A/N: If you recognize it, I don't own it. This one was inspired by a line in another fic: "she wondered if he was really sleeping, or pretending for her benefit." If it's your line, let me know and I'll give you due credit. It got me thinking about what he might do if he didn't need to sleep, and that got me thinking in adorable ways.

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In The Still of the Night

Doctor John Smith was constantly a surprise to everyone, himself included. Being the only viable human/Time Lord metacrisis ever to exist in this or any other universe, he really had no idea sometimes how he would react to things. It wasn't exactly feasible to pop down to the shops and find himself a textbook on the physiology of such beings, after all. He had theories about himself, but they were just that – theories.

For example, he had expected that having just one heart meant that his body was fully human, while his brain was fully Time Lord. This turned out to be entirely false. His senses were still up to Time Lord standards. He had an extremely efficient metabolism, which irritated him; he was accustomed to eating food mostly for the taste, since Time Lords had pretty much evolved out of all that stuff, and now he had to eat substantially more than a human did. On the other hand, he never seemed to get drunk, so evenings spent in the pub with his friends were a great deal more entertaining without the worry of an upset wife or a hangover. Not that he'd ever really enjoyed binges at the local.

And he didn't sleep more than a few hours a month. He didn't need to sleep more than a few hours a month, anyway. John made a point to sleep at least an hour a night so that Rose wouldn't ever have to go to bed alone. There was something wrong, John had decided early on, with his wife going to bed by herself. It wasn't because of any physical intimacy that might occur once there, but because marriage meant having another person always by your side, and going to bed alone just did not keep with that spirit.

So, he went to bed with Rose every night without fail, and slept about an hour every night. Sometimes a little less; sometimes only half an hour.

Then, he had learned, it was better for him to get up and be quietly productive because otherwise he would just lay there and fidget until Rose woke up to gripe at him.

In the beginning, it was difficult to find things to occupy all those dark, quiet hours. He wasn't used to being quiet for long periods of time. He'd hated the absolute stillness that came in the witching hours, when even the street lights seemed to dim and everything fell into an unbreakable hush.

At first he did paperwork, all those fiddly legal documents which were necessary to officially establish his presence in this world. Those, he could do without moving much or making noise. Once that was over, he'd spent a day or two watching late night telly, trying to force his mind to take interest in the petty, tedious, and ludicrous problems displayed on talk shows and soap operas. He quickly gave that up as a bad job and decided, instead, to attend online university. Coursework, surely, would keep him occupied for a while.

It took him two years to earn a PhD in physics, another six months for astronomy, and just under a further year for aerospace engineering. School turned out to be amusing, though it wasn't exactly challenging (honestly, twenty-first century humans – suggest something from just a few hundred years up the line and they got themselves all in a tizzy) but after three degrees, John turned his attention to more important things.

Such as the little footsteps now tip-tapping down the hallway toward him.

"Daddy?"

John smiled and immediately went to pick up his four-year-old daughter. "Hey, Claire-bear. Are you having trouble sleeping?"

"Nuh," she said, nodding tiredly and rubbing at her eyes with one small hand. "Scary dreams."

John nodded his understanding. Claire, being roughly one-sixth Time Lord as far as he could tell, had inherited part of that shared memory characteristic of Gallifrey. Luckily, it only seemed to manifest in dreams; both he and Rose were hoping it would remain that way, or even fade as she got older and her mind gained memories of its own. There were things he would do anything to keep his daughter from knowing.

"Let's make some hot milk and then we'll go and lay down, okay?"

Claire hummed her agreement and buried her face in his shoulder.

She had been a sickly baby. John had spent the better part of eighteen months sitting with her at night, holding her in his arms while she whimpered her way through whatever little bug she was fighting, warming up bottles of baby formula at pre-determined times (John had always been convinced that the stuff wasn't good enough for their precious baby girl, but he was loathe to interrupt Rose's sleep when he would be awake anyway) and generally doing everything he could to make her feel welcome to the world.

When she outgrew that, the nightmares started, and he would sit by her bedside and comfort her through half-remembered images of terrible monsters and Daddy doing everything he could to save his friends.

Sometimes when she dropped back off to sleep, John would sit and weep that such a tiny child – and not just any child, but his daughter – would have to suffer through memories like those.

"Ah – I think we might have woken Mummy up." John set down a mug of warmed milk on the table, next to Claire's sippy cup, and smiled apologetically at Rose as she entered the kitchen, every bit as bleary-eyed as Claire.

"I don't mind," she dismissed easily. "Wasn't gonna sleep much more anyway."

Since it was only just past two in the morning, John privately disagreed, but he put the kettle on for her anyway.

"Listen – John – why don't I sit up with Claire?"

John looked at her over his mug of milk while Claire sucked quietly on her plastic straw. They'd had this conversation many times before; Rose felt guilty for forcing him to take care of Claire all night, every night, while she just took it easy. John smiled reassuringly at her. "I'm going to be up anyway. Go back to sleep, luv, it's no trouble."

Rose sighed.

"Mummy was in my dream," Claire mumbled around the sippy cup, her eyes now wide and glassy as she passed through 'being tired' and into 'being so exhausted that she wouldn't be able to sleep again'. "Mummy and Uncle Daddy and bright sunshine, and metal bugs."

John couldn't remember exactly when that particular moniker had started. Claire didn't know about regeneration, obviously, but she insisted that there were men who were Daddy but didn't look like Daddy. Those men became Uncle Daddy to her; that seemed to work well enough, at least until she was a bit older. He glanced at Rose and knew that this time, as so many other times, she found it just as endearing as he did.

"The sunshine will never get that bright here," Rose assured her. The kettle whistled. John got up and made tea.

"Mummy, I'm sleepy." Claire yawned so widely that her cup slipped out of her fingers and clattered to the floor. Rose picked it up and set it back on the table.

"If you've finished your milk, we'll go lay down and sleep again." Claire nodded and held up her arms. Rose picked her up and together they disappeared back down the hallway. John emptied out Claire's cup and put it in the dishwasher for later. Then he retrieved a cardboard box from underneath the sink. It was filled with odds and ends, half-finished projects and inventions and scribbled ideas for future ones. He tinkered idly for fifteen minutes, until Rose came back for her now-cooling tea.

"She's asleep," she said, dropping into the chair.

"As you should be," John replied softly. "Come on, Rose, you know it's no trouble."

"I just… feel like I'm neglecting her," Rose admitted, nursing her mug. "I feel like I sleep through all the trouble she has and leave you to deal with it. It's not fair."

John chuckled. "Next time she comes down with the flu, she's yours. I promise I'll stay out of the way," he teased.

"Cheers. But I hope that's not for a good long while yet." Rose finished the tea and set the mug in the sink, to be dealt with later.

"Come on, you. Back to bed. There's still four hours yet before you need to be up." John escorted his wife back to their bedroom, where they lay contently in each other's arms. It wasn't long before Rose nodded off.

Doctor John Smith never slept much. An hour a night, sometimes less. He found a variety of other ways to fill the long, still, quiet hours of the night: whether it was expanding his knowledge, watching over a sick infant, comforting a toddler when she woke up screaming with her nightmares, or just lying beside his wife and watching her while she slept peacefully, like he was doing now. He was very good at tidying up quietly, and great at inventing strange and entertaining gadgets which shouldn't work but did.

And he was really, really excellent at having breakfast ready for when his wife and daughter woke up.