log: donna + eddie WHO: Donna Noble + Eddie Carmichael WHEN: Backdated to whenever chocolate cake day was! WHERE: Eddie's room! WHAT: Donna brings Eddie some food (and cake!) while Eddie is recovering from the werewolf incident earlier this month, and they talk about what happened and Eddie's guilt over it. And then they kiss. WARNINGS: N/A?
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Eddie is, at last, able to move. Slowly, and Dr. Tam didn’t let him walk back to his apartment, but it’s an improvement from where he was a week ago. He still hurts all over, and his side is still a brilliant splash of iodine and bruising. His left hand is in a brace, his pinky taped firmly against his ring finger while it heals. His face is better, but not by much. It’s also scratched and bruised, but by some miracle, his noses has been left unscathed.
Good thing, because Eddie Carmichael is many things, and one of those things is vain. He’s a good-looking man, and he knows it. A broken nose may give a face character, but that doesn’t mean that he wants that character to show. He’s happy with having a pretty face and people underestimating him because of it.
Tam and his nurse delivered him to his apartment earlier in the day, and Eddie promised that he wouldn’t get out of bed except for the loo. It’s a promise easily kept; moving is exhausting and reading is restful and keeps his mind occupied. Mid-afternoon he shuffled to the couch, and he’s been there ever since, alternately dozing and reading. By the time Donna peeks into the door, he’s sleeping again, his book having fallen from his hands onto the couch cushion, one of the pages bent and folded in on itself.
Donna has been visiting since Eddie first woke up in the hospital. She'd been panicking over him, although she doesn't like to admit to being afraid. It just makes her shouty and shrill to sort of cover up for it. She takes advantage of the fact that she's part of the medical team in order to stop by with excuses about taking notes and getting information for certain files, but it's all nonsense; she just wants to see him.
She doesn't know what they are, and she's a bit afraid to ask. She's been burned and humiliated before, and she's wary of irritatingly charming men like Eddie, fully aware that men like that don't genuinely go for women like her. So there's always a defensiveness about her, a wall up around her heart, and she's quick to express genuine emotion before taking it back with some sort of joke or tough remark.
She slips in once she realizes he's asleep, carrying a tray of food. When he doesn't stir at her entrance, she sets the tray down and crouches down in front of him. "Oi, you. Magic."
Eddie jerks awake, and hisses. “... the fuck… ow…”
His grimace eases when he sees Donna, and he pants, afraid to take a deep breath until the hurt has gone down to a level he can live with. Finally, he grins and lifts his good hand. He traces his finger down her cheek. “Hey, you. I’m a god damned wreck.”
"No, I know you are," Donna says lightly. "Don't get attacked by a flipping werewolf next time." She likes those little touches from Eddie; they send a little shiver down her spine and she's not sure he's aware of the effect he has on her.
Actually, she knows he is. Of course he is, the arrogant flirt.
She clears her throat, breaking off a piece of a roll on the tray and offering it out. "Brought you something to eat, I thought you might be hungry."
Eddie laughs, pausing to let the hurt fade. “I had to impress you somehow, hey? I think I went a little overboard.” He coughed, and took the bit of roll. He bit a piece off and chewed it, then tilted his head towards the cushion next to him. “You don’t have to sit down there, you know. I won’t bite. You have any butter?”
His inclination is to put his arm around Donna’s shoulders, but it’s painful to move, and besides -- he has an appetite. A real one, for the first time in days, and the roll tastes too good to ignore.
Donna's quick to move, pushing herself up and picking up the tray to lay it across their thighs. It's easier to do it this way than to have him keep leaning over to reach the tray on the coffee table. "Here, you." She spreads a bit of butter on the rest of the roll before handing it to him.
It's domestic, this. They're friends, they flirt a bit, and Donna wants to think that Eddie's serious but she still thinks at some point he's going to turn around and tell her that leading her on is all for a laugh. That's what charming blokes do, and Donna's in no mood to have her heart broken. She just hops that if he's going to pull the rug out from under her, he does it once he's well again, so when she slaps him it won't hurt him so bad.
“Thanks.” The roll goes down fairly well, and most of the rest of the food on the plate that Donna brought with her. And it tastes good -- most likely because it’s the first real meal that he’s eaten in days. “I hear I missed chocolate cake. What a pisser.”
Eddie isn’t sure what draws him to Donna; she certainly isn’t his type. Well, at least so far as age and coloring goes. But her personality, though. She gives as good as she gets, and beneath that exterior that she wants to badly to be dragon hide, is possibly the biggest, most generous heart of anyone he’s ever known. Donna knows what it is to be hurt, and to love, and to have lost. She’s entirely human, and on the occasions when he’s managed to tease a smile out of her, he would only call her stunning. He doesn’t know if she’ll ever allow him to be anything more than a friend, but he’ll be content with that.
"Oh, you did," says Donna with a sage, serious nod. "Chocolate cake for the first time in months, everyone flipping rioted over it."
She smiles crookedly, just a little, and walks her fingers over to the napkin that's taking up a good portion of the tray. "It's just a shame you can't get out anywhere or maybe you'd manage to get some — unless you had someone willing to fight off a hundred people just so she could steal an extra piece."
She plucked the napkin away and grinned. Yes, she's saved a piece for him. Of course she has. Maybe it would have slipped her mind if she hadn't been thinking of him, but she thinks of him a lot, probably more than she should.
Eddie laughs, and manages to move enough lean in to press a kiss to her temple in thanks. “You are absolutely brilliant, Donna Noble. Has anyone ever told you that?”
He grins as she hands him the cake and the fork, and takes a huge bites. Then he sighs, leaning back in the ecstasy that only those who’ve lived in Mount Weather for months without chocolate could know. “This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.”
Oh. The kiss sort of catches her off guard and makes her forget everything for the next several seconds. She's not even really listening, she's just thinking about the press of his lips against her forehead, like how he'd kissed her hand. He teases her when they're on the network, he flirts horribly, and then she actually gets near him and he's sweet.
"No, no, it's good," she says, slumping back and settling against the cushions. "Real good. End-of-the-world good. I had some when they brought it out." Beat. "Small piece." No, she had a big piece and she ate it like she'd never eaten cake before.
Eddie slices a bite from the cake and brings it to her lips. “Then you should eat more. I won’t be able to eat all of it.” He looks down at his plate, still half-filled with food. “And it’d be fucking stupid to let it go to waste.”
He feels bad enough as it is, being unable to finish everything that she’d brought to him. Everything is so precious, every bit of food, every drop of water, every inch of bandaging and every milliliter of medicine that they had given him. All just so his sorry ass would live. Eddie isn’t stupid; he knows how close he came to dying. Not as close as it could have been, but still.
Eddie blinks, and swallows, and takes a deep breath. The last time -- the real last time -- he had nearly died had been during the war, and there hadn’t been time to think about it. And by the time there was, it didn’t matter. Not when so many else were dead. But this… he’s had nothing but time the entire week to think about it. Or to not think about it and ignore it. It’s hit him hard now and he drops the fork. “I almost died.”
Donna's been chewing the bit of cake, watching him closely. She likes to think she's good about people, that she's a good listener sometimes, and she knows Eddie well enough by now to know that something's starting to break down in his mind and his mood.
"Hey—oh—" Donna reaches out to pick up and straighten the fork, just on instinct, though it's in no danger of crashing down to the floor. "I know. I know you did." Other people did die, and Asala's going to lose her hand, and the whole situation is horrible all around.
It never should have happened, but it did, and Donna ended up mopping up all the blood from the floor.
She reaches up, just enough to smooth his hair back. "But you didn't, and that's something important. You didn't. You're here, and you're going to be all right."
He starts shaking his head, tears pricking at his eyes. “I should have warded the cell. I should have… I should have used the loo before I went down there. I would have been there, I would have seen that bastard and stopped him.”
Adaar took ultimate responsibility of the entire incident when really, the fault lay at Eddie’s feet. Octavia had placed him in charge of the group looking for and taking care of the werewolves. And Eddie let her, because he understands procedure. Stepping forward would have done nothing but just fuck things up worse than they were. “I didn’t do my job, and people were killed. Good people, who should have lived a hell of a lot longer.”
"Eddie." Donna frowns, tilting her head to try and make eye contact with him. "Eddie, look at me. This isn't on you. That thing was let out. He didn't escape, he was let out. Someone was waiting for you to move, and if you didn't, then it would have taken advantage of someone else and found another way. You left for a moment, no one would've thought …"
“Then I should have put a bloody fucking ward on the fucking cell,” Eddie grinds out, punching his knee. “Then… Jesus.”
He’s quiet, sitting back against the cushions and tilting his head back. It doesn’t stop a tear from trickling down the side of his face, but he’s able to calm himself. After a minute he finds Donna’s hand between them on the couch, and wraps her hand in his. He needs the contact, the firm human touch; he’l apologize later for taking advantage.
Donna lets him hold her hand, and she squeezes back tight. She wants to say something, wants to comfort him with something other than her touch, but words just feel hollow. It breaks her heart to see him cry, it's the sort of thing that makes her own eyes sting — this whole situation has rattled her down to her core, bothered her somewhere deep in her soul and she can't just walk away from it. She wants to talk to the families, wants to maintain the memorial wall, wants to help however she can even if she knows she can't actually change what happened or stop this from happening again.
She doesn't want to tell him it's okay, because it isn't. She doesn't even want to keep reiterating that it's not his fault, because it sort of is, even if he can't truly be blamed.
"This won't happen again," is what she says instead. "You won't let it. Not on your watch."
The certainty is her voice helps to strengthen Eddie’s resolve. No, it won’t happen again, because every single person who is a guard will be vetted by both him and Adaar, and the holding cell in which any werewolf is contained will have his very best spells, charms, and hexes cast upon it. He’d slipped, and it had cost lives.
“How -- how are the families doing? Of the people killed. I mean, I know they aren’t well, but I want them to be okay. I need them to be, even if I have to go out there and cut wood or kill animals so they can be warm this winter or eat,” Eddie says, looking at Donna. He wants the truth, not the half-lies that he’s been fed up until he left medical.
Donna can't lie to him. He doesn't deserve that, and it doesn't even occur to Donna to really soften things. "They're not all right. They want answers. I know one of them lost her husband, and she's wondering why the Sky People haven't taken up arms against us, with all the trouble we've brought in." She frowns, squeezing his hand. She can't quite meet his eyes, because she'll cry. "Another one's wondering why we haven't arrested the people responsible, haven't killed them."
She shakes her head. "Up in that space station, if you committed a crime, they just killed you."
“The one who let the werewolf out was captured, wasn’t he? I don’t know what’s happened to him.” It occurred to him that they may be calling for his blood, and who could blame them? He was a part of it and he failed at his job. “But they’ve every right to demand and expect answers. I just wish we had some to give to them.”
He laces their fingers together and sighs. “They did what they had to do, love, in shitty circumstances. It’s just too damn bad that became normal for them.”
"It's not right," Donna says quietly. "It's not right to just … send someone out an airlock for nothing, there's no reason to do that to anyone." She can't stop thinking about how she'd feel in that situation, how terrifying it would be to face such a thing and wait for it, whether death would come quickly or take a few minutes in the vast expanse of nothingness — thinking about it makes her sick.
"There had to be another way. This whole place is just …" There's too much pain here sometimes, and Donna's sense of empathy goes into overdrive.
“Shhhh,” Eddie says, leaning into her just enough to be able to brush his lips against her temple. “I know it’s not, and I think they knew it too, but I don’t know if they had a choice love. But they do here, and we’ll all make sure they know it. They’ve already done away with the one punishment fits all bit.”
He wants nothing more than to gather Donna into his arms, but his healing injuries preclude it, so he settles for another kiss across her cheek and squeezing her hand again. “Things will get better. They’ve got to.”
Eddie keeps calling her "love" and each time he does it, she feels like her heart is skipping a beat. Then he's kissing her temple, her cheek, and Donna wants to pull back and demand to know what he's playing at. He's a flirt, he's awful about it, and Donna feels like she's getting swept up in something where she's just going to get her heart broken. She doesn't want to think that he's actually interested.
But she leans in a bit when Eddie kisses her cheek, and there's something real about it, something that feels right. It's the seriousness of the moment, the affection in the gesture, and Donna leans in and kisses the corner of his mouth.
Eddie pauses and gives Donna a half-smile, full of the very genuine affection he has for her. He turns a little, stops to give his wounds time to stop yelling at him, and brings his forefinger and thumb up to tilt her chin just a little. He waits another moment, giving Donna time to back away if she wants, then bows his head to kiss her.
He doesn’t kiss her for long, and he doesn’t try to deepen it, but it’s enough for him to feel some comfort. And, he hopes, to have given some comfort in return. It amazes him that Donna doesn’t see herself as the sort of woman anyone should feel happy to be around. But she is; she has a heart the size of the mountain they live in and a sense of humor that everyone should appreciate. She’s kind, and she’s beautiful, and Eddie knows he doesn’t deserve to have her in his life one bit.
Donna smiles in spite of herself, and she tries to keep it dainty and feminine — but she ends up grinning, leaning in to give him a kiss that's a little harder, a little more clumsy. She's been wanting to do it a long time, and holding back isn't really one of her strong suits. They're both hurting, they're both feeling broken in different ways, but she's taking advantage of one small bright spot.
If there can still be moments like this, things might be all right.