Chapter Text
When Donna Noble was in school, a distant relative, some aunt who had gone to Disney World without her, had given her a Mickey Mouse alarm clock as a present. Donna found herself cursing that alarm clock, ringing at 7am precisely every morning from primary school to sixth form. She hated that clock with a passion, only too happy to toss it into the bin when she graduated.
Nowadays, she had a different kind of alarm clock to wrestle with every morning. The Doctor, Time Lord that he was, had the same precision and level of annoyance her Mickey Mouse clock did. At her door at 7am (at least, according to the clock she had in her room), wheedling and whingeing until Donna came out for breakfast. It was especially worse when he’d thought up a new place for them to see. Sometimes she would give in and emerge with her bathrobe with a smile on her face, asking him what they had on for breakfast.
Today was not going to be one of those days.
“Sod off, Spaceman, I’m still sleeping!” She yelled from her bed, her face still buried under the pillow. They had just come from a planet where they were forced to run for their lives from a big, green, smelly parasitic alien (what were they called again? Smithereens? Supremes?) who wanted to use Donna’s body as a skin suit to trick the Doctor and get to the TARDIS. There was a lot of running, tripping over things in the dark and Donna was knackered. It wasn’t fair that the Doctor only needed an hour or two of sleep every day. She was only human, after all.
“Donna,” the Doctor’s voice drifted gently from the other side of the door. “If you’re still sleeping, how are you talking to me?”
She decided to ignore that, choosing instead to roll over to her side and cover her ears with a pillow. For all his impatience, she appreciated that the Doctor never never never entered her room without permission. That, or the TARDIS was kind enough to keep the door locked for her. Little did she know, hers was the only door on the ship that the Doctor couldn’t just waltz into. It was, in fact, the first he had ever encountered.
“Come on Donna Noble,” the Doctor whinged again. “Whole universe waiting out there to explore, you and me! We can go to the Floral Fallall Festival on the farthest planet in the Franconia System—beautiful place, populated with women who grow the biggest, most beautiful flowers in the Graconian Galaxy!”
She snorted into her pillow.
“Or we could hop around the gravity fluxes in Silphora! Brilliant place, that. Like Trampoline World, only instead of trampolines, you're bouncing over their Great Canyons.”
Something told Donna that she would love to go jumping around canyons in an alien planet, but right now, she just wanted to sleep.
“Alright then,” came the Doctor’s somewhat disappointed voice. “Whenever you're ready. I made you toast in the kitchen.”
With still closed eyes, Donna snickered, slowly sitting up from bed. She could imagine the Doctor stuffing his hands into his large, tan coat and sauntering like a kicked puppy into the kitchen. The thought made her smile endlessly and she finally yelled out.
“Give me ten minutes, Martian, and we can see about that canyon.”
As Donna showered and changed into something appropriate for the day, the Doctor went to the kitchen to make tea. It was one of those human things he’d just picked up on and couldn’t let go of. When Rose was in the TARDIS, she preferred drinking coffee, which the Doctor never understood. Even Martha needed at least two cups before she said a word to him in the mornings. As soon as Donna came onboard, she’d declared her tea preference and the Doctor was only too happy to make her tea every morning and toss the last of the coffee beans into a passing black hole.
Settling into the kitchen table with his tea (eight teaspoons of sugar made it taste a bit like Jelly Baby tea) and toast, the Doctor started to figure out their coordinates for the day when his hand flew to the psychic paper in his breast pocket. Did it just…vibrate? He didn’t know the psychic paper could even do that. Unless the distress call was so frantic that it actually shook.
‘OI SPACEMAN. Get here. Now.’
Then a list of coordinates. The psychic signature of the writing was unmistakeable—who else but Donna Noble, Queen of the Ois could make psychic paper tremble? But, the Doctor realised as he jogged to the console room, Donna was still in her room onboard the TARDIS. How could she send him coordinates?
“Donna?” he asked, tilting his head towards the general direction of her bedroom. “You still in there?”
“Yeah yeah, be out in a minute,” she answered back, like she was just around the corridor. Sonar spaces were just one of the ways the TARDIS made its massive trans-dimensional space easier to move about in. Not that Donna or the Doctor couldn’t yell like the best of them. The Doctor frowned as he looked at the message again. How was she doing this? There was no way that the psychic signature could be faked, no way that the woman in the bedroom wasn’t Donna Noble. The paper shook again, the coordinates written much bigger, much louder this time.
‘I said NOW, Doctor!’
He didn’t need to be told twice. Dashing over to the TARDIS controls, he sent them whooshing through the Vortex, exactly where Donna Noble wanted him.