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“Doctor,” Donna said, standing firmly on the moor. She was unshakable, immovable; the Doctor had no choice but to subject himself to whatever she was about to say. “I know you don’t walk like that normally.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said the Doctor, who knew exactly what she meant. It had been keeping its weight off its left side as much after a particularly bad fall, and had hoped it had managed to be subtle enough that Donna wouldn’t notice. Apparently, it had failed.
“Don’t play dumb with me, Spaceman,” Donna said. She crossed her arms and made one of her many, many upset expressions that the Doctor understood to mean We both know I’m right and we both know I’m going to win this fight, so why not make it easy and give in? He’d never have thought he’d be so good at reading scowls before Donna, but she’d unearthed a talent in him. “You told me you were fine.”
“I was!” the Doctor said. “I am.”
“I should know better than to trust you by now,” Donna said, scowling in a minutely different way. “Get over here, then.”
“What?”
“If you’re so alright, then get over here and prove it to me.”
The Doctor had decided to take Donna for a night out on the town on the amazingly vibrant planet of Croo-2n, which the TARDIS had misconstrued as meaning Scotland but long before any humans had even laid foot on Scotland at all. Which was fair, the terms were very similar in Gallifreyan and she’d had a lot of other things on her plate at the time.
Donna may not have been thrilled, but she was eventually swayed to the Doctor’s reasoning – which was a creative new term it had developed for ‘profuse begging’ – and they enjoyed a very pleasant walk through the vast country, topped off with a lovely picnic the TARDIS had kindly organised. Well, the Doctor had tried to do it himself, but thankfully the TARDIS had noticed what he’d put into the basket and it had stepped in for everyone’s wellbeing.
All that was to say, the Doctor and Donna were far from the TARDIS, the Doctor had taken a tumble, and Donna had noticed the injury. In the Doctor’s defence, it had been babbling and couldn’t very well be expected to both speak and look around simultaneously.
Haltingly, the Doctor made its way over to Donna. There was no way she was going to budge until she’d deemed the matter resolved, and no matter what horrors of the universe the Doctor went up against, he didn’t have the guts to defy Donna Noble.
“Oh, Spaceman,” Donna said in that special long-suffering way of hers. “Trousers off. Now.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your trousers,” she repeated. “Take them off.”
Staring at Donna with unabashed confusion, the Doctor nervously tucked his hands into his pockets. She’d always made it incredibly clear she had no interest in it in a romantic or sexual way, so he wasn’t assuming any of those sorts of intentions from her. Still, it was a surprising command to hear from a friend, and the Doctor wasn’t quite sure how he was expected to proceed.
“Because you’re bleeding,” Donna enunciated slowly, like she was speaking to someone who couldn’t understand her language. “And I need to look at the wound.”
Looking down at himself, the Doctor was almost surprised to find she was right. Half of his left trouser leg was stained with blood, and it was making its sock horribly uncomfortable. Of course, it was only almost surprised since it had been aware of the injury, he just hadn’t realised it was bleeding quite so much. Maybe his acting wasn’t the problem, then; the blood had given him away.
“I don’t need to see your weird body if you have a way of magically curing yourself,” Donna said. “But it looks too high up for you to roll up your trouser leg.”
Sighing, the Doctor conceded her the win and hastily unbuckled his trousers, awkwardly pulling them down while trying not to rest on his left leg. The wound was worse than he’d anticipated, really. As far as the Doctor was aware, it had just tripped and fallen and gotten a couple bruises, not a properly deep gash in its thigh.
“Doctor,” Donna chided. “You’ve just been walking around like that?”
“Well, it's not like we could hail a cab,” the Doctor replied. “I didn’t know it was quite so bad, though.”
“It’s your leg!”
“I was distracted!”
“How— you know what?” Donna said, leaning down to get a better look at the cut in the Doctor’s leg. “It doesn’t matter. We need to stitch you up, I think.”
“That seems excessive.”
“You’d say that about anything.”
“Which of us is the doctor?”
“Not you, Mr. Martian.”
“Fine,” the Doctor said, rummaging through the pockets of his coat. “I have a suture kit somewhere in here.”
Standing on a windy moor with only his trousers down as its best friend crouched down to examine its thigh was by far one of the strangest experiences the Doctor had gone through in the past week or so. It wasn’t cold, Time Lords didn’t get chilly quite as quickly as humans, but the whole experience was uncomfortable nonetheless.
“Forget sutures,” Donna said. “We need to clean this damn thing first. I’m pretty sure you’ve got half the dirt in Scotland stuck in there!”
The Doctor dropped the suture kit into Donna’s hands and went hunting in its pockets for antiseptic wipes and, if Donna wasn’t being too hyperbolic, tweezers. With Donna, one just had to accept what she said and try to catch up. There was no time to assess a situation because she’d already gone off somewhere else, and the Doctor would need to keep up. It kept their relationship balanced, with all the times the Doctor ran off.
“I can’t believe you’ve made me do this so many times I don’t even need instructions,” Donna grumbled.
“I’ve hardly made you do anything.”
“If you took better care of yourself, I wouldn’t need to do any of this.”
The Doctor stayed impressively silent as Donna cleaned out the wound and, because she did care, quickly cleaned up the rest of his leg. When she started stitching, the Doctor was impressed by how good she’d gotten. She could give a medical student a run for their money. He would ask where she’d practised, but it had the various fading scars to attest to her prior attempts.
“We could be on Croo-2n right now,” Donna said, methodically stitching up the Doctor’s injury. It still wasn’t sure the cut was bad enough to warrant stitches, but Donna had insisted, and all his energy was not enough to fight her on the subject.
“But then we would never have seen all this,” the Doctor said, spreading his arms out to gesture towards the beautiful expanse around them. “And we’d certainly never have had a nice picnic.”
“You still owe me a night out,” Donna said.
“I’ll pay up!” the Doctor replied. “But admit this is nice, at least. It’s beautiful out here, I don’t think I took the time to appreciate it last time I was really out here.”
“Last time being…?”
“The queen of England and a werewolf.”
“Right. Of course.”
“You wouldn’t see that on Croo-2n.”
“Yes, okay. It’s nice out here, you were right. Now shut up and let me work.”
The Doctor, bad at shutting up as it may be, stayed silent while Donna finished suturing up its wound. A wound which, on second thought, definitely had required stitches, if the pain that was suddenly overwhelming all his senses was anything to go by. He distracted himself by searching for non-lethal painkillers in its pockets and tinkering with any of the other interesting gadgets it found in there. He’d forgotten just how much fun junk accumulated in his pockets.
“I’m done,” Donna announced. “Nice and sewn up. You’re like a fancy quilt.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one before.”
“That’s me; always creative.”
The Doctor pulled his trousers back up almost more uncomfortably than he’d removed them, feeling like there was something he ought to say but also waiting for the painkiller it had taken to kick in.
“You alright, Spaceman?” Donna asked, offering it a hand to lean on. “Took your martian aspirin?”
“I can’t have—”
“I know, I know,” Donna said. “I wouldn’t give chocolate to a dog, either.”
A little unsteady on its feet, the Doctor graciously accepted Donna’s offer of stability, leaning on her for stability. Together they made their gradual way back to the TARDIS, enjoying a sunset over the gorgeous landscape. Or at least, the Doctor enjoyed it; Donna complained about the cold that was starting to get to her, but he was fairly certain she liked the scenery as well.