Let Down Your Hair

The man, in his heap of tangled limbs, didn’t move an inch. Didn’t budge whatsoever. Not even the disheveled hair on his head moved - it was as if he was completely frozen in time.

My heart was beating a thousand times per minute, so fast I felt like I was vibrating in place.

It was a long moment before I managed to tear my eyes away from him and up at the blue box.

It was everything I had ever imagined it to be.

The wood was a faded blue and seemed slightly coated with something white. Sharp slashes marked nicks in the wood, and there was a crack spreading like a spider’s web in one of the frosted glass windows. The little lantern light on top flickered until it went out.

In chipped black letters along the top, it declared the box to be a Police Box. My face scrunched up in confusion, nothing I had painted had the words ‘police box’ on it. There as also a sign (Pull to open). The doors were still open, pushed outward and smoke drifting lazily out.

I took a step forward, just a tiny one, my hand smeared with white paint reaching toward it.

In a sudden rush of wind, I fell backwards and the doors slammed shut with the telltale click of a lock. My eyes darted to look at the man, to see if the noise had woken him, but he was out like a light.

Then I began to panic. My breathing came in quick, short bursts, too much of it leaving my lungs and not enough of it going in. I backed up and hit the wall.

Pascal scampered over to the man, making sticky noises with the paint still coated on his feet. Looking curious, he crawled over the man’s head, taking a comfortable position in the tuft of hair beside his ear. A brown pigment spread over his skin, a low gurgle sounding in his throat. Then Pascal opened his mouth and his pink tongue darted out, headed straight for the canal of the man’s ear.

“No!” I squeaked. Pascal’s tongue stopped in mid-air, a bemused expression on the tiny creature’s face. Can reptiles look bemused?

I took a deep breath and fumbled behind me for something solid to hold on to. My fingers hit the rough surface of the counter top. “I just... need a minute, Pascal.” I turned to face the mirror hanging above the sink, the one with my name painted in the pink, sloppy letters of a child.

“There’s a person in my tower.” I stared hard at my reflection, like watching my own wide green eyes blink at me was going to give me the secret of the universe. “There’s a person in my tower who is not my mother.” I watched my face contort into a look of confusion. “There is a person in my tower, and he fell out of the blue box. The box I dream about. The box I paint. A police box.”

Focusing on my mural, I could still see the last bit of the strange symbols.

Then something strange happened. I mean, honestly, if anything could get any stranger.

The circular symbols began to glow, burning away the white paint and looking as if the sun was alive and molten beneath them. It seemed to me that they were responding to something, it was like the man’s presence had brought something that was previously missing. It was beautiful and strange and my breath caught in my throat.

“Well, I certainly didn’t intend on landing here,” a voice said behind me. I jumped twelve feet and grabbed the first hard object I could find: a frying pan.

I spun and held it out at the man (who now seemed to be fully conscious and functional and significantly less on fire), who only raised his hands up in a gesture of surrender. Pascal scurried from him and over to his favorite spot on top of my head, making the low gurgling noise again.

“Who are you?” I demanded, shaking the frying pan to hide how much my hands were trembling. Mother said I wouldn’t be to handle myself in the real world? Well I’d show her.

The man smiled like he knew some kind of joke. He straightened his bright red bow tie, slicked back his hair, and stuck out his hand for a shake. “I’m called the Doctor.”

I stared at his hand, clutching the frying pan to my body like it was a baseball bat. His name wasn’t familiar to me, but it was the way his name was said that sent a tremor down my spine before settling in my feet, making them about as useful as two blocks of lead.

“What are you?” I asked, studying his face. He had a large forehead creased with wrinkles that seemed out of place on a young face. His eyes were deep set into his skull, topped with feather light eyebrows. His mouth was wide with a smile and his entire person emitted a child-like feeling, the nostalgic kind, like he was desperately wishing he were anything but himself. The way he carried himself was strange, too, like he was uncertain of what to do with his limbs but he was confident in that uncertainty. Everything about the Doctor was a contradiction, and I was beginning to feel that it was that way for a reason.

The Doctor grinned at my question, like it was something he hadn’t been expecting. “Oh, brilliant! You’re clever, I love clever. Most people just assume from the start that I’m human –which is complete rubbish- and it makes things much more difficult later on, more than once someone’s tried to kill me. But you don’t really need to know any of this just yet—what was I going on about again? Oh, yes, I’m a Time Lord, from Gallifrey. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

My arms went slack and I nearly dropped the frying pan, and I swear my jaw fell to the bottom of the tower and bounced back up again. I could barely process half of what he told me, I just knew that there was an alien in my tower and I’d been painting him.

I said the one thing I could manage. “Rubbish?”

The Doctor quirked an eyebrow and withdrew his hand, cautiously walking closer to me. “Rubbish. Garbage, trash, nonsense, you know, the stupid things people come up with in their silly little brains. It never really ceases to amaze me.” The bitter edge to his voice surprised me. How could someone be so jaded?

The Doctor seemed to be a man wrapped up in wonder and I think that was the problem. His wonder wasn’t enough for him anymore, and he couldn’t find it anywhere else.

“What’s your name?” He prodded gently, sliding across the floor and observing each and every inch of my room.

“Rapunzel,” I said softly, and when I felt that wasn’t enough, I said it louder. “Rapunzel. My name is Rapunzel.”

“Well, Rapunzel, I’m going to tell you a story. I’d been on a long journey before this, a very very long one with no one to share it with, and then I got a call. Now, the last time I got a house call I ended up in a dollhouse with murderous wooden peg dolls but let’s not focus on that because, you see, this call seemed to promise me something odd. Odd, but important.” The Doctor stopped speaking abruptly.

“What was that?” I asked in his pause, wondering what could have cut him off.

The Doctor’s eyes floated above my head, the blood draining from his face as he gazed upon my largest mural, the one that was destroyed by Mother. His mouth was open but there were no words leaving his lips. The silence left by the absence of his voice left a nervous pit in my stomach, a bundle of nerves packed tightly beneath my belly button. I even found myself clutching at the fabric, toying with the frayed hems of my corset.

“W-where did you…” The Doctor trailed off, moving until he was standing so close to the wall his fantastically large chin grazed it. “Did you paint this?” He demanded suddenly, whirling on me, a frantic look in his eyes. My heart leapt up to my throat.

“Yes, I’ve painted everything here. I’ve never left this tower before, I get mostly everything from pictures, or I make it up.” My voice was steady and it made me feel better.

“This,” the Doctor hissed, the words squeaking past his teeth in a desperate attempt to escape. He extended a finger toward the circular symbols, which had burned through the paint but were no longer glowing. “Did you see this in a picture? Did you copy these symbols and my TARDIS from some kind of book? Do you know what those symbols mean?”

I frowned. “No, I saw them in my head. It was strange; it was like someone had… put them there. I don’t know what they mean; I didn’t even know your TARDIS was real until you showed up. I just had the feeling it was important. Like someone was trying to tell me it was time for me to leave the tower, sort of?” The hopeful lilt at the end of my sentence made me cringe. It reminded me of what I said to Mother and how she shot me down. Who was I to think that the Doctor would be any different? They were almost startlingly similar.

I felt the despair gather up in my heart and weigh it down like a ship being anchored.

Something flickered in the Doctor’s eyes, and like a switch being flipped he was back to his old self, facing the wall with renewed vigor. He could have given me whiplash with how fast he changed. He placed his hand against the symbols and pressed it flat, splaying out his fingers.

“The odd and important thing, my dear Rapunzel, is that the call said I could save them. I could save my people.”

“Why do you need to save your people?” Why did a whole race of people just like the Doctor need to be saved?

“Because a very long time ago… we were in a war. A nasty war, it changed histories and then changed them again, over and over until there was nothing left to change. They died, and I survived. No, I ran.” All I could see of him was the hair on the back of his head and the collar of his jacket. “These symbols you painted? It’s my name. My real name, something no one is supposed to know.”

A strange pain slashed through me after he said it, a clean tear right through my heart. I felt his pain, I felt his loneliness, I felt how much he did not want to hear an apology. I felt the years weighing on him like some kind of sickness, a disease he couldn’t shake.

Every year I spent in the tower echoed a sentiment of a life I could have had, of this world the Doctor spoke of. I was hit with the feeling that I had been robbed, that I shouldn’t be stuck in a tower painting places that I should be seeing with my own eyes.

The Doctor was trapped in a tower of his own making, and I was trapped in one that was not of mine.

But I wasn’t going to tell him that.

So I asked him a question. “How old are you, Doctor?”

He seemed grateful for the change in conversation. His eyes lit up. “1207, thank you very much. I’m practically middle-aged! It’s dreadful. I just hope I don’t get it in my head to go and give the TARDIS another shiny red paint job. I tried that once, and I’m almost certain that she still hasn’t forgiven me for it. Nearly dropped me in a black hole.”

“She? The TARDIS is a she?”

The Doctor had a boyish glint in his eyes. “You expected anything else? Of course the TARDIS is a she! Only the best and finest Time Lord creation in the universe, though she has a tendency of dropping me in strange places.”

I bit back a smile. “Careful, Doctor, or else I’ll tell the TARDIS that you want to paint her red again.” I was overwhelmed, but I realized belatedly that I was having fun. A strange alien man had appeared in my tower and I wasn’t dead, he hadn’t chopped off my hair and sold it to the highest bidder, he was a thing of wonder.

He could get me out of the tower. He could tell me what the floating lanterns meant.

A whole new world of opportunities suddenly opened up in front of me and there was no way I was going to let it go.

“I like you,” the Doctor said enthusiastically, clapping his hands together. “You’re important, Rapunzel. There’s a reason you saw my TARDIS in your head. And I want to know what that reason is.” He scurried back to the TARDIS and fumbled in his pockets for a key, unlocking the door and pushing it in.

The Doctor stretched out a hand. “Rapunzel, would you like to go on an adventure?”