Chapter Text
In all actuality, the Doctor was poised over the edge of the settee and Glenda was lying placidly under his hands. If you were to come upon them then you would find two people who curiously resembled wax statues. You'd swear that they weren’t real, only there was a slight rise and fall to their chests, a certain sponginess to their skin, that betrayed life.
Their minds, however, were both tucked away (in theory, if not in physical reality, to the point where the distinction did not signify) inside Glenda’s consciousness. It was another of the Doctor’s calculated risks. He would have never even considered engaging in mind-walking in any other environment than the TARDIS. The arrangement left both participants too vulnerable. Anyone-- anyone could take advantage of their physical pliability and frailty. One slip of the knife across the jugular. A poison dart to your thigh. The mind-walkers might not become aware until it was too late. It didn’t even have to be a somebody. Freak accidents had been known to happen on the physical plane that could seriously endanger people without any of their defensive reflexes intact. If there were a flood, a house fire, a hurricane--they might not make it through alive.
This was why a fanatical level of control over your environment was an absolute requirement for the Doctor. What better place than the TARDIS, a completely automated and sentient vessel that not only understood her own parts, pieces and mechanisms, but also those of her primary inhabitants? Every compartment was temperature controlled and those aboard breathed purified air that had none of the suffocating staleness of recycled air. (The Doctor was just being a crotchety old man when he'd complained that Glenda's cigarette smoke could cause the ship to explode. Even without the extra upward ventilation the old girl had initiated, in such a small quantity, the fumes would have been effortlessly filtered out of the cabin.) It also helped that while inside the TARDIS one was in another dimension entirely. The only way in or out was through the front door, and the lock on that door had withstood a legion of Daleks, Cybermen and the blitzkrieg, among other things. The Doctor and Glenda were entirely safe. You could take their security to the bank.
In the console room a single red light on the control panel began blinking insistently.
He shouldn't have been surprised, the Doctor thought as he squeezed himself through the sliding glass door that represented the entrée into his friend's mind. He did not mind-walk very often, but when he did he couldn't help but be curious as to what shape the mental construct of his subject would take on. It was usually an unconscious effort on the other person's part and one that generally reflected the personality. Sometimes he'd find himself on a beach, his subject reclining on a chaise, frou-frou drink in hand. Once he'd been admitted onto a war room in the middle of a battlefield. That person's mind had been diseased with doubt and self-recrimination and it had been one of his most heartbreaking journeys.
Glenda was frightened, yes, and her home was the place she felt most secure, but she also seemed a solid sort of woman who knew the limits of what she could handle. It was here in this humble house that she had built her life and it was here that she felt most confident to tackle whatever was sealed away in the recesses of her memories. Bravo, Glenda.
Glenda watched nervously as the Doctor entered and then pushed the glass door back to its closed position. Without thinking about it she raised a finger and with a downward flicking motion engaged the lock. It sailed home with a click just as the Doctor was beginning to turn back to her. He checked behind him and then raised an eyebrow at her in question.
She shrugged. "Force of habit." Then she sniggered without mirth. "Why am I not questioning any of this?" She waved an arm out and the lights came on and the television switched off. "How did I know I could do that? How are we here, in my house? Or rather, why are we here in what is most definitely not my house?"
The Doctor came around to the front of the couch and sat beside her. She watched as he took her hand in his. "It's okay. You're safe." Somehow he had divined what was really bothering. She was afraid. Too much was happening too quickly. Part of her instinctively knew that all of this was very real, at least as far as her senses could tell. The other part knew that things like this just couldn't happen . The cognitive dissonance was overwhelming. Of course what people don't understand is generally feared at first.
Glenda sat up straighter and reclaimed her hand. She was attempting to gather herself and while the Doctor's hand had comforted her she needed to focus. She scanned the familiarly alien surroundings of her home. That was the only way she could think of to describe what she was seeing. Everything from her actual house was there. The comfortably worn beige couch they sat on still bore the faint remnants of a wine stain on the arm rest. She had spent hours scrubbing at that stain with a boar hair brush and a bottle of spot remover. She'd had no idea at the time that the brush would only rub the stain even more firmly into the fabric. In front of her was the walnut coffee table her father had made for her, in honor of the purchase of this very house. The wood had come from the walnut trees in the backyard of her parents' house, where she had grown up. Her grade book and a stack of student writing assignments lay on top waiting to be corrected, their marks recorded.
Looking around her everything was right and as it should be but just a shade or two off. If she concentrated on the wine stain she could almost swear that the merlot border didn't stay exactly stationary, like when you watch a slow-moving progress bar on your computer. You can't be sure, but you think that the bar is creeping across the screen, so you stare and you stare, alternately thinking that yes, it moved! but in the next instant you're convinced that it hasn't budged a micrometer. And when she glanced at the stack of her students' paper she knew that Aiden Cooper's wasn't there because he'd never turned it in, claiming that he'd left it on the bus, and that Tabitha O'Connell's was in great need of spelling and punctuation correction, but that in general, her thesis and supporting arguments were very well thought out. It didn't seem to matter that Tabitha's paper had been written five years ago and that Aiden's had been due last week.
"Okay," she said, attempting to pull herself out of areas of thought that she couldn't explain. "I know that we aren't in my house. We're in my mind. A moment ago we were in the TARDIS."
"Technically, we still are," he said in a gentle tone. Glenda felt, but didn't see him shift his weight on the cushion. She was staring at the carpet below her bare feet. Where her toes scrunched through the fibers little gold treads trailed after. "Do you remember why we're here?"
A strangled laugh escaped Glenda's lips. She felt the Doctor's hand hovering over her shoulder, no doubt wanting to reassure her, but she didn't want to be touched just now so she stood and started walking out of the living room and towards the kitchen. “You said that you needed to find something in here, but I've never been clear on what that is exactly."
"I'm not entirely sure, either," he admitted, following behind her, his footsteps tapping across the linoleum. "I think we'll know when we see it."
She went to the sink and tried the faucet. There was the gold again at her fingertips, but water did start splashing into the stainless steel basin before it washed down the drain. She reached for the nearest cupboard and retrieved a glass from inside. She decided to ignore her gold fingerprints for the time being as she held the glass under the tap to let it fill with water and then lifted the cup to her mouth. She half expected not to be able to do this but the water felt cool and wet as it passed over her lips and down her throat. She did not look at him until after she had drained the glass and laid it down in the sink. Then she forced herself to look directly into his worried eyes.
"We better get going, then."
He smiled, and it lit up his eyes. She smiled back.
They excited her kitchen, with its slightly peeling linoleum tiles and went back into her carpeted living room. Now that the initial crisis of the situation had passed the Doctor took a moment to more fully inspect his surroundings. Both the living room and kitchen-cum-dining room was sunk lower than the front side of the house, which could be gotten to by going up two room-width wooden stairs. Those stairs led to a landing. On the left side of the landing was the front door. He could imagine her coming home, after a busy day teaching thirteen year olds the difference between alliteration and Thailand (the Doctor had no real grasp on what an American 21st century English teachers taught), and tossing her keys in the glass bowl on that sideboard in the middle of the landing before hanging her coat and bag up on that coat rack next to it. She'd then stop to look in the large mirror on the wall over the sideboard and sweep her ever-escaping hair back behind her ears again...Then perhaps she’d cross to the other side and look up the stairwell, trying to decide whether or not she should change into her pajamas before fixing herself dinner.
“Um, Doctor?”
The Doctor looked around, expecting to see Glenda standing right beside him, but she wasn't. And come to think of it, he wasn't where he expected to be, either. He was at the foot of her stairs, with one hand on the railing and his opposite foot on the bottom-most step, as if he were the one who was trying to decide if he should go up and put on his PJ’s. He shook his head. “Sorry, got away from myself, I think.”
“You do realize,” she said, sounding a bit strained from her unmoving position in front of the couch, “that you just went through my daily homecoming ritual?”
Had he? He patted his coat pockets, absently. It would appear that he had, if her face was anything to go on. She looked pinched and maybe even a little offended. He must have gotten caught up in one of her habit loops and run with it without noticing. Blimey, this was awkward. “Blimey, that's awkward,” he said as he went back to her side,straightening his bow tie before sniffing.
“What the hell was that?” She gestured his progress from her front door to the steps with a wave of her arm.
He sniffed again and answered without looking at her, choosing instead to inspect the spackle on her ceiling. He thought he could just make out the constellation of Cassiopeia. “That was nothing. I must have just picked up on one of your little rituals.”
She snorted. “Guess you did.” The Doctor dared a glance down at her and found that she was smiling, just a tiny bit.
Time to move on swiftly, and with a plan of action. “Right,” he began with a clap and a rub of his hands. “First things should probably go first.”
Glenda looked around her mind-house, as if expecting to see a neon-flashing light pointing to a specific place on her floor plan. “And what's the first thing?” she asked, hesitantly.