A/N: I guess I should mention: timeline-wise, this stuff is all happening between "The Unicorn and the Wasp" and "Silence in the Library" for the Doctor and Donna, and post-"Out of Gas" for the Firefly crew. Aaaand I'm sort of pretending the BDM doesn't ever happen, as will become apparent soon. Because let's be honest, we all want Wash to live.

...

There was only so much staring out a sealed airlock and yelling that one person could do before finally sensing a certain futility. So Donna decided to jog up to the bridge and have a little talk with Wash.

"Listen," she said, in what she hoped was a firm-but-not-overbearing tone, "I need to find out where that cruiser is taking the Doctor. Is there any way you could, I dunno, try and track it? Or is it too far away by now?"

Wash shook his head. "Nope. If we were close enough to track them, they'd be able to track us, which, given that we're evidently carrying around a huge piece of alien tech, they might be able to do anyhow." He turned in the pilot's chair and took a more sympathetic tone. "Look. I wish I could help. If Zoe got taken by the Alliance, I'd be trying anything I could to get her back, and I'd honestly be in worse shape than you are."

Donna flushed. "No, really, we're not a couple. Why does everyone think we're a couple? It's just..." Heaven help her, she'd fallen in with a crew of scavengers; how was she supposed to explain this? "We're friends. The Doctor and me. And when I first met him, I was no one, and then I started traveling, and saving people, and it made me better, somehow."

At this point, Mal entered the bridge, looking unsurprised to see her there.

"Should've known you'd be trying to sweet-talk Wash into going back," he said. "Well, it ain't happening. We were lucky to get out of there in as good shape as we did." Mal halted and looked at Donna, seeming to evaluate her. "You got any kind of work you can do?" he asked.

Donna had a feeling that the Serenity crew was not in need of a temp. "I used to be a secretary, sort of, back home," she said lamely. It was starting to creep up on her, slowly: The Doctor is gone and you can't get him back and you're stuck here in the future and how will you live you couldn't even work the photocopier back home.

She pushed the thought back defiantly. The Doctor will be all right! He always is! He'll figure something out with tinfoil and string and paste, and escape and come back here and everything will be fine.

"Was this on one of the Core planets, or closer to home? Might as well drop you on a world you're used to," Mal said, interrupting her internal battle.

That'd be a job, and no mistake. "I don't think that would work," Donna said cautiously. She knew the Doctor had said not to do this, but she wasn't sure what else to say. "The TARDIS, the Doctor's ship...it doesn't just appear different places. It's a time machine. I'm from about five hundred years ago."

She waited for shock, or a declaration that she was insane. Mal just shrugged, like it wasn't the craziest thing he'd heard today. "Sorry to hear that," he said briefly. "Earth's a little bit inhospitable at the moment, but we could see about finding you some kind of work anyways. Some of the mid planets have factories, that kind of thing. Farms, if you're more of an outdoor type."

This conversation wasn't going at all how Donna wanted. "Look, if you'll just help me get back to the Doctor, that won't be necessary. I know you can't fly back, but is there a shuttle, or something, I could-I don't know, borrow?"

"One woman against a whole Alliance cruiser, full of jumpy feds already on high alert? I don't think so." Mal turned to leave the bridge. "We're on a heading for Haven. Might be a good place to disappear."

...

The Doctor wasn't terribly worried about Donna. If she and the crew had been captured or killed, or were likely to become so, the officer who had arrested him wouldn't have been in nearly such a bad mood.

Some people might've been intimidated by the man's grumpy demeanor, but the Doctor had more or less made a career out of waiting till people were angry enough to make foolish decisions, and then letting them walk into their own trap. He was fairly sure, actually, that he could get out of these poorly attached handcuffs, evade the soldiers guarding him, and steal a shuttle to catch up with Serenity without much trouble. But.

There was something going on here, something he was just beginning to fully understand, and it was stunting the human race. This galaxy should've been full of settlers colonizing everything in sight. Instead, someone, or a group of someones, had been so afraid of letting go of their power that they'd hurt people, lots of people, in a desperate attempt to contain their empire. That was their great mistake.

If this had just been about that tiny little war that Captain Mal and Company were so fixated on, he would've swanned right off and let everybody figure it out themselves. But now lines had been crossed, and he was going to have to stop some people, and that would take a little more time.

The thought occurred to him, rather comfortingly, that out of all the companions he'd had who could've possibly been in Donna's shoes right now, she was probably the best equipped to handle herself till he could find her again.

"Aren't you going to read me my rights?" he asked the officer a tad provokingly. "Or is that a thing of the past?"

He'd expected a barking command to shut up; instead, he got silence.

"Is that how it is then? Minimal contact with the prisoner?" the Doctor pushed. "Afraid I'm going to poison your mind with otherworldly ideas about justice and experimental ethics?"

Still nothing. Maybe he should try a different tactic.

"Come on. Can't I even get your name?" Silence, except for the tramp of the soldiers frog-marching him through the corridors of the cruiser. The tramping ground to a halt as another officer, clearly more senior, intercepted.

"Lieutenant," the new officer said sharply. "What is this? Some deluded Browncoat rat?"

"No, Commander Wilson, sir," the lieutenant said, snapping to attention. "The wunderkind sniffed him out. Looks like he's extrasystemic."

"Did she now. And where is the wunderkind?" the general said coolly.

"Medbay, sir. There was a slight scuffle pulling him out. We lost a few men, and one more besides her was injured."

"You left the crew alive? After they'd been exposed?" Commander Wilson's tone was not one to encourage thoughts of long life in his subordinate.

The lieutenant swallowed hard. "They don't know anything. They didn't even know they had alien tech on board. They had it stored like it was a regular crate."

It seemed like a pretty obvious lie to the Doctor, but maybe you had to be there. Commander Wilson seemed to buy it. "Just get a notice out onto the Cortex," he barked irritably. "No details, just say it's classified. I'll take this from here. You four, bring this man to the research bay."

The lieutenant marched away, and the four guarding the Doctor followed Commander Wilson at a crisp gesture from the latter, hauling their prisoner along into the bowels of the cruiser.

...

Donna sat in the mess, staring at the dinner remains abandoned in the mad chase after River that had started this whole thing. She supposed she ought to try and clean it up, make herself useful, but she hadn't the faintest idea where to start. Even with a simple chore, she was completely useless in the future.

River came wandering in, having shed the EVA suit from her earlier spacewalk, but wearing a slightly loopy grin. Donna wondered how much of the loopiness was normal, and how much was a side effect of having to cling on to the hull during Wash's mad getaway. She'd forgotten about the girl and her brother in all the confusion, and now felt slightly guilty.

"He's not going to come get you," River said abruptly, sitting down a knight's move away and picking at the abandoned food.

Donna was jolted out of her thoughts. "Of course he is! You don't know the Doctor; he can get out of anything."

"Not this time," River said with quiet certainty. "He's too big to fit through the keyhole."

"Excuse me?" Donna was not in the mood to deal with any more mad people right at the moment.

"There's too much of him. All the things that were and are and could be," River continued, as if she hadn't heard. "Planets and civilizations and wonders, and it swallowed him up and now he can't see himself anymore. Only the big things. He ate the cake and now he's too tall to get through the door to the garden."

"Look, I'm really tired, and it's been a long day. I'm going to just go ask the captain about a cabin..." Donna pushed her chair back and stood.

"The garden can fit through the door," River said abruptly.

Something caught on the edge of Donna's brain, like a faint ping, but she dismissed it. "The captain already said we couldn't go back," she said, turning away.

"Well, now," a deeper, calm voice said from the shadows. "I seem to recall this crew came back for him, once."

Shepherd Book stepped into the light.

"Isn't that right, River?" he said gently. "And there were two times that he came back to save River here, and Simon. He just needs the right reason."

Something connected, like a domino tipping over and knocking down an endless pattern of dominoes.

Kaylee, telling a story about the time the crew took up arms to rescue Mal from a sadistic crime lord...

The Doctor and Mal, arguing at dinner about big wars and little wars...

River screaming earlier about how the Doctor was too big for the ship, and maybe he was, too big for people just trying to survive from job to job, but who might just be small enough to save a man who would probably forget to save himself...

Donna Noble would've been the last person in all of time and space to describe herself as smart. But she had made it, after a fashion, as a temp in London, and you didn't do that without acquiring and honing certain talents. You had to be tough, and determined, and you had to be able to figure people out. You had to be able to empathize with them, a little, if only to gain a foothold.

(This, although neither she nor the Doctor quite knew it, was no small part of why he had sensed she should travel with him. Because River was right, sometimes the hugeness of it all gets to him, and it helps to have somebody there who understands the screaming people and can get down to their size and assure them that it really will be all right.)

Donna went to find Mal, following the sounds of someone rearranging the cargo bay to its original state of affairs. Jayne was helping him; Kaylee looked as though she had started helping and ended up standing by the TARDIS and performing a stroking activity which looked suspiciously like comforting it. Deciding she would figure that out later, Donna attempted to get Mal's attention, finally standing smack in his path so he had to halt and talk to her.

"So. That...cruiser thing, that's with the Alliance, yeah?" she said.

Mal tried to ignore her. She blocked him again.

"The ones you fought in the big war, right?"

The captain sighed and ran a hand through his hair-a gesture so Doctor-ish it startled her. "If you're trying to-"

"Only I was just thinking. Right now, wherever those people are out there, they've got the catch of their lives right now. Whole big system and they get to finally nab an alien. After all that time and money their bosses spent on psychics and everything."

"You going somewhere with this?"

"Well, not really, 'cause obviously we can't go back for the Doctor, that'd be...stupid, and all...heroic, and stuff. But if somebody were to, I dunno, help him escape. Well. That'd make all those soldiers, all the feds on that cruiser, look really, really stupid."

Something flicked in Mal's eyes, and she knew she had him.

"Especially if, you know, he got rescued by some little tiny ship that had no way of pulling that kind of thing off. Ever. In, like, a million years."

Mal muttered something low and vehement under his breath that Donna guessed was an imprecation. "Woman, you had better not ever turn to crime." Abruptly, the captain spun on his heel. "Jayne, might wanna consider leaving the more sensitive cargo outta plain sight for a minute here. Take a breather. I'm gonna go have me a talk with the pilot."

Donna, not quite believing what she'd pulled off, quietly sank down onto a box, watching the captain head up to the bridge. Up on the catwalk, River came at her wandering, shuffling pace, and Donna thought she was smiling at her. But at that distance, who knew? She could've been smiling at thin air.

...

It worked.

Yes it did. Finally. I shouldn't push it that much with psychic nudges.

You helped me say it. Get the words right.

Yes.

Can you stay?

No. I'm sorry. I wish I could help you. But the Doctor needs me more. You have Simon. He has no one.

He has Donna.

For now. They never last long. He wears them out.

A flood of images, people River would never meet, flooded her mind, and she wept softly with their pain.