A/N: Big news, I've managed to catch up with the days! Yay! Let's just hope I can keep it up. :) This one's a bit more subdued and was pretty hard to write, but I think I did ok but not great.
Day Nine: Idris
I exist everywhere and everywhen. Pick a date and I could tell you the weather, perhaps even show you.
The Doctor, my beautiful idiot is in a bit of a mood at the moment. My last destination for him was the latest in a long line in his search for the Child of the TARDIS, Melody Pond. I know she's going to hurt me with her gun in the future, but I already forgive her for it. She's lost and the Doctor can't find her.
He's sitting in my pilot's seat, looking very sorry for himself. He sighs a bit, not even seeming to have the heart to fiddle with my circuits. That's not like him. He needs cheering up.
I wait until he leaves to aimlessly wander my corridors to set my plan into motion. In less than a second I have decorated the control room for the human celebration of Christmas. Coloured tinsel on my railings, the hat stand accompanied with a huge fur tree and 'Merry Christmas Everyone' playing quietly from my speakers. That never fails to cheer him up.
I can feel him coming back to the control room (and I may have helped by rearranging the corridors so that he gets here a bit faster).
He arrives and I can tell that he's smiling as soon as he sees what I've done for him. We have a psychic connection, him and I, and his spirits are lifted and so are mine. I give him a gentle nudge in the right direction and he walks over to the tree, jangling a bauble.
"Thanks, dear," he says fondly, thinking that is all I have planned for him. How wrong he is.
"Don't thank me before… yet…" I stammer. Tenses are still difficult.
He spins around, looking confused, his eyebrows (or what he has of them) disappearing into his hairline. He opens his mouth and closes it again in a perfect impression of a fish.
"Looking at the screen," I command him to do. He takes a moment to work out what I mean so I must have gotten the tense wrong again. Then he does go to my console and spin the screen around so he can see me.
"Oh…" he trails off, his face splitting into a grin.
He grins because I've done something very clever – rerouted a few power circuits and taken the deconfribulator into a state of flux so I can talk to him and tell him all is not lost.
"Hello, Sexy," he says to the image of Idris on the scanner screen.
"Hello," I reply with a tilt of my head. He laughs.
"Why have you done all this?" he asks me, gesturing with his hands madly at the Christmas decorations.
"To cheer you up, of course. You've been so… alive recently and that can be a happy thing too. I just wanted to remind you of that."
He looks to the floor then, shaking his head, hair flopping wildly. "I can't find her. I'm beginning to think I never will."
"You will. We know you do," I reassure. He doesn't ask about the use of we, so I don't expand on it. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"How long have you got?"
"As long as you want."
And so he talks, pours his heart out and I listen, even though I know how everything will pan out, because that is what he needs.
He needs his Sexy.