Donna looks at the scenery just outside of the door to the TARDIS', then turns and backhands the Doctor's arm. "Really, Spaceman?" she barks, "I know that the navigation-systems work, you plonker! Am I really going to have to give you driving lessons?" she asks, trying to put as much of the disbelief she is feeling into her voice.
"What? No!" he responds indignantly, flinging his hands out in emphasis. "I have been flying Old Girl for over seven hundred years, Donna. I don't need lessons!" Donna doesn't believe that, doesn't think even he believes that. "Oh, really? Then maybe I should take over, because something keeps going wrong when you navigate!" she yells into his face. She then quickly steps back and into the TARDIS', hoping that neither of the men in her life notice the sudden flush across her cheeks and hears her hearts fluttering like mad over her proximity to the Doctor.
She stomps over to the main console, double checks the Time rotors, triple checks the coordinates that the Doctor has entered. The Doctor strides over and stands just a few steps back from her, arms crossed over his chest defensively. Donna ignores him, or tries to. The sudden awareness of her feelings has made this much harder than it should be, and there is at least a few mental processes keeping tabs on the Doctor at all times now. Actually, weren't they always there? She wonders to herself, and then pushes the thought as deeply into the recesses of her mind as she can.
Emotions were so much easier to deal with when she was just human, she contemplates sullenly, without centuries of repression in her baggage. It had been hard enough figuring out how to deal with the friendship she felt for Wilf, those first few months they travelled together. Dealing with this realisation was a hell of endless mortification.
"Donna, are you alright?" the Doctor asks softly, and walks over to stand beside her. She gives him a questioning look, then looks back at the readouts. "You've seemed a bit angry lately," he pauses for a moment "with me, I mean. More so."
She hates the self-doubt that seeps from her friend, and herself for putting it there. Donna fidgets for a moment, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, and then turns a somewhat strained smile on the Doctor. "I'm not angry with you, Doctor. I might be having a spot of trouble remembering how to handle emotions the Time Lord way." She explains, then turns her attention back to the console. "Well," she drawls in an attempt to divert his attention from the admission, "it looks like you've put in the right commands, so I really don't know why we aren't in Chiswick. Sorry about that." She says with a negligent flick of her hair, in an approximation of her usual tone.
He reaches out and places a hand on her shoulder. His dark eyes are serious when he speaks. "Why would you want to?" he asks in that tone of his that is both sympathetic and bewildered, and Donna loves him a bit more for it. She has no idea how to explain it to him, this odd and confusing swirl of emotions that the Time Lord in her wants to control, while the human she has been for thirty-some years wants to live. "Because I don't know how to do it the human way anymore, not with all these thought!" she exclaims, and turns away from him.
"Who am I, Doctor?" she asks him her voice trembling just slightly. "You are Donna, Donna Noble." He answers after a brief pause, clearly believing he is stating the obvious and no less bewildered now. "Am I? I was The Tinker for centuries before I was Donna Noble." She pauses, fighting to find the right words to express her confusion. "Everything was so much easier when I was just silly unimportant Donna, but I'm not anymore. I don't know who I am."
The Doctor looks at her as if she's lost her mind. "Donna, you were never unimportant." He says with conviction, placing both of his hands on her shoulders as if he is going to shake her. "You were never unimportant." He repeats, stressing 'never' heavily, his voice a little rough.
"You are Donna Noble, and you are The Tinker as well. Coming back from a chameleon arch after living under one for a while is hard, I know, but the person underneath was still you. At your core, you are just as much Donna Noble as the Tinker." He explains firmly. "The thoughts, the feelings, the memories, the coping mechanisms, they are real." She stares at him for a while, searching for any doubt in his face and finding none.
Before the silence can get awkward, he cracks a fond smile. "Trust me, I'm a Doctor." Donna returns the smile with a watery one of her own, then straightens and tells herself to pull herself together. "Well, enough with this chitchat, Spaceman." She says with a slight sniffle that she tries to hide by clearing her throat. "We might as well see where we've ended up this time." The Doctor offers up his arm, which Donna takes with a grin, and they stride back out of the door, arms linked.
Terry is poking at what looks like a pretty basic terminal just in front of where the TARDIS' is parked. It looks familiar, but for a minute she can't quite place it. Then her eye catches on to a metal plaque with a string of numbers, then a red digital calendar-clock.
Messaline. They are on Messaline.
The pit of her stomach doesn't drop out, but it is a near thing. It's been months since they lost Jenny, but the grief is still close to the surface, and Donna is having a hard time understanding why the Old Girl would bring them here. Surely she understands how hard this is on them, Donna wonders, eyes blankly looking at the glowing red numbers denoting the date. There is something tickling at the edge of her mind, her sense of personal time being battered by universal time. It hasn't been months since they were here, she realises with a pang. It has been mere minutes.
The Doctor is at her side, tense and unhappy. His eyes are fixed on the clock as if he can make it change- as if the sense of Time that makes them Time Lords can change the date. He is silent as a stone, even when they are approached by the colonists. They must have heard the TARDIS' re-materialise, thinks Donna, even as she greets them. There is only one way for her to answer their questions.
"We would like to attend Jenny's funeral." She says solemnly to the young man who speaks to them first, the same one Jenny had taken a liking to. He nods sadly and leads the procession back to the Theatre where they had left Jenny. Donna's hearts clench harshly at the sight of her lain out on a bier, still dressed in the green fatigues that she had been born, and died, in. The three of them walk over and stand at her side, silent and solemn in their grief. Terry has never seen her before, not really, but Donna can feel his stark sense of loss as he stands by his half-sister's side. He gently reaches out and rearranges a lock of blond hair, gentle as if he is afraid to disturb her slumbering form.
Perhaps rightly so. As soon as Terry's hand touches Jenny, her mouth falls open and releases a cloud of golden regenerative energy that should be frankly impossible. Terry freezes, hand still extended halfway between them, but the Doctor is moving a spilt second later, his Sonic Screwdriver flashing. He runs scan after scan in less than a minute, all the while muttering 'Impossible, impossible' under his breath. He turns to Donna with a frantic expression on his face. "She is trying to regenerate. Donna, I don't know how, but she is trying to regenerate." He says in a bewildered hopeful panic. Donna snaps out of her stupor, and brings out her Sonic to run her own scans. She gets the same results as the Doctor does, except... "I don't think she has enough energy, Doctor." She says faintly, eyes on the young woman who has started glowing faintly. Too faintly.
Tears are pooling freely in her eyes at this point, and a feeling of how utterly unfair this is to her friend. Without enough regenerative energy, all Jenny can do is burn up. It'll crush the Doctor, Donna knows, to lose her again, and like this. A cruel loss, giving hope and then taking it away in the same breath. The Doctor hasn't looked at her, still trying for a solution, his mutterings gone inaudible even for a Time Lord. "No, no, we can save her, Donna." He says suddenly in the tense quiet that has descended on the room, turning and meeting her eyes with a look that is so hopeful that Donna's hearts break a little. A few tears slip free of her control, but she nods anyway. "Alright. Tell me what to do." She agrees.
He claps his hands together, then gestures for Terry to step back. Their son does as he is bid, looking every bit as upset as Donna feels. There is a tiny glint in his eyes when Donna looks at him, as if his father's hope is enough to wake his own. The Doctor looks up at her, suddenly more serious than hopeful. "Remember how Terry was born?" he asks her, then continues before she can answer. "We need to do that again, a controlled release of regenerative energy into her system, like I did with the hand. She'll have to regenerate properly, her body has taken too much damage by the length of time she has been," he pauses and gestures wordlessly to the still form. "But we can do it, Donna. If we share it between us, we can save her." He says firmly, and clasps her hand in his, already glowing with the energy he is dredging up.
"Doctor, I don't remember how, not anymore. I've only regenerated once." She tries to explain in a desperate panic. He doesn't answer verbally, his mind surging against hers and pulling up the memory of the meta-crisis in blinding detail. Donna gasps, the small link between them suddenly growing at an exponential rate and filling her head with exactly what she needs to do. She follows his lead, and feels the burning sensation of a regeneration start at the tips of her fingers. The world is engulfed in a brilliant golden light.
The hand that the Doctor is clasping burns with the fire of Vesuvius, and for a moment Donna can't hold it in. The Doctor pulls her back from the edge of regenerating herself, and shows her how to do this, how to force it where they want it to go. It's not easy, not at all. It feels like trying to push back against a tsunami, but somehow they manage. The blinding golden light flows from them and into the still form on the bier. Jenny is engulfed completely is barely a moment. Donna keeps pouring energy into her for several moments before she feels the Doctor pull her back. 'That's enough, Donna.' He whispers mentally, the thought tinged with exhaustion.
She comes back to the present, her time sense telling her that barely thirty seconds have passed, to see Terry staring at them in what might be disbelief. Behind them, a group of colonists are bowing down to the ground as if in prayer.
The golden light around Jenny is slowly dispersing, leaving a clearly breathing Jenny behind. The first thing Donna notices about this new regeneration is that she is ginger, the same exact colour as Terry and herself. Her face looks almost exactly like it did, if rather covered in freckles where there had been pale skin before. Her nose is also slightly more aquiline that it was. Donna can't help but stare.
"She looks just like you." The Doctor says, a note of giddy relief and amazement in his voice. "Ginger, she's ginger!" he exclaims, and pulls Donna into an excited hug. Terry joins in on her other side, and the three of them stand there for a moment, looking down on their miracle.
