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They lie together in the field, remnants of late-afternoon rain soaking into their backs and cool wind swirling wild overhead and sliding over the grass like all the ghosts, and this is the witching hour, the hour when light fades and falls away behind the horizon and the sky sparkles with beacons that are always out of reach and the silence is cool and quiet and lonely, but Vincent has Amy’s fingers in his left hand and the Doctor’s in his right and all the stars are brighter for it.
“I’ve seen many things, my friend,” the Doctor murmurs, reverent into the night, “but nothing quite as beautiful as what you see.”
Vincent looks up at the stars and hears the song of the colours and feels how the word friend buries itself, soft and warm, under his ribs and over his heart, and he runs his thumb gently over Amy’s knuckles and he wonders.
***
They lie there for hours, watching the swirls of the lights in the sky, until their backs are cold and their noses are chilled and their fingers are stiff from holding, from being held. Eventually the Doctor excuses himself, presumably to go to bed and probably to tinker and work the taint of lying still for too long out of his hyperactive limbs, but Amy stays.
Amy stays.
“They say I am mad,” says Vincent, because somehow he knows she will understand, “mostly I agree. But now I wonder if it really is madness, to see the world in all its colour. To see the turn of the universe, all its brightness and darkness, is that what madness is?”
Amy smiles, he can hear it. Her smile, he thinks, is beautiful, even if he cannot see it at this precise moment. “They used to call me mad, back home,” she says, and it sounds like, you’re not the only one who wonders.
“Ah,” Vincent says, and squeezes her hand, “so you are.”
She laughs, and suddenly she is kneeling in front of him, blocking out the stars. But her smile is like sunshine and her hair is bright as the dawn, fire rising out of the dark, and he cannot bring himself to mind.
(When she kisses him, sharp and laughing and, yes, mad, he sees the stars again, anyway.)
***
“You’re sure?” says the Doctor, again, for the hundredth time today. He holds his hands clasped in front of him, bouncing on his toes, and he may be the magic man from Amy’s childhood but right now he looks so young. It’s almost enough to convince her to stay. Well, to go. Whatever.
“Yes,” says Amy, anyway, because when she makes a decision she sticks to it. She’d stuck with something harder for fourteen years. “Yes, Doctor, I am sure. I am surer than sure.”
“Alright,” says the Doctor. He smiles, wobbly and wibbly and hoping to be brighter than it is. “You deserve this, Amy. You deserve to be happy.”
I stole your childhood, she hears, instead, I will not steal your future. But then again she has always been able to read him too well.
“Oh,” she says, because she loves him, too, “come here, you.”
She wraps her arms around his shoulders, standing on her tiptoes to reach. The Doctor wraps his arms around her waist and the back of her head and pulls her into his chest, buries his face in her hair and breathes in deep. She feels his tweed shiver under her hands, she could swear she feels him press a kiss against her shoulder, and she hangs onto the imaginary friend she’s clung to since she was seven and realizes, with a jolt, that it will be him who will find it harder to let go.
“Take care of him,” the Doctor says, like a benediction, into her cheek.
“Take care of you,” says Amy, as they part, and wishes that she knew, for certain, that he would.
He takes a step back and smiles at her again, his soldiering-on smile, and there are tears in Amy’s eyes again and for once she knows why they’re there.
“Doctor,” she calls, as he steps into the TARDIS. His head snaps up, and she smiles back, a smile with no regrets bar one. “Gotcha.”
“Always, Amelia Pond,” says the Doctor, and he is gone.
Vincent comes up to her from somewhere behind and slides his hand in hers, and they stand and look at the place where the TARDIS had been and she thinks of standing in her nightie with another hand in her hand and watching the stars go by, going, gone forever.
(The difference between that time and this, she decides, is this time she can stay.)
***
Vincent clears out his guest room for Amy, clearing out his art supplies and throwing his old canvasses out into the courtyard. Amy makes scandalized noises when she sees this and moves everything back in, along with about twenty other paintings he’d had lying in the bushes.
“You’re mad!” cries Vincent, watching Amy dragging a pair of canvasses that come up to her armpits in through the tiny door. One of them is a painting of haystacks; he honestly has no idea why she even thinks that one worth salvaging.
“We’ve established that,” grins Amy, leaning the paintings against the leg of the once-again-over-cluttered table. “Look, you’ve just lost about ten of these to the misplaced attentions of a crazy alien chicken, and I, for one, refuse to leave them out where they’ll be undefended. Now, shift, I’ve got another fifteen of these to move in here and my feet are starting to hurt.”
Vincent stares at her for a moment, then shrugs and heads for the door. If his paintings are precious to Amy Pond, he decides, then and there, then he had better protect them. Although where she plans to sleep in this mess remains a mystery to him.
“With you, stupid,” Amy says, when he asks, and he ducks outside before she can see the look on his face.
In the courtyard, the sunflowers bloom, bright and bold and hiddenly fragile, and Vincent weeps and laughs and smiles at the sky.
***
“Hey,” says Amy, “where’d you put that painting? The one with those trees, all gnarly and blue and all – it was right here.”
“I haven’t moved anything,” says Vincent, not looking up from his canvas. “And I don’t remember painting anything like that. Perhaps you were thinking of my friend Paul.”
“Right,” says Amy, after a moment, “yes, of course.”
***
They stride through the wheat, long stalks brushing up against their shoulders and tangling in Amy’s long hair, their finger twined together like the breeze in the treetops.
“Look at that moon,” breathes Amy, squeezing Vincent’s hand. It is, indeed, a glorious moon, full and bright like a silver dollar in the velvet sky. “How long would we take to walk there, you and I?”
“I don’t know,” says Vincent, honestly, instead of we can’t. The wheat is glowing gold in the silver moonlight and he is holding her hand in his – how would he know what is impossible, anyway?
“I know nothing with any certainty, my love,” he says, and bends down to kiss her again, “but the sight of the stars makes me dream.”
***
There is a crack in the wall.
Amy hisses when she sees it, lips pursed tight and angry and scared. She raises her fingers to her eyes and pulls them away wet, and she closes them tight and turns away. Vincent takes her by her shoulders and kisses her, and as he does so he realizes that in all the days he’s known her he’s never before seen Amy Pond afraid.
He paints over the crack, swirls a forest into the whitewash on the wall around it. As he paints he feels it, the crack, like a tether tugging at his paints and his brushes and the tips of his fingers. The feeling makes him recoil, but he thinks of Amy’s eyes, her bright eyes, looking hooded and afraid, and he paints on.
The crack is still there the next morning, but his forest is not. Vincent eyes it suspiciously, then settles down with his brushes and paints over the crack. For the first time.
He paints fire over it, red and orange yellow like their hair, his and Amy’s. Amy who burned bright into his life, his falling star, his wish. Amy who will fear a crack in the wall but will never fear his colours.
Amy who, when she sees it, murmurs that she liked the forest better. Amy who looks into his puzzled eyes and smiles, falsely bright.
Amy who says, when he asks what she means, “Nothing, it’s beautiful, thank you.”
The next day, the wall is white, as it has always been. Vincent paints it over with stars.
***
Vincent cries in the day; Amy cries in the night.
She flips and thrashes in their narrow bed, nearly flinging herself off onto the floor. Vincent wraps an arm around her shoulders and pulls her close and feels her shiver and weep and exhale another man’s name against his shoulder.
He has no concept of the things she is dreaming of, he knows. He has seen the stars, but she, she has touched them. He will never understand the things she’s seen.
(And she gave them up, she gave them up for him. He will never understand the things she’s lost.)
He will never understand, he knows, but that will not stop him from wondering.
He asks her, one day, he asks her who the man is she is crying for, this man she loved before she loved him, with the half bitten-off name she cannot ever seem to speak. He asks her, and she looks at him, eyes wide and horrified, like he’s betrayed her somehow, and she says, “I’ve never loved anyone but you.”
She is lying, he knows. What he does not know is if she knows that she is.
He doesn’t ask her about her losses again. Instead, he asks her something else.
***
The Doctor comes to visit, sometime in the summer, trailing stardust and bearing cyan paint and a white dress and a postcard, all glossy colour. He smiles at Vincent when he sees him, pumps his arm like the over-sugared child he likes to pretend to be when he thinks anyone is looking. Amy he sweeps up into a hug.
“Hello,” says Amy, laughing. “You came!”
“Oh, Pond,” says the Doctor, smiling like a coat of gesso, “I always come. Eventually.”
Amy squeezes him tight for a moment, takes a step back. “So,” she says, eyes still bright and sparkling, “presents. I see them, let’s have them. Now.”
The Doctor huffs and dumps the dress in Amy’s outstretched arms. “Girls,” he grouses, shooting Vincent a conspirational look. “They only ever want one thing. Clothes, I mean,” he adds quickly, beginning to flail, “not the other – well. Well, actually, I did meet one who wanted to have my children, but she was a fish at the time so it wouldn’t… exactly… have worked out.”
“That,” says Vincent, most solemnly, “sounds like something worth painting.”
The Doctor harrumphs and flails some more. Amy, funnily enough, doesn’t crack up.
She clutches the dress to her chest, fingers tracing the silk flowers on the bosom, eyes fiery bright and slightly unfocussed. The dress is clean and flowing, miles of satin that cascade over her arms like a stream of white water, and Amy holds it like it might flow away.
“Pond,” says the Doctor, gently, “are you alright?”
“Yeah, yeah,” says Amy, not looking up at him. “Fine.” She clears her throat and blinks, hard, fisting her hands in the soft material. “It’s beautiful,” she says, “thank you.”
The Doctor fidgets, hands stuffed in his pockets like a magician’s badly-hidden pair of doves, threatening to flap away at any moment. “Well,” he says, “I thought it’d be nice, you know, to have something from home. Not, um, that I took this from – I mean, you know, your own time period. And all.”
“Something old, something new,” says Amy, smile going a little indulgent, “and something borrowed, too, I’ll bet. If you paid a penny for this dress then I’m an otter.”
The Doctor fidgets some more. Amy smirks, but her knuckles are turning white.
“We still need something blue,” says Vincent, placing a hand on Amy’s shoulder, and he loves how she lets him and hates how she seems, now, like she needs it. He hadn’t known, he realizes with a jolt. He hadn’t known that some days he’d have to be the strong one, going in.
He squeezes her shoulder, gently, and she turns to smile up at him. If he’d known, he thinks, now, he’d like to imagine that he would have loved her anyway.
“Something blue,” he continues, raising an eyebrow, “So, Doctor. You are going to stay for the wedding?”
“Of course he is,” says Amy, shooting the Doctor a warning look. “He wouldn’t miss it for the world. Would you, now, Raggedy Man?”
“Not if the Universe made me,” says the Doctor, placating. “Although, fair warning, it might try.”
“Good,” Amy says, like he’s just gifted her a galaxy, and Vincent decides that he might clean out the guest room for him, after all.
***
The Doctor walks Amy down the aisle, and there are tears in his eyes. There are tears in Amy’s eyes, too, and Vincent weeps openly, joy dampening his lapels.
All of them think they know why they’re crying. None of them are sure.
None of them will ever ask.
***
The postcard is, apparently, a wedding gift. More accurately, it’s a wedding gift from the year 2010, purchased from the Musee D’Orsay, with a painting of sunflowers on the front. On the back, in the Doctor’s looping scrawl: Perhaps they’ll listen now.
“You went back,” says Amy, wonderingly. “How are the paintings?”
“Exquisite,” says the Doctor, smiling and far-away. “But you knew that.”
“The long life of Vincent Van Gogh,” Amy whispers, reverent, and embraces him again, once more, for luck.
The Doctor kisses the top of her head, and his smile flickers, and he says nothing.
***
“Oh,” says Amy, unwrapping yet another present, “That’s rather… nice.”
“Who’s it from?”
“Our neighbour down the street, Madame Dubois or something. The one with the green roof and the, the funny hat.”
Vincent looks up at her, a little sharp. “We don’t have a neighbour,” he says, slowly. “That house has been empty for years.”
Amy is silent for a moment. A long moment.
“Yes, right. I must have been thinking of someone else.”
***
Amy finds him, of course. Amy always finds him. She always seemed the sort to run when other people cried, with her young eyes and her long legs and her strong arms, built for flight, but she’s never run so far. She holds him when he weeps, his head in her lap, and she’s never shown the slightest towards running.
Still, still, Vincent realizes, he knows one day she will. Still, still, he is waiting.
“You don’t love me,” says Vincent, tears making tracks like comet trails down his cheeks. “You don’t love me! You love the idea – the idea of me, but me, you don’t love me.”
Amy stares at him for a long moment, mouth set in a thin line. Her hair tumbles around her face in wild unruly waves, lapping her anger up in fire. Vincent remembers when he’d looked at her, forever and ever ago, seen this fire in her eyes, this wildness, and fallen deep, so deep in love with her.
He remembers, and so he does not protest when she says, “I could say the same to you.”
He paints, instead, later, locking himself away in the spare room with his paints the colour of his wife’s blazing spirit, and he paints her sunflowers. He paints them because they’re a challenge, and because he knows they’ll make Amy smile like she deserves, and because they’re true.
He paints them because they are like the flowers, always living, always dying, and so beautiful.
***
“I don’t know why I’m crying,” whispers Amy, in the dark.
“Oh, darling,” Vincent says, holding her, “neither do I.”
***
Vincent points out Orion, hovering in the velvet black, his fingers dripping flecks of orange and yellow as they dance across the sky. Amy smiles over at him and grins up at the Big Dipper, and thinks of childhood and gold glitter and cardboard boxes filled with nothing like this.
They lie in the grass, fingers twined together like vines in the summer. Amy’s nail polish had flaked of a long time ago, but Vincent has deep blue stains around his cuticles, and Amy squeezes his hand and somehow it feels like it had that first night, with all the starlight still in reach.
“Something’s broken,” murmurs Amy, hushed in the dark. “Something important.”
“We are broken,” Vincent whispers back. For once, it does not sound like condemnation.
Amy rubs a thumb over his knuckles, her beautiful madman, feels the warmth of his shoulder pressing into hers. Above her, quietly, Orion flickers out. She almost doesn’t see it go.
“So we are,” Amy says, and kisses him.
***
“Ah!” cries Vincent, wiping the dust off yet another painting. “My haystacks! I’ve been looking for these for ages.”
“Going to frame them, are you?” asks Amy, grinning at him. “’Bout time, I say.”
“No,” Vincent says, matter-of-factly, “I’m going to paint over them. I’ve been short of canvasses all week.”
Amy smacks him on the shoulder. “Don’t you dare,” she snaps, and Vincent beams back and very cleverly doesn’t tell her how adorable she looks when she’s affronted.
She’s wearing an old dress, streaks of cadmium and chartreuse smeared across greying flowered print, her copper hair tied back with an old paint-covered rag. She looks like and nothing like a proper little wife, with her apron and her headscarf, with the sharpness in her eyes and the freckles sprinkled across her nose and the slight smirk tucked into her smile.
He desperately, desperately wants to kiss her.
He turns away before they can get distracted for the too-manyeth time today, pulls another canvas from his pile. It’s dark, deep forest green across the bottom, swirls of blue-black picking out a sky. And – there, in the darkness, shining, burning, bursting, roaring –
“Amy,” he says, looking up at her, “I can’t – do you know, what are these meant to be?”
He can feel her kneeling down beside him, feel her hand trembling on his shoulder. He turns and holds her, because all of a sudden he needs her, needs her fingers tangled in his hair, needs her pale skin against his cheek and her fire and her stillness because something is broken and the world is wrong and he doesn’t know but he loves her and he’s kissing her and –
And she’s crying.
“Oh, Vincent,” she says, a little choked, “those are the stars.”
***
“I don’t see it,” says Vincent, squinting in the dark. “I don’t see them.”
“You think I’m mad,” says Amy, not a question.
“Of course,” Vincent says, and he means I love you, and he knows she hears I’m sorry.
***
Amy spends hours in the field, at night, looking up at a black sky. Sometimes Vincent comes with her, sometimes he doesn’t. She holds his hand when he is there, clings like she’ll never let go, and he’ll kiss her right behind her left ear and whisper against her skin like she’s something precious.
And some nights she is alone, and she spreads herself out in the grass like the last, fallen star, and listens to the wind whispering over her face. Some nights, she is alone, and she imagines that she can hear the sound of the stars, of her mother’s laugh over her shoulder, of the creak and groan of engines. She spreads herself out on the grass and knows, somewhere deep inside her broken and grown-up chest, that she is still a girl, waiting.
Then she rises and walks back to her home, and sees her husband’s light in the window, and knows that the world hasn’t fallen to fractures. Yet.
And she waits.
***
The call comes when she’s at the market. Amy drops her apples on the cobblestones and runs.
“Amy,” whispers Vincent, tips of his lips curling upwards in a smile. They’d moved him back into the house and onto their narrow bed, wrapped a bandage around his chest. His blood seeps through the white cloth, stains their sheets. Amy knows she’s spent too much time with him, now, because she can name every colour it makes as it spreads over the mattress. Scarlet. Cadmium. Umber.
“Vincent,” she says, gripping his fingers in her palm. “What have you done?”
Vincent coughs a laugh, weak and wistful, and Amy doesn’t know if she wants to kiss him or slap him or cradle him in her arms and weep. She kneels down next to him instead, hand tucked into his, and drips tears onto his bandages.
“I couldn’t – I couldn’t see,” Vincent says, and crushes her fingers in his grip. “I knew, and I didn’t, and I – I couldn’t stand not knowing.” He coughs again, and bites back a whimper, and Amy can feel it like a bullet lodged in her own heart.
“The stars,” she says, not a question. She knows.
Vincent nods and kisses her gently, on the knuckle under her ring. “I’d painted them,” he says, “but they don’t exist, do they? And I couldn’t, I don’t know what’s real or what’s just – but you, you do. And I couldn’t see.”
Their fingers are tangled together. Amy can feel his grip weakening, but their fingers are tangled, and she pretends that means that they won’t be able to let go.
“I’ve been called mad all my life,” Vincent says, low and intimate like the secrets they whisper into their pillows, “But I’d forgotten how it felt to fall somewhere you cannot follow.”
“I’m sorry,” chokes Amy, “I’m sorry. I thought I’d be able to fix you, to make you better. I’m sorry.”
“Ah, love,” says Vincent, “you did.”
Amy leans forward, rests her forehead against his. Their tears mingle together and it feels horribly, awfully right.
“I thought I could save you,” she whispers. Vincent smiles.
“You and me both, darling,” he says, and presses his lips towards hers. She’s just out of reach, their kiss divided by a sliver of air, a hair, a crack.
Amy closes the gap, as she always does, and knows it is not enough.
***
He leaves her everything. The house, the courtyard, his paintings. All his paintings.
Amy sorts through them on a summer afternoon, strong shoulders draped in black. She finds his haystacks, his sunflowers, his starry nights. On his easel, paint still drying, she finds a canvas washed in golds and blues. She runs her fingers over his strokes, traces out a box that had haunted her dreams since she was a child, fingertips ghosting like kisses over shimmering timefire.
Amy kneels by her bed, and prays.
She doesn’t pray to Santa; she’s not a child, not anymore. She’s a woman grown up and grown sore with waiting, with a life traced with shimmering scars and a crack lying over her heart. She’s outgrown her childish petitions, outgrown her wellies and her suitcase in her backyard, outgrown the promise of a saviour from the sky.
She prays, instead, to a God she doesn’t know if she believes in, and she prays for the smell of the earth under her knees. She prays the rhythm of a double heartbeat, the sound of her name in the voice of a man she’s loved and forgotten, the feel of a paint-streaked hand on her cheek.
She prays for the loves she’s lost and the loves she’s found, the one she gave away and the one she never had and the one she couldn’t save. She prays, and she hears engines, and she hears a laugh that tugs at the edges of her memory, and she hears a sunflower smile, trapped somewhere between living and dying.
She prays, and hears the stars above her, roaring their light. They may be real, and they may be broken, and she will not raise her eyes to check.
“I could have told you, Vincent,” whispers Amy, into the night. “The world was never made for one as beautiful as you.”