Earth Grazer || Doctor Who

XI. Talk To Me

Author's note: a bit of a warning. There is mentions of abuse, a miscarriage, death and a interplanetary war in this chapter. I don't think anything in this chapter is terribly graphic. Read if you want to but you don't have to.

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Ella was humming a song that was stuck in her head and she wished she had remembered to grab her iPod before she ran away. "What are you doing? I thought movie night was tomorrow." Ella heard from behind her, she turned her head and saw the Doctor enter the projector room where they have a weekly movie night.

“Movie night is tomorrow, that doesn’t make me less bored right now and I still have no idea how to operate this ancient contraption. Can you help me?" Ella laughed as she unconsciously tugged on the cropped yellow hoodie she was wearing. "I swear, I'm smart." Ella went to adjust her glasses on instinct but remembered that she was wearing her contacts today.

"That projector is not ancient." He insisted as he moved and pressed a button on the side of the machine. The film Ella wanted to watch came to life on the white sheet she had hanging on the far-left wall.

"Finally," Ella mumbled as she sat down on the couch and grabbed a handful of popcorn she made. "And it is ancient."

The Doctor sat on the other side of the couch after he had switched the light off, "you're probably right, Giselle."

"Hey, are you ever going to stop calling me that?" Ella wondered as the opening credits were appearing on the makeshift screen.

"I don't know. Are you ever going to tell me why you hate your name?" The Doctor practically crawled across the couch to reach the popcorn; Ella nudged the bowl to be more in between them. "What are we even watching?"

Her dark eyes didn't move as she nodded to the screen, the Doctor looked over and saw the title of the film plastered across the sheet hanging from the wall. The Doctor didn't expect it, but he was pulled into the story after ten minutes of film. Somehow, he had become invested in the lives of the fictional people onscreen, finding himself yelling at the characters, much like Ella was.

"Wait, was she a robot the whole time?" The Doctor's confused voice broke through the tense silence that followed the end of the film.

"No, not the whole time at least,” Ella spoke up from her current horizontal position, using the Doctor’s legs as a pillow and balancing their empty bowl of popcorn on her stomach. “Remember, when she went into that room towards the middle of the movie? I think she was replaced with the robot then because there was a weird cut scene. Usually when they have scenes like that, they leave out the important plot twist stuff."

The Doctor nodded, "how'd you know all that?"

"I'm a professional movie watcher," Ella slightly smiled as she sat up and walked over to the popcorn machine to refill the bowl as the Doctor moved to pick the next movie. "How long do you think I've been with you?" Ella wanted to smack her forehead when she realized how that sounded, before she could back pedal the Doctor answered.

"A few months, I think." Ella plopped back on the couch as they waited for the screen to do something, after a few minutes the woman in yellow resumed her earlier position and used the Doctor as a pillow again. About an hour into the movie, the Doctor could sense that something was on Ella's mind as he noticed she was being unusually silent. She wasn't making any sarcastic remarks or berating the characters stupidity like she always did. “El, are you okay?”

The woman in question wandered through the confines of her mind as she thought about when the Doctor confessed that he was glad to have met her, was that real? Ella remembered her promise from a long time ago, the Doctor may not recall but she does.
“I hate my name,” she started, staring blankly at the wall in front of her, adjacent to where the movie was playing. “My dad picked it out when I was born.”