This was my entry for a DW under-1200 word, fanfiction contest on figment. The story is actually meant more to be read out loud, almost like a voice over.

I'd really appreciate if you guys would vote for me if you like it, the url is /books/609750-A-Beautiful-Anomaly

I met the Doctor on the 8th of November, 1997. I don't know what was so exciting about 1997, or even why he was there that night, but I'll always remember it. I was twenty-three then, and I found myself traveling alone down a darkened street. Rain soaked through my outer coat and my black duffle was heavy in my hand, my legs were struggling just to put one foot in front of the other.

I didn't know where I was going. Walking out that door was supposed to be something like a new beginning but all it felt like was the end of everything. Maybe it was my fault. Afterall, I was young and I made my mistakes, but I couldn't remember how things had ever become so bad. I guess no one ever really does.

My steps were aimless and when I came across an empty park, all I could bring myself to do was collapse on the nearest bench. The rain was still falling and I remember looking down, thinking that however it was my life had fallen apart, I had my eyes closed for half of it.

"Are you lost?", the voice was soft. Soft enough for me to even question that it was there, and not all in my head.

I looked across the bench to find myself staring into the eyes of a man. His eyes were dark, illuminated only by small pinpricks of moonlight from overhead. The long, brown trenchcoat he wore was weighted down with rainwater and his shoulders were set in rigid lines that suggested great loss.

"Are you?" I asked.

He stood there for a while pondering this, and I remembered wondering what it was that ran through his head in that moment, this mysterious man I met at midnight. He didn't answer, but instead sat down on the other half of the bench, an arm's distance away.

"Do you want to leave?" I almost laughed. I didn't know who this strange man was; we were just two strangers sitting on a bench. But I suppose I did. The streets were too familiar, too filled with old memories, and something about this man with the storm-cloud eyes felt the same as me.

"And go where?" I asked.

"I don't know." I realized then, that this man with a boyish face and bright red trainers was perhaps much older and sadder than he appeared to be, and I wanted to know why.

"Yeah," I paused for a moment, "I do."

He held out his hand. I took it. And the rest became that confusing jumble of past, present, and future we call history. And so began my life among the stars. I could tell you how we saved worlds and played with timelines, laying the universe at our feet, but the truth is that it was more than that.

As a child I was never pleased with anything. I was stubborn and contrary, but above all I was restless. Maybe that's why I always found myself in so much trouble. I sat too close to the fire, I wandered away where I wasn't supposed to, and I asked far too many questions. I always wanted to reach beyond that high-walled place I called my home, that barrier between the known and unknown. I wanted a lot of things.

Traveling among the cosmos in that small blue box I was privy to the secrets of the universe, and they were wholly fantastic and too incredible to be real. Through all the running and bursts of adrenaline, the end of worlds and chaotic laughter, I found that inner restlessness began to finally still. Old memories faded like writing on yellowed pages and I was at peace. He made me better, and I would like to think I helped heal him in some small way too.

There was something intoxicating about timelessness, and it clung to the Doctor like a well-loved blanket. He was a true enigma but I felt that with time I came to understand him, even love him. He existed somewhere in the lonely spaces between god and man, his home was everywhere and nowhere and more than anything he hated himself. He was a riddle that could never be solved and he was as beautiful and wild as the stars themselves.

In the beginning I thought I could walk the same lonely paces he did. But he was old, infinite even, and I was young and filled with too many hopes. I came to realize our lives are like wilted flowers, pressed in the pages of time; preserved forever for him to visit at his leisure. I wasn't made of stardust and paradoxes and he would always be a stranger; an odd man that passed through at opportune times and blew across time like he had no business being there.

I know now that we are all just numbers and solutions running around in wild circles; beautiful, anomalous things that try to capture the stars in closed fists and that's enough.

I never told the Doctor what he gave me. It was too big and too wonderful, and to put such a thing in words was cheap. But he knew. He saw me that rainy night so long ago; a lost girl on a broken park bench, and nothing else ever needed to be said.

He's gone now, and I suppose I'm a bit harder for it. I knew that I would always be bound to the earth I came from, but for a brief time he gave me some measure of infinity.

And I'm grateful.