fic: No More Dreaming Like a Girl So In Love With the Wrong World
Title: No More Dreaming Like a Girl So In Love With the Wrong World
Author: lonewytch
Fandom/Pairing: Doctor Who; Amy/Rory
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2142
Summary: Set during the 2 years between the Doctor leaving Amy and Rory at the end of The God Complex and returning to them at the end of the 2011 christmas special. Once, in a time out of time - a time when the breath of silence blew out all the stars, a time that now never really happened - Rory Williams watched over a box with faces like the void of night. Now, he's just a man and he watches only over a woman who lives half a life as she waits for her Raggedy Doctor to return.
A/N: This fic forms part of A Spiral of Stars, a series created by the lovely arwen_elen, which tracks the days that never came for Amy Pond, as she waits for her Doctor. The links to the other stories can be found in her masterlist. All the pieces are standalone, and you don't need to have read any of the others to read this.
Once, in a time out of time, when the breath of silence blew out all the stars - a time that now never really happened - Rory Williams watched over a box with faces like the void of night.
He stood sentinel for nineteen-hundred years, circles within circles carved into the blackness of the cube at his back, their shape threading through his thoughts, night and day. The weight of his sword was an anchor in his palm, and the knowledge of his task a shield against the edges of madness which threatened to lap against him as he paced the long shores of Time.
He waited while a woman slumbered inside this dark casket behind him, hovering in the space between life and death, waiting to be awoken by the touch of her younger self.
Now, long after that time, Rory Williams is just a man.
*
These days, Rory waits and watches over a woman encased in her own grief and loss, cocooned from the world around her and the passing of the everyday by the memory of the Glory out there beyond the shell of the earth. Her thoughts are caught and wrapped like threads around the stars, they span the wild black spaces in-between, caught in the wake of a spinning blue box. In his mind he sees them like a web between the pinpricks of light. Rory wants to capture them, wrap them around his own fingers and hug them close to his chest.
He, the one who Rory both hates and loves - that impossible man who set up residence in Amy’s dreams for so many years, her heart caught upon the endless Time in his eyes - has left them here behind doors of blue. These doors are a poor mirror of the Doctor’s own, a faded bruise of the Tardis... yet for Rory they shine so much brighter. They mark the entrances and exits of his and Amy’s lives, the steps they take from their inner to outer worlds and back again here on the Earth. They do not step from their threshold out into exotic vistas, into the hard chrome and glass of alien spaceships, into smoke and blood and fire. Instead this life is filled with the rhythm of what some would call mundane - clearcut days and nights, tracked by movement of the planet around the sun; pavements and buses; sandwiches for lunch; Amy’s hand in his as they walk through the park, the smell of rain heavy in the air around them like a kiss from sky to ground.
For Rory, the light inside the home he and Amy have made dazzles more than even the flare of the vortex and feels warmer than the amber glow of the Control Room; it is a place that leaves deeper impressions in his mind than all the time they spent cupped safe in the walls of that blue box as they travelled the wilds of the Universe. It is the world inside blue doors which belong to them, and them alone. It is slow languorous mornings under the duvet with coffee and newspapers; the grain of the wooden table in the kitchen under his fingers and blueberry muffins for breakfast; it is the world of a bed big enough to hold them both, and of Amy’s pale skin soft under his, the scent of her in his nostrils as he wakes from sleep.
But those other doors of blue - the Doctor's doors - the ones of the past and not the ones of now, are seared onto Amy’s memory and cannot ever be erased. Rory knows this now. Those doors had opened onto a puzzle box of a world, where for a long time the golden glow of light and the twisting maze of the Tardis corridors had wrapped even him as surely as if he was home. He supposed it had been home back then. Home because it was Amy, and because, once, there was a time when he too was enchanted by the stars and the galaxies, by the spell of slipping in and out of Time, when he had been fascinated by the spill of all the life out there. A time before he was tired of the endless fight and the endless grief of the Doctor’s haphazard life.
Back then, from within those doors, had come the deep hum of the Tardis. It could be felt like a whisper in the bones as you walked the labyrinthine corridors of the ship, a blurred vibration which had seemed to permeate Rory’s dreams as he slept, drenching them in light. If Rory is honest, he misses Her - that impossible ship. He misses the soft and almost indistinguishable brush of her vast and complex mind across his, and the feel of the Tardis air which always smelled of electricity and smoke, like a storm was waiting to break inside her. Once, somewhere close to the skin of the Universe, she had called him “Pretty,” then died in his arms, all the while whispering the reality of his daughter into his ears.
There had been a time when the starlight had rushed over his and Amy’s skin like water as they moved through the endless night of space; when the light of alien moons had illuminated the planes of Amy’s face making her seem more beautiful than ever; when he had been dazzled by the magic of the insane dream they were living. Back then, Rory had pushed out against the limits of his courage, doing things that back under the dishwater skies of Leadworth he had never even imagined himself capable of. He had found that his limits were few, that the wall around the small strength inside him first cracked and then crumbled to rock and sand, and allowed him to step across it - first to become, then to be, amazing. He knew now the steady core of himself, an iron solidity which tethered him to the ground - a solidity which he craved would become Amy’s anchor back to earth and to her life. Back then, there were monsters to fight and the clear-cut knife of threat. And when the knife threatened, there were the memories spilling through the door in his mind. They made him take up his courage, or a sword, and wield them both with a skill which punctured and sliced through armour, through flesh. He knew war, he knew strategy; the soldier in his memory gave him courage, the healer in his soul gave him the compassion to deal out the sword edge only when necessary. What he didn’t know of technology, of other species, and of the volatile nature of planets they set foot upon, he made up for with his love and his devotion to the woman he would follow to the end of the Universe and then beyond it.
There was that, then, at least. That life out there amongst the stars had forged him into a man.
But his soul and his patience had become tattered and worn by the long fights, by the constant danger and the running, by the damage to Amy. He frayed like a cloth caught upon thorns, as thread by thread was first tangled and then torn away. There was death, upon life, upon death again; insane resurrections of hopes and fears, of blood and skin. His and Amy’s child was lost. From both Melody to River she was a weapon honed in the fire of the Doctor's life, a life that burned and consumed all around it as surely as nuclear fission. Amy was split into two by the mirror of Time, by the flow of the red waterfall of blood and of years, while Rory remained anchored by the green depths of the Doctor's eyes. It was all too much.
The memories feel like a dream to Rory now, a lucid and outlandish wandering through the pathways of a slumbering mind. It could have been a dream; perhaps he could have consigned it to the delirium-memory of sleep and let it fade into the corners of his mind, but for the darkness turning at the heart of his wife. The knowledge that the Doctor was lost to them - that he had turned away and ran back out into the stars without them - was a weight inside her, a dark-matter pressing her soles to the ground. The longing for the things she could never have plagued her - possibilities of huge ring-clad planets, of bright binary systems; daydreams of the dust of alien ground clinging to the feet, of the streak of unfamiliar stars across strange skies. Rory listens to her speak about these things and the sound of her voice hitting air is an ache inside him. He watches as the utterance of each word makes her a little more ghost like, a little less rooted in the here and now, as memories of Time and the canvas of space move underneath her skin. It is a longing for a life that that can only be lived, Rory knows, until an end comes in which one of them is dead, hot blood running over the hands of the other and screams echoing into the heavy air of some alien ship, or some random planet. Or a life that can only be lived until both their blood is all over the Timelord's hands.
Yet there there was this also: that back then the opposition was at least clear and substantial, it had mass, it had form, it had shape and sense to it.
Now there are no more monsters, save the one behind his wife’s eyes that leaches the shine from her smile and makes her spirit brittle.
Sometimes now, Rory opens the doorway in his mind, and he passes through it between the walls of his memories to try and find strength. To remember what it is to wait for Amy to come awake and to live again. One moment he is a man within this world, who was born and has lived twenty-something years. The next moment he is a soldier, a fighter, a survivor, making his way across the wide continent of europe and across the small water to England, the words of ancient Gods on his lips when he prays. One moment he is the pinprick of a presence in this time, he is a nurse walking the hospital corridors, his shoes squeaking on shining floors, the smell of antiseptic wreathing his clothes. The next moment he is a thought in the endless span of almost two thousand years, he is waiting in the cold cavern beneath the henge, he is dragged across the land and across time, pulled on by the corners of that black box that cradle and hold the (dead) woman he loves.
And so, Rory knows what it is to wait. He knows how it is to mark the time and the years, to see them gather like dust upon you. He knows how it is to watch the world come and go. Day gives itself away to night over and over again, and the world turns in its relentless course around the sun.
He watches Amy wait for the Doctor to return, and part of him understands while part of him grieves. She lives her life, she does her work, she loves him with a fierceness that frequently astounds him. She is not just going through the motions, rather she allows the motion of life to move her and she engages with it willingly. But.
But there is part of her that yearns to go back.
And Rory feels like a traitor inside his bones, because there is a part of him that never ever wants the Doctor to come back.
*
Once, in a time out of time - a time when the breath of silence blew out all the stars, a time that now never really happened - Rory Williams watched over a box with faces like the void of night.
Now, no sword anchors his hand, because there are no more monsters to fight. He stands sentinel and plays warden only to a woman broken by the memories wrapped into her bones, by the whispers of a fairytale she can no longer live. His love is his shield as he paces the long shores of Time and waits for the red of his wife’s hair to set fire to her spirit again.
Now, long after that time-that-never-was, Rory William is just a man.
He watches as Amy hovers in the space between sleeping and dreaming, waiting for the press of stars against her skin again, and his thoughts circle as her dark slumber threads through his thoughts night and day
He waits for her to awake.
Author: lonewytch
Fandom/Pairing: Doctor Who; Amy/Rory
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 2142
Summary: Set during the 2 years between the Doctor leaving Amy and Rory at the end of The God Complex and returning to them at the end of the 2011 christmas special. Once, in a time out of time - a time when the breath of silence blew out all the stars, a time that now never really happened - Rory Williams watched over a box with faces like the void of night. Now, he's just a man and he watches only over a woman who lives half a life as she waits for her Raggedy Doctor to return.
A/N: This fic forms part of A Spiral of Stars, a series created by the lovely arwen_elen, which tracks the days that never came for Amy Pond, as she waits for her Doctor. The links to the other stories can be found in her masterlist. All the pieces are standalone, and you don't need to have read any of the others to read this.
Once, in a time out of time, when the breath of silence blew out all the stars - a time that now never really happened - Rory Williams watched over a box with faces like the void of night.
He stood sentinel for nineteen-hundred years, circles within circles carved into the blackness of the cube at his back, their shape threading through his thoughts, night and day. The weight of his sword was an anchor in his palm, and the knowledge of his task a shield against the edges of madness which threatened to lap against him as he paced the long shores of Time.
He waited while a woman slumbered inside this dark casket behind him, hovering in the space between life and death, waiting to be awoken by the touch of her younger self.
Now, long after that time, Rory Williams is just a man.
*
These days, Rory waits and watches over a woman encased in her own grief and loss, cocooned from the world around her and the passing of the everyday by the memory of the Glory out there beyond the shell of the earth. Her thoughts are caught and wrapped like threads around the stars, they span the wild black spaces in-between, caught in the wake of a spinning blue box. In his mind he sees them like a web between the pinpricks of light. Rory wants to capture them, wrap them around his own fingers and hug them close to his chest.
He, the one who Rory both hates and loves - that impossible man who set up residence in Amy’s dreams for so many years, her heart caught upon the endless Time in his eyes - has left them here behind doors of blue. These doors are a poor mirror of the Doctor’s own, a faded bruise of the Tardis... yet for Rory they shine so much brighter. They mark the entrances and exits of his and Amy’s lives, the steps they take from their inner to outer worlds and back again here on the Earth. They do not step from their threshold out into exotic vistas, into the hard chrome and glass of alien spaceships, into smoke and blood and fire. Instead this life is filled with the rhythm of what some would call mundane - clearcut days and nights, tracked by movement of the planet around the sun; pavements and buses; sandwiches for lunch; Amy’s hand in his as they walk through the park, the smell of rain heavy in the air around them like a kiss from sky to ground.
For Rory, the light inside the home he and Amy have made dazzles more than even the flare of the vortex and feels warmer than the amber glow of the Control Room; it is a place that leaves deeper impressions in his mind than all the time they spent cupped safe in the walls of that blue box as they travelled the wilds of the Universe. It is the world inside blue doors which belong to them, and them alone. It is slow languorous mornings under the duvet with coffee and newspapers; the grain of the wooden table in the kitchen under his fingers and blueberry muffins for breakfast; it is the world of a bed big enough to hold them both, and of Amy’s pale skin soft under his, the scent of her in his nostrils as he wakes from sleep.
But those other doors of blue - the Doctor's doors - the ones of the past and not the ones of now, are seared onto Amy’s memory and cannot ever be erased. Rory knows this now. Those doors had opened onto a puzzle box of a world, where for a long time the golden glow of light and the twisting maze of the Tardis corridors had wrapped even him as surely as if he was home. He supposed it had been home back then. Home because it was Amy, and because, once, there was a time when he too was enchanted by the stars and the galaxies, by the spell of slipping in and out of Time, when he had been fascinated by the spill of all the life out there. A time before he was tired of the endless fight and the endless grief of the Doctor’s haphazard life.
Back then, from within those doors, had come the deep hum of the Tardis. It could be felt like a whisper in the bones as you walked the labyrinthine corridors of the ship, a blurred vibration which had seemed to permeate Rory’s dreams as he slept, drenching them in light. If Rory is honest, he misses Her - that impossible ship. He misses the soft and almost indistinguishable brush of her vast and complex mind across his, and the feel of the Tardis air which always smelled of electricity and smoke, like a storm was waiting to break inside her. Once, somewhere close to the skin of the Universe, she had called him “Pretty,” then died in his arms, all the while whispering the reality of his daughter into his ears.
There had been a time when the starlight had rushed over his and Amy’s skin like water as they moved through the endless night of space; when the light of alien moons had illuminated the planes of Amy’s face making her seem more beautiful than ever; when he had been dazzled by the magic of the insane dream they were living. Back then, Rory had pushed out against the limits of his courage, doing things that back under the dishwater skies of Leadworth he had never even imagined himself capable of. He had found that his limits were few, that the wall around the small strength inside him first cracked and then crumbled to rock and sand, and allowed him to step across it - first to become, then to be, amazing. He knew now the steady core of himself, an iron solidity which tethered him to the ground - a solidity which he craved would become Amy’s anchor back to earth and to her life. Back then, there were monsters to fight and the clear-cut knife of threat. And when the knife threatened, there were the memories spilling through the door in his mind. They made him take up his courage, or a sword, and wield them both with a skill which punctured and sliced through armour, through flesh. He knew war, he knew strategy; the soldier in his memory gave him courage, the healer in his soul gave him the compassion to deal out the sword edge only when necessary. What he didn’t know of technology, of other species, and of the volatile nature of planets they set foot upon, he made up for with his love and his devotion to the woman he would follow to the end of the Universe and then beyond it.
There was that, then, at least. That life out there amongst the stars had forged him into a man.
But his soul and his patience had become tattered and worn by the long fights, by the constant danger and the running, by the damage to Amy. He frayed like a cloth caught upon thorns, as thread by thread was first tangled and then torn away. There was death, upon life, upon death again; insane resurrections of hopes and fears, of blood and skin. His and Amy’s child was lost. From both Melody to River she was a weapon honed in the fire of the Doctor's life, a life that burned and consumed all around it as surely as nuclear fission. Amy was split into two by the mirror of Time, by the flow of the red waterfall of blood and of years, while Rory remained anchored by the green depths of the Doctor's eyes. It was all too much.
The memories feel like a dream to Rory now, a lucid and outlandish wandering through the pathways of a slumbering mind. It could have been a dream; perhaps he could have consigned it to the delirium-memory of sleep and let it fade into the corners of his mind, but for the darkness turning at the heart of his wife. The knowledge that the Doctor was lost to them - that he had turned away and ran back out into the stars without them - was a weight inside her, a dark-matter pressing her soles to the ground. The longing for the things she could never have plagued her - possibilities of huge ring-clad planets, of bright binary systems; daydreams of the dust of alien ground clinging to the feet, of the streak of unfamiliar stars across strange skies. Rory listens to her speak about these things and the sound of her voice hitting air is an ache inside him. He watches as the utterance of each word makes her a little more ghost like, a little less rooted in the here and now, as memories of Time and the canvas of space move underneath her skin. It is a longing for a life that that can only be lived, Rory knows, until an end comes in which one of them is dead, hot blood running over the hands of the other and screams echoing into the heavy air of some alien ship, or some random planet. Or a life that can only be lived until both their blood is all over the Timelord's hands.
Yet there there was this also: that back then the opposition was at least clear and substantial, it had mass, it had form, it had shape and sense to it.
Now there are no more monsters, save the one behind his wife’s eyes that leaches the shine from her smile and makes her spirit brittle.
Sometimes now, Rory opens the doorway in his mind, and he passes through it between the walls of his memories to try and find strength. To remember what it is to wait for Amy to come awake and to live again. One moment he is a man within this world, who was born and has lived twenty-something years. The next moment he is a soldier, a fighter, a survivor, making his way across the wide continent of europe and across the small water to England, the words of ancient Gods on his lips when he prays. One moment he is the pinprick of a presence in this time, he is a nurse walking the hospital corridors, his shoes squeaking on shining floors, the smell of antiseptic wreathing his clothes. The next moment he is a thought in the endless span of almost two thousand years, he is waiting in the cold cavern beneath the henge, he is dragged across the land and across time, pulled on by the corners of that black box that cradle and hold the (dead) woman he loves.
And so, Rory knows what it is to wait. He knows how it is to mark the time and the years, to see them gather like dust upon you. He knows how it is to watch the world come and go. Day gives itself away to night over and over again, and the world turns in its relentless course around the sun.
He watches Amy wait for the Doctor to return, and part of him understands while part of him grieves. She lives her life, she does her work, she loves him with a fierceness that frequently astounds him. She is not just going through the motions, rather she allows the motion of life to move her and she engages with it willingly. But.
But there is part of her that yearns to go back.
And Rory feels like a traitor inside his bones, because there is a part of him that never ever wants the Doctor to come back.
*
Once, in a time out of time - a time when the breath of silence blew out all the stars, a time that now never really happened - Rory Williams watched over a box with faces like the void of night.
Now, no sword anchors his hand, because there are no more monsters to fight. He stands sentinel and plays warden only to a woman broken by the memories wrapped into her bones, by the whispers of a fairytale she can no longer live. His love is his shield as he paces the long shores of Time and waits for the red of his wife’s hair to set fire to her spirit again.
Now, long after that time-that-never-was, Rory William is just a man.
He watches as Amy hovers in the space between sleeping and dreaming, waiting for the press of stars against her skin again, and his thoughts circle as her dark slumber threads through his thoughts night and day
He waits for her to awake.