A Christmas Who fic
Title: Secret Santa
Author: Sue DeNimme
Characters/Pairing: Ten, Donna
Rating: G
Spoilers: Post-Journey's End
Summary: Donna never does learn who keeps sending her anonymous gifts every Christmas...
Disclaimer: Doctor Who and its characters are the property of the BBC. No copyrights were harmed in the making of this fanfic.
That first Christmas, it's a silk scarf.
The next Christmas, it's a pair of warm microfiber gloves.
The next, it's a fashionable belt.
And the next, it's a silver-toned watch with a tiny diamond at the twelve mark.
He wishes the gifts didn't have to be so... generic. Things you might give to someone you don't know all that well, a friend-but-not-best-friend, or a relative you don't see often. Nothing extravagant, nothing too personal, nothing to remind her of him or that one brilliant year that they spent together.
He wishes he didn't have to be so careful. Nothing from the future, nothing from the past (or at least, nothing that might give itself away by looking too new), nothing extraterrestrial or made with materials not available on Earth in the early twenty-first century.
He wishes he could shower her with things as unique as she is. Things from planets she helped save. A Pyrovilian Fire Opal. A Vroonian Mind-orb with a telepathic recording of the Ood song (the joyous, post-slavery one). A coat of the finest yarra-wool from the once-Lost, now-Found (thanks to her) Moon of Poosh.
He wishes a lot of things. All of them about as useful as wishing that the metacrisis had never happened and that they were still the Doctor-Donna.
But they're not. They're strangers now, at least as far as she's concerned. She has no memory of a firework turning into snow. She doesn't remember waving at fat. Or a walnut-and-anchovy-flavored snog. He's just a man who happened to be at her house talking to her grandfather on the evening she woke up in her clothes to find her phone full of texts raving about planets in the sky.
He tells himself it's okay. He can remember for the both of them. But memories are cold comfort when he passes her room in the TARDIS. When he catches a glimpse of long red hair across a marketplace and has to stop himself from calling her name. When he hears a laugh that sounds like hers. When he finds himself missing the "skinny" jokes and the teasing about his hair-gel habit.
On his better days, the memories do help, a little. When he's stuck in a jail cell or dangling from a rope above a pit full of Drashigs, he can hear her voice in his head. It has her inflections and accent at least, and it calls him Spaceman or Timeboy. Usually it tells him that if he dies now, she'll kill him. And it keeps him fighting, the way Rose's name used to (and still does sometimes, even now).
On his worse days, he can't help thinking how ironic it is that of all his incarnations so far, this one seems to have the most need to be with people, and has no trouble attracting them, but is absolute rubbish when it comes to keeping them.
The one good thing about this latest loss is that at least it distracts him from the older ones.
He's not sure why he feels compelled to send her gifts every year. He doesn't do that kind of thing, or at least he never used to. Well, he's given Sarah Jane a few things, but hardly on a regular basis. Used to be, once he was out of their lives, he was out. No visits, no calls, and certainly no gifts.
Maybe it's guilt. The oldest companion of all.
Maybe it's the despair he still remembers seeing in her eyes when he raised his fingers to her temples.
Maybe it's simply because this incarnation likes feeling connected. He sees Jack sometimes, now, and Sarah Jane, and he even let Martha give him her superphone and make him promise to be at her beck and call. And he might not be able to see Rose again ever, but she's literally got a piece of him now, and that's almost as good.
Maybe it's all of the above. The point is, he wants to do it, so he does.
Once, the TARDIS brings him to a school where, from a distance, he sees her drive up, get out, and hug a little girl and a boy who run into her arms. Through Martha, he learns that she's adopted the two of them just that year. So he goes back to the Christmas before and sends her a digicam.
Martha and Jack continue to keep tabs on her for him. He knows when she quits temping, when she goes back to school, when she wins her first case, when she goes on to politics. He smiles when he hears she's been elected MP, and gained a reputation for fighting for the rights of the poor, the disenfranchised and the discriminated-against.
She's found a way to be magnificent without him. And it's brilliant.
Donna never does learn who keeps sending her anonymous gifts every Christmas. The first few years, it drives her crazy. Whoever it is always seems to find her no matter where she's moved to. And he (or she) knows her tastes and sizes. She wonders if she's somehow acquired a stalker, but if so, it's an uncommonly shy one, who never makes an attempt to contact her otherwise. The gifts just show up in the post. One a year, every year, without fail.
She's not sure when it goes from being vaguely scary to kind of sweet. She finds herself starting to treasure these anonymous gifts, regardless of what they are, almost as much as the ones from Josh and Ella. And eventually she stops even wanting to know who the sender is. She's afraid that if she finds out, she'll be disappointed.
What real person, after all, can ever compare to someone who writes in a card every year, "For Donna Noble, the most important woman in the universe"?
~end