"It wasn't a wild goose chase, you know," the Doctor said to Ms. Frizzle, "no matter what the children think."
"Oh, I'm quite aware of that, Doctor," Ms. Frizzle replied, smiling.
The Doctor looked surprised. "Really?"
Ms. Frizzle laughed. "Of course. You knew too precisely where to look for something that others won't admit exist."
And, the Doctor thought, she had a magic school bus. Somehow. He couldn't expect her to be entirely ignorant. For all he knew, it was alien technology. But, well, it didn't seem like alien tech, and he'd seen a lot of different kinds. No, this was…something else. More of a conglomerate, he suspected. Not entirely alien technology, but not necessarily wholly without it, either. He needed to examine it to be sure of anything.
That in itself was a tad unusual. He usually had a stronger suspicion than this.
"How'd you wind up with this particular beauty, anyway?" the Doctor asked offhandedly, patting the side of the bus.
Ms. Frizzle's smile grew. "We all have our secrets, Doctor. If you can keep yours, I intend to keep mine."
All right, so that's what he got for asking outright. Things never were that easy. "May I at least examine her?" He didn't know whether Ms. Frizzle anthropomorphised her school bus, but his car had been Bessie, and the TARDIS was, well, the TARDIS, a wonderful old girl without whom he'd have been forced to live quite a different life, so he was used to relating to feminine personalities in what others mistakenly thought were mere pieces of machinery. Maybe it was because they were both temperamental, though the TARDIS was noticeably more so than Bessie had ever been, perhaps because she really was alive, but he wasn't quite sure.
"By all means," Ms. Frizzle replied, and the bus obligingly popped open her bonnet.
The Doctor shrugged out of his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, but he didn't see anything out of the ordinary when he examined the bus's inner workings. In fact, it was all exceedingly ordinary. Ordinary and usual and normal and dull, all without a hint of the extraordinary capabilities he'd witnessed.
The Doctor's frown deepened. Not even a sign of a plonthoister.
He closed the bonnet and turned back to Ms. Frizzle. "All right," he admitted, "that's better than I would have thought in this day and age, I'll grant you that. You keep your secrets very well. But I know there's more to this than meets the eye."
"I never said there wasn't."
The Doctor stared at her for a moment, and then it all clicked into place. "Oh," he said. "Oh, that's clever. That's very, very clever." He patted the school bus affectionately. "That's how it works, doesn't it? All of it. The bus, your field trips, the wild goose chase I unwittingly led."
Ms. Frizzle didn't say anything, but he could see the twinkle in her eye.
"You can see it if you believe in it," the Doctor continued. "All those kids of yours might have wanted to believe me, to believe all my tales of aliens, but that's not the environment they've grown up in, now is it? You've been showing them science, using the power of their imaginations and yours to do it. But me, I tried doing things differently, didn't I? I asked for faith first, for them to trust in my words when I'd as good as told them that I didn't have any more proof than my word."
Ms. Frizzle smiled at him. "They took you at your word, Doctor. Can you blame them for that?"
The Doctor sighed. "Not really, no. But it's a proper shame, isn't it? Young imaginations, so vibrant, so alive, and yet blinded by the world they've grown up in. They acknowledged the possibility, nothing more. They might yearn to know that there's more, but already they're searching for proof. They're not satisfied with speculation. Already." He looked towards the classroom window, taking a moment to watch the students who would grow up and forget, folding truths into fictions, adventures into stories, impossibilities into imagination.
It didn't have to be that way. If it had to be that way, no one would be any different. But knowing that these children had been given an extra chance and would still, in all likelihood, call their treasures of childhood mere fancy and play, was terribly disappointing.
Equally so was the knowledge that this particular adventure could have turned out differently still. "You could have dropped the shield," the Doctor said. "You could have let them see." They'd all been caught in it, that shield. They'd all willingly had the wool pulled over their eyes. Even him, until he'd realized what was happening, and not just when it came to chasing after aliens. He'd been going about finding out the truth about this magic school bus in entirely the wrong way, too.
"I wasn't going to take away something I never put up," Ms. Fizzle replied quietly. "You know as well as I that preconceptions and doubts and disbelief can construct a far better shield than anything I could do through the bus. You were trying to get them to break through the boundaries, showing them the limits and daring them to step past them. I could do no more than encourage them to take the opportunity to do so, and you know that quite well, I imagine. They needed to take that final step by themselves."
"They would have done so if you were the one leading them to it instead of me," the Doctor said. "They trust you. You're their teacher. I'm just a stranger to them. They still don't know what to make of me."
"Few do."
"True enough," the Doctor conceded, "but you can't deny that they would have opened their eyes, that they would have really looked like they'd needed to, if I hadn't been the one to ask them to do it. With me, it was all too easy for them to overlook things, to discount what's simply impossible because they've never seen it before. That's too much like me, ignoring all those little clues or looking too hard and missing something that's right under my nose. They ought to remember not to do that, discounting either the impossible or the everyday things."
"Then teach that lesson," Ms. Frizzle said simply. "Show them the value of doing what you say."
After a moment, the Doctor asked, "Why did you invite me here? You asked me to come here to speak. Why?"
"Why ever not?"
"No," the Doctor said. "No, don't do that. Don't. Just listen, and answer properly. You didn't question me. When I came to you full of questions, you didn't ask any of your own. Why not?"
"I'm a teacher, Doctor. I'm used to questions."
"Do you have the answers?" the Doctor asked, raising his eyebrows.
"Sometimes," came the reply, "and sometimes you already have the answer, and all I need to do is let you look for it."
"I don't need a lesson," the Doctor complained. "I'm not one of your pupils."
"Perhaps not in so many words," Ms. Frizzle agreed, "but if everyone can learn from everyone else, we're all pupils, aren't we? And I wouldn't have thought you would turn down a lesson, Doctor, for we're never too old to learn new ones or be reminded of old ones. Wouldn't you agree?"
Well. She did have a point. Part of the reason he kept travelling was to learn.
"But I don't even know what the lesson is," the Doctor grumbled.
Ms. Frizzle winked at him. "Then I would suggest you open your eyes yourself, Doctor, or you'll miss it entirely."
"You could just tell me, you know," the Doctor said.
Ms. Frizzle shook her head. "You'll learn your lesson better if you find it out for yourself than if I simply tell you. One thing I will tell you, Doctor, is that we take chances here, and we make mistakes, and we get messy. That way, we can learn."
"Yes, that would be a bit more interesting than reading through ancient volumes detailing times past in a dead language, wouldn't it?" the Doctor mused. "For eight year olds, at the very least."
"Quite," Ms. Frizzle agreed. She glanced in the direction of her classroom, then added, "But I would suggest that we not leave our students for too long. They're a clever bunch, and they never fail to surprise me."
"I've no doubt about that," the Doctor said, "but I do doubt the day will come when you fail to surprise them. Mind you," he added, picking up his suit jacket and pulling it back on, "I don't look forward to the day they fancy themselves grown up and above your particular brand of learning."
"Don't give up on them so quickly," Ms. Frizzle chastised gently. "They might not have let themselves look because you gave them no reason to."
"I asked them to look," the Doctor protested. "I even said they'd see it if they tried, if they opened their eyes and really looked. I asked them to, and they didn't!"
"But you didn't show them how," Ms. Frizzle pointed out, "and you let yourself get caught up in it, too."
The Doctor blinked. "You weren't? You saw everything?"
"Pyramids and all," Ms. Frizzle confirmed softly. "You were in the right place, but you were so focused on everything else, so convinced that there had to be a different problem, that you didn't look closely enough, either. Mind your own lessons, Doctor. You'll forget yourself if you aren't careful."
The Doctor was quiet for a moment. "You're right," he said at length. "About everything, those kids included. They won't ever notice anything if I don't convince them that it's worth looking for." If he could convince them now, there was a chance, a slim, tiny, sliver of a chance that they would remember when they got older.
Of course, some people, in the rush to grow up, would only push the impossible truths away all the harder, deliberately blinding themselves so that they could tether themselves to the hard and fast rules of the real world. Those sorts of people ignored the fact that rules were sometimes bent, and they ignored all that came out of bending those rules. He did a lot of rule-bending himself, so he ought to know.
"I was supposed to talk to them about mysteries, right?" the Doctor said. Without waiting for Ms. Frizzle's confirmation, he continued, "Well, half the fun of a mystery is solving it, if you've got enough information to solve it or to track down all the pieces in the first place. And they might discount the truth when it's right in front of them, but I've got to give them that chance, haven't I? And you're right. I haven't. And I shouldn't be so quick to judge, either."
"None of us should be," Ms. Frizzle agreed.
The Doctor gave her a silly grin. "All right, then. We'd better get back in there before those children have solved all the world's mysteries without us. I'd hate to miss out on the discoveries."
Ms. Frizzle just laughed.
