"Doctor? Doctor, can you hear me?" Donna called out gently in her mind.

There was no response, just the sense of that presence, curling itself away even tighter.

"Doctor, I know you're there." She heard an edge creep into her voice. "I know you don't want to come out, but we need you."

Nothing.

"Doctor!" The presence flinched, but didn't move away. She pressed forward. "Doctor, you pull yourself together right now! We don't have time for this!" And I'm not exactly comfortable poking around in your brain she didn't add. Having a head full of Timelord facts and figures was a far cry from floating around this maelstom of emotions. "Come on Doctor..." Here kitty-kitty...

"I can hear that you know," said a distant, but distinctly irritated voice.

"Doctor!" She blundered forward in excitement. "Doctor, you can hear me!"

"You're not exactly whispering, are you?"

"Sorry," she tried to think quieter. "Can you come out now? Jack's found us some shelter, some sort of cave. It's a little better in here-- well, out of the wind anyway."

She felt him pulling away again. "No, no no." She scrambled after him. "None of that now. Come on out, come with Donna."

"I can't," came the curt reply.

"So you're just going to lay here and die-- again?" She felt him flinch away from her words. "Yeah, I know about that-- I know all of it, remember? I know what happened here, what it did to you. But that was in the past. You, you of all people know, you did what you had to do then. And now, nothing can change that. You can't undo it, you can't bring anyone back by killing yourself-- and us along with you." He didn't reply, but she could feel his defenses weakening. She was getting through to him. "You can't save them-- but you can help save Jack, and Martha, and me..."

"It doesn't matter."

"What? What doesn't matter?"

"Saving you-- any of you. You all leave me." A wave of anger rolled over her. "One way or another. You all leave me alone."

"Is that what this is about? You're sulking about in your own head because you think we leave you? You have got to be kidding me."

"You move on, or grow old, or die... always, sooner or later, I'm alone again." He paused, and then continued in a casual, almost conversational tone (but she could still feel the boiling emotions just below the surface). "You know how long I spent running away from my people? Hundreds of years. Dozens of your lifetimes spent trying to get away from them. And now, now I'd do just about anything to bring one of them back. Any one of them."

"Well, right here, right now, you've got me instead. And you've got Martha and Jack-- both of them digging through a wall of rubble with their bare hands while you sulk around feeling sorry for yourself."

"Feeling sorry for-- Donna! I destroyed two civilizations, destroyed countless lives-- my friends, my family, my planet. I hardly think that--"

"Put it aside," she said simply. "Lock it away, bury it. Do whatever you always do to keep going. The universe still needs it's Doctor."

"But I--"

"You'll do what has to be done." With that she "turned" and started to draw away, no pausing to see if he was following or not. She pulled herself away from his mind, suddenly feeling his cold hand in hers again, the rough rocks against her back, the ash in her throat. She sat up blinking. Jack and Martha had disappeared into the rubble, a small pile of debris marking their progress. The Doctor lay as she had last seen him, still and ashen. She sighed in frustration. Then his right foot gave a small kick. His left hand twitched. His shoulders shook. He sat up suddenly, sending up a small poof of dust, and looked around.

He turned towards her. "There you are," he said with a nod, then hopped to his feet and offered her a hand up. "So, what have we got here?"

"Doctor! Are you OK?"

"Oh, I'm all right," he said dismissively.

She shook her head. "No, you're not all right. You're not all right at all." she said. He swallowed, not meeting her eyes. "But you will be. All that Time and all that Space-- you'll be OK again." She cleared her throat, only partly because of the dust and ash. "But first, let's get us out of here."

"Donna!" It was Martha, her head poking out of the rubble. "Doctor!" She smiled in obvious relief. "Hurry, over here. We found something!"

The Doctor gave Donna a small smile and took her hand. Together they picked their way over the rocky ground to the wall of rubble. Donna almost had to crawl to fit through the small tunnel they had cleared, but it wasn't far. On the other side of the wall was a room, larger than the space they'd left behind, illuminated by a weakly flickering yellow light somewhere above.

"Well, look at that," said the Doctor appreciatively when he popped out behind her. The room-- or what was left of it-- must have been some sort of storage space. The walls were lined with cabinets and closets, the metal warped and blackened from the heat of the fires that once raged above. No one could have survived, thought Donna, but some things might have.

Martha had to hold herself back from running over to the Doctor. He was up and about, looking around with his usual curiosity, but there was something undeniably fragile about him. She saw that Jack too was keeping his distance, only acknowledging the Doctor's recovery with a nod and a smile. Jack had been going through the storage spaces, methodically selecting bits and pieces of likely looking technology from the twisted piles of wires and tubes. She thought she recognized one or two components from things she had seen at UNIT, but the vast majority meant nothing to her.
The Doctor and Donna both made appreciative "oohing" and "ahhing" noised over the collection, holding up the occasional piece for inspection in the dim light.

"Jack," she asked. "Why can't we just use your Time Agent wrist thing? Like we did to get back from Utopia?"

He shook his head. "That was a long-shot with three of us, it would never work with four. Even," he added, "if the Doctor was so kind as to unbreak it again."

"Yeah," agreed Donna, "but with some of this and your bracelet--" She uncerimoniously grabbed Jacks wrist and unstrapped the device.

"Hey!" he protested, but let her take it. "By the way-- it's not a bracelet, it's a Time Agent Wrist Strap. There's a difference." He watched the Doctor and Donna lean over it with the sonic screwdriver humming away. "And I want that back-- in one piece!"

He wandered over to Martha. "There they go again," he said, nodding at the Doctor and Donna.

Martha shrugged. "Must be nice for him to have someone he can talk to like that," she offered. "And they don't have a lot of time together. If-- when-- we get out of here, he's going to have to take it all away from her again, isn't he?"

"Yep," said Jack sadly. "Just what he needs-- to loose someone again." He leaned back against the wall and drapped an arm around her. "You know what's ironic?"

"What?"

"I'm about the only person in the universe likely to outlive him-- that could actually stay with him forever. And he doesn't want to have anything to do with me. Barely tollerates me." He pursed his lips. "I think that's proof enough that the universe must have a terrible sense of humor."

She smiled. "He did ask you to come with us."

"Naw," he waved the though away, "that was just because he knew I'd already made up my mind to stay with Torchwood."

"Do you think he'll ever find someone?" she asked, stealing a glance at the ring on her finger.

"Well, he has time on his side."

"Haw!"
"Haw!"

Jack raised an eyebrow. "I think that's our cue." Martha started to laugh, but it quickly turned into a cough. "Come on, let's get out of here."