"Start talking Mr. Chesterton." the Brigadier said after we'd snuck out the back in order to avoid the press.

"Back in 1963 Barbara and I were ordinary teachers at Coal Hill, and then one evening we decided to poke our noses into the business of a student of ours, one Susan Foreman. It turned out that Susan was an alien, and her grandfather was a paranoid old bastard who would rather kidnap us than risk us going to the authorities. Of course, Susan's threat to leave him and remain in the sixties may have played a large role in the kidnapping considering the fact that the Doctor hadn't made any actual moves to do anything to us until she did so." he started, remembering the incident and how the old man hadn't made any moves towards departing from their era until Susan had threatened to up and leave him.

Ironic really, considering the fact that it ended up being the Doctor who had left Susan behind in the end...Before Susan had threatened to leave, it had looked like he and Barbara might've been able to talk the Doctor into opening the door and letting them go despite the nasty trick he'd pulled electrifying the console.

"Kidnapping?!" the Brigadier exclaimed, yanking him out of his thoughts on what had been and what might've been.

"Admittedly, we did barge into his TARDIS uninvited, and he swore he quit kidnapping people the last time we saw him." he replied, knowing how bad that sounded. Admittedly, it had been a bad situation overall, and it could be argued by some that he and Barbara had been suffering from some sort of capture-bonding rather than true affection for the Doctor, but their journey had eventually ended and he and Barbara had gone home alive and whole despite the deadly peril they'd been in while they'd been away.

Admittedly a good portion of that peril had been because the Doctor hadn't known how to pilot his TARDIS, and hadn't known when to butt out of things that weren't his business, though he and Barbara had been guilty of the same on a couple of occasions. Almost everywhere they'd gone, one or more of them had ended up almost dying. He'd been sentenced to death, forced into gladiatorial combat, and sold into slavery. He'd been stabbed, shot at, and nearly ended up as a museum exhibit. Any number of horrific fates could've been his, and he'd only survived most of them by the skin of his teeth.

True, he'd seen some amazing things that no other human had or would ever lay their eyes on, done things that no other man would have the privilege of doing, but he'd had no say in it. He'd had little choice in the matter. If he had been given a choice, there was a possibility that he might've said yes, but he would never know if that was so.

"Kidnapping?!" the Brigadier exclaimed again, apparently stuck on that point.

"Admittedly, if what he told me shortly before my and Barbara's wedding was true, he was rather young at the time, and from a species that considered themselves to be the most superior in the universe. It was understandable that he didn't originally see taking us as all that much worse than someone driving off with a perfectly healthy chipmunk that had somehow ended up in their car, which is wrong in and of itself." he said.

"So he just..." the Brigadier started.

"Shut the doors and flew off with us, dragging us into more trouble than most people see in ten lifetimes before we commandeered a Dalek time-travel device and made our way back to our home and as close to our time as we could get, after which we ended up running into a much older version of the Doctor during an incident with the Tribe of Gum and some psychic metal." he finished. "After us, he started actually asking before flying off with someone new on board."

"You seem remarkably calm about it all." the Brigadier said, still stunned by the revelation, apparently having met an older and wiser and kinder Doctor prior to this incident.

"There's nothing that can be done about it now. I've had years to recover, and considering the fact that it was my and Barbara's kidnapping that had kept the Doctor from continuing to treat us like mildly interesting animals and tempered him to the point where he became a decent individual, the price was worth paying considering the possible consequences had it not happened and the old man continued on as he had been before he met us." he replied.

"The possible consequences?" the Brigadier said.

"The Doctor I first met would likely have let the world burn during the first invasion he ran across rather than helped out. He was actually fully willing to leave Barbara to the Daleks at one point." he replied honestly, remembering how the Doctor had been in the beginning, and how he had been willing to leave an injured man behind to die in order to save his own skin. Actually, the Doctor had nearly killed the man himself earlier that evening and would've if he hadn't stopped him.

"There seems to be a great deal about the Doctor that I don't know." the Brigadier said with a slight grimace.

"True, but you should keep the fact that he's changed since I first knew him and the fact that he's not a threat in mind when you deal with him. He's still the Doctor you knew, there's just more to his history than you'd known about. Barbara and I have mostly forgiven him, and if it weren't for him, it's possible that we wouldn't have married and had our son Johnny and Vicki would quite likely have continued living with a murderer until she became one of his victims." he said, idly wondering what the Doctor had been like when the Brigadier had encountered him. He'd apparently made quite an impression on the man, considering the fact that there had been concern in the Brigadier's eyes when they'd raced over to the hospital to see him earlier.

"I see..." the Brigadier finally said, as he turned to look out the window, not really looking at anything as he lost himself in his thoughts.

"The Doctor is a good man." he said as the radio crackled to life and the driver answered it. "The fact that he was a spoiled brat from an advanced society who sees us as primitives doesn't change that."