First post for the site! I wrote this with the intention of it being shippy, but it doesn't have to be if your not into that. Enjoy though!
There are a lot of things he misses about having Donna Noble travelling with him. He misses her silly quips about him being too skinny, or too daft, or even eating so many bloody bananas. There was something in Donna that made him feel that little bit extra human. That he wasn't some invincible Time Lord and could do what he wanted. She grounded him. And he misses that. The little things she brought to the TARDIS.
In particular he misses the two of them floating around the vortex doing nothing special with their time. Often he'd be reading a book or trying to fix something on the ship and she'd sit in the jump seat with her crossword. Every time they had a visit to Sylvia and Wilf, Donna would insist on picking up the local newspaper so she could do the weekly crossword.
"I used to do it after I looked for jobs every week, you know?" She had once said after the first few times she'd done this. "Brings a little bit of home back I think."
Of course at the time he hadn't really appreciated it like he does now. Now that he's alone. He sometimes wonders if she still does that. He hopes she does at least.
"Gramps would help if I was stuck. I don't even think that's cheating." She mused while twirling her pen in her hand. "Oi, Spaceman. What's a downtrodden machine worker?" She asked then, lifting her head up. He remembers the concentration on her face. Mixed with frustration because he could see she was close to the end but she was obviously stuck. And how her red hair was slipping from the loose ponytail she had put in up in. The Doctor had pulled his head out from his book and thought for a moment.
"Treadle," he said, drawing out the word like it was good to think of something like that.
"Oh, perfect. Genius you are." And her head was back down as she scribbled in the answer.
Every so often she'd throw him one of the word puzzles and without fail every time he'd have the right answer. At least it'd made him feel somewhat useful if he was having a hard time getting the TARDIS to land in the right time and place again.
He desperately missed that about his best friend.
So after his quick trip in and out of a wormhole with a lovely Lady he'd picked up a newspaper somewhere near Chiswick and took it back into his ship again. All for Donna. So he could still bring a piece of her forever with him. He'd promised himself that he'd do that for her. Bring pieces of Donna with him sometimes so it was like she still had a piece in time and space with him. Wilf was doing his part, looking at the stars. It was only right that the Doctor did his part too.
He'd had extra time that day. Well, all the time in the world. So he popped down to Earth and nabbed a newspaper. He drifted into the vortex and set himself up in the kitchen with a pen and a cup of tea. That week's crossword wasn't particularly hard. He was breezing through it, crossing off the clues one by one as he got closer to the end.
He eventually got into timing himself. Donna had set a record time (not that there was one before) finishing a crossword off once. Twenty-six minutes she had completed it in. "For idiots," she had said as she threw the paper on the ground and capped her pen. So now the Doctor had set himself a goal. He was timing himself today. He didn't do it often, only when he remembered. But he was nearing her time, about to beat it when he got to the last clue.
Planet named after the Roman God of War. Easy! It was just a filler word he'd concluded. He wrote in Mars and checked the time. Twenty-three minutes.
He almost yelled out for her, to let her know she'd have to beat him now. The silence was over-whelming. He could almost hear her in his mind though.
"Of course you'd get Mars. You are the martian after all."
Not a martian, just her spaceman.
The Doctor cut out the finished crossword and put it in the bottom drawer of his bedside table in his room, with all the others. He then walked up to his wardrobe and grabbed his spacesuit and went back to the control room. Setting his next destination he thought about Donna once again. He'd promised he'd show her the planet one day, of course to only show he was nothing like a martian but he'd have never told her that. It was still another promise he hadn't kept.
He suited up just as he landed and strode to the door.
"The red planet," he chirped as he walked out, almost like he was saying it to her. So for her, he smiled and walked further out into the red dust that was Mars.