If the Doctor had been right about one thing, then that it really was a beautiful late autumn day. The air was cool, but the sun was bright and warmed the skin right through. Aside from a number of fluffy clouds, the sky was painted in fantastic shades of blue. Sarah walked across the campus, keeping her eyes peeled for a professor who would be strolling absent-mindedly along the pathways between the green spaces. Once the young woman had reached the middle of the campus, she sighed and stopped while she let her gaze wander some more. There was a big, old beech tree standing in one of the grassed areas. It was that kind of tree that had been growing there without the intervention of humans for hundreds of years and its trunk must have split in the middle early on, so that it had grown into what might be mistaken for two trees sharing the same set of roots. Sarah imagined that it was a great place for students to climb on and sit under during the hotter days of summer. This late in autumn, its green leaves had turned to bright orange and red tones, but as it seemed, the place amidst its branches had not become any less inviting.
Sarah had to look twice to discover the man wearing a brown suit lying in the wide fork of the beech's split trunk.
As she walked through the damp grass over to him, she clearly recognized the Doctor, but he was so lost in thought that he failed to notice her approaching. In his lap lay a copy of Jules Verne's 'Around 'The World In Eighty Days', which he must have finished reading sometime earlier. His assistant, who stood now at the tree's roots also noticed a big chestnut he was rolling around in the palm of his hand while he was staring at the rustling leaves above him.
"Doctor!", Sarah called for his attention. "I hope you are aware you'll be getting yourself in trouble with the dean if you keep skipping your lectures."
He jerked up his head and finally caught sight of her. "Oh, hello, Sarah!", he greeted her with joy. "Yes, I know. But the weather is so fantastic today, I thought it would be a shame for all of us to rot indoors."
She pressed the documents she had brought with her close to her chest and rubbed her arms through the cloth of her shirt after a light breeze had touched her skin. The wind was just about cold enough to remind her that it was still autumn. If it was not for the sleeveless sweater she was wearing on top, she might have been freezing. Sarah shot the Doctor a cautionary look after she had heard his half-hearted excuse. "If it's fresh air you're after, you could have just held the lecture outside."
The smile on his face disappeared. Instead he frowned at her and looked so very displeased all of a sudden. Since he was not arguing, Sarah guessed that he was already aware it would have been the better thing to do. "That's not it, is it?", she asked sympathetically, hoping that he would tell her what was really going on. "I thought you were serious about your job, so why are you doing this then?"
"I am serious about my job!", he insisted, crossed his arms and looked back up at the treetop.
Sarah stepped even closer to the tree and climbed on a thick root to meet his level. "Then I suppose, that you sent the students home because you like them so much?" Her melodic, quiet voice had an almost mocking tone to it.
As he turned back towards her, he blinked surprised to find her smiling straight into his face. "Sarah, tell me: Have you ever thought of…", he suddenly began to ask in all seriousness, but then paused dramatically as though he had to double-check his phrasing. "Have you ever wondered what it would be like to leave everything behind and to venture out into the world?"
"Oh, I see…! Is that what you want to do...?" She did not entirely understand why it came as such a surprise to her, when really, this question he had posed, described the very nature of the Doctor. Maybe Sarah had begun to enjoy having him around in the boring everyday life a little too much.
The Doctor propped himself up on his elbows as he continued to tell her his reasons. "You've told me all those amazing little stories of the places you've been investigating and I've just realized that for half of my life all I've done is this: To teach others about a planet I know mostly out of dusty old books. The real Earth is happening out there, in life, away from work." His eyes revealed a shimmer of admiration for the stories with which Sarah had inadvertently inspired him. A lot of humans probably felt just like this, and he was among those who already had a job that allowed for a bit of diversity every once in a while! But it was just not enough, it seemed.
"Doctor, I've only been around Britain, that's nothing special...", she partially lied to underplay the things she had told him about, with a sheepish smile on her face. If only he would stop thinking of his own adventures as bedtime stories, he would understand what she meant…
"Of course it is, because it's not just about going to a place! It's about the people you meet as well.", the Doctor corrected her. "I could take a trip, say for example, to the sea, and find it absolutely boring. But if I went there and got myself involved in a protest against whaling, I bet that I would have a very interesting story to tell on my return." He grinned excitedly as he pictured what kind of troubles he could wind up in.
"Oh, I don't know… Depends on so many things, doesn't it?", Sarah wondered worriedly, because she deemed it a little early for him to leap into danger again just yet – although if the Doctor suddenly wanted to fight whaling, she would not want to be a whaler.
He might have noticed something about the tone of her voice, because he tried to react to her notion of worry, even though he clearly had no clue what was really going on in the back of his assistant's mind. "Don't get me wrong, Sarah. I still love to share my knowledge with the students. But how much better would it be to share my experiences, hm?"
Sarah nodded in silent agreement, because she deemed it the right thing to do, for anyone, human or not.
Yet after he had sat up in the tree's fork, he told her something she had never thought he would ever admit like this again. "One day I have to face the fact that I'm 42 years old, and if I want to travel I would better do it now." With such a humourless, blank stare towards the sky, he made it sound like it was one of the greatest confessions ever to have been voiced by him.
In the meantime, his companion had to stifle a laugh. She realized how incredibly disrespectful it was for her to laugh at him, but in her memories she still heard him saying, all dramatically: "...It means that I have lived for something like 750 years!" To see him go through the same realization again, just with a different phrasing, was amusing her to no end. Oh, once he had his memories back, she would not let hear him the end of it!
As he looked into her face, however, the smile she tried to suppress was still showing.
"That's not funny.", he glared at her cautionary.
"Sorry, Doctor. I don't mean to laugh, really.", Sarah apologized quickly, shrugged, but unfortunately the smile was spreading on her face now despite her best efforts. "It's just; You're not THAT old. What's 42 years, after all?"
"I know, right!?", he immediately joined in the denial, but then failed to hold back on a grin himself, which caused the two of them to chuckle together about each other's silliness.
"Have you seen Professor Scott of the English studies? He's younger than you."
"Gosh, the man looks like Mother Theresa!" And with that, ever as delighted to add one on top, he had her giggling uncontrollably.
Once Sarah had regained a bit of seriousness – not as easy as you might think when someone was grinning at you like the Cheshire Cat – she attempted to get back on topic. "Doctor, I can understand very well that you find routine boring, but it means stability, you know?", she then argued. "I don't know what I would have done without a place to return to between my travels as a journalist. Besides, it's expensive. And where will you take the money from once you've quit university? You're not exactly a rich man… You'd have to make a living on the road."
Unlike him, Sarah knew very well that he had only just begun to create himself an existence on this planet. This meant that, right now, he owned close to nothing, apart from a few clothes and a mattress to sleep on in that tiny, unfurnished flat he lived in at the moment. He didn't mind, though, always arguing to her that other people had it worse than him, and that things would be looking up once he had put the first semester behind him.
"I know Sarah… It's just a daydream, I couldn't afford it anyway. Not money-wise and not regarding my responsibilities, either.", the Doctor surprisingly agreed, then looked back up at the rustling leaves above him. "I still like the idea though, to be a Phineas Fogg kind of adventurer, one day, maybe..."
"Or the Doctor.", added his companion.
"Now, don't be silly, Sarah. I keep telling you, I'm no such hero. I just want to get around more.", he humbly explained to her as he picked the Jules Verne novel back up and pushed himself off the tree. "But I look at you and think about how your life has been so much more exciting than mine! You've already been to oil rigs and nuclear power plants and military bases, you fought governments and infiltrated secret societies – with the power of words, not weapons!"
Although she felt greatly honoured, it was also quite strange to see him impressed by her lesser achievements on Earth.
"There's still nothing special about it.", argued Sarah, who, after all, saw in him the much greater being he no longer believed he was. "You can do just the same, more even, clever man that you are." She gave him her best smile to express her admiration.
"Hm. I'm certain.", the Doctor self-confidently agreed and chuckled.
"But for now, I think you just need a change of air. You should be going out to town more often.", suggested Sarah. "You know, these little everyday stories you're talking of are all around us, you just have to look for them."
"Yes, you're right about that." He stepped off the tree's roots, then walked a few steps away before turning back to her. "Well, I ought to be getting back to my office. The draft for the exam won't write itself."
Just in the moment he had said it, he threw something small over to Sarah, and she, always quick to react, caught the object in her palms. However, her brain had just forgotten that she still needed both of her arms to hold the documents with and so she accidentally took a funny stance. In her hands was the chestnut the Doctor had thrown over to her, but with her elbows she was desperately pressing the papers to her chest to keep them from falling into the damp grass, and one small move could ruin it all now.
"Whoops!", he laughed at her display, but did not bother to come to her aid. "Well, I'll be seeing you later then!" Instead, he just waved her good-bye and walked away.
"Doctor!", huffed Sarah.
The next day came and went, but the thought stuck with him. Despite of what he had told her, to become an adventurer once again was not just a fleeting daydream to chase after for the duration of a lunch break only. One time, Sarah sat with him in his office and noticed him looking out of the window like a bird trapped in a cage. It was right for him to be like that, she knew, but was still afraid of what would happen if he really was to fly away – figuratively speaking. Starting his journeys all over, would it not be as if he had accepted the loss of his identity once and for all, instead of hoping for it to return?
On the Friday evening of the same week, Sarah and the Doctor bumped into each other in the middle of town. It was a funny occurrence, because neither of them had planned for it and while she greeted him as cheerful as ever, he got quite a bit flustered about what to make of this accidental meeting. She was just running some errands – nothing special there – and the Doctor was on his way to the pub to meet some new faces, but they were not really interested to join the other. Sarah did not fancy the pub atmosphere at the time and he, obviously, found the running of errands even more boring than she did. Yet they stood for minutes in the same street, just to chat for a bit. It was on this occasion that the Doctor presented to her a recent purchase he was very proud of: Sarah laughed when she saw the piece of knitwear.
It was an orange and brown striped scarf. Nowhere as long or as colourful as the one she had thought of at that moment, but it fitted him so well you might think he would have owned it for a long time already. It came as no surprise that he told her how he was never aware of his love of loved neck wear.
As they spent some more minutes talking, Sarah noticed that the Doctor was still thinking about his recent interest in new experiences. The thought just continued to excite him, she could tell. He only needed to find a way to make it possible in this terribly complicated human world he lived in now.