Do We Need Milk?
Dedicated to bas_math_girl, because reading her Doctor/Donna fanfiction gave me the courage to write and post my own. So thank you so, so very much.
Also, thanks times eight million to JDPhoenix for being the best beta ever, even though she's not a Doctor/Donna stanner like me.
In all of her life, Donna would have never guessed that the one question the Doctor didn't have an answer to would be this. Oh, she'd tried to stump him. She really had. She'd jumped straight in with both feet with a what's the meaning of life? and followed up with a very astute why are there never enough buns when you make hot-dogs? The Doctor had had answers for every difficult question she could think of.
Apparently, it takes one million, sixteen thousand, four hundred, and eighteen licks to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop.
So she expected better than the question that finally stumped him.
"Doctor, do we need milk?"
He looked up from inspecting the back of a tin of beans she'd thrown into the cart earlier. "Sorry, what?" She noticed his hand reaching for his pocket, as if he was going to get out his screwdriver to sonic the tin open—or worse. She smacked his hand idly and repeated her question. He looked at her oddly for a moment before he finally said, "I dunno."
She scoffed. "What do you mean you don't know?"
"I mean I don't know," the Doctor said, getting a little irritable now as he tossed the tin back into the cart. Glancing at the thunder rolling from her eyes, he quailed a bit and added. "I don't drink milk that often, do I?"
She had turned to inspect the different types of cheeses laid out in the refrigerated display and now whipped around to give him a strange look. "Since when do you not drink milk?"
"Since recently," he said defensively.
"Oh, really?" Her mouth was drawn in a thin line now as her temper took over. "Because the way you were chugging it down the other day when I baked those cookies said otherwise."
"Now that's not fair," said the Doctor. It was clear that he was fighting the urge to cross his arms petulantly. "You have to have milk when you eat cookies. It's an unspoken law of the universe. If you eat more than one cookie, you are required to have milk to go with them or else Very Bad things will happen."
"Like what, exactly?" Donna said. She flicked a wave of ginger hair over her shoulder before she bent to pick up some yoghurt. "The cookies won't be soggy enough to gum on, Mister I've-Got-to-Preserve-These-Teeth?"
The Doctor's face grew sour and he pointed an accusing finger in her face. "That is not fair, Donna. I was drunk on sugar when I said that and you know it."
"Do we or do we not have any milk?" she pressed, choosing not to go down that path in their conversation.
"I do not know," the Doctor said.
For a moment, the two stared at one another, as if they could solve the argument with glares. Eventually Donna simply gave a final scoff and pushed the cart away from the dairy. After a moment of glaring indignantly at her back, the Doctor relented and trailed after her.
"Donna, do you want me to run back to the TARDIS to check?" he said as he caught up to her. "I can just pop in to see if we need any milk."
She said nothing, choosing instead to add a large box of bow-tie pasta to the cart.
"Donna?" he said, once again jogging to catch up as she continued down the aisle. She picked up a bulk package of long-grain rice and hefted it into the cart, ignoring his dogged attempts to get her attention. "Donna, if we need milk, we need to get it while we're here."
Her mouth twisted into an unhappy frown and she turned down another aisle without responding. The Doctor, growing irritated, groaned her name. "Don-na."
She finally stopped and turned to glare at him. "Did you even think to check and see if we needed it before we left? Or were you just thinking about what you were going to open and start scoffing before we left the store?" She held up a bag of knobby-looking potato-something-or-other snacks that was very clearly open.
The Doctor chose to ignore her dig at him and pressed the line that really mattered. "You never said anything about checking to see if we needed milk! It was just, 'Oh, I need to pop out to Tesco and pick up a few things.'"
"Never said anything?" she repeated incredulously. Her hair flew in her face as she whipped her head around to make sure no one was listening. "Nine hundred years old and you need me to remind you to check if we need milk before we go to the store? Honestly, you are such a child."
"It's not like I asked and begged to come," he said hotly, scrunching up his face. "I wanted to work on the dimensional matrices and you practically dragged me away from the console. So don't go blaming me if you weren't prepared for a shopping trip."
She scoffed. "Well, I'm so very sorry for interrupting you in the work that was so urgent that it was put off until after our tiddlywinks tournament this morning—which you insisted on, might I add—to go shopping for the food that I have to cook for you on a daily basis because the people on your home planet of Nimrodonia never invested in teaching their children to feed themselves." She ended this by sticking her tongue out at him in a very mature manner and turning around to inspect the various boxes of custard powder.
The Doctor sputtered indignantly for a moment or so, but he was really more amused by her tirade than anything else. The anger dropped away when the TARDIS, who had been following the entire conversation through their mental link, contacted him with a juicy bit of information. "I just got word from the TARDIS," he said with a tiny grin, "and she says that we've got two full jugs of milk at home from the last time we argued about this."
There was clear, unbroken silence for about twenty seconds before Donna reached out and thumped the Doctor a good one over the back of his head. "That's for not contacting her in the first place and saving us this argument," she said. Then, after a moment's thought, she smiled and stood up on her tip-toes to kiss his cheek. "And that's for coming out with me when I knew you didn't want to."
The Doctor grinned all the way to the checkouts.
/fin