I was having some feels recently and needed to get them out. This probably sucks, but whatevs. I just needed to write something that wasn't screenplay format and I felt weirdly out-of-practice.
Doctor Who is owned by BBC, who I am not affiliated with, blah, blah, blah.
Spoilers for series 6, as well as The Angels Take Manhattan. Kinda.
Canton Everett Delaware III could not move.
Well, he could technically, but the shock was too great. Eighty-two was too old for such great surprises.
The Doctor was there, obviously. He was the one who sent the card in the brilliant blue color that was sitting on the dashboard. He was the only person who could have sent that card. Canton had never met the Doctor, and only knew him from stories, but knew exactly who he was. The Doctor was the one lying there, dead. That explained "bring petrol" at least.
The bigger shock was the ones who were with him: Uncle Rory and Auntie Amy.
Here they were, young and vibrant and sobbing… and younger than Canton had ever seen them. They were even younger than when they found him as a lost, confused, young twenty-something in New York City. He used to babysit for them, and their son, and just watched their great-grandkids just the previous week. They grew old together, lived life together, went through ups and downs together. He had buried these two long ago, both on depressing and foggy days.
Now was not the time though. Sentiment and tears were for when he got back to Jersey—he owned the things breakable there and this beat-up truck was a rental (as much as he was in disbelief when he got it). Canton picked up the gas can from the bed of the pickup and carried it to the mourners.
"This will be the last time I see you," he said, "but not the last time you see me." It was difficult to say, but at least he knew Auntie Amy's words of how time rarely does what we want it to do. The Doctor, a raggedy man from the stars, once told her that as long as we added to people's piles of good things, everything was going to be okay. Everyone has piles of good and bad and it's okay for them to grow and okay for some things to go in both.
Everything was going to be fine.
Canton sat back down in the beat-up, pathetic rental vehicle and gasped. Everything flashed before him: Auntie Amy and Uncle Rory appearing out of thin air in the Oval Office, the Doctor alive and well, tally marks, an orphanage in Florida… Auntie Amy congratulating him on the straight face he kept around her younger self. Pieces of his life filled in, consuming a void left by what he thought was head trauma during his years in the Nixon Administration. He looked at his hand and realized there was a ring there where there hadn't been before.
Canton drove just over the ridge and parked. These tears could not wait until he got home.