Author's note: a bit of a warning. There is mentions of abuse, a miscarriage, death and a interplanetary war in this chapter. I don't think anything in this chapter is terribly graphic. Read if you want to but you don't have to.
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Ella was humming a song that was stuck in her head and she wished she had remembered to grab her iPod before she ran away. "What are you doing? I thought movie night was tomorrow." Ella heard from behind her, she turned her head and saw the Doctor enter the projector room where they have a weekly movie night.
“Movie night is tomorrow, that doesn’t make me less bored right now and I still have no idea how to operate this ancient contraption. Can you help me?" Ella laughed as she unconsciously tugged on the cropped yellow hoodie she was wearing. "I swear, I'm smart." Ella went to adjust her glasses on instinct but remembered that she was wearing her contacts today.
"That projector is not ancient." He insisted as he moved and pressed a button on the side of the machine. The film Ella wanted to watch came to life on the white sheet she had hanging on the far-left wall.
"Finally," Ella mumbled as she sat down on the couch and grabbed a handful of popcorn she made. "And it is ancient."
The Doctor sat on the other side of the couch after he had switched the light off, "you're probably right, Giselle."
"Hey, are you ever going to stop calling me that?" Ella wondered as the opening credits were appearing on the makeshift screen.
"I don't know. Are you ever going to tell me why you hate your name?" The Doctor practically crawled across the couch to reach the popcorn; Ella nudged the bowl to be more in between them. "What are we even watching?"
Her dark eyes didn't move as she nodded to the screen, the Doctor looked over and saw the title of the film plastered across the sheet hanging from the wall. The Doctor didn't expect it, but he was pulled into the story after ten minutes of film. Somehow, he had become invested in the lives of the fictional people onscreen, finding himself yelling at the characters, much like Ella was.
"Wait, was she a robot the whole time?" The Doctor's confused voice broke through the tense silence that followed the end of the film.
"No, not the whole time at least,” Ella spoke up from her current horizontal position, using the Doctor’s legs as a pillow and balancing their empty bowl of popcorn on her stomach. “Remember, when she went into that room towards the middle of the movie? I think she was replaced with the robot then because there was a weird cut scene. Usually when they have scenes like that, they leave out the important plot twist stuff."
The Doctor nodded, "how'd you know all that?"
"I'm a professional movie watcher," Ella slightly smiled as she sat up and walked over to the popcorn machine to refill the bowl as the Doctor moved to pick the next movie. "How long do you think I've been with you?" Ella wanted to smack her forehead when she realized how that sounded, before she could back pedal the Doctor answered.
"A few months, I think." Ella plopped back on the couch as they waited for the screen to do something, after a few minutes the woman in yellow resumed her earlier position and used the Doctor as a pillow again. About an hour into the movie, the Doctor could sense that something was on Ella's mind as he noticed she was being unusually silent. She wasn't making any sarcastic remarks or berating the characters stupidity like she always did. “El, are you okay?”
The woman in question wandered through the confines of her mind as she thought about when the Doctor confessed that he was glad to have met her, was that real? Ella remembered her promise from a long time ago, the Doctor may not recall but she does.
“I hate my name,” she started, staring blankly at the wall in front of her, adjacent to where the movie was playing. “My dad picked it out when I was born.”
“What are you doing? You don’t have to do this.” The Doctor’s voice was unsure and cautious as he paused the movie neither of them were paying any attention to anymore.
“Being honest with you. I want you to talk to me, Doctor and I feel like for that to happen than I need to talk to you first … my mom died when I was eight and I’m pretty sure that was the catalyst for every bad thing that’s happened since. My dad started dragging me all over the place, moving me from my childhood home in South Dakota to New York and then moving again to France.” Ella hesitated in the retelling of her life because she’d reached the part that was hardest to talk about.
“In France I met someone, Liam, … I thought he could have been the love of my life. He was just dazzling to me, too bad there was a monster lurking behind his pretty face.” Ella knew the Doctor was starting to understand what she was telling him as his expression darkened into someone who could burn the universe without breaking a sweat.
“What happened?” His voice sounded strained and a million miles away, Ella took a steadying breath to calm her racing heart. It didn’t work but she was too far in to back out now, fuck it.
“It got really bad one night and I had to be taken to the hospital … I could have died but I didn’t. No, it wasn’t me who died … it was the baby I was apparently pregnant with at the time … as soon as I was better, well, physically better my dad packed us up again, we had to abandon everyone we knew in our old lives, but Liam still found me.” Ella took a pause to sit up and stand to pace the room because staring up at the Doctor’s conflicting expressions made her more nervous than actually telling him about herself.
“The day before I left with you, he called me and well, you know the outcome of that, I ran away, the only thing I know how to do, and I don’t think I can go back. He will … always be there waiting.” Ella felt like she wasn’t giving enough of herself away yet, there was still an ever-present weight on her shoulders dragging her down, deeper and deeper into the dark. The woman knew that this wasn’t going to help in the slightest, but this was an important step in their friendship, learning to fully trust each other with their less than desirable pasts. Now she just had to wait for the other shoe to drop.
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The Doctor tossed and turned while he was supposed to be sleeping but after Ella’s painfully true story, he could not stop the thoughts racing through his head, he felt an unbearable amount of anger boiling over. He was furious at Ella’s ex-boyfriend after the revelation that the man also took away Ella’s future.
The jagged scar on her lower abdomen that she showed him suggests that she could no longer have children naturally. That information made the Doctor want to find this man and make him pay for what he had done to his friend, who had made herself a big part of his life already. All this floating through the Doctor’s troubled mind had him thinking about whether he wanted to tell Ella about his own troubles as he didn’t want to burden her with the knowledge of the Time War.
He was also deeply terrified that if he told her, then her view of him would change. He didn’t think he could handle the thought of Ella looking at him in fear or disdain. After a considerable amount of time he huffed out a breath and threw his blanket off as he made his way to Ella’s bedroom down the hallway. He was going to trust her with the darkest parts of himself just as she trusted him; he quietly knocked on her door and patiently waited for a response. It was late but the Doctor knew that Ella was most likely awake, with her insomniatic history. He honestly wasn’t certain that he would be able to work up the courage again to talk to her.
“Hey, Doc. Can’t sleep?” Ella greeted when she opened her bedroom door, she wasn’t expecting a reply to her question, it was rhetorical having already known the answer.
“I blew up my planet.” Ella didn’t react too much, having assumed a long time ago that the haunted empty look in his eyes had to be from a major loss. Instead she grabbed his hand and led him to the kitchen, fully intent on making him his favorite tea.
“So, did this happen in that war you talked about all those months ago?” The Doctor took a tentative sip of his tea before he had to answer, it took a while to get the words out but eventually he had managed to string letters together that made sense.
He told her about the war and the Daleks, the resulting destruction of his home planet and his people, she nodded and kept mostly quiet not wanting to freak him out. She stood from her spot at the round table they were situated at and walked around it until she was behind his chair, slowly she wrapped her arms around him. At first, he wasn’t sure how to react, not used to soft touches like this but after some moments of hesitation he leaned into her embrace.
The Doctor was probably losing his mind, but he couldn’t stop the tears that slipped down his face; it was like all the emotions that he’d been suppressing for years just exploded. Somewhere amid the tears and sniffling, he also told his favorite human what happens when his body dies because after all this time she deserved to know, and he didn’t want her to be confused if he died in her presence.
“So, does that mean your people are a bit flexible when it comes to the gender thing?”
“Yes … is that a problem?”
“No, why would it be?” Ella didn’t understand what the Doctor was truly asking – would she still want to be with him if his whole body changed?