#what if we were best friends and we coslept in your old room

[nat-20s]

a fic featuring Fourteen and Donna being so so eepy (also on a03)

During one of The Doctor’s usual puttering about at 3 am in the Tardis, they immediately notice two things about a certain door. The first is that in the latest rearrangement of the floor plan, this door has gone from the hidden depths of what we’ll call it “the basement”, to a fairly central area of the top level. Second, and perhaps more alarmingly, this door that has been locked for millennia is now cracked ajar.

He doesn’t, however, feel any immediate panic. Instead, a little smile he can’t quite hold back appears on his face. Soft in their old age, really. Should at the very least check that what he thinks is behind the door is there, and not some sort of intruder. Technically, while the bio-metric locks that had been put in place were some of the finest in the universe, he had enough experience to know that no locks were truly unpickable.

As gingerly as possible, The Doctor opens the door enough to peek their head inside; it’s immediately revealed that he truly needn’t have worried about a break in. Donna Noble, currently prone on the bed, had been the one to open her room, just as he had guessed.

He should have worried about how now, apparently, Donna was an extremely light sleeper. He had been almost certain that he hadn’t made a noise, but not even a full second later, she rolls over to face the door and stirs awake. Blinking away some of the sleep, she sees him and gives him a half-sheepish, half-tired smile. Before he can say something along the lines of “don’t mind me, get some rest”, she pats the space next to her and gives him a “c’mere” nod of the head.

The Doctor goes willingly, and even manages to not hold their breath stepping through the former mausoleum of their best friend’s memory. He settles next to her, face to face in a classic “talking too late at night during a sleepover” pose. Because of who they are, he can’t help but let the first thing he says be, “I seem to remember someone lecturing me about sleeping in the Tardis when there’s a perfectly good bed in a perfectly good house, spaceman.”

Donna must be half-awake, because instead of arguing, she gives a one shoulder shrug and scrunches up her nose in amusement. “You caught me.”

“I thought everyone but Granddad was at the London house tonight?”

“Oh, they are. Work ran late and here was closer, so I sent off a text letting them know I was crashing here instead.”

“In the Tardis?”

“Well. No. That’s my little secret. Or, I suppose, our little secret now.”

The Doctor raises an eyebrow at her, asking for more info, to which she replies with a sigh. “You know, I wasn’t a super fussy baby-”

“-a bit shocking to hear, considering-”

“Oi! As I was saying, I wasn’t colicky or anything like that, but if Mum just could not get me to settle down, she would pop me in a car seat and drive around the neighborhood. Said I was out like a light within minutes.”

He has no idea where this story is going. He finds he doesn’t mind. It’s silly and sappy of him (what isn’t, these days?), but he finds it deeply charming when Donna goes on a little ramble. Especially when sleepiness is slowing her words and she keeps blinking for more and more seconds. They think they’ll get maybe 5 more minutes to chat before she’s fully gone again, and they’re going to savor it. She continues, “She stopped doing that when I old enough to toddle into their room and fall asleep between them. God, one morning they had gotten up early and I apparently screamed my little head off thinking they had left me forever.”

She says that last statement with a roll of her eyes, passing it off as one of those things kids do, but The Doctor’s heart lets out a pang. He wishes he could’ve told little Donna that it was okay, that her parents are there and they love her so so much. He wishes he could tell all Donnas that she won’t be left behind, not in the end. (They also wish they could tell themselves that they don’t get left behind, eventually.)

Personal timelines, however, are messy, and best left alone. Instead, he stays now, and he listens, and he takes Donna’s hand in his own. “Honestly, I don’t think my sleeping habits have changed that much. I still hate sleeping alone. I still hate sleeping motionless. Stick me on a boat with someone to cuddle up to and I’ll have the best rest of my life.”

She looks around the room briefly, then presses her forehead to the Doctor’s and continues, “You know, kind of like the nights I spent here. The Tardis, this room...it was only my home for a year. But it was also the most home I had been for a long, long time. And the house is lovely, so lovely, still can’t believe you bought us a house, but right now it’s too quiet and I missed it here. The various whirs and clicks and hums the Tardis makes? Better than any white noise machine on the market.”

The Doctor grins at her, feeling a bit smug and a lot soppy. “Now you know how I feel.”

She gives a half hearted poke at his chest, which is rather undercut by the yawn she lets out. “Still, ‘spect you to stay with us the majority of the nights.”

“Hey, I’m with you right now, aren’t I?”

She closes her eyes, giving a grin and a hushed, “Yeah, you are,” before slipping straight back to dream land. He technically could slip away now, but he’s already under the covers, are the steady breathing of his best friend is having a rather lulling effect. Remembering that he’s now allowed to rest, whenever he wants, he snuggles in closer, pulls the blankets tighter around them, and does just that.