Soli Deo Gloria
DISCLAIMER: I do NOT own Gilmore Girls or Doctor Who.
You know when I heard the word 'fez' mentioned in GG, I had to write a fanfic about it, right? XD
Rory sat by the open window in her room. She allowed her eyes to stray from studying Shakespearean sonnets to look over the cool grey evening. It wasn't often she had time to go and enjoy the fall weather these days. What, with starting Chilton, catching up on schoolwork, hanging out at the inn, and keeping up with her family's shenanigans. She sighed a little and let her chin rest on her folded arms as she looked outside.
There was such a big world out there, just ready to be experienced. There were so many places outside of this sleepy little Connecticut town. Europe practically demanded her to walk over its every country. Africa was a jungle of adventure. India and China and Russia were foreign lands with delicious accents and sights brighter and more full of wonder than Rory could imagine. She wanted to see other states, see the Sonoran Desert and drink coffee in rainy Seattle. She wanted to explore Brazilian jungles and spend hours in a Mexican marketplace and go ice-skating across frozen Canadian lakes. She wanted to do so much—and yet her days are consumed by Chilton and her mother. She loves them both, but they're it—and they'll be it for at least the next two years. And two years is such a long time. It's twenty-four months of this; it's one-hundred-and-four weeks. Well, a little less, but still—so long.
Rory sighed and leaned her fist against her cheek. She tapped her English history book with her number 2 pencil and sighed. Her brain felt so saturated in Shakespearean facts that she felt like she could throw up textbooks. She sighed, and straightened. Mom was at The Independence Inn but would be home any minute, and when Mom came home, Rory would literally not be able to study.
Rory glanced out the window one more time, and saw the first of many bright stars appearing in the dusky sky.
Rory felt very grown-up; she was sixteen-years-old; she would be graduating in two years. She and her mother were often mistaken for sisters. She kept sophisticated company with her grandparents; she went golfing with her grandfather. She drank coffee black.
Still, she wished upon a star; she said, "Please, I wish that I could go traveling before I graduate. Just a little bit. Just one city. That's all. Then I'll study harder than ever, I swear."
The star twinkled, like it was winking at her. Then it burned out of sight.
"Weird," Rory muttered to herself. Then she shrugged and shifted her thoughts from wandering around the world to the Globe Theater.
Then she heard a strange noise outside. Frowning, she thought "Mom?" Was her mother, home from work, emitting strange noises? Was it her car? You know, it might be Babette and Morey.
It wouldn't stop, that noise. It came in and out, fading and then glowing bright; it sounded like something exciting arriving.
Rory leaned out, searching through her open window for the source of strange noise. Then she saw something that was too weird. Weird, even for Star Hollows. Weird, because while there's a lot of weird in Star Hollows, nothing weird really, truly happens.
Except maybe for that one weird thing in her yard. That blue box, the thing making the weird, exciting noise.
"What is that?" Rory said. She immediately scrambled up from her desk and then stood still, waving her hands around as she tried to think of what to do. She was still sunk in a world full of hopes for hitchhiking across the Swiss alps and Shakespeare being Hamlet's father's ghost. So, slightly panicking, she did two quick, hasty things before running out of her room.
She grabbed an old badminton racket, and she called Lane.
Her first instinct should've been to call the police or her mother, but nope: when she had exciting news, she felt obligated to give her best friend the quickest cut, especially since Lane would die without some interesting news.
"Lane! Lane!" Rory whisper-shouted into the bulky phone. She stood crouched her door, holding the badminton racket as her best defense. She listened for any other sounds from the blue box, and also for evidence of Lane being on the other lone.
"Rory, sshhhh!" Lane whispered. She was hidden in a corner of several old wardrobes and end tables. "It's almost eight o'clock. Mom will take away my phone rights if she finds out I'm talking to you at this 'late hour'." Rory could practically see Lane's eyes rolling behind her glasses.
"This is an emergency, though," Rory said.
"Is someone dying? Are you dying? Is Lorelai dying? Is your house on fire? Are you guys out of coffee? Did you get kicked out of Chilton?" Lane rambled.
Rory swallowed some impatience. "If you gave me a chance to tell you, I'd tell you." She took a deep breath and tightened her grip on her doorknob. "There's a strange thing outside my house."
"You're gonna have to be more specific, Rory," Lane said. She sighed and then chomped on a rice cake, wishing it a candy bar as she crouched under a desk. She could hear her mother's footsteps.
"It's like a blue box or something! I dunno!" Rory waved her hand holding the racket and groaned. She opened her door and glanced out of one of the kitchen windows; she saw a figure stumbling out of it; it looked like a weird-looking man with the gracefulness of a giraffe. "Oh no, there's a man—a man came out of the box! Lane?! Lane, are you there?!"
Lane had gone blank; she didn't hear a word Rory said. She only heard her mother. "Crap, that's my mom! Call the police or something, Rory, I gotta go!" Lane stashed away the phone.
It made a loud noise in Rory's ear before it got hung up. She backed the phone away from her ear and put it down. She knew she should call the police, but she was a Lorelai Gilmore. They tend to act first, think later.
Rory quietly opened the door and slipped behind a column of the front porch. The blue box was off to the left, away from the neighbors' house. It had a white light on top of it, and one of its doors was open. The man was holding onto the doorway; he also appeared to be muttering to himself and trying to wipe something off the bottom of his shoe.
Rory couldn't decide whether to hold the badminton racket as a sword or as a shield; she decided to hold it against her chest and wave it according to what the situation called for, should she need it. She tiptoed closer, close enough to hear the man mutter, "Space gunk, on my shoe! Disgusting. Why are all worlds so filthy? Really."
"Worlds? What worlds?" Rory asked. Her normal, soft voice was somehow heard by the man. His head snapped up; Rory discovered this trespasser to possess a large chin, floppy hair, and squinty eyes.
"A bit above your head, girl, rather too enormous than to what you're accustomed to knowing." The man stumbled over to her; Rory took a step back, but felt any sense of danger fade safely away as the man tripped and bumped his nose. He rubbed the honker as Rory quietly walked to him, squatting next to him. "Oh, hello, ground. Nice to meet you." He covered his nose and an eye with a large, spindly hand and asked Rory, "Tell me, am I bleeding?" He was completely serious. "Am I going to survive this?"
"You just hit your nose, so I guess so." Rory tilted her head, as if doing so could let her eyes see under his hand. From what she could assess, no blood was present. "I don't think it's bleeding." She sat down on her knees and said confidently, "I think you'll be okay."
"Oh, good. A big honker's one thing; however, people stare at you funny if you have a misshapen honker," the man said.
Rory looked at this strange man curiously as he settled back and finished messing with his face. "Who are you?" she wondered.
"I could ask you the same thing. I set the coordinates for Hartford, Connecticut, but I don't remember from previous lives rackets"—he grabbed Rory's racket, which she'd forgotten about, and waved it around, making Rory smile a little—"being used for self-defense."
Rory started off with the thing that made the most sense from that weird sentence. "You're a little off from Hartford, Connecticut," she said. She leaned back on her palms and said, looking around her, "You're in Star Hollows, Connecticut. You're off by about thirty minutes."
"Thirty minutes? So it's eighty-twenty-seven instead of seven-fifty-seven?" the man looked disapprovingly at his blue box. "Getting off by places is one thing, but please! You're getting off by time again!"
Rory didn't know where to start. She ended up stammering, "I mean that Hartford is thirty minutes away from. . . You're talking to your blue box."
The man looked at her, blinking against the brown hair in his eyes. "I am, thank you for noticing," he grinned. He offered his hand. "The name's The Doctor. And you are?"
Rory took his hand, and gave him a good, firm handshake, like she did with her grandfather. "The name's Lorelai, Lorelai Gilmore. Everyone calls me Rory, though."
This Doctor stared at her for a moment. She felt uncomfortable being sadly scruntized by this man, and said, "What is it? Did I say something wrong?"
"No," the Doctor murmured, "it's just that . . . I once ended up in another little girl's yard by accident, and I once knew a Rory, also."
"Cool. I like it. It's a good name. It's better than Junior," Rory joked. The Doctor didn't laugh like she'd hoped, though. He just gave her a soft smile. She cleared her throat and decided to change this conversation. "Where did you come from?" she wondered.
"Space," the Doctor said nonchalantly. He grinned to himself at her confused expression.
"I . . . I just wished on a star," she said quietly. "Are you, like, a wish-granter? Are you like my fairy godmother . . . er, godfather, then?"
"I've been something like a grandfather," the Doctor murmured, thinking of Susan. He looked at this blue-eyed, hesitant, curious girl, and wondered how she managed to remind him of so many people he knew—and lost.
"So . . . are you going to grant my wish?" Rory asked curiously.
The Doctor then remembered an important detail: he had no clue what this wish was. He opened and closed his mouth and then said, "Well, that depends. Remind me of that wish; what exactly was it?"
"I want to go traveling. I want to go to Fez," Rory said. She looked at the ground, her sentence trailing off lamely. It sounded so ridiculous out loud.
The Doctor grinned, like that was the best wish someone could ever wish. "Fez is cool," he said. He rocked himself up to his feet and offered his hand once more. "Run away with me, Rory."
"Whoa, no. I just met you. Ever heard of stranger danger, or, I don't know, kidnapping?" Rory asked, quirking an eyebrow.
"I'm no stranger. I'm your fairy grandfather. And am I not here to grant your wish, immediately and promptly, to boot?" The Doctor wanted to know.
"I wished that wish like six weeks ago," Rory said sarcastically.
The Doctor gave her a look.
"Just kidding. Sorry. That was me being my mother's daughter." Rory took his hand and said, "But wait! I have history homework to do."
"Oh, posh, homework. There's all the time in the world to write about things that have happened, but there are only so many times you can go experience history yourself. You've got plenty of time—so much time. But wait—what kind of history homework?" The Doctor wanted to know.
"Shakespeare," Rory said.
"Been there, done that. If we go and visit that era, I will have to make sure we don't run into one of my previous reincarnations and Martha. Oh, Martha. I forgot about her. How could I have forgotten about dear, fabulous, world-saving Martha?" He turned to Rory, one of his feet halfway into his blue box. "You've been bringing up people from my past a lot. I don't like it. I do try to forget, but you won't let me!"
Poor Rory was becoming more and more confused. Previous reincarnations? Someone named Martha? He was the one bringing up people she'd never met, not her. "What are you talking about? Where are we going?" Rory followed him into the blue box, and stopped short. Her blue eyes bulged; her head turned this way and that to take in the vast sci-fi room she'd just stepped into; she whorled around, about to step outside to make sure the outside of the blue box was as small as she thought she knew, when the Doctor said, bored, leaning against the big column thing-y in the middle of the room, "Oh, yes, this part. I forgot about this part. I haven't had many people in here for so long—you really are bringing up a lot of memories, Rory."
Rory ignored his weird words and instead said blankly, "It's big."
The Doctor allowed that, nodding in affirmation. "Yes, it is," he said, as if she were five.
"Like, really big. Like, this-shouldn't-be-possible big," Rory said.
The Doctor walked toward her, nodding. "I know."
Rory held her hands out before her in confusion. "How—how is this possible?"
"I don't really know. I mean, I don't know, how to explain Time Lord technology to you without blowing your mind. Young as you are, your brain-sponge can only hold so much before dripping out of your head," the Doctor said, tapping her skull.
"I have a 4.0 GPA. Try me," Rory said eagerly.
"Oh, I picked up a bookworm. Well, I love people who ask questions and say the word 'Why' and 'What' a lot," the Doctor said, and he smiled. "Those are my favorite kind of companions."
He gave her hair a ruffle and skipped away to the other side of the room. Rory cocked her head, trying to get a good look at him around the big column thing-y. "Well, are you going to tell me?"
"Tell you what?"
Rory waved a hand around. "How this all works. Why it's so big and stuff."
"That takes too much time," the Doctor said. He pressed buttons and pulled levers; the doors closed and the column thing-y began to beep and have lights fade in and out. There came that strange noise again.
"I thought we had plenty of time," Rory said smartly.
"Well . . . yes. . ." The Doctor groaned, and finally said, "Fine, you caught me. I just don't feel like explaining it all."
"Okay. . ." Rory didn't push him. She looked around the room. Her fingers ran lightly over the strange buttons. "What do you call this blue box?" she wondered.
"The TARDIS. It stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space," the Doctor said cheerfully.
Rory's hands shook; the entire ship was moving. "What does that mean?" Then her eyes widened. "Wait, this is a—"
"Spaceship? You get an A, Rory!"
"—A TIME MACHINE?!" Rory yelled, as the TARDIS vanished from her yard.
Lorelai had just laid her purse and keys on the dining room table when Rory came in through the back door. "Oh, there you are." Lorelai cracked her back. "You wouldn't believe the day I had. And Luke had the audacity to run out of coffee at seven-thirty at night! How dare he? I'm getting a warrant for his arrest." She glanced at her watch. "It's eight-oh-one. And I need coffee. We don't have any in the house, do we?"
"I don't know." Rory was dazed, walking around with wide blue eyes. Atop her head was a red hat with a dark little tassel off the top of it. She barely heard her mother; all she could think of was the time she'd just had with the Doctor, her fairy grandfather. They'd gone to Fez, Morocco. She'd seen the Ouzoud Falls; she'd walked through dusty markets and let a camel lick her hand. She'd walked atop rugged mountains and through narrow alleys. She'd tasted so many different foods like b'stilla and makouda. She'd pretty much dragged the Doctor, who was amused and pleased by her wide eyes, laughing, through the marketplace for them each to get a fez.
She also remembered him tipping his fez to her when he dropped her off, saying, "I'll pop around the next time you wish on your star. Now, if there's anything you should remember, it's this: your fairy grandfather says, 'Fezes are cool.'" He tipped it again, and whispered to her, "Good night, Rory Gilmore."
Then she'd watched the TARDIS disappear from sight.
Oh, what a wonder. It hadn't fully hit her yet, that she'd finally gone to Fez. That she'd traveled. That she'd been gone at all.
Then she remembered something. "Wait, what time is it?"
"Eight-oh-one. I said that like, one second ago. Where's your head? You're not the one who's running around with a caffeine deficient," Lorelai said as she scrounged through the fridge for dinner.
"Time machine," Rory whispered to herself. She grinned. She took off her hat and twirled its tassel around her finger as she relived everything in her mind.
Lorelai closed the fridge, her arms full of leftover Chinese and cheesecake. "Hey, where'd you get the fez from? It looks like an antique from the Kims' store." Lorelai took a bite of orange chicken on the way to the dining room table, and Rory smiled.
"Well, it is from the year 1789," Rory whispered to herself.
When her real grandfather gave her birthday money for a trip to Fez, Rory had a hard time hiding her secret smile. It wouldn't be a good idea to tell him that she didn't need it. Not when she had another grandfather who had a time-traveling spaceship.
Thanks for reading! Review?