Light was pouring out of Mickey Smith, out of his eyes and smiling mouth, sinking into the TARDIS console. The Doctor took one step towards him, and then froze.
Because Sarah Jane was boiling over as well; not with light but rather darkness. Black smoke seemed to coil from her hair and fingers and stream into the TARDIS, and her eyes were locked on some glorious sight that none of them could see.
The light that flowed out of Mickey was white, but when it touched the console it changed, to crimson or emerald or deep glowing blue. There was a sort of pattern to it, a congruence between which controls it touched and what colour it turned. And with each change of colour there was a deep sound that was almost music, carolling out of nowhere, matched by the colours and chimes of the black smoke as it went into the TARDIS.
The Doctor stared, they all stared, as the energies combined, twined and boiled together, and started snaking through the console, rippling round the time rotor, lancing between contacts and switches, playfully fringing dials and knobs with coloured auras. There was a crisp string of popping noises, as various controls reset themselves.
The TARDIS shuddered, and thrummed, and hummed, and suddenly roared, as she flew out of the grasp of gravity and time and dove into the Vortex, sailing free.
There was a long moment while everyone who had been fighting the bucking of the ship found their balance again. Jack was standing next to Mickey, and he reached out a hand - and then drew it back, spitting. The touch of that white energy was worse than fire or acid; it burned without marks. The TARDIS seemed to be soaking it up without damage.
"It's all right," Mickey said; the energies flowing through him pulsed eerily with the movement of his mouth, puffing like smoke signals. "And I do this for the TARDIS, not for you, Doctor." He turned, his glowing eyes staring at Donna. "Not even for you."
Slowly, she nodded her head.
"And now I must go," Mickey intoned, and the white flood slowed and trickled away to nothing. He stood there, transfixed, hands locked to the console.
Sarah Jane turned her dark-shrouded face to him, and there was laughter in her words. "And where you lead, I shall surely follow. Sarah Jane, I am still in your debt."
The black energy streamed out of her, emptying out over the console, and vanished. The Doctor and his passengers stood frozen, waiting to see what they would do next.
"Wow," Mickey spoke first. "That was fantastic. I mean really, really fantastic!" He stared down at his hands as though he had never seen them before.
"That was - oh! You're all still here." Sarah Jane looked around at them, and asked a little more slowly, "How long was that for you?"
"Less than a minute," the Doctor said.
"It was - a lot longer for us."
"That was the Eternals," the Doctor said, his voice stunned. "Reaching into the TARDIS. Donna, what did you do? How did you - invoke the Eternals?"
Donna raised her eyebrows, offended. "I didn't. I guessed that they would be watching us off. But short of punching a hole through into the TARDIS, which they would never do, there was no way they could - they couldn't -"
She gestured with her hands in the air in front of her, as if drawing some impossibly complicated machine. "I don't have the words for it," she finally decided.
The Doctor suddenly gasped in shock, "The planets!" and slapped at the controls, bringing up new displays.
"They're fine, Doctor," Rose said, her eyes still fastened on Mickey and Sarah Jane. "That Eternal woman, she put them all back."
"She put them all back?"
"Yeah."
"Oh. Well…well… if Davros was going to infuse the TARDIS with his energy or whatever you want to call it, why didn't he use me? This is my ship," the Doctor asked Donna, sounding a little lost.
"Or me, for that matter," Jack said, and Donna looked at him with a less than impressed expression.
"Eternals can't just go reaching into reality through anyone, you know," she said dryly. "Most people would just burn away. But you, Mickey, and you Sarah Jane, you are, you are-"
She shook her head slowly, her newly white hairs sliding over her face.
"You are true," she finally said, raising her head and looking at them, stressing that last word. "True to yourselves, all the way down. There's no word for it, none that I can say anyway, but that's what it is. You are true, and because of this an Eternal can be - invited to work through you."
"Invited, what do you mean, invited?" the Doctor spluttered. "They didn't invite anything!"
"Yes, I did. OK?" Mickey raised one hand. "I grabbed the console, and it was like Davros was standing behind me, and saying that he could help, that he would help, but only if I let him. So I did."
"You. Let. Davros. Control my ship?" The Doctor's eyes were white-rimmed with rage.
"Yeah," Mickey snapped. "Since the alternative was letting her be shredded into time confetti."
"That's enough." The Doctor punched at the console with a trembling finger, and the TARDIS' lights dimmed to almost nothing, leaving all their faces bathed in the faintest green glow.
His voice was grim out of the darkness. "This ship is not going anywhere - we, are not going anywhere - until I figure out exactly what happened to you, Donna. To all of us. And that means the TARDIS doesn't come out of the Vortex until I am satisfied with all your answers."
A sudden yellow glow revealed Donna, one hand on the console and one on her hip, looking at the Doctor with a sad expression.
"So," she said, "We're your prisoners."
The dark seemed to fill with flinches at the word.
"I suppose you intend to confine anyone who can pilot the TARDIS, if you refuse to do so. That would be myself, your double, and Jack."
"Can we be in the same cell?" Jack suggested.
"And you'll want to confine Sarah Jane and Mickey as well." Donna touched another control, and just those two faces were haloed in light; Sarah Jane looked nervous, Mickey still looked strangely delighted.
"OK, now I definitely want the same cell." Jack grinned, then his grin faded when Donna looked at him.
"I am arguing for your life, Mr. Harkness," she said in a throttled tone. "The Doctor is threatening to keep us captive for the rest of our natural lives, which in your case could be a very, very long time."
"He wouldn't," Jack said, trying to prop his grin back up.
"He would."
"He did," Martha said out of the darkness, with a catch in her voice. "The Family, you locked them up till the end of time. You could do it to them - but they're not your enemies, Doctor."
"They could be." The Doctor glared, eyes huge in the gloom. "They could be the greatest danger the Universe has ever faced."
"Oh, don't be melodramatic," Donna scoffed. "It doesn't suit you."
The Doctor's mouth opened in a horrified O.
"I'm not a danger to anyone, and Sarah Jane and Mickey even less so. I'll try to explain what happened." She touched a dial, and the TARDIS interior lights came up.
Donna stood straight and slicked both her hands over her hair, pushing it back over her shoulders.
"All right," she said. "Here's what happened to me. The Doctor transferred excess regeneration energy into his own severed hand, and when I reached for that hand, I triggered a metacrisis. A two way metacrisis: the hand grew into a copy of the Doctor, using both our DNA: human body, Time Lord mind.
"But-" she held up her hand, "it was a two way metacrisis: the Doctor's mind imprinted itself on mine, parallel to my own thoughts and memories. The bolt of energy from Dav served to trigger a synaptic cascade, merging my human intuition and creativity with the Doctor's memories and mental capacity. And that's when the metacrisis began to destroy me."
"What?" Rose said, speaking for all of them.
Donna shook her head. "Time Lord mind in a human body - no, it could never last. I was going to burn out, my mind overloaded."
"Wait, doesn't that mean that you-?" Rose touched the arm of the second Doctor, the one in the blue suit, and he frowned at her.
"Of course not," he said, and she wondered if he was lying.
Donna went on. "Davros saw the metacrisis and its results in me, saw my death approaching, and decided that he would try to stabilise my mind. Save my life. So he - took me away. Into Eternity. And I spent a long, long time learning your mind, Doctor. Inside and out, backwards and forwards. But now it's done, and I'm completely safe."
"Safe? Hardly," the Doctor snapped. "And I suppose you shared everything in my mind with Davros, right? All that information - damn, Donna, you've betrayed me."
"No."
"You betrayed-"
"No, Doctor! Davros saw what you were going to do. You were the death that was approaching. You were going to remove my memories of you, leave your Time Lord knowledge dormant in my brain, in order to save my life. Save my life? Turn me back into that woman I was before I met you? How could you even contemplate that!"
"To save your life-"
Donna scowled, breathing hard. "I'm not goin' to say that life without you is not worth living, because that's stupid. You are a part of what I am today," she grinned for an instant, "more now that ever really, but that doesn't give you the right to delete parts of my brain!"
She shot a glance at Rose, and then back at the Doctor. He was leaning forward, both hands spread across the TARDIS console, staring at the controls and rubbing at the spot where an old weld had miraculously healed itself in the last few minutes.
"Sarah Jane, can you tell me what happened just now?" he asked softly.
She gave him a look that was half affection, half confusion. "I thought you knew about this sort of thing."
"Right now, I'm completely in the dark. Any light you could shed would be very, very appreciated."
Sarah Jane's face was bright with memory as she spoke.
"Well, I was here, working the controls like you told me to, Doctor, and then Esselle was here. Beside me, or behind me - I'm not quite sure. But she was here, and she saw, we saw, that the TARDIS needed more power. And she asked if I'd mind letting her use my body as the conduit. And when I said all right, she - it was like a river, but it was alive; every part of it was alive and complex and flowing with meaning, and it was going through me and into the TARDIS. And it was beautiful."
Sarah Jane smiled, and she was beautiful too.
"And then Esselle told me that because her energies were passing through me, that I might start experiencing time at a much slower rate, seeing reality the way she does. And she was concerned that I might be bored." She smiled, eyes wet. "And I don't think I can make you understand that, Doctor. I could - sense, some of what Esselle was. What an Eternal is. All that power and knowledge, and she was worried that I might be bored while she used me like a spigot to pour energy out of Eternity into this world!
"She said that if I wanted to, I could look at some of her memories, as a way to pass the time. And I said," she swallowed, "that I wanted to see that the Earth was safe."
She paused and licked her lips. Everyone listening was hanging rapt on her words, even the Doctor and his double were intent.
"And then I was in space. All the planets were around me, the Dalek fleet too. And the Earth was there, right in front of me. It - it didn't look any bigger than a cricket ball. And I reached out my hand, and I touched it."
She held out her hand, her fingers white in the dimness, cupped as though holding some priceless object, or some living thing.
"I touched the Earth. I could feel it: feel the weight of the continents and the mass of the oceans. I could feel the people on it, and the animals, and the plants and the plankton and everything! And I knew that I wasn't really touching it, with a real hand; I wasn't going to crush it, or anything horrid like that. The hand was just a symbol, a focus for an Eternal's power, I guess.
"And then I moved my hand. And the Earth moved. I felt it move, and I was so careful, so gentle, as I moved it. I felt where it had to go and I put it there, making certain it was spinning just right. And," she blinked hard for an instant, "it was all so complicated…I had to move the moon, because it had drifted out of orbit. And the ISS was completely turned round backwards, and good heavens, think of the story they'll have to tell…Earth and everything associated with it was adjusted and balanced and put right."
Sarah Jane stared at her own outstretched hand. "And then I looked - back, somehow, so very far, and I thought - or rather, she thought, 'Twenty six to go.'"
"She moved the Earth first," Martha said.
"Yes. It was - such a beautiful world. It is such a beautiful world."
"And how about you, Mickey?" The Doctor was not quite convinced that these two were not still somehow at risk of possession, and his voice was unnaturally sharp. "What did Davros show you?"
Mickey swallowed before he spoke. "I - you remember how angry Davros was about the damage to the walls between the dimensions? The damage that we did, me and Rose and Jackie, and the rest of us? Well, it was like Sarah Jane said: he started pourin' energy through me, and then said that I could look at some of his memories to pass the time." He gave a quick smile, bright and then gone. "He offered to show me some sex ones, but I said no thanks."
Jack could have kicked Mickey. What a thing to miss a shot at seeing! He couldn't even imagine…but Mickey was still speaking.
"So I said, show me the walls and what we did. And - he did."
Mickey closed his eyes, his face going smooth as stone. "I say that he showed me, but it wasn't just seeing. I don't think it was something that human eyes could see. It was like - like all the mountains of the world, and all the trees, and all the living things, and all the art and music and laughter were parts of one thing, and what he was showing me was all of that combined. Great - walls, or towers or rivers, of living gold or solid light, that moved and flowed and went through each other.
"Like in a cave, you know, those rock formations that take, oh, millions of years but you get stone that looks like lace or like curtains? That's what it was like. The walls around the Howling. And they were - they weren't just beautiful. They were beauty."
He squinted for an instant, furrowing his brow. "And I could see the Howling - a little. That was bad. Real bad. But there was worse."
Mickey opened his eyes and they were sad, deep and dark and sad. "So imagine you can see those golden walls, those perfect beautiful things around all the dimensions. And now imagine that there are these tiny - dots, smaller than insects, tiny little dots that are alive and that are punchin' through the walls, and whenever they go through they leave these, these holes. These foul, rotting holes, that stretch and leak and - they're just disgusting. They're an abomination, for real, and I never saw something that fitted the word as well as that until now. The holes were abomination, and I made them."
He looked at Rose and Jackie. "We made them. Well, I mean, we didn't do nearly as much damage as the Cybermen, or the Void Ship, but - it didn't matter to me, none. Every hole was like a needle in my eye; and in my heart too."
He dropped his head, and the light gleamed on his scalp through his close-cropped hair. "They were fixin' them, though. The Eternals. Fixing the holes, and pulling the Cybermen and the Daleks out of the Howling." He shrugged, glancing up uneasily. "They all went mad in there, screaming mad. Eternals are only taking them out because they might start pounding on the walls."
He scratched at his arms suddenly, a furious gesture with clawed fingers. "I feel - dirty."
"I'm sorry," Sarah Jane said, laying her hand on his arm to stop his scratching. "I wish-"
"No, no." He shook his head. "I'm glad that I know. Because now I know I'm going home and never, ever going to cross over again like that. I can't."
"That's up to the Doctor, isn't it?" Donna's voice was very quiet, but they all heard her. "Are you going to let us go home?"
"No," said the Doctor in blue.
"Yes," said the one in brown.
They turned and stared at one another, and the air seemed to sizzle between them.