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Legacy Name: The Raggedy Doctor

But then, one day, she heard a voice coming out of a crack in her wall. It always said the same thing, and her auntie wouldn’t hear it.

Eventually, the little snowbunny with the red hair did what any intelligent child would have done: she asked Melody for help.

Granted, it was Vesnali, but she reasoned that the crack in her wall was important enough for her to ignore the season. It had to be.

She asked Melody to send someone to fix it, please, right before someone crashed down into her backyard. She was a polite child, her auntie insisted on ‘please pass the tea’s and ‘thank you for coming’s and ‘get out of the bloody way please’s, so she thanked Santa right away. And then she put on her bright red boots and hurried out to see.

The creature climbing out of the big box where her auntie’s garden shed used to be was strange, the little snowbunny decided. Not the sort she would have expected Melody to send to fix a talking crack, but, well, talking cracks weren’t exactly of the usual sort either. He was a paralix, all covered in soot and somehow soaking well at the same time.

He was stuck in the library, he told her, and thought he’d take a dip in the swimming pool. And he wanted apples.

The little snowbunny didn’t like apples, even though her Mum used to carve faces on them to get her to eat them before she and Daddy were gone. So she was happy to give the one who said he would fix the crack a fruit.

He was less than happy to eat it. So he tried yoghurt, which went down the drain. Bacon was clearly poisonous. Beans were evil—bad, bad beans. Bread and butter was forever banished from the big house.

In the end, the paralix curled around the table, contentedly dipping fish fingers into custard. He was quieter now, less frenzied, but his mane was still scraggly and scrappy, his fur tangled and singed and raggedy for all the color peeking through the soot. But he didn’t seem to mind it—and neither did the child, after he asked her to show him the crack.

She took him up the stairs and gave him an apple just like her mother had always done, with the skin cut away to reveal a smile.

There was an eyeball in the crack. A really, really big one. And then it was gone, and her wall was whole again.

And that was when the box started ringing. The raggedy paralix, who had claimed to be a Doctor ran out to it, with the little snowbunny following behind. He had to go, he told her, but he’d come back. Just five minutes, five minutes and he’d take her to see the stars.

He said that he wasn’t like all the others who had told her that before—he promised. She packed her things and waited. And waited. Just five minutes. The Raggedy Doctor had promised.

She woke tucked into her bed, her suitcase still packed, and a bit of dirt from the backyard on the bottoms of her wellies. That’s what she told the first three psychiatrists, when they didn’t believe in the strange Paralix and the talking crack. She drew pictures and showed them to everybody who would look, but they still didn’t believe the little bunny. They told her that he hadn’t been real—an imaginary friend .

They did, however, believe in her teeth after she bit them.

But there was someone who believed her. She met another little snowbunny,when her aunt ushered her outside one day. He believed her, and she dressed him up as the paralix who swam in his library and only liked fish fingers and custard. Both bunnies tried it. It wasn’t very good, the children agreed.

But the fourth psychiatrist broke through. She put away her crayons and her costumes, and grew up. She wasn’t a child anymore, there was no more little bunny. As for her friend, well, the eyes that had been so eagerly replaced with a paralix’s in her mind were beginning to be seen in a different light. She got a job—school had never been her thing, so while her friend-or-more was learning to heal she went to parties and kissed prince-for-a-days.

And then came the afternoon when she found a paralix in her house, calling the name of the little snowbunny. Of course, she promptly bashed him in the muzzle with her trusty cricket bat.

After he woke up, he showed her a room that hadn’t been there before, but had been there all along. And the voice of the crack started speaking again, but from somewhere beyond even her walls. And the door was open to let the monster through.

She and the paralix fled. She tried to lie to him, to herself—but five minutes had finally ended, twelve years later.

And then they ran, and ran, and ran. She tried to run even further, tried to run away completely—but then he gave her an apple, with a smile as fresh as the day she had cut it out for him.

They quickly found her friend, who had already started to piece together how the monster was taking the souls of his patients, her pretend Doctor, and together they tracked down the monster from the strange room, all while the voice of the crack warned of the end of the world.

When the monster tried to garb itself in the snowbunny’s dreams, in the paralix and the little bunny who still believed in ‘just five minutes’, she turned her dreams to the true form it wanted so desperately to hide. The voice caught it in a cage of light and would have left—if the Raggedy Doctor hadn’t called them back, as haughty as if he were the one with the weapons and the wielders, rather than a scraggly-maned dragon standing with four paws on the earth like the rest of them.

On the way to the roof to meet the ones who would have sent the world into fire and ashes, he paused to preen himself, running claws through the tangled mane, brushing away soot that she had seen a decade ago, stealing a few bow ties that had been left lying around.

“To hell with the raggedy,” the paralix says, “time to put on a show!"

[Doctor Who is the property of BBC]