Author's Note: Written for my friend Christie (penny-hartzs on tumblr), and based off a gif photoset she made. It's as the summary suggested-Amy is now the Doctor, and Eleven (as John) is her companion.
She's tall and lank—with legs that go on forever, called to attention by a scandalously short skirt—and the most brilliantly colored head of ginger hair John Smith has ever set eyes upon. And—
"Excuse me, did you just say you were an alien?"
"Yep. Now, come on, I need a hand." She seems to mean it literally, since she grabs his hand, but he's not budging. Perturbed, she turns back to reexamine his gaping, hapless expression. "Oh, bloody—sorry, I forgot that you humans have a low tolerance for shock." She takes him by the shoulders gently. "Other forms of life exist in the universe. Some look like humans—actually, the other way around—and others are beings of pure light energy, or are giant praying mantises… or they're living blankets. It varies." He thinks reassuring must be a uniquely human quality. She continues firmly, "I am a time traveller. And space traveller, I suppose. Nine hundred and seven years old. I've got a ship, she's great—my best girl, really—and I need you—" She thrusts their linked hands into his face. "To come along."
He gets dragged down the block and into an alleyway, where they march up to what looks like a telephone booth painted blue. She lets go of him and starts fumbling in the pocket of her pea coat.
"Why aren't I running away?" he asks, and wills the massive grin off his face. The question is mostly rhetorical, but she throws him a bemused glance.
"What's that?"
"I mean. You're daft. Mad!" he cries, trying to muster the proper apprehension, but he can't stop smiling, and his heart slams rapidly against his ribcage.
"Right," she says, smirking, and sticks a key into the door of the blue box. "I'm mad." She pushes her way in, and the interior folds out before them. "I'm impossible, even."
He expects that he'll wake up from this dream any second now.
He steps back out; and back in; and he steps out again. He repeats it all a second time. Then, finally, he goes to stand on the console deck and rotates his gaze across the warmly buzzing and lively lit control room. He can't understand, of course, but he can appreciate.
She's leaning against the controls, looking smug. "Any thoughts?"
His eyes slowly progress downwards to rest on her, an irresistible smile tugging at the corners of his mouth and an incurable energy in his voice. "Can I come?"
"What? You?" She laughs, but it fades, turning to an inscrutable assessment. "You're the one who lives in the second story flat of that house, yeah?"
He nods.
"Got any family?"
"An aunt."
"What happened to your parents?"
"They're gone."
"How?"
He shrugs, gaze flickering downwards.
She gives him one final look over, and then shakes her head with a bitten lip to hide her smile. "Yeah, sure. You can come."
John hops once in place, to an eye roll from her, and then falls into a jumpseat, as if overcome with the excitement. "All of time and space! This is going to be brilliant." He doubles back, considering her again. "You're being serious, right?"
"Never knowingly be serious," she declares, tossing him a wink as she starts about the controls, her hair two steps behind each hasty dash and duck.
He thinks, she's magnificent. (Because she is.)
A thought strikes him. "Wait! What did you need a hand with? You dragged me here, saying you needed a hand."
She laughs in the midst of working an elaborate lever series. "Yeah. I don't, was just trying to get you in here." Her tone slips into that smugness again, but in some kind of bizarre reversal, it's the best he could have hoped for. "You're bloody easy to kidnap, though. We're going to have to watch out for that."
"I don't understand—you sound Scottish."
"Yeah, well, you don't even want to know what you sound like."
"And you're not nine hundred something."
"Never question a lady when she tells you her age, John. Especially if you value your reproductive organs."
"You've gone daft," says Craig simply, and he goes back to his paper.
But John, insistent, practically throws himself down into the seat across from his flatmate, defending himself passionately over their kitchen table. "I haven't! I saw all of it. The cheese planet, and the alien king reattach his head after it fell off, and then sprout another one—"
"John, stop." His look is one of firm urgency. "I saw you an hour ago, you were going to the pub! And then you come back, spouting this nonsense about a hot lady alien time traveller—"
"I never said she was hot!" he corrects, embarrassed. "I don't care about that."
"Yeah, well, you made her sound hot. So some part of you has noticed," Craig replies, and not subtly. John squirms in the chair, looking flustered at the accusation, but not quite knowing how to react—or if there's any merit to what his friend is saying. "And anyway. I know you value your eccentricity, but if you don't shut up about this soon, you're going to get carted off."
"I'm not lying," he affirms quietly, but just gets another skeptical head shake in response.
"Yeah. All right, whatever. Sophie's coming over tonight, so do you mind making yourself scarce for a while? No offense."
He forces a smile, and gets up, starting for the door. "None taken. I think I've got plans."
"But I like my name!" he protests, pouting at her across a game of Chinese checkers (which they're playing, coincidentally, at Einstein's house.)
The Doctor looks entirely unconvinced. "John Smith? That's the dullest name I ever heard."
"I mean, it's boring, but it just forces me to be an individual in other ways," he explains excitedly, setting a bluish marble forward. "So, like—"
"Your clothes."
He smiles uncertainly at the immediate response, but doesn't let that, or the demure tone of voice, deter him. "Yes, exactly."
She sighs. "Yeah, I supposed there was some explanation for—" Her eyes travel to the maroon bowtie about his neck. "That." John's insulted. Really insulted.
"Bow ties are cool!" comes his defense, his already pitchy voice shooting up another octave with his distress.
The Doctor snorts—an actual, guttural snort. "Okay," she says, without even attempting to seem sincere.
John has gone back to pouting. "They are."
"Yeah, whatever you say—" And she pauses, as if savoring what she's about to say before it leaves her tongue, and her gaze catching his tweed, now. She smirks. "—elbow patches."
On the tenth planet of the Tristar system, hats are considered a symbol of wealth, so they come with extravagant price tags.
The Doctor, of course, is rich wherever she goes, because with a little flick of her sonic screwdriver all the money on that world is at her fingertips. She refers to it as the fee from when I saved this planet from a sentient asteroid a couple decades back, didn't even know it was coming—some cultures are cleverer than others, John.
But the hats. He's always had a soft spot for them. In the hat shop, they're treated like royalty—weird little appetizers and something he's sure is alcoholic, served to them on gold platters, and the Doctor reclines luxuriously across a fainting couch while the attendants bring him hats—lots and lots of hats.
There are ones six feet tall that he has to turn away, and some that are so richly decorated he falls over the minute he puts them on, leaving her in giggly fits. There are some that are barely hats at all, just scraps of twisted fabric that you're supposed to pin into place. Some look like they came out of the costume wardrobe belonging to an arena-filling pop star, or a Dr. Seuss story. And then there's a fez; a plain, red, Earth fez. He gasps.
"I want this one!"
"No," she says.
"But—"
"No."
It turns out that whatever they were served in the hat shop was, most definitely, intoxicating. He knows this because they decide to go for a stroll across the discolored landscape of the planet that night, through a forest where the tree trunks are not a few shades of blue darker than the TARDIS, and when they finally find themselves in a meadow with grass that's more yellow than green and smells like popcorn, he collapses into a heap and begins to laugh hysterically.
She flops down beside him after a moment, also laughing, though he gets the feeling that resistance to alcohol must be one of those things Time Ladies excel at, because there's a glint in her eye. A mysterious, funny glint, though he can't muster the brainpower or steadiness to place a meaning on it.
"Why didn't you let me buy the fez?" he whines, when he's finally caught his breath.
"Because I think you look better when you're taking things off, not putting them on."
He laughs, mostly to disguise how puzzled he is. Okay, he decides. She's got to be a bit drunk.
"I like wearing things," he asserts. "It's fun. You stay warm."
"There are lots of ways to stay warm." Her eyebrow shoots upwards, saying something, though he can't be sure quite what.
He notes that the way she's laying—on her side, with her elbow propping up her head—draws a lot of attention to her general—chest… area. He laughs, this time nervously.
She smiles.
And then she grabs his lapel and starts dragging him towards her, and he realizes—they're more than a bit drunk.
His suspicions are confirmed by the voracious enthusiasm with which their mouths crash together, frustrated and lacking abandon. They grapple for one another like hungry lions to fresh meat, the sheer heat of the skin-to-skin contact searing him, but in a good way—in a way that's refreshing and invigorating and altogether marvelous—and he begins to reconsider his previous thoughts on wearing things. Or rather, she reconsiders for him, her hands finding the button and zipper to his trousers with remarkable ease, considering the darkness. He pushes her away momentarily, struck by what's about to happen.
"In a meadow!" he gasps, utterly scandalized.
She cackles, and presses a long, pale finger to his lips. "As nature intended."
After a particularly lengthy, high-stakes chase, they stumbled back into the TARDIS. John splutters, wheezes, and clings to a railing for support; the Doctor saunters back to the console, barely even panting.
He spots her nonchalance, and his brow contracts. She looks bored, almost! "What's wrong with you?"
Her head snaps up, eyes narrowing at him. "What?"
"You—we—we just nearly got killed! Those Martians were going to kill us." He flails slightly, as if it might hit the point home. John's confused, desperate expression seems to strike a chord with her, but quietly so. Her eyes flash with an emotion he can't place, or perhaps it's a non-emotion, really, but he wouldn't know. He can't really know anything about her, it sometimes feels.
"They weren't Martians." Her gaze moves away from him, across the ship. "You scared?" she asks tersely.
He doesn't have time to wonder if it's a test, or something other than an attack on his pride. His reacts automatically, impulsively. Determined not to lose manly validity in her eyes (or something.) "No!"
"Really?"
"I—suppose, a bit." A blush creeps up his neck, and secretly celebrates that she's not paying enough attention to notice.
"Okay," she says, nodding. "Okay. Do you want me to take you home?"
"No," he refuses, adamant, taking a decidedly confident step towards her. "Were you really not frightened at all back there?"
She gives him a long look, lips twisting thoughtfully. "A little. Maybe. Nothing noticeable. But that's why you're here."
"What do you mean?" He'd like to think that his purpose in her life is multifaceted—especially after the thing in the meadow, which has subsequently also become the thing in his bedroom, and the thing in her bedroom, and the thing on the console, and the thing on several other alien planets and/or during historical eras.
The Doctor sighs, and a few strands of ginger tresses get blown about in her trembling exhale. "You're here because I can't see it anymore." She turns back to the dashboard, her palm hugging the rounded top of a lever. "What's frightening, or beautiful, or unthinkable. Because there's nothing that scares me more than what I've already seen—because I've seen so much. Too much. I can't even remember most of it, not really, not clearly."
John hesitates, because she's already told him so much, but he can't help wondering. He sneaks a little closer to her, because that's all he wants to do. "So." He bites his lip. "What do you remember, then?"
She looks up and smiles, in such a piercingly melancholy way, like he's never seen before. "People," she tells him, and pulls the lever in her hand so that the machine whirls into action, grinding noisily around them. Somehow in the midst of plotting their next destination, and twirling around the console to hit buttons and adjust settings, and humming what sounds like an Aretha Franklin classic, she manages to press a kiss to his forehead. "You, John," she calls to him, laughing a laugh that floats upwards and gets caught in the contours of the ceiling and reverberates there. "You're all I ever remember."