Happy
Ok so this is a new story idea that has been brewing in my mind for a few weeks now. I just started watching Doctor Who so I only know what has happened in the show, as I don't follow it on the outside. I will flesh this out, but it will not go in order, some of it will be flashbacks. This chapter is telling the whole story in case I don't finish the story. I may decide to write a Doctor Who story with Holly in it, but that won't be anytime soon. This chapter is a speech, and I want the emotions to be interpreted how a reader thinks that they might be.
"Is happiness something that is just given to us by some kind of God, or is happiness something that we have to work for? My name is Zooey Belikov, I'm 23 years old, and I'm finally happy. Ok so first things first, I'm not British or Scottish, sorry about that. Second, I'm going to tell you my story about moving on from the past. My parents are Rose and Dimitri Belikov, the guardians of the queen and her husband. This pretty much means that from the age of four, I was living at Saint Vladimir's Academy. I did see my parents a lot, in fact they made a point to come and see me whenever the queen was visiting her children, so I would see them about once every two to three weeks.
On the day that I started at the academy, I met my best friend, a dhampir named Luke Ivashkov. I didn't think anything of our friendship, in fact I was the weird one in that friendship. So Luke had a twin brother named Jai, and an older brother by two years, Beau. Luke, Jai, and I became inseparable from day one, with me being a lot closer to Luke than I was to Jai. I didn't really have any girlfriends, and I was completely alright with that. I didn't have any moroi friends, they all just thought that I was strange. So I had my two dhampir boys and their big brother, and that was about the extent of my socialising. I was eight when I found out that Luke and Jai's parents were old friends of my parents, in fact their father was my mother's ex-boyfriend. That is not something that we ever talked about though. It was also when I found out that Mr Ivashkov is very close to the queen, in fact they often refer to each other as "cousins". So there I am, the daughter of Queen Vasilisa's closest friend, trying to work out the world with my closest friends, the sons of her cousin. We lasted like this for the earliest parts of my life, up until I was about 14.
I was 14 when it first happened, and honestly, nine years later this is going to be one of the hardest things I will ever say, but I need to say it. This event happened from just after my 14th birthday, to about six months after my 15th, and it only stopped for one reason. I was 14 years old when I was raped for the first time. It was someone that I considered a close friend, and I never thought anything like this would happen to me, let alone this person be the one to do it. It happened up to four times a month, for just over a year and a half, and to this day, I don't know why I never told anyone until the time that I did. The person that violated me would taunt me about it, never giving away to anyone else what he had been doing. He threatened me, and I was terrified. I was terrified of him, but also scared that no one would ever believe me, even if I did speak up.
I can vividly remember the day that I told someone. That someone was Luke, my best friend, and the younger brother of the man that had ruined me. To my immense surprise, Luke didn't laugh, he didn't call me a liar, and he didn't scream or tell me that he never wanted to see me again. Luke listened and that was all I really needed from him. Like me, he didn't know how to make it stop. We were both worried that it would just get worse if we told someone. That was when Luke came up with the idea to run away from the academy.
We waited until one of those open days that the school had started to have three years previously. Those were the days when, during the day, we would all go down to the local mall, making sure that we were all in school uniform, so they would know if we were one of their students. I had been saving money that my parents had been sending me for almost two years at that time, and Luke had been doing the same. This meant that between us we had a pretty decent amount of money to escape with. The first thing we did was go and buy new outfits, inconspicuous, so that we could get out of the mall without any of the guardians batting an eyelid. The fact that it was a cold day, meant that we could wear hoodies and look like completely normal humans. We then cashed out our accounts, so that we wouldn't leave a paper trail. We then just walked out of the front door, no guardian looking twice at us.
We randomly chose a town and decided to go and live there, staying on college campuses, but never staying in one place for more than three months. One night, eighteen months after we had escaped, Luke and I had a pretty big fight, one of the biggest that we would ever have. This fight ended with me storming out of the room, and going down to the nearest frat party as an escape. When I came back to the room, ready to apologise, Luke was gone. Our room was torn apart, as if he had not gone willingly. I've recently found out that Luke managed to pass off my possessions as belonging to a college roommate with no boundaries. There I was, in the middle of Texas, 17 years old, on the run from someone that I still considered a threat, and the realisation had just set in. I was also running from my parents, some of the best trackers in the world. I made a split second decision to go and see a friend that we had met in Louisiana, and he made me some documents. I used these to run further away than I had ever thought to run. I ran away to England.
So here I am in London, I don't know anyone, and I don't have very much money left. It took a few weeks for it to really sink in that I am on my own, and that I may not have thought this through very well. I was working in a small café, cliché I know, but that's where I was, when I first met David. David was eating lunch with Billie Piper there, and he had a bit of a laugh, bit of a flirt, before they left to go back to filming. I had never heard of this show that the two were on, and I really didn't have the money to be able to check it out. The money that I was making from the café was going towards food and rent, and I was almost at the point where I was going to be living on the streets.
I was walking back to the motel when I ran into David for the second time. Completely out of the blue, and out of character for him, he asked me if I wanted to go to dinner. I tried to turn him down, after all, why would this television star want to be friends with me? He got quite pushy until I finally succumbed, when we reached the motel. I went back up to my room to change, and he waited down in what you could call the lobby. I can remember that night very clearly, it was the first kind of human interaction that I had really had outside of work, in six months.
David and I became very close, very quickly. We had more of a brother-sister relationship than anything else, and after about three months, David asked me to move into his guest room. He didn't like the motel that I was living at, and I needed the money. He also asked if I wanted a job on the Doctor Who set, as an assistant. I honestly wanted to get out of the job that I was working, so I agreed, on the proviso that he let me change my name. He was the one who suggested that I become his sister, so all that was left for me was to choose a name. With that, Zooey Belikov, who had become Zooey Hathaway, became Juliet Tennant.
I had just turned 19 and was working as my older brother's assistant when I met Matt. Matt was on set one day, being shown around by one of the other girls. Now he claims that he did not get cheesy at all, but he really did, and I fell for it. I'd like to say that this wasn't another fast thing that I did, but after knowing him for a week, I agreed to go out with him. After two weeks, we were in a fully established relationship. Our relationship went really fast to start with, but we soon fell into a routine with each other, and it became a lot more normal. It only took a month for me to trust him enough with some of my story, like my real name and the fact that I had spent the last few years running. We moved in together after six months, and after a year we were engaged.
Soon after we announced our engagement, David mentioned that they were casting another character to the show, and between the two of them, I have no idea who finally convinced me to audition. So I auditioned and got the part, one that I'm sure most of you know about. Working with my brother was probably the most fun that I had ever had, and to this day nothing has surpassed that. Soon after I started working on the show, I got guest roles in a few other places and my career picked up.
I spent almost two seasons playing Holly when David announced that he was going to leave the show. After some pushing, I convinced Matt that he would make a great Doctor and he auditioned. I remember being so happy for him when he rang me to say that he'd got the part. He came in to meet everyone a few days later, and watching us bounce off of each other is why they changed some aspects of Holly's relationship with the Doctor. I went from playing a little sister figure to playing a lover.
During the break between filming, Matt and I got married. We went to Florida for our honeymoon, two weeks in Disneyworld, and that was when my old life started to catch up with me. We were in a mall in Florida, looking for gifts for our loved ones when I literally ran into Luke. He recognized me immediately, but before he had the opportunity to say anything, Beau walked up. Before he could say anything, Matt made an excuse for us to have to leave. We made it back to the hotel before I had what was a mix between a panic attack and a breakdown. I told Matt everything that had happened to me, and this was the first time that I recounted the full story. Luke had only know bits about what happened. After telling Matt, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off of my shoulders. We went home to London two days later.
We started filming our first season together a month later, my first season as Juliet Smith. We were almost finished filming that season when I was found, this time by my grandfather. Honestly I wondered why it had taken so long for him of all people to find me, I wasn't exactly hiding. I guess the blonde wig and fake name had provided some form of anonymity. He was on a tour of the set, something that had been set up for his grandson, a little brother that I didn't know that I had. I was almost 22 when they came through, close to seven years after I had run. My little brother's name is Malcolm, and he was five at the time. I had to beg my grandfather not to say anything; that I would come back when I was ready. I had no intention of ever going back to that life, especially not after seeing my own reaction to seeing Beau.
The next year passed with the most eventful thing being last year's Comic Con, which was the first year that I was able to be on the "Doctor Who" panel. The first two years that I was on the show, I had been filming in London, and couldn't leave. It was that Comic Con that convinced me to become an ambassador for abuse awareness, in particular sexual abuse. This decision got a few different reactions, with many being negative. What would I know about being abused? What would I know about the struggle that comes with being sexually abused? What would I know about having to turn my life around after such an event?
When I came to America this year to speak at the "Doctor Who" panel I had no reservations. Why would I run into my parents? It's been eight years, I'm sure that they've forgotten about me. I was mucking around with Jenna yesterday when I saw them. I didn't say anything and I wasn't planning to until Malcolm came up to us, recognizing Jenna. My mother ran after him and froze when she saw me… when she recognized me. Honestly, I was torn. Torn between saying hello as if nothing had ever happened, trying to explain myself, and running in the other direction. I'd like to say that I went for option number two without hesitation, but I didn't. Option number one was the one that I wanted to go for, but at that moment, Matt walked up and mentioned that Jenna and I had to leave. Option number three it was. Was I freaking out over seeing my mother again after so long? Yes. Did I have a job to do that was more important than how I was feeling? Yes.
Matt encouraged me after the panel to go and talk to her, even offering to go with me. Whilst I appreciated the offer, I told my husband to go and do his meet and greet, and that I would go and talk to her. Was this intended to be a lie when I said it? Quite possibly, but I went and spoke to her anyway. I didn't tell her the real reason why I had run away, I think I just said something to shut her up. Sorry about that, but I couldn't bring myself to tell this story twice in two days.
That's why I'm here today. I'm here to tell you that it's ok to be scared. It's ok to worry. But it's not ok to run. I ran because I thought it was the right thing to do, and whilst a lot of good has come from it, it is not the solution. If you're ever attacked, speak up. Tell someone and get yourself some help, because I can tell you, you'll feel a hell of a lot better afterwards. You do have the right to happy. You are allowed to move on after an attack, but running is not the answer. Thank you."