I was going to post an original work for this prompt but at the last minute decided that it wasn't quite finished and I didn't want to post it, despite planning to post it for the last month or two! So I hurriedly wrote this from scratch last night. I wanted to include more Classic Who in here but I'm not familiar with enough of it (one day I'll see more than the four episodes I own on DVD) to add more than the scant references here.
The Doctor stood amongst a forest of doors, holding rank either side of her down the long corridor that curved off into the distance, end unseen. Each door was slightly different. Some were shiny and looked newly painted and some were worn and scared. Some were wood, others metal, some glass, stone or other exotic and strange materials. Most were rectangular but one or two were different shapes. All were shut.
This was a part of the TARDIS that none of her companions could access, this was hers and hers alone. Silent and sacred as a cemetery. It was, in essence, a cemetery of memories.
She didn't know why she had been drawn here, the TARDIS silent bar the ever present background hum. The Fam were sleeping, exhausted after another exhilarating adventure, complete with copious running. But she wasn't feeling tired, still riding that high and too restless to sit still whilst she completed a spot of maintenance. Instead her feet had drawn her here.
She walked down the corridor, fingers brushing a door now and again, just wandering. She stopped at one door. It was pink painted wood, with a carved wooden name plate. Rose.
The door opened with a gentle push. Clothes were scattered over the floor and the large bed, a union jack shirt draped over a wooden chair sat in front of a white painted dresser. The surface of the dresser was covered in bottles and tubes, one still sat open, as if the occupant had just stepped out and would be back in a second or two.
The Doctor left, door silently closing behind her. She walked again, footsteps echoing softly around her.
Another door caught her eye. Painted wood like the last, but this time painted TARDIS blue. She didn't have to open the door to know what lay behind it and just laid her hand and forehead on the surface, shutting her eyes and remembering. A hairbrush covered in long ginger hair sits on a chest of drawers next to a paper mache model of the TARDIS, and man's deodorant sits next to them both. A bunk bed sits against one wall, a framed photograph of a young couple, an older woman with a mass of curls stood between them, hung up nearby.
She left that door behind, feet walking automatically as her brain sunk into memories of times now past. Of people now lost, or gone, ones she will never see again. Of rooms she passed, once full of life and laughter now cold and silent.
Of red hair, smart blazers and a mouth that took no prisoners, of baseball bats and unpredictable explosives, of textbooks and glass test tubes, of knives, of pencils, of squareness guns, of-
SMACK
The Doctor rebounded against a door, hearts hammering and head smarting from the impact. She looked around and found herself at the end of the corridor, the door opening to reveal the path back to the console room. She took one last look back at the long line of doors as she filled her lungs with fresher air, remembering the lives still present in the TARDIS, sleeping in their own rooms that one day will join these memorials to the past. She turned from them and strode away, the door closing behind her.