What’re you doing?” asks the Doctor, all incredulousness mingled with curiosity.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” Donna doesn’t look up.

“Looks like. Looks like you’re… knitting,” says the Doctor as though it's an occurrence almost too unbelievable to be said aloud. Which is something, considering.

“So I am,” says Donna, and raises an eyebrow without stopping her hands.

The Doctor shifts his weight from foot to trainer-shod foot and peers down at her. They are in the TARDIS library, it is evening, or what passes for evening as they hang about in the Vortex. The Doctor had been enjoying a biscuit just a moment ago, now he’s just being a bother. Typical. Just typical.

“You don’t really, you know, strike me as the knitting type,” he ventures slowly, and the Doctor has known all types. He bends down into a hunched pose to get a better look.

“And why’s that then?” Donna says somewhat huffily, needles ever on the go.

“Oh, you know…” He looks closer at her double-pointed needles. “You’re fast at that.”

“Yeah.” She smirks. “Surprised?”

“I must admit, I am.”

“Good,” says Donna, with a hint of smile. “Got to keep you Martians on your toes.”

The Doctor pulls a face, stands suddenly. He takes stock, scientifically: Donna Noble, 21st century human, first companion to knit since Barbara, but Barbara was the type he’d expected to knit. She'd had the right kind of hair for knitting. It certainly hadn't been ginger. His mother used to knit, but she’d knit Gallifreyan. Donna knits…well, Donna knits English.

“It’s because you’re loud,” he says, before he realizes he’s saying it.

“What?” This time Donna puts down her knitting.

“You don’t seem like a knitter,” he says slowly, “because you’re loud. And don’t deny it, you know you’re loud.”

Donna rolls her eyes. “Right then,” she says, and starts unraveling her half-finished product about as quickly as she was creating it.

“Stop that.” The Doctor looks horrified.

“Nope.”

Unravel, unravel, unravel.

“Stop.”

“No chance, alien boy.”

“Please? You’re killing it!” the Doctor tries.

“Not on your life,” replies Donna resolutely.

“Well, what was it going to be?” asks the Doctor, when Donna has a ball of brown and blue-specked yarn where a piece of half-formed fabric used to be.

“It was going to be a cozy.” Donna shrugs.

“Tea?”

“Screwdriver-comma-sonic.” Donna looks up at him, her lips pursed in that moderately annoying way she purses her lips. As though she’s trying to hide her cheeks, or prove a point, or something.

“Oh. Oh.” At least the Doctor has the decency to look bashful. He rubs the back of his neck and sits down next to her on the couch, leans into her shoulder. Feels slightly relieved, in his own way, when she doesn’t move out of his space.

“I like that you’re loud,” he says by way of an apology and squeezes the ball of yarn on Donna’s lap.

“I know,” she says, and puts her hand over his. For the first time tonight, she smiles at him full on. “I dropped a stitch ‘bout eight rows back,” she says

The Doctor stares at her, and then he smiles, too.