Author's Note: Other than the 'I don't know the characters', this is a challenge in an interesting competition between my sister and I to write a Doctor Who story. Which doesn't matter, I suppose, but if you ever wanted to know how this story came about, that's how.

The TARDIS doors opened and the Doctor, looking rather ragged and with a good assortment of scratches on his face, stepped out into the Chiswick street. He was closely followed by Wilfred Mott, who looked perfectly fine. The only indication that anything was amiss was the look on Wilf's face, one of deep worry.

"Well," said the Doctor, glancing around. "Here we are. Home."

Wilf turned to the Doctor. "I'll see you again, right?"

The Doctor nodded. "I think I'll be seeing you again."

Wilf hesitated, sensing the Doctor wanted him to leave but unsure of whether he wanted to go or not. Whether he should go. "Are you sure you're alright?"

"Oh," the Doctor shrugged. "I'm always alright. You just go on, Wilf. Don't worry about me." He grinned. "I'm alive, after all."

"Right." Wilf nodded. "That's good, then. Well. I better see you around! None of that disappearing and never coming back."

The Doctor smiled, and if it was strained Wilf didn't comment. "Don't worry. I'll be seeing you."

Wilf nodded and walked away, back to his house. The Doctor turned and went back inside the TARDIS, closing the doors behind him.

Inside it was quiet. The silence became painfully obvious. The Doctor still didn't have a companion. Of course, he could have brought Wilf with him, but he needed a rest. He knew it. Falling from a few hundred feet through glass and landing on a marble floor had its consequences. He leaned against the center console.

He was lucky, he knew that. After the Master had revealed himself the Doctor was sure that he would die. Yet, when all was said and done he was on the floor, hurt but alive, and Wilf was rushing to him asking him if he was alright as he lay there in complete shock.

No one knocked four times.

Then a strange crackling had brought him out of his shock. The glass chamber just a few feet away had been flooded with dangerous radiation, and the Doctor and Wilf both felt extremely lucky that no one had been in there at the time.

Now, the Doctor had all the universe ahead of him. He wasn't sure how long his tenth life would last, but he had an uneasy feeling it was lasting longer than it should have.

Still, he had to go on. He decided to navigate the TARDIS into the time vortex, where he could just let it drift until he had relaxed and decided on a place to go.

That was the plan until the TARDIS jerked and threw him on the floor.

"Hey!" the Doctor yelled, but the only response was an explosion of sorts on the center console, and a few other explosive sounds. Sparks flew as the Doctor struggled to get up and fix the problem. The TARDIS jerked again, sending him flying.

"What?" He cried, and another explosion ripped through the ship. The situation reminded him of the time the TARDIS had fallen into a parallel universe by mistake, and had died as a result. He hoped this wasn't what was happening, but as the TARDIS experienced another explosion his confidence wavered.

Another period of instability threw the Doctor towards the doors, which opened and the Doctor, hanging for life on one of the railings, saw the night skyline of London.

"You have got to be kidding me!" he yelled. "We are not crashing into London!"

Almost as if in response, the TARDIS dropped a few feet, bringing the open doors dangerously close to the glass surface of the Swiss Re building. Then the ship swung around, tossing the Doctor back towards the center and slamming the doors shut.

The Doctor once again attempted to try bring some control to his ship, but a strange feeling in his stomach told him that he was loosing altitude at an extremely fast rate and that if he didn't do something immediately he would-

Crash. So hard that he was thrown from the center console into another room of the TARDIS, as the ship tilted on its side, and somehow managed to find himself buried among a ton of heavy books in his library.

There was silence.

"Oh." The Doctor gingerly stood, and saw that the entrance to his library was above him. He'd have to climb, and then find some sort of way to get up to the door and out. And then find another way to straighten out his ship.

He was dead tired.

Still, he used the shelves for foothold and got himself as far as the console room, which had nothing to hold on to. He lifted the nearest grating on the floor and pulled out a rather handy gadget, a grappling hook. "I haven't had to use this in ages," he told himself.

With a snap of his fingers (he was extremely grateful that he's figured out the TARDIS would respond to finger snaps before this point) the doors opened, and he faced a clear night's sky. The Doctor threw the grappling hook so that it landed outside the TARDIS, and used the rope to climb out. He had landed on the ground and was straightening out his somewhat raggedy suit before he noticed that someone was watching him.

"Oh. Hello." The person in question was a small ginger girl, dressed in her nightgown and staring at him like he'd grown two heads.

"Hi," she said warily. "Who are you?"

"I'm the Doctor. And I seem to have crashed in your back yard, which was a complete accident, believe me. Although it's better than crashing into London, I suppose. At least I didn't hit the house. I didn't hit it, right?"

The girl shook her head, still looking confused.

The Doctor cleared his throat. "Right. I'm talking too much. You don't want to hear that, I can tell. So. Right. Who are you?"

"My name's Amelia Pond."

"Lovely name, Amelia. I knew an Amelia once but she disappeared during a flight across the Pacific ocean. She was very nice. Shame about the disappearance. A lot of people never got over that." The Doctor took a deep breath and saw that Amelia was staring at him. "Right. Talking too much."

"Have you got a head injury or something?" Amelia asked. "You're talking about Amelia Earhart."

"Yes." The Doctor looked around and suddenly snapped his fingers. "We must be in Scotland, right? I love Scotland! You've got a Scottish accent. And it must be fairly late in the 20th century, or early in the 21st century, if I'm not mistaken, and I'm usually not."

"We're not in Scotland," Amelia told him. "My parents made me move here and it's complete rubbish."

"Oh." The Doctor was slightly disappointed. "Where is 'here'?"

"Leadworth, England."

"Oh." The Doctor sighed, feeling rather tired. A fall and then a crash. He needed sleep. Or at the very least something to eat. He eyed the house in front of him. "Where are your parents?"

"I live with my aunt," Amelia said. "She's not here right now." She frowned. "Why are you here?"

"I wish I could tell you," the Doctor said, "but as far as I know I just crashed."

"Do you think you could...?" Amelia trailed off.

The Doctor frowned. "What?" Amelia remained silent. "No, go on, tell me. You can trust me."

Amelia shrugged. "It's nothing. Just...I was wondering if you could fix the crack in my room?"

The Doctor thought it was a strange request, but he nodded. "I can." He took a deep breath. "I just need to...sit for a few minutes. And maybe have something to eat. Have you got bananas? I love a good banana."

Five minutes and a few disheveled cupboards later, the Doctor sat at Amelia Pond's kitchen table happily munching away on a banana. Amelia watched him and frowned. "You're strange,"

"Strange because I'm eating a banana?" the Doctor asked.

"No. You talk too much."

"That's not strange. Well, unless all the people you know don't talk at all. Then it's strange, but for you. Not for me."

Amelia shrugged.

The Doctor leaned forward. "Why're you so afraid of this crack, anyway?"

"I'm not," Amelia said. " I told you, it's nothing."

"I know when people are lying," the Doctor told her. "I've done a lot of it myself. You can tell me all you want that this crack is nothing but I can see the fear in your eyes. You wouldn't let a strange man who walked out of a blue box come into your house to look at nothing. So, come on." The Doctor jumped up, somewhat refreshed by his snack. "Let's go see the crack."

Amelia led him up the stairs and into one of the rooms. The Doctor looked around. It was a little girl's room, with a small bed and blue walls and a lamp lit on one of the dressers. And a crack on the wall directly facing the door.

The Doctor walked over and began to examine it, putting on his glasses. Not that he needed them, but they did tend to put him in the right frame of mind for concentration. He ran his fingers along the crack, and then took out his sonic screwdriver to scan it.

"What is it?" Amelia asked, still standing by the door.

"Well," the Doctor said, "for starters, it shouldn't be here. Amelia Pond," he fixed her with a grave stare, "you were right to call me."

"Why?" Amelia asked.

The Doctor found himself suddenly distracted, however, by a sound. He pressed his ear against the wall while asking, "Is it...talking?" He listened and frowned. "I hear something."

"Sometimes I hear voices through the crack," Amelia told him. "They say thing like 'silence will fall'."

The Doctor listened.

On the other side of the crack he could hear a conversation. A man, saying "You know when grown-ups tell you everything's going to be fine and you think they're probably lying to make you feel better?"

And then, to his complete shock, he heard Amelia's voice, even though Amelia was still in the room and not talking. The other Amelia said, "Yes."

The man replied, "Everything's going to be fine."

The Doctor shook his head and pulled away from the wall, unsure of how to take this. That 'yes', that was Amelia, but the man's voice was unrecognizable. He wondered why Amelia would be on the other side of the crack, especially a crack such as this.

"No," the Doctor muttered. "That's not what they're saying to me." The Doctor moved to stand next to Amelia, not taking his eyes off the crack. "That crack shouldn't be here. It shouldn't even exist. That isn't just a crack in your wall. It's much worse than that. It's the worst thing a crack can be. It's a crack in the universe. Which is fascinating, but it's also a ton of trouble. A whole universe-full of trouble."

"What?" Amelia asked, not taking her eyes off the crack as well.

"The crack represents two points in time and space that shouldn't have touched. Ever. It can't be painted over or fixed because its universal. The real question is, what caused it? Cracks like that are caused by explosions, but that had to be a huge explosion. But what exploded? I have to think!"

"How're you gonna find out what caused it?" Amelia asked.

"Easy," the Doctor told her. "I'll open it."

"What!"

"Don't worry," the Doctor said, fiddling with the settings on his sonic screwdriver. "Everything will be fine." The moment the words left his mouth he had a terrible feeling of foreboding. Hadn't he just heard those words from the other side of the crack?

Amelia fixed him with a suspicious look. "Are you lying to me?"

The Doctor nodded. "But isn't that exciting, not knowing what's going to happen?" One look at her face told him that it probably wasn't that exciting, for her. Still, he had to appear calm. He raised the sonic screwdriver and pressed down, pointing at the crack.

For a moment nothing happened, and the Doctor wondered whether he had misjudged the importance of the crack. And then it started to open, a bright light filling the gap between the two walls. A strange rushing sound filled the air and the Doctor felt, more than he'd ever felt before, that time was wrong.

As a Time Lord, the Doctor always had a sense of time, of its fixed points and places where it was in flu and could be rewritten. He could tell when seconds and minutes and hours were passing more accurately than the world's best watch.

But this was nothing like anything he had ever experienced.

The time suddenly felt so wrong that it was painful, and caused him to fall. He'd never felt such displacement in the universe before. Amelia yelled something but he couldn't hear her. The sonic screwdriver lay abandoned on the floor, and the crack began to close, but not before something bright and smoking flew out of it and landed in the Doctor's lap.

The Doctor stared at the object before picking it up in his hands and turning it over. His stomach jumped into his throat.

It was a charred piece of the TARDIS.

"No," he whispered, turning the piece over and over in his hands. "No, no, no, no."

"Doctor!"

The Doctor's head snapped up. Amelia was staring at him. Beyond her, the crack on the wall had closed. He looked from her to the piece of TARDIS in his hands and pocketed it. "Sorry about that," he told her. "Just...was a bit shocked. And tired. That's all."

"What was in your hands?" Amelia asked, still unconvinced that everything was fine.

"Nothing," the Doctor said. "Just shrapnel from an explosion. Now-"

He was cut off by the sound of a deep bell.

"What was that?" Amelia asked.

"The cloister bell!" the Doctor jumped up. "My ship, it has this bell and it rings when something's wrong. I need to get back!" He ran out of the room and Amelia followed as fast as her short legs could carry her.

By the time Amelia made it outside the Doctor already had reached his ship. She skidded to a halt just beside him. "What now?"

"My ship's tired of being crashed," the Doctor said. "She wants to be tested out to see if she works. And there's a terrible danger, hence the cloister bell. I've got to go."

"Don't."

Both the Doctor and Amelia looked at each other, slightly shocked by her sudden request.

"I'll be back in five minutes," the Doctor told her. "I just have to do this really quick test and perhaps figure out the danger but then I'll be back. I promise."

"People say that all the time," Amelia protested.

The Doctor raised an eyebrow. "I'm not people," he said. "I'm the Doctor. You can trust me."

"Wait," Amelia started, but the Doctor didn't have time. He merely repeated "Five minutes" and jumped back into his ship.

Amelia watched in awe as the blue box dematerialized. Then she ran back inside to pack her clothes into a small suitcase, before coming out to wait.

Five minutes later nothing happened.

Amelia Pond waited for a long time.