Author's Note: I was reading through 'The Dread of Tomorrow and Yesterday' by deathsweetqueen and, despite being someone who has really hated the 10th Doctor for a long time for some kind of stupid reasons, found myself really enjoying the chapters w/ 10. So I was inspired to write this story, which is a little different from my other DW fics since the OC doesn't know jack shit about the Doctor. The cover I made myself and the person who I based my OC off of is an Australian Aboriginal model by the name of Maminydjama Magnolia Maymuru.

Word Count: 4,212

The loudest sound Elissa had ever heard in her entire life sounded as she finished washing her hands; it was a harsh, steady wheezing with a hint of metal and it just about scared her to death. Across the tiled floor of the museum's bathroom, near the entrance door, something appeared. Covering her ears with dripping hands, Elissa backed against the wall and watched in horror as an enormous box began to materialize.

The grating wheezing subsided quickly, but it left her ears ringing. A door opened in the incredibly blue box and a man from inside stuck his head out. "You!" Elissa forgot how to breathe for a moment. "I need you!"

Cold water dripped down her cheeks as she stared unblinkingly at the stranger.

"Don't just stand there gawking at me," the man snapped in a distinctly English accent, "get inside!"

Elissa eyed the box, noting that it would be too close of a fit to stand inside with more than one person, and then looked back at the man. "Who the hell are you?"

"I'm the Doctor. Who the hell are you?" He shook his head with an accompanied wave of dismissal before Elissa could respond. "Never mind. Look, the TARDIS brought me here, presumably to find help, and you're all I've got right now, so just come inside!"

The Doctor turned on his heel and retreated further into the box. But that can't be right, thought Elissa. There's nowhere to go-. She caught a glimpse of silver railings, stony structures, and swirling yellows and oranges beyond the fluttering tail end of the man's coat. Racing forward to brace her hands against the doorway, Elissa peered inside and choked on her own tongue.

"What're you waiting for? Inside!"

Trembling fingers pointed to the box's exterior as Elissa stumbled over her words. "B-But it's-… It's-!"

Standing in the center of a room easily twenty times the size of the box was the Doctor, hunched over a strange table with a centerpiece that stretched up to the ceiling, several meters overhead. Yellow-orange lights cast an otherworldly glow across pale stone archways, some of which were decorated with black tubing and wires. The hollow ringing of feet on metal grating made Elissa start and she looked down to see that she had stepped inside the box without even realizing it.

The door slammed shut behind Elissa and the same horrible wheezing from before started up again as the box lurched to one side. She stumbled into a railing and clung to it for dear life, her legs wobbling and finally giving out a second later.

"Oi, Curly!" the Doctor shouted over the wheezing. "I need you!"

He appeared in front of her what seemed like a split second later, eyes wide and his hands grasping her biceps. His mouth was moving and sound was definitely coming out, but Elissa couldn't comprehend any of it. A jolt of electricity zapped the palm of her hand and it was as if a switch had suddenly been flipped. Still somewhat weak at the knees, Elissa let the man lead her to the table-that-was-definitely-not-a-table as she tried to understand what he was saying.

"This! This here? This is the dimensional stabilizer," the Doctor said, pointing to a lever with a yellow handle. He gestured to the weird looking pipe with a wooden handle below it. "This is the vortex loop and this is the vector tracker." Elissa stared at the dial that looked identical to an egg timer and wondered if maybe she was off her rocker. "I need you to pull or turn whatever thing I tell you to when I tell you to. Can you do that?"

Elissa looked straight into the man's eyes and, against her better judgement, nodded. He nodded in return and then darted around the table to the other side, the centerpiece blocking him entirely. The box seemed to tilt to one side again and Elissa grabbed hold of the table's edge, leaning with the movement as though she'd been doing so her entire life.

"Vector tracker!" called the Doctor. "One whole rotation to the left!"

The tracker clicked rapidly as she turned it; she felt the clicking of the notches through the metal as the vibrations tickled her fingertips. Elissa could hear the blood rushing in her ears and she rubbed her shoulder against her right ear with a grimace.

"Tracker again! Two rotations!"

The box seemed to scream then and Elissa felt her stomach fly into her throat. If she didn't know any better, she might've thought that they were falling. The Doctor screamed, too, his voice frantic and pinched.

"Stabilizer! Stabilizer, Curly!"

Elissa froze and stared at the intruments laid out beneath her hands. She couldn't remember what was what. The yellow handled lever suddenly seemed to be the only thing in the entire universe, so she grabbed hold of it and pulled as hard as she could. Her tunnel vision disappeared like early morning mist and then everything was very still and very quiet.

Several locks of midnight shaded hair had fallen over Elissa's face. A chill ran up her spine as she blew her hair from her eyes and it then occurred to her that someone was watching her. She glanced over her shoulder and saw nothing but the box's windowed doors. Soft, curious whirring reached her ears and Elissa stole a glance at the ceiling, trying to trail the invisible eyes she knew were there. The whirring rose in pitch, then dissapated, leaving Elissa unsure if she had imagined it in the first place.

"Yes, I've got him!"

The Doctor's voice drew Elissa from her trance. She stepped around the table to see the stranger hunched over again, typing away on an early 2000's desktop computer. The computer screen itself showed a map of England overlaid with a semi-transparent grid. Within one of the hexagons was a white, flashing light.

"What is that?" she asked, finally managing to find her voice.

"That," said the Doctor, "is where the Graske is. I was having a devil of a time tracing him, but I found him here in London, 1883." While Elissa tried to replay his words in her head, the Dctor squinted and leaned closer to the screen. "On Christmas Day, of all days. Blimey, I just had Christmas. I don't need another one!"

Elissa squinted at the screen, too, watching as the Doctor zoomed in on the blinking blip, eventually moving to a video of a snowy street spotted with people in historical costume. Christmas was three months ago. What the hell is going on? she wondered as she looked at the Doctor again.

"No, I can't see him." He sighed. "Alright, back to your station, Curly."

Elissa blinked and gaped at the man, her brain frantically trying to fit together the pieces of an impossible puzzle. Her mouth tried to fit around a dozen different questions, all of them too big or confusing to comprehend, so instead she settled for asking, "What?"

Guiding her back round the table with his arms on her shoulders, the Doctor placed her in her original spot. "I promise I'll explain this all as soon as possible, but I need you here. I need your help. Please." When Elissa didn't respond with even a nod or shake of her head, the Doctor became noticably more agitated. "Look, my friend's in trouble. This Graske attacked her, he did something to her, and I have to get her back. I can't do this on my own and I don't have her with me, so I need you to help me. Please!"

"Okay."

Darting out of sight, the Doctor began insttructing Elissa once more. The box hummed and vibrated a little, then thudded with a final groan hardly a minute later. Stepping away from the table-that-she-knew-needed-a-better-name-because-it-wasn't-a-table, Elissa raised her hands so they hovered in front of her chest.

"What's happening?" she asked. "What did I do?"

"Nothing, Curly. She's just landing."

Elissa frowned and turned to follow the Doctor as he headed for the doors, her hands moving to rest on her hips. "My name's not Curly and what do you mean, 'she's landing'?"

The Doctor paused to properly look her in the eye and that was when he smiled for the first time. He reached for the doorhandle and something in his eyes made Elissa feel giddy. "Why don't you find out?" he said softly.

"What do you mean?"

"Give me your hand."

"Why?"

The Doctor sighed, exasperated and a touch amused, and wiggled his fingers impatiently. "Just trust me, Curly."

"Elissa."

The Doctor's smile unfolded into a grin as Elissa reached for his hand despite her trepidation. "Trust me, Elissa." The lock clicked and the door pulled open, each second lasting an impossible eternity for Elissa. "Welcome to 1883."

Through the open doorway came a gust of ice-cold wind that chilled Elissa to her very core. She shivered, teeth chattering, and then gasped when she spotted what lay beyond the box's doors. There was no trace of the museum's bathroom stalls, sinks, and slightly green tiles. There was, however, snow.

"Merry Christmas!" called an unknown voice. "Long live Queen Victoria!"

It was nighttime and a gentle snowfall began to dust Elissa's mass of curly hair the moment she stepped outside. She shivered involuntarily as another breeze shot through her. The snow was blindingly white in comparison with the dark skin of her hands and forearms, and she gazed at it in wonder. She'd never seen snow in real life before.

It registered in her mind that there were other people around, but it somehow didn't register what that implied. So instead of caring what those people might think of her, Elissa laughed and tilted her head back to taste the snow like she'd seen countless others do in movies. In retrospect, it shouldn't have surprised her that it tasted like ice, yet it did.

Elissa turned at the sound of her name and rushed to the Doctor's side, several paces away inspecting a stack of wooden crates. "How?" she asked breathlessly, her cheeks already sore from smiling so broadly. "How did you do this?"

The Doctor smiled briefly. "I might tell you one day," he teased. "Now, I don't suppose you know what a Graske looks like, do you?" Elissa shook her head. "Mm, I didn't think so."

"What's a Graske?"

"A nasty little hobgoblin that conquers planets by replacing its citizens with changelings."

That made Elissa's smile drop. It also made her realize that something was very, very wrong. She stumbled away from the Doctor, the spell the snow had cast snapped in half with his serious answer.

"Who are you?"

The Doctor groaned in frustration, immediately recognizing the direction this line of questioning was leading to. "I already told you, I'm the Doctor. Can't we do this later?"

Elissa looked at the blue box and then back at the Doctor. "Who are you? Where-… Where is this? What did you do?"

"I didn't do anything!"

"Are you trying to kidnap me?"

Shaking his head, the Doctor stepped towards her in an attempt to comfort her, but the action only made Elissa race backwards as fast as she could. Her foot came down half on cooblestone and half on empty air at the edge of a sidewalk, and she teetered in mid-air for a second before toppling over. The Doctor was quick to help her to her feet, but the moment she was standing, she yanked her arm away and bolted down the street.

"Curly, wait!"

Barely missing getting run over by a horse-drawn carriage, Elissa jumped back onto the sidewalk and looked around to find someone or something familiar, a hiding place, anything to keep her safe from the Doctor. The snow was slick under her shoes and she tripped, falling headfirst against a stack of crates and burlap sacks.

Something squealed as she landed and Elissa hardly had a moment to catch her breath before a short, red skinned thing with tentacles attacked to the back of its head popped up at her feet. Cackling, the creature pointed a little box at her head. The Doctor's yell pierced the winter air and both the creature and Elissa turned towards its source.

"Leave her alone!" the Doctor demanded, already running across the street.

The creature pointed its box at the first thing it saw after turning away from the Doctor, a little boy who stood paralyzed with fear just beside the heap of crates, sacks, and Elissa. A ray of wiggling blue light emenated from the box and the boy seemed to be sucked inside it, then reappeared in his original spot.

"No!"

A rainbow colored flash of light like a prism refraction was all that remained of the creature by the time the Doctor arrived at Elissa's side a few seconds later. Elissa was too focused on the boy who'd been attacked to fight the Doctor as he helped her up. The boy looked into her eyes and she felt her stomach twist into a knot when his eyes flashed green.

People were screaming as the Doctor dragged Elissa back inside the box. "What the fuck is going on?" she shouted over the distressing cries. "Doctor!"

He stared silently at the part of his arm Elissa had grabbed onto, watching her fingers curl into his coat sleeve as the rise and fall of her chest caught his attention from his periphery. "If I don't catch that Graske, I may never get my friend back, and we are wasting time the longer we stand here."

"Are you going to hurt me?"

The Doctor had never heard such an outrageous notion, but he could see it in Elissa's eyes that she was scared. "What?!"

"You made me come into your weird box, you just appeared out of nowhere! I don't even know why still I'm talking to you because you scare the shit out of me and some crazy creature just tried to point a laser cube at me! What is going on? I don't understand!"

Closing his eyes as he raced through idea after idea, the Doctor tried to think of the best way to explain everything to this girl without wasting valuable time. Placing his hands on either side of her head, he opened his eyes and smiled apologetically at her. "I'm really sorry, Curly." Before she could protest or question him again, the Doctor smacked his temple against hers with enough strength to make him temporarily dizzy.

For Elissa, the transference of information from the Doctor's mind to hers felt a bit like a brain freeze. She groaned and doubled over with the heels of her hands buried in her eye sockets to soothe the ache deep within her skull. The image of Rose Tyler's face stained her eyelids, along with the memory of the Graske attacking her with its instrument and replacing her with a wickedly violent clone that could throw a mean right hook. Elissa rubbed her jaw at the thought of it and for a moment, she forgot that she was not, in fact, the Doctor.

"Rose," Elissa whispered, her lips tingling pleasantly as she recalled the woman's face. She suspected that the Doctor hadn't intentionally transferred the fact that he harbored a crush on Rose, but she also couldn't blame him for it; she already had a crush on her, too.

"Glad we're finally on the same page," the Doctor said as he jumped inside the TARDIS.

TARDIS. The word didn't seem large enough, or impossible enough, for the box Elissa found herself piloting. Hell, she didn't even know what it meant, but she knew that it was special. She even got the distinct impression that the TARDIS was - well, maybe not alive, but living.

Elissa rubbed her temple between commands, the same question stuck at the forefront of her mind: just who is the Doctor? A man who can give me information with a smack on the head, who flies a box, who seeks out little gnomic creatures with tentacles and lasers can't be real, can he? That's impossible! There was no other word that she could think of to describe her current circumstance. Yet, there he stood at the box's console and there she stood opposite him, helping him hunt down the Graske that had taken Rose Tyler.

"I was in the middle of my shift," said Elissa, gazing at the time rotor as it rose and fell.

The Doctor's head popped out from behind the time rotor. "Sorry?"

"At the museum. I was taking a bathroom break when you showed up."

"Oh… Do you need to go, or-?"

Elissa sniggered and shook her head. "No." She noticed the confused expression the Doctor wore as he looked at her. "Sorry, I was … just thinking."

"No need t'apologise," he muttered. "And look, I've found the Graske. It's on Griffoth."

Elissa paced around the console to look at the screen, which displayed a grainy picture of a vaguely purple planet that looked a bit like the moon. "Griffoth?" she echoed.

"The Graske homeworld." The Doctor typed a few things out on the keyboard and the screen changed to a display of a bulkhead. "There's a way inside, but it's shielded somehow. I can't get the TARDIS past it. Scans say there's at least three of those bulkheads out there."

Getting past those bulkheads was much less difficult than Elissa had anticipated because the Doctor had a tricck up his sleeve: the sonic screwdriver. It didn't look like much more than a silver tube with buttons and a light at the end, but the Doctor assured her it was a work of technological genius that he had crafted himself when he was much younger. Elissa was still smiling wondering what an even younger Doctor might have been like - scrawnier, perhaps - when the last bulkhead slid open to reveal a giant room full of containers.

Her smile faded away in the blink of an eye when she saw, through the foggy glass of one container, a blonde woman, a human. And there were more than just humans. Elissa could see a large, sickly green monster with claws longer than her head, and a baby blue skinned person with box-blue robes.

"Oh, my God."

"They must be in stasis," the Doctor whispered.

Elissa thanked her love of sci-fi for being able to understand what stasis likely was. She watched tiny little Graske scurry around the room, checking on control kiosks and what looked like iPads attached to the container walls, then hurry out of sight.

"Do you think Rose is here?"

The Doctor pressed his lips together. "She has to be," he said.

"So, what do we do?"

"We have to get her out of there, all of them."

"How?"

The Doctor glanced over his shoulder at the curious human he'd picked up and smiled faintly. "You're full of questions, aren't you?" Elissa managed to flash him an embarrassed expression. "I don't know. If I can get to one of those kiosks, maybe I can find out more about the system."

However, the moment the Doctor made a move from outside the protection of the bulkhead frame, a Graske spotted him and pulled a gun on him. "Get back!" he shouted. He and Elissa jumped to the opposite side of the doorway, just missing the gunshot as it flew past them and reflected off the metal walls behin them. The shot flew back into the stasis room, bouncing off of containers, walls, and kiosks alike until it finally shattered the glass on the container closest to the pair.

The giant green monster Elissa had caught a glimpse of earlier jumped out from inside the container with an outrageous cry. Recoiling into the wall, Elissa grabbed hold of the Doctor and hid behind his frame, hardly daring to peek over his shoulder. "It's alright," he said, resting a hand on his shoulder, just atop hers. "It's going after the Graske, not us."

Stealing a glance around the Doctor's body, Elissa spotted the tail end of the clawed creature as it trailed off down a row of containers in pursuit of a Graske. She breathed a sigh of relief and placed a hand over her heart to calm herself.

"I want you to stay here. I'm going over to that kiosk to try and fix all this, but if something goes wrong, I want you to run back to the TARDIS as fast as you can. Understand?" Elissa nodded solemnly and the Doctor smiled. "Good girl. Now keep an eye out for me."

True to her (unspoken) word, Elissa remained by the bulkead, her arms folded protectively over her torso as she looked about for other Graske or the claw-monster from earlier. She could hear the Doctor muttering to himself as he used his special screwdriver to search the kiosk for information. Suddenly, he exclaimed, "Eureka!", and slammed his hand down on the kiosk's surface.

Just then, the Graske and its terrifying attacker rounded a corner and headed straight for the Doctor. The monster, however, disappeared mid-stride in a flash of yellow light and the Graske skidded to a stop. The containers began to flash yellow all throughout the room, each one left empty after a flash, eventually leaving just Elissa, the Doctor, and one Graske.

"Doctor?"

The Doctor beamed at her, his wild hair a little wilder than when he left her. "I know where Rose is."

Something in Elissa's heart clenched when she saw Rose Tyler for the first time. The Doctor flew the TARDIS to a little apartment in London, circa 2005, where a beautiful family was celebrating Christmas morning together. When she and the Doctor exited the TARDIS, she noticed two things: the first being that they had landed in a very small kitchen where the TARDIS could barely fit, and the second being that Rose Tyler stood across the room and that she was very, very lovely in person.

Rose ran into the Doctor's arms without hesitation, giggling softly when he lifted her up and her toes couldn't touch the floor. When she was back on solid ground again, she turned to Elissa and smiled, confused. "Ah, yes, introductions. Rose, this is Elissa. She helped me find you. Elissa, this is Rose."

"Hello," Elissa said softly, already completely smitten with the brown-eyed cutie gazing up at her.

"Hello." Rose's smile, which had previously been a mere upturn of the corners of her mouth, morphed into a full grin with her tongue caught deftly between her teeth, and that was when Elissa knew that she was done for.

"Come on, you two. Inside," the Doctor urged, already at the TARDIS doors.

If the owners of the apartment ever inquired who the hell the box owners/passengers were, Elissa never heard it - she was far too lost in the curve of Rose's smile to notice.

Back inside the TARDIS, the Doctor began pacing around the console with his hands shoved in his trousers pockets. I don't think I've ever actually seen someone wear pinstripes before, Elissa thought. Nice shoes, though.

"So, Curly. Is it back to the museum for you? You were in the middle of your shift, weren't you?" Elissa hesitated to reply and the Doctor noticed. "Or maybe I can make it up to you."

"Make what up to me?"

The Doctor winked in Rose's direction as he explained. "Well, this was your first trip in the TARDIS and it wasn't exactly the best, now was it? I think I just about gave you a heart attack, not to mention those devious little Graske almost sticking you in stasis like Rose. In fact, why don't I make it up to you both and take you somewhere really, really special?"

Rose leaned forward so her hands were braced against the console. "What did ya have in mind?"

"Another planet. And I mean a proper planet, not a ditch in the road planet like Griffoth. How about-" The Doctor paused. "-New Earth?"

Elissa furrowed her brows. "New Earth?"

"Have you ever heard of apple grass?" the Doctor asked. When Elissa shook her head in response, he grinned. "Would you like to see it for yourself?" He toyed with one of the instruments on the panel and the look in his eyes made Elissa wonder just what the hell he was talking about. "My granddaughter always told me it smelled like Granny Apples."