Clara strode through the halls of Coal Hill School, stopping when she saw the school chairman, Dr. Chesterton, in the halls talking to another teacher. She didn't know him very well; he was rarely at the school itself. All she knew was that he was a highly respected scientist who had spent years at Cambridge researching. She hadn't spoken to him since her interview, actually, and she smiled as she walked by.
"Ah, Miss Oswald!" Dr. Chesterton said brightly, saying goodbye to the other teacher and falling into step beside her. "Walk with me?"
"Oh, yes," Clara said. "Did you want something?"
"No, just to see how you're getting on," Dr. Chesterton said. "This is your first teaching job, isn't it?"
"Yes," Clara said. "And it's been great, really. I really like it." She did, too, even though she hadn't had any idea what she wanted to do in her life. She'd always liked both books and children. Teaching English was probably the most predictable path someone like her could have taken, but for now, she didn't mind that. Not when the rest of her life was so very unpredictable.
"Good, I'm glad. Oh, what a lovely day," Dr. Chesterton said, smiling at her. Good, he seemed to like her. It was always a good thing when the boss liked you. They had stepped outside onto the school grounds, the sun bright and warm. Clara smiled, about to turn to Dr. Chesterton to ask what he had researched before coming here (it was always good to show an interest) when she saw the blue police box off to the side of the courtyard. She froze, thankfully before she started talking. He couldn't be here, not now. She would lose her job for letting anyone onto school grounds who wasn't supposed to be there. Not that she let him, exactly. She couldn't stop him. The Doctor was better than anyone she had ever met at being in those precise places he really shouldn't be.
Clara turned, to try to get Dr. Chesterton to go back to the school before he noticed when his eyes landed on the police box. She cursed under her breath as his expression grew confused. "There's no police box there. There haven't even been any in-" his eyes opened wide in what might have been horror. "Oh, no. It can't be. Not again," he said. He was staring at the TARDIS as if he'd seen a ghost.
"What?" Clara asked, thrown off. She'd been trying to come up with some kind of explanation for a police box that might just appear out of nowhere but then the idea occurred to her. He couldn't possibly know what it was, could he? Traveling in the TARDIS, she'd run into all sorts of people who knew the Doctor, including some she never would have even guessed (Beethoven? Jane Austen? Really?) but she really never would have thought one of those people would be her boss. Her ordinary boss at an ordinary school that had nothing to do with the Doctor.
Dr. Chesterton began striding toward the TARDIS so quickly Clara had to run to catch up. He didn't even seem to notice she was there, intent on his goal. When they reached it, he ran a hand along it. "It's warm - it is, it has to be!" He stared up at the blue police box in utter shock.
"Hands off my TARDIS," the Doctor's annoyed tones greeted them as he stepped through the doors. Clara was trying to decide who should be the recipient of her apologetic look - probably not the Doctor, since he was the one who'd turned up unannounced - when Dr. Chesterton's mouth fell open.
"It can't be!" he said.
The Doctor rolled his eyes. "First it has to be, then it can't be. Make up your mind."
Dr. Chesterton just kept staring. "I can't think of any other reason a police box would just appear here, especially in this day and age," he said. He squinted, looking at the Doctor more closely. "But you can't be him. You don't look like him at all." He looked as if he was trying desperately to understand what was going on, and Clara felt a bit bad for him. She'd felt the same way when she'd first traveled with the Doctor. She couldn't help feeling a bit curious, now that she knew he must really know who the Doctor was. She'd never met anyone else he'd traveled with. He rarely spoke about them. At least not this version. The last Doctor had occasionally mentioned someone named Amy, but there had to have been more and Clara was bursting with curiosity.
The Doctor squinted, studying Dr. Chesterton for what felt like ages until he nodded as if something had clicked into place for him. "I thought this place looked familiar. It is you, isn't it?" the Doctor finally said. "Chessington, wasn't it?"
"Yes," Dr. Chesterton said, amazed. "Well, no, I mean, it's Chesterton. He was always getting that wrong too. Tell me, what happened to him? Did he hand the ship down to you?"
Clara was slightly taken aback by that. He didn't know? He didn't even call the TARDIS by the right name. But he must have traveled with the Doctor, there was no other explanation.
"No, ohh, no," the Doctor said. "No, it's still me. I'm the Doctor."
Dr. Chesterton started to laugh. "No, you can't be. He'd be almost a hundred by now."
The Doctor scoffed, "Try 2000. You still don't really grasp time travel, do you?"
"Doctor, did he travel with you?" Clara asked.
"A very long time ago," the Doctor said. "You're lucky I still remember. It's not easy keeping track of everyone you've ever known when you're me."
Dr. Chesterton shook his head. "No, that's impossible."
"I seem to remember you saying police boxes couldn't travel through space and time either," the Doctor said.
Dr. Chesterton's eyes went even wider, if possible. "Doctor? Can it really be you?"
The Doctor nodded, and Dr. Chesterton went on, "But why do you look different?"
"He never told you? About regeneration?" Clara asked.
"Regeneration? And how do you know him?" Dr. Chesterton turned to Clara, looking just as shocked that she knew the Doctor as she did about him knowing the Doctor. "You're not still kidnapping people to travel with you, are you?" Dr. Chesterton asked the Doctor now.
"Kidnapping?" Clara burst out. Maybe he didn't know the Doctor after all. The Doctor could never do that. Well, he could, maybe. Probably pretty easily, actually. But would he? Never. No matter what.
But Dr. Chesterton shook his head as if he expected nothing else. "Yes, kidnap. Barbara and I, we stumbled across this TARDIS of his and then suddenly we found ourselves in the Stone Age with no way to get back." He sounded fond, not angry at all, but still. Clara looked up at the Doctor, hurt and confused in a way she'd thought she had moved on from after he'd changed. Maybe she was the one who didn't really know him.
"I've come a long way since then," the Doctor said to her softly.
"I tried to find you, you know," Dr. Chesterton said. "I looked you up on the Internet. I thought someone must have run into you besides us but all I found were conspiracy theories. I almost thought I'd dreamed it all up." He shook his head with the strangeness of it all. "So what did you call it - regeneration? What is that?"
"A way of cheating death, sort of," the Doctor said. "When it's time for a Time Lord like me to die, I don't. I just regenerate into a new body. Essentially a new person, with a totally new face and different personality."
Dr. Chesterton nodded as if that made more sense than the Doctor suddenly being here out of nowhere. "So that's something your people - what did you call them, Time Lords? - do." He took it in, looking at the Doctor closely. "You really are the same person? Just a different version of him?"
"Yes," the Doctor said, eyeing Dr. Chesterton as if studying him. "You're taking this remarkably well."
Dr. Chesterton laughed, "I don't think anything you do could surprise me anymore, Doctor." He ran a hand against the TARDIS and his expression grew fond. "I see you've never managed to get the ship to blend in again after you picked us up." He laughed. "I didn't even know Kennedy had been shot until you dropped us off. Two years late!"
Kennedy? Clara thought. The Doctor must have picked the Chestertons up in the early 1960s. But if the TARDIS was supposed to blend in and had picked a police box, a common sight back then…she realized what that must mean. "You were the first," she said, knowing she probably sounded awed. "The first people he traveled with."
"Well, Susan was really the first. She was the whole reason we ended up in the TARDIS in the first place," Dr. Chesterton said. "The Doctor's granddaughter," he added to Clara, before turning back to the Doctor. "Did you ever go back, like you said you would?"
"Yes," the Doctor said. "I'm a great-grandfather now. A great-great-grandfather, actually. Somewhere." He got that closed look on his face that meant he didn't want to talk about it anymore. Clara was just shocked. He'd mentioned his granddaughter to her once, a long time ago. When he was a different man and she was brand new to all this. But Dr. Chesterton had met her. Landing in his time was why the TARDIS still looked like a police box. Clara had never expected to meet anyone who knew the Doctor in her boring little school. Never mind someone who had known the Doctor at the beginning.
"You knew him when he was young," Clara said, almost wistfully.
"Young?" Dr. Chesterton asked, chuckling. "You were an old man then, weren't you, Doctor? Though I suppose if you can do this regeneration...thing…" he got a thoughtful look on his face. "How many times have you done it?"
"Too many to count properly anymore," the Doctor said. "This is the thirteenth face I've had since then. Except for a few extra."
"Thirteen?' Dr. Chesterton said. "There have been thirteen of you?" He stared at the Doctor as if trying to cement the fact in his head. "You really were young when I met you."
"Oh, very young," the Doctor said, getting a very faraway look in his eyes. "A long time ago."
"Have there been many people traveling with you, after Barbara and I?" Dr. Chesterton asked.
"Thirty-five, counting Clara," the Doctor said right away. It didn't surprise Clara that he knew how many traveling companions he'd had right away when he professed not to remember how many faces he'd had. "And a robot dog."
Dr. Chesterton nodded as if that satisfied something. "I've often thought about you, Doctor. Wondering where you were, if you were still out there. You know you're the reason Barbara and I went back to get our doctorates after we came back."
"Oh, are you a doctor now too?" the Doctor asked, sounding surprised.
Dr. Chesterton laughed. "Yes, in chemistry," he said. "You know, I'm starting to see it now. The similarities. The TARDIS is still the same, you're still wandering through time and space. You're even still going by Doctor. I thought you'd have told someone your name by now. You can't possibly still be running from whatever it is you were running from back then."
"No," the Doctor said, the closed look appearing on his face again so he looked like the alien he was. This time Clara knew why. Dr. Chesterton had known him before the Time War. Before the Daleks. Long before any of that had happened. "I have enough names. I don't need another one."
Dr. Chesterton, however, smiled. "I should be flattered, I suppose, that you're still going by what we started calling you."
Clara blanched. She doubted she could have been more surprised if Dr. Chesterton had suddenly revealed he was about to take over the planet the way so many tried to. Actually, that would have been considerably less surprising.
He had known the Doctor before he was the Doctor.
He had given the Doctor his name.
"You're the one who came up with that?" Clara asked breathlessly.
"Of course. He was calling himself Doctor Foreman," Dr. Chesterton said, and he laughed. "Except you could never remember that was supposed to be your name, could you, Doctor? I didn't know what else to call you besides just 'Doctor.'" Dr. Chesterton shrugged. "I suppose it stuck."
"I suppose it did," the Doctor said. Clara was still reeling. The Doctor hadn't just chosen the name. It had been chosen for him, by the first person he'd ever traveled with from his favorite planet. An ordinary schoolteacher from Earth had given the universe the Doctor. It was even more of a promise than she'd realized.
"So why is it still stuck as a police box?" Dr. Chesterton asked, stepping back to survey the TARDIS. "You've had plenty of time to fix it."
The Doctor smiled now. "Oh, I like it this way. So does she. I doubt I could change it if I wanted to. And I never run the risk of losing her." He opened the doors. "D'you want to have a look?"
Dr. Chesterton froze, then smiled. "For old time's sake, Doctor? Why not?"
He looked around the interior of the TARDIS with a fond, nostalgic smile, though it had to look different than he remembered it. The Doctor showed him around enthusiastically, and Clara couldn't help smiling, watching them. By the end she'd almost forgotten Dr. Chesterton was her boss (though it might actually be helpful to have a boss who understood why she would sometimes need to leave immediately to travel to another galaxy).
"Well, I must say, it's been wonderful to see you again, Doctor," Dr. Chesterton said as he left the TARDIS. "Who knows? I might even see you again, if you'll be visiting Miss Oswald here."
He began walking back toward the school but the Doctor called after him, "Dr. Chesterton?"
Dr. Chesterton turned around, and the Doctor continued. "I don't think I ever thanked you."
"For what?"
"For the name," the Doctor said. "It's not even really just a name anymore. It's who I am, what I am. What I stand for." He shook his head as if amazed. "You named me perfectly before you even knew me. Before I even knew who I was."
Dr. Chesterton came back towards them. "It fit you, Doctor." He smiled as he and the Doctor shook hands. "I'm glad to know there's still something of Barbara and I with you, so many years later."
"Oh," the Doctor said with a small smile. "There's something of you and Barbara all over the universe."
In every place, Clara thought, that had ever told a tale of the Doctor and his blue box.