“I don’t want to go...”
Tears streaked down the Doctor’s visage as he felt that all-too familiar and horrifying warmth of the regenerative energy bubbling to the surface. He caught the yellow-orange wisps in his peripherals as he shakily lifted his right hand into his field of vision. His fingers were nearly concealed in the glow of the potent energy. His sad, heavy eyes moved to his other hand, which was likewise enveloped.
Turning his attention to the TARDIS console, the Doctor looked upon the beautiful, derelict machine for what would be the last time with his current, weary eyes. Fresh tears broke away from the corner of his eye as he felt the final surge well up within his two hearts. Above the humming of the energy, he heard the TARDIS’ engines flare up—a sad, horrible noise that sounded more like a whimper than the normal roar of her reactors.
And just like that, everything was yellow. The final eruption of energy threw his head back and his arms out as the fury of the regeneration process turned the glow of yellow into surging pillars that spewed forth from his exposed skin. The entire chamber shuddered as the raw power of the outpouring energy tore apart the walls. Chunks of the honeycomb console room were blown away by the blast, and the dense, arched support struts withered and snapped beneath the horrible force.
Even the console itself was consumed in the blast—the delicate assortment of levers and dials erupted into flames as the massive glass cylinder suspended from the ceiling exploded into a thousand sparkling shards of crystal. And even after that first surge, the process did not relent—waves continued to emanate from the Time Lord’s quivering, energy-wreathed form. Fires spread across the cavernous chamber as sparks rained down from cracks in the ceiling.
Through it all, the Doctor remained conscious—his wide, teary eyes staring up through one of the cracks into the void of time. The storms of the Time Vortex surged violently, as if the Vortex itself wept for his passing. His gaze never faltered until he felt that familiar and never pleasant sensation that snapped his eyes shut.
In the next instant, the Time Lord as his recent friends knew him was gone. It was in that moment, his eyes clamped shut and his flesh born anew, that the Doctor let his mouth fall away. A scream—a quick, fleeting scream that sounded utterly new--escaped him before he snapped his eyes open.
The yellow and orange energies of his predecessor’s passing had dissipated, but in their wake, the console room was bathed in fires and still actively in the throes of a cataclysm. Sparks flitted from ruptures in the walls and danced above broken panels. Despite the fact that the room was an inferno and actively shuddering like a person experiencing a seizure, the fresh Doctor found his attention pulled elsewhere.
Looking down, the Time Lord lifted his leg up and grabbed his pants. “Legs! I’ve still got legs.” With a manic grin, he planted a kiss onto the tattered remnants of his predecessor’s pinstripe trousers. “Good!” He added as he patted his hands across his chest and then down his sleeves. “Arms! ...Hands!” The Doctor smiled widely as he flexed and twitched his ten new fingers.
“Fingers... lots of fingers.” He gently clapped his fingers over his ears. “Ears… Very small ones.” They then slipped over his eyes. “Eyes. Two.” One slid down and squeeze his nose. “Nose!” Sticking out his chin, the Doctor ran a hand over it. “Chin.” He then ran both hands through a surprisingly matty head of hair.
“I’m a girl? How progressive of me!” He exclaimed before one of his hands clasped a very distinct Adam’s apple on his throat. “No... no, I’m not a girl.” Reaching back up, he pulled a some of his hair down in front of his eyes to see it wasn’t much different from the brown shade of his predecessor. “Bah, and I’m still not ginger!”
With that done, the Doctor began to glance to and fro, his eyes wide and his lips pulled back in an erratic, tense grin. “Ah... there’s something important! I’m. I’m. I’m...” At that moment, something exploded deep within the TARDIS, and the Doctor was knocked from his feet. He would have slammed face-first into the floor if he didn’t manage to fall right onto the burning, broken console. As he stared up, the realization dawned and a manic smirk spread across his fresh face.
“Crashing!” At that moment, the flames surged once more and the room shuddered again as fresh fires seemed to spew forth from nowhere and everywhere. Outside the TARDIS, the ship, her hull literally consumed in flames, erupted from the time vortex and began an uncontrolled plunge down to the planet Earth.
Inside the blue box, the Doctor whooped and hollered as he ran around the other side of the console, where the view screen had somehow managed to remain intact. Despite the situation, the Gallifreyan text displayed on the window said that the systems were relatively stable. With that same, wide-eyed grin, the Time Lord grabbed both sides of the monitor, threw his head back, and let out a shout. “Yippie kay yay!”
As the TARDIS dropped down from the upper strata, the entire chamber shuddered violently, and the Doctor found himself thrown backwards over the railing. With a dull thud, he landed just a few inches away from a blaze erupting up from a ruptured pipe beneath the grated floor. The flames were close enough to leap onto his suit jacket, which the Doctor quickly shrugged off after retrieving his sonic screwdriver. Putting the device between his teeth, he glanced around with wide, gleeful eyes
Scrambling back up to his feet, he let out a far too energetic ‘woo’ as another shudder threw him down the walkway and clean through the doors of the TARDIS, which must have opened at some point.
With a less enthused yelp, the Doctor grabbed hold of the threshold before he was dropped onto what looked like Washington DC. As the TARDIS zipped over the White House and in a direct line toward the top of the Washington Monument, it became extremely clear to all parties involved that this was Washington DC. Pulling himself up far enough to rest his chest inside the ship, the still smiling Time Lord let out a sigh and aimed the screwdriver at the battered, burning console. The tip of the device light up with a hum as one of the levers clamped down with a pneumatic hiss, sparks spraying out all around it.
The TARDIS let out another groan as she angled upward, causing the Doctor to lose his grip and nearly plunge out of the ship once more. He managed to catch himself with enough time to lift his dangling legs so they could skirt by the tip of the marble obelisk.
A sigh escaped the Time Lord’s lips as his beloved blue box continued to angle upward, away from any more pointy monuments. Immediate crisis averted, he let out a grunt and gradually pulled himself up into the veritable inferno of a console room. Once he was snug inside, he slapped the doors shut behind him and collapsed against them. The wailing, burning machine permitted him only a few seconds as a respite before another explosion shook him back to reality.
***
A little blond girl, a sole streak of purple in her bangs, sat in her room, alone and as apathetic as one could imagine an eight-year-old could get. She was perched on the end of her bed, her blue eyes staring blankly ahead at the drapes. A cool breeze from the cracked window was making them waft ever so softly. Like many nights before, mom and the brothers were running late on their way back home, which meant they probably wouldn’t be back before she fell asleep.
The little girl let out a sigh and fell back onto her bed. As she did, she lifted her hands up and clasped them above her head. “Whoever’s listening, I need a really big favor... I want out of this place.” A tiny scowl spread across her face as she glanced over at her desk, where a book sat open, its pages scrawled with a days’ worth of irritating memories. “School is bad, and I don’t like those people. They’re mean.”
Another sigh escaped her lips as she looked up at the ceiling over her head. In the dark, the white musical notes glowed a vibrant shade of green. Her mother, a songwriter and aspiring performer, had purchased them for her because the two of them shared a love of music. The little girl loved the times she got to go with her mother to the studio and sing. On nights like these, she couldn’t wait for the day she could run away from all of this and become a rock star like Freddy Mercury, Johnny Cash, or Madonna. She’d often imagine herself playing with dinosaurs or fighting the monsters under her bed. “I just want away...”
From the crack of her open window, the little blonde girl heard a bizarre noise—like the sound of grinding gears echoing in and out. Then, a beat later, there was the recognizable sound of something crashing through wood and slamming into the ground. Hopping off her bed, she ran over to the other side of her room, shoved aside the drapes, and threw up the window.
She poked her head outside to see that the backyard shed had been obliterated. Lying in the midst of the smashed structure and its equally flattened assortment of tools and lawn care devices was what looked like a large blue box with a telephone container. A light at the top of the box flared a few times before going out, and the words ‘Police Public Call Box’ emblazoned at the top of each side seemed to both alleviate and muddle the mystery of the crashed object.
Scooping up her coat and flashlight, the little girl scampered down the stairs and burst through her backdoor. As she drew closer to the box, she heard the squeak of old hinges as the ‘top’ side of the tipped over booth fell inward. A beat later, a grappling hook erupted out from somewhere within the small box, and after barely missing her head by a few feet, it landed in the middle of her carousel and latched onto one of the handles once it was pulled taut.
As she watched, a grinning, raggedy-looking man drenched in water hoisted himself up over the edge of the box and slumped onto what would have normally been the base. He glanced around for a few moments before he noticed the girl, whose mouth had fallen open at the sight of the wide-eyed man in the box. “Can I have a pear?” Her brow furrowed as the smiling man continued to gawk at her. “All I can think about are pears. I love pears. Maybe I’m having a craving...that’s new, never had cravings before.”
With a grunt, the damp man pulled himself all the way out of the box and straddled the threshold. Leaning to the side, he looked down into the box. “Woah!” From somewhere inside the blue box, the little girl heard a series of strange, warbling sounds. “Look at that!” He declared as he grinned madly at something she couldn’t see. “I didn’t think water could do that.”
Pursing her lips in what amounted to something between confusion and more confusion, the little girl glanced once more at the label on the box. “Are you okay?”
The man smiled as he swung his leg around so both were on the outside of the box. “Just had a fall. All the way down there, right to the library...heck of a climb back up,” he concluded nonchalantly as he fixed one of his rolled up sleeves.
“You’re soaking wet,” the girl replied.
“I was in the swimming pool,” he shot back.
“You said you were in the library.”
“So was the swimming pool.”
The girl blinked hard as her mind tried to wrap itself around the casual tone of the man’s replies. “Are you a policeman, mister?”
The remark caused the man to furrow his brow and lean forward. “No. Why, did you call a policeman?” He glanced over her shoulder toward the darkened house.
“Did you come about the monsters under my bed?” She asked as she lifted the beam from her flashlight up to his face.
“What monst—ah!” The man’s eyes went wide as he stumbled from his perch and hit the ground in front of the girl.
“Are you all right, Mister?”
“No, I’m fine, it’s okay,” he gasped as he clasped one hand to his chest and held the other up toward her. “This is all perfectly nor—” the raggedy stranger was cut off by a seizing pain in his gut that hunched him over. Lifting his head up, he opened his mouth and breathed out a sparkling yellow puff of air.
The girl’s eyes went wide. “Who are you?”
Visibly more relaxed, the man leaned back and lifted up his hands, which were also sparkling yellow. “I don’t know yet. I’m still cooking.” The girl twisted her features up in yet another exacerbated. confused expression. “Does it scare you?”
“No,” she scoffed as she shook her head a wee bit.
“No, no, no,” he waved his hands, which still glimmered faintly. “The monsters under your bed. Do they scare you?”
“Yes,” she answered, which prompted a fresh grin on the man’s damp face.
“Well then!” He exclaimed as he hopped up off his haunches to a vertical stance. “No time to lose! I’m the Doctor. Do everything I tell you, don’t ask stupid questions, and don’t wander off.” With that, the man pivoted on his heels and marched straight into an oak tree, which lai
“Are you all right?” The girl asked again.
“Early days. Steering’s a bit off.” With another grunt, the Doctor scrambled up to his feet and was led by the little girl through a gate, a back door, and then into her kitchen. He stood in the threshold as she ran over to a bowl on the counter to retrieve a pear.
“If you’re a doctor, why does your box say police?" She inquired as she handed him the fruit.
Staring down at her, the Doctor lifted the pear to his mouth and took a large bite. Without breaking eye contact, he chewed it for a few moments before promptly spitting it out the side of his mouth onto the floor. With a cough, he held the fruit out between them. “That’s disgusting, what is that?”
“A pear,” the girl replied with an incredulous look on her face as the man shook the fruit at her.
“Pears are terrible. I hate pears.”
“You said you loved them.”
“No, I love peanut butter. Peanut butter is my favorite, give me peanut butter.”
Without objecting, she ran back over to the counter, reached up into a cabinet, and grabbed a large plastic jar of peanut butter. Scampering back over the raggedy man, she extended the jar toward him, and he snatched it up. A quick twist removed the lid, which he dropped on the ground, and the Doctor scooped a handful up into his mouth. He held it there for all of three seconds before spewing it out over her shoulder. “I hate peanut butter. It’s just slimy stuff with bits in it.”
“You said it was your favorite,” the girl retorted, unsure whether to be amused or frustrated with the strange, damp man’s eccentric behavior.
“New mouth, new rules,” he answered matter-of-factly as he rubbed away the traces of the gunk from his lips. “It’s like eating after cleaning your teeth. Everything tastes wro—Ah!!” The shout seemed to force itself up from the man’s gut without his consent. If that wasn’t enough, his entire body started to shudder and he clamped a hand over his forehead.
“What is it, what’s wrong with you?”
“Wrong with me? It’s not my fault...why can’t you give me any decent food? You’re… Southern, aren’t you? Can you barbeque something?”
The girl furrowed her brow for a brief moment before spinning around and jogging over to the oven. She twisted the igniter with one hand as the other threw open the nearby fridge. As the Doctor watched, she threw some meat onto a griddle and poured a heaping amount of thick, brown sludge from a Mason jar on top of it.
Moving over to where she was cooking, he grabbed a small towel off a nearby rack and used it to start drying his sopping wet hair. “Ah, barbeque pork!” With his hair dry-ish, the Doctor dropped the towel onto the counter and plopped into a seat on the kitchen’s tiny table. Grabbing a fork that had been left there, he grinned wildly and tapped it on the table as his cook finished tinkering with the food.
A few moments later, the girl sat down across from him and slid him a plate of barbeque pork. Cutting off a chunk, the Doctor stuffed it into his mouth and looked across the table as he chewed. The tiny blonde smiled proudly right up until the strange man’s entire body quivered. He then opened his mouth and scraped off the chunk of meat as if it were venomous. “Pork. That’s pork...” he declared as he leaned forward. “Are you trying to poison me?”
A frown spread across her tiny features as she slid up out of her seat and reignited the burner. The Doctor followed her and watched as she dumped a can of beans into a pot. “Ah, you see? Beans!” He exclaimed before rushing back over to his seat and picking his fork back up. He tapped the fork onto the table for a minute or so before he was rewarded with plate covered in beans. A beat later, he scooped up a mouthful, and after all of one second, he shot up out of his seat and toward the countertop. With a distinct ‘ugh,’ he spat out the entire mouthful of beans into the sink.
He looked over to see a look of shock on his tiny associate’s face. “Beans are evil.” He muttered, his eyes wide with genuine horror. “Bad, bad beans.”
For her next attempt, the girl dropped a slice of bread onto a plate and retrieved a dollop of butter. Sitting down across from the Doctor once again, she spread the butter thickly onto the bread as she glanced up at his expression, which was back to that sort of strange, manic glee.
“Bread and butter,” the happy tone made the girl smile. “Now you’re talking. An American staple… or something.” He added with a nod as she slid the plate over to him.
The Doctor took barely one bit before lunging out of the seat—plate and all—and making a beeline for the back door. He threw open the door with one hand and then flung the plate like a Frisbee out into the night. “And stay out!” He shouted as a cat meowed in the distance.
When he arrived back in the kitchen, the Doctor began to pace back and forth as the girl glanced through her fridge. “We’ve got some carrots.”
“Carrots? Are you insane!” The man declared as he spun to face her. “No, wait...hang on.” He added as he rushed over to her. “I know what I need. I need. I need... I need...” He threw open the freezer door and grabbed a box as his other hand found a tupperware container. “Corndogs and jello.”
A few moments later, the Doctor was sitting at the kitchen table, happily swirling a corndog through the plastic container of jello. Using the deep-fried hotdog on a stick as a spoon, he lifted a mound of jello up to his mouth and joyfully devoured it as he stared across the table at the little girl. She was also smiling as she ate ice cream straight from the box, using the scoop as a spoon. Once he swallowed the mouthful, he repeated the action with the remaining half of the corndog, and then he tipped back the tupperware and gobbled down the cherry jello until all that was left were the bits fused to the sides of the plastic.
“Funny,” she remarked as he set down the tupperware and sloppily chewed the gelatinous mouthful.
“Am I?” He inquired. “Good. Funny’s good. What’s your name?”
“Kesha. Kesha Rose.”
The Doctor furrowed his brow, thinking he should remember something that he couldn’t place. After a moment, he shrugged his shoulders before realizing he had never responded. “Ah! That’s a brilliant name. Kesha...like some type of alt-rock fairytale princess. Are in the South, Kesha?”
“Yea, you guessed it. Brentwood, Tennessee,” she answered with a noticeable sadness in her voice. “I was born in Los Angeles, though. I want to go back when I’m older. It’s crap here.”
“So what about your mom and dad?” The Doctor asked between bites of another corndog. “Are they upstairs? Thought we would have woken them by now...”
“I don’t have a dad, and my mom is with my brothers.”
“I don’t have a dad or a mom or brothers,” the Doctor replied with an awkward smile painted red with cherry jello stains.
“You’re lucky...” she replied as she turned her sad, blue eyes to the empty rooms over her head.
“I know,” he shot back with another grin. “So your mom and brothers...where are they?”
“They’re out.”
“And they left you all alone?” The Doctor scoffed as he used the corndog to shovel another mouthful of jello.
The remark caused Kesha to straighten her back and purse her mouth. “I’m not scared.”
“Of course you're not, you’re not scared of anything! Box falls out of the sky, man falls out of box, man eats corndogs and jello, and look at you, just sitting there. So you know what I think?”
“What?” She asked with a tilt of her head and a little gesture from a small hand.
“Must be a hell of a scary monster under your bed.”
Kesha mulled it over before giving a small nod, prompting a wide grin from the Doctor, who pushed away from the table and made his way upstairs. Realizing she’d been left behind, she made a detour at the fruit bowl before following the raggedy stranger. She arrived in her doorway to see the man on his hands and knees with a strange flashlight-looking device.
“Oh, you’ve had some cowboys in here,” he quipped as he brought the illuminated blue tip of the device up to his face and gave it a thwack with his index finger. “Not actual cowboys...although that can happen.” The Doctor stood up off the ground to see Kesha standing in her doorway with another pear in her hand.
“I used to hate pears, so my mom put faces on them,” with that, she walked over to the raggedy man and handed him another fruit. He accepted it with a warm smile and turned it around to see that she had tenderly carved a smiling face on it.
“She sounds good, your mom,” he remarked as he tossed the pear up and caught it in his hand. “I’ll keep it for later,” he replied as he dropped to his knees again and stared at the black space under her bed. “Ever wonder why it’s always dark under here, even when the room’s completely lit up?” He asked with a grin as he swept the space with his blue stick.
“...No?” Kesha replied as she went on her hands and knees next to him. Now that she looked under there at that dark, empty space, she did wonder if it always looked so black.
“Well,” the Doctor said as the tip of his stick blinked out mid-sweep. The raggedy man frowned for a moment and tapped it a couple of times before it lit back up. “There are certainly some monsters under here. Unless you live to be about two hundred years old, I don’t think you have to worry about them maturing and devouring you,” he added rather nonchalantly as he stood up and pocketed the stick.
“But what…”
The Doctor glimpsed at her. She still looked sad. Unsettled, almost. “Okay, then,” he replied as he grinned. He reached into the pocket of his trousers and pulled out a small little device. “You know when grownups tell you that everything’s going to be all right, and you probably think they’re lying?”
“Uh huh,” Kesha replied in a tone that told her she hadn’t heard that phrase for the first time.
“Well… everything’s going to be all right,” the Doctor grinned as he ran the tip of the sonic along the edges of the oversized computer chip. A beat later, he chucked it under the bed. Lifting the screwdriver, it buzzed a few more times before the faded musical notes on the girl’s ceiling started to glow bright. “Well nothing exploded. That’s a bonus.” He chuckled as turned, saw her diary, and scooped it up.
Before the girl could protest, the man started thumbing through her open diary, his lips tight in a frown as he read words quicker than anyone should be able to. “Hey!” Kesha shouted as she pulled the book from the desk and slipped it into a drawer.
“You shouldn’t let people bring you down,” the Doctor spoke with that warm smile as he reached up onto a shelf above her desk and retrieved a bottle of glitter. “I’m going to say from the hair that you make it an effort to separate yourself from others, but the problem is, you either have to go big or go home. Me? I ran. I ran as fast as I could and I never looked back.”
Kesha shrugged her shoulders as she tenderly ran her hands over her purple streak.
“Ahh!” He shouted as he popped the cap off and walked over to her. “Rule of thumb: Glitter makes everything more awesome,” before the little girl could react, the Doctor drew something on her face with the tiny bottle of dry-on glitter. “There you go, you wanna see?”
With a grin, Kesha nodded her head. Reflecting her enthusiasm, the Doctor stepped out into the hallway and began to glance around at the numerous doors that lined the rather cramped passage. Kesha ran out after him, but before she could get a word out, they both heard the distant thrum of what sounded like a giant gong or bell. Whatever the sound was, it made the color drain from the raggedy man’s visage.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no!” The Doctor shouted as he spun around and started sprinting for the stairs, leaving the bewildered little girl to follow after him as he leapt down the stairs three at a time and made a beeline for the backdoor. “I’ve got to get back in there!” He shouted as he erupted through the door into the backyard. “The engines are phasing. She’s going to burn!”
“But...” Kesha shouted as she followed him to in front of the toppled box. “It’s just a box. How can a box have engines?”
“It’s not a box,” the Doctor replied as he undid his grappling hook and spun around to face her. “It’s a time machine.”
“What, a real one? You’ve got a real time machine?” She asked as he ran around to the other side of the police box.
“Not for long if I can’t get her stabilized,” he remarked in a rushed but still casual tone as he tossed the newly lassoed rope down into the box. “But a five-minute hop into the future should work.”
Kesha looked down at her feet, back at her boring home, and then back to the erratic, raggedy man in front of the blue box with the orange glow. “Can I come?”
“Not safe in here...not yet,” he answered as he continued to feed the rope in. “Give me five minutes. I’ll be right back.” With that, he hopped up onto the toppled box and stared at something inside.
“People always say that,” Kesha muttered as she frowned.
The girl’s despondent tone gave the man pause. He spun around and hopped back down to the ground. Walking over to her, he crouched down to her eye level and smiled at her. “Am I people? Do I even look like people? Trust me, I’m the Doctor.”
When he saw a smile start to creep across the young girl’s face, the Doctor turned back and hopped up onto his box once again. He glanced over at her and held her smile for a few moments before slipping off the ledge and into the orange glow. “Yippie kay yay!”
The Doctor’s voice echoed up for a few more moments before the doors snapped shut and a strange, gentle thrum began to emanate from the box. The orange light on the top started to glow as wind kicked up around it, knocking Kesha’s hair back as she continued to smile. As she watched, the blue box slowly faded away until only the wrecked remains of the shed were left behind.