"This is bad."

"You've said that already, da?"

"It seemed worth repeating."

Okay, that little spurt of dialogue must be really confusing, and for that I'll apologize. I just didn't know how to start this. Where does one begin the tale of how their life - their normal, boring, excruciatingly anticlimactic life - was flipped-turned-upside-down in a matter of seconds?

I'll rectify this. Let's rewind a bit, shall we?

It was four o'clock in the morning. I was awake, nestled all cocoon-like in my comforters, my eyes fixed on the Nook screen I held in front of me, slanted to accommodate for my unorthodox posture. Why was I still conscious at this ungodly hour? Obviously because the fictional lives of the Doctor, Rose, and Captain Jack Harkness wildly surpassed the importance of the prescribed eight hours of rest I never got anyway.

No, not really. My insomnia was kicking in. But watching Doctor Who was still my top priority, so in a way the insomnia was welcome.

So. Watching Captain Jack be his adorable, innuendo-making self. Adjusting my earbuds every few minutes because I'd had them for months and like all their previous incarnations they turned to crap after so many tortured jam sessions (one ear was nearly blown out so the sound was lopsided and I cursed my own existence because of it). Waiting with baited breath as the Daleks infiltrated Satellite Five...

Whoa, whoa - spoilers. I'll take a page out of River Song's book and just skip ahead a bit so that I don't anger any potential Whovians. Savvy?

Wait, wrong Captain Jack. 

Ahem. Anyway.

While I was engrossed in my geeking-out (as well as the internal strife that always cropped up when I began comparing Nine and Ten's reigns as the Doctor) something gave me pause. I blinked in the graying darkness, held at bay only by the soft glow of my eReading device, shifting up onto my elbows so that my eyes cleared the headrest and I could make a quick sweep of the room. Shadows paced along the walls, chased by the light of the high-beams from cars rumbling along outside. Aside from the faint, electronic sound of "Exterminate! Exterminate!" chanting from my dangling earbud and the ambient noises of the night, there was silence.

I met the flat, black eyes of my stuffed bear who lay curled up among my pillows, shrugged, and dropped my head, once again fixing the placement of my earbuds for the optimum Who experience.

"Dammit, Jack, don't you die on me! I mean, this is like the third time I've watched this episode and I know how it ends, but goddammit, there's a build-up of false hope so don't you dare betray me, Captain Innuendo!"

There it was again.

Whatever'd snagged my attention before had resurfaced, and this time at a very critical point in the episode. Irritated, I paused the video, threw off my covers, and swung my feet to the floor. I rubbed at my bleary eyes, blinking again in the enveloping darkness, which, now that I'd escaped my illuminating Nook, seemed ten times darker. But this was, of course, my room, and so I had no trouble navigating while practically blind, cocking my head to follow the increasingly persistent tapping to its source. 

"God, do I hate that tree," I mumbled, ruffling my hair (which, despite my non-sleeping, had already gone into the first stages of bedhead, and so entangled my fingers in disastrous knots before I could pull my hand away) as I rolled up the blinds, expecting to see the spindly, skeletal branches of our gargantuan pine tree scraping at the glass. 

In case you haven't already guessed, it wasn't the damn tree.

Well, okay, the tree was there, as support for the person who'd actually been tapping at the window, but it's not the main focus of this tale, alright? Just wanted to get that straight.

Separated from me only by a thin pane of translucent glass was a large man, with familiar violet eyes and ashy-blonde hair, wearing a long pink scarf wrapped twice around his neck, a heavy winter coat, dark pants and sturdy boots. He grinned as our eyes locked, waving a gloved hand.

My first thought: Dude, that is a damn good cosplay. 

Second thought: Why the hell is he crouched in my tree, though? This ain't a convention... 

Third thought: He's really cute... 

Fourth thought: Wait. Not the time. And... not a cosplay? Oh. Shit. 

As you can see, I was a little slow on the uptake. But in my defense, it was four o'clock in the morning and I hadn't slept all that much the night before. Also I was emotionally distraught over the fate of one Captain Jack and Christopher Eccleston (aka the Ninth Doctor), so I was bound to be kind of screwy. Give me a break.

Alright. So we've established I was fairly out of it during this whole escapade. That'll explain why, when I tuned back in, I was already throwing open the window without much forethought, considering this really could have been some nut who liked running about in Hetalia cosplay, rapping at people's windows while they slept for whatever sick reason he had. But all my hindsight regret was for naught, as the man ducked his head to peer into the room, glanced around once, then settled on me again, a cheery grin on his thin lips.

"Maria, da?"

I nodded mutely (though not for lack of trying).

"Класс! Come, you are missing the fun!"

I decided this was a dream. I'd fallen asleep sometime during my Doctor Who marathon, maybe with the barest threads of a Hetalia fanfic weaving together in my subconscious, and now Ivan was paying me a visit. A dream. That was all it was.

So why not take advantage of it? 

"I'm in!" I grin, taking Ivan's offered hand and following him out onto the netting of twisted branches he'd used as a bridge to my window. 

Ivan backtracked to the trunk, and I stayed on his heels, watching my footing so that I didn't take an unwanted spill. He gestured downwards.

"It is lazy American custom to have the lady go first, da?" he asked.

I shrugged. American, British, whichever country that gentlemanly gesture had originated from didn't really matter; chivalry was dead, after all. Still, this was sweet, in a way. Sort of. Not really. 

Ivan was trying. That was something, right?

"Er, if it's all the same to you, man, I'd rather not go first." I slowly crouched down, shifting my center of gravity so as to keep myself from toppling over the edge, and squinted in the blackness below. Street lights burned a disjointed path through the dark, but they were too far away to be of any use to me. "You're the one who climbed up here, so you know the way to go. Handholds and all. I'll just follow you..."

Ivan nodded and started shimmying his way down the trunk, hands and feet catching branches with ease. I was just about to follow (uncaring about the consequences should I actually slip and fall, because, c'mon, it was a dream) when something exploded out of the pine needles above me, launching itself at my face. In my haste to dodge, I backed up way too far, and before I could even hiss a curse gravity had me in its clutches, and I was falling, a silent plea on my lips.

But no sooner had I come to regret that this dream would come to such an unsightly close then I stopped completely, a jarring halt that left my teeth rattling in my jaw, but otherwise unharmed. Out of fear alone, I instinctively clutched at whatever was in reach, my nails digging into soft fabric, then something hard, which I presumed to be muscle.

"Whoa, little lady, the claws don't usually come out until the second date. But I'm not complaining."

Oh holy... 

I craned my neck back, blinking through the remnants of terrified tears at another grinning face, this one belonging to a devastatingly handsome brunet in a gray military overcoat (which I was still clinging to for dear life). 

My tongue, thick and useless against the roof of my mouth, refused to obey me.

"I... You... Y-You're..."

He smiled, that goddamn pretty boy smile that lifted my own lips reflexively.

"Captain Jack Harkness. And you are?"

Totally, head-over-heels in love with you. But that's not important. 

I could practically hear Nine and Ten admonishing him in the background, saying that he didn't need to flirt with anything that breathed, to which Jack would reply that he'd only introduced himself - which, of course, was more than enough. 

"Captain, you saved little Maria! Good! It would have been bad if she had hit the ground. No snow to soften the landing."

"So you're Maria?" Jack asked as he gently set me down, flicking Ivan (who had just reached the ground and was walking towards us) a charming smile which said he found him adorable, and that he wasn't going to argue his flawed logic because of his cuteness. 

More muted nodding on my part.

"Great, just who we've been looking for." Jack glanced upwards at my open window. "I would have gone up to get you myself, but, me being me, I wasn't sure how you'd react. Would have been trouble if you fainted right off the bat." He winked at me. "I tend to have that effect on... well, everything. But impressionable teenage girls are probably a little more susceptible, don't you think?"

Oh I most certainly did. And I would have told him so, point-blank, in dreadfully nervous chatter, if Ivan hadn't stepped up behind me and placed both hands on my shoulders.

"So," he said amicably, "now we go?"

"Go?" Distracted from my enthralled studying of Jack's immaculate features (which he'd noticed right away, judging by the fact that he'd started making dramatic facial expressions, like a model posing for a shoot), I glanced back at Ivan, brow furrowed. "Go where? Wait, why are you two even here? You're not from the same universe, like, at all."

"Like I said," Jack replied, and I wrenched my head around to look at him again, to which he grinned, "we came here for you."

"Me?"

"You," he smiled.

Oh the blushing was fierce right then, you've no idea. Literally everything Jack said sounded like a pick-up line, and for a girl who hadn't so much as been asked out on a date, that was detrimental to my well-being on so many levels.

"O-Okay, you wanna... maybe explain that a bit better?" I turned my head, focusing on the tail end of Ivan's scarf that had fallen over my shoulder when he'd come closer, because looking at Jack was a sure-fire way for me to make an even bigger fool of myself than I already had. Dream or no, humiliating myself was not fun by any means.

Ivan squeezed my shoulders as he said, "You will help us return home!"

Right here, when Ivan said that, that was when I'd begun to suspect something was wrong, that maybe this wasn't as harmless an adventure as I'd thought it was. But I was still under the delusion that whatever happened in this dreamscape was meaningless, insubstantial, and so I went along with it.

"Oh, that'd explain why you're together," I mused, cocking my head in contemplation. "So you're stranded here for some reason, and you can't get back to your home universes. Okay, makes as much sense as anything else right now. I'll help."

"Glad to have you on board," Jack said, flashing me another heat-inducing grin, which I stubbornly tried to look away from. "I was worried I'd have to convince you through some unconventional means."

I was ninety-nine-point-nine percent sure that if he'd resorted to unconventional means my fragile fangirl heart would have exploded right then and there. So thank God for that.

Anyway, that was it. The start of my own harrowing adventure, the likes of which I could have only imagined in epic five book sagas, from the minds of Rowling, Tolkien, or Paolini - a story for the ages. 

Suffice it to say, for the most part, I was more worried about how I responded to Jack's flirting than I was about dying.

Trust me, if you were in my position... you'd understand.

___________________

So I just found out that John Barrowman (Captain Jack Harkness) is 48. What the hell. No. That's not cool. I thought he was like 35 or something. He looks damn good for his age, holy shit. 

Er... that's neither here nor there. Anyway, I finally finished my own piece for the tag, FlyingSwallow123~ Sorry it took so long, I kept getting sidetracked by things (Doctor Who being one of them, in case you couldn't tell...)

I don't really have anyone to tag for this... everyone I would have called out has already been tagged. So... yeah. If you read this and wanna write something similar, go for it!