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Donna watches him come back into the TARDIS and she doesn’t really know whether she wants to laugh or cry. All she can think, right now, is that it’s a kind of surreal parody of what every woman is meant to want – a big, powerful man walking through the door and saying he’s home, darling.
She doesn’t want that. Not quite. Now Lee walking through the door – that would be another matter.
Can you grieve for something you never really had? Something that was a dream, an illusion created by someone else? She’s quietly angry in a way she’s never been before, that someone chose that dream life for her and then took it away. They had no right to do that. The assumption that anyone would prefer a fake life with real feelings to death might seem obvious to another person – particularly if he was male – but it still makes her furious.
She hadn’t been furious with Lance, even though she’d had every right to be. She blames herself for being taken in like that and she’s refused to speak to anyone about him ever again. It’s not so much hurt – it’s shame. But now she’s angry – not with Lance; that all feels as if it happened to another person. She’s angry with the patronising, manipulative git that set her up with a future she hadn’t asked for and then wasn’t around to pick up the pieces when it fell apart. It makes her feel a bit angry with the Doctor, too. She could imagine, so easily, him doing something like that.
“So did you save her?” she asks, and there’s a nasty tone in her voice that crept in when she wasn’t looking.
He seems oblivious. “Yep,” he says, with that impermeable smile of his that covers up so much pain. Then he stands back and snaps his fingers, and the door of the TARDIS closes.
“I never knew you could do that,” she says automatically. Then hates herself for it, because that’s what he wanted her to say. That’s why he did it.
“Me neither,” he answers with a smirk. She wants to thump him. That makes it all worthwhile, does it? That he picked up a new trick?
“So did she tell you? Did she see you do it in that future you weren’t allowed to hear about?” she asks. And she wants to add, “She was economical with the truth, but she let things slip when it suited her.” But she doesn’t, because then he’ll think she’s just being pathetic and jealous, and it’s not like that. It’s deeper and more complicated. It’s not that she wants him – the Doctor. It’s more about wanting to be the person to decide what she wants, thank you very much.
“I told her I couldn’t do it,” he explains. “But she’d seen me do it, she said.”
“And you believed her? Just like that?”
He pauses. His eyes look dark and she feels a little shiver; it reminds her that he killed a whole species on the day they met, and he’s capable of doing things like that.
“Yep,” he pops out, and starts twiddling things.
“When did all that happen?” she can’t help wanting to know. “When did you start trusting her?”
She knows he’s never going to tell her. “Just did,” he replies, without meeting her eyes.
“Liar,” she flashes.
“Why should I lie about something like that?” he says indignantly. “I just met someone who’d already met me before I’d met them. Happens to me all the time. Read ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’; then you’ll get it.”
“Do they all call you Pretty Boy?” Her arms are folded now and she’s almost tapping her foot. All she wants from him is honesty, the one thing she’ll never get.
“Okay.” He taps the side of his hand against the console – rather hard, she can’t help noticing, and turns to her with a frown. “I can understand you’re emotional. You’ve lost somebody…”
She slaps him. She never expected to do that again, or even that she’d want to do it.
“You arrogant prick,” she exclaims. “You think you know everything, don’t you? What if she didn’t want to be saved? Never thought of that, I suppose, did you?”
He’s staring at her like a little lad accused of talking in class when it was the kid next to him. The indignation, the disbelief – she’s almost waiting for that pretty little lip of his to quiver. It occurs to her that she’s being unkind taking the option of saving people away from him. It’s all he’s got. How else does he justify his place in the great scheme of things?
But then she reminds herself how casually he lied to her about the reasons for coming here. That hurt, and it hasn’t been dealt with yet.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he demands. “Was I supposed to apologise for saving her life?”
“You didn’t save her life!” she protests. “She’s still dead, but now you’ve trapped her in some dream world where anything could be going on – just so you can say she’s having a fantastic life and move on and all that crap! And if she doesn’t like it, there’s nothing she can do about it. She can’t even die.”
Suddenly his face seems to collapse in on itself. “I couldn’t do anything else,” he says, quietly. Clearly he’s struggling with something. After a minute, he decides to open up a chink; quite why she doesn’t know. “She wanted to die because if it had been me instead, then she’d never meet me. I couldn’t just let her die because of me.”
“You’ve done it again, haven’t you?” she sighs – and now she’s feeling desperately sorry for him. “You can’t bear to be alone, so you let people in, but every time you do that they end up loving you and getting hurt and thinking it’s worthwhile. So you feel you have to save them.”
“Yep,” he says again. His voice is choked; she knows she spoke the truth.
He looks at her; there’s the hint of unshed tears at the corner of his eyes. “I don’t ask to be the way I am,” he says. “I just try my best. Everyone does. Well, if they’ve anything worthwhile about them, they do.”
“Promise me something,” she insists. “Promise you won’t choose for me. If I haven’t said I want to be saved, don’t save me. Don’t go on to whoever comes next and tell them I’m having a great time when I’m just trapped somewhere that isn’t real.”
“How do you know what’s real and what isn’t?” he asks. “What you think is reality – what you’re experiencing now – is no more real than any of the alternatives.” He’s got his hands spread over the controls and he’s looking into a distance that’s only in his memories as he taps his fingertips slowly on the console.
“I can’t live like that,” she says. “I have to give myself completely to whatever reality I’m in. I can’t go around thinking everything could fade away at any moment. How can you get close to anybody?”
“You can’t,” he says, simply. She thinks that’s it – but again, he decides to say more. “My people didn’t. They held themselves apart; most of them never left their native planet.”
“Gallifrey,” she says quietly. It sounds like a paradise. She thinks of all the lost places that have that sound about them. Camelot. Shangri-La. Atlantis. None of them exist. Neither does Gallifrey, now.
“I can’t pretend I’m not glad you were saved,” he finishes. “I’m sorry if it hurt. But at least…” His voice trails away.
She walks around a little bit.
“If that place – that world where I was – is as real as anywhere else,” she says, struggling to express herself clearly enough to keep his interest, to hold down that brilliant butterfly mind of his, “then could I find him again?”
“Yeah, I suppose so,” he replies, brightly.
She’s going to call him in on that. “Then you could find her, couldn’t you?” she says.
“I do find her. Or she finds me.”
He’s being deliberately obtuse and they both know it. “Not that River woman,” she snaps. “Stupid bloody name, anyway. She’s the type who’d find anyone she’d set her mind to. No, I mean-”
“That’s different,” he says, before she can finish. Not that she’d quite brought herself to say the name. All she could think about was his face, all that time ago in the fake snowstorm he’d created, the way he’d choked up as he’d said, “Her name was Rose.”
“Or is it easier just to leave her there?” she asks, her voice gentler than her thoughts. “Your little data ghost frozen in her perfect world, the one you made for her?”
“It wasn’t like that,” he says, and there’s a hollowness in his tone that’s worse than anger. “It was a botch job, cobbled together at the last minute, the best I could do. It has to be good enough.” She’s still thinking that the way he put that was interesting when he says it again. “Has to be.”
And then she wants to hug him. He’s all elbows and pain and she wonders if he wears that coat to make him look bigger than he really feels. Like snapping his fingers and saying he’s fine and showing off his ship to little human women. Like saying he’s got his own song, and that his daughter wasn’t part of him.
“Tell you what,” she proposes. “We’ll both agree to keep our eyes open. You’re so good at believing things for other people. So, you believe in Lee and I’ll believe in her.”
He sighs and looks up at her. He’s knackered again. He never seems to sleep. She doesn’t know how he does it. Only why he does it. It’s so he doesn’t have to think.
“If you like,” he concedes. “Won’t make any difference, you know.”
“Tell me that the next time you rush in and save somebody against impossible odds,” she says. “If it won’t make any difference, then it won’t do any harm. More than you can say for alcohol. Mind you, I could murder a Martini right now.”
His smile is shallow, but relieved. “I’ll join you,” he says.