It was a cloudy, jam-packed Tuesday. She remembered that much, at least. She remembered how the sky had been gray as a ghost, and, later, how the bus station had been sweaty and filled with loads of chattering people with their overstuffed shopping bags and under-stuffed wallets. She'd gotten off early from work that day and had been halfway to her car, phone nestled beneath her chin and folders balanced in her arms, before she had realized it was her mum's day for the car anyway. Shaun was at work, her mum was out running her Tuesday afternoon errands, Gramps was at home, and so Donna found herself walking to the bus alone.
She didn't remember much from that day. In fact, she simply didn't remember much at all anymore.
She wasn't sure why. Usually, she tended not to ask, because to do so was like trying to catch a dust mote that fluttered just out of eyeshot. If her life ever felt sidetracked, she was too busy smiling at Shaun or laughing at the ridiculous nonsense of her office coworkers to notice. And when she did notice, it was in the handful of moments between sudden sleep and stark lucidity—and in those moments, she wondered how she could be so desperately happy and sad at the same time. How she could be so desperately desperate. She lay there and let beautiful, smeary, glorious color paint the backs of her eyelids, and then slink off to sleep as she did.
She didn't question why the old photos of Dad and Mum, of Nan and Gramps, made her fingers tremble when she wiped the dust off of them. Why it seemed to hurt somewhere past her heart and beyond the normal grief and nostalgia of her dad grinning back at her, frozen in time. A hole, somewhere deep in her bones that felt attuned to the universe, something weeping with all the force of the millions and billions of marbled planets and galaxies and blue gas and brilliant, brilliant suns. A something that made her rub her thumb over the label of the photographs and stare at the smudged ink like it should've at least held someone else's name, anything else's image.
Brilliant, it said, and she shivered.
She hated mismatched things, and yet a mismatched memory was just one of those things. Who was she, to recall some random day with as much gray as the black-and-white, forgotten happiness of her photographs?
But it was Tuesday, she knew. The sky was angry, the air was hazy, and, amongst red-faced strangers and dirty pavement, it could've just been the typical sludge of the week. On days like these, when she was tired and feeling just a little bit like a child, she found herself wishing just a sliver of natural blue sky would peek out. Maybe a little bit of warmth from the sun, because something about that gold—when she looked at it just right—sent a thrill through her to her toes. There were thousands of things that liked to do that to her—crawl into her mind, rattle around and make funny noises until she'd just look up, or look outside, or turn around, and then, by the time she inevitably did, there was nothing to look at. She was convinced they'd cluttered up her head, sometimes, even though that wasn't possible. Blue skies instead of dead, gray ones didn't do that; neither did snowy Christmasses instead of the bone-dry ones she'd seen her whole life.
She put all those things along with the dust motes of memory. Along with those strange, sweet, headachey days, when her head felt syrupy with someone else's thoughts and dreams. She'd look, now and again (because of course she would), but she never saw.
She had been walking a different route to the bus station, on that Tuesday, as that little part wished the clouds away. A back alley had crept by on her right, with a flash of blue that turned out to be wooden bins, covered in flaking paint like bruised skin, shoved in the shadows, left to rot. She did not see the other alley on her left, holding just a scrap of badly-concealed blue box that may or may not have been there at all.
Look, it said.
She didn't.
Instead, she simply thought. She had time, after all, and not a whole lot to remember.
She thought about Gramps. She thought about his love for stargazing, and let a smile tug at her lips as she thought of Saturday nights with him and his telescope. Sometimes, she wondered where that thirst for the worlds outside their own had come from, and if he'd given it to her as well. A curiosity, all wrapped up like a gift with a little bow, that made her buy astronomy magazines every now and then for no reason and then not be able to throw them away. They came in pairs, because she'd always buy two brands—one for her, one for Gramps. Because she hated mismatched things, things without their other half.
She pulled out the time-worn photo from her coat pocket that she'd stolen from one of her mum's photo albums, and stared at Gramps' young blue eyes, where the glittering love of stars had to already have been brewing by then. She thought of how something so clearly destined for the wide-open arms of the universe could look so whole when it was stuck here on boring old earth, stuck in a house on a hill, alone in its own way.
And she thought of Gramps without Nan. Mum without Dad. A telescope where no one was looking back.
She was in the middle of a crowd, just thinking, in the middle of a thousand, faceless people. But she turned when this suit shoulder jostled into hers, and found herself looking at the back of a man's profile. Looking at sticky-uppy brown hair that buzzed with an energy, that echoed with smeary colors and smudged ink and spoiled books.
He was still walking—hurrying, rather—off into the gray light.
Look down, that something said.
So she did.
"You're missing a shoe," she told him. She was staring down at a single, ratty, fire-engine red Converse. It looked so very small, and made her feel so very sad.
And when he turned, she saw brown eyes, too. Light eyes like the Gramps in the photograph had, yet dusty with something so much older.
Suddenly, all Donna could see was the lonely brilliance of a thousand suns.
She was already walking away by the time he had finished staring. She looked, but she never saw anyone looking back through the telescope, because maybe it was just too bright out there.
The Doctor looked down at both of his shoes, and wished he knew what to say.