Nicknames
Kate Lethbridge-Stewart x g!n Reader
Summary: The minute you meet Kate Stewart, you christen her “Katie” with a smirk and a shake of her hand. She thinks she hates you for it, until she doesn’t.
Warnings: Implied sex, implied risk of violence
You call her Katie. No one is allowed to call her Katie.
At first, it pisses her off. Every once in a while, you flounce off the TARDIS, trailing after the Doctor, and smile at her a “hi Katie!” because you know it winds her up. You cause whatever necessary destruction to the UNIT office, narrowly avoid an alien invasion and disappear with a “bye Katie!”, leaving her with a migraine and stacks of incident reports.
Her staff think it’s funny, in a sort of distant way because anyone seen mimicking that behaviour would get their head bitten off. Mel finds it bemusing. Kate didn’t even know where you’d gotten it from. The Doctor had introduced you two with a grandiose “this is Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, Commander of UNIT and daughter of one of the greatest men I ever knew.” Instead of looking in-awed, you’d smirked, shook her hand and winked “nice to meet you, Katie.”
She tries to ignore it. She won’t be swayed by the Doctor’s companion mocking her, someone half her age and probably half her experience and intellect. She gets on with the job, runs the most clandestine government office excellently and puts up with your visits every once in a while.
It doesn’t strike her just how interesting you might be until she bumps into you at Donna’s birthday doo.
It really wasn’t her scene, parties and late nights. She’d prefer a glass of wine, a book and a bubblebath. But she finds herself at Donna’s house one Saturday evening, celebrating the former companion’s 40th and sat on the sofa chatting with the great and good of the Doctor’s friends. You muscle in through the crowd of bodies, gift bag in hand.
“Hi love!” You cry over the the music and chatter to Mel who’s curled up on the other end of the sofa from Kate, “Where’s the main woman?”
“Oh, out in the garden I think,” Mel waves vaguely, bringing you in for a hug, “chatting with Rose.”
“Ah,” you hold up the bag, “present from the Doctor.”
“The Doctor does presents now?” Kate raises an eyebrow.
“When I remind him to, Katie,” you smile, “you know what he’s like.”
“That’s very caring of you,” her tone is guarded. She doesn’t exactly like you, and she’s prodding.
“He leaves people behind,” you shrug, “they deserve to know they’re remembered.”
Kate watches in confusion as you melt away back into the party.
It doesn’t strike her as flirting until… well.
UNIT picks you up in the middle of the night, sometime late in the autumn. There was an alien incursion imminent and Kate was panicking. They couldn’t find the Doctor anywhere and whilst she resented running to him for help, the dozens of red dots on the radar were blinking closer and closer to Earth. Colonel Ibrahim suggests the next best thing - you of all people would know where the Doctor was.
They track your location, Kate sends out a team and not fifteen minutes later, you stumble into the control room.
When she says stumble, she means it. You’re in a little dress, heels and… tipsy.
“Seriously,” she says to Ibrahim, “Kraxon invasion on the horizon and this is the solution you’ve brought me?”
He merely shrugs. “You asked for them,”
“Katie!” You swagger over to her where she’s sat at her desk with a pout. “You interrupted my night out.”
“Yes, well, sorry about that,”
You lean on her desk grinning down at her. She notices that your eyes are a much lighter E/C than she thought.
“You asked for me?” you stage-whisper. You cross your legs, skirt riding up to show more thigh.
“There’s a bit of a situation-“
“You know if you wanted to see me you could just call,”
“Do you need a coffee or something to sober you up, because -“
“Did you say Kraxon?” You interrupt. She sees something click in you and you look up at the screen looming over the room.
“Yes,” she stands up, suddenly feeling a little too hot and a desperate need to put some space between you two. “They’re coming from the east - we think Mars. We’ve been tracking them for days and so far all defences have failed. We’re reaching the eleventh hour with this and we were hoping you might know where to find the Doctor.”
You don’t look like you’re listening. You’re staring at the screen intently.
“Y/N, we really don’t have -“
“Radiation,” you say.
“Radiation?” She repeats.
“They’re extremely susceptible to it. Can you defences field them towards… say Chernobyl? That will finish them right off.” You swing your legs a little.
Kate looks at you. At the screen. At Colonel Ibrahim. She swears under her breath - of course.
“Get to it,” she nods to him, and the command deck springs into action. In the middle of it all, you sit smiling at her. The colour of the dress really does brings out your eyes. She wants to hate you, tottering into her office, wearing something incredibly distracting and solving the headache that’s been keeping her awake for days.
“Thank you,” she offers, squeezing your arm.
You smirk at her, and she’s fairly certain you’re too intoxicated to fully comprehend what you’ve just done.
“Anything for you Katie,”
After that, you play on her mind constantly.
Kate tries not to think about it, but you’re everywhere. In her dreams, her case reports. She can’t stop thinking about you in that dress, that cheeky smile. “Katie,” echoes in her head and suddenly she doesn’t hate it as much as she once thought she did. It’s a teenage infatuation - she’s never felt it before. Not for her son’s father, not for her ex-wife. It’s borderline embarrassing, and she does her best to ignore it, giving you cold stares when you flirt and deflecting Mel’s pointed questions. She was the Commander in Chief of the Unified Intelligence Task Force. She was not lusting after one of the Doctor’s companions just because they had some brains and showed a bit of skin.
It doesn’t strike her as anything serious until the Toymaker incident.
It was only meant to be a demonstration so you and the Doctor could fully comprehend the severity of the situation. However, she hadn’t quite considered in that moment what she might say once under the influence of the Toymaker’s waveform.
She takes off the Zeedex.
“Hi,” says the Doctor.
“Hi…” she frowns.
“How was your day?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“Just curious,” you pipe up.
“You’re nosy,” she snaps. “All you do is talk.”
“What if I like talking to you, Katie?”
“Don’t call me that!” Kate snaps. She begins to move towards you and thats when the guards grab her and snap it back on.
She comes back to herself. She looks at you and sees the tears in your eyes, and you see the moment she registers how she’s made you feel. She opens her mouth to say something, but someone else gets there first and she’s left listening to them like white noise, still staring at you.
Once it’s all over, she catches you in the corridor between the control room and the her office. She can’t bear the thought of you upset, and she grabs your arm before you can disappear and before she can think to hard.
“Sorry,” she stammers, “about earlier.”
“It’s okay,” you reply.
“No,” she shakes her head, “I’m really sorry.”
“It’s alright,”
“I could see you were upset.”
“You didn’t mean it.”
“I’m not sure you know that,” her hand is still on your arm, rubbing circles.
You look away, up the corridor, shifting slightly beneath her grip.
“Do you really hate the nickname Katie?” You whisper.
She frowns. “That’s it? That’s what’s bothering you?”
“It’s nothing,” your guard slams shut and you move to pull away, but her hand tightens.
“I don’t mind it,” she confesses. “I mean, I hated it. Initially. But now… now not so much,”
She’s close. She’s close and she shouldn’t be, because she’s meant to be the serious, in-control boss. She has a reputation, priorities…
You lean up and kiss her. It’s light and cautious, a mere few seconds as your hand cradles her face and all thoughts leave her brain. When you pull back, she doesn’t move, breath ghosting your lips.
And then she surges back in and effectively pins you to the wall. She kisses you like she’s dreamed about, like she’s wanted to for months, even if she hadn’t admitted it to herself. Your arms wrap around her and you kiss her like she’s oxygen, like you’d die in this moment without her to anchor you. You probably really would have died that day if it weren’t for her and you whimper against her lips, feeling her warm and alive beneath your hands. You want her clothes gone, you want to drag her into her office, you want -
There’s a cough. You break apart and the Doctor smirks from the end of the corridor. “You wanting dropped home or what?”
After that, the nickname “Katie” strikes her as a prayer.
It’s a whisper in the dark, it’s a moan against her neck as she does whatever sinful things she wants to you. It’s a murmur in crisp sheets, it’s a laugh at the dinner table. It’s her name in your phone and it’s written at the top of Christmas cards. Katie is synonymous with you. She can go out there, be Commander Kate Lethbridge-Stewart, and come home to you and be your Katie. Without you, Katie doesn’t exist and she isn’t anyone.
You spend a lot of time around her lately. The Doctor’s moving on - some girl called Ruby, Kate thinks - but you don’t seem to mind or notice. You’ve got a job at UNIT now, and Kate’s rather glad you’re posted a few floors below her because she’s not sure she could manage with the distraction at work as well as at home. You wake her up with cups of tea and kisses in the morning, and greet her in evenings with dinner and - if she’s lucky - matching underwear beneath your clothes. Her obsession with you shifts from lust to something more serious without Kate quite realising. More and more of your stuff has gravitated into her flat. Her grown-up kids have started asking questions.
She comes home one evening and finds you stood at the stove, stirring a pan and humming along to something on the radio. She dumps her handbag on the table, wraps an arm around your waist and presses her chin into the crook of your neck.
“Hello darling,”
“How was work?” You twist your head and press a kiss into blonde hair.
“The usual. What’s cooking?”
“Spaghetti bolognese,”
“Delicious,”
You snort. “It’s the third time I’ve made it this week, babe,”
“I’ve not had time to food shop,” she groans, “a task for Saturday.”
“We’ve gone all domestic,” you tease. It was true. What had started as a rather physical infatuation with Kate Stewart had at some point melted into easy co-habitation. She was a different women these days to the one you’d met on that control deck. Warmer. Free.
“Yeah well,” Kate’s thumb rubs circles in it’s all too familiar habit, “for that to be true you’d have to move in with me.”
“Oh?”
“What do you think?” She squeezes your side.
“A million times yes, Katie.”
77 notes
·
View notes