Chapter Text
When he first picks Amy Pond up, it’s because her life doesn’t make sense.
The Doctor crashed into her backyard, abandoned her for twelve years, came to traumatize her for a day, and then left for another two years. Her life has passed by him in two TARDIS trips. The rough, crackling nature of the woman he’s met three times now feels at odds with the bright-eyed child he left behind in the beginning. Amy is still curious, and bright, and brave, but the Doctor can’t help but feel that she’s grown up in entirely the wrong way.
He falls to the easiest solution: he blames himself. He blames himself, feels responsible for the way her life’s turned out, and itches to take her with him. It’s a new life for him, a new mind, and he ought to be held accountable for the damage he leaves behind. Despite the fish fingers and custard, the quips to invading aliens, and the bowtie—he will not have regrets. This Doctor will paper his errors over until forgets they occurred to begin with.
So he tells her that he’s taking her out of loneliness, but it isn’t true. He owes her something; a lifetime of wild adventures to compensate for all those years in Leadworth. In some corner of one of his hearts, he knows it isn’t enough, but it has to be. Despite the time machine and a thousand years of experience, the Doctor thinks he can fix everything but knows he can’t.
"So, are you okay, then?" he asks. "Because this place, sometimes it can make people feel a bit, you know."
"I'm fine," says Amy. Her eyes shine with wonder, her hair falling down her back as she gazes up to the roof of the TARDIS. "It's just, there's a whole world in here, just like you said. It's all true. I thought—well, I started to think that maybe you were just a madman with a box."
"Amy Pond, there's something you'd better understand about me, because it's important, and one day your life may depend on it." The Doctor's giddy, his profile drawn in line with hers, a smile blooming across his face. Her serious expression makes him laugh, and he finishes the thought. "I am definitely a madman with a box. Ha ha! Yeah."
"Goodbye Leadworth, hello everything," says the Doctor.
He takes Amy to a future spaceship, and a Star Whale, and a descendant of Queen Elizabeth he likes better than any of her predecessors. What he tells her is that they only interfere when there are children crying. What he means is he wonders if she cried, waiting all night in her garden, waiting for a Doctor who never came back. He hopes it isn’t the case.
They’re on a spaceship hundreds of years in the future, and Amy is brilliant. The Doctor had retreated into himself, decided he knew best, made a choice that could’ve killed a Star Whale. And Amy Pond—reckless, brilliant Amy Pond—solves the riddle, takes the chance, saves the day. The Doctor had seen a false dichotomy: pick one or the other, both end badly. What do you want to live with?
Amy sees the third option, and he’s reminded of the companions who talked him down and found solutions when there were none. He’s reminded, however quietly, that he isn’t always right. The Doctor feels insulted, at first, scared of the risks this friend is willing to take. There’s a moment, a shout he doesn’t mean, and then he tells Amy he’s got her. (He does. He has no intention of dropping her at home if she doesn’t want to go.)
“You could’ve killed everyone on this ship,” says the Doctor.
“You could’ve killed a Star Whale,” Amy says.
He sees her thirst for adventure, her limitless compassion, curiosity and intelligence and bravery, and he thinks that he really has got her. He thinks—damn his loneliness, what he wants is to travel the universe with her.
They go back to World War Two and he introduces her to Winston Churchilll. They run into Daleks who are lying yet again (although this time they are funny colours, he will give them credit for that) and the Doctor loses his mind. He rages against the Dale because things have got to go a certain way; people have got to be good and Daleks have got to be evil, and above all everyone should tell the truth.
He beats in a metal machine with a wrench and screams out his suffering and it’s just another part of the Dalek plan. In a moment, the Doctor feels defeated enough to get in his TARDIS and run away. It’s what he’s always done. It’s what he’s best at. But the Doctor has never been able to walk away from children crying, and so he stays to save the day.
The Doctor tries to convince Professor Bracewell of his humanity. He defaults to pain and suffering, because that is what the Doctor knows. Every time he saves the world, he has spotted fear and sadness in the aftermath and come to know them as uniquely human. In his head, he has built a group of people defined by their greatest pains instead of their happiness.
Amy tells Bracewell he is human because of his love, because of his ability to have hope, and it is a much better argument. Her red hair is like a firebrand, whistling through the air and behind her words, her voice a magnet for empathy. When the Doctor travels with humans, he is always reminded of how unlike them he truly is. He looks like them, he wears their clothes, he speaks their language: and yet, he is not human. Earth is not his home, and he only understands what he can quantify.
The professor says his life is a lie, that he wants to choose to end it. Inexplicably, the Doctor turns to look at Amy, and finds her face slack in sympathy. Something curls in his stomach, a feeling like guilt surfacing in his gut, and he tries to convince himself that twelve years and four psychiatrists only meant belief in impossible aliens, couldn’t possibly be—
“Listen to me. I understand. Really, I do.”
And he thinks maybe if he had crashed into someone else’s backyard Amy Pond wouldn’t say it like that.
He is beamed up to a Dalek ship so Amy rescues him with the assistance of a prime minister long dead. It’s funny, sometimes, how time travel works. A Scottish woman born in 1989 can collaborate with a British statesman who died in 1965. Later, when the action has died down, she takes the TARDIS key away from Churchill, and then he takes it from her without knowing why. They step back into his spaceship, and he turns to her.
“You better keep this key,” he says, folding it into her hand. “I might lose it to someone else.”
“I’ll keep an eye on it for you,” says Amy, and she beams.
They travel to weird and wonderful locales; rescue ancient cities from alien influence. Amy nicks a first edition of The Bell Jar from Sylvia Plath and convinces Leonians that the Great Library of Alexandria is worth saving. The Doctor fixes the TARDIS and inquires about Amy’s childhood, about her friends, about her hobbies. She presses in equal measure, and so they swap stories about lives foreign to the other.
“I snuck out in the middle of the night once to meet Rory and Melody for a concert,” says Amy. “I barely remember what it was now—I got so drunk I can barely remember it—but when the lights flashed green at the end I screamed that aliens were coming back and vomited onto my brand new sneakers. Pity, really, they were almost fifty pounds.”
“Rory your sometimes-boyfriend?”
“Rory my kind-of boyfriend. You’d think an alien would have better memory.”
Amy tells him time and time again that she doesn’t want to go back, that she wants another adventure right before she does. He’s promised her planets, worlds, and a lifetime to be crammed in before she goes back to Leadworth. But with every intent rejection of her regular life, the Doctor will spot the date he took her away from inked into paper alongside half-finished sketches of wedding gowns.
He isn’t half stupid, but he chooses to ignore it.
She is a brilliant artist, and a learned one too. While she expresses no interest in the mathematics or scientific aspects of time travel, choosing to accept what they do as something akin to magic, she papers the walls with watercolours of landscapes and charcoal recreations of aliens. When she’s sleeping, he nicks a few ‘lost’ paintings from Degas just to watch her face explode into a smile.
“I want to meet Marie Antoinette,” says Amy.
“All of time and space and you only want to go to Earth,” grumbles the Doctor, but plugs the coordinates in anyway. “Next time I’m showing you another planet.”
They have just gotten back from ending the Sontaran uprising in 1792 when the Doctor gets a message from his sometimes wife River Song. When the Doctor recounts the story of these travels in later years, he will say that this is when it started to go to hell.
(A phrase, incidentally, that he picked up from Amy.)
For the first time since regenerating, the Doctor has sunk into a state of relaxed happiness. He hasn’t worried about his future, grand mysteries, or scheming foes—just thrown himself into the moment after this one, into wherever Amy wants to go, into the danger that lies directly ahead. River (who is his future, a grand mystery, and potentially a scheming foe) does not fit into this picture.
However, the Doctor can never resist lending a hand, and he promised Amy a planet. This, of course, is exactly how he gets roped into a mildly terrifying scheme with Weeping Angels in a cave.
Amy, like all the Doctor’s companions, is thrown into danger despite his will. He doesn’t let himself think he cannot save her—he only convinces himself that he can do it on his own. His mind is in hyperdrive, furious and confused with River in equal measure, pushing the fear to a place where he can’t reach it.
“I don't need you to die for me, Doctor. Do I look that clingy?” Amy says. Her voice is like steel, her face betrays no fear, and he suddenly wants to cry.
He realizes then that he’s done a number on her whether he admits it or not, that no amount of space travelling will make up for how badly being abandoned has messed with Amy’s head. If she’s the Girl Who Waited, what does that make him? Not the Raggedy Doctor, that gives him too much credit. No, he’s the one who left her.
The Doctor inhales the musty, demoralizing air of the Angels’ cave, and he does not leave.
“You can move your hand,” he insists. His mind races, questioning—how do you make someone who thinks their hand is stone move? The Doctor taps her hand, but his movement yields no reaction from her. The shock must not be strong enough, and that gives him an idea.
“It's stone,” Amy replies.
“It's not stone.”
“You've got to go. Those people up there will die without you. If you stay here with me, you'll have as good as killed them.”
Her gaze is fierce, her words resolute. There is no power on this earth to contend with her, no Angel that will catch her off guard now. She might be cleverer than him, but she is twice as reckless. All he knows is that he will not leave her here to die, that he refuses to let Amy’s story end here no matter what she says to him.
“Amy Pond, you are magnificent, and I'm sorry,” he says. In the space of a breath, the Doctor tries to apologize for everything and the words catch in his throat. He presses his lips together, thinking of the future, thinking of the pages of Amy’s sketchbook of adventures covering the betrayals of the past.
“It's okay. I understand. You've got to leave me,” she says. Her face is turned away from him, but the steady tone she employs makes him believe she is not breaking. She has come to expect being left.
What has to happen to a girl from Leadworth to let her go with grace to her own death?
“Oh, no, I'm not leaving you, never,” says the Doctor, throwing himself ahead before his words can hang in the air. The future, the future, he can fix Amy, she’s going to be fine. He’s going to be fine. He can forget what he’s done. “I meant that I’m sorry for this.”
He bites her arm, she yelps, and she stays alive.
More than almost any other creature he’s encountered, the Doctor hates Weeping Angels. He hates the instinctive fright others have of them, the fear at being lost in time, the type that keeps you alive but rots you inside out. Most of all, though, the Doctor hates not being in control.
They’re stuck in the Byzantium, and he knows the Angels are trying to make him angry (River knows, because River seems to know everything about him) but he won’t let this be the end. He won’t let anyone else die. Bob’s voice filters through his ears, but he’s barely hearing it, he just knows that he has to get out. He’s the Doctor, and there isn’t a trap he can’t escape from.
It’s a selfish need he’s got, to categorize and recite and mark everything into his boxes. He wants to make the world into something he can understand, and he wants to blink while doing it, to savour those regenerations when his wonder can supersede anxiety. When they escape, he thinks he has it figured out, thinks he’s saved—and then Amy starts to count down.
“So, what's wrong with me?” she asks, and the Doctor thinks he hears her voice tremble. It makes sense to him, of course. When she thought he would leave her it was something she expected: people leaving. Then she knew that the Angels would kill her. Now, she doesn’t know what’s going to happen, ergo, she’s scared.
“Nothing. You're fine,” says River. Her voice is clipped and quiet, and the Doctor feels something wrench in his chest. He shouldn’t have come here, he knows he shouldn’t have, and more than anything he shouldn’t trust River Song.
“Everything,” the Doctor tells Amy, “you're dying.”
“Doctor!” River snaps.
“Yes, you're right. If we lie to her, she'll get all better. Right. Amy, Amy, Amy. What's the matter with Amelia? Something's in her eye. What does that mean? Does it mean anything?”
“Doctor,” Amy insists, and now her voice is definitely shaking. Bob might have said something, he doesn’t know, he is fixed on the fear in her eyes. If she dies here, if she dies today, it will be his fault. He brought her here; because he was guilty, because he was lonely, because he thought she was magnificent.
“I’m going to fix it,” the Doctor promises her.
“Doctor, I’m…” says Amy, trailing off. She glances at the hem of her sweatshirt, fiddling with it to avoid his gaze. “Doctor, I’m scared.”
“Of course you’re scared,” says the Doctor, “you’re dying. But it’s going to be okay, you know. Because I think you might be sick. And do you know what sick people usually need?”
“If you say a Doctor, I am going to smack you in the face.”
“Oh, Amelia Pond, always one step ahead of me.”
He’s learned from Rose and Martha and Donna and all those bright, shining companions who always, always die, so not Amy. Not this time. He can do better, he knows he can, and he will do better by her. The Doctor forces everything he knows about the Angels through his brain, tries to come up with something that explains how he can help.
“Three. Doctor, it's coming. I can feel it. I'm going to die.”
“You haven’t got to one yet, Amy, I’m going to figure it out,” he says, breathing too fast. “Now, counting. What's that about? Bob, why are they making her count?”
“To make her afraid, sir.”
So that’s the answer. It’s because the Angels can make her. Because they want to frighten her. Amy Pond found a man in a spaceship in her backyard and wasn’t afraid; she just believed in him for twelve years. The Doctor hears her fear now and it galvanizes him. His hand curls into a fist at his side, his jaw set.
“Doctor, she’s got seconds,” pleads River, “do you know what’s wrong? How do we help?”
“An image of the Angel becomes the Angel itself,” muses the Doctor. “Wait. Amy, you once told me you never had parents. You also told me that your mum used to carve faces into apples.” He drops the communicator, paces across the room. “You told me that there was a duck pond that never had any ducks.”
“Please explain how that’s in any way relevant!” Amy says, her breath hissing out of her teeth.
“Your memory,” breathes the Doctor. “You looked into the eyes of the Angel, and you knew you needed to remember it. So your brilliant, but misdirected, you—your memory created an image of the Angel inside your head, and an image of an Angel becomes an Angel. You’re becoming a… I’ve said Angel too many times, it’s not a word anymore.”
“So I’m becoming a Weeping Angel,” Amy says. “That is exactly how I was expecting today to go: possession by an otherworldly being I didn’t know existed twenty-four hours ago.”
“Sarcasm, at a time like this,” mutters River, and follows this comment by saying something unintelligible under her breath.
“How do we fix it, though?” asks the Doctor. “Knocking you out does no good, because your memory still has the picture. Visual… visual… what do we know that’s visual? Amy, you froze the Angel on the tape. It’s a pity the human body doesn’t have a remote.”
“Visual,” says Amy, “wait, if it’s visual, can’t I just close my eyes? I can’t see the screen, the Angel can’t get farther.” She winces. “I’m not sure I like that very much.”
“That’s not you, that’s the Angel,” says the Doctor, “it’s scared of what you’ve said, and that must mean you’re right. Come on, Amy, you’re stronger than it is, just close your eyes! I’ll get it out later, but you can buy us that time.”
Amy shuts her eyes, and the Doctor grins.
He rambles off orders he’s not sure he understands, and then he’s off. Off into the wild, off to stop a homicidal race of decorative statues and save his companion. All in a day’s work for the Doctor, really. He knows time can be unwritten, and he knows the Angels can be defeated. That is all he needs to solve this problem, just another scare in the avalanche of his travels.
Funny. He didn’t know this regeneration would be so afraid.
The catch of terrible days is that they can always get worse. He watches a man die, he runs until his legs nearly give out, and then he realizes he’s left Amy near the most dangerous thing in the universe. The Doctor curses himself out in his mind, in every language he knows, and then he picks up his communicator and tells Amy to come to him.
Where is the safest place in the universe?
Behind the Doctor.
Why is that?
Because everything will be trying to kill him first.
The Doctor will not let Amy die, and he will not let her be erased from existence. He cannot bear the thought of her life winking out, of no one remembering the strange girl who drew and believed in things she couldn’t touch and whose bravery could catch an ancient alien off guard. His frantic voice pedals over the communicator, his hearts race in double time, and all the while behind him River clicks around on a teleporter that saves Amy.
(Maybe he can trust River. He can forget what the Army bloke told him, the Doctor has never truly trusted the military. If River will save Amy, she is an ally in his books. He doesn’t let himself think about an alternative where River fails.)
He sets himself to solving the next puzzle, muttering about space time events and puttering around the console. The Doctor fiddles with the controls to focus and curses himself for not completing a better study on the Angels when he had a chance. He does not want to sacrifice himself.
“Doctor,” says Amy, her eyes still shut tight.
“Amy?” asks the Doctor.
“The Angels are affected by gravity, aren’t they? And we’re in a spaceship where you can control the gravity, perhaps? And you can stop breaking the things that are going to let you change the gravity in here, yeah?”
The Doctor looks at a button that’s come off in his hand, uncomprehending. “Oh. Wait, no.”
River’s eyes light up. “Doctor, the Angels can’t move while we’re looking at them. I think that what Amy’s saying—if I’m right—is that gravity can act on them while we’re looking, same as statues. And, you know, there’s a time rift that can wipe all those Angels out of existence?”
“Wait. I think…” says the Doctor, then bursts into a grin. “Oh, why do I ever bother travelling alone?” He fumbles for the handle that controls the gravity on the ship. “Everyone hold on tight!”
The Angels are defeated, River Song is returned to her prison, and the Doctor and Amy Pond are alone on the TARDIS again. Everything is as it should be again, except for the shake in Amy’s voice. He watches as she skims her hand over a drawing of a wedding dress, as she clings to the railings in the ship to keep herself standing. It occurs to him that now is the closest she’s come to dying.
“Are you alright?” he asks.
“Yeah,” whispers Amy, but she bites her lip right after. “Doctor, if I ask to go home…”
“Go home?” the Doctor asks, feeling something seize in his gut. He won’t cry, he can’t cry, he’ll have other companions. Maybe Amy will want to travel with him again. He shouldn’t be so worried about how this conversation will end, but he can’t help but lurch a little closer to her.
“If I ask to go home, can I come with you again?” Amy asks. “I promise, just drop me off at this party and give me half an hour. There’ll be cake and everything, you won’t be bored. I’d just like to make a pit stop. Get a few things I seem to have forgotten.” She cracks a tentative smile.
Relief is all-encompassing, his face going slack as he leans against the TARDIS attention. “I love cake. I can definitely spend half an hour eating cake. Did you know that Time Lords have seven stomachs? No, that isn’t true, I’m rambling.” The Doctor stops to catch his breath. “I’ll take you home.”
“Thank you,” says Amy, leaning backwards against the console. She reaches out, pats his shoulder a little harder than strictly necessary, and her smile becomes a little less brittle. “I won’t make you wait too long.” Almost self-conscious, she adjusts loose strands of hair around her face.
“I won’t leave,” says the Doctor, and hears the gust of her exhale beside him.
He gestures to the buttons for coordinates, and she hums as she plugs a string of numbers in. June 26th, 2010, the origin of those cracks in time. It’s just another thing about Amy’s life that doesn’t make sense, another puzzle left to be solved.
(Not for the universe, though, as selfish as that motivation may be. He’ll solve the mystery for her, and the vestige of a normal life she can still have.)
The TARDIS comes to life, the controls whirring at his touch. Amy turns her face to his, that tentative smile becoming buoyant. Orange light swaths her face as they take off, passengers on a blue police box shooting through the stars.
“Mad, impossible Amy Pond,” says the Doctor. “How could I ever leave you?”