Disclaimer: Doctor Who does not belong to me.
falling out of trees
"Only yesterday was the time of our lives -
We were born and raised in a summer haze
bound by the surprise of our glory days."
.
He yells "Run!" and you jump. You fall straight down the hole into the TARDIS, bigger on the inside just like the rabbit hole Alice fell into. You feel that perhaps you are Alice, and remember when you used to wonder if you wanted to be Alice, or merely wanted to be like her. You were a little girl back then, and the world was big. The big world was your Wonderland and it stretched on from one horizon to the next.
You wonder when you lost that. (You wonder if you ever did.)
The Doctor is your Wonderland now. You grew up, stopped dreaming of the Cheshire Cat telling you tales and got a job. You went out into the real world and realized that your Wonderland never existed in the first place. It was all in your mind, playing fanciful tricks, and it hurt. When you realized that. It hurt and it stayed with you and you pushed, shoved and forced it away.
And then The Doctor comes and he's the most wonderful man you will ever know. He's the Cheshire Cat and the Mad Hatter (oh yes, he is the Hatter and he offers you tea over the console of his ship, clinking cups with you and giggling like a child) and The Red Queen. He owns this Wonderland and he is ruling it with an iron fist.
He is the Jabberwocky and the sword that slays it - he is the Alice of his own story and at some point, whether at the end of your journey or right when you think you're about to die, praying not to your God but to the Doctor (the Doctor will save you, he always saves you, if only you wait long enough and believe) you think this. You're not Alice; you never were Alice. That role will always belong to him and him alone, because he makes himself out for it. The Wonderland you see is no longer a Wonderland to him and he needs an Alice, he needs to be Alice if he wants to continue having the will to save you.
Save you humans. That's what he does. He saves you time and again and again and again and again—
He yells "Run!" and you jump. You jump into the TARDIS, into his arms and he smiles at you. "All of time and space at our command," he says, swinging that pocketwatch belonging to the White Rabbit. You don't ask whether right now he is Alice, or you are, or how many there have been before you. For now he lets you be her and you don't protest, because the Wonderland that was never quite yours when you were a girl is now at the touch of your fingertips.
He leaves you. You watch him go. And you finally realize that this Wonderland of the Doctor's - this wonderful, mad, brilliant Wonderland you thought you had - was never yours at all. You merely saw the coattails of a passing by rabbit and poked your head into the rabbit hole he jumped into.
And that's the farthest you will ever go, because on those walls of stone and dirt and tree roots in the unfathomable pit of darkness you will never see, he writes your name in ink. He writes your name in ink and no matter who he is that day - Alice, The Queen, Mad Hatter, the Jabberwocky:
He will never, ever let himself forget you.