*A/N: This story is a birthday present to Emeline - Happy Birthday and I hope you've had a great day! I was going to upload this all in one go, but then I got a bit carried away with the storyline and decided it would sound better in 2 or so chapters (plus due to my rubbish timing I haven't quite finished it yet ;) ) So in the next few days I'll upload the next chapter - call it an extended birthday present! So I hope you enjoy it and I haven't done too bad a job with your character...and my writing isn't too bad ;)
To all my other readers, chapter 13 of Waiting For You will be on soon - I've just been so busy so sorry for the wait, you guys are so loyal and I really appreciate that!
Anyway, enjoy, and happy reading x!*
Window To Another World
Chapter 1
"So, Clara…" The Doctor called as he ran around the TARDIS console, manically pulling levers and pressing the odd button as he went. "Where would you like to go today?"
Clara watched him from where she was slouched in the passenger seat lazily, observing how his tweed coat whooshed around him as he spun like it always did, and the way his floppy brown hair fell in front of his eyes every time he peered up to beam at her. Which was, noticeably, quite often. She let a small smile momentarily spread across her lips as he yanked the last lever and the whole room jerked, signalling they'd paused somewhere in space. She'd never admit it to him, but Clara Oswald loved watching the Doctor in his element, bounding around the console room with such enthusiasm. It was any day better than other times she'd seen him; scared, distressed and sad. Watching him in the console looking so carefree and excited about taking her on a new adventure was a pleasant contrast to any of those awful times.
The Doctor looked up at her again, so Clara quickly replaced the smile with a smirk and jumped to her feet. "Oh I don't know; take me to some exotic planet I've never heard of before. I know you like taking me to new places."
She came and stood close beside him and The Doctor looked down at her with a big grin plastered on his face. He started to fiddle with some controls and swung the monitor around to face him. "The universe is a big place Clara, there's so much to see."
Clara wandered back around the console, letting her fingertips lightly brush over the cool metal of the controls as she went. "Do you know where you're taking me then?" She gave him an eager look which encouraged the Doctor into full adventure mode.
He dashed closer to her and started running his hands together thoughtfully. "Have you ever been to a planet completely made out of gold?"
Clara raised her eyebrows and crossed her arms. "Do you really need to ask?"
The Doctor shuffled backwards slightly and made some small gestures with his hands. "Well, it's just…you were, you know, in my timestream and I don't know where you…went."
Clara's face fell slightly at the mention of her many lives and she began to fiddle with her Mother's ring on her finger uneasily. She didn't like thinking about those of her that died. Even though they were copies and now just hazy memories, the thought of them caused a heavy uncomfortable ache in her abdomen which she often tried to avoid. The ache of loss, the pain and the suffering she was trying so hard to forget. She knew it had all been worth it, but it was still so hard to think about. The wounds were still fresh in her mind and she knew they would be for a while. But Clara knew she could bare it, she could do it for him. Clara knew for him, she could do anything.
She finally lifted her eyes from her ring to see the Doctor's staring into hers with concern, biting his lip with worry. "It's fine." She said finally, letting her shoulders relax and her smile resurface. "I'm sure I was never on a planet of gold…that I'm aware of. So what's it like there anyway?"
The Doctor's face lit up with relief and he returned back to his monitor, Clara following close behind. "The planet's called Floriar, it's small, but the ground and the hills and the mountains are made of the finest gold in the universe, the leaves on the trees are gilded and the skies are just beautiful…" He waved his arms in front of him demonstrating the sight. "The brightest yellows and oranges make them up and the sunsets are just remarkable-"
Clara placed her hand softly on his arm and looked up into his eyes willingly, causing him to pause his speech. "Then what are we waiting for?"
The Doctor's grin grew and he began twirling around the console room as he'd done before, pressing buttons and flicking switches, yet again beaming at Clara as he went. She giggled faintly as she always did, before grabbing onto the bars around the console room to steady herself as the TARDIS came to a sudden stop.
The Doctor ran up to the TARDIS doors and Clara followed, but he stopped before them and stepped aside, gesturing for her to step out first. "After you."
Clara paused and glanced at him excitedly, before throwing the door open and running outside. However, she unexpectedly found herself not in front of a golden sunset, but instead quite the opposite, in a very dark room. The Doctor toppled out after her, pulling the door closed behind him, his elated smile quickly changing into a confused frown. Clara strained her eyes to make out the contents of the room. It was small, she noticed, with what looked like a bed in the far corner. Her composure dropped and her eyes closed with a sigh, before she turned back to face the Doctor. She couldn't say turning up in the wrong place was much of a surprise with the Doctor's history of getting them lost. "We're not on Floriar, are we?"
"Urm, I don't think so…no." He replied, reaching out to take her hand to pull her back into the TARDIS.
But before he could, the light suddenly flickered on, to reveal what was in fact a cosy looking bedroom and most importantly before them, a young woman in pyjamas armed with what appeared to be a hairbrush. Clara jumped back in surprise and the Doctor repositioned himself, straightening his bowtie.
"Who on earth are you and what are you doing in my bedroom?!" The girl hissed, clearly not wanting to create too much noise. She then shook the hairbrush towards the TARDIS. "And how did you get that thing in here? Is this some sort of joke?"
The Doctor swallowed and exchanged a worried look with Clara before turning back to look at the woman. She was young, he guessed around the age of twenty, quite tall, with a pale complexion and long strawberry blonde hair. Golden, much like the planet they were supposed to have been visiting.
Clara tugged on his sleeve to draw his attention back away from the girl. "Doctor, where are we?" she whispered.
"Um…" He studied the girl again who was now waiting impatiently for answers to her questions. "Earth, I'm guessing…" He gave the room another quick glance. "2013, I'd say around your time actually…In this girl's bedroom."
Clara gave him an exasperated glare. "Yeah, I got that part."
"Excuse me." The girl hissed again, advancing closer with the hairbrush. "You better explain to me what you're doing here right now or I'm calling the police!"
She then studied the 'Police Public Call Box' sign on the TARDIS confusedly, which the Doctor realised was taking up a rather large amount of space in the room. "Wait, are you the police?"
"No, no, no we're not the police, just travellers. Sorry, we ended up here by mistake, we were aiming for somewhere very different…must of gotten the co-ordinates wrong."
"Again." Clara added, teeth gritted in annoyance.
"Sorry for bothering you, we'll just be on our way…" The Doctor said, reaching for the door handle of the TARDIS. But the girl wasn't having any of it, and swiftly pushed herself in between the gap separating them and the time machine, using her hairbrush to back them further into her room.
"Travellers? Tell me who you are and what you're doing here right now, I'm warning you…"
"Or you'll do what?" The Doctor asked amusedly.
"Batter us with a hairbrush?" Clara smirked.
The young woman sighed and lowered her arm, before tossing the hairbrush onto her bed. "It was my first weapon of choice...it was either that or my lamp shade. What do you expect me to do when a pair of strangers turn up in some sort of noisy flashing police box at 3 o'clock in the morning?"
The Doctor chuckled slightly, in her defence this all did seem rather bizarre. "I'm the Doctor and this is Clara." He finally introduced himself and his companion.
"Hi." Clara greeted with a small awkward wave.
"And that is the TARDIS." He said, pointing towards the blue box behind her.
The girl turned and gave it another puzzled look before staring at the Doctor again quizzically. "Doctor who? And what is a TARDIS?"
"Just the Doctor. And the TARDIS…well, basically…it's a sort of time machine. Clara and I are time travellers."
The girl crossed her arms and scoffed. "Time travel? Do you really expect me to believe that? Is this some sort of prank? Wait…are you one of the professors here? Is this what you do? Go round scaring students at god-knows what hour in the morning?"
The Doctor frowned. "What?"
"Um, Doctor. I think I know where we are." Clara said, nudging his arm a little.
"Where's that?"
"The halls of residence…in a university."
"Oh… Oh." The Doctor realised, glancing around again…but this time catching something in the corner of his eye.
"Well done." The girl muttered sarcastically. "Which is why I'd really appreciate it if you kept your voices down, you'll wake up my flatmates if you're not careful."
"Yes, yes." The Doctor mumbled. "But what about you?"
The girl frowned. "Sorry?"
"What's your name?"
She studied him again sceptically, taking in the outdated clothes and rather ridiculous bowtie before answering. "Emeline."
"Emeline. That's a lovely name, I'd keep that if I were you." The Doctor said as he did a quick spin around to give the room another thorough look.
Emeline raised her eyebrows at his weird behaviour. "I wasn't planning on changing it."
"That's marvellous." He replied, fishing his screwdriver out of his pocket and giving the room a quick scan, before reading it and putting it back in his coat in a hurry.
Clara also began to notice his sudden strange behaviour and gave him a funny look.
"What was that?" Emeline asked, pointing towards his pocket. "What did you just do?"
"That? Oh that was my sonic screwdriver. Just making sure everything's timey-wimey and correct, that's all."
"Sonic Screwdriver? You're mad, you're actually mad."
"You get used to it." Clara replied, earning a petulant scowl from the Doctor. "As he said, we should really be going now though, lovely meeting you…"
Clara tried to enter the TARDIS doors, but Emeline blocked them once again. "You two are not going back in the weird box until you tell me what you're really doing here."
Clara stepped back again and sighed, whilst the Doctor started nosing through Emeline's room, scanning the odd thing with his sonic screwdriver. "We told you, we're time travellers!"
"I'm not stupid, do you really expect me to believe that?!"
"What other way to you suggest we got in here?" Clara asked. "Look inside the TARDIS if you don't believe us." She glanced at the Doctor for permission, to which he nodded and flapped his arm around absent-mindedly, far too preoccupied with what he was examining on the other side of the room. Clara rolled her eyes.
"You want me to look inside the box? It's a bit small to be a time machine." Emeline said, giving the TARDIS a doubtful look.
"Just amuse us." Clara answered, walking closer to the box. "Go on."
Emeline studied Clara anxiously before slowly pulling open one of the doors and peering inside.
"No way…but that's impossible!"
Clara watched in amusement as she briefly disappeared inside the TARDIS, before coming out again and studying the exterior. Emeline stared at Clara then the Doctor in shock. "It's bigger on the inside! How does that work?!"
"As he said, very, um, timey-wimey." Clara explained cluelessly. "Now that you know the truth, we're sorry to have accidentally disturbed you at 3 in the morning, but we have somewhere to be…don't we Doctor?"
"Hm?" The Doctor spun around and clapped his hands together. "Right, yes, about that…"
Clara groaned and crossed her arms. "What is it?"
"I sort of want to stay for a while."
"And why's that?"
The Doctor looked past her and instead towards the young woman still stood in front of the TARDIS doors. "Emeline, how long has there been a crack in your bedroom wall?"
Clara and Emeline's eyes flickered from the Doctor to the large crack beside him on the far wall, before both giving him confused looks. There didn't seem to be anything special about it, it was simply a thin split faintly running through the paintwork. The sort of thing you'd only really notice if you looked carefully, but nevertheless looked strangely out of place.
"What? That?" Emeline asked, advancing towards the wall. "I dunno, a month or so? Maybe longer. I don't really know what caused it…I just sort of noticed it one day. Why?"
The Doctor put his ear up against the crack and tapped the edges with the tips of his fingers. Clara frowned and walked up to the other side of the wall, arms still crossed tightly across her chest. She was beginning to feel slightly disappointed, as she'd come to the conclusion that her and the Doctor's plans of a day out to see golden sunsets had come to an abrupt halt. Ever since she got her new teaching job she'd been seeing him less and less, mostly because she was so busy with all the lesson plans and marking she had to do. Because of this, she treasured the quality time she could spend with him when they were together, before he had to drop her back to teach her classes on Monday morning. Spending this quality time in a stranger's bedroom was not exactly what she'd been hoping for.
"Doctor, it's just a crack." Clara commented. "You get them in walls like this all the time."
"Not like this." The Doctor replied, lifting his head from the wall before running his fingers along the crack slowly. "You don't get ones like this."
Emeline frowned. "What do you mean? It's just a crack, dodgy plastering probably. It's nothing special."
"No." The Doctor said, lifting his hand from the crack and turning towards her. "That's what it makes you believe. It's nothing special. It's just a crack. It sits there, unnoticed, lying on your bedroom wall. Why would it be anything else? But it is, it's so much more than that. Because this crack isn't in your bedroom wall, Emeline, this is a crack in the fabric of reality. It's a split in time and space." The Doctor began tapping the edges of the crack again slowly, making quiet knocks against the wall. "If you knocked down this wall, the crack would still be here. It will always be here in this exact place no matter what you do."
"What? So reality is splitting open in her bedroom?" Clara queried, somewhat bewildered.
"Sort of." The Doctor replied, stepping back away from the crack to observe it again.
"If that's true I'm going to be in a hell of a lot of trouble with maintenance." Emeline sighed.
The Doctor got out his sonic screwdriver and began running it along the edge of the crack, so the trio listened quietly to the humming noise it made. The Doctor lifted up the sonic and read the readings again before scratching the back of his head. "Interesting…" He announced. "This crack, it's not like any I've seen before. It's not really a gateway…it's more of a window."
"A window?" Emeline questioned. "How's that thing a window?"
The Doctor turned to Emeline again, and then studied her up and down before scanning her with the sonic. He read the results and frowned slightly, rubbing his large chin with his free hand with worry.
"Why did you scan me?" Emeline asked, her voice quivering slightly with concern.
Clara noticed the Doctor's anxious expression immediately and stepped forward. "Doctor, what's wrong?"
The Doctor ignored their questions. "Has it ever made a noise?"
"What?" Emeline replied.
"The crack, has it ever made any weird noises? Have you ever heard and strange voices, for example, funny sounds?"
"No…why would it? You're beginning to scare me. Why is there a crack in reality in my bedroom wall?"
"You should be scared." The Doctor told her bluntly. "Not everybody just gets a crack in their bedroom wall."
"But why do I have one?"
"How long have you lived here?" The Doctor asked, ignoring her question yet again, scanning the crack once more with his screwdriver.
"Since late September, it's my first year here."
"And how old are you?"
Emeline studied him up and down. It felt like she was dreaming, a weird man and his friend had just appeared out of nowhere in a blue box in her bedroom, talking about space and time travel, and now they were obsessing over what she thought was a plain old crack in her bedroom wall and asking her lots of weird questions. She didn't know whether she could trust a word they said, but if this crack really was abnormal, it looked like she had no other choice then to do just that. "As it's 3am, Nineteen today, actually."
The Doctor smiled. "Oh! Happy birthday! I do love a good birthday!"
Clara smirked and shook her head. "Sorry, he gets a bit excited about birthdays."
"What's not to get excited about?!" The Doctor exclaimed. "I've had over 1200 and I can tell you they never get any less exciting."
"Wait, you're 1200 years old?!" Emeline asked in astonishment.
"Yes, I'm a timelord, alien, 2 hearts, 27 brains-"
"With a chin far too big for his face." Clara interrupted. "Now, Doctor, how do we fix this crack? I mean…it can be fixed right? It doesn't pose any danger, does it?"
"Well...Let's see, shall we?"
"What, you mean you don't know?! It could be dangerous?" Emeline replied.
"There are lots of dangerous things in the universe. Lots of dangerous and scary things. But do you know which of those are the scariest? The ones we don't know about, the ones we don't even realise are there, like this crack sitting on your bedroom wall. But do you know what makes this crack so scary?"
Emeline shook her head.
"As I said, it's a window."
Clara frowned and stepped closer to him. "Don't think she shares your phobia of double-glazing."
The Doctor sighed and turned towards her, dropping his composure slightly. "I mean, Clara, what would you use a secret window for?"
"Watching someone." Emeline replied.
The Doctor grinned and pointed his screwdriver at her. "Exactly."
"But wait…who would want to watch me?"
"I don't know." The Doctor admitted, scanning her with his screwdriver again. "But they've not just been watching you, they've been scanning your thoughts, monitoring your brain activity…"
"All though the crack in her wall?" Clara queried. "But how do we find out who's doing it?"
"Easy." The Doctor replied. "It's a window, a window can be seen through both ways."
"What?" Emeline asked confusedly.
"Watch." The Doctor stepped close to the crack again, and then adjusted the setting on his sonic screwdriver before holding it close to the crack. Nothing happened for a moment, but then suddenly the crack began to grow, the edges splitting further across the paintwork until the crack covered half of the wall. Then the wall began to quiver slightly and right before their eyes the crack began opening up, a bright light seeped through which they all had to shield their eyes from as it slowly dimmed, the gap growing and growing until it was big enough for them to see inside.
"Please tell me you're going to be able to fix this once you're done, or I'll have to spend my whole student loan getting it fixed." Emeline groaned, observing the size.
"Yes, yes don't worry about that." The Doctor replied, moving closer to the edge of the crack and looking down so he could see what was inside."Emeline, I think you should take a look."
The two women inched closer to the crack before uncertainly glancing down to view the inside of it.
Emeline's jaw dropped as she took in the view before her, the Doctor carefully observing her reaction.
"But that's…that can't be…that's impossible."