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Rory gets a taste of what it must be like to be the Doctor as the Last Centurion. Powerful and unchanging, trying desperately to protect such a fragile thing as a human life in an endless sea of time. It doesn’t really sink in until the museum, though. Before, the rain and snow and wind washed over him like a figure in a snowglobe, unchanging and unchanged by the tempest around him, unaware of whatever lay outside his small domain. Just the undercroft of Stonehenge at first, but rapidly the entire structure, then its environs as he remembers the Doctor’s warning about going mad over the centuries. Amateur archaeologists and gawkers, all coming and going. But then came William Gowland and the dawn of the 20th century. Stonehenge was in need of some serious restoration, and for its safety, Gowland explains in scholarly Latin, the Pandorica would be moved to the National Museum. Studied, and put on display. “You could accompany it,” Gowland adds hastily as Rory draws his gladius. Satisfied, Rory returns his sword to its sheath.
Yes, it’s at the National Museum that Rory really gets a sense of what it means to be immortal. He watches schoolchildren visit, be inspired by the wealth of knowledge around them. Watches them return a decade later, eyes hollowed and shell-shocked from the Great War. A decade after that, with their own children, jazz echoing through the marble halls. A decade after that, and Rory, like them, has his home destroyed in the Blitz. The fire melts his armor, and he can’t stay as the Last Centurion in melted plastic armor. Not without raising questions he doesn’t have great answers to.
So he enlists, because what else is a man in his twenties and good health supposed to do in England in 1941? And really, he rationalizes, it’s protecting Amy in its own way. Not to mention he’d like to be able to look her in the eye when all this is said and done. The universe looks out for him, and he comes back as the first of a series of ‘distant relatives’ who work as security guards at the museum, slowly aging themselves up and retiring, and returning to fill the ever-so-convenient vacancy after a week or so. He outlasts directors, curators, even janitors; he sees the children he first watched from beneath the plume of a centurion’s helmet come back with their grandchildren.
He wonders if this is what it will be like with Amy, if he’ll watch her grow old and die while his love and his synthetic heart endure in his plastic chest, not beating, but humming at the same, constant pitch.
He wonders if this is what the Doctor meant about going mad.
Yes, Rory gets a taste of what it means to be the Doctor. To possibly understand him. And, God forgive him, to understand someone is to love them. It doesn’t dim his love of Amy - if anything it enhances it, because to understand the Doctor is to know how much the Doctor loves Amy. (A perfectly normal amount, as far as Rory is concerned.)
And, in a way, Rory gets a taste of what it means to be Amy, too. To wait, year after year for someone who had promised to return in five minutes. Five minutes for them - twenty years for her - twenty centuries for him. To wait, always watching, always curious about the world around you. Always pretending to be someone you aren’t: someone whose heart hasn’t broken, while you stitch it back together with the thread of what you know to be true - that the most wonderful person in the world is on the wrong side of a magic box from you. He doesn’t need any help learning to love Amy, but he does anyway, heart or no heart. And if Rory doesn’t have a heart to offer Amy, well, the Doctor has two, and that might be enough to go around.