Returning the Lost (Ten/Donna)

[Garchomp]

It was a strong wish.

They could not help but be drawn to it. Someone with so many years, such a burden of age and emotion and experience... so many desires, so many regrets. They could reach out, all but touch those wishes, bring them forth -

There was one regret above all. One wish crying out to them.

A life lost, in so many ways. Such brightness and strength and courage, memories and actions that were destined to be kept in the past. To have an entire person's being and their changes locked away - that was not right. He regretted doing it, it had been the only way out then, but now... now they were here. They could fix it. And fix it they did, appearing above Cardiff, a hundred strange floating letters streaming in a single direction.

Towards Donna Noble, to give her back what was lost, and quietly remove the risk of dying from the memories of what it meant to have a Time Lord's knowledge in her head.

Then they faded out of sight, returning once more to their usual location, their purpose completed.

[donna]

In true Donna Noble-style, she'd missed it all. Flying letters in the sky, lights among the clouds and apparently, they'd all disappeared right before she'd woken up. They'd been staying in Cardiff for a short time, her and her mum and her grandad. Something about a clinic there that might have been able to do something for the migraines Donna had been plagued with ever since that night she'd slept right through the whole "planets-in-the-sky" incident. Honestly, she wouldn't have believed it was true if she hadn't seen the pictures that'd been taken during it. And she'd missed this one too, and while this time there weren't any pictures to prove it had actually happened, there was something else just a little more concrete.

Memories.

Not of what had happened, but much, much more important. And, just for future reference, waking up in the middle of the night with sudden knowledge and memories flooding back into your head? Not really the best of experiences. Lying awake for hours, processing it all and letting it just come back? Slightly better but still weird. At least an explanation for why she'd lost them all lay in the memories, but the fact that she wasn't burning up on the inside was...slightly concerning. Actually, very concerning, seeing as there hadn't been any way for them to come back without slowly killing her. Definitely a problem and a mystery, and who better to solve said mystery than her? Still. A bit of help might be needed. And she knew exactly who could provide it.

Anyone else would have been discouraged at the prospect of trying to find a time-traveler when they were stuck in one time without any real way of either getting off of Earth or into some other time, but Donna had done it once and she was going to do it again. What was she supposed to do with all these memories back, just go on and pretend they'd never happened? No, thanks. It had taken a long time to explain what had happened, even though Donna wasn't really sure of the cause, and though Sylvia had been against her going off to find the Doctor again, she and Wilf working together had managed to convince her that this was the only choice, especially if they'd wanted to know what had happened exactly.

Where there was weird stuff, the Doctor was bound to show up, so Donna had headed down to where people had said the floating letters had first appeared. There was nothing there now, of course, just people hoping to catch another glimpse of what had occurred the night before. All around the street, they'd gathered, looking up to the sky and waiting for another flash of rainbow light. People in Cardiff must have been used to this sort of thing by now, really, but it was strange that they hadn't seemed to do anything. Nothing but restore the memory of one Donna Noble. Bit specific, wasn't it? Something was definitely up here and undoubtedly, it has something to do with the Doctor. Donna joined the crowd in looking towards the sky, but she wasn't looking for a glimpse of light or the floating, black letters.

She was looking for a blue police box.

[The Tenth Doctor]

The blue police box in question was sitting rather neatly on a street corner. The Doctor honestly could not count how many times he'd been thankful for the TARDIS' perception filter. The TARDIS could make it's noise and just appear right out of thin air without anyone around noticing, even if it was right nearby a large crowd of people. The Doctor himself, however, was not in the TARDIS. Instead, he was roaming through the crowd, picking up some of the people's conversations. From what he understood, there were letters in the sky... and the letters had eyes. That wasn't any kind of species the Doctor knew... which was weird, since he was used to knowing any species he came across.

Of course, this was all happening in Cardiff. Everything happened in Cardiff. It was probably because of a particularly nasty Rift underneath the place, or because so many important people lived here. The Doctor considered for a moment the possibility of stopping by Torchwood base and saying hello to Jack Harkness and his group. While it would be fun, Torchwood was probably very busy with... Torchwood stuff. The Doctor honestly didn't know very much about Jack Harkness' version of Torchwood. The only Torchwood he knew about was the one that almost brought about two different apocalypses. So, Torchwood wasn't exactly the Doctor's cup of tea, at least not old Torchwood. Maybe new Torchwood was better.

The Doctor figured he wasn't going to get much done waiting around for the letters to show up again, which they probably wouldn't do anyway. He started to walk back over to the TARDIS, intent on scanning around to see if he could find the location of the weird letter things, or at the very least some trace of them actually being there. On the way, the Doctor was so distracted with his own thoughts that he bumped into a certain redhead. Whoops.