It's been quite a while since I've updated this story. I do apologize. I never mean to keep people waiting for months on end, it just sort of works out that way! Thank you for your support and I hope you enjoy.
Donna sifted through her luggage with growing confusion. How was it that she'd forgotten these? She hadn't seen any of them since before marrying Shaun. She cleared up her own confusion by assuming she must have failed to unpack on her last bit of travels. The luggage might have been in storage all of this time and Shaun probably decided it was fine enough for her to still use.
Something else was bothering her. Sure there was the crazy man and his strange toys like that big thing in the middle of the lobby that looked more like something a kid threw together for fun than anything that might do with medical needs.
But what could Shaun have possibly been thinking, having her carted off to this place? Shaun knew her better than that. He wasn't a leader, he was a follower. He never would have considered sending her here if someone else hadn't convinced him to.
There was no way her grandfather would have done. He wanted what was best for her, but he also let her lead her own life and wouldn't have done any of this without her permission without some coercion from someone else. She would have blamed her mother, but doubted it. She'd been wanting her to go to a real clinic for study. Not some nutty place that seemed to have more problems than solutions to it.
She pulled on a sapphire blue outfit that offset her bright ginger locks and admired herself in a nearby mirror.
The clothes still fit perfectly. If anything, they were more slimming than ever before. She turned this way and that, relieved to have not lost her figure. She brushed a hand through her hair and saw her skin was abnormally pale.
Leaning in to peer into her own eyes, a sudden sharp pain blasted it's way through her temples. "Oh!" She gasped and grasped at her head with both hands.
The pain was so all encompassing. Donna couldn't focus on a single other thing. She closed her eyes and leaned forward. Her forehead rested against the mirror frame as she did her best to cope with the literally blinding migraine.
"My God, What's...Happening..." She mumbled breathlessly. The normally robust woman was at the mercy of something she couldn't see or fight.
Just as quickly as the pain came, it subsided with a white flash. Taking a deep breath, she lowered her hands from her head, to the face in the mirror. She pulled her head up and stood back, straightening her shoulders.
She could report it to that Williams Pond person, but she wasn't so sure he could be of help any more than anyone else had been so far. Then again, he did have that unique way of easing her headaches. What was that about anyway? Some weird homeopathic thing? He also came over as very confident.
She was about to make her way back down to him when someone spoke. She turned toward another corridor with a curious blink. It sounded like a muffled voice coming from a short distance away. She couldn't make the voice out or even if it was male or female.
Maybe there were other people here, after all. She hadn't spotted anyone else so far. Other people would be a relief. She headed in the direction of the voice. She couldn't quite make out what they were saying, but it was definitely someone talking.
"Hello?" She called, following the voice up and around the weird corridors.
The voice quieted as if the person heard her, then continued on. They probably couldn't make out what she was saying any more than she could understand them, she reasoned.
She found herself facing another of those sliding doors. She wasn't too sure how to open or close them, but just as she was wondering and about to knock, the door slid open. She stepped inside. It slid shut behind her, closing her into complete darkness.
Donna wasn't worried. Dark didn't scare her. She felt along the wall for a light switch, but could find nothing. "Hello? Anyone here?"
Where had the person gone? The voice just stopped as soon as she stepped inside. "I'm Donna. Donna Temple-Noble. If I'm bothering you, I can leave?" She offered, straining to make out anything in the dark. Nothing.
No one replied. She sighed and gave up on trying to find a light switch. She turned back to the door.
"Come on then, you must be automatic or something 'cause you opened before on your own." She told it. She tugged at it, trying to open it. It wouldn't budge.
She knocked on it. And knocked again. "Hey, anyone out there?" Of course, no answer. "Where is that Williams guy?" She muttered, pulling at the door some more.
This was useless! She wasn't panicked about being stuck in a dark room alone. She just didn't want to be. There was nobody here so it was pointless to stay, and who wanted to be stuck in the dark with nothing to do anyway?
She started banging on the door loudly. "Hey, let me out!"
The Doctor stared at the scanner. He tapped the screen as symbols and various other images danced across it. He'd run multiple scans on Donna as well as the Earth's current atmosphere and couldn't come up with anything tangible.
He had to find answers. He had to fix Donna.
He bit his lip, concentrating hard on a particular sequence of symbols. Something about them was familiar...
There was a strange, soft thump from upstairs. Such sounds were unusual, even with a companion roaming about. The Doctor was on alert.
His feet were moving before he even turned in that direction. "Donna?" He called.
He raced up the stairs and around to the wardrobe.
"Donna?"
There she was, leaning forward with her hands and head pressed against a mirror, eyes closed.
The Doctor slowly approached her and placed a hand on her shoulder. "Donna?" He questioned, his voice full of uncertainty.
"Donna, are you-" He couldn't finish the sentence because as he reached out again to shake her gently, her body fell backwards. He jerked forward to buffer the impact of her fall, catching her upper body and carefully laying her on the ground.
He knelt beside her and scanned her with his sonic. From it, he could see she was in distress and her heart rate was unusually slow, but it didn't tell him why this was happening to her.
His hand delicately rested atop her head. He couldn't let this overtake her, whatever it was.
He placed his hands to her head. He eased his way into her mind.
Donna's consciousness wasn't present. It wasn't asleep and he couldn't find it. That sent the Time Lord's pulses rushing.
It was as though her body were nothing more than a shell. Still breathing, still functioning, but without it's owner. His fail-safes were firmly in place and hadn't been tampered with, so he didn't have to be concerned about her memories escaping. But where was she? Her mind ran purely to control her bodily functions, but all that made Donna, so very Donna, was so very absent.
It was like nothing he'd seen before, and that was really saying something.
There was always a way out of something as there was always a way in. He just had to find it. That path Donna had been taken on to leave her very own mind. He had to find it. Someone must have stolen her from him.
He was able to think his way out of some of the most unprecedented predicaments in all of history. Surely, there was a way to find out what was going on with Donna and solve it. He couldn't stand the thought of her suffering any more than she already had. She'd lost so much...
He was relieved she didn't know just how much she'd lost. He would carry that burden alone for her.
He gave a groan of frustration and sat back, releasing his hold on her head. It was useless to continue searching her mind when it lacked the important element of her consciousness. He would never find her there. "Donna." He addressed her empty form. "You really, really need to stop doing this." His gentle scolding held an obvious affection in it.
His fingers combed back her ginger locks before he hopped to his feet. Trying to dive into her mind wasn't getting him anywhere. It may have soothed her headaches, but it wouldn't get her back. Nor was the endless scanning with the TARDIS. "Time for a new approach."
He slid his arms under Donna and lifted her up once more. He carried her carefully back to her room and set her in the bed. After securing a blanket over her, he straightened up and faced away from her.
"I know you're not an illness. You're not a virus. You're not a leak in her memories. Only something sentient could create a way for a consciousness to leave it's mind and body, and still leave the body alive. But why?"
He turned back to her, frowning. "Why would anything need to do that?" His intensive scans had picked up zero signs of life apart from himself, Donna, and the usual germs and such. "There is something I've missed..."
He glared fiercely at Donna, watching her breaths rise and fall while tapping his screwdriver lightly across his temple. She was rarely so quiet. It unnerved him. His friend was not one to sit back and take something like this happening to her. She would have fought it.
She had a lot of fight in her.
"Ah ha!" He jumped excitedly into the air. "That's it!" He slapped himself in the forehead. "Of course! How could I have been so stupid! I'm stupid and old!" He turned around and ran from the room at top speed.
"I've got you now." He skidded to a stop in front of the console, laughing and wagging a finger at the time rotor. "Oh, I've got you now!" He smirked.
"Clever. Very clever." He moved with his usual mixture of part grace, part circus clown, around the console, tugging on this, pulling on that, more alive than he'd felt in quite a while.
"Donna Noble-Temple and not Temple, hang on, because I'm coming!"