Thanks to SpaceHead3 for adding me to story alert. This is the last of the background, and then I'm throwing you all right in.

Discl.: This. Is. Fanfiction. All I own are my OCs, Christie and Sam. Touch them at all, and you will die a slow, painful death, beginning with Chinese Water Torture. (that means you, Moffat.)

Chapter Three: Cracked

Then I met Samantha Cardinal.

In 2007, I was newly a freshman, starting my first year of high school. I had spent the past five years secretly researching my abilities, filling my head with computer articles and book excerpts and whatever folklore I could get my scrawny hands on. I experimented in the privacy of my small room, testing my range of forms.

I shapeshifted into animals. I had never felt the need to become another human and had never been daring enough to attempt inanimate objects. I discovered that if I concentrated hard enough, I could even become mythical creatures – the griffin being my favourite.

But my private world came to an abrupt standstill when Samantha Cardinal transferred in from Australia.

Samantha – Sam – was British. That was the first thing that drew my attention; I'd never encountered anyone from a different country, other than a handful of Asians and the immigrants that worked in fast-food restaurants and manicured landscaping. I'd seen many of the James Bond movies, and her accent fascinated me. She was exotic, with her thermos of tea and red, high-top Converse. She was different.

It occurred to me after almost a week that she and her family did a lot of travelling; she seemed to bear the mark of different countries – England, Scotland, Australia, and somehow I guessed even France. It reminded me of my own unstable life. Only all my journeys took place within southern California, not even straying outside of Irvine and Orange County. Most recently, I'd been landed in a Teen's Home – I'd been out of foster care for about six months, as it had been decided that a Home would be more stable than a foster home, and stability was "most important" now that I was "leaving the realm of childhood" and entering high school.

Which was an excuse for how no one currently wanted to adopt an emotionless yet volatile, constantly hungry teen with "social inabilities." I hadn't cared. As long as I'd had a place to sleep and something to quell my hunger, I seriously hadn't cared.

All the same, I had found a fragile connection to the new girl. We were both different. We both moved a lot. Sam just had something I didn't: an uncaring, confident attitude. My only confidence rested in the notion that I was better off sheltering myself from the discrimination of the world – after all, there were so many examples of how people reacted to things that were different and to things that they didn't understand. Black people; Jews; the Witch Trials of Salemtown and the Witch Hunts of Europe – people had been executed simply for being different. But Sam was obviously of a contrary mind – and it worked for her. But she also wasn't a freak like me.

Sam seemed to carry herself around in some sort of invisible bubble, or maybe she could transmit subliminal messages to the common public, declaring, This is who I am. Like it or shove off. It had been utterly fascinating to me.

I had contented myself with watching her, without being too much like a stalker, for the first few weeks. We'd shared a math class, where she'd struggled with some of the concepts. I took Spanish and she took French. I took regular gym – where I discovered my adequacy as a runner – and she took dance.

We met officially one day in math. She had been struggling with our Algebra homework, rather than engaging in conversation like the majority of the class. Finally banishing my nerves and breaking every rule I'd established to isolate myself, I'd taken a seat in the empty desk beside her, glanced at her homework, and quietly instructed her how to finish her problem. She'd glanced at me, reached the answer, and looked up.

Then she'd introduced herself, asked me my name, and immediately struck up a conversation.

I had answered with mostly monosyllables at first, but soon she'd had voicing my opinion on the latest American music – in complete sentences, although my voice never grew louder. What seemed like seconds later, the bell rang and class was over; we had spent more than fifteen minutes discussing things from music to math to books. Before I had been able to absorb the gravity of what had happened, Sam was on her feet and smiling, saying goodbye and that she'd see me to tomorrow.

The rest of the school day passed in a blur, and that night I realised that I had spoken more in those few minutes than I had in the past two months, if not more.

I had also realised that I was eager to see her again.

Our companionship bloomed into friendship. The world had opened up as I had. Sam accepted me like no one else ever had, seeing me for my good qualities rather than for what was "wrong" with me. If I had nothing to say, she didn't push me to talk. If I was particularly stoic or even unresponsive, she didn't mind. She didn't assume. She didn't judge. She liked me. I became attached to her -- the first real object of my affection in nearly a decade.

She invited me over once for dinner, one night during Christmas vacation, and even accommodated for my vegetarian diet. I was usually very reserved around her family – mom, dad, and little brother – but not as closed up as I would have been a single month prior.

But it took me a very long time to realise that my changes signified that I was healing – mainly because at the time, I was not of the mind that I was broken. Repressed and misunderstood, perhaps, but not broken. As our friendship deepened, my shields came down. I'd eventually reached a point where I trusted her with my life, and I'd wanted to tell her what I was and what I could do. I'd hoped to whatever god there was that she would accept all of me. But how would I have broached such a subject?

One afternoon, as we sat in her bedroom doing Algebra, I accidentally dislodged something from a stack on her desk. I'd asked her what it was and she told me with a huge grin. It was, of course, her sonic screwdriver.

Thus our math session had been interrupted as Sam wove a tale about someone called the Doctor, an alien that travelled through time and space in a TARDIS. The following week had then been devoted to Sam's math tutoring and my education on everything Doctor Who. I became quickly captivated and was soon well on my way to being what she called a Whovian.

Once I had been exposed to the Doctor's strange world, I then understood how Sam had been drawn to me as a friend: I must have had a mien of otherworldliness about me. She was obviously attracted to all things alien or extraterrestrial. I fell into that category more deeply than she knew.

But she was not unaware for very much longer after that.

We had been on the roof of my "home" on Saturday night, talking. Sam had begun practicing a dance routine when she came to close to the edge. One second she was dancing, the next she had disappeared over the ledge. Hesitating for no more than a heartbeat, I leapt up and dove over the side of building, arms spread-eagled in the open space. My body took but two single seconds to morph.

Sam had then become like prey to an eagle: clutched safely in talons the size of her head and carried high over the dark street with huge feathered wings. With the body of a giant bird, I'd plucked her from the night air, but half a storey from the ground. I had thrown away secrecy to save the life of my one and only friend, and no matter what we went through later in life, I would never regret it.

Her initial reaction was bewilderment. The next was excitement, then pure exuberance.

And that was that. My secret was safe. She'd cracked me open at last. I was her alien friend, and never happier.

That was a little less than a year ago.

Enter the present.