Matthew and the Blue Box

I didn't tell the Aldermen.

Of course I didn't, I hardly ever told them anything. It was mostly out of spite but their pretentious attitudes towards all things not Alderman had a habit of getting under my skin.

Besides that, we wanted to do this on our own.

Something in the city was restless. I mean, this was London and London never really slept but night tended to be a fair deal calmer than the day (all magical entities aside and we'd had more than our reasonable share of those lately). This night, on the other hand, I had felt something...bend. I didn't know what it was and we were curious so we went out and walked.

I had not walked (in the magical sense, not the normal sense) since my inauguration and I was somewhat wary to do it again considering how I had ended up last time. But as soon as I had set off, I'd felt the safety of the city surrounding me. The shadows and ghosts whispered around me, their dark fingers plucking at the hem of my long coat, peeling away from the heels of my shoes, pushing, pulling, reminding me what it meant to be Midnight Mayor.

But that bend, that feeling of displacement, was still there and our curiosity was now tinged in an arrogant annoyance that someone had dared intrude upon our city.

Or maybe it was just a bit of fear. At this point, fear of the unknown would be a rather smart thing for me to listen to.

I rounded a corner and smelled ozone, felt an impossible vastness at the edge of my senses, and we tasted a great, neon power that made us wonder because that power was alive.

Something had dropped in our London and it was strong. Very strong. And we wanted to find it.

I shook off the shadows that were caressing my shoulders and began walking again, glancing around for anything out of place. And it was probably because I was looking for it that I saw it at all. Tucked into the shadows of an alley to my left, almost unnoticeable, was a blue box.

A childish twinge of gleeful interest made us grin a bit because this was a Police Public Call Box and one never saw these anymore than one saw spats. And it was on; lights spilled from its windows, the words on the top illuminated in white, and it was...humming. I frowned because as far as I knew police boxes didn't hum. And then we realized that this was the source of the bend, the ozone, the power and we were confused. What caused that power? The phone? Was it the phone lines? Was it the lights? Where was the vastness coming from? It's source seemed to be everywhere.

I pulled the hot neon light from a few of the streetlamps behind me, cupping it in one hand and with the other, the one burned with the twin crosses of London, I reached out to open the police box doors. A clatter from inside the box made me freeze. Then the doors rattled, shook, and one was thrust open with a shuddering bang. We stepped back, dropping our hand, and stared with fascinated curiosity at the man who had burst out of this strange relic.

"Oh," He said, blinking back at us, "Well, that was rather unexpected. Where am I?"

My eyes narrowed distrustfully, "London. Why? Who are you? Why are you in a police box?"

"London? Really?" He glanced over his shoulder into the white-blue light that was leaking past him and then turned his gaze back to me, "Are you sure?"

"Last I checked, yes."

The man frowned, drumming his fingers on the wooden door, "Right." He muttered and then ducked back inside. We caught the door before it closed and then paused. I really didn't want to go through another ordeal like The Death of Cities but we were just too interested in the strangeness of the situation to let it go. Besides, the power radiating from this tiny little box was worth investigating. So we went into the box and almost fell right back out again because the inside was definitely not that of a police box. It was far bigger on the inside, for one thing, and impossibly technologically advanced.

"What?" We said, looking around in amazement at the twisted structure. It almost looking like a living thing, like coral that was wired with metal and glowing bits. My concentration broke and the light in my hand winked out.

"What?" The man popped his head out from behind one of the strangest structures I had ever seen. A ring of what may or may not have been control panels around a big...tube thing.

"What is this?" I stepped up the metal ramp, prodding at the curving walls, "Who are you?"

"Who are you?" The man countered, brown eyes staring hard at me, "And what're you doing in here?"

"We followed you." We responded, peering in interest at the panels, watching things spin and twist, "Something is alive here and is very strong and we were curious so we followed you." I looked up and found him scrutinizing me, "What?"

"You're saying "we" when you mean "I"." He said and there was a wariness in his voice that somehow satisfied us, "Why? Who are you? No, wait," A single eyebrow rose impossibly high, "Better question: what are you?"

"Matthew Swift." I answered. And then, because it seemed like the right thing to do, I added, "Sorcerer."

"And?" He urged, "Come on, there's something else in there too, I can see it in your eyes."

"We are the blue electric angels." We responded in an almost casual manner because this had become the norm to us, "We came from the telephone lines. We be fire, we be light, we be life, we dance electric flame. We be the singing in the wire, the whisper of the friend, the static on the line." We sent a cool smile at the confused look on the man's face, "Come be we and be free."

"Riiiggghhtt..." He was looking both confused and somewhat wary but that didn't put out the glow of fascination in his brown eyes, "So which one am I talking to now...?"

I sighed, because this was also the norm, and said, "I am we and we are me. We are the same thought and the same life and the same flesh. We are me and I am us. Now who are you?"

The man snorted, running a hand through his messy brown hair, "Interesting. You're fused mind and body. How did that--." But we gave him a dark scowl that said we would rather not discuss it and he chuckled weakly, "Right. Not the question to ask. I'm the Doctor. This is the Tardis. That's Time And Relative Dimension In Space" He waved a hand around and a shower of sparks sputtered from the control panels. Flinching, he turned to address the problem.

"It bent London." We muttered, frowning at him, "Why did it do that? What are you doing here?"

"Bent...what?" He looked up from his work, confused, and then a clarity crossed his features, "Ooooooohhhh, yeah, um, that would be my fault." He grabbed a lever, pulled it back, and gave something near the floor a sharp kick. There was a clang and more sparks, "I wasn't paying attention, well, not that much anyway, and accidently hit some turbulence. Threw the Tardis a few centimeters off course, through the fabric of the universe, and dropped me in a different London. No harm done, though, I just have to realign the controls. She didn't land that far off." He kicked out again, sent more sparks into the air, and then cast a glance at us, "So what was that on your hand? Didn't get a good look at it but it looked pretty interesting..."

My fingers curled defensively around the mark and then we thought better of it because even though there was something dangerous about this man, there was something infinitely older and kinder that we could not place and we were still young to this world. So I shrugged my shoulder and held my palm up to him. He looked at the twin crosses and I could almost see him processing the information, gears turning behind his brown eyes. Then his eyes widened and his gaze shot to my face.

"You're the Midnight Mayor. The Midnight Mayor?" An almost childishly excited grin was spreading across his features, "Protector of London? The one who walks in shadows, and talks to the ghosts of the past, and hears the dreams of the cobblestones, and shields the city from all the bad things?"

I sighed, letting my hand fall back to my side, "Yes, but I didn't ask for it. It was...thrust upon me. A telephone rang. We answered. We always do."

"Interesting." The Doctor yanked on another lever and the lights sputtered for a moment before he threw it back, "There's no Midnight Mayor where I come from. Well, there was but not anymore. Not for centuries. There's no magic there. Science took over."

"Magic is a matter of perspective." I answered, watching him scramble over his machine, "Life is magic, you just have to see it."

The Doctor paused in his work, leaning against a control panel and looking at me with a warm smile on his face, "That's what I love about you humans. You see things so much differently than the rest of the universe."

"We are...not so much human." We said in a flat tone.

"No, no of course not," But he was still smiling like he knew something we didn't, "And neither am I." The Doctor tugged a hammer out and slammed it down on some panels a couple of times. Several things dinged and a flurry of sparks danced into the air, "Ooh, that should do it." He turned to me again, the smile becoming a grin, "It's been a pleasure, Mr. Mayor, but I don't think the Aldermen would be very pleased with me if I took the city's protector to a different London."

I couldn't stop the small smile that crept across my features, "No, they wouldn't. Though I'd love to see them try to get me back."

The Doctor pulled a face, "I'm not really in the mood to run from the Aldermen."

I actually laughed, "Try doing my job." I said as I backed towards the door.

"Try doing mine." The Doctor challenged with a grin and then raised a hand in farewell, "Good-bye, Matthew Swift."

"Good-bye, Doctor." I pulled the door open and stepped out into the cool London night.

"Oh, and Matthew," I'd been about to close the door but the Doctor's words stopped me. I looked up to see an honest, friendly smile on his face,

"There's something at the end of the alley."

Then the door swung out of my fingers and slammed shut. A terrible grinding noise made us flinch and step back, a great wind kicking up dirt and debris and tossing our coat around our ankles. As I watched through slitted eyes, the police box-Tardis faded out of existence, then in again, then out, then in, and finally vanished all together, leaving no trace behind except a few swirling bits of London's usual rubbish.

I remained in the alley for a moment, contemplating what I had just seen because anything out of place deserved contemplating. And then I shook my head, turned, and walked back out into the street, pausing for a moment to look both ways just in case the Doctor's warning had any merit. There was nothing waiting for me so I headed out into the orange-yellow of the streetlights again. The restlessness was gone, the dent in London's magics faded, and I had lost interest in continuing my walk. If there were consequences for a half finished walk, let the Aldermen deal with it.

Dawn was beginning to creep up on the city and we could feel London waking up around us. We stopped at a crosswalk, watching the traffic light, felt a car trundling along sleepily in the early morning two blocks away, and sighed. I would be meeting my apprentice in a few short hours. How little time I seemed to have to myself these days, mostly due to the interruptions of others, and all of it accumulated into a weirdness that, oddly enough, was our life.

A sorcerer who was supposed to be dead.

The blue electric angels that had been pulled from the wire.

The Midnight Mayor.

And a man in a blue box who had warned me of something at the end of the alley.

But at the moment, our chief concern was a place where we could get pancakes this early in the morning.

I would worry about the future when I got there.