Flying from NZ to London is close to a 30 hour journey once you include transfers and customs. I was trapped even longer in airports due to having perfect travelling timing around Covid, having to wait in airports to avoid closures and do-not-travel guidance (I'm a rebel/was already in the departure lounge when the do-not-travel order came through).

Rather than staring at Marvel movies on a tiny screen, I thought writing would be more fun, and I called out for prompts on Twitter (and got some fantastic prompts from the ever-amazing Darvey community). I only had my phone to write so was limited in length to whatever I could cram into four screengrabs on my notes app to upload to Twitter. This led to a really fun challenge of trying to do justice to some very in depth prompts with around 450-500 words per prompt.

I've collected them all here, in canonical order. They are mostly the same as what I wrote in a weird haze on the planes, just edited for grammar/spelling and clarity. I hope you enjoy these little ficlets! As always please leave reviews, they're so appreciated.

Prompt: The deleted scenes we never got to see around 'the kiss' in 7x10. This isn't quite where I ended up going, but I think it's close enough...

She kisses him at 9:46pm on a Tuesday.

He thinks he should feel surprised but he doesn't and he feels like it should be unexpected but it isn't. Not that he saw it coming, particularly - no more than people see the dawn coming or the tide going out - he's not surprised by those either, just unsure of the timing.

Donna kissing him isn't a what-if. It never has been. It's an inescapable almost, a not-quite-but-nearly, it's the feeling of the sun peeking behind the horizon or the first of the waves lapping at the shore.

In his bones, he was waiting for this and waiting for her.

The problem is, they've always had shitty timing. Later, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and hidden by the kind of privacy you only get at 2am, he lets himself think that it's a fucking tragedy that the same timing that jolts Donna out of her complacency is also the timing that has him going home to someone else's bed and someone else's body. He's not unfaithful and he's not a cheater and her timing is impossible and smashes up against his fucking stupid moral code like a wave dashing itself on rock.

But there's always a moment of beauty in a wave dashing itself on rocks, and in that moment of beauty and insanity he kisses her back.

She's everything, everything he's secretly wanted and loved and desperately longed for but that he's convinced himself is just him noticing her height or her hair, just him feeling lonely or horny but he's not and she's not, she's actually the dawn and dusk hung together, and she melts against him as his hands find her waist and pulls her to him. He finds her with his lips, his teeth, his tongue, and the only thing he thinks is

oh.

It's her that pulls away, he doesn't have the strength or awareness for it. She says she's sorry, she just needed to know, and when she walks away he thinks what the fuck did she read in his body and his kiss to know that she needed to walk away because he was an inch from pushing her up against her desk and ruining everything last goddamn thing for both of them and the instinct terrifies him.

It terrifies him so much that he spirals into another woman and makes them both choose so he doesn't have to, and it's unfair and awful and he's more like his mother than he ever wants to admit, it's just that he makes other people into monsters instead of him.

It hurts, and so he slowly, slowly works on it, on him, on his mess.

And then, one day, it snaps into place, and he kisses her at 10:28 on a Thursday, and never stops.

end