Disclaimer: I own nothing; for fun, not profit; etc.

Setting/Spoilers: Everything in New Who through Series 4's Journey's End.

Notes: There's a lot here I was trying to do with regard to the similarities between Rose and Donna's stories, and maybe I failed, but I won't go into that. It was a fun exercise. Three things contained herein that I do not own are: T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (again), William Blake's The Tyger, and Buddhism's Fire Sermon. In as far as poetry lines are used by Donna, we'll just pretend that the Doctor is an admirer of English poetry, and during her descent into madness/death/etc. at the end of Journey's End she got those lines from his mind in the general melee in information she couldn't assimilate. As far as what I've hijacked from the Fire Sermon goes, there are four kinds of burning related to life: passion, delusion, aversion, and the sufferings of birth, aging, and death. Oh, and on an unrelated note - Document Manager ate my formatting.

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(Prelude)

"Rose, you're gonna burn!" the Doctor was shouting at her.

But Rose Tyler shook her head, her skin glowing and eyes distant and mind spinning, spinning, spinning with flame and heat and light. "Everything comes to dust. All things."

And years later, Donna Noble thought and felt burning burning burning burning –

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rāgagginā (passion)

The Doctor shouts, Run! and

there's a solidarity she's never felt before in her life, the strangest of any exhilarations that have ever coursed through her veins. Rose is nineteen and such a contrast to the ancient man beside her, drawing him out of his dark and brooding shell bit by bit with every move she makes, all giddiness and youth and innocence, sweet and beautiful and more clever than she'd thought to look for in herself; and it's so very liberating to be this person. She's dancing on the cusp of something, or bursting into colors she hadn't known were in her, and she thinks, This is where my life begins.

she can't believe she's running toward something, for once, something other than temping and filing and the same old monotony in a thousand of the same places, filled with the same lot of dissatisfied people sharing the same collective apathy. Donna is sharp and funny and a bit shouty, and closer to middle age than she'd like. She's a counterbalance to her companion, and she finds something fulfilling in this role: of all the forces in the universe, she can even this one out. She is more than a mere witness, less than passive in all her irrelevance, and a hand to grab in the rush of a shared thrill; and she thinks, This is where my life has been leading me.

(He thought you were brilliant, Rose will one day tell a Donna who will shortly cease to exist.

Don't be stupid, Donna says.

No, but you are, Rose insists. It just took the Doctor to show you that. He did the same for me.)

they run for their lives.

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(Birth)

One day, Rose looks into the time vortex, not knowing she's led herself to this very moment; and something more than and yet not herself creates itself inside her mind.

Another day, Donna will create something new and become something new, her hand stretching towards her fate lying in another hand, her movements compelled and choreographed by something the Doctor has already termed destiny.

Neither are meant to survive it, and already in the back of their minds, burning burning burning manifests itself like war drums too distant to take notice of just yet, because the universe has plucked them from their lives and made them too important in this moment to die. So their eyes glow and their minds sing with all the creative power and all the knowledge they'll never retain.

And the desperation and the terror and the burning and it's beautiful.

(You are something new, voices whisper across time.)

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mohagginā (delusion)

("But Sarah Jane, you were that close to her once, and now…" Rose struggles once, early on. "You never even mention her! Is that what you're going to do to me?"

"No, not to you," the Doctor assures her, but she's already overheard a snippet of his hushed conversation with Sarah Jane, shoulders slumped and faces hardened with the emotion of seeing each other again so very unexpectedly:

"I waited for you," Sarah Jane said. "I missed you."

"Oh, you didn't need me!" he'd said with forced cheer. "You were getting on with your life!"

But Sarah Jane replied, "You were my life."

There Rose had stopped listening, because oh, she understands this.

"This," Rose says, carefully avoiding Sarah Jane's too wise eyes, "this is really seeing the future.")

The Doctor whirls her around to a thousand stars and suns, letting her pick the place and time and letting her enthusiasm, bright and new, feed into his own. Rose loves, and is loved; and amongst all the confusion, and all the intricacies of time, this can be simple. So she clasps his hand all the tighter, and girlishly leans her head against his shoulder, because she is his one-and-only, and he'll always give his all for her the same way she will for him. And his all may be dark and terrible, too intense for words, and nearly too much for her, but it's also the most beautiful thing she's ever seen. It changes her in a million tiny ways, enough so that the light seems to refract differently through her ever crystallizing being, and that her mother hugs her closer and looks at her more and more like she's a stranger whenever she comes home.

She's known almost since day one that she'll live with this love forever.

(How long are you gonna stay with me? the Doctor asks Rose once, a little later.

Forever, she replies with a smile, as though it should have been obvious; and perhaps it should have been; and if the Doctor knows better, he doesn't say anything.

"Never say never ever," he'd already told her, but maybe it hurt too much to repeat it.)

oOo

Sometimes you need someone to stop you, Donna had told him not long after they'd first met; and at the time, she'd had only the faintest inkling of Rose, only hours gone and already pulling at the edges of his being to disappear into that same void after her.

Sometimes I need someone, he'd finally acknowledged to her a year later, looking straight at her, asking without asking, and had Donna not already resolved to be that someone for him as long as he needed, she would have in that moment.

In return he gives her the stars and the whole of time and space, and a feeling of becoming, on her way towards belonging, in her own skin that she's never had before. She tells him off and puts a grin on his face; and he grabs her hand and tells her to run; and her soul is so much lighter and weightier than she ever could have before imagined it feeling where it rests in her chest and rises in her throat. She'll live with this friendship her whole life, if it means her whole life will be just like this, changing at every moment and pulling her along with it.

She'll do this forever, she dreams. If she can swing it, she'll spend the rest of her life right here in this blue box.

(I was gonna be with you forever, she'll say much later, and thinks frantically to herself, You need someone to stop you, but she is rooted to the spot, frozen and burning and her mind is spinning, spinning, spinning, and I can connect nothing with nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing O Lord thou pluckest me out -

I know, he'll reply quietly, and

No please no no no no)

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(Aging)

"I can see everything," said Rose, a tear slipping unnoticed down her cheek.

(Years from now, the Doctor will tell Donna Noble, Every waking second I can see

"All that is –

(all that is -

"All that was –

(or was -

"All that ever could be."

(or could be, or must not.)

And years later, Donna feels time in her heart and her mind and her soul, and if she speaks too quickly or her pulse starts racing or her brain is catching fire already, she pretends not to notice.

Burning, thinks Rose.

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(Interlude)

"One will die," Dalek Caan predicts; and both Rose and Donna at the time have other things on their mind more to do with their immediate survival, and so they pay little attention to him. If pressed, they'll admit they don't much care for prophecy, anyway.

But there is a difference between not much caring for and not much believing in; and though both of them have fought against time itself, Rose is the valiant child, and hears echoes of bad wolf still threaded through time by her own fingers;and Donna knows there is still something on her back, and some suffering yet to come. For all the Doctor's protests, time still functions linearly, and is by and large an immovable medium; and so when someone whispers that something is coming, they'll listen.

Someone's been manipulating the timelines, and there is no such thing as destiny, and certainly none of fate's happily-ever-afters.

"One will still die," Caan repeats later, final words to a fleeing congregation.

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dosagginā (aversion)

Bad wolf, Rose will hear and see and read several times over, in many forms and many languages; and she suspects that as much as it seems to surround her, she hasn't caught half of the times it's been right in front of her eyes.

"But I've heard that before, bad wolf," she says. "I've heard that lots of times."

It feels like a warning, and that expectant knot in her gut drops just a little bit more every time it shows up, because surely something's coming, and she isn't sure she wants to know what.

But then it's a message, a paper trail of pebbles and spray paint, and she follows it in reverse to where she's been leading herself all these months, because she is the bad wolf, creating those same trails in the past and future for herself and others to follow. They're marks of her existence and her touch, a thousand encoded messages in tendrils of thought. She creates herself, and crafts a world.

And yet that knot never resolves itself, and she can never remember anything more about it than a lot of bright light.

Bad wolf, she tries out on her tongue again, and it tastes so tangibly familiar.

(Bad wolf, Donna will predict sometime into the future; and Rose will remember placing those words that time, if nothing else.)

There is something of the wolf in you, she's told though she doesn't understand; and you are the lost girl, the valiant child, who will die so very soon.

"They keep trying to split us up," Rose says to the Doctor, her hand warm in his, "but they never ever will."

(She says, "Something is coming.")

oOo

"You're Donna Noble?" many people will ask Donna many times, more statement than question, and take on an inexplicably worried expression.

"Yeah, what of it?" she always replies, though over the months there's been a growing pit in her stomach at all the implications of that question. There is something written for her already, and she doesn't care to find out what it is.

(Tell your fortune, lady; don't you want to know if you're going to be happy?

I'm happy right now, thanks.)

"There is something on your back," they will also tell her, and she looks and looks and looks and never sees anything, but sometimes she feels it, and sometimes she hears it.

But then –

She is the one being on whom all the universes converge, for whom time itself is shuddering, and she has never done anything important in her life.

And is that the point, or isn't it?

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(Death)

"Sorry, so sorry," Rose tells Donna. "But you're gonna die."

"But I can't die!" Donna later will scream back at her, but this Donna does not know the weight of time pulling sluggishly and all too quickly through her veins, dragging adrenaline and fear with it, or how it blinds and clarifies at once, or how it can center on something, someone.

Rose says nothing in return, because she does.

And finally, so does Donna, by the time her death is upon her (there is something on her back, and she's Donna Noble and she's something new, and there is something waiting for her in these dark twists of time curling around her brain and burning burning)

and Rose herself never forgot, left on Bad Wolf Bay in an alternate universe (I am the bad wolf, though she doesn't remember it, and this is the story of how I died)

and this is what's been coming:

Rose is twice displaced, abandoned again in an alternate universe with her best years behind her at twenty-two years old, and a man at her side who is similar to but yet not the man she loves. The beach is grey with all its lack of life, and the fire behind her eyes dies at the long stretch of bleak mediocrity before her. There's a shell she'd hollowed out for herself in this world the last two years she'd been stranded here, and she supposes she'll go back to it: big sister to new sibling, new daughter to new father, defender of the Earth and grounded in linear time. And with the knowledge that this time she can't curl up with some vague hope that she can change that last bit, she squares her shoulders and thinks, This is where my life begins.

("I'm back working in the shop," she'd told the Doctor the first run around on this beach, and he'd said,

"Good for you," and meant it; and oh her heart.

"Shut up," she'd snapped at him, but it had been miserably distorted by her tears and her joy at seeing him if only one last time.

"The Doctor and Rose Tyler, in the TARDIS, as it should be," he told her and not-him this time, and it wasn't until after he left that she wanted to scream after him,

"Shut up!"

because God, there's so much more to this time round, and yet nothing at all; and if he's going to leave her with a world of hurt and impossibilities and contradictions, the rest of it's bloody well going to be on her terms. This is Bad Wolf Bay, after all; and she's scattered the words to lead herself here. And that, she thinks, is worth something.)

Donna is stolen away from herself and the burning burning (Tyger Tyger, her mind whispers hysterically on a tangent halfway to its own death) stops and sputters as if a wet blanket has been thrown over it. It is warm, but heavy, and she can never quite throw it off, even when she notices it. She ignores her headaches and thinks, This is life.

(Be magnificent, she hears voices (she thinks) in her dreams, and thinks,

Ha!

And Donna will never be or feel herself again, as much as she likes to think that maybe she meant something once to someone, to something; and she never vocalizes this thought because she really is another useless body in the streets, an all too common non-tragedy, and her mother is good at reassuring her of this if nothing else. So she continues as she always has, and it's not at all painful to never see anything appear in her eyes that she'd never looked for in the first place.)

And there is nothing else coming.