Universe

[nevermoreraven]

Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: Teen
DISCLAIMER: Again, Doctor/Martha isn't a thing.
Summary: Not the most cringiest, but not great.  Mostly archiving here. Teenage Eleven meets Martha over a "who controls the hill" situation.  Soft and school-y.  Not much to it but I do like it.

 

It’s a huge, impossible universe out there.  You have no idea what’s out there.  Beautiful planets, constellations and horizons stretching as far as the imagination can reach.  Creatures of wonder, terrors you’ve never seen and stories you’ve never told.  It’s an adventure.  But if you’re like me…if you’re like me, you’ve wondered what’s at the edge of space and dreamt of a place far beyond your own.
If you’re like me…you began to run the minute your feet stepped on the path to adventure.  And you’ve never stopped running since.

The last month of school before summer.  Naturally, spirits were flying high.  Lunchtime involved running around until you were dizzy and then running around some more.
“C’mon,” Martha told her friends, climbing up the hill.  Naturally, Terr was resistant.  He almost always complained, but he kept coming anyway.  Honestly, Martha wondered why he bothered.
He pulled at her sleeve, and she stopped, eying him with annoyance.  “Yeah, what?”
“That Doctor kid claimed the tree.  Nobody’s allowed near.” he whispered, showing that he believed it to be a matter of life or death.
“A bully?”  Her fists tightened at the mere thought.  If he was, everyone was deathly scared of him, since she’d never heard his name before.  People were afraid to talk about him.
Alex was shaking his head.  The sensible one.  “Nah.  Just weird.  No one really talks to him, because he’s so…weird.  Mysterious.  Nobody really even knows his name.  He just shows up for class, and he’s really smart.  I think.  That’s all I know.”
Susan, small and timid, peeked out from behind Sarah’s skirts.  “I heard he’s an alien, and he eats people.”
Liz laughed out loud.  “As if, silly.  No such thing as aliens.”
“Well, he can’t have the whole hill to himself,” Martha stated practically and kept climbing.  Sarah nodded, Alex smiled one of his secretive, sort of proud grins, and the rest trailed after, somewhat freaked out.
Sarah had a revelation halfway up.  “‘Doctor’?  What if, y’know, he’s one of those drug people?”
“If he is, he won’t bother us, or he’ll face the consequences.” Martha stayed calm, though her heart was pumping like mad.
They finally reached the top of the hill and stopped dead.  Martha not the least among them.  She wasn’t scared, but she had to admit, she hadn’t quite expected this.
A strange, gangly limbed, bony kid was sitting in the crook of the tree, leg lazily swinging as greenish hazel eyes stared vaguely into the distance.  A book rested, unused, in one big, knuckly hand.  In her mind, Martha had already cast him as some weird genetic experiment gone wrong.  Like some mad scientist had tried to build a teenage boy, but all the proportions were off.  The head was improbably big, like a child’s.  A flop of hair so distracting that Martha just wanted to reach out and tuck it firmly into place hovered over the right eye.  On the other side, the hair was tucked in and looked very soft, almost vulnerable.  Even weirder was the outfit—tweed jacket, suspenders, bow tie, boots.  Almost as if someone had taken their third grade geography teacher and…reverse aged him.  If something like that was possible.
He wasn’t aware of them.  Just kept staring, with an odd look on his face, toward the fields far away.  Sort of a bittersweet look, all sad and happy at the same time.
Martha cleared her throat, and his head whipped around so fast she was afraid he’d hurt himself.
He grinned, a goofy, childish, endearing grin that made her feel a little bit funny.  “Hello, sorry.  Here I was, caught up in my own thoughts—which involved Very Complex Things, mind you—and ignoring all of you.  Were you…wanting something?”  He cocked his head slightly to the side, studying all of them quizzically, and Martha felt an inexplicable heat rising to her cheeks.
“Yes.  We were wondering whether you’re prepared to share the hill.”  Meet oddness with oddness.
He blinked, looking utterly confused.  For that matter, her own friends were probably staring at her as if she’d gone completely barmy.  “The hill,” he repeated slowly, as if he didn’t speak a word of English.  “The hill.  Oh, the hill!”  He nearly jumped up, excited, and pointed one long, bony finger down at the ground they were standing on.  “No, not really.  I plan to take over every hill in Britain.  Soon, they will all belong to me.”  He waited a moment, and his face burst into yet another adorable grin when Susan squeaked.  He even laughed, a weird laugh that really did sound like ‘ha ha’.  Martha had begun to wonder whether anyone did that except when they were being sarcastic.  Yet he seemed genuinely amused.  “Just…pulling your leg.  Not literally of course.  Feel free.”  He gestured at the ground, and Terr kept casting nervous looks at the mental bloke sitting in the tree. 

In the end, it was as if he wasn’t even there.  He spent his time staring into the horizon or half-heartedly flipping through his book, and Martha and her friends eventually forgot he was there, all talking excitedly about the end coming and their plans for the summer.
Martha was the last to stand up when the bell rang, savoring her last moments outside before being shoved back into the stink that was a secondary school, breathing the fresh air and slowly stretching.
She was slightly startled as she heard a slight noise behind her.  Like a cat, wearing boots, hitting the ground with less noise than she’d expect for someone as heavily built as ‘the Doctor’.  She flew around, startled, and he grinned sheepishly, wringing his hands a bit.  The book had disappeared.  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
“It’s all right.  I knew you were there.  I shouldn’t have been surprised.”  He managed an even more endearing smile, and she almost cursed him in her head.  How was it possible for any teenage bloke to be that cute?  She smiled back instead.
“Yes, true.  Well…I’m very glad to meet you, Jones.”  He was halfway down his casual stroll down the hill before she remembered she hadn’t told him her name.