Chapter Text
“Why’d you take me here?”
Ryan finally broke the silence, his eyes trained on Vera.
They were a bit out of town, in a nice big park with a lake, sitting at an outdoor table opposite each other.
Vera fidgeted with her hands beneath the table as she scanned the park with her eyes as she had been, for the past five minutes since they arrived. Though it was decreasing in casualty by the minute. She promised Ryan a nice romantic outing to a park that they had driven by a couple times on her way to work if their main road was closed. And yeah, it was pretty. And she loves Ryan, too, so why not take him there?
It all felt perfect in her head.
She needed to be here, and they hadn’t had a good date for a while.
Ryan says it’s because she hardly leaves the flat. She wouldn’t argue, but it felt pretty damn necessary when situations like these occur when she goes out.
“What? What’dya mean? It’s nice, right?”
She feigns an innocent tone and smiles at him, hoping to get him off her back for just a moment longer. He glared back at her.
“Since when have you wanted a date at a park full of people? We’re just sitting here. You’re not telling me something.”
Vera swallows.
He’s serious.
She thinks far too hard and far too long for some sort of excuse before she realizes theres probably some imaginary time limit for the question, and just blurts out something, anything.
“I have to go to the toilet.”
She took a little too long in her seat before standing up and just-barely-not-running towards the little brick park stall.
She clicked the door locked and took a deep breath. She had promised him quality time.
She promised him a lot of things.
Busy, that’s what it is. That’s what it should be. And god damnit, the one day she gives in it’s because she wants to investigate some stupid park with hundreds of people that visit daily. What is there to investigate? People would notice if something was wrong. And she certainly wasn’t equipped for it either.
She sighs against the door. She supposes she owes it to him.
Just one day with the two of them.
She can spare that. She worried her lip between her teeth. Communication. Right? That’s all she has to do. Communicate. She’s afraid for nothing. She has to keep telling herself that.
Vera pushes herself off the door and is about to unlock it again when she steps on something. It clinks like glass under her shoe yet stays in tact.
She lifts her foot to the side and looks down to see it, but is instead greeted with the bathroom floor and nothing else.
No, she stepped on something.
She had to have.
She squats down and pats the floor like she’s lost her glasses— and feels it again. She picks her hand up but there’s nothing underneath it.
What the hell?
She puts her hand back down and feels the invisible object.
It’s small, no bigger than a golf ball and smooth like glass. Its flat, not thick, yet feels very sturdy. It’s odd, she can feel it in her hand. She can feel it so very well yet she looks down and nothing is there.
Vera stands back up and pockets the item, feeling it indeed weigh down her pocket.
Step one, communication. It’s probably about time she actually told Ryan why she’s here, especially now that something weird is literally happening. Maybe he’ll understand. Because she sure doesn’t.
Vera opens the door and heads back to the table, stopping in her tracks at the sight of a man sitting across from Ryan— in her spot.
He’s leaning forward, his forearms resting on the table. He wears a brown duster coat and red converse that tap restlessly under the table as he speaks out of earshot.
Vera walks towards the both of them.
The man looks up at her when she comes into eyeshot, his eyebrows raising and he smiles once he gets a good look.
He shoots up and walks the rest of the distance she was keeping toward her.
Ryan looks irritated and he stands as well, but more as a way to be ready to make a move if this man tries anything.
“Ah! You must be Vera. Detective John Smith. I’m here to investigate this…park, and I’d like to ask you a few questions.” The man flashes his ID and grins. Vera hardly thinks about it. Her mind is swirling anyway already.
“Okay.”
“Great! First of all, have you ever been to this park before, or is this your first trip?”
John pulled a little notebook out of his coat pocket along with a pen. He looked pleasantly surprised with the fact he had them.
“Er… no. No, this is my first time.”
John nods, scribbling something onto the notebook though she wasn’t quite sure it was words.
“Alright, another question.”
John straightened up, closing the book and looked at her in such a way that made him seem a lot more serious.
“Why’d you come here?” He finished.
She swallows, not allowing herself to look at Ryan, though she knows he’s staring at her. She pauses long enough for the two men to very much know that she fully hears and processed what he asked, but she brushed over it any way.
“Well hold on— you’re investigating… I think I deserve to know what exactly you’re investigating before I answer anymore questions.”
She fully faked her confidence, and her voice was shaky enough for no living thing to be fooled. Refreshingly lucky for her, John seemed to be a little nervous at her statement either way.
He rubs the back of his neck.
“Well… I’m not so sure yet. But… there’s something. I can… tell. Thats what I’m counting on you lot for, really.” He makes a vague gesture to her and Ryan.
When all she does is stare back at him, he gives her a sheepish smile.
“Well that’s lousy. What kind of investigator are you if you’re just here on a ‘hunch’?”
She crosses her arms.
He hums in response, stepping forward and leaning in a little, his stance getting more stern. He lets a moment pass before he starts again, as if trying to keep the next words just between the two of them.
“Well… tell me, Vera. Why are you here? Because I don’t think you’re just here to enjoy a date with your boyfriend. Hm?”
His voice lowers as he speaks. He nods his head in the direction of Ryan.
She scoffs. He’s got a point. She scoffs again. Why does he have a point?
She has a feeling they are both lying to each other about something, and that brings her a strange sense of comfort.
“I-I found something-“
“Who the fuck do you think you are?”
Ryan interrupted, reaching his breaking point no one seemed to even notice start up in him. He steps closer to the detective, pressing an accusing finger against his chest. John turns to him but his expression hardly changes, other than an eyebrow.
“She’s with me. If you need some confirmation for your little delusions go find the park owners, not my girlfriend you fucking psycho.” Ryan barks out the insult.
John opens his mouth to speak but glances at Vera and seemingly decides to turn back to her.
“Wait— hold on. You found something? Let me see.” John says, pretty much entirely ignoring Ryan, which wouldn’t help his ego.
He places a gently encouraging open hand out in front of Vera.
She considers, knowing that Ryan must be flushed with anger and chooses not to look.
Again.
Still trusting him enough in that moment to continue talking to him and not just get the hell out of there with Ryan and drive home. She finally lets her eyes dart to said boyfriend for a moment, his mouth is slightly agape with disbelief and she falters again. After a moment John seems to notice and speaks up, softer this time.
“I can help, Vera.”
She sees the genuine look in his eyes and her body relaxes a little.
She sighs, reaching into her pocket.
Ryan scoffs loud enough not to be ignored.
“Are you serious, Vera? Are you actually proving him right?”
The two go silent, more than they already had been.
A feeling of shame creeps up Vera’s throat and she swallows, remembering her lies. She wants to give him the whole story but instead she just spits out what he’s probably tired of hearing.
“Ryan, something is wrong here…”
John just watches carefully, putting his hand that was in front of Vera back into his pocket and stepping aside a bit. He decides he’ll let the Immature boy talk until he does something stupid.
Ryan moves closer to Vera.
“You bring me here, to some park— on your one day off of doing god knows what— just to fuck around because ‘something feels off’?
Seriously?”
Vera can’t bear to meet his gaze because she knows what it must look like. That helplessly betrayed look she hates seeing.
And it’s her fault.
Her eyes fall to the ground as Ryan awaits a response from her that he isn’t going to get. He scoffs again and runs a hand through his blonde hair.
“Okay. I can’t do this. I can’t do this with you right now, Vera. I’m going to go wait by the car. Do whatever the hell you need to do with this man but when you’re done you need to be honest with me. You need to tell me what you’re hiding from me.”
Before she can respond he’s walking towards the parking lot, she finally jerks her head up to look at him, settling into reality, but he’s already on his way. She lets a moment pass where she sorta just watches him go, before she sighs and turns back over to John, who has his brows furrowed, taking in the scene that just displayed itself before him. Vera rubs the bridge of her nose.
“Okay. You could at least start with telling me your real name.”
It takes a moment for him to snap back into reality. His eyes dart over to her.
“Wha- how did you…”
She smiles weakly, lazily stepping toward him. “Ah, good. I’m glad I at least got that right.”
She stops for a moment, thinking.
“You know that feeling when there’s a word at the tip of your tongue but you just can’t quite put your finger on what? That’s how I feel when something very abnormal is going on near me. Although, I can never tell what it is, or why it is, and like hell if I could control it. That would be a superpower.”
Vera speaks more confidently than she feels, she still isn’t even sure what the ‘rules’ of her ability are.
The man nods, his mouth still slightly agape. His voice is hung with interest when he speaks.
“It’s The Doctor. I’m called The Doctor.”
He lets himself take in the information for a moment before clearing his throat and returning to his seemingly usual fast-paced upbeat tone.
“Right! Well, I can’t say I’m not curious about what you may or may not have found, especially if it can explain the weird electrical readings I’m getting in this area…”
He waggles his eyebrows at her and opens his hand out in front of her once again. She can’t help but choke out a laugh.
“You’re an odd bloke, you know that?”
The corner of his mouth slowly quirked into a small grin and he spoke, reaching into his pocket and pulling out what looked like a pair of reading glasses.
“I get that a lot, actually.”
The Doctor slid on the glasses and crossed his arms over his chest, the implication too obvious to ignore, and frankly she didn’t feel like she needed to ignore it anymore.
Vera sighed, feeling the object in her pocket and pulling it out. She held it out to him in the palm of her hand, and only then did she look down at it and realize how ridiculous she must seem.
The Doctor’s eyebrows were both raised, his mouth agape and his face taken by a look of udder confusion and a slight bit of offense.
She opened her mouth, but he began talking before she could.
“Okay, first of all, rude. But on the other hand, quite clever, you really had me going there, I’ll give you that. Although you did waste a solid fifteen minutes of both our lives. Never getting those back. Anywho, I’ll be off.”
The Doctor spun on his heel and stepped away from her, but stumbled backwards when Vera grabbed his collar with her free hand and pulled him towards her.
“Doctor! Just- will you let me explain for a minute!”
Once she let go, he fixed his collar and she took the opportunity to talk before he could give her another spine-chilling stare.
“Listen, I did find something. It’s just… it’s invisible.”
She gestured to her still open hand and half expected him to laugh in her face and walk off again.
He didn’t, he just quirked his eyebrow and waited to see if she was going to say ‘just kidding’ or something of the sort before carefully, almost gently touching the palm of her hand. Of course, he didn’t touch the palm of her hand, rather that smooth, circular, and flat object that rested in its center.
Once this registered to him, his head shot up to hers and the corners of his mouth exploded into a full grin.
Vera was taken aback by his reaction, how could this be of some sort of delight to him? This is supernatural, probably some lab experiment and he’s smiling like it’s Christmas Day.
The Doctor picked up the object and pulled out an odd looking sort of wand-like tool from his coat pocket and pointed it to the invisible item.
His grin faded into a look close to horror.
He looked left and right and seemed to consider something before speaking again to Vera, lowly and urgently.
“Where did you find this? It’s very Important that I know, or lots of people could die.”
The colour drained from Vera’s face. What the hell?
“W-what? What’dya mean people could—“
She sensed the urgency of the situation and collected herself, lowering her voice.
“Okay. Yeah, I found it in the bathroom. The bathroom floor.”
The Doctor ran a hand through his hair, then he took off his reading glasses, shoved them in Vera’s hand unexpectedly, spun around, and began pacing.
“Ooookay. Unfortunately for us, that doesn’t help. Let’s think, Vera. Brilliant Vera. This is bad. They wouldn’t be in the bathroom. See, see… someone would catch on. The armour must have been kicked in there by accident. They would need a big empty space, that reduces the risk of someone bumping into them…”
He paused his pacing, looking round.
A big, empty park.
Certainly hundreds of people, but around 1 1/2 acres of empty space. The Doctor groaned, dragging his hands down his face. Vera was bewildered. She shoved his glasses in her pocket without much thought and attempted to take in all of the nonsense he just sputtered out to spare him of an explanation since it seems like he’s in some sort of a rush. Nevermind that, what the hell is he talking about?
——— ——— ———
“Feel like explaining all that to me? Preferably English this time, thank you.”
The Doctor spun around and met her gaze, almost looking confused, and then lighting up with an “Oh!”
The Doctor stopped for another moment, and Vera could tell he was considering just brushing it off again before he gave in with a sigh, leading her back over to the picnic table that her and her boyfriend had recently abandoned.
Her stomach clenched at the thought, but she shoved the feeling down for the time being.
The Doctor sat, and Vera followed, sitting herself across from him. He leaned forward on his forearms, and she did the same for some reason, god knows why, which brought them just close enough to eachother to be awkward.
She internally scolded herself for leaning even closer to the stranger (emphasis on the strange) and she briefly considered sitting back upright before he began talking. He doesn’t look like he minds, or notices, either way.
“That thing you found… that is a body part of an alien life form. It’s sort of like a protective armour, much like the one of a, oh I don’t know, a pangolin… except, you know, invisible.”
The Doctor paused for a moment, but when Vera’s expression didn’t change from her wide-eyed confused face he just cleared his throat and continued.
“They’re called Brykans. Uh, the thing about the Brykans… at the beginning of the species existence, they had lots of offspring at once, and a very short lifespan. Sort of like wild rabbits, in a way. Sure, wild rabbits. let’s pretend that all the energy released during the year or so of a wild rabbit’s death cycle happened all in the same second. This would mean, hypothetically of course, If you killed that rabbit all the energy and gas that would normally be released over a long period of time during decomposition, would be emitted with a sudden burst of heat, thus creating an explosion the strength of your average hand grenade.”
He paused to flash Vera a ‘reassuring’ smile that did absolutely nothing to calm her nerves, in fact maybe even worsened them with circulating the fact back around her head that he was taking all this so seriously.
Was he just messing with her?
Exploding grenade rabbits?
Before she could speak, which this time she actually wanted to, mostly to ask him what the fuck he’s taking about, he started up again.
“So, uh, obviously, rabbits don’t do that. But the Brykans do. And, well, now their species has been around for a little over 6 billion years. They are the top of their planet’s food chain, and have no problem with reoccurring predators any more. But they still explode upon death. And well, they’re roughly the size of 300 wild rabbits, if we’re still on that scale. So that’s a significant blast. Anyway, they’ve collectively come up with a system— you see, at the end of an individuals life, a Brykan would now travel to a different planet to… die. It’s law, actually. They don’t want damage to the planet, now that the Brykans have grown physically and increased in number. They- their planet isn’t even in this galaxy— or any neighboring ones. I haven’t had to worry about it until now…”
The Doctor scratches the back of his neck, this time actually awaiting a response. Possibly a slap in the face, too. But to both of their surprises, she sighs in a sort of… relief?
The entirety of that feeling… the one of something being wrong, is gone.
Vanished.
Her whole body relaxes, yet her eyes widen still in confusion and shock. Does this mean he was right? That she found out what the mystery was… and it’s invisible exploding aliens? No. She could just leave now, go home with Ryan. The feeling is gone, the only thing that was keeping her here. But on the other hand…
“Okay.” She breathed out. The Doctor stared at her wide eyed.
“Okay…? How’d you mean okay-“
“I mean okay. You sound absolutely ridiculous, don’t get me wrong, but after you told me all that, the ‘itch’ went away. Like it got what it was looking for. So I have to trust you, because I need to know. I need to know if I’m psychic or crazy or something—“
She paused, collecting herself. She had never expressed that thought aloud. In fact, now that she was thinking about it, she had never told anyone about the topic at all. Not even Ryan. She took a deep breath.
“I need to know. Or I won’t be able to live with myself.”
He nodded slowly in understanding, and he looked like he really did.
Like he understood her.
She cleared her throat.
“So. How long have we got? To find it. Before it… you know.”
The Doctor nodded one more solemn time in consideration then stood up abruptly, clapping his hands.
“Right! We’ve got anywhere from half a year to… any second, really. I already tried to scan the park for alien lifeforms… but the Brykans are not not only invisable, they also don’t show up on any scanners or whatnot— it’s a miracle I was able to find any electrical signals at all. So! Let’s think. If I were a Brykan where would I be…”
The Doctor looked round, and Vera joined in. Her eyes settled on a muddy area way in the back of the park. There was no one near.
“Maybe there? If it was in the middle of that muddy patch I doubt anyone would bump into it, at least by accident. I wouldn’t even kick a ball in that area.” God she felt so stupid being apart of this, but what’s the harm, really? Other than Ryan potentially driving off without her— no. He wouldn’t. She shook that thought off and tilted her head in the direction of the area she was referring to. The Doctor’s face lit up as he saw and he exclaimed.
“Oh!”
He looked at Vera like she was the most brilliant person on earth and her heart fluttered. He grinned big at her and she couldn’t help but do the same back. When he started running to the area she ran after him too, trying to keep up. She hopes he didn’t hear her laugh as she ran up behind him. Because she did. And it felt really good.