"And then we discovered it wasn't the robot king, after all, it was the real one. Fortunately, I was able to re-attach the head."
Peyton slouches in the beige chair by the console as the Doctor tells Rory the story of how they all got banned from Xiopria A, back when it had just been the Doctor, Amy, and her in the Tardis.
"Do you believe any of this stuff?" Rory asks Amy who descends the stairs from the bedrooms.
"We were there," Amy says.
Something starts beeping. "Oh! The warning lights!" The Doctor groans. "I'm getting rid of those, they never stop!"
Peyton watches from her seat as Amy and Rory walk down away from the main deck as the Doctor berates the console.
Rory had told her that Amy was obsessing over the events at Lake Silencio again. She tried to remind him that they all were. The image of the Doctor dying, even if it was two hundred years in the future, was something that Peyton thinks will be burned into her mind forever.
Then something knocks. A familiar pattern; knock, knock, knock-knock, knock. Peyton and the Doctor both turn to stare at the TARDIS doors.
"What was that?" Amy jogs up to the deck again.
"The door," the Doctor says, still rooted to the spot. "It knocked."
"Right, we are in deep space?" Rory reappears as Peyton pushes herself up from her seat.
"Very, very deep," the Doctor mutters as he slowly starts making his way to the door, his hands raised as a precaution.
It knocks again; knock, knock, knock-knock, knock.
"And somebody's knocking?" Peyton decides to stay back with Rory and Amy, they were on a nice streak of safe and not life-threatening situations and she didn't want to jinx it.
She watches in anticipation as the Doctor slowly opens the doors. She can't really tell, but she can see something glowing, whatever it is, is hidden from sight by the Doctor's body.
"Come here!" He laughs. "Come here, you scrumptious little beauty!"
Peyton isn't phased by his strange words, she's learnt to ignore him any time he's not instructing her on how to survive.
The Doctor reaches out to grab, whatever it is, but it flies past him and into the TARDIS. Peyton ducks just in time as it soars over her head and around the console room before it flies back to the Doctor and hits him in the chest, knocking him to the floor. The thing, this cube, falls to the floor, lying still next to him.
"A box?" Peyton raises an eyebrow.
The Doctor snatches it up off the floor and looks at it intensely.
"Doctor, what is it?" Amy asks.
"I've got mail!"
"You what?" Rory scoffs.
The Doctor leaps to his feet and up to the flight deck in half a second. "Time Lord emergency messaging system," he explains, prancing around the console. "In an emergency, we wrap up our thoughts into psychic containers and send them through space and time. Anyway, there's a living Time Lord still out there, and it's one of the good ones!"
The Doctor grabs Peyton's hands, she can't help but adopt his same stupidly happy smile. Other Time Lords. This means when the Doctor... when the Doctor dies, she isn't going to be alone.
"There's more?" she laughs.
"You said there weren't any other Time Lords left," Rory points out, interrupting their moment.
YOU ARE READING
The Time Lord's Apprentice
Fanfiction"But, you're impossible!" "Yeah, and the world is ending, I don't think now is the time." Peyton is an orphan, taken from her mother as an infant by the Unified Intelligence Taskforce. She is raised separately from other children because she is spec...
