Fic: The Courage to Explore
Title: The Courage to Explore
Author: Tardisblue
Characters: The Doctor
Genre:Character Study
Rating: G
Summary: The Doctor remembers being a young boy and escaping his classroom at the Academy. Fourth in the series “A Different Kind of Adventure”; Can be read as stand-alone.
Words: 472
Published: October 7, 2008
Disclaimer: The BBC owns everything Doctor Who.
Note: A Thank-you goes out to Murtal123 for her Brit-picking advice!
Part I: A Different Kind of Adventure
Part II: The Courage to Try
Part III: The Courage to Continue
“We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.”
-John Hope Franklin
‘Ah. Well. I found the teaching method rather stuffy, not to mention the classrooms were rather stuffy and closed in and I much rather like seeing the sky where you can actually breathe and not feel so trapped…and…well. I couldn’t sit still,” the Doctor admitted with a sheepish grin…’
-The Doctor, The Courage to Continue
He raced out, grinning as he snuck a peek over his shoulder at the purple smoke emitting from his classroom. It had been a wonderful explosion! Of course, it hadn’t been a dangerous one (he never wanted to hurt anyone), nor was it particularly messy (he learned his lesson the last time, spending three hours cleaning up masses of sticky blue goo), but it was just enough to get him out of his classroom relatively unnoticed.
It wasn’t that he disliked learning. On the contrary, he absolutely thrived on it, encountering everything with curiosity and enthusiasm. He just didn’t particularly enjoy sitting still in a quiet, stuffy classroom while a rather over pompous professor lectured, telling him how to think and what to think and what the universe was like and how he should see it. He wanted to be out there! He wanted to explore it, to experience it all. To see-it-feel it-touch-it-taste-it-smell-it-hear-it himself! How was he ever going to know otherwise?
Turning left, he darted into the toilets. The fastest way out was through the main doors, but if he went that way, he would have to pass by the headmaster’s offices, the ever curious secretaries and the ceremonial guards in their brocaded crimson robes. If he went through the other way, he was bound to run into other professors or pretentious prefects who would only be overjoyed to turn him in. The toilet was the best way to go.
Reaching up, he half scampered, half pulled himself up to the window ledge and pushed the window open. After poking his head out to make sure his escape route was clear, he wiggled himself through the opening, taking care not to bump his head.
He was free!
He got to his feet, dusted himself off and grinned while taking in a deep breath, savouring the feeling of the fresh, cool morning air. Without a second glance back at the academy, he began to run across the dewy, neatly trimmed crimson grass (also making sure to run through the neat piles of crisp silver leaves, scattering them in his wake as a groundskeeper shouted and shook his fist at the small, laughing, carefree boy), his eyes to the burnt orange sky, shining with the excitement that only the spirit of adventure could bring forth.