Doctor Who fanfic: The Children’s Story (2/9)

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Title: The Children’s Story
Author: sarah531
Rating: PG13
Characters: Amy and Rory’s children Alec and Johnny; totally OCs- plus Amy, Rory, Aunt Sharon and the Doctor
Summary: Alec William Pond is about to discover that the bedtime stories his parents told so well were true.

This chapter deals a bit with mental illness issues. No more than Vincent and the Doctor, but I figured I oughta warn.

The Two Blue Boxes

Alec and Mum and Dad and Johnny sat in the middle of the room.

“Boys,” Mum said, holding Johnny, “parents shouldn’t keep secrets from their children. We had a good reason, but we shouldn’t have done it.” And Dad nodded.

“What secrets?” Alec asked.

Mum looked at them both and said, “The Doctor’s not a story.”

Alec went through this in his head, every bedtime story, every significant look that passed between his parents…

“He’s a real person?”

“Yes,” Mum said. “And we’ll prove it.” She swallowed. The fearful expression was back. “Boys. You musn’t tell anybody, especially not Aunt Sharon, that you know about this. I’m sorry to put this on you, but…you have to know. And you’re old enough now.”

Both boys nodded.

“Okay,” Mum said. And she looked at Dad and took his hand. “When I was a little girl I had a imaginary friend. But he wasn’t. He was real. And he came back for me eventually, took me away on the TARDIS, his spaceship. We went through time and space. And he came back for your dad too and he joined us. We did so much. Every one of those stories we told you was true.”

Johnny was staring in amazement. “Even the one with the vampires?”

“Yes, even that one.” Dad said. Alec’s mind spun. “But eventually we left the TARDIS, left him.” Alec wondered what sort of story was behind that. “We came back here and we wanted children. We wanted to raise you believing that the world was full of…magic. Because it is. But we couldn’t tell you about the Doctor and what he did, we couldn’t tell you the truth, because…”

“Because of Aunt Sharon,” Mum said. “She raised me, you see…”

Johnny raised a hand.

“You don’t have to do that, Johnny,” Mum said, smiling a little. “What is it?”

“Why did Aunt Sharon raise you? What about Granny and Grandpa?”

“Oh,” Mum said. “Oh, of course. It’s hard to explain, sweetie, but both of them raised me.”

Johnny obviously didn’t understand, but he nodded.

“A lot of these things we’ll explain in more detail later,” Dad said. “Anyway. After we came back, Sharon started…kicking up a fuss. She knew the Doctor was real, but she didn’t want to believe it, because it
would have messed up her world. You get people like that. But for ages she told Amy…told your mother she was insane and not fit to raise kids. She wanted both of you…taken off us.” And he had the same fear in his eyes Mum had had. “Do you remember when you were little, a lady came to the house? She was a social worker, checking things were okay. Anyway, we eventually made Aunt Sharon back off, and things went back to normal. But now her mind’s changed again, I suppose, she’s desperate to…” He trailed off and Johnny started crying.

“I don’t wanna leave! I don’t wanna leave you!”

“Shhh, shh,” Mum said, holding him tight. “You won’t. We won’t let you go.” And she nodded at Dad. Dad stood, and took a key from his pocket, and unlocked the cupboard next to the toy cupboard. A cupboard Alec and Johnny had never seen inside, had been told contained only boring household junk.

He took out a blue box.

“This is it,” he said. “We wouldn’t expect you to believe in the Doctor without proof.”

Alec and John looked into the box. There were photographs, papers, a DVD, a bow tie…

“That’s one of his,” Mum said. “He had a few of them. Gave us one to keep…”

Alec looked at the photos. They were of Mum and Dad’s wedding- there was Mum in the background- and showed a man. He was all dressed up in a suit and looked…normal. But at the same time utterly out of place.

“That’s him?”

“Yeah,” said Dad. “That’s him.”

Johnny looked. “I like him! He’s got a hat!”

“What’s on the DVD?” Alec asked.

Dad plucked it from the box and put it in the player. (Alec had always wondered why they had a DVD player when everyone else had long since gotten rid of theirs). He pressed play, and a well-dressed red-haired woman appeared on screen.

“Who’s that?” Alec asked.

“Harriet Jones. Former Prime Minister.” Mum said. “What are they teaching you at school?”

“Ladies and gentlemen, this crisis is unique,” Harriet Jones said. “And I’m afraid to say it might get much worse.”

“Christmas day, 2006.” Dad filled in.

“I would ask you all to remain calm,” the Prime Minister said. “But I have one request. Doctor, if you’re out there, we need you.”

“She knew him?” Johnny gasped.

“Everyone in power did, back then,” Dad said.

“I don’t know what to do. But if you can hear me, Doctor…if anyone knows the Doctor, if anyone can find him…”

The image flickered and changed then. It was the wedding again, and the Doctor was dancing with a woman.

“That’s Aunt Sharon!” Johnny yelled.

“Yeah,” said Mum. “It is.”

“She met him?” Alec said, stunned. “She doesn’t believe in him but she met him?”

“Yeah,” Mum said. “That’s right.”

All four of them watched the screen.

“So you’re the Doctor,” Sharon said to him. “You really exist.”

“I do,” the Doctor said. But Aunt Sharon was frowning and looking right through him.

“Prove it,” she said.

“Eh?”

“Prove you’re actually him. You could be an actor she paid!”

“Um…Sharon, is it?” the Doctor said. And suddenly he seemed rather cold and unforgiving. “You saw my time machine materialize. I dunno about you, but that’s quite…proof-y.”

“Could have been a trick.” Sharon said.

“Well, anything I show you could be a trick.”

Sharon glared at him. “She said you were an alien.”

“I am an alien.”

“Prove that!”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’d have to go in your mind.”

“Then do it. You have my permission!”

“No,” said the Doctor. And he turned away, but Sharon grabbed his arm.

“My niece went mad because of you. Because…you left her in the dark alone one night, didn’t you? You made promises you couldn’t keep. And I had to try and help that little girl and I failed! So show me
what you really are!”

The Doctor sighed. As he did that, he looked like a different person, and Alec saw the alien. “Okay.” And he took off his gloves. “I’ll just scrape the surface. Okay? And I’m sorry about anything you see…”

He placed his hands on each side of Sharon’s face, closed his eyes. She jumped a little, and closed her own eyes.

Silence, all around Alec and his family in the room. On the tape music blared in the background, a tinny love song. And then…

“Sharon,” the Doctor said urgently, and the tape crackled. “The door you see. Don’t go through it.”

“What will I find?” she asked.

“No!” the Doctor said, and he let go and dropped his hands, but Sharon still had her hands on him, and she seemed frozen in place…

The Doctor pulled her hands away.

“You silly girl,” he said coldly. “You shouldn’t have looked.”

Aunt Sharon stared into his eyes.

“Oh.” she said. “You are. Alien.” And her breath came in gasps. “The thing that kills monsters. The thing that takes children. The thing that took Amy!”

“No, Sharon,” said the Doctor, but she wasn’t having it. She moved away and was swallowed up in the dancing crowds, without looking back, without saying a word.

The person holding the camera turned it round. It was Mum, and she looked deliriously happy.

“Now, that was a bit weird,” she said. “Blimey, he freaked out Aunt Sharon!”

And then the video ended.

Mum took it out of the player. “Boys. Something else. Sharon’s wanted to get hold of this DVD for ages, yeah? She wants to destroy it, because it’s not going to exactly help her case if it turns out she met the bloke she claims I invented and actually, you know, admitted he was an alien. She managed to convince a lot of people he was an actor, some boyfriend of mine I’d paid. She took some old diary entries of mine from ages ago and kept copies of them, kinda twisted all the words…she managed to convince a lot of people I really was crazy. Unstable. Unfit.” And she swallowed and Dad put his arm around her.

“Okay,” Alec said. He looked down into the blue box. “I’ll never tell her.”

“I won’t either,” Johnny said. Then he asked the thing Alec hadn’t asked. “Mum, what did the diary say?”

Mum twisted her hands. And looked at Dad. And back at the boys. “Alec, John…sometimes you have to…fight to get what you want, okay?. When I had Alec, when he was a baby, it was difficult, because…having a baby can affect your mind a little, you see. Which is no one’s fault, but it happened, and I survived it and decided to fight for the family I wanted. And I had you, Johnny, and the same thing happened and I wasn’t quite right for a while. The diary entries, they’re from around those times.”

They all were silent. Alec realised he actually understood, understood perfectly- he even knew the name of the condition: postpartum depression, he had leant about it in class, and he wasn’t angry but very sad. He didn’t want to think about it, didn’t want to go back that far, so he reached into the box and pulled out another photograph. “It’s…is that…?”

“That’s the TARDIS,” Mum said. “The time machine. Remember? The time machine shaped like a 1960s police box. Bigger on the inside, so many rooms.”

Johnny looked amazed, and Alec had to pull the photo away from him so he could see. He stared at the picture for a long time, puzzling it out, looking at the blue doors and wondering what his parents had found behind them…

“There’s one other thing,” Dad said.

“What’s that?” Alec asked.

“Come outside.”

*

All four of them went outside to the back garden. And Alec noticed it right away…

On the grass there was a marking, a sort of shadow, box-shaped. As if something shaped exactly like a 1960s police box had landed there recently and then left again.

“What is it?” Johnny asked, wrapping his coat around himself.

“We think the TARDIS was here,” Mum said. “Which was another good reason to tell you boys the truth.” She shivered, but Alec thought it was little to do with the cold. She wore a funny expression- delighted, excited, fearful.

They all stared at the mark on the ground.

“Why would he come here?” Johnny asked.

Neither Mum nor Dad spoke, so Alec did. “Maybe he wants to see us! Mum, Dad, you’re his friends!” He trailed off as he realised how big a thing that actually was. “Why wouldn’t he want to see you? Us?”

“Because…well…he doesn’t always like to return to old friends,” Dad said, when Mum didn’t. “He just…moves onward. Makes new friends, and leaves the old ones. It’s just how he’s wired.” And he sighed.

Mum looked to the stars. And then back to her sons.

“If there’s ever…trouble, anywhere on this Earth, he’ll be there,” she said. “But there hasn’t been anything like that. And he just goes where the trouble is…” And she trailed off. And Dad looked at her.

“Let’s go in,” he said. “It’s cold.”