The Girl Who Grew Up In The TARDIS (Wattys2014)

"Who am I?"

 The Doctor was younger again, desperately confused in the aftermath of his regeneration, lost in a hospital morgue in America and it took him a fair while to remember who he was, as in the Doctor momentarily forgot he was a time travelling alien with two hearts from the planet Gallifrey… It hardly helped that the Doctor had died on the operating table and had been dead for far longer than ever before but in truth the Doctor was all over the place even by his usual post regenerative standards and basked in his confusion as he kissed a girl and claimed he was half human…The lucky recipient of the Doctor’s joyous kiss was the surgeon who had operated on his previous self, she tried to save his life but with an alien cardiovascular system it was all going to end tragically, Dr Grace Holloway was an attractive young woman so the Doctor wasn’t exactly slumming it though I’m pretty sure it had been a very long time since the Doctor had got up to that sort of thing…But a touch of romance kind of suited this Doctor. I’m blushing as I recall this but he was rather handsome, dark tumbling locks, almost Byronic in appearance with his long Victorian frockcoat, he was tall and athletic again, outgoing in manner but his compassion was still evident and for the Doctor he was pretty open about his feelings, maybe the most human of all his incarnations. But for the brief time I was allowed to see him, he was also manic, verging on crazy. In the frantic, whirlwind hours following his regeneration like his previous incarnations the Doctor hit the ground running, it was a good job that Grace was there to help him for the Master was very much on the scene and had to be fought again, wandering around in someone else’s body again, he had taken a human and had killed him, so the body was decaying fast but this time the Master meant business and he was after the Doctor’s body and all his remaining regenerations. Somehow this involved the eye of harmony and this was seriously bad news for planet Earth and its molecular structure. Well when I see visions of the Doctor’s adventures replayed, it can all get a bit jumbled up and sketchy in my head but suffice to say if it hadn’t been for Grace, the Master wouldn’t have been defeated and the Doctor wouldn’t be here now, so to this day I find it utterly inexplicable why Grace didn’t join the Doctor on his travels, sure it was dangerous but once you’d had a glimpse of the Doctor’s world, all of time and space how could you turn your back on the rest of the Universe? I understood that Grace had an important career saving lives but she was forgetting one important thing, the Doctor had a time machine, no one need ever have known she had gone. They would have made a great team. I wanted to slap Grace for being such a fool and leaving the Doctor on his own, the Doctor on his own for too long is never a good thing…  

 I never truly believed that by wishing for something and wanting it so badly that you could make it happen, well not until the day before I turned seventeen…I cannot be certain but I swear the Doctor actually SAW ME for the first time. I was tired of waiting, I believed I was ready to be with the Doctor even though the TARDIS kept telling me otherwise. That day I was stood in the control room and I cried out in desperation, a burning mass of anger and passion. The Doctor suddenly appeared from out of nowhere, he was standing on the other side of the console with a cup of tea in his hand, it startled me but never in a million, billion years did I think we were standing in the same time and space for the very first time, that this was the here and now, never could I have dared to imagine…Until the moment, that wonderful, beautiful, twisted, gut wrenching moment he looked up at me. It felt like forever, the Doctor and me in the control room together but it was over in a microsecond as the tea cup fell from his hands and smashed to smithereens on the control room floor. The Doctor was staring straight at me, his eyebrows raised and his ancient eyes brimming full of bewilderment that another being had suddenly appeared and had somehow breached his TARDIS defences…If only he knew! And there was no fear in his eyes, no anger, just utter bafflement which quickly turned to wonder then excitement. The Doctor had finally seen me. And he was staring straight into my eyes, my heart stopped instantly, I couldn’t breathe as my knees almost gave way, my mouth opened to speak… And then I was gone, wandering lost in the TARDIS corridors of infinity and my moment lost. The TARDIS was angry with me, unknowingly I had outwitted her as she tightened her defences. I was devastated, I truly believed this Doctor would be the one. And so I was banished, I did not see this version of the Doctor again, not until it was the end. But that was my small victory, the day I had almost broke through to the Doctor, by wanting so badly to be with him and by will power alone somehow I had broken down the TARDIS barriers, through my very own bubble of time. The TARDIS would never let it happen again…