Hello, everyone! This is going to be a multi-chapter story, and I'll publish the next chapter once I'm done editing it. This chapter is sort of almost a prologue: It's mainly for amusement, and it introduces the Ponds' neighbors, who will be in the rest of the story. All of the action will start in the next chapter, by the way.
I hope you enjoy it, and if you see any typos, feel free to tell me. Typos are obnoxious. Also, reviews would be greatly appreciated.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment.
- T.S. Eliot, The Rock
Amy and Rory nodded politely at the conversation of the neighbors and hoped that no alien invasions would interrupt their attempt to get to know the four families better.
"Janet and I are thinking about getting a cat," Linda was saying as she looked over at her sister. "They're awful sweeties, and plus, we're almost getting into our fifties and we're both still spinsters. It's about time that we start accumulating cats."
"Oh, you're not old," Rory protested. He glanced around at the group of adults sitting on chairs and standing by the windows. "Does anyone want something else to drink? We've got tea, soda, and some beer if you're feeling adventurous."
"I'll have a beer," said Darren. The others shook their heads.
"I know we've all been talking about ordinary things, cats and careers and everything" Carol said as Rory headed off to fetch the drink, "but you have to admit that that business with the Olympics this year was the weirdest thing ever."
"Bizarre," Janet agreed. "Did anyone ever explain it?"
"I don't think so. I'm just glad everyone got back okay from wherever they went. That was a blessing at least," Linda said.
Amy glanced out the window, and her heart turned cold at the sight of an alien walking across the backyard. "God. No," she said.
"What?" Carol asked in confusion.
"Just… give me a moment. Rory!" Amy called, and she hurried over to the back door. The neighbors glanced over and saw a tweed-suited man tapping lightly on the glass.
"Who's that young man?" Linda asked.
"Amy? What's going on?" Rory asked, returning with the bottle of beer. "Oh. It's him." He placed the drink down on a table and hurried over to the door.
"Is he one of your friends?" Janet said. "You can't just let him wait out there. Let him in. I'm sure we'll all be happy to meet him."
The Doctor waved again from behind the glass, looking around at the guests. Amy reluctantly opened the door.
"Sorry for popping by unexpectedly," the Doctor said, slipping inside. "I didn't know you had guests." He turned to the nearest person, Linda, and shook her hand. "I'm John Smith. The Ponds', er, Williams's friend from… Leadworth."
"Why'd you come through the back door?" Carol asked.
Frank was peering out the kitchen window. "And what's that big blue thing out there?"
"That's my shed of tools. I cart it around with me when I travel, and I just left it in the back yard, so I thought I might as well come in this way," the Doctor explained. He glanced around at the room as Amy hurried over to shut the blinds in the kitchen. "Are you having a party? Do you have any jammy dodgers? If you don't I know a recipe. Not quite as good as the packaged ones, but sometimes you have to make do. What do you say, Ponds?"
Amy turned to her husband. "Rory, why don't you just stay in here for a minute, and I'll talk to John in the kitchen." She dragged the Doctor into the other room, shut the door, and turned to face him. "Did you really have to come today? This is the first time I've gotten up the courage to face all of the neighbors after Linda saw the Ood you sent us and started screaming."
The Doctor frowned. "Oh. Sorry about that, Pond. But you've got to admit, he does make good sausages."
She smiled reluctantly. "Alright, I'll forgive you for that. But Rory and I are not going on any adventures today. You can either leave and come back later, or you can stay and act like a normal human adult."
"Course I'll stay. I can never pass up a party at the Ponds' house. So, do you have any jammy dodgers?"
"You are so hopeless, Doctor. We're the Williams family, and making jammy dodgers is so not a normal adult thing to do at a neighborhood gathering." She gave him a gentle shove towards the door. "Alright, come with me and I'll show you who everyone is."
When the pair walked out of the kitchen, they saw that the gathering had broken up into two different groups, one in the living room and one in the sitting room. Amy directed the Doctor to where Rory was talking to two middle aged women.
"That's Linda, on the left there, with the blonde hair," the Scot said quietly, "and standing beside her is her sister, Janet. Linda's a social worker, and Janet was a physicist until something happened to her hand." Amy gestured at the red-haired woman's twisted and scarred left hand.
"I've heard some strange ideas about what happened," Linda was saying. "No one knows for sure what it was, but some people say it was a publicity hoax, some say it was a weird government experiment, and some say it was aliens." She turned to the Doctor. "We're just talking about that bizarre thing that happened at the Olympics a few weeks ago."
"Ah, yes," the Doctor said. "That was very odd. Mysterious."
"Yeah," Janet continued. "I heard that no one knows who that man was who lit the torch."
The Doctor looked uncomfortable, and Amy grinned mischievously. "I'm certainly not an expert on these things," she said, "but I'd guess it was aliens." She jabbed the Doctor with her elbow.
"Yep. Definitely aliens," he said.
"But what would they have been doing here? Were they trying to invade the planet, do you think, or did they land here on accident?" Amy asked.
"Oh, I'd guess that they were just lost and scared," the Time Lord said casually.
"Do you think they got away alright?"
"Yes. I'm certain they did."
Amy looked around. "Well, I think I should introduce John to the others now." She turned to him. "Come along, John."
"Oi! That's my line," he complained, but he followed her over to where three of Amy's neighbors were sitting and talking on the couch and chairs.
As the two walked away, Janet stared after them in confusion. "It feels like I missed something in that conversation."
"Yeah," Rory said quietly. "I'm pretty sure you did."
Across the room, Amy and the Doctor sat next to a forty-year-old man. "That's Frank, next to us," she said, leaning over to whisper while the man finished what he was saying. "The two youngest children, Stella and David, are his. The blonde woman on the chair over there is Julia, and she's the mother of the oldest kid here, Jordan, and the wife of Darren, who's that man sitting over there alone. That other woman is Carol. She's an electrician, but no one knows if she has any family or anything. No one's ever seen anyone visit her house."
"It was really fitting that he played the sheep," Frank was saying, "because we named him after David, the shepherd in the Bible." He turned to the Doctor. "Do you have any children, John?"
"Yes, er, no. No children," the father and grandfather replied.
Frank smiled. "Well, you've still got plenty of time. How's Jordan been doing, Julia?"
She looked down at her lap, and the Doctor noticed that her eyes were sunken and dark, as if she had been sleeping poorly. "Well…" she began. "Don't tell Darren, but I'm concerned about Jordan. He behaves badly at school, and the teachers have called home several times. He's just so restless and hyper, except sometimes he has no energy at all and just sleeps all day. I talked to his teacher, and she told me to take him to a psychiatrist to see if he has ADHD or something and to get him some medicine for it, but Darren doesn't want us to. He doesn't want to think anything is wrong with Jordan, and he keeps saying that Jordan will get through it on his own."
"Do you want me to talk to him?" Frank asked. "I talked to one of the parents of Stella's classmates a few weeks ago, and she said that her daughter recently was put on medicine. She said it made a big difference."
"No, Darren would just get defensive. He says that Jordan won't ever amount to anything if we tell him that medicine is the solution to all his problems." Julia looked up from where she had been running her fingers through the material of her dress. "I'm sorry for telling you all this, especially you, John. You just popped over for a party, and now I'm burdening you with all your problems. Darren loves Jordan very much, actually. He just sees things from a different angle."
"It's no problem, Julia," the Doctor said. "Because I've met a lot of people like Darren and a lot of people like Jordan, and I know how these things turn out. Don't give up on Darren yet; there's hope for him. If you keep telling him in the right ways, he'll realize the truth. But Jordan." He smiled. "Jordan is gonna be brilliant. All he needs is people to show him that. Yeah, he might be having a hard time now, his brain might be fighting against him and his father certainly isn't helping, and maybe the hard time will never leave. Maybe it will last forever. But let me tell you, even if he's hyper and hard to control his whole life, he can find a way to make use of it. I was just like him in school, always running off and never sitting still and not listening to the lessons. But you can ask Amy and Rory, and I think I've done a few things in my life, hyper and excitable or not. Jordan will be wonderful. He'll travel places and meet people and find cool things to do with his energy and his lethargy. He'll be truly brilliant. He just needs someone to tell him that he can be."
Julia looked up at the Doctor with tear-filled eyes. "Thank you," she said.
"My pleasure," said the Doctor.
Julia blew her nose, and Carol looked uncomfortable.
Amy cleared her throat. "Well, er, let's go see if Rory needs help with anything," She dragged the Doctor away in the direction of the other room. "You are so bloody weird. Though that was a nice speech. You're pretty good at those."
"Oh, thank you, Pond. I am sort of proud of this body's oratorical skills," he said.
Their progress across the room was interrupted when a young girl, who was perhaps six years old, ran up and grabbed the Doctor's tweed jacket. "We're bored because Mrs. Williams doesn't have any toys," she said without introduction. "What should we do? And who are you? I've never seen you before."
He kneeled down to talk to her. "I'm John Smith, a friend of Mr. and Mrs. Williams. And yes, it's terribly sad that you don't have any toys. Are you Stella?" She nodded. "Oh, that's wonderful! Stella means 'star' in Latin." He picked her up and spun her around. "You're named after the stars." Still holding the girl in his arms, he looked at Amy with a pleading expression.
"Alright, you can play with the kids," she said. "But if anything happens to them, I'll turn you over to the Daleks."
"Cross my hearts, nothing will happen." He set the girl down. "Alright now, what do you want to do?"
She grabbed his hand and pulled him off to the dining room, where the other kids were playing under the table. Amy shook her head fondly and went off to talk to her other guests.
Half an hour later, the Doctor was finishing braiding Stella's hair. "I met this great archer," he said, "while I was in the New Stone Age, and her hair was braided like this, except she had some porcupine quills woven in."
"Wouldn't they poke her?" David asked, running his fingers over the three little braids in his longish hair.
"Nah, she was careful. The arrows were another matter, though. Are you almost done, Jordan?" The Doctor was sitting on the ground in the dining room, and the older boy was perched above him on a chair, carefully folding the Doctor's hair into a braid as the Time Lord tied off the end of Stella's hair.
"Yeah, Mr. Smith. I'm done. Do you have another tie?" Jordan asked.
The Doctor reached into his pocket and pulled out a ribbon. "Be careful with this one. It's pretty old. Belonged to Marie Antoinette, the queen of France."
"Cool," Jordan said, fixing the ribbon into the Doctor's hair.
"Yes it is, isn't it?" the Doctor said. Finished at last with the braiding he and the three children sat in silence for a moment.
"Do you know when the party's supposed to be over?" the doctor asked at last.
"Mum said seven thirty," Jordan said. "How much time do we have left, then?"
"Forty-eight minutes," the Doctor said immediately.
"How do you know so quickly?" David asked.
The Doctor grinned. "I just have a good sense of time." He hopped to his feet and clapped his hands. "So, what do you want to do now? Checkers, hide-and-seek, hovercraft?"
"Can we do hovercraft?" Stella asked excitedly.
"Sure. Do you know where they keep them?"
"Er, I don't think Mrs. Williams has any," Stella guessed, not really knowing what a hovercraft was.
"We'll just have to make a few, then. Follow me out to my… shed. I'd get the materials myself, but I'm supposed to be watching all of you."
The adults had congregated in the kitchen, so no one noticed the Doctor and the three children sneak out the back door. The neighbors could see only the top of the TARDIS through the kitchen window, but Janet heard the clank of metal parts being dropped in a pile on the ground. Frank heard the whir of the sonic screwdriver. And Carol heard the light buzzing of the newly made hovercraft.
When they all heard the laughter and excited squeals of the children, Linda said, "They sound like they're having so much fun. That John of yours is really good with children, Amy."
Amy stood on her tiptoes from her position near the table and tried to see out the window, but she only caught a glimpse of the Doctor's head as he ran by. She laughed at the braids and the blue ribbon that was waving in the air. "Yeah. Sometimes I think he's good with them because he's a child himself."
"How did you and Rory meet John?" Darren asked, and everyone turned their heads toward Rory as he answered with a bland lie. They missed the sight of Stella whizzing past the window in a small flying car, and the conversation continued.
When the time for the guests to leave began to approach, Frank excused himself to fetch his children from the backyard. The thump of the closing door covered up the sound of a crashing hovercraft, and Frank walked around the side of the house to see the Doctor with his arms submerged in a bush. "Come on out of there," the Time Lord said, and he pulled Stella out of the grip of the twigs. Her clothes were wrinkled, and leaves were tangled in her hair.
"What's going on?" Frank asked, smiling, as the Doctor held the girl in his arms and carried her over to her father. Jordan and David followed them, their bare feet sliding through the grass.
"We were just – " David began, but the Doctor interrupted him.
"Playing hide-and-seek. The children wanted to ride a hovercraft, but I told them that it was unsafe and, more to the point, impossible in this century." He winked at the kids, and they giggled.
"Well, you certainly sounded like you were having a good time earlier," Frank said, "but I'm afraid the children have to go. The party's about ready to break up."
The children protested, but Frank refused to give in, and soon the children were being fitted with their shoes in the entryway.
"Thank you for the dinner, Amy," Janet said. "It was magnificent."
"And it was very nice to get to know you and Rory better. We should talk more often," said Frank.
"Yes, and we hardly got to see your friend John at all. Will he be staying for very long?" Linda asked.
"Well, er, I don't know," the Doctor said.
Linda continued cheerfully, "We've certainly got to have a chance to chat before you go. Janet and I don't meet too many new people since we spend too much time at home and in the garden. What would you say to a neighborhood picnic this Saturday? The weather's supposed to be nice, and the kids always love a chance to go to the park."
"That would be perfect," Janet enthused. "You'll all come, won't you?"
Frank, Julia, and Rory assented. Darren nodded grudgingly, and after some persuading, Carol agreed to join the picnic.
"You'll be there, too, won't you, Mr. Smith?" Stella asked pleadingly.
The Doctor tried to bring himself to disagree, but then relented. "Oh, alright. If you want me to come, I will." He leaned down and whispered to her, "But no hovercrafts, you understand? That has to be a secret."
"I promise," she said, and the Doctor patted her on the head.
"We'll see you all on Saturday!" Linda called as she and Janet walked away at last.
When the other neighbors had departed, the Doctor turned to the Ponds, scowling. "You see what you roped me into? I came over for a brief chat and maybe an interstellar journey, and now I have to spend a Saturday eating fancy sandwiches and making polite conversation."
"Hey, it's your own fault. I certainly didn't ask for a weird alien to show up in the middle of our attempt to make the neighbors think that we're not lunatics with a blue door and an Ood as a housemaid," Amy said.
"Well argued, Pond," the Doctor said. "Well, at least there might be biscuits at the picnic. And I can pop out in the TARDIS to get some jammy dodgers. Or you know what would be even better? I can try out that recipe that I have." He turned and rushed back into the house, leaving Amy and Rory still standing on the doorstep.
"Well, at least even the Doctor can't mess up a picnic," said Rory.
"You never know," Amy said, grabbing Rory's collar and pulling him in for a kiss.