Title: Chloe and Stan in the Shadow of the Sphinx
Author: MinervaFan
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: PG
Pairing/Characters: Nine, Donna Noble
Summary: Sometimes, things are right under your nose. Too bad you're not paying attention.
A/N: fey_spirit wanted Donna and Nine to meet. She didn't say anything more.

He wasn’t very charming or handsome, but he was English…

She looked the type to talk and talk a lot, so he didn't start….

They sat together in the shadow of the Sphinx, feet blistered, guidebooks wilting in the heat, and said nothing much of anything.

He noticed she was ginger, wondered absently if he'd ever be ginger.

She noticed he was slim, and wondered absently if she'd ever lose weight.

Altogether, it wasn't much of a first meeting.

The Splendors of Ancient Egypt tour came highly recommended and had cost a pretty penny to book. She'd scrimped for it, knowing she had to get out of Chiswick, knowing she had to have the sand of ancient times under her feet.

He'd popped in unnoticed with the gaggle of tourists, and the professor leading the tour never even bothered to ask his name.

She did, though. He lied, and said Stan, because he was getting rather tired of John Smith.

She lied, too, and said Chloe, because Donna Noble didn't talk to strange men in Arab countries whilst rubbing her feet beneath giant stone statues.

They chatted about the Sphinx, because it was looming overhead, and said nothing at all about why they were really there.

He said nothing of war and loss and the fear of being all alone in the endless universe. He said nothing of his travels, and his mistakes, and his incongruous and sudden desire for rhubarb pie, of all things.

She never mentioned the endless emptiness of days, the feeling her life would end before it ever really began, the urge pushing at her from inside to burst free of who she was and become the woman she wanted to be.

"Hot, isn't it?" she said instead.

"Yeah," he answered.

He didn't look at her face, because he was tired of faces. Faces haunted him in those rare moments of sleep he did succumb to, faces of the dead and dying, accusatory and blurred, as if they'd never really existed outside his dreams.

She didn't look in his eyes, because she couldn't bear the judgment. Eyes were her enemy, Mum's eyes, Wilf's eyes, Dad's eyes shut forever now. Eyes that looked right through the bluff and bluster, eyes that see the pointlessness of her days, eyes that mourned the potential everyone had always told her she'd had.

They looked at the dusty stone, giant paws from ancient times. She hadn't noticed how he'd sniggered at the historical lectures their guide offered, and rolled his eyes in scorn.

He hadn't noticed how she searched for signs of otherness around every corner, as if she expected the stones themselves to open up and bring the universe to her waiting arms.

They simply waited out the break, quiet together, yet galaxies apart as their thoughts brought them to other times and places they couldn't quite escape.

He winked at her, looking right through her, as the driver called the tourist back to the coach.

"Aren't you getting on?" she asked as she slipped on her shoes and grabbed her things.

Stan tugged his jacket around him, seemingly unconcerned with the logistics of wearing leather in the stifling Egyptian heat. "Nah," he said in his Northern accent. "Think I'll walk this one."

Chloe shrugged and got back on the bus without a glance back. It was none of her affair whether he missed the Great Pyramid or not.

As the dust settled around him and the tourists went off to ogle the dusty bones of a great civilization, the Doctor whistled to himself as he headed back to the TARDIS. He'd had great fun taunting Cheops, once upon a blue moon.

The End