AN: Post-Journey's End. This is the story of the third and final part of Donna's life, and the third and last time she met the Doctor.

Disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing in this story. Well…I guess Charlie. But he doesn't deserve Donna anyway, lol. I totally love Donna as a companion. She completely rocked.

..V..

…Third and Final…

Donna Noble laughs as her friend tells her some nonsense about planets in the sky and aliens. The man—John? James?—that had been talking to her mum and granddad pops in to say goodbye and she waves him off without a second thought. Minutes later she turns back to the door with a sudden frown but she doesn't know what's wrong and can't seem to remember what she had been thinking of so she shrugs it off and texts back Anne who swears there were robots in the streets. She walks back to her room with a laugh.

She keeps bouncing around jobs at the temp agency and relaxes with her friends at the pub, laughing and gossiping and trading horror stories from work, but she can't seem to shake this little spot in the pit of her stomach that declares the world around her wrong.

Donna Noble dreams of a figure—a silhouette of a man—whose voice she cannot remember. He holds her hand and pulls her as he runs and there's a humming and a light and the shadow of a song and she wakes feverish and crying and her mum doesn't comment, for once, when she starts buying sleeping pills.

The pills don't always work, and she blames the dreams for that ache that sometimes hits her. She spends more time at work, because she can't take her granddad's sudden sadness and doesn't understand her mother's sudden quietness and when the company she's temping at recognizes her sudden dedication and offers her a permanent job as a secretary, she takes it and moves to the city.

Her mum is excited for her, of course, but seems even more relieved, and her granddad holds her a little too tight and a little too long and she kisses his cheek and promises to visit—often—and tries to, but…

The friends she makes in the city all seem eager and going places and from somewhere inside herself she discovers she has the strength to risk disappointment and even failure, and that maybe, despite everything she has ever been and felt she has retained the capacity to hope and believe in herself. It surprises her, but she takes a couple of night classes and never takes crap from anyone and thinks the name Donna Noble might be a name worth hearing and worth repeating.

Something has changed. She has no memories of singing Oods or Doctor-Donna or how much she has seen and done and become, but deep down in her very essence, the Donna-of-before-the-Doctor has shifted and fundamentally altered. She is not the Donna-that-was-and-can-never-be-again, but a third version. A third chance, this Donna, who sees and yearns and strives for more then she ever did before, because somewhere down in her heart she knows she has the right to want and the ability to know. Donna Noble looks at the stars and wonders what is up there.

She has a couple of long relationships but she is no longer eager to settle and marry and besides, she is earning her degree one class at a time and she thinks she might like to take a trip somewhere—"Pyramids! Great stone buildings built by hand! Ages ago! Imagine!"—and the world around her seems to be…

…holding it's breath.

People like her, and Charlie really likes her, and she's secretary to the Vice President of the company and one more night class away from her degree and five years have passed since people had gone crazy and seen planets in the sky and Donna Noble is walking down the street. She's off work early and on her way back to her flat, where she'll cook dinner for Charlie. Except she won't make it back home.

She's listening to music on her iPod but a woman is walking alongside her, staring behind her, and finally Donna yanks out her headphones and turns to the lady and demands to know what's going on. The woman stutters, but in horror and confusion, not embarrassment. "Th-there's something on your back!"

Donna swivels to look at her reflection in the window of Bad Wolf Antiques, but there's nothing there and when she turns to look back at the woman, she can only see her in the distance. Running.

It's the city, and odd things happen, but Donna can't shake the sudden worry that grips her and she walks to the park instead, eager for a bit of fresh air. It saves her life.

Overhead the sky has darkened and explosions rock the city and the world 'alien'—which is now, suddenly, such a common word and concept—is bandied around. Donna Noble had read and heard about mysterious alien-type events in the last five years, but this is the first she has witnessed for herself, and there is a sudden ache inside as she sees the debris that had once been her apartment building. She throws up when she discovers that her office building has also been destroyed, along with most of her co-workers. Charlie, of course, had stopped by her work that day to bring her flowers. All dead.

Her mum and granddad beg her to return home, but she chooses to volunteer at one of the makeshift camps throughout the city instead, knowing somehow, inside, that she has to stay. Spaceships fill the sky that night, and voices from above order the complete disarmament of the human race. Total surrender.

When a light flashes and humming echoes in the building she is in, she looks up at the blue Police Box that appears in the center of the room and nods sharply. "Right." A skinny man in a suit steps out and she walks up to him.

"You one of them?" she demands, and he looks at her. Shocked. Pale. Wide-eyed.

"What? What? What!" he sputters. She rolls her eyes, furious and determined and exasperated in one go.

"Are you—" she points at him, "One of them?" she finishes, pointing at the sky. He blinks and then shakes his head slowly.

"No."

"Right," she nods. "I'm Donna Noble. How're we going to deal with 'em?"

"We?" he sputters again.

"We. You and me," she says slowly, pointing to the two of them. "You and your little blue box just appeared in the center of this alien attack, meaning you must have some sort of plan. And as you seem to be alone you can always do with a bit of help, eh?"

"I don't—Donna—Ms. Noble—I don't think—"

"Listen, whoever you are—my boyfriend was murdered and my friends were murdered, my home and my job are gone and I am bloody-well able to do something about it, so I am, got me?"

"But—"

"What's your name, then? Mind you that box is small, so don't be getting any ideas, even if you do have fantastic hair. Besides—aliens and all! No time for flirting, understand? Now, name?"

"Donna—"

"What is your name, Spaceboy?" She frowns. Pauses. "Spaceboy?" she whispers to herself.

"Spaceboy," the man in the suit repeats, eyes widening, and she rolls her own.

"Oy! Name!"

"John Smith," he tells her softly, and she snorts.

"John Smith? Right, I'm sure."

"Donna, I'm sorry," he tells her. "I have to do this on my own." He walks away, and she stares at him—flabbergasted—and then runs after him, but he slams the door of his blue box in her face and with a flash and a hum he is gone.

That night the world shakes in explosions and fire and the announcements change as hour after hour the aliens call for the surrender of the human race but now also order them to give up the location of the doctor.

There's an orthodontist and a cardiologist in her camp, but everyone knows that this, somehow, is different. It must be the fires, but Donna is warm although others are huddled together. Maybe they're huddled because of fear and not because they're cold, but she isn't sure anymore—not of anything.

And that night, as she tries to sleep, she can hear the slow throb of a heartbeat sounding in the distance. A night spent in turmoil and sleeplessness, and when dawn breaks there is no mention of the Doctor in any of the aliens' announcements and orders, and the heartbeat is still there, slow and steady.

Donna Noble, secretary, stumbles out into the dust and debris and follows it though a city that now crumbles in places and burns slowly in others. Three hours later she breaks a window in a familiar little antique shop, stumbling in the dim light over antique tables and desks and finds the blue box. The door opens for her and she takes a deep breath and walks in.

The door shuts behind her and she's standing in a room that is bigger then it should be and she's so very warm, now. She wipes a hand across her face and then starts to back out, but before she can a very handsome gentleman runs in. He stares at her in shock.

"Donna?" he whispers. She blinks.

"Do I know you?"

"It's—I'm Jack!" He frowns, suddenly. "What are you doing here?"

"I don't…I don't know," she tells him. Her eyes are large and worried, and he suddenly flashes her a smile. She goes a bit weak at the knees.

"Doctor will sort it all out," he tells her. "We've just got to go and…well…rescue him."

"The Doctor?" she asks, remembering the announcements the night before and suddenly intrigued. "Where is he?"

"Up there," Jack points, gesturing to where the spaceships hover above. "They've got him and Martha—you remember Martha? No? Well, they've got them." He pauses, struggling with something, trying to decide something before finally turning back to her. "Remember how to fly her?" he asks, and she blinks, startled.

"How to—how to fly this? Jack, what are you—" She freezes suddenly. "Oh." Flashes, now, of this ship—"TARDIS," she whispers. Flashes of people and places and from above numbers are counting down and…and…the room is so hot, but she shakes her head and her hands find controls on instinct as she shrugs out of her jacket and Captain Jack Harkness watches her.

"It was all a trap to capture the Doctor," he tells her, softly, his voice slow and even and calm. "All of it, all of this a trap. They'll destroy the earth because they can, and because it'll hurt the Doctor." She nods as if she's listening, and she is. Sort of.

The TARDIS shudders and pulls and yanks and then slowly reappears on a spaceship. Donna Noble is in a spaceship floating above the earth, and all she wants to do is cry. Or maybe laugh.

She sits down abruptly, but when Jack tells her what needs to be accomplished she tells him how to do what he can do and does the rest herself. So slowly now. His hands are cool on her skin as he holds her up, and she thinks he's crying but is no longer sure why. Time is passing like a blur, and Jack is suddenly gone, and when he runs back into the TARDIS and yells for her to bring them back to earth he is followed by Martha Jones, who looks at her in shock, and a man.

She recognizes him, of course. He is John Smith, from yesterday, and the man from a hundred thousand dreams, and now, she knows, the John Smith from five years ago, when he left her life for what should have been forever.

And as the TARDIS lands back on earth Donna Noble meets the Doctor for the third and final time.

Voices are swirling around her—

"The TARDIS must have called her—recognized the Time Lord in her—"

"How could you tell her—"

"Can't you do anything?"

"Why was she even here?"

The Doctor pulls her into his arms and rocks her and she buries her face in his chest. "Donna," he whispers, "I'm so sorry…there's nothing I can do."

"I know," she whispers back. "The Doctor-Donna, remember?"

"I remember," he tells her. "You saved the world. Again. Getting to be a habit," he half-laughs, and she tries to smile up at him.

"You should've seen me, Doctor," she grins, suddenly. "Got a job in the city. Posh. One class away from my degree. I had a good life. Not as good as with you, of course, but…"

"I know," he smiles. "You saw me and decided you were coming to save the world. You turned out brilliant, you know. You're magnificent, Donna Noble."

"Remember…" she gasps, "When we first met? You told me to be magnificent. I said I always listened to you, Doctor."

He laughs sharply, but the look in his eyes says he always knew this day would come, and her grip on his hand tightens.

"'One will still die,'" she quotes, softly, and the Doctor pales as he remembers fighting for her, forcing himself to save her in the only way he could.

But the Donna-that-was would have chosen to die that day, rather then return to the Donna-that-had-been, to a life without magnificence or potential or hope, and she would've screamed that to the Doctor if she'd had the time, but he'd been so hell-bent on saving her, on defying prophecy and death just one more time that she hadn't had the chance. She is, now, what no one thought she would become—could become—and she takes this as merely the culmination, the inevitable moment of truth that has been slowly churning forward since she was born.

"One will still die," Dalek Caan had whispered, and she is enough of the Doctor to call out to him, to wrap her mind around him, holding him—It was meant to be, Doctor, always this moment was meant to be—and she scrambles now, her mind flooding with thoughts and words too many to comprehend, and he can feel the heat inside her, can feel her begin to burn and he holds her in his arms, so tightly, tears spilling down his cheeks.

He knows her well enough, still, this amalgamation of friend and self and new-discovery that he flips through memories until he finds it. So simple and so right, and she smiles through her tears as the Ood sing to her, sing to the Doctor-Donna as she burns and breathes and dies and lives.

Donna Noble lived three lives. She was a temp and a bride-to-be. She was the Doctor's companion, seeing the unimaginable, doing the unthinkable. But her third life was brilliant and her own, short and everlasting. She can see Jack holding a sobbing Martha near her, and above her she can make out fire the Doctor's eyes, and inside her the Ood sing and the TARDIS hums.

"Tell my mum I love her, will you? And tell granddad I saved the world." She laughs through her tears. "He'll like that."

"One will still die," Dalek Caan had prophesied, and now Donna Noble—the temp, the fiancée, Doctor-Donna, the companion, the secretary, the hero—does because of that one day, that one moment and choice and action five years ago. A lifetime ago. But in her own time and on her own terms.

Always on her own terms.

Donna Noble burns and the earth keeps turning.

Ultimately, and always, on her own terms.