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Amy Pond is lost.
She’s standing on the balcony outside her hotel room on an alien planet. She’s wearing a white nightgown and white complimentary slippers and holding a bunch of flowers from the nightstand, most of which look nothing like any other flowers she’s ever seen. Amy’s sleepwalking, she has to be, and she doesn’t realize it until she runs into the metal balcony and wakes with a start.
The flowers in the bouquet flutter as her hands tremble, but she doesn’t let them fall.
She sighs, and wonders how much the Doctor’s madness has rubbed off on her in such a short time. Then she sets the flowers down, carefully laying them at her feet, and she looks over the edge of the balcony. The sea is placid and dark, waves lapping gently away at the base of the island. She doesn’t know just how much of this planet is covered in water, but surveying the horizon, she can’t see any trace of land. Then she raises her head, and watches the night sky. There’s a whole new set of stars out there. And the sky is remarkably clear, hardly any light pollution, so she can survey the constellations and planets in the sky freely. She doesn’t know if the Lighthouse shines only on the other side, or if the lights are designed to allow the stars to be seen, but she can see thousands, and they’re beautiful.
When she was young, one of her friends had a telescope. She doesn’t remember who it was, but it was a very good telescope, the kind that could distinguish between a distant star and the planet Mars if you knew what you were looking for. Amy has no idea what she’s looking for here. Once she thinks she can make out the Big Dipper, but that’s just a trick of the imagination.
Amy doesn’t remember falling asleep; she remembers the twin bed feeling huge and empty, and she remembers shifting positions dozens of times. But she must have stirred and risen, because here she is standing on this balcony at the edge of a hotel room in the Lighthouse of Xal-Ariadne, and she’s lost. A cold wind blows, and she realizes at once how bitter the night is, with only her thin dress to shield her from this planet’s chill.
Amy feels a sudden, aching homesickness. But she can’t understand why; she had nothing back in Leadworth. Sure, she had a few friends, but only the few boys and girls who liked her enough to associate with her. There was no one there – except perhaps her aunt – for her to miss. The Doctor is the only man who ever truly understood her, and he’s only known her a few weeks.
She decides to go back inside, try to get some more sleep. Right as she turns, though, she sees a falling star and looks back to the sky. Amy wonders if it’s actually a spaceship of some sort, flying with an arc that mirrors a shooting star. She watches it fall, and she wants to make a wish but she’s not sure what she’d wish for.
For that moment, though, she feels better, more connected to the universe. Amy’s lost, but she knows that she’s lost, and somehow she can find her way again. She feels, for the first time in a while, something like hope. Amy Pond slips away, and gets back in her bed, tucking herself away, willing herself to rest.
She sleeps, but not easily.
~
It was the Doctor’s idea to come here; he said he wanted to get far away from where they were. Amy had enjoyed her time back on Earth with Vincent van Gogh, but she agrees it’s time for a change, and the Lighthouse of Xal-Ariadne is definitely a change.
They visit in the dawn of 1,002nd century, the furthest Amy’s ever gone in the future – thousands of years past the star whale and the crash of the Byzantium. She’s disoriented for a while after the TARDIS lands, reeling from the strange thought that she and everyone and probably everything she knows are dead by now. “Don’t you ever feel anything like that, Doctor?”
“Oh, I’ve been here and there and about,” he says, avoiding the question. “I’ve been millennia further into the future. I’ve come to times where they count in millions of years, not decades.”
She stares at him. “Then why is this time special?”
“Come on, Amy, the truly remarkable part is outside…”
The Doctor leads her down a short stone corridor from the room where the TARDIS is parked. He puts an arm around her shoulder, and throws open a door, and they walk out onto a stone terrace. Bright afternoon sun shines on them, and Amy turns her eyes upwards. The building looks impossibly high, towering into the heavens like a beacon. It’s made of stone, or at least it looks like that, with a few metal bits here and there. Periodically, colored lights flash from different points above. Then Amy looks over the edge of the terrace, and sees they are hundreds of meters in the air, suspended far above a few sandy beaches and a great expanse of water.
“Doctor, this is a lighthouse?”
“Lighthouse of Xal-Ariadne, oooh yes, once the tallest structure erected on land, the jewel of the planet Espera. One of the Seven Wonders of the Future World, if you will… Over five hundred storeys straight up, and almost a thousand when you count underground caverns and tunnels.” Amy thinks he’s beginning to sound like a history professor, but she doesn’t mind it this time. “It was erected in the 42nd and 43rd century, commissioned by a hundred interstellar leaders – including Liz Ten – and built over six decades, primarily by Ood and Hojohohto. Originally built to signal to ships at sea and airplanes, now it’s a space transmitter, directing whole fleets of starships, the largest of its kind.
“Once, the Daleks invaded and tried to take it over. They got the whole rest of this planet, every other inch of Espera, but the Lighthouse shot them out of orbit and they destroyed the Dalek ground forces, one by one – brilliant. Wish I had been there. Well, I might be someday, not sure.”
“When was that?”
“Over two thousand years ago.”
“Why is it still here?”
The Doctor considers his words carefully. “Sometimes it isn’t all about jotting around the universe, visiting other worlds and seeing what else is out there. Sometimes it’s about a nice place to spend the night.”
“So that’s what the Lighthouse is?”
“That and so much more… Over the centuries, the Lighthouse of Xal-Ariadne has grown into this complex, sprawling monument to humanity. There’s a whole amusement park in there, a dozen shopping malls, and a sixty-storey hotel. Humans like constancy, humans like things nice and reliable, well, so do lots of other races. The Lighthouse stays here through the ages. It’s a safe place, a peaceful harbor in the night.
“And you’ve got to admit,” he says, gesturing up at it, “It’s magnificent, isn’t it?”
Amy nods.
And when they check in to the Lighthouse Hotel, and there’s a sudden sharp feeling that someone else should be staying with them – someone brilliant who Amy desperately wants to see again – well, she can ignore it. She can’t think of anyone she’d rather be here with than the Doctor. Not even when she tries.
~
The morning after the sleepwalking, the Doctor takes a rather exhausted Amy down to the docks. The ten lowest levels of the Lighthouse are dedicated to boats, he explains, with a dozen different ports and massive shipping industry and hoverboat rentals and a sport called submersion therapy which is like scuba diving, water polo, and croquet all mixed together. “Planet with more water than land, twice the size of Earth, you need a lot of boats. And yes, you still need them, least if you can’t naturally swim for miles. Kayaks, hoverboats, pontoons, pirate ships, sailboats, boats that run on antimatter – I’m quite fond of boats, have I mentioned that? Should’ve said that to Vincent; he could’ve done to paint more pictures of boats. In fact, my TARDIS –”
The Doctor stops in the middle of his sentence, and doesn’t say anything else.
Then Amy sees, right in front of them, less than twenty meters away, what shut the Doctor up, and she shudders. There is a crack in the beach. Flat against the sand, it’s just a gaping white stretch of brokenness, stretching between points in space and time that were never supposed to meet. If she walks up close enough to it, and leans down, she bets she’ll be able to hear voices.
The Doctor strides over to the crack in the sand, glaring down at it. “What?” the Doctor cries. “What are you? What do you want from me?”
The Doctor grabs a rock from the foot of the pier and hurls it at the beach. It vanishes into the crack entirely, not leaving a trace. It’s gone, torn out of time, just like the Weeping Angels.
Amy reaches a hand up to her face and touches a shimmer of wetness under her eye, and it isn’t until then that she realizes she’s been crying. It’s the fifth time in the past week, she realizes, and this time she can’t blame shock, or the cold, or anything but herself. She stares at the crack again. “Doctor,” she says, “Why does looking at a crack make me feel sad?”
The Doctor turns to her, concerned. “Sad how?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” Amy says, wiping at her eyes with the back of her sleeve. “Just this big, deep sad feeling comes over me. It’s like I’m looking over a graveyard, or an old, abandoned house – something like that.” The Doctor looks away, stares down the length of the beach.
“I’m sorry.”
“I’d like to go back to the lighthouse,” Amy says softly.
They walk back in silence.
~
Over 100,000 years earlier, an Auton who remembers the name Rory Williams wakes and reports for the morning training exercises. He is very cleverly made. First, he is hollow. His mind is full of thoughts put there to make him disregard the fact that he (and his entire legion) don’t ever eat, to make his exceptional physical prowess seem natural, to make the weird lights swirling around in the sky from time to time seem normal. He has a translation circuit wired into his head to manage the conversion between English and Nestene and Latin.
Besides that, he has a thin layer of Roman memories papering over the real memories of Rory’s life papering over the fact that he is a plastic holding-vessel and not a true human.
He remembers things sometimes, when the layers of false information are not enough and facts bleed through. He knows things he shouldn’t know or even be pondering as a Roman soldier in 102 AD. He knows that the Empire will fall and fade into memories and then history books, merely a grand memory in the timeline of Earth, something that schoolchildren will write essays about in over a thousand years. He knows it but tries to ignore it, the way he used to try to ignore mortality – suppressing the thought that everyone would eventually die, no matter what he tried to do about it, even though he knew it had to be true.
Rory knows that Rome will fall, and the Holy Roman Empire will later appropriate the name, as it rises up and then declines itself; he knows the end of The Great Gatsby, and he knows the name Ron Weasley. And he’s convinced that he was once in Venice, hundreds of years in the future, on a dark stormy day when the city almost sank forever. One day Rory walks around with his head full of the facts of a 2006 Organic Chemistry course, and all through his exercises marching over the dull, flat terrain of Britannia, he’s remembering the difference between butane and butanol, and the patterns of atoms that make up esters and ethers and ketones, and every time he concentrates too hard on these facts, they hurt his head. He forgets these things at the end of the day, but they’re never truly gone.
Rory is undefined and out of place, and he can’t speak to any of the other troops about the strange magic and superstitions that keep running through his mind.
One night, he stops and looks up at the stars, just like Amy Pond once did, just like she will do. He sees a falling flash of light, and believes it to be a shooting star and not a Slitheen ship.
Rory Williams is lost.