The road less travelled...

I know it's early, but it's already the 11th here! So, time_converges:

Title: Guilty Secret
Author: katherine_b
Rating: G
Characters: Donna and the Doctor
Summary: The Doctor stumbles on Donna in an awkward moment.

"Don-na!"

The Doctor's voice rang through the TARDIS and Donna dropped the chocolate bar she had been consuming with unladylike enthusiasm. However she hadn't wiped the guilty look or the remains of chocolate off her face when he appeared in the doorway. Whatever he was about to say died when he caught sight of her face.

"What are you doing?" he demanded suspiciously.

"Nothing," she offered in tones that sounded guilty even to her ears.

His hawk-like eyes swept across the room and lit up as he clearly caught sight of incriminating evidence. "A-ha! Nothing, huh?"

He launched himself at the couch where she was sitting and plucked the offending item up from between the cushions where it had fallen, but with the tail-end of the wrapping sticking up and giving its location away.

"You're the one who's going to be complaining that you'll be - now what did you call it - oh, yes 'the size of a blue whale' in a couple of months." He grinned, plumping himself down on the cushion beside her. "And yet you keep scoffing these?"

Donna shrugged and tried to snatch it out of his hand, but he was too quick and crammed the rest of the chocolate bar into his mouth.

"Not my fault," she complained. "It's - well, yours mainly."

The result of this accusation was an indignant look and a choking sound she took to mean 'Mine?!' or something similar. If it wasn't for his respiratory bypass, she was pretty certain he would have choked.

"Yes, yours," she repeated, prodding him gently in the chest. "If it wasn't for you, I wouldn't be in this mess."

He chewed vigorously on the chocolate bar in what was clearly a desperate attempt to clear his mouth so that he could rebut her accusations, but she continued before he could get the words out.

"You're the one who lured me along, after all. Oh, I know what you were up to, Mr 'Look, I can even make it snow and destroy giant spiders'. And that reminds me - why can you kill the Empress of the Racnoss, but you yelp for me if you find a normal-sized member of the eight-leg brigade in our bedroom? I thought killing spiders was the man's responsibility."

The Doctor watched her, his head tilted slightly to one side, one hand resting on her knee and his other arm draped along the back of the couch behind her. He grinned when she finally closed her mouth.

"Done?"

She shrugged. "For now. At least until I hear what you've got to say."

He arched an eyebrow and grinned. "First, I called you in the other night to admire that spider in our room, not to kill it. But you got so carried away that I didn't have to heart to tell you the truth. And you can't possibly blame me solely for this." And he moves his hand from her knee to the ever-growing curve of her rounded belly.

"You could have at least warned me it was possible!"

"I assumed you'd have realised that from our other conversations - you know, all those ones about how similar the habits of humans and Time Lords are. And that did include sexual habits, I'd like to remind you."

"Hah!"

He moved the arm behind her from the back of her couch to drape it around her shoulders and she leaned against him. They sat like that for a moment in silence before he looked down at her.

"Are you really so unhappy about this?"

He sounded so concerned that she had to smile. "Of course not, you daft Spaceman," she replied readily enough. "But if you're going to make it sound like every unhealthy item of food that I put into my mouth is a crime, it makes me a bit snappy."

"Well, if you're going to leap three foot into the air and blush like that, what do you expect?" He chuckled and wiped the smears of chocolate off her face. "And you don't have to scoff them like they're going out of style, you know. There's plenty more where that came from."

"I know."

She ducked her head and captured his finger in her mouth, sucking off the remains of the chocolate. He lifted his finger and eased it out of her mouth before replacing it with his lips. She deepened the kiss, tasting chocolate and nuts in his mouth.

It was, after all, the only way she was going to be able satisfy her cravings for the rest of that bar.