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He wakes with an unfamiliar aching in his joints. Eyes closed, he breathes in. Breathes out. It takes him a moment to reorient himself. The room is quiet, because of course it is, of course it is, he’s not in the TARDIS anymore. With a wince and a grimace, he sits up fully. Faint gold light seeps in beneath the door. Cold air chills through the thin fabric of his borrowed shirt. He runs a hand down his face and heaves a sigh into the silence.
His mouth is tacky. Distantly, he recalls the existence of a bathroom not too far down the hall and carefully swings his legs off the bed, and gets to his feet, and walks to the door.
Creeping down the dark hallway, it seems his every step makes the floorboards groan in adamant protest. There are exactly five doors lining this hallway, and all of them are closed. For a moment, he stands awkwardly in the middle of the hall, weighing his options. In the end, he starts down the hall to the kitchen.
When he is only a metre out from the end of the hall, a shadowy figure rounds the corner.
Instantly, he jerks back, hands flying to nonexistent pockets for the screwdriver he unwittingly left in the coat still hanging in his bedroom closet.
But then—
“Doctor?” hisses the figure.
He squints at them, struggling to make out their face. But he knows that voice. He’d know that voice even if he had a different face, or forgot who he was, or heard it at the end of time. “Donna?”
A jarringly bright phone light sends him flinching backwards.
“Ah, sorry,” Donna says, hastily pointing her phone to the ground.
Blinking the spots from his eyes, he says, “No, no. It’s okay. I’m good.” He shakes his head, a minuscule movement that fails to clear his vision any more than blinking. “What are you doing awake?”
“I could ask you the same question,” Donna agrees.
“I woke up,” he replies dryly, and inches closer, trying as best he can to avoid the squeakiest floorboards.
“Well,” Donna says. “I never fell asleep.” She tilts a questioning glance at the kitchen. “Care for some coffee?”
“This late at night? No wonder you didn’t sleep.”
She shrugs. “Tea, then. Or hot chocolate?”
“I don’t actually know yet,” he says honestly. “This regeneration”—he touches two fingers to the corner of his mouth, drags them down his stubbled chin—"who knows what it likes?”
“Guess we’d best find out, then,” Donna says, and she leads the way into the kitchen.
“Why were you awake?” he asks, pulling the kettle off the stove top before it can whistle and wake the rest of the house.
“Couldn’t sleep,” Donna says. “Happens, sometimes.”
“Why?”
She grabs a pair of cups from a cupboard. It’s all very surreal, the Doctor thinks, to be in Donna’s house, wearing her husband’s old pajamas, helping her make tea. On the wall, the clock reads 3:02 am.
“Ever since I forgot…” says Donna, rolling open a drawer. Her fingers flicker over an array of tea bags, and she breaks her thought to ask, “Chamomile?”
“Yeah,” he replies, shoulder bumping against hers as he peers into the drawer. “Chamomile sounds good. And, uh, as you were saying?”
“Yeah.” Her face is carefully neutral, and it’s not an expression he recognizes, and his hearts twist at the sudden re-realization that he’s missed fifteen years of her life. “Ever since I forgot, I…”
“You”—he winces at his own tactlessness—“you don’t have to reply, if you don’t want to.”
“No, it’s okay,” she says. And then she stops. “Well, it isn’t, because I really needed all the sleep I could get raising Rose.” She drops a teabag in each cup. “And technically, it is your fault.”
“The feedback loop?” he asks.
She arches a brow and sarcastically says, “What, have you been having sleep problems, too?” She grabs the kettle, knuckles clenching white, and pours the water.
“Well,” he says, and he rubs the back of his neck. “To a degree, yeah. New-old body.”
“Yeah, that is a bit weird,” Donna agrees. She leans against the counter. “You still don’t know why?”
“No.”
“Maybe it’s a sign,” she says, the corner of her mouth lifting. “One more adventure? You and I? Two old gals, back together?”
“Just us girls,” the Doctor agrees, and he grins at the memory. “Oh, we had so much fun.”
“Are having,” Donna corrects.
“Are having.” He shifts his bare feet against the cold floor. Overhead, the single kitchen light casts the room in gentle orange light, the soft hum of electricity tickling the back of his brain. And then, of course, Donna is in front of him. The familiarity of it all makes his breath catch.
“Here,” Donna says, pushing a cup towards him. “Hopefully this regeneration isn’t as picky as the other one, eh?”
“Oi,” he complains lightheartedly. “He wasn’t too bad.”
Donna tilts her head, a smile pulling at her mouth. “He wasn’t too bad at all.”
They end up on the couch, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder and thigh-to-thigh, and he fights back the urge to rest his head against hers.
“The tea is good,” he says into the quiet, and he doesn’t need the faint light to know she’s smiling.
“I’m glad.”
“So,” he says. He traces the lip of the cup with his thumb. “Why haven’t you been sleeping well?”
“Well, before…” She inhales, slumping further back into the couch. “Before, it was because I…”
“You?”
She tilts her head, meeting his gaze in the semi-dark. In that split-second connection, he suddenly knows, he knows, what she’s about to say.
“I missed you,” she says, and the admission shouldn’t be as relieving to hear as it is—except it is, and he swallows and holds his cup tighter.
“You did?” he asks.
“Yeah.” And she laughs, small and self-deprecating, and it makes his hearts twist. “Isn’t that the silliest? I didn’t even know who you were, and still I…”
“I don’t think that’s very silly,” he says earnestly.
She lifts a shoulder in a half-hearted shrug.
“I missed you, too.” The words burst from him in a rush. It doesn’t surprise him as much, this time around, but still, he hesitates before meeting her gaze once more. “I did, Donna. I really did.”
Donna exhales, a soft sound of understanding, and murmurs, “This regeneration is…”
He smiles, tight. “Silly?”
“No,” she says, thoughtful. She nudges her elbow against his side. “It’s kind of nice.”
“I’m so glad you’re back,” he says.
She leans her head on his shoulder. “I’m glad I’m back, too. You know, I think you owe me another lottery ticket.”
“You gave it all away,” he points out.
“Only because I wanted to be like…” She trails off, sips carefully at her tea. The you goes unsaid, but that’s probably for the best. She doesn’t need to know what he did, who he became, after he left her. “Anyway. I’m glad you’re back, too.”
“Donn,” he says finally. His mouth is tacky again. He swallows, runs his tongue over the back of his teeth. “Donn, I—”
“It’s okay,” she replies, quiet. “You don’t have to say it. Besides, isn’t this nice?”
“Yeah,” he agrees. The cup in his hands warm his fingers, and Donna is a comforting weight beside him, and if he tries hard enough, he can almost pretend the electricity humming from the light fixture is actually that of the TARDIS. “Yeah. This is nice.”
“We could do this forever,” Donna murmurs.
Forever. Forever. He turns the word over in his mind, circles it around like a question. Forever.
“If we have the time,” he says instead, and maybe it’s enough, or maybe it isn’t, and Donna makes a sound like a sigh, and they sit side by side until dawn.