Before the Boctor: Tales From Leadworth

Through the Looking-Glass; and What Rory Found There

Two days after Jeff asked me out on a date, Clara Sposwald lost control of her ravens of death and the entire town became something out of a hellish nightmare. Nothing like this had ever happened before. None of us had even known that the ravens were alien, or supernatural, or anything in between. We'd all thought that Kate Leadworth Stewart had been joking when she called them 'ravens of death', and that they were harmless birds that she just had a weird affinity for. But no. We were terribly, terribly wrong. This wasn't just the summer of new romances and new chances; it was the summer that Leadworth became an epicentre of alien activity. It's why the most surprising thing about the Doctor was the fact that he wasn't just an imaginary friend, not any of the alien activity that had surrounded Prisoner Zero's attack on Leadworth. We were used to it. After two long years of alien chaos, we'd gotten used to it at that point.

The ravens of death were what opened the portal into what we called the mirror realm. It was this sort of bizarre alternate version of Leadworth that looked almost completely the same, except for the fact that it had magic. And aliens. And all sorts of weird things that bled through into our reality. None of us were quite sure what it was about the ravens that had brought this upon us, and each theory people came up with was more bizarre than the rest. I'd theorised that the ravens were actually magic themselves, and that they could go between the two dimensions. Everyone except Jeff laughed at me, and he probably just felt obligated to not laugh at me because he had asked me out on a date.

I was the unlucky soul chosen to go forth and be the first to step foot into the other Leadworth (probably because I was in the middle of being the first and only applicant to the University of Leadderton's Unaliving Studies degree program – I was willing to do whatever it took to get out of this town.) I went in with nothing but a bookbag full of food and medical supplies and an unhealthy lack of self-preservation instincts. Luckily, the ravens' portal didn't kill me the second I stepped through. Unluckily, it closed the second I walked through, essentially trapping me in this other, stranger Leadworth.

The Mirror Realm, pardon my French, was fucking weird. And given Leadworth was already a pretty weird place, that was saying a lot. I walked down the streets wondering if I'd be able to find a way back home, but all I saw around me could simply be described as impossible. The trees bent and waved at me, the air tasted of glitter, and the cars drove on the right side of the road instead of the left. A strange flag I'd never seen hung from the top of Leadworth Town Hall.

What I found stranger than anything else was the way that the sky looked like shattered glass. If you looked up, you could see glimpses of the void through the fractured sky. Some would call it entrancing. I thought it was horrifying. I half-expected a giant octopus to extend its long, slimy tentacle and entrap me in its deadly grip. Here I was, Rory Williams, the most normal boy in Leadworth, trapped in a world beyond even Amy's wildest imagination. And then I noticed I had barely seen anyone.

Only, of course, to run into myself.

The other me felt off. It was like the uncanny valley effect; he looked like me, smelled like me, probably thought like me –– but there was something in him that felt unnatural. His eyes didn't have the same tired lull mine had, and his skin looked more plastic than human. When he spoke, his voice vibrated subtly, a reminder to myself that it wasn't me who was doing the talking. He looked like a puppet Rory Williams, a fake constructed from the imagination of someone who'd only ever seen me in passing.

"You're me," he said simply. One point to whoever made him in Create-A-Sim for giving him the straightforward trait.

"You're me," I echoed.

I was thinking of doing some sort of Turing test on him, a way to try and figure out whether or not he was real. Above us, the ravens of death cawed. I recognised Agatha Christie (the raven, not the writer) looking at us rather peculiarly. I turned back to the Other Rory.