After the Storm (1/6). Post JE. Donna, Wilf, Sylvia, Jack, Tenth Doctor Rating G
AUTHOR: sensiblecat
WORDS: 3691
SPOILERS: Up to the end of JE.
CREDITS: picture by fizzling_whizbee
RATING: Gen
CHARACTERS: Donna, Sylvia, Wilf, Tenth Doctor (original), Jack
She's not daft, and she knows that they're all lying to her. But why? And why did everything change that night, anyway?
This is the story of the family the Doctor left behind, how they tried to deal with the impossible and the unsayable - and how, rather to his own surprise, the Doctor found himself dealing with them.
The characters are the property of the BBC and no plagiarism or personal profit is intended. Though I don't always like the way he treats them, I have the utmost respect for RTD for creating them, and for the talented actors who brought them to life.
There was something about that Mr Smith. Donna couldn't quite put it into words, but he was definitely a bit odd. Nice enough, though he was painfully shy. He could barely bring himself to look at her, so it hadn't been easy getting a good look at him. She’d not really looked at his face but it looked older than the rest of him somehow - the twig-thin, lanky body in the rumpled suit and the spiky hair. Somehow, he’d managed to give off two contradictory vibes, seeming utterly self-contained yet completely lost at the same time.
She’d a horrible feeling she must have passed out somewhere and he’d been lumbered with the task of getting her home. If there hadn’t been so much else going on, she’d have thanked him, but no matter. He probably had girls throwing up on him all the time. He looked like the Sir Galahad type - nicely brought-up, bit old-fashioned, too shy to have a girlfriend of his own but ever ready to rush to the aid of a damsel in distress.
But this was silly. Why was she spending all this time wondering about someone she’d only met for a minute or two, and hardly spoken to? He’d just grinned unconvincingly, waved a quick goodbye and rushed off as if he feared she’d lunge at him at any minute.
Definitely the shy type. Not her sort at all. She liked a bit of something you could hang onto with a bloke. He was a walking pencil, and besides there was something about him that didn’t feel normal. Whether that was good or bad, she didn’t know.
There was a time when “normal” would have been the most complimentary word Donna could think of to describe anything. When all she’d wanted was a job she didn’t have to think about, a few mates to get bladdered with on a Friday night and enough spare cash to go on the odd trip to the Costa Brava. Life was short and pretty meaningless - she didn’t think there was anybody up there or any real point to it, so why not just have a good time and a laugh? Oh, sometimes Mum went on at her for not going to uni, not having a proper career and making something of herself, as she put it. But she could have a double first from Cambridge and live in a ten-bedroomed house with five sports cars in the garage, and Mum would still find something to be disappointed about.
Mum seemed to be particularly jumpy tonight, as if she couldn't get their nervy visitor out of the place fast enough. Well, it made a change from seeing every new male that appeared as a potential son-in-law. If anything, she'd gone a bit the other way with Mr Smith, frogmarching her away from him and into the kitchen and letting Grandad show him out. What did she expect them to do, Donna wondered - make out right there on the doorstep? He wasn't that irresistible. And it wasn't as if they'd been caught misbehaving before. Anyone would think the bloke had been stalking her or something, not that she'd just woken up and hadn't a clue who he was anyway.
“What’s that noise?” Donna asked her mum.
“What noise?” Sylvia crashed teacups together. Apparently Mr Smith had merited the cup-and-saucer treatment. There was even a half-empty bowl of sugar on the tea tray.
“That sort of…” Donna stopped. She didn’t know how to explain the sound she’d just heard. It wasn’t exactly a roar, more a sort of groan, like something very old and mechanical starting up, mixed in with the sound of a transistor radio when you fiddled around trying to get Radio Luxembourg. “Outside,” she said. “That one.”
“You’re imagining things,” her mother said quickly, though Donna wasn’t sure how her mother could be so certain when she’d not even described what she was meant to be making up. “Or maybe it’s the central heating. I’ve been saying for months, we need to get that boiler looked at before the winter sets in. If you leave it too long the Gas Board are run off their feet and they make you pay through the nose before they’ll even come out and look at it.”
Donna wasn’t listening. Instead, she was looking in surprise, and some concern, at Gramps. He looked upset. Worse than upset. Surely that wasn’t a tear rolling down his cheek?
“It’s always the same.” He sighed and Donna noticed the catch in his voice. “You do all that and you end up on your own. Doesn’t seem fair, somehow.”
“Stop it, you silly old man,” her mother ordered. “You heard what he said.”
“What who said?” Donna demanded. She couldn’t understand why Mum had responded so sharply, when it was obvious that something had reminded him of Nana and brought back all the pain of losing her.
“Never you mind,” Sylvia snapped.
“I’m not eight years old you know, Mum!”
“Aye.” Wilf got up with another deep sigh and went to get his coat. “Think I’ll nip out for a bit of fresh air, if it’s all the same to you, Sylv.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Donna’s mum exclaimed. “It’s chucking it down out there! You’ll catch pneumonia and then what’ll I do, running around after the two of you?”
Typical of her mum, Donna thought, to think about how everybody’s problems would inconvenience her. “I’ll go with him,” she offered. “We can have a bit of a chinwag, can’t we, Gramps? Sounds like it’s been a pretty eventful weekend.”
“Not really,” Wilf argued, with a shrug. “People always make too much out of these things - it’ll all settle down in time. That’s what I like about looking up at the stars; it puts everything in perspective.”
“Dad…” Sylvia said, warningly.
“Why shouldn’t he look at the stars?” protested Donna. “It’s not gonna do anybody any harm, is it?”
“Unless he catches his death of cold,” said Sylvia. “And you’re not going anywhere, young lady. You’ve not been well.”
“Oh, come on, Mum. All I did was overdo it a bit and sleep it off.”
“No, not that. You haven’t been right for the best part of the year…not since all that…that business with Lance.” Donna noticed a look pass between the two of them, almost like they were agreeing on a story. “That’s why you keep nodding off,” Sylvia went on. “The pills they had to give you. To stop you having bad dreams. You weren’t sleeping, so they knocked you out. It’s just been too much for you, all that’s happened.”
Donna frowned, more bewildered by the minute. “What, you mean with Dad and all that?”
Her mother hesitated, as if she was filing away her daughter’s response in a mental card index. Then she nodded, a bit too eagerly.
“That’s right,” she said. “After the weekend we’ve all had, you’re better off out of it.”
For one startling moment, her face seemed to melt a little. And then she was giving Donna a hug. “You stay here with me,” Sylvia said. “We’ll take it easy and watch something nice on the telly. One of those Sunday night shows like Michael Palin going round the world. I like those. I’ve got some choccies…”
Donna looked at Wilf but if she’d expected a bit of moral support from that quarter, she was going to be disappointed. He nodded. “You do that,” he agreed. “You’ll feel better. Your mum shouldn’t be on her own, not after all that’s happened.”
“And you shouldn’t be off up the hill,” Sylvia pointed out.
“I won’t be long,” he promised.
“Oh, he just wants to make sure they’ve put all the stars back where they belonged,” Donna said.
“That’s not funny, Donna,” said Sylvia.
Puzzled, Donna frowned. “I never said it was.”
She didn’t see Gramps again until the next morning.
********
Wilf walked briskly through the rainy evening, just putting one foot in front of the other. All over the place there were sounds of revelry, even a few fireworks going off here and there. It was as bad as bloody New Years’ Eve. How people could want to let off fireworks after all that had just happened was beyond him.
He felt mean leaving Donna behind but he was edgy and upset, and she never failed to pick up on his moods. He had a lot of thinking to do and if he made one slip-up it could cost Donna her life. How the hell were they going to deal with this? Donna wasn’t daft. It was all very well saying they’d just have to tell her it was a story, and she hadn’t really saved the world, but not everyone had a convenient TARDIS they could nip into when the awkward questions began.
Now all that speculation about the Doctor would start up again, at least until the Government managed to put a lid on it. And every time something like this happened, it got more difficult. Frankly, Will doubted whether they’d get away with it much longer. It was only a few months since the sky had gone up in flames and people’s car engines had choked them. And before that, there’d been that great ship in the sky and all the funny little fat people. Sylvia could deny it until the cows came home, but he knew better. She’d seen it with her own eyes.
Damn it, thought Wilf, he wished he’d not remembered that night. His beautiful Donna waving at him from the open TARDIS, so full of happiness and hope and a sense of doing something really worthwhile. And now she wouldn’t remember any of it. He’d been so happy for her that night he’d cheered and done a little dance, and even the thought of what Sylvia would have to say about her daughter disappearing like that hadn’t been enough to damp his spirits.
And now she’d saved the world - more than the world. More than he’d ever be able to get his mind around, if he lived to be a thousand years old. All that and he could never ask how she’d done it. Bad enough that he’d never know, worse still that she wouldn’t.
Still, reasoned Wilf, you had to try and look on the bright side. Here they were, the world saved all over again. Time and again the Doctor had been there for them, doing his bit for the human race. Where did he come from? Where did he go when all the danger was over, until the next time? Why did he keep on bothering?
And what would happen if he just stopped?
He’d reached the top of the hill now. London spread out before him, all those street lights, all the little houses filled with people who owed more to that strange, gangly alien than to any God they might choose to worship. His Donna had been part of that. One shining moment, that was all. Maybe the Doctor could take her memories away, but could he take away the ways it had changed her?
Because it had. She’d been a different woman with him. Everything he’d seen inside her, everything that Sylvia seemed either unable or plain unwilling to see, had bloomed into its full glory after she met that Doctor. Even after just a few days, there she was, slap bang in the middle of danger, telling the Army what she thought of them, standing up to aliens, her face shining as she told him of the things she’d seen. Now the only person who really knew what had happened was out there among the stars, God knows where, and he’d probably never see him again.
Perhaps he’d find that other young woman who’d carried a torch for him, the mysterious Rose Tyler who’d come out of nowhere, bearing a gun and mysteriously knowing exactly who they were? The world was coming to an end all around her, but her eyes had been fixed on that computer screen willing just one face to appear - the Doctor’s. Might have been a crush, of course. Who could say? And if it was, who could blame her? But he’d suspected that there was more to it than that. Once Donna had told him about the day she’d met the Doctor, and the look on his face as he’d mentioned Rose.
Then there were all the other faces that had appeared, briefly, on the computer screen. The hand-picked team that Harriet Jones had sacrificed her life to bring together. The beautiful black girl with her mother. The dashing chap with his team somewhere in a bunker in Cardiff. The older woman - some kind of journalist - hugging her son.
Donna had been part of that. For one brief shining moment. She’d flown the Earth back home in that wonderful ship, surrounded by those faces. He could imagine the laughter, the cheers, the camaraderie. You could live a lifetime on a memory like that. Wilf’s memories of his time in the Paras weren’t all bad by any means.
Now the Doctor was up there alone. That was one thing Wilf knew with complete certainty, that all those people were somewhere else now, and he was up there carrying the emptiness of millions of miles, hundreds of years, an unthinkable number of faces of those who had died, in the depths of those lonely eyes.
He’d kept his promise. He’d brought Donna back home safely to them.
But was safety what she wanted? Wilf Mott had lived through enough danger in his long life to know that there was no easy answer to that kind of question. Probably, the Doctor liked to pretend that there was, perhaps because he was so much older and cleverer than humans and he could dismiss them as a simple species. Nevertheless, sometimes overcoming danger together was the only thing that really made you feel alive. He wanted that kind of life for Donna; nothing else was good enough.
Wilf had seen things in the war that he wouldn’t be able to live with if he hadn’t made himself forget. Sometimes the only way to do that was to make things seem simpler than they really were.
He sighed deeply as he looked up into the sky. All those beautiful stars back where they ought to be. Until the next time.
And nobody left to thank for it. It didn’t seem right somehow.
*******
“What’s wrong with you tonight?” Sylvia grumbled. “You got ants in your pants, young lady?”
“I dunno,” said Donna. “I suppose I’m just a bit wired up. In a funny mood.”
“Well, you can snap out of it,” said Sylvia. “Can’t I have a nice quiet night in with my only daughter for a change? You don’t mind sitting up there for hours in all weathers with him.”
Jealous of her own dad, thought Donna. Mum really was plumbing new depths tonight. She made a conscious effort to keep still and watched as the titles of Michael Palin’s wanderings scrolled across the screen, accompanied by inoffensively jaunty music. Her mum had always been a fan of the affable Python - Donna could remember when “Full Circle” was on how she’d sit there going on at Dad because he wasn’t more like him. “He can talk to anyone,” she’d say. “Such a gentleman.”
It wasn’t that Donna didn’t like Michael Palin - how could you not like Michael Palin? - but she’d noticed with the last couple of series he’d done that there seemed to be a formula to his wanderings - a sameness about the way he’d turn up in every out-of-the-way community and make a beeline for the most eccentric person living there, trying to maintain the illusion that it hadn’t all been set up by a BBC researcher and he’d just stumbled across them by sheer serendipity. How wonderful it must be to be that kind of person. Always on the move, endlessly cheerful, charming and knowledgable. Of course, you didn’t see the bad bits. The endless waiting in airports, the arguing with petty border officials, the luggage disappearing yet again. (Although she did recall he’d had a rather grim time in the Sudan).
She struggled to be sociable. “Must be nice, travelling like that,” she said.
“You’ve done enough of that, young lady,” snapped her mother. “Time you settled down now.”
There it was again, Donna thought, one of those bizarre taunts that came out of nowhere. “Mum, what are you on about?” she asked, bewildered. “I’ve never been further than Palma.”
“And quite right too,” Sylvia declared. She reached for the remote and the beginning of a news bulletin pinged into electronic limbo.
“I was watching that!” Donna protested. “You could ask…”
“It’s nothing we need to know about,” her mother said rapidly.
“The Earth gets moved, it goes dark for thirty-six hours, there’s aliens out on the streets killing people and you say we don’t need to know?”
“Not now it’s over and done with. If it ever happened in the first place.” Sylvia got up, brushing chocolate fragments from her lap. “Well, it looks like Dad’s decided to make a night of it again. If he thinks I’m staying up in case he’s forgotten his key again, he’s got another think coming. I’m going to have a quick shower, then it’s off to the land of Nod for me, and if you’ve any sense you’ll do the same.”
Donna rolled her eyes and waited for her to go upstairs; as soon as she heard the bathroom door click shut, she reached for the remote control. She’d no intention of going to bed anytime soon. In fact, she might even nip out once Mum was safely tucked up and take Gramps a fresh Thermos. Find out why everybody was acting so oddly, and what had really happened this weekend.
The doorbell rang. It looked as if Mum was right; Gramps had forgotten his key after all. Donna smiled; he’d be scared stiff of a lecture from Mum as soon as the door opened, a situation she intended to milk for all it was worth. She chuckled as she crossed the hall to let him in.
“And what time do you call this?” she began, as she opened the door, taking care to reproduce Sylvia’s indignant tone of voice to perfection.
But the stranger on the doorstep was a lot more striking than her grandfather. Donna hadn’t a clue who he was, or what he was doing here, but with a smile like that, a trench coat scraping the floor, a twinkling pair of blue eyes and an unshakable belief in his own charisma, she was more than prepared to give him the benefit of any doubt that was going.
Michael Palin might be a national treasure and her mum’s pin-up, Donna thought, but for sheer sex appeal this guy knocked him into a cocked hat. And when he spoke, the easy American accent clinched the deal.
“So, Donna Noble, how does it feel to save the whole of creation?” he asked.
WORDS: 3691
SPOILERS: Up to the end of JE.
CREDITS: picture by fizzling_whizbee
RATING: Gen
CHARACTERS: Donna, Sylvia, Wilf, Tenth Doctor (original), Jack
She's not daft, and she knows that they're all lying to her. But why? And why did everything change that night, anyway?
This is the story of the family the Doctor left behind, how they tried to deal with the impossible and the unsayable - and how, rather to his own surprise, the Doctor found himself dealing with them.
The characters are the property of the BBC and no plagiarism or personal profit is intended. Though I don't always like the way he treats them, I have the utmost respect for RTD for creating them, and for the talented actors who brought them to life.
There was something about that Mr Smith. Donna couldn't quite put it into words, but he was definitely a bit odd. Nice enough, though he was painfully shy. He could barely bring himself to look at her, so it hadn't been easy getting a good look at him. She’d not really looked at his face but it looked older than the rest of him somehow - the twig-thin, lanky body in the rumpled suit and the spiky hair. Somehow, he’d managed to give off two contradictory vibes, seeming utterly self-contained yet completely lost at the same time.
She’d a horrible feeling she must have passed out somewhere and he’d been lumbered with the task of getting her home. If there hadn’t been so much else going on, she’d have thanked him, but no matter. He probably had girls throwing up on him all the time. He looked like the Sir Galahad type - nicely brought-up, bit old-fashioned, too shy to have a girlfriend of his own but ever ready to rush to the aid of a damsel in distress.
But this was silly. Why was she spending all this time wondering about someone she’d only met for a minute or two, and hardly spoken to? He’d just grinned unconvincingly, waved a quick goodbye and rushed off as if he feared she’d lunge at him at any minute.
Definitely the shy type. Not her sort at all. She liked a bit of something you could hang onto with a bloke. He was a walking pencil, and besides there was something about him that didn’t feel normal. Whether that was good or bad, she didn’t know.
There was a time when “normal” would have been the most complimentary word Donna could think of to describe anything. When all she’d wanted was a job she didn’t have to think about, a few mates to get bladdered with on a Friday night and enough spare cash to go on the odd trip to the Costa Brava. Life was short and pretty meaningless - she didn’t think there was anybody up there or any real point to it, so why not just have a good time and a laugh? Oh, sometimes Mum went on at her for not going to uni, not having a proper career and making something of herself, as she put it. But she could have a double first from Cambridge and live in a ten-bedroomed house with five sports cars in the garage, and Mum would still find something to be disappointed about.
Mum seemed to be particularly jumpy tonight, as if she couldn't get their nervy visitor out of the place fast enough. Well, it made a change from seeing every new male that appeared as a potential son-in-law. If anything, she'd gone a bit the other way with Mr Smith, frogmarching her away from him and into the kitchen and letting Grandad show him out. What did she expect them to do, Donna wondered - make out right there on the doorstep? He wasn't that irresistible. And it wasn't as if they'd been caught misbehaving before. Anyone would think the bloke had been stalking her or something, not that she'd just woken up and hadn't a clue who he was anyway.
“What’s that noise?” Donna asked her mum.
“What noise?” Sylvia crashed teacups together. Apparently Mr Smith had merited the cup-and-saucer treatment. There was even a half-empty bowl of sugar on the tea tray.
“That sort of…” Donna stopped. She didn’t know how to explain the sound she’d just heard. It wasn’t exactly a roar, more a sort of groan, like something very old and mechanical starting up, mixed in with the sound of a transistor radio when you fiddled around trying to get Radio Luxembourg. “Outside,” she said. “That one.”
“You’re imagining things,” her mother said quickly, though Donna wasn’t sure how her mother could be so certain when she’d not even described what she was meant to be making up. “Or maybe it’s the central heating. I’ve been saying for months, we need to get that boiler looked at before the winter sets in. If you leave it too long the Gas Board are run off their feet and they make you pay through the nose before they’ll even come out and look at it.”
Donna wasn’t listening. Instead, she was looking in surprise, and some concern, at Gramps. He looked upset. Worse than upset. Surely that wasn’t a tear rolling down his cheek?
“It’s always the same.” He sighed and Donna noticed the catch in his voice. “You do all that and you end up on your own. Doesn’t seem fair, somehow.”
“Stop it, you silly old man,” her mother ordered. “You heard what he said.”
“What who said?” Donna demanded. She couldn’t understand why Mum had responded so sharply, when it was obvious that something had reminded him of Nana and brought back all the pain of losing her.
“Never you mind,” Sylvia snapped.
“I’m not eight years old you know, Mum!”
“Aye.” Wilf got up with another deep sigh and went to get his coat. “Think I’ll nip out for a bit of fresh air, if it’s all the same to you, Sylv.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Donna’s mum exclaimed. “It’s chucking it down out there! You’ll catch pneumonia and then what’ll I do, running around after the two of you?”
Typical of her mum, Donna thought, to think about how everybody’s problems would inconvenience her. “I’ll go with him,” she offered. “We can have a bit of a chinwag, can’t we, Gramps? Sounds like it’s been a pretty eventful weekend.”
“Not really,” Wilf argued, with a shrug. “People always make too much out of these things - it’ll all settle down in time. That’s what I like about looking up at the stars; it puts everything in perspective.”
“Dad…” Sylvia said, warningly.
“Why shouldn’t he look at the stars?” protested Donna. “It’s not gonna do anybody any harm, is it?”
“Unless he catches his death of cold,” said Sylvia. “And you’re not going anywhere, young lady. You’ve not been well.”
“Oh, come on, Mum. All I did was overdo it a bit and sleep it off.”
“No, not that. You haven’t been right for the best part of the year…not since all that…that business with Lance.” Donna noticed a look pass between the two of them, almost like they were agreeing on a story. “That’s why you keep nodding off,” Sylvia went on. “The pills they had to give you. To stop you having bad dreams. You weren’t sleeping, so they knocked you out. It’s just been too much for you, all that’s happened.”
Donna frowned, more bewildered by the minute. “What, you mean with Dad and all that?”
Her mother hesitated, as if she was filing away her daughter’s response in a mental card index. Then she nodded, a bit too eagerly.
“That’s right,” she said. “After the weekend we’ve all had, you’re better off out of it.”
For one startling moment, her face seemed to melt a little. And then she was giving Donna a hug. “You stay here with me,” Sylvia said. “We’ll take it easy and watch something nice on the telly. One of those Sunday night shows like Michael Palin going round the world. I like those. I’ve got some choccies…”
Donna looked at Wilf but if she’d expected a bit of moral support from that quarter, she was going to be disappointed. He nodded. “You do that,” he agreed. “You’ll feel better. Your mum shouldn’t be on her own, not after all that’s happened.”
“And you shouldn’t be off up the hill,” Sylvia pointed out.
“I won’t be long,” he promised.
“Oh, he just wants to make sure they’ve put all the stars back where they belonged,” Donna said.
“That’s not funny, Donna,” said Sylvia.
Puzzled, Donna frowned. “I never said it was.”
She didn’t see Gramps again until the next morning.
********
Wilf walked briskly through the rainy evening, just putting one foot in front of the other. All over the place there were sounds of revelry, even a few fireworks going off here and there. It was as bad as bloody New Years’ Eve. How people could want to let off fireworks after all that had just happened was beyond him.
He felt mean leaving Donna behind but he was edgy and upset, and she never failed to pick up on his moods. He had a lot of thinking to do and if he made one slip-up it could cost Donna her life. How the hell were they going to deal with this? Donna wasn’t daft. It was all very well saying they’d just have to tell her it was a story, and she hadn’t really saved the world, but not everyone had a convenient TARDIS they could nip into when the awkward questions began.
Now all that speculation about the Doctor would start up again, at least until the Government managed to put a lid on it. And every time something like this happened, it got more difficult. Frankly, Will doubted whether they’d get away with it much longer. It was only a few months since the sky had gone up in flames and people’s car engines had choked them. And before that, there’d been that great ship in the sky and all the funny little fat people. Sylvia could deny it until the cows came home, but he knew better. She’d seen it with her own eyes.
Damn it, thought Wilf, he wished he’d not remembered that night. His beautiful Donna waving at him from the open TARDIS, so full of happiness and hope and a sense of doing something really worthwhile. And now she wouldn’t remember any of it. He’d been so happy for her that night he’d cheered and done a little dance, and even the thought of what Sylvia would have to say about her daughter disappearing like that hadn’t been enough to damp his spirits.
And now she’d saved the world - more than the world. More than he’d ever be able to get his mind around, if he lived to be a thousand years old. All that and he could never ask how she’d done it. Bad enough that he’d never know, worse still that she wouldn’t.
Still, reasoned Wilf, you had to try and look on the bright side. Here they were, the world saved all over again. Time and again the Doctor had been there for them, doing his bit for the human race. Where did he come from? Where did he go when all the danger was over, until the next time? Why did he keep on bothering?
And what would happen if he just stopped?
He’d reached the top of the hill now. London spread out before him, all those street lights, all the little houses filled with people who owed more to that strange, gangly alien than to any God they might choose to worship. His Donna had been part of that. One shining moment, that was all. Maybe the Doctor could take her memories away, but could he take away the ways it had changed her?
Because it had. She’d been a different woman with him. Everything he’d seen inside her, everything that Sylvia seemed either unable or plain unwilling to see, had bloomed into its full glory after she met that Doctor. Even after just a few days, there she was, slap bang in the middle of danger, telling the Army what she thought of them, standing up to aliens, her face shining as she told him of the things she’d seen. Now the only person who really knew what had happened was out there among the stars, God knows where, and he’d probably never see him again.
Perhaps he’d find that other young woman who’d carried a torch for him, the mysterious Rose Tyler who’d come out of nowhere, bearing a gun and mysteriously knowing exactly who they were? The world was coming to an end all around her, but her eyes had been fixed on that computer screen willing just one face to appear - the Doctor’s. Might have been a crush, of course. Who could say? And if it was, who could blame her? But he’d suspected that there was more to it than that. Once Donna had told him about the day she’d met the Doctor, and the look on his face as he’d mentioned Rose.
Then there were all the other faces that had appeared, briefly, on the computer screen. The hand-picked team that Harriet Jones had sacrificed her life to bring together. The beautiful black girl with her mother. The dashing chap with his team somewhere in a bunker in Cardiff. The older woman - some kind of journalist - hugging her son.
Donna had been part of that. For one brief shining moment. She’d flown the Earth back home in that wonderful ship, surrounded by those faces. He could imagine the laughter, the cheers, the camaraderie. You could live a lifetime on a memory like that. Wilf’s memories of his time in the Paras weren’t all bad by any means.
Now the Doctor was up there alone. That was one thing Wilf knew with complete certainty, that all those people were somewhere else now, and he was up there carrying the emptiness of millions of miles, hundreds of years, an unthinkable number of faces of those who had died, in the depths of those lonely eyes.
He’d kept his promise. He’d brought Donna back home safely to them.
But was safety what she wanted? Wilf Mott had lived through enough danger in his long life to know that there was no easy answer to that kind of question. Probably, the Doctor liked to pretend that there was, perhaps because he was so much older and cleverer than humans and he could dismiss them as a simple species. Nevertheless, sometimes overcoming danger together was the only thing that really made you feel alive. He wanted that kind of life for Donna; nothing else was good enough.
Wilf had seen things in the war that he wouldn’t be able to live with if he hadn’t made himself forget. Sometimes the only way to do that was to make things seem simpler than they really were.
He sighed deeply as he looked up into the sky. All those beautiful stars back where they ought to be. Until the next time.
And nobody left to thank for it. It didn’t seem right somehow.
*******
“What’s wrong with you tonight?” Sylvia grumbled. “You got ants in your pants, young lady?”
“I dunno,” said Donna. “I suppose I’m just a bit wired up. In a funny mood.”
“Well, you can snap out of it,” said Sylvia. “Can’t I have a nice quiet night in with my only daughter for a change? You don’t mind sitting up there for hours in all weathers with him.”
Jealous of her own dad, thought Donna. Mum really was plumbing new depths tonight. She made a conscious effort to keep still and watched as the titles of Michael Palin’s wanderings scrolled across the screen, accompanied by inoffensively jaunty music. Her mum had always been a fan of the affable Python - Donna could remember when “Full Circle” was on how she’d sit there going on at Dad because he wasn’t more like him. “He can talk to anyone,” she’d say. “Such a gentleman.”
It wasn’t that Donna didn’t like Michael Palin - how could you not like Michael Palin? - but she’d noticed with the last couple of series he’d done that there seemed to be a formula to his wanderings - a sameness about the way he’d turn up in every out-of-the-way community and make a beeline for the most eccentric person living there, trying to maintain the illusion that it hadn’t all been set up by a BBC researcher and he’d just stumbled across them by sheer serendipity. How wonderful it must be to be that kind of person. Always on the move, endlessly cheerful, charming and knowledgable. Of course, you didn’t see the bad bits. The endless waiting in airports, the arguing with petty border officials, the luggage disappearing yet again. (Although she did recall he’d had a rather grim time in the Sudan).
She struggled to be sociable. “Must be nice, travelling like that,” she said.
“You’ve done enough of that, young lady,” snapped her mother. “Time you settled down now.”
There it was again, Donna thought, one of those bizarre taunts that came out of nowhere. “Mum, what are you on about?” she asked, bewildered. “I’ve never been further than Palma.”
“And quite right too,” Sylvia declared. She reached for the remote and the beginning of a news bulletin pinged into electronic limbo.
“I was watching that!” Donna protested. “You could ask…”
“It’s nothing we need to know about,” her mother said rapidly.
“The Earth gets moved, it goes dark for thirty-six hours, there’s aliens out on the streets killing people and you say we don’t need to know?”
“Not now it’s over and done with. If it ever happened in the first place.” Sylvia got up, brushing chocolate fragments from her lap. “Well, it looks like Dad’s decided to make a night of it again. If he thinks I’m staying up in case he’s forgotten his key again, he’s got another think coming. I’m going to have a quick shower, then it’s off to the land of Nod for me, and if you’ve any sense you’ll do the same.”
Donna rolled her eyes and waited for her to go upstairs; as soon as she heard the bathroom door click shut, she reached for the remote control. She’d no intention of going to bed anytime soon. In fact, she might even nip out once Mum was safely tucked up and take Gramps a fresh Thermos. Find out why everybody was acting so oddly, and what had really happened this weekend.
The doorbell rang. It looked as if Mum was right; Gramps had forgotten his key after all. Donna smiled; he’d be scared stiff of a lecture from Mum as soon as the door opened, a situation she intended to milk for all it was worth. She chuckled as she crossed the hall to let him in.
“And what time do you call this?” she began, as she opened the door, taking care to reproduce Sylvia’s indignant tone of voice to perfection.
But the stranger on the doorstep was a lot more striking than her grandfather. Donna hadn’t a clue who he was, or what he was doing here, but with a smile like that, a trench coat scraping the floor, a twinkling pair of blue eyes and an unshakable belief in his own charisma, she was more than prepared to give him the benefit of any doubt that was going.
Michael Palin might be a national treasure and her mum’s pin-up, Donna thought, but for sheer sex appeal this guy knocked him into a cocked hat. And when he spoke, the easy American accent clinched the deal.
“So, Donna Noble, how does it feel to save the whole of creation?” he asked.