fic: The Blue Box Man
Title: The Blue Box Man
Rating: PG
Pairing(s): Eleven and Amy
Summary: Since she was a little girl, she had heard fantastic, frightening, tragic tales of the Blue Box Man.
A/N: AU drabble sort of inspired by Howl's Moving Castle. I just might turn this into a chaptered fic, because I quite love the concept. c: Let me know if I should continue!
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The Blue Box Man sails through time and space. And, as you can imagine, he does this with his big blue box. Sometimes, when you look up at the sky at the right moment, if you’re lucky, you might catch a glimpse of this box sailing through the night, racing with the stars, or you might hear the whirring, grinding, grating purr of that bluest of blue box as it slips in and out of reality, the sound which denotes that the Blue Box Man has either gone or just arrived, though it’s usually the latter.
The Blue Box Man can save lives and worlds and galaxies with his brilliant mind alone, or he can obliterate empires and entire species with just a clever idea. He is merciful, and he is ruthless. He's a hero, and a villain, and a victim. He's a legend, and a fairytale, and a nightmare. The Blue Box Man isn't always called the Blue Box Man; he has many names (doctor, healer, caretaker, the oncoming storm), and twice as many faces.
But don't ever let him find you, or fancy you, or love you, because he'll steal your heart. For you see, the Blue Box Man has no heart, it was stolen from him by tin-canned demons years and years ago, so he steals the hearts of pretty girls and plucky boys, and he likes the bravest, purest ones the best. He takes them away, far away from the world they know and into a world beyond their tedious comprehension, so there's no way for them to go back, no way to escape. They are never heard from again.
The Blue Box Man is dangerous.
That is how the story goes, and that is how Amy Pond has always remembered it. Since she was a little girl, she had heard fantastic, frightening, tragic tales of the Blue Box Man. All the children of Leadworth have. But that's all they ever were: fairytales, stories that parents told their children at night before bedtime, in hopes that in the morning they might behave and be good little boys and girls-otherwise, their hearts would be stolen by the Blue Box Man. And they didn’t want that, oh no. At least, they weren’t supposed to.
No one really accounted for little Amelia Pond, who was an oddball and not quite like normal little girls. Amelia Pond was not afraid of the Blue Box Man, like she wasn’t afraid of ghosts and bogey men and creepy-crawly bugs. The scary stories her parents told her of the Blue Box Man only proved to fascinate her.
At the age of seven she had began spinning tales of her own, painting portraits and molding cardboard sculptures, creating this impossible fantasy of having met the Blue Box Man late one night while her parents were asleep, because she had prayed to Santa for the Blue Box Man and, naturally, Santa delivered.
She claimed he had crash-landed into their garden shed, and he didn’t like apples, or bacon, or beans (beans were evil), among other things. But he did like a combination of baked fish fingers and custard pudding. He wore a raggedy suit and smelled of soot, and smoke, and dust after rain-and also of chlorine, but Amelia casually explained to anyone who’d ask that it was due to his impromptu dip into the swimming pool. He had a Northern accent, and in that sharp, keen, breathy voice he told her that the pool was in a library, which was in the blue police box that was his home.
At age twelve she still hadn’t grown out of these fantastic fallacies, even insisting that they were true. At this point, her parents intervened, because they truly meant well, even if it meant they must break a child’s heart.
Little Amelia Pond went through four psychiatrists (and bit them all, three on the arm and one on the leg) before she finally accepted what everyone insisted to be true, and upon entering high school she never spoke of the Blue Box Man again.
She calls herself Amy now, and won’t allow anyone to call her Amelia, not even her parents. No one knows that she keeps all her paintings and papier-mâché sculptures of a raggedy man and a blue police box hidden away in her closet, and she tells herself that the only reason she keeps these mementos at all is because she had worked very hard on them, damn it, so why should she throw them away? It would be such a waste, because they were rather pretty works of art and, most importantly, they were hers, so they had priceless sentimental value.
She knew what the Blue Box Man would say to her if he could see her now, years later, when she’s nineteen, an adult for all intents and purposes, and still dreaming of his silly flying police box with a library and a swimming pool, and a swimming pool in the library.
“You humans are so nostalgic,” he would say, with a crooked, knowing smile and twinkling eyes of jade.
And so she shoves them far, far back into her closet and never looks at them again.
Until he returns.
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