A/N: This turned out different than I originally had the idea for, but I quite like it…I'm currently writing another Doctor Who story, but I've gotten so many ideas for oneshots that they're beginning to take over my mind. Haha, so I had to start writing this. Anyway, this isn't mine, because Doctor Who is British and I'm not. Enjoy!
The box sat in an ally, blue paint chipping off, the wood looking thousands of years old, though the people living in the town knew it was within ten years ago that the box appeared for the first time. There were, of course, those who said they had seen it before, but it had never lingered. Now, it seemed permanent, and not only a few noticed it. The white paint was chipping from years of weather, and one could hardly tell what it said any more, though nearly everyone knew it said Public Police Call Box.
No one quite knew how it had gotten there, though some said it belonged to an alien, biding its time. It was hardly joking anymore. In fact, right around the time the box appeared, so did more aliens—a month couldn't go by without some invasion somewhere. Torchwood was trying, but they just couldn't keep up.
Underneath the thick, peeling paint, silver bark was noticeable—some had thought that it was simply more paint, but after it began chipping too, it was learned that all the bark was the same colour. People had tried to open the door, find out what was inside, after this became obvious, but it seemed that it was impossible to get into. It had become almost a rite of passage—people would tell visiting friends or family that another friend had hidden something in the police box, and would ask if they could go fetch it for them. But no one ever could.
No one knew what the box was or what it had been through throughout the years—how could they? They didn't know that it was older than any of them, its age showing now that it had been left to die. They didn't know that it was this box which had helped save their world so many times since its creation. They couldn't know how many planets it had been on, how many wars it had been in—that it had been there when a specific world had fallen, giving guilt to both man and machine for hundreds of years. It was one of those things never explained, never examined—it wasn't important enough to know.
They had no idea that one woman, not quite as young as she once had been, often walked a few blocks to the box, trying to get the courage to open it. It wasn't known that she kept the beautiful, silver, old and new key with her at all times. Now the one thing in the entire universe that could open the box. And of course they couldn't know that a few months back she had finally gotten the courage, slipping the key into the lock and turning slowly, as if not to wake the sleeping machine. They were ignorant of the fact that she had walked around for hours, tears dripping down her face as she mourned someone lost so long ago. That amazing man who saved world, who was now gone forever.
And of course they didn't know that as she reached for the door, to leave, after reminiscing for so long, she heard a cough behind her, a skinny man in a trench coat who explained that the box was too far gone to come back, that it had taken all this time to get back and find that it was so close to being dead that it would never return. The last of its kind, gone. He could no longer travel.
The box would just become a memory, refreshed every time the two walked past the blue box with their children. They would tell them stories about that box, stories that would eventually fade from the immediate, as those who had experienced it faded. Stories that would eventually join the fiction and become indistinguishable from the lies.
The aging box would continue to grow old, becoming one of those things people assumed had been there forever. The box would never truly decompose, though one day the children would come back and learn that their parent's home for so many years no longer had any magic—it was still bigger on the inside, but nothing would rearrange, as if it was man-made.
It would become just what he said it would—an oddity in an ally, with hundreds of conspiracy theories about it, though none even came close to the original. The box was immortal, forever spawning curiosity and stories. But the real one was lost, the story of a mad man who stole a box and ran away, travelling the galaxy.
The stories would live on, despite the fact that everything else would fade away.