CHAPTER ONE:
23/11/16
I was walking back from the shops when it happened, a thrilling experience that everyone loves deep down (not). My earphones were in and I was listening to what my younger brother would describe as 'pop trash', which is what I called it too when other people were around. The shopping bags I carried weren't that heavy, and they were filled mostly with essentials.
And two pints of ice cream; but I was a woman, and vast amounts of ice cream is a basic human right for me.
I remember the night to be chilly – it was November and I lived in London, this isn't a surprise, people – and I had boots that clicked on the pavement – sidewalk to you Americans – only I couldn't hear the click, because as previously mentioned I was listening to music.
It was a perfectly normal, boring night. A rather average one, if I'm being honest to myself.
Then a blue box came out of a hole in the sky and crashed into the park across the street. It was small, rectangular in shape, and it landed on its side with smoke trailing off into the artificially lit sky (in the middle of London, you could never see the stars).
I stopped there, I think, and weighed my options. To continue walking was a laughably easy 'no', but to walk over and investigate was equally as off-putting. I lived in London, okay? Alien invasions were the norm here.
But, I had to admit, none of them ever started with the arrival of a blue box.
The doors swung open and my decision was made for me as a grappling hook came sailing out and wrapped itself – literally, it curved through the air in a way that was physically impossible – around the trunk of a large oak tree. I blinked several times, to make sure I wasn't hallucinating, but was forced to face the reality of what was happening.
Walking over took a lot of bravery, which I'm proud of myself for, even if I did mutter under my breath the entire way.
"I'm gonna get killed by a maniac in a blue box," I said. "What sort of a maniac chooses a blue box as a mode of transport? What's scary about the colour blue?"
And then a set of hands grabbed at the side of the box and a man began climbing out, all gangly limbs and floppy hair. He was soaking wet, floppy hair plastered to his forehead, and he stared at me as though he hadn't been expecting to see me stood there.
The man, in the blue box that had arrived from the middle of nowhere, was surprised to see me.
"Hello," I waved to him awkwardly.
"Hello," he said, not waving back. "Where am I?"
I glanced around, wondering if I should just say 'Earth' and leave it at that. "Shoreditch, North London."
The man climbed fully out of the box, resting on the side. He looked around and greatly resembled a Meerkat scoping out its territory. "Totters Lane?"
"A street off, actually," the man had a surprisingly good grasp of geography. "Are you an alien?"
"Usually it takes them longer to ask," he said, looking at me properly for the first time. "Why'd you think that?"
"You appeared out of a gap in the sky in a blue box," I said. "What part of that screams 'human'?"
He laughed. "You're good."
"And you never answered my question."
The man clicked his heels together, hands in his lap. The clothes he wore were strange; normally, I'd say it was just a suit… if it wasn't ripped to shreds and pulled tight across his body like it was three sizes too small for him. "I am an alien, yes. I think."
I frowned at that. "How can you think you're an alien?"
"It's not my fault," he defended. "Everything's fuzzy right now, post-regeneration haze. You're lucky I didn't wish you 'Merry Christmas' and then collapse in your arms. It's what happened last time."
"I'm atheist," I began, the frown not leaving my face. "And you're weird."
He hopped off the box, landing on his knees. There was a strange twitch that ran throughout his body before whatever it was got expelled through his mouth; a great big exhale of golden dust. It flew up into the sky, dispersing gradually until I couldn't make out the faintest glint. "Don't worry," he said. "Perfectly normal."
"Normal for an alien, maybe." I dropped my shopping to the ground, helping the man stand. "Who are you?"
"The Doctor," he wobbled for a moment, bopping my nose. "I think."
"Doctor w-" Suddenly the finger he'd used to bop my nose was on my lips, stopping me from speaking.
"I don't like that anymore," he explained. I didn't really know what was wrong with the man; even he looked confused at his actions. "Don't ask that."
I blinked at him, the tender skin of my lips tingling when he moved his finger away. "How can you be called the Doctor? That isn't a name… it's a title."
"I just am." he said. "Just accept it and move in. Make your life easier. That's a lot of ice cream."
We both glanced down at the abandoned shopping bags at my feet. An awkward silence lingered. "Um. I… really like ice cream?"
"I didn't," the Doctor – still a stupid name – mused. "Don't know if I do now. It'll be a test, yeah?"
And then, without even asking me, he swooped down and grabbed one of the tubs. Ripping it open with what I can only describe as inhumane strength (seriously he ripped off the plastic wrapper and the lid without even pausing), the Doctor then scooped up a massive handful and shoved it in his mouth.
I stared at him with equal parts of disgust and awe. "You're paying for that," I said, very quietly.
"It's good," he rolled the ice cream around his mouth, tongue peeking out to lick at the corner of his lips. "Better than I remember. Bit warm though."
"You're completely mad," I realised. "You're a mad, wet alien."
The Doctor blinked at me, ice cream forgotten. He glanced down at himself, as if realising his state of undress. "Oh, that isn't me. That was the swimming pool."
I looked at him, and noted with bone-deep certainty that he wasn't lying. "The blue box is a swimming pool?"
"The blue box has a swimming pool," he corrected, eating more. "And a library. That's where I was – the gravity turned off, damage to the stabilisers, boring stuff. The swimming pool fell down after I did, made for a soft landing."
"Was that supposed to be an explanation?" I asked, taking some of the ice cream for myself. I needed the comfort food sooner than expected. "Because you just made everything more complicated."
"Humans are always so slow," the Doctor sighed. "The box is in fact an inter-dimensional time machine that can go anywhere and anywhen in all of creation, and inside it has a swimming pool and a library. It's very simple and easy to understand."
I hate this man, I thought. Outloud, I said; "That's the opposite of simple."
He glared at me- or at least, he tried to glare but then another coughing fit happened and I had to pat him on the back until he breathed out more of the golden stuff.
"You sure that's normal?" I asked, watching it move off into the atmosphere.
"Post-regeneration," the Doctor waved a hand, gasping for breath. "I'm working out the extra regeneration energy from my system. Like breathing in dust only you don't breathe it in and it isn't actually dust."
"Regeneration? That's what happened to you? You regenerated and now you can't remember simple stuff like whether or not you're an alien?"
"I said you were good," he said, admiringly. "But you really are quite quick."
I shrugged. "I live in London, so aliens aren't that unusual nowadays."
The Doctor let out a little laugh. Instead of standing back up, like he had before, he collapsed against the foot of the blue box, resting against it with the ice cream in his lap. "I know all about those."
"You can remember the alien invasions..." I sat next to him, making sure to keep a distance between us. "But not if you were part of them?"
"No, no," he patted me on the knee. "I was there. I'm the reason they didn't win. Titanic heading right towards Buckingham Palace, that was me."
Staring at him, I wondered if I really was hallucinating after all. "It was not."
"It was! And the spaceship over London, that was me, too." The Doctor nodded, very seriously, as he ate more of my ice cream.
"Which one?" I asked. "There's been loads."
"All of them," he sighed. "But the first one was just me alone, no back-up 'til Torchwood got involved. Ended up losing a hand in a duel for the planet."
I'd heard enough. Taking the tub back from him, I openly scoffed. "You got that from Star Wars."
"No," the Doctor protested, stealing the ice cream back. "I did, honest. I told you, regeneration. I regenerated the hand back."
"Aliens don't look like humans," I said. "I mean… are you like a tiny little bug in a human costume? Did you crawl into the brain and take some man over, like that episode of Stargate?"
"You watch too much sci-fi," he noted. "And this is my body. My new body."
"This is all mad," I said.
"Yes," he agreed. "It is."
We sat there in silence for god-knows how long, with the Doctor steadily eating all of my ice cream. I stopped complaining about it, knowing that I had more than enough back at home and in the bags, and simply watched him instead. He seemed so human, yet I knew without a doubt that he was far from it.
"The year you supposedly lost your hand," I began, hesitantly. "Everyone stood on the edge of a roof, ready to jump, and then nothing happened. They were all set free. Was that you?"
"Blood control," the Doctor told me. "Cheap bit of voodoo. Easy to break."
"I was fourteen. I woke up, freezing cold, with my little brother and my dad next to me. We'd all walked up there, and our mother couldn't stop us. She was in tears."
Slowly, I turned to him. The Doctor was watching me, green eyes wide with understanding. "You wouldn't have died."
"Maybe not from that," I stood, dusting off my jeans from where the grass stuck to me. "But that duel for the planet… you lost a hand, but you won. What would've happened if you lost?"
"Then the planet would have been lost," the Doctor stood up too, leaving the ice cream behind. "It was nothing. Saving people is what I do for fun, I can remember that much."
"You need somewhere to stay, yeah?" I cast a critical eye over him and then at the blue box. "And I don't think you can go back in there any time soon."
As if sensing that we were looking at it, the blue box's doors swung shut and I heard the lock engage. "She's occupied," the Doctor said. "I did blow her up."
"You can stay with me," I decided, picking up my bags. "I'll set out the sofabed."
"Wait," I didn't let him speak, walking off with purpose. He was forced to follow, even if he was very unsteady on his feet. "Just like that, you're helping?"
"Just like that," I said. "You've helped me loads of times, from the sounds of things, and I never knew. So, this is me helping you."
The Doctor sighed, elbows hitting me as he swung his arms around. "I don't help so I have something to hold over someone. I help because it's the right thing to do. You humans, you're so young! Barely even out there, up in that gorgeous sky, full of worlds and civilisations, and there are some who don't want to let you get that far. History states that the human race evolves to something so much more than what they started off with, lasting until the final days of the universe. That's one history fact I actually like."
I looked at him and felt like those worlds and civilisations didn't compare at all to him. He was young and old at the same time, a magnetic quality to him that compelled me to not leave him behind. The Doctor, I thought, was the most interesting thing I'd ever seen in all twenty-four years of living on Earth.
"Every helper needs to be helped," was what I said.
"Maybe," he acquiesced.
"No 'maybe' about it, Doctor." I nudged at him. "Trust me on this, I'm an art student. Philosophical questions that are completely pointless are my forte."
He laughed, a proper one, which took me off guard. It made him so much more alien; I could imagine him as serious and grim quite easily, because wasn't that what aliens were supposed to look like?
It occurred to me, right then, that I'd seen an alien laugh. I'd shared food with an alien. An alien.
Covertly, I pinched myself.
"You aren't dreaming," the Doctor said, with a chuckle that had yet to leave. He seemed to notice every move I made, adjusting himself in response on an almost instinctive level. I wondered if he noticed how he moved, limbs as co-ordinated as a newborn giraffe. "This is real."
"It's strange," I began, tying myself down to the normal London street I was walking down and the shopping bags swinging by my side. The lit sky, the bitter wind, the smell of rain that never seemed to leave the cobblestones of the road. "This should all feel very surreal. But it doesn't."
The Doctor shrugged. "Either you're ridiculously trusting, or you're ridiculously adaptable to new situations."
I bit my lip – I wasn't sure which one I wanted to be. To be trusting, not ruined by the cynical views of modern society, or to be adaptable, so that I could fit into any situation and make the best of it.
"Or maybe you're a bit of both," he continued on. "You're certainly smart enough for that."
"Thanks," I said, with a bit of a blush. "But I think you're over-estimating me a bit."
He looked at me as we walked, gaze intense, and I pretended not to notice as I focused on the path ahead of us. We were gaining more than a few odd looks from other pedestrians on the street; a Chinese woman walking with a white man wearing a ripped suit.
"Art student?" He repeated, sometime later. My flat was almost in sight and my keys jangled in my grasp, anticipation building. "What kind?"
"Just art, I suppose. Architecture mostly, but I'm a classical painter too." I stood on the steps leading up to the front door, buzzing myself in. The Doctor took one of the bags from me in a gentlemanly move that was genuinely surprising. There were moments where I could forget that he was an alien. These moments passed quickly.
"I've met a few painters in my time," the Doctor said, following me up the stairs. "Time travel offers that benefit of meeting whoever I want in history."
"So, that blue box, you weren't lying when you said 'anywhere and anywhen'? It's a spaceship?" I couldn't hide my scepticism. "It's a time machine?"
"It's called a TARDIS-"
"But the doors say 'police box'," I pointed out. "Why'd you label a time machine that? Is it safe to be saying this stuff out loud?"
"Who's gonna look at a blue box and think 'time machine?" The Doctor asked. We'd reached the second floor now, and he had a faint sheen to his skin. It wasn't sweat, but he didn't look well. "It's called the TARDIS."
"The TARDIS for the Doctor?" I pointed out.
He didn't smile, only pausing to rest on the wall. "What floor do you live on?"
"The fourth," I said. "The lift was broke from before I moved in, and the landlord has deigned not to fix it."
The Doctor pushed himself off the wall, passing me the bag back. He loped off down the corridor, padding on the hardwood flooring softly, and now he moved with a bit more grace to him. The newborn giraffe thing was sticking around though.
"What're you doing?" I queried, following at a sedate pace. I didn't like this; there was only one guy who lived on this floor, and he was a total creep. As in, 'no one wanted to live near him' level creep. "We shouldn't be going- Doctor!"
"Where's your sense of adventure?" He asked me. He trailed a hand on the wall as he walked; I didn't know if that was a normal part of how he walked, or if he was trying to keep steady. "Don't you want to know why he's never fixed it?"
"It's because he's a stingy bastard," I said. "Mystery solved, let's go."
"You have a very cynical view of your landlord," the Doctor mentioned, perplexed. "I'm sure he's a nice man, deep down."
He'd found the lift now, a cramped thing packed into the corner of the corridor. I'd always been sort of glad it didn't work; the thing resembled a metal coffin from the outside. I shuddered to think of what it was like on the inside.
The Doctor, who apparently viewed metal coffins as a cool and interesting thing to explore, took out a silver pen from his pocket and began… waving it towards the lift, a whirring sound coming from it as the end glowed blue.
"What's that?" I asked, curiosity getting the better of me.
"Sonic screwdriver," he answered. "It'll get her fixed up in a jiffy." The Doctor's head cocked to the side, sending me a confused look. "How long is a 'jiffy', anyway? Longer or shorter than 'in a mo'?"
"Are you okay?" I patted his arm, noticing how even that made him flinch away. I stopped trying to touch him after that.
"Regeneration isn't fun, you know," the Doctor told me. "It hurts – like every part of you is on fire and then you come out of it and it still hurts, like when your arm's numb and the blood starts flowing again. All over."
I ran my tongue across the front of my teeth; my instincts were telling me to phone an ambulance, or UNIT, or, hell, Torchwood, because the Doctor was quite clearly not well. "Doctor?"
"And it's not just the body that changes," he continued. The pitch of the screwdriver had now increased, and the machinery of the lift began to grumble. "It's the mind too; the neural pathways are completely rewritten, personality changed entirely."
"Doctor?"
"The old me said it was like dying; everything about you changes and some new man walks away. Is that what I am? A new man? I feel the same, I feel like I'm the Doctor, but he said I'm not- but was that what he meant?"
I didn't know what to say; this was obvious a trauma for him, mentally and physically, but what was I supposed to do? He was an alien, and I was an artist, not a nurse. But-
"My roommate, she's a medical student," I said, as the lift arrived with a cheerful 'ding'. "I trust her. Can she take a look at you?"
"She can take more than a look, but I'm not sure why she'd want to." The Doctor stepped into the lift, dragging me with him. "I'm not sure about this face yet. Haven't seen it."
"Er," even though I'd already been covertly staring at him since we met, I made a show of glancing at him. "You're- you look good. Young. Very young."
"How young?" He asked, poking at his cheeks. "I don't want to look like a child!"
I kept quiet.
The Doctor continued feeling up his face, feeling the bridge of his nose. "I'm not feeling any wrinkles. Or facial hair – not even any sideburns this time 'round. Hair's a bit long."
"A bit, yeah." I bit my lip, being very entertained as the Doctor started grabbing himself all over his body. "D'you want me to leave you alone so you can touch yourself more?"
"Why would I-?" He gasped, cheeks blushing red. "Oh, you are- shut up! Naughty!"
It was with a tinkling laugh that I left the lift when it arrived on my floor, leaving the crimson Doctor behind. He followed, wrinkling his nose when we reached my green front door.
"I don't like that colour," he said.
"You're gonna have to get used to it," I told him, slipping my key into the lock. "You'll be seeing it in the mirror quite often."
All the Doctor did was frown at me; didn't he even know the colour of his own eyes?
I entered the flat with a buzzing mind, shuffling over to the kitchen to drop off my shopping. It seemed like a lifetime ago that I'd set out to the shops… I supposed, for the Doctor, it really was a different lifetime ago.
"Cosy," the Doctor said, looking around. I pretended that he wasn't just using real estate-agent speak for 'this place is tiny'. "Lived in."
"It's a mess," I said, bluntly. "But we don't really have the time to clean up."
The Doctor sat down on the patterned armchair, looking as out-of-place as his TARDIS did in the park. His long, spindly legs stretched out in front of him. The newborn giraffe thing really wasn't going away. "You have a roommate, yes?"
"She's a student, and she works night shifts at the hospital. Otherwise, we'd be very quiet right now so she could get her sleep." I began putting the shopping away, careful to keep an eye on the Doctor at all times. "So, um, I've got some spare pyjamas you could wear, if you'd like?"
"I'll be alright," he decided, fiddling with the lamp on the coffee table.
"But isn't it uncomfortable?" I asked, back to him as I stocked up the fridge. "I mean, the other you; they're his clothes, aren't they? So, aren't you basically wearing a dead man's outfit?"
I expected a reply – ranging from a hearty 'no' to another mad ramble about his previous self – but when I faced him, I knew why there had been silence. The Doctor lay on the chair, arms hugging the lamp to his chest, as his head tilted back and he let out a guttural snore.
Honestly, I wasn't even that surprised. It was kind of expected for him to nod off eventually; I guessed regeneration to be a tiring thing. Still, I set out the sofabed and half-pulled, half-dragged the Doctor until he was lying on it. I'd fallen asleep on the armchair before, and it wasn't a comfortable experience.
It didn't look to be a peaceful sleep the Doctor was having, his face contorted into pain, but there was little I could do. I didn't know alien biology… all I could do was wait until the Doctor woke back up.
If that happened.
