fic: Not Knowing When the Dawn Will Come, I Open Every Door
Title: Not Knowing When the Dawn Will Come, I Open Every Door
Author: lonewytch
Characters: Amy/Rory
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2496
Summary: Set between The God Complex and The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe. Amy Pond loves the sea, the moon and the stars these days. And she misses her raggedy Doctor
A/N: This fic is especially for arwen_elen, because it was inspired by her fics The Days That Never Came and especially And We'll Just Be Dreaming Until You Wake Me Up, and because she loves the sea.
It forms part of A Spiral of Stars Verses which can be found in her Masterlist.
Amy Pond, the girl who waited - the girl with the flame orange hair and the wide eyes, who fell out of her own life and into a fairytale of bowties and boxes, secrets and stars - loves the night sky and the sea these days. They haunt her even when she sleeps. She pulls them in her wake when she nestles down into her bed, and they follow her into soft white sheets, burrowing their way down into the warm darkness with her.
Woven through her dreams are waves that wash bright against the corners of her sleep, their constant rhythm rocking her endlessly. The skies of her dreamscapes are night black, punctuated only with the cut-out shape of a full moon which is bordered on each side by mirrored crescents, and a slow spiral of stars which tangle in her hair, their light catching in her eyes.
These days are the days whose time is marked by the feel of her feet on the ground, by her body anchored to the iron sphere of the Earth like a wing-clipped bird. All her feathers have fallen into dust, stripped away by the vibrating nimbus of a blue box disappearing for the last time.
These are the days that are counted by the scrape of the sun across the sky, and by the wax and wane of a moon with a light that settles on her like spider webs and makes her hair glow strangely.
These are the days that came after him.
When she is awake and the edges of her memories are too sharp for her to contain them, she waits by the window for the soft smudge of evening to appear and give the day away to the night. When the last streaks of dusk have disappeared from her garden, she steps outside barefooted in her nightdress, and turns her face up to the sky. She counts the scatter of stars across night, loses count, and counts again. She makes shapes in her mind out their patterns, drawn from the whimsical stories of her childhood and the recent fantastical memories of her adulthood. She watches the slow movement of the moon and hundreds of distant suns across the heavens. She waits, and she wonders.
Rory lies awake and waits for the familiar sound of the back door clicking closed, for her slow step on the edges of the stairs. She comes to bed with cold bare feet, dew damp on the hem of her nightdress and sadness all over her skin. He thinks that he can see the pinpricks of stars in her irises when they make love.
Because for one person to see all that, to have tasted the glory, and then go back...it will tear you apart.
If the sky is blanketed with cloud and the stars hidden beyond their thick embrace, Amy feels impossibly caged. Her thoughts begin to beat against the limits of a world that feels so small to her now. She feels her heart flutter against the wall of her chest, as if it yearns to break out of her skin, to arrow up through the drenching mist clouds to the dark beyond and the light that patterns it.
On those nights when her memories can’t be contained and she cannot see the stars or the moon, the next morning when she wakes gasping into the cool light, she asks Rory to go to the sea with her. They get up early, and they take the car that sits a violent splash of red against the Tardis blue of their front door -
red as her hair had shone against the wooden doors of that blue box so many months ago now
- and they go speeding over dual carriageways that cover the land in lacework patterns, like strips of dull beaten metal. They move through winding country roads, framed by high hedgerows where small birds nest; they travel down lanes, fenced in by trees that arch and enclose them in tunnels of shifting green light. They travel forwards, and they put space between them and their home. There is movement and there is motion, kinetic energy wrapped up in their journey, felt but unseen. She has read the science of it and she understands that she is moving from one place to the next, that there is forward motion and impetus, that her blue front door lies behind and the promise of the sea ahead. But she never really feels like she is moving.
Because it isn’t like moving through time and space, spanning the vast distances between stars in the blink of an eye, skipping in and out of the twisting hum of the vortex, all of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will...where do you want to start?...
They drive for miles and miles, following the pull and the pulse of her heart, until they reach a place where the ragged coast of England breaches onto the salt of the wide ocean.
They always go to the same location. A quiet beach of small sloped dunes, lined up like the humps of some huge beast sleeping below the sands. Tufts of marram grass hold the curves together; they whistle in the breeze, a subtle sound just on the edge of human hearing, haunting and wild. The dunes lead onto a line of rough textured stones, all tumbled against each other, quartz glittering under their skins with the shift of light as Amy and Rory pick their way across. The stones are followed in their turn by pebbles, rounded and smooth against the palm, tumbled and licked clean over millennia by the relentless push and pull of waves.
After the territory of stone comes the sand, a beige strip dotted with shells and solitary stones. The sand is dry at first opening willingly to the press of feet as the grains rasp together, but it eventually becomes something not quite land and not quite sea, a threshold space between the two. It sucks at their feet, and their footprints leave small pools that fill with seawater, seeping from a sand which is rippled into undulating lines by the movement of the waves. A thin strip of flotsam and jetsam washed in by the tides lies somewhere in-between stone and sea, a jumble of lost things, discarded things, that have taken the long journey of the ocean currents and ended up here. Forgotten things at the end of their journey, all tangled together with the seaweed.
Sometimes the sea is all steel, mirroring a grey sky. On those days the swell is made ragged by howling winds, which rip across the beach and press strands of cold through every layer of clothing. Erratic waves lift and clash against each other, pushing themselves up into white capped peaks. It seems to Amy that the froth and churn of foam moves deliberately, as if a form made of bubble and brine will burst forth; as if some shape will come running towards her over the swell, arms reaching, grasping. She finds herself tensing, bracing herself, ready for it.
Dalek...Sontaran...Silence...Silurian...names pass through her like sand through the fist, to be scattered like grains sinking in a huge sea, gone into the deep currents of memory...
Sometimes, the sea is nothing but a calm patchwork of green and darker blue, rising and falling gently as small clouds pass over. The clouds mark the face of the ocean with a shifting pattern, a moving puzzle that seems to Amy as if it should be understood, as if it should make sense to her, but doesn’t.
Sometimes, the sky is clear and devoid of all clouds, nothing but a great blankness inhabited only by the sun scratching its way lazily across the heavens; and the sea a pure blue with light shafting down into the deeps.
Every time she is there- no matter the time of year, no matter the bite of the sea - Amy Pond takes off her shoes and her socks, and places them carefully above the tideline out of the water's reach. She rolls up her jeans as far as they will go and walks out into the ocean. Rory hovers at the shoreline behind her, picking through flotsam and jetsam like a nervous bird. She senses the concern rigid in his muscles as he moves, and the glances that he shoots her. She knows what he thinks as she walks into the waves. He thinks that maybe she could walk out and onwards into the sea, letting the cold water run up her body and her hair pool above her like a orange halo; that she could breathe in the salt and the cold and sink into the blue-black below -
- the shift of the blue into black below, the mirror of the place where atmosphere turns to space, a space that that goes on and on until the very edges of the Universe, and a blue blue box tumbling through the darkness out there somewhere, somewhen...
- but that isn’t why she’s here.
She lets the water lap at her toes and then over her feet, a cool balm against her skin in summer, a cold ache inside her bones in the winter. Kelp and shells are thrown head over heels through the water around her, pushed to the shore by the rush of white waves that crash further out beyond the shallows. She steps out into the water further and further, lets it run over her and cup her in its cold embrace; first over the ankles, then the calves, lapping against the edges of her jeans and sinking its way into the fabric.
This is why she is here. For the pulsing motion of waves dragging themselves higher and higher up the shore or else receding and ebbing leaving a shining skin of water streaked over the sand. She is here to feel the relentless back and forth, the movement of this huge body of water, connected over thousands of miles by the motion of its salt in endless tides and tides and tides.
This is why she is here. Because up there beyond the dome of the clear blue, outside of the wrapping clouds and the hidden airstreams that criss cross the planet, is something not of the Earth. Somewhere, thousands of miles above and outside the relatively thin layer of atmosphere that wraps the planet like a shell, is the dusty white sphere which spins around Amy's so-small-now world and illuminates her dreams.
Dreams of waves and moons and stars, spiralling down through sleep into seas deep blue as that box - that box of wonder and delight and magic, with a whole world of golden spilling light inside it...
It is many times smaller, this Moon, such a tiny thing compared to the vast green-blue swell of the Earth. She has read all the books, taken in the dry facts, and knows its size and its motion. She has watched it from her small garden with the night wrapped around her, or from her bedroom window, leaning against her windowsill with the glass reflecting back her own face like ghost of herself trapped outside. She has looked at the diagrams and she understands why it grows from a crescent scythe to a bright coin in the sky, and then back again into a reverse image of itself.
Amy Pond knows longing. She knows how the Moon yearns for the Earth, how it has done for millenia and will do for long long after she is nothing more than bones. She feels, through the relentless movement of the tide around her feet and legs, how this shining sphere tries to pull the Earth towards it with the heavy secret of its total mass, how the salt and the water reach back out to it. But she feels, too, how Earth and tide are forever separated from the spin of the Moon by the blankness of space that lies in-between; a dark slice filled only with solar winds, stardust, and space debris.
If the bright night time window of stars and moon is closed to her, here - here - is where she can reach beyond her small sky. Here is where something beyond, something other, exists and touches the Earth. A lonely white thing, draped in the shroud of the sun, moving on its graceful arc through the black, touching her oh-so-tiny-now world -
a world no longer touched by the raggedy Doctor
- and she in her turn touching beyond the skin of the planet as she stands there inside the sea.
Amy reaches outwards with the movement of salt and of water, her tears tracking over her skin and down into the tide, mingling together in the cup of the ocean, longing for something that moves out there in the black.
Are you lonely out there without us? Can you hear my voice in the swell of the waves, across the miles, past the light of the moon, out, out, out to wherever you are? Can you hear me?
Eventually, she walks from the tide, over the slick of sand and into Rory’s waiting arms. They move, wrapped together, over dry sands and shell husks. They stumble across pebble and rock and stone which slip and clatter under their feet, over the swell of the dunes and the whistling grasses. They return to their red (oh so bright red) car which waits for them, a lonely sentinel at the edge of the beach. They travel, as they have done so many times, back through the twists and curves of green lanes and over straight grey roads, the sea at their back, the countryside flying by them in a blur.
They return to their house and to their own door of the brightest blue, walking through it into the warmth and the light of their home. They nest inside the comforts within, sinking into each other as the day fades into stillness, tasting the salt on each other’s lips.
Amy Pond loves the moon, stars and sea these days. Sometimes, just for a short while, her heart is stilled and the world around her is enough - the fresh, earthy scent of Rory’s skin on hers, people and places she knows well, the movement of everyday life within the world, language, form, sense - grounding her inside her own time and space.
But sometimes, the night comes again. The pieces of her that belong to somewhere else stir inside her restlessly. Bits of her that belong to bowties and boxes, to nebulae and black holes, to the wide open black and to alien suns, to unimaginable seas and moons far away.
The stars and moon prickle bright across the sky. The tides go in and out, and in again.
Amy Pond watches them.
She waits. She wonders.
Author: lonewytch
Characters: Amy/Rory
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2496
Summary: Set between The God Complex and The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe. Amy Pond loves the sea, the moon and the stars these days. And she misses her raggedy Doctor
A/N: This fic is especially for arwen_elen, because it was inspired by her fics The Days That Never Came and especially And We'll Just Be Dreaming Until You Wake Me Up, and because she loves the sea.
It forms part of A Spiral of Stars Verses which can be found in her Masterlist.
Amy Pond, the girl who waited - the girl with the flame orange hair and the wide eyes, who fell out of her own life and into a fairytale of bowties and boxes, secrets and stars - loves the night sky and the sea these days. They haunt her even when she sleeps. She pulls them in her wake when she nestles down into her bed, and they follow her into soft white sheets, burrowing their way down into the warm darkness with her.
Woven through her dreams are waves that wash bright against the corners of her sleep, their constant rhythm rocking her endlessly. The skies of her dreamscapes are night black, punctuated only with the cut-out shape of a full moon which is bordered on each side by mirrored crescents, and a slow spiral of stars which tangle in her hair, their light catching in her eyes.
These days are the days whose time is marked by the feel of her feet on the ground, by her body anchored to the iron sphere of the Earth like a wing-clipped bird. All her feathers have fallen into dust, stripped away by the vibrating nimbus of a blue box disappearing for the last time.
These are the days that are counted by the scrape of the sun across the sky, and by the wax and wane of a moon with a light that settles on her like spider webs and makes her hair glow strangely.
These are the days that came after him.
When she is awake and the edges of her memories are too sharp for her to contain them, she waits by the window for the soft smudge of evening to appear and give the day away to the night. When the last streaks of dusk have disappeared from her garden, she steps outside barefooted in her nightdress, and turns her face up to the sky. She counts the scatter of stars across night, loses count, and counts again. She makes shapes in her mind out their patterns, drawn from the whimsical stories of her childhood and the recent fantastical memories of her adulthood. She watches the slow movement of the moon and hundreds of distant suns across the heavens. She waits, and she wonders.
Rory lies awake and waits for the familiar sound of the back door clicking closed, for her slow step on the edges of the stairs. She comes to bed with cold bare feet, dew damp on the hem of her nightdress and sadness all over her skin. He thinks that he can see the pinpricks of stars in her irises when they make love.
Because for one person to see all that, to have tasted the glory, and then go back...it will tear you apart.
If the sky is blanketed with cloud and the stars hidden beyond their thick embrace, Amy feels impossibly caged. Her thoughts begin to beat against the limits of a world that feels so small to her now. She feels her heart flutter against the wall of her chest, as if it yearns to break out of her skin, to arrow up through the drenching mist clouds to the dark beyond and the light that patterns it.
On those nights when her memories can’t be contained and she cannot see the stars or the moon, the next morning when she wakes gasping into the cool light, she asks Rory to go to the sea with her. They get up early, and they take the car that sits a violent splash of red against the Tardis blue of their front door -
red as her hair had shone against the wooden doors of that blue box so many months ago now
- and they go speeding over dual carriageways that cover the land in lacework patterns, like strips of dull beaten metal. They move through winding country roads, framed by high hedgerows where small birds nest; they travel down lanes, fenced in by trees that arch and enclose them in tunnels of shifting green light. They travel forwards, and they put space between them and their home. There is movement and there is motion, kinetic energy wrapped up in their journey, felt but unseen. She has read the science of it and she understands that she is moving from one place to the next, that there is forward motion and impetus, that her blue front door lies behind and the promise of the sea ahead. But she never really feels like she is moving.
Because it isn’t like moving through time and space, spanning the vast distances between stars in the blink of an eye, skipping in and out of the twisting hum of the vortex, all of time and space, everything that ever happened or ever will...where do you want to start?...
They drive for miles and miles, following the pull and the pulse of her heart, until they reach a place where the ragged coast of England breaches onto the salt of the wide ocean.
They always go to the same location. A quiet beach of small sloped dunes, lined up like the humps of some huge beast sleeping below the sands. Tufts of marram grass hold the curves together; they whistle in the breeze, a subtle sound just on the edge of human hearing, haunting and wild. The dunes lead onto a line of rough textured stones, all tumbled against each other, quartz glittering under their skins with the shift of light as Amy and Rory pick their way across. The stones are followed in their turn by pebbles, rounded and smooth against the palm, tumbled and licked clean over millennia by the relentless push and pull of waves.
After the territory of stone comes the sand, a beige strip dotted with shells and solitary stones. The sand is dry at first opening willingly to the press of feet as the grains rasp together, but it eventually becomes something not quite land and not quite sea, a threshold space between the two. It sucks at their feet, and their footprints leave small pools that fill with seawater, seeping from a sand which is rippled into undulating lines by the movement of the waves. A thin strip of flotsam and jetsam washed in by the tides lies somewhere in-between stone and sea, a jumble of lost things, discarded things, that have taken the long journey of the ocean currents and ended up here. Forgotten things at the end of their journey, all tangled together with the seaweed.
Sometimes the sea is all steel, mirroring a grey sky. On those days the swell is made ragged by howling winds, which rip across the beach and press strands of cold through every layer of clothing. Erratic waves lift and clash against each other, pushing themselves up into white capped peaks. It seems to Amy that the froth and churn of foam moves deliberately, as if a form made of bubble and brine will burst forth; as if some shape will come running towards her over the swell, arms reaching, grasping. She finds herself tensing, bracing herself, ready for it.
Dalek...Sontaran...Silence...Silurian...names pass through her like sand through the fist, to be scattered like grains sinking in a huge sea, gone into the deep currents of memory...
Sometimes, the sea is nothing but a calm patchwork of green and darker blue, rising and falling gently as small clouds pass over. The clouds mark the face of the ocean with a shifting pattern, a moving puzzle that seems to Amy as if it should be understood, as if it should make sense to her, but doesn’t.
Sometimes, the sky is clear and devoid of all clouds, nothing but a great blankness inhabited only by the sun scratching its way lazily across the heavens; and the sea a pure blue with light shafting down into the deeps.
Every time she is there- no matter the time of year, no matter the bite of the sea - Amy Pond takes off her shoes and her socks, and places them carefully above the tideline out of the water's reach. She rolls up her jeans as far as they will go and walks out into the ocean. Rory hovers at the shoreline behind her, picking through flotsam and jetsam like a nervous bird. She senses the concern rigid in his muscles as he moves, and the glances that he shoots her. She knows what he thinks as she walks into the waves. He thinks that maybe she could walk out and onwards into the sea, letting the cold water run up her body and her hair pool above her like a orange halo; that she could breathe in the salt and the cold and sink into the blue-black below -
- the shift of the blue into black below, the mirror of the place where atmosphere turns to space, a space that that goes on and on until the very edges of the Universe, and a blue blue box tumbling through the darkness out there somewhere, somewhen...
- but that isn’t why she’s here.
She lets the water lap at her toes and then over her feet, a cool balm against her skin in summer, a cold ache inside her bones in the winter. Kelp and shells are thrown head over heels through the water around her, pushed to the shore by the rush of white waves that crash further out beyond the shallows. She steps out into the water further and further, lets it run over her and cup her in its cold embrace; first over the ankles, then the calves, lapping against the edges of her jeans and sinking its way into the fabric.
This is why she is here. For the pulsing motion of waves dragging themselves higher and higher up the shore or else receding and ebbing leaving a shining skin of water streaked over the sand. She is here to feel the relentless back and forth, the movement of this huge body of water, connected over thousands of miles by the motion of its salt in endless tides and tides and tides.
This is why she is here. Because up there beyond the dome of the clear blue, outside of the wrapping clouds and the hidden airstreams that criss cross the planet, is something not of the Earth. Somewhere, thousands of miles above and outside the relatively thin layer of atmosphere that wraps the planet like a shell, is the dusty white sphere which spins around Amy's so-small-now world and illuminates her dreams.
Dreams of waves and moons and stars, spiralling down through sleep into seas deep blue as that box - that box of wonder and delight and magic, with a whole world of golden spilling light inside it...
It is many times smaller, this Moon, such a tiny thing compared to the vast green-blue swell of the Earth. She has read all the books, taken in the dry facts, and knows its size and its motion. She has watched it from her small garden with the night wrapped around her, or from her bedroom window, leaning against her windowsill with the glass reflecting back her own face like ghost of herself trapped outside. She has looked at the diagrams and she understands why it grows from a crescent scythe to a bright coin in the sky, and then back again into a reverse image of itself.
Amy Pond knows longing. She knows how the Moon yearns for the Earth, how it has done for millenia and will do for long long after she is nothing more than bones. She feels, through the relentless movement of the tide around her feet and legs, how this shining sphere tries to pull the Earth towards it with the heavy secret of its total mass, how the salt and the water reach back out to it. But she feels, too, how Earth and tide are forever separated from the spin of the Moon by the blankness of space that lies in-between; a dark slice filled only with solar winds, stardust, and space debris.
If the bright night time window of stars and moon is closed to her, here - here - is where she can reach beyond her small sky. Here is where something beyond, something other, exists and touches the Earth. A lonely white thing, draped in the shroud of the sun, moving on its graceful arc through the black, touching her oh-so-tiny-now world -
a world no longer touched by the raggedy Doctor
- and she in her turn touching beyond the skin of the planet as she stands there inside the sea.
Amy reaches outwards with the movement of salt and of water, her tears tracking over her skin and down into the tide, mingling together in the cup of the ocean, longing for something that moves out there in the black.
Are you lonely out there without us? Can you hear my voice in the swell of the waves, across the miles, past the light of the moon, out, out, out to wherever you are? Can you hear me?
Eventually, she walks from the tide, over the slick of sand and into Rory’s waiting arms. They move, wrapped together, over dry sands and shell husks. They stumble across pebble and rock and stone which slip and clatter under their feet, over the swell of the dunes and the whistling grasses. They return to their red (oh so bright red) car which waits for them, a lonely sentinel at the edge of the beach. They travel, as they have done so many times, back through the twists and curves of green lanes and over straight grey roads, the sea at their back, the countryside flying by them in a blur.
They return to their house and to their own door of the brightest blue, walking through it into the warmth and the light of their home. They nest inside the comforts within, sinking into each other as the day fades into stillness, tasting the salt on each other’s lips.
Amy Pond loves the moon, stars and sea these days. Sometimes, just for a short while, her heart is stilled and the world around her is enough - the fresh, earthy scent of Rory’s skin on hers, people and places she knows well, the movement of everyday life within the world, language, form, sense - grounding her inside her own time and space.
But sometimes, the night comes again. The pieces of her that belong to somewhere else stir inside her restlessly. Bits of her that belong to bowties and boxes, to nebulae and black holes, to the wide open black and to alien suns, to unimaginable seas and moons far away.
The stars and moon prickle bright across the sky. The tides go in and out, and in again.
Amy Pond watches them.
She waits. She wonders.