Work Text:
The Doctor: “How’d you do it?”
Donna: “Well, you can’t expect me to tell you if you just say ‘it.’ ‘It’ could be bloody anything.”
The Doctor: “You know what ‘it’ means.”
Donna: “I don’t, actually, cause you won’t tell me.”
The Doctor: “You saw so much out there. You saw the stars, and aliens, and all these planets, all completely different, spread across the galaxy. You saw billions, billions of years of human history in the blink of an eye. You saw unfathomable cruelty, and you saw life changing acts of grace. You saw more in a short stint in the TARDIS than almost any other human will see in their lifetime.”
Donna: “And I’m glad I did. I’m glad I got to travel with you.”
The Doctor: “But that’s my point. It’s all past tense. ‘Got,’ not ‘get.’”
The Doctor: “You’re here, in the backyard of your red brick house, going to work every day and making dinner every night, even though there’s this whole great big universe out there, and you can remember every little bit of it. And you keep on doing it every single day, when you know there’s no way to get back.”
The Doctor: “How do you slow down? How do you box it all up and act like it never happened? How do you keep going without trying to speed up?”
Donna: “Doctor, I–”
The Doctor: “How are you happy?”
Donna: “...”
Donna: “For the first bit of it, I couldn’t remember anything. I could just sort of – I don’t know, feel something was missing. So I won’t be much help there.”
Donna: “But you’ve got it all messed up, spaceman. You asked me how I boxed it all up, or whatever, and the answer is that I don’t. Except for when you made me box up forever ago.”
Donna: “Fighting off space potatoes and solving murder mysteries and all those other things are a part of me. You are a part of me. Literally. I still haven’t forgiven you for making me give away 166 million pounds.”
Donna: “You’re an idiot if you don’t acknowledge it in everything you do, but you’re also an idiot if you just sit around fawning over the good old days. I hold grudges – especially if your name is Nerys, or if you, I don’t know, made me give away 166 million pounds – but I don’t let myself look back.”
Donna: “I’ve got things here to worry about. I got to keep Shaun in line, and I’ve got to protect Rose from those tossers down the street, and I’ve got to make sure Sylvia doesn’t have a heart attack over whatever I’m doing, and I’ve got to keep Wilf updated on them aliens, and I’ve got to make sure your scrawny arse doesn’t run off into the abyss.”
Donna:“And it’s smaller, but I don’t think it’s less important. It’s as important as you want it to be. I want my family – all of you – to be the most important thing in my life. So it is.”
Donna: “‘Cause I noticed something. With you, but don’t go taking credit for it. All of the most important people are the ones who really screw it up for everybody else. It’s the people who are just trying to live their lives who do the most good. They have something to fight for.”
Donna: “And I love you, but I don’t know what you were fighting for. I told you you needed somebody, and I said that because when it was just you versus that spider lady – it seemed like you were fighting because you didn’t know what else to do. And that’s where you start to mess with the lives of real people.”
Donna: “So just – make this important, I suppose. Tell your stories, but tell them as part of being a good uncle. A good brother. You’re about as annoying as one actually related to me would be, anyways, so you might as well. You don’t need to save the world to help people. You just need to be there, and not running off to the next thing that you think might fill that void.”
The Doctor: “...”
The Doctor: “I’m looking back, and I still don’t know who I am.”
The Doctor: “I say all these things about myself – I lie, I’m a man who never would, I’m never cruel or cowardly, I don’t give second chances – but I don’t think any of them are completely true. I didn’t even work out the whole manliking thing until Isaac Newton. Did we ever fix mavity? I don’t think we ever fixed mavity.”
The Doctor: “My point is – I don’t know if I can be enough just by being present.”
The Doctor: “I’m not a whole person. Literally. Half of me is running around and doing what I once did. Before that, I compensated for that by playing the hero. Now I’m here, and I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know how to make this important without it being an act. I don’t know how to love something without knowing that it’s not going to last. I don’t know how to live beyond the present.”
Donna: “You put on your big boy trousers and you sit your arse down and you become a real person. You’ve been put here to heal and rest and process all the shit you’ve done because you never took a moment to just stop. It’s not going to be easy, but it shouldn’t be. It’s a hell of a lot easier to pretend than to be vulnerable. Just ask Nerys.”
Donna: “But you like a challenge. So here’s how you save not the world, but yourself. Do it, or don’t, but I strongly recommend you do, because against all logic, I care about you. And I want you to be happy here, and that last question of yours worries me.”
The Doctor: “...”
Donna: “I worry about you a lot. I make fun of you, and you deserve most of it, but I worry about you.”
The Doctor: “...”
Donna: “I still think you need someone.”
The Doctor: “I’ve got a lot of someones.”
Donna: “I think you need to be someone too. And that you need to treat those someones as people, not just as an audience.”
The Doctor: “...”
The Doctor: “I am. More than I was, at least.”
Donna: “Then you’re making a really good start.”
Donna: “Now go to bed and rest before I slap you into next Tuesday.”
Donna: “…”
Donna: “I love you.”
The Doctor: “...”
The Doctor: “The same to you.”