Author's note/warnings: Contains 2 AOFCs, one plug for a book, one pushy mother, gratuitous medical technobabble, one gratuitous spider plant, telepathy stuff, gratuitous UNIT reference.
All author's notes should be taken with a grain of salt and two grains of Tylenol (but not aspirin).
All the Doctor wanted was to get into some dry clothes and drink some very hot tea. He squelched his way down Second Avenue, looking for the house with the big burr oak poking up out of the back garden. Right there. He sped up to a jog, water squishing out of his trainers with each step, slipped through the open gate and into the garden. He trotted up to to the Tardis, pulled out his key, and stopped. A small leg, dressed in embroidered blue jeans, purple striped socks, and painted canvas sneakers hung down in front of the door to the Tardis. "Oi!" he said, startled, then looked up.
There was a little cry, and the leg abruptly vanished. The Doctor looked up. A small girl, with light brown hair cut to chin length around a thin face, was perched on top of the Tardis. A paperback book slipped from her fingers and tumbled to the ground at his feet. Her eyes met his for an instant before she shied away, apparently fascinated with her own toes.
Slowly, not taking his eyes off the child, he reached down to pick up the book. "Hello up there!" he said. "Mind telling me what you're doing on my box? No, silly question, obviously you were reading, the appropriate question is why?" He flashed his most winning smile.
The girl pointedly did not look up. "Why what?"
"Well." He took a step back and looked the girl over again. Not thin, he corrected himself. The skin was pulled too tight across her hands and bare ankles, the face too pinched to be healthy. "Well," he started again, "I suppose I could ask you what you think of," he pulled out his glasses, "Douglas Hofstadter. Godel, Escher, Bach: The Eternal Golden Braid. That's a challenging choice for someone your age, isn't it?"
"I'm eleven." She kept her eyes fixed on her feet. "Have you read it? I understand the fables at the beginnings of the chapters better than the rest of it. I picked it up because I like Escher prints."
"Why are you sitting on my box?" It didn't seem to him like a comfortable place to read.
She shrugged. "It's quiet up here. Why is your box sitting in my yard?" She kept stealing glances at him, then snapping her eyes away as if she expected his gaze to burn.
"Good question," he conceded. "Would you mind coming down from there, or at least looking at me? It's rather awkward having a conversation with the side of your head."
The girl crossed her legs and turned her body to face the Doctor, but spared him only the briefest glance before fixing her gaze disconcertingly at a spot about a meter to his left. "I can't come down unless you leave."
"Why ever not?"
The girl chewed her lip. "It's complicated."
"Try me."
A screen door clicked shut. A woman with dark hair and a worried expression was running toward him. She stopped a few feet away, looked from the child, to the Tardis, then to the Doctor. "Excuse me, but is that...object...yours?" she asked.
"Oh, ah, yes," he said. "Getting to that." He paused, then gestured toward the child's perch with his chin. "Yours?"
"My daughter. Alex."
"Alex was just about to inform me why she is incapable of getting down off my box, when she was clearly perfectly capable of getting up onto it." He turned back to address the girl. "How did you manage that, by the way?"
"I swung down from that tree branch up there," Alex said, pointing to a gnarled horizontal branch hanging less than a body length above the ship. "When I climbed up, I was alone. Now you're here. And Mom." She flicked another of those microsecond glances from the Doctor, to her mother, and back to her favorite spot of air, stretched her lips into a tight, brief smile, then said, "I get motion sick around people."
The Doctor scrubbed at his hair. "All right then, your mother and I will just head off over there and you can get down. Will that do?"
Alex shrugged her skinny shoulders. "I guess."
The Doctor strode off to a corner of the garden. After a beat, the girl's mother followed. "Now, who are you and what is that box doing in my yard?" she demanded, then added unnecessarily, "You're soaking wet!"
"You noticed." He patted his own sleeve absently. "I'm the Doctor."
She looked past his shoulder at the Tardis, distracted. "Yeah, well, me too. Doctor Marie Caron, family practice. My office is on the first floor."
"So." He ran his hand through his hair again. If he could get her talking about the girl, she wouldn't ask difficult questions about him. "Your daughter is quite bright."
Dr. Caron nodded. "She keeps us on our toes." She stole a second glance over his shoulder in the direction of his Tardis, chewing her lip anxiously.
"She's not well, is she?" He wished he could recall the question as soon as he'd said it. At best he'd been rude, at worst, he'd find out things he didn't want to know.
The woman shook her head. "Disintegrative synesthesia," she said. Her voice tightened, but she controlled herself, put on a forced smile. "It's a newer diagnostic category. Are you familiar with it?"
"Not my subspecialty, I'm afraid," he evaded.
"She has complex multisensory hallucinations pretty much continuously, and seizures when her buttons are pushed. It took her almost two days to recover from the last one. Next time, she may not wake up at all." She rubbed the back of her neck absently. "Could be today, tomorrow, next week..." Her hand dropped back to her side as she looked from the Doctor, to her daughter, and back. "Sorry. TMI, right?"
Alex interrupted their conversation with a shout. "All right, I'm off your precious box, happy?"
"Delighted!" The Doctor gestured to Dr. Caron to follow him, then jogged back toward Alex, stopping about two meters away. The girl had settled to the ground with her back against the Tardis' double doors. "I'm the Doctor, by the way."
Alex's face paled. "Mom, I told you. I've had enough of doctors!" She stood up unsteadily. "Nice to meet you and all. Sorry you had to come all this way. Mom shouldn't have called you, whoever you are." She stumbled a few steps away from the two of them, arms held out for balance. It really was quite disconcerting, the way she avoided looking at either one of them. As the child stepped out of the psychic shadow of the Tardis, her own field flared, brilliant and uncontrolled. Right. Of course. The doctor adjusted his mental barriers in response.
Dr. Caron shot the Doctor a sharp look, then turned back to her daughter. "I didn't call him, Alexandra."
Alex paused and spared him another glance, a long one for her, almost a second. "Doctors don't usually make house calls," she mused. "Doctors don't bring giant blue..things...to house calls, ever." She peered up at him again, then back toward the house. "What did you do, fall in the lake?"
"Sea monster."
She snorted, "Don't patronize me."
"I'm not. Really."
Dr. Caron interrupted with cheerful firmness, "Let's get you into some dry clothes. It's a nice enough day, but the wind has to be blowing right through you, wet as you are. Come on, you don't want to catch pneumonia."
"I'm almost home," he protested weakly.
She reached for his arm, but stopped herself, crossing her arms instead across her chest. "Please." Her smile vanished.
Against his better judgement, he allowed himself to be led into the house. Shouldn't have stuck his nose in, with all those questions. Besides, he was curious. Alex retrieved her book, patted the Tardis affectionately, and followed them in.
A fresh set of slightly too large clothes borrowed from Alex's father's closet and a couple of cups of hot tea later, the Doctor found himself ensconced in an overstuffed couch, wrapped in a brightly colored afghan. Dr. Caron had settled herself in a battered yellow armchair by the door to the living room. Alex was curled up in another particularly squishy armchair, toying with a couple of shortbread cookies and occasionally taking a swig of some tinned protein drink and grimacing.
He really ought to be going. Really ought to...the mother's smile had gone desperate, almost predatory. "Right, I am a Doctor of...a lot of things. Your daughter's condition does strike me as unusual."
He turned back to Alex. "I have some questions I'd like to ask you, if you don't mind," he said to the little girl. "Would you please look at me?"
She shook her head. "I'm sorry. I know it's rude," she said to the spider plant on the end table.
The Doctor gave that particular battle up for lost. "How long have you been ill?"
"Three months."
"Your mom says you see things that aren't there. What kinds of things do you see? Ghosts? Monsters?" It would have to be monsters, wouldn't it? Not Gelf. Please not Gelf.
Alex addressed the spider plant. "Just lights, and voices....around people. They hurt if I pay attention to them them for too long. Or even if I don't. There's a quiet space around your box. That's why I climbed up there." She paused, suspicious. "If my mom didn't call you, why are you here? What kind of doctor are you anyway?" She tried another look at him, winced away.
He damped his mental barriers, a little trick he usually used when sneaking up on anything that might have the capacity to percieve him psychically, but which might make his presence less uncomfortable for the child. "Oh I'm here completely by accident. Which generally means I'm exactly where the universe wants me to be. What else?"
She chewed her lip. "I feel like I'm falling toward people all the time, like...how much do you know about gravity and space and stuff?"
"Oh I know a bit," he allowed. "Go on."
"Well, it's kind of like I have a gravity well, like a planet. And so does everyone else. That's a simile, by the way, psychologists can't seem to tell a simile from a delusion, these days. Anyway, that's why I fall down. It's like when you're walking along and you think there's a step down, but there's not, so your foot hits the ground at the wrong time."
"I know exactly what you mean. Any hypotheses as to the cause?"
She twisted her lips, thinking. "Nothing official. I'm just crazy, that's all."
"But what do you think?"
Alex shrugged. "Well, there's something called a Theory of Mind. People are wired to be interested in other people and try to figure them out. In disintegrative synesthesia, that interest becomes kind of compulsion in the brain, and the brain starts making lots of theories about everyone else, and turns them into hallucinations. It's kind of like autism, except backwards."
"Congratulations!" The Doctor grinned. "That is one of the most complex rationalizations I have ever heard. Epicycles upon epicycles. What do you really think is going on?"
"Telepathy would be simpler if it weren't bull...um. I'm trying to keep my reality testing intact."
Reality testing? Twenty first century psychobabble. "Doesn't reality testing mean you make hypotheses about reality and then test them?"
"Not really. Not when I can't trust my observations."
"You could test your hypothesis and let someone else, say your mother, check your observations. Dr. Caron, what do you think?"
She smiled tightly. "I..." She shrugged. "I'm sorry, Alex, I've known for a month at least."
"Wha!?" The Doctor stared. Not the response he'd expected. Did he have the year wrong? A decade one way or the other would make a difference.
She continued. "Here are my observations, if we're going to play science fair. I get a weird feeling at the base of my skull when you're nearby, kind of like when the air pressure changes suddenly on the Ell. You answer questions I haven't asked you. I've even tried thinking things at you on purpose, just to see if you would respond. You generally do."
Alex gaped. "Why didn't you say something, Mom?"
"I don't know." She deflated, sinking into her chair. "I didn't want to say it aloud. It's a bit woo. Like all the hysteria about aliens in England this last few years." The washing machine buzzed. "I'll get that." She hurried off. "Behave. Both of you."
Alex nibbled her cookie. "So, you're an alien, aren't you?"
"How did you guess?"
"That thing in the back yard. Besides, you don't look like other people. I mean the other kind of looking. You fill the whole room, but you're sort of flat. A bright light and a...a song without words." She scrubbed at her face with both hands. "Can you hear what I'm thinking?"
"No. I'm blocking you. Along with everyone else in about a three block radius."
Dr. Caron popped her head back around the doorway. "Doctor, help me in the kitchen for a moment."
"Excuse me," the Doctor nodded to Alex and followed Dr. Caron to the kitchen.
"Can you help her?" Dr. Caron asked without preamble, as soon as the kitchen door closed behind them.
He leaned casually against the kitchen counter, studying her. "What makes you think I can?"
"You feel strange too. A bit. I noticed when we were talking in the yard." She fished around in the fridge, pulled out a head of broccoli and a block of cheese. "Can you help her?"
"Not sure. I'd have to get a better look at how much damage is already done. If it's just a matter of teaching, probably. Not the sort of thing that can be done in an afternoon, though." He was half talking to himself.
She made a wry sort of face. "I take it you're not local, then."
"Not by a long shot."
"Go get your better look then, while I put together some lunch. If it's not too much trouble, I mean." She turned away, ducking into a lower cabinet to pull out a handful of potatoes. "I'm getting out of your way, so go." She set down the potatoes with trembling hands, then gripped the edge of the countertop to still them.
He rested one hand on her shoulder. "I'll see what I can do."
Alex was still curled in her chair, pretending to read her book. "Done conspiring with my mother, are you?"
"I wouldn't call it conspiring exactly." He eased himself onto the couch, across from her. "I need to have a look. In your head. If that's all right?"
She bent forward, pressing her palms into her eyes. "It's going to hurt, isn't it. I mean, more than it does just you being in the room."
The doctor winced apologetically. "It's not supposed to. Telepathy can be joyful, profound, silly, terribly sad, other stuff you are definitely not old enough to worry about, but it's not supposed to hurt."
"But it's going to."
He shrugged. "Yeah."
"Thanks for not lying to me. Adults lie a lot, especially when you're dying. It makes them feel better." She smiled, her first genuine smile. "I'm a tough little girl. I can handle it."
"Was that a Miyazaki reference?"
"Yeah." She closed her book, then carefully set it on the endtable. "Sorry in advance if I barf on you. I have a history." She looked up from her hands, folded tightly in her lap, and met his eyes.
The Doctor smirked. "Then it's a good thing these aren't my clothes." He brushed aside her hair, already falling.
Pain flooded his mind. He shifted gently into the girl's thought patterns, which were rapidly losing coherence. "Stay with me, Alex," he urged, holding them both still until a consensus pattern emerged and he could relieve some of the pain, help her stay oriented. "Sorry," he told her. "It's a real mess in here. Let's see..." Her basic personality seemed to be intact under the frayed and fraying connections, but it was a close thing. Three months. At least two of those completely undefended against every emotion, every stray thought, every accidental touch. Days spent fighting her way out of chaos, when her mind broke under the strain. Fortunately, humans were remarkably resilient. A bit of education, a bit of time, a lot of the damage ought to fix itself.
"You really been all those places? Done all those things?"
"Oi, quit with the sightseeing. Now, I'd rather have a specialist patch you up a bit." But to do that, he'd have to take her elsewhere. Or elsewhen. She reminded him so much of Adric already. Too young to put at so much risk.
"Right, one quick lesson, you up to it?" He couldn't leave her completely undefended.
"Yeah. Who is Adric?" She ought to be curled in a ball, gibbering. Instead, Alex was asking impertinent questions. He was really beginning to like this girl.
"Pay attention. This is a basic shield. Won't be very strong until you practice with it, but anything's better than running around with your consciousness hanging out all over the place."
She hesitated, watching carefully, then copied the pattern he presented to her. "Like that?"
He tested the barrier gingerly. "Not bad, for a first try. You're quite the mimic."
"Thanks."
"You need to sleep. Now." he waited for her to succumb to his suggestion, then broke contact. She flopped over in her chair. He tucked the brightly colored afghan around her.
He looked around. Dr. Caron was watching from the doorway. Her eyes were scared. "You know," she said, "You're the first person I've met who's as smart as she is. It's good that you don't talk down to her," she said. "Thank you."
Shouting. Out front, on the street. The Doctor flicked the front curtains open, peered out. "UNIT. Followed me here...under whose orders, I wonder?"
"UNIT?"
"Never mind that. They're looking for me, but they're likely to pick up Alex as an aside. They've got psychic field detectors. Alien technology. Good people, you understand, most of them, but she's too fragile. Just riding out to Fermilab--I think their regional base is at Fermilab--in a van full of agents could put her over the edge. Americans." He looked down at the girl, still sleeping on the couch.
Her mother ran to a hall closet, reappearing with a stuffed purple backpack. "Bugout bag. Disaster readiness, you know." She walked over to where her daughter lay. "Alex, wake up, quick!" Alex did not respond.
She turned back to the Doctor. "You have to go. Now." Dr. Caron reached around the Doctor and snatched up Alex's book to stuff it into the outer mesh pocket of the backpack. She shoved the bag into the Doctor's arms. "Alexandra, get up!" she shouted.
The Doctor stood in the middle of the living room, arms full of backpack. He slung it over his shoulder quickly, bent down, and touched the child's forehead. "Wake up, you've got to run!" Alex's eyes fluttered open. The Doctor hauled her to her feet.
Dr. Caron bustled them toward the back door. "What did you do?"
"It was only a little sea monster. It needed a place to stay. Lake Michigan is plenty big enough..."
As they reached the Tardis, he tried another protest. "I live a very dangerous life. I can't guarantee her safety."
She smiled, a little sadly. "Neither can I. But I trust you more than I trust them."
Alex caught up with them. "There are soldiers next door."
Dr. Caron reached out a hand, as if to pull her daughter into her arms, but stopped herself at the last moment. "Take care of her. Bring her back when you can. If you can."
The Doctor opened the door of his Tardis. Alex ducked under his arm and inside, preempting any further protests.
"I wish I could have kissed her goodbye," Dr. Caron said, then turned away, running back toward the house. "I'll stall them."
The Doctor closed the door and locked it, then ran to the console, flipping switches. The Tardis groaned, shuddered, and took flight. He turned around. Alex was sitting crosslegged on the floor with her back against a wall, eyes closed. "You all right, then?" he asked.
"I miss them already."
The Tardis stopped whirring. The Doctor stepped over to the door and opened it with a grand gesture. "There's a lovely ring nebula out here, if you'd like to have a look?"
Alex crept up behind him to peer out the doorway. "I like your spaceship, by the way."
"It's called the Tardis. Travels in time, too."
He'd been a dad once. He tried to remember just the right tone. "I'll show you the kitchen. You get that shield stable. Really stable, and gain about, say, four kilos, and I'll let you go outside. Until then, only what you can see from the door."