"I'm not following," Peyton stares down at the Doctor from a leather armchair on the Tardis balcony.
"Question! Why do we talk out loud when we know we're alone?"
"I don't know, because you're a nutter?" Peyton mumbles before tossing two white painkillers in her mouth, followed by a long sip of tea.
"Conjecture," he continues. "Because we know we're not."
"Don't you think you're overreacting just a little?" Peyton asks, rubbing her forehead above her right eye as the Doctor marches up the stairs toward the chalkboard beside her.
"Evolution," he writes. "Perfect survival skills. There are perfect hunters. There is perfect defence. Question, why is there no such thing as perfect hiding?"
"I have a question," Peyton stands to her feet, looking between the Doctor and his chalkboard. "When was the last time you slept?"
"Will you quit being a killjoy for two minutes," the Doctor says exasperatedly.
"Okay," Peyton sighs, deciding that what the Doctor needs right now is for her to play along. "Suppose a creature with the perfect hiding ability existed, if it was good at its job we wouldn't know about it."
"Exactly," he snaps his fingers at her before pacing away. "Logically if evolution were to perfect a creature whose primary skill were to hide from view, how could you know it existed?"
"So you think this creature exists?" Peyton asks as the Doctor tosses his stick of chalk down into the crease of an open book.
"It could be with us every second and we would never know. How would you detect it? Even sense it?"
Peyton watches the Doctor continue with his pacing as he rants. She picks up the piece of chalk, studying it for a second before pocketing it,
"Except in those moments when, for no clear reason... you choose to speak aloud. What would such a creature want? What would it do?"
"Uh, I don't know," Peyton shrugs. "If evolution decided it needed to hide, maybe it just wants to be left alone."
The Doctor stops, staring off into the middle distance.
After several moments of silence, Peyton steps toward the Doctor to break him out of his thoughts.
"Doctor, what do you get up to when I'm not here?"
"How often aren't you here?"
"Right," Peyton glares before storming down the stairs to the flight deck. So much for trying. So much for caring. "I can't deal with you alone when you're like this."
She sets the Tardis for flight and storms around the console to enter the coordinates, ignoring the Doctor's sullen face at the top of the stairs.
• • •
Clara's bedroom door slams into the side of the Tardis suddenly. Peyton didn't even hear her come home.
"You just have to squeeze through," the Doctor says, staring at himself as he had been for the last ten minutes in Clara's vanity mirrors.
"What are you two doing here?"
"Why do you have three mirrors? Why don't you just turn your head?"
"I repeat myself, what are you doing in here," she presses.
The Doctor looks over his shoulder at Peyton for support who is sitting against the pillows of Clara's bed, shoes kicked off into the floor.
"You said you had a date," Peyton says. "We thought we better hide in the bedroom in case you brought him home."
YOU ARE READING
The Time Lord's Apprentice
Fanfiction"But, you're impossible!" "Yeah, and the world is ending, I don't think now is the time." Peyton is an orphan, taken from her mother as an infant by the Unified Intelligence Taskforce. She is raised separately from other children because she is spec...
