A/N: Someone asked me why the Doctor trusts Beatris so easily. Well, he's lonely. This fanfiction takes place directly before The next Doctor and directly after Journey's End, so he misses Rose, Donna, Martha, Jack, Mickey, etc. And there will be other reasons later. you'll see.
"Anywhere?" I asked.
"Anywhen, too," the Doctor replied, a bit smug.
"Ca- can I see Leonardo Da Vinci?" I asked, the reality of time travel and its implications dawning on me. We'd read about Leonardo Da Vinci in English this year before school got out, and he was so interesting, I did some research of my own. He was insane, creating torture devices and weapons and machines not even dreamt of outside his mind until centuries later. Not to mention his, well, homosexuality, a rarity in those days that could even get you killed. He intrigued me, and now I could finally meet him.
"Of course. To the fifteenth century we go, Dex," he said, and a few people walking by stared. He winked at one particularly starey little boy and pulled a balloon out of his pocket, blew it up, made a highly complicated rocket for the boy, and bowed. I had, at first thought he was the no nonsense, straightforward type, but now I saw him for what he was. A little kid. An adorable little kid. Not like crushy adorable, like little boy at the circus, eyes filled with wonder and hopes and dreams adorable.
"Now, are you ready for a magic trick?" he said to the kid.
"Yeah!" the little boy squealed.
"Just you watch. Dex, we're off!" he said. He opened the door and I entered that wonderful blue box.
"Now, you mustn't tell your mum, okay," he said as he shut the door. I just caught a glimpse of the boy's nod as the Doctor shut the door. He threw his trenchcoat over one of the hugenormous coraly thingies, ignoring the coat rack obviously put there for that purpose. I walked up to the console in the middle with all the buttons and levers and stuff. Not just buttons and levers and stuff, thought, a keyboard and a sewing machine wired into it. It looked as if he had just taken random bits and bobs from the hardware store (or maybe a junkyard) and stuck them on when the original parts fell off. He pushed a red button, which I thought you were never supposed to do, and a blue button, and a green button, and flicked a lever, and the whole thing jolted. It seemed to wheeze and groan in a strangely beautiful rhythm. And I had just realized that it was the sound of the universe passing us by, planet and stars and galaxies and everything that has ever existed from bacteria to complex aliens to the Ice Age, and a war, what a war, a great endless war with life and death and love when my world went black.
TO BE CONTINUED...