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1.
There’s a noise. A series of noises. Information, gradually coalescing - this is why the Doctor hates sleeping, it takes so long to come back into the world. He peels his face off the desk, straightens slowly, staring blearily down at his notebook. Pries open a space in his head for the processing of whatever is happening.
“Is that bongos?” he asks whoever might be around. Sleep-hoarse and too quiet. He clears his throat, tries again, hitting a proper shout just as the music cuts out: “I’m not afraid of bongos!”
“Good to know,” Clara says. Of course Clara was here to witness that. She closes the door delicately behind her and scrunches her face up, the squinty-thing she does whenever she thinks he’s being embarrassing.
There was a context, he means to say. I was accosted. It comes out as “Right, so, ah.” An echo of bongos where words once were. This is why he doesn’t sleep.
She ruffles his hair and drops a coffee (extra sweet, extra black, slightly burnt) in front of him. “You’ve got,” she says, pointing at her mouth.
“I’ve got your face?”
“Drool,” she specifies, and tosses him a paper napkin.
2.
This time he’s awake when it happens. The wireless radio kicks on, the frequency is found. A moment out of time, a DJ somewhere putting the record on, sending out over the airwaves the dreams and desires of a young man longing to connect with the object of his affection.
He can appreciate the sentiment but really very little else about this situation. So he turns the dial to the next station over. The song fuzzes out but returns. A coincidence, maybe. Next station? No, still the same song. All stations are this song. There is nothing but this. He turns the radio off. The radio turns itself back on.
By the time he starts wondering if today will be spent solving the mystery of the haunted radio, the song finishes. And he puts it out of his mind, and moves on, and does not think about it again.
3.
“Are you trying to tell me something? Is it a code? A warning? What? Tell me.” He’s yelling. The music ticks up in volume to compensate.
He’s looked it up, of course. Cross-referenced and thoroughly researched. He knows everything there is to know about Peter Andre’s 1992 smash hit “Mysterious Girl”. Why this song? Out of all the songs to have ever existed, why this one?
The lights from the round things are flickering slightly. It could be a system-wide defect, a virus, a malicious program picked up in the last database update. Or maybe it’s been here for years, lurking, waiting. And now it’s infected him. Oh oh oh, his mind helpfully supplies. Mysterious song, I wanna get-
4.
“Are you humming?” Clara is hovering over him, a small ball of nervous energy. He’d ask her to sit down, but he knows better by now.
“An old Venusian meditation song.” He carefully pries the bomb’s casing off, revealing a mess of wires and circuitry.
“Are you sure? Because it sounds like…no, couldn’t be. I suppose there’s only so many songs to be sung. Kind of neat, actually, how cultures so far apart can come up with the same melody. Like we all have the - is that red light supposed to be blinking?”
5.
That’s it. That’s enough. “Mysterious Girl” plays no more. The Doctor unplugs the radio, puts it in a trash bag, and drops the bag into the trash chute behind Round Thing X89-C. There, job done. He’s not sure why he didn’t think of that sooner, but he must have had a good reason.
The TARDIS whines and grinds to a halt. Lights off, rotor stilled, an eerie (albeit blessed) silence.
“No. No no no. No. Seriously?”
A chittering noise, an increase in atmospheric pressure. An electric tension. He won’t cave, he refuses. He can wait. He’s got all the time in the universe.
6.
The ship is still dead in the water. He’s tried bribes and brute force, he’s pleaded, he’s apologized. Nothing works.
He puts his hand on the console. A gentle caress, everything bundled forward to his fingertips, all his love and all their history. A reminder, a promise, a threat.
Nothing.
He sighs. Something is pressing through the surface of his consciousness, the splinter of a thought. A plan, please let it be a plan. Reach back, dig in. Let it come. He closes his eyes and concentrates.
And it comes: Girl you are my heart’s desire-
7.
Fine. If that’s what it takes, if that’s what she needs, he’ll give it to her. He’s been through millennia of trials and tribulations, he’s lived through wars, broken hearts, unimaginable tragedy. He can handle three and a half minutes of pop-reggae. Even if it is every day. Even if he carries it around with him. And who’s to say, maybe hearing it again will get it unstuck from his brain. This has to be the right decision.
He digs the radio out of the dumpster and carries it back up to the console room, sets it on the floor, and stands back with arms folded as Bubbler Ranx announces that he is, in fact, upon the microphone. Slowly, tentatively, the ship awakens.
“I hope you’re happy, because I’m certainly not.”
The ship warbles back, vaguely in tune with the song.
8.
“No offense, but your taste in music is terrible.” Clara winces at him, judgement writ clear in her expression.
“My taste in music is impeccable. This is the TARDIS’ favorite song. And that’s okay. I can’t judge, we all have our guilty pleasures. Besides, all she’s done for me, I can put up with it for her sake.” He smiles weakly.
9.
He used to know how to pick a lock, but now he does not know how to pick a lock, because that information has been replaced with the full lyrics of “Mysterious Girl”. Put that on his gravestone. Here Lies the Doctor, It's All Peter Andre's Fault.
10.
Only the dead know peace. Or do they? What exists after death, if anything? What is waiting for him on the other side? An afterlife? Or silence, nothingness, the cold comfort of the void. The lack of 1990’s love songs.
He’s not tempted, exactly, but he does wonder.
11.
He could travel back in time and punch Peter Andre in the face. Or the DJ. Or all of them, everyone involved, he could methodically go through the entire chain of causality and punch everyone in the face.
He could go back to the start, he could prevent this. Figure out where things went wrong and nip this monstrosity in the bud. But what would a universe without “Mysterious Girl” look like? Every decision has repercussions. Like a stone thrown into a lake, every change made on the basic state of the universe causes ripples. To deliberately affect the time line, the fabric of reality itself - does he have the right? Does the existence of evil justify asserting his will?
Such are the thoughts that occupy his mind. Deep thoughts, moral dilemmas. Death and the debatable necessity of evil. Not ‘whoah-oh-oh’ repeated endlessly, no.
12.
The TARDIS has discovered that there’s an accompanying video to her favorite song. He’d been hoping they could avoid this. Praying, even.
“Please, no,” he begs. But it plays, and plays again, on the screen and then forever after in his head and in the very fibers of his soul. It exists within him now. He forgets how to juggle - the slot is now occupied by Bubbler Ranx’s undulating abdominal muscles.
The TARDIS beeps happily and zooms into a close-up of Peter Andre’s right nipple, bobbing on the upbeat.
It’s fine. Everything is fine.
13.
Everything is awful. Everything is Peter Andre. There is nothing else. Maybe the Doctor is already dead, and the afterlife exists, and he has been judged for his crimes, and this is hell, and this is his punishment. Whoa-oh-oh.
14.
He smashes the radio with a baseball bat.
“I don’t care,” he shouts. “Shut down if you want to. Sulk. Go ahead. I’m done, d'you hear? It’s over.”
He waits, trembling a little. The TARDIS slows, and sighs, and then whirrs reluctantly back into gear.
Clara shows up as he’s brushing the bits of broken radio and the shattered remnants of his sanity into a neat little pile. He realizes what this must look like - the baseball bat - he’s been crying - she’s handing him a cup of coffee and looking up at him with an expression of concern, those massive eyes.
“I needed the parts,” he blurts out. “I’m building a, um.” Think of something think of something girl I just wanna get close to - no. No. “Clockwork squirrel,” he says. Where did that come from? He doesn’t know.
“O…kay?” Clara raises an eyebrow and takes a deliberate sip of her coffee. “Anyway. Adventures?”
“Please,” he says. “Anywhere you like. Just no tropical beaches.” He clamps down on the 'whoah-oh’ beginning to bubble up in his brain. It’s over. He can move past this now. He’s stronger than this. Work it harder, make it better. Do it faster, makes us stronger.
Oh, no, not again -