The doors of the TARDIS slammed shut at his command.
Running through the halls of the ship, a man wiped tears off of his angular face. Tears were rare for him, but these droplets of anger and frustration refused to be contained. They ate away at the ragged threads holding his mind together, and soon they broke them entirely.
The Doctor slumped against a wall, far from the heart of his beloved craft, and nearly suffocated with regret.
He had been on the planet Uriah, to try and clear his mind of the events that had just transpired. The War had ended, but there was no victory for either side. He had fought, willing to fall with the Timelords. Fate had different plans, though, and wrest him from the battle, claiming him as its champion. The lone survivor. He wanted to forget, he was ready to die, and that was how he found himself sitting on the edge of Uriah's highest cliff, contemplating leaning forward and simply...falling. Ending. Escaping the madness he was the crux of.
As he sat on the precipice, a shadow fell over his knees, and a hand touched his shoulder.
"Excuse me?"
The Doctor, hearing the sound, turned around. He had thought he was alone up here, inhaling the high, thin air. Contradicting his belief, though, was a boy, looking to be about twelve. He was short, with hair growing past his ears and an unwashed face.
"Yes?" he replied, his grief overpowered for a moment by curiosity.
"Why are you here?" the boy asked, staring at the worn face below him. "No one's supposed to be up here. It's too high."
"Well, why are you here then? If nobody's supposed to be?" the Doctor retorted.
"None of them can breathe up here, so they've made laws saying nobody can come up. What if a kid scrabbled up here and found himself suffocating, too far away for help? Technically, we're both committing a crime."
"Laws...have never mattered to me much," the Doctor replied, a smile breaking his face for the first time in a long while. "But you never answered my question. Why are you here, and how can you breathe up here if nobody else can, like you said?"
"I'm different…" the boy said, pulling at his collar. He seemed hesitant to say any more, and his short legs were tensed to run in case the man couldn't be trusted. There were too many who had turned out to be bad already.
"Go on, I won't tell." the Doctor said, trying to reassure the boy.
"Okay, but you have to promise."
"How do I promise?" Promises came in so many different forms, and he wanted to get it right with this one. It wouldn't do to scare the boy with the windblown brown hair off. He liked him, and he had a sense of familiarity when he looked at him.
"We lock thumbs," the boy said, holding his hand out in a thumbs-up.
"I promise not to tell a soul what you're about to tell me," the Doctor said, curling his long thumb around the boy's short, grimy one.
"All right. I live up here. I used to live in the buildings down there-" he gestured to the distant ground- "but the people who I was living with got taken and I ran away up here 'cause I had nowhere else to go. I found out I could breathe the air, and I've acclimated to it over the last few years. Sometimes I steal down to the village and get supplies, 'cause I can run real fast there on account of the air being thicker."
"They got taken? Who took them?" The Doctor asked, truly engaged in the boy's story.
"I never found out, but my brother's looking for 'em. He's in a gang that's trying to find other people that got taken, too, but they wouldn't let me in, and so I couldn't stay with him. Otherwise I'd still be down there, in school and stuff. That's the only thing, I miss, school. I was really good at math, but there's not much of it to do up here."
The boy was more of a talker than the Doctor could have envisioned. With no family connections, no real home, and only the responsibility of his own survival, he'd be a good candidate for the TARDIS! He looked to have a knack for staying out of trouble, and a few adventures would be good for him...and possibly good for the emotionally scarred Timelord too.
"You forgot to mention something," the Doctor said, looking at the boy. "I can't just think of you as 'boy' or 'kid' in my head all the time. What's your name?" The man corrected himself. "If I may ask, of course. I'm not going to make you tell me."
"Sorry, I should have stuck that in there somewhere." He grinned, liking the mysterious stranger more and more. "My name's Adric."