Disclaimer: In one of the alternate universes, I'm pretty sure that Kathryn Shadow and myself are the head writers of Doctor Who. I'm on a mission to find that universe, because in this one, I don't own any of it. Let's all have a sadness!fest with regards to our mutual non-ownership, shall we?
A/N: I'm not sure where the heck in the series this is supposed to be set. I'm thinking somewhere between the end of the Golden Age of Martha and the Donna Era. Or something. Shove it between whichever episodes you wish, really. :-)
A/N2: I'm going to make something vaguely resembling an attempt to shape this particular fic in the image of an actual series of DW, with thirteen episodes and a Christmas special. We'll see how well that turns out. -shrug- If it doesn't turn out, it doesn't turn out, yeah?
Beta'ed by the aforementioned alternate-universe co-head-writer, Kathryn Shadow.
Without Screaming
1
Worlds Apart, Pt. I
August 28th, 2008
Our World
A gentle drizzle pelleted the umbrellas of the impatient businessmen and businesswomen—and a few business-children, from the serious expressions of the uniformed students waiting for their bus. Young men in pressed shirts and slacks mingled at the stop with young women in plaid skirts, knee-high socks and naval blouses. The students took care to keep their iPod volumes as low as their sleepy voices, sharing the stop as they did with their parents' colleagues. No need for a fuss.
The bus arrived perfectly on time, like every morning, and the commuters boarded, spilling the contents of their coin purses into the fare machine or scanning their travelling cards. A lone figure stood, unmoved by the shouldering of the shuffling mass of bodies, his chocolate brown hair slowly absorbing as much water as it could. He stood a good head and a half taller than most of the people around, and looked all the more out of place for it. With his broad grin, long, thin nose, and wide eyes—eyes sparking with eagerness and only slightly mischievous intent—, the fellow was about as well camouflaged as his blue, wooden vehicle, which happened to be parked between a pair of vending machines inside the train station behind him. The man took a deep, hearty breath through his nostrils and savoured the scents of the bustling city.
Mumbled excuse me's filled the Doctor's ears as people milled about him, many giving surreptitious glances of what-an-odd-fellow. Understandably so; he was a very obvious foreigner just standing there, for no apparent reason, at a busy bus stop. Not that he cared about the shouldering and the looks, but eventually he did move—tripped by a wrinkly-skinned, grey-haired woman's dachshund. He promptly fell face-first to the concrete, bumping his arm into the solid pavement. The Doctor rubbed his shoulder, wincing, while the woman apologised at him.
"'s fine!" the Doctor said consolingly as he stood to his feet. "I'm all right, see?" He gestured to himself. "Totally genki."
The woman continued to apologise anyway, and then, rather suddenly, decided that her penance had been served. She placed a sweet into his hand and walked away with a bow of farewell. The Doctor sighed with relief and unwrapped the sweet, popping it into his mouth with an mm of contentment. Japanese sweeties—wonderful stuff. Almost as nice as jelly babies.
Humans were unbelievably good at making foodstuffs that would eventually kill you, weren't they?
...Speaking of things that would eventually kill you, where was that whatsit he had been alternately following, chasing, and casually observing for the past week and a half? He had, in fact, been attempting to spot it when he had been standing at the stop, and had only just caught a glimpse of the thing when the dachshund decided to twist its leash around his ankle. He stood on his tip-toes to try and find it again.
Oh, forget that. He waited for the lights to be in his favour and crossed the road. He smiled at everyone he passed, though few smiled back. The Doctor sometimes wished humans were more reliable. It would be infinitely easier to just ask, "Have you seen a large, beetle-ish creature with six thick, armoured legs and a head similar to that of a triceratops?" than go through all this rigmarole of following the silly beast around. But no, humans had to go and be unobservant and all that nonsense.
The really unfortunate thing was that the creature was a master of disguise, chameleonic to the extreme. It was cognizant and had a larynx capable of communicating in humanoid language. Annoyingly, it was also a shape-shifter. The one in particular that he was chasing after had, for all its intelligence, been stupid enough to wander into a malfunctioning teleport on its home planet.
It then landed with a rather loud, unpleasant crunch in the middle of Tokyo. The Doctor had taken it upon himself to nab the thing and return it to its own world. Said task he had charged himself with was proving to be much more difficult than he had previously assumed. Rhino-sized beetle-dinosaur thing with six legs and a shiny black exoskeleton; should stick out like a sore thumb, yeah? Fat chance. It had already absorbed the genetic data from three different denizens of Harajuku, Shibuya, and now Shinjuku. Ergo, it could go from being a girl of about five feet, three inches with ludicrously long hair, dressed in a maid outfit, to being a young man of five feet, seven-point-eight-three inches in a crisp suit, to being a grandfatherly fellow in a wheelchair. "Absorbed the genetic data from", pronounced eaten.
The Doctor's self-declared job was to find the thing, perform impromptu surgery on it to get those poor people out of its storage stomach, return said people to their families, and take the creature itself to its home world. Easier said than done didn't come close to describing it.
~ — ~
May 27th, 2007
Pete's World
Rose Tyler yawned and rubbed her sore neck. She had been staring at her computer screen for the past hour, using one of her rare quiet days to—what else?—search for a way to get back to the Doctor. She had done thus almost without rest ever since seeing the wraithlike hologram at Dårlig Ulv Stranden. That was eight months ago. Since then, little Tony had been born, she had been on every continent twice, and had tried and failed so many times to find a suitable puzzle piece to fill the hole in her life left by the Doctor. In the past two months, she had given up on her search for a replacement, and devoted the time used by that, instead, to finding the Doctor himself.
So far, that search had turned out perfectly fruitless. She had looked for and looked into dozens of leads, all of which were either hoaxes or outdated articles on paranormal activity. In just the time she had been on the computer this particular morning, she had found no less than eight web pages devoted to interdimensional rifts, none of which bore anything vaguely resembling a grain of truth. Rose refused to give up, however. She would find him if it was the last thing she did.
On effortlessly debunking the nineteenth theory about time travel and those who engaged in it, Rose sighed and closed the tab she had been using for her search. Rubbing her eyes with one hand and letting out another yawn, she employed the other hand for the purpose of logging onto her email. Spam, adverts, more spam, an update about some sort of family reunion on her father's side, more spam, more adverts. Rose sighed, tucked an errant lock of hair behind her ear, and deleted the useless messages. More spam, another advert—why on earth would she want to try and enter Cambridge, anyway?—, more spam, spam, spam... hello, what was that?
Unknown Sender: Urgent
Urgent, eh? Some request from an eccentric civilian, no doubt, asking her for help from imagined baddies. Rose clicked it anyway.
Miss Tyler,
I know who you are.
That is all.
That, and I'd like to meet you for coffee. How does Friday sound?
-A Friend