A/N: The Doctor is not mine.
Never Look Back
2.
She cried to drive the rain away. It never worked because the rain was a constant beyond her control, but she always felt better after she'd cried. It didn't make this anger go away either. Though it pushed the pressure back for a while, it always came back.
She never used to be so angry at everything— at the weather, her homework, her friends and their opinions… Everywhere she went, she was followed by an unshakable irritation with the world. Her teachers had written home about her attitude, the first time any teacher had written home about any problems, and now she was grounded.
So she sat in her room and wrote bad poetry, though she tended to break pencil points, leak ink, and rip her paper to shreds. And then she would cry in frustration because she couldn't explain to herself what was wrong, let alone explain it to her parents. And every day it rained, and she cried harder.
Months passed. She seethed and she cried, and her parents decided that grounding her wasn't working, so she was allowed to go out, though no one really wanted her anymore. One day, she found herself sitting on a bench in the park in the misting drizzle, as far from the other teens in the park as she could be. She was scratching in the mud with a stick, drawing angry squiggles and thinking dark thoughts when a man dropped onto the bench beside her. She glanced at him; he paid her no attention, staring out at the others in the park with angry blue eyes. He seemed to hate the laughter as much as she did.
Swallowing, she inched away. He looked vaguely disreputable, with a ridiculously short haircut and a leather jacket. More than that, he radiated a sense of distance. She had run out of bench, and was about to get up nervously when he turned, pinning her like a deer in the headlights with his gaze.
Carefully, eyes holding hers, he lifted an arm. She flinched. The next second, he snatched at the empty air over her left shoulder.
"Gotcha," he said. His smile was anything but reassuring. In his hands, squirming, was a grey goblin, about the size of a squirrel and as ugly as a gargoyle, with a squinched up caricature of an angry face.
"Mood goblin," the man said. "Impossible to spot unless you know what you're looking for. This one's been here for a while. It won't trouble you again." And he walked away, carrying the angry creature with him. As she sat back down, she thought that the last thing that man needed was anything to make him angrier.
She glanced up in surprise as the sun came out, her mood lifting for the first time in months. She found herself smiling for no reason at all. And though she often wondered, she never did find out who the man was.