her to hang on. The TARDIS shook and squealed as it started the dematerialisation sequence, writhing as it fought for release. Using a movement she had no intention of performing again, Donna kicked off the handbrake and allowed the ship to take flight.

The golden glow of the Aetheni swept out of the Doctor's body. He did not stir and the alien molecules swirled in circles, at war with itself. As the great swathe of golden light swung towards the central column, the Doctor's voice in Donna's head screamed at her to let go.

The lever flew from her fingers and the Aetheni froze.

From the floor where she had fallen, Donna stared at the motionless cloud as it hung, paralysed, in mid flight. Like a dust storm, microscopic particles in vast numbers coloured the air in a sandy haze. Donna felt the Doctor's awe as he observed the creatures and somewhere inside she shared a little of his wonder. Looking away, her eyes came to rest of the Doctor's physical form which lay, prone, on the deck. With no energy left to stand Donna crawled to his side and was about to shake him by the lapels when his eyes popped open and his dry lips broke into a broad grin.

With a bound the Doctor was on his feet. Two energetic steps threw him to the console where he swung the display screen into place, scanning the readout and adjusting a dial. Satisfied, he turned back to Donna, beaming lips splitting his face in two.

"Donna Noble, you are officially brilliant!" he declared, bouncing on the balls of his feet. "Breaking through their projections, pulling your consciousness from their existence. That… that takes talent."

He swung back to the console and tweaked another setting. Donna's shoulders sagged and her head dropped to her chest as he turned away, the effort to hold back tattered emotions sapping the last of her spirit.

"Of course, if I'd known we were inside a contemporaneous sphere before the Aethini addled my cognitive functionality I'd have known our bodies were still in the TARDIS," he continued as he pointed the sonic screwdriver behind him and scanned the cloud whilst simultaneously adjusting controls and frowning at the display. "Because now my brain is repairing, I remember that contemporaneous spheres aren't designed to contain physical matter. Dreamworlds are dangerous places. I try my best to avoid them. It always gets complicated..."

He walked around the cloud, examining it from every direction with glasses whipped from an inside pocket and eyebrows locked in considered scrutiny.

"...but it worked out in the end. You got back here, boosted the TARDIS shields, ran a modified decontamination programme..."

Finally his enthusiasm gave way to observation and his stopped mid sentence, seeing for the first time Donna's hunched shoulders and crumpled form. The grin slipped from his lips.

"Donna?" his mouth, suddenly dry, found it difficult to speak her name.

When she didn't turn he placed his sonic on the console and walked to her. Dropping to his knees he lifted her chin with delicate fingers until he could see her dulled eyes.

"We did it," he told her. "You did it. We're safe now."

She turned her head from his caress and blinked in slow motion.

"Yeah, we did it," she agreed with no hint of celebration, adding with a sigh. "Take this thing out of my head."

"Thing?" he frowned, "Oh! The piece of my consciousness. I nearly forgot."

He raised his hands to her face and reached into her mind. With the Aethini gone he slipped into a state of calm and the part of him they had shared crossed back into his head. He sat back on his heels feeling it settle back into his mind. Donna struggled to her feet and turned away. She needed to be alone. Though she may have succeeded in returning to the TARDIS guilt sat heavy on her heart. She'd left a man to die alone, delayed her second attempt at escape because she was too upset to try again. Shame heated her pale cheeks.

"It'll just take a minute for the effects to wear off. You'll start to feel yourself again soon," he reassured her. "And in a few seconds I'll get a download…"

He closed his eyes as a wave of emotions poured through him from the fragment that Donna and he had shared. His eyes widened, his face dropped, a hard lump of pain lodged in his throat. Unable to walk away Donna kept her back to him, knowing from his sudden silence he knew what had happened.

She heard him move, stand, and cross the deck, Converse soles slapping on the metal grate. His hands rested on her shoulder and she felt tears trickle across her cheeks as her eyes closed. Turning her to face him the Doctor gathered Donna into his arms and held her close against his chest.

"We were played, Donna," he spoke gently, smoothing the hair at the back of her neck. His eyes burned and his brows knitted together. "Played by both sides. They used you to get to me. They needed my knowledge to unlock the spheres, but they couldn't risk me remembering what the Aethini were. So they tricked us into trying to save a fictional world from an invisible enemy. Used our consciousness to bleed from one sphere to another. But I promise you, Donna. They will never have the chance to do that to anyone else. Never again. I swear."

Donna's arms reached around his back and she returned his embrace with a bone crushing hug of appreciation. She held the embrace a moment longer than normal then, with a sharp intake of breath she broke away, stepped back and wiping salt water from her cheeks. The Doctor smothered the anger in his face but his eyes smouldered.

"What are we going to do with them?" she asked, her voice cracked as she spoke but she held her head up high and grit her teeth.

A dark desire for retribution clouded the Doctor's face. The emotions he shared with Donna were raw, and his anger at the pain inflicted on his companion snarled in his voice. "I can destroy them."

"No!" Donna cried, surprised by her own reaction. "Can't you contain them somehow?"

"They broke free before." His answer was curt. "I'm not risking that again."

Donna stared from the frozen Aetheni to the Doctor. "There must be another option."

With a frown he strode back to the control panels and ran his fingers along a series of switches, the combination set the Aethini cloud aglow. "There is one place they can go and cause no more trouble."

Donna's tired face looked up to him, "Where?"

"Inside the TARDIS." He turned the display screen to Donna and pointed at the illuminated diagram. "The heart of the TARDIS is capable of absorbing and containing the spheres. They will be trapped, alive, existing as they do now. Never able to leave."

"And the TARDIS won't be damaged?"

He shook his head, then shrugged, "She may have indigestion for a week, but trust me, she's absorbed far worse in her time."

His hand hovered over a button, fingers itching. It was far from the prison the Aethini deserved.

"Wait."

The Doctor raised his hand a fraction, and his scowl deepened. "What is it?"

Donna straightened her shoulders and squared her chin.

"Let me do it."

The Doctor stared at her, his lips pressed in a thin line.

"Donna…"

"I don't want to do this because of my Dad," said Donna, interrupting his objection. "Not for what they did to me, or to you, because that would be vengeance. I've seen that look in your eyes Doctor, and I don't want to be that person."

The Doctor's hand wavered and fell away from the controls.

"I want to end this to save anyone else from suffering. Piece by piece they were killing us. Using our compassion, our humanity, our friendship against us. I want to show them what it is to be human. I want to show them mercy."

Donna words faded into silence and the Doctor raised his lowered eyes to meet hers. The anger in his face had been replaced with humility, the fire in his eyes quashed and humbled. With the smallest of nods he turned an open palm above the button and he companion moved to face him.

Her shaking hand extended over the console. She cast a last look back at the Aetheni, admiring their beauty, then lowered her fingers, depressing the button. There was a faint click, a hiss, and the Doctor swooped her away from the console, back to the guardrail, his hand on her arm, keeping her at a safe distance.

From inside the core of the machine came a frantic churning. The central column burned brighter and part of the control desk opened, exposing a brilliant orange light. The Doctor's hand linked with Donna's as, with a piercing wail, a lasso of light captured the Aethini and dragged them into the heart of the ship. Around the room circuits and dials spun. Sparks of electricity popped, smoke, or perhaps steam, chuffed from the time rotor, and with a grinding of cogs the control panel groaned shut. The rotor stuttered, a low grumble vibrated the floor at their feet, and then everything went quiet.

Donna released a long held breath. "Is it over?"

The Doctor nodded. "It's over."

He gave her shoulder a squeeze before crossing back to the controls, flipping two switches and spinning a dial counter-clockwise.

"I'm taking us out of the time stream, don't want to over stretch the poor old girl while she digests her new components."

The Doctor gave Donna a broad smile and she found her lips curling in reciprocation.

"So we have time for that luxury holiday spa you promised me?" Donna fixed him with a hard stare. "Dream world or not, that's one promise I won't let you forget."

His fingers danced across the dials once more and a new image of a holiday brochure appeared on the screen. His eyes danced with excitement as he read the advertising speel.

"So, Donna Noble, how do you feel about a trip to Midnight?"

A/N:

That's all folks. I hope you enjoyed it right up to the end. I will writing some shorts in the next months and aim to post another multi-chapter story in the summer. Probably a 12/Donna reunion fic. If you would like to offer any words of encouragement, or suggestions for improvement, please do let me know. Be well.

CG