Chapter Text
It’s the first day of February. For California, it’s unreasonably cold, and Harry is exhausted, impulsive, and weary, wanting nothing more than to simply climb into bed.
Instead, she’s sitting at the dining room table and staring blankly out the window like a ghost. The sun is setting quietly, hidden behind a thick layer of clouds. There are kids outside kicking a ball around in the dirt, unaware of her haunted gaze. She knows, in the back of her mind, that she should be working on her essay, but she can’t bring herself to it.
Instead, she shivers and pulls up her hood. Her fingers have long grown stiff and cold. They’re wrapped around a chipped mug, long empty, clutching onto the memory of the bitter coffee that used to occupy it; the drink had filled her with a warmth she now sorely misses. She’d blame the chill on a draft, but it would be a lie. The ramshackle house, built in the nineteen thirties, was not designed with heating or cooling in mind, and it’s been unbearably chilly inside for months now.
There’s some indie song playing in the background that feels right as she stares at the world. She doesn’t have a genuine reason for the melancholy behavior, per se, but is choosing to blame it on the weather. It’s a little silly. Harry isn’t sure she needs a real reason to act glum, though, so she isn’t dwelling on it. Anything is better than trying to power through the unearthly amount of coursework due tonight. Of course, just because she’s procrastinating doesn’t mean she isn’t thinking about it. It’s been eating her alive. Even while she’s staring out the window in her fit of dreaminess, she’s thinking about the cracked laptop in the other room. The monstrous computer has been with her through thick and thin, from long middle-school nights spent scrolling and blinking blearily through the bright blue glow of the screen, binge-watching British science fiction shows, to where she is now: procrastinating college assignments and torturing herself about it. This passage of time feels weird to consider, odd, like the rate at which she’d been living was different from everyone else’s.
A disturbing mechanical wheezing snaps her out of her reverie. It’s guttural, groaning, and familiar, in a way that Harry had never really felt before. The feeling that she needs to find the source of the sound is bone-deep, permeating her brain like a subconscious memory bubbling up.
Without thinking, she races outside, the metal screen door slamming shut behind her with a squeal. She can’t immediately spot where the noise had been emanating from, and the chilled concrete sends a shock through her body, losing steam as she comes to a halt at the end of the yard. There’s nothing out of place, no mysterious car or animal screeching, and nobody in the area at all.
As Harry turns to go back indoors, feeling more than a little foolish, her gaze lands on a peculiar sight: a hint of blue visible through the fence of her backyard, which had definitely not been there before.
The ground is muddy and cold under her as she makes her way to the side gate. She’s not as cautious as she probably should be — after all, this is her house. Day in and day out, the same few things happen here, her safe haven, her base of operations. Her feet slap against the concrete as she takes bounding steps toward the novel sight. Deep down, she’s stifling a fluttering and glittering feeling, like a daydream, akin to so many single-digit afternoons spent basking in fiction as fantasy and reality merged in her mind.
Something new , her childish heart sings. Something new. Shiny, rare, and new.
Instead, Harry keeps her expectations low. She’s hoping for a bluejay, or a new blooming bush, when she tugs open the flimsy metal gate and comes face-to-face with a wooden box.
The TARDIS , her childish heart sings. The TARDIS.
Harry laughs out loud at the sight, and as if the sound summons it, a figure steps out from the other side of this random big blue box.
It’s a man. Her brain comes to a stutter-stop, flight or fight instincts all combining into one pathetic attempt at freezing. She blinks, stunned, feeling awfully startled at the intrusion.
That show she loved in middle school, the one she’d stay up all night watching — the time-traveling alien in a big blue box — seems to be haunting her, as the man trying to break into her house is a dead ringer for the protagonist. At a second appraisal Harry comes to realize he’s wearing the costume, too.
“Oh, yes,” the man exclaims, all British and proper-sounding. “A familiar face! It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”
Harry stares blankly at the sight of him.
“Well, not for me,” the man grins. “I assume it has been for you, as you’re practically swimming in void particles. Dangerous matter, that is.”
“What,” she says simply.
“The stuff’ll kill you, you know.”
“I’m trying to quit,” without thinking, she spits out the trite phrase at the intruder. A good-spirited smile spreads across the man’s decidedly familiar face at the repartee.
“Good ol’ Harry. Do I even want to know why you reek of void particles? Or, let me guess, spoilers,” the cosplayer wrinkles his nose as he sounds out the words, as if it’s a refrain he’s gotten used to hearing. Her heart starts to pound uncomfortably fast at the easy use of her nickname. The way he says it makes it sound so natural, like he’s addressing an old friend, and it sends her brain into a frenzy of red flags and warning signs. However, she quickly comes to the decision that the situation is too interesting to separate herself from despite the inherent danger. (Harry has never known where to stop.) After all, it would be more fun to treat this like a daydream instead of the real threat a delusional stalker would be.
The man walks further into the yard as she’s internally beating her common sense into submission. With a baseball bat.
“You live here?”
“Yeah,” she says, the word short, instinctively defensive. Obviously, he already knew where she lived, so the comment just stings. In its dilapidated state, her house does look a little haunted — there are brittle leaves scattered everywhere and caught in cobwebs, and the kitchen window is framed by ugly old floral curtains, the glass broken from when the neighbor kid had thrown a ball into it — but it’s home.
The not-Doctor hums vaguely, sending another glance between her and the house.
“Not really what I expected, to be honest.”
“Yeah, not all of us can live in time machines,” Harry says, playing along, following his gaze toward the box. It’s unsettling how easily she falls into the fast-paced badinage. She fights back a nervous giggle.
“Ah, well, that’s true,” he says, scratching the back of his head. “Speaking of, she really didn’t want to land here. Threw quite a fit as we were landing. I’m sure something just needs recalibrating, but it was odd. Made me wonder why I was even asked to come here in the first place.”
Catching a glimpse of the true-blue box again, there’s no hint of otherworldly power, no overwhelming feel of sentience or alien presence, just wood and glass. But years of yearning for it to be real seem to have built up inside her, coalescing into a strong urge to yank on the handle and see what happens.
“Are you coming? Usually, you just storm right in,” the almost-Doctor says faux-casually, scanning her with a discerning eye. Harry’s brow furrows as she processes his words. Sure, she’d been waiting her whole life for an extraordinary hero’s offer to take her on adventures, but come face-to-face with it, she’s feeling a bit unsure about the prospect. (She has no way of knowing this, but he’s more than thrown off as well due to the subdued reaction to his appearance — her nervous, flighty demeanor not matching up with the girl he had been traveling just with a few days ago. Combined with the mysterious note, the TARDIS’s reluctance to land, the abundance of void particles, and the haunted-seeming house, he’s feeling oddly unsettled.)
“Unless you’re too busy,” he teases, leaning against the wooden door. “After all, I’m sure you have more important things to do than galavant across time and space.”
All of time and space . What a joke.
“Yeah, what if I do?”
“Oh, I’d like to see that,” he says. She doesn’t look directly at him, but she can hear the smirk in his voice.
Suddenly feeling the urge to prove herself, but unwilling to prove him right by responding, Harry unsticks herself from her fixed position by the gate and creeps closer to the blue box.
The man, this maybe-Doctor, watches silently as she sums up the ship and tries the door. When it clicks open, Harry nearly falls forward, not having expected the handle to actually work.
“Fuck,” she mutters. Pulling herself up on the handle takes a moment.
The costumed man shuts the door behind them and quickly sashays up to the console, his jacket billowing out behind him. He’s pressing buttons and pulling levers within moments.
“No,” Harry says quietly under her breath, unwilling to take in the situation. The room fills with a beautiful humming-groaning-wheezing as the man in front of her flicks a switch. Around them spans a cavernous space, flooded with an orange glow, and enormous coral-like pillars twisting and rising up above.
Her brain refuses to process the events of the past few minutes. It’s like a mental block. Harry can physically feel herself spacing out — it’s not a new sensation, but an unpleasant one, reminiscent of times she isn’t fond of thinking about — so she focuses on what she can touch. Thick metal grating spans the floor, cold under her bare feet, but the interior of the box is at least fifteen degrees warmer than her yard had been. It’s nice to not feel frozen.
“Is there something wrong?”
She glances up and meets the eyes of the man she followed into the box. She really takes him in for the first time — the pinstripe suit, the sideburns, the ineffable look in his eye — and there’s no mistaking him like this, in the diffuse orange light.
He is unquestionably the Doctor.