Orange

[continuum_of_drs]

"Well, Doctor, what d'you think?"

Izzy grinned at him from under the most ridiculous example of haberdashery he'd ever seen, and he'd seen the Castrovalvan Silly Hats Competition. It was shaped like a flared bowl, came down almost to her eyes, and was orange. Bright, safety-tape orange. The sort of orange you see grown men stalking about in in American forests, looking to shoot deer with obscenely overpowered firearms. Painful orange. His sixth persona would have been proud.

His present persona, however, Byronesque as he was, was something more approaching "blinded."

"Ah... eh.... It's...."

"I found it in the wardrobe. No idea whose it is, but whoever it was was my kinda bloke. Girl. Other. Something," Izzy nattered on. The hat set up an almost nauseating contrast to the pink dye in her hair and the riotously-coloured jacket she seemed to perpetually wear.

"No idea whose it is," he answered faintly.

"Well, not like it's got a name tag on, right? Guess it's mine, now."

The Doctor was floored. She was going to keep it? He saw a future of that hat preceding its wearer in his perception countless times. The hat was so outrageous as to have an existence completely separate and independent of the actual individual on whose head it perched like a nose thumbed at visual cortices everwhere.

"Ah... well, that's true...." he floundered.

Izzy grinned a grin that wouldn't be called sane by a child of three. "And just think. Next time I get captured by, oh, Cybermen or Daleks or sentient mushrooms or somethin, it's not as though you'll have much difficulty finding me."

No, he was pretty sure they'd take one look at that headwear and give her back. Especially the sentient mushrooms. Load of critics, the lot of them.

She'd made her way round the console and was now standing next to him, looking up at him. "...You don't like it, do you?"

It was hideous. Confrontational. Unspeakably rude in its loud brashness, like a shouted, drunken laugh at a sombre dinner. And he found he loved it. He loved it because it was also so very Izzy Sinclair--vibrant, uncompromising, take-me-as-I-am. Unafraid and unabashed.

He grinned. "I love it."