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mhalachairating: g
type: gen
characters: the Doctor, Lily Evans
words: 825
spoilers: none, baby
notes: From a recent request on the Summaries for Dummies III post. This just flowed as a ficlette, rather than a summary.
It starts with a girl.
With him, it usually does.
She's small for a human, not fully formed, and she runs about the English countryside like a maniac, mud on her boots and a stick in her hand, shouting stories of dragons and magic for the sheep to hear.
The Doctor sits on the stoop of his misbehaving TARDIS and watches the little girl conqueror the universe.
Eventually, she spots the blue anachronism in amongst the sheep, and she stops dead in her tracks.
"Hallo," says the Doctor, because it's proper Time Lord etiquette to do when you're spotted sitting in your time machine in a Sussex field. "What are you doing?"
The girl drifts closer, her hair a right mess over her jumper. There are sticks in her hair, grass stains on her elbow, and mud stains up to her left knee. She stares at the Doctor a moment longer, then she breaks out into a grin. "I'm saving the world," she declares.
The Doctor smiles for the first time in what feels like years. "Brilliant!" he exclaims, jumping to his feet. "What from?"
"Dragons," the girl tells him. "They've escaped, and they're everywhere! We need to catch them before they eat everyone up!"
"Can't have that, can we?" the Doctor says, hands in his pockets. "What do we do when we catch them?"
"Send them home, of course," she replies. "They can't help being dragons."
"That's true," says the Doctor, then, because he's always wanted to be ginger and it's the right thing to do, "What's your name?"
"I'm Lily. Who're you?"
The Doctor bows, nearly falling over his own feet. "I'm the Doctor."
The girl squints up at him with green eyes, then she hold out her tree branch. "You'll need a magic wand to catch the dragons."
A flick of the wrist, and the Doctor produces his sonic screwdriver. "I've already got a magic wand," he says with a grin.
Lily looked at the sonic screwdriver, then at her stick, then shrugs. "Mine's got more mud on it."
"Is it magic mud?"
"I dunno, but it might do!" With that, Lily turns on her heel and races off into the field.
The Doctor helps Lily build a dragon catcher between two trees, made of packing string and foil and a shiny blue button that falls out of his pocket (it is no fault of his own that he ends up dangling from a tree, thank you very much). They sit in the sun and wait for dragons to appear, and Lily tells the Doctor in very confidential terms that she thinks she can do magic.
The Doctor hems and haws, tapping his shoe against a convenient rock. It's likely, even though he can't tell her that. She can't be older than thirty. No, five. Or eight. The age of human children always confuse him.
His sonic screwdriver could tell him if she had the special sort of energy human call "magic", but where is the fun in that? How do you tell a little girl that she is magical?
How do you tell a little girl that she is not?
"If you were magic, what would you do with it?" the Doctor asks, tugging on the string attached to the dragon net.
Lily throws her hands up in the air. "I'm going to help people," she declares. "And I'm going to ride a dragon, and I'm going to make potions to turn people into frogs and everything!"
She jumps up and runs to the other side of the glen, then back. She's halfway up the tree to check the dragon net, when she tilts her head to one side, listens for a moment, then slides to the ground.
"Mum's calling for tea," she says. "Do you want to come?"
The Doctor does; he loves a nice cup of tea, but he needs to get back to his TARDIS before the old girl works herself into a full-blown sulk. "Nah, you go on."
Lily sets off at a run, waving back over her shoulder. "Goodbye Doctor!" she calls, voice drifting away on the wind.
As she runs, the Doctor sees a glimpse of her future, stretched out in an invisible thread that snaps as he reaches for it. He pauses, sitting beneath a tree, hand outstretched for a future that's not his to see.
The sun is setting by the time he drags himself to his feet, tired and cold and so, so old. He walks across that quiet, lonely field, hands in his pockets.
Humans are born to die, but he's a time traveler. He can always be in the time they have alive, dancing on the edges of their lives... but at the end of it all, everywhere he walks, there are the echoes of small bones from where life once existed.
The Doctor shakes his head, unlocks the TARDIS door, and steps inside.
There's nothing he can do for Lily now. It's time to move on.