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The sky was a pleasant shade of blue, the weather was the warmest it had been all week and The Doctor and Donna Noble were sitting on a bench outside an ice cream shop. A perfectly normal Earth ice cream shop, thank you. Just a little yellow shack with a blue roof and daisies potted in the soil around it. Although, the Doctor thought that if you asked Donna, she’d say that it couldn’t be normal because it was willing to sell him banana ice cream.
The Doctor had argued that if it was perfectly acceptable to put ice cream on a banana for a banana split then it should be perfectly acceptable to skip that stage and put it all together. Donna had just rolled her eyes and accepted her cone of chocolate vanilla chip.
And so they sat side by side on the bench in companiable silence, listening to the chirping birds and the excitement of kids who had gotten to taste one too many ice cream samples.
Of course, with them, such a state would never last.
“Do we have kids?” said Donna Noble approximately five minutes into the silence born from ice cream eating.
The Doctor choked on his cone, hacking around the cold milk-sugar treat that had gotten lodged in his throat.
“Wot?”
“I said, do we have kids. Weren’t you listening?”
“Yeah, I was, but. Do we, have kids? Together?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, no, we never- we never- y’know.”
He and Donna were on a strict no-mating policy. It was working out really well so far. Donna often complained that he was too skinny and too alien for a partner and The Doctor wasn’t looking to get into the complications that came with a relationship. Besides, he’d never mate with Donna. Ever. He was pretty sure she was half of him now.
“Not like that, you prawn. I’m talking about kids like Jenny.”
The blonde did a cartwheel through his mind.
“Hold on a minute, why is she your kid? She came off of me.”
“Well yeah, but you didn’t want her, so I had to be her mum ‘til you did.”
The reminder stung just a bit. Or more than a bit. A violent flash of the spritely soldier that lived a life cut way too short. That lived and loved and persisted despite his best attempts to deny everything she was.
He shifted on the bench. He could feel Donna’s eyes on him, judging where he was at without asking, deciding whether or not she had brought up something she shouldn’t have. It was kind of her, Donna was always kind, and her kindness was tough and knowing and understanding but it wasn’t needed right now.
He blew a breath out and turned back to her, “And you want mum rights?”
“Yeah, I think I deserve that,” Donna said. “Or are you the mother since she came from you?”
That stopped him. The banana ice-cream flowed lazily down the cone and pooled on the top of his finger. He brought the cone to his mouth to lick it off.
“I don’t actually know,” he said because humans and their genders were still weird to him after all this time. “I don’t think it matters. She thought of me as her dad though, if that counts.”
“Alright then. Then yeah, I want mother rights.”
“Right. So, Jenny. You said kids, plural. Who else?”
“Well, what about the metacrisis? He’s like a kid.”
“He’s me.”
“Well, yeah, but he’s also me. Came from my DNA too. And last time I checked, it takes two to tango.”
“Don’t-don’t say that,” The Doctor scrunched up his face. “If anything, he’s like my twin. Purely asexual reproduction. Like Jenny.”
“Oi! Half-human. Human-biological metacrisis. He sounds like me. He’s got my mannerisms as if I raised him myself.”
“But that’s weird Donna,” The Doctor said, a whine making its way into his voice.
“Which part?” Donna said opening her mouth to take a large bite into her ice-cream.
The moment her teeth made impact into the dessert, The Doctor’s brain short-circuited. All thoughts of the weirdness of he and Donna’s hypothetical children vanished in favor of watching Donna eat. He could only imagine the coldness on teeth, ricocheting all the way up into the bone and through the nervous system. Like a brain freeze amplified by one million.
“What was that?” he said.
“What was what?”
“That. What you just did. That.” He gestured widely to her cone, to the teeth marks. “You bit into the ice cream.”
“What about it?”
“Its cold.”
“It’s ice cream.”
“You’re a monster Donna.”
“Try it.”
“No.”
“C’mon try it,” she even held her cone to him. “One bite. I promise you won’t regenerate.”
He sunk his teeth into the cone and immediately drew back, back slamming against the bench as he tried, in vain, to get away from the ice cream.
It felt like the very essence of his timeline was fracturing, splitting, doubling in on itself, the world in blinding screaming color and maybe he was going to regenerate after all and-
And then the moment passed.
The Doctor shot Donna a dirty look, thoroughly unimpressed. Donna grinned and despite himself and her attempts to murder him, he smiled back.
“Oh my gosh do you think he’s putting me down on documents back in that other dimension?”
“What?”
“Like as his mother. He doesn’t even have a name, what’s he going to put on a birth certificate? Do they have birth certificates over there?”
“He has a name,” The Doctor said. “He’s The Doctor.”
Donna gave him a look that told him exactly what she thought of his name.
“If he’s anything like me, which he is, he’ll go by John Smith.”
“John Noble, more like.”
“Eh,” The Doctor said tilting his head back and forth as if weighing the name in his mind.
“John Noble-Smith,” said Donna which really wasn’t a compromise and they both knew it.
“Smith-Noble,” the Doctor says. “Sounds less like a title.”
“Yeah,” Donna agrees.
“Wilf has more grandkids,” says the Doctor.
“Great-grands, actually.”
“Oh, would you look at that. An alien great-grandchild. Should we tell him?”
“Nah. Then he’d want to meet them.”
The Doctor thought about it for a moment. About him and Donna, if it were possible, bringing home a man who looked exactly like him but sounded like Donna and a woman who could beat all the girls on Rose’s gymnastic team. There would be a lot of explaining to do.
“Best we keep them away from your mother,” the Doctor reasoned.
Donna snorted and it turned into a laugh and the Doctor followed suit. The two of them must’ve looked a sight cackling on the bench but the image of Sylvia and her great-grandchildren was too much to handle. She could barely handle one of him imagine his kids.
It quieted down after that, both of them resuming eating until they finished their respective cones. The Doctor stood first, wiping his hands on a few crumbled napkins and depositing them in a bin a few steps away. He walked back over to Donna, offering his arm.
“Well, say we get you back home Mrs. Doctor?” The Doctor offered his arm.
“Oi!” said Donna, who accepted his arm as she pulled herself to standing.
“What? You don’t like it?”
“If anything, we should be calling you, Doctor Noble.”
The Doctor made a face, “I sound like a tv show character.”
“You dress like one,” Donna nodded to his pin-stripes. “Our kids have better fashion sense.”
She dropped her own trash into the bin and released his arm to grab his hand. The Doctor swung their hands as they walked.
“The metacrisis has my fashion sense. He was wearing my suit.”
“Yeah, but you and I and the TARDIS all know that I have better outfits.”
“Oh the TARDIS?”
“Yeah the TARDIS.”
“Well let’s go ask her.”
When they had reached the TARDIS, which had been snugly parked in an alley not too far away, the Doctor proceeded to do just that. He and Donna waited, side by side, for the machine to give her verdict.
It came in a series of warm hums and the materialization of a brand-new spiffy suit for Donna.
Donna cheered, giving the old girl a pat on the console.
The TARDIS was such a traitor.