The first thing the Doctor had noticed upon walking into Amelia Pond's bedroom was not the crack on the wall. Yes, that was quite important—but no, he'd sensed the little blue ball, still blinking red in a far corner of the room. The beacon had probably led the TARDIS right to this location.
The problem was that the Doctor couldn't ever remember giving the help beacon to this particular girl.
And there was the problem of the empty rooms. Such a large house; so many empty rooms. Plus one little girl in a highly unlikely situation. She couldn't have survived on her own, in such a large house, all by herself for ten years, could she? Hardly. This was supported by the help beacon… and the book hastily dropped next to bed. Amelia didn't seem to notice it at all, but it had stood out the moment the Doctor had entered her bedroom. It was the one object that hadn't been stored neatly away in its proper place. Instead, it looked as if it had been suddenly dropped… as if the person once holding it had suddenly vanished into thin air.
While standing next to the crack in the universe.
Why Amelia Pond had not disappeared as well, though… He didn't know. It was quite the mystery.
Mysteries. He loved them.
Which brought him to the next one: the whisper he heard was achingly, heartbreakingly familiar. Yet it was through a crack in the universe, and those were never any good. Cracks in the universe, running through not only width and length and height, but also through space and time, cracks running through the folds of reality itself? Not good.
Not good, he had to keep telling himself. Not even one particular crack that emptied out into the expanse of the Void before somehow finding its way to a parallel crack in a parallel universe. A crack through which whispers floated gently, a simple two-worded warning that instantly caught his attention.
He had to seal the crack. He didn't know why Amelia Pond remained safe, despite being the residence within the closest proximity to the damage in the space-time continuum; it seemed as if the majority of Amelia's family had fallen prey to the crack.
That large house. All those large, empty rooms. The one girl, whom, up to what was most likely yesterday, had once been tucked into bed and read a nighttime story about the Roman Empire by… a parental figure. Somebody who had showed her love. Amelia had once had somebody; now she was alone.
The Doctor saw himself in Amelia, and so he decided to help her in the only way he knew how.
He pointed his screwdriver at the crack and began the arduous task of sealing it shut.
But when the Doctor sonic'd the crack, he certainly had not expected the crack to initially widen slightly. The light blazed into his eyes, yet he did not look away. He did not look away… because, try as he might, he could not but give up the possible opportunity to see her again.
But the woman he barely caught a glimpse of—more like a girl, standing on the peripheries of his vision, just barely out of sight—it was not her. It was not his former time-traveling companion. It was a complete stranger, somebody whom he'd never met before.
Or perhaps he had. Though he certainly did not hold any memories of her (and the Doctor always remembered), the Doctor felt a strange resonance. Ripples across space and time; echoes all along his time stream.
That phantom remnant of a memory hovered on the sidelines, however, as more crushing thoughts overwhelmed him: though he could hear her through the crack in space and time, she was not there on the other side of the crack. She was not in her alternate dimension.
Now that just raised more questions than answers. Not that any answers had been answered in the first place.
And then the crack sealed itself halfway shut—much like, well, perhaps a roll of cardboard, with one end (the parallel universe) now squashed shut and the rest of the Void crashing together, running along the length of the cardboard roll until it reached the other end (here at Amelia's bedroom) and sealed that shut as well. For now, for just a second, the Doctor stared into the empty Void of the time/space continuum, watching as it collapsed onto itself, mending the tear in the fabric of the universe…
Yet the figure of the strangely familiar brunette remained, still hovering in the depths of that abstract emptiness between the walls of the universes. Nothing should be able to exist in that vacant non-reality. One could travel swiftly across the Void with a Dimensional Transporter, those little metal discs with yellow activator buttons that Pete and Mickey and Jackie had used during the battle at Canary Wharf. But once one fell into the Void, one simply stopped existing.
Except for that girl. She was impossible. Where no Dalek, no Cyberman, no human could possibly exist, she did.
And then he could no longer see her, because the crack had also closed in Amelia's room.
For several seconds, the Doctor could do little more than stare at the empty wall. He had wanted to see the woman he'd lost; instead, he had received the impossible girl.
A/N: Can you guess who Amelia Pond's aunt is?
