Disclaimer: I own neither Doctor Who, nor Once Upon A Time, I'm just borrowing them for fun.

The Doctor finds himself accidentally landing in Storybrooke at random intervals.

Sometimes it's a few centuries before he gets there again, sometimes just a couple of years; never deliberately, however. He just can't figure out how to get there on purpose – not that he really wants to, mind. There's something just slightly wrong with the town, that he can never quite put his finger on.

Back when he was younger, he positively hated it because for a portion of its existence, Time was frozen there.

It was an absolutely horrid sensation. Unnatural. Positively distasteful. Potentially catastrophic, too – but since the parenthesis was only 28 years long (relatively speaking) and appeared to have resolved itself without any outside intervention, he accepted to leave it well enough alone.

Eventually.

It still gives him the creeps whenever he doesn't land outside of those frozen years.

Then there's the fact that it keeps blinking in and out of existence randomly.

Not as interesting an occurrence as it sounds – mostly, it's irritating. In a getting-a-headache-when-you-think-of-it way. Besides, it's quite stable on the whole. No point wasting energies fretting over it; and who could blame him if he's disinclined to investigate further? Really, the place is dull. As if all joy has been leached from it, but not replaced by the usual anger or hatred or whatnot. Just boredom. Especially during the frozen years.

It becomes marginally better when time resumes, but not by much.

For all that he can never figure out the place, however, he keeps finding himself there without rhyme or reason.

He can never understand why the Tardis would take him there. Nothing ever seems to happen – no alien invasions (he'd checked, repeatedly), no nefarious plots (regardless of that smart kid's claims that his mother is an Evil Queen), not even a sad lack of bananas that he would have to remedy (Granny's banana pancakes are simply divine, the one bright point of the boring, boring town).

The oddest thing is that his companions always seem to love it.

Why, he could not fathom.

"It felt good," most of them say afterwards (although what could be good in such a dull place, the Time Lord couldn't begin to guess).

The Doctor has learned to take it in stride.

After all, the day every secret of the Universe is revealed to him, he would just have to give up entirely!

(Oh, who is he kidding? The mystery eats at him and will continue to do so until he gets to the bottom of it.)

His personal (very low) opinion of the odd town doesn't seem to matter any, in any case. The Tardis keeps bringing him there whenever it pleases her – and really, isn't that just typical?