Author's Note:
Hello! I'm starting another story, this time in the Doctor Who fandom! I know, I know, I should update my in progress stories, but I had a good idea for another "Whovian from our universe meets the Doctor" story and I just wanted to get this down before I forgot it. Anyway, on with the story!
Disclaimer: I don't own anything you recognize. I just own my OC. Anything that you recognize belongs to BBC.
I sighed, fed up with my English teacher's idea of a fun assignment. I was currently trying to squeeze a good idea from my brain for a soliloquy I had to write for my English class. But no, it couldn't be just a soliloquy. It also had to be from the perspective of a character from a Shakespearean play, include three literary devices, have a rhyme pattern, be about a current event and be in iambic pentameter. For the love of God! How could I be getting high 90s in Science class, yet have trouble with writing a supposedly simple poem?
Anyway, as I was about to look up a word that rhymed with conflict on my phone, the doorbell rang. I immediately tensed, knowing that I was home alone and it couldn't be anyone that I knew, since I had no friends in this neighbourhood. Of course, my dog, Maggie, started barking ferociously (kind of ironic, considering that she weighs literally 8 pounds) and ran to the window to see who was outside. I stood up too, since if someone looked through the window, they would be able to see me sitting on the couch, and moved out of sight, where I could make out a figure standing at the door. Of course, the glass was frosted, so I couldn't see them perfectly, but I could make out that they were of medium height, maybe a little on the tall side, and not very wide.
Of course, I didn't open the door (my mother had managed to instil some form of self-preservation in me while I was a little kid), but I took a quick peek out the window to see who it was. What I saw made my eyes widen to the size of saucers and my heart start beating faster.
A man who looked remarkably like David Tennant was standing at the door, smacking a silver stick that resembled the Doctor's famous sonic screwdriver against his hand, as if to get it working again, then he pointed it at my door while making the classic high-pitched sound that the sonic usually makes. Oh, Jacqueline is so going to get it! I thought.
I picked up Maggie and put her in her crate so she wouldn't go running outside, then I opened the door. David Tennant stood there, momentarily startled by my sudden appearance but masking it well, discreetly stuffing his screwdriver into his pocket inside his coat while smiling at me and introducing himself, "Hello! I'm the Doctor. I was just wondering, do you know what day it is?"
Okay, I don't know how Jacqueline or Shannon managed to wrangle this, I thought. But this must be one of them, because this is not possible.
I looked at him for a second, sizing him up while ignoring my dog's frantic howling at hearing a stranger's voice and me opening the door to them. Same long tan coat, same pinstriped brown suit, same blue-at-the-end sonic screwdriver, same wild hair... He must've really gotten into character for this one. I didn't reply to the actor and simply stepped onto my front porch, looking into the corners of my door and around my mailbox.
"Um, what are you doing?" David asked, watching me curiously.
"Looking for cameras," I said nonchalantly. For David Tennant to be at my door, this either had to be a prank or I had gone insane. I was reasonably sure that I would have seen some warning signs before I went completely insane, so this had to be prank by one of my Doctor Who-loving friends, Jacqueline or Shannon.
"Cameras... that's new. Why cameras?" David asked, stepping back as I leaned back to look up at my roof to see if they had somehow placed them there. Any minute now, Jacqueline or Shannon (or both, knowing how devious they were when combined) would jump out from the side of my house and yell, "Surprise" or "You've been pranked!" or something like that. Well, I wouldn't give them the satisfaction of fangirling and freaking out over an actor.
"Because this is a prank," I replied simply to David's question. I had to give the guy some credit, he was a great actor. He even looked genuinely confused when I said that.
"What's a prank?" he asked, leaning forward to hear my answer.
"This is. You can't be here. You're an actor from a TV show." I answered, trying to look serious. Even though I had already figured out that this was a prank, I couldn't say that I wasn't pleased that the actor that played my favourite incarnation of the Doctor from my favourite TV show had somehow showed up on my front porch.
"Sorry...What?" David asked incredulously. I knew he had heard me perfectly fine, he was probably just trying to save face and buy my friends a few more minutes of me being "pranked".
"Yeah. Your name is David Tennant. You play the 10th Doctor from Doctor Who, a British TV show." I rattled off, hoping to see some form of recognition on his face. However, when I looked, there was none. All I saw was shock and wariness. Interesting.
"Sorry... what? Doctor what? A TV show?" the actor asked in quick succession. Now he looked really confused.
I decided to make it clearer that I was having none of this so that he knew that the game was up. "Yeah. You know, the one with the Time Lord with two hearts who destroyed his home planet Gallifrey in the Last Great Time War to kill the Daleks and who travels all of time and space in this TARDIS with various, mostly human companions." I said in a rush.
The actor actually took a few stumbling steps backwards, his eyes wide and his mouth agape. Then he took out his sonic screwdriver and started 'scanning' me with it. "How... how can you know all of that? Who are you?" I felt the first flicker of doubt in my mind. Okay, now he was really acting like he had no clue what was going on. Had I actually gone mad? Or was this just a very vivid dream? Because obviously, the Doctor can't be real! Even if he was, he would be existing in a parallel universe and it was impossible to cross universes. Well, Rose Tyler had done it, but we weren't advanced enough to invent that sort of technology.
By now, we were both on my driveway and I could see up and down my street. I looked to my right and some ways down the street, a blue police box stood there. Oh, of course the TARDIS was here too! I really need to figure out how to tell if I'm dreaming while I'm doing it. I started walking towards it with determination, ready to prove to at least myself that this was all a prank or something. David Tennant saw me suddenly walking towards his 'ship' and followed me, wondering what I thought I was doing. "What are you doing? Don't go in there!" he told me when I reached the police box and I moved to open it. I, of course, ignored him and pushed the door open, expecting to see a small, blue wood interior.
But instead of that, I came across the last thing I expected. It was bigger on the inside.
I saw coral twisted pillars with a grungy look and a console with a Time Rotor that moved up and down constantly. It was the 10th Doctor's console room!
"But-but that's impossible..." I muttered, mostly to myself, but I think the man standing behind me heard, because he ran a hand through his spiky hair and tried to reassure me.
"Yeah, it's bigger on the inside, I know. But how can this be?" now he seemed to be talking to himself while pacing back and forth. "How can a human know that? I've never even met you before! I was just in the TARDIS when the old girl picked up an anomaly and I went to take a look! Bit more of a bumpy ride today than usual, but that doesn't explain the fact..." then he looked up suddenly and stared at me. "You're not from my future, are you?"
"No, not as far as I know," I replied, trying to sound casual so this actor (the Doctor?!) would calm down already. He had that classic "Ten" look on his face when he was seriously stressed or panicked. The wide eyes, the grimacing mouth, the frustrated frown... He was even starting to hyperventilate as he probably tried to rationalize what was happening and how I could know so much about him. It was then that I made the biggest mistake of my short life. Then, the true realization that the flipping Tenth Doctor was standing right in front me (not the actor who played him, the real, actual, freaking Doctor!) hit me and I stumbled back a bit, just like how the Doctor had when I had revealed my knowledge about his past and who he was, and I felt myself trip slightly over a raised surface, like when you walk into a room in a house that's slightly higher than the room you were just in and you didn't notice where you were going. I stiffened and tried to stop myself from falling backwards, but I failed and ended up falling on my rear end on a smooth floor. Hold it, smooth floor? Shouldn't I have fallen onto rough pavement?
It was then that the thought occurred to me to have a look at my surroundings and I gasped in wonder. I had accidentally fallen into the TARDIS' doorway! I stood up a bit shakily and gazed at the humming room. It was exactly like on the TV show, except just so much ... cooler, as the Eleventh Doctor would say. There is a huge difference between a scene from a TV show and the real thing. For one, the TV show's console room didn't always have the cloister bells ringing frantically... wait, what?
"No!" the Doctor yelled, dashing inside his sentient ship and straight to the console, flipping switches and pushing buttons and banging things with his mallet. "Behave!" he ordered, and I stroked a nearby pillar, empathizing with how distressed the TARDIS must be if she was ringing the cloister bells.
Suddenly, the floor began to shake and I grabbed the railing to steady myself before I fell. I watched the Doctor as he ran manically around the console, trying to stabilize her, I suppose. Why was the TARDIS being so frantic? Were we moving?
I realized later that I should've walked out of that blue Police Box the moment that I fell into it, but I didn't, and I can't change that now. Eventually, the TARDIS stopped shaking, the cloister bells stopped ringing and the Doctor stopped running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
I think we (me, the Doctor and the TARDIS) all simultaneously took a deep, calming breath, then the Doctor got down to business. "Alright, then," he started with a serious look on his face. "You say there's a TV show called Doctor Who. Show me."
I complied with shaking hands (hey, I had just survived a trip in the supposedly fictional TARDIS-give me a break!) and took out my cell phone. I pointed out the "No Signal" sign to the Doctor, who soniced my phone and then watched as I put in the passcode and opened the videos app, where I had bought, through quite a lot of gift cards and birthday money over the years, all the episodes of the 2005 Doctor Who. I had watched the first episode of the classic Doctor Who, but it seemed boring to me, so I put off watching the rest. I chose series one, episode one, simply called "Rose" and pressed play. Immediately, the screen showed Earth, then it zoomed in on London, England, where Rose Tyler was just waking up to her alarm in her mother's apartment.
We watched the screen for five minutes, then the Doctor said softly, "Stop," and I pressed pause, waiting for his reaction. He look quite stunned and stumbled to the pilot seat to sit down. I followed him, wary of how serious and hard his face looked. He started his habit of talking (well, muttering) to himself. "But how? How could anyone know about my companions? And how could they make it into a TV show without me noticing it? But, most of all, why do so? It just doesn't make sense!" he cried the last sentence out loudly in frustration, running a hand through his spiky hair.
I was startled and still quite shocked by the appearance of the last Time Lord (well, the last one until the Twelfth Doctor finds Gallifrey again), but I still felt a small need to make him feel better. I had always wanted to comfort the lonely Tenth Doctor while I watched the show and now I had a chance to do so. I stepped closer to him and patted his arm reassuringly, saying, "It's ok, Doctor. I know that you hate things that you don't know about, but I think I have a theory." The Doctor lifted his head and glanced at me curiously. I continued, "I think that my universe is parallel to yours, or maybe my universe is the first universe and all the other universes are parallels which contain the characters from our fictional works, such as Doctor Who."
The Doctor seemed to digest this theory, then after a while, he replied, "Not such a bad idea. It's plausible. But, then am I in a parallel universe right now? The TARDIS shouldn't be able to cross universes!" He jumped up and started fiddling with the console, probably trying to figure out the TARDIS' coordinates in space and time. Finally, he yelled, "Got it!" and told me, "Come here." I followed him and peered at the same screen he was pointing to. "That shows our current coordinates, but if I do this..." here he typed in something on the keyboard, "...it shows the past coordinates the TARDIS has been fixed at, with the most recent at the top. It says that a few minutes ago, the coordinates for the universe we were in were different than normal, so..." he let that thought trail off as I put the pieces together.
The TARDIS' cloister bells ringing. The Doctor running around the console like mad. The floor shaking. My phone with the "No Signal" sign. The now "normal" coordinates.
We weren't in my universe anymore.
We were in a parallel universe.
The Doctor's universe.
And there was no way back to my universe.