AN: *salutes hello* Just so you know, this is my first DW fanfic, but certainly not my first fanfic ever. This one seems to take place inbetween when Martha leaves, and right before the Donna reunion. There will be no shipping in this, unless there is like, a million dollar request for it. Sorry, I just don't see it happening in this story right now. I do have a Beta, my good friend in real life, and I'll try and have a story posted every Tuesday. That depends, of course, on Beta's schedule, and what time zone you live in. It could be Tuesday 11:00 PM here, and Wednesday in yours, so don't hold me to my word on that promise.
"See you tomorrow, Shawn." Ms. Angela called from her desk in the hospital lobby, smiling and waving warmly.
"See ya." Shawn called back as she turned towards the revolving glass doors. She pushed her sweater sleeve up over her fingers and pushed the black handle on the glass panel in front of her. Shawn turned left on the dimly lit sidewalk and walked the same path she'd been walking everyday for the past five months.
She looked ahead of herself, and checked all around her to make sure that she wasn't being followed. Just as a precaution, of course, not paranoia. Anyone in this part of Illinois knew that Friar Street wasn't exactly the best place for a young woman to be walking alone. She'd even thought of buying mace sometimes on her walk home.
The tree up ahead with the twisted branches reminded her that she was halfway home, and it wouldn't be long until she was safe in her bedroom again. The room she'd grown to love throughout her entire life.
Just behind that tree, about five houses behind it, someone's porch light went on. Then another next to it. The one to the left of that followed. Soon every porch light on Shawn's street began to turn on. Shawn stopped walking and looked as her street was suddenly illuminated, and not by coincidence. Her eyes grew wide when the lights started to all flicker slowly. She looked around her street, and then began to walk quickly to her house, picking up speed as the flickering lights did.
The small heels Shawn wore on the uneven sidewalk increased the fear that had started to blur her vision. A blue light started to waver in front of her house as she approached it. She sped up her sprint as she tried to race past the light and make it to her house first. The twisted tree branches were finally above her head and provided more shade to her house, which she soon noticed was the only house not blinking.
Shawn turned onto the concrete pathway to her front door as someone jumped from behind the tree and crashed into her. The person's arms wrapped around her as she started screaming and flailing.
"Get back!" he shouted in her ear as she broke free of his grasp. Shawn lost her balance and fell to the ground in pain. She looked up as she tried to stand back up in her heels to escape her capturer. But then the ground gave a sharp shift to the side and knocked her down again.
"Let's go!" the man shouted to her, but it did not sound as menacing as she'd figured a kidnapper's voice would. The earth shifted again as she screamed again and held her hand up to the man. He reached and helped pull her up as all the lights on her street suddenly burst at once and went out. The two people stood in total silence, looking at each other's faces.
"That silence can't be good..." Shawn whispered, afraid of what breaking the silence might do. The man's face shifted in the dark as his eyes grew and he let out a breath. He looked like he'd just realized something very bad.
"We need to go," the man turned to look directly into Shawn's eyes. His accent stuck out to her as he grabbed her wrist and violently pulled her along behind him. Shawn didn't fall this time. She was determined to keep up with him as they made their way down the street.
"What's happeni-" Shawn screamed again as a deafening explosion went off behind her. Her knees shook from the force of it as she tried to turn around and see the damage.
"This way." the man pulled her arm to make her face forward, but not before another explosion happened, and then another.
Shawn turned to see the man turn the corner and lead them to what looked like an old phone booth that she knew shouldn't be on her street. He pushed open the door on the right and dragged both of them in as another explosion happened. Shawn turned as he closed the door behind them and caught a glimpse of what was left of her street. The tree with the twisted branches was nowhere to be found.
Shawn stood in front of the closed doors and stared at where she'd last seen her house. The man ran past her and left her to stare at the closed doors, her eyes wide and her throat tight. Lights seemed to flash around her but went unnoticed as she continued to stare at the wood that had just been shoved in her face. She just didn't feel like moving was appropriate at the moment.
Little buzzing sounds went off around her as she heard footsteps slowly walk towards her. She didn't turn to look at the man until he was right behind her. Her eyes looked down at first as she turned and they then took a moment to focus on the man who stood before her.
Her capturer stood with a solemn, pained face that contrasted his energetic hair. He slouched over half a foot taller than her in a slim pinstripe suit and red converse. Shawn's eyes slipped from his and noticed what was behind him for the first time. She gasped and took a step backwards into the doors.
"It's ok." the man said calmly in an accent that comforted Shawn, "I'm here to help."
Shawn looked around the room that was filled with blue and orange lights. A large column rose into the ceiling behind the man. Shawn's eyes tried to focus on what was around her as the adrenaline in her brain slowly calmed down. The man's face was dimly lit from the colorful lights around them, and seemed much calmer than Shawn was. He raised his hand slightly towards Shawn in a gentle and welcoming manner. She pressed herself against the doors, desperate to get back home.
"I won't hurt you." he whispered sternly, but at the same time, in a comforting voice. Everything she had experienced in the past few minutes sent Shawn into a state of fear she had never felt before, and the stranger before her was the most calming source she could find at the moment. She raised her hands from the wood, and then took a step forward. Her muscles felt like they'd run a marathon as she tried to balance herself in her heels. The man raised his hand a little more and carefully helped her to a chair in the center of the room.
He sat down next to Shawn and turned slowly to face her. "I'm the Doctor." he introduced himself as Shawn reluctantly turned to look at him. She leaned into the cushion and tried to calm herself. "What's your name?"
Shawn opened her mouth to speak, but nothing came out at first as she felt her trachea tighten slightly. "Shawn." she finally managed.
"Shawn," he looked in her eyes, "I'm here to help."
"How?" she shouted and turned to him. "How the heck does a person fix what I just saw?"
"Because I'm not just a person." he sat up in his chair. An aura of authority rose in the room as he stood up and walk towards the column in the center of the room. He slowly walked around it and pressed a few buttons that reflected their blinking light on his face.
"Dude, what?" Shawn asked as she watched him wander.
"Time Lord," he leaned around the column to look at her, "and I'm sorry. Did you just call me 'dude'?"
"I, um, yeah. Sorry." she looked down, and then back up to him again. "Why'd you say you weren't a pp-." a little puff of air squeezed out of Shawn lips as she knew what was happening again. Her lips quivered as she tried to get out the next letter in the word. Her chest tightened as she watched the man's gaze grow concerned as he looked at her. Shawn squinted her eyes and gripped the chair as she finally said "person" to her relief. Another one over.
The Doctor, as he'd said earlier, continued to walk around the column as he glanced at a few more lights. "Basically, it's a really long story, but I'm what you'd call an alien. Another planet and what not." he spread his arms out wide to make her look at the room around them as he leaned on the panel. "This is my space ship."
Shawn thought for a second as she brought her wandering eyes back to focus on him. "So martians look like humans and have b-b-ph." Shawn cringed as her chest tightened again.
The Doctor turned exasperated to her. "Why do people always assume I'm- he ended his sentence right in the middle of his thought and watched her as she squirmed in her seat and breathed deeply. Her mouth spazzed a little as she shut her eyes, and then finally spoke out of the silence.
"British accents?" she let out a breath she'd apparently been holding, and then laughed a little. Shawn looked up at the Doctor, hoping he hadn't noticed, even though she knew it was inevitable. Her heart still beat quickly and loudly in her chest from the temporary stress she'd just been under.
The Doctor squinted at her, and then a thought seemed to dawn on him as he quickly looked away. "So," Shawn always tried to play her stutters off as if they didn't happen, "this is weird..." was all she could think to say in the situation she was in.
The Doctor smiled at her simple response. "What's really 'weird' " he said the word like it was from a different language, "is that I have absolutely no idea what-"
"Wait-" Shawn interrupted him. "S-sorry, um, am I still in that" Shawn paused as she tried to think of a word she could use and not stutter on, "phone thing we went in to?"
"Time Lord technology." he said cheerfully. "Bigger on the inside."
"So," she kicked off her heels and stood up on the cold floor, he legs a bit weak, "all of this," she walked along the metal railing, "it's all real?"
The Doctor stopped and turned to her, confusion written on his face. "Well, yes, clearly. Why wouldn't it be?"
Shawn turned to him and looked at his genuinely confused face. She smiled and then laughed a little at how ridiculous he looked. She continued to laugh as she realized just how ridiculous the past few minutes had been. "So, what you're telling me, " she said in between nervous laughs, "is that my parents, house, neighborhood, and life just spontaneously combusted and now I'm in a space ship with an alien doctor?" she ran her fingers through her short hair and squeezed at it a little. She stopped laughing as she realized what she'd actually said.
"I know how awful what just happened to you is," he said, his face growing serious, "but i swear, I'm going to figure out what happened to your family."
Shawn nodded as she slowly walked around the room, taking in the new information. "So, space ship, huh?" Shawn tried to distract her mind a little from the explosions that still went off in her eyes. "What's it do?"
"Tons." the Doctor said, "space travel, time travel, the occasional dimensional trave-"
"Could-?" Shawn started to ask, but regretted it before the words were even formed.
"No." the Doctor said sternly, and then again a little more gently as he explained about fixed points in time, and how it was impossible to change them.
"Figured." she sighed. Talking this long to a man she didn't know and had just kidnapped her, or saved, she couldn't figure out which, was something Shawn had never thought she'd be doing. "Whole butterfly effect, huh?"
"What is everyone's obsession with butterflies in time travel?" he asked curiously as he jogged over to where she'd wandered.
She laughed a little as she watched his lanky figure bounce over to her.
"What?" he frowned.
"Nothing." she ran her fingers through her hair again. "It's a um, a short story by this author Ray Bradbury." The Doctor nodded as he recalled the familiar name. "So it's about in the future, or whatever, and the world has time travel that's accessible to the public."
The Doctor frowned at that idea. "Well that wasn't very well thought out, was it?"
Shawn laughed, "Exactly. Well, the whole point is that this guy wants to hunt a dinosaur or something and kill it as a 'prize' or something." Shawn could tell the Doctor really didn't like that. "And the government's only rule is to 'not step off the pathway' that they built. They kept trying to enforce that the slightest change, even 'stepping on a butterfly' would alter the fate of humanity or whatever. And then, of course, the stupid guy doesn't listen and goes off the pathway and steps on a butterfly. So when they get back to the present, he finds out that that little change ended up making the world this really crazy, awful place to live in. It's a really crazy story."
By the time Shawn had finished telling her story, The Doctor was at a loss for words. "What?" he asked, beyond exasperated now. "What?" he laughed. "I don't know whether to agree with this guy or be offended! I mean sure, you can't just wander willy-nilly around the past and be careless, but that's a bit extreme, don't you think?" He ran his fingers through his hair and made it stand up even more than it had been earlier. "What?" he questioned again in a higher pitch voice.
"Hey, that's how the story gg-" Shawn's throat tensed up again as she involuntarily stopped talking. She laughed when she saw the Doctor's face go from curiosity of their current conversation to a more solemn look. The look everyone got. Shawn eventually stopped and looked down as she gave up trying to form the simple word. She'd done so miraculously well telling her story, so it was hard for her to comprehend why she couldn't just say one word. Shawn took a deep breath. The amount of tenseness that four little letters could cause was insane. A short silence filled the room again as neither of the two strangers knew what to say.
The Doctor quickly turned and bounded lightly back towards what Shawn now noticed seemed to be a control console, and perhaps was what controlled the ship. "So," The Doctor announced, excited again, "we have two options."
"Ok." Shawn was glad he changed the subject again, but knew that he'd changed it because the stutter had made another uncomfortable silence. Shawn walked towards the center of the room again.
"We can either, A," he twisted a green knob on the console, "take a little break and do a little sightseeing," he swung his foot onto the console to hold down a button as the room around them started to move, "or B," his voice faltered a little as his foot slid off, "we can find out what happened to your family."