The first book that caught her eye was plucked straight from the shelf. She flipped it over in her hands a few times, weighed down by 588 pages of American Gods. She skimmed the summary with bored eyes, but figured she had nothing to lose.
She slumped back into the armchair wedged into the corner of the living room. Having already been there, in the house belonging to the nice couple she'd ended up with that month, for two weeks, she still couldn't find it in herself to call any space her own. She reckoned she never would. Even the spare bedroom upstairs, holding the small collection of her possessions, was - and never would be - her own.
Despite the intrusive thoughts, she sighed in content, throwing her legs over the edge of the chair to find a more comfortable position. She knew she still had a few hours to kill until anybody was due to be home. As she was nearly finished with the eleventh page, though, when the doorbell rang. She wanted to ignore it. But the second, third, fourth, and fifth time it interrupted her focus, she gave up.
"Me and you both, buddy," she muttered to the line she made a mental note of. Shadow checked his conscious. Thumb holding her place in the book, she pulled it close to her chest and rolled off the chair.
Whoever was at the door had not stopped banging on the bell, as if it was a game she was supposed to have picked up on. She ran over the mental list of any possible visitors; she was 99% positive that anyone it could be knew the adults were at work. That day shouldn't have been any different. She picked up her pace through the living room and into the hallway when the figure behind the glass of the front door resorted to banging their fist on it. "I'm coming, I'm coming!" she told the door.
The man who stood behind it still had his hand raised in anticipation when she opened it. Nearly a foot taller than she was, she forced herself to look up at him; he dropped his hand for a moment, raising both of them to straighten the bow tie around his collar. He put on a smile and dug into his tweed jacket, flashing the blank card trapped in a leather sleeve at her once he found it.
"Hello there," he started. "Just here to do a bit of inspecting."
"They aren't home," she replied. Almost mechanically, to her surprise. "Jason and Rebecca, I mean."
"Oh, that's quite alright. Grown-ups are rather boring nowadays, aren't they?" He phrased the question like a statement, but still raised his voice at the end of it. Replacing the card in his jacket, he held out his free hand. "I'm the Doctor, by the way."
Holding onto the edge of the door frame with one hand, hanging off it in an attempt to lean across the doorway, she raised her eyebrows. "Doctor…?" she prompted.
"Just the Doctor," he insisted. He noticed the book in her hand and tapped the cover. "That's a good one. It's one of the most accurate portrayals of everyone upstairs."
She blinked. "You mean - the gods? Plural?"
"Of course. But, the last time I met one - yikes." He clapped his hands together. "Right, speaking of upstairs, there's - something I've come to inspect. May I come in?"
He was a man in the medical profession; how much trouble could she get into by letting him inside the house that wasn't hers? She stepped aside and granted him passage. The Doctor smiled pleasantly at her and stepped through the hallway. He stopped in the middle of the living room. "Nice little setup," he commented. "I never caught your name."
"It's Annabelle," she answered. She pointed him in the direction of the stairs; she picked up on the way he seemed to get more and more fidgety by the second. Whatever he had to 'inspect' must've been quite the deal. "Upstairs is that way, knock yourself out. But try not to break anything."
The Doctor gave her a mock salute and went on his way. Annabelle shook her head at him, but settled back into the armchair. Ignoring the footsteps above her head, she made it another twenty pages into her book until she heard a dull thump, followed closely by the sound of glass shattering. Although she jumped, she didn't up the stairs immediately. She wanted to decide on what arrangement of words she would use to chastise the Doctor for breaking the one rule - an easy rule, at that - she had given him.
She eventually found him in the middle of the spare room, the one that showed it was hers by her own things scattered about it. She had no idea what to make of the look on his face, a jumbled mess of shock, horror, and anger all wrapped up into one. At his feet laid a broken picture frame; he was lucky Annabelle cared more about the photo housed in it than the frame itself. "You've gotten glass all over my room," she told the Doctor.
Staring at the floor, he pointed at the mess as if he'd just noticed it. Then, he pointed at Annabelle, mouth opening and closing as he tried to make words. While his brain worked, he pointed back and forth a three more times until they came. "That's - that's you, isn't it?"
Annabelle nodded. Even if the photo was eight years old, she still looked like her five-year-old self. The same brown hair that couldn't choose between curly or straight; the same grey-green eyes that, now that she looked closer at him, matched the Doctor's. She shrugged internally at the revelation.
The Doctor mimicked her nodding. He bent down to snatch the photo from the wreckage, staring at it for a few moments before speaking again. "And that's you, with…?"
"A family friend," Annabelle finished. "Friend of my parents. Auntie River."
"Friend of your… parents," the Doctor repeated, half-muttered to himself. He snapped his fingers. "Your parents. You gave me your first name, but not your last. What's your whole name? It won't match the name on the letterbox, will it."
"I'm only here temporarily," she said. "It's Annabelle Pond. What's it got to do with anything?"
He laughed, giddy like a little kid. "Annabelle Pond! It's like a name from a fairytale." He stopped laughing abruptly, the smile falling from his face. "Oh. Oh. That means...oh! Pond, Pond, Pond." He dug into another pocket, revealing a metal rod. Its end glowed green and buzzed when he pressed a button on the side.
Annabelle pushed it away as soon as the Doctor started to wave it around her. "You didn't answer my question," she reminded him. And I'm starting to regret letting a mad man in, she thought.
"Oh, it's got to do with everything." The Doctor laughed once more, spinning an entire three-sixty on his heel. "Absolutely everything. Would you like to come see something wonderful?"
"...Maybe if you hadn't - probed me first - "
"It isn't a probe! It's a sonic screwdriver!"
"That sounds made up."
"It really isn't. Trust me."
Annabelle shot him a skeptical look. "How can I trust you? You waltz in here, acting like you own the place, get spooked by a picture - and, quite frankly, it's easy for you to be lying."
"That is a fair argument." The Doctor considered it, tapping his chin with the sonic screwdriver. "If it's any consolation, I could tell you what I came to inspect."
"Go on."
"There's a condition."
"Okay, shoot."
"You don't me for this later."
"Hate you? I don't even know - HEY!" The Doctor had darted straight for her, and in no time she was slung over his shoulder. Annabelle pounded on his back with blows that went unnoticed. The Doctor soldiered on, straight out of the door of the house that Annabelle didn't belong in, and down the street. She hit him one more time before realizing that everything around them was quiet. No people milled around as they normally did; no cars were speeding to and fro on the road. No witnesses to my kidnapping, Annabelle added. Out loud, she murmured, "Just my luck."
She glanced down and watched the concrete below change suddenly into a black floor. She heard a door shut and a lock turn and was placed back on her feet. "Don't try running off," the Doctor advised her.
"Is that supposed to be threatening?" she bit back. Busy dusting herself off, she hadn't noticed her new surroundings just yet.
They were standing next to a stairway up a glass floor, held together in panels by different metal fittings. The ground further below resembled coral, different holes that were full of darkness speckled around; a swing bound with different bits of rubber and tubing and leather hung from the glass platform. More steps led down to the under level visible through the glass; different staircases led to other areas that branched off from the room. In the middle of it all sat a glass tube that extended from floor to ceiling, encasing another blob of green glass. The centerpiece was surrounded in different panels, each one holding more buttons and levers than the last. A yellow pilot seat was bolted to the ground in front of the railings on the other side of the console.
"Woah." The Doctor had already taken his place on the glass platform, leaning against a panel of the console. "What is - where are we?"
"She's called the TARDIS," the Doctor said casually. He spoke like he'd rehearsed the words hundreds of times before. "It stands for 'Time and Relative Dimensions in Space.' She's a time machine, and she's mine - well, maybe I'm more hers than she is mine."
Annabelle walked cautiously around the console, resisting the urge to press any and all buttons she came across when she ran her fingers over them. Only when she began to wonder what each of the multiple levers did, did she actually hear the Doctor's words. "Wait - time machine? That can't be possible."
"It is," he asserted. "I'm from a place where it's the norm. Time traveling - it explains itself, I suppose."
He crossed the platform, stopping once his contorted image was visible to Annabelle through the middle of the console. He jumped, remembering just why he'd dragged her onto his time machine. "I'll be right back!" he called, flinging himself up a set of stairs. "Just - go ahead and explore - but don't touch any buttons or levers! There's an unlabeled self-destruct gear that's the stupidest idea I ever had!"
Annabelle listened to his fading footsteps, laughing quietly to herself. A time machine. It sounded wrong just thinking about it; time travel was the stuff you could only read about if you were lucky with the book you chose. Something only limited to whatever a mind could think up; something she'd wished for since long before she could remember, and there she was.
In a time machine. Unsupervised. Left alone to explore the depths of what looked like an ship.