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Peri walked through the corridors to the console room. Each step echoed slightly. The usual symphony of sounds (beeps, whirs, sparks, clatters and loud mutterings) was not present to guide her to her destination. Though she knew the way from her bedroom to the console room like the back of her hand, the TARDIS did feel bigger that morning – each corridor as openly silent as the last.
She entered the console room and found it devoid of any other life forms, but at least here there was the peaceful background hum along with the odd chirp coming from the mechanisms of the TARDIS. This was the first time she had been awake and out of bed before the Doctor. Having become a late riser in her teens, Peri was usually the last up in her house. She thought back to those rare days in her childhood in which she had wondered the house alone in the early morning. It never lasted long as her dad wouldn’t be far behind.
Let’s get you some breakfast, love. That’s what he would have said. Probably.
She wondered through to the kitchen. Looking in the cupboards revealed many ingredients she didn’t recognise, and any she did recognise she didn’t fully trust. She found what looked like a standard apple and tentatively ate that. With still no sign of the Doctor, Peri decided to have a go at cleaning the hob which had the burnt remnants of last night’s supper caked onto it (and the remnants from the night before, and the night before that, and the night before that...). She chose what she hoped was plain old soap and a metal scourer over the colourful bottles of liquid that lived under sink and boasted of being ‘THE MOST ACIDIC SPRAY SINCE 3013’ and of ‘killing all life forms under 1 foot in length’. The sound of her scrubbing drowned out the footsteps of the figure which had approached and stood in the doorway.
She caught sight of him out of the corner of her eye and jumped slightly.
“Oh- Doctor! For goodness sake, how long have you been there?!”
Shoes, spats, trousers, shirt, waistcoat, fob watch, neck tie and That Coat. This was what he unfailingly wore every morning. If they were going somewhere where this outfit was not appropriate (or at least less appropriate than usual), he would always land, check the location, time and temperature, then change. This morning was different though: he was missing his spats, waistcoat, watch and neck tie. His coat hung off his shoulders like it was still hanging in the closet.
“Have you eaten?”, he said in a monotone voice.
“Yes,” she said, much softer than before, “I had an apple, would you like one?”
“Hm? No, no.”
He went and sat down in one of the bright pink and purple kitchen chairs by the wall. He pulled the two halves of his coat together over his chest and his gaze set on one of the lower cupboard doors. The screws of its hinges were loose and it sat at a slight angle. It had been like that so long he didn’t really see it.
“I’ll be done here in just a second, if you want to use the stove,” Peri said.
“Oh, don’t worry, I’m not hungry”, he said, looking up at her and giving her a smile. Then his eyes went back to looking at the cupboard.
It was that smile, that damn smile. Three days he’d been like this. None of her usual arguments as to why he should cheer up had worked, mainly because there wasn’t any of the usual melodrama for her to argue against. Yesterday she’d been able to pick the destination for once, “The last working steam boat in Britain,” she had reminded him while they stood by one of the biggest engines she had ever seen. She knew this was a person who adored all the workings of the mechanical world, but he had hardly batted an eye at it. He just gave her that smile.
“Doctor?”, she said, filling two glasses of water.
She sat opposite him and hesitated for a moment. He didn’t look at her.
“I’ve been feeling... a little... down recently”, she said, her voice tailing off towards the end as she began to regret what she was saying and feared what his reaction might be.
The face that met hers though, was full of concern, “Down? Peri are you alright? What’s troubling you?”
“Oh- nothing, yes I’m alright. It’s nothing serious Doctor, it’s just, I guess… you know how sometimes people are just kind of sad?”
He didn’t seem to hear the last part of what she said.
“Ah, I know what the problem is,” he said, getting up and pacing around the kitchen slowly with his hands in his pockets.
“You do?”, she said hopefully.
"Yes, it is a common problem among you humans: you are overwhelmed by all the wonders of the Universe.”
“I don’t know, Doctor-”
“Your experiences seem so new and disjointed, whereas a seasoned time traveller, such as myself, can see how everything is connected – the web of time stretches out across all worlds, along with other webs besides. Something new is always a variation on something old, a corridor on Varos is essentially the same as a corridor five thousand light years away on Telos. Things can even start to blend together, like you’ve been everywhere before...” He stopped pacing. “Ah ha! I have it!”
He started to walk though to the console room at a pace that almost constituted a stride. Peri hurried after him.
“What you need”, he explained, “is something to break you out of your comfort zone and help you accept uncertainty. See the world from a new perspective and go where the wind takes you – a hot air balloon ride!”
“That sounds perfect!”, Peri announced.
“I’LL HAVE YOU KNOW THAT- oh, you think so? Hm, yes, I’m setting the coordinates for 1783, France – the first balloon ride. The excitement about this wonderful new contraption was palpable at the time.”
It began to dawn on Peri what a ride in a hot air balloon with the Doctor might look like – she was sure she would either be bored stiff as they flew over endless, identical fields or she would somehow end up fearing for her life. There wasn’t much imagination needed to think of all the ways travelling in a newly-conceived flying contraption hundreds of feet in the air could go wrong. This time though, she decided not to voice her concerns. Instead she watched her friend fly between various buttons of the TARDIS and felt she’d been here before.
***
It took a few false starts, but eventually they landed at a hot air balloon fair in Nottingham in 1985. Close enough.