Chapter Text
He is five years old when he meets her, the first time, crouching low in the cream-carpeted corner of his classroom, knobby knees poking out of his shorts. He stares down at them,miserable, wishing he could cover them up – they’re little, like him, and pale, also like him, and like him again they wobble a bit, awkwardly.
A shadow falls across his corner, and he looks up. The first thing he sees is knees, but they’re Adult Knees, strong and brave and good for hiding behind, and they don’t wobble. At all.
“Hello,” says the owner of the knees, crouching down beside him, “you’re a quiet one, aren’t you? What’s your name?”
“Rory,” whispers Rory, blinking. The lady in front of him is bright, with sharp features and laughing eyes and red hair and freckles. He wonders what she’s doing, talking to him.
“Well, nice to meet you, Rory,” says the lady, and she reaches out a hand for him to shake, like he’s a real grown up instead of just a kid with crippling shyness and wobbly knees. “What’re you doing over here all by yourself?”
Rory peers over the lady’s shoulder. Kids are giggling, rolling on the carpet, running in circles in some bizarre game of tag. Two girls are sitting over on the alphabet mat, playing some sort of hand-clapping game. A big-looking boy is busy poking another, smaller boy in the shoulder. The pokee lets him, with a slightly bemused smile, and seems to be somewhat enjoying it.
Rory looks at the other children, all movement and noise, then at the lady’s bright, happy eyes, and shuffles a little further back into the corner. “I don’t belong here,” he mutters, finally, wretchedly. He looks down, again, at his knees, and he means it.
The lady leans closer, and she smiles, wide and sparkling as the sun. “Let me tell you a secret, Rory,” she says, and suddenly he notices how red her hair is, like fire or autumn leaves, how it stands out against the classroom’s muted pastel-and-cream. How strong she seems, how real in this watery kindergarten world, and how her voice is like a song, her accent broad and lilting and so very Scottish in this very English village. “Neither do I.”
If you ask him, later, when he’s grown and adult himself, when he’s gotten over his shyness and wobbling and crippling fear of bare knees, if you make him pick a moment, he’ll think back to this one and say, yes, I suppose this is it.
Five-year-olds don’t fall in love, but Rory does.
***
Miss Jessica Pond is his teacher for a year, guiding him through reading and ‘rithmetic and the rocky politics of pre-school. She gets him out of his corner, eventually, and tweaks his nose every so often, playfully, until he almost isn’t embarrassed of it anymore. She laughs at his feeble five-year-old jokes, and her laugh is loud and open and shiny, like a penny glimmering in the sun. Her anger is like the rage of a storm, and the bullies, especially his bullies, are cowed into submission by the end of the first week.
She is, to Rory, a dragonslaying knight in a long scarf and short skirt, which is to say amazing, and she always marks his spelling papers with a smiley face, which is almost better.
(He keeps every one, in a shoebox under his bed. Fifteen years later, he still has them, but he’ll never admit it to anyone.)
He cries when the year ends and he has to leave her class. She kisses himgently on the forehead, and tells him not to be a baby, he’s her hero, remember, her brave strong Rory. He smiles at that, and it's a little forced and still a bit wobbly, but she smiles back so it’s good enough for him.
When he gets the news, midway through the summer holidays, that Miss Jessica Pond has passed away, tragically, at the age of twenty-three – car crash, a freak accident, how horrible, what is the world coming to nowadays? – he screams into his pillow, just once.
His parents will never find out that he knows. They never meant to tell him, after all, never meant for him to overhear, and he never cries about it, in front of them.
He keeps smiling instead, as he knows she would’ve wanted him to.
***
When Rory is fifteen, he falls in with the wrong crowd. This is probably less to do with his own nascent teenage rebellion than with the fact that his delinquent sort-of-friends seem to have adopted him, all of a sudden and with great enthusiasm, and he has neither the heart nor the guts to tell them to go away.
Their choice to do so, he suspects, is less to do with his inherent coolness than with the fact that he is Mostly Harmless, owns a nice bike for getaways and is fun to corrupt, but he figures he can live with that.
Rory has always prided himself with living with things. He’s discovered, over the years, that if he can’t be bold and brash, being unfazeable is the next best thing, and it’s probably the best he can aspire to anyway. He’s learned to put up with his mother’s fussing, with his dad’s insistence on teaching him to change bulbs and carry a trowel everywhere, with his lanky legs that don’t seem to have grown any less knobby since he was five, and with any other crap life unceremoniously hurls in his general direction.
Including being handed a fag, which is, smell-wise, not something he’s too fond of and, term-wise, not something he’s quite comfortable with and, legality wise, not something he’s comfortable with at all, especially since the boy who handed it to him seems to have suddenly and completely disappeared.
“Don’t tell me,” says a dry, distinctly Scottish voice from somewhere behind him, “you’re holding it for a friend.”
“Er,” says Rory, with typical eloquence, whirling around. “Yes I am, actually.”
The woman who spoke is gorgeous, by fifteen-year-old standards at least. Her waist is tiny and her features are delicate and her legs, you could build temples to those legs. You could build monuments.
This isn’t, however, Rory’s first impression of her. His first impression is of a (very short) black skirt and a black-and-white chequered vest and a bowler hat with a chequered stripe, followed very quickly by oh shit, a copper.
“You,” she says, in a Copper Voice, “what’s your name?”
“Er,” says Rory, again. “Rory Williams. Er. Ma’am.”
“Rory Williams,” says the cop, ponderously, as if she’s tasting it, trying it out for size. “You can’t be more than – what are you, fifteen? What kind of lousy friends do you have, exactly?”
“Well,” Rory says, and realizes that he doesn’t really have an answer and then, with a horrible sinking feeling, that he really does: “They’re not, well. They’re not really my friends.” And then, because he is always honest to police and can never lie around pretty girls:“I don’t really have friends.”
The copper peers at him, as if studying him, learning him, judging him. “I don’t see why,” she says, finally, matter-of-factly. “You seem like fun. Strong. Brave. Kind of sweet.” Her eyes narrow, just slightly, and then she smiles, like she’s decided, and it lights up her face. It lights up the entire street. “You are sweet, aren’t you, Brave Strong Rory?”
Rory starts, unsettled, and then realizes that she’s teasing. Him. Teasing him. He hasn’t been teased, teased properly, not cruelly or as a prelude to stealing his trousers, in what feels like all his teenaged life.
“I, um,” he says, trying to smile. He desperately wants to smile. “I could be.”
The copper beams, and Rory feels his soul catch on fire. “Good,” she says, plucking the cigarette from his fingers. “You do that, yeah? Leave the loneliness and the swashbuckling to the likes of me.”
Rory stares at this beautiful woman, with her miles of leg and flaming hair and confident, authoritative, dazzling smile, and decides that yes, he’ll leave the swashbuckling to her. He’ll leave anything, do anything, really, if she asked. He would.
“Get yourself some proper friends, while you’re at it,” she adds, and he thinks, I could do that too. And then she winks and she turns and she leaves, flicking his damning cigarette into a bin as she goes.
And when she’s halfway down the street and she turns and grins at him over her shoulder and says, “Stay off the contraband and I’ll see you around, eh, Brave Strong Rory?”, he thinks, fervently: And that as well.
In the papers the next day, he reads about a shooting down in the city. The local force had been called down to help deal with it, the papers say, and they’d done the village proud by being instrumental in helping with the arrest, with the cleanup, with the saving of lives.
One officer, say the papers, Police Constable Amelia “Mia” Waters, was gunned down in the line of duty, taking a bullet for an unknown civilian.
Rory stops reading the papers after that. He can’t say exactly why, except that he gets the feeling they’ve betrayed him, and they make him feel, for a long time after, like he’s failedsomehow.
***
He stays off the contraband, anyway, because it’s sensible advice. He makes some friends who, however wild they might be, actually study and seem to appreciate him, and that’s sensible too. He gets over sweet the way he got over shy, which is to say slowly, gradually and never quite fully, and sensible seems to take over the space that it leaves. It is, in Rory’s mind, a sign that he’s growing up.
He takes his exams on three years of consistent hard work and three months of coffee-fueled mugging and gets good enough marks for a medical career. He chooses nursing because it’s a less intimidating option than surgery, and because it feels warmer and more caring and the tuition is cheaper. He moves to London for university and rents his own flat. He changes, more than he’d ever thought he’d change, and he starts to feel like he’s in control, he starts to feel bigger and smaller and older and younger all at the same time, he starts to feel like he’s finally living.
He starts to see her everywhere.
Red-haired Amie, his favourite barista down at the college coffee shop. A girl who’d served him at the perfume counter in Henrik’s on New Years’, green-eyed and freckled. His thesis supervisor. Women he passes in the streets, with bright hair or bright eyes or long legs or power.
Any of them, he thinks, after all-nighters or graveyard student shifts at the hospital or when he’s just tired of being sensible, all the time, always. Any of them could be her. Any of them could be her, coming back.
He wonders, sometimes, alone in the dark, if he has somehow gone mad and has just been too sensible to notice.
***
On his twenty-first birthday, Rory’s friends hire him a kissogram.
They’d actually ordered him a stripper, but when they’d told him his face had gone so white and horrified that they feared he'd embarrass them all with a fit of righteously bewildered pontificating, and they’d called the poor girl off and phoned for another, less explicit, one.
This is, for the record, not a decision he meets with any degree of enthusiasm, but at least he’d stopped spluttering eventually.
“Come on, Rory,” Jeff had said, tweaking his ear in a gesture Rory would’ve thought he’d grown out of when he’d turned six, “stop being such a prude. You need to live a little!”
“I’m sorry if looking at naked women isn’t exactly my idea of living,” said Rory, somewhat acidly, “but to each his own, I suppose.”
Jeff had laughed and clapped him on the back, entirely unoffended, and given Mels the all-clear to call the agency.
She’d gone and picked the girl out herself, had Mels. She’s a bit of a wild one.
Rory spends the morning of his birthday memorizing the names of the bones in the human hand, and eating leftover birthday soufflé, courtesy of Mels’ roommate, who has pretty chocolate-brown eyes and a penchant for nicknaming people and probably the world’s most embarrassing name. He’d had a thing for her, briefly, and she’d flirted with him in the way of a friend who, when confronted with the possibility of taking things further, really wouldn’t mind either way, but her hair had been too brown and her manner too chirpy and anyway she’d had a nasty habit of calling him Nina.
He spends the afternoon of his birthday on a mandatory pub crawl with his friends, who, to be fair to them, have made a note of the early hour and the delicate nature of Rory’s nerves and spend the time mostly chatting and laughing and only really cajole him into downing one pint, okay, maybe three. Tops.
He spends the evening of his birthday sitting back in the living room of his flat waiting for the bell to ring, and rather dreading it, all things considered.
When the bell does ring, as it was always going to do, Rory’s personal preferences be damned, he sighs and rises and yanks the door open with the irritated determination to get the whole awful thing over with and –
And stops, mouth hanging open, completely frozen to the spot.
“You,” he says, and if it comes out as a squeak he will deny it to his dying day.
“Yes,” says the woman at the door, all long legs and hazel eyes and red hair and freckles across the nose, “me. Now pucker up, birthday boy.”
She grabs him by the collar and pulls him close, and as she kisses him Rory can feel his knees buckling. He has always hated his knees. This is, he reflects, unlikely to change at any point in the foreseeable future.
He will, however, have to reconsider his position on his lips.
“Oh,” says Rory, when he can breathe again, “oh. Um. Wow.”
He’d dreamed of kissing her, another her, in little guilty maddening dreams. On beaches, in the sunset, holding hands or curling close or pressing skin against skin under soft sheets, and he’d occasionally dreamed in Technicolor so vivid he can’t even think of it without turning pink. And yet, and yet – and yet. He – wow.
The woman clears her throat, a small noise that sounds like satisfaction and slight discomfort and maybe even a little surprise. Her eyes are wide. “Well,” she says, ducking her head, straightening her vest, “you’re welcome.”
She is, Rory realizes, suddenly sober and really looking, beautiful. Properly, truly beautiful. Gorgeous, yes, especially in that fake police uniform that should really, really not be as flattering as it is, but beyond that – there’s something in her eyes, in the way she stands, a kind of inner fire that is dangerous and admirable and enough to light a whole cavern full of darkness. Rory stares, for a long eternal moment, and realizes with a dreadful hallmark jolt that he’s in love with her. He’s always been in love with her.
She steps backwards, into the hall.
Rory’s heart stutters.
Wait! screams a voice in Rory’s head, and also, rather more tetchily, do something!. And for all he tends to slide towards the 'flight or freeze' ends of the survival instinct spectrum, he’d learned long ago never to ignore annoyed little voices in one’s mind.
“I’ve loved you since I was five,” blurts Rory, and whatever it was that was shouting away in his head pauses to bury its face in its hands.
A silence, and then the woman turns and cocks her head slightly, staring at him, eyes narrowed. “I’m sorry, what?”
She’s watching him like she thinks he’s insane, and Rory wants to shrivel up inside his skin and curl up on the floor, unnoticed and unseen. Then again, then again, she isn’t leaving yet.
“I meant,” says Rory, taking a step back into the flat and hoping it looks at least a little bit inviting, “would you, would you like to come in? I’ve… got cake. Well, actually it’s soufflé, but it’s pretty excellent.”
A small snort. “You’re sweet,” says the woman-who-was-at-the-door, leaning back into the hall, “but no, thanks.”
She turns and takes a step, but it’s a bit slower than Rory would have expected. Reluctant, maybe, or perhaps he’s just projecting, but it’s enough to make him step out after her, following.
“Won’t you at least tell me your name?” he calls, more pleading than he’d like, but she does stop and turn and it’s absolutely, it’s absolutely worth it.
“Amy,” she says, and smiles, a proper smile, a bit wry and a bit shy but radiant and sparking and utterly amazing, “Amy Pond.”
“Amy,” says Rory, and bites back the urge to say Miss Pond as he rolls the name on his tongue, tasting, “come to dinner with me?”
A pause, and Rory forgets to breathe again, it’s a bit disgraceful for a man of his age and he really ought to write things like that down. How to breathe in emergencies. With any luck he’ll need it, often.
Amy takes a step, and another, but this time she walks towards him instead of away and it is so vastly preferable. She pulls a fake parking ticket pad from her waistband, scribbles something down and rips it off.
“Ask me again tomorrow,” she says, stuffing the ticket into Rory’s hand, and her eyes sparkle.
“Why tomorrow?” asks Rory, through the gaping, and Amy laughs and turns and walks away again, surefooted this time, and her steps are just a little bit lighter.
“Because tomorrow,” she says, calling over her shoulder, “I might say yes.”
Rory watches her for a moment after she’s gone, then turns, still stunned, to find his own front door shut and locked behind him. He opens his palm to find a number, scrawled in black ink in a too-familiar hand.
“Shit,” says Rory, with real feeling, though he can’t quite untangle the reasons why.
***
“You know, I just really wanted to tell you,” says Rory, over the phone, “that I really, really hate you.”
Mels laughs, loud and long like a thunderstorm. “No, you don’t,” she says, and her grin is so smug it’s practically audible.
She’s still laughing as Rory hangs up.
***
“Do you believe in destiny?” Rory asks, over dessert, and Amy chokes on her crème brûlée.
“Um,” she says, coughing madly, and how, how can she be coughing like that and have her face turn purple and still look so incredible? “Not particularly.”
“Okay,” says Rory, pouring a glass of water. Amy takes it with an appreciative nod.
There’s a lull as Amy drinks and sputters and tries to get her breathing under control. Rory averts his eyes, because he thinks she’d appreciate it, and gets in another spoonful of crème caramel before she speaks again.
“Why,” says Amy, sounding just barely mocking and genuinely curious, “do you?”
Rory takes another bite, considering. “Well,” he says, after a moment, as earnestly as he can, “how else could I explain meeting you?”
He looks up to catch her eye, meets her gaze with the sort of soulful intensity he learned from twenty-one years of watching romantic movies on the television. For a moment, it appears to be working, then Amy throws her head back and laughs so hard she nearly falls off her chair.
“Uh,” says Rory, eloquently, and resists the urge to wring his hands. “I’m sorry, did I say something…?”
“Corny,” finishes Amy, still laughing, “and a little bit creepy. But generally sweet, so on balance you’re fine.”
“Oh,” Rory says, and flushes crimson. “Alright.”
They finish their dessert in relative silence, but Amy keeps grinning at him like they’re sharing a joke and it’s, it’s the best feeling in the world.
After, Rory takes her to a nearby fairground, and they laugh some more and eat lots of cotton candy and then Amy grabs his hand, almost instinctively, and that is better.
***
He drags her to a fortune teller. It feels odd when they have to untangle their fingers from each other so the lady can get a look at their palms, and it feels a little like a loss, almost karmic. Rory wonders.
He doesn’t hear what sort of fortune Amy gets, but it makes her laugh, and then he’s being beckoned into the tent by a woman with a scarf tied around her head, and she traces his love line with a wrinkled finger.
“You are,” says the fortune teller, “a very lucky young man.”
Tell me something I don’t know, thinks Rory, but he’s too polite to say.