Doctor Who - Tea and...

Full Title: Tea and Tortaalan Toast

[Doctor/Donna | PG | humour/fluff]

[follow-up to Vanilla and Aldesian Smoke.  Not essential to read that first to understand this one, I don't think.]

Donna woke the next morning with the hangover to end all hangovers. She let out a groan, her head pounding its protest as she focused on what turned out, after a moment, to be her bedside table. On it, there was a glass of water and two aspirin that she was fairly sure she hadn't put there the night before.

She popped the aspirin into her mouth and took a grateful swallow of water to relieve her dry, scratchy throat. Setting the glass back on the table, she rolled over and buried herself beneath the covers for another hour of sleep.

The next time Donna woke she felt significantly better. She still had a bit of a headache, but at least her stomach had stopped doing little flip-flops. In fact, she decided she was hungry.

Flipping back the covers, she swung her feet to the carpet before promptly freezing in place. Hang on. How had she got here? Into her bed, with her pyjamas on? She had no memory of having done either of those things the night before. The last clear memory she did have was of being in a rather crowed, noisy alien pub with the Doctor. But where was the rest of it—what had happened between that and waking up this morning?

Try as she might, the most Donna could recall were a few vague, isolated, unhelpful images here and there. And a rather nice dream involving the Doctor that he definitely never needed to hear about. He had a high enough opinion of himself as it was; imagine how insufferable he'd be if he ever found out she'd had dreams about him that—Well, frankly, they were the sort of dreams no one should have about their best mate.

No, he definitely didn't need to know.

God, she'd drunk enough to make her black out; she hadn't done that in a while. She prayed she hadn't done anything overly embarrassing last night. She had awoken alone, fully clothed, so nothing like that had happened. Thank God. But she knew she could be a bit mouthy when she was drunk.

Her tummy growled, reminding her that she was hungry, but she was suddenly less keen to go out to the kitchen and greet the Doctor than she had been.

Sighing, she pushed her feet into her slippers and tugged her robe off the hook on the back of the door.

---

When she got to the kitchen, she found the Doctor spreading marmalade on his toast, his back to her.

She wasn't sure if he'd heard her come in. After a moment she ventured, "Morning."

He gave her a quick glance before turning back to his toast. "Morning, Donna," he said cheerily. "How are we this... ah... morning?"

She wasn't quite sure how to read his cheeriness. "Alright..." She shrugged. "Bit of a headache, I s'pose."

"Hmm," he agreed vaguely. "Like some tea?"

"Yeah, actually." Donna pulled out a chair and sat down at the table. "Thanks."

She waited for him to say something, but the longer she waited, the more she got the impression he was trying to pretend she wasn't there. This wasn't a good sign. Normally he'd be jabbering on about some planet he wanted to visit that day, or boasting about some clever, brilliant... science-y thing he'd done with the masses of junk he'd collected that he loved to tinker with in his spare time. Anything, really—so long as he could hear himself talk.

This morning he was oddly subdued, sitting himself down across from her without a word. He passed her her tea with barely a glance.

She sipped at her tea quietly and watched him munch through his breakfast with a particular interest in the plate and the toast in his hand.

Oh, sod it. She was going to just ask. This was silly. "Erm... Doctor..."

He looked up from his plate with a mouthful of toast bulging out his cheek.

"Did I... I didn't do anything... wrong, last night, did I? Anything... embarrassing, maybe?"

He stopped chewing at her words, but recovered after a beat. "You don't remember?" he asked, swallowing.

The way he'd paused didn't fill her with reassurance. "If I did, d'you think I'd be asking?"

"No... Well, I s'pose... No."

He took a painfully slow sip of his tea and she raised her eyebrows, still waiting for an answer.

After he'd swallowed, he glanced up and said, "You were pleasant, co-operative and perfectly well-behaved. Sugar?" He pushed the bowl toward her.

Her stomach dropped a bit at that. "Well now I know you're having me on, then," she said in what she hoped was a light tone. "That doesn't even sound like me when I'm sober."

"We-e-ll..." He drew the word out, scratching the side of his chin. "When I said perfectly well-behaved, I may've been exaggerating a bit, but..."

She hesitated another moment before asking, "What was it, then?"

"Oh..." He sniffed. "Nothing really." He pointed down at his mostly-empty plate. "Toast—would you like some toast? I can put more on," he said in a rush, gesturing back at the toaster. "Good for you, toast, well... Can be not so good; it depends... But this is lovely, very nutritious. Comes from Tortaal—fifty-seven different kinds of grain in one slice; they really know how to make the most of their food, nutrition-wise, the Tortaalans... Bit obsessed with it, actually... Still, not a bad thing to be obsessed with, if you think about it..."

He kept talking, of course, but Donna wasn't really paying him much attention by that point. There was a niggling little suspicion beginning to surface at the back of her mind that maybe not all of that dream had been a dream. Though she really hoped she was wrong...

"Erm... Doctor..."

He stopped in the middle of a detailed explanation of the way in which this particular toast had been made, and looked at her.

A slight heat began to rise in her face and she glanced down at her mug, swirling her tea. "Did I, by any chance..." Oh, just say it... "Get a bit too friendly, last night?" She raised her head again. "With you?"

He looked back at her like a doe on the motorway. "With me?" he asked, his voice an octave too high.

"Yes." She thought she already had her answer. And she almost wished she didn't.

"Um... Well..." He rubbed a hand up the back of his neck, shifting his gaze across to the fridge. "Depends what you mean by 'too friendly', I s'pose."

"Did I try to snog you like a randy teenager," Donna clarified.

"Ah. Well. When you put it that way... You may have been a bit... amorous, last night, yes. Slightly. Well... When I say slightly..."

Donna put her hand over her face and let out a little groan. This was mortifying.

She heard him take a sip of his tea.

"Oh, God." She peeked through her fingers, another little detail of her dream (which, by this point, she was beginning to wonder exactly how much of it had actually been a dream) coming back to her. "I didn't... happen to tell you about any dreams I'd had, did I? About... anything?"

He gave a little sniff, the beginning of a grin on his mouth. "You may have." He looked just a bit too chuffed with himself for Donna's liking.

Donna mentally swore and squeezed her eyes shut. She didn't want to have to look at that smug little face.

After some of the heat had gone from her cheeks, she raised her head. "When I said that, I wasn't... I mean... Well, I would've said anything, wouldn't I, if I were that far gone... I mean... I was completely pissed, wasn't I? I didn't..."

"Oh, of course," he agreed quickly, nodding.

"I mean... That's ridiculous," she said with a laugh that sounded a bit forced to her ears.

"Mhm, absolutely... Hey! Hang on a minute!" he squawked, suddenly quite affronted. "What's ridiculous?"

"Well, that I would dream about... You know. With you."

"What?! I—" He stopped dead, his mouth snapping shut. "Never mind."

" 'Never mind' what? You've got names and phone numbers and documented testimony of loads of women who'd bend over backwards to have the chance to shag you?"

"We-e-ll..." he replied offhandedly, an eyebrow quirking and the side of his mouth curling in a smirk.

"Oh, piss off," she scoffed. "Only daft women would want to sleep with you—ones with a thing for scrawny know-it-alls who put more product in their hair than they do. They probably felt sorry for you—if they do exist at all, that is." She took a calm sip of her tea before adding, "You'd never shut up long enough long enough to let a girl get a moan in edgeways. Act of bloody charity, sleeping with you."

He looked as if he were bursting to say something else in his defence, and there was something in that hint of a smirk that wasn't fading that suddenly had Donna worried.

"No. I... Tell me we didn't."

His eyes widened and the smirk fell in a flash. "Nooo, no, no, no, no," he was very quick to assure her with a sharp shake of his head.

"Good. Because I wouldn't. Want to, that is. With you."

"Of course not."

"Good." She nodded firmly.

He gave a little nod as well. "Good."

They sat in a somewhat awkward silence for another few minutes before the Doctor said, "Now that that's settled..." He paused a moment to clear his throat. "Where would you like to go today?"

"Somewhere where they've never even heard of alcohol."

"Sounds like a plan. Ooh, there's a lovely little planet called Bhaltar, just the other side of the Farrykker system..."