Chapter Ten
"Ah, the blue box!"
The man's eyes shot open, revealing that he lay in a street of gravel. Straining, the man pushed himself up from the ground. He planted his feet on the ground, but stumbled back onto a blue surface behind him.
"Oh, my head," he groaned.
He opened his eyes wide to get an idea for where he was. It was a small alley, with a wooden fence shutting it off from the main street. Behind him was a large blue box that emitted a single sound like a low boom from within it. Before him was a short woman, with curly brown hair drawn back in a single braid down below her neck. Her eye were big and rounded, with gleaming brown eyes.
"I've been looking for you." the woman extended her jewelry encrusted hand forward towards the man. "Clara Oswin Oswald, head of the junior recruiting department of Unified Intelligence Taskforce." the woman tapped a badge on her red top that said "UNIT."
"Erm," a faint echo of pain sliced through the man's head, but he dismissed it quickly. "hello."
"Is this box yours?" inquired the officer.
The man looked towards the blue box that he had leaned against. He was about to say no, but something inside him disagreed.
"Yes, it is." The man blinked as he looked at his surroundings once more. "This is…Earth, isn't it? And you are…human?"
"Yeah. I wasn't aware those were optional." Clara responded.
"It is with me." The man echoed a faint memory.
"Right. Well, can you come with me then? And bring your box, too. Captain Harkness and Gwen are waiting for us back at headquarters." Clara nodded towards the box. "They're the ones who told me about it. 'Look for the blue box,' they said."
"How am I supposed to move it?"
"Dunno. It's your box."
Inexplicably, the man snapped and said, "It's not a box! It's the TARDIS."
"The what?"
The man slapped his forehead. His head burned again as memories bubbled beneath the surface. He tried to grab the memories, but they seemed too far out of reach.
"TARDIS. I don't know, I think that's the name."
Clara smirked, "You named your box?"
"Oh, it's not just a box." More memories began to reach the surface. "Come in."
"You want me to go in there?" Clara laughed incredulously. "There isn't enough room for the two of us in there."
"No, you're right." the man muttered, puzzled. But whatever the reason, his hand fell into his pocket and pulled out a key. He began to open the box. "There isn't enough room."
The door flew open. Clara gave the man a curious look before stepping in. The man quickly followed her, for some reason extremely eager. He broke into a run
He shut his eyes, expecting hit the other end of the box. Instead he bumped into the woman from UNIT's back.
Sent back on the floor by the collision, the man rubbed his arse. "Oh, sorry about that."
But the crash seemed to have no impact on Clara. She was staring at the area around her. "But it was a box," she murmured, "it was just a box."
The interior of the box was anything but a box. The wall moved in oblong shape, close to a circle. The wall were lined with hexagonal roundels, all emitting bright white light. The entire room was colored black, which was occasionally interspersed with an orange-red color. In-between the roundels on the wall was a black leather, the coated nearly every non-walking surface of the room. The roof seemed higher than the eye could see and from it extended a tube which connected with a console that was centered on the upper deck of the room. The console, like the majority of the room was black stripped with red. The console had numerous buttons and numbers and thingys and whatsits.
Clara grinned widely in disbelief. "No, but it's…it's…"
"-bigger on the inside." completed the man in agreement. The memoires were returning more rapidly and more complete now. He began to remember leaving home. The time he left and the time his other self left.
"Yeah, and it looks as though she's regenerated."
"'She?'"
"The TARDIS."
"Your box is a she?"
"Yes." As he caught Clara giggling at his definition of the box, he added, "And shut up."
The man moved closer to the console and began pressing the buttons. Although unsure at first, the move her played around with the nobs, the more it felt right.
Clara walked behind him, arms crossed. "So, this box of yours. What exactly is it?"
The man began to understand the console, and began moving across rapidly. "Well, it is the TARDIS. It's my home. Or was. Well, I don't know."
"You live in a box in an alley in London." Clara stood right behind him, craning her neck to see what exactly it was that the man was doing on the console.
"No, don't be ridiculous." the man said, searching for the last button. "I live in a box that can travel anywhere in time and space."
"Ah. Right."
"No, really."
"No, of believe you," Clara lied.
"I'll prove it." The man pushed down on what appeared to Clara to be an aerosol can embedded in the controls. "Ha ha! Found it!"
The TARDIS began to shutter aggressively, as if trapped in an earthquake. A loud noise seemed to engulf them and both Clara and the man had to find something to clutch onto to keep themselves from falling. The man clutched onto the leather-coated rail that surrounded the area around the console. Clara clutched onto the man.
"Okay!" Clara yelled. "I believe you! You can stop now."
"No," the final memories asserted themselves in the man's mind. "We have a planet to save."
Clara screamed, not so much out of fear, but out of excitement of the unknown. "You're mad, you know that? Who are you?"
The man threw his head back and let forth from his mouth a burst of residual regeneration energy. He grinned and rubbed his hand along his brand new teeth.
"Good question. Who am I?"
Author's Note: So, initially in this chapter, I had a character named Sheree Bloom who worked for UNIT (in my earlier notes, for a human resistance group called "the Fight.") who would discover the man with the box. I began writing a second part of this story that centered on Sheree and the man with the box that was about the human resistance to the Porigath, but it was extremely weak and overall unimportant to the plot. While, I did end up getting rid of that story, I retained Sheree and the man with the box for reasons you will see in the next and final chapter. However, after coming back to the story after several months, I found that I was dissatisfied with her character. Now that Series 7 had concluded (Spoilers) we know that Clara Oswald has been spread across time and space to save the Doctor, so I thought it would be a nice nod to our current continuity to include her in this role. I know that "prime" Clara existed around the same time as this version of Clara, but my intent is that since Clara seemed to save the Doctor in all of his past adventures, there must be several existing at one time, so this is just one of the Claras in the early twenty first century. I hope you enjoyed this and look out for the final chapter later today!