Disclaimer: all I own here is some angst, and even that I'm sharing with someone else.

A/N: A sort of sequel to "One Stop Swap", written for the hc_bingo challenge prompt "blood loss".

Two Seconds Late

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Donna stood watching the helicopter flutter off into the night sky, droning out its inaudible message. Quicker, quicker, quicker.

'Yes, hurry up and flipping get there,' she internally cried. It near broke her heart to see it leave but it was necessary.

Someone to the side of her softly asked, "Are you alright, love?"

She turned towards the voice that had asked the question. The speaker was an older blonde woman, and she had to blink several times in order to recognise her.

It was only tears, she told herself forcefully; not the sudden onset of cataracts. "I'm fine, Mum. Or…. I will be, in a minute; once we're at the hospital and I can see my boy."

"I know," her mother gently crooned, and reached out to fold her daughter within her arms, probably for the first time in years, if not decades. The girl had always resisted any sign of affection from her.

What Sylvia hadn't expected to happen was her daughter bursting into unconcealed floods of tears. Trying to remain strong, she clasped her daughter tighter, wanting to hide her from all the griefs of the world but knowing she had failed before she even tried.

"He'll be okay," she said, partly to convince herself. "He has to be."

Donna merely nodded out of habit, almost numb with shock. "We'd better follow the air ambulance to the hospital." She turned to begin walking down the road towards the railway station a few yards away and their potential transport.

"And what about that?" Sylvia indicated her head towards the wreck of metal that lay smashed into the nearby brick wall.

It had once been a car; rather a posh one, judging by the maker's badge; but it was hard to tell which model it had been. The colour was pretty nondescript too.

Beneath it all laid the body of an Archanian, one of a particularly vicious species that had leapt into the car Donna's son had bravely commissioned; thus leading it away from a coach full of schoolchildren setting out on a field trip to an outward bound centre. They had certainly started their school trip with an adventure.

There was blood everywhere. Donna had to force her attention away from it. A huge pool of blood spread across the pavement and dripped into the road. Splatter marks adorned the wall too. The Archanian had virtually exploded everywhere after it had ignited the small piece of nuclear power that worked the same as a heart. There was very little of its body left to scrape up. Fortunately her son's body was still intact; but only just. Judging by the blood loss, he was hanging on to life by the merest thread.

One of the good things about his biology was that he had a greater chance of survival. His biology was also the reason why she had to get to the hospital and intercept certain matters. She would need to deal with any evidence of blood tests and transfusions. It was going to be an uphill struggle. Thank goodness they could rely on Jack to help.

"Leave that to the police, UNIT or Torchwood to deal with. I don't care anymore," Donna remarked bitterly. "If they'd taken my warnings seriously earlier none of this would have happened; and he wouldn't be fighting for his life."

"You think they deliberately targeted him? Them aliens, I mean," Wilf added, now that he felt able to move forward and interrupt this touching scene between mother and daughter.

The last thing he'd expected when he got up that morning would be standing outside the Hammersmith Apollo Theatre, in the dead of night, having to cope with his precious great-grandson possibly being taken away from them by an alien threat. True, he had seen the boy's father killed in a similar way, sort of at the hands of the Master; but he had hoped and prayed that they would be saved from any other further such shenanigans.

No doubt the television news would fob people off by claiming it had been a terrorist attack, like the one at Glasgow Airport years ago, but the public were more savvy now to alien threats. Especially in light of that flipping enormous bang that had preceded this incident.

"Of course they targeted him," Donna replied on a sob. "He must stand out like a Belisha beacon to all and sundry out in space. That's why I wanted the Doctor to find him first, and take him into the safety of the TARDIS."

"But you'd lose him anyway like that," Wilf blurted out before he could stop himself. "His lordship will come along and save his boy, you mark my words," he assured her with a comforting pat on the arm. "Our boy will pull through."

"How can you be so sure?" Donna lifted her watery gaze to his, almost daring him to fail her in her time of need. "He is barely alive."

So Wilf gave her the cheeriest smile he could muster. "If he's as strong as his mother, he'll refuse to give in. You never have. Where there's life there's hope."

"Come on, Gramps, let's find this taxi and get up the hospital," she ordered as they walked along, held within the loose embrace of her mother and grandfather. "My son needs me."

A small spark of hope had been ignited, and she'd be damned if she'd let go of it yet.

A/N2: continued in the sequel "Drifting and Waiting"