Note: Why, hello again! I just wanted to give a little preface to this particular fic so I won't be misunderstood. Although I love him to death, I have some issues with the Doctor that no one seems to be addressing. I'm hoping to do a little bit of that with this fic, and moreso with another one I'm still fleshing out. This one is mainly to try to explore one a specific idea I've had for quite some time: what if the Doctor wasn't the only one with a companion? This is just the first chapter, so bear with me. Enjoy!
No, that one wouldn't work. Too damaged. The girl threw the mangled can over her shoulder into the growing pile behind her. She needed ones that weren't too banged up or rusted in order to get her tuppence for each. She didn't recycle out of some self-serving, half-assed desire to help the environment; she did it for the money. Ever since her father had been killed by muggers just a few months prior, she'd been on her own, scrounging for anything that would help her survive another day.
She thought back on just how she'd ended up in this dump as she continued her search for recyclable goods. The memories seemed more like something from a movie rather than real life. What she remembered of her younger days were happy and good, but when she was seven her mother had walked out one day and never came back. Her father, the kind, sheltering man that he had been, had explained that Mummy didn't love Daddy anymore. She'd fallen in love with another man, so she'd gone to live with him instead. Young as she'd been, she'd understood (even though she'd been obviously upset by the news), and reassured Daddy that she still loved him and always would. He'd started crying at that innocent declaration and hugged her for nearly an hour.
Amazing how little details like that stay with you, she thought sadly. The love between parent and child didn't dampen as the years went on, however. Times had been difficult, what with her being too young to get a job and her father having to hold down two just to keep a roof over their heads. It was on his way to his second job, in fact, when he'd been killed by a trio of muggers for all the cash in his pocket: £12.53.
The police had found her the next day, and when they'd told her the terrible news, she'd given up. Her faith in humanity had been shattered beyond repair by one violent act that destroyed her entire world. The one person she loved with all her heart and knew loved her just as much had been taken from her. Relatives had been of no help, none of them wanting to take in a traumatized seventeen-year old; the same with "family friends". She'd been sent to an orphanage by the courts, but they could only shelter her until she turned eighteen...which happened to be less than five months after she'd been put there.
So, that left her here now, digging through the refuse of the city and its inhabitants she now despised. She dragged herself back to the present with a small shudder. She had to work, not linger on memories that reopened wounds. If she wanted to eat and have an extra pair of socks she needed to find more cans. Maybe a few plastic bottles at the very least.
Her digging continued steadily in silence despite the chill of the night air. She moved through three more heaps of trash, her "keep" pile slowly growing more respectable. Just a couple more, she thought. As she reached for a glimmer of something shiny, she noticed how curiously this particular heap was shaped. Her fingers made contact with the shiny thing; it felt solid enough. A bike, maybe? She pulled, but it was lodged firm. Perhaps the garbage had been packed down too tightly around it. She started pulling everything that was loose away from it, determined to make it her last piece for the night.
Her fingers touched something at the end of the newly revealed metal rod, something rubbery. Clearing away more debris, she saw it was a plunger-like object. She forced her instinctive disgust aside (after all, going through the dump of a major city had yielded far more nauseating items) when she saw that the other end was attached to something as well...and if it was indeed a plunger, it was the weirdest one she'd ever seen in her life.
She cleared more, working faster as her curiosity and fascination increased when large half-orbs showed themselves, then the flat metal sheets they were fused to, followed by seeming-out-of-place horizontal ridges above those. Her heartbeat increased as the pieces fell into place, reconstructing a memory long-buried, but never fully forgotten. Something evil, something so terrifying and so incredibly...wonderful.
She recalled seeing the sky that day, staring out her classroom window as she usually did, as she brushed aside the last pieces of trash from the domed "head". She'd seen millions of these things that day, filling the sky so that even the sun had been blocked. Everyone else had started screaming and running, but not her. She'd merely stood at the window in awe, watching as what she would later come to know as the Daleks move in such beautiful harmony as they rained destruction and death on those below them. She'd understood the horror of the act of mass genocide against her own species, but she'd also seen something she'd never once felt herself: unity. Every individual Dalek acted as a single entity to reach one common goal, however terrible. Her own life had been nothing but the finest examples of selfishness and single-minded arrogance humanity had to offer (her mother leaving, the lack of respect shown to her father by others, the lack of concern for a lonely child shown by her relatives). It was only during that global invasion that she'd seen a group work together for something greater than its members alone. It'd struck a chord deep within her, a longing to belong to something so utterly unified; no dissention, no back-stabbing politics, no lone wolves. All were equal.
And now, in the cold, putrid night air of a London dump, she faced one of those terrifying, wonderful creatures. But something was glaringly wrong: it was here in a dump. A dump. "What the hell..." the girl muttered under her breath. Looking closer, she saw the dented and scorched sides, the places where its orbs should have been but weren't, the hard bend of the not-a-plunger device that shouldn't have been there. It looked like it had been through hell. Welcome to my life, she thought dryly.
It looked quite pitiful, actually. Such an obviously proud creature reduced to this. She reached out to it again, wanting to investigate the extent of the damage. Her hand had only just landed on its head (what she assumed to be its head) when she felt a searing pain shoot through her palm. She jerked her arm back with a sharp yelp. The pain faded almost instantly. "Curiouser and curioser", to quote Lewis Carroll. Without warning, a voice cut through the air. Deep, foreboding, unequivocally hateful, and in pain. "D...N...A…..ex...tra...po...late...sssystems...restooooooore..." The voice grew stronger as it went on, sending a shiver up her spine.
It reminded her of magic as shown by movies, the Dalek coming to life. There was a kind of subtlety to the process, a series of blink-and-something's-changed moments. In a single word: beautiful. It was over in mere moments, giving her no time to appreciate every detail of it. The dents and scorches were still present, but its head and (what she akinned to) arms could move, albeit slowly. She couldn't stop herself from gawking; what could she say? What could she do?
Her racing mind screeched to a dead stop when the singular glowing eye focused directly on her. "EXTERMINATE!"
TBC...
