Title: Somebody
Fandom: Doctor Who
Character: Donna Noble
Rating: G
Word Count: 560
Warnings: major spoilers for 4.13
Summary: Donna Noble wants to be somebody.
Author's Note: I got the chloroform treatment from this one while I was trying to make dinner, and I later sat down and wrote it all at once, which is rare for me. It's a lot more "voice"-y than most of my stuff, which is because I was watching the last few minutes of "Journey's End" for a detail, and Donna's voice took over.
SOMEBODY
Donna Noble is walking down the avenue, thinking about the man who was there when she woke up, the night it rained until the gutters flooded the streets.
She’s not sure why she thinks about him, but she does, fairly often these days. She supposes he was a nice-looking bloke, nice enough. Too skinny by half, of course, but nice enough, and he seemed like he might have a nice smile. He seemed like the kind of bloke you’d trust your mail with, who’d water your plants if you went on holiday. John Smith, he said his name was; Donna’s always been good with names and faces, especially when they match. His didn’t quite, but she remembers him. He gets into her head, somehow, and she thinks about him.
Mostly, though, she thinks about Donna Noble. What does Donna Noble want? She’s not sure she knows the answer. It’s weird, because she’ll flip through the same old magazines and pick out the same old tabloids, and the telly’s got all the same shows and all the same ads, but it feels like something’s… changed.
For starters, she’s noticing different stuff now-since when is charity work more fashionable than fancy premiers? It’s funny that that’s changed, or that that’s what sticks out. That’s weird.
But what’s really weird is… it makes sense, all of a sudden. She knows why they do that, why actors and celebrities empty their pockets and pour out these stories about how badly people need help. Because she knows, now, that people do need help. Out there, somewhere, all over, there are people who just haven’t got it as good as she’s got, certainly not as good as the famous people do. There are human beings all over the place, all over Britain, all over the world, who’ve got next to nothing-but they haven’t done anything wrong. They’re no less valuable than anybody else. They’re still people, and somebody’s got to start treating them like it.
Donna Noble wants to be somebody.
Donna Noble wants to change things.
Donna Noble wants to save the world.
And maybe she can’t do it on her own-all right, she can’t at all; that’s just a fact-but she can certainly do something. She can certainly try. And there’ve got to be other people out there who have seen it, too-who have woken up one night, fully-dressed, and suddenly started seeing things different. There’ve got to be other people who’ve stopped looking at what everyone’s wearing and started to search out faces instead.
Donna Noble is walking down the avenue, looking at people’s faces and thinking about names to match. She thinks of her granddad and glances up, way up, up at the stars. They’re a bit hazy, a bit blurry, because this is London, after all, but even big-city pollution can’t quite drown them out.
Donna Noble wants to be proud that she’s here, on planet Earth, making this hunk of rock just a little bit better. Then maybe, if the world’s not gone crazy, and there really are big honking aliens running around up there… then maybe some of them might look over here and think planet Earth’s not a bad place to be.
Because it’s not, or it shouldn’t be, and she doesn’t want anyone to forget that.
Donna Noble wants to be remembered.