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Some days, Amelia Jessica Pond wakes up and can't remember when she is. She always knows where she is; the smells of her childhood home in Leadworth are distinct from the smells of the Tardis, or her and Rory's flat and later their house, or another planet, or even the horrible place Madam Korvarian held her.
But no, remembering when is more tricky. The smells are too similar to know that way.
When she's on the edge of waking, Amy feels like her head is too full to move, too much to wake up from. She knows that there was a time that it wasn't like this - that she was normal little Amelia Pond who grew up with parents and Rory and nothing really truly interesting happened. But those days are long gone.
Some days she wakes up and smells green green grass and the flowers her mother loves to plant and care for and that the Tardis always lands in. In those moments, she knows she's at home in Leadworth from the way the grass smells, and that her mother is there from the flowers.
Some days there's a tang of ozone and soot and the odd sharp scent of the Vortex and later the smell of dust after rain, and she knows she's in the Tardis, with her Doctor.
The days she wakes up to the smell of Rory's hair, the soap he always uses on his skin, or the sweat from a long day before, are always the best because she knows he's there and that's the important thing.
Sometimes, though, she can't quite smell things and she's lost.
In her parent's house, in Leadworth one rainy stormy day, she wakes confused and scared. She knows she's home, but which home is it? She's always a little disoriented and afraid when she can't tell.
Because Amy Pond remembers a world where she didn't have parents and only had a crack in her wall and her Aunt Sharon, where she knew she had a mother who put smiley faces on her apples but was never there and Amelia couldn't remember her face and no one else noticed.
Amy Pond remembers growing up in a world without stars, where she could trace where the constellations should have been but weren’t and never were but she knew them anyway. (Sirius the dog star, Betelgeuse a Red Giant, Polaris, the North Star, to guide the way, Orion and the Great Bear and Cassiopeia who looked like a giant W or M and Pisces from Astrology and all of them didn’t exist but should.)
And Amy Pond remembers a world where she grew up with her parents and Rory and Mels and her imaginary friend the Doctor who was coming back for her some day, he was. And she dreamt of giant space whales and lizard creatures and terrifying statues and sunflowers and vampire fish and told Rory and Mels what she could remember. And if Mels got into trouble and Amy always had to be there for her, well, Mels was there for her too and loved all of her stories of the Doctor and the adventures in his blue box.
And some days she wakes up and can’t remember which one is real. (Because they all were real but only one of them is real now.)
So when she’s waiting for the Doctor and Rory to come save her and Melody, she knows they will come because they wouldn’t let this exist they’d fix it they would and they’d all be brave and good and true. It doesn’t work out that way because sometimes happy endings that fix everything are only for children and Melody was the Child of the Tardis but Amy wasn’t.
But River is here, and happy, and safe. And, well, Mels was here too and they grew up with her and then she became River who was Melody and Amy knows her life has always been more than peculiar but this is confusing even for a woman who has to remember every morning which timeline she wakes up in.
***
When she’s trapped in the medical facility in Apalapucia, waiting for Rory, waiting for the Doctor (and really, Rory needs to stop picking up bad habits from the Time Lord, he used to be unfailingly punctual), things are even more complicated. She spends thirty-six years awake - she breathes, but she doesn’t need to eat and she doesn’t need to sleep and she doesn’t need to use the bathroom and there’s nowhere to do those things anyway. She hides in the room with the temporal engines, where the time streams split, where the Handbots can’t get to her.
She uses some of the time to just think, but she’s always been restless and never been one to sit around. So she goes out into the rest of the facility, fighting the Handbots as she goes. Sometimes she thinks that if she damages enough of them they’ll all be gone but slowly that hope wears away. But while she’s out she visits the galleries and gardens and asks the computer questions and learns what she can and always, always fights. She does still need to rest even if she can’t sleep, so she returns to her hideaway in the engines often. Some of the time, early on, she used to calculate what a minute was to the unit of time used by the computer here, and translated it into hours, days, weeks, years.
Rory arrives thirty-six years, two months, three days, and eight hours after she entered the Two Streams facility. She doesn’t believe he’s real at first. After so, so long, he has to be a hallucination, a dream. (Just like all the other dreams where - no.)
He isn’t. She fights the Handbots with the sword she made a long time ago (it isn’t all just gardens and aquariums in the facility - all people, she’s found, have a need to make things, even if they’ll never really be used) and he’s still there when she’s done. And she takes him back to her hideaway not quite believing he’s still there and she knows that for him it’s been hours since they last saw each other, not decades. (And she’s angry and hurt, but then - he waited and protected her for 2,000 years. She owes it to at least listen to him.)
She’s learned so much here and made her own tools, improving and improving as she went, and one of those things she learned was to hate the Doctor. She hated that he always made her wait, she hated that this was the longest wait of all, and she hated that he wanted her to give up herself, her existence, to a younger, less bitter self. Especially because she was that self once, and the her now said no.
But young Amy reminds her of kissing Rory, and the Macarena, and when life was rich and full and glorious and happy, because Rory was there. And she doesn’t want to give up that chance now but... Rory. Rory outright told her that he isn’t upset that she got old. He’s upset that they didn’t grow together. So she’s reminded herself that he, at least, has never, ever lied to her or betrayed her. (And the way he looks at her, so familiar, like she’s the most beautiful thing in the entire universe... well, that doesn’t hurt.) Amy Pond knows what she has to do. She knows that he deserves their life together. And she knows that she deserves it, too.
So she makes the choice. (This Doctor, these men, always making her the deciding vote. Always making her choose.) And she chooses to live and to let herself and Rory have the life that they should have had.
As they run towards the Tardis (and oh, that familiar blue - as much as she resents the Doctor, she could never stop loving that bluest blue) she brushes the other Amy’s hand, for just a second, and feels a shock run through her (through them both).
The Older Amy lets them go. She lets the Tardis go without her as the Handbots take her down. And maybe this - this - was what all those years of waiting and learning and making and fighting... This is what it was for.
This time, if only for one time, Amelia Pond saves herself.
***
After Two Streams, after Apalapucia, everything is different.
Not too different, but different enough.
She’s always seen the Doctor’s flaws - even when she was seven years old and he promised that everything would be all right, she could always tell when he was lying. But sometimes he lied even when he thought he was telling the truth.
The simmering fierceness is new though. Both for and against him, like part of her couldn’t decide. But that was ridiculous. He was her friend. He’d always been her friend.
Her dreams were different, now, too.
Once, she dreams that she’s a little boy with a bright blue balloon, laughing at a fish that she recognizes as being from Two Streams’ aquarium. Once, she is an old woman, talking to her children through a Time Glass one last time. Once, she is a man, an inventor, driven to create, making things over and over. Her hands (not her hands, his hands, but her hands) run over smooth metal, crafting a sword and handle.
And she dreams that she made it, too.
She knows things, sometimes, that she knows she shouldn’t. She could always tell when they were in the vortex but had played it down as the Doctor’s bad driving and bumpy landings and the sound cues. But now its different. She feels the vortex against her skin, even lightly when they’re on a planet or another ship off on an adventure.
She remembers brushing the older Amy’s hand as they raced through Two Streams towards the Tardis, towards the Doctor, hand in hand with Rory, her Rory. She knows what happened, what Rory told her after she woke up from being sedated by the Handbots. Older her died, so that she could live.
But she remembers the shock of touching her, and the sudden thoughts and racing memories and times she couldn’t have, never had experienced throwing her off enough to get sedated in the first place. A spark of memory. And this is why, she thinks, the Older Amy really gave up. Because she remembers a thought that was hers/not-hers and it was:
Oh. Maybe I shouldn’t have hidden in the Temporal Engines .
So when she wakes from dreams of electron orbitals and books she never read and histories of the Apalapucians, timelines layered and layered on top of one another, and thirty-six years, two months, three days, and eight hours of waiting and fighting and learning floating in her head, she knows.
She remembers.
***
When they’re trapped in the hotel, with the monster, and the Doctor she understands how the Older Amy felt like an epiphany. Because, oh. She’s tired of waiting. She’s tired of waiting.
She loves the Doctor, will never stop loving him, he is her best friend and he will always and forever come back to her.
But she has spent entire lifetimes, literally, like no one has, simply waiting for him. Waiting for the excitement and adventure he brings.
So when she’s at their new home (her’s and Rory’s and oh, they don’t deserve this but they do deserve it and he’s leaving) after she’s watched him die and she remembers a universe where he didn’t and broken time - Rory only remembers bits and pieces, but sometimes Amy remembers it all, crystal clear, down to forgetting Rory, that he was her Rory, and sometimes she even remembers smudges of faces that she knows are the Silence...
After all that, she’s tired of waiting.
Amy Pond Williams, brilliant, mad, and impossible, decides.
She’s going to make her own adventures now. And if they’re only on Earth and in one time and one place, well, there is nothing wrong with that.
***
People think that the Doctor is long lived. And its true; compared to humans he’s lived so much longer. He has lived 900 years and has all of that space and time and adventures in his head.
People who know their story know that Rory Williams, Rory Pond, the Last Centurion, waited two millennia for his wife, for the love of his life, protecting her as she slept. That some days he can remember every last one of them, and on these days he’s older than even the Doctor.
People who know their story know of the Girl Who Waited. They know that little Amelia Pond grew up with a crack in her wall, a crack through time and space. They know that she can remember things that never happened, lives that she no longer lived. They know that Amy Pond, on her wedding day, looked at an empty blue journal and cried a tear and remembered the Doctor (had remembered the universe) back into existence.
But not even the Doctor, not even Rory, know this.
By memory of life lived, of diverging timelines and split lives and the memories of thousands of sick people whose lives were lived in kindness...
Amelia Jessica Pond remembers all of it, and she is old.
Amy Pond is the oldest of them all.