When Maggie awoke, she kept her eyes closed for at least five minutes, try to let herself down easily by telling herself again and again, "It wasn't real. None of it was real. You've been ill. It was all a fever dream, and you're about to wake up in a hospital."
She gasped and opened her eyes at the sound of laughter above her. "You have very unusual dreams, Maggie," the Doctor chuckled, leaning over her. Shooting upright like a bolt, Maggie pulled the blankets around herself and scowled.
"Doctor!" she said in as admonishing a tone she could muster, channeling her mother all the way. "Now, you grabbing me like a mad man yesterday was bad enough - you being in my room while I'm asleep is simply iun/iacceptable!"
The Doctor looked surprised, like he wasn't accustomed to being scolded, but immediately backed away. "Alright, alright, but it's not like you aren't properly dressed or anything! I was just fetching you for breakfast; I made fish fingers!"
Blinking and loosening her hold on her blanket, Maggie scratched her head. "Fish fingers?" Did fish even ihave/i fingers?
There was a petulant hum in the back of her head, almost one of agreement, if an imagined sound could be agreeable. Maggie shook her head and began to crawl out of bed. "Alright, well, I'm having a bath, so shoo!" She ushered the Doctor from the room and locked the door firmly behind him before venturing into the enormous bath.
An hour later, the Doctor was knocking on her bedroom door. "Maggie, did you drown in there?" he called through the door, not sounding worried in the least, which probably should have bothered Maggie more if she weren't so enraptured by the wardrobe. It was enormous, bigger even than the control room, and filled from top to bottom with clothes. Ensconced safely in a long white dressing gown, she opened the door a crack and gaped at the strange man.
"Doctor, where are the ladies' clothes?" she asked, not daring to believe her eyes. "I don't see any dresses."
The Doctor quirked an eyebrow. "Do you iwant/i a dress?" he challenged, shouldering past her into the room and laughing when she scowled. "Oh, calm down, you're covered and I'm not interested; come along!"
She let out a huff and followed him into the depths of the wardrobe. "Even so, it's not appropriate for a man to be in a lady's bedroom when she isn't decent! Or in her bedroom at all, to be honest!" she protested.
There was suddenly a tall gangly bow-tied man standing nearly chest-to-chest with her, looking painfully amused. "Well, it's a good thing I'm not man, then, aren't I?" he grinned. Before she could ponder that, he continued. "Now stop your fussing and we'll find you something to wear. How about this?"
He held aloft a black shirt, brown jacket, and trousers of an unusual blue material she'd never seen before. "Trousers?" she asked as though he were suggesting she run through the streets in her birthday suit.
"They're called jeans," supplied the Doctor with the air of a twelve-year-old professor. "Or denims, depending on where you are. Very durable, very comfortable, and very stylish, eh?"
"But they're itrousers,/i" she insisted again, not daring to believe that this was acceptable.
There was a twinkle in the Doctor's eyes that suggested he was laughing at her. "Yes, and girls are allowed to wear them, if they so choose," he said patiently. "Give the human race enough time, and gender won't matter. Isn't that something?"
"What about corsets?" asked Maggie suspiciously.
The Doctor bounced on the balls of his feet. "Only for fashion purposes, and much less constricting. The whale-bones are a bit degenerative to the ribcage." He poked her in the side to emphasize his point.
Yes, she'd noticed that. She tentatively took the ijeans/i and ran a hand over the coarse-and-yet-soft material. "Jeans," she said experimentally, letting the word roll around her mouth for a moment.
"Or denims!"
Raising her eyes to his, Maggie smiled. "I can ireally/i wear this?" she asked, feeling something foreign but not unpleasant bubbling in her stomach.
Rolling his eyes slightly, the Doctor walked to another rack of hanging clothes and pulled out what looked like two scraps of spare aubergine material. "Maggie, this is a bathing suit for girls in the year 1970. You could go out in ithis/i and wouldn't be looked at twice, unless of course someone thought you were pretty, and in which case probably would look several times," he explained.
"But I'd be naked!"
"No one says you ihave to/i wear it if you don't want to!"
Trying to hide just how appalled she was by the tiny clothes, Maggie snatched a few random garments from the racks and silently pointed the Doctor out so she could change.
"Undergarments are over there."
"iDoctor!/i"
It was another hour and a half before Maggie was dressed, simply because there were so very many choices to look at. She kept the ijeans/i hugged to her chest as though they would fly away if she released them and wandered the several floors of the wardrobe room, before finally just diving in and taking the first thing to catch her eye. Not quite willing to let go of everything to which she had been accustomed, she found a very pretty white blouse with blue flowers embroidered on. It took her a full ten minutes to properly operate the simplest-looking of the brassieres she found, unused to such tiny hooks, and took a few moments to be appalled by the size of the underpants before remembering that no one saw them anyway, and if they were any bigger they'd be noticeable under her ijeans/i. She briefly ogled a beige jacket with a celery stalk attached to the lapel before finding a ladies'-sized one in tweed, rather like the Doctor's.
Giggling almost madly to herself, Maggie donned the tweed and then found a blue silk bow tie hanging on a hat rack; she was laughing so much she could hardly tie the thing, but at last managed it with tears of mirth in her eyes.
Last were the shoes, and there were quite so many that she didn't quite know how one girl could manage them all, and took a pair of shining brown leather shoes, forgetting about stockings until the last moment. Those were just downright ridiculous, and she took the least offensive-looking ones, which were a blinding shade of green.
Successfully dressed, Maggie practically skipped out of the wardrobe room into the corridor. The Doctor had slumped onto the floor to wait, and broke into a grin so wide upon seeing her that she worried he might split his lip. "A bow tie?" he asked, nearly vibrating with enthusiasm. "That's so icool,/i Maggie!" He embraced her again, and she allowed it in her own high spirits, beginning to realize that it was more common for the culture from which the Doctor came.
Releasing her with a gleeful laugh, the Doctor clapped his hands. "Oh, Maggie Moss, have I got a universe to show you," he promised grandly, and Maggie felt excitement swell in her stomach. "First though, breakfast! Always need a good cuppa before an adventure, I say!" They traversed the corridors to the most dangerously exciting kitchen Maggie had ever seen before, where the Doctor made tea and toast because the fish fingers had gone cold.
"Now, when shall we go first?" he pondered, sucking idly on his teaspoon. "There's the sixties, sixties are always fun - well, maybe not sixty-nine, best avoid another moon-landing fiasco - or we could do the eighties, the nineties, the two-thousands - love the two-thousands, some of my best companions came from there -"
"iTwo-thousands?/i" blurted Maggie through a mouthful of toast, eyes boggling. "You don't possibly mean the iyear/i two thousand?"
"I do, indeed."
She shook her head, breathless with disbelief, and the Doctor beamed.
"Would you like me to sho-?"
Already she was on her feet, fists clenched excitedly at her sides, biting her lip as she flushed with anticipation. "Oh, yes, I want to see everything!" she gushed. "I want to see new worlds, and stars, and iAmerica!/i Oh, could we go to New York, iplease,/i Doctor?"
He laughed and got to his feet as well, allowing Maggie to abandon her toast for the enchantments of the control room once again.
"I still don't understand how this works, but I am so very keen to learn," she said, watching closely as he began to work the controls again. He pointed her towards buttons and dials, showing her how to operate them.
Soon the rotors began moving in the glass column, rising and falling with all the grace of a bird in flight, then the engines roared to life, and then everything went topsy-turvy and Maggie screamed with equal terror and incandescent delight. Her heart clenched in her chest as she wondered if perhaps things were going wrong, but then saw the Doctor's face, his love for that strange machine, his joy for flight, and was comforted even as the TARDIS flung them about.
Then, just as quick as anything, it stopped. Maggie relinquished her hold on the rail surrounding the console and stood on shaking legs, laughing weakly as the Doctor flipped his final switch. "Where are we?" she asked eagerly.
"We'll have to see, won't we?" the Doctor smirked before becoming serious for a moment. "Now, you keep hold of my hand, alright? And if it's too much, just say so and we'll stop for a rest; I don't want you going into culture-shock."
Culture-shock? Maggie had never even heard of it before, but she nodded agreeably and ignored the offered hand in favor of his elbow. The tweed was comfortably scratchy against her fingers, and a good distraction against her sudden nerves. There was nothing to be afraid of, except perhaps everything.
The Doctor pulled the doors open, and Maggie sucked in a shocked breath.
Outside was a bustling metropolis, somewhat similar to London and yet completely different in the same moment. She had seen automobiles before, certainly enough, but never so many at once and never any quite so alien-looking. They almost resembled insects, or fish, with their sleek shining bodies and gleaming glass. There were people ieverywhere/i, doing ieverything/i and yet nothing at the exact same time. Many of them had small devices seemingly attached to their hands or ears or pockets, some of them flashing, some of them emitting guttural tinny music, some of them were being talked into like a telephone without a wire. The clothes themselves were an enigma of variety, softened only by the great diversity of the Doctor's wardrobe. Hair, also, was a mystery. Some had their hair short, some had no hair, some had hair that fell gracefully - or gracelessly - down their backs, some had fringe, some had braids, some had buns and some had tightly-twisted curls. Bicycles, trams, trains, things that iflew/i through the air like motionless metal birds, constant noise, ringing, sirens, wails of children, the clap of heeled shoes on pavement, the loud laughter of a few teenagers, one girl shouting with glee and no one looking twice...
"Take a breath, Maggie," the Doctor gently reminded her. She released the air held fast in her lungs and took in more, her hand sliding down the Doctor's arm to take hold of his hand, which squeezed comfortingly around hers. "Is it too much?"
Maggie took a breath, and then another, and then another, and every time it was a bit easier, and every time her wonderment grew. "No. No, it's not too much at all. In fact, it's not inearly/i enough." And still, there in the door she stood, gripping the Doctor's hand like she used to hold her mother's, as if stepping through the door of the TARDIS would be to step over the edge of a precipice, right into the sea.
"On three, then?" asked the Doctor, sensing her trepidation. She nodded.
"One..."
"Two..."
"Three."
They stepped out into a new world.
"Welcome to Seattle, 2011."