Doctor Who-Short Trips "Miracle Enough"

The End of the World Part 1

Over the following years Emma Meakin would often relive her last meeting with the Doctor, she regretted the lost opportunity to travel through space and time with him, for if the Doctor had been alone that day she would have asked him. However, she would have made sure that she'd got her cat Holly home first before gallivanting off with her friend who she assumed was an alien from another planet but as to where the Doctor came from, she had never had the chance to ask him. So although Emma thought of the Doctor as a friend, she had only met him twice in her life, once when she was a girl and then in her twenties, she didn't really know anything about him but as far as she was concerned the Doctor had saved her life.

And because of the Doctor Emma believed she'd been given the chance to live. She knew what it was to love and be loved in return, a life that had its share of joy and laughter, with the boring, uneventful bits in-between, along with the pain and heartbreak because that was what it was to be alive. Emma Meakin had lived. Even if the last few years had been too much for one lifetime.

The pandemic had swept across the world and changed everything. Emma carried her grief, along with the guilt that she had unknowingly brought the virus home to her mother and killed her. That was in the very beginning in the first wave, in the second one her cousin Tracey had died, leaving behind her two children who were barely out of their teens. Devastated and heartbroken, Emma was left to pick up the pieces, her cousin had been forty-eight, which was no age at all, the very same age Emma now found herself.

Emma's life had changed forever but out of that terrible time, the hardship and grief something good happened too. Emma hadn't expected to find love, someone to share the rest of her life with. But somehow miraculously she had found love in the time of coronavirus, alongside another volunteer at a vaccination centre.

During the pandemic, times had been desperate, there seemed no end in sight, the poor became poorer and others sunk into despair. Life had been terrible for many before and for a time the world grew even colder, with its rules and regulations but Emma owed it to her family to survive.

Emma had given up on many things, having children, finding love, opening a cat sanctuary, a job she loved again, the book she wanted to write but had never got around to finishing but one thing she secretly hoped for was to see the Doctor again. Emma Meakin had never given up hope of meeting the Doctor again. Some days it had been the only thing which had kept her going.

Emma Meakin was eager to leave the Merry Vale shopping centre, the shiny beige, impersonal building was part of the economic recovery, newly constructed and just outside the village where Emma had lived most of her life. Her shift had finished at the bargain basement store which also specialised in pet supplies where she worked. Emma's surgical mask was still clamped to her lower face, winter wasn't over yet and the virus which kept returning in one form or another was always worse at this time of the year, it was something everyone had learned to live with. Emma wasn't the only one wearing a mask in that crowded space, though she was the only person carrying a pet carrier which contained a wide eyed, feisty cat who also couldn't wait to get home. Bella the Burmese, with silky chocolate fur was the final gift from Emma's elderly rich Aunt the cat breeder, who had decided to call it a day on selling pedigree cats as no one could afford them anymore.

Emma made her way to one of the exits on the lower ground, the shoppers thinning out as there were only empty units which hadn't been turned into shops yet. Emma peered through the automatic doors and was shocked to see snow, this was the trouble with working in a windowless environment, most of the time you're utterly oblivious to the outside world. Emma darkly mused that a nuclear bomb could drop on her village and she wouldn't know until her shift finished.

Emma gently placed the pet carrier on the floor, she removed her mask and began to button up her coat and rearranged her scarf, home was within walking distance but she didn't fancy struggling home in a snow storm with a growling cat. Emma crouched down and started having a conversation with her cat like she was reasoning with a five-year-old child.