Eleven years ago, Julie Hadley wished for a doctor.
Kneeled down, hands together in prayer, like she was praying to a god, not her mum, Jules whispered her wishes aloud. "Mummy. Hello. How's heaven? Daddy says you're all right up there, but he also says oatmeal is good for you, so I don't have much reason to trust his opinions. I learned a new word at school today – or home-school, that's what daddy calls it. It's doctor. I know, daddy's laughing because I know what a paediatrician is, but I've never heard the word doctor. It's silly. Doctor's such a short word, but that's the perks of being home-schooled, I guess. You think it's so hard, and then the simple stuff gets you in the end."
Jules stopped rambling and breathed. Daddy told her rambling wasn't polite. "Well, anyway, we're going to move to London later. I know. It's a nightmare. Speaking of nightmares, I've been having this bad dream recurring again and again. Can you help me, mum? Daddy says, of course, you can't come down here and help, but I know you're listening. So, please, mummy, can you send a doctor? I mean, I haven't studied every single doctoral profession, but maybe a therapist, or a psychologist? Or maybe, a–"
And then there was a loud, huge wheezing sound, like an old man breathing haggardly, and Jules rolled her eyes. It was probably the neighbours making the racket. "Ignore that noise, mum. It's the neighbours."
But the sound was coming from the street, and it was loud and irritating and Jules certainly couldn't have a chat with her mother with the sound reverberating obnoxiously in the entire area. Jules sighed, said goodbye to her mother and promised to talk tomorrow.
Eventually the noise died down and Jules was able to go to sleep, curled up in the same bed she'd slept in for ten years. Honestly, she was scared to go to sleep, to go and sleep and unlock those bad dreams again, where the man with the ridiculous red hat – a fez? – and a bowtie told her, urgently, six words, again and again, all the time, before the darkness swallowed him and her and all she could hear was her own screaming.
She fell asleep, feeling no comfort after talking to her mum. It seemed that the doctor she had wished for wouldn't come at all. With nothing else to do, she fell asleep with the hope her nightmares were gone.
Of course, they weren't.
Jules opened her eyes to a dark, damp cave, with the sticky, underwater feeling of a dream. The only light was a bioluminescent, green orb that floated in mid-air almost edgily, tense and nervous as if Jules's presence made it uneasy. Always in her dream, she walked closer to the orb, her hand stretched out, wanting to touch the odd sphere.
And always before she could touch it, the orb disappeared, leaving her in darkness. After moments of silence and dimness, a smaller, greener orb glowed, bringing a buzzing noise with it. The man in the bowtie held up the light to his face – Jules was always confused what the second light was; it seemed to be attached to something, like a miniature, thin torch, or a screwdriver with a light at the end – and hurriedly whispered six words, always the same.
DAY. GOD. CRY. SEE. BAD. DIE.
After the six words came darkness and a cacophony of noises so chilling that Jules shuddered and spun around constantly, even though she couldn't make out anything in the blackness.
There was the animal hooting, the hissing, the weeping, the screaming, the whimper and then – and then the silence, the overbearing, overwhelming absence of noise, even worse than the noises. Because the noises meant something was there, but the silence, the silence enveloped and encompassed everything around her, and she sure she was alone. Alone was bad. Alone was terrible. Alone was how she always felt.
She would wake up now. Jules waited for the inevitable shriek, her own shriek, and waking up covered in cold sweat. But it didn't come. Instead, came the bowtie man's voice, echoing through the silence like a pinprick of hope in the darkness. He said two more words, a command, which, this time, Jules followed:
WAKE UP.
She jerked awake and standing over her was the bowtie man, the man in her dreams, now in reality.
"Finally!" the man said gesturing his hands around for dramatic affect. "You're awake! You humans do sleep ever so heavily, don't you?"
"Excuse me?" Jules said. This man was acting awfully rude. What was he doing in her house? What was he doing in her bedroom? "Get out of my room!"
He looked offended. "It's, what?" he checked his wristwatch, which he wore the wrong way around. "2014? I'm sure you get taught manners in school."
Jules was starting to be offended as well. "Perhaps you didn't go to school, which explains your manners.
Instead of being affronted, the man laughed. "My school? Nah, we didn't learn manners, we learnt temporal alterations in the space time continuum and recreational atomic science and occasional corporeal physics. All that jazz. Awfully boring. I don't go anymore, of course, I burned my school down. Long story. Involves a Kargorian cow, some angry alien villagers and a hamburger. Lovely things, hamburgers."
Jules laughed as well, not understanding a word he said, but finding him incredibly funny. "I don't really go to school. I'm home-schooled by my dad because he travels a lot for work and I never have time to settle anywhere."
Then, realising what she said, she frowned. "Why did I tell you that?"
The man took out a tool – a screwdriver with a green globe at the tip? – and pressed a button, making the globe glow and an immensely loud buzzing sound, very familiar.
"Hmm. A truth field. Level … two, maybe? Strong enough for you to say whatever's at the tip of our mind. Not strong enough, however, to say everything on your mind. The truth, nasty thing. Always avoided the truth. Rule one with the Doctor, I lie. A lot." He said this all very fast and Jules was finding it hard to keep up with him.
"I'm finding it hard to keep up with you," she said suddenly and clamped her hand over her mouth.
The man smiled. "Most people do. It's fine by me, really, just nod like you know what I mean whenever I take a break."
Jules tilted her head, and this time a truth field, or whatever it was, didn't stop her from saying it: "You're really confusing."
"I suppose I am," he said happily and went around waving and buzzing his screwdriver around her room. "By the way," he said, after checking under her bed and telling her that under bed were a very good hiding place, "my name's the Doctor."
"Doctor who?" Jules asked, watching the crazy man walk around her room and buzz – scanning, he'd called it, scanning with the sonic screwdriver.
The Doctor cringed. "Dangerous words, those. What's your name?"
"Julia Ambrose Hadley," she said before she could think. "And what are you doing in my room?"
"Well, Julia Ambrose Hadley–"
She shook her head adamantly. "Just Jules."
"Well, Just Jules," the Doctor said, smiling. "I am in your room to find out what that awful noise is."
"What noise?" Jules asked. The only noise in the room was the both of them talking and the "sonic screwdriver". "Because if you're talking about the buzzing, it's your screwdriver, and that means you must be as daft as you look."
The Doctor shook his head. "You're a human, you can't hear it because it's too high for your hearing range. But most other species can hear it. Aliens around here are writhing in agony because of that awful racket your room is making. And I intend to find out what it is," he said and the buzzing screwdriver went off again.
"Aliens? Did you say aliens?" Julie shook her head. "You know what? Never mind. The only sound in this room is your blasted wand."
The Doctor looked thoroughly offended. "Excuse me? Did you refer to my sonic screwdriver as a 'wand'? I've seen wands; made friends with some, rubbish conversationalists to be honest. This," he said, twirling his screwdriver, "is not a wand!"
"It looks like a wand," Julie said.
"And you look like a hairless ape," the Doctor said, and then turned abruptly to the screwdriver in his hand, caressing it gently. "Shh, don't listen to the little girl, she's just deranged."
"I'm not the deranged one," she said honestly and the Doctor snorted.
"Yeah, well, I'm too early," the Doctor said, and at Julie's questioning look, he added, "The sound hasn't fully matured yet. The crescendo isn't at its highest. I have to rework the controls, move a little forward in the sound's time stream … I'll be back!"
He rushed out the door, out of her house, and he was gone. Later, a loud, wheezing noise erupted around her house, much louder than any noise the Doctor's wand created.
He never came back.
Well, not for another eleven years, at least.
On the day her doctor finally came, Julie was busy setting fire to children's desks and unleashing hungry little rats from their cages.
"You don't have anything to be afraid of, they're harmless, they–" Julie yelled to the students screaming and rushing out the door, the fire alarms blaring.
The only reason she was there was for work experience day. The classroom teacher had gone out to get coffee, leaving Julie to teach the kids chemistry. The innocent chemistry lesson had gone with children setting tables on fire and causing the sprinklers to go off and a chaotic class to release an army of rats. Rats and children – weren't they the same thing? – scurried out the door, abandoning Julie.
Soaked, annoyed and sick of school, she trudged back to her car, drove home and lurched inside. Her father was still in Germany; he had decided when Julie was eight that she was a growing young girl, so they decided not to go to London, and they stayed in a nice place in Oxford. That is, until last year, when her father started travelling for work again, flying everywhere for meetings and other boring things. Always, he left Julie behind, making her feel more alone than ever.
She sighed as she unlocked the front door and leaned against it, clutching the knob like life support. The silence in her house was all encompassing, creating an atmosphere of loneliness and sadness. She opened her eyes to the familiar hallway of her home, with stands for umbrellas and shoes throw ungracefully on the carpet and –
Footprints? Muddy footprints? Very clumsily splattered around her hallway, like someone had just waltzed in all over her carpet. The dread came after; was there somebody still in her house, lurking, doing whatever intruders did? Whoever they were, they weren't doing a very good job as an intruder.
She followed the footsteps quietly, feeling like she was in a detective movie. Tiptoeing and rounding a corner, she found the prints lead to her room. Silently, she pushed the door open and in her room was a frenetic young man waving a screwdriver about.
"Who are you?" Julie asked and recognised the man suddenly, the past eleven years flooding back to her. It was the man who had haunted her dreams for a month, and then suddenly stopped them as he appeared, real and in the flesh, in her room, buzzing a magic wand around. He'd told her he would return soon, and never showed up. Until now, standing casually in her room and waving the wand about.
The Doctor groaned. "We did this five minutes ago. Can this wait until I've," – and then he began smacking the screwdriver against his head, yelling gritted words with every smack – "figured – out – what – this – sound – is!"
Julie ignored his words entirely, focusing instead on his face. "You're … young. Still! It's been eleven years and you still look twenty five."
"Humans," the Doctor said irately. "Worrying about appearances at a time like this."
And then suddenly the Doctor yelled out in agony, crouching down and slamming his hands against his ears. Julie ran over to him and repeatedly asked if he was okay, but he was just screaming and screaming and shaking until he ran out of breath and energy and just squirmed. Julie didn't know what was happening, but it was scary; the Doctor was the most composed person she'd ever met, and she'd only known him for a few minutes.
Eventually, the Doctor stopped yelling and his hands shook, but he let them hang by his sides finally, panting loudly, sweat plastering his crazy hair to his forehead.
"Are you all right?" Julie asked, pondering silently if the Doctor was a deranged, asylum escapee as well as a man who aged very well.
"I'm fine," he said and then frowned. "No, I'm not. I'm far from fine. Would you be fine if your entire race, your family and friends were all wiped out, dead and dead and you had the power to save them but you can't? Me neither. And I can't figure out what that noise is. It's so … explosive. It rises and falls, but the frequency detector predicts its highest note will come very soon. I just have to wait. I don't like waiting the slow way. It's boring. I don't know how you humans manage it."
"So the reason you were crouching and screaming," Julie said slowly, trying to absorb it all, "is because of the noise? Because it went really loud and you couldn't handle it?"
The Doctor nodded, breathing shallowly beside her.
"You said only aliens can hear the sound. Are you an alien?" Julie asked, only half-heartedly, because she was trying to lighten up the mood.
"Well…" the Doctor said. "Technically you're the alien to me."
Julie snorted. "You think you're really funny."
"You don't believe me."
"Well, you came into my bedroom twice without my permission and now you're acting like a crazy lunatic. Forgive me if I'm a little doubtful."
"Feel my chest."
Julie almost fell over in her crouched position. His voice held no trace of suggestiveness but his words made Julie blush. "I have a boyfriend."
"I had one once," the Doctor said dismissively. "Stupid things, boyfriends. How was I supposed to know it needed feeding?"
Julie didn't know if he was being legitimate or if he was trying to make her laugh. "I have a boyfriend," she repeated.
The Doctor rolled his eyes. "Put your hand where my heart is."
Slowly, Julie did. She felt the familiar, repetitive thump of the heartbeat, but she felt another heartbeat dancing along.
"Oh, my God," Julie said and bit back a scream. "You're an alien!"
The Doctor made a face. "Not many species really approve of that term. I mean, it implies that somebody's different. We've all made mistakes in the past, but android marriage is now legal. It just goes to show all of us are the same insi–"
Julie yelped again, staring at her hands, and then at the Doctor. "How do you even have two hearts? Is that possible? How does it fit?"
The Doctor shrugged. "I've been told I have a very spacious body."
Julie ignored him, frantically staring back and forth between the Doctor and his screwdriver and herself. He is an alien, she thought, oh, my God, is he going to eat me? Julie stared at the Doctor's slight build and decided he wasn't capable of consuming her, thankfully.
"Is that why you're young?" she demanded. "Do you have a replenishing thingy with you aliens? Fountain of Youth?"
"I've been to the Fountain of Youth before," the Doctor said, examining his screwdriver. "Rubbish tourism over there. The guides didn't notice all the Kragaga lurking in the shadows. Had to save the planet. Again."
"Why are you young?" she demanded again.
The Doctor kept looking his screwdriver, as if looking for a fault. "I'm actually more than a thousand years old, really."
Julie began screaming again. "Why do you look like a floppy, skinny guy with a bad chin?"
He self-consciously rubbed his chin. "Whatever. We have to go."
Julie felt her annoyance seep back. This was her house, and this stranger wasn't allowed to order her around. She was about to speak up, when she heard a set of heavy, deliberate footsteps, like an army marching towards her house.
"What is that?" she whispered.
The Doctor grinned sloppily. "Well, a loud, booming sound echoes throughout the solar system, right? Any neighbouring aliens that don't immediately die from the noise come and investigate. Looks like they're finally here."
"What? Are they bad? Will they kill us? Do they hate you?" All her questions tumbled out of her mouth without knowing it. Perhaps the truth field the Doctor had talked about had been working at Julie and her dad all these years, bringing out their thoughts, and suddenly she felt worried. Had she let secrets slip around her household? Had her dad?
"Um, well, yes, yes, and yes. Now, run for your life!"
Julie, fully aware the Doctor was the safest thing she could hold on, grasped his hand and began speeding out of her house. As they sprinted from her house, past her garden and out onto the street, she felt a rush of exhilaration. When she'd been younger, she'd found herself breathless and exhausted from moving around from place to place. When her father had decided to settle down, she'd found not moving was worse, staying still creating an atmosphere of boredom and tediousness and watching her father run away all those times, deserting her.
Being with the Doctor was thrilling, intoxicating. She felt her skin crawl and her breath quicken and her heart beat. It wasn't that the Doctor made her feel that way exactly, but what he did, his excitement for adventure, his familiarity with running, the odd way he talked. He was a walking, talking distraction, and Julie felt terribly good about it.
As they turned around a street corner and stopped, the stomping, marching sounds faded away. Julie couldn't help but notice a blue, big, police box, like in the old days. The Doctor notice her looking at it, "Come on, we have to go in there."
Julie looked at him strangely. Maybe the Doctor was a mental patient after all. "It's bigger than a normal one, I'll give you that, but we'd hardly fi–"
A deafening explosion interrupted her, happening no more than a few hundred metres above them. Heat washed over her, and she almost felt like she was burning. The noise had the force of an atomic bomb, shuddering throughout the neighbourhood, and, possibly, the city. Julie crouched and covered her ears, not unlike the Doctor previously. Debris rained upon them, ashes coming down in torrents.
"What was that?" she yelled as the Doctor ducked being pummelled by flaming rocks.
"My – my enemies, they – while they were searching for the source of the sound, they found me. They've found something much more valuable, and they intend on attaining it."
A kilometre away, another explosion echoed.
"Come on! The box!" the Doctor said while stooping down, Julie grasping his hand again.
They ran through a rainfall of rubble, ignored by horrified people coming out of their houses and staring at the wreckage. The Doctor clicked his fingers loudly and the doors of the box swung open. They dashed in, the Doctor closing the doors and – and Julie gasped.
The interior of the box was massive. What Julie had stepped inside was something similar to maybe a spaceship's control room in a sci-fi movie. It was a shaped like a cylinder, neon blue, with funny, little half-spheres decorating the walls. Stairs and railings lead up to several other doors, and a hexagonal console was in the middle of the room, a cylindrical, glass object in the centre. Strange rings and symbols encircled the ceiling, and Julie found herself fascinated.
"It's big," she gasped, overwhelmed by the strangeness of it all. "It's bigger, on the inside!"
The Doctor, running around the console and flipping switches, pulling levers and slamming buttons, smiled as if sharing a private joke. "Really? Nobody's told me that before."
"No, really, it's amazing," Julie said. She didn't need a truth field to make her speak honestly this time.
The Doctor blushed, and the machine hummed, almost appreciative, as if it could hear her and was grateful. "She likes you saying that," he said.
"She?"
"The TARDIS. That's her name, the machine," the Doctor said, stroking the wall softly.
Julie giggled. "It has a name?"
Immediately, the TARDIS turned bright red, blaring and shaking, throwing Julie to the side, the Doctor hurriedly fussing over the console and muttering comforting words. When the machine's klaxon noise died down and the reddish glare faded, Julie stood up, panting and breathless.
"The TARDIS is sensitive," the Doctor said to Julie.
"Yeah, I figured that much," Julie said, and then the TARDIS began clamouring again, flashing red. Julie was hurled violently across the machines screaming as alarms screeched, the Doctor frantically flipping switches and pressing buttons. However, it seemed that the TARDIS's temper tantrum wouldn't stop, as it began making a whooshing, haggard breathing noise and the Doctor groaned.
"Now you've made her angry! She's dematerialising," he said, shouting over the uproar of noise. "You haven't even been here for five minutes! The last one had to stay in the TARDIS for a few trips for the old girl to get really furious."
"Last one?" Julie echoed, grabbing a railing to steady her. "Do you pick up women regularly?"
"No! Well, technically," the Doctor said, and then the sounds calmed down.
Next thing Julie knew, the Doctor was flung out of the TARDIS doors, and so was Julie. Landing ungracefully outside, somewhere, the doors of the police box slammed shut and the Doctor rose next to her.
"Wonderful!" the Doctor said, grumbling and not bothering to hide his annoyance. "Now she's locked us out. Eh, she'll calm down eventually."
"What do we do until then?" Julie asked, and the Doctor gave her a grin and she knew he had no idea as well. Looking around, she realised they weren't in her neighbourhood streets anymore. They were standing on a hill, overlooking some houses. "We – we moved? Where are we? What the f–"
"Language," the Doctor said teasingly, and then stood up. "Looks like … we're only a couple hundred miles off Oxford. And it's still the same time zone, so that's good."
"A couple hundred?" Julie was shocked. "How did we move?"
"Well, the science and molecular education of the early 21st century Earth can't really comprehend or explain it, but it's an act of assembling atoms together and thrusting the atoms through a time vortex, or a space void, or other temporal environments, targeting them to a specific point in space or time through coordinates, moving them somewhere else, though the TARDIS is also a ship, so it can easily travel like a normal spaceshi–"
"Don't. Please don't."
The Doctor looked slightly disappointed that his opportunity to baffle her was gone. Julie sighed and looked around, and then saw a very familiar sight.
"A couple hundred metres, huh?" she said and pointed directly down the hill, where her house's backyard was. She recognised the cheap, mangy house and her dirty, old garden surrounded by posh, lustrous ones.
The Doctor saw it, said, "Oh," and then shrugged. "Okay, I was a little off. I didn't pass my time vortex orienteering with flying colours."
"Your stupid machine just moved us a few dozen metres away. Seriously," Julie said and sighed.
The Doctor grumbled. "Well, that explains why the awful noise is still there," he said while brandishing his screwdriver and scanning the hill they were on.
"And that explains the pounding sounds," Julie said and then pointed at the opposite side of the hill, where a bunch of shady, metallic figures, like robots, were marching up methodically. She guessed they were the Doctor's enemies, by the way they rose up their arms, lasers rising up from their palms, aimed straight at her and the Doctor.
"Run!" he said and grabbed her wrist and began dashing down the hill towards her house, for what seemed like the third time today.
"Do you do this often?" she shouted as they went faster with momentum, like gliding down a child's slide.
"Yep!"
Laser beams shot from over their heads, making Julie scream a little. The Doctor laughed, and finally Julie was completely aware that the Doctor was crazy. He was a madman, his greatest love adventure, and his fondness for his machines. He was a lunatic, brought bliss by built things rather than human hearts, turned on by death. And she found that she was completely fine with this, fine with the fact that what the Doctor needed was also distractions, distractions from loneliness, perhaps, or distractions from sadness. She needed distractions, he needed distractions, and, in each other, they found a distraction.
One other thing that distracted her was the metal arm that clamped around her wrist like an iron grip. And when she looked up, she saw it was an iron grip, a steel hand clasped around her arm. She saw one of the robotic things holding her arm and yanking her to stand with it. Around the robot, others of its kind came from behind, standing and holding her prisoner.
The Doctor, when he'd seen Julie taken captive stopped and stared, wide eyed, at the robots and her.
"Get off of me!" Julie yelled, thrashing wildly in the robots' grip. "What do you want with me?"
"The Cybermen have drawn the conclusion that the Doctor has a special attachment to you, like most of his past companions," the robot said in an ominous tone. "One of the Doctor's weaknesses is his emotions, and the Cybermen have decided to trade your life for the Doctor's."
"Never," the Doctor said, much to Julie's surprise. She'd only known the Doctor for less than half an hour, but had decided, in that time, that he was a noble man. This was very uncharacteristic, and it vaguely hurt her. "I'm more important than a human."
The Cybermen were just as confused as Julie. "What is the explanation for this? All databases and records show the Doctor would have traded his life for the human in situations like this. Perhaps we predicted wrong."
Apparently, the Cybermen weren't used to being wrong. One of them spoke up. "Impossible! The Cybermen are never wrong!"
"Agreement," one said. "This must be a ploy to puzzle us and disarray our line of thinking. We have one objective, and that is to obtain the Doctor and bring him to the Cyberking."
"That is illogical," another argued. "We cannot bring an enemy on board our ship. We must attain all the information we can and then delete the Doctor."
Soon, all of them were arguing, and Julie was confused. They'd acted like one, single force, with one, single goal driving them, like a hive. Maybe all the Cybermen were actually individuals and could act of their own accord, have their own opinions.
"We shall document this event. The Doctor is not as altruistic as we think," the Cyberman with its grip on Julie intoned.
"If the Doctor will not trade himself for his friend, we shall have to bring him aboard the Cybership. There are no alternatives," one Cyberman said.
"If that is the case, what of the human female?" The one holding Julie pointed directly at her.
"She shall be upgraded," another one, the leader possibly, answered, and the decision was final. Some Cybermen began advancing on the Doctor, and the one keeping her captive began pulling her across the hill.
All this time, Julie had stared at the Doctor the whole time, and during the whole time, he hadn't looked at her, except once. A split second, a flicker of the face, but long enough so Julie saw his wink. As they dragged her away, Julie began yelling.
"Upgraded? Into what? Into you?" Julie flailed frenetically, trying to resist the Cyberman's pull. "I'd rather die!"
"That is the objective," the Cyberman intoned and Julie paled. "The objective is to kill off all human emotions and feelings, and replace them with the superior knowledge and thinking of a Cyberman. Many humans treat it as torture and punishment, but it is a glory to join the Cyberiad."
"No thanks," she said and watched the Doctor throw his sonic screwdriver into the air, soaring for a few seconds before Julie caught it in her free hand. Quickly, imitating the Doctor, she pressed a button, but the screwdriver didn't open.
As Cybermen yelled, "Warning, warning, the human female is in possession of a Time Lord weapon," Julie screamed to the Doctor, "It's not working!"
"Push it harder!"
Julie did so, aiming the sonic at the Cybermen, and his other arm exploded.
It was a nasty experience for Julie. The little explosion had been so close, it almost burned her face. She had ducked, so only her hair was charred black, but it still hurt her. "How does a screwdriver do that?"
The Cybermen advancing on the Doctor turned and started marching towards her. Julie shrieked, pressed the screwdriver again and the Cyberman's fingers flinched away, as if two magnets of the same polarities were trying to touch. She ran, tossed the screwdriver back to the anxious, running Doctor, who missed it clumsily.
She only had time to curse the Doctor, his TARDIS and his goddamn magic wand, when the Cybermen began descending on her.
Julie crouched down, cowering and about to die, when the Cybermen started crouching down as well, all of them yelling different things, like, "System meltdown! Unidentified noise, frequency Level One Million, Million! Soundwave unbearable! Cyberman brain unable to cope!"
Julie, slightly horrified, realised that, the noise, the one she couldn't hear because she was human, was reaching a crescendo. She rushed over to the Doctor, who was also on the ground, sobbing, because the noise was ear-splitting.
His ears began to bleed, and she looked away, just sitting next to him and hesitantly stroking his hair. After a while, the Doctor croaked, "Julie?"
"Yes, Doctor, I'm here," she said.
"Please…please…the noise is unbearable…" the Doctor said, and Julie felt a rush of sympathy for the man. Was he going to die?
"I know. And I'm sorry," she added gently, knowing that was what kind people said.
"Humans," he said, trying to be amused. "So…human. Apologising for things that aren't your fault."
And then the Doctor began convulsing again, twitching and crying and writhing in pain, his hand futilely slammed on his ears. Julie couldn't do anything but watch him sadly.
Surprisingly, the Doctor talked again, in a painful wheeze. "I-I can't bear the sound … please, Julie."
"I can't do anything, Doctor," she said, and feeling terrible about it.
"You can – I can … transfer the sound, a bit of it, to you…" He sounded hesitant, as if he really didn't want to do it.
Julie jumped at the offer. "Of course," she said, though her heart wasn't really in it. If the noise was loud and horrible enough to make the Doctor, supreme alien, cry, what would it do an average human being?
The Doctor, exhausted and pained, reached out his arms, placed them on either side of Julie's head, and she began to hear the noise.
She had thought the noise was some horrible, clashing clamour of yelling and shouting, like rock music, for example. She had thought the noise was extremely loud and she would start keeling over from pain immediately. She had expected the noise, the sound, to be a roar, a bellow, a thunderous caterwaul.
What she hadn't expected was a song.
The noise that seeped into her head was a song, a screeching, squealing, squalling, screaming song, filled with pained cries of sorrow. The sound was loud, all right, but instead of keeling over, she began crying at this melancholy, mournful melody. The loudness wasn't what made it horrifying; it was the sadness that came with it, a beautiful and terrible warble of hurt and regret, and it made all those unfilled silences, the loneliness and the feeling of abandonment come rushing back to her. Musical moans filled her ears, cramming in every corner and relishing at every tear Julie made. It made her think of her darkest, deepest moments, and tears falling from her eyes like raindrops. Her throat was thick as she listening to the horrible, high trill, getting increasingly louder and louder, a crescendo of cries, a tune of terror. The song, most of all, made her think of death and the pleasure she would find in dropping dead, right now, to stop the horrible music pounding in her ears. Death, where she would find happiness. Death, where, eventually, nobody was left behind.
She finally woke up, curled up in a fetal position, with the Doctor sitting beside her, staring solemnly in the distance. Slowly, she crawled into a sitting position. Eventually, she found her voice. "How long was I out?"
"Half an hour."
"Half an hour?" she echoed, shocked. The music that consumed her had felt like it went on for an eternity, but also a minute as well. She stared at him, waiting for him to think of something baffling in return, but he was just sombrely looking over the hill, and Julie realised he was regretful.
Regretful because he had passed on the sound, the dreadful, depressing sound to her, his friend, and he was feeling guilty, because in his moments of pain there was nothing else he could have done that would have lead him to not dying. Regretful because Julie, less than an hour after meeting him had decided to trust him fully and let him grant her agony, momentary, but agony nonetheless, without more than a few second's doubt. Regretful because he had ruined another of his companion's life already.
Not meeting his eyes, Julie sidled up to the Doctor and sat next to him, listening to him breathe. She eventually leaned her head on his shoulder and asked, "Where did the Cybermen go?"
"I finished them off," he said in a strangely flat voice. "Though one of them ran off, back to the Cybership probably. Possibly sending back-up troops now."
Julie was alarmed. "Then why are we sitting around, waiting for them to come?"
"We aren't!" he proclaimed loudly. "Right now, we're going to your house, the heart of that awful racket, to find out what it is."
"So, what you're saying is that you were almost killed, and now you're going to meet with what almost killed you?" Julie didn't even know why she was still surprised with him.
"Exactly," he said, happy she understood. "Good that you're catching on."
Rolling her eyes, Julie and the Doctor ran, running like hell was on their heels, which it kind of was.
Wasn't that always the way with the Doctor?
The first thing the Doctor did when they arrived at her house was realise he needed the TARDIS. So, with Julie making irritated comments all the way up the hill, they got back inside the sentient machine, whose tantrum had gone.
The Doctor made the first trip with Julie in the TARDIS, planning to just materialise in front of her house. He still materialised where he wanted to, except a thousand millennia back. Julie, still annoyed beyond comprehension, was the first to step out of the machine and inside her room, where the TARDIS had materialised.
"You're rubbish at using that thing," she said, dusting herself off. "Didn't you need to take a test to drive the TARDIS?"
"Oh, yes," he said, Julie surprised he wasn't waving the screwdriver madly around like usual. "I didn't pass."
"Typical," Julie muttered and collapsed on her bed. "So what're you going to do to my room? Explosions are not appreciated."
"I'm going to attach a speaker to the sound, which seems to be coming from right here, rewire it so it rings out a certain frequency, blasting the Cybermen from the sky," he said, scratching his chin. "But I need to get it to the right frequency, otherwise both of us will hear the sound and die, and seven billion humans will be dying right and left."
"You're risking it?" she asked, surprised. "You're risking a whole planet's population?"
"Risks are what I live for," he said, grinning. Moments later, he added, "Plus, I wouldn't do it unless I was sure it was going to work. And of course it's going to work, because I'm the Doctor and I make people better."
"Whatever," Julie said and slumped herself across her bed, watching the Doctor work.
It was fascinating, watching him bring out contraptions from the TARDIS, crazy gizmos and weird little machines, buzzing, beeping, blipping. He brought out a long, long piece of wire and a kind of speaker, with long tendrils like cables, lengthening and shortening erratically and zapping with electricity. He, much to Julie's protests, got out a gun and began shooting her floor, except instead of bullets flying out, a cubic piece of earth had suddenly disappeared, leaving a metre-deep hole in the middle of her room.
"Are you paying for that?" Julie asked.
"I'd have to have money to pay for that, and even if I did, I wouldn't."
Julie rolled her eyes. "Figures."
He thrust the speaker inside the earth, and shot her floor again. The earth suddenly returned, as if the hole had never been there, except that now there was a giant speaker in her room.
"The cables leech into the earth, destroying everything in its path until it finds the loudest sound," the Doctor explained. "Always kept oddities like that. And I'm the last of my race, almost dead and have two hearts, so I'm really saying something. You never know when metal-based aliens with a fetish for being a loudspeaker can be useful, am I right?"
Julie didn't even want to know why the Doctor kept an alien on board, or why the alien liked being a loudspeaker, so just watched as the Doctor attached the extensive wire to the speaker and began switching buttons on.
"What's it going to do?" Julie asked, still a little confused. It was always confusing around the Doctor.
He grinned. "Watch," he said and pushed a lever.
Immediately, a warbling, wavering sound that definitely wasn't the sorrowful song Julie cried at began resonating throughout the area. It travelled through the neighbourhood, the hill and possibly the whole city. It made Julie's skin crawl.
"What was that?" she asked.
Suddenly, the Doctor wasn't grinning. He was blank-faced, standing erect with his hands to his sides. Slowly, but surely, his skin began to morph. His pale flesh hardened, became shinier and more silver, until it was the shell of a robot's. The Doctor was no longer there – or had it never been the Doctor? Had the thing travelling with her this whole time been a Cyberman, a monster?
Julie, afraid and anxious, grabbed for the sharpest thing she could find. She found a long metal rod with a curve at the end, like a staff, except it had a grip at the end with a dozen buttons reading gibberish she couldn't understand.
"Where's the Doctor?" she demanded. "Who are you?"
"I am Cyberiad Member, Rank Cyber Scout 2, name Delta 23991D," the Cyberman said in its unsettling, sing-song voice. Julie noticed it spoke by placing inflections on the wrong syllables in words. "And the location of the Doctor is not of your concern."
"It so is!" Julie argued. "I'm his friend. I deserve to know where he is. And what was that loud sound you made with the speaker? I don't suppose you blew up your friends like we were supposed to?"
"I did not detonate my fellow Cybermen. The noise was a warning and a call, to bring the Cybership here and begin investigation of" – and then, for the first time, the Cyberman almost looked like it flinched – "the resounding noise. Our Cybership was badly damaged on our way to Planet Earth, and we had no means of tracking down the sound. Now, we have the location."
"Where is the Doctor?"
Apparently, the truth field worked on Cybermen too, because it suddenly spilled out the truth. "The Doctor is inside his TARDIS. With a lack of time before you woke up from your sleep, I hid him behind the console after the other Cybermen distracted him and I managed to shoot his back and knock him unconscious. I planned on using his brain to create another Cyberman, perhaps, and if he was incompatible, the Cyberking would still be satisfied with the information the Doctor would give."
Julie, never taking her eyes off the still Cyberman, rushed into the TARDIS and found the Doctor lying limply against a console. He had his screwdriver in his pocket, which explained why Cyber-Doctor hadn't used the screwdriver.
She tried shaking him awake (which didn't work), shouting at him (which didn't work either), so she resorted to slapping him (which finally worked). Dazed, he sat upright, staring at her and nursing his chin. "Julie, the Cybermen are–"
"Yes, yes, I know," she said. "But everything's all right now. Except for the fact that a Cyberman is waiting outside the TARDIS. And he called a bunch of his automaton friends. And now we're going to die a horrible death. You're going to think of a way out of this anyway, right?"
The Doctor's eyes widened. "A Cyberman is outside?"
"Well, you can think of something, right?" Julie was optimistic. "Wave your wand and the bot is gone?"
"First of all, it's not a wand. Second of all, they're cyborgs. Third of all, get me a fez."
"Are you serious?"
"No, I'm never serious, but get me the fez anyway," he said, and Julie, after a moment of ruffling through the mess on the floor, found a bright red fez and handed it to him.
"Okay, can we kill some robots now?"
"They're cyborgs."
"Whatever."
"That's what President Galkoon said, and then they legalised android marriages. I've always said that–"
The Cybermen began shooting beams of fire towards the TARDIS doors. Julie bit back a scream and signalled for the Doctor to throw the doors open. One, two, three, and then the Doctor clicked, the doors swinging open loudly.
The Doctor brought out the screwdriver and waved furiously – similar to how a Harry Potter witch or wizard waves their wand, Julie noticed – an irritating buzz flowing through the room.
The Cyberman's gun stopped shooting and sparks flew as its arm fell to the floor. The Doctor buzzed the thing again, the other arm zapping and then flew away, as if a magnetised. The entire body crumbled away, the chest collapsing inwards and the legs shuddered and broke in quarters. The head was left on the pile of metal, looking sad.
"Can we keep him?" Julie questioned, looking at the lone head, wire and cable poking out under the decapitated metal. "We can call him Handles because of the things on his head–"
"This isn't the time, Julie," he said, quickly lifting the head up and placing it inside one of the discarded items in the TARDIS. Immediately the TARDIS began whirring and the screens lit up, reading:
INFORMATION EXTRACT PROCEEDING AS SOON AS POSSIBLE.
"What are you doing?" Julie wondered as the machine began whirring again.
"The information extract is going to start soon. It means all the information in the Cyberman's head is going to be leeched out," the Doctor said solemnly. "After that, I'm destroying the thing."
"What?" Julie was alarmed. "So you're going to take out all it's knowledge? No! You can't do that! The Cybermen live on information."
"I'm not going to let it live!" he said. "It tried to kill us both!"
"So? You're the better person. Be the better person. Let it live," she said.
Oddly enough, Julie felt sympathetic to the Cybermen, who once were human, and were stripped of their very emotions and things that made them human. Julie didn't like the idea of the Doctor killing anything, human or not.
They glared at each other for a few seconds, and then the Doctor relented. "Fine. But I'm going to make it do all the work."
The screens read:
INFORMATION EXTRACT CANCELLED.
And he stayed true to his word. He attached the Cyber head to another contraption, pressed multiple buttons and had it scanning codes, downloading software and rewriting the Cybership's engines, to delay it from coming to Julie's house.
After that, he began attaching wires to the head – Handles, Julie called it – and typing furiously fast on a keyboard. When Julie asked what he was doing, the Doctor replied, "Saving your life."
He worked like a madman, which he was. Julie tried to figure out what he was doing and only understood when she saw explosives in his hands.
"You're not exploding my house," she said.
"As much as I would like to, I am not," he said. "I am, however, exploding the earth underneath your house."
"Why? I like my ground un-exploded."
"Really? How boring."
And then he got out a laptop, wired up the Cyber head and typed as fast as he could, his brow furrowed in concentration. When he'd stopped typing, the earth in front of Julie disappeared.
She shrieked and scrambled away from the hole, which was miles and miles and miles deep. Breathing shallowly, she turned to the Doctor and screamed, "What did you do?"
"I converted reality, by wiring the computer up with Handles and creating a makeshift Reality Modifier," he said, picking up his explosives now. "I basically found the whole structure of space, and chose that spot of earth and converted it. I altered the whole of reality. With a MacBook! Who'd have thought?"
Julie kind of understood. "So that patch of earth is gone? Forever?"
"No, no, making things disappear entirely is impossible," he said. "I, ah, placed it somewhere else. Just plopped it off somewhere a little far from here."
She imagined somebody in China screaming as a skyscraper-length block of dirt appeared suddenly in front of him or her.
"But why are you exploding the earth underneath my house?" she asked. "Is this because I made that jibe about your chin? Because–"
"No," the Doctor said. "I need the explosion to, well, release whatever's down there."
"There's something down there?"
"The song, the noise, the crying, that's all something down there, something waiting to be free. By the sound of it, it's in pain. I want to find out what it is, and if it needs help," he said simply.
"How will exploding help?"
"Ah, by the massive voice range, it's an enormous creature. A few human-made explosives won't hurt it. I just want to find out if it's trapped down there by a cage or something, because a creature that big wouldn't be crying for help if it was free and unrestrained; it'd be burrowing out of the earth and destroying civilisations. I'm worried."
"You're worried that it isn't destroying civilisations?"
"Exactly."
The sound of a ship hovering above interrupted their conversation, and the sound of a million metal feet marching in sync echoed through Julie's mind. The Doctor swore and rushed over to the TARDIS, bringing out a huge magnet with a loud transmitter. He quickly explained that the magnet was a Polarity Compressor, and Julie had no idea what that meant, but she played along. Surprisingly, he handed her the sonic screwdriver and told her, at his signal, she would press the sonic, and just basically go on from there.
It definitely sounded like one of the Doctor's plans.
So when the time came when the Cybermen came marching from all corners of Julie's house, one of them, presumably the leader, said, "I request an audience with the Doctor. The Doctor must speak with us."
"No thanks," the Doctor said through a megaphone.
"The Doctor shall come outside the human female's residence or the residence shall be obliterated, along with the human female," the Cyberman said.
"She is under my protection, and you know who I am," the Doctor said. "You know my reputation; you know what I've done to your species, and you know what I'll do to your species in the future. You know that whoever I protect doesn't die."
"Untrue! Many of your friends have lost their lives protecting yours!" The Cyberking almost sounded amused. "If this is the case, Doctor, then Cyber Scouts shall be sent inside immediately to restrain the Doctor."
"Try your best," he said and flung the megaphone away.
He clapped his hands and turned to Julie. "Let's get to work."
By the time the scouts had broken the door, marched seriously through the hallways and detected the Doctor, they were ready. Julie buzzed the screwdriver, the door swung open and the Doctor used the Polarity Compressor to not be able to walk towards him, as if there was a magnetic field, so the Cybermen all walked backwards until they slammed into each other and all of them broke.
The second surge of Cybermen received the same fate. However, by the third time, the scouts had learned and were resisting the magnetic force. The Doctor turned it up a notch and even the metallic objects behind the doctor were hovering. By the fourth time, one of the Cyberman shot the Doctor's arm.
Julie panicked and buzzed the screwdriver at the Cyberman until the group of scouts broke apart, piece by piece.
She dashed to the Doctor, who was nursing his injured arm and gritting his teeth. "Are you okay?"
The Doctor was probably going to say something snappy or sarcastic, when the blood ran from his face. He looked up, his face pale. "The crescendo – it's coming."
As if on cue, the Doctor began yelling in pain and cradling his ears, an animalistic screech warbling from him. Outside the Cybermen were probably all yelling distress and shouting, "Warning, warning!"
But there was still a determined group of scouts, who upgraded themselves to be resistant to all noise. Julie, horrified, picked up the screwdriver and began buzzing it. But it faded out, as if out of charge. Not knowing what to do, she charged it up to Handles, hoping it would work.
But there were still ten or so Cybermen marching into her house right now, guns at the ready. The only weapon she could see was the Compressor and she picked it up, full aware of the consequences of what she was about to do.
The Doctor had told her the Compressor had five settings, Low, Moderate, High, Extreme, Catastrophic. Slowly, she began to pull the lever from High to Extreme to Catastrophic.
Immediately, everything metallic in the room began to shake. Objects flew around, crashing against the walls. Her iron bracelet exploded into tiny pieces and one almost hit her eye. All the things Cyber-Doctor/Handles had taken out of the TARDIS were soaring around, clashing against each other and making exploding, crashing noises all over the room. She heard the Cybermen yell alarms as all their body parts shook violently and then scattered across the room, now a hazardous hub for speeding, sharp metal. She dropped the Compressor, stared out the window and saw Cybermen exploding into steel shards, only maybe one resisting the magnetic chaos sparking everywhere. When her walls started breaking down from the frantic metal flying around the place, and a scrap of steel nicked the Doctor's cheek, she turned off the Compressor, exhausted from ducking and dodging and avoiding being killed by a frypan.
The crescendo, apparently, was still exploding in the Doctor's ears, she realised, as the man cowered on the floor, screeching and having ignored the flying metal scraps everywhere. She gave him the screwdriver, not knowing what to do. She turned to him, to stroke his head, maybe transfer some of the pain into her again–
The wall exploded.
Julie covered her face as a Cyberman stepped the room, lasers aimed directly at her face. They were moving in jerky, uncontrolled movements and oiled spilled from them, convincing her that the still-screaming thing down the hole in her room was affecting it. It quivered as it stepped and spoke in a warbled voice.
"The human female will step aside and allow the Cybermen to finish the Doctor. Despite the colossal amounts of information we could gain from him, I have deemed him unreliable and unworthy of the Cybermen's efforts. He shall be executed immediately," the Cyberman said, speaking in such an authoritative manner that Julie considered him the Cyberking. Though, Julie thought, there weren't going to be many Cybermen to rule once this day was done.
"I will not. I will stand by the Doctor's side," she said firmly.
"You will not. You will move away or you shall die."
"No."
"The human female will listen to me! I am superior!"
"You're a lump of metal!"
"Move aside."
"Never!"
The Cyberking shot her in the heart.
Julie gasped in pain, and the Cyberking kicked her away from the Doctor, who was still screaming and whimpering. Julie clutched her heart, willing it to keep on beating, and wondered vaguely if she was better off with two hearts.
The Cyberking turned to the Doctor. "By the Law of the Cyberiad, you have defied the Cybermen and will die by the hand of the King. Final words shall be permitted."
"I … have … last … words …" the Doctor croaked, his voice hoarse from shouting.
"What are they, puny Time Lord?"
"Catch," he breathed and threw the screwdriver in the air. The Cyberking warbled and jerked around unpleasantly, demanding to know what was going on.
Julie, with all the pain in her chest and the slowness of the heart in her body, reached out an arm and caught it. "Come on, magic wand, work for me," she muttered. Feeling lighter and lighter with every passing moment, she reached her thumb out and …
Press.
After the buzz and familiar green light, came the explosions. Now, in all fairness, Julie had forgotten about the explosives rigged deep beneath her house because of the commotion and the dying thing. But now, as the Cyberking reacted unpleasantly to the screwdriver, feeling jerkier and convulsing more violently, as the Doctor crawled towards her, placed a hand on her heart like she'd done to him this morning, a golden light in wisps floating through the air like mist, as she breathed shallow, last breaths and as she felt the screwdriver in her hand, she pressed and held on, the annoying light and the annoying sound resonating through her.
The explosions must have freed the creature, and, for the second time, heard the creature's cry.
The sadness, regret, coldness washed through her, the terrible music floating like an eerie wind in the night. Like last time, the only comfort she felt was in death, where nobody was left behind. She closed her eyes for the last time and felt ease wash over her.
And then she felt like she didn't want to die.
There was still a thread holding her to the real world. A golden, tiny wisp of light, barely tangible. The string still attached to real life. She could grab it, technically. It wasn't too far away. But did she want to grab it? Did she want to go back to reality? And then, she realised she couldn't hear the creature's cry. If she didn't want that life, why would she have the will to resist the music? She didn't want to die. She wanted to live. She grabbed onto that string, the thing thread, and felt one thing for sure. That string wasn't going to leave her like everybody else. It would stay, stay, stay until she woke up.
And when she did wake up, it was inside the TARDIS. The Doctor was fiddling with the controls, still dirty and ragged from the Cybermen's attack, but he was back to his jolly, old self, jumping and jostling around.
"H-How am I still alive?" Julie asked, and the Doctor looked up, surprised she'd woken up.
"I have this thing called regeneration energy," he said. "It replenishes me. But I can use it to heal other people. And that's what I did to you."
"Oh," she said. She didn't really know what to say. "Thanks" didn't cut it.
"So did we ever find out what that creature was? The thing under my room?" she asked.
Suddenly, the Doctor's face became grim and Julie was sure he had. By his expression, Julie figured it definitely wasn't something good. But, far away from the truth field in her house, he cheerily said, "Nope. Not at all."
"So, where are we going now?"
"I never really know," the Doctor said, and then he grinned. "Come on. I'll take you somewhere fun."
DOOOWEEOOO
Hey! This is my first FanFiction ever, and I'm really excited about it. I tried to make it structured as similarly to the show as possible, the ending of the first part leading into the theme song, and then the ending leading to the credits. The ending of the chapter, in my opinion, was kind of ... flat, but I can't think of any other way to be honest. R&R, please! Feedback is appreciated.
Thanks :)