Chapter 1- Out of Your League
The Doctor thoroughly enjoyed being eccentric.
The strange looks people would give him as he inhaled the scent of a first edition 'Jane Eyre' were absolutely priceless. More than once, he'd been lying in his Blue Volkswagen Microbus, reading away in his usual bow tie, suspenders, and button up, when a curious person would peek in and withdraw a second later with their thoughts questioning how a person could be so peculiar.
On rare instances such as this one though, he regretted being so strange.
It had been a mistake to assume that he could climb a bookshelf to the top and come down with the book his customer needed, unscathed.
The shop had been empty all day, with his three assistants off collecting new merchandise for his shop at a book convention in France for a week. So when young Jethro Cane came in looking for a science fiction novel called 'Midnight', the Doctor was more than eager to help.
He found that he'd vastly overestimated himself when the shelf he was clinging onto dangerously tilted forward.
He jumped off just in time for the shelf to move back to its proper place against the wall.
The air left his lungs in the form of a groan as he landed on his back. His vision blurred, and he turned onto his side. A few books toppled onto him with almost comedic timing, bringing tears of pain to his eyes.
He tried not to be too irritated by the arrogant snickering of the teenager he'd been trying to help only a few seconds ago.
He pulled himself to his feet, and noticed the boy hastily thrusting his cell phone into his pocket.
The Doctor scowled, red to his roots, and shoved a book into the boy's arms, sending the skinny teenager back a step.
He glanced around, hoping that nobody had seen his embarrassing fall.
A movement from outside the bookshop caught his attention.
A petite young brunette walked by the large shop window, hands behind her back, lugging something that he couldn't see.
The soft tinkling of the bell on the door sounded, and he watched her step into the shop pulling a small rolling cart that was stacked high with papers.
She looked around, her eyes falling onto a small table in the corner of the shop, and promptly sat down on one of the wooden chairs.
Almost immediately, she reached into her cart and pulled out an armful of papers.
She extracted a red pen, uncapped it with her mouth, and got to work.
"Forget it, Doctor," Jethro said, following the Doctor's gaze to the pretty woman, "She's way out of your league."
The boy payed for his book, and left the shop with a smirk on his face.
The Doctor watched him go with his lips twisted into a frown.
He sat down on his stool behind the counter and pulled out '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,' munching mindlessly on an apple as he did so.
Books were his everything. When all his friends were gone, his books were there to embrace him and accept him for as long as he was willing to read them.
He'd just turned twenty-nine, but he felt like an eighty year old who'd gone through the loss of all of his friends and family.
He went to the university to study anthropology, hoping that such a degree would help fill his need to travel and learn about different people.
When he was nineteen he'd met Amy and Rory. Rory was studying to be a nurse, and Amy, struggling to attain an English major. They became his best friends, and he loved them all so much that his happiness knew no limits. When Rory proposed to Amy, the Doctor had offered to pay for their wedding. When they'd gotten married, he had offered up his house for the new couple to stay in. Soon after, he met River Song, femme fatale, and lover of adventure. A month after they'd first met, she somehow convinced him to break into the lab in the dead of night, and place push pins in the vicious Professor Dorium's chair. The morning after, River had waltzed into the class, pulled him out of his seat, and kissed him senseless in front of about fifty other people.
He didn't even react when Professor Dorium began yelling about his bum because all he could think of was River's lips against his. Without quite realizing it, he fell in love with her.
That all ended after graduation.
One morning he woke up, expecting River to be lying against his chest, but found her to not be anywhere in the house. Later, when he checked the fridge for food, he found a note in her handwriting saying that she would be in Africa for a year, that he was a sweet boy, and that one day he would find someone absolutely fantastic to love him with all their hearts, but that that person just couldn't be her.
He'd moped about the ordeal for weeks, but whenever he tried to talk to Amy and Rory about it, both of them were too inexplicably happy to even concentrate on what he was saying.
It turns out that Amy had gotten pregnant, and was expecting a baby girl.
A few months later, his friends' child was born in his house because of its need to see the world at four in the morning.
He remembered the occasion with a wince: all of Amy's screaming, Rory's frantic excitement, the blood, and the hand crushing.
But at the end of those two terrible hours, he was holding his best friend's baby in his arms and thinking to himself about how beautiful new life could be.
Only afterward, when he was scrambling about, talking about all the places they could take the baby, did the Ponds reveal that they were moving to New York in two weeks time.
The Doctor had been heartbroken.
He never got to really know his mother, though he'd heard enough about her to know that she was smart to leave a husband who screwed his secretaries behind her back. His only grudge against her was that she hadn't taken him away as well.
His father, John Smith I, had been a wealthy man who owned Sonic Industries, a company that specialized in making computers. From childhood John Smith II had despised his name, claiming that it was a boring name, and that he hated boring. So one day, he decided that he wanted to be called Doctor, and the nickname had stuck so much that most people didn't know his real name.
When the Doctor's father died, the old man had handed down Sonic Industries to his eldest son, Koschei, and had given his younger son John, a fortune that could sustain him for several lifetimes.
Instead of living luxuriously as his father had no doubt envisioned him doing, the Doctor had invested a part of his fortune into a decently grand bookshop with four small apartments on top, and another part on a blue microbus he nicknamed the TARDIS. The rest of his fortune had been stuffed into a bank account for rainy days that never came, and his plans to travel the world were gradually abandoned.
He took another loud bite of his apple, and chewed.
He was about to turn the page when he heard someone clear their throat meaningfully.
The lanky man straightened his back and looked around, startled to find the young woman from earlier glaring at him from her table.
He took another bite of the large apple, annoyed that he'd been so rudely interrupted, and was about to return to his book when, much to his surprise, she stood up from her table and marched up to the counter with her arms crossed over her chest.
He stood up quickly, and cringed under her intense glare.
"Oi, chin boy, do you see those papers over there?"
She pointed at the cart back at her desk, and he nodded timidly, astonished that someone so small could to be so feisty. Hold on! Chin boy? There was nothing wrong with his chin!
"I need to have those papers graded by eight o'clock because after that there is no way I'm going to be able to get anything done at home, and your stupid chomping is really distracting. So when a woman coughs and glares at you, it means you're doing something wrong and you'd better stop or she'll throw something at you," she said huffily.
He closed his book and looked at her for a while, holding her burning gaze for about five seconds before dropping the look and sadly tossing his snack into a bin beneath the counter.
"Thank you," she said, her voice softer than before.
He watched her go back to her table and tried to focus on his book but kept sneaking glances at her between pages until eventually, he stopped trying to read altogether.
He found himself admiring how the fading sunlight caught on her hair and made parts of it look golden, and on how whenever she smiled at something on the paper she was grading, a small, perfect dimple would appear in her cheek.
Finally, two minutes to eight, she gathered her papers hastily and with the slightest of waves to him, left the shop.
He watched her go with a smile and read on until his assistants returned with a carful of books from the French convention.
"You alright Doctor, ya look a bit, well, cheerful," Jenny said, hopping out of the backseat, and not bothering to beat around the bush with one of her closest friends.
The Doctor shook his head, affectionately giving the young woman a hug, "Its nothing, Jenny. How'd it go for you three?"
A tall and haughty looking woman appeared from the passenger seat, "Quite well if I may say so myself. How are you Doctor?"
The Doctor wasn't deterred by her coolness, and stepped forward with outstretched arms to give her a hug.
Vastra bore it with grace, but pushed him away slightly when it became too tight.
A short, stout man stepped out of the car, and shook the Doctor's hand, "I'm pleased to report that the operation went according to plan sir."
The foursome entered the bookshop conversing about the events of the week, but the Doctor was distracted by the sight of a red satchel lying beneath a chair.
He bent down to retrieve it and an ID card on a lanyard fell out.
He brought the card close to his face, and his eyes widened.
Clara Oswald
Teacher
Grade 1
The satchel belonged to the woman who'd snapped at him earlier, and somehow the fact that he was going to see her again filled him with more happiness than any of his books had in a very long time.
A/N: And thus it begins. Please leave a review about anything you all think needs some work (I embrace constructive criticism), or if you liked it then just say a few words. Thank you for reading and hopefully I'll have the next chapter up sometime next week :)