There once was a small girl on a small planet in a small galaxy in a small corner of the universe who prayed to Santa about the very not-small crack in her bedroom wall. Her aunt had assured her that the crack had always been there, and she remembered it too… but she couldn't but help but feel as if it had not always been that way. Plus she didn't like the woman's voice that echoed on the other side of the wall.
Not two minutes later, a blue Police Box crashed into her backyard shed.
She ran outside, not bothering to don anything other than her pair of little red boots, because her prayer had been answered and an Official Adult was here to help her with her problem.
Well, she was very surprised when out of the police box stumbled not a Police Man, but a Regular Man in a brown pinstriped suit. And by stumbled, it was more like toppled headlong out of the blue box in a tangle of long limbs and fell flat on his face.
He was obviously not in a very good way right now. Actually, he was very much like Rory, that one time when Kurt and Blaine had asked him ("very nicely" Rory had made sure to add) if he could share his tater tots. When Rory had ("very politely") said no, the school was thrown into a no-holds-barred food-fight brawl, with a couple fists thrown in for good measure.
When the Regular Man didn't move, she tried to pull him upwards into a sitting position, leaning him against the wall of the shed. He cooperated after a second, groaning, his eyes rolling into the back of his head, and he opened his mouth and vomited up a cloud of golden light. Deciding that this was Not Quite Right, the girl ran into the kitchen like she had for Rory to grab a bag of ice and an apple. She applied the bag of ice to his head, like her aunt had told her to do, and pushed the apple up against his mouth, hoping it would block the light from escaping.
The man did not like the apple—only it wasn't an apple, it was a pear, and as he spewed juicy pear mush all over his lap, even more wisps of golden light exploded from his mouth and vanished into the night sky. So she ran into the house again for some more food, but he didn't like the toast or the Nutella or canned peaches or the leftover fish fingers or the custard, so she grabbed a basket from the laundry room on her way to the kitchen and gathered up everything in sight. Then she brought it outside to where the Regular Man was leaning against the last standing wall of the shed that his blue box had crushed and dumped the kitchen's edible contents in front of him.
He literally pounced on a banana; when he finished wolfing it down, his eyes seemed to glow with a renewed energy. A burning golden energy that made her slightly uncomfortable, but he kissed her on the forehead anyways and made his way on unsteady feet back to his blue box, where he thanked her for her help and said goodbye.
She wanted him to stay though. She needed somebody to investigate the crack in her wall, be it Regular Man or Police Man. As he unlocked the door, she ran to block him from entry, pushing past his long legs. She intended to turn and face him and present her problem to him—but she never got to the turning part, because the inside of the police box was not a tiny, cramped, dark space, but a wonderland of thrills and marvels. When the Not-So-Regular Man told her that his name was the Doctor and that this was his spaceship that traveled through time as well as space, she didn't even doubt it for a second. After all, if he could squeeze everything into such a tiny area, then of course it made complete sense that the Doctor was a time traveler as well.
She turned around to tell him so—and didn't miss the pain that he immediately tried to hide. The tortured agony in those dark, dark windows to the soul. The depths of his sorrow were beyond her comprehension; she only knew that, though she needed help, the Doctor needed it even more. So she ran back outside and grabbed the rest of the bunch of bananas and offered them to him, because it had brought him such happy relief earlier, and she could see that he needed more of that.
His eyes softened. His grimace of pain stretched upwards into a gentle smile. He took the bananas carefully and, in return, offered her a small blue sphere from the depths of his suit pocket and said to use it if she wanted to find him again, and he'd pop by and say hello. He'd probably be wearing a different face by then, but he promised it would be still be him.
And though this didn't quite make so much sense to her, she accepted the gift and held onto it tightly. The Doctor was obviously in a bad spot now, but, as her aunt said, Everything Gets Better With Time. She told him so as the door swung shut, and he just smiled back at her before closing the door all the way.
And so, she stood by as, slowly, the Doctor's spaceship made strange whooshing, wheezing noises and faded from sight. She decided that she would wait until he felt better before reaching out to him; after all, somebody still needed to look at the crack in her bedroom wall.
She turned around and walked back into her house, the blue sphere cupped tightly in her hands. It was sort of like glass, but a lot lighter than she expected it to be. She didn't quite know how to use it, but she figured that it would work when it needed to. She showed it to her aunt, who marveled that it seemed to pulse with a steady blue heartbeat. Then her aunt ushered up to bed and tucked her in and read her a bedtime story about the Roman civilization, except that the girl fell asleep halfway through, assured that the Doctor would come back for her—even as ghostly murmurs drifted from the crack in her wall and spiraled down into her dreams, filling her mind with tendrils of golden light weaving through the endless void of space, of the little blue box spinning through the ashes of enemies, the scattered remnants of foes completely obliterated by the Oncoming Storm, the Beast, the Destroyer of Worlds.
And, body pressed flush against the wall on the other side of the crack, a woman wept with whispered warnings that barely reached Amelia Pond's ears as she woke the next day to a familiar wheezing and groaning, followed by a sudden crash as the Doctor's spaceship crushed the remaining walls of the shed in her backyard.
The ten-year old ran outside in her little red boots, so eager to see the Doctor again that she did not notice the sphere, discarded on the ground next to the abandoned storybook, was no longer a steady blue, but a throbbing and urgent red.
She crashed into the Doctor as he emerged from his blue Police Box, and she went to cry his name joyfully, but what came out instead were the two words she had heard all night.
"Bad Wolf."
