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The Centurion's Suit
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Rory Williams was proud of the little oasis he had created in his back garden. It had been an immense labor of love to design and build the Japanese-style garden. While the various structures and plants were expensive, the most expensive part was the koi pond that was the centerpiece of it all. The waterfall structure kept the water moving enough that it wouldn't freeze except in the most frigid of winters, offset by a sensitive heating mechanism running along the pipes moving the water from the pond back up to the top of the waterfall.
But all of that wasn't what made the waterfall so expensive. No, that honor belonged to the seven koi fish living in the pond. Each fish was easily over a thousand pounds. They were all different colors and patterns from each other. Rory had even named them, not that he shared that information with any of his fellow nurses at the local hospital.
He didn't even want to imagine what kind of teasing he would receive if he started sharing pictures and stories of his fish like his coworkers did about their pets and children. They already thought he was enough of a weirdo without adding talk about his moist companions and the work of keeping their pond just right.
It was a quiet life, but Rory didn't mind that. He had had his fill of adventures and chaos. At the end of the day, it was nice to just relax with some gardening. When there wasn't anything that needed to be done, it was just as nice to sit beside the pond and let the fish hypnotize him with their colors and movement. It was lonelier than he had been used to in the past, but that was all right, too. If he couldn't have Amy, then he would make do with his fish and the occasional visit from his father.
His back garden was securely fenced, as were many back gardens on the street where he lived. That was a completely understandable thing. Not only did the tall wooden fences grant each space a certain degree of privacy, but they also helped to keep the neighborhood children from getting into things. Most of the children weren't any worse than what Rory knew to expect from children in general. They were curious little buggers with more energy than they knew what to do with. To tell the truth, it reminded him of his own childhood with Amy and Melody.
Then there was the Dursley boy. The Dursleys lived three houses down from him on Privet Drive. While the other children were rambunctious and a little bit clumsy, Dudley Dursley was rude and prone to temper tantrums despite being nearly eight. He was an entitled little snot, a real life version of Veruca Salt and not in the badass, take-no-prisoners way as his best friends. He was destructive for the sake of being destructive and no amount of telling his mother Petunia seemed to matter.
Dudley also had the unfortunate tendency to wander into other people's yards, regardless of fences and locked gates. Rory had learned that there were a certain sect of people who took signs saying Keep Out as an invitation, but he still made sure to have one on both the gates to his back garden. The signs did not dissuade the boy from stacking up boxes in the alley running between the backyards of Privet Drive and Wisteria Crescent. Dudley had then climbed his little mountain to get over the back fence.
And because the world loved to mess with Rory Williams, Dudley had fallen while climbing over the fence. After skidding a bit on the waterfall structure, he ended wedged between the small boulders and the unforgiving wood of the fence. Rory had hurriedly dropped his tea to help the child that had become literally trapped between a rock and a hard place.
Dudley was mostly fine. He had a few scrapes that might take a while to heal and the indigo shirt he had been wearing at the time was torn beyond repair. He was really lucky that he managed to not break a leg. The real cost was in the damage caused by Dudley's slide on the waterfall. It had sent dirt and pebbles into the water.
It had also sent one of Dudley's shoes and a whole roll of toilet paper into the water. The shoe was probably what caused his fish to sicken after the incident, given how it was more likely to have bacteria. He managed to save a few of them but some died from the fungal infection they developed.
Rory might have just accept the loss as a bad job if he hadn't received a visit from the screeching harpy that was Petunia Dursley. She was insistent that her precious baby's injuries were the fault of Rory. Apparently, having something nice on a fenced private property was an attractive nuisance and Rory should cover the pond if not remove it entirely.
Never in the two thousand years he had lived had Rory met someone with such audacity, which was really saying something given some of the people he had met. Henry the Eighth was truly nothing to sniff at, let alone any individual Dalek. Yet here was someone so entitled that it was surreal. And to make matters worse, she was raising a son who was showing signs of being just as entitled.
So Rory decided to file a suit for the cost of repairing his garden and replacing the koi he had lost.
Hopefully, that will be the wake-up call that the Dursleys needed to change their ways or at least learn a little humility and empathy.
Rory didn't think it truly would, but hey, he was made of cybernetics. What did he know?