The Moon & The President's Daughter Chapter 1, a doctor who fanfic

The Moon and the President's Daughter

There is a story that every child among the Shobogans hears before they can even talk. The story of their hero, their friend - the Doctor. It's the story of the night he stole the moon and the President's daughter.

Breaking into the President's garden started out as a bet, as one of those silly dares Missy usually had in mind for him. The Doctor never expected to get caught - by the President's daughter.

Chapter 1

The night was warm, the air still sticky with the receding heat of Gallifrey's twin suns that were slowly disappearing behind the horizon, yet there was another light in the sky, one they had seen several nights in a row now and the Doctor looked up and watched it going around the capital in circles like it had done the night before and the one before that. He sighed audibly.

"It's too damn hot, isn't it?" Missy asked next to him.

He nodded in agreement. They had been walking in silence for a long while, not really paying much attention to where they had wandered off and the Doctor realized that somehow they had ended up in the part of the city usually reserved for the most wealthy and the most powerful and somehow he thought there was a certain irony to it. They were neither powerful nor wealthy and they had no intention to be. What they wanted to be, the Doctor couldn't quite say.

"She's beautiful, isn't she?" he asked his best friend and nodded towards the bright light above the Citadel. Somehow, whenever he looked at it, the Doctor felt a sense of longing or even envy.

"It's broken," Missy scoffed dismissively. "It's just a damaged TARDIS that keeps escaping the shop. I'm saying they should burn it. There's really no point in trying to fix it if it just keeps flying off."

The Doctor uttered a heavy sigh. "She wants to see the universe, I think," he replied hesitantly and then turned his head to look at Missy. "Did you know the Shobogans call her Gallifrey's third moon?"

He yelped when a sudden smack hit him across the head. "If you believe that, you're just as deranged as the Shobogans. Gallifrey has no third moon."

"Deranged?" The Doctor gawked at her. "You're the one that's deranged. You picked a drunken fight with six of them just last week!"

"A fight I won," Missy pointed out.

"You were lucky they didn't kill you."

When his friend failed to respond, the Doctor continued his stride along the red streets, for the first time realising just how sweet the air smelled around here. This part of town was filled with gardens full of flowers and fruit, yet they never saw any of them. Their owners had hidden them away behind high stone walls and iron gates to keep out the Shobogans that sometimes wandered into the capital, stealing what they could get their hands on. Not that the Doctor blamed them. No, quite the contrary. He had sympathy for them.

Once again his eyes fell on the light of the floating TARDIS above them and when he held his breath, the Doctor thought he could hear the sounds she made. It was a wheezing, groaning noise and somehow it tugged at his hearts. It was as if she was beckoning him to fly away and never come back.

"Remember that night?" he asked after a long moment of contemplation. Missy usually thought it was silly when he talked like this, but right now he just had to know. There was no other way to get these thoughts out of his head. "That night we stared into the Untempered Schism and stayed up all night, watching the stars?"

His friend hesitated.

"Well?"

"Yes," Missy replied and her annoyance was showing in her voice. "Of course I remember. We said we would visit every single one of them."

The Doctor kicked a stone with the tip of his shoe and it startled one of the stray cats, causing it to scale the nearest wall and disappear in the garden behind it.

"Do you still think about it?" he wanted to know. "About visiting the stars?"

"It was a childhood dream, Doctor," Missy responded harshly. "A nice one, I give you that."

"Yes, but doesn't it bother you that we have all these TARDISes and we never use them? Imagine all the places you could see," he said enthusiastically and in his mind the Doctor was already elsewhere, on a planet far away or in the future, having a look at what Gallifrey would be like in 2000 years. "The possibilities are endless! Don't you hate being stuck here? Don't you ever wish you could have an adventure?"

To his surprise, Missy suddenly came to a halt and turned to look at the wall over which the cat had disappeared only a few moments ago. He stopped next to her to see what the matter was, but spotted nothing out of the ordinary. It was a palace like many others around here, enclosed by a massive brick wall.

"Do you know who lives here?" Missy asked him, nodding towards the extravagant building.

The Doctor shook his head. "Does it matter? Probably someone very rich, judging by the big house."

His friend gave him a nudge. "It's the President's mansion," she explained and there was a hint of curiosity in her voice.

"So?" he cocked an eyebrow at her, not really sure why she was suddenly so interested in where the President of Gallifrey lived.

The look that appeared on Missy's face was one the Doctor was all too familiar with, that mischievous grin he always noticed when she had one of her wicked ideas and he knew that whatever came next, he probably wouldn't like it. The Doctor wasn't someone to always follow the rules, quite the contrary, but Missy's idea of mischief often went too far for his liking. It was the same look he had seen before she had picked a fight with six Shobogans, all of them bigger and stronger than her. Their wits had been the only thing to save them.

"You said you wanted an adventure," Missy said in a sing-song voice and nodded towards the wall. "I'm having a sudden craving for apples."

The big apple tree in the President's garden hadn't slipped his notice and the Doctor turned his head, glowering at his friend. "You can't be serious."

In response, Missy winked at him. "Bet you're too much of a coward to break into the President's garden and steal a fruit."

"You're mad."

"Oh, come on," she prompted him gleefully, "the Council will still be in session."

"The President will have servants," the Doctor argued. The last thing he needed was to get caught breaking into the Lord President's estate. They were already keeping an eye on him because of their suspicion that he was occasionally breaking out of the Citadel to visit the Shobogans. Not that they were wrong.

Yet Missy shoved him further towards the wall. "They will have better things to do than to attend to the garden at this time of day. Come on. Do it!"

The Doctor growled at his friend and yet his gaze wandered towards the big apple tree behind the wall once more and for a brief moment, he wondered what would happen if he just did it. There was hardly anything that could go wrong, after all. The President was probably really still in the High Council chambers and the setting suns were making it harder to be spotted. His fingers tingled at the thought of climbing up that brick wall and stealing some of the Lord President's own fruits.

"Come on, coward," she teased him once again, but something about the way Missy looked at him told the Doctor that she already knew he had given in.

"Shut up and give me a boost," he replied gruffly.

The boost wasn't actually necessary, the Doctor just didn't want to do all the heavy lifting on his own as he started to climb up the wall. There were cracks between the stones big enough to find a foothold and his arms did the rest in pulling him up until he could catch a glimpse of the garden. Out of sheer surprise, the Doctor almost slipped when he spotted the paradise that lay behind the wall and he clung a little more tightly to the stones to get a proper look.

Somehow the property seemed so much bigger on the inside and he couldn't help but gasp at the red grass still glowing in the waning sunlight. There were trees and flowers and beautiful laid out paths leading up to a lake. What he saw behind that, the Doctor could only describe as a small forest.

"Get on with it!" Missy's hushed voice came from below. "I think I can hear guards approaching."

With a sigh, the Doctor moved on and stretched his arm, but there was still a short distance between his hand and the first apple. He moved his foot, trying to find another crack in the wall, but in an attempt to reach for the fruit, his foot suddenly slipped as the stone beneath it gave way.

"Doctor!"

He tried to regain his balance, leaning forward, but he had greatly misjudged his own weight and a second later, the Doctor felt himself falling.

"Ow!" he growled as he landed in the grass with a loud thud. Before he sat up, the Doctor took a moment to assess his injuries, but found nothing apart from a few bruises and a battered ego. Slowly, he scrambled back to his feet and brushed the dust off his velvet jacket when suddenly he became aware of a figure standing close by. The Doctor raised his head.

In the middle of the President's garden, right in front of him, stood a young woman. She was dressed in the scarlet and orange colours of the Prydonian Chapter, wrapped in a long cloak that veiled her figure save for her face. The woman looked at him out of insanely big, dark eyes and for a moment he felt like he couldn't even move. She was the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on on the entire planet.

The Doctor swallowed hard. "Please tell me you didn't see that."

She opened her mouth and for a moment the Doctor feared she would call for help, raise an alarm, but whatever she had intended to say, her words were cut off by someone else.

"Clara?!"

The blood froze in his veins when he recognized the Lord President's voice and he threw the woman a pleading glance while he slowly backed off towards the wall.

The woman named Clara looked from the house back to him and any moment now she would call for the President or the guards and the Doctor would be arrested and spend the rest of this regeneration in a cell deep beneath the Citadel.

"Go," Clara mouthed towards him before she spun around on her heels and rushed back to the house.

The Doctor watched her for a moment longer, hardly able to believe his luck, but when he finally came back to his senses, he plucked an apple from the tree, slid it into his pocket and climbed the wall. Just a minute later, he was back on the street, safe.