The Doctor, Rose, Donna, and Lee had saved the day. They watched from orbit as the Hindenburg imploded somewhere in the mists below, allowing the flashing plasma storms to run their course and peter out. Towing the wrecked Draconian ship out of the quarantine zone and alerting the authorities to its location had taken only a few minutes, and now the three veteran time travelers stood in the open door of the TARDIS looking out over the planet's rings while Lee McAvoy knocked around exploring somewhere deeper within.
Rose bumped the Doctor with her shoulder. "I thought you said the second Hindenburg had a long and successful run and retired to the interstellar shipyard museum with honors after hundreds of years," she remarked dryly.
"Er…" The Doctor tugged his ear uncomfortably. "That may have been the third Hindenburg…"
"Right. 'Course." Rose nodded, smiling. "What was I thinkin'? 'Course they made a third one."
She gave him a pinch and then headed into the ship to go slip her shoes off and change. Donna and the Doctor stayed behind to watch the dust a while longer.
Somewhere out in the rings was a shiny, state of the art luxury lifepod with only two people in it, waiting for rescuers to come pick them up. Probably sitting pathetically on opposite sides of the room, trying not to catch each other's alien cooties. Donna reflected quietly on another ill-fated marriage and tried not to look for it.
"You okay?" the Doctor asked quietly after a couple of minutes, still looking over the rings himself.
"Yeahhh." She shrugged his question off. She stayed silent a few minutes, and then added as a joke, "Too bad you don't have a time machine. You could take me back in time to undo a big mistake."
The Doctor looked at her with understanding in his eyes, and she felt her mocking smile fade.
"Yeah, I… didn't think so. No going back on your own personal timeline, or whatever." She shivered despite the regular room temperature and rubbed her arms.
The Doctor turned to look back out the door again before saying lightly, "Well, you know… If that whole parallel world debacle reminded me of one thing, it's that even though you can't undo what you've already done, that doesn't necessarily mean things have to end the way they are. You can always change the future. Well, I say always. More like sometimes, fixed points and all that… Weeelll, and then sometimes you change something and time just sort of flows around it and things end up the same anyway… And sometimes you think you're not changing anything and then you end up reversing an entire causal nexus, creating a temporal prism of parallel universes and self-contained pocket dimensions – you get the idea."
"How could I do that?" Donna asked seriously, ignoring the temporal physics tangent. "How could I face my friends and family again, after all that?"
"Easy. Don't." He shrugged. "No need to go back. You can stay on the TARDIS the rest of your life, I said so."
"But what would that say about me, though? To just get married and then blow it off? Throw him over 'cos I changed my mind?"
"Everything. And I meant everything, this time." He turned to look at her earnestly, and she looked back with glittering, vulnerable eyes. "That's growth, Donna. You aren't the same person you were three years ago. You're brilliant. I mean, you've always been brilliant, had that capacity for brilliance, and now you know it. You've got a heart that's open and full of mercy, courage, and compassion. You didn't see it back then, and you didn't miss what you'd never had, but now you've been out there, you've seen things, saved the Ood, watched the fall of Pompeii, saved the universe – universes, actually – and that person inside you, all that potential, has come to life and you can't put it back. Would you want to?"
Donna looked at him, sad and lost. The Doctor shifted to look out the door again, adding in a soft voice, "It's one thing to bring him with you, Donna, if he'll come. But if he can't, don't give up who you are for him. No one should ever make you give that up." A flicker of remorse flitted across his face, a reminder of the last time he'd stood this close to her in the console room and had a one-on-one conversation. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the doorframe again.
"Don't let anyone take away who you are. Not even me."
Donna saw the guilt wash over him plain as day and gave him a lopsided smile. "No fear there, spaceman. I see you coming at me with your great flippin' telepath hands up by the sides of my head again, you can bet I'll chop 'em both off, and make sure they don't grow back this time!"
She whacked him on the shoulder and turned back in towards the center of the room, finished brooding out the open door. The Doctor smiled slightly and closed it, walking up the ramp after her.
"Anyway!" she said lightly, forcing a little bounce into her step. "Maybe I'm better off single! I can see the universe. Come into myself a bit more. Have a good flirt now and then."
"I was… thinking of inviting Lee along," the Doctor said carefully. "That all right?"
"Yeah," Donna scoffed at him like he was ridiculous. "Course! Why wouldn't it be? More the merrier. Besides, anything to keep from being stuck by myself watching you and Rose suck face all day. You two are like rabbits! It's disgusting, is what it is!"
She turned with a sassy flip of her hair and trounced away to find her old bedroom.
…
The front lawn of the millionaire Temple-Noble estate was impeccably landscaped. The property had been purchased so very recently, and of course gardening styles varied so much from owner to owner, that the neighbors (had there been any living close enough to actually see over the surrounding hedge to the house itself) would not have been surprised to see what looked like a large, blue modern art piece sitting there on the grass that day.
If they had seen the doors open up and release two squabbling people with their arms full of luggage, they probably would have revised their impressions from 'art piece' to 'rather odd garden shed.' Fortunately, it didn't come up.
Shaun was still ranting, something he'd been doing ever since the TARDIS had unexpectedly appeared inside the mostly empty lifepod to pick him up.
"…'cos he's crazy! You had no way of knowing we'd come out of that alive! And I said that! I said it then, and I said it back in, in Venice! You'd have to be MAD to go back into that thing after all that!" He set his suitcase on the grass and turned back to Donna, who was behind him with their other two bags. "You can tell 'im, Donna, you can just tell 'im that's it. We're done. You tell 'im he's a menace, and we're 'aving nothing to do with him after this, and next time he wants to save the world or whatever, he can leave us bloody well out of it!"
Donna chucked the heavier of the two bags on the ground, and then hoisted the other up and threw it at him. He blocked his face against it and stumbled back, surprised.
"Oi! What was that for?"
"You can bugger off," Donna hissed at him, fed up and done.
"What?"
"I'm having the marriage annulled!" she shouted.
"What? You can't have it annulled!"
"A divorce, then. Whatever. I don't care." She turned to head back into the TARDIS.
Shaun shook his head and laughed, unable to take her seriously. "Donna, it's been two weeks! What would the neighbors say?"
"You can tell 'em I've gone mad."
"Donna!"
She turned back around to face him. "All right, look. You were right. The me you saw out there isn't the one you got engaged to. I'm not the same as the person you met. But this is who I am, really. And that's who I'm stayin'. And you don't get that. This isn't goin' t'work."
He fish-mouthed for a few seconds unhappily, but didn't really look distraught.
"But… but what about the house, the cars, the dog… the… bank account? You can't just pack up and leave…?"
"You keep it. I don't need it anyway." She turned around and strode back into the TARDIS without looking back.
As soon as she entered, the doors slammed firmly behind her and the time rotor began its usual up and down slide. Donna stumped up the ramp and took hold of the railing at the end.
"Let's get out of this place," she said, feeling tired behind all measure. "Find me a swamp planet or something, anything other than here."
The Doctor and Rose exchanged a look, and Rose licked her lips contemplatively.
"Dagobah it is, then, yeah?" She joked. She watched with concern as Donna climbed the rest of the ramp, shuffled over to the jump seat, and plopped down into it without answering. "You all right?" she added.
"Yeah. Fine." Donna looked gloomily off to her right somewhere like she expected a drink to pop up into her hand, which, considering this was the TARDIS, wasn't totally out of the realm of possibility. "It's only another marriage attempt turned rubbish in less time than it takes to send out thank you cards. Third time in a row. What is it with me and fiancés? Least I made it down the aisle, this time."
Rose leaned on the console and studied her friend. "So you're leavin' him?"
Donna scoffed and smiled, leaning back into the seat with her eyes closed. "Pssh, yeah. Can't feel too bad about it, leaving 'im with millions and millions of lotto winnings. Anyway, don't need it where I'm going, do I?"
"And where's that?"
"Dagobah!"