DISCLAIMER: I do not own Sherlock and Doctor Who.

This is my first venture into writing fan fiction. Special thanks to my beta reader Black Angel of the Underworld for her patience and awesome proofreading skill :)

I hope you like the story!

Prologue

Molly Hooper was exhausted. She couldn't feel her legs anymore and her shift seemed like it was never going to end.

Standing over the latest corpse she had on the slab, she wondered if her days would continue to be like this until she died: monotonous, tiring, boring.

And waiting for the one man who would never love her back.

It had been seven months since he left, off to wherever he was needed to dismantle Moriarty's network.

During her darkest days, she winced at her own thought of ever being with the Sherlock Holmes. Why would a genius like him ever be attracted to a plain and unassuming woman like herself? She had worked alongside him for several years. Even though she enjoyed those times when he came to the lab to run some experiments, he seemed to forget her being there in the same space as him altogether.

Sometime she would compare herself to Irene Adler. It was true that she had never met the woman before. And she instantly saw the differences. The woman was beautiful, sexy, and clever. She was, in essence, a seductress. One would even say she was the perfect match for Sherlock.

It wasn't as if she was stupid. In fact, Molly Hooper was actually an intelligent woman. It wasn't easy to become a pathologist at her age, yet she did it. She also had a few journal articles published on several medical journals. Not to forget the occasional offers she received for various high-paying positions – the most notable one being the head of scientific research at a prestigious university.

However, aside from that, she was nothing. She knew she wasn't beautiful or sexy like Irene. She had an apartment, she paid her rent on time, she went out with her friends occasionally, and she had a cat named Toby. She also admitted to herself that some time she didn't have the best taste in fashion.

All in all, she was normal - and Sherlock Holmes despised normal.

She didn't accept any of the offers because the ability to help the dead speak - figuratively speaking, of course - and the gratification she experienced in helping the families to find closure are important to her. Even during her more honest moments, she stayed because of Sherlock Holmes.

But she didn't fool herself to think she was in any way important to him. No one thought much about her. Why would anyone? She was just there when they needed her, and easily forgotten when they stopped needing her. She just didn't count.

When Jim Moriarty – the ITguy – entered her life, she thought she was, at least, worth something. That someone actually noticed her. However, it turned out she had been dating another sociopath. A murderous sociopath who lied to her in order to get to Sherlock. In hindsight, she should have noticed it. Of course, no one would ever willingly date her, let alone remember her. Of course it would be because of Sherlock Holmes.

There was one time he remembered her. It was also the only time she had seen something other than cold aloofness in his eyes when he looked at her: it was when he asked her to fake his death.

It was ironic, that he would ask the one person who didn't count to do something so important to him. She helped him to cheat death in front of the entire world. To be truthful, she had been slightly hopeful when he told her that she mattered when he asked her for help. She hoped that he would come to acknowledge her and maybe, just maybe, that they could start something together.

However, when all she got was a sparing glance and a grateful nod from him afterwards, she dispersed the thought. She knew, at the very least, that he was grateful for her help because it was the first, and probably the last, time that he would spare her a glance longer than one second. But it was just that. A "thank you." Nothing more, nothing less.

Still, the little girl inside her – the same little girl who looked at the starry night sky and wished for a prince in shining armor – hoped that he would come to love her.

Sometimes, she would be jealous of John Watson, the man who managed to get close to Sherlock and became his best friend. They lived together and, somehow, it worked. She had accepted that she would most likely never hear from him anymore, if he ever came back at all. She was sure it would be John to hear about it first.

Molly knew. She knew it all came down to the fact that Sherlock Holmes didn't see her. It would never be her. There would be someone else but it would never, ever, be her.

She just didn't matter.

She snapped out of her thought when a voice called out to her, "Molly? Hey, I'll cover for you. You look dead on your feet. Go home and get some rest, would you?"

She turned around to find her colleague smiling kindly at her and she returned the smile. "Alright, thank you."

Normally, she would feel really bad to have someone to cover a part of her shift. But, today, she couldn't get home fast enough. She was really tired and all she wanted was a hot shower and a good night sleep.

She threw the gloves into the biohazard bin in the corner and walked out of the room after another muttered thanks to her colleague.

On her way home, she contemplated the thought of resigning and accepting one of the offers. Maybe she should start moving on.

Because staying here starting to mean nothing to her anymore.

Yes. She was honest enough to admit that she was lonely. And, yes, she did try to do something about it, something along the line of speed dating and creating a profile on a dating website. But they never worked. And why would they, when all she could think about was a pale face framed by dark curls and the penetrating blue-green eyes that could tell everything about you just by a glance.

When she unlocked the front door to her flat, she expected Toby to welcome her by curling himself around her feet. She expected that the cup of tea she left on the kitchen counter to be cold before she had left for work in the morning. She also expected the stack of files on the table to be scattered around because she didn't close the living room window in her rush to get to work.

What she didn't expect was to find a blue police box in her living room - and a man battling a robot. No, correction, a man with a bow tie battling a robot by waving around the room with a torchlight.

She rubbed her eyes, thinking she must be hallucinating the whole ordeal because she was overworked and exhausted and –

Oh my god, was that another robot walking out of her bathroom? Really now?

Without knowing what to do with her overly imaginative mind that just wouldn't shut up, she stood at the doorway and watched. Perhaps at the same time, ignoring the tiny little voice in the back of her mind that this might not be a hallucination. But why didn't the neighbours come running with all this noise from her flat then?

Clearly, it was just a hallucination.

When all there was left of the robots were two piles of smouldering ashes on her fluffy pink carpet, she stared at the strange man who had a smug grin on his face.

"Who are you?" she managed to say. Ah, she was even talking to her mind projection now, how wonderful. She should really just go to sleep.

"Oh, hello! Didn't see you there," the projection answered, too, she thought.

"Um, why are you here? And what were those…things?"

"Oh, you mean the Cybermen! Actually, I'm sure there are more of them hiding in this building posing as humans by a filter that would alter your perception of them so you would think of them as humans. A wonderful disguise, I might add, but they should have never taken to changing humans into one of them. That is not good. No emotion, the lot of them."

After pointing the torchlight thing he held towards the piles of ashes, he turned around and asked, "How terribly rude of me. What is your name?"

Well, since it was just a product of her tired mind, it wouldn't do any harm to tell the man her name (she was pretty sure she had never seen him before, but she never did understood how the mind worked anyway). So, she just blinked and said, "Molly. Molly Hooper."

The man smiled brightly and spread his arms. "And I'm the Doctor."

He continued to point the strange thing around her flat and then frowned at it. "Oh, oh, this is pretty brilliant! Not good, but clever."

And Molly? She just concentrated on her breathing, ignoring the man as he continued pointing the tool around the flat again and mumbling in some sort of one-sided conversation. She did catch a few words like "crashed ship", "regeneration", and "energy pulse". She swore to herself that her hallucination had just gotten weirder by the second.

Soon, the frown was gone on the man's face and was replaced by a cheerful grin. He looked at Molly and suggested, "Well, Molly Hooper, want to see a spaceship?" With that, he turned around and walked towards her door.

I'm having one hell of a hallucination. Molly thought. She was just going to answer "Don't be silly," when all the lights in the flat exploded. Yes, exploded. Not just gone off like what normal lights did. They exploded. Really loud, too.

They were enveloped in darkness and she let out a yelp of surprise when he touched her arm to stabilize her.

"Was that—?"

"Yes. That was the Cybermen, too." She was going to say earthquake, but the man continued, "They have gathered enough energy from here and now their spaceship is ready to launch. We need to stop them quickly. Otherwise the launching would flatten the whole area, they start an invasion, and everybody dies."

"Spaceship. Launching. And we die?" She looked at the door, then at him, and let out a shaky breath, "Al—Alright."

"Let's go then!" The man walked out of the door and she followed behind in a daze.

Whatever Molly thought her night after work would be like, it was certainly not on her apartment's rooftop battling some robotic creatures in an honest-to-god spaceship alongside a man who called himself The Doctor that fought by pointing around a screwdriver ("Not just a screwdriver, Molly, it's a sonic screwdriver!")

She had lost count on how many times she narrowly escaped from being blasted apart by some weird laser beams the robots fired. She was sure that she would be spotting some nasty bruises when this was all over; but she was so high on the adrenaline rush that she didn't care about any of that. So when the Doctor was surrounded, she didn't hesitate to save him by hitting the Cybermen repeatedly with a broom.

Whatever that worked, really.

When they reached what she thought was the control room, the Doctor pointed the screwdriver at the main control panel and said, "We need to stop the ship from launching."

"How?"

"We - Hold on." The Doctor scanned the panel again and frowned.

"Er, Doctor?"

"Yes?"

"What is that light?"

"Time running out."

"Oh."

Was she going to die in an alien spaceship? Actually, can one die in one's hallucination? Should she start panicking?

Meanwhile, the Doctor was trying to figure out how to stop the engine. He looked at the locked entrance and back to the panel. "They tried really hard to keep us out of the control room. It makes no sense if they know we can't command the ship." Wait a minute…

He pointed the screwdriver at the screen above him and grinned. There!

"MOLLY!" The Doctor's shout snapped her out of her reverie.

"Yes?"

"Put your hand on that scanner, Molly! It's a high-level biometric scanner that has a built-in security system which would recognise you as a full human and start the process of self-termination. It's a failsafe!"

She hovered her hand above the scanner and forced herself to stop thinking. She didn't think of the underlying implication that The Doctor wasn't a human being. She didn't want to think of the giant high-tech machine in front of her belonged to an alien spaceship. And she definitely didn't want to think about what "self-destruct" would do and what it meant for her human body.

Because if she slowed down to think about it, no doubt she would faint. No doubt at all. And fainting was not a choice. Not even in your own hallucination. What would Sherlock say?

She blinked a few time and berated herself, "Not right now," then pressed down on the scanner.

Then, her world turned black.

When she regained consciousness, it was to find the strange man waving his screwdriver (sonic screwdriver, her mind provided) over her.

When he noticed she was awake, he smiled. "There! You're awake."

The man was still here. This hallucination was getting really, really real. Shouldn't it stop the moment she woke up? Or was this "waking up" a part of the hallucination, too?

Molly shook her head sharply in hope of getting rid of this weird ordeal her mind constructed. A few seconds later, she looked up again and the man was still there.

So, not a hallucination then.

"The robots?" she asked in a shaky voice.

"Not robots, Molly Hooper. Cybermen."

Right. Cybermen. Because that made all the sense in the world. She looked up in a daze and said, "Alien spaceship."

"Yes! And we just stopped a massive catastrophe to this area! Do you know the –"

"Are you an alien too?"

"I suppose. Anything that does not originate from the Earth is considered an alien, right? Then, yes, I'm an alien!" he smiled brightly.

Right. A catastrophe…the self-destruct spaceship. And an alien right in front of me. Right. She looked down at her hands again as the Doctor continued talking, and then her mind caught up.

Real, it was all real. All those robots and spaceship and explosion and sonic screwdriver and bow tie.

Real.

There were aliens hiding in her apartment. Aliens. A spaceship on the rooftop waiting to launch. Aliens. She'd fought them, with nothing but a broom she found on the rooftop. Aliens. And she was still alive.

Aliens.

Oh, God.

Suddenly, she couldn't breathe. Everything seemed hazy and she felt really faint and—

Someone shook her shoulders, "Molly? Molly Hooper? Oh, no, not right now," then she found her head in between her knees in a customary shock-relieving position. "Breathe. Come on, Molly."

And she breathed.

When her mind cleared, she found that she didn't dislike this alien and fighting thing. Not one bit. It seemed to her that her life wasn't boring anymore. As a matter of fact, it was overly exciting and too much for a human who worked with logic and scientific knowledge all her life. But she couldn't bring herself to care about it because she, Molly Hooper, a mere pathologist with a monotony lifestyle, had just saved the entire area from an alien spaceship! Wasn't that exciting? What would Sherlock say?

She flinched inwardly when she found herself thinking about Sherlock again. Stop thinking about him.

"Well then."

Her head snapped up to look at the man she had been ignoring for the last few minutes, and whispered, "Yes?"

The Doctor just looked at her thoughtfully. "What do you think?"

"What?"

"This." The Doctor waved at the space around them and repeated, "What do you think?"

"Unbelievable, I suppose," she muttered. "Overwhelming, too." Was this how John felt when he went on chasing criminals with Sherlock?

Stop thinking about him!

The Doctor nodded encouragingly. "Good! And?"

Molly shifted awkwardly on her couch. "Maybe, it is…quite…interesting?"

The man jumped from the chair suddenly, startling the disoriented pathologist, and clapped his hands together.

"Brilliant!"

"What is?"

"You! Molly Hooper, you! You. Are. Brilliant." Molly, being Molly, blushed profusely at the compliment, but the Doctor didn't notice and looked at his watch. "We still have time. Now, go pack a bag."

"What? Pack a bag? Where to?"

The Doctor paused on his way back to the blue box and looked back at her with a conspiratorial grin. "How do you like an adventure through time and space?"

She looked over to the police box and gave it a skeptical look, "It's a blue police box."

The Doctor just smiled. "Bigger on the inside, I promise."

"Time travel?"

The Doctor nodded eagerly. "Space travel, too. It's called TARDIS, Time And Relative Dimension In Space."

She frowned in confusion. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why are you asking me? Is it because your box landed in my living room? I'm not like you. I'm just a human, a weak human. Up until just now I didn't know time travel was possible, I didn't know there were aliens and spaceship and –"

The Doctor interrupted her. "Sometimes, human can be the strongest species across the entire universe. And you, Molly Hooper - " He stepped forward, placed his hands on the side of her head, and looked her in the eyes. " - you are definitely not weak. You just have to believe in yourself."

When she didn't say anything, he let out a sigh. "Molly, Molly, Molly. You fought the Cybermen and saved my life back there. So why not?"

Why not, indeed. Molly thought. Her gaze flicked around her room, taking in the framed photographs of her parents above the fireplace, the television that she spent half of her monthly's salary on, the well-worn carpet, the broken mugs on the floor, and her gaze shifted back to the TARDIS.

Her parents had passed away in a car accident when she was nineteen and she had no other family members left. Since then, it had been just her against the world. Her life had fallen into a monotony routine. It'd became…inane.

She needed to get away and this crazy adventure might just be the thing.

But Molly was nothing, if not, responsible. "How about my work? I still have to check in tomorrow."

The Doctor gave a lopsided grin. "Time travel, remember? I could take you away for months on end and have you back here right at this moment. No charge!"

For a long while, Molly just stared at him, then at the innocent box and didn't answer. Whatever Molly was thinking, it was long enough for the Doctor to feel dread creeping in. He didn't realise until now how much he didn't want to travel alone anymore. He'd been lonely for so long. He was going to retract the offer when Molly let out a slightly breathless laugh, a grin creeping across her face.

"Can Toby come along?"

AN: Thank you for reading it. The mystery and fighting would be more intense in the subsequent chapters when Molly is more familiar with the idea of travelling through time and space. For now, she is just tagging along trying to make sense of everything happening around her.

Reviews are definitely welcome! I would really love to know what you think of it :)