Fic: Eclipse (21/?)
Title: Eclipse
Rating: R
Pairing: Ten/Donna
Word Count: 2,066
Summary: The morning after. Spoilers for Doctor Who 4.13 - Journey’s End.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Story title inspired by The Frames.
Author’s Notes: Long time, no see, right? Really and truly, though; I’m too damn happy about the election to hold out on this. It’s pretty much all I have, as things have been so busy (in large part due to the election itself, which was more than worthwhile :) ), and it turned out to be kind of crap, because I am not exceptionally skilled at fluff; which I must warn you - you’re going to be seeing my paltry attempts at it rather consistently through the end of this story - but it’s been waaaaaaaaaaay too long since I updated (which I do apologize for), and I’m just.... happyxinfinity after Tuesday night. And a bit sleep deprived from working the campaign, watching the coverage all night and having a full 13 hours of class back to back. But yes, enough rambling. The poem of course belongs to E.E. Cummings, because I adore him immensely, and I couldn’t get the image of the Doctor reciting poetry out of my head - and because there was no other poem I could imagine him using with Donna that fit anywhere near as well as this one.
Part One: Eulalie
Part Two: Desperate Moments In Linear Time
Part Three: Ontological Subjectivity
Part Four: Better Than One
Part Five: Ātman
Part Six: Only
Part Seven: Two To Tango
Part Eight: Sonnets To A Dark Lady
Part Nine: The Forgotten Tide
Part Ten: Fifth Symphony in Ood Minor
Part Eleven: Ragnarök
Part Twelve: Fancy Feet
Part Thirteen: The Pulse Of The Universe
Part Fourteen: Learn to Crawl
Part Fifteen: Sunday Best
Part Sixteen: Starlight
Part Seventeen: Faint Of Heart
Part Eighteen: Falling Slowly
Part Nineteen: Sweetest Downfall
Part Twenty: Because The Night
Part Twenty-One: Somewhere I Have Never Traveled
When she began waking to the world again, so unfocused and bleary that she couldn’t quite make sense of what time of it day it exactly was, Donna Noble was sure of only one thing - she hadn’t dreamt the night before, not once.
Which meant, which had to mean...
She started when, eyes still shut, she made sense of the weight wrapped around her waist in two long, limber tendrils of arm, the pressure just above her breast on the right, and just below on her left now distinctly shaped like hands; protective hands holding her close. It took a moment longer to notice that the cool against her shoulder wasn’t breath alone, but instead a full mouth, wet and insistent, sucking and kissing at her bare flesh.
“What are you doing?” she asked sleepily, rolling her shoulder back indicatively into the Doctor’s chin. She bit her lip in a half-hearted attempt to reign in a smile as his touch brought her back to the night before, her hearts fluttering wildly at the recollection, the perfect memory of it. Donna was wise to the world - she’d picked up her womanly wiles where she could, and her experiences as a result were varied enough to have an informed opinion on the matter; but never, not once in her entire life, had a man made her feel quite like that, had made love to her quite like that. And she’d never before made love to a man return quite like that, either.
“You taste lovely,” was all he moaned in response to her question, pausing just to speak before returning to suckling gently at her skin, liking little patterns at the crook of her arm and halfway across her back as he made his way lower, and then back up again, his lips warmer and softer than any had the right to be.
She giggled, only half in spite of herself, as he nipped playfully at her skin, tugging it out a bit before letting go and flicking his tongue into the indentations his teeth had left. “You’re a loon,” she told him fondly, grinning over her shoulder before turning to face him, propping herself onto her elbow as he did the same, mirroring her almost perfectly and studying her with the most honest, genuine ease shining in his eyes, so stark and true that it made Donna’s chest feel tight and tingly.
“No, it’s true,” he said, his expression barely wavering as he watched her, only changing as his eyes slid slowly shut and he leaned in to press his mouth against hers, his tongue outlining the perimeter of her lips, splitting them in the middle and just barely delving past them before pulling away, savoring the flavor before declaring with supreme confidence: “Gorgeous.”
“What do I taste like, then?”
The Doctor cocked an eyebrow at her, bending a bit to lick deliberately just inside the hollow pillow of skin beneath where her bottom lip jutted out past the rest of her features. “Vanilla,” he decided after a moment of deliberation, tracing a damp trail from her mouth to her chest, kissing soft and delicate down the line of her cleavage. “And cinnamon.” He dipped his tongue into the tight space between her breasts, making her squirm a bit at the unfamiliar sensation. “Salt,” he declared at that juncture, next moving the open ‘o’ of his lips to encompass the dark rounds of her nipples, sucking them fully into is mouth, making them soft with the warmth before exposing them to harden in the cooler temperature of the room as he let them fall free of his taste. “Tulip petals,” he said with a note of surprise in his voice at coming to that conclusion, but his posture was sure.
Donna didn’t quite know whether that was a compliment or not. “Do you eat tulip petals often?”
The Doctor looked up from where he was still nestled against her bosoms, looking honestly scandalized. “You don’t?”
Donna laughed heartily at that, her chest shaking so that her breasts bounced lightly against his chin where he was settled next to her - and she felt totally unashamed as his eyes took her in, in all her naked splendor, in a way she’d never felt before. “You’re daft, you know that?” she said as her fingers tangled idly in his hair.
“Mmm,” was his response as she felt his fingers dancing against her, peppering her in one area, and then jumping to another, small swirls from the pads of his fingertips tickling her before dotting away, over swell of her chest and upwards, slow and steady but persistent.
“Stop that,” she finally whispered, a harsh hiss as she squirmed when he reached her clavicle, a particularly sensitive spot.
“Shhh,” he admonished her with all seriousness. “I’ll lose count.”
“Count of what?” Donna asked incredulously.
The Doctor didn’t answer - or at least not directly; instead, his fingers tapped out a consistent rhythm up and down the lines of her bone, stopping for a moment here and there before picking up again. “You’ve got a whole line of constellations from the Upper Casanovian Vector stretched out across your collar bone, did you know that?” he asked suddenly, apparently enthralled by this recent discovery; it was enough interest to clue Donna in to what he was trying to do.
“Are you counting my freckles?”
He chuckled at her emphatic surprise, his fingers slowly abandoning their work, his mouth replacing them as he continued his cataloguing efforts by kissing his way between the densest groups of specks. “Let’s just say I’m playing connect the dots,” he grinned, hot and smooth against her flesh as he traced quietly around circles and squares, star formations and spirally characters from a language she didn’t understand, but felt some profundity from, even as the words and phrases were traced invisibly by his lips upon her skin.
“Your slightest look, easily,” he spoke softly, breaking the sudden silence; his tone low and echoing through her chest where she was pressed against his; “will unclose me.” His eyes flicked up to meet hers, and the unguarded vision of himself that shone through their depths robbed her of breath, of thought. He allowed himself a steadying sigh, reaching down to wrap his hand around her fingers, smiling softly down at their hands as Donna instinctively closed hers in the middle of his hold, a fist, so as better to feel his touch encompass the lines of her skin fully, stretching all the way out to her wrists.
“Though I have closed myself as fingers,” he exhaled gently, squeezing his fingers with the words around her hand, so tight that she could feel his heartbeats through the press of his thumb before he released her, the pressure gone and replaced by the subtle curl of his fingers prying her own apart; “You open always, petal by petal.” With a breath he drew her hand slowly to line up with the hard length of his sternum as he finished the line with a desperate sense of meaning bleeding through his inflection, the rise and fall of his pitch, his tone; “Myself.”
“Well aren’t you the romantic,” Donna whispered, her eyes wide as she teased, but there was an honest undertone to her words; she was indeed surprised by him, by this turn in his mood. He smiled briefly, but he did not falter.
“Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility,” he continued in a murmur, his eyes darting from the nape of her neck, where her hair fell gently to contrast with the creamy pallor of her flesh, to her plump, poised lips. He leaned in, brushing away a lock of ginger hair and tucking it behind her ear before whispering against her, warm and more a vibration than a sound: “Whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries,” his tongue dragged unintentionally against her earlobe as she shifted, coming just that small bit closer, and Donna jumped at the contact, her hearts leaping desperately at the unexpected touch.
She could feel his grin as he dipped his head into the crook of her neck, smiling to her shoulder for a moment before he swung himself around her, situating her wordlessly between his legs, leaning her back up against him. He reached around her and pulled her close, settling his hands on either side of her chest, letting out the next line in a rush of breath timed to match the cadence of her own as he let himself rise and fall with her respiration, with the rhythm of the lungs beneath his palms: “Rendering death and forever with each breathing.”
He tilted his chin to press a kiss behind her left ear - a slow and attentive kiss that left a cool dampness that was chilled as he exhaled. “I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens,” he spoke in a trail of words that followed the back of her neck, just along her hairline as he brushed away the bulk of her tresses, letting the silky strands cascade from the cup of his hands.
Dropping her hair in a tousled waterfall around her naked shoulders, he turned her to him again; their legs tucked at angles away from one another so that they were face to face, gazes wide and waiting. “Only something in me,” he grabbed for her left hand, and drew it up to his collarbone, letting her fingers skip tenderly along the outline beneath the skin, up the trembling protrusion of his Adam’s apple, sliding against the curve of his chin before coming to mold itself against his cheek, where he leaned into the contact just as Donna took control and stroked her fingers against his skin in a soft caress.
“Something in me understands the voice of your eyes,” he stammered a bit, closing his own eyes as he simply existed in the reality of her touch before bringing both hands back to hers upon his face, cradling the smaller fingers between his, and drawing them to his lips; “is deeper than all roses.” He kissed delicately at the center of her palm, enclosing her hand again from either side, as if praying with her fingers pressed tight between his, before drawing one hand away again, marveling now instead at the fit of their hands together.
“Nobody,” his whispered, his eyes on the size of her palm outlined by his; “not even the rain, has such small hands.”
He closed his fingers around hers once more, holding her hand in his purposefully as he watched her, his eyes saying so many things, only half of which Donna could comprehend - they were too deep, too fathomless to really grasp, and they stirred her soul in a way that made her entire body seize up with the one question that she couldn’t help but ask.
“What does this make us, now?” she murmured, eyes studying her fingernails, the uneven curves of her cuticles against his pale palm. “What are we?”
He sighed, his hand pulling hers up, and then down briefly as his shoulders heaved. “We’re two people,” he said matter-of-factly, shaking their hands once in emphasis of what he was about to add; “and we’re in love.” Donna adored how that sounded, that simple phrase rolling smooth, like silk or fine wine, and yet low, rough and masculine in a way that enveloped her, that made her feel safe and appreciated - really and truly loved, from her trilling hearts right down to her toes.
“Is that enough?” he asked, a single note of hesitation stilling her hand in his and ringing through the hot, heady air that was still tinged with the scent of their earlier arousal as he stared into her - straight through her - his gaze open and unwavering, wanting nothing but her honesty - her hearts for him to hold.
All he had to do was ask, really.
“Yeah,” Donna whispered, cupping their joined hands to her face and relishing the way his palm contoured to her features, so immediate and knowing, so familiar and so right. “Yeah, it is.”
Part Twenty-Two: Riddle Of The Sphinx
Rating: R
Pairing: Ten/Donna
Word Count: 2,066
Summary: The morning after. Spoilers for Doctor Who 4.13 - Journey’s End.
Disclaimer: I own nothing but the plot. Story title inspired by The Frames.
Author’s Notes: Long time, no see, right? Really and truly, though; I’m too damn happy about the election to hold out on this. It’s pretty much all I have, as things have been so busy (in large part due to the election itself, which was more than worthwhile :) ), and it turned out to be kind of crap, because I am not exceptionally skilled at fluff; which I must warn you - you’re going to be seeing my paltry attempts at it rather consistently through the end of this story - but it’s been waaaaaaaaaaay too long since I updated (which I do apologize for), and I’m just.... happyxinfinity after Tuesday night. And a bit sleep deprived from working the campaign, watching the coverage all night and having a full 13 hours of class back to back. But yes, enough rambling. The poem of course belongs to E.E. Cummings, because I adore him immensely, and I couldn’t get the image of the Doctor reciting poetry out of my head - and because there was no other poem I could imagine him using with Donna that fit anywhere near as well as this one.
Part One: Eulalie
Part Two: Desperate Moments In Linear Time
Part Three: Ontological Subjectivity
Part Four: Better Than One
Part Five: Ātman
Part Six: Only
Part Seven: Two To Tango
Part Eight: Sonnets To A Dark Lady
Part Nine: The Forgotten Tide
Part Ten: Fifth Symphony in Ood Minor
Part Eleven: Ragnarök
Part Twelve: Fancy Feet
Part Thirteen: The Pulse Of The Universe
Part Fourteen: Learn to Crawl
Part Fifteen: Sunday Best
Part Sixteen: Starlight
Part Seventeen: Faint Of Heart
Part Eighteen: Falling Slowly
Part Nineteen: Sweetest Downfall
Part Twenty: Because The Night
Part Twenty-One: Somewhere I Have Never Traveled
When she began waking to the world again, so unfocused and bleary that she couldn’t quite make sense of what time of it day it exactly was, Donna Noble was sure of only one thing - she hadn’t dreamt the night before, not once.
Which meant, which had to mean...
She started when, eyes still shut, she made sense of the weight wrapped around her waist in two long, limber tendrils of arm, the pressure just above her breast on the right, and just below on her left now distinctly shaped like hands; protective hands holding her close. It took a moment longer to notice that the cool against her shoulder wasn’t breath alone, but instead a full mouth, wet and insistent, sucking and kissing at her bare flesh.
“What are you doing?” she asked sleepily, rolling her shoulder back indicatively into the Doctor’s chin. She bit her lip in a half-hearted attempt to reign in a smile as his touch brought her back to the night before, her hearts fluttering wildly at the recollection, the perfect memory of it. Donna was wise to the world - she’d picked up her womanly wiles where she could, and her experiences as a result were varied enough to have an informed opinion on the matter; but never, not once in her entire life, had a man made her feel quite like that, had made love to her quite like that. And she’d never before made love to a man return quite like that, either.
“You taste lovely,” was all he moaned in response to her question, pausing just to speak before returning to suckling gently at her skin, liking little patterns at the crook of her arm and halfway across her back as he made his way lower, and then back up again, his lips warmer and softer than any had the right to be.
She giggled, only half in spite of herself, as he nipped playfully at her skin, tugging it out a bit before letting go and flicking his tongue into the indentations his teeth had left. “You’re a loon,” she told him fondly, grinning over her shoulder before turning to face him, propping herself onto her elbow as he did the same, mirroring her almost perfectly and studying her with the most honest, genuine ease shining in his eyes, so stark and true that it made Donna’s chest feel tight and tingly.
“No, it’s true,” he said, his expression barely wavering as he watched her, only changing as his eyes slid slowly shut and he leaned in to press his mouth against hers, his tongue outlining the perimeter of her lips, splitting them in the middle and just barely delving past them before pulling away, savoring the flavor before declaring with supreme confidence: “Gorgeous.”
“What do I taste like, then?”
The Doctor cocked an eyebrow at her, bending a bit to lick deliberately just inside the hollow pillow of skin beneath where her bottom lip jutted out past the rest of her features. “Vanilla,” he decided after a moment of deliberation, tracing a damp trail from her mouth to her chest, kissing soft and delicate down the line of her cleavage. “And cinnamon.” He dipped his tongue into the tight space between her breasts, making her squirm a bit at the unfamiliar sensation. “Salt,” he declared at that juncture, next moving the open ‘o’ of his lips to encompass the dark rounds of her nipples, sucking them fully into is mouth, making them soft with the warmth before exposing them to harden in the cooler temperature of the room as he let them fall free of his taste. “Tulip petals,” he said with a note of surprise in his voice at coming to that conclusion, but his posture was sure.
Donna didn’t quite know whether that was a compliment or not. “Do you eat tulip petals often?”
The Doctor looked up from where he was still nestled against her bosoms, looking honestly scandalized. “You don’t?”
Donna laughed heartily at that, her chest shaking so that her breasts bounced lightly against his chin where he was settled next to her - and she felt totally unashamed as his eyes took her in, in all her naked splendor, in a way she’d never felt before. “You’re daft, you know that?” she said as her fingers tangled idly in his hair.
“Mmm,” was his response as she felt his fingers dancing against her, peppering her in one area, and then jumping to another, small swirls from the pads of his fingertips tickling her before dotting away, over swell of her chest and upwards, slow and steady but persistent.
“Stop that,” she finally whispered, a harsh hiss as she squirmed when he reached her clavicle, a particularly sensitive spot.
“Shhh,” he admonished her with all seriousness. “I’ll lose count.”
“Count of what?” Donna asked incredulously.
The Doctor didn’t answer - or at least not directly; instead, his fingers tapped out a consistent rhythm up and down the lines of her bone, stopping for a moment here and there before picking up again. “You’ve got a whole line of constellations from the Upper Casanovian Vector stretched out across your collar bone, did you know that?” he asked suddenly, apparently enthralled by this recent discovery; it was enough interest to clue Donna in to what he was trying to do.
“Are you counting my freckles?”
He chuckled at her emphatic surprise, his fingers slowly abandoning their work, his mouth replacing them as he continued his cataloguing efforts by kissing his way between the densest groups of specks. “Let’s just say I’m playing connect the dots,” he grinned, hot and smooth against her flesh as he traced quietly around circles and squares, star formations and spirally characters from a language she didn’t understand, but felt some profundity from, even as the words and phrases were traced invisibly by his lips upon her skin.
“Your slightest look, easily,” he spoke softly, breaking the sudden silence; his tone low and echoing through her chest where she was pressed against his; “will unclose me.” His eyes flicked up to meet hers, and the unguarded vision of himself that shone through their depths robbed her of breath, of thought. He allowed himself a steadying sigh, reaching down to wrap his hand around her fingers, smiling softly down at their hands as Donna instinctively closed hers in the middle of his hold, a fist, so as better to feel his touch encompass the lines of her skin fully, stretching all the way out to her wrists.
“Though I have closed myself as fingers,” he exhaled gently, squeezing his fingers with the words around her hand, so tight that she could feel his heartbeats through the press of his thumb before he released her, the pressure gone and replaced by the subtle curl of his fingers prying her own apart; “You open always, petal by petal.” With a breath he drew her hand slowly to line up with the hard length of his sternum as he finished the line with a desperate sense of meaning bleeding through his inflection, the rise and fall of his pitch, his tone; “Myself.”
“Well aren’t you the romantic,” Donna whispered, her eyes wide as she teased, but there was an honest undertone to her words; she was indeed surprised by him, by this turn in his mood. He smiled briefly, but he did not falter.
“Nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals the power of your intense fragility,” he continued in a murmur, his eyes darting from the nape of her neck, where her hair fell gently to contrast with the creamy pallor of her flesh, to her plump, poised lips. He leaned in, brushing away a lock of ginger hair and tucking it behind her ear before whispering against her, warm and more a vibration than a sound: “Whose texture compels me with the colour of its countries,” his tongue dragged unintentionally against her earlobe as she shifted, coming just that small bit closer, and Donna jumped at the contact, her hearts leaping desperately at the unexpected touch.
She could feel his grin as he dipped his head into the crook of her neck, smiling to her shoulder for a moment before he swung himself around her, situating her wordlessly between his legs, leaning her back up against him. He reached around her and pulled her close, settling his hands on either side of her chest, letting out the next line in a rush of breath timed to match the cadence of her own as he let himself rise and fall with her respiration, with the rhythm of the lungs beneath his palms: “Rendering death and forever with each breathing.”
He tilted his chin to press a kiss behind her left ear - a slow and attentive kiss that left a cool dampness that was chilled as he exhaled. “I do not know what it is about you that closes and opens,” he spoke in a trail of words that followed the back of her neck, just along her hairline as he brushed away the bulk of her tresses, letting the silky strands cascade from the cup of his hands.
Dropping her hair in a tousled waterfall around her naked shoulders, he turned her to him again; their legs tucked at angles away from one another so that they were face to face, gazes wide and waiting. “Only something in me,” he grabbed for her left hand, and drew it up to his collarbone, letting her fingers skip tenderly along the outline beneath the skin, up the trembling protrusion of his Adam’s apple, sliding against the curve of his chin before coming to mold itself against his cheek, where he leaned into the contact just as Donna took control and stroked her fingers against his skin in a soft caress.
“Something in me understands the voice of your eyes,” he stammered a bit, closing his own eyes as he simply existed in the reality of her touch before bringing both hands back to hers upon his face, cradling the smaller fingers between his, and drawing them to his lips; “is deeper than all roses.” He kissed delicately at the center of her palm, enclosing her hand again from either side, as if praying with her fingers pressed tight between his, before drawing one hand away again, marveling now instead at the fit of their hands together.
“Nobody,” his whispered, his eyes on the size of her palm outlined by his; “not even the rain, has such small hands.”
He closed his fingers around hers once more, holding her hand in his purposefully as he watched her, his eyes saying so many things, only half of which Donna could comprehend - they were too deep, too fathomless to really grasp, and they stirred her soul in a way that made her entire body seize up with the one question that she couldn’t help but ask.
“What does this make us, now?” she murmured, eyes studying her fingernails, the uneven curves of her cuticles against his pale palm. “What are we?”
He sighed, his hand pulling hers up, and then down briefly as his shoulders heaved. “We’re two people,” he said matter-of-factly, shaking their hands once in emphasis of what he was about to add; “and we’re in love.” Donna adored how that sounded, that simple phrase rolling smooth, like silk or fine wine, and yet low, rough and masculine in a way that enveloped her, that made her feel safe and appreciated - really and truly loved, from her trilling hearts right down to her toes.
“Is that enough?” he asked, a single note of hesitation stilling her hand in his and ringing through the hot, heady air that was still tinged with the scent of their earlier arousal as he stared into her - straight through her - his gaze open and unwavering, wanting nothing but her honesty - her hearts for him to hold.
All he had to do was ask, really.
“Yeah,” Donna whispered, cupping their joined hands to her face and relishing the way his palm contoured to her features, so immediate and knowing, so familiar and so right. “Yeah, it is.”
Part Twenty-Two: Riddle Of The Sphinx