THE DOCTOR
There was a fly in the TARDIS. For one thing, flies don't talk. They buzz. Their perception of reality is so distinct, with their various eyes and different perception of time, they're terrible conversation anyways, so why bother trying?
The crown prince of an alien world had once been accidentally turned into a fly and he had to risk his life to turn him back again. Amy had swatted him with a newspaper. That'd been terrible manners.
He couldn't remember the name of the planet, no matter how hard he tried.
He wondered how many worlds he'd taken the fly to. Flies must have a very short lifespan, so it couldn't have been much. Perhaps the fly had been here a day, maybe two. The Doctor had never read up on flies. After releasing the fly back to his natural habitat (he figured Canterbury was good enough; not even a fly would want to go to Brighton) he took a random book off a random shelf in the TARDIS and sat down for a good think.
Reading took his mind off Clara.
He didn't want to think of Clara. Because Clara didn't want to think of him.
"It's your planet too!" she'd told him. Well, maybe he was fed up with Earth. He'd tried to do the right thing. He respected their choices. He let them create their own history. What more do they want? How many times did he have to save the Earth to prove he gave a damn?
Well, he didn't. Not today. Today, Clara left him for doing the right thing.
A few thoughts later, the Doctor's eyes resettled on his book. He wondered how long he had been trying to read the same page. Over and over.
The TARDIS, its sounds, its wealth of sounds and air and blinking buttons, he loved it, all of it; when he had first changed the desktop settings of his TARDIS he tried them all and explored all its new aspects. Until he got bored. And there was always a manual somewhere; the TARDIS kept dropping them in random places for him to read, but he never would. He threw them out into space whenever he could. Somewhere out there is a planet with a film of debris in orbit that just consists of TARDIS manuals.
"Right!" he exclaimed to no-one in particular. He was getting hungry, which was enough inspiration for him to turn on navigation and make the TARDIS go into phasing. He jumped from his reclining chair (where he neatly deposited his book) and ran down the steps. At the centre of the room stood a giant six-sided console, with a tube down its centre that reached the ceiling and went up and down when the machine was activated. There was a noise that came with it. The Doctor loved that noise.
"Give…me…a destination!"
He threw a lever downward and the entire room shook and there was that noise again. The Doctor closed his eyes, without letting go of the lever, which he gripped with a strong hand, and seemingly waited. Without warning, he threw the lever back up. His other hand had turned into a fist.
"I know I shouldn't…" he said out loud again, seemingly to no-one in particular, seemingly to the console itself that would always listen when he was alone. "I shouldn't go out angry. Bad for the blood pressure."
Slowly he made his way to the door.
"Maybe I should talk to someone…. A professional, perhaps. A thousand years of repressed memories and PTSD, good luck Freud. No, what I need is... to get away! To get a long way away! Maybe I deserve that. Or maybe I don't."
The mostly sensible idea of talking to Clara just made him angrier, just made him feel more rejected.
He stood before the doors of the TARDIS. Through the small windows there was only blackness, but they were never that transparent anyway.
"Fine, then," he said. "Have it your way."
He stepped outside the doors. Light from the TARDIS spilled out into an otherwise pitch black room, until he closed the door behind him. The Doctor took his sonic screwdriver and used its green light to examine the room.
The first thing he saw was a counter with alongside it a stool bolted to the floor. There were dirty plates all over the counter, some of which still contained food. He couldn't guess how long it had been left there, although some contents were beginning to smell.
With his elbow, he touched a small cup that bounded off the counter and on to the floor. In a bustling marketplace filled with people no-one would've paid it any notice, but in here, in this small dark chamber the sound of the small cup rolling and spinning on its own axis was like a truck backing into a chicken coop. The sound however was quickly gone. Absorbed by the thick walls. Here must be well padded or deep, wherever here was.
As he looked around, he couldn't find a door. He did find a woman, in a bed twice her size, slowly waking to the sound of the cup.
"Don't mind me. I'll be out in a moment," he said, still looking for that door. He was hoping for a starry night, a bustling megacity, some googly-eyed aliens, or better yet, a good old-fashioned doomsday device and a mad scientist. Those were his favourite. It's been a long time since he handled one of those.
As he made his way through the room, he stumbled across random objects littering the floor. Clothes, plates, shoes, dirt, and for some reason, white locks of hair.
He still couldn't find a door. "This is a very small room," he said, looking around. "Do you live here?"
The woman in the bed was finding her voice. Her skin was white, her hair was white, and her eyes as black as coal. She curled up beneath her blanket to shield herself from his sight, but she did it slowly. She looked like a woman untouched by the sleep she just woke from, as if she had been awake for a very long time and feeling every second of it.
"Are you here to kill me?" she asked. Her voice was raw and barely audible.
The Doctor raised his eyebrow and stopped in the middle of his stride.
"Why would you say that?"
Why would her mind immediately jump to that? A stranger is standing in the middle of her room at night and the first thing that pops into her mind is 'assassin'.
"Are you a princess of some kind? A president? An oracle?"
Oracle had been a bad guess. If she'd been an oracle, she would've known he wasn't an assassin, unless she saw the future in which he foresaw such an event happening. He hated knowing the future. That never worked out well for him.
"No, that can't be it. Oracles can see the future," he said, sharing the products of his speedy mind. "If you could see the future, you would've seen me coming. You could've put the kettle on."
On the other side of the room, a boiling pot started to whistle.
"I think I did," the woman said. "I don't know how, but I did."
The whistling grew louder. The TARDIS groaned softly, like a dull ache, in the corner.
The TARDIS translation circuit couldn't handle the next word out of the Doctor's mouth, so it changed to something similar the woman could understand.
"Frell."