It feels like something should happen once you step over the safety rail and out onto the edge. It feels like the world should tear itself apart trying to stop you, the very muscles of your body tensing up against your movements, the sky electric with the morose.
Of course, it doesn’t. The world doesn’t match or diminish you. It probably won’t even have the decency to cry. It just... goes on. If you’re an optimist, that ability- that necessity- to always keep going on, even after you and all your petty little problems have fallen, seems amazing. If you’re me, it is merely another sign of your insignificance.
Nothing and everything happens, spinning, keeping calm and carrying on. I hang suspended, dizzy with the enormity and the fearfulness of it all. I want it to go on. I want to stop. Most of all, I want to be the one to make it do these things, to have some sense of control over the chaos. No such chance. I will die as I have lived- in pale imitation.
My mouth sucks in air for a final breath, my heart beat a rich thrum deep in my chest. I close my eyes, letting my weight press me forwards, my toes barely keeping to the edge of the bridge....
...And a sound fills my ears, startling me, brushing me back.
There, lingering in the air in front of me, is a blue box, tilting in some invisible breeze, accompanied by a ridiculous whirring sound.
One of the doors of the phone box – no, ‘police public call box,’ I see the lettering reads- opens, and a man steps out, nearly breaking his own neck as he stumbles about wildly, only now realizing his mistake in picking this particular piece of air to land on. He sees me there, just fingertips and knees and toes against the cold metal, and I know he thinks he understands, thinks he is now totally aware of who and what I am. This man is completely impossible.
He waves at me. I slink a little further from the already distant water, lifting myself to sit upon the thick steel bar that separates the happy from the lost. My hand raises of its own accord. What it gives him is more of a twitch than a friendly gesture, but he grins anyways, all laugh lines and ruffled hair.
“Hello!” He calls out jovially. “I’m the Doctor. I just fancied going out to the Golden Gate, and I seem to have misjudged the landing by a few feet. The TARDIS is a smart one, though, she never lets me fall.” At this point he took a deep breath, steadying himself in the doorway of the booth, which was glowing from inside with a mysterious golden sheen.
“Who exactly are you, though?” I ask. I feel as if I’m hardly in a position where the rudeness of direct questions should matter. This freeness has been liberating in the past few months, as I have slowly grown less scared of losing and dying. I no longer take the precautions most people center their lives around, providing for increased physical and social protection. Even as I feel trapped inside myself, unable to bare my feelings or bear my reality, I have defended myself with an aura of coolness, of physical and unironic fearlessness. Why should I fear death when life no longer has a use for me?
His answer is nowhere near as direct, which annoys me faintly. As I so recently asked, who is he to interrupt the melancholy of the night?
“Who am I?” His eyes open wide in a play of innocence. “I’m nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too?”
“I hardly know sir, just at present,” I reply in turn. What a pair, Emily Dickinson and Alice.
“I see! As the Caterpillar did not, of course. Well, I was here to see the sunset. Do you fancy watching it with me? I’ve always said that things are better with a companion, a friend... without someone there, someone who hasn’t seen the sunset in the way that you have, you start to lose sight of why you really watch it after all. All the miracles of the universe, big and small, seems so much less miraculous. No, yes, it’s important to have someone to share the world with, the wonder.”
I’m quite tempted to tell the man that I’d rather he just be gone, but his company feels so different from all the relationships I’ve had with people lately, the conversations with white-coated psychiatrists and with coffee shop baristas and drop-outs. Perhaps it’s the Dickinson, or his falling from the sky like an angel in a pinstriped suit. Whatever it is about him, I decide that I shall give him the moment. This whimsy, another uncontrollable thing, will just have to be. In any case, it’s not as if he can hurt me; as if anything he is capable of doing or saying to me can ruin me any more.
“Alright,” I tell him, my voice cracking the word into two shattered pieces. “I’ll sit with you.”
“Brilliant!” With that, he turns, jamming the door of the box shut with a long finger and spinning out of view. The same respiratory hum fills the air, and the light on the sloped roof of the thing lights and flickers dimly, flashing in and out in time with the noise. Slowly, it disappears before my eyes, gradually dissolving into the air before me, before suddenly melting back into the world a few yards away, safely inside the guard rail and next to one of the towers.
“Well?” He calls as he twirls out from the mysterious depths of the box. “What do you think?”
“It’s...” The words catch in my throat, and I know that I have absolutely no words to describe that event. No words for anything else, either, really. That’s what scares me most of all- how empty the world feels to me know, how bare, how cold. I have no descriptions for things that once I found happy. I feel abstractly like Frodo Baggins. The taste of strawberries seems alien to me, and all is dusty and dark. Perhaps this doctor is right when he says that a companion helps you to see the world anew. But perhaps he isn’t aware of just how hard it is to find someone who really wants to look around and view things from beyond his or her own perspective.
“Mhm,” he breathes. “You haven’t told me your name yet, you know.”
“Nor have you,” I remind him.
He grins again, Cheshire Cat-like, too wide for his handsome face. “I’ve told you- I’m nobody.”
“And I’m nobody, too.”
“So there’s a pair of us! How dreary to be somebody.”
“I’m Clarisse.”
“And I’m the Doctor. I’ve said that already, haven’t I?”
“I suppose you have, but it means just as little as it did the first time. What sort of doctor?”
“How public, like a frog-“ His voice is still bright, lilting up at the end to express joking refusal to answer.
“But-“ I protest.
“-To tell your name the livelong day-“
I sigh, and the faintest hint of a smile pushes itself up onto my chapped and torn lips.
“To an admiring bog!” He concludes, raising his arms in the arm dramatically.
We are seated on the ground, our backs up against the damp coolness of the tower. For a few minutes we look up and around, silent apart from the scuff of my boots against each other as I fidget.
“Why?” His voice is soft, almost a whisper, as he asks the inevitable question. There is loss and sadness in his voice, but I sense no judgment there.
“Because... because...” I try to find a way to phrase this, at least, in a way that can be intelligible. “Because I’m never going to be anything. I cannot change the world. I cannot make things better. There’s nothing at all I can do to prevent the random, or even the planned. I am good for absolutely nothing. And I’m afraid. I am cowardly and I am afraid that if I stay on this world, I will be not only failing to cause good, but causing unceasing harm. My actions have already caused enough scars, both for myself and others, and I don’t want to cut anyone any deeper.”
The Doctor closes his eyes for a second, as though his mind is far away. When he opens them, the grief is even more evident in his face. While so recently I saw him as bright and optimistic, I now see that beneath his mask of happiness he bears a guilt and a pain that is so strong I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.
He turns towards me, his hands outstretched, as if to tuck my hair back behind my ear.
I twitch back out of habit and a persistent fear.
Undaunted, the Doctor places one gentle hand on either side of my face, his fingers on my temples, I stare at him, frozen in place, mentally planning how best to escape this man, how to throw him away from me. Suddenly, something happens inside my head. A presence unknown to me enters my mind, blue and silver and swirling red in my own deep purple. The Doctor speaks, and his words echo inside me as I open my eyes to see that his mouth isn’t moving at all.
“In 900 years of time and space,” he whispers, his voice amplified by our connection, our linked minds, “I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t important before.”
My eyes are closed again and images glitter before my eyelids- a woman dressed all in white writing alone in a New England bedroom, a ginger-haired man with a bandaged ear, paint brush in hand and tears streaming from his face, and there, standing next to the Doctor, a plain, normal looking girl with metal-encased monsters exploding behind her.
“Emily Dickinson,” I choke out. “Vincent Van Gogh...?”
“And Donna Noble,” he finishes for me. “A temp from Leadworth. A perfectly ordinary woman who saved the universe.”
“So because she did, because Emily Dickinson did, you think I can.” While I’m still in shock at how this man could possibly have shown me these things, I am also annoyed at the nerve of him. Just like all the others, he is certain he knows how to ‘cheer me up,’ how to ‘make me better.’ I yank myself away from his gentle grip and stand.
The water crashes against the shore to my left, too far below to be heard.
I hear him stand behind me, too, and my muscles tense.
“I know it’s hard,” he starts off slowly and carefully, as though fearful I’ll jump any second. “I know that sometimes it seems like there’s nothing you can do. I’ve felt that more than I can ever say. I understand how painful it can be to let someone go, and how much guilt that can bring. Sadness and darkness are very real things, and there are monsters hiding in the shadows, but even they shall pass. The world is also full of bright and beautiful things, and the beauty is worth fighting for. It’s worth standing up, even if you think that by standing you’re making things worse.”
I open my mouth to reply, but he cuts me off.
“It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all.”
“’...In which case you fail by default.’ Yes, I know my J.K. Rowling just as well as I know Emily Dickinson, but that doesn’t help me at all. I have already failed by default, and will continue to do so. What exactly is the point if I might as well not have lived at all?”
“There is still time,” he says annoyingly. “You can still make the difference you want to. Clarisse, you’re going to be amazing. You’re going to be more than amazing, you’re going to be brilliant... and nothing can stop you from that. Nothing can stop you but yourself.”
“And this crippling depression I carry around with me,” I retort. “I can hope that I’m going to be special and try to be great and that’s all lovely. But it just isn’t going to be, and it hurts too much to keep trying. Once you stop trying, it doesn’t hurt anymore. And that sounds pretty nice to me right now.”
“But it’s worth the pain!” The Doctor shouts, now, all fear forgotten in his defense of himself and me. “You can’t stop hoping. Don’t stop hoping that you can make a difference, that you are making a difference. You have to believe in hope and in the infinity of it and the power that it holds. Yes, hoping hurts. Hoping lets you down and drives you crazy and renders you useless. But that hope is better than anything in the world because it is what makes people do things, makes them matter. Hope is what inspires people, what made the Allies win the war and the Renaissance begin. I believe in you. I believe that you can change the world, that you just haven’t taken the chance yet.”
“It gets better,” I intone sarcastically, parroting the phrase thrown at so many LGBTQA teens these days.
“It does get better,” he replies immediately. “It gets so much better, once you’ve found the right people and place and being. And you can be the right people and place and being to make it better for other people. Life can take dramatic turns for the better- but it won’t do that on its own. Life will get better when you help it to do so. Make your life exactly what you want it to be by being who you are.”
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,” I quote in a childlike, high-pitched voice dripping with bitterness. “Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
“Ah, Dr. Seuss!” The Doctor is back to cheerful again, quickly covering his momentary lapse into seriousness, as though hoping to deny to himself that his heart is broken. “There’s another one I’d love to meet! Emily Dickinson, Dr. Seuss... What do you think? Should we visit Emily or Theodore?”
“I’m actually a bit busy this week. Lots to do, you know. Not much time for visiting dead authors.”
“Ah.” His smile droops. “So you won’t come with me?”
“Let’s see here. Man appears out of thin air in a big blue box. Man quotes Emily Dickinson. Man watches sunset. Man tries to convince girl not to kill herself. Oh, and right, he goes all Vulcan and reads her mind. Then he tells her about how guilty he fees and invites her to visit two of her childhood inspirations... who are dead. Pretty sure the first type of person they tell you to avoid when you’re in safety classes at school is magic, poetry-reading space sluts who are probably imaginary.”
“I... I’m not a slut!” The Doctor says, surprised and offended. “And I’m certainly not imaginary!”
“Alright, whatever.” I’ve lost patience for this man, and I’ve lost patience with myself even more. What am I waiting for? Why have I let him delay me, give me even more suffering? “I’ll just... go now, shall I?”
“I wish you’d stay,” and his tone is sweet again. “Really. Give me a chance. Let me show you the world.”
“Shining, shimmering, splendid?” I ask.
“Tell me... now when did you last let your heart decide?”
I hesitate. Once again, I ask myself, what could he possibly do to hurt me any more than I have already hurt myself? The only thing I fear is that he could convince me to change my mind. How cowardly is that, to be so terrified of another’s opinion that I won’t risk hearing it? If he can prove to me that there’s more to live for, if has actions can indeed speak louder than his ridiculous words, maybe it’d be alright to have my mind changed. Maybe I can bear the monsters with someone like him by my side, entirely mad and totally inspiring.
“...Where exactly are we going?” I am suspicious, but without fear. After all, I don’t have any particular connections to this place, any more than I am tied to my own life.
“Anywhere. Everywhere. All of space and time.” To me, this sounds vaguely prepared, as though he’s used this line on potential ‘companions’ before. The Doctor leaps towards his box (time machine? Ridiculous. Although I did see it melt into the air and reappear...) and opens the door, the back of his head hiding the absurd smile I’m sure is gracing his face.
“Come on in!” He shouts. “Make yourself at home!”
As the door opens wider, the entire section of bridge walkway we’re standing on is bathed in a sudden glow. I reach into my pocket and pull out a well-worn piece of sea glass and rub it between my fingers as I have done so many times before in times of franticness or confusion. This small familiarity is welcome as I step into a new Perhaps- a thoroughly different one from what I sought mere minutes ago in the emptiness of my fall.
“Still, I go to seek a great Perhaps,” I whisper under my breath, as I step through the doorway and into another world, one guarded by a man who walks through time.
The inside of the Police Box is entirely different from the quiet, muggy San Francisco evening outside. Everything glows with a faint green and gold light, as though I’ve landed in a glass case under the ocean. Long pieces of bleached coral reaffirm this, reaching up to the high domed ceiling. The light radiates from a globe at the room’s center, low to the ground but stretched up like a belled The rounded base of the center pillar- no, it’s a console of some type, but a glorious one- is decked out with wires and levers and handles, like a child’s playful re-creation of an airplane pilot mechanism. I notice a hammer on a piece of string, and a computer screen. The modge-podge of dials and buttons is incomprehensible to me but seems to make perfect sense to the Doctor, who bounds up to it, throwing his long tan coat over the crook of a pillar as he goes, showing total disregard for a hat stand just inside the entrance.
The whole scene is a mix of alien bizarreness and steampunk normality, with duck tape holding pieces of an inside railing together and the floor beneath the console just metal grating. Despite these aspects of simplicity, the whole thing holds an air of strangeness, consistently poised on the edge of something new and dangerous and exciting. I stand dumbfounded in the doorway before hesitantly stepping around, drawn inextricably to the console in the center.
“How?” I ask, my question a mirror of his earlier ‘why?’
“It’s dimensionally transcendental,” the Doctor states proudly, like a child showing off a new invention. “That means it’s... bigger on the inside!”
“Well yes, that much is obvious,” I say, still perplexed. “I meant... how is it so... alive?” The whole ship or box or machine or whatever it is has a certain feeling to it, a consciousness.
“You can feel it? That’s brilliant!” The Doctor practically jumped on top of me in his excitement. “It seems alive because it is, of course. This is a Type 40 TARDIS, which stands for Time And Relative Dimension In Space. It’s a sentient ship built by a race known as the Time Lords.” This all comes out as a great rush, as though he’s desperate to communicate how awe inspiring this (and he) should be.
I do my best to catch up.
“The... Time Lords? A different species, you mean? A species that considers themselves the rulers of time itself? I don’t much like the sound of that, no matter how technologically able they are.”
He seems a bit downtrodden at this. “You know, I’m a Time Lord. We’re not too bad.”
“You’re... an alien. From a different planet.” Admittedly, after all the other strange things I’ve experienced in the last few hours, having this absolutely insane man be another species is practically believable.
“Yup!”
“So... you control time?”
“I don’t control it exactly. I more... have the ability to utilize it in a way other races don’t. And I have certain responsibilities when it comes to maintaining history.” He sounds wary, as though worried he might give too much away or say the wrong thing.
“Responsibilities? Like what? History can’t maintain itself?”
“Well, species beside the Time Lords have developed ways to travel through time. Sometimes they abuse that power and try to mess with established events for their own benefit.”
“But when you do it, it’s ‘maintaining history,’ eh? I see.”
“It’s not quite like that!” He’s on the defensive again, and I can see he’s protecting himself from more than just me, like he secretly agrees. “The Time Lords invented temporal travel, and I always make sure to never interfere with what must be. I just help things along, rid worlds of Racnoss and daleks and any other monster of the week!”
“Alright, fair enough. But what about the other Time Lords? Do they have the same morals and integrity that you, sir, are so plentiful in?”
“There aren’t any others.” His eyes are piercing, and it’s almost as though he’s inside my mind again as he looks me straight on. “They all died. I let them die, I had to. But I don’t let it stop me, not ever. Because it’s important that I keep fighting, for them. That what my people suffered did not happen in vain. I might not be able to wipe out all the evils in creation, but I can try. And while I wish it had never happened, wish every day that I had never been pushed to do what I did, I can’t change it. I can only live, now, as I should have done before.”
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” My voice lacks his passion and his defiance, but there is a similar grief in it.
“So do all who live to see such times,” he quotes in turn. “But that is not up to us to decide. All we can decide is what to do with the times that are given to us.”
He opens his arms as though to give me a hug, then thinks better of it and turns wide towards the console. He pulls a lever and bangs a button with the flat of his palm and grabs hold of a handle as the TARDIS punches into action. I put my arms around a coral column and clasp my hands together, my toes barely supporting my weight against the rapidly shifting floor.
“Have you decided yet? Where are we off to?” His grin is back in place.
“Uhm....”
He begins to whistle the theme from Jeopardy, laughing at my hesitation. Give a literature geek the Universe, and apparently she’ll sit thinking forever. That always was my problem, people would tell me. I think too much. I think myself unhappy. And here I am off, again, caught in my head.
“Uhm....” I mutter again, still trying to think of where I want to go, what I want to see and feel and touch firsthand.
“Do you want to go meet Emily Dickinson?” The Doctor asked. “I bet she’s brilliant! Of course, bit eccentric, bit quiet, bit anti-social, but brilliant!”
“I’d love to meet her, of course, but don’t they say you shouldn’t meet your heroes? And wouldn’t we scare her? I’ve read a bit about her life and everything I’ve read says that she mainly communicated by letters, and only very rarely left her house, or even her bedroom. I feel like falling out of the sky in her dining room might prove a bit much for her!”
The Doctor visibly wilts. “I suppose you’re right, of course. At least about the scaring her bit. I, however, think you should always meet your heroes! That’s the best part about it, getting to know them, seeing how they really are! Either their actions impress you even more, and you realize just how perfect they are, or you have the opportunity to learn that even people who have done and said beautiful things may not be so fantastic all the time.”
“I don’t know about that. What if, in meeting them, they really just reaffirm your former convictions about the world? If Vincent Van Gogh could create such beautiful art and express himself so well, and still feel enough pain to kill himself, what chance do I have?”
He just stares at me, and I wonder if he’s regretting bringing me aboard.
“Not Emily Dickinson then,” is all he says, and then, “what do you think about going to the future, instead of to the past? Maybe we can drop by my good friend Will Shakespeare later, but for now...”
“Oh,” I gasp. “I hadn’t really thought about it. Where in the future? It’s definitely not a subject I can pretend to know a lot about.”
“How about... New Earth?” He sounds bittersweet, as though the place reminds him of something- or someone- he has loved and lost.
“Is that a nice place?” The question sounds childlike, even to my ears, and he smiles.
“Gorgeous,” he replies. “There are two moons in the sky, and the ground smells like apple-grass. It’s one of my favorite planets to visit. The city of New New York- well, actually New New New New New New New New New New New New New New New York- is so wonderfully built. Skyscrapers and a lovely hospital and-“
“Alright, alright!” I laugh. “Don’t spoil it all for me before we get there!”
“Brilliant! Allons-y!” And the TARDIS jolts and crashes around a bit more.
As he tries to steady the ship, frowning at a screen mounted to the console, I take a minute to watch him. The man- Time Lord- is tall and thin and more than a bit attractive. His eyes are the best part of him, deep and bright and expressive, and his hair, which stands up all over the place. As he raises an eyebrow at the console, he puts a hand through it, a nervous habit I’m sure he’ll repeat. And how could I possibly neglect to mention his accent? It’s gorgeously British, posh and faintly superior. It’s the sort of accent that most American girls go crazy for.
His light-brown overcoat twirls behind him as he spins around the controls like a girl’s dress at a fancy ball, and I giggle faintly as I notice his shoes for the first time- I’m in a spaceship with an alien in red Converse tennis shoes.
It’s his quirkiness that interests me, though, far more than the way he looks and dresses. I have always been drawn to less-noticed details in people, like the way the walk, the colloquialisms they choose to use, how they keep their fingernails. Incidentally, his fingernails are neat and clean. I look down at my own jagged and scabbed nail beds and vow to keep them out of sight.
When I look up again, the Doctor’s pulled a pair of dark, rectangular tortoise shell glasses from a pocket and is glancing at the screen again from behind them, his eyebrow still up and his hair even more ruffled.
“Is something wrong?” I ask hesitantly, hoping not to disrupt him in any important mental calculations.
“No! Well... yes, but... not wrong exactly, but... the TARDIS doesn’t seem to be heading towards New Earth... she does that quite a bit actually.”
“You mean... your sentient spaceship doesn’t take you to where you ask it to?”
“Well, yes. It always takes me to where I need to be, though, that’s for sure. Like tonight!”
“You said you wanted to watch the sunset at Golden Gate!”
“I did, who doesn’t? I just hadn’t exactly been planning on it on that particular day, or at all, really, I just sort of showed up there, and-“
“She sent you to me.” My voice betrays no emotion but my mind is whirring with the impossibility of this on top of everything else.
“Your life is important, and she felt that. She felt you, calling out to her and to me, all the way across the universe. And she came to your aid. She took me where I was needed.”
“I’ve had quite enough of being someone’s charity case.” My voice is quiet but I can hear the anger and the rage inside it. “Just leave me somewhere, please. I don’t have a home to go back to but I don’t want to be a burden on you or your magical time machine. Let me be. I’m not worth wasting your time with. Please, just go save a planet. Find someone who deserves your help.”
I unhook my arms from the pillar I’ve been holding tight to for support, mentally and physically, and reach into my pocket to feel the comforting weight of the stone inside it.
Without looking at the Doctor, who is silently watching my progress, I hastily stride across the area surrounding the console and down the little ramp to the doorway. I yank on one of the police box doors, so out of place in the steampunk, futuristic interior. It doesn’t open. I push on it. It remains closed. Turning to face the Doctor, again, my voice keeps its coolness as I demand that he let me out.
“No.” His answer comes heavy with pity, and I hate it. I hate it and him and how I’ve let myself be dragged into this.
I sit heavily against the inside of the doorway.
“I won’t beg or plead. I’m not going to scream or scratch or fight. I just want you to let me go.”
“I can’t.” He’s locked inside his own head, too, and I can see him running off without his emotions. The Doctor’s face is blank and his tone the same, as though he simply can’t bear to show how he feels. As though he might break with the pain of it.
“Why not?” I don’t care, I don’t want to hear it, I know what he’s going to say and it’s absolutely none of his business.
“Because it’ll be my fault. I can’t bear to have another life on my hands. I can’t stand knowing that I could have helped, but didn’t. I’ve seen so many people fall, and there’s nothing I could have done for them, but you... I can help you. There is, you know, surprisingly, always hope. And I still have hope that I can show you that.”
“What happens to me isn’t your fault. It isn’t anyone’s fault but my own. The fault, dear Doctor, is not in my world, but in myself, that I am an underling. Find someone to travel with who can see the world as you do, who wants to love and live and believes in radical hope, who believes that even inside the suffering she and the world around her can grow and become more beautiful. Leave me to sleep.”
“To sleep, perhaps to dream?” It strikes me how much like Hamlet this lonely traveler is, how mad, how tethered to the dead. He must be revengeful, must drop that melancholy and that cheerful mask at times to show a powerful anger.
“My dreams are nightmares.”
He is silent for a moment, and I wait to see his reaction. Part of me, a part I despise even more than I despise the rest, wants him to force me to stay, wants to travel with him and make this lonely man less lonely with my presence, with my smile and my words. I want to comfort him.
The rest of me feels how foolish this is, how utterly ridiculous it is to put so much trust into a man I don’t know at all and whose background is totally unclear. How can I be sure that he will stay with me, how can I be sure that he will love and support me for any longer than anyone else did? They find out you’re in pain, and they hug you, help you for a while, but they grow weary of it. It happens. I don’t blame them for being tired of me or for hating me. How can I when I feels so much of the same myself?
He runs his hand through his hair again and I can see the conclusion forming on his face.
“Please,” he begs, one last time.
“I’m sorry,” and I genuinely am. I don’t want to hurt this eccentric but intriguing man, but I know that this is for the better. He may think he wants me, but I know myself so much better than he ever can, and I know just how wrong he is.
“How about I drop you off in Cardiff, then? I have to refuel my ship, anyways.” His eyes remain still and deep, and I wonder where their sparkle has gone.
“You have to refuel... in Cardiff? That’s in Wales, right? How does a time machine refuel... in Wales?”
“There’s a rift in time and space in Cardiff, you see. It doesn’t take very long to get all the energy I need- just about twenty or thirty seconds, if it’s been active. The TARDIS travels in the time vortex, you see. It’s all a bit confusing.” He seems reluctant to explain, despite me having pegged him as a nerd earlier, the sort of person- alien- who would ramble on for hours about their particular areas of expertise.
All the while we’ve been having this conversation, the Doctor’s just been standing there, watching me where I sit, leaning up against the doors that refuse to open against my weight. Now he turns, slumping against the console. His dance around it is far less animated now, as though the very life has been sucked from his body.
With a similarly muted shuffle, the TARDIS sinks to the ground, landing with a dull thump.
I lower my knees from my chest and lift myself on my elbows before standing fully. I turn to face the wooden doors I was until so recently leaning up against and wait. The Doctor softly steps up behind me and places his hand on my shoulder. I tense, and look over it at him.
He takes his hand from my shoulder and lifts my chin instead so my face is turned towards him, uplifted like a child seeking praise.
He carefully leans towards me ever so slowly, as though approaching some sensitive and skittish wild thing, and kisses me gently, his thin lips brushing mine like flower petals. My eyelids flutter and I unconsciously part my lips in an unsaid “oh,” and he responds in turn, his face matching mine, his eyes half closed but watching me the whole time. It is a comforting kiss as opposed to a passionate one, a tender, fragile thing of porcelain and shattered dreams and broken wings cocooned in this place of impossibility, Time Lord and human spinning in a dichotomy of melancholy chaos.
He draws back from me and pushes the door open with a trembling hand, letting the cold evening air of Wales tear the moment to shreds; nothing more than a tattered banner twisting in the polluted breeze wafting from the sea.
“Clarisse...” My name, sharp and pointed on so many other tongues, is a sugar cube dissolving on his tongue. “You’ve read Fahrenheit 451, yes? [...]
I’m totally speechless, divided between slapping him for touching me without permission and reaching up to do it all again, but instead I find my feet stepping out from the blue doorframe of their own accord, turning me around only after I’m a few feet away from it. As I stare, dumfounded and numb with overwhelming feeling, the mournful cry I heard earlier on the bridge starts out, ending with a whale-song like pitch as the blue dissolves into the grey of the night.
I am alone in a city that until this evening I was uncertain was really in Wales. I know nothing about the place and know nobody here. It’s getting dark, and the wind is coming in off of the water, and suddenly my witty t-shirt and jeans leave me feeling overwhelmingly cold.
It’s funny how just a few hours ago I didn’t notice the weather or the temperature at all, didn’t really notice the world around me at all. I complained, then, about how self-centered the happy seem to me, how overwhelmed in their own petty problems they are, and in the amazingness of their lives. Now I see truly that those who suffer are also bound in self.
