Lost In Thought

As Good As I Got

The Doctor:

"Liz?!" I called, trying to find her to have dinner, which Donna was cooking, so I wouldn't be surprised if she really was hiding. "Sis, come on, Donna's waiting for us!"

Her room was empty, the med room if she'd gone to get the hard core soaps to clean Jenny's blood from her hands, the bathroom, even the library. Which she'd actually finished organising, after such a long time of my having left it. She started it, then I stole the TARDIS and I never could bring myself to do what she loved. Books.

Donna hadn't seen her in hours, I'd not seen her since she dropped off Martha and then just stormed off to somewhere in the interior TARDIS, and this was what was worrying me. She'd just lost her daughter, Jenny, who had died saving me. There was a good chance she hated me for it. I wouldn't exactly blame her, and if she didn't want to see me, there was an ever changing maze of rooms and corridors she could try and throw in my path to stop me from finding her.

The last place that I could think of checking before trying to run a TARDIS life signs diagnostic was where I was scared to find her after last time. Her garden.

Only, as I peeked my head around the door, I wasn't greeted with anything near the same scene as before. No whirling snowstorm, no dead of winter garden that held next to no life, or half frozen Elizabeth in a corner. Elizabeth, my amazing, incredibly baby sister, was sat in the middle of a spring garden, perfectly still, with flowers all around her socks as she held her knees up to rest her chin on, green grass velvet soft under my bare feet as I tried to quietly walk towards her.

Even somewhere like the TARDIS, setting up a perfect seasonal ecosystem without copying it from somewhere was near impossible. I knew this was clearly somewhere from my sisters head that she had spent hours upon hours coding into the TARDIS, and had then created exactly how she wanted, all her favourite plants. God, my sister was so brilliant, but so, so sad ad tragic at the same time.

"I can hear you."

Dammit, there went the element of surprise to make sure that she was actually her. "Oh. Right. Sorry. Donna's waiting for us for dinner, I was trying to find..." She was just looking at me through one eye, the other still closed. Not Wandering, she was just meditating. "Sorry. You probably wanted to be alone."

Beth shook her head, short red hair falling over that pale brown eye, so she shook it back off and opened both so I could see her expression. Not that it meant anything, there was no one in the universe with a better poker face than my sister. "I'm n... never alone. Especially not in the T. T... TaaaARDIS." I heard a bird song, looking around, trying to distract myself from the stutter that had developed itself in her voice since she found it again. "Don't mind the b.. birds. They're mmmmostly ones from Earth, given that Gallifff... rey didn't have many. I've always loved sparrrrows and p.... P...."

"Pied wagtails?" I asked, so she nodded, looking away. "Elizabeth, you're scared of birds. Always have been."

"No, I'm sc...cared of flocks of birds chasing m... m. Me. You're the idiot who brought me back The Bbbbirds when I was a k-id, and have now put me off visiting the seaside, given the tides." Now she closed her eyes again, changing to sit in a perfect meditative stance, legs crossed delicately over each other so I could see the odd rainbows on the bottom of her socks, saying Thursday and Monday. It had been Tuesday when we'd been on Earth, but then she just sighed, standing gracefully. "I'm not hungry, anyway."

OK, you hadn't eaten in at least two days, and even if you could mostly talk now, I was still your brother, and still going to look after you if you didn't look after yourself. "I don't trust Donna's cooking either, but if I have to suffer, so do you." The eyebrows rose, some small semblance of a smile now on her face. "Lets be honest, she should not be trusted with anything she can hurt herself with."