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“Do you ever have a single day where you don’t go confronting chaos?” Amy demands, hopping onto the console’s platform to look at the Doctor as he rifles through a box, looking for a part that would attach to whatever thingamajig he’d just bought off the planet. The planet which they’d arrived at a few centuries too primitive for their tastes. They got the part they needed of course, but she really could have done without the carnivorous trees and sentient water, both of which seemed to have had a taste for Rory.
“Days gone without confronting chaos are boring!” The Doctor calls, “Have you gone mad, Pond? You sound like you’re suggesting an Ordinary Day.” He shudders, like that genuinely horrifies him. She has no doubt that it does. “Besides, Ordinary Days are usually Sundays, and we –”
“Hate Sundays.” Rory finishes for him, from where he’d collapsed after almost being molested by water. He isn’t quite sure how he feels about showers now.
Amy grins at them, swinging herself around on one of the many handholds on the TARDIS’ console to stare at the Doctor’s back. “So where to next, Spaceman?”
There is a loud crashing sound, and both Ponds jump, hurrying over to see that the Doctor had dropped the box of junk he’d been holding. The bric-a-brac of coils and buttons and light bulbs and what appeared to be a Frisbee were all over the floor, the contents rolling away in a bid for freedom. Rory scrambles to pick the parts up before they get stuck somewhere unfortunate.
Amy ignores the bits and pieces, walking forward to see that the Doctor’s face is ashen, as colourless as wax and terrifyingly blank. She stares. “Doctor? Doctor, what’s wrong?” He flinches at the sound of her voice, half turning to her with his mouth half open, as if to answer. But then he shakes his head, and without a word, he dashes off, slips into the TARDIS’ corridors and out of sight. Rory catches a glimpse of his face before he disappears, and the expression sends a jolt of shock and recognition through him. Amy runs to follow, but the TARDIS slips a door that hadn’t existed there before closed, cutting her off. Amy almost slams into the door, but she doesn’t back off. She pounds the door with her fists.
“Open it! Let me through!” She yells at the TARDIS, and the ship hums apologetically, but does not open the door. Amy rails at it for a bit longer before kicking it for good measure, then sits right in front of the door, glaring and petulant. Rory is quiet on the other side of the console, making sure he’s picked up every piece and put them back into the box. When he’s done, he walks over to where his wife is sulking, and sits down beside her.
“What did I say?” She asks him, staring at her hands. Rory shrugs, his guess as good as hers. “I hate it when he keeps secrets, when he doesn’t trust me back. Do you think he’s okay?” Rory takes her hand and gives it a soft squeeze. Her nails are dark blue today, with little bits of glitter in them like the heart of a galaxy.
“I’m sure he’s fine. I think he just needs to be alone, whatever it is.”
“But –” Rory kisses her hand, cutting her off gently.
“He’s given us all of time and space; I think it’s only fair we give him some in return.” Amy looks at him, her face softening as she remembers exactly why Rory is such a wonderful nurse.
“Alright.” She says, because after having four psychiatrists and the whole village thinking she's mad, she understands when someone wants to be left alone. As if in response, the TARDIS opens the door, the corridor stretching far out behind them. Amy bites her lip, clearly wanting to find the Doctor, but she stays and gives Rory a bright smile.
“Let’s go to the hot pools.” She says, and tugs him up to stand with her. “And I won’t even wear a bikini.” She laughs at the instantly dazed look in her husband’s eyes, and pulls him along.
=
After an hour or two in the hot pools, Amy and Rory still couldn’t find the Doctor anywhere. Coaxing Amy to sleep had been a hard task, but one made much easier by the fact that they no longer slept in bunk beds, ladders or no. With a final grumble and mutter about the questionable intelligence and ancestry of a certain Doctor, she’d drifted to sleep curled up in Rory’s arms. But Rory didn’t sleep.
On some nights, it was hard to keep that door in his mind closed, the one that guarded two thousand years of life. It cracked open from time to time, little bits of memory and sensation sneaking out like small drafts, memories of two millennia’s worth of consciousness. It had been so hard, he remembered, not so much keeping the box safe, but keeping himself with the box. So many close calls, so many people wondering who he was, what he was. All that time awake and waiting for the only woman in the universe he loved, the one he’d killed. He’d nearly gone insane sometimes, the despair crawling in his throat like bile, the guilt like the weight of the world, the anger like wildfire, the bitterness like cold embers. But most of all the loneliness, like the centre of a black hole, eating him alive.
He remembers Amy telling him about her trip with the Doctor to Starship UK, and thinks he understands a little of how the Doctor feels. Very old, very kind, and the very very last one. In all his nine hundred years, how many people had he lost? How many had been his fault? And who, out of all those, did he miss the most?
Decision made, Rory slips silently out of bed, pulls on his trousers and pads out of the room, heading towards the console. The Doctor will be in there, he knows, because he knows people always look for comfort in what they are most familiar with, and the Doctor will undoubtedly be in the heart of the one companion that has stayed with him all these years.
When he gets there, he finds the lights dimmed and the Doctor below deck, tinkering with some wires and metal bits. He sits down on the metal stairs, the cold steel uncomfortable but not the worst he’s had, considering hospital chairs. The Doctor must know he is there, but he doesn’t say anything, just keeps tugging redundantly on a cable, sonicking the exposed bits. Eventually he gives up, on the cable or on the pretence, Rory isn’t sure of, but the Doctor tucks the thing away and rests his hands in his lap, letting silence fall upon them both.
“Who was it, Doctor?” Rory asks, peering at him between the rails. He'd have said 'she', but he wasn't going to assume he knew anything about aliens. The Doctor looks up at him from where he is sitting on the swing and slowly pushing himself backwards and forwards on one foot.
“Who was who?” He replies, feigning ignorance with a carved smile. Rory gives him a look, not impatient but firm.
“I’m kind of an expert at the whole lovelorn business you know,” he says with an awkward shrug and a self-deprecating smile, “and I’m a good listener. Comes with being a nurse and all.”
A corner of the Doctor’s mouth crooks up. “Oh I think you’ve been a good listener even before that.” Rory ducks his head, ears reddening a little as he remembers a little Scottish girl with her strange tales of a man from the sky and his rapt, transfixed attention. He looks back up to see that the Doctor’s gaze is focused somewhere in the middle distance, beyond time and space. He waits for the Doctor to start.
“There was… a woman.” The Doctor finally says softly, and flashes Rory a quicksilver smile, as if to say ‘isn’t there always?’ and continues. “The most amazing woman, Rory. In fact, the Most Important Woman in the Universe... In my universe.” He adds, something like being taken apart in his voice, and he fidgets with the screwdriver in his hand, unused to exposing anything of himself.
“And she was just brilliant, absolutely brilliant. She always thought she was nothing special, just a temp at Chiswick, never done anything noteworthy in her life. But she was extraordinary, and she was my best mate. When I lost hope, or when I… lost control, lost sight of what I stood for, she’d be there, with these amazing ideas or to pull me back, to stop me, or to save me. I needed to be, back then. Sometimes I still think I do.” There is a telling sort of honest and heartbreaking uncertainty in that last sentence, which admits that even the Doctor is unsure whether he still needed to be stopped, or whether he still needed to be saved, or whether they were synonymous for the man who now finds that he can turn an entire alien army around at the mere mention of his name – did he ever mean for his life to turn out this way?
“And you loved her.” Rory says, not a question but nothing accusatory either; he doesn’t want to pry, but he knows that some things needed to be told, and remembered, and cherished. The Doctor looks into him, not a trace of surprise in his impossibly old eyes.
“Yes.” Simple, quiet, precious. His posture is of a man whose shadow weighed a tonne, Atlas with the universe. “I was her Spaceman, and she was my Earthgirl.” The Doctor chuckles a little at that. “She was fiery and passionate and funny and never, ever, let anyone look down on her, not for anything. Shouting at the world, even if no one was listening.” The Doctor waves his arms about, “And so very stubborn, she was like a… a really hard wall made of hard things like diamonds and dwarf star alloy. But she never lost sight of her compassion, or her courage, or what she believed in, and she never lost sight of hope... She was just so… human, one of the most human of all my companions, and even if she never thought herself special she was my equal. Probably better than me, actually. Technically the previous me but I think all the mes. All the mes are just life ruiners. We save strangers and destroy the lives of those most important to us, our family. Our children of time.”
Rory swallows hard, averting his gaze to the ground. He’s not too sure if there was a double meaning to that. “What happened?” He asks, voice gentle and unobtrusive.
The Doctor pulls in a shuddering breath. “She saved the entire universe, including the parallel universes; in fact, it was all of reality she saved and it was actually twice if you think about it, if you count in that alternate world, and she was even more brilliant than I was, well… the both of mes actually – not a separate regeneration, well yes sort of, because it was separate from me, but more like a biological metacrisis, it’s a long story.
“But it came at a cost, like they always do and it destroys me that she paid it twice for me. She’d absorbed my mind, and it was killing her, burning her up from the inside and I had to stop it, see?” His voice was harsh, but only directed at himself. “I was selfish and I couldn’t bear to let her die and have it break my hearts again. So I refused to let her have the choice. I sealed off her mind, all the memories of our travelling, our happiness, and we had the best of times, Rory.” He stares at him with earnest desperation, willing him to understand the sincerity of his affection despite his selfish actions. "She saved my life and I killed her. I really killed her. And Caan had been right all along." The Doctor mutters to himself, and shut his eyes tight.
“Everything she’d ever wanted and she can’t remember any of it, or me, or she’ll die. And now she’s back to thinking she’s no one special, when there are free planets out there telling all these wonderful stories about her, the woman who saved the universes, and singing songs of us… with an old man and his box missing her.” The Doctor sniffles a little, turning his face away from Rory to fiddle again with two of the wires, an exhausted, ashamed slump to his posture. There is a hum like whale song from the TARDIS, and the lights dimmed just a little further. The Doctor rubs his hand over the base of the console, making comforting sounds.
“I know, old girl, I know.” He says, trying to find solace in her constant presence. She misses Donna as well, the beautiful and sassy and wonderful woman who had saved her from the Daleks and Sontarans and had saved her Doctor too, so many times.
“I’m sorry, Doctor.” Rory says gently, filled with a quiet understanding. And he did understand. Rory knew what it felt like to have the most important woman in his universe forget him, and what it felt like to be the cause of her almost-death. Rory glances up to find the Doctor looking at him as if he knows exactly what Rory is thinking. There is a fragility to him, Rory realises, something that only became weaker as he grew older and his companions grew up. He remembers the Dream Lord and his mocking smiles, his awful taunts, and the Doctor's hard, angry eyes as he stared at the only person in the universe who could hate him that much.
He gets up from the stairs and goes to the Doctor, leaning down slightly to give the Time Lord a hug, a hug that acknowledges this pain, this memory, this woman and her extraordinary importance, a hug like one a man might give to a tender, helpless thing. The Doctor buries his face in his shoulder and tries desperately not to cry.
=
Amy wakes up to find both Rory and the Doctor sitting in the TARDIS’ kitchen enjoying their breakfast. There is bread and jam and eggs and sausages, and a bowl of custard with fish fingers beside it. She smiles. Comfort food for Time Lords, she supposes.
“Ah, morning Amy!” Her boys chorus together, toasting her with their tea. She laughs and bounds up to them, glad to see the Doctor smiling again. She gives the Doctor a peck on the cheek and Rory a quick kiss on the lips. She pulls back suddenly.
“Why do you taste like fish fingers and custard?” She asks, raising an eyebrow. Rory shrugs.
“Been a long time since I had them.”
The Doctor snickers, “I was surprised when good ol’ Rory here stole some of my fish fingers and custard, and then he explained to me in great detail,” Amy’s eyes widen in horror and mortification, “that you used to force him to dress up as the Raggedy Doctor, better known as me – well, better known as the Doctor, but the Doctor’s me so I guess that all comes around, and make him eat fish fingers with custard! Amazing that he grew to like the taste – well, it tastes fabulous to me, but I’ve come to understand you humans are rather particular about your foods.” The Doctor waves a custard covered fish finger in the air, dripping viscous yellow goo everywhere.
Amy narrows her eyes. She jabs a finger at the Doctor “First, I think the irony of that just flew right over your head, you hypocrite, and second,” she turns to poke Rory in the chest, “you’re in big trouble, mister.” Rory grins and kisses her.
The Doctor admires their domesticity for a while, recalling a previous time when he and Donna had sat there, bickering and laughing over breakfast with the light of the universe in their eyes and all of creation before them. He is still just a little wistful and melancholic, his fingers wrapped around a plain gold ring that has never left his pocket and which was so much more than just an accessory.
“With this ring I thee biodamp.”
“For better or for worse?”