Author's Note: This fic is actually an old one, written two years ago to accompany an illustration for JesIdres's Whooligans contest. Which explains a couple…small plot points? Cleaned up and rereleased two years later, this fic provides your daily dose of crackfic.
Ooooh. Very uncomfortable, that.
The Doctor stretched, feeling his back pop rather unpleasantly as the muscles uncoiled after a long night spent sleeping in a posture oddly reminiscent of the quadruple-joined acrobats of Jubrox III. As he was never much for sleeping anyway, the Doctor's bed served mostly as a combination workbench, bookshelf and junk drawer. Only a vaguely toast-sized spot was kept clear for an exhausted Time Lord to curl up in. The Doctor maintained, however, that if he was going to do something so…so…human, it was going to be on his own damn terms, and besides, if a nine hundred year-old back couldn't have the occasional kink in it, whose back could? Even if his spine did feel like a wrong-twisted Slinky.
Come to think of it, where was his Slinky anyway? He hadn't seen that thing since—he cast his mind back—oh, it had to be decades by now. A full century, even. Maybe?
After indulging in a great, jaw-cracking yawn, the Doctor flung his long limbs out of bed, slithering to his feet as he scrubbed the back of his hand across bleary eyes. His pajama bottoms were sliding down his hips, and he sort of wondered where the top had got to. Rassilon, he couldn't remember being this hazy in the TARDIS-equivalent-to-morning since he'd last regenerated, and his whole brain had been collapsing then.
Blinking against the white fog trying to lay claim to his eyeballs, he stumbled muzzily to the bathroom. Without thought, he fumbled for the cold tap, splashing icy water on his face. He managed to soak almost all of his hair in the process, but it worked to bring him fully awake and to wash away the little icky crusty things gluing his lashes together.
Dripping and chilly, but with massive brain now in gear (mostly), the Doctor raised his head and grinned his wild grin at his own reflection. Didn't even need a shave. Though even soaking wet, his hair once again seemed to be experimenting with antigravity.
Blimey, it was quiet in here. Granted, his room was one of the quietest onboard, but he might at least expect to hear the old girl humming around him, the whirl of the Vortex through his time sense, even a companion or two wandering around lost and confused—no, wait though, this was Martha now, not given to shrieking when she was lost, though a swear word or two might filter down the hall from time to time—but it was almost eerily quiet. Brow furrowing in concentration, the Doctor realized that even his grand lady herself was silent in his mind. Wiping his face dry on his forearm in blatant defiance of the towel on the rack, the Doctor padded barefoot to the bedroom door, intent on heading to the console room to have a small chat with his suddenly coy ship. He opened the door—
And stopped.
Turned back to his room.
Back out.
Twisted, stuck his head into his bedroom, rapped on the wall. Solid.
Stuck his head back out into the impossible. Tapped tentatively on the incredibly impossible wall, squinted in supremely, completely impossible sunlight.
Sunlight.
There was definitely no sunlight on his TARDIS.
There was also no couch, fish tank with little yellow fish or kitchen on his TARDIS—well, at least not in the hallway outside his bedroom. And definitely no ragged bunch of flowers in an old…beer bottle? Was that a…oooh, nope, that was an old glass cola bottle. Which was a bit odd in and of itself though: he didn't like cola.
Eyes wide, the Doctor very nearly tiptoed out into the impossible living room, crossing to a wide picture window through which poured warm golden sunlight. Well, this really was something new. And quite, quite real. He could FEEL the sunlight on his skin, sense the timelines of creatures all around him passing in the blink of an eye (now that he thought about it, anyway, and why hadn't he sensed it before? Why hadn't he noticed that there were far, far too many humans in proximity for him to be on his TARDIS?), even hear, distantly, the growl and honk of car horns on the streets below.
Swiftly, as if it might bite him if he lingered too long, the Doctor reached out and thrust up the window, poking his head (and most of his torso, too) out into the early morning air. He was so far through that he was very nearly in danger of tumbling out entirely. He sniffed. Smog, humans, small fuzzy domestic animals, scrambled eggs burning, and dirt. Good, solid Earth dirt. Early Twenty-First Century, he'd guess, give or take a few decades.
"Morning, John!"
The Doctor blinked in surprise, glancing down to see…no, that couldn't be….Jackie Tyler waving at him from the balcony below, sipping coffee and smiling like…like…well, like she liked him, and that was strange enough. Not to mention the whole trapped-in-another-universe thing. Those minor details.
Pulling himself back into the completely impossible flat (he had to, as a car with an extremely distressed exhaust system managed to nearly choke him three floors up), the Doctor dodged to the coat rack by the door, diving into the pockets of his familiar brown trench and coming up with….nothing. No sonic screwdriver, no psychic paper, not even a single banana! He did, however, find the bottom, the lining, barely wrist-deep in. These weren't dimensionally transcendent pockets. These were perfectly ordinary pockets!
He was fully prepared to analyze this state of affairs, but before he could, something caught his eye. The sunlight had caught on the glimmer of a silver picture frame taking pride-of-place on the coffee table, but as much as he loved to investigate shiny objects, it was the photograph within that reduced him to a state of slack-jawed shock. It was himself, grinning brilliantly for the camera with his arm around a very familiar, equally glowing blonde who was at least several years older than she had been the last time he'd seen her. The last time he would ever see her. Below, engraved into the metal, were the words: The Hottest Team in Town – Sigma Delta Chi Award For Journalism. Stroking his fingers lightly over the glass covering the image of himself and his lost Rose, almost in a trance, the Doctor very nearly didn't notice the ringing telephone until it had already gone to the old-fashioned message machine.
"…John Smith, leave a message at the sound of the tone and I'll get back to you as soon as possible. BEEP!"
The Doctor had to admit, the part where he yelled "Beep!" into the phone did sound like him.
"Smith!"
His head snapped up so fast he was astonished his neck didn't break; he knew that voice.
"IF you'd like to show up for work today…"
He hadn't spoken to the man since, oooh…well, a long time by any reckoning...but the Doctor would know the clipped, authoritative voice of Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart anywhere.
"…and for that matter, where in the hell is Tyler? I can't run a newspaper with my two best reporters haring off…"
There seemed only one thing to do, really. He wasn't likely to find anything out just hanging around an impossible flat, and in his jimjams, no less. And besides, he was very, very interested to see why the Brig was going on about a newspaper. "Oh," he groaned softly, leaning up against the bubbling aquarium to address the quietly interested tropical fish, "Looks like I'm headed to work, then."
He grinned brightly, but the fish didn't care much about that. "Always fancied seeing how the news worked!"