Chapter 1: A Lost Child of Gallifrey

It's freezing out...snow falling in the early hours of January 1st. Another ear has gone already and it's 2005. For the 20 years that Jane Doe know she's been living this miserable existence, so really only remembers the last decade. Before that...it's...fuzzy.

Now that would be a treat...a nice fuzzy blanket and somewhere warm. But after her appearance on the steps of the London, England orphanage steps ten years ago, she's led a mean life. Hard. Harder than most twenty year olds can stand. But she's nothing if not a survivor. Alone. It doesn't do to dwell on why she was left on the orphanage steps in 1995...whether she was orphaned or abandoned, she's alone in this world now. There's no one left to rely on, not since she left the orphanage behind. She's tried, time and again to make her way in this seemingly unrelenting world. The truth is, she's a bit odd. Bit of a loner. Bit of a mouse...not just in personality, but appearance. She's not pretty by anyone's standard. Her hair is limp and mouse brown, hiding most of her face in a lank curtain. Her eyes are gray, but dull-not prefaced by glamorous adjectives, such as 'stormy' or 'slate'. Her skin is sallow and faded...not once has she been called an English Rose or any other lovely name. Her body is thin and awkward, as though it considered puberty to be an unnecessary bother. She is utterly plain in every respect.

The universe, clearly conspiring against her, had not even seen fit to give her an extra dose of neural brilliance. She was unexceptional.

Unexceptional, but for her missing memory regarding her 10 formative years. Some form of traumatic amnesia, the doctors had all finally decided. As a child, they posited, she must have witnessed something so horrific that her brain simply refused to share it with the rest of the world.

It's a fair assumption, seeing as her appearance on the London Orphanage steps was sudden, silent, and covered in charred clothing. She was, for all intents and purposes, Munsch's Paperbag Princess, though it could hardly be claimed that she'd been singed by a dragon, or abandoned by Prince Ronald. Her only possession was a curiously decorated fob watch, which she refused to let the doctors examine. It was suggested that the watch might belong to the girl's father(likely deceased) and this gave rise to the rumour that she may have murdered her own family in their beds, maybe she had set the house on fire...scarcely escaping with her own life.

Her odd and plain and boring and dull and unexceptional status made it curiously difficult to obtain any semblance of gainful employment. She resigned herself to the contentious state of welfare, but choose to sleep in homeless shelters and halfway houses, over the tumultuous life of government assistance. She never begged, but occasionally stole, deciding she'd fare better in prison than throwing herself on the mercy of her fellow humans to provide pennies for a meal. She had never been caught in her acts of theft, somehow using her ability to blend in to the scenery in her subterfuge.

Her free time is spent in libraries, consuming all manner of literature-fiction or non. It is her one solace.

There are no libraries open on this early New Year's day, and she has been scouring the streets for a small warm spot that she might hide away in until morning.

She keeps to the shadows, and goes unnoticed by the two blond women who walk down the snow covered street. She looks along the otherwise empty street and notices a blue box...much like a telephone booth, nearly hidden by the shadows...if it were not for the warm orange light spilling out of it she might have walked right by. Just for a short while. She's so cold, she'll just stay an hour, shielded from the snow. She'd read about hypothermia at the library..it didn't sound much fun.

Pushing the door further open, she peeked inside. She covered her gasp with her hand. She was hallucinating...that much was clear. She'd read about that at the library too. She was have delusional thoughts right now. She, however, was far too cold to care...so what if she imagined the inside far surpassed any reasonable size that was indicted from the outside of this blue box?

Her delusions allowed her to keep walking through the door, closing it behind her. She continued up the ramp to the strange looking console in the middle. She peered around it and decided to venture further inside...as long as her delusion was going to sustain itself, she might as well be entertained by her hypothermia-amplified imagination. Following one of the metal grated ramps she found herself in a large room...something like a storage facility, or someone's eclectic attic. There was a desk pushed to the side, stacked with loose papers and books and bizarre objects. On the very top of the precariously stacked pile of books was a shiny new edition of a book entitled "A Journal of Impossible Things" by Verity Newman. A drawing of a fob watch was below the title. Her hallucination was vivid enough to incorporate the familiar, interesting...
She picked the book up and dropped cross-legged to the floor, leaning against a musty pile of velvety material. She read...and read...her eyes speeding across the pages, a frown embedding itself into her brow. This journal was really about some impossible things: a man from the stars, indeed. There was no such thing as aliens...not in her experience! And yet...these things that were mentioned in the book...name ...Gallifrey...somewhere knitted in the back of her subconscious ...it resonated. She blinked. Of course, it was her hallucination, it would have to be something she had already read about. Perhaps it was a made up place from a book she'd read before...like Narnia or Middle Earth or Hogwart's. Of course. Of course.

Even in her delusions she could be reasonable.

So engrossed was she in her imaginary book, it wasn't until well after the snick of the door, that she realized she might not be alone. Who had come to share her delusion?

A growling whine...like a metal animal pierced the quiet. A plaintive, ancient yet mechanical sound swelled up around her. She cast the book aside and sprang to her feet, "Who's there?!" she shouted over the din

She felt the ground shaking beneath her feet. It all felt too real to be a hallucination, she raced out to the main room of her delusion and stopped suddenly when she caught sight of the wild-haired man in a suit and trench coat.

"I don't have any money!" she raised her hands demonstratively.

"What?"

"Sorry if this is your place for the night!" she continued, keeping her hands up to show she was not a threat to this well-dressed, if slightly rumpled, fellow transient.

"Sorry what?" he hadn't moved, but wore an expression of incomprehension. Perhaps he had run out of a medication he had been prescribed.

All thoughts of his intentions were halted when the ground began to move beneath their feet. It was an earthquake!

"Hold on to something!" she cried out to him

"Who are you?!"

"What?!" she looked at him incredulously. How could he possibly consider that to be of any importance when they were clearly in the middle of an earthquake?!

"How did you get in here?" he demanded.

"The door was open. I'm sorry. I was cold...and I just felt like I could-that's hardly the biggest problem at hand-we have to get out of here! Or-" she considered,"D'you imagine we're safer in here, what with the earthquake happening?" she braced herself against the console. "It's bigger on the inside...so perhaps it's stronger than it looks from the outside, do you reckon?" she looked at him desperately.

The wild haired man in the suit strode over to the his side of the console and fiddled with some knobs and buttons. The room took on a quality which made Jane think that they were floating. She snuffed a breath through her nose. "What's happened? What did you just do?"

"I...fixed...the earthquake."

Jane gave a little nod, and steadying her hand against the console, she began to make her way around to the other side. She dug her other hand into the pocket of her coat, fingers closing around the comfortingly familiar shape the old fob watch.

"Again, who are you?" the man took a step toward her. He was taller than she first realized.

"Jane."

"Is that like Madonna or Cher?"

"Jane Doe." she frowned.

"Right." he looked at her skeptically.

"So then who are you? If you fixed the earthquake, does that make you some sort of ...of...some sort of..."she gesticulated, "Wizard?"

"I prefer the name Time Lord." he said casually.

Jane blinked. That name. Like a stolen memory imprinted on the back of her brain. It was making her head spin.

"Are you alright? You look a bit peaky." the man narrowed his brown eyes at her.

"This is going to sound completely mad, but I don't think I'm quite right." Jane frowned at the ineloquence of her words. "Look, I didn't mean to end up in this Time Lord base. But I saw the light on and I thought I was going to pass out from the cold...I just came in here to rest a bit...but then I saw how big it was inside."

"That's just it, you aren't supposed to be able to get inside. How did you manage that?" the man was still looking at her with deep suspicion.

"Why's that?" Jane demanded in frustration, "I didn't trip any alarm that I know of and the door was open."

"Well, I didn't leave the door of my TARDIS open and it doesn't just open to anyone, especially without a key." he insisted.

Jane blinked again. Hard. TARDIS. "Time And Relative Dimension In Space." she murmured softly, blinking again.

"What did you just say?" the man advanced on her.

"I don't know...I don't know!" she backed up quickly, her hip hitting the side of the console with a painful bump. She winced and blinked again, "I feel like I'm going insane." she said weakly.

The man withdrew what looked like a pen with a blue flashlight at its tip from inside his trench coat. He pointed it at her forehead, and it emitted a faint buzzing sound. She blinked rapidly, leaning back away from him against the console. "What are you-? What is that thing? What are you doing?"

"Just trying to get some readings from you to see if you're human or if yo-" the man stopped short.

Jane opened her eyes to see him pointing his blue flashlight at her hip. At her pocket. At her pocket where her watch was clutched in her fist. They stood frozen in a tableau for a moment.

"What," the man said with a breathlessly quiet tone, "is that you have in your pocket?"

"You can't have it." Jane gritted out firmly, clutching the watch tighter. "I don't care who you think you are or how big your TARDIS Base is...I'm not giving you my watch!"

She pushed herself off of the console and hurled herself towards the door.

"No!"

She heard a buzzing sound behind her and a snick of a lock. She fell against the door and rattled the handle. She wrenched it frantically with both hands, her heart pounding in her ears, "Let me out! You can't have my watch and you can't keep me here!"

She felt a hand on her shoulder and she felt herself being whirled around. The man pressed her back against the door, one hand pinning her shoulder and one hand pointing his flashlight at her face. Maybe it's a weapon, she thought frantically, adrenaline coursing through her veins. She flared her nostrils and glared ferociously up a her attacker.

"I'm not going to take your watch I just want to see it!" he demanded, looking more than slightly crazed.

"I wasn't born yesterday, I've heard that one before!" she shouted into his face, "Let me go!"

"Really, I just want to see it! Where did you get it? Why do you have it?"

"I've always had it," she found herself explaining to him, "I had it with me since I can remember-it was with me when I got to the orphanage."

"When?" he pressed her

"A decade ago."

"Who gave it to you?" he demanded.

"I dunno, my Dad? Whoever left me there? I don't know, I don't remember. I don't remember anything before that! I don't know! I don't know! Why do you keep asking me?! I don't KNOW!" she let out a sob, sagging against the door. She felt so confused and this man as pestering her about questions that she never really asked herself before. How was she to know where she got the watch. It was hers and that was all there was to it. Who could know where it came from? The people at the orphanage said they didn't know where she had come from. She'd just appeared on their doorstep, smelling of ash and smoke and clutching the watch and completely shell-shocked. She hadn't even been able to tell them her name. They called her Jane Doe. At first it was because there was nothing else to call her, and then after a while, it was because that's what she began to respond to. She was alone. No one ever came back for her. She read about children being saved from orphanages. Anne of Green Gables had found the Cuthbert siblings, Orphan Annie was adopted by Daddy Warbucks. Pippi Longstockings had piles of gold at her disposal thanks to her absentee King father. Even Gilbert and Sullivan had written a whole musical about orphans who had turned into hapless pirates sailing around on adventures. But no one ever took her into their home. No one wanted the strange and mysterious girl who watched quietly from the sidelines of life. Perhaps she'd been too content to dream and wish and read about the fantastical life she might have had to bother with forging one of her own.

The man had released her, stepping back to stare at her tear-streaked face. She sniffled ashamedly, wiping her face on her sleeve, "Please, I just wanted somewhere warm to stay tonight. I've got nowhere to go..."

A pained grunt from the man drew her eyes up, away from her own pitiful state. She stared at him. He was gritting his teeth, hands balled in fists at his sides. For a second she thought he was going to take a swing at her.

"Let me see that watch." his voice was quiet, hollow, broken. She looked at him in puzzlement, dipping her hand into her pocket and withdrawing the old fob. "Sometimes..."she whispered, "Sometimes I think it's talking to me..."she stretched her arm out to the man with the pained expression. His brown eyes were a mystery to Jane, holding secrets she couldn't even begin to fathom.

"It-it can't be." he muttered, taking the watch in his hand and shining the buzzing blue flashlight on it. He looked at it like he'd seen it before.

Jane had never felt more uncertain about anything, he was too young to be her father, he barely looked 30. A brother, maybe? "Did you give it to me? Do you know who could have-you recognize it, don't you?"

He looked back up at her. There was pain and confusion written all over his face, and the slightest glimmer of...hope? Jane's head hurt.

"Who am I?" she breathed.

The man clenched his jaw, "I can only tell you to open the watch."

Of all the nonsensical, cryptic, steaming pile of useless advice to give someone-Jane glared at the man.

But that was all there was time to think. Because the earthquake started again. The room rocked sideways and the man fell heavily on top of Jane, knocking the breath right out of her. She tried to wheeze for air, but before she could catch her breath, the room tumbled the other way and several loud crashes echoed throughout the chamber. Ass over tea kettle. Jane and the man pitched forward...or backward? It was hard to tell which way was even up anymore. Without her breath, Jane was finding it difficult to regain any sort of equilibrium. She felt like passing out and gagging up vomit all at once. The room rolled over several times, whirling them both like they were clothes in a tumble dryer. Jane cracked the back of her head on something metal and hard, possibly some sort of railing. There were explosions sounding from seemingly every direction and suddenly, violently, Jane felt like she was in her own memory. Fire and explosions, glass shattering, the vile and choking smoke that was billowing over her. Her eyes stung here and now from the acrid black, her lungs screamed for oxygen, and somehow she had felt this all before. It seemed to Jane that the only decent thing to do in a situation like this was lose consciousness altogether.

So she did.