A/n: Rewatched Donna's season a month ago and have been crying since. Must fix that, people have begun to stare.

Full Summary: For Donna Noble, it has been a two years since her accident and all weirdness aside; she's having an okay time with it. Sure a cocktail of medication and constant occupation are what's keeping her sane but who doesn't have their crutches? New memories soon begin to emerge and someone claiming to be an old friend is desperately in need of her help.

Meanwhile the Doctor has just lost Clara and is in complete and utter denial. The Tardis, having none of it, sends him where he's needed most.

I can't give much more away without spoiling, but I can say that there will hopefully be a twist or two you won't see coming. It's gonna be a slow build towards Doctor/Donna. If that's not your thing, I hope you'll continue reading as it won't shift that way for quite a while. And if it is; WELCOME TO THE CLUB BUDDY!

Steady as a Beating Drum

Chapter 1: Puzzles

x

Donna Noble sat on the hill near her family home staring up at the stars like they were a particularly difficult connect-the-dots puzzle. When she looked up, she knew she was supposed to be seeing something- find some sort of meaning in the spilled diamonds in the sky. But try however hard she might, she couldn't fathom them into logic she could follow.

All her life he grandfather had babbled on and on about the stars. She could spot the Little Dipper and Alpha Centauri on a cloudy day if anyone had asked it of her- strangely, no one ever had. Beyond the names and constellations though, Donna could not shake the feeling that there was something bigger, greater and more Important (with a capital 'I') out there waiting for her.

She tried not to think about it as much these days, it made her head hurt.

"Alright Gramps, you think maybe you should turn in for the night?" She pulled her sweater tighter around her and worried her lip between her teeth.

"Getting weary in your old age Donna, my girl?"

"Oi, don't you get sassy with me. I'm the one who organizes your pillbox every week."

"And I greatly appreciate that Darling," Wilf replied without averting his gaze from the lens of his telescope. "What would I do if I forgot to take my unnecessary iron supplements at exactly noon every day?" Wilf was always disgruntled when someone tried to take care of him these days. He said it made him feel even older than he already was. 'I'm old, not an invalid!' he'd say.

"Not much, let me feel important for a moment, yeah?" sighed the Most Important Woman in the Universe.

It was October 2011 and it had been almost two years since her accident. The whole world had been displaced and replaced, and she'd been none the wiser, knocked out cold by some kids who couldn't properly drive their scooters. She woke up missing a year of her life.

Oh well, just another on of those Donna Noble stories.

Except…

(Right now she could feel it. The earth was rotating at 460 meters per second, revolving around the sun at 30 000 meters per second, in a solar system whirling around the Milky Way at 220 000 meters per second and being pulled in 46 305 different directions at varying gravitational pulls at minimum 13495 Newtowns and maximum 13858969999999999999999999—

Donna shook loose the train of thought and held her head in her hands. From her pocket she fished out a yellow pill bottle marked methylphenidate (40mg). She dry-swallowed the dusty tasting pill and tried to ignore the surreptitious glances Wilf was throwing her way. Donna stood very still, breathing and trying her damnedest not to fly off the Earth as it turned too quickly for her to hold on. It took 20 minutes for the numbers to quiet, for the twitching in her right cheek to stop. For her mind to calm.

At first it had been very disconcerting. Her mother had insisted on her seeing a professional, who had diagnosed her with severe ADHD (among other things). "It's actually very normal," the psychiatrist, who'd had very kind eyes, had said. "Many women tend to remain undiagnosed until they're challenged. If they're smart it's likely not until uni." Donna had balked. She'd never gone to University. And she was not what you'd call smart.

Most days she just wanted the leaping threads of her thoughts to just untangle. She wished that pulling one didn't mean yanking everything else along with it. Other days, when the medicine was working especially well she felt like a shark that stopped swimming; you stop and you die and such…

She found single-minded focus in puzzles and occupation. When it all got to be too much she did her best to find one single thing to think about and stay on that track. It was a precarious balance between crosswords and medication that kept her sane.

Multitasking was impossible, where it had once been as easy as breathing.

And in the wake of her divorce; she had felt marginally better. It had been hard at first, when he left her, but slowly she had begun to feel like she was better off without Shaun Temple bringing her down. Where before she drifted, now she held course. She felt better than she was, like a whole new woman and people had started to notice.

Donna Noble; making the best of a hard situation. Who would have thought?

It had all started when her agency had sent her to Uto-tech not a week after.

On her first morning Donna had signed at least thirty-something waivers, confidentiality agreements and contracts pertaining to the Secrecy Act. It was explained to her that anything and everything she heard was to go in one ear, out the other and into an incinerator or the word 'Treason' would be thrown around.

And then she'd met her boss.

Dr. Smith was not what she had been expecting. She was young, beautiful and very social- not at all your usual corporate ladder rung type. She chatted with Donna about herself, genuinely interested in the answers to her questions and wasn't afraid to share the odd joke or two. She was her biggest supporter and confidante during her separation and then divorce. Sure, the doctor was a little off; manic and silly, but for the first time in quite a while Donna liked her employer.

She worked there for a month before Dr. Smith asked her to stay permanently.

And every morning since, Donna had a reason to get up in the morning.

X

The next morning Donna took the bus as usual. She found a seat next to a pockmarked teenager in a black cap and carrying a green apron.

Side to side she swayed as the driver stopped and started again, picking up the regulars along the route. She'd finished her first crossword of the day by the time she was halfway to work. For a while she just sat there staring at the black and white boxes with blue ink scrawling sketchy letters inside them, letting her mind roam.

She was jolted out of this period of reflection by the zit-y boy beside her.

"What?" she stressed in an annoyed tone. The boy, taken aback and slightly unnerved pointed to a man sitting directly across from her.

The man was very tall. His long legs were stretched out into the aisle and his pants were too short; exposing his lack of socks. White ankles jutted out above the tops of shiny black shoes. Eventually her eyes made their way to his face; creased by wear and beholden to bushy grey eyebrows threatening to curtain his eyes. Hm, and a full head of hair. If he hadn't been staring at her desperately, like a bloody creeper she might have been flattered.

"Allo," he offered with a wave.

Ugh. Donna rolled her eyes and did a sarcastic parody of his motion.

"I was just- uh…" Out with it then!

"Uh, four down is pentagon."

Donna was taken aback for a moment and looked down at her completed puzzle. "Agatha Christie's Dictaphone victim is a pentagon, is it?"

He didn't seem like he had much to say after that, and his big eyes and pleading gaze was giving her an uncomfortable chill. She felt as if she'd seen him before and that it had not been a pleasant encounter. Perhaps in the year she couldn't remember?

Either way, there were warning lights going off in her head and if there was one thing you learned as a woman in London it was to listen when your instincts told you that you had just encountered a Bad guy.

At the next stop she disembarked (eight stops too early) and raised her arm to hail a cab. She had no patience for nutters today, even vaguely good looking ones. Perhaps with her raise she might be able to afford halving her commute by moving out of her mother's. She'd been looking at a nice little flat with white walls that reflected the sunlight-

(Reflection: the change in direction of a wavefront, in this particular case 360-760 nanometers in length- visible spectrum- the ninth satellite of rexocolis 14 which was a naturally occurring prism that threw rainbows over the planet and colored the sky in different parts different hues, attributed to the planet's different sort of atmosphere- the Earth's atmosphere has a 78.084% concentration of nitrogen- breathable by Humans and Septuplepods on Euwedeka—

x

"Hallo Doctor," Donna chimed that morning when she got in. As usual, her boss was already in. Try as she might, she could never quite beat her to the office and ceased trying after the first week. Dr. Smith smiled and waved in a fluttering way then returned to her drumming fingers and reams of paperwork.

The day progressed as normal for the first while, until the phone rang. "Dr. Smith's office, Donna speaking. What can I do for you today?" she asked in a chipper tone.

There was silence on the other end. Even when she listened closely she couldn't hear breathing at all. Donna tugged at the wire in the phone's cradle seeing if it was still connected- it was.

"Hello?" she tried, staring into the speaker. "This is Donna Noble. Is anyone there?"

Silence.

"Oi, I know you're there. Speak up or I'm hanging up!"