At the exact point in time that nobody would notice, the box by the street disappeared and appeared once again. The Doctor looked exhausted as she clambered out of it— she'd got out of the habit of using time travel quite so intricately.
She'd been reluctant to drag the stunned Bendolene through the corridors of someone's house, and leaving it there with its flesh-slicing blades didn't seem like a great idea either. So there was only one thing for it: to turn off the sound in the room she was in, run out the house through the back, vworp back to the room and pick up the Bendolene, then vworp out again to before John would be done with his fight. It was the sort of temporal gymnastics that could probably win her medals, and it made her scowl that no one had seen her do it.
As she walked towards the house John burst out the door in tears, and quick as she could she buried her scowl away.
"I'm sorry," she said as she took him into his arms. She could tell he was uncomfortable with crying so openly as a man, and she wished she could say how she'd once been just like that, too. But it wasn't the time for saying anything at all, so she just hugged him tight as she could.
"She's the same," he said through the tears. "With a different face and voice, but I knew it was still her. Why couldn't she have known me, Doctor? Why did all that have to change?"
"It's not always the same," she said. "The John you'd have become; he could've been very different to the person that you are now. Regeneration's funny like that. There can be things a person finds hard to let go, and people who can let go of everything. There's no rhyme or reason to it, not really. It can take a while, before some people change."
She sighed, and looked towards the TARDIS.
"And sometimes?" she continued. "Sometimes a person can change a lot. Look, you've had a very stressful day. And everything I have to do now, it'll be more stressful than that. Before we go any further, I have to ask— do you want to go further, with any of this? 'Cause there's no shame at all in running away."
John gave the snotty snort of someone who'd run out of tears. He looked at her in a blank way like he hadn't heard her question, then looked empty as he told himself the answer.
"All this change, everything that's happened. It's too soon for it to be real. With what I think real's going to feel like, I'd like to keep going with you. Because all of this, it all just feels like a dream."
"Now that," said the Doctor as she fiddled with the TARDIS doors, "that's an extremely convenient answer. Seeing as what's about to happen, it probably won't seem real to you at all."
She looked away from his face as she thrust open her blue box, so she didn't have to watch his response to seeing the inside of the TARDIS, or the strange half-plastic person that fell weightily out to her arms.
"Okay, that's too unreal," said John, weakly. "My dreams are a bit odd, but not"—
"The unreal's just getting started. So that's your neighbour Rosie, except she's a hairdryer now," said the Doctor. "And I've been keeping her in this box, except it's actually my time machine and it has a whole forest inside. So if you're wondering about all those things you just saw, well. That's pretty much what all of it was."
"I don't understand," said the hairdryer, reflecting the mood.
John took a very deep breath, feeling like he wanted to give the universe a shake. He tried to remember what he'd read in his science books: that whenever someone learned something massive and about the world, it seemed impossible, like everything they'd thought was true was warped into something new. But the books would also say that however frightening that new truth was, it was rarely the whole of the story. Newton changed the way the whole world moved, but Einstein would come to tell him to think again. No matter how weird things got, things could always get weirder below.
But then Einstein's neighbour had never turned into a household appliance.
"Rosie's not a hairdryer," he said. "She's a woman! I don't even know if she had a hairdryer."
"She was a woman. Now she's that. When regeneration's made into a weapon; that's when you get things like the Bendolene. A whole different kind of life, based on other life changing to them."
"But she's still her?"
"As much as your mother's still your mother. Same person inside, even if she's now got the mind of a hairdryer."
"I don't understand," said the Bendolene that had once been called Rosie.
"It does get a little bit complicated," said the Doctor.
"It's speaking English!" said John. "Has it's language not gone and regenerated?"
"Oh no, that's me. The power of my wonderful spaceship; translates any language into your own."
"I don't understand," the hairdryer said again.
"Except," said the Doctor. "It isn't working here. This is a very bad example, for your first time at all this."
"I don't understand," said John.
"Don't you start saying it, too! We were struggling there, right, when we talked about youness? It's a concept we both understand, but our words just slide round it like they're made of grease. You can't translate something into English if there's no way to say it in English, because—"
"I don't understand," said the Bendolene.
"Everything the Bendolene think is alien," said the Doctor. "Really alien. There's no way you can understand it, and there's no way it can understand you. In fact, the only thing either of you can understand about each other is—"
"That we don't understand," said John.
"Aren't we the distinguished philosophers," said the Doctor.
"This is insane," said John.
"It's one of the less normal days, I'll grant you that."
"It's mad! I always thought I knew what aliens would be like; all tentacles and little green men! But you're just an ordinary woman, and she's just lying there like a hairdryer"—
"That's the thing about aliens," said the Doctor. "Wouldn't be doing our job right if we didn't seem a bit, well. Alien."
"I don't understand," said the Bendolene.
"Bit slow," said the Doctor. "Unlike me. Your body's not saying what your words are John; it's all there in your face. You know I'm an alien, and it doesn't bother you; in fact it's the total reverse. You're relieved, aren't you? To meet someone who isn't really human."
John looked incredibly awkward.
"You look incredibly awkward," said the Doctor. "Maybe I should phrase this as a question. Rosie the Bendolene, a hairdryer bound up in wire. Everything you say she finds totally incomprehensible, and you'd never even consider that she could understand how you feel. And I'm thinking you wouldn't feel any different," she said, "if she was still a human person there right now."
She turned sadly to him, though his eyes were looking away.
"I'm right, aren't I?" she said. "Everyone's like a Bendolene to you."
John sighed.
"You're right," he said. "People don't always think I'm very… peopley."
"I do!" said the Doctor in mock outrage.
"I know. But it's like you said; you're an alien. You're not like what other people are."
"In my experience," said the Doctor, "other people are like a great many things indeed."
"You know what I mean, though. Like… like you have to keep secrets, all of the time, because if you're honest about what you're keeping in everyone'll just stare?
"Yes," said the Doctor, "is something I definitely understand. But the kind of person I am," she said, "has a great many secrets indeed."