January 15th, 2005

Amy Pond kicked the curb nearest her mutinously. Okay, maybe London hadn't worked out how she had planned. She had the potential to make it as a model—she knew it. But nobody was willing to give a sixteen year old without any kind of a useful portfolio and no parental consent a shot. Seeing as her aunt was in Liverpool. Or Cardiff. Or not even in the UK anymore, for all that she knew.

She kept a modest flat in the bad part of town. Worked for a cafe as a hostess—shitty work, but all that a sixteen year old high school dropout who had run away to London to make it big could manage. Not that she had to pay for everything. Her aunt paid for the flat, sent her enough to cover living expenses—barely. The money from the job—every bit of it went towards her portfolio, her headshots.

But sometimes, no matter how hard she worked, it felt like she was just sitting on her arse, waiting for someone to come along and discover her. And that didn't sit well with Amelia Pond—she had ditched Leadworth at sixteen for a reason—she liked to be moving. The only thing worth staying in Leadworth for was Rory, but Rory had told her to go. It had broken his heart to do it, she knew, but he had told her to go, told her that he would join her in a few years, as soon as he had graduated and he could get the money for medical school.

Nobody else liked her in that crappy little town—the odd little girl with too-vibrant hair and too much of an imagination. She no longer believed in her own fantasies as she had when she was little. Maybe she really had imagined the whole thing?

But the shed had been knocked down.

And what he had said. "I'll come for you when you're older, Amelia. Don't ever stop believing in me—please, don't ever stop believing in me. I won't look the same. I can change my face, and I won't look the same when you see me, but I'm still me."

She didn't believe it, even if the Raggedy Doctor had been real. She didn't believe that she would ever see him again. And she didn't believe that he could change his face.

She didn't believe, and she didn't hope, she tried to convince herself, again, for the fifth time today alone. For someone that she had met for an hour (if even) when she was seven, the Raggedy Doctor still couldn't get out of her thoughts.

She decided that, since it was starting to get dark, moping in the streets right now was probably not the best plan. This was a nasty area of London, after all, and just because she knew some basic self defence (pull hair, bite and always go for the bullocks) didn't mean that it was smart to be loitering around at night, especially since she was a pretty young woman. Gorgeous, in fact, if she did say so herself. There was a reason why she had thought that she had real potential as a model, after all.

But then the yelling started, from two or three streets over, and she had always had an overdeveloped sense of adventure. She had to know what it was about. Despite the fact that there were several alleyway shortcuts that would get her there much faster, Amy was unwilling to take the risk of going through them now, when it was starting to get dark. She was still fast, though, and skirted up the nearest main street towards the source of the commotion.

It did not take her long to find it. A man in a leather jacket was hurtling towards her at top speed, yelling at the top of his lungs. And on his heels were several massively tall green things, bounding behind him like hunting dogs.

He hurtled up to her and grabbed her by the arm. "Come on, run!" He yelled, dragging her along for a bit before she got over the shock of the situation and started running under her own power.

"What are those things?" She demanded of him, moving faster to put as much distance between the snapping teeth and her body as possible.

"Racans! From the planet Karlatan. Or, as you lot would probably put it, hellhounds," he yelled gleefully. He veered to the side, pulling her straight into one of the alleyways that she had been so determined to avoid. But it seemed to trick them, because they continued on straight.

"What?" Amy demanded, yanking her wrist away from him and bracing her hands on her knees to pant. Clearly, she wasn't in as great shape as she had thought that she was. Her pulse pounded in her temples.

"Racans," he repeated himself, more softly this time. "Or hellhounds. They're scent-tracking something, I just got in the way. And they'll eat anything that does that. You're lucky that I was here, else you would have gotten eaten."

"I heard you the first time. Did you mean... like, aliens?"

"Yep!"

"Oh," Amy said weakly.

"Give it a minute," he offered. "Culture shock—happens to the best of us."

"I'm not shocked."

"I mean, not me, of course but—what do you mean, you aren't shocked?" He demanded. The expression—it was... familiar, somehow. She didn't know how—she'd never met this man before in her life. Or... she'd never seen anyone who looked like him before in her life. But hadn't she just been arguing with herself over the existence of a man who had claimed that he could change his face, who had said that he would see her again. A man that had told her not to stop hoping?

"Doctor?" it slipped out before she could stop it, and she stepped forward to peer into his eyes.

"Yes? Do I know you?"

"I don't—I don't know what's happening," Amy said helplessly. "I don't understand anything. When I was seven, a blue police box crashed into my shed, and a man with a ripped up suit and floppy hair popped out, and he knew me. He knew who I was. And he told me that he could change his face, that I would see him again, because he'd come for me, but he'd look different. I still don't understand what happened."

"Interesting," the man said, peering at her carefully. He produced a fine metal tube and clicked it a few times, and the light at the end buzzed.

"He had that!" Amy said excitedly. "It was you, wasn't it? You did do it? You do exist! Everyone said that I was crazy!" She threw herself against him and hugged him tightly. He didn't seem to know what to do.

"I don't know," he said, pushing her away gently. Amy didn't let that discourage her. "I am the Doctor, but it hasn't happened to me yet."

"What does that mean?" Amy asked, wrinkling her nose.

"He didn't explain about time travel?" The Doctor asked exasperatedly.

"Time travel?" Amy repeated incredulously.

"Huh. Guess not," the Doctor said. "What's your name?"

"Amy. Amy Pond," Amy said.

"Amy Pond," he said, nodding. "Do you happen to know of someplace that I can get some quiet so that I can try to figure out what the hellhounds are tracking? They'll wreak devastation if they're left to roam London for long."

"Uhhm..." She was too smart to invite some man that was a complete stranger back to her flat—it would be a stupid thing to do, frankly. She might've been stupid enough to do it when she was seven, but she wasn't about to do it now. But... she was curious. About the time travel. And everything and... oh, maybe she should invite him back to her flat? He seemed mostly harmless. He hadn't hurt her when she was seven, after all.

"You live with your mum and dad?" He fished.

"No—ah, I live with my aunt," she lied. Stranger danger. She tried not to tell anyone that she lived alone in London. It wasn't like any proper guardian would have allowed it; her aunt was just a completely neglectful bitch who had never much cared for the responsibility of child-rearing, but had been too concerned for her reputation to allow her orphaned niece to be passed off into state care.

"There's a cafe, down that way," Amy offered. "I work there, it's still open."

"Sounds fantastic," he said, grinning infectiously at her. "Lead the way."

He followed her through the back alleyways without complaint—now that she had a male escort, she wasn't so worried about traversing those alleys after dark, and Amy led him to Bella's, the cafe that she worked at and pushed the door open to let him in.

It was mostly deserted—a single man in one corner, taking advantage of the free wireless internet access that they provided with a Cappuccino at his side. Mickey was the only person behind the counter, leaning against a barstool but not actually sitting on it.

"Hey, red," Mickey said cheerfully as she came in. "Who's your friend?"

"Oh, just someone I met. He needed someplace to slow down for a minute."

"Fair enough. Mickey Smith," he said, offering a hand to shake. "Any friend of Amy's is a friend of mine. What can I get for you?"

"Coffee, please," the Doctor said. "Just milk. I'm the Doctor, by the way."

"Doctor who?" Mickey asked.

"Just the Doctor," he answered.

"What are you still doing here? Thought you weren't going to be around so much anymore—you said that you had picked up some more hours at the garage," Amy said, lifting up the middle partition and stepping behind the counter to help herself to the latte machine.

"Ah," Mickey said, wincing. "Needed some extra cash. Gran's hospital bills are getting bad again. What do you think you're doing, red?" He added playfully as Amy selected her mug from the cache of staff mugs (brought from home, so that they could have their own mug here) and added an assortment of flavourings and setting the milk to steam extra hot.

"Making my drink. Nobody else makes it right," Amy shot back.

"Yeah, and for good reason," Mickey said, snorting. "Who has hazelnut, caramel and raspberry in the same latte?"

"It's good!" Amy mixed the milk, espresso, and expertly scooped a spoonful of foam onto her masterpiece, topping it off with a dollop of whipped cream and an excessive amount of caramel drizzle.

Mickey had prepared the Doctor's coffee, and waved off the offer of a couple of pound notes to pay for it. "Friend bonus," Mickey explained.

Amy led the Doctor to a table on the opposite side of the cafe from the other woman in the corner. "So. Time travel?"

"I'm a nine hundred year old time travelling alien with a time ship that's shaped like a blue police box, except she's bigger on the inside," the Doctor said, smirking. "When I'm dying, I regenerate into a new form. And, of course, the version of me that you met when you were seven had already met you now."

Amy gaped. "So that's how he—you—knew me?"

"Yes," the Doctor agreed. "And he likely only already knew that it would happen, because of what you're telling me now."

"So, which came first?"

He laughed. "I think I like you, Amy Pond. Most people would just gape at me when I mentioned time travel, but you ask me a technical question about time loops. And the answer is that I don't know. Perhaps I never would have told you the things that I told you if you hadn't just now told me—there's no point in getting into that," he interrupted himself.

Amy took a sip of her latte, thinking that maybe, she was going to need the caffeine.

Here's the first real chapter! Nine meets his soon-to-be companion, Amelia Pond. As you could probably gather from the description of her childhood, Mels was not in it. There are reasons for this. River will come into play later, but it'll be a bit different from her role in canon. This Amy wanted out of Leadworth because of some different reasons—for one, I felt like Amy had spent her entire life waiting for the Doctor, and in this version, the Doctor didn't promise her five minutes. He said that he'd see her again, and if anything, she left town to look for him, at least subconsciously. She and Rory were best friends, but they never dated, partially because Mels wasn't there to push them together, and partially because she had been thinking of taking off for awhile, and therefore, she wasn't concentrating on relationships. I thought that the model thing was fairly realistic, partially because Karen Gillan was a model before she started acting, and partially because Amy was a model in Closing Time and The Asylum of the Daleks. Mickey probably won't play a huge role, but I just couldn't resist throwing him in there. Rose isn't around in this verse, and Mickey's not in love with Amy—they're just work friends, and that means that Mickey doesn't have a reason to feel the same sort of animosity towards the Doctor as he did in canon.