Chapter One: Pilot
Whenever she looked in the mirror, she didn't see herself. Instead, she saw the body that carried her. Her mind was who she was, not the outside.
Yes, it's typical, like a mother saying "it's the inside that counts." But she decided she would only be defined by what her mind and her spirit told her. In her mind, there was nothing more powerful than thoughts. She was right.
Chara Lindsdale never thought of herself as interesting. Only in-between. She wasn't brilliant, she wasn't stupid. She wasn't pretty, she wasn't ugly. She wasn't skinny, not fat, not tall, not short, not interesting. More of the same.
Looking at her, you'd think she was just like every other fourteen year old out there. Likes shopping, likes chips, hangs out with her friends; has fun. That's just an inference. Chara hated shopping, okay, maybe she liked chips, and she could never be around the friends she had.
Stereotypically, people would categorize her as another chav, an ordinary want-to-be; a nobody. No future, no goals; nothing.
Nobody knew she liked to sing. Nobody knew she sang with the birds in the morning. No one cared that she loved music, and eighties was her favorite decade. No one ever asked.
No one ever cared until one day she met someone who would change her life in ways she could never have imagined. They changed her for the better.
This person was the Doctor. Around him, he made her feel special, like more than ordinary. Her friend Abby had asked Chara if she loved him. She said yes. Abby went away with the thought that her friend had fallen for an older man. But really, Chara thought of him as a father figure, someone who was always there. And he was.
Chara means "joy" in Greek. Before he died, her dad used to call her his joy in life. He died when Chara was six. And nobody called her their joy for the previous eight years of her life.
Then one day, everything changed.