Birthday fic for a_phoenixdragon: And Miles to Go Before I Sleep
Title: And Miles to Go Before I Sleep
Author: lonewytch
Characters: Rory/11 (pre-slash)
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 3551
Summary: Set early on in series 6. Sometimes Rory Williams cannot sleep. The doorway in his head opens and the memories of 2000 years pour through it.
A/N: A birthday present for my wonderful a_phoenixdragon because sometimes she cannot sleep, and because she loves Rory and 11. Happy Birthday sweetie, I hope that you enjoy this fic and have a lovely day. All my love. x
Sometimes, Rory Williams cannot sleep.
Though his body tells him it’s time to let go - to drift away down into the place where tissue and nerves repair, where the chatter of the conscious mind rests, soothed by the subconscious - he cannot. Sometimes two thousand years stretch out darkly behind him, stark and terrifying, yet filled with a love which carries him through the long nights where no stars shine.
These days there is a doorway inside Rory’s mind, and beyond it a pathway into memories which are both his own and not his own at the same time. It is a door which he can sometimes open at will, through which he occasionally allows himself to pass when he needs to seek the strength and the skills of his soldier self. When he wishes, he crosses the threshold into this other self, like a wind moving from one continent to another and swirling within the boundaries of his own internal world.
However sometimes when his guard is down, this door in his mind opens without his intent, without his permission, and the years flood through it and into him like a river in spate. Currents batter against the edges of his thoughts; his feet unconsciously twitch in a familiar marching pattern; his hand reaches for a sword that is no longer there; the long long wait with the ever present black box against his back pushes into him like a starless night.
Tonight the doorway is open.
Rory tosses and turns, too warm and too overtired, reaching towards sleep and seeking it in the white sheets of the bed, grasping towards Amy’s supine form which rests cradled inside her dreams. But slumber is elusive, slipping through his fingers and away from him, chasing its own weight from his eyelids - off and down through the twisting corridors of the Tardis.
Finally Rory gives up the fight, accepting that he will not sleep any time soon. Instead he lies there passively, letting the memories flood through him, considering them as they brush against his thoughts. Those years - when he’d lived them - had been oddly easier than the memory of them now. Maybe because back then he was plastic inside, he thinks, faintly disgusted with himself; just living plastic all through his body, a thing with the memories of the man he used to be. A soul anchored into an artificial body by nothing but the love of the girl waiting inside the box. Then, it had been easier to bear because the thought of Amy and the need to wait for her had sustained him. Now Amy is back, alive, vital and breathing next to him. There’s nothing to wait for any more, so the memory of those years haunts him and he feels purposeless in their wake. Now he is human, a real boy again, all soft flesh and nerves spun out like silk inside him, a brain ill adapted to the long years he has borne.
Tonight he moves and shifts about for a long time, trying to get comfortable, but when the sheets of the bed begin to feel like rope tangled around his legs he eventually gets up. He puts on his dressing gown and walks from the room, glancing behind him as he leaves, noticing how Amy’s hair is spread out like a halo on the pillow and shining in the low light emitted from the ceiling. He begins to wander the corridors, no particular destination in mind, the years flooding through his head as he moves... a thousand winters and more, never feeling the cold, body never succumbing to the deep pull of of the dark season which would drag any normal human into the urge to sleep and hide away. Years and years, his circadian rhythm lost to plastic and the body of his past life, sleep a memory he can taste but never truly within his reach. A million memories jostle for superiority in his mind, his subconscious stirring and deep currents forcing them up into his all-too-awake mind. The dank smell of the underhenge - the edges of the box somehow visible even in the deepest dark, because they are darker than the dark itself; the panic as the box is excavated from under the henge, the hiding, the watching, the endless night of waiting.
His hands trail against the walls of the Tardis as he walks, and he finds some comfort in the questing brush of her mind against his. She recognises his restlessness, his distress and sends tendrils of soothing comfort to him, twining into his mind through the brush of his fingertips, making him sigh a little with relief. The corridors are lit by a soft glow that accompanies him as he walks; bulbs illuminate before him then fade when he passes on, like fireflies keeping pace with his steps, the ship lighting his way as he wanders, directionless.
He doesn’t mean to, but somehow he ends up in the Control Room, drifting aimlessly down the stairs and underneath the clear glassy floor; wandering towards core of the ship where the engines lie, where the roots of the Time Rotor are encased inside the central column that plunges deep into her heart. A dull thud pulses in the air, the movement of the ship as she pushes them through whichever forgotten stretch of the Universe they are currently drifting in.The rhythmic vibrations are a physical sensation that can be felt inside the walls of his chest when he stands this close to the engines, all else hanging still and quiet around him, nothing but the sound of the ship and his own thoughts. The Doctor’s repair swing hangs there, swaying slightly in the air, moved by the imperceptible motion of the ship. Protective goggles hang from a strut nearby, looking ridiculous, making Rory smile and grounding him momentarily.
He steps forward and presses his hand to the Time Rotor, feeling the pounding vibration through his palm, the heart of the ship so alien to his own and keeping an entirely different beat. She soothes him, dissolving the strangeness inside him and replacing it instead with her own strangeness. Distantly, the nurse in him ponders for a moment on the anatomy of a multi-dimensional being with the physical body of a space-craft; on the make-up of a small blue box exterior with a labyrinthine interior, filled with memories and endless rooms, something awake, aware and alive at the heart of it... but the thought makes his head hurt and he gives it up as a bad job. Instead he just holds himself still, letting her flow through him.
His eyes are closed, his attention immersed within the ship, so he doesn’t realise he isn’t alone until he feels the brush of cool fingers against his cheek. He comes awake, back to himself with a jolt and a sudden involuntary jerk of his body away from the sensation. His eyelids spring open to find the Doctor standing before him, one hand still hovering in the air near his face. His tweed jacket is absent, shirt sleeves rolled up, hair tousled and hanging down over his brow. The Timelord drops his hand and gazes at Rory, eyes a shifting colour that could be called hazel, but is a bit too hard to pin down, a bit too otherworldy to fit that description. They are wide and curious now, his face unreadable.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Rory admits pointlessly. The Doctor just nods, still watching him closely, and Rory can feel himself being examined and stripped down, his tone, expression and body language being assessed, interpreted, catalogued.
“The memories, they keep me awake occasionally,” he admits. “From when I was an Auton. It’s still....weird. I can’t shut them off sometimes.”
The Doctor still doesn’t speak, and all of a sudden Rory feels oddly guilty for trespassing here when the Doctor isn’t present. It’s the Timelord’s space, the place he goes when his mood is dark and he cannot speak, where he goes when he wants to think some problem over, or when he just wants to fiddle with wires and send showers of sparks, bangs and pops of electricity curling through the Control Room. It’s the place where he goes to be close to the ship that he loves.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to - “ Rory begins, but the Doctor raises a hand to stop him, shaking his head fractionally.
“No, it’s fine.” The Doctor’s eyes are still curious, their indistinguishable colour seeming to shift and grow darker in the dim light of the engine area. Rory watches as the Doctor absent-mindedly reaches his hand out to the side and strokes one long finger slowly down the central column that encases the roots of the Time Rotor. His fingertips seem to linger and drag against the surface, and Rory can feel it through his feet when the ship hums in response, the pleasure in the Tardis’s tone unmistakable.
“Does she help,” the Doctor tilts his head towards the column. “With the memories? With the Time inside you?”
Rory nods, searching for the language to explain just how she helps him “Yep. She...I don’t know, she makes it easier somehow. I mean, it’s not serious, it’s not really a problem, it’s just sometimes I can’t sleep and I can't help but remember, and it’s just such a long time...I mean, it’s just really....” He trails off, lost for adequate words to describe how he feels.
The Doctor nods sympathetically. “Can’t help but remember,” he echoes, giving a mirthless laugh. “I know how that is.”
The Timelord’s eyes go far away for just a moment, displaced somewhere out of the space and time the two of them currently occupy; but it’s just a flash and before Rory can comment on it his eyes are clear and focusing again, even as Rory looks on. Sympathy and empathy are in the Doctor’s gaze now, and his features soften from unreadable to compassionate as he quirks his lips in a smile.
The Timelord’s fingers are still pressed to the body of the Tardis, and when the Doctor turns his head to look at where he is touching the engines, Rory’s eyes follow his. The Doctor has begun to trace patterns across the hard surface of the ship’s central column, complicated swirling symbols, circles within circles, strange flourishes and dots. The hum of the Tardis rises again as the Doctor moves his fingers, and the sound diversifies into many different notes which ring together harmoniously, the vibration coming from her now multifold. The symbols he is writing....Gallifreyan. They must be, Rory realises. He feels a strange sense of intimacy rise suddenly between them, the ancient language hanging in the air between them, unspoken but very present in the moment with Rory as their witness. He watches transfixed, eyes tracking the movement of the Doctor’s hand.
“I heard you, you know, through the ship,” the Timelord murmurs softly.
“Oh?”
From the corner of his eye, Rory sees the Doctor nod as his hand moves continually over the column.
“Her psychic circuits picked up on it when you were touching her. Your thoughts were moving through them. I could feel her talking to you, feel your restlessness.”
“How do you do it?” Rory blurts out, suddenly, impulsively, dragging his eyes away to look back at the Doctor, seeing the concentration that furrows the Timelords brow, at the way he absentmindedly brushes the hair back out of his eyes. “Not that, I mean. How do you live with it? With how long you’ve been around? It’s centuries, so many of them...just all that time and all those memories. I believe the only reason I didn’t go mad was because I was - well - plastic. But mainly because I was waiting for Amy. But, how do you do it, Doctor? What are you waiting for? What keeps you going?”
The Doctor turns his gaze back to Rory and shrugs non-committally, but there is a barely concealed pain spilling from his eyes and layering itself over his features. It’s a pain the Doctor usually masks, but right now he is letting Rory see. Rory feels as if he is springing open a locked puzzle box of secrets, a box filled with mysteries, tricks and secret spaces. Right now he is looking inside at the very heart of it, into the secret darkness at the core where loss and loneliness dwell.
“My race is long lived - our brains, our psychology - we’re structured for Time,” he answers. Rory watches the sharp lines of his profile, the way the blue-ish light glances off them as the Timelord inclines his head towards the plunging heart of his ship. “It has its perks,” there is the ghost of a smile, then the rich line of the Doctor's lips is still again. “And it has its pains.”
Then as quickly as it appeared, the pain is wiped away, boxed up again and the Doctor’s face becomes suddenly concerned and serious as he switches the subject back around, fast as light. “You must tell me, you know, if it’s a problem, if you’re struggling with it.”
Now it’s Rory’s turn to shrug non-committally, but to let his eyes give the lie to his actions. “It’s not a problem - I mean it’s weird sometimes. Really weird. Sometimes, when I remember, it feels as if I’m going to lose myself in the length of all that time. But it’s okay. Really, it is.”
He looks steadily at the Doctor and wants to ask, again, if the Timelord struggles with his years, how he lives through them - but he already knows the answer, has read it in the Doctor’s face in that secret moment he was given. It’s not the years themselves that are hard, it’s those people who run through them, the ones the Doctor has seen come and go, live and then die. However, it’s also those very people who keep him living through them. It is Love that carried both himself and the Doctor through their years, Rory reflects. They have that in common between them. But, at least when Rory was living through those years he knew that in the end Amy would step from the black box and back into the light, that she would be reborn . She was never dead, not really.
Rory thinks of how it would be watching everyone he loves die away, tells the Doctor, “I’m sorry.”
The Timelord steps suddenly closer to him, closing the space between them, one hand still lingering against his beloved ship. He’s only a whisper away now, tension stretched tight across the air between them. The written words he has created on the body of his ship are still unspoken; the weight of them heavy, their shapes seeming to fill the space around and between the two of them. Rory wants to speak the words, to know this secret and forgotten language - but he cannot comprehend what they are, can’t form the words with his own tongue. Instead, he looks into the years of the Doctor's eyes, noticing the way they are crinkled in kindness at the edges.
“Rory Williams. The boy who waited. You’re fantastic, both of you, really you are. My Ponds.”
The Doctor at last drops his hand from the continual tracing pattern over the body of the ship, then reaches across the small distance between them, takes Rory’s fingers in his own. The alien’s skin runs much cooler than his and is a balm against the overtired and overheated skin of his all-too-human body. Rory complies when the Doctor tugs at his hand, allows his arm to be lifted upwards, lets the Doctor press his palm to the central column, right over the spot where he has been tracing the symbols and the words. The Timelord presses his own palm firmly over Rory’s, tangles their fingers together and looks at him wide eyed and intense.
Then all of a sudden, without there seeming to be any space of time between the Doctor taking his hand and what happens next, the Timelord is pressing his lips to Rory’s.
Rory’s head spins - he feels like he should be thinking of many different things at this point, but he cannot parse the different reactions going off inside his mind; they are all muddled together in a wave of strangeness as the Doctor and the Tardis sweep through him. In the end the only clear thought he has is of is the way the alien smells and tastes; the scent of soap and smoke and stars - the taste of Time beating in an off-kilter pulse under the Timelord’s thin, warm skin, pressed against his own lips. The kiss must only last a few seconds in reality, but to Rory it seems to last minutes, hours, years, aeons, milliseconds, nothing, no time at all. It exists in a place where two things happen at once. First of all, Time becomes everything; it overflows between the two of them, spills in all directions at once, past, present, future and all the bits inbetween that can only be described in a dead language that can burn stars and topple Gods. Second, because Time now is all things in every direction at once, because there is nothing else but that, it becomes utterly meaningless. It fades into the borderlands of Rory’s mind, gathering long memories and taking them back into the shadows with it. Eventually all there is is the pulsing heart of the ship inside him, the feeling of a cool hand pressed to his, and the contrasting warmth of the Doctor’s mouth on his, the taste of Time on his tongue.
When the Doctor finally pulls away, gently tugging Rory’s hand from the hard surface of the ship, and disentangling his fingers, Rory’s head is left momentarily spinning as he opens his eyes and regains his bearings. Eventually his head clears and stills, and normal vision and thought returns to him.
The doorway in his mind has closed, for now. He is all human, flesh blood and bone, with nothing but the span of twenty-odd years spun out behind him, and the memory of his life on earth and in this ship. The memory of the long years in the Underhenge, the desperate struggle to protect the black box is, once more, an abstract concept in his mind, something that happened to somebody else long ago. It is like a story, a myth he once read as a child, a book that now languishes between dusty covers on a forgotten shelf.
The Doctor looks at him carefully, and Rory feels the sleep that eluded him beginning to drape its way across his - now stilled - mind, trying to pull him down with it as it sinks deep into his bones.
The Timelord smiles, lifting his hand to brush gently across Rory’s cheekbone again, the suggestion of stars and Time tracking across Rory’s skin and flaring in his mind as he does so.
“Go back to bed now” the Doctor suggests, “go to sleep.”
Rory just nods, murmurs his thanks and begins to walk; but as he reaches the bottom of the stairs that lead back to ground floor level, he turns to look back at the Timelord. The Doctor is still standing, but he’s leaning against the engines now, the length of his whole body and his cheek pressed to centre of his Ship. Blue light illuminates his features, making shadows out of the strange angles and lines of his face, and in that moment he looks both incredibley vulnerable and beautiful.
Rory wants to say a lot of things; he wants to say thank you, and I know, and I understand, and me too. He wants to say; I can never know and I’m sorry ...but he doesn’t. He just hopes that the Timelord catches the flow of his thoughts threading their way across the room to him; that where his bare feet contact the floor his thoughts become known by the ship, that the words travel like roots growing from the soles of his feet through the Tardis’s psychic circuits and are carried to the Timelord. Maybe the words do reach him because just a second later the Doctor smiles at him warmly, and then makes a shooing gesture, saying “Go to bed, Rory, Boy Who Waited.”
So he does. He leaves the Doctor there in the close air of the Tardis underbelly, wrapped in thoughts and grief, Time and a smile on his lips. He wanders back through twisting corridors, mind still and calm, the lights racing ahead of him and trailing in his wake. He returns to the low-lit room and the white sheets, to the spread of Amy’s hair across the pillows and the soft sound of her breathing. He crawls into the bed, burrowing down into the warmth and softness, letting his muscles relax and his eyelids close.
Lulled by the ever present low hum of the Tardis from the floor and walls around him, drifting into dreams of stars and soft gold light, of cool fingers on his cheek and distant shadows of Time, Rory Williams sleeps.
Author: lonewytch
Characters: Rory/11 (pre-slash)
Rating: PG
Wordcount: 3551
Summary: Set early on in series 6. Sometimes Rory Williams cannot sleep. The doorway in his head opens and the memories of 2000 years pour through it.
A/N: A birthday present for my wonderful a_phoenixdragon because sometimes she cannot sleep, and because she loves Rory and 11. Happy Birthday sweetie, I hope that you enjoy this fic and have a lovely day. All my love. x
Sometimes, Rory Williams cannot sleep.
Though his body tells him it’s time to let go - to drift away down into the place where tissue and nerves repair, where the chatter of the conscious mind rests, soothed by the subconscious - he cannot. Sometimes two thousand years stretch out darkly behind him, stark and terrifying, yet filled with a love which carries him through the long nights where no stars shine.
These days there is a doorway inside Rory’s mind, and beyond it a pathway into memories which are both his own and not his own at the same time. It is a door which he can sometimes open at will, through which he occasionally allows himself to pass when he needs to seek the strength and the skills of his soldier self. When he wishes, he crosses the threshold into this other self, like a wind moving from one continent to another and swirling within the boundaries of his own internal world.
However sometimes when his guard is down, this door in his mind opens without his intent, without his permission, and the years flood through it and into him like a river in spate. Currents batter against the edges of his thoughts; his feet unconsciously twitch in a familiar marching pattern; his hand reaches for a sword that is no longer there; the long long wait with the ever present black box against his back pushes into him like a starless night.
Tonight the doorway is open.
Rory tosses and turns, too warm and too overtired, reaching towards sleep and seeking it in the white sheets of the bed, grasping towards Amy’s supine form which rests cradled inside her dreams. But slumber is elusive, slipping through his fingers and away from him, chasing its own weight from his eyelids - off and down through the twisting corridors of the Tardis.
Finally Rory gives up the fight, accepting that he will not sleep any time soon. Instead he lies there passively, letting the memories flood through him, considering them as they brush against his thoughts. Those years - when he’d lived them - had been oddly easier than the memory of them now. Maybe because back then he was plastic inside, he thinks, faintly disgusted with himself; just living plastic all through his body, a thing with the memories of the man he used to be. A soul anchored into an artificial body by nothing but the love of the girl waiting inside the box. Then, it had been easier to bear because the thought of Amy and the need to wait for her had sustained him. Now Amy is back, alive, vital and breathing next to him. There’s nothing to wait for any more, so the memory of those years haunts him and he feels purposeless in their wake. Now he is human, a real boy again, all soft flesh and nerves spun out like silk inside him, a brain ill adapted to the long years he has borne.
Tonight he moves and shifts about for a long time, trying to get comfortable, but when the sheets of the bed begin to feel like rope tangled around his legs he eventually gets up. He puts on his dressing gown and walks from the room, glancing behind him as he leaves, noticing how Amy’s hair is spread out like a halo on the pillow and shining in the low light emitted from the ceiling. He begins to wander the corridors, no particular destination in mind, the years flooding through his head as he moves... a thousand winters and more, never feeling the cold, body never succumbing to the deep pull of of the dark season which would drag any normal human into the urge to sleep and hide away. Years and years, his circadian rhythm lost to plastic and the body of his past life, sleep a memory he can taste but never truly within his reach. A million memories jostle for superiority in his mind, his subconscious stirring and deep currents forcing them up into his all-too-awake mind. The dank smell of the underhenge - the edges of the box somehow visible even in the deepest dark, because they are darker than the dark itself; the panic as the box is excavated from under the henge, the hiding, the watching, the endless night of waiting.
His hands trail against the walls of the Tardis as he walks, and he finds some comfort in the questing brush of her mind against his. She recognises his restlessness, his distress and sends tendrils of soothing comfort to him, twining into his mind through the brush of his fingertips, making him sigh a little with relief. The corridors are lit by a soft glow that accompanies him as he walks; bulbs illuminate before him then fade when he passes on, like fireflies keeping pace with his steps, the ship lighting his way as he wanders, directionless.
He doesn’t mean to, but somehow he ends up in the Control Room, drifting aimlessly down the stairs and underneath the clear glassy floor; wandering towards core of the ship where the engines lie, where the roots of the Time Rotor are encased inside the central column that plunges deep into her heart. A dull thud pulses in the air, the movement of the ship as she pushes them through whichever forgotten stretch of the Universe they are currently drifting in.The rhythmic vibrations are a physical sensation that can be felt inside the walls of his chest when he stands this close to the engines, all else hanging still and quiet around him, nothing but the sound of the ship and his own thoughts. The Doctor’s repair swing hangs there, swaying slightly in the air, moved by the imperceptible motion of the ship. Protective goggles hang from a strut nearby, looking ridiculous, making Rory smile and grounding him momentarily.
He steps forward and presses his hand to the Time Rotor, feeling the pounding vibration through his palm, the heart of the ship so alien to his own and keeping an entirely different beat. She soothes him, dissolving the strangeness inside him and replacing it instead with her own strangeness. Distantly, the nurse in him ponders for a moment on the anatomy of a multi-dimensional being with the physical body of a space-craft; on the make-up of a small blue box exterior with a labyrinthine interior, filled with memories and endless rooms, something awake, aware and alive at the heart of it... but the thought makes his head hurt and he gives it up as a bad job. Instead he just holds himself still, letting her flow through him.
His eyes are closed, his attention immersed within the ship, so he doesn’t realise he isn’t alone until he feels the brush of cool fingers against his cheek. He comes awake, back to himself with a jolt and a sudden involuntary jerk of his body away from the sensation. His eyelids spring open to find the Doctor standing before him, one hand still hovering in the air near his face. His tweed jacket is absent, shirt sleeves rolled up, hair tousled and hanging down over his brow. The Timelord drops his hand and gazes at Rory, eyes a shifting colour that could be called hazel, but is a bit too hard to pin down, a bit too otherworldy to fit that description. They are wide and curious now, his face unreadable.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Rory admits pointlessly. The Doctor just nods, still watching him closely, and Rory can feel himself being examined and stripped down, his tone, expression and body language being assessed, interpreted, catalogued.
“The memories, they keep me awake occasionally,” he admits. “From when I was an Auton. It’s still....weird. I can’t shut them off sometimes.”
The Doctor still doesn’t speak, and all of a sudden Rory feels oddly guilty for trespassing here when the Doctor isn’t present. It’s the Timelord’s space, the place he goes when his mood is dark and he cannot speak, where he goes when he wants to think some problem over, or when he just wants to fiddle with wires and send showers of sparks, bangs and pops of electricity curling through the Control Room. It’s the place where he goes to be close to the ship that he loves.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to - “ Rory begins, but the Doctor raises a hand to stop him, shaking his head fractionally.
“No, it’s fine.” The Doctor’s eyes are still curious, their indistinguishable colour seeming to shift and grow darker in the dim light of the engine area. Rory watches as the Doctor absent-mindedly reaches his hand out to the side and strokes one long finger slowly down the central column that encases the roots of the Time Rotor. His fingertips seem to linger and drag against the surface, and Rory can feel it through his feet when the ship hums in response, the pleasure in the Tardis’s tone unmistakable.
“Does she help,” the Doctor tilts his head towards the column. “With the memories? With the Time inside you?”
Rory nods, searching for the language to explain just how she helps him “Yep. She...I don’t know, she makes it easier somehow. I mean, it’s not serious, it’s not really a problem, it’s just sometimes I can’t sleep and I can't help but remember, and it’s just such a long time...I mean, it’s just really....” He trails off, lost for adequate words to describe how he feels.
The Doctor nods sympathetically. “Can’t help but remember,” he echoes, giving a mirthless laugh. “I know how that is.”
The Timelord’s eyes go far away for just a moment, displaced somewhere out of the space and time the two of them currently occupy; but it’s just a flash and before Rory can comment on it his eyes are clear and focusing again, even as Rory looks on. Sympathy and empathy are in the Doctor’s gaze now, and his features soften from unreadable to compassionate as he quirks his lips in a smile.
The Timelord’s fingers are still pressed to the body of the Tardis, and when the Doctor turns his head to look at where he is touching the engines, Rory’s eyes follow his. The Doctor has begun to trace patterns across the hard surface of the ship’s central column, complicated swirling symbols, circles within circles, strange flourishes and dots. The hum of the Tardis rises again as the Doctor moves his fingers, and the sound diversifies into many different notes which ring together harmoniously, the vibration coming from her now multifold. The symbols he is writing....Gallifreyan. They must be, Rory realises. He feels a strange sense of intimacy rise suddenly between them, the ancient language hanging in the air between them, unspoken but very present in the moment with Rory as their witness. He watches transfixed, eyes tracking the movement of the Doctor’s hand.
“I heard you, you know, through the ship,” the Timelord murmurs softly.
“Oh?”
From the corner of his eye, Rory sees the Doctor nod as his hand moves continually over the column.
“Her psychic circuits picked up on it when you were touching her. Your thoughts were moving through them. I could feel her talking to you, feel your restlessness.”
“How do you do it?” Rory blurts out, suddenly, impulsively, dragging his eyes away to look back at the Doctor, seeing the concentration that furrows the Timelords brow, at the way he absentmindedly brushes the hair back out of his eyes. “Not that, I mean. How do you live with it? With how long you’ve been around? It’s centuries, so many of them...just all that time and all those memories. I believe the only reason I didn’t go mad was because I was - well - plastic. But mainly because I was waiting for Amy. But, how do you do it, Doctor? What are you waiting for? What keeps you going?”
The Doctor turns his gaze back to Rory and shrugs non-committally, but there is a barely concealed pain spilling from his eyes and layering itself over his features. It’s a pain the Doctor usually masks, but right now he is letting Rory see. Rory feels as if he is springing open a locked puzzle box of secrets, a box filled with mysteries, tricks and secret spaces. Right now he is looking inside at the very heart of it, into the secret darkness at the core where loss and loneliness dwell.
“My race is long lived - our brains, our psychology - we’re structured for Time,” he answers. Rory watches the sharp lines of his profile, the way the blue-ish light glances off them as the Timelord inclines his head towards the plunging heart of his ship. “It has its perks,” there is the ghost of a smile, then the rich line of the Doctor's lips is still again. “And it has its pains.”
Then as quickly as it appeared, the pain is wiped away, boxed up again and the Doctor’s face becomes suddenly concerned and serious as he switches the subject back around, fast as light. “You must tell me, you know, if it’s a problem, if you’re struggling with it.”
Now it’s Rory’s turn to shrug non-committally, but to let his eyes give the lie to his actions. “It’s not a problem - I mean it’s weird sometimes. Really weird. Sometimes, when I remember, it feels as if I’m going to lose myself in the length of all that time. But it’s okay. Really, it is.”
He looks steadily at the Doctor and wants to ask, again, if the Timelord struggles with his years, how he lives through them - but he already knows the answer, has read it in the Doctor’s face in that secret moment he was given. It’s not the years themselves that are hard, it’s those people who run through them, the ones the Doctor has seen come and go, live and then die. However, it’s also those very people who keep him living through them. It is Love that carried both himself and the Doctor through their years, Rory reflects. They have that in common between them. But, at least when Rory was living through those years he knew that in the end Amy would step from the black box and back into the light, that she would be reborn . She was never dead, not really.
Rory thinks of how it would be watching everyone he loves die away, tells the Doctor, “I’m sorry.”
The Timelord steps suddenly closer to him, closing the space between them, one hand still lingering against his beloved ship. He’s only a whisper away now, tension stretched tight across the air between them. The written words he has created on the body of his ship are still unspoken; the weight of them heavy, their shapes seeming to fill the space around and between the two of them. Rory wants to speak the words, to know this secret and forgotten language - but he cannot comprehend what they are, can’t form the words with his own tongue. Instead, he looks into the years of the Doctor's eyes, noticing the way they are crinkled in kindness at the edges.
“Rory Williams. The boy who waited. You’re fantastic, both of you, really you are. My Ponds.”
The Doctor at last drops his hand from the continual tracing pattern over the body of the ship, then reaches across the small distance between them, takes Rory’s fingers in his own. The alien’s skin runs much cooler than his and is a balm against the overtired and overheated skin of his all-too-human body. Rory complies when the Doctor tugs at his hand, allows his arm to be lifted upwards, lets the Doctor press his palm to the central column, right over the spot where he has been tracing the symbols and the words. The Timelord presses his own palm firmly over Rory’s, tangles their fingers together and looks at him wide eyed and intense.
Then all of a sudden, without there seeming to be any space of time between the Doctor taking his hand and what happens next, the Timelord is pressing his lips to Rory’s.
Rory’s head spins - he feels like he should be thinking of many different things at this point, but he cannot parse the different reactions going off inside his mind; they are all muddled together in a wave of strangeness as the Doctor and the Tardis sweep through him. In the end the only clear thought he has is of is the way the alien smells and tastes; the scent of soap and smoke and stars - the taste of Time beating in an off-kilter pulse under the Timelord’s thin, warm skin, pressed against his own lips. The kiss must only last a few seconds in reality, but to Rory it seems to last minutes, hours, years, aeons, milliseconds, nothing, no time at all. It exists in a place where two things happen at once. First of all, Time becomes everything; it overflows between the two of them, spills in all directions at once, past, present, future and all the bits inbetween that can only be described in a dead language that can burn stars and topple Gods. Second, because Time now is all things in every direction at once, because there is nothing else but that, it becomes utterly meaningless. It fades into the borderlands of Rory’s mind, gathering long memories and taking them back into the shadows with it. Eventually all there is is the pulsing heart of the ship inside him, the feeling of a cool hand pressed to his, and the contrasting warmth of the Doctor’s mouth on his, the taste of Time on his tongue.
When the Doctor finally pulls away, gently tugging Rory’s hand from the hard surface of the ship, and disentangling his fingers, Rory’s head is left momentarily spinning as he opens his eyes and regains his bearings. Eventually his head clears and stills, and normal vision and thought returns to him.
The doorway in his mind has closed, for now. He is all human, flesh blood and bone, with nothing but the span of twenty-odd years spun out behind him, and the memory of his life on earth and in this ship. The memory of the long years in the Underhenge, the desperate struggle to protect the black box is, once more, an abstract concept in his mind, something that happened to somebody else long ago. It is like a story, a myth he once read as a child, a book that now languishes between dusty covers on a forgotten shelf.
The Doctor looks at him carefully, and Rory feels the sleep that eluded him beginning to drape its way across his - now stilled - mind, trying to pull him down with it as it sinks deep into his bones.
The Timelord smiles, lifting his hand to brush gently across Rory’s cheekbone again, the suggestion of stars and Time tracking across Rory’s skin and flaring in his mind as he does so.
“Go back to bed now” the Doctor suggests, “go to sleep.”
Rory just nods, murmurs his thanks and begins to walk; but as he reaches the bottom of the stairs that lead back to ground floor level, he turns to look back at the Timelord. The Doctor is still standing, but he’s leaning against the engines now, the length of his whole body and his cheek pressed to centre of his Ship. Blue light illuminates his features, making shadows out of the strange angles and lines of his face, and in that moment he looks both incredibley vulnerable and beautiful.
Rory wants to say a lot of things; he wants to say thank you, and I know, and I understand, and me too. He wants to say; I can never know and I’m sorry ...but he doesn’t. He just hopes that the Timelord catches the flow of his thoughts threading their way across the room to him; that where his bare feet contact the floor his thoughts become known by the ship, that the words travel like roots growing from the soles of his feet through the Tardis’s psychic circuits and are carried to the Timelord. Maybe the words do reach him because just a second later the Doctor smiles at him warmly, and then makes a shooing gesture, saying “Go to bed, Rory, Boy Who Waited.”
So he does. He leaves the Doctor there in the close air of the Tardis underbelly, wrapped in thoughts and grief, Time and a smile on his lips. He wanders back through twisting corridors, mind still and calm, the lights racing ahead of him and trailing in his wake. He returns to the low-lit room and the white sheets, to the spread of Amy’s hair across the pillows and the soft sound of her breathing. He crawls into the bed, burrowing down into the warmth and softness, letting his muscles relax and his eyelids close.
Lulled by the ever present low hum of the Tardis from the floor and walls around him, drifting into dreams of stars and soft gold light, of cool fingers on his cheek and distant shadows of Time, Rory Williams sleeps.