Logos
By TwinEnigma
Warnings: Spoilers and References to Voyage of the Damned, Time of Angels, Flesh and Stone, The Big Bang, Eleventh Hour, Rose, the Movie.
Standard disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who and am not the BBC. Really. Seriously.
AN: It was interesting writing this. In so many, many ways.
Once upon a time, there was a little girl who liked to tell stories.
Her name was Amy Pond and she was fond of jumping in puddles and looking at pictures of far-away places. She liked to draw, too, and had a big box of crayons, more than anyone else. She drew houses and trees and sometimes her parents, but her mind would wander and the trees really looked prettier silver and purple and blue.
"They're alien trees," she told her teacher when she was asked about the trees, because it was really quite obvious that they were alien trees.
Amy liked aliens. She drew all kinds of them, red ones, green ones and ones that looked like her gram's old salt and pepper shakers (those ones are robots and she chased them around the table until she dropped them and her mum told her to stop). She named them all, too, and some of them were funny, like Bannakaffalatta, and some were mean, like Davros and Restac. They were much more fun than dolls and dresses and it was easier to find others to play with when it was aliens. Jeff was a better alien than Rory, though, but Rory was cleverer and made up the best ships.
Sometimes, she imagined what other worlds would be like. Some were all made of rocks and sand, like pictures of the moon, and some had jungles and others had giant flying sharks and waterfalls of sapphires. They went to a quarry on a field trip and she got in trouble for dragging Rory and Jeff off to hide from aliens ("This looks just like the planet of the Cybermen," she told them because it was true, so of course they had to hide or be caught and made into robots, too, but the teacher didn't like that, not a bit).
Once, Amy's parents took her to the beach. It was hot and she built sandcastles that crumbled when the water hit them. The spaceship her father had bought her ended up half-buried in the sand and she decided she would rescue it. The sand between her toes grated and itched and she was too tired, so she decided all the soldiers inside died.
"There were aliens inside," she told her mum, as they passed a cemetery. The statue of a crying angel caught her eye. "They looked like that, but it's a trick. They have scary faces underneath and you can't let them get you or you disappear forever."
"Is that so?" her mum asked. "So how do you stop them?"
"You can't close your eyes," Amy explained, "Never ever."
"Not even to blink?"
Amy nodded, her eyes already wandering. Something tall and blue peeked out of the brushes on the side of the path. It was a box, old and weathered, with the faded words Police Public Call Box on top. She liked it very much and instantly wanted to see what was hiding inside – after all, it must have been alien because it didn't seem like it belonged there at all.
"You step inside and it takes you places," she later explained to Rory and Jeff, "Anywhere you want, even Space Florida!"
They loved it, of course, because they knew Space Florida was just the best place ever and you could go on every roller coaster in the universe there and stay up late, eating candy and jumping on the bed.
Rory came back with a cardboard box and had his dad cut doors in it and tape a flashlight to the top. The word "Police" was misspelled, but it was the most brilliant blue ever. "It's bigger on the inside," Rory told them proudly and they hopped inside before the Daleks could get them and make them their slaves.
Once, Amy tripped on a rock on Skaro and cut her knee. It hurt a lot, but Rory decided he was a doctor and put a bandaid on it and kissed it better like mum did.
"You don't look like a doctor," she told him, "Doctors wear suits and ties!"
Rory found his dad's old suit and his mom hemmed it up for him so he could be a proper space doctor and Amy and Jeff both agreed it made him very much doctorish, but not very space doctorish.
"You can be an alien space doctor!" Jeff added, because of course there were alien doctors in space, how silly of them to forget.
"But I don't look like an alien!" Rory complained and so Amy drew a second heart on his chest with a marker because she told him that's what aliens from his planet had (and really, the aliens didn't look like them, they looked like the aliens).
One day, it was raining and Amy jumped in every puddle she could, just to be contrary. Her aunt hated it when she did that and promised that this meant she would not get the treat she wanted when they got to the shops. She made her wait at the bus stop in front of the shop while she got mum's package and Amy sulked, miserable.
At the bus stop, there was a man in a loud suit. It was bright and patterned with stripes and polka dots. He pretended to be formal like the old men in movies as he stood under his multicolored umbrella and laughed when she asked him if he was an alien.
"It's a very popular look in some parts of the galaxy," she explained.
He laughed and asked her why she was sad.
"My aunt is mad at me for jumping in puddles," she told him.
The man smiled, gave her a balloon animal and a wind-up tin dog that he pulled from his coat – really his pockets could never have fit the two, so he had to be an alien – and disappeared on the next bus.
"He was an alien doctor, you know," she told Rory and Jeff. "And the dog is a robot from the future."
"Did he also have two hearts?" Rory asked.
"Of course, silly," she said, because it was true and she just knew these things. "And his pockets were bigger on the inside."
There were others, too, that she knew were alien doctors – they made her feel better when she was sad or unhappy, so they had to be doctors because that's what doctors do. There was the clerk at the candy shop with the scarf that went on forever and gave her a jelly baby for free if she was with her aunt and Rory's dad, who could make spaceships from boxes and played cricket with the ball that was their stand-in for Mars. There was the little old man with the bowtie in the park who played the flute for the ducks and Captain Red at the fair with the old yellow car that let her ride in it an extra turn. And there was the old man on the telly who talked about science and Mr. Fennic from their old home, who had showed her how to play chess before they moved to Leadworth and always wore a bowler hat.
At Christmas, she noticed a crack in her wall. She dreamed an alien doctor came to fix it and ate all the custard and fish sticks in the house (mum said it was really dad, but Amy knew better). The crack was still there so her dad fixed it good-as-new, and Amy got a brand new explorer's kit so she could investigate more strange new worlds and civilizations. One of her uncles gave her a fez and she pretended she was Lawrence of Arabia – on a spaceship, of course, with a mop standing in for her rifle.
The best gift, though, was the telescope and when she looked through it, she dreamed of visiting far off worlds for real this time.
In the spring, a car broke down near the house and a young couple knocked on their door, asking to use the phone. The girl was from London and she looked sort of like one of those girls in the magazines, bleached blonde and pretty. She had a great big wolf on her red hoodie and the words 'big bad' glittered. The boy stayed outside with Amy's dad and tried to fix the car. He looked like a bad guy with his leather coat and shaved head, but wasn't.
Amy watched them curiously. "What are you doing?"
"Just a little jiggery-pokery," the boy said, fiddling with something inside. "The belt came loose and then... and it's all very complicated, you see."
Mechanics were full of dosie-whatsis and thingamajigs, so she was not so surprised. "Can you fix it?"
He tapped the edge of the screwdriver against one of the things inside and there was a funny whirring, but the car sluggishly started. "Percussive maintenance," he told her, winking.
"What was that noise?" she asked.
For a moment, the skinny boy looked lost and then he seemed to perk up, holding up the screwdriver. "Ah, that was my... sonic screwdriver. You can fix anything with one of these."
The girl in the hoodie smiled, covering her mouth with a hand.
"I could use one of those," Amy told him. "I'm going to see the Aplans on Tuesday. They have two heads, you see."
"Oh yes, well you should definitely have one of those, then," he agreed, smiling. "They can get you out of all sorts of trouble on planets like that. I should know. I was there once on holiday with the missus."
"Are you an alien?" she asked, even as her dad groaned. "Because you don't sound like it."
"Lots of planets have a north," he winked and the girl laughed.
The very next day, Amy built her own sonic screwdriver out of paper tubes, glitter and plastic gems. She gave it to Rory because Jeff might lose it and told him space doctors can fix things with it.
"Does it work on Daleks?" he asked.
"No, and that's why space doctors are enemies with them," she explained. "That and they tried to destroy their planet."
Amy was an intrepid reporter the next week, like the woman on the telly, and all she wanted to do was tell a story on the Space Doctor, so she told her parents all about her adventures with him and Jeff as they raced around the universe. She was careful to mention how many times they'd saved it and how stuffy and boring the Doctor's planet was (but it's gone now, the Daleks blew it up in the War and he's the last Space Doctor ever).
"It all seems terribly much," her mum said, "How do you manage to find the time?"
"His ship travels in time," Amy explained because how else would they have had time to save Christmas and meet Cleopatra and save London from the Daleks and see the dinosaurs?
Her mum said she should write it all down and it took forever and ever. When she'd finished, Amy went back to playing and running around, until it was eventually no longer cool. For a time, she forgot about the journal full of impossible things and shoved all the dolls, her gram's pilfered salt and pepper shakers and the glitter-covered sonic into an old suitcase in the back of her closet.
Amy was fourteen and the plaster in the wall of her room was starting to noticeably crack when she found it again.
The story was crazy and incoherent but she remembered that time fondly. There was a creative writing project due in class soon, so she dusted off the journal and tried to bring it up to speed. She changed his name to "Doctor," dropping the silly and childish addition of "Space," and added a girl that falls in love with him (a bit like Beauty and the Beast, she thought) to spice things up a bit. She made is real name a secret only she knew and made him able to change his face, to go from an old man to a young man, because aging backwards sort of made sense for such a strange alien and the romance would have been terribly awkward otherwise.
Her teacher marked her down and told her that it was like she didn't know what she wanted to write – a science fiction story or a romance – and, in anger, Amy nearly tore it all to pieces.
She went to the beach with Rory that summer and they watched a zeppelin float lazily overhead as they talked about the story.
He kissed her and it was wonderful and awkward.
That night, she dreamed they were flying around space in the blue Police Box of her story, but he wasn't the Doctor anymore. Instead, it was a man with blue, blue eyes and curly hair, who looked like he came from a spaghetti western. He introduced them to a talking penguin and they had tea on top of the Golden Gate Bridge, against a sky that looked like Van Gogh's Starry Night.
She woke up with a start and almost jumped out of her skin when she saw him on the telly. It took her a moment to wake up fully and realize that it was an actor playing a sheriff in a remake of an older Western that she'd fallen asleep watching, but the face did not leave her.
Amy added more to the story every now and again over the years. It was now a tale of an impossibly old man and his adventures across time and space and all the people he shared his brilliant experience with. It was impossible and funny and sad all at once, but she, like Alice, made it a habit to believe in six impossible things before breakfast.
She had never, not once, read it aloud in its entirety.
And on the eve of her wedding, she had decided to do so, the newest addition to the story waiting at the bottom of the stack of papers in her hand. Rory sat on the edge of her bed, patiently waiting for her to begin.
The clock clicked and it was now the twenty-sixth of June, 2010.
Amy cleared her throat and opened her mouth.
In the beginning was the word...
The Doctor was born.