Lemon Lozenges

Words: 631

It was easy to see that the Doctor was distracted. He'd been doing that for the past thirty minutes—the shifty looking around, the tiny snapping of his fingers, the bouncing of his feet. They were small signs, Donna wasn't even sure why she noticed them. No, that wasn't true. She didn't notice them, not at first, but then the Doctor had stumbled over his words.

"And . . . and here," he was doing it again, she saw, and the hand he was indicating the tower with was shaking, "Here, you can see that the windows—the windows are mid-19th Century . . . Lorathian . . ."

"Are you alright?" she asked then, because he hadn't been shaking this badly before, he hadn't looked so exhausted or so pale.

"Me?" the Doctor looked around, as if lost. "I'm fine. I'm . . . fine—fine, I'm always fine."

"Are you sure?" she stepped closer to him and saw a few beads of sweat that had gathered on his forehead, right below his hairline. "Are you sure?"

"Mm," he nodded, but grimaced and seemed to think better of it, just saying, "Yeah."

"Well, I'm not."

The TARDIS, when they got back, greeted them with an opened first aid kit, complete with ten different types of thermometers. As she stuck it into the Doctor's ear, Donna realized how thankful she was about his near-human physiology. It was so near-human, in fact, that most doctoring procedures, especially those that had to do with simple viral infections, could be treated the same way as on a human.

When the thermometer beeped, the Doctor helped her read the temperature. It was higher than his usual temperature, but nothing to worry about, according to him. Donna supposed that if he had been lying, the TARDIS would have told her.

He ended up taking a couple of aspirin—and Donna knew that he hadn't been "fine"—which almost immediately returned the color to his face. He said that it was just a small cold (the Lorathian version of it, anyway), easy to catch and even easier to get rid of. Donna was happy for that. She had no idea what she would have done had the Doctor become too ill.

Donna made them hot cocoa. The Doctor drank his almost immediately, and asked for another with a guilty look on his face. As she turned her back to obey the request, Donna noticed him rubbing at his throat, doing his best to hide the action. She rolled her eyes.

"What?" he wondered when she stopped mixing the cocoa.

"I saw what you did there," Donna resumed making the drinks, then put them on the table between them, and sat down. "Does it hurt?"

"Does what hurt?" he drank half of the cup (he hoped that the shifting of his eyes didn't betray him).

"Knowing that you can't lie to me," Donna smiled. "No. I mean your throat."

"Oh," he looked down and would have blushed, had he been human. "Um . . . yes. Sorry."

"I grabbed these from the first aid kit before I put it away," Donna took out a few wrapped candies from one of the pockets in her dressing gown, and handed them to him. "They're supposed to work, I think."

The Doctor's face lit up when he saw them, and he instantly unwrapped one of the small, yellow candies. He grinned, "These are my favorite!"

The TARDIS chimed her disapproval when he smiled and popped it into his mouth. Donna smiled and took a satisfied sip of her cocoa. She knew she'd never be able to get the lozenges away from him, but they had no ill effect, not unless soothing tired muscles with lemon oils counted as an ill effect.