There was a girl, once. She was not special. She did not have a power, only simple dreams. She did not breathe the mystical fragrance of legends, but was a mere partaker in a world far beyond the reaches of her imagination. She was only human. Rightfully so.
She was not a mystery.
She traveled, once, with the man in the blue box. They saw worlds together, fantastic worlds, worlds with equally fascinating beings that seemed too strange to exist. Then there were other worlds, empty worlds, of snow and ice and sand and fire. Not a soul breathed. And they wondered, together, what might have become of such a place. The man in the blue box told her once that everyone, and everything, had a story. In the realm of her imagination she created their stories- the stories of abandoned worlds, of forgotten worlds.
They wondered, together, what else there could be. For the man in the blue box had lived for a very long time, and had seen many things. But he saw, always, with wonder. For that, truly, was the way of the man in the blue box.
They witnessed, together, the end of her world and his world and every world in between, and it was beautiful. She never thought the end of the universe would be so colorful.
And then, one day, the man in the blue box realized himself and felt what could only be remorse. He saw himself to be selfish, and felt, in that moment, like one of the terrible Angels that he loathed. For he was, indeed, not human. But the girl was, and her life continually drained away as she was sucked time and time again into the adventures of the man in the blue box. He was, truly, not human, though he had spent ages wishing to be so.
His name was the Doctor.
Her name did not matter.
His legend would continue on into eternity.
Here, her story ends.
This time, he left her behind. For the world was a hard, cruel place, and not befitting for a mortal.
The man in the blue box told her to live a normal life. He told her that she would be happy that way.
She didn't believe him at first. The man in the blue box was lonely without his companions. That much was obvious, though she had never dared to ask. So why, then, must she go?
Then, gradually, she came to believe that the man in the blue box did not want her around. He didn't need her.
And, perhaps, she had herself convinced she didn't need him either.
He left her behind.
She tried to return to her world- Earth, finally, at last- but it seemed that her world was not as she remembered. No fantastical adventures waited just outside her bedroom window. When she turned out the lights, she didn't have to be afraid. Angels were only statues, and she visited other worlds only in her dreams.
And, perhaps, she wanted to be afraid. Because fear meant that it was real. That the man in the blue box wasn't just here imagination, but more substantial than a mere dream. It must have been real, even if the man in the blue box himself had slipped away, to galaxies and planets and peoples a lifetime away.
The girl took to writing in a journal, of the things the man in the blue box had taken her to see. There was an entire page filled with tally marks, angry slashes against stark white. She kept it locked away, but still close to her heart, in the hope that one day, her adventures would begin again.
But, still, they found it. Asked if these were stories of hers that she'd written. She had never been one for writing stories. Not much of a liar, either. She tried to tell them, tried to paint with words the fantastical images resting behind her eyes. No one believed her. They thought her crazy. Delusional. Schizophrenic. Childish.
They took her away, brought her to a place where they told her she'd be okay. But she knew where she was. And even so, she knew she wasn't crazy.
The man in the blue box was real.
A woman came by every couple of days (three, to be exact), a funny little woman with a puff of white hair and a little clip board and a lot of questions that the girl didn't want to answer. She was kind, but she didn't understand. No one did.
The man in the blue box's worlds were real, too. She knew it, in her heart, even if she was the only one to have seen them.
But as the days passed, he never did return. And she began to wonder, again, if perhaps they were right. If, perhaps, the man in the blue box was a figment of her imagination, though she wished with her entire being that it was not so.
She lay in her bed, rigid as a board, her fingers curled at her sides and nails gouging red marks into her palms. Her eyes were shut, but she didn't sleep. She couldn't. The woman had come by again that day, and brought along her parents. They looked at her with sympathy, but concealed beneath that was a strange sort of expression- as if she were a stranger herself. As if they didn't know her, didn't understand how their child could have turned out this way.
But she heard, then, a sound.
She froze, for she knew that sound. It was not of this world, but oh, so very familiar. She was still, her ears straining with a violent desperation.
She heard it again.
The girl shoved the sheets off her sweating body and slid cautiously onto the floor, padding across the room to the window. She pushed up on her toes and peered outside, hoping to see the familiar blue box that-
The street was empty.
She stepped away, a sigh pulling itself from her lungs and feeling as though it was enough to crush her. That was it, then. It was over. Her feet dragged tiredly across the cold concrete floor as she made her way back to the bed. But she found that it was no longer empty, but occupied by someone- a lanky-figured someone in a wrinkled suit and coat, leaning up against the bedframe and looking completely at home.
Her lips formed a single word.
Doctor.
He glanced up at her, then, though she hadn't spoken out loud, a piece of hair that was decidedly not ginger falling across his forehead. His face was touched by an ancient sadness, as if the weight of everything had descended upon him in that moment. But even so, the edges of his lips pulled up in a little smile, filtered with uncertainty.
"You waited for me?"
She let out a breath, the air leaving her lungs sounding like a scoff. "How couldn't I?"
"To be perfectly honest… I had hoped you might have forgotten."
The girl looked at him in disbelief for a moment. She couldn't think of anything else to say, so she hit him.
He winced but didn't say anything, having apparently noticed the surroundings for the first time. His eyes widened marginally as they swept over the stark white of the walls, the tiny window set far back into the wall, the thin mattress thrown carelessly over a bed frame that was better suited for a jail cell.
"What're you doing here?"
She sat down on the edge of the bed, next to his feet, and gave a little shrug. "They think I'm crazy."
"Crazy?" The man looked shocked. "Far from it, I'd say."
The girl could almost smile at that. "Not everyone sees the world the way you do, Doctor."
"They ought to." His eyes flitted around the room once more. "I'm sorry. I wouldn't have come back if I knew it'd be this way, I swear."
"I wanted you to come back!" Her voice was sadness edged with anger, and quite loud. She glanced towards the door, to check that no one was coming to see what the noise was for, and then lowered her voice. "I waited for you, Doctor. How could I have forgotten?"
"I wish you had. You deserved a normal life. Taking you along with me all the time… that's selfish to the core."
"Normal?" she said quietly. "I don't even know what that is anymore. No one could ever be normal again. But you don't care about that, do you? I'm not important."
"You are important," he said firmly. "And I did it because I care. So many things could have happened out there. I didn't want to make you forget, or lose you entirely to another world. What else could I have done?"
She knew, then, what had happened to his other companions. He hadn't talked about them before.
"Then why did you come back? Why now?"
"Because…" He scrubbed his hand across his face and sighed. "Because I'm lonely. I've spent most of life as the only one of my kind left, and that's not easy to get over. It's selfish, purely selfish." He held out his hand, half hidden in the sleeve of his coat. "Would you honor me by coming along on another adventure?"
She took it without an ounce of hesitation. "I've been waiting for you to say that for five years."
She left behind a note, scrawled hastily on the notepad the woman had left in her room earlier that day.
I won't be back for breakfast. The Doctor's come back for me.