Ad Astra

Latin: 'To the Stars'

The Doctor landed in the back garden of the right house, and for him at least that was an achievement. And, if nothing else, he was also in the right time period! The house, of course, was in fact standing there and had not been replaced with a forest or seabed as had happened once or twice before with someone else who'd been interested in aircraft... he'd reached Heathrow eventually, and he didn't know why she was so put out when he did.

With a smile on his face, he ran out of the door and poked his head out. Not much had changed. The swing set was still there, and so were the petunias and the now cut back Buddleia that had, the last time he'd been, been threatening to overrun the back end of the garden.

He looked up at the house, and a curtain moved, ones that he recognised with aeroplanes printed on them.

Excited, he slipped out and closed the door behind him, and started to jump from one unnecessary stepping stone to another, something that took him long enough to get to the door for the person who had moved the curtain to have come out of his room while still in his pyjamas and slowly creak the garden door open, even though he had to reach up high to be able to.

The boy looked up, and the Doctor, who had been about to open the door himself, looked down.

This hadn't quite been what he'd been expecting, but he could improvise.

"Ah," he said. "Hello." And then he down to the boy's level, so he didn't have to get a crick in his neck.

"Mum says I'm not allowed to talk to strangers," the boy said, although he wasn't even looking at the Doctor, he was looking at the blue box that had never been in his garden before.

"Well, yes. That's the sort of thing mums say, isn't it? Don't talk to strangers, don't wander off, don't forget to turn off the stabilisers... very smart and useful but also, might I add, very boring if you want an interesting life."

The ginger-haired boy didn't seem to be listening. Instead, he pointed out into the garden, and then looked back at the Doctor.

"Is that what made the noise that woke me up?"

"I woke you up? Oh, sorry, yes, I suppose it was. That's my TARDIS. I'm the Doctor."

The boy scrunched up his nose in consternation.

"A doctor? Really? What kind of doctor?"

"Of everything, really. Why?" He asked, suddenly wondering, "do you need one?"

He remembered bits and pieces of what this person had told him when he wasn't quite so small, but the where-they-were and when-that-happened had tended to get mixed up in his head.

The boy did a strange sort of nod-shrug.

"Caitlyn broke my toy plane and it needs fixing. And mum says she can't and dad's too busy."

The Doctor smiled.

"I tell you what. One day, you're going to have more than just a toy plane. It's going to be big, big enough to carry people, and you're going to be the Captain. Just you wait and see." And he bopped the boy on the nose, which got an indignant squawk from him.

"Really?" Martin didn't seem to believe him, for some reason. "Dad says boys can't be aeroplanes."

"Then your dad is silly. Dads can be just as silly as mums. Trust me, I'm a doctor. I know these things."

Bright blue eyes stared at him, wondering whether to trust, to believe, when his dreams had been shattered not really all that long ago. Eventually, he nodded.

"Tell you what," said the Doctor, "come with me. Let me show you something."

Martin hesitated. This was more than just talking to a stranger. It wasn't that he didn't trust the Doctor - for some reason, he really did, and he didn't even know why - but that there seemed to be something off about him. Different. Not like anyone he'd ever met before. It was kind of scary and sort of like being dizzy, which wasn't very nice, but also really exciting.

"You see that big box?" the Doctor asked, glancing over at it with a moment's grin, "It's that. See? I won't even be taking you out of your own back garden. Promise."

Still sort of nervous but feeling a bit better, Martin nodded again, and the Doctor stood up abruptly and raced back to the blue box. He didn't go in, though, but rather waited for Martin to catch up with him, shorter legs and bare feet taking longer to go through the garden and over the stepping stones, just as the Doctor had when coming over to the door earlier.

The Doctor held the door open, and Martin went in.

His first thought was that it was a lot brighter than he thought a box in the back garden in the middle of the night should be. His second was that it was a lot bigger than a box in the back garden in the middle of the night should be, and poked his head back out to make sure that it was the same box.

It was.

He poked his head back inside, and the Doctor, who had been watching him, went over to the big thing in the middle of the box that looked like something out of Star Trek, like what Simon liked to watch.

He hadn't noticed the door close behind him, or the noises as the central column started to move, but he did notice when the Doctor came back to him, crouched down, and put an arm around his shoulder.

"Want to see something special?"

Martin nodded, unable to find words, because he couldn't think right now of anything - other than the idea of flying a plane if he couldn't be one - more special than the box he was in right now.

The Doctor slowly opened one of the doors.

Martin gasped.

He could see the world - all the world - and they were so high up he could see stars no matter which direction he looked in.

"Take a look, Captain," the Doctor said quietly. "We're right above your garden. See? If you look carefully, you can see it. All the way down there."

Martin stared at the world for quite some time, trying to imagine being able to fly around that big green and blue Earth he could see, safe in the knowledge that he was being held by the Doctor and wouldn't fall out.

Too short a time later, the Doctor ushered him back so that he was properly inside again, and this time Martin paid attention as the Doctor fiddled with the controls and talked to the box and the box made noises as they landed so that they were in his back garden again, rather than several thousand miles above it.

He started to run back inside to fetch the Lockheed Martin model plane Caitlyn had broken the moment they were back on solid ground, but once he was in his room and had his hand around the plane, he heard the same whooshing noise as he had before, and in the box, and knew, knew that the box was going away again.

...

Alis volat propris

Latin: She flies with her own wings

For some reason, Martin never told anyone that he'd flown among the stars. For some reason, he didn't think they'd believe him, and for another, he liked to think that it was his own special secret. The things he'd seen, the stars, they were his, so long as he could keep it hidden close to his heart.

Without even realising, he waited. Of a night, he'd imagine sometimes that he heard a strange, familiar wheezing sound as he drifted off to sleep. Sometimes, in a crowd, he'd crane his neck around and lose sight of someone he thought might be wearing just that kind of tweed, those long legs and that bowtie. They'd vanish, though, or they'd turn out to be someone else, so when Simon or Caitlyn or mum or dad asked, he just shrugged and said he felt restless, and turned his eyes back to the sky, watching aeroplanes so that he couldn't think he'd seen the elusive man who'd taken him to the stars again.

By the time he was ten years old he had already well and truly decided that he was going to be an airline captain, and had decided to give his dream as much effort as he could. So maybe his classmates thought he was boring, or annoying, and he always got left alone at lunchtimes. Okay, maybe not always, but nearly always, and the ones who sometimes sat near him and talked to him tended to disappear after just one or two days, and he didn't even know why. Sometimes when they drew the sky he was tempted to put a blue box in the corner, but that would be giving away the secret.

He would just keep going, he had decided after his second (failed) try at his CPL. The Doctor had told him he'd get it at some point, because what sort of Captain couldn't pass his tests? He didn't think they were allowed to fly, for one thing. And he had to fly. He just had to.

He passed his test. He'd opened the letter that had come from the examining board, and seen that there was a PASS, rather than a FAIL. He should have been shouting, and calling everyone up, but instead he guessed it just had to sink in a little longer. Maybe then he'd be able to get past the fact that the first person he'd be telling wouldn't be his dad. It was a horrible, hollow feeling that became a sort of resentment - why couldn't he have waited? It wouldn't have been much longer... not much.

But he put the feeling to one side, and focused on the letter - the pass grade, the proof that he could finally be a pilot, the fulfilment of a dream given to him in what he was starting to believe had been a childish dream. No one could make a box that was bigger on the inside, and no one could make such a thing fly into space even if they could, but he could, now, fly. (Although he would always have a soft spot in his heart for the stars in the countryside, when there weren't any lights to dim them. He'd look up and wonder, briefly, if any of those were the ones he'd seen from a blue box with the hand of a bowtied man resting around his six-year-old shoulders.)

MJN, he had to admit, had been a last-ditch attempt. He was being rejected from all of the main airlines, and even most of the smaller ones, and those who saw him seemed to lose interest on sight. He supposed it wasn't something he could blame them for, either - he didn't look much like a pilot, if he was really honest with himself. He certainly didn't look much like a Captain.

And yet Captain was what he'd been hired to be, even if it was for an airline with only one plane, a plane that was battered and kept falling apart, and even though he wasn't, technically, being paid.

Technically, because it seemed to him that it was either that, or not fly at all. And he'd prefer a tight budget than not be able to fly.

It wasn't so bad, once he'd settled in some. Douglas might be older than him, and smarter than him, and better than him, and people tended to listen to him more than they ever did Martin, but the man was a good pilot and wasn't truly awful company. Arthur was hard to live with at first, being constantly unnecessarily cheerful. Martin learned that Arthur grew on you more than anything, and once he had you couldn't get rid of him. It wouldn't be right, really. The man thought everyone - even Martin - was brilliant, and if nothing else it would be like kicking a puppy. Besides. Arthur called Martin 'Skipper'. Even Carolyn, his boss... he couldn't really say that this was the best place, that it was where he would have chosen, but it was where he seemed to have found himself, for now. He was their Captain. And they were his crew. As small crew of four, but a crew all the same.

And now he was thirty-three. Weirdly enough, there'd been enough time both before and after for him not to worry that he'd be rushed on either side by flights, and he had a funny feeling that Arthur, or, less likely, one of the others, might have had something to do with it.

They were at his family home - Caitlyn and the baby were sat in a deck chair, and Arthur was cooing at the little thing, Martin's niece, really. Simon was talking to one of his friends he'd invited over for some reason, and Douglas- for some reason he didn't want to think about too hard, his first officer was talking with his mother. Carolyn was, thankfully, doing double duty; both keeping a lead on Snoopadoop and keeping an eye on Arthur, to make sure he didn't do anything too... Arthur. The only reason Herc wasn't here was because he hadn't been able to reschedule his flight.

It was the first time there had been so many people gathered around just because of him, and Martin was finding himself ever so slightly overwhelmed.

Quietly, he slipped out and into the back garden. The butterfly bush had become overgrown since he, Simon and Caitlyn had moved out, and mum had kept forgetting to get someone around to fix it. The rest of the garden had more or less stayed the same ever since the box had first appeared twenty-seven years ago.

Still the same old petunias, still the same swing set that had never been thrown out - Caitlyn said she'd let hers play on it once they were old enough, so it was better to let it just stay there - and still the same stepping stones that weren't really needed, and served no purpose other than to look nice.

On a whim, Martin hopscotched his way from one stone to the next, landing first on one foot and then on the other, balancing on each one for a second or two before moving on. It was silly and childish, and he'd never hear the end of it if Douglas happened to pass by the window and saw him, but it was his birthday. He was allowed to be unprofessional and silly every once in a while on his birthday.

It was then that he started to hear the wheezing he hadn't known he'd been waiting so many long years for, and he backed up, accidentally stepping on a strawberry plant that was, thankfully, not in season.

The blue box materialised, and Martin stared. He stared as the door opened, and the man in tweed and a bowtie came out, and looked around, and didn't seem to see him at first.

His dream. It hadn't just been a dream, like he'd almost started to believe. It had been real. Real.

He glanced back in the direction of the house, but no one had noticed.

"Er... hello?"

The Doctor looked at him, all big hair and old eyes and still so much taller than he was, and didn't seem to recognise him.

"Hello," the Doctor said. "I seem to have landed in your garden. Hope you don't mind."

Martin laughed.

"It's all right. I was having a birthday party in there. Needed to get out for some air. It's not the first time this garden's had a blue box land in it, though," he said, hoping to jog a few memories.

It didn't work. The Doctor was just as oblivious as to who he was as before. There was, however, a strange light of understanding dawning in those old eyes.

"We've met before, haven't we?" he asked, questioning, looking at Martin's face for some kind of clue.

Martin nodded.

"Right here. I... I think I must have been six. You showed me the stars. You were gone before you could fix my toy plane." He smiled, nearly giving in to the urge to laugh again. "I don't know why I thought you'd do that. But it's still in my old room - the plane, I mean."

The Doctor, instead of assuring Martin that they'd never met before, instead smiled.

"I did it, you know," Martin blurted out, wanting desperately to feel justified in having accomplished what he'd set out to do. "I'm a captain. A real airline captain. It isn't much, but..."

"Tell you what," the Doctor said, well aware that there were people inside, and Martin kept looking back, and looking at the TARDIS, as though he didn't truly want the two worlds to collide. "I'll come back later tonight. When there aren't so many people about. I don't mind people, people are great, it's just when they start asking so many questions. You don't mind, do you?"

Martin had a funny feeling that the question was only rhetorical, but he didn't, not really, and suggested eleven o'clock. He'd come down with the old Lockheed, and ask all the questions he never thought to ask as a six year old.

And maybe this time he'd come back.

He went back inside feeling oddly like his life had been turned upside down, hearing the odd groaning and wheezing - engines, his mind now supplied, after a good two years of flying GERTI. And he smiled. He really had become a captain, flying people all over the world. He wondered how many of the places he'd seen from space that night were places he'd since been to, or flown past.

Arthur grinned when he saw him. Douglas frowned, noticing that something was different about his captain, but not knowing what. And for the first time that day, Martin really started to enjoy himself.

Once everyone was gone, once they'd all left, he retreated to his old room, where his mum still kept most of the things he'd left here, when he'd realised he wouldn't be able to bring it all with him to the small student accommodation he'd been able to rent, and never really moved out of.

There, still in a little box, was his old model plane, wing still broken and tail starting to go the same way. Martin probably could have had it fixed years ago and it wouldn't have made that much of a dent in his earnings, but he'd left it like this. For the memory.

He was startled awake - he'd dozed off at his desk by the window about an hour and a half ago by the seems of things if his watch was accurate still - at eleven o'clock precisely. He'd recognise that wheezing sound anywhere, and this time, he held the box with the broken plane in it as he flew down the stairs, his uniform jacket slung over one arm and his hat under it, just to show, to prove, that he really had done what he'd said he would.

The Doctor was still there, waiting, leaning against the blue call box, when he got down and into the garden.

"Sorry," the Doctor said, still smiling, "I got a little side-tracked. messed up a bit with the year. I don't think I mentioned before that she travels in time?"

"No," said Martin, bemused, "you didn't."

But somehow, things made a little more sense now that he knew. For one thing, he could now see, coming in through the door, the small, dirty footprints of his younger self, who'd arrived barefoot in his pyjamas and hadn't bothered to fetch his slippers.

...

AN: This is the second part of Ad Astra, and it turned out to be a lot longer than I thought it would be!

I have no idea if I'll do more of this, but I just thought that'd be a good place to end.