Call Me Kermitt

⋆.˚✮ Notes: I feel like Thor from the game doesn’t have a lot of screen time, so I’m not really confident in portraying his character. (Also, the only Thor depiction I’m super familiar with is MCU Thor.) I did my best, don’t hate me if it’s shit. 

Also, he’s married, so I went into this with the idea that he had divorced or something at some point.

✰Confessing Your Love✰

Thor does not really give me the vibe of someone who would laugh off a genuine confession unless he thought it was a joke or a trick at first.

He’d probably go still for a second, stare, and make sure he heard you correctly.

“You love me?”

Once he realizes you mean it, he’d give you his full focus.

He’ll breathe a little heavier and consider his options. 

Thor is emotional in a big, powerful way, and not always refined.

Since the confession took him of gaurd, he reacts by resting a hand on your cheek before he can tell himself otherwise. 

For how powerful he is, and how many enemies Odin has, and him by proxy, he’ll consider it a trick at first. 

He’ll ask you if you’re mocking him or lying.

When you grovel and tell him it’s true, and beg him to believe you, that little insecurity in the back of his mind will melt away. 

“Do you understand what it means to stand beside me?”

He’s a wreck and a drunk; his own family has decided that.

So what good could he do for you? 

Yet you are unwavering, and he feels the need to keep you close regardless of all of it.  

There will be a long heart-to-heart about your feelings and desires for him, and his hesitation. 

But after all that, he’s just a lonely broken man who revels in your affection. 

He’ll want to take things slow, but he will find himself reaching for you regardless of that. 

Thor is not a subtle man, so he’ll parade you around afterward.

✰Confessing his Love✰

Thor is not the kind of man who would pine forever and do nothing about it. 

He waits longer than he should if he’s unsure, or if he thinks the timing is wrong, but once he decides to act, his confession will be direct.

He’d approach you privately when he finds you alone, just in case you turn him down.

He does not want witnesses to his embarrassment.

Nor does he want them for what he’d planned to do if you’d accepted him. 

He’ll just say it.

“I want you.”

“I have tried to master this feeling, and I find I no longer wish to.”

He might accidentally come off a little intense in his confession.

His hand twitches, like he wants to hold your face or take your hand, but he waits for your reaction first. 

When you look shocked, he just waits silently. 

Maybe painfully, maybe intensely, but he’d wait.

He’ll watch every rise and fall of your shoulders and the gears turning behind your eyes.

As soon as your mind catches up with what just happened, and you smile at him and return the sentiment, all that tension in him breaks.

He cups your face, pulls you close, and kisses you. 

✰Nicknames✰

He’d likely tolerate your nicknames for him at first, then secretly grow very attached to them.

At first, he might act a little gruff about it, especially with something very sweet or teasing.

When you first started calling him “Love”, “Dear”, and “Sweetheart”, his reaction would just be a raised brow and maybe a scoff.

“Is that what you call me now?”

He’s not used to soft and sweet pet names.

The world sees him as this big, imposing God, so that is how the world treats him.

When you call him these pet names, they make him feel a little more like just any other man. 

He kinda likes it. 

He warms up to them eventually, though he’d prefer the nicknames stay private. 

They feel intimate with him, and would prefer it if it were just something between the two of you. 

Though he’d eventually have his own for you as well.

He’d call you “Dear”, “Darling”, and “Beloved”. 

Though he’ll stick with calling you by your name when others are around. 

If you ever called him something outrageous, like cupcake, cutie, or sugar, he might react differently to those. 

“You test me.”

Though as long as it’s not meant to tease or mock him, he’d very obviously indulge them anyway.

✰Little Gremlin✰

You are impossible, and I think that would fascinate him.

So if his lover has a talent for finding trouble, his immediate response would usually be physical and decisive.

He’d move in front of you, or actually hold you back if you were all but literally barking at someone, and glaring at the offensive party, even if you started it.

 He would be constantly torn between scolding and laughing.

“You are forever one breath from disaster.”

A very obvious ‘you exasperate me, but I adore you’ kind of tone.

Thor would respect that you are not timid.

He likes that you are fiery and mouthy. 

It’s constant entertainment, really.

A lover who turns into a tiny snarling beast when threatened? 

Thor would pretend this is the most aggravating thing in the world.

He’d groan.

He’d mutter to himself.

He’d tell you to hush.

And then later, when the danger had passed, he’d remember exactly what you’d said and how you bit the man in that bar fight.

And he’d spare it a chuckle, and be privately entertained by it.

Sometimes he has to step in when he knows it’s a fight you won't win.

He’ll pick you up and move you out of the line of fire.

Plant a hand on the back of your neck to steer you away

Physically turning your face away from danger, so you stop barking at the enemy for one second.

“Enough. You’ve had your turn.”

Then handle it himself.

When you argue that you could’ve handled it just fine without him, he’d entertain the idea for a single second before, “No. You couldn’t.” 

You’d bicker about it with him.

You insist you could handle yourself.

Thor telling you that was not the point.

You accusing him of treating them like you are fragile.

Thor snapped back that you are not fragile, merely reckless.

You calling him overbearing.

Him calling you impossible.

Then plenty of kissing and making up after the heat has settled. 

He’s learned your patterns and your ways and is always paying attention to try to keep you out of trouble before you can find it. 

✰His Reaction to your first Kiss✰

Thor and you are alone after an argument.

Thor is standing close, saying something low and serious, still focused on you with that full, heavy attention of his.

You’re struck by how open he is in that moment, even if he does not mean to be.

Even if you're bickering, he’s telling you off for doing something dangerous.

And before you can overthink it, you lean in and kiss him.

Thor goes completely still for a second.

The sudden affection catches him off guard.

His eyes widen slightly, and there is a brief moment where he just stands there.

He seems almost shocked by how gently you’re touching him.

For one suspended breath, he does not move, as though he is making sure this is truly happening.

Then his hands react before his words do.

He reaches for you carefully.

One hand at your waist, the other at your jaw.

At first, the return kiss is almost cautious, like he is restraining the full force of what he feels.

Then it deepens quickly, because Thor is not built for half-measures.

The kiss becomes a mess of tongue and teeth.

When you finally part, Thor stays very close, still holding on.

He is breathing heavier, staring at you, looking a little stunned and a little hungry for more.

He does not speak immediately.

Then he says something like, “Do that again.”

Afterward, he rests his forehead against yours.

From that point on, it would be much harder for him to pretend his feelings are manageable or hidden.

He’d be confused about how they went from bickering to tongue wrestling, but he wouldn’t argue. 

He indulges in the affection you give him.

He can argue with you for your recklessness and ask questions later.

For now, he just wants to milk as much of his moment as he can. 

✰Cuddle Bugs✰

Thor likes to cuddle.

Plain and simple.

While some men see it as a sign of weakness or silly, Thor sees it as just a natural thing between lovers.

It’s a comfort he has to look forward to after a long day.

And intimacy that doesn’t require mess like kissing and sex. 

Thor’s love language is acts of service and physical touch. 

He likes to hold you close. 

Cuddling lets him do several things all at once: 

Keeping you close.

Reassure himself that you’re safe.

Show affection without needing many words.

And relax in a way he does not allow himself to often.

He seems like the kind of man who carries a lot of tension, so lying with someone he loves wrapped against him would probably calm him more than he expects.

He doesn’t openly admit it in the beginning.

He acts as though he only tolerates it for your benefit.

He’d sigh and say, “Come here, then.”

But once the motion of your relationship is set, he grows comfortable admitting he likes and looks forward to it.

He likes it best when you're tucked against his chest, and he wraps his arms around you. 

He also loves to be the big spoon.

Its the most comfortable to fall asleep in.

Though every now and then, after tossing and turning all night, he’ll wake up to find you spooning him. 

He’s a big guy, and it's amusing to see your arm swung over him.

But he likes that too. 

He’s not openly clingy, nor a man of profound words. 

But when it’s just the two of you, winding down for some shut-eye, he’ll open his arms and wait for you to take your place in them.

He’ll pull you back when you try to get up too soon.

✰ABC’s✰

A is for Aftercare ★  Thor is very attentive afterward, even if he’s not overly talkative. He’d want you close, make sure they’re comfortable, tuck you against him, check whether they need water, warmth, or rest. His version of care would be practical and protective, with a softer side that he doesn’t show many people. He’d probably stroke your back or hair and keep them tucked to his chest until they drift off. He’d only worry about cleaning up the mess if you were uncomfortable with it. Otherwise, it's a future Thor problem. 

B is for Body ★ Thor takes pride in his hands and arms, the parts of him most tied to his strength and ability to protect. His favorite part of your body is your face. He’s drawn to your expressive features, especially during the act. He likes to watch your face when he fucks you, or the curve of your lips when they're around his cock.

C is for Cum ★ He likes to come on you rather than in you. He likes how intimate the mess feels. He’s not done until you’ve cum.

D is for Dirty Secret ★ He may seem steady and dominant, but privately he’s more affected by tenderness, praise, and being wanted than he’d like anyone to know. So he’ll often let you be the one to take control and tell him what to do and how to do it. He’s a submissive top.

E is for Experience ★ He’s had plenty of experience. He’s a father, so clearly he’s fucked. But he feels inexperienced when it comes to fucking you. Everything you two get up to in the bedroom is really new to him. And what isn’t new is just intimidating. He’s fucked up relationships before, and he’s determined not to fuck up this one.

F is for Favorite Position ★ He favors positions that feel intimate rather than impersonal. So while he does love how you feel from behind, it’s not his favorite. He prefers letting you sit on him, either his cock or face, and set the pace. He likes to watch you use him.

G is for Grooming ★ I do not think Thor would be overly fussy or vain, but he would likely be clean and put together, just not shaved.

H is for Halla At Ya ★ His way of getting you in the mood would probably be through intense attention and physical closeness rather than clever pick-up lines. He’ll tell you outright that he’s turned on and what he wants from you. He’ll touch and caress whatever skin is exposed beneath your clothes. He’ll stand close and press as much of himself against you as he can until the clothes start coming off. 

I is for Intimacy ★ Even if the moment is heated, there is a strong thread of care in it. Even if it’s a quick hard fuck, he’s kissing and coressing, and making sure you’re enjoying it.

J is for Jerk Off ★ He doesn’t mind it, but he’d rather it be your hand, mouth, ect, on him. Mostly, he’ll wait until he can get you alone, but if that's not an option, he’ll close his eyes and imagine it’s you touching him. He’s a big fan of lying beside you and touching you while you stroke him. 

K is for Kink ★ He likes being used by you. With his size and strength, you can’t really do much in the way on manhalding him, but he likes it when you push him back and use him until you're finished. It gets him off to watch you enjoy yourself on his cock like he isn’t even there. Also, a mild overstimulation kink. If he’s finished and you’re still going, it’s painful in the sweetest way. 

L is for Location ★ Any setting where he can fully focus on undoing you without interruption. He doesn’t really care for risky public places as much, though sometimes what happens happens. He prefers to fuck you in the comfort of your bed, or on the floor by the hearth. 

M is for Motivation ★ He’s a slut for you doing those dirty little dances and stripping down in front of him. That's one way to get him in the mood real quick. But other than that, he finds that you showing feats of strength (not always physical ones) gets him hard rather quickly. 

N is for “No” ★ Anything that feels cruel or mocking, or even humiliating, is a very easy way to make his dick deflate like a sad pool floaty. That degrading kind of dirty talk turns him off so quickly. Although he will agree to praise you for being a slut for him and vice versa, as that is just a fact, not an insult. 

O is for Oral ★ Thor is a generous, attentive lover rather than a selfish one. He loves to put his mouth on you, taste you, and watch you squirm. Though he wouldn’t be a man if he didn’t like watching his cock disappear behind your lips and feel your tongue stroke him. Still, he’d much rather have you riding his face.

P is for Pull-Out Game ★ He’s not looking for you to get knocked up, so pull out game string with this one. However, if that's not a problem, he’ll leave it in and paint your insides happily. Still, he’d rather see his cum on your chest, back, or face.

Q is for Quickies ★ He prefers to be able to take his time. Though if the heat of the moment is strong, and you ask really nicely, he will happily give in. He’d absolutely be capable of being swept up in it, removing only the clothing necessary to get the job done. It’s not his favorite or a regular thing, but very likely passion runs high.

R is for Risk ★ He’s all for risk. If you want to try something new, no need to ask twice, or even once, just do it. He’s a blunt man; he’ll tell you outright if he’s not into it. But he’s always willing to try if it’ll make you cum.

S is for Stamina ★ He could go for hours if you let him. And he does, often. Though the longer it goes on, the more rounds that pass, the more he slows down. Not cause he’s tiered, he’s a God, but because he’s overstimulated and his cock is aching, and it just feels better to slow the pace when you’re on the 6th round of the night.

T is for Toys ★ Eh. He doesn’t care for them persay, but he likes your reactions to them. As long as you’re cumming, he won’t make a fuss. 

U is for Unfair ★ His teasing would probably be very deliberate once he realized the effect he had. He’d enjoy getting a reaction out of you, especially if you're easily flustered. It’d mostly be teasing touches, edging you during foreplay, and remarks about how desperate you’re becoming.

V is for Volume ★ In the beginning, he’s quiet, low huffs and grunts. But as the night goes on, and his intense focus on unraveling you dissolves into a need for release, this man pants and moans just as badly as you. He’s not shy about how good you feel; he’ll praise you and moan your name, unashamed if anyone passing by overhears something. That’s their problem. His goal, aside from making you cum, however, is to make you sound just as much of a desperate whore as you make him. He loves it when you’re loud.

W is for Wild Card ★ Anyone would expect him to handle passion well, but soft touches, forehead kisses, quiet praise, or you fussing over him after a hard day? That would probably hit him straight in the chest. When you shower him with buttler fly kisses and lazy pecks afterward, it feels like a reward for a job well done. 

X is for X-Ray ★ His dick is just like the rest of him. Big and thick. Need I say more?

Y is for Yearning ★ Moderate to severe. Your body is never far from his mind. If you’re down, he’s down. 

Z is for Zzz ★ Once he’s tapped out, he’s out. Especially when you’re curled up against him and already worn out and asleep. That man goes into a cum indused comma for the next few hours. Completely dead to the world. 

⋆.˚✮ Notes: This is for @vexerieart, who made me smile with their kind words, bitch boosted my ego SO BAD. So I just want to return the favor, pay the smile forward. I hope this cheers you up since you’ve been sick, my love. <3

This part kinda got away from me a bit ngl.

The big light was off, only the television and the fairy lights strung through the little kitchenette lit the flat now, leaving the room washed in soft gold and blue. The glow from the TV flickered over the walls in restless shadows, while the fairy lights bled a warmer kind of light into the room, catching on glass, on the edges of furniture, on the careful little details they had spent the last hour arranging.

The couch had been shoved back farther than usual, its legs scraping stubbornly across the floor until it sat a little deeper into the room. The coffee table had been dragged closer to the television, leaving enough space in front of it for the real event.

The fort.

Blankets had been layered thick over the rug, topped with an unreasonable number of pillows for someone who lives alone, and a few stuffed animals they had absolutely not overthought before adding. A single bedsheet hovered over it all, taped to the back of the couch and clipped to two standing lamps to make a sloping roof, which sagged a little in the middle.

It looked very cozy, and maybe a little too cozy.

On the coffee table sat the spread they had proudly assembled earlier: the three bags of fundraiser popcorn, bowls ready for each flavor, a pitcher of lemonade sweating on a coaster, takeaway chips still warm in their paper wrapping, and a stack of DVDs gathered from the shelf because they still, somehow, had not chosen an actual movie.

They sat inside the fort now, leaning back against the couch cushions, knees drawn up slightly, staring at the whole setup with a slowly growing sense of panic.

It was nice but hat was the problem. It felt oo intimate, too much like the sort of thing a couple might do on purpose.

Their gaze moved over the blankets again, then to the stuffed animals, then to the soft slope of the sheet overhead, and they groaned quietly, dropping their head back against the couch.

“Oh no.”

Because what had sounded fun in theory, blankets, popcorn, stupid films, the full home theater experience, now looked suspiciously like they had built a date. An aggressively adorable date.

They rubbed both hands over their face and peeked out at the room again through their fingers, as though maybe it would somehow look less romantic if viewed from a different angle.

It did not. If anything, the dim lighting made it worse.

Their mind started racing in circles.

Maybe it was fine. Maybe it just looked cozy. Friends could be cozy. Friends watched films in forts all the time. Probably, somewhere, in theory.

But John was, well, John.

He would walk in, duck under the sheet, see the whole ridiculous little setup, and- and what? Think they were weird? Think they were trying too hard? Think they had lit the room like this on purpose because they’d gone fully insane and decided subtlety was overrated?

They looked toward the lamps holding up the fort and bit their lip.

They could still take it down. Not all of it, there wasn’t enough time for that, probably. But they could pull the sheet down. Move the pillows. Pretend the blankets were just there. 

Except they had no idea when John was actually going to arrive. That was the other problem.

Whenever is good for him, they had said.

Which had seemed charming and laid-back at the time, right up until it became very unhelpful in practice.

He could show up in ten minutes, he could show up in an hour. He could text first. He could just come in.

If they started taking it down now and he arrived halfway through, that would be even worse. Then it would look like they had been building some sort of bizarre romance cave and chickened out at the last second. That was somehow more humiliating.

They let out a long breath and slumped a little deeper into the cushions behind them.

Maybe it was fine, he would think it was fun. Maybe he would grin that bright, boyish grin of his and say something teasing and duck inside and sit too close and everything would feel easy again.

That thought did not help nearly as much as it should have.

“This is ridiculous,” they muttered to the empty fort.

They looked toward the front door, listening for footsteps in the hall that never came, and felt the anticipation twist tighter in their chest.

Because beneath the panic, beneath the embarrassment and the overthinking and the very real temptation to yank the whole fort down and blame it on structural instability, there was one simple fact. They wanted him to like it.

Wanting him to see what they’d made and smile. Wanting him to think it was fun, or sweet, or clever. Wanting him to settle into the fort and look at home there, like he somehow always did in their flat, even in the middle of the most ridiculous little corners of their life.

They exhaled again and dropped their head back, staring up at the underside of the sheet.

They jumped at the knock hard enough to make the sheet roof above them flutter. For one stupid, hopeful second they thought it was him.

Then their brow furrowed.

John didn’t knock anymore. Not since they’d handed him an emergency key about a month ago after he’d gotten locked out in the hall because he’d left his phone and wallet inside while taking the rubbish out. He’d been absurdly grateful for it, as if they’d handed him a national honor instead of a key to a flat he was already halfway living in.

So if someone was knocking, it wasn’t him.

They pushed themself up too quickly, caught a shoulder against one of the standing lamps, and nearly took the whole fort down in a slow, tragic collapse.

“Oh, no, no, no!” They grabbed the lamp just in time and steadied it, waiting until the sheet roof stopped wobbling before backing away with a muttered curse.

Another knock sounded.

And then, faint through the door, the muffled shape of a woman’s voice. They stepped closer to the door, confusion deepening with every step. There was definitely someone talking just outside, sharp, hushed, fast enough that they couldn’t make out words, only tone. It sounded like bickering. Or scolding.

They frowned, unlocked the deadbolt, and pulled the door open.

John stood there.

Beside him was a redheaded woman around his age, both of them turning quickly as the door swung inward in the middle of what was clearly a very intense, very low-voiced argument.

The woman recovered first. John, meanwhile, looked exactly like a child who had just been caught doing something he absolutely should not have been doing.

The barista blinked.

The redhead stepped forward with all the confidence in the world and stuck out her hand. “Hello, nice to meet you. Donna Noble,” she said brightly.

They stared for half a second, then automatically took the offered hand. “Oh, hi.”

Donna shook once, firm and quick, and released them.

They looked from her to John and back again, trying to stitch this unexpected scene into anything resembling sense. Their brain scrambled, caught on one obvious thing, and finally supplied it.

“Donna,” they repeated. “Wait, John said Donna was a coworker.”

At that, John made the tiniest, most doomed sort of face.

Donna, however, lit up. “That’s me.”

Recognition fully settled in.

They pointed between Donna and John, still looking mildly stunned. “The terrifying and brilliant spitfire.”

Donna beamed. “One and only.” Then her smile faltered and the words replayed. Her eyes narrowed.

Slowly, very slowly, she turned her head toward the Doctor.

There was a dangerous little pause.

“Terrifying?”

The Doctor looked as though he had stepped squarely into a trap and heard it snap shut around his ankle. His hand came up on instinct, shielding one ear.

The barista pressed their lips together so hard they nearly hurt, fighting not to laugh.

Donna looked back at them. “Did I hear that right?”

The Doctor opened his mouth and closed it again.

Donna’s eyes widened with fresh outrage. “He called me terrifying?”

The barista made a strangled little sound and had to cover their mouth with one hand. John took one cautious half-step back, hand still near his ear in a gesture that suggested this was not theoretical self-protection but experience.

“Donna-”

She rounded on him immediately, “Oi! I’ll show you terrifying.”

The barista’s laugh broke free, bright and helpless, echoing into the hallway. They tried to muffle it and failed spectacularly.

John looked at them, betrayed. “Don’t encourage her.”

Donna pointed at him. “Too late.”

Still laughing, they stepped back and opened the door wider. “You two should come in before the neighbors think someone’s being murdered.”

“Oh, give it a minute,” Donna muttered, still glaring at the Doctor as she swept past him into the flat like she belonged there already.

John lingered for one brief second on the threshold, looking faintly put-upon and deeply embarrassed. Their met his eyes, still smiling.

“You called her terrifying?”

His expression shifted at once into weary self-defense. “I also said brilliant.”

He gave a tiny, put-upon sniff and stepped inside after Donna.

And then he stopped because Donna had stopped.

Because the second she crossed fully into the living room and saw the fort, the dim light, the blankets and pillows and fairy-light glow and carefully arranged snacks,  Donna Noble went absolutely silent and they felt their stomach drop.

Oh no.

John saw it a heartbeat later and froze too, all fresh embarrassment abruptly replaced by a brand new kind. Donna turned very slowly to look at him. Her expression was unreadable for exactly one second.

Then she slapped a hand over her mouth and made a noise halfway between a gasp and a laugh. “Oh, you are joking.”

The Doctor looked like he wanted the floor to open and take him.

The barista, meanwhile, had never in their life wanted to vanish more.

“It’s not-” they started.

“Oh, no, don’t mind me,” Donna said, eyes glittering now as she took in every last detail. “Carry on. I’ve just accidentally walked into the most adorable crime scene in Britain.”

John closed his eyes briefly. “Donna.” There was murder in his voice, or at least the intent of it.

They stood there in the warm glow of the fairy lights, heart hammering and face burning, while Donna Noble, terrifying, brilliant Donna Noble, looked from the fort to the Doctor’s expression and seemed to understand far too much.

Donna smiled as if none of this were strange in the slightest.

“Sorry to barge in,” she said, waving one hand lightly as she stepped farther into the flat. “John”, she put just enough odd emphasis on the name to make it sound very deliberate, “and I were traveling back together.”

Their attention snagged on that emphasis for half a second, a tiny thread of curiosity tugging loose, but Donna was already carrying on before they could really sit with it.

“I’m from Chiswick,” she explained, shrugging out of her coat. “And I just couldn’t be bothered finishing the trek this late.”

They nodded politely. “Right, yeah. Of course.” They did not mention that Chiswick was only about a twenty-minute taxi ride from here, give or take traffic.

Donna, meanwhile, went on with easy cheer, as if she had been rehearsing this on the walk up. “John”, again with that peculiar little stress on his name, “was basically acting as my tour guide, and when he said he already had movie night plans with a friend, he invited me along so I wouldn’t have to spend the whole evening alone in some miserable hotel room.”

The barista looked over at John, then back at Donna, and smiled. “That was nice of him.”

John made a small noise in the back of his throat that sounded like he’d swallowed a protest and regretted it too late.

Still, they stepped back and opened their arm toward the room. “Well, you’re welcome in.”

“See?” Donna said brightly, shooting the Doctor a look that was all triumph. “Lovely.”

The Doctor said nothing. Which, to Donna, was as good as admitting she’d won.

He was getting irritated now, though. In that particular tight way that settled around his shoulders and sharpened the line of his mouth whenever Donna had pushed one inch too far and knew it.

Because subtle, she had promised. Subtle and normal and no trouble at all. And instead she had arrived at the flat with pointed emphasis on his fake name, a flimsy cover story, and all the delicacy of a marching band.

He did not want her here.

Not because he didn’t trust Donna exactly, well, perhaps a little because he didn’t trust Donna, but mostly because the second he stepped fully into the room and took in what they had built, everything in him drew taut with a different sort of vulnerability entirely.

The carefully made blanket bed. The pillows and stuffed animals. The dim room, softened by the television glow and the fairy lights bleeding in from the kitchenette. The coffee table with its bowls of popcorn and lemonade and takeaway chips and stack of DVDs.

They had done it all exactly as they’d said they would. And he hated, suddenly and irrationally, that Donna was here to see it.

Because it looked like a lot of effort, a lot of thought put into an evening he had been quietly looking forward. He did notice, too, that the whole room had a romantic sort of atmosphere to it. It would have been impossible not to notice, really. The dim lights alone did that much. Low light made anything look softer, closer, more intimate.

But he refused to let his mind run away with that. The rational part of him took hold, firm and determined not to make things worse than they already were.

Dim lights equaled romance, yes.

But you couldn’t very well have a proper movie night with all the overhead lights blazing like an interrogation room, could you? That would be absurd. The room had to be dim for the television. The fairy lights simply existed. The blankets were for comfort. The fort was exactly the sort of thing they would build because they thought it was fun, not because they had secretly engineered some grand romantic atmosphere.

It wasn’t on purpose, he was sure of it.

Mostly.

Even if, standing here now with Donna in the room and the whole thing laid out before him, it was deeply embarrassing to have someone who knew the truth of his hearts witness it.

Donna looked around with alarming interest.

They, still a little flustered but doing a much better job of recovering than he was, moved to clear a bit of space on the coffee table that did not need clearing. “Sorry, it’s a little chaotic.”

“No, it’s great,” Donna said at once. The Doctor looked at her sharply. She ignored him. “It’s cozy,” she added, with enough innocent warmth to be suspicious on principle.

They smiled, ducking their head a little. “Thanks. It might be slightly overcommitted.”

“That,” Donna said, “is the best kind.”

The Doctor made another small, disapproving sound.

They looked over at him with the faintest trace of a grin. “What?”

“Nothing,” he said too quickly.

Donna snorted. He shot her a warning glance that she met with the blandest expression imaginable.

Their eyes moved between them, curiosity surfacing again in a quiet little flicker. There was something odd in their rhythm together, not bad odd, exactly, but lived-in. Donna pushed at him in a way no coworker would, and John, for all his irritation, let her in a way he let almost no one.

It made the barista wonder, just for a second, who exactly Donna Noble was to him.

Donna, mercifully or perhaps not, took the question away before it could be asked.

“So,” she said, clapping her hands softly once, “what’s the film, then?”

The barista laughed. “That is actually still undecided.”

Donna gasped. “You built all this and didn’t pick the movie?”

“I know,” they admitted. “Terrible planning.”

The Doctor muttered, “I said as much.”

They pointed at him immediately. “You are outnumbered now, so I’m going to need less judgment and more cooperation.”

Donna grinned at that. “Oh, I like them.”

The Doctor closed his eyes for the briefest second, as if bracing himself.

For one awkward stretch of time, the three of them simply stood there. No one spoke. The television menu music looped softly in the background. Somewhere outside in the hall, a pipe clanked faintly in the wall. Inside the flat, however, the silence took on a life of its own.

The Doctor wanted, with increasing intensity, for Donna to suddenly remember some urgent reason to leave. A headache, traveler's fatigue, a sudden, overwhelming desire to return to the hotel room that did not exist.

Anything.

He was already halfway composing possible exits for her in his head and trying to decide whether he could physically herd her back toward the Tardis without making it obvious to the other two people in the room.

Donna, meanwhile, was doing exactly the opposite.

Her expression remained pleasant and open and entirely normal, but behind it her mind was racing at top speed, turning over angles and glances and atmosphere, trying to gauge whether the feelings she had dragged out of the Doctor in the console room had anything resembling an echo on the other side.

Not enough to be intrusive, of course. Well. Not too intrusive. Just enough to know.

The barista wanted the floor to swallow them whole. They stood near the coffee table with their hands clasped a little too tightly in front of them, smiling the strained sort of smile that only existed when someone was trying very hard to be gracious through a deeply inconvenient emotional collapse.

Because this was mortifying. Not Donna specifically. Donna seemed lovely, in a terrifying sort of way. But the situation was mortifying. 

This had been meant to make John smile.

That was the humiliating part of it. They had spent the evening fussing over blankets and fairy lights and popcorn and DVDs, making something cozy and a little silly and maybe, if they were being fully honest, a bit special, all because they had missed him for the last week and wanted the night to feel good. Wanted him to be happy he was back, and maybe never want to leave. Wanted him to walk in, laugh, and climb under the blanket roof and look pleased.

And now there was a stranger in the middle of it. A stranger who seemed very comfortable. Very observant, very likely to remember every embarrassing detail of the fort forever.

They did not want to be mean, but they were, privately, a little bit mad at John for not giving them a heads-up that he was bringing a third wheel into their carefully assembled nest of blankets and snacks. If he had texted by the way, bringing a coworker, they would have had time to take the whole thing down and pretend this was an ordinary, low-stakes movie night and not this.

Still, the annoyance struggled to hold. Because John was John. Because, of course, if Donna really was traveling back with him and really was facing a lonely night in a hotel room, he would be exactly the sort of person to invite her along rather than leave her on her own.

That was the problem with him, really. He made it very hard to stay irritated for long.

So they stood there, caught between mortification and reluctant fondness, and looked at him.

John, for his part, looked caught too. Not guilty, exactly, just a bit like he knew this had all gone wrong the second he stepped through the door, and he had not yet found the correct combination of words to fix it.

Of course he looked sweet and awkward about it. That made it even worse.

Donna, apparently deciding the silence had ripened enough, clapped her hands softly once and smiled. “Right,” she said. “This is getting painfully British.”

That startled a laugh out of the barista before they could stop it. The Doctor shot Donna a look that she ignored it magnificently.

“We’ve got popcorn, haven’t we?” she went on, stepping toward the coffee table. “And chips. And a fort. Honestly, at this point it’d be rude not to carry on.”

The barista smiled a little more genuinely this time, grateful for the push. “Yeah. Right. Sorry. It’s just not how I pictured the start of the night.”

Donna’s brow lifted. “No?”

The barista let out a small huff of laughter. “Not exactly.”

The Doctor shifted, then finally spoke, his voice quieter than before. “Sorry.”

They looked at him.

He had his hands in his coat pockets now, shoulders slightly drawn in, expression apologetic in a way that made their irritation dissolve another inch.

“I should’ve said,” he added.

“Yeah,” they said, before they could soften it.

The Doctor winced.

“But,” they went on, gentler now, “I get it.”

He looked up to see them gave a tiny shrug. “You didn’t want your friend spending the night alone.”

Donna’s expression changed in a quick, unreadable flicker, something like satisfaction, something like tenderness, before she smoothed it away. The Doctor looked at the barista for a second too long, visibly relieved by how easily they had understood him.

So they broke eye contact first and gestured toward the fort. “Anyway. It’s done now.”

Donna’s face lit up. “Exactly.”

The Doctor still looked wary.

Donna turned to him immediately. “Oh, stop it. We’re not dismantling the fort just because you’ve got emotional issues.”

“I do not have emotional issues.”

Both Donna and the barista looked at him.

The Doctor paused, “…That was badly phrased.”

“Very,” Donna said.

The barista laughed, and some last knot of awkwardness loosened just enough for the room to feel breathable again.

Donna pointed toward the blanket bed. “Right. Who’s sitting where?”

The barista blinked at her.

“What?”

“Well someone’s got to decide before we all stand here until morning,” Donna said. “And I’m not above assigning seats.”

The Doctor muttered, “You’d enjoy that far too much.”

“I would.”

They stepped a little closer to the fort, glancing over the blankets with fresh uncertainty.

“I can take it down,” they offered, already half reaching for one of the clips holding the sheet in place. “There’s loads of room for two, but I’ve no idea how cramped it’ll be for three.”

“Oh, don’t you dare.” Donna, who had already kicked off her shoes by the door, looked properly scandalized.

They paused, hand still hovering near the lamp.

“I haven’t been in one of these since I was little. My grandad used to help me build them.”

That won a softer smile from them at once. “Yeah?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Donna said, warming instantly. “Blankets over chairs, cushions everywhere, torchlights under the duvet, the lot. Proper effort, too. None of this sad one-chair nonsense.”

They laughed. “He sounds sweet.”

Donna’s whole face changed when she spoke about him,  “He is. Best man in the world.”

The Doctor smiled too, small and fond, just watching her.

Donna noticed and jerked her chin toward him. “Only person who probably cares more about my grandad than I do is the Doctor.”

The barista’s smile faltered into confusion, and the Doctor froze. Donna froze a beat later, realization hitting with visible force.

The barista tilted their head. “The Doctor?”

Donna’s eyes widened just slightly, “Hm?”

The Doctor looked as though he had been struck by lightning and was still deciding whether to fall over. For one long second no one moved.

Then Donna, because she was Donna, recovered first.

She gave a quick, careless shrug, forcing a casualness over the moment that almost worked. “Nickname.”

The barista blinked. “Nickname.”

“Yeah.”

They looked from Donna to John, curiosity sharpening now. “Are you a doctor?”

The Doctor made a small, strangled sound that was not a word.

Donna plowed on before he could fully collapse. “No.”

The barista’s brow furrowed. “Then why, ”

“He’s an archaeologist,” Donna said smoothly. “Working on his doctorate.” 

The Doctor turned to look at her with the sort of silent betrayal usually reserved for war crimes. Donna did not even glance at him.

Their face lit with immediate understanding. “Oh.”

The Doctor opened his mouth, still trying to catch up with the lie, but Donna had already built the bridge and set fire to the exit behind him.

“You know,” she said breezily, waving one hand as if this explained everything. “History, ruins, old things, dirt. That sort of thing.”

The Doctor stared at her.

Archaeologist, of all the possible human professions. Donna knew exactly what she was doing. She knew, from the library, from the Vashta Nerada, from his own smug little quote about being a time traveler and pointing and laughing at archaeologists, that this was probably the funniest lie she could have chosen on short notice.

It was retaliation. A tiny, viciously well-timed act of payback for every secret he’d kept from her.

The Doctor’s jaw tightened. Still, when the barista looked back at him, expectant, he had no choice but to nod.

“Yes,” he said stiffly. “Archaeologist.”

Donna smiled to herself.

Theybought it immediately. Which was, frankly, insulting.

“Okay, that actually makes so much sense,” they said, looking at him with a new kind of delight. “Why did you never say?”

The Doctor sputtered. “I, well-”

“He’s weird about talking about work,” Donna cut in.

The Doctor shot her a murderous glance. They didn’t notice, they were too busy connecting all the little dots in their own head.

“No, but seriously,” they said, turning fully to him now. “That explains everything. The history facts, the museum obsession, the way you talk about dead people like you knew them.”

The Doctor’s eyes flicked up.

“And the whole constant traveling thing,” they finished, smiling. “You’re such a history nerd.”

The word nerd seemed to settle him a little, or at least pull him out of outright panic.

He gave a weak, uncomfortable little smile. “Bit.”

Donna folded her arms, looking far too pleased with herself.

They laughed softly and shook their head. “You made it seem like your job was so boring the way you never talked about it.”

The Doctor, still deeply irritated and not at all comfortable in his brand-new false profession, muttered, “Depends on the century.”

Donna coughed sharply into her hand to cover a laugh.

They grinned. “That was such an archaeologist thing to say.”

That, somehow, was worse. The Doctor closed his eyes briefly. Donna looked like Christmas had come early.

Still smiling, they stepped back toward the fort again. “Right, well. Archaeologist or not, I’m keeping the fort up if Donna wants in.”

Donna clapped once in approval. “That’s the spirit.”

The Doctor opened his eyes and looked between the two of them, Donna glowing with triumph, the barista glowing with relief, and realized, with quiet despair, that he had lost complete control of the evening in under five minutes. 

“Don’t you two pick the film without me,” Donna said, already half walking backward toward the hall. Then she stopped and frowned. “Actually, where’s the bathroom?”

The Doctor and the barista answered at the exact same time, “Hall, second door on the left.” They both stopped, looked at each other, and the barista’s mouth twitched.

Donna pointed between them. “You two spend too much time together.”

“Oi,” the Doctor said.

Donna rolled her eyes. “And if you start in on one of his weird old-man films while I’m gone, I’ll know.”

“They’re not old-man films,” the Doctor protested.

“They are if no one under seventy has heard of them.” With that, she disappeared down the hall, still muttering about his taste in movies as she went.

The second the bathroom door clicked shut, the flat seemed to exhale.

The barista turned back to him at once, lips already curled into a teasing smile.

“Doctor,” they said, making the title sound far cheekier than Donna had. The Doctor smiled despite himself. It was impossible not to with them looking at him like that, amused, pleased, a little smug at having acquired a new thing to call him. 

He slipped out of his trench coat and draped it over the armchair that had long since become the place for his things when he was here. Then he bent to untie his Converse and kicked them off, letting himself settle into the room in that quiet way he always did, as though some part of him unclenched the second he stepped inside.

They watched him do it.

“Why didn’t you ever mention work?” they asked softly.

The question wasn’t accusing, not really, but there was enough curiosity in it to make him pause.

He didn’t have a real answer to give them, not one he could say out loud. ‘Because I don’t actually have a job’ did not feel like a strong choice. So instead he settled for the nearest thing to truth he could manage.

“I don’t know,” he admitted, straightening. “When I’m here, work’s usually the last thing on my mind.”

The words landed warmer than he had meant them to. Immediately their brain tried to be unhelpful and twist it into something sweeter than it probably was, but they shut that down at once. Of course he’d be preoccupied when they were together. They were always doing something, games, films, food, talking nonsense for hours. It didn’t have to mean anything more than that.

Still, they nodded, smiling a little as they let him off the hook.

“Right,” they said. “Undercover Indiana Jones.”

The Doctor groaned as if physically wounded. “Absolutely not.”

“Not even a little?” That only made them laugh.

“No.”

“Bit of fedora energy.”

“Cruel,” he said, but he was laughing now too.

He slipped his hands into his pockets and, drawn by something softer, took a few slow steps closer to the television wall. His eyes lifted to the painting hanging above it.

Their painting, his atrocious little portrait of them, framed and hung there with a seriousness it had never earned. He looked at it for a moment, smiling faintly.

Even now, even after they had texted him the photo and told him they’d found a place for it, the sight of it there still did something strange to him. Made him feel chosen in some quiet, domestic way he had no business treasuring quite so much.

When he turned back, they were already watching him. The look on their face softened as soon as his eyes met theirs.

“It’s good to have you back,” they admitted.

The Doctor’s expression changed, his own smile going warmer. That open, boyish grin that always seemed to make him look younger and older all at once.

“It’s good to be back,” he said.

For a second they just stood there in the soft light, smiling at each other like the week apart had mattered more than either of them would usually say outright.

Then they glanced toward the hall, checking that Donna was still safely out of sight. When they looked back at him, their expression shifted into a mock severity that was entirely undercut by the way their eyes shone.

“You owe me,” they said in a hushed voice.

The Doctor faltered, though the grin did not quite leave his face. Because their trying-to-be-angry face was, unfortunately for them, not intimidating in the slightest.

“Do I?”

“Yes,” they said. “For bringing Donna along.”

He winced just a little and had the grace to look sheepish. “Sorry.”

They held the look another second, then let it soften with a shrug, “You’ll just have to make it up to me by sticking around a bit.”

That made something flicker in his face, something warm enough that they nearly looked away from it.

He grinned again, lighter now. “Can’t promise that.”

They narrowed their eyes.

“But,” he added, stepping a little closer, voice dropping just enough to feel private, “I’ll make the rest of my time here worth it.”

That pulled a grin out of them before they could help it.

“Smooth,” they murmured.

“I know.”

They looked like they were about to say something else when the bathroom door opened down the hall. Both of them stepped back on instinct.

And by the time Donna reappeared, drying her hands on a tissue and looking immediately suspicious of whatever she’d missed, the two of them had done a poor but determined job of arranging their faces into something much more casual.

Donna did not hesitate for even a second. The moment she ducked under the sheet roof, she surveyed the blanket bed like a general assessing a battlefield, then promptly made herself comfortable right at the edge in a spot that left only one sensible arrangement for the remaining two spaces. 

The barista noticed.

The Doctor noticed.

Donna, judging by the deeply innocent look on her face as she folded one leg beneath herself and adjusted a cushion behind her back, absolutely noticed.

Neither of them said a word.

They stayed outside the fort for the moment anyway, both pretending this was entirely practical because someone still had to choose a film and put the DVD in. The Doctor crouched by the coffee table and began flipping through the little stack they’d gathered, cases clicking softly one against another in his hands.

He had seen every one of them. Some in cinemas, some on telly, some on other worlds where they had inexplicably become cult classics, and at least one while hanging upside down in the ventilation system of a diplomatic transport because the only functioning monitor in the place had been playing it on loop.

Still, he said nothing. For their sake, he was more than willing to pretend otherwise.

They hovered nearby, feeling a bit more self-conscious than they had a moment ago. Everything was different with Donna there, not worse exactly, just more visible. Less private. They glanced down at the stack and said, “Those seemed like films you might like. Assuming you haven’t seen them already.”

The Doctor looked up at them and smiled, warm enough to make their stomach do something irritating. “Thoughtful.” 

Then he kept flipping through the cases, buying himself a second to settle the smile back into something manageable.

Donna groaned from inside the fort. “You’ve got to be careful what you pick.”

They looked over. “Why?”

“Because,” Donna said, with the air of someone passing on hard-won survival knowledge, “he’s got a terrible habit of spoiling the endings.”

The barista laughed. “That is true.”

The Doctor turned, offended. “It is not.”

“It is,” Donna and the barista said together. He stared at both of them in wounded disbelief.

Donna pointed at him. “You watch something for fifteen minutes, go all squinty, then suddenly announce who did it and why.”

“I do not announce it.”

“You do,” the barista said, smiling now as they leaned against the arm of the couch. “Not on purpose, but you definitely go all,” They scrunched their face and tilted their head in exaggerated concentration. “Oh. Well, that’s actually not accurate because-.”

Donna slapped her knee. “Yes!”

The Doctor made a disapproving noise. “I’m being slandered in stereo.”

“There’s no slander if it’s true,” Donna said.

The barista nodded. “You piece things together weirdly fast.”

“That’s not a crime.”

“No,” Donna said. “Just annoying.”

He put one hand over his chest. “I am not annoying.”

That got a laugh out of both of them, and he sat back on his heels with a little huff, watching them over the stack of DVDs in his hands.

It struck him then, not for the first time that evening, how odd and strangely lovely this was. Donna and the barista, bantering together already, both of them talking about him as though they had each separately collected enough of his habits to compare notes.

There was no malice in it at all.

Donna wasn’t finished. “And don’t get me started on how fast he talks.”

The barista let out an immediate laugh of recognition. “Oh, God, yes.”

The Doctor opened his mouth to object, but Donna steamrolled right over him.

“He’ll say something at top speed, all complete nonsense, then stop, sigh, and explain it again in actual human.”

The barista pointed at her, delighted. “Yes! Exactly that.”

“That is not fair,” the Doctor said.

“It is, spaceman,” Donna replied.

They were grinning now, warmed into the rhythm of it despite the initial awkwardness. “He did that during a movie night once.”

Donna turned to them with interest. “Go on.”

The Doctor narrowed his eyes. “Maybe don’t.”

But the barista was already laughing to themself.

“We watched this terrible indie film,” they said, “like, properly low-budget. Alien invasion, end of the world, all that.”

Donna brightened. “Sounds brilliant.”

“It was objectively awful,” the barista said. “And for at least half the film, he kept pausing to explain why none of it made any sense.”

“I did not pause it.”

“You paused it twice.”

“Twice is not ‘kept pausing.’”

Donna cackled. “What was wrong with it?”

They looked at the Doctor with a smile that was half apology, half delight. “Everything, apparently.”

The Doctor lifted a finger. “To be fair, the science was appalling.”

“It was a film,” they reminded him.

“It was nonsense.”

“It was fun.”

“There are standards.”

Donna was laughing so hard now she had to wipe at one eye. “Oh, I know that tone. He gets all righteous, like he’s been personally offended by the script.”

“He had a whole rant,” they said, turning more fully toward Donna now. “Like an actual monologue. About atmospheric conditions and sound in space and the fact that some kind of alien virus thing would not work the way the film claimed it would.”

The Doctor frowned. “Because it wouldn’t.”

“And then,” they went on, speaking over him, “he had to backtrack and explain it all again in simpler terms because I just stared at him.”

Donna pointed at the Doctor in vindication. “See?”

He looked between them, both of them smiling at him now with the same maddening fondness, and felt his mock offense lose most of its strength.

“That happened once,” he muttered.

The barista and Donna exchanged a look. Then, in perfect unison:

“No.”

The Doctor dropped his head with a groan while both of them laughed.

Donna reached for the cheesy popcorn and said, “Right. We’re picking the worst alien film you’ve got.”

The Doctor looked up sharply. “Absolutely not.”

They reached for the DVDs. “Now that,” they said, “might actually be fun.” They went straight to the DVD shelf and crouched in front of it, fingers skimming over old plastic cases until they made a triumphant little noise.

“Oh, no way.”

Donna craned her neck from the fort. “What?”

They pulled a case free and turned, grinning like they’d just unearthed buried treasure. “We have Battlefield Earth.”

The Doctor’s face changed instantly. He looked at the cover, then away from it, then back again with the expression of a man being shown a war crime.

“Oh no,” he said, pathetically.

Donna sat up straighter at once. “What is it?”

The barista laughed as they came back toward the fort, holding the case aloft. “One of the worst sci-fi films ever made.”

Donna’s eyes lit up. “Really?”

“Oh, absolutely,” they said. “I bought a whole bin of DVDs at a yard sale years ago and this was in it. Never watched it because every review I’d ever heard was horrific.”

The Doctor made a wounded sound in the back of his throat.

Donna looked from the case to his face and grinned wickedly. “Well, now we’re watching it.”

“We are not,” the Doctor said, with all the conviction of someone who already knew he had lost.

“Oh, we are,” Donna said.

They nodded, delighted now. “Definitely.”

The Doctor looked between the two of them, one redheaded menace and one human who should have been on his side and very much was not. Then, with the weary air of a man accepting his fate, ducked into the fort and slid down beside Donna.

“Fine,” he muttered. “If I’m to suffer, I’ll do it properly.”

Donna beamed. “That’s the spirit.”

They laughed under their breath and turned to the TV, feeding the DVD into the player. The machine whirred obligingly, and they grabbed the remote before dropping down onto their hands and knees to crawl into the fort.

The second they settled in, they realized they had been right to second-guess the setup. It was cramped. Donna had taken the far edge, half-curled into a nest of pillows with the confidence of someone who made herself comfortable anywhere. Which left the middle and the other side for the barista and the Doctor, and the only way for that to work was for them to be close.

They tucked themself in beside him and felt their shoulder press immediately against his.

So did he.

Neither of them moved away.

The fort was too small for that, really. What were they supposed to do, refuse basic geometry? There simply wasn’t room. Perfectly innocent. Still, the excuse sat there between them like a gift.

The Doctor adjusted one leg, trying not to seem too aware of where his knee brushed theirs under the blankets they threw across their laps. The barista shifted too, equally unsuccessful at pretending not to notice how warm he was through the fabric of his trousers and shirt sleeve.

Neither of them minded. Not nearly as much as they probably ought to have.

Donna, thankfully or perhaps not, was too occupied making a proper home for herself with a bowl of popcorn in her lap to comment. She wriggled deeper into the pile of cushions, snagged the buttered popcorn, then changed her mind and grabbed the candied one too.

“Right,” she said. “If this is as bad as you two say, I’m going to need sugar.”

The previews began to play, loud and ridiculous in the dark. The TV light flashed over the inside of the sheet roof, turning the whole fort blue and silver by turns.

The Doctor reached without ceremony for the takeaway chips on the coffee table and dragged them closer, helping himself immediately. The barista smiled and stole a few from the pile between his fingers and the carton, and he let them without so much as a glance.

Donna, meanwhile, went to town on the popcorn as though she’d been training for this exact moment.

For a little while, the awkwardness dissolved into the simple business of settling in. Blankets tugged into place. Bowls shifted around. The remote passed back and forth while the DVD coughed up another preview no one cared about.

Donna was muttering commentary at the previews already. The barista was trying not to laugh. Their shoulder still rested against his, light but constant, and every time they reached together for the chips, their hands nearly brushed.

It was not the night he had pictured. But as the menu screen finally gave way and the room dimmed further under the shifting light of the film, he found he couldn’t quite bring himself to mind.

“This,” Donna announced around a mouthful of popcorn, “had better be terrible.”

The barista grinned and hit play. Beside them, the Doctor let out a low, resigned sigh and leaned back into the pillows, already bracing himself for disaster.

For the first half of the film, the Doctor made a visible effort to behave.

Every now and then something on screen would happen, some impossible bit of technology, some laughable bit of alien logic, some wildly inaccurate choice that clearly offended him on a cellular level, and they could practically see him biting his tongue. His mouth would twitch. His eyes would narrow. He’d inhale like he was about to launch into a full lecture, then think better of it and grab another chip instead.

Apparently he was trying.

Donna, on the other hand, had no such restraint. She had been openly baffled from the opening stretch of the movie.

“I don’t understand,” she whispered loudly during one scene, squinting at the screen. “Is it the future or is everyone a caveman?”

The barista snorted softly.

The Doctor kept his eyes on the television. “It’s attempting both.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s bad.”

Donna made a face and reached for more popcorn.

They smiled to themself and stole a glance at the Doctor. He was trying to let most of it slide, clearly. Trying very hard to grant the film its many crimes against science and common sense because, as far as the average human audience was concerned, they simply did not know any better yet.

Still, every time one of the aliens fired a blaster on screen, the Doctor rolled his eyes so dramatically it nearly counted as a physical performance.

They noticed every single time. And because they didn’t know he was reacting to actual firsthand knowledge of alien weaponry, they found it deeply funny. To them it just looked like he was being absurdly picky about special effects and movie logic, the world’s most intense sci-fi snob unable to tolerate cinematic nonsense in peace.

Which, to be fair, was also true.

At one point another ridiculous burst of blue light shot across the screen, and the Doctor made a low, personally offended sound.

The barista bit back a laugh. “What now?”

He shook his head once. “Nothing.”

“That was a something noise.”

He gestured vaguely at the television. “That’s just not how those work.”

They smiled at the screen. “Those…?”

“The blasters.”

They looked over at him, “You say that like you’ve used one.”

The Doctor paused for half a beat too long, then reached for a chip and said, “I’ve seen enough films to know that was rubbish.”

Donna narrowed her eyes in amusement for all of two seconds before the film did something even stupider and pulled her attention away again.

By halfway through, all three of them had settled in enough that the crampedness of the fort had become less of a careful adjustment and more of a fact.

Donna had gradually expanded until she occupied far more of her side than seemed physically possible. The Doctor and the barista had, by silent agreement, compressed themselves into the remaining space and stopped pretending they weren’t pressed together from shoulder to knee.

Then Donna decided to make a performance out of it.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, breaking away from the film to squirm dramatically. “Doctor, you are practically sitting on me.”

The Doctor blinked, affronted. “I am not.”

“You are.”

“I’m not.”

Donna shoved at him with one hand. “You’re all elbows.”

They laughed under their breath, eyes still on the screen.

“And honestly,” Donna continued, pushing harder now, “you’re so thin and bony it’s like being jabbed by a folding chair.”

“Donna!”

She shoved him again.

The Doctor, caught between the two of them and the limited architecture of the fort, gave way with a protesting noise and was forced bodily in the other direction, straight into them. They let out the tiniest breath of startled laughter, still looking at the film for one stubborn second longer before the full reality of the new arrangement registered.

The Doctor had been pushed even more firmly against them than before. His side was fully along theirs now, his knee crowding theirs under the blanket, and in the effort to keep himself balanced against Donna’s relentless complaints, he shifted and braced one arm along the the couch behind them.

And suddenly harm was around their shoulders. Not quite holding them but resting along the couch behind them, warm and close enough that if they leaned back even a fraction more, they would be tucked neatly into his side.

They went very still because some treacherous part of their brain, completely unhelpful and far too aware of romance tropes, immediately supplied the deeply humiliating thought that this was the most cliché thing that had ever happened in the history of human seating arrangements.

Arm around the back of the couch and accidental closeness? It was so cheesy it ought to have had its own soundtrack. Somewhere out there, an author is kicking their feet and saying your welcome. 

The Doctor settled after Donna’s assault, adjusting his weight carefully so he wasn’t actually crushing either of them, and once he had stopped moving, the shape of him remained there beside them. His sleeve brushed the fabric of their shirt whenever either of them shifted.

Donna had done this, clearly. So if anyone were to question it, there was a perfectly innocent explanation. Tight fit, limited fort space, Donna Noble, and her aggressive insistence on personal comfort. Entirely practical.

A free pass, really.

The thought made their ears feel warm. Beside them, the Doctor was having a similarly difficult time pretending the situation was not affecting him at all. He kept his gaze on the film with heroic determination, jaw slightly set, as though the worst sci-fi movie imaginable required his full concentration and not a single shred of awareness for the warm person tucked against his side.

He was failing.

Donna only huffed once, satisfied now that she had established a more comfortable distance from the Doctor’s allegedly pointy bones, and muttered, “Better.”

The barista bit their lip to hide the smile threatening at the corners of their mouth. The Doctor’s arm stayed where it was.

For a little while, neither of them paid much attention to the film. The Doctor sat very still, doing an admirable job of pretending this was an entirely practical arrangement.

He watched them from the corner of his eye with a straight face that fooled absolutely no one. There was a fond gleam there, bright and quiet and impossible to miss if one looked closely enough. He kept his mouth carefully neutral, but his eyes gave him away every few seconds when they flicked down to them and softened.

It felt far too nice to have them tucked close to his side like this, to have a reason, however ridiculous, not to move away. He could feel the line of their shoulder against him, the warmth of them under the blanket, the slight shifts in their posture as they tried to settle more comfortably without making any of it obvious.

And though he was enjoying every second of it, he decided, with complete conviction, that he was absolutely never bringing Donna around the flat again.

Not ever. Not if this was the sort of dangerous situation her meddling created.

Beside him, they were trying with determination to look casual. They shifted once, then again, trying to find a position that didn’t leave their knee at an awkward angle or their shoulder knocking the standing lamp holding up the fort. The structure swayed faintly overhead whenever they moved too much, which only made them more cautious. Eventually, the least impossible solution required leaning a little more into him than they had before.

Which was not helping either of them at all.

They swallowed once, nervous now in that strange, breathless way that didn’t feel like panic exactly. They were hyperaware of where his arm was, where his side met theirs, how easy it would be to overthink every inch of contact until the whole of them combusted.

So they risked a glance up at him just to make sure he wasn’t uncomfortable. Only to find he was already looking down at them.

The Doctor’s expression had gone wonderfully unguarded in that private little pocket of shadow and television light. There was no real surprise on his face at being caught, only that growing grin and that bright glint in his eye, like he’d been quietly enjoying their attempts to get settled and had no intention of pretending otherwise.

It was impossible not to smile back. The grin pulled out of them instinctively, small at first and then wider when his own widened in return.

The Doctor’s eyes flicked once toward the lamp, then back to them, as if acknowledging the absurd practicality of their position while also thoroughly enjoying it. They ducked their head just a little, smile still there, and let themself settle properly at last.

Then Donna threw a piece of candied popcorn at the television and loudly demanded to know why everyone in the film looked damp, and the moment thinned into laughter.

By the time the credits rolled, they had stopped pretending to keep any kind of careful distance.

At some point during the second half of the film, the awkwardness had worn itself out. They had shifted, then settled, then shifted again, and now they were simply tucked into the Doctor’s side as though that had always been the natural end point of the evening. The bowl of popcorn rested in their lap, and the two of them had fallen into an easy rhythm of reaching into it without looking, fingers occasionally brushing and neither making a fuss of it.

The blanket over their legs had gone warm with shared body heat. The fort sagged softly above them. Donna had long since migrated into a nest of cushions at the opposite edge, somehow still managing to look like she was prepared to fight the film personally.

On screen, the credits began their slow crawl.

Donna broke the silence first. “That,” she announced, “was awful.”

The Doctor, without missing a beat, gave a quick, smug, “I told you so.”

They laughed under their breath, still half leaning into him. “Okay, yes, but not for the reasons you said.”

The Doctor looked down at them with mock offense. “Excuse me?”

“The movie itself was horrible,” they said, lifting a hand to count it off on their fingers while balancing the popcorn bowl with the other. “Bad acting. Bad effects. Bad dialogue. Bad everything.”

Donna pointed at the TV. “That one bloke looked like he was reading cue cards from across the room.”

“Exactly,” they said.

The Doctor sniffed lightly. “And the technology was nonsense.”

“We know,” Donna said.

“We know,” they echoed, a second off from Donna, grinning.

He looked faintly wounded by how little care they gave about his suffering.

Donna sat up a little, brow creased in fresh indignation now that the film had ended and she could devote proper energy to hating it. “No, but seriously, why were the humans suddenly flying the alien ships at the end?”

The Doctor blinked.

Donna turned fully toward him. “They were basically cave people at the beginning.”

“That is true,” they said, nodding.

“And then by the end,” Donna continued, hands moving as she built momentum, “they’re all up there flying about like they’ve had years of training. Where did that come from?”

The Doctor frowned thoughtfully at the TV screen, where names continued scrolling by in indifferent white letters.

“Hm.”

Donna leaned forward. “Don’t hm me. Explain it.”

He squinted slightly, as if perhaps the answer might be hidden somewhere in the credits if he stared hard enough. “They must have explained it at some point.”

There was a beat. Then both Donna and the barista turned to stare at him.

“You didn’t even notice that one?” the barista asked, laughing.

The Doctor looked vaguely defensive. “I was distracted by several other catastrophic failures happening simultaneously.”

Donna let out a bark of laughter. “So even you lost track.”

“I did not lose track.”

“You absolutely did,” they said.

Donna grinned. “Translation: it was such a bad movie even the Doctor gave up.”

They laughed harder at that, and the Doctor looked between the two of them with all the long-suffering patience of a man being unfairly persecuted. Still, he smiled.

It was dreadful. A waste of time by almost any proper metric of cinema.

And yet somehow none of them moved. The credits kept rolling. The menu music had not yet kicked back in. The room stayed dim and warm and close, lit by the pale flicker of the television and the softer amber halo from the fairy lights in the next room.

Donna reached lazily for the cheesy popcorn.

The Doctor, still beside them, shifted only enough to get a little more comfortable, not enough to disturb the shape they’d settled into.

No one got up to turn on the big light. No one started gathering bowls. No one suggested the night had run its course.

They had all agreed the film had been terrible, that the acting was wooden, the effects laughable, the plot full of holes big enough to fly alien ships through.

Donna let out a long sigh and sank deeper into the pillows. “Worst movie I’ve seen in ages.”

The barista smiled sleepily. “Same.”

The Doctor looked at the two of them, then at the fort, then at the screen still glowing faintly in front of them. His grin came back, small and satisfied.

“Well,” he said, “good company.”

Donna made a face but didn’t argue. Then she perked up suddenly, her attention snagging once more on the wall above the television.

“Wait,” she said, pointing with a loose bit of popcorn between her fingers. “Did you paint that thing? I swear, it's been staring at me all night.”

They followed her gaze and immediately laughed. The Doctor made a wounded sound.

“John painted that,” they said, grinning.

Donna’s eyebrows shot up. “He did?”

They nodded, still smiling as they looked at the portrait hanging above the TV. “He took me to the National Gallery for my birthday a few months ago, and there was this interactive exhibit where you could paint portraits. We painted each other.”

“Oh, that is brilliant.” Donna looked from the painting to the Doctor and back again, clearly delighted by this information.

“It is not,” the Doctor muttered.

“It is,” they and Donna said together for different reasons.

Donna, of course, was only getting started. “So where’s the one you did of him?”

That made them glance back at the Doctor with fresh curiosity. Because, actually, yes, they’d never gotten a straight answer on that.

They turned more fully toward him. “Yeah. Where did you put yours?”

“In my room.” The Doctor, who had been hoping very much that this subject would die quietly, made the fatal mistake of answering too casually.

“You have a room?” Donna looked at him with a brow raised. The question slipped out before she could stop it.

The Doctor went still.

They frowned slightly, confusion flickering over their face.

“Why wouldn’t he have a room?” they asked, looking between them. “At his apartment?”

Donna blinked.

The Doctor moved fast. He sat up a little straighter and gestured vaguely toward the painting above the TV as if that had always been the far more urgent subject. “Can we not keep discussing it like it’s some treasured masterpiece?” His tone was light, but his ears had gone a little pink in the television glow, which only made the barista smile.

“No,” they said flatly.

Donna, recovering quickly, nodded toward the portrait with a grin. “I mean, it’s not bad.”

“Thank you,” the Doctor said flatly.

“But,” she added, “it’s got personality.”

He looked scandalized. “That’s what people say when they’re trying not to say horrible.”

They laughed and shook their head. “It’s not bad.”

The Doctor turned to them with immediate disbelief. “You are the least objective person in the room.”

“I’m the person it was painted for.”

“Exactly.”

They looked up at the painting again, smile softening around the edges. “I do love it.” That quieted him more effectively than anything else had. They kept going, half to Donna and half to him now. “I mean it. It makes me happy every time I look at it.”

The Doctor’s expression shifted, embarrassment and warmth colliding into one big mess of blegh. Donna noticed, and very wisely chose not to comment.

The Doctor turned his head just enough to look at them properly, and the fondness in his face came through before he could stop it. Donna smiled to herself, watching the whole thing like she had front-row seats to a play she already knew the ending of.

Her eyes flicked between them, sparkling. Donna, after a suspiciously thoughtful pause, asked, “So how did you two meet then?”

The Doctor’s head turned toward her. He knew that she knew exactly how they had met. Which meant the question wasn’t innocent at all, and that alone was enough to put him on edge.

He looked at her with narrowed eyes. Donna looked back with perfect blandness.

The barista, unaware of the silent argument taking place over the top of the popcorn bowls, answered simply enough. “He became a regular at the café.” They shrugged one shoulder, keeping the explanation easy and surface-level. “Started coming in a lot. We talked. Kept talking.”

They did not mention the rest.

Did not mention the first day he’d looked like grief in a suit. Did not mention the quiet, aching loneliness they had seen in him before they even knew his favorite tea order. Did not mention any of the deeper, more personal pieces he had only given them carefully, later, in softer moments.

They had no idea how much Donna knew, and they were not about to start letting John’s cats out of the bag on his behalf.

Donna nodded along, accepting the version offered. “Right.” Then, as casually as one might ask about the weather, she said, “And how long have you been friends? Because you seem very close.”

The Doctor’s expression went flat. He did not like where she was taking this.

The barista, thankfully oblivious to the specific danger in the question, answered without much fuss. “About a year now.”

Donna nodded again. “Mm.”

The Doctor shifted, already preparing to cut her off before she got any cleverer, but the barista beat him to it.

“What about you?” they asked, turning the question neatly back on her. “Where’d you meet John?”

Donna did not hesitate, “He crashed my wedding.”

The barista’s eyes went wide. They turned to John so quickly he barely had time to brace himself.

He lifted both hands a little in self-defense. “Not like that.”

Donna snorted.

“That is not a defense,” they said, still staring at him.

“It sounds worse than it was.”

“It sounds exactly as bad as it sounds,” Donna said.

The barista looked between them, scandalized and delighted in equal measure. “He crashed your wedding?”

Donna grinned, settling in more comfortably beneath the blanket now that she had an audience. “Well. Sort of.”

The Doctor sank a little lower into the cushions, already regretting everything.

Donna launched into the story with theatrical ease, omitting all the alien invasion details with admirable quickness while still preserving the drama of it. “I was about to marry a complete prick,” she said. “And then I ran into him.”

She jerked her chin toward the Doctor, who made a small, put-upon face.

“I was going to be late,” Donna went on, “and he helped me get there.”

They nodded, following along.

“And when I got there,” Donna said, with mounting indignation even now, “they’d already had the reception without me.”

They sat upright. “Without you?”

Donna pointed at them immediately. “Exactly!”

“They had the reception without the bride?” they repeated, appalled.

“Yes!”

“Oh, that is awful.”

Donna slapped the Doctor on the arm. “See? See, they get it.”

The Doctor rubbed the spot with quiet offense. “I was there.”

“You weren’t offended enough on my behalf.”

“I was very offended.” He tried to defend.

“No, you were practical,” Donna said. “Different thing.”

They looked positively scandalized now, wholly invested. “That’s genuinely terrible.”

“It was,” Donna said, thrilled to have found such enthusiastic agreement. “And then, to make it all worse, when I got there, Lance was dancing with this little twit from the office. Nerys.”

The barista gasped softly. “No.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, I hate him already.”

“Thank you,” Donna said, pleased.

The Doctor, beside them, looked on with the weary expression of a man who had heard this story before and still knew better than to interrupt.

Donna waved one hand dramatically. “There was a lot of shouting.”

“I can imagine,” the barista said.

“A lot.”

The Doctor muttered, “There was quite a bit.”

Donna ignored him. “Anyway, long story short, I realized Lance never cared about me nearly as much as I’d convinced myself he did.” The room softened, just slightly. Donna’s tone did too, though only for a moment. “And I got out with my dignity,” she finished.

They smiled at her, warm and sincere. “Good.”

Donna held their gaze a second, then nodded once in quiet agreement with her own younger self. “Yeah.”

The Doctor watched the two of them from where he sat between them, something faintly fond flickering over his face.

Then they looked back at him and said, with fresh disbelief, “You really led with ‘not like that’ as if that helped.”

Donna burst out laughing.

The Doctor sighed. “It was the first thing I had.”

“It was terrible.”

“I know that now.”

Donna wiped at one eye. “Honestly, I don’t know how you talk your way out of anything.”

“He usually doesn’t,” they said. Oh, if only they knew.

“Brilliant,” he muttered. “I’ve been teamed up on.” The Doctor looked from one to the other, Donna grinning, them smiling with that same bright amusement, and shook his head slowly.

Donna leaned back against the pillow pile with enormous satisfaction. “Too right.”

Donna gave a little shrug, smoothing the sharpest edges off the story with the ease of someone who knew exactly which parts to keep and which to bury.

“We went our separate ways after that,” she said. “Then ran into each other again later by chance.”

The Doctor made a face at the phrase ‘by chance’, but let it go.

Donna went on breezily, “And the rest is history.”

That seemed to satisfy them well enough. They smiled, then perked up with a fresh thought, “So are you an archaeologist too?”

Before Donna could so much as inhale, the Doctor cut in, “She’s my assistant.”

Donna turned so sharply to glare at him that the blanket shifted over her lap.

His assistant. Of all the possible retaliations. Firecracker Donna Noble, reduced to some meek little archaeological assistant, trailing along behind him with a clipboard? Absolutely not.

The Doctor, of course, knew this perfectly well. Which was why he looked far too pleased with himself. He even had the gall to keep going.

“She was having a bit of trouble holding down a job,” he said, in the mildest tone imaginable, “what with her fiery personality, and I needed help. She got to travel, and I got assistance. Win-win, really.”

“Oi, spaceman,” Donna barked. “That is my business!”

The Doctor had the grace to look pleased with himself for all of half a second more before Donna started scolding him, flicking a hand full of popcorn in his direction like a weapon.

“That is rude,” she informed him. 

“You started it.”

“Yeah, and I’ll finished it if you keep that up, you.”

The barista laughed softly under their breath, eyes moving between them with that same entertained fondness they’d worn all evening. Donna huffed one last time, then pushed herself up to standing, stretching her arms over her head until her back gave a satisfying little crack.

“Well,” she said, already stepping carefully over the edge of the blanket bed, “if anyone asks, I’m not his assistant, and if anyone asks twice, I’ll deny knowing either of you.”

The Doctor looked up at her. “Bold words from a woman who’s doing the potty dance right now.”

Donna pointed at him again. “Don’t talk about my potty dance, and don’t call ot that. I’m not a child.” And a second later she was padding off down the hall toward the bathroom.

The cozy spell she’d helped create broke with her movement.

The room felt different without her filling the edge of the fort with commentary and noise. A little more hollow, even with the credits music still humming softly and the white names rolling over a black screen.

He could no longer pretend any closeness between himself and the barista was merely the unavoidable result of Donna Noble’s physical bullying and the architecture of the fort. Donna had removed herself from the equation entirely, and still the barista remained tucked close against his side, warm and comfortable and seemingly not in any hurry to move.

He checked toward the hall as they watched Donna go. He should pull away, that was the sensible thing.

Not dramatically, not enough to make it awkward, just some natural little shift. Reach for the remote. Adjust a pillow. Sit up to stretch. Something that would put a bit more air between them before the silence grew too aware of itself.

But he hesitated because they still looked comfortable. Because they had not flinched back or edged away the second Donna left. And because, suddenly, pulling away seemed cruel.

So he stayed still for a moment, then another, trying to think of an excuse.

They, meanwhile, seemed occupied by far simpler concerns. They dipped a hand into the nearly empty popcorn bowl in their lap, sorting idly through the last pieces with complete seriousness, apparently hunting for one final acceptable piece of candied popcorn as the credits droned on in the background.

They were not thinking about him. Not at that second, anyway. They were looking down, lashes low in the shifting television light, brow faintly furrowed in concentration over something so ordinary and unimportant that it made his hearts ache.

The Doctor turned his head just slightly and watched their profile.

The soft line of their nose. The curve of their mouth when they were quietly pleased with a piece they’d selected. The way the TV glow caught on their cheek and turned one edge of them blue-white while the fairy lights left the rest warm.

And just like that, the comfortable little thump of his hearts melted into grief.  Or more so the shape of it, arriving early as it always did, slipping its shadow under good moments to remind him they could not stay untouched forever.

An insecurity surfaced, sudden and ugly, of how wrong this was.  To let himself get this attached when he already knew, somewhere down the line, he would have to pull the plug on it all or tell them the truth and watch whatever came after wreck the easy shape they had made together. Even if they never once stepped aboard the Tardis, even if he kept them on Earth and safe and wholly outside his real life, they still deserved more than this vague, drifting half-honesty. They deserved to know that one day there might come a time he simply did not return from “work.” Or worse, that he might come back with a different face and ask them to trust that he was still the same man. The thought made his stomach turn.

His gaze dropped to the popcorn bowl in their lap, to their fingers still picking carefully through the last pieces as if none of this was crashing through him at all.

And then, unwelcome and immovable, Donna’s voice rose again in his memory from earlier that night, before dinner with Wilf and a chat about the stars, before coming here.

‘If it doesn’t feel like a loss when it’s gone, then it meant nothing.’

Then the other one came, softer and somehow more infuriating for it.

‘So, you might as well enjoy as much of whatever word you choose while you can.’

The Doctor exhaled slowly through his nose. The barista let out the tiniest pleased hum, having apparently found a “good piece” at last, and popped it into their mouth. That tiny, stupid, ordinary sound nearly undid him.

He sat there beside them, considering Donna’s words while the credits rolled and the room stayed dim and warm around them. Considering the grief he could already taste at the edges of something not yet lost. Considering, too, the fact that he was here now, and they were here now, and for this brief moment the ending had not happened yet.

They finally glanced up, still chewing, and caught him looking.

“What?” they asked, voice quiet so it wouldn’t carry down the hall.

The Doctor blinked, drawn abruptly back to the room.

For one mad second he nearly said something honest. Not the whole truth, not anything so catastrophic as that, but something a little too real. That he was glad to be here. That he had missed them more than the days apart should have allowed. That watching them eat terrible candied popcorn under a blanket fort felt like standing too close to a life he wanted and did not trust himself to touch.

Instead he only looked at the bowl and said, “You’re being very selective.”

They smiled, immediate and easy.

“Well, yeah,” they said, tilting the bowl a little so he could see the pathetic handful of leftovers. “We’re down to the weird bits now.”

The Doctor huffed a small laugh.

They held up one misshapen cluster between finger and thumb. “See? That’s not popcorn anymore.”

Donna came back from the bathroom yawning before she said anything else. A proper, full-bodied yawn too, the sort that made her blink a little harder afterward and drag a hand through her hair like she’d only just realized how tired she was.

“Well,” she said, voice roughened by it, “I’m about done.”

Before either of them could ask what she meant, she started collecting herself by the door, shoving her feet back into her shoes, reaching for her coat, patting her pockets to make sure she had everything.

They sat up a little straighter from the fort, watching her in mild surprise. “You’re finished already?”

Donna glanced over, still shrugging into her coat. “Yeah. Getting tired, aren’t I?” She tossed the Doctor a quick look over her shoulder. “Figured he’d be heading back soon anyway.”

The barista blinked. That caught them off guard more than it should have. John normally stayed fairly late, especially on nights like this when there was no work in the morning and nothing pressing to hurry him off. And it was only ten.

Still, they didn’t argue.

“Oh,” they said, a little more quietly than before. “Okay.”

They pushed themself up from the blankets and started tidying almost automatically, smoothing down the fort roof where it had slipped and reaching for the nearest bowl on the coffee table. Except the Doctor didn’t move, he stayed exactly where he was for one more second, then looked up at Donna with a sharp little frown.

And then at them and something in his expression settled. Because no, actually, he wasn’t ready to leave.

He had wanted some real time with them tonight. Proper time. Time not split three ways or softened around Donna’s meddling or spent bracing for whatever she might say next. He’d promised he would make the rest of his time here worth it, and he had meant that.

So before they could get too far into clearing things away, he said, “I’m not leaving yet.”

They paused, bowl in hand, and looked back at him. Donna’s mouth curled immediately.

The Doctor stood then, slower than usual but with a certainty in it, and slipped his hands into his pockets. “I was actually going to stay a bit longer.”

Their face changed, surprise giving way to something warmer. Donna noticed, she turned fully toward him, one hand still on the doorknob, and gave him a look so cheeky it ought to have been illegal.

“Were you now?”

The Doctor sighed. “Donna.”

“No, no, fair enough,” she said, grin widening. “Wouldn’t want to interrupt your very important archaeological research.”

Theylaughed under their breath while the Doctor shot Donna a warning look that only made her brighter.

She softened it at the last second, though, turning back to the barista with a much kinder smile. “Thanks for letting me crash your night.”

They smiled back. “You’re welcome.”

Donna nodded once, pleased, then jerked her chin toward the Doctor. “He’s alright, really. Just odd.”

“I’m right here,” the Doctor said.

“I know.” She gave the barista a quick, conspiratorial little smile that made the Doctor instantly wary again. Then she opened the door and stepped out into the hall.

“Night, then,” she said.

“Night,” they answered.

The Doctor lingered half a step behind, still watching Donna with the exhausted caution of a man who knew she was capable of one final act of sabotage. To her credit, she kept moving, though not without one last look over her shoulder at him, full of smug affection and far too much understanding.

Then she disappeared down the hall, the door clicked shut, and the doctor flipped the deadbolt shut. And just like that, the flat went quiet again.

They stood by the coffee table, still holding the bowl, and looked back at him. Then the Doctor exhaled and seemed to shed an entire layer of tension at once. He tugged off his suit jacket first, draping it over the armchair. His tie followed a moment later, loosened and laid over the chair with less care than usual.

They chuckled under their breath as they started tidying the coffee table.

He looked over at them. “What?”

“Nothing,” they said, smiling to themself as they swept crumpled wrappers and napkins into the now-empty popcorn bowl. “You just look a lot less on edge.”

The Doctor made a small, noncommittal noise, which was answer enough.

They kept cleaning, leaving behind anything unfinished for continued pecking and gathering all the proper rubbish into the bowl. When they stood and carried it toward the kitchenette, he followed without thinking, hands slipping into his pockets again as he watched them tip the trash into the bin and set the bowl in the sink.

The fairy lights cast warm little reflections over the counter. The flat felt softer now.

The question came out before they could stop it, “Why’d you stay?”

The Doctor blinked, “Hm?”

They shrugged lightly, suddenly a bit self-conscious now that they’d said it out loud. “I mean Donna left. Thought you would’ve gone with her.”

He looked at them for a moment, then gave a small shrug of his own, “Said I’d make the most of our time.”

They stared at him for half a beat, and then the memory caught up. His voice from earlier, low and private while Donna was in the restroom the first time. I’ll make the rest of my time here worth it.

“Oh,” they said, the warmth of it coming back all at once. “Right.” A small laugh slipped out of them. The Doctor’s mouth softened into a grin.

The Doctor, still smiling from their little laugh, tilted his head and said, “Could do another film.”

They looked up.

“A better film,” he added, with emphasis.

That pulled a grin out of them immediately. They stepped closer to him, close enough that the smile in their face turned bright and conspiratorial as they glanced past him toward the fort and then back again.

“It would be a shame,” they said, “to waste a perfectly good fort.”

The Doctor felt his own grin deepen almost helplessly at their enthusiasm. It was infectious in the most dangerous way. Just being near it made him lighter.

Then they covered their mouth suddenly, like they had remembered something appalling.

“What?” he asked, amused now.

They looked at him with exaggerated solemnity. “I kept something from you.”

He raised a brow.

Without another word, they turned and opened the fridge. The Doctor leaned just enough to see around them as they revealed, with all the gravity of a major confession, two pints of ice cream tucked into the door.

He blinked.

They looked back over their shoulder at him, still in full deadly-serious mode. “I know.”

The Doctor laughed softly under his breath.

They turned to face him again and held the fridge open like a display case. “What flavor do you want?”

He considered the two pints. Not because he cared especially, he didn’t, not really. Ice cream was pleasant enough, but not the point. The point was the look on their face as they offered it to him like this was suddenly the most important decision of the evening.

“The chocolate one,” he said.

“Hm.” They thought about it for one second with absurd intensity, then nodded. “I also want that one. Suppose it’s big enough to share. ”

The Doctor shook his head, smiling. They grabbed the chocolate pint, shut the fridge with their hip, and immediately launched into a ramble on the walk back toward the fort.

“Okay, so we need something good this time,” they said, moving around the coffee table with quick purpose. “I’d like at least twenty minutes before your film criticism kicks in.”

The Doctor opened the drawer in the kitchenette and pulled out two spoons, still listening.

“And no alien invasions, probably, because that feels like tempting fate now.”

“A wise decision,” he said.

They pointed at him with the pint. “See? You’ve already started.”

He laughed and followed them back toward the fort, spoons in hand, shaking his head as they kept going, thoughts moving aloud faster than he could properly track. The room had settled into that lovely, late-night looseness he was familiar with now. They left the ice cream on the coffee table while they sorted through the remaining stack of DVDs.

The Doctor, already half disappearing back under the sheet roof, looked over from the fort and said, “Honestly, any of the ones you had out looked fine.”

They glanced back at him. “You don’t care?”

He settled himself more comfortably beneath the blankets, stretching one leg out and propping a pillow behind his back. “Not particularly.”

They laughed softly. “That’s not helpful.”

“It’s very helpful,” he said. “It means you can’t choose wrong.”

“That’s not how choices work.”

The Doctor only smiled and tucked himself in farther, looking altogether too at home there now, shirt sleeves a little rumpled, tie gone, shoes off, all the sharpness of earlier softened into something warm and boyish under the fairy lights and TV glow.

They shook their head at him, amused, and held one finger over the little pile of DVDs.

“Right then.” They played a quick round of eeny meeny miny mo under their breath, tapping each case in turn until they landed on one near the bottom of the stack.

“There,” they said, holding it up in triumph. “Fate has spoken.”

The Doctor made a thoughtful hum from inside the fort. “Dangerous system.”

“It’s efficient.”

“It’s reckless.”

“It’s democratic.”

That earned a quiet laugh from him as they crossed to the DVD player and fed the disc in. While it loaded, they gathered the leftover cases and slid them back onto the shelf. 

The Doctor watched them over the back of the couch cushion as they ducked beneath the sheet and settled in beside him. He noticed immediately that they sat nearly as close as before. Shoulder to shoulder. Knee almost touching under the blanket. Close enough that no one could pretend it was simply a matter of limited space this time.

Donna was gone and so was the excuse.

He did not comment on it. He only shifted slightly to make room for them, calm and easy as if none of it required remarking on at all, though something warm came up low in his chest all the same.

They adjusted the blanket over their lap, reached out for the ice cream and the spoons, and for a second neither of them looked directly at the other.

The new film’s menu music started up softly.

The Doctor took the spoon they handed him. “What did fate choose for us, then?”

They finally glanced over, smiling. “You’ll live.”

The Doctor ended up staying much later than he had meant to. Later than he had told himself he would when Donna first left. Later than a sensible man with any interest in self-preservation ought to have stayed, considering Donna Noble was almost certainly waiting in the Tardis with enough material to torment him for weeks.

But then one film became two.

Two became four.

Somewhere between the second bowl of popcorn and the shared pint of chocolate ice cream, the fort stopped feeling like an event and became simply where they were. The DVDs stacked up in watched little piles. The fairy lights kept glowing. They had drifted from movies into games without even really deciding to, first Mario Kart, with all the usual accusations of cheating and deeply unfair item distribution, then a long, absurdly competitive hour of Uno that somehow grew more intense the more tired both of them became.

By the end of it, their eyes had started drooping between turns. They tried to fight it at first. He saw them doing it, blinking harder at their cards, rubbing at one eye with the heel of their hand, insisting they were still fully capable of humiliating him in a children’s card game while very obviously losing the battle against sleep.

The sight of it softened him in ways he tried not to inspect too closely.

He didn’t want to leave then. Not when the flat had gone so quiet and warm around them. Not when the night had stretched into that strange, intimate hour where everything felt gentler just because the rest of the world had gone to bed. Not when they were tired enough to stop guarding half their expressions and every smile looked softer for it.

But humans needed sleep in a way Time Lords did not.

So when they finally admitted, with a sleepy little laugh, that they were probably done for the night, he let them slip off to change into pajamas while he cleaned up the remains of the evening.

He did it almost without thinking.

Gathered the empty glasses, stacked the bowls, folded in the edges of the blanket fort just enough to keep it from collapsing entirely. He moved through their flat with that easy familiarity he had once found so dangerous and now only found quietly dear. The sort of familiarity that came from enough nights spent here to know where the rubbish bags were kept, which cupboard held the spare mugs, where the extra blanket usually got tossed when it wasn’t in use.

When they came back from the hall in soft pajamas, sleepier now and somehow even more unreasonably lovely for it, they found him by the coffee table with the last of the wrappers in hand.

They smiled at the sight. And then, because of course they did, they offered him the couch. The Doctor smiled at that but it was about two in the morning by then. Late enough that staying would have been the simplest thing in the world. Late enough that no excuse would have been needed beyond tiredness and the unfair coziness of the flat and the fact that Donna was not here to physically drag him away.

But Donna was waiting in the Tardis.

And if he stayed until morning, he knew exactly the kind of earful that would be waiting for him when he finally reappeared. Not that Donna would be truly cross, not in the important sense. But she would know too much. She already did. And the thought of facing her after spending the whole night here, sleeping on their couch like he belonged in the soft little margins of their life, made something in him tighten with embarrassment.

So he made an excuse. Something vague about needing to be up early. Something plausible enough to pass without sounding defensive. They looked faintly disappointed, though only for a second, and then smiled like they understood.

So he said his goodbyes and when he stepped out into the hall at last, coat on and tie still undone.

On the walk back to the Tardis, the Doctor had been forced to admit that Donna was irritatingly onto something. He couldn’t keep lying to them.

Not forever.

Not if he meant to keep coming back. Not if he meant to let this thing between them keep growing in all the quiet little ways it already had. Because every hour spent in that flat, every easy night and warm look and shared in-joke, only deepened the eventual pain of all the what-ifs waiting at the end of the road if he said nothing.

What if he regenerated.

What if he vanished one day and never came back.

What if time stretched oddly again and again until the lie itself became too large to step around.

Donna had not been wrong. He hated that. She had not been wrong when she told him that naming it did not change what it was. She had not been wrong when she made him see how cruel silence could become if he let it stand in for honesty long enough.

The hours he spent there, with them, were some of the simplest pleasures he had known in a very long time. That was the truth pressing in from the other side of the fear.

He was always moving. Always running. Always leaping toward the next crisis, the next impossible thing, the next bit of danger that demanded his cleverness before he had time to feel too much of anything else. That was the shape of his life, nothing but motion and noise.

But Earth, especially that flat, somehow made slowing down felt just as exhilarating as standing at the Tardis doors with the stars opening out before him.

A blanket fort. Tea in mismatched mugs. Bad films, game nights, shoes kicked off by the door. The softness of a lamp in the corner. The way a human life arranged itself into familiar little comforts and made a place for him among them.

It should not have mattered as much as it did.

But it did.

Because for all his love of the stars, for all his wonder at the universe, there had always been something about Earth that held him differently. Human beings, in all their fragility and ridiculousness and brilliance, had always had a way of reaching him where stranger, grander civilizations could not.

And that connection, his admiration for this planet, for these people, for their stubborn small kindnesses and their ability to make meaning out of the simplest things, had never felt stronger than it did now.

Not since he had stumbled, lonely and half-broken, into a quaint little café and found someone behind the counter who had looked at him and decided he was worth talking to.

By the time he reached the Tardis, that thought was still with him.

He would have to tell them.

Someday soon.

Because what he had found on Earth was too precious to keep building on a lie forever.

⋆.˚✮ Notes: This is for @vexerieart, who made me smile with their kind words, bitch boosted my ego SO BAD. So I just want to return the favor, pay the smile forward. I hope this cheers you up since you’ve been sick, my love. <3 Part 5.2 cause i keep forgetting tumbler has a limit per post. ugh

An hour had passed. Only an hour. It felt impossible that so much could fit inside sixty minutes.

An hour since the Cybermen had come down the corridor toward them, metal and certain and unstoppable.

An hour since those same Cybermen had suddenly stopped in their tracks, hands flying to their heads, bodies jerking violently, voices breaking open into screams that had not sounded mechanical at all. Human screams. Horrified, shattered, agonized human screams dragged up through steel throats.

An hour since they had crouched beside one of them on the floor while the ship dissolved into chaos and listened to the person trapped inside that metal shell grieve their own life. Their wife. Their son. The smell of coffee in the morning. A yellow front door. A dog they had loved. The first person they had shot after the conversion, and the next, and the next. All of it pouring out in fragments and gasps and tears that could no longer physically fall, because the body no longer belonged to them.

An hour since the Cybermen had remembered they were once people, and the remembering had been so monstrous, so unbearable, that many of them had torn themselves apart trying to escape it.

An hour since the Doctor had become less a man than a storm.

He had gone ship to ship. Reversed teleports. Dragged the living out, sent every human, terrified, injured, disbelieving, back down to Earth. Including them. Then he had put the Cyberman scout ships on automatic and sent them drifting, silent and full of their own dead, into the sun.

Now they sat on a curb in London and watched the world try to remember how to be a city again.

Soldiers moved through the street in waves, corralling survivors into triage points, shouting for medics, and loading the wounded onto stretchers. Floodlights had been dragged in somewhere and now cast harsh white pools over the road, glinting off broken glass and twisted metal. Men in fatigues knelt beside pieces of Cyberman technology with insulated gloves and sealed containers, collecting them one by one like they might still wake up and bite.

Smoke hung in the air, thinner now, but still there.

So did the smell. Burnt circuitry. Dust. Rain starting somewhere far away and not yet reaching them.

The Tardis stood down the road where it had been parked in a space no ordinary vehicle could possibly have fit into so neatly. Blue box, perfectly still, absurdly unchanged in the middle of a city clawing itself back from invasion.

They looked at it and looked away again.

The Doctor stood several yards off, speaking to someone important enough that other people were giving them both room. UNIT, maybe. Military. Government. They couldn’t tell anymore. The man facing him wore authority in the straightness of his spine and the earpiece in one ear, but even from here it was obvious who was controlling the conversation.

The Doctor’s coat was back on. His hair looked worse than ever. He spoke with fast, clipped precision, one hand cutting through the air as he explained something, corrected something, insisted on something. He looked exhausted. 

They watched him and felt nothing simple.

Not relief, though there was some.

Not anger, though that had not gone anywhere.

Not gratitude, though they knew they should feel drowned in it.

Only a strange, hollow overwhelm, as if every feeling had been poured into them too quickly and now all of it had settled in separate layers they could not yet sort through.

The world had changed in an hour, or maybe they had.

Someone from a medical team had tried to approach them twice already. Check them over. Ask questions. Offer water. They had answered enough to be waved off for the moment, uninjured on the surface and too quiet to fuss with when there were people nearby bleeding visibly.

So they sat on the curb with their hands clasped between their knees and watched the Doctor from a distance he had created and not yet crossed.

The important man finally stepped away from him, barking orders into a radio as he went.

The Doctor stayed where he was for one moment longer then he turned and looked directly at them.

No grin. No shield of brightness. No John-shaped ease to soften it. Just the Doctor, tired to the bone and carrying too much and looking at them like he had been building toward this moment since the second he stepped out of the Tardis on that ship.

Their stomach turned over.

He started toward them slowly, trainers crunching over broken glass and grit.

They did not move.

The street worked around them, soldiers shouting, medics hurrying, generators humming, survivors crying quietly into blankets, but somehow the space between the curb and his approaching figure felt sealed off from all of it.

He stopped in front of them.

Close enough now that they could see the soot on his sleeve, the fresh nick near his jaw, the exhaustion in every line of his face. For a long, awkward moment, neither of them spoke.

Then, very softly, he said, “You alright?”

It was such a stupid, ordinary question that they almost laughed. They looked up at him, and they said rather simply, “I don’t know.”

The Doctor closed his eyes briefly, as that answer hurt him in exactly the way it should. When he opened them again, there was no John left in his face at all. Only the man underneath.

“Yeah,” he said.

The Doctor hesitated before sitting down. It was only a second, but they saw it in the corner of their eye, the moment he weighed the distance between them and chose caution. He lowered himself onto the curb beside them, not too close, leaving a respectful gap where once he would have folded easily into their space without thinking.

The silence stretched.

The city moved around them in waves of shouted orders and sirens and boots on broken pavement, but on the curb it felt oddly sealed off, like they were sitting inside the eye of something after it had already wrecked everything.

The Doctor cleared his throat softly, “Donna say goodbye before she left?” It was a flimsy question. They both knew it. Something to put into the silence so it wouldn’t choke them.

They didn’t answer or even look at him. They just kept staring ahead at the soldiers and medics and the smoking remains of London. The Doctor waited half a beat too long, then kept talking to fill the hole their silence had left.

“She’ll be back in a few hours,” he said, eyes on the street in front of them rather than on their face. “Wanted to check in on her family.”

His hands folded loosely between his knees. Uncharacteristically still.

“Looks like the attack centered around London,” he went on. “Didn’t get as far out as Chiswick. Not properly. Some panic, some power loss, but they’re alright.”

Still nothing from them, not even a nod. The Doctor swallowed once and glanced at them, then away again almost immediately when they didn’t turn. The gap between them on the curb felt enormous.

He had sat farther away on purpose, knowing they would be upset with him, knowing he had no right to slide back into closeness he had once been welcome in, at their shoulder, under blankets. Now he sat here careful not to presume.

They kept staring straight ahead.

He could see the profile of them in the harsh spill of work lights down the street, face drawn, eyes fixed, shock and exhaustion sitting under the skin like bruises. He wanted, with a near-physical ache, to ask what they were thinking.

He did not.

Instead he watched a stretcher go by and said quietly, “No one should’ve had to see any of that.”

That got the smallest reaction at last, their jaw tightened. The trouble was, there were no right words. So he sat there beside them, soot still on his sleeve, his tie crooked, and tried not to crowd the silence they had every right to keep.

A long moment passed.

Then another.

Finally, without looking at him, they said, “Donna told me some things.”

The Doctor went very still, and not cause he was surprised. Because he had known, somewhere in the back of his mind, that Donna would not leave them standing in the wreckage with nothing. But knowing it in theory and hearing it out loud were different beasts entirely.

He kept his voice careful. “Right.”

“She said you save people.”

The Doctor looked down at his hands, “I try.”

Their mouth twitched, “She said you’re wonderful.”

He let out the smallest breath through his nose, almost a laugh but too bruised to become one. “Did she.”

“She said none of us would be here without you.”

The Doctor said nothing to that. Because if he answered, he’d have to answer all the rest of it too, the body in the café, the hour aboard the ships, the people he hadn’t reached fast enough, the ones he had, the unbearable statistics of survival.

They finally turned their head then, not much, just enough that he could see the side of their eyes.

“She also said you lied because I meant too much.”

The Doctor shut his eyes for one brief second. When he opened them again, he still didn’t look at them directly.

“Sounds like Donna.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” he said softly. “It’s not.”

The street noise swelled and receded around them.

A medic shouted for saline. Somewhere farther off, metal clanged into the back of a truck. The Tardis stood silent down the road like a fact waiting patiently to be addressed.

The Doctor dragged a hand over his face and exhaled. “I know you’ve got questions.”

They looked back ahead. “That’s one word for it.”

He nodded, accepting that.

“And I know I don’t get to ease into any of this, not after,” he glanced toward the street, “Not after this.”

Their shoulders rose and fell in a tired breath. For a second he thought they might retreat into silence again.

Instead they asked, still not looking at him, “Is your name even John?”

The Doctor’s mouth tightened into a thin line, “No. John Smith is a name I use when I need to blend in.”

They laughed once, short, sharp, disbelieving, “Right.”

He risked a glance at them then. “It wasn’t meant to-”

“Be cruel?” they cut in.

He stopped.

Their voice stayed level, which somehow made it worse. “Because it was.”

The Doctor looked at the pavement between his shoes. “Yes,” he said.

No defense.

No cleverness.

Just yes.

That finally made them turn a little more toward him, enough to study his face properly for the first time since he’d sat down. He looked older like this. Not physically, not in any way they could point to, but in his eyes.

“You sat in my flat,” they said quietly. “You let me tell you things. You let me. . .” They stopped, jaw tightening. “And all that time you were something else.”

The Doctor met their eyes then.

“Not something else,” he said. “Still me.”

The answer made no sesnce to them, and irritated them so much they looked away again.

“You don’t get to say that like it fixes anything.”

“No.” His voice roughened. “I know.” Then, very carefully: “I am the Doctor.”

That much, at least, was clean.

They gave the faintest nod. “Alien.”

“Yes.”

“Time machine.”

He looked toward the Tardis down the road. “Yes.”

“Traveling for work,” they said, and this time there was the ghost of bitter humor in it.

The Doctor almost smiled, but couldn’t quite. “Sort of.”

That got a look from them, flat and exhausted and not remotely willing to indulge him.

He let out a breath. “I travel. Mostly for the fun of it, but I help where I can. Stop things when they need stopping.”

“Like tonight.”

“Yes.”

Their eyes searched his face in brief, unwilling little flicks. As if every answer made him both more recognizable and less so.

“And the Doctor,” they said after a moment. “That’s what? A title?”

The Doctor nodded once. “Near enough.”

They absorbed that, looking past him toward the Tardis again.

Then they asked the one thing he had been dreading most, “Was any of it real?”

The Doctor turned fully toward them. There were a thousand ways to misunderstand that question, and he knew exactly which one they meant.

His answer came without hesitation, “Yes.”

The force of it made them blink.

“All of that,” he said. “Every bit of that was real.”

Their face tightened, wounded by how much they wanted to believe him.

“The only thing that wasn’t,” he said more quietly, “was how much I let you know. I’m sorry.”

This time, there was no quick answer. No sharp comeback. Just the city breathing around them and the wreckage of a night that had torn every lie apart.

After a long while, they said, “You don’t get to be the person I miss and the person I’m angry at at the same time.”

The Doctor looked at them with something like heartbreak, “I know.”

They stood up so abruptly that the Doctor’s whole body tensed before he could stop it. For one horrible second, as their back turned to him and they looked out over the street instead of at him, he thought that was it. That they were leaving.

He felt the old panic rise with sick familiarity, Rose being taken away, Martha choosing herself, every ending he had half-earned and half-feared all at once. He had lied, and he had waited too long, and now of course he had lost them anyway. Of course, he had. That was the pattern. That was the warning he had feared so much, a self fulfilling prophocy.

Then they turned back, just to look at him with their arms folded and their face still tight with too many feelings.

“You and Donna fit in that blue box,” they said, glancing down the street toward the Tardis. “So what, do you just squeeze in?”

The Doctor blinked; it was not the question he had expected. And because relief was still ricocheting painfully through him from the mere fact that they were still here, his answer came out softer than he meant it to. 

“You’d be surprised how much room there is in there.”

They raised a brow, intrigued, despite themself.

The Doctor saw it and, before he could think too hard about how much this mattered, made a small motion with one hand toward the Tardis, an offer.

They were not impressed. Their expression flattened immediately. “I am far too upset with you to step into your snog box.”

The Doctor flushed so quickly it was almost comical, “My what?”

They gave him a look that said ‘you heard me.’

He very carefully did not allow himself to picture anything that phrase suggested, which naturally meant his brain supplied several images just to be difficult.

“That is not,” he began, then stopped and started again with more dignity. “It’s not a snog box.”

They folded their arms tighter. “Mm.”

“It’s a ship.”

“That you apparently invite people into.”

“Yes, but not for,” He cut himself off, ears still warm. “It’s got more room than it looks from the outside.”

That got a tiny, unwilling shift at the corner of their mouth.

They looked over the road again, at the floodlights, the shouted orders, the crying, the awful noise after disaster that settled in once the immediate danger had passed and left people alone with what they’d seen. Their shoulders tightened almost imperceptibly.

“Is it at least quiet?” they asked.

The Doctor stood up, heart kicking harder. “Yes.”

They looked at him for one long second, weighing him, weighing the box, weighing their own frayed nerves.

Then they sighed.

“Fine,” they said. “I’ll go in there with you.”

The Doctor tried very hard not to let hope show too plainly on his face.

They pointed at him before he could say anything, “But only because Donna told me to interrogate you and not let you get away with dodging questions.”

That pulled a small laugh out of him before he could stop it, “Right,” he said. “Of course.”

They gave him one last deeply unimpressed look, and he sobered just enough to remember that this was not forgiveness. Not even close, but at least it was a door not yet shut.

So he turned and started walking toward the Tardis, and they fell into step beside him. The street felt strangely quiet between them despite the chaos still carrying on all around. Somewhere behind them, a woman cried into someone’s shoulder. Ahead, the blue box waited at the curb, impossible and still.

The Doctor kept his pace measured, not too fast. Giving them time, if they needed it, to stop. Halfway down the street, he glanced at them once.

They were looking at the Tardis with wary focus, like they still half expected it to vanish or reveal itself as some trick of shock and adrenaline.

“It’s called the Tardis,” he said quietly.

They looked at him.

He kept his eyes ahead. “Time And Relative Dimension In Space.”

There was a pause, then, with dry disbelief, “Of course it is.”

The Doctor smiled faintly.

They reached the doors. The Doctor stopped with one hand on the handle and looked back at them, suddenly aware of the weight of what came next. This was not just another room. This was the line between the life they had known him in and the one he had hidden.

He searched their face for any sign they wanted to turn back.

They only lifted their chin a fraction and said, “Open it.”

So he did, then stepped aside and let them see.

The doors stood open behind them, the ruined London street still visible for a moment at the edges, but the Tardis swallowed all of that almost immediately. Warm gold light spilled over metal and glass and strange glowing panels. The central column rose and fell with its steady wheezing hum, alive in the middle of the room. Ramps curved down around the console. Coral-like supports arched up into the ceiling. Everything gleamed with movement and purpose and impossible scale.

He watched their face.

Watched their eyes go wide, watched disbelief and wonder war quietly for dominance behind the shock of everything else. Even now, even with all the hurt between them, even with their anger sitting raw and rightful in the space between them, this was still his favorite part.

That first look. The moment reality gave way and something bigger came pouring in.

They looked at him once, quickly, as if to confirm he was not somehow joking, then back at the ship. And then, slowly, they stepped inside.

They moved like someone entering a cathedral and a dream at the same time, gaze darting from one impossible detail to the next. Their anger didn’t vanish, he could still see it in the tightness around their mouth, the guarded set of their shoulders, but wonder had gotten its hands on them too, and wonder was difficult to resist inside the Tardis.

He followed them in and shut the doors behind him.

The city noise fell away immediately. Silence, or as close as the Tardis ever came to it, settled over the room, threaded only with the low familiar hum of the engines and the rhythmic rise and fall of the time rotor.

They stood at the bottom of the ramp for a moment, turning slowly.

He gave them that moment. Walking past them without crowding, he shrugged off his coat and tossed it over one of the branching support beams that had, since the remodel, become the closest thing he had to a coat rack. It landed there easily, with the familiarity of a repeated habit.

Then he made for the console.

Not because anything needed doing. But his hands wanted somewhere to go, and some old instinct in him wanted, despite everything, to show off a little. So he flipped a switch, checked a readout, adjusted a dial that had no meaningful reason to be adjusted, and watched the screen with an expression of great concentration he absolutely did not need.

He would never admit that to them.

Behind him, they remained still for a beat longer. Then, slowly, they started making their way up the ramp.

Their steps were quiet. Their eyes moved over everything as they came, up the railings, across the glowing controls, toward the great impossible heart of the ship. By the time they reached the center console beside him, they were still speechless, still staring, still looking as though their mind had not yet decided whether to accept any of this as real.

The Doctor glanced sideways at them and fought the urge to smile too much. Because yes, there was still all the rest of it waiting. The anger. The explanations. The questions that would cut and deserve to. But right now they were standing beside him in the Tardis for the first time, and the room had gone soft with their wonder.

“That,” they said at last, very quietly, “is bigger.”

The Doctor’s mouth twitched, “Yes.”

They looked from the console to him, then back again. “A lot bigger.”

“Yes.”

They gave him a look, half dazed and half accusing. “You said it had more room.”

He lifted one shoulder. “It does.”

They blinked slowly, still turning in place as their eyes climbed the room again. “This isn’t more room, this is-”

“Impossible?”

They looked back at him.

He was smiling now, just enough for them to see the fond, helpless pride in it. They huffed a tiny breath of disbelief and turned one slow circle, taking in the coral arches, the metal grating, the humming light of the central column.

“It’s beautiful,” they said.

The Doctor looked at the Tardis then, because it was easier than looking directly at them while they stood in the middle of his oldest love and said something so simple and true about it.

“She likes you,” he said, almost absently.

That made them look at him. “What?”

He reached out and patted the console with one hand. “The Tardis.”

They stared at him for a second, then narrowed their eyes. “Your ship is alive.”

He considered. “Sort of.”

“Sort of.”

“Well, yes.” He tipped his head. “Bit more complicated than that.”

They let out a short, strained laugh and rubbed a hand over their face. “Of course it is.”

The Doctor’s fingers hovered over a switch, then stilled. The moment shifted. Wonder was still there, bright and fragile as a held breath, but under it something heavier returned. He felt it when they stopped turning. When their gaze left the room and settled back on him with new steadiness.

The Tardis hummed around them.

They stood beside the console now, close enough to touch but not touching, the impossible ship spread around them like the inside of a truth too large to hide any longer.

And finally, softly, with all that speechless awe narrowing down, they asked, “How long were you going to keep pretending?”

The Doctor sighed. His hands stayed busy on the console, fingers moving over switches and levers that did not need moving, eyes fixed stubbornly on the glowing readouts instead of on them. They could see it for what it was now, something to do with his body while the rest of him braced for impact.

“I’d been thinking about telling you,” he admitted. “Since Donna walked in on me texting you, really. And then everything came out.”

They said nothing. The Tardis hummed around them, warm and alive and impossible.

He swallowed once and kept going, voice lower now. “There are a lot of things about my life that make enjoying the simple things complicated.”

Their brow furrowed. “What things?”

That made whatever rhythm his hands had found on the controls falter. He looked down at them and then past them, his face suddenly gone hollow in a way that made something in their chest twist. The haunted look in his eyes was enough that, for one brief second, they almost took the question back.

Almost said never mind, almost told him to leave it. But then the anger in them stirred again, quiet and tired and still real. They had earned this answer, if they had earned anything tonight. So they bit their tongue and waited.

The Doctor drew in a breath. Let it out slowly.

Then he sighed and said, “Right. Beginning, then.”

That got their full attention. He turned one dial absently, not because he needed to, but because he still couldn’t seem to make himself look at them directly for too long.

“I’m a Time Lord,” he said.

The words sat in the air between them.

“A what?”

“A Time Lord.” He glanced at them then, quickly, as if checking whether the phrase landed at all. “My people. We were from a planet called Gallifrey.”

They stared at him, speechless for a beat, then nodded very faintly for him to continue. The Doctor’s mouth tightened in the effort of making something ancient and immeasurable fit into human words.

“The Time Lords created time travel,” he said. “Or, at the very least, perfected it before anyone else worth mentioning did. We created and upheld the Laws of Time. Monopolized it for quite a while, actually.” A tiny, joyless flicker touched his mouth. “Then had to regulate it once everyone else started getting ideas.”

Their eyes widened slightly.

“Yes,” he said, “it was all very imperial of us.”

They should have laughed at that; instead, they were too busy trying to process the fact that he was saying these things as if he were describing his old university department and not an entire civilization of beings who invented time travel.

The Doctor’s voice smoothed into something almost distant as he went on, the words coming a little easier now that he had started.

“Time Lords are sensitive to timelines. More than other species.” His fingers rested on the edge of the console, still at last. “We can feel them. See patterns in them. Possibilities. Branches. Fixed points. I can feel the Earth turning under my feet right now.”

That stopped them. They looked down automatically, as if they might somehow sense it too through the metal grating of the floor. Then back at him.

“‘All that is, all that was, all that ever could be,’” he said quietly. “That’s how it was put once.”

They let out a soft breath.

For all the shock, for all the betrayal and confusion and hurt still twisting through them, fascination had gotten its hands in too. They couldn’t help it. This was impossible and horrifying and incredible all at once, and their mind, traitorously, wanted to know more.

The Doctor saw that much and some old instinct in him softened. Not enough to ease the weight in the room, but enough to make him speak a little more freely.

“For a very long time,” he said, “when I was much younger, the Time Lords reigned in absolute power. Ten million years, give or take. We stood above everything. Entire civilizations looked at us and saw gods.” He looked away from them then, toward the central column rising and falling in its steady rhythm. “We were magnificent,” he said.

The word came out strange. It sounded like memory and grief. And longing for something too large and too ruined to name simply.

They listened without interrupting. His face had gone older again in the way it sometimes did. As if there were shadows beneath the skin that only showed themselves in certain lights and certain truths.

He kept talking, softer now.

“Gallifrey was. . .” He searched for the word and found none that satisfied him. “Beautiful. Orange skies. Silver leaves. Mountains that caught the light like glass. Towers all across the Capitol. Time energy in the air so strong it sang if you stood still long enough.”

He wasn’t looking at them now. He was looking through the tardis, through the room, through time itself to somewhere far beyond either of them.

“We weren’t simple,” he said. “None of this is.”

They held his gaze.

“No,” they said quietly. “I gathered.”

That drew the faintest twitch at the corner of his mouth. He drew a breath and went on, eyes fixed somewhere just past them now, as if it were easier to say these things if he didn’t have to look them in the eye.

“The thing about Time Lords,” he said, “is that to some species we’re as good as immortal.”

They frowned slightly, still trying to keep pace with him.

“We don’t age like humans do,” he explained. “Not remotely the same way. One regeneration can live for hundreds of years, depending on accidents, wars, bad decisions, all the usual.” He said it lightly, but the lightness didn’t quite hold.

They stared at him, and slowly, they asked, “How old are you?”

That, finally, made him look almost embarrassed. The Doctor glanced down at the console, rubbed the back of his neck once, and admitted, “Over nine hundred.”

Their eyes went wide.

He winced at the expression on their face. “I know.”

“No, I don’t think you do.”

He huffed the smallest breath of something like a laugh. “Right. Fair.”

They were still staring at him, trying to reconcile the man in front of them with the number he had just said as though it were something one could simply say and move past.

After a beat, he added more softly, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that’s basically early to mid-twenties by Time Lord standards.”

That made them blink and look around the room for someone to come out with a camera and tell them it’s all been a prank. Then they decided that particular road was best not explored too closely just yet, and seized on something else.

“What do you mean, regenerations?”

He nodded once, grateful enough that the question had shifted.

“It means,” he said, quieter now, “that this isn’t my first face.”

He kept going before they could interrupt.

“When a Time Lord is close to death, we can regenerate. All the cells in our body are burned and replaced. It rebuilds the body into a new one.”

They frowned, trying to picture it and failing.

“A new face,” he said. “New body. New brain, so new personality, to an extent.”

That got their full attention again.

“A new personality?”

He gave a small, uneven shrug. “Same person underneath. Same memories. Same history. But different, too. New instincts. New temper. Different habits. Different emphasis, I suppose.”

They looked at him like he had just described dying and reincarnating while still expecting everyone else to treat it like a wardrobe change.

The Doctor saw it in their face and said, “It’s complicated.”

“That’s your answer for everything.”

“Because everything is.”

The silence that followed felt denser than the rest, because now they were looking at him not only as a liar or an alien or a time traveler, but as someone who had stood at the edge of death enough times to change his face and keep going.

They swallowed.

“So…” Their voice came out thinner than they wanted. “How many times?”

The Doctor hesitated.

Then, because there was no point softening this one, “Ten.”

Their mouth parted slightly.

“This is your tenth face?”

“Tenth body,” he corrected quietly. “Ninth regeneration. Bit of a technical distinction.”

They gave him a pointed look.

He gave up and amended, “Yes. This is my tenth face.”

That sat between them a moment before, very carefully, “And you were just not going to mention that?”

The Doctor looked down at the console again. “No,” he said.

The honesty of it stung more than a deflection would have. They laughed once under their breath, not because it was funny but because their body needed somewhere for the shock to go.

“So one day,” they said, staring at him now with a kind of horrified clarity, “you could just show up looking like someone else.”

The Doctor did not answer immediately.

When he did, his voice had gone very quiet, “Yes.”

They looked away. Toward the central column. The glowing panels. Anywhere but him.

“What did you look like before?”

Then a rueful little smile touched his mouth. “Bit older,” he said. “Bit bigger ears.”

Despite everything, their brows lifted, “Bigger ears?”

“Oh, much.”

That got the tiniest breath of laughter out of them, unwilling and startled.

The Doctor’s smile deepened only a fraction, “Leather jacket,” he added. “Northern accent.”

They tried to picture it and failed so completely that the absurdity of that failure cut through the shock for one strange, fleeting second. Then the moment passed, and they looked at him again and saw the sadness underneath the humor.

He let out a breath and looked down at his hands on the console, “I never meant to get attached,” he said. “Well, sort of.”

The honesty of it was so plain that they didn’t interrupt.

“When we met, I was in a rough spot.” His mouth twitched faintly, without humor. “That’s putting it mildly, really. And then you were just there.”

He glanced up at them for half a second, then away again.

“You were easy to be around. Funny. Kind. You made ordinary things feel,” He searched for the word and settled on the truth. “Good.”

They stayed very still, listening.

“And I got addicted to it,” he admitted. “To you. To the flat, and tea, and game nights, and all of it.” He gave a small shake of his head. “By the time the lies had got properly involved, I was already afraid the truth would scare you off.”

That landed quietly between them.

He kept going before either of them could speak.

“Then there was the other fear.” His voice dropped. “That if I never told you, someday I’d regenerate and not be able to face you after. Because why would you believe it was me? Why should you?”

They swallowed, but said nothing.

“And all the while,” he said, “I was stuck between telling you and not telling you, and underneath both of those was the fact that I didn’t want you too involved in my life anyway.”

He lifted one hand and motioned toward the doors, toward the wreckage and sirens outside.

“Because things like this,” he said, and looked toward the doors, toward the city beyond, the memory of what had happened tonight still hanging in the air like smoke. “Happens all the time.”

“There’s a risk to being close to me. Always has been.” His jaw tightened. “And I didn’t want to be selfish enough to risk you.”

They looked at him and saw the old guilt in him before he said the next part.

“But I was selfish anyway,” he said softly. “Because I kept coming back. Kept lying. Kept making excuses to see you again.” He huffed the tiniest, most embarrassed little breath. “Couldn’t help myself.”

That should have been enough. It should have been the end of it.

But he was already past dignity now, and the Tardis hummed around them like a witness too old to care about pride.

“When I was with you,” he said, eyes fixed on the console, “being human was so easy. Or as easy as it gets. Life felt simple. Happy.” He laughed once under his breath, and this time there was a little sadness in it. “You made me wish I were human for a while.”

Their expression changed at that, but he didn’t see it yet. He was still looking down, still talking because he had finally started and did not know how to stop halfway.

“But my biology doesn’t much allow for simple. Or for equal.” His hands flexed once against the edge of the console. “What’s a year to me can be a lifetime to somebody else. Or a day, depending how I’m moving through it. And for you,” He swallowed. “Someday you’d be gone. And I’d still be here. And I’d have to grieve it.”

Only then did he look back at them, and stopped because they were smiling at him. A small, soft, almost helpless smile that did something awful and wonderful to his chest all at once.

He blinked. “What?”

They shook their head once, smile still there, eyes a little glassy now from too much of everything.

“That,” they said quietly, “is probably the most honest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

The Doctor stared.

Then, despite himself, the corner of his mouth twitched.

“I’ve said lots of honest things.”

Their smile deepened a fraction, warm now even through all the hurt. “You’re making it very hard to stay properly angry at you.”

He looked absurdly, painfully hopeful for one second before caution reasserted itself. “You’re still angry.”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“But,” they added, looking down briefly before meeting his eyes again, “I think I understand why you made the mess.”

The Doctor went still in response to that.

“That doesn’t make it alright,” they said.

“No.”

“It doesn’t mean I’m not upset.”

“I know.”

“It definitely doesn’t mean you’re off the hook.”

That got a faint breath of laughter out of him. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

They watched him a moment longer, still smiling in that sad, thoughtful way.

Then they said, “You wished you were human.”

The Doctor looked away, embarrassed now that he had said it aloud. “Bit ridiculous.”

“No,” they said softly. “Bit sweet, actually.”

He looked back at them, and the look on their face was so open for one second that he had to glance down again just to steady himself.

“I meant what I said,” he murmured.

“I know.”

The Tardis kept humming around them, quiet and alive and full of truths neither of them had quite finished surviving yet.

After a beat, they tilted their head and asked, gentler now, “So what happens now?”

The Doctor let out a slow breath.

“That,” he said, “depends how much interrogating you intend to do.”

They gave him a tired little smile. “A lot.”

He nodded as if accepting a sentence. “Right, then.”

Their jaw tensed. They crossed their arms, shifting their weight from one foot to the other, clearly arguing with themself in silence. The Doctor stayed still on the far side of the console, hands light on the edge of it, waiting. Braced for another question, another demand, another hurt thing he deserved.

Instead, they moved with one quick step forward, then another. Before he could make sense of the look on their face, resolve and nerves and something almost angry in how certain it was, they grabbed him by the tie and kissed him.

It wasn’t hesitant but a little impulsive, yes. A little shaky in the fingers that tightened in his tie. But the kiss itself landed with all the force of a decision finally made. Their mouth warm against his, their hand fisted in the silk at his throat, the whole of them close enough that the Doctor had barely enough time to realize what was happening before instinct made him lean into it. And then they were pulling away again.

The Doctor just stared at them.

For one completely derailed second, he had half a mind to walk straight back out of the Tardis and ask one of the medics outside to treat him for the whiplash.

Their own face had gone a bit pink now, the force of what they’d done clearly catching up to them. They looked down almost immediately and, in a gesture so absurdly tender it nearly finished him off, reached up to fix the tie they had just mauled.

“You,” they admitted quietly, not looking at his face, “make me wish I was immortal.”

The Doctor forgot how breathing worked as their fingers smoothed the tie with great concentration, as though that was easier than meeting his eyes while saying any of this.

“I wanted to know everything about you,” they said. “Even before I found out you were a space crime-fighting alien.” A little breath of embarrassed laughter escaped them. “I wanted to spend the rest of my life getting to know every little thing about you.”

That made his knees feel alarmingly less reliable than he would have liked.

Then, because apparently they had not done enough damage already, they stepped back and said, “Sorry. About the kiss.” They were still looking down, shoulders drawing in a bit now. “I think I let the nice things you said get to my head.” A pause. “And if platonic is what you want, I can do that.”

“Martha,” the Doctor blurted.

They flinched enough that he saw at once what they thought he meant, that there was someone else, some girlfriend-shaped secret he had not yet got around to springing on them.

“No, no, not like that,” he said quickly, hands lifting in immediate defense of his own horrible phrasing. “Martha was, she was a friend. A companion. Traveled with me before Donna.”

They stood very still, listening. The Doctor was already talking too fast now, trying to get ahead of the misunderstanding and making it worse in the process.

“Martha wanted more from me than I could give her at the time. She, well, she fancied me.”

They nodded once, too calm, which only made him more anxious, because they looked exactly like someone quietly bracing themself to be told they were in the same miserable category as some woman he couldn’t love properly.

He pushed on.

“She left,” he said, the words coming rougher now. “And I thought, ” He stopped, frowned, started again. “I thought something was broken in me, because she was brilliant. She still is, brilliant and wonderful and one of the best people I’ve ever known, and I couldn’t,” He gestured vaguely, helplessly. “Couldn’t do it. Couldn’t be what she needed.”

He was rambling. He knew he was rambling.

“She’s moved on now,” he added, because apparently his mouth had abandoned him completely. “She’s engaged, actually. Which is amazing, good for her, obviously, because she deserves all of that, and-” He stopped.

Because they were staring at him with the patience of someone waiting for him to please, for the love of God, arrive at the point.

The Doctor shut his mouth. Then opened it again, slower this time.

“The point,” he said, breathless and a little dazed, “is that this isn’t that.”

They held his gaze, waiting. The Doctor swallowed once, then gave a small, uneven shake of his head. “I don’t think anything was broken in me after all.”

Their expression softened.

“I was in a dark place when Martha left and I met you,” he admitted. “So maybe that had something to do with it, maybe not. But I don’t think my lack of interest in her was because there was something wrong with me. Not really.” He glanced down, then back up again, more certain now that he had started. “I think it was just her and me weren’t that. And you and me,” He stopped there, the sentence hanging open between them.

The Doctor let out a quiet breath and looked at them with an honesty that felt almost new on his face now that he had finally stopped fighting it.

“Everything in my life is loud,” he said. “Fast. Exciting in the dangerous sense. Always moving, always shouting, always one catastrophe away from the next.” A faint, helpless smile touched his mouth. “And then there’s you.”

They smiled a little at that, though their eyes stayed intent on him.

“You make me calm,” he said softly. “You make me feel like I invented calm, which is,” He huffed the smallest laugh through his nose. “A very new sort of exciting.”

That did something terrible and lovely to their face, warming it all at once. The Doctor saw it and hesitated because now came the harder bit.

“I don’t want platonic,” he said, more quietly than before, but no less sure. “Not even slightly.”

They looked almost painfully pleased by that, but he kept going before the moment could carry him too far.

“But,” he added, and there was the caution again, the old fear threading itself carefully back through the openness, “I’m still not sure how much of myself I’ve got the guts to give.”

That landed more gently than he’d feared. They didn’t flinch from it. Didn’t harden. If anything, their smile softened even more, and something in their eye twinkled. And when they spoke, it was with that same simple warmth that had ruined him from the beginning.

“I’ll take anything I can get.”

For a second he looked almost stricken by the tenderness of it. Then his mouth curved, small and fond and a little disbelieving. “That’s not terribly self-protective.”

They gave one shoulder a tiny shrug. “Probably not.”

He laughed softly. But the look in his eyes when it faded was full of something alike gratitude, maybe, or awe. He stepped just a little closer, enough that the air between them thinned again.

“You deserve more than scraps,” he said.

“Maybe.” Their eyes flicked once to his mouth, then back up. “But I’d still rather have the truth in pieces than a lie all at once.”

“Alright,” he said. “Truth in pieces.”

They smiled. “Good.”

The Doctor looked at them for one long second, as if committing the shape of that smile to memory.

The Doctor’s eyes dropped to their mouth once, then lifted again.

“Are you still mad at me?” he asked.

They nodded at once, like he was an idiot for even asking. “Yes,” they said. “I’m mad. And traumatized. Severely.”

His smile fell for half a second, genuine concern flashing through the fondness.

Then they added, with perfect seriousness, “You’ll just have to spend the rest of your life making it up to me.”

And just like that, he was grinning again, that bright, boyish grin that always made something in their chest flutter in ways they were no longer particularly interested in hiding from.

The next thing he knew, they were kissing again. He wasn’t entirely sure who moved first. Maybe them. Maybe him. Maybe the space between them had simply given up pretending it was ever going to survive the night intact.

Either way, it didn’t matter.

Their hands were in his hair almost immediately, making a glorious mess of it, fingers catching and tugging just enough to make him breathe out a helpless little sound against their mouth. Their other hand had found his tie again and was ruining any work they’d done fixing it, pulling him in by the knot like they’d decided this was where he belonged now.

He, for his part, had been given far too much freedom.

His hands settled at their waist and the small of their back first, then shifted, warm and sure and incapable of pretending restraint for long once they were allowed not to. He drew them closer, palms moving in slow, absent strokes as though he couldn’t quite stop confirming they were real, here, kissing him back in the middle of the Tardis like the universe hadn’t just ended and restarted around them.

It was a long kiss. Every time they broke for air, it only lasted a second, a breath, a look, his mouth brushing the corner of theirs while both of them tried and failed to remember how breathing worked, before one of them tipped back in and found the other again.

The Doctor hadn’t known kissing could feel like this. Not with this much relief in it. This much want. This much ridiculous, almost painful happiness curled up inside every touch.

Their fingers in his hair made his whole body feel awake. His loosened tie hung forgotten between them. The Tardis hummed amused, steady and alive and mercifully unbothered by how thoroughly they were being derailed in her console room.

When they finally pulled back far enough to look at each other, both of them a little breathless, his hands were still firm at their waist and their fingers were still half tangled in his hair.

He looked ruined. So, they suspected, did they.

The Doctor blinked once, twice, as if returning from a very long distance, then said in a voice gone pleasantly rough, “Right.”

They smiled. “Right?”

He glanced down at their mouth again, helplessly. “Give me a second.”

The laugh that escaped them was soft and startled, muffled immediately against his lips as he kissed them again with far less caution than before. There was something almost giddy in it now, in the way he came back to them like he’d just remembered this was allowed. Like he still couldn’t quite believe it, and had to check again.

They were halfway to pulling back with some comment already forming, something smug and ridiculous about it turning out to be a snog box after all, but he moved first.

One quick turn.

Suddenly they were between him and the console, the warm metal edge at their back end and the Doctor in front of them, close enough that there was nowhere for the rest of the universe to fit. The central column rose and fell beside them with its low, living wheeze. The Tardi lights glowed gold over his face and caught in his hair where their hands had already made a complete disaster of it.

Whatever joke they’d been about to make vanished completely.

Their hands went to his face instead, instinctive and sure, palms cupping his jaw, thumbs brushing the warmth of his cheeks as if they needed to hold him there and feel the reality of him under their fingertips. His skin was warmer than they expected. Softer too, despite the tension still living under it.

The Doctor made the smallest sound against their mouth when their fingers slid up into his hair again.

Then his tongue met theirs and everything in him seemed to light at once. His hearts were beating so hard he felt half convinced they might actually give him away by sheer force, thudding in his chest with all the grace of a drumline. It was absurd. Undignified. Entirely beyond his ability to stop. Their hands on his face, their mouth opening for him, the closeness of their body pinned between his and the console, it was more intimacy than he had let himself imagine properly for months, and now that he had it, now that it was real and immediate and kissing him back, he didn’t know what to do with how much he wanted.

So he kissed them like he was trying to learn the shape of them with it.

One hand slid from their waist to the small of their back, pressing them closer still, while the other settled high against their side, thumb moving once under the fabric there in a touch almost reverent for all the heat in it. His tie, already mangled, hung uselessly between them. Their breath caught into his. His own came back to him in short, uneven pieces that only made them both smile briefly before diving back in.

The console at their back hummed and clicked around them, unbothered by the fact that its pilot was currently losing what little remained of his composure.

Their fingers at the side of his face gentled for a moment, and the Doctor almost melted on the spot. Their hands were holding him like they meant to keep him from spinning apart. His foreheads nearly touched when they broke for one quick breath.

Neither of them went far. Their noses brushed. His mouth lingered at the corner of theirs. He was smiling now, not boyish exactly, just wrecked and delighted and far too gone.

Then they kissed again, slower for half a second. And the Doctor’s hearts gave up any pretense of behaving sensibly at all.

Donna’s voice hit the room like a slap, “Oi, knock it off.”

They tore apart so fast it was almost violent.

The barista spun half away, one hand flying to their hair and the other to their shirt as though they could somehow smooth evidence out of existence by sheer panic. The Doctor lurched back from the console, face going red in record time as he yanked at his tie with the frantic dignity of a man trying very hard to look like he had absolutely not just been making out against the Tardis controls like a teenager left home alone.

Donna stood in the doorway, one hand still on the door, watching the two of them with an expression of profound disbelief and entirely too much satisfaction. The Doctor had never been more embarrassed in his life.

Which was saying quite a lot, considering how long that life had been.

Donna shut the doors behind her with maddening calm and looked him up and down. “Unbelievable.”

The Doctor was still trying to fix the tie they had absolutely destroyed. “Donna-”

“Oh, no, don’t start.” She held up a hand. “The other night I found you giggling at your phone like a fifteen-year-old, and now this.”

He made a wounded sound. “I was not giggling.”

“You were one breeze away from kicking your feet.”

The barista, still red-faced and trying very hard not to laugh, failed and made a tiny choking noise into their hand.

Donna pointed at the Doctor as she came farther into the room. “Honestly, are you even past thirteen by Time Lord standards?”

The Doctor looked scandalized. “I am over nine hundred years old.”

Donna shrugged. “Doesn’t show.”

They gave up on pretending they had merely been talking about the weather. The Doctor’s tie was hopeless. Their hair was definitely a state. The Tardis console itself probably looked offended.

Still, Donna approached them as if she had walked in on a perfectly ordinary conversation and not the two of them thoroughly compromising his dignity.

The Doctor finally got the tie somewhat straight and glared at her with whatever severity a man could muster while blushing like that.

Donna was unimpressed. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “You’re the one snogging people against the dashboard.”

“It’s not a dashboard.”

“That is your objection?”

The barista’s shoulders shook with laughter now, despite every effort to contain it. The Doctor looked between them, Donna openly delighted, the barista trying and failing not to smile, and closed his eyes briefly as if appealing to the Tardis herself for mercy.

The Tardis, apparently, had none to spare.

Donna turned to them, eyes glittering with far too much satisfaction.

“Well,” she said, “looks like the interrogation went well.”

They looked away, suddenly very interested in smoothing down a wrinkle in their sleeve. “There are still things we need to talk about.”

Donna snorted. “Didn’t look much like talking to me.”

The Doctor made a noise of deep suffering that was so adolescent in tone it nearly proved her point on the spot.

“Donna,” he groaned, with all the mortification of a schoolboy being humiliated by his mother in front of company.

Donna only looked smugger. Then, because she was physically incapable of not escalating, she asked, “So does this make-up make-out mean you’ll be coming with us?”

They turned to her, “Coming with you?”

“In the Tardis,” Donna said, gesturing around them as if the answer ought to be obvious. “Traveling.”

Silence.

The barista looked to the Doctor instinctively. He looked torn, caught at the center of two truths that hated sharing space with each other. Of course the idea of them in the Tardis with him lit something bright and impossible in his chest. The thought of showing them stars and histories and worlds they could not yet imagine was almost too lovely to look at directly.

But the fear was there too. Because having them here meant danger. Meant risk. Meant nights like tonight becoming a possibility not on the edges of his life but at the center of theirs.

And yet, they could have been hurt tonight whether he’d wanted them near his life or not. The sky had fallen without asking his permission. If he had not been there, they would have been lost to him all the same.

So maybe, some treacherous part of him thought, maybe having them by his side was safer after all. If that was what they wanted.

They, meanwhile, seemed to be arriving at a thought not entirely unlike his own. After a beat, they shook their head.

“Not yet,” they said. Donna raised a brow. The barista smiled a little, tired and honest and still just this side of overwhelmed. “I think I’ve got a few therapy sessions and some more interrogations to get through before we approach that bridge.”

The Doctor’s mouth twitched.

“But,” they added, glancing sideways at him, “the idea’s not completely off the table.”

There was a selfish kind of relief in it that warmed the Doctor immediately and made him feel guilty a second later, not because they hadn’t said yes, but because part of him was glad they hadn’t. Glad that, for now, their flat would still exist as its own quiet, human place he could come back to when he needed that steady calm they seemed to create around him by simply being there. And glad, too, that the Tardis could remain his offering to them whenever they wanted excitement, wonder, and the stars.

A beautiful combination, he thought before he could stop himself.

Donna, for her part, only shrugged, “Fair enough,” she said. “Worth asking.”

Then she snapped her fingers as another thought struck her. “Anyway, I left my mobile here, came back for it. I’m staying home tonight.”

The Doctor perked up. “Wilf’s there?”

Donna looked at him flatly. “Yes, Doctor. My grandad lives there.”

He tried not to look too pleased by the idea and failed spectacularly. Donna saw it and rolled her eyes with fond resignation before turning back to the barista.

“You’re welcome too,” she said. “If you want.”

They blinked. “What?”

Donna gestured vaguely toward London outside the doors. “Most of the city’s shut down for cleanup. You’ll probably have a nightmare getting back to your flat.”

That was, unfortunately, true. They thought about it for a second. The closed roads. The floodlights. The soldiers. The sheer exhausted wrongness of trying to make it home through a city still dragging itself back together.

Then Donna added, with the timing of a professional menace, “And Mum’s making dinner now.”

The idea of a home-cooked meal, warmth, normal voices, people talking over a table instead of under a metal sky, it all sounded dangerously appealing after everything the night had become.

Donna saw them wavering and nodded once, satisfied. “Thought that might help.”

The Doctor, who had already fully perked up at the thought of Wilf and a proper meal and maybe, if the universe was feeling unusually merciful, an evening ending in something almost resembling peace, looked at them carefully.

“No pressure,” he said, and meant it.

They exhaled, long and tired and suddenly aware of how deeply tired they actually were. Then they gave the smallest nod, “Okay.”

Donna smiled. “Good.”

The Doctor went straight to work. The second the decision had been made, he was back at the console, hands flying over switches and levers with the confidence of long habit. The Tardis woke around him, lights brightening, the central column beginning its steady rise and fall as he set coordinates with far more enthusiasm than the situation strictly required.

They watched him for a beat before asking, “What are you doing?”

He glanced over at them like the answer ought to have been painfully obvious. “Getting us there.”

“Right,” they said. “But how?”

The Doctor scoffed softly. “Well, unless you fancy finding a taxi in the middle of an active military clean-up, I don’t, and walking that far is entirely out of the question.”

Donna rolled her eyes so hard it nearly became a full-body movement. She had, after all, just walked there and back from Chiswick. But she kept her peace. Mostly because she could see him enjoying himself and had decided, for the moment, to let him show off.

The Doctor, sensing no one was actively stopping him, threw the last lever with flourish. The Tardis groaned into motion.

He saw it immediately, that involuntary widening of their eyes, the little startled laugh that escaped them as the floor seemed to shift under their feet and the whole ship filled with that impossible, living sound. Wonder got them again, quick and bright in its own right, and the Doctor grinned helplessly at the sight.

The Tardis shuddered once, twice, then settled. Silence fell in its wake.

They blinked and looked around as if expecting the walls themselves to have changed. “Did we move?”

Before the Doctor could answer, a polite but enthusiastic rap sounded at the door. His entire face changed and he abandoned the console and their question.

“Wilf,” Donna said, not sounding even slightly surprised.

The Doctor didn’t bother responding to them at all. He was already hurrying to the doors, grin widening as he pulled them open.

“Wilf!”

Wilfred Mott stood just outside with all the warmth of a man greeting the universe itself rather than one slightly disheveled alien in a suit. His face broke into a delighted smile at once.

“Doctor!”

The Doctor beamed and stepped aside, and immediately the little front garden beyond came into view, night-dark and modest and, according to the woman now appearing from the doorway behind Wilf, newly burdened with a police box on the lawn.

“Oh, honestly,” Sylvia complained, arms folded as she looked past Wilf toward the Tardis. “Does he have to park on my grass every time?”

The Doctor made an unrepentant face. “It was the best spot.”

“It is not a parking space.”

“It is now.”

From where they stood just inside the console room, they could hear the men already chattering over one another, catching up with that easy, immediate fondness that made the Doctor sound lighter than he had all night.

Wilf was full of questions before he’d even crossed the threshold. “You alright, then? Been a terrible business on the telly, well, what’s left of it, Donna said you’d been in the thick of it again.”

The Doctor waved a hand as if the Cyberman invasion had been mildly inconvenient traffic. “Nothing we couldn’t sort.”

Donna snorted and moved toward the doors. “That means it was catastrophic.”

Sylvia looked pointedly at her daughter. “And you’ve both got soot on you.”

“Fashion,” Donna said.

Wilf, however, had already leaned in toward the Tardis interior, peering around the Doctor with open curiosity. That was when he spotted them standing inside.

“Oh!” he said brightly.

The barista straightened a little. The Doctor looked back over his shoulder, suddenly remembering not everyone here had met yet.

Donna, ever delighted to narrate chaos, smiled and said, “See? I told you. He’s brought company.”

The Doctor opened his mouth, clearly prepared to protest her phrasing, but Wilf had already tipped his head kindly toward them in greeting.

“Well, come on then,” he said. “No one ought to be standing out there after a night like this.”

The barista smiled despite how wrung out they still felt.

Beside them, Donna leaned in just enough to murmur, “The only one you’ll ever have to fight for his attention with is my grandad.”

The Doctor heard that, “Donna,” he said, scandalized. She only grinned.

As they stepped down from the Tardis after Donna, the Doctor reached for their hand. Naturally, his fingers finding theirs in the dark as if they already knew the shape of them. Warm from the console room, a little rough at the knuckles, steady in a way they hadn’t been all night.

They looked at him.

He looked back with that softened expression they were beginning to understand belonged only to his truest moments, no performance, no teasing brightness, no clever dodge waiting behind it. Just the Doctor, tired and relieved and still here.

Their fingers closed around his in return.

Ahead of them, Donna was already marching toward the front door, calling for her mother not to start and for Wilf to put the kettle on if he wanted gossip. Sylvia was complaining about footprints. Wilf was laughing. The house glowed warm against the London night, windows lit, dinner waiting inside, ordinary life carrying on with stubborn human grace after the sky had nearly fallen in.

⋆.˚✮ Notes: This is for @vexerieart, who made me smile with their kind words, bitch boosted my ego SO BAD. So I just want to return the favor, pay the smile forward. I hope this cheers you up since you’ve been sick, my love. <3

London had become a battlefield in minutes.

One moment the Doctor had been striding through the street with Donna at his side, the familiar noise of the city rising around them in the ordinary, living way of it. Engines, footsteps, voices, a distant siren somewhere too far off to matter.

The next, the sky had darkened under steel.

The Doctor looked up sharply, trench coat snapping behind him as the sound hit a second later: the deep, mechanical drone of Cyberman scout ships hanging over the city like a threat made solid. They hovered between the buildings, ugly and deliberate, their undersides lit with cold blue light that swept over brick and glass and terrified faces below.

All around them, panic spread faster than sound. People screamed, and someone shouted for everyone to run.

A car swerved half onto the curb and clipped a postbox before the driver abandoned it entirely. Shop doors slammed. A child cried somewhere behind the Doctor’s shoulder. Across the street, a man stood frozen with his phone still in his hand, staring up at the ships as if looking hard enough might make them unreal.

Then the Cybermen came.

They marched from the end of the street in a line of steel and synchronized movement, ugly and merciless, their footsteps heavy enough to seem to shake the pavement. Energy weapons lifted with inhuman precision.

The first blast struck a man who had stumbled trying to run, he dropped instantly.

Donna gasped.

The Doctor moved without thinking, one arm shooting out to hold her back while his eyes swept the street, calculating too fast for thought.

“No, no, no.” His voice was barely more than breath, swallowed by the chaos around them.

A Cyberman’s voice boomed over the panic, cold and amplified, utterly devoid of urgency because urgency belonged to the living.

“Humans identified as incompatible for upgrade will be deleted.”

Another blast.

The crowd broke harder, people surging in every direction with no plan beyond getting away. The Doctor grabbed Donna’s arm and dragged her down behind an overturned newspaper stand just as a volley of energy fire tore through the place they’d been standing seconds before.

“Oh, this is bad,” Donna said, breathless and furious all at once.

The Doctor peered over the edge, sonic screwdriver already in his hand, though he knew before he even raised it that it would do precious little against a full invasion force.

“Bad?” he echoed. “Donna, this is catastrophic.”

Above them, another scout ship drifted lower between the buildings, close enough now that the Doctor could see the insignia burned into its metal plating.

This was organized, and the worst part, the part that made cold understanding slide down his spine, was that it had happened here.

In London. This bit of Earth, this ordinary stretch of street with frightened people pressed into doorways and Donna breathing hard beside him and the whole city coming apart under a steel sky.

His jaw tightened.

“They tracked the Tardis,” he said.

Donna turned to him. “What?”

He looked upward again, mind racing through impossibilities and hating every single answer. “They tracked us here. Don’t know how yet, but they did.”

Because this was no random target. Not really. Cybermen didn’t just drift into his orbit by accident, not on this scale, not with scout ships and marching units and enough force to blanket London in terror. Somewhere along the line, something had followed the trail of the Tardis.

Something had found him and now Earth was paying for it.

A blast hit the side of the building behind them, showering the pavement with brick and glass. Donna flinched, swearing loudly.

The Doctor’s eyes snapped back to the street.

Two Cybermen were advancing now through the smoke, scanning the cowering survivors behind abandoned cars and benches with mechanical calm, weapons raised.

“Do not resist. Surrender for upgrade.”

“Yeah, not happening,” Donna muttered.

The Doctor grabbed her shoulder and pulled her lower as another shot carved a glowing line through the air above them. Around them, fear rained through the city as thick as ash. The London he loved, messy, human, loud, impossible London, had become a hunting ground in the space of a breath.

And somewhere in that same city, was a café with someone who’d just clock in, who had no idea the sky had just fallen. The thought hit him like a blow.

Donna saw the change in his face immediately, “Doctor.”

He rose just enough to get a better look down the street, expression hardening into something bright and terrible.

The Doctor grabbed Donna’s hand and ran.

Not toward the nearest group of survivors or toward the Cybermen. Not toward the center of the chaos where instinct and guilt and every old wound in him screamed he ought to be.

He pulled her low behind the shell of an abandoned car instead, then darted between two more, heading hard and fast down a side street that angled toward the café.

Donna stumbled once keeping up, then found her footing and yanked at his hand.

“Oi!” she shouted over the panic around them. “Where are you going?”

The Doctor didn’t answer, he only ran faster, head down, coat snapping behind him as he steered them around a fallen bike and through a cloud of dust blown from a shattered shopfront.

Behind them, a Cyberman voice echoed cold and amplified through the street.

“Humans identified as compatible will be processed for upgrade.”

Then another.

“Incompatible subjects will be deleted.”

Donna twisted to look back. Across the road, people were being rounded up, herded with all the inhuman precision of livestock, while others who resisted or failed some unseen standard were simply shot where they stood. Blue energy blasts lit the street in horrible flashes. A woman dropped to her knees screaming. A man tried to drag someone to cover and was struck down before he’d made it three steps.

Donna jerked against the Doctor’s grip. “Doctor!”

He rounded on her just long enough to drag her behind the burnt-out shell of a van as another volley tore through the air nearby.

“We can’t just leave them!”

His face snapped toward hers.

“I can’t save all of them!” he shouted. The words came out sharper than he meant them to, edged with something raw enough to make Donna fall silent.

In his eyes there was fear and regret. The brutal knowledge of numbers, distance, time, and what happened if he made the wrong choice right now. He knew what he was doing and he hated it.

Donna looked at him for one long second, hearing everything in the crack of his voice that he hadn’t said aloud.

Something in her face changed. So she swallowed the rest of the protest, grabbed his hand back properly this time, and said, “Then move.”

The Doctor did.

They ducked lower and ran again, weaving through the wreckage of London as the sky groaned with Cyberman ships overhead. Sirens wailed uselessly in the distance. Smoke curled up between the buildings. Somewhere behind them came the sound of another explosion and the terrible, thin chorus of people who hadn’t gotten out fast enough.

The Doctor’s hearts hammered. Every second stretched too long and disappeared too fast. He cut them through alleys, across a service lane, around a lorry half-jackknifed into the curb. His mind was doing three things at once, tracking routes, listening for pursuit, and calculating the fastest way to get to the café.

Donna kept pace beside him, breath coming hard but steady, not asking again.

Once, as they crouched behind a low brick wall while two Cybermen passed through the next street over, she glanced sideways and said, quieter now, “It’s them, isn’t it?”

The Doctor did not answer he didn’t need to. Donna nodded once, grim and resigned, then waited for his signal.

When he moved again, she moved with him.

The front door of the café had not so much opened as exploded inward.

One second, there had been the ordinary noise of the morning shift, the hiss of steam, the clatter of cups, someone at the register apologizing for the wait, and the next there had been splintering wood, screaming, and the impossible shape of metal bodies stepping through the wreckage.

They did not remember deciding to run.

They remembered someone shouting. They remembered the new girl they had trained just a few days ago, dropping a tray so hard it shattered.

They remembered a man near the window trying to push past one of the things, alien, robot, whatever it was, and being shot so quickly that for a second their mind refused to understand what had happened.

Then the room had gone mad.

Now they were outside, herded down the street in a crowd of people under a sky gone wrong.

They kept their eyes moving because holding them still felt worse somehow. Every direction offered something awful. Shop windows blown out. Smoke rolling up from somewhere ahead. Cars are abandoned at strange angles in the road. People are crying openly. A child wailing for someone who wasn’t answering. The mechanical things marched at the edges of the crowd with terrifying calm, their hollow metal eyes fixed forward, their weapons held ready.

The café door hanging half off its hinges flashed through their mind again.

The body on the floor.

The way the machines had spoken in those dead, amplified voices, calling some people compatible and others incompatible as if they were talking about broken appliances instead of human beings.

Shock had wrapped around everything, muffling it. Most people around them were screaming or sobbing or begging questions no one answered. They did none of that because the fear had gone too deep and settled into something cold and rigid inside them.

Ahead of them, an older man stumbled and fell to one knee. The line of prisoners rippled around him, but before anyone could really react, one of the Cybermen seized him by the arm and hauled him back upright with mechanical ease. The man cried out, no one else did. Everyone had learned too quickly that attention could be fatal. They kept their head down after that. 

The city looked unrecognizable.

This was a street they knew. They knew that off-license with the faded sign. Knew the chemist at the corner. Knew the bus stop where people always crowded too close in the rain. But all of it had been turned sideways by fear. London had become something hunted.

A woman near them was sobbing so hard she could barely breathe.

Someone else kept repeating, “It’s not real, it’s not real, it’s not real,” in a flat, exhausted voice that suggested they no longer believed it.

They swallowed and tried to think, to make sense of something.

Aliens. Robots. An invasion. People dead in the café. Marched through the street under gunpoint.

And somewhere stupidly, helplessly, was John. The thought came uninvited and lodged into their mind, unmoving.

Was he still out of town?

Had he seen the news yet, if there was even news left to see?

Would he know what was happening here?

Their chest tightened.

The most absurd part of it all was that some small traitorous corner of them still wanted him to walk around the corner like this was just another impossible thing he would somehow make better by existing in the room. John, with his coat and his quick eyes and his voice, was always half a step ahead of everyone else. The thought hurt almost immediately.

Because John was not here.

And even if he was in London, even if he had come back early, what exactly was he meant to do against this?

The person ahead of them let out a scream as another line of Cybermen turned onto the road from a side street, joining the escort. The crowd compressed in on itself, bodies bumping together in terrified instinct. They got jostled hard enough to lose their footing for half a step, and when they looked up, one of the metal faces was turned directly toward them.

They froze, and their stomach lurched. The Cyberman looked away again just as quickly, apparently deciding they were not worth immediate attention.

They kept walking.

Only about forty minutes had passed since the Doctor had found the café. Forty minutes since he’d skidded to a stop in front of the shattered doorway, chest heaving, and stared at the wreckage like he could force time backward through sheer refusal. Forty minutes since he had seen the body on the floor and the smear of panic frozen into overturned chairs and broken cups and blood.

He had not let himself think too hard about whose body it was. Had not let himself picture the alternatives too clearly.

He could only hope, desperately, that they had been taken. That “compatible for upgrade” had claimed them before “incompatible” had. That they were still somewhere inside this nightmare with their own face, their own mind, their own beating human heart.

And that he had not yet run out of time to keep it that way.

Now he was aboard the Cyberman ship, alone. Or close enough to alone for the moment.

The control room he’d broken into was empty, all steel and cold blue light and humming systems that pulsed through the walls like a mechanical nervous system. The room smelled faintly of heat and metal. All harsh angles and panels, and the quiet, inhuman efficiency of a machine built to move through the sky and strip whole cities bare.

The Doctor crouched in front of an open control panel with his coat flung half behind him, and his sleeves shoved up, hands buried wrist-deep in wiring. The sonic screwdriver was currently clamped between his teeth while he traced one strand to another, muttering around it under his breath.

He spat the sonic back into his hand, buzzed it once across the exposed circuitry, then shoved it between his teeth again while he reached deeper inside the panel.

Blue sparks flashed, and he ignored them.

Donna was aboard the Tardis, parked just in the corner. As safe as Donna Noble ever let herself be, anyway, which was to say likely pacing and swearing. But safe enough. Out of the firing line. Out of his way. He had practically had to shove her through the doors to get her there, promising he would come back, promising he needed her not dead for five bloody minutes so he could think.

She had hated it, but he had done it anyway. Because of this part, this race against time and steel and impossible odds, he could not split his focus. 

Not while they were somewhere on this ship, or another ship, or some holding facility on the ground already queued for conversion.

He shut his eyes for one second and saw the café again.

His jaw clenched hard enough to ache.

“No,” he said to the wires, to the ship, to the thought itself. “No. Not happening.”

The sonic buzzed again.

At last a different panel came alive under his hand, a display lifting from black into lines of scrolling code and location grids. The Doctor yanked the screwdriver free from his mouth and leaned in close, eyes racing across the screen.

Prisoner processing. Routing sectors. Conversion chambers.

His hearts kicked harder.

There.

Multiple holding zones. Some already marked for transfer. Others pending classification. The Cybermen, efficient as ever, had spread their captives across the invasion force to avoid bottlenecks. Which meant he did not yet know where they were. Which meant every second spent guessing was stolen from whatever little time remained before “pending” became “upgraded.”

His hand flew over the controls, rewiring access permissions on the fly.

“Come on, come on, come on…”

One holding area flashed full. Another half-capacity. Another locked behind biometric nonsense he bypassed with a hard jab of the sonic and a muttered insult.

The screen expanded.

And with it came a live feed, grainy surveillance imagery of rows and rows of terrified people behind metal barriers under white industrial lights. Crying. Shaking. Huddled. Some trying to bargain with armored guards that did not hear pleading as language.

The Doctor scanned faces.

Not there.

He switched feeds.

Another room. More prisoners. A child clinging to an older sister. A man bleeding from the forehead. Two Cybermen standing watch like statues beside the far wall.

Not there.

Another.

Another.

He stopped breathing for half a second.

A familiar shoulder. A familiar posture. Head bowed, arms folded close to the body like they were trying to occupy less space than they physically did.

The Doctor leaned closer to the screen, one hand bracing hard against the metal frame of the console.

There.

Alive.

Still human.

The relief hit so violently it almost brought him to his knees. It was not joy, there was too much fear still inside it for that, but it was enough to make his vision blur for a single stupid second before he blinked it away.

“Got you,” he whispered.

On the screen, they stood in a holding chamber with maybe fifty others, penned behind a force barrier while Cybermen moved in and out through a far door. Processing queue, not yet conversion.

He checked the chamber code, mapped it against the ship layout, and felt the floor drop out of his stomach.

The Doctor straightened so fast he nearly cracked his head on the open panel above him. He grabbed the sonic, slammed the access hatch closed with his free hand, and turned toward the corridor at a dead run.

Forty minutes.

That was all it had taken for London to fall into pieces. Forty minutes to go from movie-night memories and untouched truths to metal skies and conversion lines. Now every second after that belonged to him.

The Doctor tore through the Tardis doors and into the console room with all the force of a storm breaking.

Donna was on him immediately, “What happened? Did you find them? What are those things? How do we stop them?”

Her questions came one on top of the other as he strode straight for the console, coat snapping behind him. He didn’t slow down. Didn’t even properly look at her yet. His hands were already moving, buttons, levers, switches, the old ship answering him with groans and flashing lights as he woke systems she hadn’t seen him touch in months.

“I found them,” he said first, because he knew that was the one she cared about most.

Donna let out a breath, sharp with relief.

“They’re alive. Still in processing. Not upgraded yet.”

“Right.”

The Doctor yanked a lever down, checked a monitor, then crossed to another panel. “The things are Cybermen.”

Donna followed half a step behind, keeping up by instinct now. “Yeah, gathered that much. What are they?”

He hit three buttons in quick succession and didn’t look away from the readout as he answered.

“They were human. Once.”

Donna stopped. The Doctor’s hands faltered only for the smallest fraction before continuing.

“Or something close enough,” he said. “Different worlds, different origins, but same idea. Flesh torn apart, bits replaced, emotions stripped out, every human thing cut away until all that’s left is logic and obedience and steel.”

Donna stared at him.

The console light flickered over his face, making him look sharper, older, the anger in him more visible.

“They upgrade people,” he went on, voice flat with the effort of staying functional. “Convert them. Shove all the fear and pain into some locked little corner and call it progress.”

Donna’s mouth twisted. “That’s sick.”

“Yes,” the Doctor said simply. “It is.”

He slammed his palm against a control and the central rotor jumped into a higher rhythm. Donna watched him, taking in the speed of him, the focus, the way grief and fury sat side by side in his face with no room between them.

“You’ve fought them before,” she said.

The Doctor nodded once. “Too many times.”

“And?”

“And I’m going to do what I always do,” he said. “Beat them.”

Donna almost smiled at that, except there was too much sharpness in him for it to land as comfort. He brought up a new display, blueprints and code flooding across the monitor in a wash of symbols she couldn’t begin to understand.

“Cybermen rely on emotional inhibitors,” he said. “Shut down the panic, the guilt, the horror of what’s been done to them. Keeps them compliant. Keeps them moving.”

Donna’s brow furrowed. “So if you shut that down…”

“They feel everything.” He said it quietly. “Done it before. That horror of releasing whats been done to them, it’ll kill ‘em all.”

Donna looked at him.

The Doctor kept his eyes on the screen, but his mouth had gone hard. “All at once. Every person still trapped in there, every fragment left alive enough to know what’s happened, ” He cut himself off and swallowed once. “That’s the cancellation code. Find it, feed it through the network, and the whole Cyberman system tears itself apart.”

Donna exhaled. “So that’s how you stop them.”

“That’s how I end them.”

The Tardis gave a low, rising hum beneath their feet as the Doctor rerouted more systems toward the Cyberman ship.

“But not yet,” he added.

Donna nodded immediately. “Them first.”

The Doctor looked up then, finally, and there was something raw in his eyes that made her chest tighten.

“The queue comes first,” he said. “I get them out, get them in here, get them safe. Then I go hunting for the code.”

Donna took that in. Took all of it in, the fear under his urgency, the way he said safe like a prayer and a command and a plea all at once.

“What do you need from me?” she asked.

The Doctor’s hands slowed, only for a second. Then he drew a breath and straightened. “Just follow my lead,” he said.

Donna studied him, as if deciding whether that answer was enough. It wasn’t, but it would have to do.

So she nodded once, sharp and steady. “Alright.”

The Doctor turned back to the console, voice already sharpening into action again. “When we board, stay close to me. No heroics unless I ask for them.”

Donna snorted. “Bit rich.”

“I mean it.”

“So do I.”

That almost tugged a smile out of him.

He set the final coordinates, fingers flying over the controls. “I’ll lock onto the holding chamber first, pull the doors if I can, scramble internal comms, make a path. If I can’t do that, we improvise.”

Donna folded her arms, settling in at his shoulder. “You always improvise.”

“Yes, but this time I’m admitting it.”

The Tardis’s engines rose around them, the ship responding to his urgency, time and space beginning to bend under his hands.

Donna looked at him sidelong. “You alright?” The question slipped out before she could stop it.

The Doctor didn’t answer straight away. His gaze stayed fixed on the monitor showing the holding queue, on the one tiny grainy image he had frozen there, on the person waiting without knowing he was this close.

“No,” he said at last. Honest as a wound.

Donna’s face softened. Then his jaw set again, and when he reached for the lever, there was murder in the motion.

They stood in line and moved when the line moved. That was all.

One small shuffle forward every so often, prompted by the bodies around them compressing in fear and the silent pressure of the Cybermen waiting ahead. It had become mechanical in its own horrible way. 

Step. Stop. Breathe. Listen. Try not to think too hard.

The room, or corridor, or processing bay, or whatever industrial nightmare they had been funneled into, felt less like a place than a system. Bright white light washed all warmth out of everything. 

Ahead, the Cybermen scanned each person as they reached the front. Then one of two outcomes. Some were shoved toward the left, deeper into the facility, through a set of doors that opened and shut with brutal efficiency.

Others were pulled right. Those did not go far. Those did not scream for very long.

They kept their eyes down until they couldn’t bear not knowing, then looked up and immediately wished they hadn’t.

The left-hand route led toward a corridor where the sounds were worse than the sight. Heavy, rhythmic, wet in the imagination even if it wasn’t in reality. They heard the whine of something electric. The grind of metal. A saw, maybe, or something close enough that the distinction didn’t matter. The sounds came and went as the doors opened, each time revealing just enough movement and shadow and strapped-down panic to make the line of waiting prisoners sway as one living mass.

Someone near them started sobbing openly. Someone else began praying under their breath.

A man farther ahead tried to bolt when his turn came. He made it two steps before a Cyberman seized him by the back of the neck and slammed him to the wall hard enough that everyone nearby flinched. He was dragged to the left after that, screaming until the doors closed and the sound became muffled machinery again.

Their mouth had gone dry. They swallowed and tasted nothing.

Their hands were cold, though the room itself was too warm. Their pulse had migrated somewhere awful and constant, hammering in the throat, the wrists, the gut. A woman behind them kept bumping lightly into their back every time the queue advanced, too lost in panic to apologize. They didn’t turn around. They didn’t think they could stand another human face right now, another set of eyes asking a question no one could answer.

The Cybermen scanned each person and decided.

Compatible.

Incompatible.

As if human beings could be reduced to a setting on a machine. They tried not to imagine what “compatible” meant anymore. Tried not to connect it to the corridor on the left and the screaming and the way people who passed through those doors did not come back out.

The line moved.

Another step.

Closer now.

They could see one of the Cybermen more clearly. The smooth steel face. The tubing at its neck. No anger in it, no thrill, no hate. That might have been worse. It was doing all of this without emotion, without judgment, like it was sorting stock in a warehouse.

They tried to think of ordinary things. Fairy lights in the kitchenette. The smell of coffee grounds. The scratch of an old DVD menu. John’s shoes by the door. The thoughts came broken and stupid, little human scraps held up against the machinery of this place like paper against fire. They did not help.

The line moved again.

Now they were close enough to hear the scan device whine as it swept over the next person. Close enough to see blood smeared faintly near the base of the right-hand wall where the “incompatible” bodies fell before they were dragged away.

As the line crept forward and the number of people between them and the scan dropped to only a handful, a new sound broke through the machinery.

A loud, wheezing groan.

They stiffened. For one confused second, they assumed it was just more ship noise, another awful mechanical system somewhere deeper in the walls, another warning tone for some part of the process they did not want to understand.

But then the Cybermen reacted.

Every metal body nearest the far end of the corridor snapped toward the noise, arms lifting, posture shifting from passive processing to active threat.

The person in front of them twisted halfway around to look back. They followed their gaze and saw a blue box appearing in the corridor.

Not rolling in. Not being carried. Appearing.

Their brain stalled on it immediately.

A box. A police box, absurdly old-fashioned, impossibly out of place in the middle of a steel nightmare. It shimmered at the edges like heat haze, flickering in and out of solidity while that strange, groaning wheeze filled the corridor. One second there was empty space. The next there was half a blue door, then a corner, then the whole impossible thing settling into existence with a final soft thud and a cheerful little chime that felt so bizarrely ordinary in this place it almost made their head spin.

For one suspended heartbeat all they could think was, “What the fuck?”

The Cybermen didn’t hesitate and advanced as one, heavy steps ringing on the metal floor, arms raised, forearm blasters charged and ready. Blue light built in the weapons with an ugly electronic whine.

People in the queue cried out, some crouching instinctively, others trying to press backward into the line, though there was nowhere to go. The corridor became a crush of fear and confusion.

The blue box door swung open and out popped John.

Their mind simply failed to process it.

One second: alien ship, metal monsters, blood, screams, imminent death.

Next second: John.

John, in his suit and coat, hair all over the place, sonic screwdriver in one hand and a look on his face they had never seen before, bright and terrible and utterly alive.

They took one step out of line before they could stop themself, straining for a better angle. Because it couldn’t be, except it was.

Not just a man who looked like John in the middle of an alien ship and a nightmare. Not some impossible resemblance lit by panic and bad light. It was him. The tilt of his head, the line of his mouth, the wildness in his hair, the way he stood like motion itself had decided to wear human skin.

One of the Cybermen advanced, weapon arm raised, “Identified: the Doctor.”

The name hit them like a second explosion, recalling what Donna had called him. The Doctor.

“Surrender for upgrade.”

Their mind snagged on it uselessly even as everything else kept moving too fast. John, no, apparently not John, apparently something else entirely, looked down the line of prisoners. His eyes swept over faces in one quick, terrible pass.

Then he saw them.

He stopped.

Only for a fraction of a second, but they saw it happen. Saw the whole of him catch on their face and hold there, relief and fear colliding so sharply it almost looked like pain.

Then he turned back to the three Cybermen in front of him, and something in him changed. The grimness didn’t vanish completely, but the tension in his face loosened by degrees, and his eyes sharpened into something brighter, more mocking and amused. His posture unwound from raw urgency into that infuriating, impossible casualness they knew so well, except now it was pointed like a blade.

He slipped both hands into his coat pockets as if he had not just stepped out of a blue box into a corridor full of killer robots. As if he had all the time in the universe.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, voice carrying clean and quick through the corridor. “And better yet, how did you track me down?”

The Cybermen did not fire. That, somehow, was almost more unnerving.

“We did not track you.”

The Doctor paced once across the width of the corridor, circling just out of immediate reach, head tilted in thought. He looked, absurdly, like a man arguing with a waiter over a bad meal instead of stalling three armed Cybermen while a crowd of terrified people watched.

“Oh, now I don’t believe that for a second,” he said. “Cybermen haven’t been to Earth on this world in quite some time. Not this version of it. Not this century. Not this branch. So unless this is all one tremendous coincidence, and I don’t much care for coincidence on a Tuesday, you tracked something.”

The Cybermen said nothing.

The Doctor kept moving, almost lazily, circling with his coat swaying around his legs.

“Question is what.” He pointed at them suddenly. “Advanced scanning? Psychic links? Temporal technology? Which one is it, because I’ll tell you now, each one is very unlike a Cyberman.”

The three metal figures held position, fixed on him. Behind them, the line of prisoners had gone deathly quiet. Even the screaming from farther down the hall seemed to have receded beneath the strange spectacle of this man talking to monsters like they were bureaucrats being mildly disappointing.

The Doctor stopped pacing and planted himself directly in front of the middle Cyberman as it turned to him, face lifted in challenge.

“Well?”

The Cybermen remained silent one beat too long.

His expression hardened. “No, go on. Tell me. I’d really like to know why you’ve decided to invade Earth now, and why you just happen to be doing it in the same city as my ship.”

That last word cracked with a bit of anger he didn’t bother hiding.

The Cyberman in the center finally answered, “Large energy signals were detected in this location.”

The Doctor stilled, then, slowly, he smiled. Not warmly or even close to kindly. The kind of smile that meant a puzzle piece had just clicked into place and someone else was about to regret it.

“Ah,” he said softly. “There we are.” He turned half away from them, thinking aloud now at the speed of his own mind.

“Not tracking me specifically, then. Tracking artron emissions. Or something close enough to them to make no difference. Large energy readings in one concentrated area,” His eyes flicked, just for an instant, toward the blue box behind him. “Oh, you stupid, clever things.”

They watched him, still half hidden in the line, heart hammering so hard they could feel it in their teeth.

Nothing made sense.

Not the box. Not the name. Not the way he stood there in front of the Cybermen as if he were the most dangerous thing in the corridor. Not the way the Cybermen had obeyed the rhythm of his conversation, even for these few seconds, like he had stepped into the room and changed the gravity of it.

But one truth had become impossible to deny.

John had lied.

Massively.

Catastrophically.

And whatever he really was, whatever “the Doctor” meant, he was very, very used to standing in the path of death and making it blink first.

The Doctor looked back up at the Cybermen, smile still in place.

“So that’s it, then,” he said. “You weren’t following me specifically. You were following the Tardis.”

The unfamiliar word meant nothing to them.

The recognition in the Cybermen’s silence meant everything to him.

His smile widened another fraction, “Brilliant. Well, not for you.”

Three Cybermen stood between him and the blue box, their backs turned to it, all their attention fixed on him. Their weapons were trained on his chest, blue light building in the barrels, but he didn’t move. Didn’t so much as flinch.

Instead, he tilted his head and said, almost conversationally, “Remind me. Last time you saw me?”

“Temporal encounter logged. Coordinates: Karsk-Vel, Sector Nine. Date classification unavailable.”

The name meant nothing to them. The Doctor, however, went still for half a beat, then gave a small nod of recognition.

“Oh, right,” he said. “That one.” He frowned slightly, remembering. “Bit of a mess, if I recall. Whole moon made of converters.”

The Cybermen did not respond.

The Doctor’s mouth twitched. “So it’s been a while, then.” He let the thought hang there just long enough to feel casual. Then he smiled, “Have you met Donna?”

The Cybermen did not have time to answer.

The blue box door flew open behind them.

Donna Noble burst out just far enough to hurl something into the corridor, a lumpy, unmistakably homemade object wrapped in tape and wires, the sort of thing that looked deeply unprofessional and therefore immediately dangerous. The Doctor caught it in one hand without even looking. The Cybermen reacted instantly, arms jerking up toward him, targeting systems recalibrating in a swarm of blue-lit precision.

But the Doctor only held up the device and kept talking.

“Now this,” he said brightly, “is what happens when you leave Donna Noble in a time machine full of spare parts and give her an instruction manual.”

Donna’s voice rang from the doorway behind them, “You are never calling it arts and crafts again!”

He grinned, eyes never leaving the Cybermen. “Counterpoint, it absolutely was.”

They couldn’t see exactly what he did next. His back was to them, shoulders angling just enough to hide the movement of his hands as he thumbed something loose or twisted a wire or let the sonic flash once against the taped casing.

All they knew was that one second the Doctor was standing there holding a ridiculous homemade bomb and talking far too fast, and the next a shrill pulse snapped through the corridor.

White-blue light burst outward in a hard ring.

The nearest Cyberman convulsed. Then all three of them did. Their metal bodies jerked violently, limbs seizing at impossible angles as the pulse tore through their systems. The Doctor took one quick step backward.

“EMP,” he said, almost cheerfully, over the awful electronic shriek of their failing systems. “Bit rude to the implants. Sorry about that.”

The Cybermen spasmed again and then dropped. All three hit the floor in near-perfect unison, steel crashing against metal hard enough to shake the corridor.

He tossed the EMP device back toward the TARDIS, and Donna caught it with both hands and a scandalized noise.

“Oi!” she snapped. “You could’ve warned me you were making me do the last bit!”

The Doctor was already turning back toward the corridor, coat swinging behind him. “Thought I’d let you have the glory.”

“That’s not glory!”

He flashed her a grin over his shoulder, quick and bright and entirely inappropriate for the moment. “Fine. Next time you do the stalling.”

Donna opened her mouth then shut it again. Because, irritatingly, she had no comeback for that. The look she gave him made it very clear she was deeply unhappy about this state of affairs anyway.

Then the Doctor turned to them. The whole corridor seemed to narrow around that one movement.

He stepped toward them, and for the first time since stepping out of the blue box, the frantic, dazzling, impossible energy in him shifted into something more human. He looked them dead in the eye.

A thousand things unsaid, crashing between them all at once.

He looked like a man with apologies stacked behind his teeth. Explanations. Truths. Regret. Relief so sharp it almost bled through everything else. They had questions enough to drown him in.

But the corridor was still full of screaming and alarms and the rush of people forcing themselves toward the TARDIS, and there simply wasn’t time for any of it.

His hand came out and closed around their arm as he pulled them out of the line and toward Donna, guiding them with firm urgency until they were close enough for her to grab them if needed.

“Stay with her,” he said.

They blinked. “What?”

The Doctor was already half turning away.

Panic cut through the shock fast enough to give them motion again. “Wait-”

He moved to leave, and they caught his sleeve instinctively.

“John-” They could hear how breathless they sounded. “You can’t just-”

“Shh.” His voice dropped, softening just for them in a way that made their chest hurt. “I know.”

No, they thought wildly, he didn’t. Or maybe he did. Because the look on his face said he knew exactly how much this was to ask.

He glanced toward the far end of the corridor, where more metallic footsteps were already beginning to echo back through the ship.

Then he looked at Donna.

“Stay here,” he told her. “With them. With everyone. Keep the EMP on.”

Donna straightened, grip tightening on the device. “Got it.”

The Doctor gave one quick nod.

Then they tried again, more desperate this time. “Where are you going?”

His eyes came back to them one last time, “To stop this,” he said.

Before they could answer, before they could demand more, or beg him not to, or ask what in God’s name was happening, he was moving.

He ran down the corridor at full speed, not hesitating once, vanishing into the ship with the same bright, impossible momentum he’d arrived with, heading toward God knew where to do God knew what.

They stood frozen for half a second, staring after him. Then Donna’s hand landed on their shoulder, firm and grounding.

“He’ll come back,” she said. She sounded like she believed it.

As the line dissolved and the rescued prisoners crowded together in the corridor, fear and confusion bouncing wildly off the metal walls, they turned on Donna, shaking a little. And angrier than they had any right to be when they were still alive, only because of him.

“Who is he really?” The question came out rough and breathless, sharper than they meant it to, but nothing about this made sense anymore and their mind was trying to build a bridge across a canyon with splinters.

John had called that box a time machine. The things had called him the Doctor, just as Donna had. He had known what they were, how they worked, how to stop them. He had stepped out of nowhere with impossible technology and impossible certainty and moved through all of this like it was terrifying but familiar. And the more they let the pieces knock against each other in their head, the worse it got.

Because suddenly every odd little thing about him had turned over at once. The historical facts and the way he talked about dead people. The technology and handy skills. The constant travel. The evasions and dodging of questions.

Donna was still gripping the EMP device, standing against the Tardis door like she was trying to be a wall between the frightened people and the ship beyond. She looked at them with a softness that only made the anger burn hotter.

“He’s called the Doctor,” she said gently.

“I got that bit,” they snapped.

Donna flinched, not from the volume, but from the hurt in it.

They ran a hand hard over their face and looked away for one second before turning back to her. “Who is he?” Their voice cracked on the last word.

Donna saw the awful beginning of understanding that none of this was a misunderstanding or a weird coincidence or some bizarre work emergency. This was the truth, or some terrible edge of it, and it had been standing in their flat drinking tea and calling itself John.

The corridor groaned around them. Somewhere farther down the ship came another dull explosion. One of the rescued people whimpered. Someone else asked if the blue box was safe. Donna ignored all of it for the second it took to look at them properly.

“He’s,” She stopped, searching for the least impossible version of the truth. “He’s not what you thought.”

“No, really?” That was so obviously inadequate it made their laugh come out bitter.

Donna took that without complaint.

“He’s an alien,” she said.

The word landed like a physical punch in the gut. They stared at her.

Donna kept going, because stopping now would only make it worse. “A good one,” she added quickly. “The best one, honestly, which I know sounds mad given the circumstances, but-”

“An alien,” they repeated.

Donna nodded once. Their eyes widened, then narrowed, then went glassy with the effort of trying to hold onto something stable while the whole shape of reality shifted under them.

“No,” they said, but not like they were disagreeing. More like their mind had simply thrown the word back out because they had nowhere to put it.

Donna’s face gentled. “Yeah.”

They looked toward the corridor where he had disappeared. Toward the place John had become the Doctor had become something impossible.

“He’s been lying to me.”

Donna winced, “Yes,” she said quietly. “He has.”

They swallowed, throat working painfully, “How long?”

Donna hesitated, which was answer enough.

“All of it?” they asked, voice thinning. “The job, the traveling, all of that?”

Donna drew in a breath. “Not all of it.”

They looked at her sharply.

“He does travel,” she said. “Constantly. And he does save people, if that helps at all. He just,” She glanced down the corridor too, as if he might somehow hear her choosing words. “He made himself smaller for you.”

That stopped them cold.

Donna saw it and pressed on, softer now. “I’m not saying it was right. It wasn’t. And he knows it wasn’t.” She shifted the EMP device in her hands and stepped a little closer. “But he wasn’t lying because he thought it was funny. He was lying because he was scared.”

“Scared of what?” They stared at her.

Donna gave them a sad sort of look.

“Of this,” she said. 

They shook their head once, trying to clear it and failing. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It does if you know him.”

“I don’t know him,” they said, and the pain in that finally came through full force.

Donna’s expression broke around the edges.

They looked past Donna at the Tardis, eyes darting it impossibility, “That box. . . ”

Donna looked back too, then at them again. “It’s a ship. And a time machine.”

Their laugh this time was nearly hysterical. “Right. Sure.”

“I know how it sounds.”

“No, you don’t.” Their eyes flashed back to hers. 

Donna held their gaze for a second, then jerked her chin toward the Tardis. “Come here.”

They didn’t move, their feet seemed fixed to the metal floor, rooted there by shock and anger and the awful sense that if they took one step closer to that impossible blue box, everything would become even more real than it already was.

Donna saw the refusal, sighed once through her nose, and came to them instead. She was grateful, at least, that they didn’t move away when she stopped in front of them. For a moment, she just stood there, the EMP device awkward in one hand, the other hovering like she wanted to touch their arm and wasn’t sure if she’d earned the right. In the end, she didn’t. 

She looked at them with that rare, steady softness of hers and said, low enough that it felt private even in a corridor full of people, “He’s wonderful.”

They made the tiniest disbelieving sound.

Donna went on anyway, “I know that’s not what you want to hear right now,” she said. “But you need to know it.”

Their face stayed tight and stunned, but they listened.

So Donna told them. Not everything, there wasn’t time for everything, and half of what mattered wouldn’t make sense yet. But she told them enough.

“The first time I met him for real,” she said, “my ex-fiancé Lance was in cahoots with, this is going to sound ridiculous, so brace yourself, a giant spider alien woman.”

They stared at her.

“A giant what?”

“Exactly,” Donna said, almost amused at the insanity of it. “Welcome to his life.”

Despite themself, the barista’s mouth twitched in confused disbelief, but Donna didn’t stop.

“She wanted to eat everyone on Earth,” Donna said bluntly. “Lance had been spiking my coffee with Huon particles every day. Needed them to incubate in a human body till they were ready for use. Still don’t understand what that means really, but that's what the Doctor said.”

That got a full frown out of them now, their shock sharpening into something more focused and somehow more horrified.

“What?”

“Oh, I know.” Donna waved a hand. “Don’t worry too much about the details. The point is, it was bad. Properly bad. And he saved me. Stopped the spider lady. Got me out.”

The barista swallowed, the story sounded too impossible to fit inside one head.

And as Donna spoke, some remembered edge of the man they knew seemed to sharpen into something stranger. The way he had stepped into this ship and turned it from a place of terror into a battlefield he understood. They felt more nervous, not less, at the idea of meeting him properly when he came back.

Donna caught some of that in their face and sighed again.

“I saw something in him that night,” she said, quieter now.

The barista’s brow furrowed. They weren’t sure where she was going, but they let her keep going.

“There was fire everywhere,” Donna said. “And he was standing right in it. Waiting. Grieving someone he’d just lost.” Her eyes went distant for a second, pulled backward by the memory. “A friend. And I looked at him and thought, God, there’s a darkness there.”

The barista stared at her. They didn’t understand yet, not fully, but the seriousness in her voicemade a shiver go up their spine.

Donna gave a tiny shake of her head. “That’s his world,” she said. “That’s why I turned him down the first time. Why I didn’t get on board that box with him.” She nodded toward the Tardis. “I knew if I stepped into his life, I’d be stepping into all of that too.”

The barista’s gaze flicked to the blue box and then back.

Donna’s mouth tightened. “And then I regretted it.”

She didn’t linger there. Didn’t mention tracking him down or the stubborn, aching choice she’d made to find him again when she realized turning away hadn’t stopped her thinking of him, of the life and adventure he offered.

Instead she kept moving through the truth she wanted them to understand.

“I’ve seen Pompeii with my own eyes,” she said. “Seen people smiling and living and loving right before the sky buried them.” Her voice dipped lower. “I’ve seen a whole race called the Ood, kept as slaves. Locked up, tortured, treated like they weren’t even alive enough to matter. And they sang this beautiful song.”

The barista said nothing. Neither did the people huddled closest behind them. Donna didn’t notice that the others in line were listening too, or maybe she did and no longer cared. The corridor had gone quieter around her voice. Fear still lived in it, but now there was this too, people hanging on to the only calm, human thing they had been given.

“The world can be cruel,” Donna said, and there was iron in her now. “Cruel in ways you don’t even know to imagine until you see it. His world most of all.”

She paused for breath.

The barista stared at her, still trying to hold all of it at once. This wasn’t helping, wasn’t making them less angry, it wasn’t making the lie smaller. But it was changing the shape of their anger. Taking the neat edges off it and replacing them with understanding.

Donna looked at them carefully.

“And do you know what he still does?” she asked.

They didn’t answer.

“He runs straight at it anyway.” Donna nodded once, her voice thinning just slightly with the force of her own feeling.

“He keeps going into the worst places. Keeps saving people. Keeps hurting over every last one of them, whether he says it out loud or not.” Her eyes flicked down the corridor where he had vanished. “He acts like he’s this big impossible thing that can carry it all, but he can’t. Not really. He just keeps trying.”

The barista’s throat worked. They looked away for a second, toward the metal wall, the floor, anywhere but Donna’s face.

And in that second they remembered him in their flat. The Doctor. John. Whatever he was. Both things sat painfully together.

Donna saw the conflict in them and gentled a fraction.

“I’m not telling you this to make excuses for him,” she said. “He should’ve told you. I know that. And I promise you, he knows it too.”

Their eyes snapped back to hers.

“Then why are you telling me?”

Donna’s expression broke into something tired and honest.

“Because if he gets back here and you look at him and all you can see is the lie, you’ll miss the man underneath it.” She swallowed. “And he is worth seeing. Even when he’s an idiot.”

That almost got a laugh out of them. Instead they just stood there, breathing too shallowly, with the whole corridor listening and the whole world rearranging itself around the truth of one impossible man.

Donna drew a breath and kept going, as if once she had started she could not bear to leave the truth half-built.

“There’s a man called Caecilius,” she said. “Had a wife. Children. Lived in Pompeii. The Doctor saved them from the fires.”

The barista blinked.

Donna nodded once, fierce and certain. “Not everybody, he couldn’t. It was a fixed point, he couldn’t. But them, he got them out.” She didn’t pause long enough for the weight of that to settle before she pressed on. “And the Ood? Freed. The whole lot of them. The circle is broken, and now they sing because they want to. Not because someone’s forcing them.”

Her face had changed again as she spoke, more animated, more alive, as if all the fear in the corridor had found an answer in the shape of memory.

Then she cut herself off abruptly and asked, “You know ATMOS?”

The barista frowned. “Of course. Everyone knows ATMOS.”

A few of the other people in the corridor stirred faintly behind them at that. ATMOS was the kind of thing people did know. Cars. Systems. News. The sort of disaster that had become part of the collective memory of Earth, even if most people only remembered the headlines and the panic.

Donna nodded sharply. “Aliens.”

The word still hit strangely.

“Aliens built it. Nearly choked the whole planet to death.” Her mouth tightened. “He stopped it.”

The barista stared at her.

Donna looked almost bright with conviction now, warmed by the force of her own point.

“Everywhere I’ve been with him, it’s like that,” she said. “Awful things. Impossible things. Things no one should have to see. But he goes anyway. And when he gets there, he changes it. He saves people. He saves worlds. I’ve watched him end wars.” She glanced down the corridor, toward wherever the Doctor had vanished. Then she looked back at them, and her voice mellowed just enough to make the last part land cleanly.

“He is not for the faint of heart,” she said.

The corridor had gone still around her again. Even the others huddled nearby seemed to be listening intently now, frightened faces turned in their direction because in the middle of metal walls and screams and uncertainty, Donna was offering something people could hold onto.

A shape.

A reason.

“But none of us,” she said softly, “would be here without him.”

The barista looked away for a second, trying to swallow around the thickness in their throat. Because that, at least, was impossible to deny.

The barista’s voice, when it came, was quieter. “That doesn’t make him easier to trust.”

Donna nodded once, no argument in it. “No.”

“It doesn’t make the lying hurt less.”

“No.”

The honesty of that steadied something in them.

Donna shifted the EMP in her hands and added, “But it does mean when he gets back, you’ll be looking at the whole of him. Not just the worst bit.”

The barista let out a breath through their nose and looked down the corridor again, “Whole of him,” they echoed faintly.

It felt absurd that such a phrase could apply to someone who apparently carried time machines and alien invasions around like excess pocket change.

Donna almost smiled. “Well. As much of the whole as he’ll manage to spit out before he starts dodging.”

That won the smallest huff of laughter from the barista. A tiny thing, barely there, but it was enough to soften Donna’s face.

They turned away from Donna and from the blue box and from the corridor where he had disappeared, because all of it had become too much to look at directly.

It still felt like a nightmare. In the sick, floaty way of something, the mind kept insisting would snap apart any second if they just waited long enough. Any minute now, they thought, they would wake up. Maybe on the couch, maybe with the TV still on. Maybe with the second movie menu looping and their neck stiff from falling asleep against his shoulder.

Donna stepped closer and put an arm around them.

It was clumsy, not because Donna was bad at comfort, but because this sort of comfort had nowhere easy to go. They didn’t shove her away. They couldn’t quite summon the energy for that, but they didn’t lean into it either. They just stood there, rigid and exhausted, letting it happen.

After a long silence, they asked, “Why did he keep all of this from me?”

Donna was quiet for a moment, then she said, “He’s got his reasons.”

That answer landed badly enough that they turned to stare at her. Donna met the look without flinching.

“If you want answers,” she said, “interrogate him all you like when he gets back. Ask him everything. But I’m not telling his secrets for him.”

That confused them so completely that they just blinked at her. It was such an absurd line in the middle of all this that for a second they honestly looked at her like she’d grown two heads.

Donna sighed.

“I know,” she said. “I know how that sounds.”

“No, I don’t think you do.”

She winced faintly, then nodded down the corridor where the Doctor had gone. “He never wanted you dragged into any of this. Never wanted you in danger.”

Their mouth tightened.

“And that,” Donna said, a little more firmly now, “is all I’m saying on his behalf.”

The barista looked away again. For a moment, they said nothing. The corridor hummed. The other frightened people behind them shifted and whispered and tried not to listen too obviously, but they didn’t exactly have a choice. The ship still groaned around them like a living machine dreaming violent dreams.

Then, very quietly, they smiled. It was a sad little thing, barely a smile at all.

“I’m disappointed in myself,” they admitted.

Donna frowned. “Why?”

They let out a breath that might have been a laugh if there had been any humor left in it. “Because part of me is still standing here worrying about how much of him was real.”

Donna said nothing.

The barista looked down at their own hands.

“And that feels,” They searched for the word and found only bitterness. “Pathetic.”

Donna’s arm tightened slightly around them.

They shook their head. “Not because it doesn’t matter. I know it matters. It does. It hurts. It should hurt.” Their throat worked around the next words. “But we’ve just been marched through a ship by robots deciding who lives and who doesn’t, and somehow I’m still standing here thinking about every tea, every game night, every stupid little thing he ever said and wondering which parts were him and which parts were. . . whatever else he is.” Their eyes lifted to the corridor ahead again. “Like that’s the thing my brain picked.”

Donna was quiet for a long moment before she answered, “It’s not pathetic.”

The barista laughed weakly. “Feels like it.”

“No,” Donna said. “Feels human.”

That pulled their gaze back to her.

Donna’s expression had gone very steady now. “You thought you knew someone. Then the world cracked open and handed you a bigger, stranger version of them, and now you’re trying to work out whether the person you cared about was real.” She shrugged one shoulder. “That’s not pathetic. That’s what anyone would do.”

The barista’s face pinched, like they weren’t sure whether to be relieved or more upset by the kindness of that.

Donna went on, gentler now. “And for what it’s worth, the bits you’re thinking of?” She nodded vaguely, as if to encompass tea and films and cafés and all the rest. “Those are the bits I’d trust most.”

The barista frowned. “Why?”

“Because that’s the part of him he doesn’t know how to fake.”

They stared at her.

Donna continued, “The running about and the cleverness and all this,” she gave the ship a disgusted little glance, “that’s him too. But the small stuff? The way he looks at people he loves. The way he gets excited over nonsense. The way he sits in somebody’s flat and lets himself be ordinary for a bit.” She shook her head. “That’s real.”

The word hit like a bruise.

Love.

Donna had used it so naturally, so casually, that it almost slipped by unnoticed. The barista looked away before Donna could read too much in their face.

“That still doesn’t make it alright,” they said.

“No,” Donna agreed. “It doesn’t.”

For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Then the barista asked, quieter now, “Does he even have a normal name?”

Donna actually smiled at that. “Oh, now that,” she said, “you’ll have to get out of him yourself.”

That won the faintest huff of breath from them. Not laughter, but closer.

Then the ship shuddered again, harder this time.

Somewhere deeper inside, alarms rose to a new pitch. The frightened cluster of survivors tightened in on itself, and every head in the corridor turned toward the same dark stretch of hall.

Donna straightened.

And with Donna’s words still settling painfully into place, they stood in the mouth of the impossible, waiting for the Doctor to come back and show them which part of him would arrive first: the liar, the alien, or the man who had saved them.

⋆.˚✮ Notes: This is for @vexerieart, who made me smile with their kind words, bitch boosted my ego SO BAD. So I just want to return the favor, pay the smile forward. I hope this cheers you up since you’ve been sick, my love. <3

A few months had changed more than the Doctor liked to admit.

Long enough for seasons to shift at the edges of London. Long enough for habits to settle into something reliable. Long enough for one human barista in a little café to become a fixed point in his life, and for Donna Noble, brilliant, impossible Donna Noble, to stride back into it and refuse to leave again.

She had taken him up on the offer in the end.

Not the first time he had asked, not when they had stood beneath a stolen sky with her wedding dress still in her memory and all that hurt still too fresh between them. But later, when life had circled back around in the way human lives sometimes did, she had said yes. And the Tardis, which had been too quiet for too long, had filled again with Donna’s voice, Donna’s laughter, Donna telling him when he was being an idiot and refusing to let him sink too far into himself.

It was good for him, more than good.

By now, he felt full of life again in a way he had not thought possible a year ago. Like someone had opened a window in a room he had forgotten was suffocating him.

That wasn’t only Donna’s doing.

Though he would sooner fling himself into a supernova than say it aloud, some part of that healing had begun in a café, over tea and easy conversation and the quiet, persistent warmth of someone who had looked at him one lonely afternoon and decided he needed a friend.

After Donna’s rejection, after Martha’s leaving, after Astrid’s death, he had gone to a dark place.

Not all at once, that was the trick of it. The darkness had crept in slowly, through silence and empty corridors and too much time alone with his own thoughts. He had sworn off companions in that stretch of bitterness and grief. Told himself he was done. No more inviting people in. No more asking anyone to stand too close to the edges of his life. It never ended well. It only ever changed shape.

Then he had met them, and somehow, against all reason, they had coaxed life back into him. Not by asking anything impossible of him or by demanding explanations or grand gestures or pieces of himself he did not know how to give. Just by being there. By making him laugh. By pulling him into game nights, days out on the town, and silly little text conversations that made the universe seem less cold when he was away.

It had been enough.

Enough to soften him. Enough to make him reach back toward the world instead of away from it. Enough that when Donna returned, he had actually been ready to let someone in again.

Even now, though, he had kept the lie.

John. Work trips. Vague excuses. The careful fiction of being an ordinary man who travelled too much and never quite explained what he did for a living.

He was in too deep to come clean now, or so he told himself.

Really, the truth was uglier and simpler than that: he had never wanted them involved to begin with. Not truly, not in the dangerous, breathless, blood-and-fire reality of his life. He had wanted them safe, kept separate, untouched by the part of him that drew in catastrophe like a storm system.

And yet lately, more and more often, he found himself thinking about telling them. Sitting them down and tearing through every careful lie he had built, trying to rebuild whatever trust that would be shattered in the telling. Showing them the Tardis at last. Explaining that all those impossible little things they had almost noticed, all those moments he had brushed away, had roots deeper and stranger than they could imagine. Offering, God help him, to sweep them away in the blue box and let them see it all, if they wanted.

That was one part of him, the dangerous, selfish part. The part that wanted to keep them close no matter the cost.

The other part knew better, or at least, knew history.

He had lived too long not to know how these stories ended. History always repeated itself with him. Different faces, different voices, same wounds in new arrangements. He was almost mad enough to keep hoping otherwise, and perhaps that was its own kind of insanity. Because anyone who stepped aboard the Tardis was bound, sooner or later, to one of only a handful of endings.

They died and left him with grief he would carry forever.

They left him of their own choice, and he would spend years wondering when exactly it had gone wrong.

Or they stayed long enough to grow older while he did not, until one day they retired from the Tardis and he watched time take them the ordinary way instead.

That was the curse of it. Even the gentlest ending still ended in loss. So he had made a compromise with himself. A coward’s compromise, perhaps, but one he could live with.

He would go off and do what he must. Save worlds. Run headlong into danger. Keep Donna safe as best he could, though that was often like trying to contain lightning in a teacup. And when he came back to Earth, when the fighting was done and the shouting was over and the universe had been stitched together for one more day, he would visit.

As often as he could, he would keep them in his life in the only way he trusted himself to. At a distance near enough to matter, but far enough, hopefully, to spare them from becoming one more tragedy he could never quite stop reliving.

The Doctor stood at the console with one hand braced against the railing, laughing under his breath while Donna Noble paced the grating like an aggrieved union representative prepared to personally dismantle an entire civilization.

“I’m telling you now,” Donna said, jabbing a finger in his direction, “that place was a scam.”

The Doctor’s grin widened. “It wasn’t a scam.”

“It absolutely was. ‘The most innovative workforce in the Spiral Arm,’” she quoted, piling on an exaggeratedly grand voice that made him snort. “‘A shining example of labor and progress.’ Yeah? Well all I saw was a planet full of people who hated their jobs and looked like they wanted to bite their managers.”

He turned back to the console, flicking a switch with absent ease as the Tardis hummed around them. “Not all of them.”

“Most of them.”

“Some.”

“Alright, fine,” Donna said, throwing up her hands. “Enough that I noticed.”

The Doctor tilted his head concedingly. “That’s fair.”

Donna planted her hands on her hips, still fuming. “And another thing, PTO.”

He looked over at her. “Pardon?”

“They had it in their contracts,” she said, still marching back and forth, her voice climbing again with fresh outrage. “Properly written down. Owed to them, and still they had to fight tooth and nail to get permission to use it.”

The Doctor gave a sympathetic wince.

“And don’t get me started on the docked pay.”

“Donna.”

“No, because I am serious.” She rounded on him fully now. “Docked pay for lunch. Docked pay for bathroom breaks. Bathroom breaks, Doctor! What are they meant to do, explode politely on company time?”

That made him laugh outright, bright and helpless.

Donna pointed at him again. “Don’t laugh.”

“I’m not laughing at you.”

“You are.”

“I’m laughing at the phrase ‘explode politely.’”

“Well, good, because that’s what they expected.”

The Doctor leaned back against the console, still smiling. “To be fair, in that particular corner of the universe, in that period of time, it was still a relatively new labor system. They were working out the kinks.”

“The kinks?” Donna stared at him.

“Yes.”

“The kinks were worker exploitation.”

He lifted one shoulder. “Temporarily.”

She made a sound of deep offense. “Oh, well, that’s alright then.”

He kept going anyway, because it was too much fun winding her up. “In a few thousand years, they'll fix all of it. Better protections, better pay, properly enforced leave, the whole lot. Eventually, they do become exactly what they boast about.”

Donna folded her arms. “Then you should’ve brought me there.”

The Doctor blinked. “What?”

“To the planet when it was sorted,” she said, as if this were the most obvious correction in the world. “Not in the middle of all the rubbish version.”

He smiled despite himself and turned a dial. “Couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

He glanced at her, already knowing she would hate the answer. “Because the annual festival still wasn’t celebrated then.”

Donna’s mouth fell open in disbelief, then she barked, “Oh, that’s rubbish.”

“It is not rubbish.”The Doctor laughed again, delighted now.

“It is! You’re telling me you dragged me halfway across the universe to a planet full of miserable office workers because you wanted to see a parade?”

“It was a very good parade.”

“It had floating balloons.”

“They were sentient lantern-whales, Donna.”

“They were balloons with opinions.”

The Doctor grinned, hands flying lightly over the controls while she continued muttering to herself.

“And the food,” Donna added darkly, not nearly done. “You said the food would be worth it.”

“It was worth it.”

“No it wasn’t.”

“You had three helpings.”

“That’s because I was starving.”

“You had dessert.”

“I was being polite.”

The Doctor actually had to look away for a second, smiling to himself as he adjusted the monitor. Donna watched him, narrowed her eyes, and then huffed a laugh of her own despite all her complaining.

“You know what your problem is?” she said.

“Go on.”

“You think sticking a festival on top of something makes it charming.”

He turned back to her, eyebrows raised. “Doesn’t it?”

“No.”

“Bit.”

“No.”

He smiled wider. “Definitely bit.”

“Rubbish.” She spat, though she was smiling herself.

The Doctor felt the faint buzz of his phone against his pocket. He knew who it was before he even reached for it. The only number saved in that phone.

That alone was enough to shift something in his expression, only slightly, but there all the same. He cleared his throat, smoothing over the moment before Donna could clock it too obviously, and turned back to the console with studied casualness.

“Donna,” he said, a touch too brightly, “fancy popping in to see your family for a quick visit?”

Donna, who had been only half pretending not to sulk anymore, perked, “Grandad?”

Her whole face softened with immediate interest, all righteous annoyance with alien labor systems vanishing beneath the much more important prospect of Wilf. 

“Yeah, alright,” she said, already sounding lighter. “He’ll be dead excited to hear about the last few trips.”

The Doctor nodded, leaning one hip against the console. “Thought he might.”

Donna crossed her arms, but the edge had gone from her posture now, replaced by the restless little energy she always got when home was suddenly within reach. “And anyway, someone’s got to appreciate my suffering on the planet of miserable office workers.”

“You did suffer nobly.”

“I did, yeah.”

The Doctor grinned, then, because he couldn’t resist, added, “And of course, you’d get to see your mother as well.”

“Oh yeah,” she said. Donna’s expression flattened instantly. “Meh.”

That made him laugh.

She pointed at him. “Don’t start. You know what she’s like.”

“I do, yes.”

“She’ll ask where I’ve been, then ignore the answer, then complain I don’t visit enough.”

“She loves you.”

“I know she loves me,” Donna said, already rolling her eyes. “Doesn’t make her less hard work.”

The Doctor’s smile only deepened.

Donna gave a dramatic sigh, but there was no real complaint in it. “Alright. Fine. Give me a bit first, yeah? I’m not turning up at Mum’s looking like I’ve been dragged through three galaxies.”

He glanced at her hair, then at the state of her jacket, and wisely said, “Fair.”

She made a face at him. “Cheek.”

Then, already half turning toward the corridor, she added, “I’m having a shower and changing first. If Grandad gets adventure stories, he’s getting the polished version of me, thanks.”

The Doctor nodded. “Take your time.”

Donna disappeared down the corridor toward her room, muttering something to herself about alien dust and how she still thought the office-worker planet had been a waste of perfectly good daylight.

The Doctor waited until she was fully out of sight. Then he let the smile he’d been trying not to show spread properly across his face.

He slipped the phone from his pocket at last andleaned back against the console, one ankle crossing over the other while he flipped open the little phone in his hand.

The screen glowed faintly against the blue-green light of the console room.

A message blinked up at him.

Out of town? Wanna do a movie night or something soon?

His smile came quickly and without permission. There it was again, that warm little lift in his chest he never quite managed to prepare for, no matter how often it happened. He stared at the message for a second longer than necessary, thumb hovering over the keys.

Then he typed back.

Am out of town at the moment, yes. Movie night depends entirely on what film you’ve got in mind.

He hit send, and a response came back almost immediately.

:( You work too much

The Doctor let out a soft breath of amusement through his nose, gaze lingering on the words. He knew what that meant, or at least, he suspected he did.

‘You’re gone too often. I miss you. Come back soon.’

His grin widened, smaller this time, softer. Before he could overthink it, he typed:

Miss you too.

The second he sent it, he made a face at himself.

“Oh, smooth,” he muttered under his breath. He immediately tapped out another message, barreling past his own honesty as quickly as possible.

So. What movie are we talking about, then?

He stared at the screen, waiting.

No answer.

The Doctor’s smile faded into something more uncertain. He shifted his weight against the console and glanced down the corridor toward Donna’s room, suddenly seized by the ridiculous worry that she might reappear at exactly the wrong moment and demand to know why he looked like a teenager hiding contraband.

With no sign of her, he looked back at the phone, still nothing. A full minute passed.

His mouth tightened.

Had that been too much? Too obvious? Too strange? Humans were difficult enough in person; over text they became a minefield of silences and timing and read-between-the-lines terrors.

The Doctor checked down the corridor again, just to be certain Donna wasn’t doubling back for some forgotten question.

Then, finally, the phone buzzed in his hand.

Didn’t have anything specific in mind tbh

The Doctor let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding and smiled to himself, equal parts relieved and faintly annoyed at how quickly he had managed to work himself into nerves over a perfectly ordinary reply.

He typed back almost immediately.

Thinking cinema or staying in?

The reply came fast this time, bright and decisive.

Staying in 100%. There were school girls outside the shop doing a fundraiser and selling flavored popcorn. I bought three bags.

The Doctor smiled before he’d even read the rest of it.

Three?

Don’t judge me.

He did, a little. Not enough to stop smiling. His thumbs moved over the keypad again.

What flavors?

Truthfully, he did not much care about the answer itself. Popcorn was popcorn, in his opinion, useful as a vehicle for salt and very little else. But asking felt right. The sort of question that kept them talking.

And they did, enthusiastically.

Classic butter, obviously. A cheesy one because I was curious And a candied one that looked weirdly interesting

He could practically hear them saying it, that bright little current of excitement threading through the words. Before he could answer, another message arrived.

So definitely a night in.

Then another.

Blankets.

Another.

Pillow fort maybe??

Another.

Lights out except for little lamps or the fairy lights

Another.

And proper food too! not just popcorn I’m not an animal

The Doctor laughed softly under his breath. The messages kept coming.

Like actual takeaway or pizza or something? Actually no pizza, ive had too much lately blugh Full home theatre experience I could even move the coffee table This is becoming an event now

With every buzz of the phone against his palm, his smile widened.

It was ridiculous, really, how easily they could do this to him. How a few excited texts about popcorn and blanket forts could make the whole of him feel warmer, lighter, more absurdly fond than any sensible man ought to.

He leaned more comfortably against the console, eyes flicking over each new message as though there might be some hidden treasure in them beyond the obvious one: that they wanted him there. That they were building the evening in their mind and fitting him neatly into it.

His thumbs hovered for a moment before he finally replied.

You’ve planned everything except the actual film.

There was a short pause.

Then:

Details.

He laughed again.

That is the one detail a movie night traditionally requires.

No it doesn’t. Vibes are more important.

You cannot watch vibes for two hours.

Watch me.

The Doctor shook his head, grin full and boyish now, and tapped out:

You are deeply unserious.

And yet you keep texting me.

That made him pause just long enough for that familiar, fluttering warmth to settle a little deeper in his chest. Then he smiled to himself and typed back:

Someone has to keep this operation organised.

Wow. Rude. I’m bringing the popcorn and the fort-building skills You can bring your weirdly strong opinions about films

He could not even argue with that.

I do have very strong opinions about films.

I know. That’s part of the charm.

The Doctor stared at that one for a beat longer than the others, then glanced once more down the corridor on instinct, as though Donna might somehow emerge and catch him smiling at his phone like an idiot.

Still clear.

He looked back down to the buzz of another text.

So are you in or not, johnny????

His grin softened at the nickname, even if it wasn’t his actual name.

I’m in. Provided you choose a film that doesn’t make me despair for the future of cinema.

Their response was immediate.

No promises.

I’ll text you when I’m back in town. Pick the film by then.

The response came quickly, full of mock offense.

I always do the planning. You should try it sometime.

The Doctor snorted softly.

It was your idea. You plan. I’m merely a guest.

A beat later, another message buzzed in.

Merely a guest?? Wow.

His grin widened.

When you drag me into your schemes, you plan them. When I take you out, I plan it.

That is just arguing semantics.

The Doctor laughed under his breath, leaning one shoulder more fully into the console. He let them have the last word on that and shifted the conversation instead.

How was work?

This time the reply took longer.

He waited, flipping the phone shut and open again once before it finally buzzed in his hand with a long block of text.

Actually kind of madHad to train a new girl today and she was lovelygenuinely really funny >:( but it was the busiest day of the week and my manager only put the two of us on the morning shift

So basically I was working alone while trying to teach someone else at the same time Like throwing her in the deep end and telling her to learn to swim while sharks circle

The Doctor frowned as he read.

He could picture it too easily, them rushed off their feet, trying to smile through stress and customers and broken rhythms, taking on too much because there was no one else to do it. His thumb hovered over the keys for a moment before he typed back.

That sounds awful. sorry

Their answer came after only a few seconds.

It honestly ended up being a really good day tho She kept cracking jokes and keeping spirits up It was mostly just the morning rush that was bad

The Doctor’s frown eased. He leaned back again, relieved, already starting to compose some answer about them having a talent for surviving chaos when the phone buzzed once more.

Thanks for worrying about me tho How’s your work trip going?

He stared at that first line a moment too long.

‘Thanks for worrying about me.’ Something in it caught under his ribs, warm enough to leave him smiling at the screen before the second half of the message landed fully.

How’s your work trip going?

The smile faded into thought.

The Doctor glanced instinctively down the corridor, toward where Donna had disappeared. No sign of her yet. Just the soft hum of the Tardis and the quiet weight of the phone in his hand.

He did not want to lie to them, not more than he already had. Lately he had taken to avoiding it where he could, sidestepping instead, telling half-truths rather than complete inventions. It didn’t fix anything, not really, but it eased the guilt enough to let him sleep. 

So he typed:

Not bad, actually. Got a coworker traveling with me lately, Donna. She’s a bit of a spitfire, keeps things from getting dull.

He looked at the message before sending it. Not untrue, not even mostly untrue. He sent it and waited, turning the phone over once in his hand.

The reply came fast.

Donna sounds terrifying.

The Doctor laughed aloud.

Often. But mostly brilliant.

Another buzz.

You attract intense people.

His eyes flicked over that one, and the corner of his mouth lifted again.

Takes one to know one.

Rude. Accurate but rude

He shook his head, smiling helplessly now, the earlier tension easing away again as the conversation slipped back into its usual rhythm.

Any ETA for when you’ll be back in town?

The Doctor’s thumb hovered over the keys.

For him, if he wanted, he could be at their flat within the hour. Sooner, probably, as soon as Donna was settled at home and he could make an excuse to get back to the Tardis without her. He could set the coordinates, skim through the vortex, and knock on their door before the tea in their kettle had properly cooled.

Instead, he glanced up at the console.

One of the clocks had been set to their local time for so long now that he no longer even thought about it being there. He checked it, did the tiny bit of arithmetic required to make the answer sound normal, then looked back down at the phone.

Should be back Saturday. What time do you want me at your place?

He sent it, and the response came back almost immediately, bright enough that he could feel the energy of it through the screen.

Finally!! I haven’t seen you in nearly a week

The Doctor frowned at that. A week?

For them, yes, of course.

He looked up at the console again, at the clock ticking dutifully onward in their time, and felt that familiar little jolt of dislocation. It hadn’t felt like a week to him. Not remotely, not even three full days, really, depending on how one counted a labor dispute on an alien world and the long way back through Donna Noble’s opinions.

And yet at the same time, it felt like years.

That was the trouble with missing someone. Time became slippery around it. Too short and too long all at once.

The phone buzzed again.

Stop by whenever works for you

That softened something in him immediately.

No fussing over exact times, no pretending indifference, just the easy permission to arrive. The sort of thing that should have felt ordinary by now and somehow never did.

He smiled faintly, reading the first message once more.

I haven’t seen you in nearly a week.

The Doctor leaned back against the console, expression turning quieter. For them, nearly a week had passed. For him, barely any time at all.

And still, somehow, he understood exactly what they meant. Because he had been feeling the same strange stretch of absence from the opposite side of it, carrying them in the back of his mind through planets and corridors and Donna’s endless commentary, with that odd sensation that no matter how busy he kept himself, some part of him remained pointed stubbornly toward Earth.

Toward them. His thumb moved over the keys again.

Saturday it is, then.

He sent it before he could sit with the sentiment too long, then looked down the corridor once more, listening for Donna.

Still nothing.

Just the Tardis humming around him and the little phone in his hand, holding open this ridiculous, fragile second life he had built for himself, one where he lied and missed people and counted days in two directions at once.

It took them so long to answer that the Doctor eventually assumed the conversation had run its course.

He checked the clock again, and it was late enough that they were probably getting ready for bed by now. He smiled to himself at the thought and snapped the phone shut.

Crossing the console room, he moved toward the little spot where he kept the charger for it tucked among various bits of technology that looked far more advanced and infinitely less beloved. He plugged the phone in, watching the tiny screen light up faintly as it began to charge.

And because his mind was unhelpful, it wandered at once to the one time he had actually seen their night routine play out.

There had been a storm that evening, rain hammering the windows hard enough to turn the street outside into a blur of reflected streetlamps and black glass. He had made some token protest about walking back in it, and they had looked at him as if he were stupid and told him to crash on the couch because they weren’t about to let him go stumbling through a downpour at that hour.

So he had stayed, and from the safe, ordinary distance of their living room, he had watched them wind down for the night.

They had made tea in the little kitchen while the storm muttered beyond the windows. Changed into comfortable pajamas that somehow made them look softer and younger and even more impossible to leave. Curled up for a while with a book, legs tucked beneath them, reading until a yawn finally stole over them and they blinked at the page as though betrayed by their own exhaustion.

Then they had said goodnight, easy and fond and utterly trusting, and disappeared down the hall while he remained on the couch with a blanket and two hearts that had felt far too full for such a small, human evening.

It had been intimate in a way he had not expected. 

Now, as he stood in the glow of the console lights, he found himself imagining them doing it all again tonight. Tea in hand, hair mussed from a shower perhaps. Smiling a little to themself while thinking of him and Saturday.

The thought made his own mouth soften into a helpless smile.

Then the phone buzzed.

The Doctor turned back, unplugging it almost immediately, and flipped it open.

Sorry. Spilled my tea and had to clean it up.

He laughed under his breath. Thumb moving quickly now, he typed back:

Clumsy. I assumed you’d gone to bed.

He sent it, still smiling, and leaned one shoulder against the console again while he waited for whatever ridiculous defense they were about to mount on behalf of their tea.

Nah not yet I got up to check what films I already had on the shelf so I could ask your opinion And then tripped over the rug like an idiot

The Doctor let out a quiet laugh, the sound escaping before he could stop it.

He could picture it far too easily. The little flat half-lit and drowsy, them padding about in socks or bare feet, distracted by the thought of Saturday, only to catch the edge of the rug and go down in a heap with a muttered curse and a cup of tea in hand.

He shook his head to himself and typed.

Did you burn yourself?

The answer came quickly.

No But my rug is suffering

He smiled.

Tragic. A terrible loss.

A pause, then another message appeared.

Wait I want to show you something

He straightened a little. Before he could respond, the phone buzzed again with the arrival of a photo.

The Doctor stared down at the tiny, grainy image. The old flip phone’s graphics were still rubbish, even after he’d done what he could to improve them, all muddied shadows and softened edges. But he knew that room instantly anyway.

Their living room. The entertainment center beneath the television. The familiar clutter of shelves and consoles. The lamp in the corner casting that same warm amber glow.

But the camera was angled slightly higher, focused on the wall above the TV.

And there was his painting. The one he had made of them in the museum months ago. The dreadful, orange-tinted, uneven little portrait he had nearly died of embarrassment over. The one they had laughed at and insisted they liked. The one they’d said they were “looking for a place to put,” after it had sat in their room for far longer than he’d expected.

It was hanging there now, centered above the television where a poster had been for as long as he had known their flat.

For a moment he simply stared at the little photo, the low-quality screen doing nothing to soften the impact of it. His ridiculous painting, framed by the shape of their life. Placed somewhere visible.  His mouth parted slightly, but no sound came out.

Without meaning to, his thoughts jumped at once to his own room aboard the Tardis, to the portrait they had painted of him. That one had gone beside the bed, the one his timelord biology rarely required him to use. He had told himself it was only because he liked it. Because it was good, because it was theirs.

His thumb hovered uselessly over the keypad.

He remembered asking them once what they’d done with his painting after the museum. They’d shrugged it off, said they were still figuring out where to put it, and he’d thought no more of it beyond a quiet, selfish hope that they hadn’t thrown it in a drawer out of mercy. But they had hung it in the living room.

Somewhere they would see it every day. Somewhere anyone who visited might ask about it. The thought made something warm and painful twist through his chest.

His phone buzzed again.

I finally hung it up Thought you should know

The Doctor read that twice. His expression softened into something helpless, almost boyish in its openness, and he leaned back against the console as though the strength had gone briefly out of his knees.

He typed, erased it. Tried again. Erased that too. Nothing he came up with felt equal to the quiet enormity of what they had shown him.

At last, slowly, he managed:

You hung it up.

It felt stupidly obvious, but it was all he had. Their reply came back with quick affection woven through it, even in text.

Yeah I like it so duh Gonna miss my poster tho But sacrifices must be made

The Doctor laughed very softly. His eyes drifted back to the photo of his horrendous work of art. He swallowed once and typed:

It’s terrible.

They answered immediately.

It’s mine.

For a long moment he didn’t move at all, just stood there in the humming heart of the Tardis with the tiny phone in his hand and that picture glowing on the screen, feeling something in him go dangerously soft.

Because of course they had kept it, of course they had found a place for it. And of course, though he had no right to want this, some treacherous part of him thrilled at the thought of that painting hanging in their home while the portrait they had made of him watched over his bed aboard the Tardis.

As if each of them had carried a version of the other away and quietly made space for it.

His thumb finally moved again.

I’m glad.

He hesitated, then added:

Looks good there.

This time their response took a little longer, and when it came, it was brief.

Yeah It does

The Doctor smiled at the screen for a second too long, already knowing he would look at that blurry little photo again later, and later still, until he knew every pixel of it by heart.

“What’re you doing?” Donna’s voice cut across the console room so suddenly that the Doctor nearly jumped out of his skin.

He jerked around, snapping the phone shut and making a very obvious attempt to slip it back into his pocket as though that might somehow qualify as casual.

“Nothing,” he said. Which, unfortunately, was the least convincing possible answer.

Donna stood at the edge of the grating, fresh from the shower and changed into clean clothes, her hair still a bit damp around the edges. She looked comfortable, refreshed, and instantly suspicious.

Her eyes narrowed.

“Nothing,” she repeated.

The Doctor straightened beside the console and busied himself with adjusting a dial that did not need adjusting. “That’s what I said.”

Donna didn’t move for a second. She just looked at him with the sort of expression that a mother gives when they ask you about school, but knows you’re lying cause your teacher already rang home about your behavior. Then she started toward him.

“Hang on,” she said. “Since when have you got a mobile?”

The Doctor shrugged one shoulder without looking at her. “Had it a while.”

“A while.” Donna stopped dead.

“Yes.”

“And I didn’t know?”

He flicked another switch. “Apparently not.”

Donna stared at him in growing outrage. “You’ve got a secret phone?”

“It isn’t secret.”

“It is if I didn’t know about it! You hid it in your pocket.”

The Doctor turned, face set in a look of exaggerated patience. “Donna, I’m allowed to own a phone.”

“That’s not the point.”

“It rather feels like the point.”

She jabbed a finger at his pocket. “You were texting someone.”

“No, I wasn’t.”

Donna’s mouth fell open. “Oh, don’t insult me. I literally walked in and watched you panic.”

“I did not panic.”

“You did that thing with your face.”

“What thing?”

“That guilty thing.”

The Doctor looked deeply offended. “I don’t have a guilty thing.”

“You absolutely do.”

He folded his arms. “You’re imagining it.”

Donna gave a short, disbelieving laugh and moved in closer, peering at him like she might be able to spot the truth written under his skin if she got near enough.

“Who is it?” she demanded.

“No one.”

“No one,” Donna repeated flatly. “Right. And that’s why you looked like I’d caught you snogging behind the bike sheds.”

The Doctor choked. “Donna!”

“Well you did!”

He turned away from her immediately, making a show of fiddling with the console again. “You’re being ridiculous.”

“No, I’m being observant.”

“You’re being nosy.”

“I’m your friend. It’s my job.”

The Doctor made a quiet, affronted noise under his breath. Donna crossed her arms and leaned one hip against the console, settling in with the unmistakable air of a woman who had no intention of letting this go until she had every last detail.

“I didn’t know you even had a phone,” she said. “That alone is suspicious.”

“It’s not suspicious.”

“It is when you’re grinning at it like a teenager.”

The Doctor froze for the smallest fraction of a second, big mistake, cause donna saw.

Her eyes widened in triumph. “Oh my God.”

“No.”

“Oh my God, there is someone.”

“There isn’t.”

“There absolutely is.”

He turned back to her with a glare that would have made lesser people back off immediately. Donna Noble, of course, was not lesser people.

“Donna,” he said through gritted teeth.

She leaned forward slightly, eyes bright now with delight. “Who are you texting?”

The Doctor’s jaw worked once. “No one important.”

That was the wrong thing to say.

“Oh, that is a lie,” she said, almost reverently.

“It is not.”

“It so is. You can’t even look at me properly.”

“I can look at you perfectly well.”

“Then do it.”

He did, for one full second, then his gaze slid away again.

Donna clapped a hand over her mouth, scandalized. “Doctor.”

He shut his eyes briefly, already regretting every choice that had led him to this moment.

“What?”

“You’re texting someone.”

“I am not, ”

“You are, and we’ve covered that. So you can't exactly deny it now.” Donna’s suspicion sharpened into certainty so fast it was practically visible.

“Well,” she said slowly, drawing the word out in a way that was instantly, viciously familiar, “this is interesting.”

The Doctor pointed at her. “Don’t.”

She gasped. “You do say it like that!”

He dropped his hand, momentarily betrayed by the universe itself.

Donna grinned, now fully enjoying herself. “Who is it?”

“No one.”

“Is it a woman?”

“No.”

She blinked. “A man?”

“No!”

“Then who?”

The Doctor exhaled hard through his nose and looked toward the corridor as if escape might somehow present itself if he believed in it strongly enough.

Donna followed the glance and snorted. “Oh no you don’t. You are not running off. You were clearly texting someone, you’ve got a secret phone, and now you’re acting weird.”

“I always act weird.”

“Not like this.”

He shoved his hands into his pockets, as though burying them might hide the problem. Donna’s eyes flicked to the pocket with the phone, then back to his face. Her expression softened just a fraction, not less curious, but a touch less combative.

“Doctor,” she said, gentler now. “Who is it?”

He looked at her and saw, beneath all the nosiness and delight and barely-contained interrogation, the real concern. Curiosity, yes, but not cruelty. Donna wanted to know because she cared, because she had noticed something shifting in him and intended to drag it into daylight. Donna caught the hesitation in his expression and immediately stepped in on it.

“Aha.”

The Doctor groaned. “Oh, for-”

“You hesitated.”

“I did not.”

“You did.”

He dragged a hand over his face. “Donna.” He drew out her name, exasperated. But she was already off again, circling him like a detective who had found the first proper clue.

“You’ve been disappearing off on your own every time we come back to Earth,” she said, more to herself now than to him. “Always saying you’ve got something to do. And the phone-”

“There is nothing strange about me having a phone.”

“There is when you’re you.”

He made a face at that.

Donna’s eyes narrowed further, mind clearly racing now. “And all those little detours before we land…”

The Doctor went very still. There it was, he saw the exact moment the pieces began to move in her clever head.

Donna gasped. Not a small gasp, not a quiet little intake of breath, one of her full-bodied, morally offended gasps, the kind that suggested someone, somewhere, had committed a personal crime against her.

“Oh my God.”

The Doctor did not react. Or rather, he reacted by immediately becoming very interested in the console. He moved around it with brisk purpose, all long strides and fixed attention, as though inputting coordinates required every ounce of his concentration.

Donna pointed at him anyway.

“You’re seeing someone.”

He said nothing. That silence was, to Donna Noble, louder than any confession.

“You are,” she said again, voice climbing in disbelief as she followed him around the console. “You are seeing someone and you didn’t tell me.”

The Doctor kept his mouth firmly shut and reached for a lever, then a dial, then another switch. Anything to avoid answering.

“Unbelievable.” Donna’s eyes widened further with every second of non-response.

Still nothing. He keyed in the coordinates for her mother’s house with studied precision, face set into that maddeningly blank expression he wore when he thought silence could save him.

It could not. Not from Donna at least.

“Oi,” she barked, in that very specific Donna Noble cadence that could stop traffic and probably lesser gods. “Don’t you ‘silent treatment’ me, spaceman.”

The Doctor winced, but did not turn around.

She came closer, arms folded now, wounded outrage written all over her face. “Keeping your secret lover a secret from me of all people.”

He spun around so fast the coat tails swished.

“They are not my lover,” he snapped. “Or anything like that.”

Donna froze. The words hung in the console room, sharp and sudden.

The Doctor’s expression shifted almost immediately afterward, anger giving way to the familiar look of a man who regretted speaking the second he’d done it. He looked away, jaw tightening, and turned back to the controls.

The Tardis groaned faintly as he readied her for takeoff.

Donna just stared at him, because of the way he’d denied it. Fast and sharp and defensive. And underneath all of that, plain as day to anyone who knew him even half as well as she now did, was the bruised edge of something else he’d refuse to speak of..

Donna’s outrage softened into understanding so quickly it almost hurt. He wasn’t hiding a grand romance; he was pining, the poor idiot.

She watched him for another second, taking in the rigid line of his shoulders, the way he kept his face turned away from her, how very carefully he was pretending to be occupied. And because Donna Noble was many things but never stupid, the shape of it came together in her mind all at once, close enough to the truth to sting.

There was someone.

Someone human, probably, if she were guessing by the way he’d gone all strange and soft and secretive about Earth. Someone he kept slipping off to see when he brought her home to visit. Someone important enough that just texting them made him grin like a teenager, but distant enough, or complicated enough, that he’d snapped the second she called them his lover.

Which meant he wanted them and didn’t have them.

Donna’s heart sank a little for him.

Because suddenly it was all there. The hidden phone. The vanished hours. The ridiculous expression on his face when she’d caught him. And beneath all of it, the same old Doctor ache she was beginning to recognize too well: wanting something he was already halfway convinced he couldn’t keep.

She felt sorry for him then.

The Doctor kept working the controls, studiously ignoring her.

Donna let him have the silence for a few beats.

Then, much gentler than before, she said, “Oh, Doctor.”

He didn’t answer.

Donna watched him for a long moment while the Tardis groaned into motion around them.

Then, quieter now, she asked, “Are you going to see them after you drop me off?”

His eyes flicked up to hers and then away again so quickly it might have meant nothing to anyone else. To Donna, it meant everything. There was shame in it, almost painfully plain. 

Donna’s voice softened further. “Why keep them secret?”

Still nothing.

The Doctor’s hand moved over the console, fingers tightening slightly on a dial as though the Tardis might save him if he just kept flying her hard enough. He looked anywhere but at Donna, at the monitor, at the rotor, at a switch that absolutely did not need adjusting.

Donna stepped closer and without fanfare, she laid her hand over his. The whole of him seemed to go still at once, every restless bit of motion abruptly stilled beneath that small touch.

“Doctor,” Donna said softly. Her hand stayed where it was, firm and grounding, and when she spoke again her voice had gone almost motherly, gentle, steady, with none of the earlier teasing left in it.

“I already know something is going on,” she said. “So there’s no point bottling it all up like you always do.”

The Doctor’s face tightened as though holding himself together had suddenly become more difficult than before. Donna could see the conflict moving across his features in little flashes, the instinct to shut down, to joke, to deflect, to run. All of it warring with the awful relief of being seen anyway.

“You don’t have to tell me every detail,” she went on. “Not if you don’t want to. But don’t stand there acting like you’ve got to carry all of it by yourself.”

His hand shifted slightly under hers, not pulling away, just uncertain. The Doctor finally looked at her properly then. And written all over his face in a way he probably thought he was hiding: the fear, the wanting, the guilt. A whole storm of it all.

“Oh, sweetheart,” she murmured, the words slipping out before she could stop them.

He let out a breath through his nose, something close to a laugh and nowhere near one. “Don’t.”

“I’m serious.”

“That’s worse.”

“Good.” Her thumb moved once against the back of his hand. “Means you might actually listen.”

He looked away again, but not as sharply this time. 

Donna kept her voice low. “You like them.”

The Doctor said nothing, but he didn’t have to; it was in his eyes.

Donna nodded to herself, sad and fond all at once. “Yeah.”

The Tardis thrummed around them, steady as a heartbeat. For a second it seemed he still might refuse. Might close up again and leave her with silence and half-glances and all the rest of it.

But when he spoke, his voice came out quieter than she expected.

“It’s complicated.”

Donna’s hand stayed over his. “Course it is.”

He gave a tiny shake of his head, eyes fixed on the console. “No, you don’t understand.”

“Then help me out.”

That made his mouth tighten. He hesitated for so long she thought he might stop there.

Then, very softly, he said, “They think I’m human.”

Donna blinked. “Human?”

“A man with a job. Too many work trips. A mobile phone.” His mouth twisted faintly at that, bitter and self-aware. “Just ordinary.”

Donna stared at him for a beat, “You never told them?”

The Doctor shook his head once.

And suddenly Donna understood the depth of it, not just a crush, not just a hidden person on Earth he’d gone all moon-eyed over, but a whole lie laid carefully between them and tended for months because he hadn’t known how to do anything else.

“Oh, Doctor.”

“I know.”

“No, you really don’t.”

He laughed again, brittle this time. “I do, actually. I know exactly how bad it sounds.”

Donna watched him, all sharp edges and tired eyes and centuries of damage wrapped up in one impossible man, and felt her heart squeeze for him.

“Why?” she asked gently. “Why hide all that from them?”

His face went still, “Because I didn’t want them involved.” He kept going now, because once he had started, it was all too close to the surface to stop. “I didn’t want them in danger. Didn’t want them looking at my life and thinking it was exciting or grand or worth stepping into.” His jaw worked once. “And I didn’t want. . . ” He stopped, then forced it the rest out anyway. “I didn’t want to lose them.”

Donna’s hand tightened over his. He finally turned his head just enough to meet her eyes again, and there was something so raw in his expression that Donna’s throat tightened.

“They’re safe like this,” he said. “I visit. I leave. They stay out of it.”

“And you’re miserable.”

The Doctor looked away.

Donna sighed softly. “Oh, spaceman.”

He flinched at that just a little, enough that she knew she’d hit the mark.

“You can’t keep someone at arm’s length and then act surprised when it hurts,” she said. “Not if you care about them this much.”

His voice dropped almost to nothing. “What am I supposed to do?”

Donna didn’t answer right away.

Because that, unfortunately, was the question. She could see it all over him, the way he wanted the answer to be impossible, because impossible was safer than hope.

So she gentled her hand over his once more and said the only true thing she had, “You don’t have to decide it all tonight.”

The Doctor almost folded in on himself. Donna could see it in the way his shoulders curved forward, the way his free hand came up to drag across his mouth, the way his thoughts seemed to catch and circle and catch again faster than he could sort them.

“It’s not just,” He broke off, shook his head, and started again, quieter. “It’s not just that I like them.”

Donna said nothing, only waited. Now that he had started, he was no longer talking to avoid the truth. He was talking because it had built up too long, and there was no tidy place to put it now that Donna had opened the box.

“I’m comfortable there,” he said. “With them. It’s just simple.” His mouth twisted faintly, helplessly. “Or it feels simple. Their flat, tea, terrible films, takeaway, just quality time. Nothing exploding, no one pointing anything at me, no one expecting me to save a planet before supper.”

Donna’s face softened.

“And I keep,” He laughed once under his breath, but it was brittle. “I keep falling for it. With being simply human. Or as close as I can get. Just John. Just a bloke showing up for game night.”

He looked away, jaw tightening.

“And even if I kept it up,” he went on, words starting to tumble now, “even if everything somehow went perfectly and I never slipped and they never asked the wrong question and I managed to keep the lie going, what then?”

Donna stayed still, her hand on his, grounding him while he spiraled.

“They’d age,” he said. “Sooner or later enough to notice I’m not. Not properly. Not the same way.” He swallowed. “Or worse.”

“What if I regenerate?” His voice thinned around it.

Donna looked at him like he’d suggested something impossible.

“What am I meant to say then?” he asked, the question aimed somewhere beyond her, beyond the room. “How do I explain that I’m the same man when I’ve got a different face? Different body, different voice, whole different everything? How do I ask them to believe that? To trust me after all the lying before I even get to that part?”

His eyes shut briefly.

“And if I can’t, if I’m too much of a coward to tell them then, what do they think when I go off for ‘work’ and never come back?” His voice dropped lower. “What are they meant to do with that?”

Donna felt her chest ache watching him stripped of all his cleverness, and having it replaced by not just fear of the truth, but fear of leaving a wound behind in someone he cared about. Fear of becoming a ghost in their life because he had not been brave enough to be a real person in it.

“I’ve been selfish,” he said.

Donna frowned. “Doctor, ”

“No, I have.” He shook his head hard. “Letting it get this far. Letting them matter like this when I knew- when I should’ve known better.”

He stopped, then said more quietly, “I’d just been alone so long after Martha.”

Donna’s brow pinched. She looked at him more carefully. “How long exactly were you on your own after Martha went home?”

He hesitated. Then, because Donna had never once made honesty feel like a trap, he answered.

“A few months.”

Donna nodded slowly.

“And then I met Astrid.”

The name was unfamiliar, but the way he said it told her enough already. He stared at the console while he spoke, eyes fixed on nothing.

“She was a waitress,” he said softly. “On a cruise ship. In space.” The ghost of a smile tried to touch his mouth and failed. “Brilliant. Funny. Bold as anything. She was going to come with me.”

Donna’s expression changed when the Doctor stopped there.

Donna’s hand tightened over his. “She died.”

His face gave him away, the old pain in it, still fresh-edged somehow, still raw enough that even now he couldn’t shape the words himself.

“Oh, Doctor,” Donna said quietly.

He gave the tiniest nod, admitting it without having to say it aloud. Then he pushed on, because stopping there would hurt too much.

“After that,” he said, voice flatter now, worn thin by memory, “I was on my own nearly a year.”

A year.

Donna let that settle.

And she could see it suddenly, the shape of what those months must have done to him. Martha leaving because she had to choose herself. Astrid gone before she’d even had the chance to stay. A year of corridors and stars and no one to talk to but himself.

Then he gave a small, humorless breath. “And then I stopped for tea.”

Donna almost smiled through the sadness of it.

“Tea,” she repeated.

He nodded once. “Tea. I met them by chance,” he said. “Didn’t mean for any of it to happen. I just went in because I didn’t want to feel like that for one more hour.”

Donna said nothing.

He looked down at their joined hands, though he was clearly seeing some little café instead of the console room.

“I didn’t want to make the same mess of it I had with Martha,” he admitted. “Didn’t want to stand there again while someone cared too much and I had nothing honest to give back. Didn’t want to lose them the way I lost Astrid. Or Rose. Or any of the others.”

He drew in a breath and let it out slowly, “But then I wanted to see them again.” The words were simple but devastating.

“And once I did, that should’ve been it, shouldn’t it? I should’ve pulled away. Kept it brief. Left it alone.” He laughed under his breath, bitterly fond. “Instead I kept coming back. Tea, then chats, then game nights, then museums and birthdays and all the rest of it. And every time I thought this is enough, leave it here, I’d turn around and want one more hour.”

Donna watched him, heart sore with it.

“So the lie kept going,” he said. “Deeper and deeper, and every time I should’ve stopped it I told myself it was kinder this way. Safer. Easier on them.”

He looked at her then, finally, and there was so much conflict in his face Donna nearly reached up to smooth it away like he was a child again.

“But I couldn’t pull away,” he said, almost to himself. “And I refuse to let them in on the half of me that would hurt them.”

That was the center of it. The conviction that the truest part of him, the Doctor, the Time Lord, the life in the Tardis, was also the part most likely to ruin whatever good thing he had managed to build.

Donna looked at him for a long moment. Then, very softly, she said, “You really love them, don’t you?”

The Doctor stared at her as if she had said the single most appalling thing possible. His eyes went wide. Shock flashed across his face first, then offense, real, almost comically indignant offense that might have been funny in any other circumstance. It settled into a look that was somewhere between horror and ‘how dare you’.

“Donna,” he said. Just her name, but packed full of outrage.

She didn’t budge.

The Doctor opened his mouth, then closed it again. His expression only grew more scandalized, like the word itself had set off alarms somewhere deep inside him.

He did not use that word. Not casually. Not carelessly. Not at all, if he could help it.

Not since the Time War.

Not since Gallifrey burned.

Not since he had lost his family and with them the part of himself that had once said that sort of thing freely, without fear that the saying of it might become a curse.

Love was not a harmless word to him. It was not light. It was not young. It was not some sweet little human confession spoken over tea or beneath fairy lights or in the hush after a good day. It was a word with ruins behind it, graves of the people he could never have back.

And Donna, who knew him just well enough now to see all of that cross his face in one quick storm, softened instantly.

“Oh,” she said, quieter now.

The Doctor looked away, jaw tight, one hand braced hard against the console as though the floor had shifted under him.

“No,” he said, but it came out thin. 

Donna tilted her head. “Doctor, ”

“No.” He shook his head once, sharper this time, eyes fixed stubbornly on the time rotor. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“That.” He gestured vaguely, helplessly, as if the accusation itself still hung in the air between them. “Don’t put words to it.”

Donna was silent for a beat. His eyes began to burn with tears and his jaw set, grinding teeth. How could she say that? How could she open the box and shove her nosey human hands in and start taking things out and giving them names?

Then, gently, “Because it isn’t true?”

The Doctor laughed once through his nose, but there was no humor in it. “Because it’s not that simple.”

Which was not an answer.

She stayed where she was, her hand still resting near his on the console, no longer pushing, only present. “Right,” she said softly. “But it’s something.”

His silence stretched, and inside it Donna could see him trying to outrun himself again, to reduce it, contain it, turn it into something smaller and safer and less likely to break him open.

When he finally spoke, his voice had gone very quiet, “I care about them.”

Donna almost smiled, but he shot her a warning look before she could.

“I do,” he insisted. “I care about them. I’m fond of them. I worry about them. I-” He stopped, visibly irritated with himself for having started the list at all.

Donna waited.

“They matter,” His eyes dropped to the floor between his feet. Then the Doctor spoke again, slower this time, like he was picking his way barefoot across broken glass. “I haven’t let myself think in those terms in a very long time.”

Donna’s other hand came up to his shoulder, rubbing soothingly coxing it out of him. He looked so much older then. Not in his face, he still wore that same young shape, same expressive mouth, same bright, wounded eyes, but in the weight of him. In the exhaustion of someone who had buried entire parts of himself so deeply he had almost mistaken the burial for healing.

“Since before-” he said quietly.

Donna didn’t make him explain before what. She knew he meant before the war, before Gallifrey fell. The Doctor drew in a breath and let it out slowly.

“I can’t,” He shook his head. “Donna, if I start calling it that, if I let it become that in my own head-” He stopped again.

This time Donna finished it for him, barely above a whisper, “Then you can lose it.”

His eyes flicked to hers.

There was no point denying that because that was the horror in it, wasn’t it? Not the feeling itself, but the fact that naming it gave it a body, something time could take.

The Doctor looked down at his hands. After a while, he said, very quietly, “I don’t know what to do with it.”

That softened place in Donna, the one she kept locked down beneath all the shouting and sarcasm and sharp edges, stayed on her face for another moment. It was rare enough to feel almost holy when it surfaced, and rarer still for it to last.

So she asked, just as softly, “D’you want to know what I think?”

The Doctor looked up at her with wet eyes. He wasn’t crying, not quite, but close enough that the shine in them caught in the console light. He looked at her as if she were about to hand him the answer to the universe itself. Something monumental. The sort of advice that might crack his whole life open and set it right.

Donna Noble stared at him for one long suspenseful moment, then flicked him sharply on the ear.

The Doctor yelped and flinched back so fast he nearly lost his footing. His hand flew up to the offended ear, eyes widening in shock. “Ow! What the was that for?”

“For being thick.” Donna folded her arms.

He stood a step back from her now, one hand clapped over his ear like a scandalized schoolboy, his entire devastating mood cracked clean open by the sheer violence of Donna’s timing. His face had gone blank with confusion.

Donna looked at him like he was an idiot. “Honestly.”

He was so baffled by the sudden switch that he couldn’t even summon a comeback. He just stood there, holding his ear, blinking at her.

She took one step forward, voice rising back into that unmistakable Donna cadence. “Let me ask you something. If you’re so terrified of someone getting hurt by being with you,” she demanded, “then what the hell am I doing here?”

He blinked at her.

Donna pressed on before he could wriggle free. “If it’s all so dangerous, if it’s all so doomed, if everyone around you is apparently one wrong step from tragedy, then why’d you let me come?”

The Doctor’s mouth opened. “Donna, that’s not-”

“No, answer me.”

He frowned, still half stunned. “Of course I don’t want anything happening to you.”

“Right.”

“Of course not.”

“Then why am I here?”

The Doctor stared at her, hand still lingering near his ear, he had no answer at all because Donna did have a point.

He’d kept them carefully at arm’s length. A whole relationship built around the idea of staying just far enough back to protect them from the worst of him.

But Donna?

Donna was in the Tardis. At his side, running into danger with him as naturally as breathing. He had let her in without even properly interrogating the contradiction of it.

Why was she the exception? Why had that felt different? Why was he only just now noticing it?

He stared at her, bewilderment deepening. “I. . .” Then nothing.

Donna’s expression shifted, not softer exactly, but more grounded. Less scolding mother, more concerned friend who had decided honesty was kinder than comfort.

“Someday,” she said, “my grandad’s going to die.”

The Doctor’s head jerked back slightly. The statement came so cleanly and suddenly that for a second he looked even more confused than before.

Donna pointed at him. “Don’t you start.”

“I wasn’t, ”

“Yes, you were.” She took a breath, steadied herself, and when she spoke again her voice had lost the edge. “That fact scares me. I hate it. I hate thinking about it.”

The Doctor’s face changed, because of course it did now that he was thinking of something happening to Wilf.

Donna nodded once. “Exactly. But it doesn’t stop me loving him, does it?”

The Doctor looked down.

“You can call it whatever word you want,” Donna said. “You can dance around it, chop it up smaller, stick it in a box and label it something else if that helps you sleep at night. But that doesn’t change what it is.”

Donna stepped closer. The Doctor immediately flinched back and raised a hand to protect his ear. She stopped dead and gave him a long, unimpressed look. He lowered the hand slowly.

“That was one time,” she said.

“It hurt.”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

He still looked suspicious, but he didn’t move again, and Donna let it go.

When she spoke next, her tone turned gentler, “I’m on board the Tardis with you because, just like everyone else, you need someone,” she said. “Everyone does, even you.”

The console room hummed around them. The old ship, listening.

Donna’s voice softened another fraction. “Losing someone is part of having them in the first place.”

He swallowed.

“If it doesn’t feel like a loss when it’s gone,” she went on, “then it meant nothing. And if you’re this scared to lose them now,” Donna said, “then you’ve already got them, in a way.”

The Doctor’s eyes dropped to the floor. His hand had fallen away from his ear entirely now, forgotten. Donna watched him take that in, watched the words settle through all his fear and all his centuries of caution and strike somewhere painfully close to center.

“So,” she said, with a small shrug that could not hide the tenderness beneath it, “you might as well enjoy as much of whatever word you choose while you can.”

The Doctor stood very still.

His expression had gone strange again. Like she had reached in and moved something fundamental a few inches to the left, and now he was standing there trying to understand the new shape of himself.

After a long silence, he said, almost dazed, “That’s your advice?”

Donna snorted. “What, were you expecting poetry?”

He looked at her with the faintest spark of himself returning. “A bit.”

“You got an ear flick.”

“I did get an ear flick.”

“Count yourself lucky.”

That pulled the smallest, weakest laugh out of him. Donna saw it and smiled, just slightly.

The Doctor dragged a hand over his face and looked away, breath catching halfway to a sigh. “I hate it when you make sense.”

“I know.”

“And I especially hate it when you make sense by threatening me.”

“That’s because you’re thick.”

He almost argued, then thought better of it, because somewhere in the middle of her bizarre combination of violence and compassion, she had done what he’d been unable to do for himself: She had made the thing feel less like a complicated catastrophe and more like a simple fact. 

He leaned back against the console at last, spent and thoughtful and still a little protective of his injured ear.

“Take me home,” Donna said, with the firm finality of someone issuing orders rather than making a request.

The Doctor nodded once and turned back to the controls. He slipped easily into the motions of it, hands moving over levers and dials, the Tardis answering him with her familiar groan and thrum. It was muscle memory by now, or something deeper than that. Even rattled, even emotionally flayed open and stitched back together by Donna Noble in the span of ten minutes, he could still fly the ship.

Donna hovered near the console, arms folded.

“And you’re staying for dinner,” she informed him. Then she squinted upward as if trying to calculate time by sheer force. “Or lunch. Or whatever it is by the time we get there.”

The Doctor didn’t argue.

“Good,” Donna said, taking his silence for agreement exactly as she intended. “You’ll sit there, you’ll chat with Grandad, you’ll smile, you’ll laugh.”

The Doctor glanced at her sidelong, mouth twitching.

“You’ll perk up,” she went on. “I’m not having you skulking around my mum’s house looking like a kicked puppy.”

That got a faint smile out of him. He could picture it easily enough, Wilf’s warm face lighting up at the sight of them, the easy comfort of tea and stories and Donna rolling her eyes while still leaning into every second of it. Time well spent.

And from there, because his mind was treacherous, it wandered to Saturday. To a little flat and a pillow fort probably already half-planned in their head. To the certainty that when he knocked, they’d be waiting for him. The thought warmed him.

Then Donna cut cleanly through it.

“And after we’ve had our fill of my mother,” she said, too casually, “we’ll pop back in the Tardis and you’ll introduce me to this friend of yours.”

The Doctor stopped dead, every movement on the console hit a visible hitch. Then he looked at her. “What?”

Donna lifted a brow. “You heard me.”

“No.”

“Yes.”

The Doctor turned fully away from the controls, scandalized. “Absolutely not.”

Donna didn’t even blink. “Absolutely yes.”

“Donna-”

“If you’re pretending to be human,” she said, shrugging one shoulder, “then I’ve got no problem. I am human.”

“That is not the problem.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Then what is?”

The Doctor opened his mouth, closed it, then pened it again. “It just isn’t.”

Donna’s expression flattened. “That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the answer you’re getting.”

“Oh, don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not being stupid.”

“You’re being incredibly stupid.”

The Doctor’s voice rose. “Donna!”

She stepped in before he could build up momentum and, with deadly efficiency, flicked his other ear.

He yelped and jerked back, one hand flying up in immediate self-defense. “Ow! What is wrong with you?”

Donna drew herself up. “What is wrong with you?”

“That is my other ear!”

“Good. Balanced now.”

“You can’t keep doing that!” The Doctor stared at her in disbelief, cupping the offended ear.

“I can, and I will.”

He glared. “Violence is not a substitute for persuasion.”

“It is when you’re being thick.”

He made a strangled noise of outrage.

Donna pointed at him before he could launch into a proper protest. “You just spent all that time standing there having a breakdown over this person, and now you’re acting like introducing them to one normal woman from Chiswick is too much?”

The Doctor still had one hand clamped over his ear. “You are not normal.”

Donna blinked. “Oi.”

“You’re not!”

She gave this a second’s thought. “Fair point. But I’m human, and that’s close enough.”

He dropped his hand just long enough to gesture wildly. “Donna, you don’t understand.”

“Then explain it.”

“I can’t just turn up with you!”

“Why not?”

“Because,” He stopped, visibly grasping for words. “Because I can’t.”

Donna folded her arms. “That’s nonsense.”

“It isn’t.”

“It is.”

The Doctor dragged a hand through his hair, already looking frayed again. “They know me one way.”

“And?”

“And you complicate that.”

Donna gaped at him. “Me?”

“Yes, you!”

“What, by existing?”

“By asking questions!”

“I’m allowed to ask questions!”

“Exactly!”

Donna stared at him for one long beat, then huffed through her nose. “So what, I’d blow your cover in five minutes?”

The Doctor didn’t answer which was answer enough.

Her eyes widened in fresh offense. “Oh, that is rude.”

“It’s also true.”

“I can do subtle!”

The Doctor looked at her and Donna looked back. Then she pointed at him again. “Alright, maybe not subtle. But I can behave.”

That earned a deeply skeptical sound from him.

“Doctor,” she said, warningly.

He sighed, rubbing at his temple now instead of his ears. “It’s not just that.”

Donna’s expression shifted to something more serious.

He looked away, back to the console, to the moving light in the rotor, to anything that wasn’t her knowing face. “They’ve got an idea of me,” he said quietly. “And I told them about you, said you were a coworker. I can’t show up to plans we made with a random coworker.”

Donna said nothing, just watched the line of his shoulders tighten. He was afraid. Afraid the careful balance he’d built would crack if too many truths stood next to each other at once. Donna took that in, and though her expression softened a fraction, her resolve did not.

“Right,” she said. “Still meeting them.”

The Doctor actually laughed then, a short, disbelieving sound. “Donna!”

“No, because now I definitely want to. Anyone who’s got you this twisted up must be worth knowing.”

He groaned and turned back to the controls, pretending very hard that flying the Tardis required absolute concentration and not wanting in the slightest to continue this conversation.

Donna leaned one elbow on the console, watching him with infuriating patience.

“You can protest all you like,” she said. “I’m meeting them eventually.”

The Doctor muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like ‘over my dead body’.

Donna heard it anyway. “Don’t be dramatic.”

“I’m not dramatic.”

She gave him a long look.

The Doctor, still nursing both ears in spirit if not in action, glared at the controls as though they had somehow betrayed him too. But beneath the protest and panic and Donna’s impossible meddling, there was another feeling curling quietly through him.

The image of them meeting.

Donna with her sharp tongue and sharper heart. Them with their quick humor and infuriating warmth. They’d get along so well. Which probably, he thought grimly, meant Donna was right again.

Donna watched him work the controls for another moment, then said, far too casually, “We could always ask my grandad what he thinks.”

The Doctor turned to her so fast he looked genuinely horrified. She brightened at once, because that reaction alone was worth saying it.

“What?” she asked innocently. “Grandad wives lovely advice. Bit of perspective, that’s all.”

“You are not dragging Wilf into this.” The Doctor stared at her as though she had just threatened him with public execution.

Donna’s grin widened. “Why not?”

“Because, ” He stopped, scandalized by the fact that he apparently had to explain this. “Because he does not need to know about my,” He made a vague, useless gesture in the air. “This.”

Donna folded her arms, delighted. “Your what?”

The Doctor looked deeply betrayed. “You know exactly what.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, drawing the moment out with shameless pleasure. “Could be all sorts. Your little secret friend. Your mysterious text messages. Your tragic pining.”

“Donna!”

She laughed outright.

And the thing was, he did love Wilf. Deeply, instinctively, in that way that had no room for irony. Loved him like comfort and starlight and tea on cold nights. Loved him with something dangerously close to the shape of a father, or perhaps the closest thing he could bear to one.

Which was precisely why the idea of Donna going to Wilf with the Doctor’s relationship drama felt so catastrophically, absurdly humiliating. It was all kinds of elementary-school embarrassing.

The Doctor actually looked ill at the prospect.

“I’m just saying,” she said, shrugging one shoulder, “you could bite the bullet and introduce me, and Grandad never has to know.”

The Doctor narrowed his eyes. “That,” he said, “is an appallingly weak attempt at blackmail.”

Donna lifted her chin. “Still blackmail.”

“It’s not even proper blackmail. There’s no finesse.”

“And yet,” she said, smug now, “it’s working.”

Worse than the threat itself, worse even than the image of Donna sitting at Wilf’s kitchen table saying ‘so the Doctor’s got a thing for someone and he’s being weird about it’, was the maddening fact that she was right, it was working.

The Tardis groaned softly as the last coordinates settled into place, and the console room lights shifted around them. Earth. Chiswick. Wilf. Sylvia. Lunch or dinner or whatever meal Donna’s mother would insist on feeding them at.

The Doctor looked down at the console for one second longer than necessary, then reached for the lever.

⋆.˚✮ Notes: This is for @vexerieart, who made me smile with their kind words, bitch boosted my ego SO BAD. So I just want to return the favor, pay the smile forward. I hope this cheers you up since you’ve been sick, my love. <3 Btw I am an art geek lol! The paintings I reference are housed in London's National Gallery, and I would die to see them irl. 

The Doctor’s hands were buried deep in the pockets of his coat, shoulders slightly hunched, head tipped at just enough of an angle to suggest he was seeing something no one else in the room could. The soft lighting caught in the sharp line of his profile, gilding the bridge of his nose and the restless intelligence in his eyes. He looked entirely at home beneath centuries of framed history, like he belonged among old things and old stories.

“The brushwork’s lighter than people expect,” he said, voice low but quick, the words already gathering speed as he went. “That’s the trick of it. Everyone remembers the color first, the greens, the reflections, all that lovely softness, but the structure underneath is terribly clever. Makes it look effortless. Isn’t, of course. Never is.”

He took one hand out of his pocket to gesture vaguely toward the canvas hanging just inches from his face, fingers fluttering through the air as if he could map each detail without quite touching it.

“The Water-Lily Pond,” he went on, his tone bright with admiration, “people talk about it like it’s just tranquil, but it’s not just tranquil. That bridge there, Japanese influence, obviously, Monet was fascinated, and the way he lets the foliage nearly swallow it, that’s deliberate. Makes it feel like you’ve stumbled onto it by accident, like nature happened to arrange itself into art while no one was looking.”

He leaned in a little closer, eyes narrowing slightly.

“Which is nonsense, obviously. Takes a staggering amount of work to make something look that unforced.”

He sounded less like someone reciting facts and more like someone talking about an old friend whose habits he knew by heart. The sort of enthusiasm that turned him into something almost luminous overtook him, his words tumbling faster and faster as he warmed to the subject.

“Monet understood atmosphere in a way very few people ever do. Not just what a place looked like, but what it felt like to stand in it. That’s harder. Anyone can paint a bridge. Capturing the air around it? Different thing entirely.”

He shifted his weight, the sole of his trainer squeaking faintly against the polished floor. His tie hung slightly crooked from the walk it took to get here, but he seemed entirely unaware of it, too caught up in the painting to care.

“And he was stubborn,” the Doctor added, almost fondly. “Which helped. Painters ought to be stubborn. Don’t trust one who isn’t. You don’t keep chasing light like that unless something in you refuses to give up, no matter how many times it slips away.”

Only then did he step back from the canvas at last, slow and reluctant, like pulling himself out of deep water. His gaze stayed on the painting another second longer before he exhaled softly through his nose and muttered, almost to himself, “Claude was a clever man.”

The spell of his rambling broke when they stepped in beside him, close enough that their shoulder nearly brushed his arm.

They tipped their head, looking from the painting to him with a crooked little smile. “You know,” they said, “it’s getting a bit ridiculous how much you know about art.”

The Doctor finally dragged his eyes away from the Monet and glanced down at them. “Is it?”

“Yes.” They folded their arms, feigning offense. “I’m meant to be the artist here. You’re supposed to be the geek.”

That won a laugh from him, quick and bright and entirely unbothered.

“Oh, you are,” he said easily. “You have your art. I have history.” Something about the way he said it, like the two of them fit naturally into those roles, made their smile soften.

“Right,” they murmured, amused. “Convenient for you.”

“Very.”

He gave the painting one last lingering look before finally turning away, and together they began to drift through the rest of the gallery.

The room opened wide around them, grand and quiet in the way museums always seemed to be. Tall walls stretched upward, hung in careful rows with heavy gilt frames and little brass plaques. The polished wood floor shone beneath the overhead lights, reflecting a softened glow that made every step feel just a touch more hushed, more careful. Crown molding traced the ceiling in elegant detail, lending the whole hall a weighty sort of importance, as though even the air inside expected reverence.

Their footsteps clicked softly as they walked side by side, slowing now and then before one painting or another, never quite in a hurry. The Doctor kept his hands in his coat pockets this time, posture loose and wandering, though there was still that restless alertness in him, as if every frame on the wall might prompt another delighted little lecture if given half the chance.

And beside him, they smiled to themselves, because it was impossible not to. He looked so entirely in his element here.

“Seriously,” they said, glancing over at him as they slowed in front of another painting, “thank you.” They thanked him again, though by this point it had to be the thousandth time.

The Doctor looked almost offended by the repetition, though the smile tugging at his mouth ruined the effect. “You’re welcome,” he said, softer this time. Then, with a little tilt of his head, “And happy birthday. Again.”

They laughed under their breath, hands slipping into their pockets as they turned in a slow circle to take in the room around them once more. “This is so much better than staying home, ordering takeout, and arguing over a game.”

The Doctor made a quiet, dismissive sound. “There’d be no arguing if you didn’t cheat.”

They turned to him at once. “I do not cheat.”

Before they could properly start protesting, he spoke over them instead, voice brightening as he looked around the gallery again. His grin was impossible to miss, boyish and pleased, like a child being proven right in real time.

“Well?” he said, spreading one hand slightly as though presenting the entire hall to them. “What did I say?”

They narrowed their eyes, already smiling. “Oh no.”

“What?”

“That’s an I told you so face.”

“It is not.”

“It absolutely is.”

He looked delighted with himself. “Well, maybe just a little.”

They laughed and shook their head, and he continued before the moment could slip away, already swept up again in his own enthusiasm.

“I said birthdays deserved proper celebration,” he reminded them, walking backward for a step or two so he could face them more fully as they moved through the room. “Not just takeaway and television and your frankly alarming determination to destroy me at games.”

“Alarming?”

“Yes,” he said gravely. “Deeply worrying.”

They bumped his arm lightly with the back of their hand, and he only grinned wider. Then his attention flicked outward again, toward the paintings, the soft light, the polished floors stretching ahead of them.

“This,” he said, turning half in place to gesture around them, “this is a celebration. History and beauty and a thousand stories all crammed into one building. Humans at their best, really. Trying to leave something behind that says we were here, and this mattered.”

His voice had gone a touch warmer, less teasing now, touched with that familiar note of awe he got whenever he spoke about something he loved.

“Museums are marvelous,” he went on. “Bit quiet for some people, I know, but I love them. Love the way they hold time still, just for a little while. You can walk through entire lifetimes in a single afternoon. Art, invention, memory, obsession, half the human race putting pieces of themselves on display and hoping the other half bothers to look.”

They watched him as he spoke, far more interested in him than any of the paintings on the wall. He always did this. Took something ordinary, or at least something they’d thought was ordinary, and made it feel bigger, stranger, somehow alive with meaning they hadn’t noticed before.

They smiled and tipped their head. “Be honest.”

He glanced at them. “Always dangerous.”

“Was this present really for me,” they asked, “or for you?”

That won an immediate grin. He stepped a little closer as they kept walking, the sleeve of his coat brushing theirs before he nudged their shoulder with his, lightly at first, almost playful.

Then he didn’t move away.

The contact stayed there, easy and warm, his shoulder pressed to theirs as though it had happened by accident and was simply too natural to correct.

“Why can’t it be both?” he asked.

They looked up at him. He was still smiling, eyes bright with mischief, but there was something gentler tucked underneath it now. Something fond enough to make their stomach flip in a way they very firmly refused to examine.

So they rolled their eyes instead, because that was safer.

“Convenient answer.”

“Best kind.”

They huffed a laugh, and neither of them broke the line of contact as they wandered deeper into the gallery, shoulder to shoulder beneath the high ceilings and watchful frames.

​​They had barely made it halfway down the wall before the Doctor lit up all over again.

“Oh!” He pointed suddenly, the sound bright enough that they followed his hand at once.

A large painting hung a few frames ahead, sunlit and open in tone, full of quiet figures along a riverbank. It had the sort of softness that invited you in before you understood why.

They slowed beside him and tipped their head. “That is pretty.”

The Doctor’s grin widened at once, the look of a man delighted to have found a new excuse to talk. They glanced up at him and braced themself automatically, already expecting the ramble.

He did not disappoint.

“Bathers at Asnières,” he said, almost fondly, stepping a little closer to the canvas. “Georges Seurat. Early work, this one. Before everyone started going on about the other one.”

He gestured loosely toward the painting, fingers flicking from one figure to another as he spoke.

“It’s younger somehow, isn’t it? More open. You can feel him trying things out, light, composition, atmosphere. There’s structure to it, obviously, carefully arranged, but it hasn’t yet become quite so controlled.” He tilted his head, eyes narrowing thoughtfully. “Still terribly clever, though.”

They smiled, watching him more than the painting. He always looked brightest when he was explaining something. His whole face changed, more alive somehow, all quick eyes and animated hands and that eager note in his voice like he genuinely couldn’t help sharing every interesting thing in his head.

“Are you familiar with A Day at the Park?” he asked suddenly, glancing at them. Then he corrected himself with a little wrinkle of his nose. “Or, more accurately, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte.”

Their face lit with recognition. “Is that the one made up of all the little dots?”

The Doctor beamed, clearly delighted that they knew what he meant.

“Yes!” he said, almost triumphant. “That’s the one. Same artist. Georges Seurat. Father of Pointillism.”

“This was his too?” They looked back at the painting with renewed interest.

“Mmhm.” The Doctor nodded, pleased with himself and with them for following along. “Painted only two years before the one everyone knows him for. Which is fascinating, really, because you can already feel where he’s heading, but he’s not fully there yet.”

They leaned a little closer to the canvas, squinting as though dots might suddenly reveal themselves if they stared hard enough. “Wait. So was all his art made of little dots?”

“No, not all of it.” The Doctor chuckled softly at that, stepping in beside them.

They squinted harder anyway. “I’m looking for dots.”

“You won’t find many here.”

“That sounds like quitter talk.”

He laughed under his breath, warm and amused, and they could feel the sound more than hear it with how close he stood.

“Pointillism didn’t spring fully formed out of thin air,” he said. “He worked toward it. Experimented. Shifted. Like most artists do when they’re busy becoming themselves.”

They glanced up at him. “That was annoyingly poetic.”

“I’m allowed. We’re in a museum.”

They smiled and looked back at the painting.

From this close, they could see more of what he meant. The color, the careful balance of figures, the light resting over the scene. Not dots, exactly, but something deliberate all the same.

The Doctor stepped nearer the little brass plaque, then leaned back again, hands returning to his coat pockets. “It’s funny,” he said, a thoughtful note slipping into his voice. “Everyone remembers the famous technique. The gimmick, if you like. But there’s always all this,” he nodded toward the canvas, “before it. The years of figuring things out. People love the finished version of an artist. They’re less interested in the becoming.”

They looked at him for a second, caught unexpectedly by the softness in his tone. Then, because that felt a little too serious all of a sudden, they nudged his arm lightly with theirs.

“So what you’re saying is,” they said, “I’m witnessing your early work whenever you lose at Mario Kart.”

“That is not even remotely similar.” The Doctor turned to them with a look of deep offense.

“It is to me.”

“I’m talking about artistic development. You’re talking nonsense.”

They grinned. “And yet you understood me perfectly.”

He shook his head, but the corner of his mouth lifted anyway.

The Doctor perked up again almost immediately, as if standing still for too long might do him actual harm.

“Come on,” he said, already turning and motioning for them to follow. “Plenty more to see. So many paintings, so little daylight.”

They laughed and let him lead them farther down the hall, his energy returning in that familiar rush, quick steps, bright eyes, coat swaying around his legs as he moved from one possibility to the next.

It was in moments like this that the want hit him hardest.

Not just to show them a museum. To show them everything, the real everything.

He wanted, absurdly and all at once, to catch their hand and pull them out of this hushed gallery, back through the streets of London, into the Tardis. He wanted to watch their face the first time the doors opened onto somewhere impossible. To take them not just to paintings, but to the moments before they were paintings. To the cramped studios and sunlit fields and half-finished canvases leaning against walls while genius was still wet paint.

He wanted to introduce them. Not in the vague, showy way he sometimes hinted at history, but properly.

Tea with van Gogh while he talked too quickly and gestured with paint-stained hands. A polite handshake with Leonardo da Vinci and an argument that lasted three hours because neither of them knew when to stop. A lazy afternoon in Giverny, mud on their shoes, while Monet squinted at light on the water and complained that the color wasn’t right yet.

He wanted them to see the becoming of things. The drafts, the mistakes, the humanity inside all those famous names. He wanted to give them that.

The thought landed warm and sharp in his chest. And then, just as quickly, it turned sour.

Because he couldn’t, not really. Not without telling them the truth. The Doctor’s steps slowed only a fraction before he forced them steady again, hands sinking deeper into his coat pockets.

He had dug this hole too deep now.

John, with his vague work trips and his easy smiles and his little half-truths, had become too solid a shape between them. Telling them now would not be some simple correction, not some harmless reveal followed by a laugh and an explanation. It would crack something open. Alter the shape of him in their eyes. Change this, whatever this was, into something stranger and harder to hold.

And maybe they would take it well. Maybe they would laugh in disbelief, ask a hundred brilliant questions, lean into it with that same open curiosity they brought to everything else.

Or maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe they would look at him and only see the lie. The omissions. The oddness they had excused because they thought he was only a man with quirks and secrets, not this.

Not a Time Lord. Not an alien. Not a traveler who could pluck centuries out of the air like petals and hand them over as though they weighed nothing.

He wasn’t willing to risk that; that was the ugly truth of it. For all his talk, all his swagger, all the centuries of clever plans and impossible bravery, when it came to this, to them, he was a coward.

He kept walking.

Beside him, they were still smiling faintly from the last joke, still looking around the gallery with an artist’s eye, still entirely unaware of the war quietly waged inside him.

The Doctor glanced at them and felt that old, dangerous fondness tighten in his chest. He swallowed it down, tucked the truth neatly out of sight, and pointed ahead to another painting with renewed brightness.

“Ooh,” he said, seizing on the distraction with practiced ease. “Now that one’s interesting.”

They stepped up beside the next painting and both slowed instinctively.

It was a portrait of a young woman in white, standing atop a wolf pelt rug, her dress falling in soft, luminous folds around her feet. Her red hair spilled loose over her shoulders, and something was arresting in the way she held herself, dreamlike and distant, as though she had been interrupted halfway through a thought and never quite returned from it.

The barista tipped their head, studying it.

“She’s beautiful,” they murmured. “Look at the detail in her face.” Their eyes traced the work more closely. “And her hair. God, that’s good.”

The Doctor stood beside them, hands in his coat pockets, smiling faintly, though some piece of him still seemed a little far away, still shaking off the private thought that had caught him on the walk over.

They took a half step back from the canvas and looked up at him expectantly. The Doctor, still only half paying attention, didn’t notice at first. Then he glanced down, caught them staring, and lifted his brows.

“What?”

“What do you mean, what?” They gave him a look.

He blinked innocently. “What are you looking at me for?”

They gestured between him and the painting. “For the lecture, obviously.”

“The lecture.”

“Yes. The painting, the artist, some scandalous little historical detail you happen to know for no normal reason.”

The Doctor scoffed, a laugh slipping into it. “I do not know everything.”

They smiled, slow and teasing. “Mm. You only make it look that way when you show off.”

“I am not showing off.”

“You absolutely are.”

He opened his mouth, clearly preparing a defense, but before he could deliver it, they turned toward the little plaque beneath the frame and leaned in to read it.

“Symphony in White, number one. The White Girl,” they read aloud. “James Whistler.”

The Doctor made a small sound of recognition. “Oh.”

They looked back at him immediately, triumphant. “There it is.”

He narrowed his eyes. “There what is?”

“That noise.”

“What noise?”

“That oh, I know this one noise.”

“I’ve got a noise?” His mouth twitched despite himself.

“You’ve got several.”

“I do not.”

“You do.”

They pointed toward the painting with one finger, smiling. “Go on then, encyclopedia.”

The Doctor huffed a laugh through his nose and tilted his head toward the canvas again, whatever had clouded him a moment ago now softened by their easy insistence.

“Well,” he said, drawing the word out as he looked the painting over, “for one thing, Whistler always did have a flair for naming things as though they were musical compositions. Bit pretentious. Effective, though.”

They smiled to themself, pleased to have coaxed him back into it. As they drifted away from the painting and on toward the next, the Doctor was still frowning at them in exaggerated offense.

“I do not have noises,” he said.

They laughed under their breath, hands tucked into their coat pockets as they walked. “You absolutely do.”

“I don’t.”

“You do.”

“Name one.” The Doctor slowed slightly, watching them out of the corner of his eye. 

They looked up at him with a grin that should have warned him not to ask.

“Well,” they said.

He blinked.

They straightened a little and slipped into a pitch-perfect imitation of him, complete with the slight pause and particular emphasis he always used when he was about to correct someone or double back on something he’d said too quickly.

“Well.” They lifted a finger in the air, their voice tipping into his exact inflection with unsettling accuracy. “Well. Well. Well.”

The Doctor stopped short.

They kept going, delighted now, “Well no, that’s not what I meant, ‘cause technically-”

He stared at them. They were laughing too hard to finish properly, shoulders shaking with it, their face lit with the sheer satisfaction of having caught him in something so absurdly specific.

“That is not what I sound like.” The Doctor narrowed his eyes.

They pointed at him immediately. “That was exactly what you sound like.”

“It was not.”

“It was.”

He fell into step beside them again, still looking mildly scandalized. “It was a grotesque exaggeration.”

They were still chuckling. “No, it wasn’t.”

“Yes, it was.”

“You say ‘well’ all the time.”

“I do not say it three times.”

They shrugged. The Doctor made an affronted noise under his breath, which only sent them into another fresh wave of laughter.

“Oh, and that!” they said, turning toward him as they walked backward for a step. “That little offended huff thing.”

He looked even more betrayed. “I’m beginning to regret bringing you here.”

“Liar.”

He opened his mouth to retort, but they were already rolling on.

“You’ve got the sniff, too.”

The Doctor hesitated. “The what?”

“The sniff.”

They demonstrated it, just a tiny scrunch of the nose and a quiet little sound that was maddeningly, horribly familiar.

“Oh, no.” His expression changed, flattening with horror.

“Oh, yes,” they said, grinning wider. “You do it when you’re uncomfortable.”

“I do not.”

“And when you’re thinking about what to say.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“It’s not nonsense.” They tilted their head, studying him with obvious mischief. “You do it all the time.”

He shook his head once, as if refusing the entire premise on principle. “I absolutely don’t.”

They gave him a look that said he was fooling no one.

Then, with a smile that softened around the edges, they added, “You do it over text, too.”

The Doctor glanced at them. “Over text.”

“Mmhm.”

“That’s impossible.”

“It really isn’t.”

He looked deeply skeptical. “How, exactly, does one sniff in a text message?”

They laughed quietly and turned their attention to the next painting only halfway, more interested in him than the art now.

“I don’t know,” they admitted, “but somehow you manage it.”

“That makes no sense.”

“I know.” They smiled to themself. “When you’re away and we’re texting, sometimes I can practically hear it anyway. Like you’re in the room doing that little thinking face at your phone.”

The Doctor said nothing for a moment. They kept walking, but more slowly now, the museum hushed around them.

“You just,” They shrugged one shoulder. “You’ve got very specific habits, I guess.”

He was still looking at them.

“And you text like you talk,” they went on. “So it’s not hard to imagine the rest.”

There it was, in the middle of their teasing and impressions and easy little observations: the plain fact that they noticed him. That they had spent enough time with him, in person and apart, to know the shape of his pauses. The sounds he made when he was uncertain. The odd rhythm of him well enough to hear it even in silence. The Doctor felt something in his chest go tight and warm at once.

“That’s mildly unsettling.” He tried for offense again, but it came out weaker than before.

They smiled and bumped his arm lightly with theirs. “I know you.”

For one brief second, the Doctor forgot whatever glib response he’d been about to give. Then he recovered, sniffed, actually sniffed, and immediately looked annoyed with himself for doing it.

They laughed so brightly at that that even he had to smile.

“Oh, don’t start,” he muttered.

“Too late,” they said, still grinning. “That one was practically on command.”

He shook his head, though the corners of his mouth had given up the fight entirely now.

The Doctor changed the subject so quickly it was almost impressive.

“Tea,” he said, with the brisk certainty of a man declaring a solution rather than making a suggestion. “Or something equally restorative. It must be nearly lunchtime by now.”

They let him steer the conversation away without protest. Whatever he’d been trying to outrun with that abrupt pivot, he was doing it with enough charm that it hardly felt worth chasing. Instead, they smiled, cheeky, knowing, and slipped their arm through his as naturally as breathing.

“Lead the way, then.”

The Doctor glanced down at where they’d linked onto him, and for half a second, his expression flickered with something he couldn’t quite smooth over in time. Then it settled back into a grin, easy and bright, and he started forward with them tucked at his side.

They left the gallery hall together, their steps softening as they crossed from the polished wood floors into the main corridor. The museum opened wider here, the ceilings higher, the light cooler and brighter from the skylights above. Footsteps echoed faintly off the stone, and voices carried in low, respectful murmurs from visitors drifting between exhibits.

The Doctor seemed entirely recovered now, his energy turning outward again.

“Oh!” he said suddenly, perking up. “Gift shop.”

They laughed. “What about it?”

“We’ve got to stop there before we go.”

They looked up at him, amused. “Do we?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

He glanced at them as though the answer should have been painfully obvious. “Because I love a little shop.”

“Of course you do.” That earned a snort of laughter from them.

“They’ve always got something odd in them,” he said, already warming to the subject. “Postcards no one sends, pencils no one needs, tiny overpriced replicas of ancient objects, brilliant.”

“Overpriced tat,” they translated.

He looked delighted. “Exactly.”

They shook their head, smiling, and stayed hooked on his arm as they continued down the corridor.

Along one wall, set back into a shallow alcove, stood a large bronze statue on display, dark and gleaming beneath its dedicated lights, imposing enough to pull the eye even at a distance. The Doctor’s gaze snagged on it for a moment, his attention shifting instinctively toward the shape of it, curiosity already beginning to flicker.

But they were in the middle of saying something, some teasing remark about him absolutely buying a museum-branded pen and pretending it was a historical treasure, and he looked back to them instead, his focus stolen before he could properly take the statue in.

They were just passing the alcove when two women standing in front of it stepped forward.

“Excuse me?” one of them asked.

The Doctor and the barista both slowed.

The woman lifted her phone with an apologetic smile. “Sorry to bother you, would one of you mind taking a photo for us?”

The Doctor blinked once, attention shifting fully at last. The Doctor took the phone, all easy smiles and bright manners.

“Of course,” he said. “Right then, stand wherever you like.”

The two women moved back in front of the statue, adjusting themselves with the half-laughing fussiness of people trying to decide who looked better on which side. They were older, though not old, stylish in a comfortable sort of way, clearly out enjoying the day together.

The Doctor held up the phone and beamed at them as though this were a professional engagement.

“Lovely,” he said. “Now then, smile.”

They did, and he snapped the photo. Then another and another.

The barista stood off to the side watching, amused, as he immediately slipped into full charm. He angled the phone slightly, stepped a fraction to the left, then crouched just enough to improve the shot.

“Oh, that’s nice,” he said. “Very nice. Bit closer together, yes, like that. Wonderful.”

One of the women laughed. “You’re taking this very seriously.”

“Well, if you’re going to have a photograph, it ought to be a good one.”

The other woman touched her friend’s arm and smiled toward the camera again. The Doctor took another few shots, looking absurdly pleased with himself.

“Perfect,” he said. “One more, there we are. Brilliant.”

The barista watched him linger on the screen, still tapping away, still clearly taking more than just the one picture he’d been asked for. There was something almost unbearably endearing about the concentration on his face, like he’d decided this tiny favor deserved the full weight of his attention.

They nudged him lightly in the side.

The Doctor glanced at them, blinking once as if he’d momentarily forgotten where he was. “Hm?”

“You can stop now, Mr. photographer.”

“Oh.” He looked back at the phone, then up at the women, and gave a cheeky little grin. “Right. Yes. Sorry.” He handed the phone back.

The woman who had asked for help took it with a smile. “Thank you so much.”

“Not at all,” the Doctor said.

She looked between the two of them then, her expression warming further. “And you two are adorable.”

The Doctor cocked his head. There was just a flicker of pause, so brief most people would have missed it.

Then he smiled anyway, easy as ever. “Thank you.”

The women drifted off a moment later, already looking down at the photos and murmuring to each other in pleased little tones.

The Doctor and the barista started walking again. Only now, the barista had gone strangely stiff beside him. The shift in posture was small, but he had become annoyingly good at reading them; he felt it there in the slight tension of their arm still looped through his, in the way their gaze fixed a bit too hard on the corridor ahead.

He glanced sideways at them. “What?”

They looked up too quickly. “Nothing.”

The Doctor arched a brow. They made a face, awkward and a little pinched around the edges, then looked forward again.

After another few steps, they said, “She thought we were a couple.”

The Doctor was quiet for half a beat, then, “Ah.”

“And a cute one, apparently.” They cleared their throat.

He made a small sound that might have been amusement, might have been surprise. They risked a glance at him and found him looking back, curious, as though he was trying to figure out why this had rattled them.

“You just said thank you,” they said, a touch too pointedly.

The Doctor blinked. “Yes.”

They stared at him. He stared back. Then, slowly, understanding began to dawn across his face.

“Oh,” he said.

They looked away again at once, suddenly fascinated by a sign for the museum café.

“I mean,” they said awkwardly, “that’s all. It’s just, she assumed, and then you-”

“Said thank you.”

“Yes.”

“That was the issue, was it?” The Doctor’s mouth twitched.

They exhaled through their nose, embarrassed now that they’d started talking at all. “It was a bit like agreeing with her.”

He looked ahead for a moment, thinking. Then he glanced back to them, his expression impossible to read for a second, somewhere between amused and something softer, stranger.

“Well,” he said lightly, “she said we were adorable. Felt rude to argue.”

That made them huff a laugh despite themselves. He smiled at the sound, pleased to have coaxed it out of them. But the air had shifted, only slightly.

The Doctor looked ahead again, his voice gentler when he added, “Besides, I think she was mostly being nice.”

They nodded, though they weren’t sure that actually made it less complicated. Still linked to his arm, they kept walking toward the café, both a little quieter than before, and both thinking far more about that woman’s offhand comment than either of them wanted to admit.

It had begun as a joke, or near enough. A passing comment from a stranger, harmless and brief, the sort of thing that should have slid past him without leaving a mark. Normally it would have. Normally he would have smiled, said something clever, and moved on without a second thought.

But the thought stayed. The trouble was that he hadn’t minded it at all.

If anything, being mistaken for their boyfriend, or whatever neat little human label the woman had meant, had not felt odd in the slightest. No jolt of wrongness. No instinctive need to laugh it off or correct her, he hadn’t even really realized or thought about it until they mentioned it. The words had landed with a strange, easy sort of fit, settling against him like they belonged somewhere his mind had already built without asking permission.

No, the awkward part had been them.

The way they had stiffened beside him. The careful, stilted way they had brought it up. The embarrassment curling around the edges of their voice as though the whole thing had caught them off guard in a way it hadn’t caught him.

That was what had left him unsettled. Because the possibility had been there, hadn’t it? Quietly and patiently, creeping up in the back of his mind for months.

Woven through game nights and takeaway boxes and long conversations in their little flat. Through the ease of knowing which mug was theirs, of watching them curl into the corner of the couch with sleep heavy in their eyes. Through linked arms in museum corridors and texts sent too often to be casual and the way his hearts had gone so impossibly still when they’d leaned close to him on the sofa.

It did not feel absurd.

It would have been easier if it felt ridiculous, if the very idea had made him recoil in disbelief. But instead it rose up in him with terrible, disarming softness. An image more than a thought. Domestic evenings recast in a different light. The same flat, the same couch, the same laughter, only now with all the careful deniability stripped away.

It almost made him smile until sense caught up with him, and the smile never came. Because the moment he let the thought settle properly, all its complications crowded in behind it.

He had said it before, to Rose, once. Quietly, in one of those rare moments when honesty had slipped out before he could stop it. The curse of a Time Lord. How humans aged and withered and changed, and he didn’t. Not the same way. He could love them, perhaps, but never in the clean, equal way stories liked to promise. Not while time kept moving so differently through him. Not while he remained, and they did not.

He could still hear himself saying it. How one day she would grow old, and he would not, how he would watch. And now it’s them he’d be forced to watch.

His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.

Even if he were foolish enough to let himself feel these things freely, even if he stopped lying to himself about what was happening here, about what he wanted, there was no future in it that didn’t fray at the edges the longer he looked. They would age, their face would change. Their life would move forward in ways his never really did. And if he stayed too close for too long, if he let them watch the years gather on themselves while he remained infuriatingly, impossibly the same, they would notice.

Of course they would notice.

Humans noticed more than people gave them credit for. They noticed habits, sounds, the shape of pauses in text messages. They noticed when someone was late, when someone smiled too long, when someone never seemed to change quite the way they ought to.

They would catch on.

And then what? Tell them the truth after all that? Confess not only what he was, but how long he had hidden it? Let their trust break across the reality of him?

The Doctor looked ahead, expression smoothing into something unreadable as museum visitors drifted past and their footsteps echoed softly through the corridor. Beside him, they were still tucked against his arm, still warm and real and terribly easy to want more of.

Best not to let his mind wander there. Best to keep this as it was, light, undefined, safe in its uncertainty. Friendship he could manage, he told himself; it was still enough.

So he fixed his eyes on the corridor ahead and kept walking beside them, all the while feeling the quiet ache of the life he was already half-imagining and already denying himself.

By the time they found themself in the next wing of the museum, the afternoon had softened pleasantly around them.

Lunch had been nice, nothing remarkable, just tea and sandwiches and a shared pastry they had both insisted they didn’t really want until it was gone. After that had come a slow wander through the gift shop, where the Doctor had picked up and examined at least twelve different items with deep personal interest before putting every single one back.

Apparently, loving a little shop did not necessarily translate to buying from it. They had teased him for spending five full minutes admiring a set of absurdly overpriced postcards, and he had defended himself by claiming they were “well curated,” which had only made them laugh harder.

A couple more exhibits had followed after that, their pace slower now, less intent on seeing everything and more content to simply drift. By then the museum had grown a little busier, voices threading through the halls in low murmurs, footsteps rising and falling over polished floors.

That was how they stumbled onto the interactive exhibit.

It had clearly been designed with children in mind. Bright signage. Cheerful staff. A line of easels already arranged on both sides of two long tables, beneath a hanging banner encouraging visitors to “Paint Like the Masters.” Little trays of paints sat ready on each stand, with brushes laid out beside blank canvases.

Despite the branding, there were very few actual children in sight. Mostly adults, really. Museum-goers who had either arrived with enough curiosity to try it or enough self-confidence not to mind looking a little silly. A few couples, a pair of university students in oversized jumpers, and one older man taking the whole thing extremely seriously.

At the front of the setup stood an instructor in a paint-splattered apron, cheerfully explaining that for ten pounds, a “measly little tenner,” as the sign put it, anyone could join in for a guided portrait session.

The Doctor had only glanced at it once before they saw the exact moment interest sparked in his face.

“Oh,” he said.

They looked from the easels to him and immediately smiled. “Oh?”

His hands slipped into his coat pockets, posture going falsely casual in a way that made it obvious he was trying not to sound too eager. “Portraits.”

They followed his gaze. “You want to do it.”

He looked at them sidelong. “I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

He huffed the tiniest laugh, then nodded toward the setup. “Come on. Could be fun.”

They raised a brow. “You? Willingly agreeing to let me paint you?”

The Doctor smiled, that bright, boyish one that usually meant he’d already made up his mind. “Why not?”

So that was how they ended up there.

Now they sat across from each other at neighboring easels, a little cluster of paints and brushes between them, each with a blank canvas already bearing the first few hesitant strokes of a portrait.

The museum’s grandeur gave way here to a different kind of atmosphere, lighter, noisier, full of chatter and half-laughter and the occasional groan from someone realizing their painting looked nothing like a human face. The smell of acrylic paint hung faintly in the air, mingling with the dry museum warmth and the distant hum of voices from the adjoining galleries.

The Doctor had shed his coat again, draping it over the back of his chair. A brush rested awkwardly in his fingers. They had never seen anyone hold a paintbrush with such suspicion.

“Oh, that’s tragic already,” they said, peering at the way he gripped it.

The Doctor looked up at once, offended. “I haven’t even started.”

“Yes, and yet.”

He glanced down at the blank canvas in front of him as though it had personally wronged him by requiring manual skill. “This is a ridiculous tool.”

“It’s a brush.”

“It’s flimsy.”

They laughed softly and dipped their own brush into a wash of color. “You sound like you’re blaming the equipment in advance.”

He narrowed his eyes at them, then looked back to his easel with renewed determination. Across from him, they smiled and began sketching in the loose shape of his face.

The position suited him infuriatingly well. One arm folded loosely over the back of the chair, one leg stretched out a bit farther than the other, head tilted just slightly as he tried to divide his attention between painting and studying them. The overhead light caught in his hair and along the sharp lines of his features. His expression kept shifting every few seconds, focused, then amused, then suspicious whenever he thought they were looking at him for too long.

Which they were.

“You’re staring,” he said, not looking up from his canvas.

“That’s the assignment.”

“There are polite ways to do it.”

“You’re sitting for a portrait.”

“Yes, but there are still standards.”

They smiled to themself and dragged another careful line of paint across the page. “You volunteered.”

“I was tricked.”

“You suggested it.”

“I was manipulated into suggesting it.”

That earned a laugh from the instructor somewhere nearby, and the Doctor looked briefly betrayed that he had acquired an audience. They only smiled wider and kept painting.

For all his complaining, he seemed to be enjoying himself. There was that little crease in his brow again, the one that always appeared when something genuinely caught his attention. He kept glancing up at them, then down again to his canvas, trying to translate what he saw into shape and color with far more seriousness than the children’s activity arguably required.

It was, they thought, adorable. So they bent over their painting instead, hiding their smile in the concentration of it, while around them brushes scratched lightly against canvas and the museum afternoon carried on.

They grinned down at their canvas, a quiet chuckle slipping out before they could stop it. Across from them, the Doctor looked up immediately.

“What?” he asked, narrowing his eyes in suspicion. “What’s so funny?”

They bit back another laugh and shook their head, dipping their brush in water as if that might somehow save them. “Nothing.”

“That was not a nothing laugh.”

“It was.”

He set his own brush down for a moment, leaning forward slightly in his chair. “Show me.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m still working on it, it’s gotta be a surprise.”

“That’s never stopped you mocking me before.”

They huffed a laugh and finally glanced up at him, smile still tugging at the corners of their mouth. “It’s your hair.”

The Doctor blinked. “My hair.”

“Yes.”

He frowned, lifting a hand automatically to touch it. “What about it?”

They tilted their head, studying the painted version of him with exaggerated seriousness. “It’s tricky.”

“Tricky.”

“Very.” They made a vague little motion with the end of their brush. “Tall hair is hard to capture.”

That won a brief, affronted pause. Then the Doctor ran a hand through it, pushing it back in a gesture that only made the unruly shape of it more pronounced.

“My hair,” he informed them, “is one of my main attractions.”

They hummed thoughtfully, eyes dropping back to the canvas as they added another few careful strokes. “Mm.”

He waited.

They nodded once, still not looking up. “Agreed.”

The Doctor went still. It was such an easy answer, tossed out so casually, that for a second it didn’t seem to land until it did.

They were focused on the portrait again, lower lip caught briefly between their teeth as they tried to get the shape of his ridiculous hairline right, entirely unaware of what they’d done to him with two offhand syllables.

The Doctor forgot his own painting.

Forgot the instructor somewhere off to the side, reminding everyone to think about proportion. Forgot the scrape of chairs and the low museum chatter and the paint drying at the tip of his brush.

He only looked at them.

At the easy concentration on their face. The pleased little curve of their mouth. The way they’d said it without flirtation, almost without thinking, just honest, as though agreeing that yes, of course he was attractive, and now back to the matter of painting him.

Something warm and startled moved through him. Then, because he was him, he recovered just quickly enough to pretend he hadn’t been caught staring.

He picked up his brush again and glanced at their face with exaggerated deliberation, as though he had only paused to gather reference for his own work.

“Hold still,” he said, affecting concentration. “Can’t paint you if you keep moving.”

They looked up, one brow arching. “I haven’t moved.”

“You did just then.”

“That was blinking, John.”

“Very disruptive blinking.”

They laughed softly and shook their head, but settled a little more squarely in their seat all the same. The Doctor tried to focus on his canvas. Tried very hard, actually.

But now there was a new and deeply inconvenient awareness humming under his skin, making him feel just a touch too warm in the museum light. He cleared his throat and made a show of studying the line of their jaw, the tilt of their head, the shape of their mouth, all in the name of art.

The Doctor glanced up from his canvas again, brush held awkwardly between his fingers, and smiled faintly.

“You know,” he said, “in all the time I’ve known you, this is the first time I’m actually going to see your work.”

They looked up. “That’s not true.”

“It is,” he said at once. “Properly, I mean. You’ve got all those sketchbooks lying about your flat, paint stains on half your things, that tablet always balanced on your knee. . .”

His mouth softened with quiet amusement as he went on.

“All those evenings I’ve been sat on your couch reading something off your shelf while you’re hunched in the corner with a stylus, muttering at the screen.” He gave them a pointed look. “And not once have you actually shown me.”

They huffed a small laugh, eyes dropping back to their painting. “That’s because most of the time I’m just messing about.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“Yes, it is.”

“It really isn’t.”

They smiled despite themself and dragged another line of paint down the canvas. “You’re very insistent about things you know nothing about.”

The Doctor made a quiet, disbelieving sound. “I know you’ve avoided it every single time I’ve asked.”

That was true, annoyingly.

He continued, now clearly on a roll. “Every time I’ve tried to get a look, you change the subject or tell me it’s not finished yet.”

They shrugged one shoulder. “Because it usually isn’t.”

“Mmhm.”

“It isn’t a crime to want to finish something before showing it to people.”

“No,” he said. “But after this many months, it’s starting to look suspicious.”

That made them laugh under their breath.

He leaned back slightly in his chair, eyes bright now, all easy honesty. “I’m excited, that’s all.”

The words landed more gently than they expected. Their hand stilled for a moment against the canvas. They looked down at the half-painted version of him in front of them, the shape of his face already there, the impossible task of his hair still only half-solved, and tried not to let the warmth of that admission spread too far.

“It’s not that serious,” they said, aiming for casual and not quite making it.

The Doctor’s brow lifted.

They sighed softly and gave in a little. “I know I’ve got talent,” they said. “I’m self-aware enough to admit that.”

“Good.”

“But,” They dipped their brush back into the paint, watching the color gather at the bristles. “There’s always that little voice saying it’s still not good enough. That it could be better. That if someone else sees it, they’ll spot every wrong thing straight away.”

The Doctor didn’t even let them finish the thought properly.

“You’re brilliant,” he said.

They looked up. His voice had cut cleanly through their self-deprecation, warm and certain and leaving absolutely no room for argument.

“You are,” he went on, meeting their eyes across the easels. “And you’ve no right to say otherwise.”

The phrasing was so entirely him that it caught them off guard, not just the certainty of it, but the almost offended conviction, as though the idea of them doubting their own talent were something personally irritating to him.

They smiled before they could stop themself. The Doctor smiled back.

For a beat, neither of them painted. They just looked at each other across the little gap between their easels, brushes paused in hand, the museum noise fading to something distant and unimportant around them. Then they ducked their head first, smiling into their canvas.

“Bossy,” they murmured.

“Accurate,” he said automatically.

That pulled another quiet laugh from them, and both of them returned to their paintings, still smiling, still carrying the warmth of the moment with them as the portraits slowly took shape.

The Doctor worked at his portrait in brief, careful strokes before glancing up at them again.

“Have you ever thought about doing something with this properly?” he asked.

They looked over the top of their canvas. “With painting?”

“With any of it,” he said, gesturing vaguely with his brush. “Art. Design. Illustration. Something that actually uses your talent instead of making you wrestle coffee machines and the general public.”

They huffed a laugh at that, though it came out softer than amused. “The café’s wonderful, actually.”

The Doctor lifted a brow.

“It is,” they insisted. “Mostly. It’s just that customer service jobs are like that. People are exhausting. Machines break. Managers lie. Someone always acts like their flat white is a matter of life and death.”

The Doctor nodded once, conceding the point. “No, I don’t disagree with that.”

They smiled faintly and returned to the portrait, adding another stroke near his collar. For a moment, the only sounds between them were the light scrape of brushes on canvas and the instructor somewhere nearby reminding a child not to drink the paint water.

Then they said, more quietly, “I did try once.”

The Doctor looked up at once. They kept their eyes on their canvas, like it would be easier to talk if they didn’t have to see his face while doing it.

“I looked for work in fields where I could actually use my art,” they said. “Design stuff, freelance bits, junior creative roles, illustration, anything, really. Just something that would get my foot in the door.”

He listened without interrupting now, the brush in his hand gone still.

“But everything was either not paying enough to survive off,” they went on, “or they just weren’t hiring. Or they wanted three years’ experience for an entry-level job, which is always fun.”

That made the Doctor pull a face. “Humans do love making impossible little systems for themselves.”

“‘Humans’? You talk like you aren’t one sometimes.” They smiled, though only briefly. “But, yeah.”

He studied them for a second, curing himself for a moment, then asked, with genuine surprise, “So that was it? You gave up?”

The question was so immediate, so plainly baffled, that they glanced up despite themself.

“The café was only meant to be temporary,” they admitted. They shrugged one shoulder. “Just something to pay rent while I figured things out and waited for an opportunity.”

Their brush moved again, slower now, more out of habit than purpose.

“But the opportunity never came,” they said. “And after a while,” Another shrug.“The barista thing just sort of became the fallback.”

The Doctor’s face changed. Something more troubled than pity, more personal. As if the idea offended him on their behalf. He leaned back a little in his chair, studying them in silence for a beat too long.

They noticed and gave a faint, self-conscious smile. “That sounds more depressing out loud than it does in my head.”

“It’s not depressing,” he said.

They raised a brow. “No?”

“It’s,” He frowned, searching for the right shape of it. “Wrong, is what it is.”

They laughed softly. “Bit dramatic.”

“No, it isn’t.” He looked at them properly then, voice sharpening with conviction. “You’re talented. You care about it. You should be doing something that lets you use that.”

Something warm and uncomfortable twisted in their chest at the certainty in his tone.

They looked back down at the canvas, trying to hide their smile by pretending to fuss with the paint. “You make it sound simple.”

“It isn’t simple,” he admitted. “Doesn’t mean it’s not true.”

They didn’t answer right away. Around them, the little painting class carried on: brushes clinking in water cups, quiet chatter, the occasional laugh from another easel. But the space between them had narrowed again, thinned into something private.

Finally, they said, “Maybe one day.”

The Doctor held their gaze for a moment longer, like he wanted to argue with the “maybe” of it.

Then he nodded once. “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Maybe one day.”

They went quiet after that, brush hovering for a moment above the canvas as they looked at him properly.

John had gone back to painting, or at least pretending to. His tongue pressed faintly to the inside of his cheek in concentration, brows drawn together as he studied the shape of their face and tried, with very mixed success, to translate it onto canvas. He looked sincere even in silence. Earnest in a way that never felt forced.

That was the thing about him. When he cared, he cared all the way.

Lucky, they thought. That was what they were. Ridiculously lucky to have him in their corner at all.

He had never even seen their work before today, not really. Not finished, not properly. And yet the little scraps he had picked up, the sketchbooks lying around, the way they talked about color or composition, the time they lost to a tablet screen, had been enough for him. Enough to make him believe in their talent with that same stubborn certainty he seemed to bring to everything.

As if passion alone proved potential. As if loving something that much had to count for something in the end.

It made them want to try again.

Not in the vague, wistful way they sometimes thought about it while half-asleep or on a bad shift at the café, but actively. Properly. Like maybe they could start looking again. Start applying. Start making a real effort instead of quietly assuming it would all go nowhere.

And if it did go somewhere, if they actually found something, some little opening, some chance to use their art for real, they’d have him to thank for it. The idea came so sweetly it almost made them smile.

The sort of story you told later, years down the line. The sort of thing you laughed about fondly while telling your grandkids how one very annoying man had once sat across from you in a museum and insisted you were brilliant until you finally believed him.

The thought landed then made them do a double take within their own mind.

Grandkids?

Their brush stalled entirely.

What the hell was that?

They stared at the canvas without seeing it for a second, suddenly, acutely aware of themself in a way that felt almost embarrassing.

Grandkids?

This man was their friend. Yes, he was gorgeous, which was unfortunate but survivable. Yes, he was kind, and clever, and brilliant in that way that made them feel like the dullest person in any given room and somehow never bad about it. Yes, he was compassionate and funny and so mysteriously put together and gloriously strange that sometimes just looking at him too long felt like the beginning of a bad idea.

And yes, terrifyingly, he was miles out of their league.

But none of that changed the fact that he was their friend. A weirdly attentive, devastatingly attractive, emotionally confusing friend, but still.

They were not meant to be thinking about grandkids. They were not meant to be building entire futures off one warm conversation and a little too much eye contact over acrylic paint.

That was absurd.

They shifted in their chair and forced themself to look down at the portrait again, dragging the brush through a stroke that probably went far too dark around his collar.

Across from them, the Doctor glanced up almost immediately.

“You alright?”

Their head snapped up. “What?”

He tilted his own, studying them with mild concern. “You’ve gone all odd.”

They let out a quick laugh that sounded a little too thin to their own ears. “I’m painting, that’s all.”

“That wasn’t a painting face.”

“No?”

“No. More of a spiraling quietly in public face.”

That pulled a real laugh from them, thank God.

They shook their head and dipped the brush back into water, buying themself a second. “I’m fine.”

“Right,” he said slowly. The Doctor looked unconvinced, but not enough to push.

They smiled, smaller this time, and looked back to the canvas before he could study them any harder.

They were fine, just a little too aware, suddenly, of the shape of his mouth when he smiled. The warmth in his voice when he told them they were brilliant. The dangerous ease of imagining him in places he had no business being, in stories, in futures, in quiet little domestic scenes they had no right to want.

Then they looked up at him across the easel and said, “You ask a lot about me, but you never really say much about yourself.”

The Doctor’s brush paused. It was only for a second, but they caught it, that little stillness, that fractional hesitation that always seemed to come over him when he was deciding whether to joke, dodge, or tell the truth.

He glanced down at his canvas, then back up at them. “What do you want to know?”

They tilted their head, considering him. “Your travels, I guess.”

He shrugged one shoulder, trying for casual. “Work is work.”

They gave him a look over the top of their painting. “That’s vague.”

“It’s accurate.”

“It’s annoyingly accurate.”

The Doctor’s mouth twitched, but he said nothing else, which told them all they needed to know. He was dodging. So they pushed, though gently.

“Why do you travel so much?”

The Doctor’s expression shifted, not dramatically, not enough for anyone who didn’t know him to notice, but they did. The ease in him dimmed just a little. His eyes dropped, not to the canvas this time, but somewhere lower, more inward.

When he spoke, his voice was quieter, “I just like to keep moving.”

They waited.

He let out a breath through his nose, almost a laugh, except there was no humor in it. “Staying put too long tends to lead to misery.”

Their brow furrowed. That was not the kind of answer someone gave lightly, or by accident.

They set their brush down altogether and looked at him properly now. “Do you have family in town?”

The question seemed to catch him off guard. He looked up at them sharply, something almost startled in his face.

“What?”

They held his gaze, softening. “You just,” They shrugged a little, trying not to make him bolt from the moment. “You seemed lonely when I met you.”

The Doctor stared at them, not offended, or upset, just surprised.

He gave the faintest, most disbelieving shake of his head. “Was I that obvious?”

“That was the whole reason I started chatting to you.” Their smile turned small and a little sad around the edges.

The Doctor blinked. They looked down at their hands for a second, then back up at him, their expression open now in a way that made his chest tighten.

“You came in looking like your heart had been broken,” they said softly. “And I don’t know. You just looked like you needed a friend.”

Something in the Doctor’s face changed then, slowly, like warmth returning to somewhere it had gone cold. His mouth curved, not into one of his usual grins, but into something softer. Almost disbelieving. That made them smile too, though more faintly.

Then he looked down at his hands, at the brush he was still holding without using, and quietly admitted, “No. No family in town.”

A beat.

“No family left, actually.”

The words seemed to settle heavily between them. They didn’t speak.

The Doctor swallowed once, eyes fixed on the table between the easels as though it were easier to tell the truth to the space between them than directly to their face.

“I’ve just,” He exhaled, the sound thin and tired. “Been on the move since.”

His smile came back, but only barely, and only in the saddest sense of the word. Not a real smile. Just an old habit trying to soften something that didn’t want softening.

“Stopping for too long gives me time to remember,” he said. “And remembering hurts, so,” He gave the smallest shrug in the world. “I keep moving.”

They stared at him, their chest aching with the simplicity of it. He said it like it was practical. Like it was just a thing he’d worked out about himself, no more dramatic than choosing to walk instead of stand still.

But the pain in it sat plain beneath the words.

Without thinking too much about it, before they could second-guess themself, they reached across the little gap between their easels and laid their hand over his.

The Doctor went still. Their fingers curled lightly around his, warm and steady and entirely without demand or word, just comfort. He looked down at their hand, then up at them. They smiled, sad and soft all at once. He smiled back in that same broken little way, and this time he let it stay.

Neither of them said anything for a while after that.

The museum carried on quietly around them, brushes scratching canvas, the instructor speaking to someone on the far side of the room, footsteps passing through the neighboring hall, but at their easels, the world had narrowed to the space between their joined hands and the fragile truth he had finally let them see.

They were the first to break the silence.

“I’m sorry,” they said softly. “I didn’t mean to drag all that up.”

The Doctor shook his head. “No.” His voice was gentle, firmer on the second try. “No, don’t be sorry.”

Their hand was still over his. Only now, at some point they hadn’t quite noticed, his had turned beneath it. He was holding theirs back. His thumb moved absently across their knuckles, a small, unconscious stroke that sent a warmth up their arm so sudden and strange they had to work not to react to it. He didn’t seem to realize he was doing it. Or if he did, he gave no sign.

“There’s no need to be sorry,” he said again, quieter now. “You only asked.”

They watched him across the easel, barely breathing. He glanced down at their joined hands, then back up at them. His expression had gone open in that rare way they were beginning to understand was precious, unguarded, a little uncertain, but entirely sincere.

“You are important to me,” he said.

The Doctor kept going, as if once he had started, stopping would only make it harder.

“I mean it,” he said. “This, ” He gave the smallest motion with his head, as though he meant the museum, the painting class, the long game nights, the tea after bad shifts, all of it at once. “Our time together. It matters to me.”

His thumb brushed once more over their knuckles. They could feel their pulse in their wrist.

“You’re brilliant,” he went on, voice warming as he spoke, conviction gathering under every word. “And funny, and fascinating, and far better company than most people I’ve met in the last-” He caught himself, mouth twitching. “A while.”

That made them smile despite the tightness in their chest.

“You give me something to look forward to,” he admitted. “And I,” He exhaled a little laugh through his nose, almost embarrassed by the honesty of it. “I don’t know that I could thank you enough for that.”

By the end of it, they were both smiling. Their throat felt too tight for anything grand or clever, so what came out was a little breathless and simple.

“Ditto.”

The Doctor blinked, then he laughed, bright and soft and helpless around the edges.

“Ditto?” he repeated.

They gave a tiny shrug, smiling wider now. “What? It means ‘the same thing.’”

“I know what it means.”

“Then there you go.”

“Could’ve said something a bit more poetic.” He shook his head, still chuckling, and looked down as though he needed the break from their face.

“You did enough poetry for both of us.”

That only made him smile harder. Their hands stayed where they were for one more heartbeat, then two, neither of them quite rushing to let go. And when at last they did pull apart, it was only because the instructor’s cheerful voice cut across the room to announce that they ought to be adding finishing details by now.

The spell thinned, but it didn’t break.

It lingered in the way they looked at each other afterward, both of them a little lighter, a little softer, as they picked up their brushes again and returned to their portraits with smiles neither quite seemed able to shake.

“Hm.” They pulled back from the canvas, squinting at it with the exaggerated seriousness of someone preparing to deliver bad news.

The Doctor glanced up from his own painting immediately. “What’s hm?”

They tipped their head one way, then the other. “I might’ve made your nose too big.” They looked from the portrait to his actual face, then gave a tiny, indifferent shrug. “Meh.”

The Doctor narrowed his eyes. “Meh?”

Their mouth twitched. “I mean. . .”

“It’s not wildly inaccurate.” They reached for a clean brush and began carefully softening the line they’d laid down, still looking far too amused for his liking.

“Oi,” he said at once, offended.

They laughed under their breath, still working at the correction. “What?”

“My nose is perfectly fine.”

“Didn’t say it wasn’t.”

“You implied it.”

They glanced up at him with infuriating innocence. “I implied nothing. The brush implied it.”

“The brush,” he repeated flatly.

“Yes.”

The Doctor sat back in his chair, scandalized. “For your information, it used to be worse.” The second the words left his mouth, he froze.

They looked up. Then their eyes widened, comically, dramatically wide.

“What?”

The Doctor’s mind went completely blank for half a second.

“What?” he echoed, much too quickly.

They lowered the brush slowly, staring at him in open delight. “What do you mean it used to be worse?”

He sat very still.

They pointed at him with the clean brush like a barrister about to cross-examine a witness. “John.”

The Doctor scrambled for the first plausible human explanation and nearly tripped over all of them at once.

“I- well- deviated septum.” He nodded as though that settled everything. “Yes. Deviated septum. Surgery.”

They stared at him.

He smiled too brightly. “Very common.”

Their expression did not change. “That,” they said carefully, “is the worst lie you’ve ever told me.”

The Doctor drew himself up, wounded. “It is not.”

“It absolutely is.”

They were grinning now, laughing while they went back to fussing over the nose in the painting. “A deviated septum?”

“It happens.”

“And it made your nose different?”

“Yes.”

“In a way you compare to your old one like you’re talking about a previous draft?”

The Doctor opened his mouth, found nothing helpful, and closed it again.

They were full-on laughing at him now, shoulders shaking as they fixed the brushstrokes. “Oh my God.”

“It’s entirely plausible.”

“It is not plausible.”

“It is to someone.”

“Not to me.”

He gave a tiny, defensive sniff. That only made them laugh harder.

“You’ve had a nose job,” they declared.

“I have not had a nose job.”

“You absolutely have.”

“I haven’t!”

They sat back to admire their correction, then looked him over with exaggerated suspicion. “Wow.”

The Doctor frowned. “Wow what?”

They sighed, shaking their head as though terribly disappointed by the revelation. “Your handsome face was too good to be true.” He went very still. They carried right on, oblivious to the effect of the word. “I should’ve seen the writing on the wall.”

The Doctor’s brain, most unhelpfully, latched onto exactly one part of that sentence.

Handsome.

They were still smiling at the portrait, entirely pleased with themself, still half-lost in the joke and not paying nearly enough attention to him.

Which was just as well, because the alternative explanation they had jumped to, ridiculous, human, cosmetic surgery, was infinitely better than the truth. Better than anything remotely adjacent to regeneration or Time Lords or the impossible biology he absolutely could not explain from an easel in a museum.

So yes, relief came first. Followed closely by amusement. And then, rather inconveniently, flattery.

The Doctor tried very hard not to look as pleased by that as he felt. He failed, but only slightly.

“Oh, so now I’m handsome,” he said, aiming for dry and landing somewhere a touch too smug.

They blinked once, clearly realizing a beat too late what they had actually said out loud. The Doctor’s smile widened.

They pointed the brush at him at once, accusatory. “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Get smug.”

“I’m not smug.”

“You are absolutely smug.”

He leaned back a little farther in his chair, looking unbearably satisfied with himself. “You called me handsome.”

They groaned. “That is not the point.”

“It’s a very good point.”

“It was in the context of accusing you of secret cosmetic procedures.”

“Still counts.”

They rolled their eyes, though their mouth betrayed them by curling at the corners. “You’re impossible.”

“And yet,” he said, all bright-eyed mischief again, “apparently very handsome.”

They laughed despite themself and shook their head, returning to the portrait before he could get any more unbearable about it.

Across from them, the Doctor picked up his brush again with far too much self-satisfaction for one man, privately thanking every star in the sky that they had chosen nose job over anything even remotely close to the truth.

They grumbled at him without looking up from their canvas. “You need to hurry up, by the way. I’m nearly done.”

The Doctor made a small noise of offense. “Rushing perfection is never wise.”

That earned a snort from them.“Perfection,” they repeated.

“Yep.”

“You are painting with a lot of confidence for a man who has not once cleaned his brush properly.”

The Doctor glanced down at the muddled colors collecting near the base of his bristles and chose, very sensibly, not to acknowledge that. “Art is about instinct.”

“Art is also about not turning every skin tone grey.”

He huffed a laugh under his breath, and both of them bent back over their work.

The little portrait class around them had begun to wind down. Some people were already standing, holding up their paintings with delighted embarrassment while the instructor made encouraging rounds. The afternoon light had shifted warmer through the high windows, softening the museum hall into gold and dust and quiet voices.

The Doctor focused on his picture.

Or tried to.

Because his mind kept drifting to the day he’d had. The museum, and their linked arms in the corridor. The way they had laughed at his nonsense and listened to his rambling anyway. Lunch, tea, the gift shop, their shoulder pressed to his as they walked. Their hand over his at the easel. The softness in their face when he had said too much and somehow not regretted it.

He felt closer to them now. The truth of that settled over him with startling ease. Closer not only because of the hours spent together, but because something in the space between them had shifted, opened. They had seen a little more of him today, nothing dangerous, not the real danger, but enough. Enough that he could still feel the warmth of their comfort like a handprint left behind.

And they had been so gentle with it. So wonderfully gentle.

The Doctor lowered his brush for a moment and looked at them properly.

They were concentrating, mouth slightly pursed, one hand steadying the edge of the canvas while the other worked in careful strokes. There was paint on one of their fingers now, a streak they either hadn’t noticed or didn’t care about. Their hair had shifted loose over the course of the session, a few strands catching the light when they tilted their head.

For one moment, just one, he let himself feel it without trying to name it smaller than it was. The care and want. The dangerous, growing pull of something that would become impossible the second he looked at it too long.

He knew himself well enough to know what came next. Sooner or later he would have to box it all up. Shut the lid. Shove it away somewhere dark and hard to reach. File it beside all the other things he had not allowed himself to keep. He knew that. Knew it with the same grim certainty he knew his own name.

For now, he let it be.

He let himself sit there in the museum light and enjoy the shape of his own happiness. Let himself bask in the impossible sweetness of being here with them, of being wanted here, of feeling this stupidly boyish grin spreading across his face every time they glanced up.

And they did glance up.

Often.

Each time, it was brief at first, a quick check of his face, his posture, some detail for the portrait, but neither of them seemed in much of a hurry to look away. Their eyes would catch, and there would be that little pause. A smile tugging at one mouth, then the other. A shared look that had very little to do with painting and everything to do with the fact that they were both enjoying being looked at.

The Doctor caught himself sneaking glances that had nothing whatsoever to do with artistic reference. The line of their mouth when they tried not to smile. The way their eyes lit when they were amused. The softness in their expression when they forgot to guard it.

He smiled to himself and went back to his canvas before he could be caught too openly staring.

Across from him, they were having thoughts dangerously close to the same.

Their brush moved more slowly now, not because the painting required it, but because they were stalling, letting the moment stretch. The whole day had felt strangely perfect, better than they had let themself expect, better than any birthday in recent memory. They felt closer to him too, and that closeness sat warm in their chest, threaded through with something they still refused to examine too directly.

He had been wonderful today. Infuriating, smug, ridiculous, yes, but wonderful.

Thoughtful enough to plan all this. Sincere enough to listen. Soft enough, when it mattered, to let them see the hurt tucked beneath all his brightness. They still could not quite believe he had said those things to them. That they were important to him. That he looked forward to them.

It made their chest feel too full in a way that was almost painful. So they did what he was doing, though neither of them knew it.

They let themself enjoy it, just for a moment. Just the looks, and the smiles, and the dangerous ease of being seen by him and liking it far too much.

They looked up again and he was already looking at them. This time neither of them pretended it was for the painting.

The Doctor’s grin widened, young and bright and so open it made something in them catch. They smiled back, slower, softer, and for a second the rest of the room seemed to blur around the edges. Just easels and drying paint and the warm museum hush holding them in place while something unnamed passed gently between them.

Then the instructor clapped their hands once and announced that time was nearly up, and the spell thinned into laughter and movement.

The Doctor added one last, deeply questionable touch to the portrait and then set his brush down with all the solemnity of a man concluding important work.

He looked at it.

Then kept looking at it.

And the longer he stared, the more torn he became between laughing outright and quietly folding the canvas in half so that no living soul would ever have to witness what he had done.

Apparently, art was not his strong suit.

The portrait was dreadful. Not abstract in an interesting way. Not stylized with intention. Just wrong..

They were there, technically. In the broadest possible sense. A rough arrangement of features had made it onto the canvas, and if one already knew what they looked like, one might perhaps identify them under favorable conditions. But everything about it had gone slightly sideways. Their face was too blocky. Their eyes had come out too large, giving them a startled expression they did not possess in real life. Their nose had somehow ended up too small, which he felt was unfair considering the amount of grief they had given him about his own. Their hair had ceased being hair at some point and become a single shape hovering over their head like a weather event.

And their skin had acquired an orange hue. The Doctor frowned harder. He had not used any orange paint, he was nearly certain of that.

He leaned in, scrutinizing the canvas as though closer proximity might reveal where he had gone so catastrophically astray. It did not. If anything, the details only got worse. In a few places the colors had blurred together into a muddy, tragic mess that suggested he had perhaps attempted to paint them during an earthquake.

It looked, he thought grimly, like the sort of thing a child brought home from school while a teacher praised their confidence.

His mouth flattened. Without thinking too much about it, he picked the brush back up.

Perhaps it could be salvaged.

He added a bit near the cheek, which did not help. He tried softening one line around the mouth, which made it actively haunted. The Doctor froze, stared at the fresh damage, and slowly lowered the brush. Fix what, exactly? All of it?

He looked from one side of the portrait to the other, searching for some reachable starting point, some single area he could improve enough to pretend the rest had been intentional.

There wasn’t one, there was no saving it. With the air of a man conceding defeat to a superior enemy, he set the brush down again.

Then, cautiously, he looked up to see whether they were finished.

And found them already watching him, entirely, unmistakably amused.

The Doctor held still.

They were leaning back slightly in their chair now, brush idle in their fingers, smile curling wider by the second as they took in the whole scene, his frown, the abandoned attempts at repair, the unmistakable air of artistic despair radiating from him.

“You done?” they asked, far too innocently.

The Doctor looked back at the portrait, then at them, then back at the portrait again. “That,” he said carefully, “depends on how one defines done.”

They laughed immediately.

He narrowed his eyes. “Don’t.”

“I haven’t said anything.”

“You’re about to.”

They bit down on the smile and failed. “You looked like you were trying to negotiate with it.”

“I was assessing my options.”

“And?”

“There are none.”

That made them laugh harder, warm and helpless and impossible not to join in, though he tried very hard not to.

“It’s not that bad,” they said, which was exactly the sort of thing someone said when it was very bad indeed.

The Doctor gave them a look. “Liar.”

They grinned, shoulders lifting in a tiny, guilty shrug. “A little.”

He glanced down at it once more and exhaled through his nose. “Honestly, I’m not sure how it got orange.”

“You made me orange?” That only renewed their amusement.

“I didn’t mean to.”

“Impressive.”

“It was an accident.”

They set their own brush down at last, smile still lingering, and looked between him and the portrait with open delight. “Can I see?”

The Doctor’s expression shifted at once into instinctive alarm.

He put one hand lightly over the edge of the canvas as though he might shield it from view.

“Absolutely not.”

That made them laugh so brightly that a few nearby people glanced over, smiling in spite of themselves. The Doctor sighed and looked back at his hopeless painting, already knowing he was doomed.

They were finished.