Basically a Doctor Who episode

written by Rusty Tea Babies

The Doctor stared at the console of his TARDIS, the Smiths playing forlornly in the background. Rose wasn't awake yet, and with my track record, she might never, the Doctor thought. 

She was asleep somewhere in the depths of the TARDIS's unspecified vastness. Through a corridor to the left, behind the closet door, under the stairs, behind the wallpaper, and beneath the floorboards there was probably a winding staircase leading to some crumbling, military-style army barracks with a dozen (or so) stiff beds for the human companions the Doctor circulated through. After all, sleep was for the weak, and the Doctor was nothing if not stubbornly insistent he wasn't that. 

But the Doctor's brooding was interrupted by Rose's entrance and he quickly strung up a smile for her. 

"Sleep alright?" 

"Well, thank you," she smiled at him. "You alright?"

"I'm always alright," the Doctor smiled wider, attempting to look even happier. The Smiths played disputedly in the background. 

So you go and you stand on your own/And you leave on your own/And you go home and you cry and you want to die

Rose pretended she didn't hear the music and the Doctor switched it off. 

"So," she said. "Should we go somewhere nice or wait until the Tardis flies us into the heart of a universal crisis?"

The Doctor looked up, a grin on his face. The effort looked painful. "Which'd be more convenient do you think?"

BANG!

The Tardis shuddered violently and Rose was thrown to the floor for dramatic effect. 

The Doctor grabbed one of the monitors and tried desperately to see what had hit the Tardis, but the monitors were miraculously broken. He waved his sonic screwdriver at them helplessly. 

"Nothing can get in through those doors, right?!" Rose shouted, rolling around on the floor. 

"NO!" The Doctor shouted over the din of something breaking through the doors. 

CRASH!

The Tardis doors were ripped from their hinges, and splintered wood rained like bullets down on the Doctor and his companion. 

Then all was well. The Tardis stopped shaking and the Doctor got up cautiously. Rose stood and stepped beside him, peering out of the Tardis from behind the Doctor's pinstriped shoulder. 

"But...that's Earth," Rose murmured. 

"Or so it would seem," the Doctor growled. He knew something she didn't. 

The world was perfect. The sky was blue, children laughed, flowers bloomed, Big Ben tolled, adults ate ice cream, dogs and cats lay in the sun, the air smelled like cotton candy, there was no starvation, and everyone was happy. 

The Doctor sniffed the air. "Do you notice that?" 

Rose shook her head. He grabbed her hand. "Come on!" He shouted. 

They dashed through the perfect streets of Cardiff-pretending-to-be-London and hid behind a wall that did not conceal them at all. 

"What are we hiding from?" 

"I'm not quite sure yet," the Doctor said. He put on his glasses and leaned in close to the pavement. "Do you see that?"

"Evidently not..." Rose grumbled. 

The Doctor sniffed the sidewalk and licked it, which he immediately regretted. He lept to his feet, still trying to get the taste of sidewalk from his mouth, and grabbed the ice cream cone of a passing adult.