The Doctor:
"She's still asleep then?" Clara asked me as I carefully administered another dose of the antidote to her poisoning. It was going to take a while, but it was definitely working. "Are you sure you definitely know what's wrong with her, Doctor? We took her from an old hospital, they might have just been looking for the right time to cure her."
I shook my head, gently laying the girl's arm back down by her side, white hair curled around an impossibly pale face. A side effect of the cure, it caused the body to wash melanin and other colour pigments out of the skin and hair, at least for a short while. "The antidote is working, the poison is just deep set now. The Flux Adder, a bright purple snake from the Taint Jungle of Notch. It secretes a sleeping toxin in it's venom, making it a common way to murder someone as it's hard to make an antidote, so they just fall into a deep sleep and just drift away. It's the basis of your Sleeping Beauty, I believe. Some smugglers lost one on Earth and it bit a girl, not her pricking her finger on some spinny thing."
"Was she awakened by a handsome prince and true loves kiss?"
"Of course not." I scoffed, shaking my head as the heart monitor beeped softly to show it was gradually picking up. "There's no such thing as true loves kiss."
That made her sigh at me, something that she had done a lot since I'd regenerated, before tucking our new friends torso in under the covers better. "Yeah? Well, I hope one day, someone shows you different. I'm off, I still need to get home and do all my marking for Year 9." Maybe you had to go and flirt, too, I knew that smile. "Why they need to draw so many penises I'll never know." Then hesitated at the idea of leaving me alone with my patient. "If you need my help, I can stay a little longer, or maybe we should take her to a hospital."
I just waved her off, ushering her out of the TARDIS before sitting back by the girls side. She'd caught my attention at the Aristotle, spotting her on our way back to the TARDIS. The only person left over from when the ship had been a hospital, left lying there, having been asleep for at least 4 years. They'd just tucked her away into the corner, bare minimum care, barely feeding her, no papers to say who she was or where she was from, and she'd come close to being killed by the Dalek's.
They had no idea how long she'd even been there for, so this poor nameless girl, I'd just taken her, picked her up and carried her into the TARDIS without even asking. That was two days ago and the cure was slowly but surely waking her up. And hopefully, she'd be able to tell me who she was once she was up.
The girl was young, even I could see that she was young at heart, but looked mid twenties at the latest. Her hair and skin were as white as the moon now, but before they had been just a little darker, her hair more honey coloured. She was small, frail, peaceful and utterly innocent. I couldn't leave her in the middle of a war zone.
Her heartbeat monitor stuttered, her breathing quickening as I administered the final dose of the antidote, her eyes flicking open and her left hand reached out to grab mine. She was strong, I could feel my bones clicking. "She's coming for me, she's here, I have to run, she's coming for me!"
"Hey, hey, it's alright!" I told her, seeing complete and utter fear in her cornflower blue eyes, rimmed in spidery white lashes like my own, only hers were a lot thicker. Oh, and terrified. "You're safe here, no one is going to get you."
"I, I, I'm... Safe?" She repeated, now seeming to be scared of her own words, like she didn't know why she had said what she had. "W, where? Who?"
Well, either she was struggling to adjust, or she'd never managed to complete a question in her life. "You're in my ship, it's called the TARDIS. I'm the Doctor, what's your name?"
She frowned a little, her hand going to touch the hollow of her throat as though there was normally something there, before shaking her head. "I, I don't know. Why don't I know? Where did you find me, no one was supposed to find me. I was supposed to be gone for good..."
A hard question, that one. "They found you just in the war zone one day. The Sleeping Beauty Venom, the thing that made you sleep, was deep rooted into you. Technically, you should have been dead a long time ago, it's a fatal poisoning, but you held on. You've been asleep for at least 4 years. The cure to the poison completely washed the colour out of your system, but it might have also wiped the memory base of your brain. Does that make sense?"
"To wake me up, you, um, you did a cell wash with an anti-venom, taking out melanin from most of my body, but it also affected my brain." The girl nodded, not realising that she was still painfully holding my hand. "It makes sense, but I don't know why it makes sense."
"You were obviously smart before you went and got yourself poisoned." I told her as she looked down at her hands, nails long, curled and cracking from years of lying in a bed, her skin deathly white all over her small body. "I'll see if there's anything that I can do to bring back your memories, but for the moment, I need you to eat something."
The girl frowned, but nodded as I picked up a tray of food, ranging from chips to jam sandwiches to a bowl of soup. She nibbled on the chips, but after a moment started to devour the food, having not eaten in 4 years and being tube fed. "Guessing you needed that then, huh?"
"Thank you. I did not know I was hungry until I started to eat." She admitted, nodding slowly as she tucked her hair absently behind both her ears. "Your name, you said it was the Doctor? Are you an actual Doctor or is it just your name?" She asked, making me realise for the first time that she had a thick New Zealand accent, making me also think how young she looked and sounded. "I'm guessing that it's probably both, given that you somehow woke me up."
I nodded, passing her a glass of water so she stayed hydrated. These next few hours were crucial for waking up her organs properly, if not they could just completely shut down and she'd only have a few hours of painful life after years of not living at all. "It's a little bit of both, yes. If I give you some things to do, please do them while I got and get you some clean clothes and see if I can do a trace on your blood, come up with a match on your identity and planet of origin."
She agreed and took the aptitude test I offered her, starting to fill it out right away. Meaning I felt perfectly safe to leave her unsupervised for a moment as I went to grab her a giant top and weird stretchy black trousery things from Clara's room. Then took them with me to the console room to see if she had any better ideas on who she was.
"Alright then, old girl. Who is she?" I asked, holding the monitor as she kept the loading screen spinning around, asking me to 'Please Wait' in Gallifreyan. Like I'd ever had the patience to wait for anything. "She's a New Zealander, very far off of Earth, and she was poisoned by something that shouldn't have even been in this galaxy, it shouldn't be hard to find her." She was still loading, making me sigh and get more impatient. "Come on, it should be easy!"
The console groaned in complaint of me rushing her, before coming up with a 404 Not Found screen. "That's not possible, come on. Even Clara's fragmented selves showed up!"
"Who's Clara?"
I jumped as the girl appeared behind me, silent like a ninja. Why did I always pick up the ninjas? "Don't do that or I'll end up having a dual heart attack!" I gasped, clutching at my chest as I looked at her stood in a blue best like before, still bare legged with a pair of stripey blue mens boxers on. "Why are you up? That test should have kept you busy for far longer than that."
She handed it to me, fully filled. "I finished it ages ago and got bored. I've been asleep for the last 4 years, I'd rather not just lie in a bed. Who's Clara?"
Flicking through the papers quickly, I frowned as I saw each question answered in a different language, from Earth ones to a small amount of Kaled. That was a tiny bit worrying, as it was the original dialect of Skaro, and therefore the Daleks. "All correct. Are you sure you don't remember anything?"
"I remember... Fear. I was running from someone, someone I couldn't ever hope to get away from, but then... I don't know, it all just stops." She sighed, her arms going around herself to let me see just how scared she was of even how little she remembered. "It's weird. I just keep remembering her voice, the voice of the woman coming after me. You can't leave me, Gee. I can't lose again, not this time."
"Gee? Do you think that could be the first letter of your name?" I asked her softly, wondering if maybe that could help. "Like Grace, Gwen?"
The girl shook her head again, cornflower blue eyes lost in thought, trying to piece together her missing past. "I don't, I can't... It's like... It should be there, but..."
"But it's out of reach, or just isn't there at all?" Gee nodded. "I know that feeling, yeah. You should pick a name, an interim one, just with the same letter. Gee is a great nickname, but I can't call you that all the time. I'll get up a list of names for you."
And got it up on something called , letting her look through them as I looked through the aptitude test again. Every single answer was right, but even things that she shouldn't have known were, like how fast you needed to go to travel faster than light, how old the universe was, how old it lived to be. Things that even I barely knew. "Gee, how did you know all this?"
She shrugged, looking at the screen intently, the worse reflected backwards onto her eyes. "It was easy, don't know. I liked the questions about numbers. They only had one answer, whereas the words ones were more what you thought, an opinion. Words just flow and flow, while numbers have a point where they end."
"That's a strange way of thinking about it. I don't think I've heard someone say it like that before." I commented, before the door opened and Clara came in. It had been about 12 hours by now, and I was technically still parked in her classroom. "Oh, hello there."
"First, move the box. Second, I can't just leave you with her, if you're the first thing she sees when she wakes up then she's going to have a heart attack." She sighed, before Gee stepped out from behind the console, half naked so she stopped and blinked. "Ah, right. Hello. You're awake."
She nodded, her white hair getting tucked behind her ears once more as it fell. "Yes. I'm awake. Hello. Are you Clara?"
"Yeah, I am. I, um, I'm sort of like the Doctor's friend." The Blackpool girl smiled, holding out her hand to her, which she just sort of stared at for a moment before touching it cautiously in reply, like it was the snake that put her in this position. "What's your name?"
That made her smile and she moved to pull the monitor to show us the name she'd picked. Georgia. "The Doctor told me to pick a name starting with the letter G, because I don't know my name. I really love the name Georgia, but he said apparently Gee is a good nickname as well?"
Which made Clara look at me with a confused expression on her very expressive face. "How come it's only ever you who could fine a young, albino Kylie?"
"She's not even Aussie, Clara." I shot back, offended that she could say such a thing. "It's more New Zealand. Georgia here woke up with no memories, so while I try and help her to recover them, and work out why she is freakishly smart, I think it would be a good idea for her to stick around for a while. What do you think about that, teach?"
"I think either she needs clothes or I need sunglasses." Clara replied, making Georgia frown down at herself, not understanding. I'd known Amy and Gee was far paler, so that was saying something. "That melanin deficiency thing, that's not gonna be permanent, is it?"
Nodding, I leant against the console to look at them both. Same height, and same sort of face shape too, kind of wide but with big expressive eyes. Definitely needed name labels. "Should be. Depends on what species she is. The TARDIS can't find her, but I think she's basically human. I borrowed some of your clothes for her, I've lost the wardrobe again, hope you don't mind."
Clara now picked up the top and stretchy trousery things before frowning. "Property of Captain Jack Harkness, Mickey the Mouse wishes he could be this buff. Doctor, this is so not my top."
Wasn't it? "Where the hell did I get it from then? Jack took all his clothes home after last time he stayed here. Ach, no matter, take her off to get dressed, you're better at all that malarkey."
"Going, going. Anything to not be blinded. No offence, Gee, but you're as pale as milk."
They both headed off into the interior TARDIS, leaving me alone to look at the test again. Her handwriting, gently sloped and cursive, was also shaky. Like her brain was moving so fast that her hand was struggling to keep up. "Oh, Gee. Who are you and who were you running from?"
