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You look up, and she runs, feet light on the balcony. And you almost laugh, because of course it’s her. Who else would it be? She comes to you when you are dying.
You wouldn’t want anyone else.
When you first saw her, curious child that she was, life was flowing through your veins, exploding from your skin, regeneration energy still coursing through you. You weren’t a full person yet, not quite. You see her now as the same energy runs through you, sparking your cells, restless and urgent, and it is the same, but it is your end, not your beginning.
Beginnings are a good place to end, you think. That is what drew you back to the fish fingers and custard after all, this time eaten around a TARDIS console rather than at a kitchen table in the middle of the night.
Then, everything was possibilities. You were wide-eyed and full of wonder, and there were only opportunities.
Now, you have used all your possibilities. You store your wonder inside.
The drawings pinned to the walls rustle, children’s artwork, hers mixed in among the others. Drawings of the TARDIS. Drawings of you.
“Amelia,” you say. A beautiful name, a fairytale name, for a fairytale girl and her raggedy man.
She passes out of sight and you blink, and she’s grown up, those twelve years you never saw plus the ones you did. Amelia becomes Amy.
She’s beautiful, and she comes towards you, and she touches your face, and she is beautiful.
Amy Pond, the girl who waited. Her face is a face you had not expected to see again. She is seared onto your hearts, and it aches to see her. But you are glad, so glad, that she came back for you now, at the very end.
As it should be.
You smile at her, and you touch her face, mirroring her gesture. She smiles at you.
“I always come back,” you told her, but this time, she came back to you.
Amy was always a possibility. She was the first possibility you had, and you left her, unintentionally, but you left her all the same. You were always trying to make up for that. You aren’t sure if you ever did.
She left you, in the end, and you begged her not to go, knew it was too late to stop her.
“Come along, Pond,” you sobbed, already knowing you had lost her.
“Goodbye,” she said, and it was so final, a deathblow dealt by a loving hand. Such sadness, then, endless and immobile.
Now everything is bittersweet.
You always hate goodbyes. It’s funny that you don’t hate yours.
She looks in your eyes, and she looks at your lips.
It could have been different, you know.
You’re her friend, you’re her best friend, and you don’t regret it for a moment. But that other possibility always existed, that other time stream. It would have been so easy to make the jump, there were so many opportunities. Just change a few small details.
You never could. She didn’t belong with you.
This Amy, you think, the Amy greeting you now, is that Amy, that other possible Amy that you never quite met. You’re meeting her now: the Amy greeting you as a lover, not as a friend.
You loved her.
She loved you.
You both know it.
“Raggedy man,” she says, and it is your name, your name in her voice, the first name she gave you. Your own fairytale name. She was a fairytale, a bedtime story, and she is putting you to sleep.
“Goodnight.”
She was the first face your face saw, and she is the last.
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