(Somewhat strong language warning :)
Willow glanced outside of the classroom window. Her feet bounced up and down as she observed the people walking far below her on the campus. She savored the way the students made their way across the hedge lined sidewalks, and how everyone seemed busy and smart. She squinted at a rather handsome fellow who had a phone in hand and a textbook in the other. A tall girl with long blonde hair passed him, a backpack slung over her dainty shoulders.
Would I like to go to class with them, Willow thought, not noticing the smile that had spread across her face.
Suddenly, a ruler hit the side of her desk, making her nearly fly out of her chair. Papers from her disorganized notebook flew all over the ground, making the rest of the classroom hum with amusement. Willow's head whirled around to face her teacher who had a frustrated expression on her face.
"Mademoiselle Willow, I asked you a question!" the tight lipped woman quipped in her French accent.
"Oh, right! Uh," Willow scurried to grab all of her notes that she didn't bother to study with after writing them down. She flipped to a page filled with responses, and read one from the top of the page. "Madame Brodeur, pouvez-vous... le répéter s'il vous plaît?"
Madame Brodeur sighed as she crossed her arms over her blue blazer.
"Quel âge as-tu?" she asked again.
Willow racked her brain for the response, feeling increasingly embarrassed the longer she took to answer what she assumed was a simple question. "Um, j'ai vingt ans."
Madame Brodeur nodded lightly with approval before smoothing a strand of black hair into her bun. "Please try to pay attention in this class, I will not say it again. After all, you are the one who paid for it, yes?"
"Yes, Madame," Willow said monotonously with a big eye roll when Madame Brodeur turned around. Her gaze linked with her roommate Ruby's, who in turn scoffed playfully at her friend's behavior.
Willow met Ruby at the beginning of the course. The two hit it off immediately, even though they were complete opposites. Ruby dressed in pink pastels everyday while Willow dressed as boldy as possible. Ruby was an A plus student while Willow was...there. Ruby kept Willow organised (for the most part) and Willow kept Ruby on her toes. Originally, they were living separately, but soon figured that it would be easier if they moved in together since rent was getting to be a handful for the both of them, especially since Willow couldn't keep a job to save her life.
With the ruler in hand, Madame Brodeur motioned to the board where a list in French was written.
"Class is dismissed for today, but make sure that you all copy down the homework," she eyed Willow. "Including you, Mademoiselle."
As the class packed up, Willow put her hand on her chest in fake shock. "Moi? Why wouldn't I?"
"Shut it, Will," Ruby said as she made her way across the room. "You've been in this class for like, two months, and you still haven't done any work outside of the classroom."
Willow put her arms up and shrugged. "You got me there."
Ruby pushed her red tinted glasses up with satisfaction before helping Willow gather her mess and shove it into her bright yellow backpack.
"Thanks," Willow sighed as she pulled the load onto her back. "Are you heading back to the place after this?"
Ruby shook her head and tossed back her strawberry blonde bangs. "I've got three classes on Tuesdays, remember?"
Willow and Ruby walked out of the now empty classroom, which wasn't new to them. They were always the last ones to leave.
"Ew! More classes?" Willow wrinkled up her nose before laughing at Ruby's face.
"Some of us aren't here just because we conveniently felt like it, Willow," Ruby fiddled with her chipped pink nail polish. "Which by the way, I can't even believe."
Willow shrugged. "I can't believe that you're here to study Botany," she remarked. "Now that's beyond me."
Ruby hit her arm playfully. "The first day I met you, I asked why you were in the class. You said, and I quote, 'I don't know. I was bored, I got a train ticket and came here," Ruby giggled. "I think that takes the cake, don't you?"
Willow pulled on the turtleneck of her black sweater. "Eh. I wanna go to Paris if that makes things better. Botany's weirder, unless you're planning to start a massively successful pot farm.... hey, I could work for you!"
They climbed down the four flights of stairs before they opened the large glass doors. A crisp breeze flew in the air, rustling Willow's curls.
"Alright Ruby, see you later," she said over her shoulder.
"À toute à l'heure," Ruby responded.
Willow was on the verge of shooting back a snarky response, but Ruby was already walking to another building on the massive campus. Deciding it was for the best, Willow began her walk back to the townhouse.
She crossed a busy street before stopping in her tracks. A familiar whooshing noise filled her ears, making her heart catch in her chest.
"Is that..." she thought before slowly turning around. She blew out a sigh when she realized that it was just the sound of a couple passing cars. Willow's cheeks heated with embarrassment as she turned back around and trudged the rest of the way home.
"I really gotta get out more," she said to herself as she climbed the steps to her home.
The small brick townhouse had an assortment of vines and bushes creeping up the sides and front of the building, almost covering the massive three panel window that perched next to the white wooden door. Rusty and wiry black fencing was nailed on either side of the stairs. One leaned to the side, as if it was going to tumble down at any second. The place wasn't exactly A grade, but it wasn't terrible.
As Willow grabbed her key from her backpack, something very odd happened. A whirring noise from a few streets away- similar to the one she heard from the street- sounded before a squirmish noise replaced it. All Willow could make out were small shadows dancing on the other complex's wall, and the shapes were misshapen and distorted. It was most definitely not human, unless someone was wearing a very realistic alien-esque costume.
Yeah right.
Willow sucked in a breath before snatching her key from her pack and jamming it in the keyhole as quickly as she could. She rushed inside and quietly shut the door behind her.
"Am I going crazy?" Willow asked aloud.
She was doing so well. She was practically over the Doctor, but now she was back to thinking that every car passing was the sound of the TARDIS. Willow went over to her desk. It was covered with small TARDIS drawings doodled on the sides of her incomplete French assignments. She grabbed the papers and balled them all up before stuffing them in the metal trash can beside her desk, which was filled with recently scrapped sketches of the blue box. So maybe she wasn't doing as well as she thought.
Feeling bothered by this, Willow grabbed her phone and dialed Ruby. Her finger wavered when she remembered that Ruby was in class and would probably leave her on voicemail, so she pressed the contact with 'Mama' as the name. The phone dialed for about three seconds until her mom picked up the other end of the call.
"'Ello?"
Willow smiled at the sound of her mom's voice. They had rekindled their relationship with each other since Willow's disappearance with the Doctor, and had gotten into the habit of calling each other on a daily basis after Willow left for the next town over.
"Hey Mom," she started, but soon stopped. She wasn't exactly sure what she was going to say to her, or why she had called her in the first place. She couldn't come out and say that she was struggling with getting over a missed opportunity of seeing the stars with a time traveling man, and she most definitely couldn't say that she was hearing creatures and seeing distorted shadows. Deciding it was for the best, Willow kept it vague. "How was your day?"
"Pretty nice... I'm about to go to work. Evening shift today," her mom replied.
"Fun. Um, mom?"
"Yeah?"
"Have you ever tried to get over someone, but you wind up having their face stuck in your head so much to the point where you start hearing things that remind you of them and you begin to regret rejecting the one and only chance you had of staying 'associated' with them?"
Realizing how overwhelming her question sounded, Willow attempted to digress the situation. "I'm uh, asking for a friend."
She heard her mom sigh on the other end of the phone. "Is it that Piscelli girl again? Willow, I told you long distance relationships don't work-"
"N-no! Ma, what even?!" Willow's face heated with embarrassment as she recalled last year's disaster of a relationship with Summer Piscelli from down the street. "It wasn't healthy from the beginning... anyway that isn't even who I'm talking about. Let's think platonically, you know?"
"I see..." her mom dragged out, making Willow roll her eyes. "If you both don't completely hate each other, I would try to call them up and ask for forgiveness, 'cause knowing you, you're probably the one that messed it up."
"Mooom," Willow groaned before frowning. "I don't think he even has a phone."
"What kinda guy doesn't have a phone in this day and age?"
"I don't know, a kind hearted and brave one? One that would help his friends at the drop of a hat even if it meant risking himself?" Willow snapped back before realizing she was overly defending the Doctor.
"You need to get new friends, Will," her mother muttered.
"I need to work on maintaining friends first," Willow said before concluding their call. "Thanks for talking to me."
"Anytime," her mom replied. "Stay safe out there."
"I will," Willow assured her. "Bye."
"Bye. Oh, and Willow?"
"Yeah?"
"If you're hearing things solely from the fact that you screwed up a friendship, you might want to fix it as quickly as you can," her mom said with a dramatically disturbed voice.
"Oh really? Wow, Mom," Willow replied sassily before hanging up the phone.
Feeling hungry, she went into the small kitchen and opened the fridge. There was a leftover piece of shriveled steak from two nights ago and some kind of soup that Ruby liked. Willow wrinkled her nose at both options.
"Ugh," she murmured. "Looks like I'm going out."
She threw on her backpack and pulled on her platform boots (she refused to wear her other pair of black converse because... personal reasons) before remembering the figures from earlier. Her fingers hesitated near the handle before falling to her side. If there were aliens out there, she wouldn't have anyone to aid her this time. Willow shook her head with denial.
"There aren't any aliens," she said, as if she could convince herself that she hadn't been engaged to one six months ago.
With a wavering finger, Willow grabbed the door handle and pulled. She peeked out of the door, half expecting a horrible and misshapen creature to jump into view. Fortunately, the sounds had ceased, and the street was quiet once more.
"See, Will?" She mumbled to herself. "Absolutely nothing to worry about."
Even though the shapes and noises had disappeared, Willow couldn't help but rush down the brick steps and get off the street as quickly as she could.
She wandered down the streets, following the steady flow of people, until she reached a small café nestled between a bookstore and a bike shop. She looked at the sign on the face of the building.
The Ivory Cafe, it read.
This was one of the few places that she could tolerate sitting in and doing nothing at all except relax and enjoy the atmosphere. She took in the white washed brick and the black door with happiness. As she stepped inside, the smell of strong coffee hit her nose, overwhelming all of her senses. Willow ordered a turkey panini and an espresso from the bar, one of her favorite coffees.
She waited for some time before thanking the barista and grabbing the cup. Willow selected a comfy booth that was placed in front of the store's massive window, displaying the quaint shop to the streets. She took her notebook from the inside of her backpack and flipped to a fresh page.
She grabbed a pencil that was hooked on the notebook and began to doodle. Lines and swirls became shapes and figures, eyes were formed and soon came a pair of hands.
Willow's guilty pleasure was sketching, but she'd never confess to it out loud. Partially because of the people that say 'ooh, draw me,' and the fact that she wasn't perfect. Sometimes an ear would be bigger than the other, or she'd accidentally slip up and add too much detail into one spot of the drawing, but Willow found it slightly charming in a strange way.
One thing that she was fond of was how therapeutic it could be. Willow was happy with using her art as a coping mechanism to get the Doctor out of her head. She had a tendency to draw the TARDIS, a couple lines and a few rectangles, then shade in the back parts. But today, she felt determined. She needed the Doctor completely out of her system.
She started with a circle, then a couple lines to map out the face. She sketched in his sculpted but also soft facial shape, then his quizzical eyebrows. Her hands swirled around the canvas for her favorite facial feature to draw: the eyes. She was persistent in making them gentle but lightly broken, perfectly describing him when they had first met. It also described his eyes when she rejected his offer like the little fool she was-
Willow didn't realize that she had pressed so hard on her pencil that the lead had snapped and rolled onto the other page.
"Dammit," she muttered before taking a sip of her espresso. The taste was as bitter as she felt towards herself. Perfect.
Willow shut the notebook and stuffed it into her bag before taking a big bite out of her panini. The bell above the doorway chimed and Ruby stepped into the cafe.
"Ruby!" Willow waved her over.
"Hey, Will," Ruby replied cheerily, smoothing her plaid pleated skirt down as she scooted in the booth.
"How'd you know I'd be in here?" Willow asked in between a bite of panini.
"No offense Willow, but where else would you be?"
Willow shrugged. "You got me there," she sipped her coffee. "Aren't you supposed to be in class, like the studious college student you are?"
Ruby pulled on a strand of hair. "The professor let class out early," she looked down at Willow's backpack. It wasn't completely closed, the notebook was peeking out.
"What's that?"
"What's what?"
"That." Ruby motioned to the bag.
"I dunno what you're talking about," Willow whistled.
Ruby sighed before quickly reaching over the table and snatching the bag.
"Hey!" Willow whined.
Ruby's eyes brightened as she opened the notebook. "I knew you could doodle Willow, but I didn't know you could draw!"
She gasped like a proud mother, making Willow roll her eyes. "These are good... what's that?" Ruby pointed to a watercolor piece of the TARDIS that was next to the incomplete sketch of the Doctor.
"Oh it's a, uh," Willow could feel her cheeks heating up. "It's an old Police Box. A reference picture."
"Ah," Ruby said before flipping another page. "I thought they were red."
"Everyone's a critic," Willow replied before grabbing the sketchbook.
"Hey Ruby?" Willow said, thinking it would be a good time to talk to a person of her own age about the Doctor situation. "I'm having an issue here. There's this guy-"
"Oooh, Willow's got a crush-!"
"No, shut up! It's not like that..." Willow growled. "I got into a minor, uh, issue with this person, and I kinda sorta made a choice to not want to see them anymore."
Ruby leaned forward with interest.
"I wasn't thinking at the time. Or maybe I was. Maybe I used to make more sense back then and now-"
"Willow," Ruby interjected. "Just tell me what's going on."
"Okay, so," Willow sucked in a deep breath. "I met this guy, we went on an extremely unimportant trip and then... he asked me to travel with him. I was so ready to get back home and apologise that I didn't think about my life after that. By the time I went back to change my mind, he was gone. That's the real reason why I came to this town. I came to escape a mistake I made six months ago."
"Woah!" Ruby exclaimed. At this point, she was almost off her seat with anticipation. "This is like a tragic love-"
Willow eyed her with a raised eyebrow.
"I mean a totally platonic-no-romance-friendship story." Ruby thought for a moment before frowning. "Can't you call him?"
Willow sighed. "He doesn't have a phone..."
"What kind of guy-"
"Doesn't have a phone, I know!" Willow pinched the bridge of her nose. "I spoke to my mom about it and she said the exact same thing. Maybe I need to face the fact that he's... gone."
Willow's eyes flew to the window. A man with a brown trenchcoat and spiked hair passed the glass with an all too familiar pep in his step. At least that's what she assumed the completely unidentifiable blur was.
She jumped up and ran out of the shop and pushed her way through a group of people, desperately trying to find the Doctor.
"Doctor?" She shouted, not caring about the looks she was met with by other pedestrians. A flash of brown fabric slipped through the crowd, making her heart race even faster.
"Doctor!" She called, quickening her pace and nearly twisting an ankle in her shoes. It felt like she was walking on air. She finally had a chance to make everything right. However, it wasn't long until her feet began to feel heavy, and she grew increasingly out of breath. Her eyes felt weary when she realized that it was nothing but a stupid mistake. Willow reached the end of the street before giving up her chase. She turned around and ran both hands through her hair.
"I'm seeing the Doctor now," Willow breathed heavily. "How fun."
She headed back to the café, dazed and confused.
Ruby was standing outside of the building with her arms folded atop her tan cardigan.
"What happened Will?"
Willow stormed past her and into the café. She snatched up her bag and coffee, then went right back out. "I'm sick of this shit," Willow grumbled.
Ruby sighed and followed her friend back to the townhouse.