[A/N: Hi fam! Firstly, let me apologize for not updating in some time. There was an important personal project I wanted to finish and I have some exams coming up, so it's possible updating will still be a tad slow the coming week(s). I hope to be picking up again next week though.

Now, however, another chapter for all you lovelies! (And a spectacular new character introduction!)]

Chapter 8: The Mad Man with a box

"Papa! Papa!"

He never said anything. Just looked. Always looked. He just stood there, arms crossed, staring with that cold, thoughtful frown as they dragged her through the corridors. She kicked, she cried and she begged, but he wouldn't listen. The men in the white shirts were hurting her, but he didn't care. Or maybe he did – but he decided to ignore it because he thought she deserved a punishment.

Eleven didn't understand the nature of 'punishment'. She always thought you would get punishment once you had done something bad, because it would teach you not to do it again. But the things Papa asked from her… were they good things? Surely finding and listening to strange people wasn't that bad, she even liked to think of it as a game of some sort, but hurting animals, hurting and killing animals was entirely different. It didn't feel good. She didn't want to do it. And so she would refuse, every time, and Papa would punish her for it. Because she wasn't listening to him, which was a bad thing but listening to him was a bad thing as well, only would she not get punished if she listened to him – and could you please explain how that was not confusing?

Oh, it didn't matter. Not now. Now she was on her way to another lonely session in the empty room.

"Papa!"

She managed to kick one of the men, but he immediately snapped back at her, twisting her arm. She cried out in pain. Of course she could stop him if she wanted to, but she didn't. She knew Papa wanted to see her do it, fighting back against the men, but she wouldn't; it was simply a bad thing.

They carried her to the open door of the empty room. Threw her in. She fell to the hard tiles and managed to crawl up, just in time to see one last glimpse of their stone cold faces as they pushed the door shut and the lock clicked with a metallic thunk.

"Papa," she said, now softly, and she started to sob. It was of no use, the door surely was soundproof and even if it wasn't, she doubted that Papa would listen to her ("you've been bad so you deserve punishment, Eleven"), but once the waterworks had turned on, you could hardly stop them. Besides, what else was there to do? Crying made her sleep easier.

She cried until she felt she had no tears left, then carefully sank down on the floor. She put a hand under her head and stared into the darkness, listening to the rhythmic beating of her own heart. The questions always came after the sobbing. What it all meant. Whether this existence was all there was to her life, and if she'd ever got to experience one without all the pain and the punishment and the coldness. Whether she would ever know love. She had heard this word a couple of times, not just in her dreams and her trips to the darkness but also from Papa, although he never seemed very eager to talk about it. He never seemed eager to talk with her about normal things. Eleven was alone, but she was smart enough to understand that there was more than this bad place with its concrete walls and eerily humming machines and people in white suits. There was a world beyond this. If she had been nice and listened to what Papa told her to do (and even then it was still rare), he would sometimes tell her things. About cars. About toys and how they worked. About televisions, which were a sort of weird machines in which people were locked up, but not completely because it was supposedly only an image – working via a kind of telepathic connection like hers. She enjoyed hearing about these things, for sure. But there were some things he didn't tell her about. Like love.

Eventually, exhaustion made way for sleep, and sleep made way for dreams. The experience of the cold around her disappeared into a vague, warm mist. With the little consciousness she had she hoped there wouldn't be any nightmares. The empty room was bad, but nightmares were even worse, because they would haunt and scare and terrify her and when she woke up, there would only be more coldness. Please, she thought, let there be no monsters. No darkness. No alone.

There were no nightmares. What did appear in Eleven's dark subconsciousness, however, was so strange and new that it scared her a little. She had a dream in which she saw a large, round room, filled with twirling steam and all sorts of bright lights and funny bubbly noises. In the middle of the room was a sort of red, bright column which kept emitting a weird, screeching sound. The noise was very clear in her head – almost as if she was standing right next to it. It seemed to talk to her. Maybe if she could-

Eleven stirred a little in her sleep. In the dream, something new, no, an actual figure had appeared. A man was hopping up and down around the column, turning all sorts of levers and pushing buttons as he kept yelling at the machine. It was almost kind of funny. She couldn't hear him as clearly as the noise, but he seemed to shout about "telepathic circuits being jammed again" and "picking up weird signals". He actually pleaded "her" to tell him what was wrong.

Not knowing that he meant the machine and not her, Eleven started to think. The machine seemed capable of talking to her. So what if she told it to get here? To the empty room? It wouldn't fit, for sure, but it was worth a try. Eleven was so intrigued by this new phenomenon that it was practically impossible to let it go without seeing what it meant. So she focused on the noise, kind of tried to speak to it like she would when she had to listen to the strange men. It seemed to work. The man still couldn't hear her, but the noise kept only growing louder.

VWOOOOOOOORP

VWOOOOOOOOORP

VWOOOOOOOORP

THUD

Eleven sat up. That sound had definitely not been a dream. She looked around, hoping to see at least a bit of smoke or hear a loud, bubbling bloop, but there was nothing. Just the brightly lit tiles of the empty room. Could it have been a dream after all?

No, she was sure she had heard it – otherwise she wouldn't even have jumped up. It had to be outside. The small girl quietly got up and walked over to the door, putting a hand against the metallic surface. If Papa had been alerted by the noise, he would surely be already out there with some of the Bad Men who had guns. But that automatically meant she had to warn the man. They could kill him.

She concentrated and carefully pried the lock open with her mental hands. The Bad Man thought they had made the door strong enough to withstand her, but in fact it hadn't taken her long to figure out how to open it. She just decided to save the opportunity for a better moment. Like now, for example.

Eleven opened the door – and stopped dead in her tracks the moment she set a foot outside.

The corridor was blocked by a strange object. It was a blue box, with windows and a lantern on top of it which emitted a soft glow. The sign above the doors was hard to read because some letters were still a bit difficult to her, but she thought it said POLICE BOX, although she still had no clue what that was supposed to mean. Not that she understood any of it anyway. She recognized the machine because of the vague humming, but that was all.

The right door suddenly opened and a huge cloud of steam came rolling out. The cloud was followed by the man she had seen in her dream, who was coughing loudly and waving his hand around. He seemed a bit odd. His hair was grey (a bit like Papa's, although his was more white) and his face looked old. He was wearing a dark red sort of coat with a single bright red button on each sleeve and dark trousers. He looked a bit like Papa, yeah, but there was just something about him that made them incredibly different as well, though she didn't know what it was. Yet.

"What's the matter?" he asked, and it took her a little while to understand that he was talking to the machine again and not to her. His voice had a funny accent. "You never do this! Are you having whims again? Was the Vesuvius a bit too much for you?"

The box emitted a whooping cough which sounded like a bit of a snarl. He shook his head. "Of course I know your telepathic circuits are jammed! You've been acting up ever since we came in proximity of 1980's America! What's wrong, are the big hairdos upsetting you?" He started to walk around the box, inspecting each side. "Stop overreacting. Everything in the 80's is big. Save for your tolerance, that is."

The box blooped an indignant-sounding protest. If Eleven hadn't been so scared, she probably would have found it funny. The man's head suddenly popped up on the other side and she quickly recoiled. "Don't you dare calling me that! As far as I can tell, I am the only one being useful around here! Now if you could just shut up for a minute, I can try to figure out what caused those telepathic waves. Just a short scan should do."

He pulled out a weird, blue stick-like object which buzzed slightly as he waved it around. Maybe it was a scanner of some sort, like the ones Papa and the Bad Men used. He kept moving it in broad circles… until it finally landed on Eleven. She swallowed. He frowned a little, then lowered the scanner.

"Well, it appears I've found the source." He kneeled down. "Hello! What are you exactly? Some kind of a physical interface?"

He reached out to touch her, but she quickly stepped out of his reach. "Ah," he said. "No interface then? Are you an extraterrestrial species? Lost contact with your mothership?"

She didn't answer. Just looked at him. He seemed to be getting impatient again as he got up and looked around, trying to make some sense of the situation. "I have to say, this is quite a strange place to hang out. Especially for such a hypertelephatic creature like you. Is that really your only way to communicate, by the way?"

The box buzzed again. The man made an annoyed gesture. "Oh, shut it. Of course I know it was a call for hel –"

And he fell silent. He looked at the girl again, and again (his stare was somehow worse than Papa's, Eleven thought, not only because it looked so grim, but also because it almost seemed to look right into her) before inspecting the scanner once more. "You aren't exactly an extraterrestrial, are you? No, of course not. Why did I ever think that. You're one of those weird little mini-humans." He smiled for the first time, although the expression on his face seemed a bit… distant. "I had a companion who used to teach a lot of you. Well, she called it teaching, I called it cattle herding. Don't know why she ever expected that bunch of shouting little monsters to learn anything. Oh well." He shook his head. "I shouldn't keep thinking so much about that. Right then, could you tell me your name?"

Eleven kept looking at him, blankly. He raised an eyebrow. "Can't you talk?"

She didn't answer his question, but she did put her arm forward to show him the black number tattooed on the skin. He briefly glanced at it before turning back to her. "Yes, very lovely. Look, I don't care if you lost your tongue, but I'd like to know who I'm shouting at because it wouldn't leave an impression otherwise. Whoever you are, you somehow managed to hack into my TARDIS' systems and you rather upset the old girl. So I'm going to ask you one more time: what's your name?"

She swallowed again, then said three simple words: "Eleven. I'm alone."

He didn't seem very impressed. In fact, he only sighed and raised his hands in a helpless gesture. "Oh well, so much for sensible communication. Alright, I will likely be not regretting this, but just in case I'm going to apologise in advance. A quick memory wipe should sort this out. You might end up slightly paralysed, but I suppose-"

"Please!" She cried, and she leapt forward. She still wasn't anywhere near him but he seemed rather surprised by the gesture, immediately shutting up. "I know you can help me. Please help me. I don't want to be alone."

The hall went silent. For a slight second, she was truly terrified to her bones – she didn't who he was, she didn't know what he could do, she had no idea what he would do and the mere thought of it made her insides go cold. When he finally moved again, she could feel her muscles tense up; preparing to defend herself. Maybe Papa would get what he wanted. At last.

"I see," the man said. "Maybe that call wasn't an anomaly after all." He kneeled down once again to her level, his blue eyes piercing into her brown ones. "Tell me, Eleven, why are you alone?"

"Papa," she said.

"Papa? And what exactly does this "Papa" do to you?"

"He wants me to do bad things. If I don't do the bad things, he'll punish me."

The man sighed. "Typical child abuse. One of the few things I may despise more than a Dalek. No wonder the TARDIS picked up your signal. As much as all that technological development helped humanity to march forward, it had a lot of horrible consequences as well. Every revolution has its victims." He looked at her again. "Do you have any indication of where you are?"

"Bad place," she said, looking down. "And cold."

He shook his head. "Kept in the darkness from birth. Unbelievable. I'm going to set this right. I just need you to stay here and wait for me while I go ahead and find out what this place is. I did tell Cleopatra I would visit for pearl tea, but I suppose she can wait. As long as I stay ahead of the snakes. Literally and figuratively."

"Will you come back?" There was despair in her eyes, an utter expression of helplessness which tore deep into both hearts of the old man. He had seen planets die and galaxies fell apart, but there would never be anything worse than a child's pain. He knew why he was here. He knew he had to be here.

"I won't make any promises. But I will tell you my name. I'm the Doctor. Do you know what that means?"

Eleven shook her head. The man smiled. "That name means hope. Rescue. Saving civilizations and protecting the ones shackled by injustice and suppression. And if it comforts you, Eleven, that name means I'll come back for those who need it. Not many qualify for that, I admit, but hope does wonders."

"Hope?"

"Yes, hope. Just remember that word. Right, I'm off. There appears to be a shady government operation that requires my attention. Just stay right here."

Before she could answer, he was already off, running through the tiled corridor with the scanner glowing above his head. "And don't touch anything!" he shouted back. "She's very sensitive!"

Eleven wasn't sure, but she thought she could hear a low whirring from the box as the man ran out of sight. She was simply left in complete silence, standing in the open door of the empty room with the box just a few steps away from her. She looked at it again. The strong connection she had felt in her dream had calmed down again, but its mere presence was still very imposing. She carefully took a few steps around it to look at each side, but it really wasn't bigger from behind or something – it was practically as small as the empty room. But the room she had seen in her dream was clearly bigger. Surely that wouldn't fit in there, would it?

The longer the Doctor stayed away, the more her curiosity grew and gradually she dared to step closer. She even found the courage to go ahead and touch it. Of course, the odd man had said she wasn't supposed to, but she had a funny feeling he didn't actually mean everything he said. As she laid a hand against the blue surface, she expected it to feel rough, or at least a bit cold, but it was quite the opposite, almost warm. She wondered whether this was just an illusion, but in the end, did it matter? She knew the box was trying to comfort her. The mere knowledge was beyond anything she had ever felt until now.

Eleven wanted to walk back and try the doors, but before she could even grab the handle, she jumped and cried in fear as a loud alarm blared through the corridor and the lights turned red. She crouched, expecting Papa to come marching through the hallway, ready to give her another punishment. But it wasn't Papa. It was the Doctor, looking slightly worried as his coat flailed behind him.

"Alright, I might have triggered some alarms and insulted a German Shepherd," he said. "Couldn't help it, I'm sorry. We better get out of here before he gets back at me for calling him neurotic!"

The moment he grabbed her and moved to push the door open, Eleven lost slightly track of time. She wasn't quite sure of the things that happened. First, he shoved her into the box, a bit too forcefully, and she tumbled in. Next, she was staring up at the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. It was the column she had seen in her dream, but it was far more impressive in its full presence, and with the entirety of the glowing room around it. The Doctor ran around the console, flipping switches and pressing buttons as he kept shouting at her to close the door. Without him noticing, she found it in her mind and closed it. Immediately after she heard a thud behind her, the whole room seemed to wake up, lights flashing and the large rings above the column starting to turn. She heard the familiar resonating noise she had heard in her dream and felt the floor starting to shake under her feet.

"Taking off!" the Doctor yelled. "It might be a kind of a bumpy ride, so make sure to hang onto something!"

He hadn't even finished his sentence before the surface seemed to start moving under her feet. She quickly grabbed hold of the metal bar next to the door. The room shook and shuddered around her, groaning, almost breathing. The chaos lasted nearly five more minutes before the machine finally seemed to calm down. The Doctor pulled another lever and seemed visibly relieved as he took a step back and listened to the steady, regular pulsing around them. "Lovely. That took more effort than I expected. So, Eleven, what do you think?"

He rolled up his sleeves as he walked back to her, showing a somewhat broad smile. She just took it all in with the expression of a child who had encountered Santa Claus for the first time in their life. "Pretty."

"Yes, in fact it's dimensional eng- wait, what?" He looked confused. "No, you're doing it wrong. You should be reacting to the fact that it's bigger on the inside and then I'm supposed to make a comment that stresses your ridiculously small comprehension. Oh, you know what, forget it. There are more important matters we should be attending to."

He walked back to the console and pulled one of the screens to him before starting to type on the keyboard. "Alright. Shamefully I've managed not as much information as I hoped I would, but at least I have some indication what's going on. Judging by the time period I'm guessing you've become a victim of that stupid mud fight between the United States and the Soviet Union." He snorted. "Humanity, always eager to find more ways to upgrade warfare. As if nuclear weapons weren't enough. Honestly, I liked you a lot better when you were crawling in the mud still trying to figure out how to walk."

He suddenly stopped typing and looked at Eleven with a strange expression in his eyes. "Although I have to say, a psychic human is quite interesting. I can see why you're so sought-after."

Eleven slowly started to retreat. She felt a sudden fear for the man, or rather for the strange expression that had appeared out of nowhere. She recognized it from Papa. The weird tone he always had in his voice when he told her about why she was so important to him and the Bad Men.

"Imagine being capable of knowing all of your enemy's secrets," the Doctor almost whispered. "Knowing what keeps them awake at night, all of their plans and their fears and their dreams. Imagine you could always be one step ahead of them. You could save lives. Thousands. Possibly millions."

For one second, Eleven was almost positive he would leap forward and grab her. He would take her arm like the Bad Men always did, and he would drag her away, far into the machine to put her in a small, cold room. But he didn't. He shook his head and turned around, once more circling the console. "Unfortunately it's also the one thing which destroys everything that distinguishes you from them. I won't stand for it. I will stop them, and I'll start by bringing you out of the reach of their greedy hands."

He pulled a lever again and Eleven wasn't quite sure what happened, but the whole room suddenly started to shake, the machine groaning around them as a sort of shiver shot up the column. The Doctor nearly fell back before he managed to gain balance again and rushed to push the lever back. "Oh, darn it! We can't leave her behind! You know we can't leave her behind!"

The machine just emitted an echoing groan in reply. He pinched the bridge of his nose, muttering something she could not understand. She didn't think it was a nice word.

"What's wrong?" she asked, after gathering a bit of courage.

"The TARDIS can't take off. She refuses to take such a powerful telepathic presence along. We can't leave earth."

He sighed, trying to contemplate the possibilities. They couldn't leave. He also refused to leave her behind in the hands of those monsters. He had to stop them, but without any help of the TARDIS. So what could he do?

It seems like you got yourself another challenge, Doctor. he thought. What, did you expect the universe to let you go that easily?

He went back to Eleven and kneeled down in front of her. "Listen," he said. "I'm terribly sorry for what you've been through, and I'm terribly sorry for the fact that I can't solve it right away. But I will make sure it will end. I just need a bit more of time and I need you to be strong in the meantime. Could you do that for me?"

She didn't answer, neither through nodding or shaking her head. There was just the stare of her small eyes. The Doctor felt the urge to smile. If it wasn't all so horrible, he would've found it hilarious. Just when you thought it was impossible for you to ever go soft inside again.

"Do you remember the meaning of my name?"

"Yes," she said. "Hope."

"That's right. And I know a lot of people have lied to you, just to abuse the trust they were blessed with. I don't need you to trust me, but I want you to remember that simple word. Hope. Think of it, whenever you feel lost and alone, and you'll hear the sound of this old lady. Okay?"

"Is that a promise?"

She noticed she didn't just ask it, she urged him to say it. The light in his eyes seemed to go out for a bit. He had promised himself a long time ago not to make any promises anymore, which surely was a tad paradoxical, but it had felt necessary at that time. Now there was a creature in front of him which possibly didn't even understand what it meant. She had heard a lot of promises in her life, all to be broken. And for what? Power?

"If that helps you," he said. "Yes. That is a promise."

Eleven stood at the back of the empty room, looking on as the man hilariously struggled to close the heavy door. Before he shut it completely, he looked one more time at her, offering her a small nod. She nodded back, a small and fragile grin spreading across her lips. The door fell shut with a series of metallic clicks. A little later, she heard the vworping noise of the box taking off, followed by a couple of shouts coming from the end of the corridor.

Papa questioned her, and she told him everything she knew; she had waken up because of the alarms, not quite sure what was going on.

She didn't know anything about a man.