Peyton looks around the console as the Doctor reenters the Tardis, muttering to himself under his breath.
"You don't think it's a little bit creepy to be basically stalking a six-year-old?" She asks.
"I'm not..." the Doctor glares, giving up knowing that Peyton wouldn't let it go. "I just have to know, she's impossible!"
"Yeah, uh-huh," Peyton nods boredly, reaching over to grab the monitor. That's the thirty-seventh time he's said that exact phrase in the last thirty two hours. She pulls it around to take another look at the records the Doctor had pulled up.
She frowns at the file for the Junior Entertainment Officer for Starship Alaska: Oswin Oswald. It's her, more than just a splitting image. An entire life, birth certificate, missing persons report; presumed dead. Medical, school, employment records, everything.
And then she's there in Victorian London, just as the Doctor has said. Birth certificate, death certificate, employment contracts, photographs. It's completely baffling.
"Right," the Doctor huffs, starting up the Tardis. "We need to jump forward a couple years real quick."
"Sure," Peyton throws herself back into the grey seat on the flight deck, sighing and burying her forehead in her hand.
She hears the Tardis land but the sound of the Doctor skipping out toward the doors never comes.
Peyton dares to peer up toward him over her hand and sees him gazing at her from across the console with those sad hazel eyes.
Neither say anything as the Doctor slowly lowers his hands from the controls and walks around the console toward her before crouching at her side, looking up into her stormy eyes, searching, trying to unravel her.
"Do you want to, talk... about what happened?" He speaks slowly, as if unsure of the words that will come out of his mouth before he says them.
"Doctor, I-"
"Have you talked about what happened?" He interrupts.
Peyton lets out a dry laugh. "What? You think I just waltzed into a psychologists office and was all like 'hello, my two best friends were viciously ripped from my life and displaced into the 1930s by alien statues who only move when you're not looking and I have no way of seeing them again. While we're chatting, my dad was a former prime minister and an alien who tried to take over the world and murder everyone'!"
She folds her arms and looks away from the Doctor, tears prickling in her eyes.
"Peyton," he places a delicate hand on her knee. "Grief is a horrendous experience, but you cannot hold it all inside of you."
"Well," she blinks back her tears and glares at the Doctor, mustering up the most sarcastic tone she can. "That seems to work perfectly well for you."
"Please," he sighs. "Will you listen to me?"
Peyton unfolds her arms, placing her hands down into her lap, staring down at them defeatedly.
"What about your mum and dad? Lovely Mr and Mrs Barrett?" He suggests. "I'm sure they'll understand, you know."
"Oh, absolutely not," Peyton shakes her head before lifting her eyeline to look off towards the other side of the console room. "They still don't even know I'm not human. And I'm not going to tell them, it would break their hearts. My mum barely knows how to work her IPad, I'd rather not have to explain to her the facts of my biology."
"Keeping something like that from the people close to you might not be the best thing to do. What if something happens-"
"Do you think something will happen to them?" Peyton cuts him off very quickly, panic rising in her throat.
"Peyton, I can't promise anything, you know that," he says, looking to the floor, his hands dropping from her knee before he straightens out. "The curse of the Time Lords, the curse of our people, is that we live while everyone around us withers away to ash. When Gallifrey still spun in the stars, we mostly kept to our own kind, it was safer for us. Two hearts feel twice as much loss. I would never wish for you to lose anyone else but I can't guarantee anyone else's safety either."
Peyton nods. "I'm still not telling them."
"Please just think about it."
"Okay," she lies.
Silence once again hangs in the air of the time machine. Peyton slowly turns her head to look up at the ancient Time Lord who is still watching over her with that sad expression.
"Haven't you got a child to stalk?" She says with a pestering facade.
The Doctor sighs before tutting and walking off toward the door. "I'm not stalking her."
"Sure," Peyton gets to her feet as the door creaks open. "I'll be in the library."
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...
