A Noble Ship Sets Forth-Doctor/Reader

Donna Noble was, by nature, strangely suspicious for someone with a track record of utter obliviousness.

Maybe she couldn’t tell you the size of the universe or rattle off each planet within it, like some talkative bean poles, and maybe she couldn’t half-understand the Doctor’s ramblings and wasn’t as gung ho about history, like some h/c companions. But she could tell if a certain bean pole and a certain companion wanted to… to… dance around the maypole? God, never mind, the metaphor got away from her.

Point: Donna Noble wasn’t blind, not like the lovable idiots she travelled with. At least not when it came to the biggest, brightest elephant-in-the-TARDIS that trumpeted “Love Me Do" in their faces.

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At first it had seemed a little questionable. Maybe she was over-reading things, being a little too set on seeing what she wanted to. Because of course she wanted to see it. The two of them deserved to be happy. And, let’s be honest, they would have the cutest little babies imaginable, all for her to spoil absolutely rotten.

“Oh, what did you get?” Y/N asked, peering over at the strawberry-tinged cone in the Doctor’s hand. It glowed crimson in little swirling currents so that it looked like lava instead of ice cream.

“Mount Olympus Mons Mango and Mocha,” he said, over annunciating the M’s. Donna would bet five pounds that half his decision to get the flavor was based on alliteration, the big dork.

Y/N laughed but wrinkled her nose. “I can’t tell if that sounds disgusting or delicious.”

“Here,” the Doctor offered, “try mine.”

“You sure?” she asked. When he nodded—something about his blank face struck Donna as far too forced, his nod too fast—Y/N accepted the ice cream. The Doctor’s brown eyes never left her as her tongue darted out, swirling around the cone. His cheeks seemed to grow pink, and his hand was a little shaky when he took the cone back.

“Hmm,” Donna mumbled, eyebrows pulling inward. She watched the pair as they walked a few steps in front of her. Yes, she’d slowed down to… spy a little. It wasn’t as crazy as it sounded, don’t even judge. Y/N laughed and licked her lips, then said she still wasn’t sure about the flavor. The Doctor laughed, rubbing the back of his neck. Both had trouble hiding their smiles.

“Hmm,” she repeated. This time, eyes squinted, she slowly nodded.

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“Can I drive?” Y/N asked, leaning across the TARDIS console.

The Doctor looked down at her, mouth pulled up into a smirk. “You. You want to drive the TARDIS?”

“Oh, it can’t be that hard,” she replied. Her tone was playful, though, and Donna knew that she’d better settle herself in for another round of teasing. She watched the two of them from where she was sprawled out on the console sofa-thing, silent for the sake of eavesdropping. Which was completely normal, thank you.

“Can’t be that hard?” the Doctor repeated, scoffing. He leaned forward in her direction, crossed arms resting on the console.

“Well, you’re always mucking it up a bit, but I think I could handle it.” Y/N flashed him a grin, then surprised him by imitating his signature wink. Donna had to swallow her snort when the Doctor’s comeback faltered a bit, stuck staring at Y/N until he cleared his throat and began explaining some swirlymajigger. What a massive dork.

Of course, Donna knew all about this sort of thing, the light flirting that would suddenly catch up with you and make your stomach drop. She wasn’t a stranger to that kind of relationship. She knew how friendship and banter could lead to the rumpy numpy, Humpty Dumpty. Donna Noble understood hidden attraction. Donna Noble knew romance.

All right, so she’d seen it on the telly, back off. It’s called living vicariously. God.

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Donna tipped her head toward a sailor in uniform, her new white skirt blowing against her knees. With a bit of whining and a lot of prodding, she’d convinced Y/N to sport old nursing uniforms for the day. Normally, Donna would’ve accepted clothing that looked less like a Halloween costume, but she was adamant that you couldn’t go to V-J Day in Times Square without looking the part. World War Two was finally over, and there were some very good looking, very eager military men looking for their gingery Florence Nightingale.

She nudged Y/N. “That one puts the boom in baby boomer. I would gladly give him a physical. And I’d be thorough.”

Y/N managed to catch her giggle, turning it into a cough as the Doctor turned to frown at them. “One of the happiest celebrations in New York of all time, and you two are out on the prowl,” he said, lips pressed together disapprovingly.

Donna watched as his gaze kept flicking toward Y/N, trying to follow her eyes. His hand was tugging fitfully at the end of his sleeve, instead of finding some excuse to brush against Y/N’s as per usual. He looked like he’d remembered that he’d left the TARDIS oven on, or someone had painted his sonic pink.

Eyes locked on the Doctor, Donna whistled, pushing Y/N forward. “That one’s nice, isn’t he? Look at the arse on him. You could bounce a ten pence off that arse.”

“Oh, come on!” the Doctor protested. Was it just her imagination, or was he looking particularly agitated? His tie had even become askew. “His back’s not even facing us!”

“’Oh, come on,’ you sound like my mother!” Donna shot back, still analyzing the tension in his body language. “And God knows I don’t need another one of her, thank you very much. Besides, Y/N’s fine with it, you big prude.”

The Doctor’s eyes shot to Y/N, and inwardly, Donna did something like a victory dance, mental fist pumps flailing. The Doctor was jealous. And she could tell it wasn’t a mild jealousy, or a little pout. Donna Noble understood the intricacies of the human/Time Lord/whatever psyche, and she could easily identify when a man was full-on brooding with jealousy. She’d seen it for herself a thousand times.

All right, all right. But the telly programs were really in-depth. And if there was one thing she'd learnt from El Amor y Aventuras de Consuela Gonzalez, jealousy was a powerful force, revealing “la pasión” and sometimes triggering Mexican saber fights at dawn.

Thinking along those lines, minus the sabers, Donna asked, “Isn’t this where that famous kiss was photographed? Between a sailor and a nurse?”

The Doctor relaxed, glad to be back on a topic he could handle. “Yeah, it is. Alfred Eisenstaedt, “The Kiss.” It’ll be featured in Time magazine in about a week, and everyone’ll go mad over it. It shows up in American pop culture for decades and decades.”

“And no one truly knows who the sailor and the nurse are,” Y/N added, obviously excited, “at least not for sure. I wish we could find them, see who they are.”

Finishing her trouble making, Donna took Y/N’s set-up and hit her point home. “Wouldn’t that be something if, say, one of us ended up being the nurse in the kiss? Creating a bit of history in a loop-y thing?”

“All right, bit bored with all of this, aren’t you?” The Doctor said abruptly, grabbing one of Y/N’s shoulders and steering her back in the direction of the TARDIS. “A party’s just a party, after all, nothing new to see here. Charles the Second, though, he could party. Let’s go meet him, shall we? Right now.”

Donna's lips curled into a very Grinch-like smirk, and she tucked her arm through Y/N’s, winking at a businessman passing by.

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When Donna had first met the Doctor, she thought she had seen the full fury of a Time Lord. She could remember him standing above her, flames and water reflecting in his dark eyes. She had never before seen someone so empty, so merciless than in that moment.

Until a trip to the Selmar Nebula went horribly wrong.

Bruised and covered in sweat, she stood beside him in the TARDIS as it stood, locked, inside of a Kalhoonan war ship. She could hear weapons pounding, trying to force their way into the TARDIS. They’d ran, all three of them—she, the Doctor, and Y/N—lost in that maze of a ship they’d accidentally found themselves exploring. The inhabitants had been stoic, harmless, until the Doctor had realized the ship was weaponized and pointed at a peaceful would-be colony. Donna was a little confused about the entire thing, but understood the general gist of things: the strong and powerful preying on the meek and patient once again. And then they’d been running, faster, with more fear, as they found themselves against an entire army of purple-veined soldiers. Somewhere along the sprint back to the TARDIS, Y/N had been ripped from them, lost, and the Doctor was burning.

The Doctor held his sonic to the TARDIS console, glaring at the door. He’d made a connection with the warship’s radio, and a deadly calm head spread into the TARDIS as he’d told the captain exactly what he was dealing with, and what the man had so arrogantly, ignorantly done. Donna could hardly breathe, for the first time truly understanding what it meant to be worried out of her mind.

“And I can promise you one thing.” The Doctor’s voice turned as dark as the pit of a black hole, and as sharp as cut ice. “If you harm her, if you so much as touch her again, I will come for you with a reckoning that your species will never forget.  I will split every single part of you, until you are mangled and devoid of every shred of honor, and I will put you on display so that your children’s children write of a time when the skies of Kalhoon went red. They’ll be too afraid to write my name in their records, and you will join your history’s greatest regrets. Unless you return her to me right now, I will stain your ancestors with the blood of your corpse.”

The voice on the other side of the connection went silent. The Doctor’s hand gripped his screwdriver so tightly that his knuckles were white.  Donna found herself unable to move.

The doors of the TARDIS flew open, and Y/N ran in, stumbling through a limp. The Doctor dropped his sonic and met her, pulling her to him and winding his fingers into her hair. “I am so sorry,” he whispered against her. “I am so, so sorry. Please don’t—I’m so sorry—“

“It’s all right,” she mumbled into his chest. “It’s all right, I’m all right. It’s okay.”

And for a moment, Donna wasn’t sure which one was comforting the other.

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This morning, Donna had woken up a little bit later than most adults would have found “acceptable.” At two, she’d finally tumbled out of bed, and immediately wondered why the Doctor hadn’t burst in screaming about aliens, or dead historical figures, or fruit smoothies. The console room had been empty, and the TARDIS seemed to be floating aimlessly in space.  No one had been in the kitchen either, or Y/N’s room, or that one room where a machine made those big squishy pretzels.

She nibbled on a salted pretzel and made her way down yet another hallway. She was definitely getting annoyed now. Had they left her and gone off on some mad trip? It didn’t sound like them, but they had the joint attention span of a squirrel on amphetamines and fizzy drink, which made cabin fever a particular problem.

Finally, there was a soft murmuring of voices as she approached the thick doors of the library. Softly, curiously, she cracked the door open and peered inside. The Doctor and Y/N were sitting together on a comfy-looking sofa, a thick book in the Doctor’s hands. If she squinted, Donna could see that its pages were filled with odd circles that looked a bit like the gears of a clock. The Doctor was reading aloud, voice soft and steady, making up different voices for characters. Y/N was listening intently, eyes going between the book and the Doctor’s face. They were close together, presumably using the excuse that Y/N wanted to see the pages, shoulders and knees lightly brushing.

“Oh, yeah,” Donna muttered to herself, eyes beginning to shine. It was as if a fleck of the universe, burning and bright, had been embedded in her iris, a gleam that was almost unsettling. “I ship it.”