Ficmix: "{and swallow fireflies}", Doctor Who, Amy-centric
Title: {and swallow fireflies}
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Amy, the Doctor [a bit Amy/Eleven, a bit Amy/Rory]
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 9205
Genre: Gen [het]
Copyright: Title taken from Brightly Wound by Eisley.
Summary: She’s not the mentally ill one here, really, and she still can’t eat custard, ten years later.
Author’s Notes: I’ve never created a ficmix before but I love Amy and I love trying new things so here, have this. Eighteen individually downloadable tracks (mixture of mp3s and mp4s, so sorry if you don’t have itunes) that made me think of Amy (Brightly Wound is my default Amy song, for some reason) accompanied by seventeen vignettes. Go on and laugh at my taste in music. Spoilers for The Eleventh Hour (obviously), though the rest of this is evidently going to be jossed in the coming weeks. No, I have no idea how I got so many words out of one episode either.
Additional {slightly spoilery} notes: In my personal canon 1) Amy isn’t a “kiss-o-gram” (whatever the hell that is; do we even have those?), she’s a stripper, and 2) whatever the show says, Jeff is so Amy’s gay BFF, and so I’m writing about them as such, ‘k?
{and swallow fireflies}
(One. Brightly Wound~ Eisley)
Two. Strange Little Girl ~ Tori Amos
{She survived but she’s feeling old
‘Cause she found all things cold
Strange little girl, where are you going?}
The third psychiatrist is clearly a big fan of Freud. Amelia crosses and recrosses her legs and attempts not to fidget too much as he explains in great, excruciating detail that her “Raggedy Doctor” was actually a manifestation of her subconscious as a result of her budding sexuality.
“I was seven,” Amelia protests at one point, but he doesn’t seem to hear her. He uses “burgeoning” a few too many times, rolling it around on his tongue with far too much relish, and she mentally labels him a paedophile, picking absently at a hole in her tights. He doesn’t look at her once, gaze fixed on something outside the window.
“The overtly phallic nature of this screwdriver you insist he carried is further evidence of your sexual awakening,” the psychiatrist continues. Right, Amelia thinks dazedly, and then wonders where exactly the fish fingers fit in.
The half-hour car ride home is tense, as usual, her aunt’s knuckles white on the steering wheel. Amelia sucks her lower lip in and out of her mouth, absently listening to the inevitable you’re thirteen now; why are you still so damaged? speech she has heard far too many times. She wants to snap back a why do you think? but she never does.
“What did Dr Richards say?” her aunt asks eventually, unlocking the front door.
“He thinks I want to fuck the Doctor,” Amelia responds flatly, “and he really needs a thesaurus.”
She is screamed at and then sent upstairs to her room, where she leans her forehead against the window and clenches her teeth and stares out into the empty garden until her eyes blur.
Three. Amy ~ Mark Ronson (feat. Kenna)
{Is God playing evil tricks on me?
Oh, I love you Amy
Do you still love me?}
Her friend (well, insert inverted commas around the word) Marcie says the pay is good and the work is easy.
“You’re a pretty girl, Amelia,” she points out. She’s wearing too much mascara and enough foundation to make her look about thirty. Amelia absently wonders what psychiatrist number four would think of her, but in any case number four was the last. Her aunt decided to pull the funding for project Let’s Make Amelia Stop Being Crazy and Amelia is grateful for it. She’s sick and tired of talking about the stupid Doctor who said he’d come back and didn’t and sick and tired of being treated like she’s mentally ill. She’s not the mentally ill one here, really, and she still can’t eat custard, ten years later.
“It just seems...” Amelia searches for the words without calling Marcie anything unforgivable. “I mean, is it safe?”
Marcie scoffs. “They can’t touch you, if that’s what you mean.” Her lips curl and it’s momentarily disturbing. “You can charge extra for that.”
“Jesus,” Amelia mutters.
Marcie shrugs. “It’ll piss your aunt off,” she points out.
This shouldn’t be the selling point, but it really sort of is. In a matter of weeks, Amelia finds herself attempting a coy look over her shoulder and peeling a tiny nurse’s outfit from her skin with an attempt at a come-hither smile while a crowd cheer appreciatively. Later, when she’s obediently kissed the birthday boy and is debating whether you can be a whore while still technically being a virgin, one of the other party guests sidles up to her while she rebuttons her shirt. They make small talk, awkward and tight, and he asks her for her name. Amelia hesitates, hearing her Doctor saying Amelia Pond is like something out of a fairytale. She doesn’t remember princesses taking their clothes off for money in anything she read as a child.
“Amy,” she says at last, and something in her chest eases a little.
Four. I Know You ~ Laura Marling
{Everybody knows that you’re a posh girl
‘Cause when it comes to cockneys you’re down on your knees}
“If you get the cowgirl outfit can I borrow the hat?” Jeff asks, lounging in the rickety chair in the costume shop.
Amy arches an eyebrow. “How are you still debating whether or not you’re not the only gay in the village?”
Jeff glares. “I wouldn’t be the only gay in the village,” he says at last.
“I know,” Amy replies, turning back to the mirror and re-angling the hat a little more. The fringing around what can loosely be described as a skirt is itching her legs. “It was a joke. You know, ha ha and all that?”
“Just stick to taking your clothes off,” Jeff advises her cheerfully. “You’re much better at that. Or at least, I imagine you are.”
“You imagine me taking my clothes off?” Amy enquires distractedly, trying a smouldering look in the mirror.
“You and Zac Efron,” Jeff promises. “You know, while I make my mind up.”
“Well, if it’s research,” Amy smirks, walking back into the tiny changing cubicle and pulling the curtain tightly across. “I’m going with the nun one.”
“You’re going to hell,” Jeff warns, laughing.
They’ve come a long way from their childhoods, playing Raggedy Doctor on the green, having adventures in blue-painted cardboard boxes in his back garden with Rory, and as Amy begins to change back into her own clothes, she glances at herself in the mirror. It’s ok, she thinks, I’m pretty much there already.
Five. What I Say And What I Mean ~ The Like
{Never going back and forth
I’m only going forward - that’s what I keep saying
Never going back and forth
I’m only going back - that’s what I mean}
Amy wishes that she were more of a bitch than she is because she would quite like to kick the ragged-looking man sprawled unconscious on her hallway floor, or at the very least have a few more vicious minutes with the cricket bat. Unfortunately, she cannot bring herself to do it; she’s fairly certain the first rule when your imaginary childhood friends turn out not to really not be imaginary is To Not Beat Them Up, No Matter How Many Psychiatrists You Had Inflicted On You.
“I knew you were real,” she mumbles, looking down at his crumpled and damp form. “God knows why you’re here though.”
None of the windows or doors are forced and she’s not entirely sure how he got into her house. He’s as crumpled and ragged as ever, rips in his shirt and fraying hems, converse that have seen far better days laced to his feet. Amy crouches beside him, reaching out in spite of herself to stroke his messy hair back from his face, pressed into the carpet, to trace the features she has drawn so many times they are far more familiar than they perhaps should be. His skin is cool but with something hot somewhere far beneath; he exhales and a string of gold spills from between his lips to dissipate into the air. For a moment the house is very, very quiet and very still, and her fingers slip to stroke across his mouth.
Amy withdraws her hand swiftly, feeling caught, and straightens up again. She doesn’t have much time and she’s still dressed from the last party she attended; a police woman’s outfit that leaves little to the imagination, though at least her stocking seams are straight. She looks down at the Doctor and an idea begins to form.
“Bloody hell, you’re heavy,” she groans, dragging him down the hall, all gangly loose limbs and torn clothing. “You should eat fewer fish fingers.”
Amy takes the cuffs from her belt and snaps one around the Doctor’s wrist and the other around the radiator. Then she pulls the window open and flicks the key into the garden, quick, before she can think twice and relent. Sprawled against the radiator, the Doctor looks almost reproachful, blacked-out or not.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Amy whispers, “the whole village thinks I’m harmless but insane and I had four psychiatrists and one of them was really confusing and I had some very messed-up teenage fantasies as a result. This is less than you deserve.”
He says nothing, and she goes to retrieve her hat.
Six. Two Birds ~ Regina Spektor
{I’ll believe it all;
There’s nothing I won’t understand
I’ll believe it all;
I won’t let go of your hand}
“He didn’t even say goodbye,” Rory says behind her, voice blank and confused.
Amy blinks furiously because this isn’t waterproof mascara and in any case this is hardly the first time this has happened. “He doesn’t,” she replies, and is startled by the bitterness in her tone.
They’re silent for a long moment. “At least he didn’t crush my shed this time,” she accedes, still not turning around because she can’t school her expression into something decent and well-behaved and calm. For a moment she’s herself, seven and raw and sleeping in the garden most nights until her aunt dragged her off to psychiatrist number one, who used finger puppets and advised round white medication.
“I still can’t believe he’s real,” Rory says, sounding awed. “I mean, he’s real, you didn’t make him up after all.”
“So you’ve spent the last twelve years thinking I’m insane,” Amy half-snaps. “Well, that’s nice to know.”
“Amy...” Rory sighs. “Come inside. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
She follows him in, sits dumbly at the kitchen table as he boils the kettle, and obediently drinks the resulting mug of PG Tipps. They don’t speak, maybe can’t speak, and Amy stares down at her kitchen table, a scratch the Doctor put there twelve years ago still visible beneath her palm.
“We nearly died,” Rory breathes at last, and Amy realises dimly that they’re both trembling, fizzing with stale adrenalin. “I mean, the whole world was nearly bloody incinerated.”
Amy’s feet hurt and her skirt has ridden up her thighs and when he stands to try and collect her mug she grabs his wrist, pulls herself upright and kisses him. They do this sometimes, Rory and her, fumbling around each other and never sure exactly what it is they think they’re doing. Boyfriend is far too clean-cut for this and kind of a lie but on the other hand she isn’t anybody else’s either; Rory’s hands tangle in her hair and she tugs almost frantically at his shirt. It’s never been like this before but then they’ve never saved the world by the skin of their teeth before either, and the stupid policewoman’s costume falls around her feet.
She runs her hands down the warm skin over Rory’s spine, eyes closed, and does not think about the shifting muscle of the Doctor’s bared shoulders or about the fact the first time she reached a tentative hand between her legs she really, really wasn’t thinking about Rory.
Seven. Extraordinary Machine ~ Fiona Apple
{If there was a better way to go then it would find me
I can’t help it; the road just rolls out behind me
Be kind to me, or treat me mean
I’ll make the most of it, I’m an extraordinary machine}
The next day, Amy is lying on Jeff’s bed feeling sorry for herself and nursing the confusion with lots more tea.
“It’s like The Time Traveller’s Wife,” Jeff enthuses brightly.
“Oh my God, shut up,” Amy moans, “I’m meant to be helping you pick a job, not hearing your theories about the Doctor.”
“Who’s real, by the way,” Jeff points out. “Who saw that one coming?”
Amy sits up, hair tumbling around her shoulders. “Um, me?”
“Right.” Jeff turns his attention back to his computer screen. “UNIT means I get to wear a pretty nice uniform.” He pauses. “He came back for you. It’s sort of romantic.”
“You sound like psychiatrist number three,” Amy tells him. “If you use the phrase ‘burgeoning sexuality’ I’m outing you in the form of weed-killer letters on the green.”
“The Doctor thinks I should get a girlfriend,” Jeff remarks.
“The Doctor is kind of narrow-minded when it comes to sex,” Amy responds, “he was very judgy about the whole kiss-o-gram thing.” Jeff snorts and she ignores him, a thought occurring. “Oh please, please tell me he didn’t walk in on you wanking. Please.”
“I wasn’t wanking-” Jeff begins irritably, but he is interrupted by his bedroom door opening. A tall man with blue eyes and an old-fashioned military coat is standing there, with Rory hovering behind him.
“Feel free to start,” the man tells Jeff in an American accent, grinning with very white teeth. He turns to Amy and she sees that behind the entity that is the man’s smile, he’s very tired. More tired than anyone she’s ever seen before, more tired than she knew anyone could be. “Miss Pond, I’m assuming?”
Amy has had enough, but she doesn’t see the point in saying this aloud. “I’m Amy,” she corrects the man lightly. “And you would be?”
“Captain Jack Harkness,” he replies brightly. “If you could come with me?”
Well, the week can hardly get any weirder.
Amy and Rory are driven to the hospital in a gigantic black SUV with Captain Harkness - “he hit on half the village tracking you down!” Rory whispers urgently - who questions them intently about the Doctor while leading them through the corridors. Amy answers half his questions and ignores the other half but Harkness doesn’t seem to mind too much. They enter the still-deserted locker room, a mess of other people’s clothes left around by the Doctor, and a sad little heap of his old ragged clothes.
Harkness sighs when he sees them; the abandoned converse, tattered pinstriped trousers, torn shirt. It’s a sigh and nothing more but there’s something hurt, something saddened in it nonetheless, and Harkness gathers up the clothing with an attitude resembling reverence.
“These deserve a better resting place than a hospital incinerator,” is all he says. “Oh, and tell your friend not to go for UNIT. NASA’s probably a safer bet.”
Eight. Starry Eyed ~ Ellie Goulding
{You look at me
It’s like you hit me with lightning
Oh; everybody’s starry eyed}
When she sees the blue box in her garden for the third time, Amy contemplates, just for the smallest of seconds, going back to bed. But her feet make the decision for her, carrying her downstairs so quickly she almost slips twice. She’s curious about excuses, about what the Doctor has to say now, wondering how long it’s been for him.
She thinks of Rory, fleetingly, because she’s not heartless and she’s marrying him tomorrow; the dress is upstairs in her wardrobe, selected after what felt like a million fittings. Jeff accompanied her to most of them, when he could; smartly suited and bubbling with classified information. Amy’s not jealous at all, though she sometimes thinks she ought to be. But if she really wanted to get out of the village she would have done it by now, not accepted Rory’s proposal and started making plans.
She shouldn’t go. She really shouldn’t.
Fourteen years of her life and one day of his; it seems impossible and ridiculous and she really, really wishes she’d kicked his unconscious body just once when it was on her hallway floor two years ago. Just so she could do it once, because she never will now and she thinks the Doctor deserves something swift and painful for shaping the course of her life so very perfectly, though of course she’ll never tell him that. Amy has always made her own decisions as best she can but it’s always been done with tied wrists, done by the Doctor fourteen very long years ago.
Amy slides her engagement ring off her finger with her thumb, burying it safely in the pocket of her dressing gown. It feels weirdly, unnaturally heavy. She contemplates telling the Doctor and then recalls him referring to Rory as “nurse boy”, wonders what he would think of her getting married. She doesn’t know how to say it. Maybe it doesn’t need saying. Just as long as she’s back in time for the wedding, that’s all that matters.
She slides her hand into her pocket, curling it around the ring and clutching it tight until it cuts into her palm. And then the Doctor’s time machine - the Tardis, apparently - starts whooshing and whirring and screeching with that noise that has stayed with her since childhood and she laughs as it surrounds her, the Doctor’s shoulder warm against hers. Somehow, she manages to forget that he has no sense of time whatsoever, whatever he claims, and there is a distinct possibility that she’ll arrive for her wedding day two years too late.
Nine. Short Skirt/Long Jacket ~ Cake
{I want a girl with a mind like a diamond
I want a girl who knows what’s best}
“I need tea,” the Doctor remarks distractedly when Amy has found herself some clothes to wear in the Tardis’ terrifyingly extensive wardrobe, which is approximately the size of her entire village and the roads surrounding it, full of clothing of all shapes and descriptions. There were a number of intact pinstriped suits in one corner, accompanied by a variety of different coloured converse hightops, and Amy fleetingly recalled Captain Harkness, gathering up the remains of the Doctor’s suit.
“Do you like tea?” Amy asks a little warily, remembering the way her aunt yelled when she came home to find the kitchen full of half-eaten food and messy plates.
“I think tea is a universal constant,” the Doctor informs her cheerfully. “And it has all the stuff you need to look after a brand new body. Should’ve got you to make me one earlier, really.”
“By ‘earlier’, do you mean fourteen years ago?” Amy asks, following him down one of the Tardis’ corridors.
“I mean about twelve hours ago,” the Doctor responds.
“I wasn’t here twelve hours ago,” Amy reminds him.
“Oh, maybe I do mean fourteen years ago.” The Doctor grins at her. “We’ll figure it out. Make a future together in the same time zone and then you can stop yelling at me.”
“I think you like being yelled at,” Amy mutters, following him into a kitchen so large you could lose an army of cooks in it. In the centre is a rather incongruous little wooden table, covered with a gingham cloth and with two chairs sitting at it. She takes one of the chairs and watches the Doctor haphazardly making a pot of tea before carrying it and two mugs over to her.
“You know,” he remarks brightly, without any sort of preamble, “the last woman I met when she was a child and then again when she was an adult fell in love with me.”
Amy arches an eyebrow. “Were you better-looking then?”
The Doctor laughs but looks rather offended. “I'm terribly good-looking now, I'll have you know,” he informs her. “I've never been this young. I turn heads and everything.”
“Well,” she says, “that's very nice. But I didn’t fall in love with you.”
“No,” the Doctor agrees bluntly, “you became a stripper instead. I've never had that happen to me before.”
“I'm not-” Amy splutters automatically, spilling her tea all over the table. “I mean, how do you even know what-”
“I can know about these things,” the Doctor responds loftily. His expression is largely curious but she can see disapproval glittering in his eyes. “So just how many outfits did you dress up in?”
“Oh my God,” Amy says, covering her face with her hands, “oh my God, we are not having this conversation.”
“Why not?” the Doctor asks, tone disarmingly innocent.
Amy reaches for more tea. “It’s none of your damn business.” She pours herself a fresh mug. “I went to parties. I kissed people. Sometimes I took my clothes off for money. I once broke a man’s finger for trying to touch me. It was a living. I don’t do it anymore.”
“Fair enough,” the Doctor says, taking a huge mouthful of his tea and mercifully not spitting it across the table. “Ah, that’s the stuff.”
Ten. Mowgli’s Road ~ Marina and the Diamonds
{There’s a fork in the road
I do as I am told
And I don’t know who I wanna be}
The Tardis seems to have an almost infinite number of rooms, so it’s really no wonder the Doctor hasn’t yet found the swimming pool or the promised library. Amy spends vast amounts of time exploring and has yet to visit the same room twice, except for the kitchen, the console room and the room which has apparently become her bedroom. It’s also very difficult to track the Doctor down when they’ve been separated.
She walks in on him standing in front of a mirror prodding thoughtfully at his face. Amy stands in the doorway for a moment watching him, but can’t work out what the Doctor thinks he’s doing. She frequently feels this way around him and suspects it isn’t going to wear off anytime soon.
“Uh...” she begins. “Do I want to know?”
“New face,” the Doctor responds, pressing his nose flat with a fingertip. “Well, new everything, but new face. Makes interesting expressions, you know?”
“You keep saying that,” Amy says, “and that big eye thing showed all those men. Is being the Doctor like a job that you take over or something?”
“No,” the Doctor responds, picking up a round metal thing from a table near him and throwing it to her before turning back to poking his cheeks. Amy looks at the device he’s given her; there are a variety of buttons on it and a glass panel in the centre. “Blue button,” the Doctor adds, and she pushes it.
A slightly wavery hologram of an old man in a hat appears, and she holds the device at arm’s length to stop herself from being blinded.
“That’s me,” the Doctor tells her, before baring his teeth and studying them.
Amy squints at the old man but can’t see anything of the Doctor in him. She frowns, and sees a button with an arrow on it. She pushes that one, and the old man is replaced with another man with a dark, Beatles-like haircut.
“That’s me too,” the Doctor adds without turning around, spreading his skin flat along his cheekbones with his palms.
Amy keeps pushing the button and a succession of other men appear, with various outlandish outfits and stupid haircuts.
“So you’re like a... shape-changer?” she suggests, trying not to laugh at one man who appears to have stumbled off the set of a BBC costume drama, all long curly hair and velvet.
“When I’m dying my body changes itself into a new one,” the Doctor informs her, turning to one side and then the other. “New personality, new body, new everything really.”
Amy pushes the button again, revealing a man with large ears and a leather jacket, and then again. When she presses the arrow one more time, the image flickers but doesn’t change, implying it’s the last one. She studies the skinny man with a shock of hair and a slightly wistful expression before noting that he’s wearing an intact but nonetheless familiar brown pinstripe suit and cream converse allstars.
“So this is what you looked like before you met me,” she says.
The Doctor glances over his shoulder and then turns back to the mirror. “Yep,” he agrees. “Up until thirteen minutes and forty seconds before I first met you.”
Amy turns all this information over in her head. “So you died less than a quarter of an hour before you turned up in my garden?”
“Yep. Well, in a manner of speaking, anyway.”
“Wow,” Amy says. “No wonder you were so fucked-up.”
“Language,” the Doctor admonishes softly, before turning around and grinning at her. “So yes. All new and shiny.”
Amy looks back at the previous Doctor, hands in his pockets and eyes staring somewhere very far away. “Pity really,” she remarks, “I like this one. He was pretty.”
The Doctor looks hurt. “I can be pretty,” he protests. “Well, from certain angles, anyway.”
Amy stares at him. “Really? You’ve spent the last however long prodding your face and you still think you’re pretty?”
He shrugs. “I thought I was a girl when I first changed. The hair was terribly misleading.”
Amy presses a red button and the hologram disappears. She looks at the Doctor and smiles slightly. “So I’ve known you for most of your life, then.”
“Yes, you have,” the Doctor agrees. “It’s still early days yet, we’re figuring me out.”
“Figuring you out?” Amy echoes.
“Well,” the Doctor shrugs, “you don’t really know who I am and neither do I.” He grins at her, broad and excited and just a little mad. “Isn’t this fun?”
Eleven. Dog Days Are Over ~ Florence + the Machine
{Leave all your loving behind
Can’t carry it with you if you want to survive}
“We’ve got a wedding to go to,” the Doctor informs her cheerfully after about a week.
Amy’s heart stops in her chest. Rory’s ring is burning a hole in her pocket and she wonders what she gave away and when.
“We do?” she asks, trying to keep her voice steady and not sound like she’s having a panic attack. The Doctor frowns at her. “Whose?”
“A couple of old friends of mine,” the Doctor responds. “I’ve had the invitation for a while but I haven’t had the time to go until now. Are you all right, Amy?”
“Uh, yeah,” she says quickly. “Fine. So, um, who are these old friends of yours?”
For the first time since she’s met him, the Doctor actually looks momentarily uncomfortable. “I’ll explain when we get there,” he says after a pause that’s just a little too long, and starts pushing things around on the Tardis console. Amy leaves him to it and goes to find a dress in the wardrobe, eventually selecting a pretty but simple black one. The label, she learns, has been scrupulously labelled M. Jones by someone with a permanent marker and tidy handwriting. A lot of the clothes in here have been labelled, she’s discovered in time; she likes exploring in here. She once found a pair of blue jeans crumpled in a corner with J. Harkness written over Topshop on the label, which explains really rather a lot.
They arrive at the wedding in time for the reception; the newlyweds look very happy and a little sheepish as they’re covered in confetti. Amy watches the bride for a moment; a beautiful woman with rich dark skin, looking a little uncomfortable in the ivory gown.
“Who is she?” she asks, looking at the Doctor, who has a strange little smile flitting about his mouth.
“Martha Jones,” he says after a moment. “And the man she’s just married is Mickey Smith.” Something reminiscent flickers across his features. “Smith and Jones,” he mumbles, apparently to himself. He clears his throat, turns his attention back to Amy. “She used to travel with me,” he explains. “Well, they both did.”
It appears that Amy has come to Martha’s wedding in Martha’s own dress. Well, that’s an interesting thought. She notes the way they’re hovering at the back of the room, not going over to greet Martha or Mickey, and looks at how the Doctor is looking at Martha.
“Did you ruin her life like you ruined mine?” she asks, keeping a smile in her voice.
“I prefer to think I saved your life,” the Doctor replies cheerfully, tucking a stray lock of hair behind Amy’s ear.
“All right,” she says, mostly because she agrees, “so it was just her life you ruined then.”
“I didn’t ruin her life,” the Doctor protests, awkwardness still tight on his features, “well, I mean, I might have ruined a few years of it but it wasn’t really my fault and she never held it against me and anyway, she’s married now, and she’s happy. I think she looks happy now, anyway, don’t you think she looks happy? I think she’s happy. Do you want cake? Let’s get cake, I want cake.”
Amy lets him drag her over to receive a slice of cake in a napkin, smiles slightly when he takes a bite and mumbles something like eugh, cake is horrible, how did I not know this and then suggests, gently, that they leave. He agrees and they sneak over to the doors. Amy looks back to find Martha is looking at her dress before her eyes slide sideways to look at the Doctor. Amy knows enough about Time Lords to know that Martha won’t recognise him but there’s something in Martha’s eyes anyway, and she smiles sadly before she turns back to her husband, laughter ringing bright.
She really, really, sincerely hopes that her wedding day won’t be like this.
Twelve. The Cactus That Found The Beat ~ Missy Higgins
{‘Cause I know that there will always be a life for me
Because I found my place in history}
“You wrote comics about me,” the Doctor remarks cheerfully.
“I did,” Amy allows, refusing to allow herself to blush because that would be ridiculous.
“And you drew pictures of me,” he adds. “Which must have been quite good because half your village recognised me on sight.”
“I also made puppets of you out of toilet roll tubes,” Amy responds sharply. “Are you going somewhere with this?”
“Do you have photos of nurse boy dressed as me?” the Doctor enquires, teasing.
They stole one of Rory’s father’s ties and cut it with nail scissors and ripped half the collar off one of Rory’s shirts, strictly for best and visiting his grandma, and ran around all afternoon with a sonic screwdriver made out of a biro pen until Amy’s tights were laddered to hell and Rory’s trousers had holes in the knees and mud all down the hems. Rory’s dad was not impressed, but Amy took responsibility and since everyone thought she was having a mental breakdown as a result of no longer having parents and having an aunt who didn’t really give a shit about her they got away with it. There aren’t photographs.
“You could call him Rory rather than ‘nurse boy’,” Amy suggests without thinking. She has been trying to avoid bringing him up or correcting the Doctor’s blithe use of ‘nurse boy’ in case the Doctor will suddenly see something in her, read something into her tone, and go you’re marrying him tomorrow! That’s what ‘stuff’ is! Amy still isn’t sure why she doesn’t want him to know, but she doesn’t, and she protects her upcoming wedding and the ring in her pocket with a ferocity that unsettles her a little.
“Is he a real actual boyfriend now?” the Doctor asks, eyes lighting up, eyebrows arching almost comically.
“It’s like travelling with my aunt,” Amy mutters. “I may not be nine-hundred odd years old but I am a grown woman and it really isn’t any of your business.”
He laughs, scrunching up his face. “Can I have one of your toilet roll puppets?”
“No,” Amy replies, elbowing him. “That’s really narcissistic, you know.”
“I’ve never had puppets made of me before,” the Doctor remarks thoughtfully. “There’s a planet in the Rygas system who’ve made action figures of me but they’re a bit of a weird lot, their atmosphere has all sorts of strange chemicals in it.”
Amy smirks, resisting the urge to ask if they can go there. Maybe she could give Rory a little figurine of herself as a wedding gift.
“I did try and publish the Raggedy Doctor stories when I was about fifteen and needed the cash,” Amy offers. “Simon and Schuster were really quite interested.”
“What happened?”
“Some men in black suits arrived in the middle of the night to tell me not to publish them and then assured me that they didn’t really exist and they were figments of my imagination,” Amy says lightly.
The Doctor looks confused. “Oh. Well, that’s a bit ridiculous.”
“Most of my childhood was a bit ridiculous,” Amy sighs, momentarily tempted to ask for an apology.
Thirteen. All This Beauty ~ The Weepies
{All this beauty; you might have to close your eyes
Slowly open wide
All this beauty; we travelled all night
Drank the ocean dry and watched the sun rise}
The swimming pool turns up in what her watch says is the early hours of the morning, though really Amy has no way of knowing what time it actually is or if the Tardis feels the need for there to be time at all.
She’s come to love living inside the world within the blue box, which is so much more beautiful and rich than anything her fevered and slightly bitter imagination came up with when she was a child with pencils and crayons and the mental image of thousands of books floating in chlorinated water. The library in her head, she has realised belatedly, was heavily based on the library in the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, because although all the Disney movies lied to her and by the time she was seven she’d renounced all that princesses and singing animals shit, pieces of them have lingered around, impossible to stamp out.
The Tardis’ library is nothing like the library in Beauty and the Beast but that doesn’t matter because it’s bigger, better, breathtaking. There are balls of string beside the door to help you find your way back there again; the old-fashioned minotaur labyrinth method. Amy doesn’t think that the Tardis would let her get lost forever, though, not unless she wanted her to. And Amy thinks that they’re friends, the Tardis and her, or at least there’s a kind of mutual respect there. She ignores the little voice inside her that whispers she’s only trying to befriend the Tardis in the hope the time machine will do her utmost to get Amy back in time for her wedding. That’s something in the future, something to worry about later, the eternal tomorrow.
The swimming pool is about three times the size of the village green, the water still and breathtakingly blue. Amy hesitates, wondering if she will be able to find it again if she goes and gets herself something to swim in, and then reasons that there are only two of them on the ship and anyway her underwear is black and not likely to become transparent. She piles her clothes on the side and dives in, thinking this is for you, Amelia as she cuts effortlessly through the water. She tried hard in swimming lessons at school, preparing for this exact moment; swimming in the pool inside the Doctor’s ship.
“Ah, so this is where it got to,” the Doctor says, sometime later, appearing in the doorway.
Amy stands up in the shallow end, wet hair sticking to her arms. “You coming in?” He dithers, possibly distracted by the fact she’s not really wearing very much. Amy simply looks back at him, entirely unashamed. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” she adds brightly.
She’s never seen the Doctor visibly flustered before. It’s a little magical. “I told you to turn your back,” he points out.
“I didn’t,” Amy shrugs. “Come on, the pool’s turned up, you should be in here already.”
He dithers for another moment and then begins piling his clothing next to hers; she’s almost disappointed that he doesn’t leave the bow tie on. Clad in tasteful boxers, he jumps in with far less grace than Amy did and swims over to her with an endearing lack of coordination.
“This body isn’t terribly good at swimming,” he explains, hair looking particularly silly plastered to his head. Amy laughs. “You’re utterly shameless, aren’t you?” he says, smiling, though there’s something in his eyes.
“And you’re judgy,” she responds crisply.
“Hmmm,” the Doctor says thoughtfully. “I haven’t been properly judgy in a while. It makes quite a nice change.”
It dawns on her that the two of them are in their underwear in a giant swimming pool. “Psychiatrist number three would have a field day,” Amy murmurs, grinning, diving under the surface again.
Fourteen. Child Among The Weeds ~ Eliza Carthy
{The day is only dazzling
Fly, bird, fly, on your raven wing
Take to the sky
And sing for the love of wheeling and turning}
The surface of the planet Prygoria is extremely cold and covered with a thick film of lilac ice, which glows with something bright under the surface, like amethyst held up to the light. It is, Amy thinks, very possibly the most beautiful thing she has ever seen, lying on her back on a thick blanket the Doctor procured from somewhere and looking up at the sky. There are stars here, thousands upon thousands of them, tinted lilac too by the planet’s atmosphere and sparkling bright and brilliant.
They have a picnic too - the main feature of which is still custard, though Amy still can’t touch it - though it has been long forgotten in favour of staring upwards.
“We could make a list,” the Doctor offers. “Places you’d like to go, things you’d like to see. You know, before it’s time for stuff.”
Amy cannot figure out if he knows or not, if he’s pretending to have no idea for her sake or for his, or if he truly is ignorant. She shifts a little and feels the ring in her pocket, small and hard against her hipbone.
“Has anyone ever done this forever?” she asks, curious, impatient to get the Doctor’s mind away from stuff. “You know, just stayed with you for their entire life?”
“No,” the Doctor responds, and he looks almost wistful, face bathed in purple starlight. “No, they always move on. Go home, or somewhere enough like it.” He looks thoughtful, and Amy swallows back further questions, waiting. “The last person I was travelling with before I met you, she said she was never going to leave. But... she didn’t have a choice.”
Amy looks up at the stars. She wonders what it would be like to do this forever and ever, in the promise of endless tomorrows, and then return to get married grey and quiet and a whole new person. But she doesn’t want that; not for herself and not for Rory.
“I’m sorry,” she says, because the Doctor looks grave and tired.
“Don’t be,” he replies, immediate and quick with a bright smile. “Come on, think of places or times you’d like to go. Who do you really want to meet?”
Amy thinks back through her history classes. “Elizabeth the First,” she suggests.
“Ah.” The Doctor grimaces. “That might be a problem. We have a bit of a history.”
She raises her eyebrows but he doesn’t elaborate, and after a moment she says: “Victoria?”
“Bit of history there, too,” the Doctor admits.
“Oh my God,” Amy says, “and you judged me for taking my clothes off at birthday parties.”
“Not that sort of history!” the Doctor protests quickly, though it’s hard to tell if he’s flushing or if it’s just a trick of the coloured light. “I’m not Jack.” He glances at her. “Not that you know who Jack is, but-”
“Jack Harkness?” Amy suggests, and is gratified when the Doctor actually looks startled. “Propositioned half my village and an ornamental lamppost, if I remember correctly,” she adds.
“When did you meet Jack?” he demands.
Amy is about to reply and then recalls the look on Jack’s face as he looked at the Doctor’s abandoned shoes and thinks that there’s history there she doesn’t understand and shouldn’t get involved with.
“A long time ago,” she replies, and keeps her eyes on the stars.
They’re silent for a long while, while above them the sky twinkles sharp and bright. “He kept my severed hand in a jar for years,” the Doctor remarks, lightly, at last.
Amy thinks about asking, and then decides that she doesn’t want an answer. “That does not surprise me at all.”
Fifteen. She’s A Handsome Woman ~ Panic! At The Disco
{Accidents let the evening in the backdoor
Filled the room ceiling to the floor}
“You two do make a very attractive couple,” the guard says, somewhat apologetically, as he locks the door.
“See?” the Doctor says, turning to Amy, “he thinks I’m attractive.”
Amy ignores him, banging a hand against the bars and getting a mild electric shock for her troubles. “We’re not a couple!” she yells after the retreating guard, “he’s a madman with ridiculous hair and I take my clothes off for a living! And sometimes I kiss strangers for money!”
“I’m pretty sure that’s the plot of Pretty Woman,” the Doctor remarks cheerfully, walking across to a bench and sitting himself down.
Amy sighs through her teeth, banging the bars again in spite of the pain. “I am going to pull off all his tentacles and feed them back to him,” she mutters.
The Doctor tips his head to one side. “You’re quite an angry young woman, aren’t you?”
“And whose fault is that?” Amy demands, but decides that being this cross is really not going to help matters.
“Mine?” the Doctor suggests, in his we’re going to have that fourteen years discussion again, aren’t we? voice.
“Hardly,” Amy sighs, moving to lean against the wall. “You weren’t the only one to let me down. The psychiatrists just fixated on you because you were the one who made me seem like a crazy person. You know, box falls out of sky, man falls out of box, man eats fish custard. Girl who saw all this needs medication.”
The Doctor grimaces.
“I’ve heard every possible theory about you,” Amy adds, before he can say anything. Something occurs to her. “Oh, if we make it out of here without being killed by the tentacle people, can I go meet Freud? I’d quite like to kick him.”
“I did not invite you to come along just so you could go around the universe kicking people,” the Doctor informs her, but he’s smiling.
Amy smiles back, then remembers they’ve been chucked into a prison by some random tentacled aliens who seem to think they’re in a relationship. “By the way, have we worked out why we’re in here yet?”
“Not yet,” the Doctor admits, “but they haven’t confiscated my sonic screwdriver, so we’ll just wait for matey-boy out there to take a tea break and then we’ll escape.”
“Oh,” Amy says, and firmly reminds herself that escaping with ease from an alien prison should not in any way be looked on as an anti-climax. She goes to sit on the bench beside the Doctor.
“So we’ve got about half an hour to kill,” the Doctor tells her. “I-Spy?”
“Really no,” Amy replies, leaning back against the wall and sighing. “Also, when did you see Pretty Woman?”
Sixteen. Someone To Fall Back On ~ I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
{I am no prince, I am no saint
I am not anyone’s wildest dream
But I will stand behind
And I will be someone to fall back on}
They don’t win all the time, Amy eventually learns. Her inner seven-year-old self is devastated to discover this because disenchanted as she was when he never returned and the sun rose on an empty day, she has always believed in him. Her aunt was never adequately able to work out what had happened to the crack in Amy’s bedroom wall, and trying to explain it only ended in prescribed medicine and Amy biting her first psychiatrist so hard he apparently still has the scar. Her outer twenty-one-year-old self is almost equally upset to learn that the Doctor cannot win everything, cannot save everyone’s life, cannot rearrange the universe to fit to her exact wishes.
The first time they don’t get there fast enough and people die, Amy’s heart shatters in her chest and she can’t even look at the Doctor, at the horror on his face. He’s been around for centuries and he’s got to have fucked up before, this can’t be his first ever mistake. But Amy’s never been on the losing side and it’s like a punch to the stomach.
“I’m not a god,” the Doctor tells her on the walk back to the Tardis when they’ve fixed things as best they can, but they can’t save the people who are already gone. “I tried that once, a while back, and... and it was dangerous and it was wrong and I can’t make everything work out. I really can’t.”
Amy still doesn’t look at him, eyes on her boots, as in her head the pictures she drew flutter and burn because they’re lies. They’re lies; the Doctor is just a man with a lot of knowledge and a larger-than-average pinch of luck, but it doesn’t make him magical or infallible or able to make everything be ok all the time. She can’t admit it - she’d hurt anyone who tried to say it to her, and in fact that’s why psychiatrist number four told her not to come back - but she needs her scaffolding, her stability, her certainty. She needs it and the Doctor has pulled away all that trust and left her naked and gasping.
“I’ll be fine,” Amy mumbles at last, in answer to the question he hasn’t asked.
“Good,” he says, and she finally manages to turn to him, sees how pale and tired and shocked he really is. It occurs to her that it’s the first time he’s got it wrong, this new man and this new body, and it can’t be entirely easy to cope with either.
“Are you going to be all right?” she asks.
He shrugs, smile lopsided and not entirely sincere. “I will be,” he replies. “Sometimes, I’m not fast enough. Sometimes, I make the wrong choice. Sometimes, I have to make the wrong choice. Sometimes, for the greater good, I have to destroy entire planets or races of people or my own race or... Pompeii. Sometimes that has to happen.”
Amy has heard snatches of information about Gallifrey, though the Doctor tries not to talk about it often and she knows not to bring it up. “Pompeii?” she echoes, because the Doctor can’t have been responsible for that, that’s just insane.
“Pompeii,” he agrees, hands in his pockets, hair uncharacteristically limp. “I’m sorry,” he adds after a while.
“You don’t have to apologise,” Amy replies. “Really. I mean, nobody can be magically right all the time, that would be stupid.”
“I seem to be very good at letting you down,” the Doctor remarks, voice too light. “I mean, I’m the king of cock-ups over here, you can be angry if you want to be.”
Amy stops walking and just looks at him. “I’m not angry,” she tells him. “I might be disappointed, but that’s my own fault for not leaving fairytales behind with Amelia.”
“Fairytales are important,” the Doctor tells her, looking mildly wounded.
“Sometimes,” Amy agrees, “but I can’t spend my life thinking you’re infallible and neither can you.” She manages a smile because it’s his fault but it isn’t, not really. “Come here, I’m going to hug you now.”
“Oh.” The Doctor frowns, like he’s considering refusing, until Amy kicks her glare up a notch. “Ok then.”
They hold each other for a long, quiet moment, and Amy closes her eyes and breathes him in and says nothing at all.
Seventeen. The Pageant of the Bizarre ~ Zero 7
{It’s never gonna be normal, you and me
What you’re signing on for is a storm at sea
So if you think you’re tough, give me all your love
And I’ll give you every little piece of me}
“Do you think you’ll ever stop?” Amy asks. The kitchen is quiet, the soft hum of the Tardis little more than background noise, and she’s carved faces onto every last apple in the fruit bowl from force of habit. “I mean, you know, do you think you’ll settle down somewhere, take up beekeeping or something?”
“Well, if it was good enough for Sherlock Holmes...” the Doctor smirks. He flicks his tea mug with his thumb. “That’s a very weird question, Amy,” he adds.
It is. Mostly, Amy is thinking about the ring in her pocket and the fact tomorrow still hasn’t come but it will and part of her is wondering whether she’ll even fit into the dress. She has split-ends and a scar on the heel of her hand she didn’t have before and she’s going to go home older by some degree, though time is sort of fluid here and she really isn’t sure how long it’s been. Rory will notice, she knows, and he won’t care, which makes her relieved and makes her sort of sad too.
“I’m just curious,” she shrugs. “Are you going to wander around the universe by yourself for forever?”
“Yes,” the Doctor says, simply. “Of course.” He smiles slightly, not looking at her. “I’ve done settled down. I’ve done having a family and a home and I was happy but that was a long time ago and I’m not that person any more. I wouldn’t even know how to be that person anymore.” The last bit seems to be largely addressed to himself and Amy isn’t even sure why she thought bringing this up would be a good idea.
“You don’t think... you don’t think you’ll ever meet someone and want to stay with them somewhere for... forever?”
“No,” the Doctor shrugs. His eyes narrow. “I don’t think we’re really talking about me anymore. Is there anything you want to tell me, Amy?”
“No,” she says quickly. “I’m just being hypothetical here.”
He doesn’t believe her but he also doesn’t push it. Amy suspects he’s worked out exactly what her stuff is but is privately grateful for him not saying it aloud.
“Fine,” he says, and pours them both more tea. “Well, any more hypotheses you want to suggest while we’re just sitting here?”
Amy shrugs. “Psychiatrist number three said I was in love with you.”
The Doctor looks both surprised and uncomfortable. “I’d rather you weren’t.”
“I don’t think I am,” Amy says, praying it’s not a lie because there are moments when she’s not entirely one hundred percent sure, but in any case she’s marrying Rory and he’ll make her happy and also she’s worked out enough about Martha Jones to learn she doesn’t want to be the next one to get her fingers and feelings burnt. “Also, he basically said your sonic screwdriver was a nice big phallic symbol you were waving about.”
It’s quite satisfying, watching the Doctor choke on his tea. Amy smirks and sips at her own drink and tries not to think about the fact her days here are numbered and just starting to tick.
Eighteen. Drops Of Jupiter ~ Train
{Well tell me, did you sail across the sun?
Did you make it to the Milky Way
To see the lights all faded
And that heaven is overrated?
Tell me, did you fall for a shooting star?
One without a permanent scar?
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?}
When Amy knows it’s time - and she honestly wouldn’t be able to explain how she knows, just that she does - it’s sharp and sudden and irreversible as a hammer to the skull. When she knows, she can’t un-know it, can’t put it off by a single minute. When it’s time, she composes herself by counting the chips in her nail varnish and then goes to find the Doctor. He’s in the console room, sleeves rolled up and history teacher jacket slung over a railing. He looks at Amy, dressed once more in her nightie and dressing gown and slippers.
“It’s time for stuff,” she says, voice steadier and calmer than she expected it to be.
“I can see that,” the Doctor replies. He studies her for a moment before trying to smile and adding: “do you want to have a sleepover in here instead? We could have marshmallows.”
“You don’t like marshmallows,” Amy points out.
“I could pretend,” the Doctor protests.
“You are the fussiest eater I have ever met,” Amy tells him firmly, “and how do you even know what a sleepover is?”
“I’ve travelled with a variety of young women,” he explains, “you learn these things.”
Amy is privately impressed at how he manages to say that without sounding the slightest bit creepy or perverted. It’s quite the achievement.
“Tempted as I am to sit in here in my nightie watching you ponder the existence of marshmallows in an irritated fashion until you go and harass their inventor - again,” Amy says, “I have to go back to stuff. For stuff.”
“Right,” the Doctor says, and begins flipping switches.
“You will get me back in time for morning, won’t you?” Amy tries not to sound accusing or anxious. “Because if you don’t I may actually have to start believing what psychiatrist number two said about you being an evil malevolent spirit my brain decided to conjure up to cope with moving to England.”
The Doctor frowns. “A psychiatrist said that to you?”
“She said she was one,” Amy shrugs, “and since psychiatrist number one put me on all sorts of anti-hallucinogenic medication I was pretty much prepared to like number two by default.”
The Doctor presses more buttons, looking worried. “I really messed up your childhood, didn’t I?”
“Don’t give yourself so much credit,” Amy scoffs, “it was messed up long before you arrived. And anyway, I was the one who made bloody puppets, which was apparently the action of a disturbed mind. According to number four, anyway.”
“Can I have one of those now?” the Doctor asks.
“No.”
The Doctor slides two levers, smiling crookedly at her. He doesn’t try talking her out of it or telling her to stay, though she knows he wants to, and she loves him just a little more for that. Amy takes a step closer, sliding her hand into her pocket and closing it around her ring.
“I’m getting married,” she says.
“I know,” the Doctor replies.
Amy hesitates, but doesn’t ask. “Ok,” she murmurs. “Ok.”
“I’m assuming you’re marrying nurse-boy,” the Doctor says after a moment of silence, then immediately corrects himself: “Rory.”
“I love him,” Amy tells him.
“I know,” the Doctor smiles. “I wouldn’t take you back if I thought you didn’t.” He presses a few more things and the Tardis starts whooshing around them. “There. Back in time for you to have extra beauty sleep and everything.”
He eases himself to the Tardis floor and, after a moment, Amy comes to sit beside him. He puts an arm around her shoulders and she leans into him. “Thank you,” she murmurs into his collarbone.
“Thank you,” he replies.
They say nothing and hold each other until the Tardis finally stops moving. There’s a crunching sound and it definitely doesn’t come from inside.
“Ah,” the Doctor says, “I appear to have crushed your shed. Again.”
{end}
There’s no zip because I have yet to work out how to make that happen and if I even want that to happen, but there may be one in the future. Personally, I like mixes with separate tracks because then I don’t get tangled up with tracks I’ve already got. Please let me know if various tracks don’t work/stop working and so on and so forth and I’ll re-upload. And if you only download one track out of this lot, download Drops of Jupiter, because it is one of my favourite songs of all time and I love it. Really, if you don’t have it, acquire it now.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Amy, the Doctor [a bit Amy/Eleven, a bit Amy/Rory]
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 9205
Genre: Gen [het]
Copyright: Title taken from Brightly Wound by Eisley.
Summary: She’s not the mentally ill one here, really, and she still can’t eat custard, ten years later.
Author’s Notes: I’ve never created a ficmix before but I love Amy and I love trying new things so here, have this. Eighteen individually downloadable tracks (mixture of mp3s and mp4s, so sorry if you don’t have itunes) that made me think of Amy (Brightly Wound is my default Amy song, for some reason) accompanied by seventeen vignettes. Go on and laugh at my taste in music. Spoilers for The Eleventh Hour (obviously), though the rest of this is evidently going to be jossed in the coming weeks. No, I have no idea how I got so many words out of one episode either.
Additional {slightly spoilery} notes: In my personal canon 1) Amy isn’t a “kiss-o-gram” (whatever the hell that is; do we even have those?), she’s a stripper, and 2) whatever the show says, Jeff is so Amy’s gay BFF, and so I’m writing about them as such, ‘k?
{and swallow fireflies}
(One. Brightly Wound~ Eisley)
Two. Strange Little Girl ~ Tori Amos
{She survived but she’s feeling old
‘Cause she found all things cold
Strange little girl, where are you going?}
The third psychiatrist is clearly a big fan of Freud. Amelia crosses and recrosses her legs and attempts not to fidget too much as he explains in great, excruciating detail that her “Raggedy Doctor” was actually a manifestation of her subconscious as a result of her budding sexuality.
“I was seven,” Amelia protests at one point, but he doesn’t seem to hear her. He uses “burgeoning” a few too many times, rolling it around on his tongue with far too much relish, and she mentally labels him a paedophile, picking absently at a hole in her tights. He doesn’t look at her once, gaze fixed on something outside the window.
“The overtly phallic nature of this screwdriver you insist he carried is further evidence of your sexual awakening,” the psychiatrist continues. Right, Amelia thinks dazedly, and then wonders where exactly the fish fingers fit in.
The half-hour car ride home is tense, as usual, her aunt’s knuckles white on the steering wheel. Amelia sucks her lower lip in and out of her mouth, absently listening to the inevitable you’re thirteen now; why are you still so damaged? speech she has heard far too many times. She wants to snap back a why do you think? but she never does.
“What did Dr Richards say?” her aunt asks eventually, unlocking the front door.
“He thinks I want to fuck the Doctor,” Amelia responds flatly, “and he really needs a thesaurus.”
She is screamed at and then sent upstairs to her room, where she leans her forehead against the window and clenches her teeth and stares out into the empty garden until her eyes blur.
Three. Amy ~ Mark Ronson (feat. Kenna)
{Is God playing evil tricks on me?
Oh, I love you Amy
Do you still love me?}
Her friend (well, insert inverted commas around the word) Marcie says the pay is good and the work is easy.
“You’re a pretty girl, Amelia,” she points out. She’s wearing too much mascara and enough foundation to make her look about thirty. Amelia absently wonders what psychiatrist number four would think of her, but in any case number four was the last. Her aunt decided to pull the funding for project Let’s Make Amelia Stop Being Crazy and Amelia is grateful for it. She’s sick and tired of talking about the stupid Doctor who said he’d come back and didn’t and sick and tired of being treated like she’s mentally ill. She’s not the mentally ill one here, really, and she still can’t eat custard, ten years later.
“It just seems...” Amelia searches for the words without calling Marcie anything unforgivable. “I mean, is it safe?”
Marcie scoffs. “They can’t touch you, if that’s what you mean.” Her lips curl and it’s momentarily disturbing. “You can charge extra for that.”
“Jesus,” Amelia mutters.
Marcie shrugs. “It’ll piss your aunt off,” she points out.
This shouldn’t be the selling point, but it really sort of is. In a matter of weeks, Amelia finds herself attempting a coy look over her shoulder and peeling a tiny nurse’s outfit from her skin with an attempt at a come-hither smile while a crowd cheer appreciatively. Later, when she’s obediently kissed the birthday boy and is debating whether you can be a whore while still technically being a virgin, one of the other party guests sidles up to her while she rebuttons her shirt. They make small talk, awkward and tight, and he asks her for her name. Amelia hesitates, hearing her Doctor saying Amelia Pond is like something out of a fairytale. She doesn’t remember princesses taking their clothes off for money in anything she read as a child.
“Amy,” she says at last, and something in her chest eases a little.
Four. I Know You ~ Laura Marling
{Everybody knows that you’re a posh girl
‘Cause when it comes to cockneys you’re down on your knees}
“If you get the cowgirl outfit can I borrow the hat?” Jeff asks, lounging in the rickety chair in the costume shop.
Amy arches an eyebrow. “How are you still debating whether or not you’re not the only gay in the village?”
Jeff glares. “I wouldn’t be the only gay in the village,” he says at last.
“I know,” Amy replies, turning back to the mirror and re-angling the hat a little more. The fringing around what can loosely be described as a skirt is itching her legs. “It was a joke. You know, ha ha and all that?”
“Just stick to taking your clothes off,” Jeff advises her cheerfully. “You’re much better at that. Or at least, I imagine you are.”
“You imagine me taking my clothes off?” Amy enquires distractedly, trying a smouldering look in the mirror.
“You and Zac Efron,” Jeff promises. “You know, while I make my mind up.”
“Well, if it’s research,” Amy smirks, walking back into the tiny changing cubicle and pulling the curtain tightly across. “I’m going with the nun one.”
“You’re going to hell,” Jeff warns, laughing.
They’ve come a long way from their childhoods, playing Raggedy Doctor on the green, having adventures in blue-painted cardboard boxes in his back garden with Rory, and as Amy begins to change back into her own clothes, she glances at herself in the mirror. It’s ok, she thinks, I’m pretty much there already.
Five. What I Say And What I Mean ~ The Like
{Never going back and forth
I’m only going forward - that’s what I keep saying
Never going back and forth
I’m only going back - that’s what I mean}
Amy wishes that she were more of a bitch than she is because she would quite like to kick the ragged-looking man sprawled unconscious on her hallway floor, or at the very least have a few more vicious minutes with the cricket bat. Unfortunately, she cannot bring herself to do it; she’s fairly certain the first rule when your imaginary childhood friends turn out not to really not be imaginary is To Not Beat Them Up, No Matter How Many Psychiatrists You Had Inflicted On You.
“I knew you were real,” she mumbles, looking down at his crumpled and damp form. “God knows why you’re here though.”
None of the windows or doors are forced and she’s not entirely sure how he got into her house. He’s as crumpled and ragged as ever, rips in his shirt and fraying hems, converse that have seen far better days laced to his feet. Amy crouches beside him, reaching out in spite of herself to stroke his messy hair back from his face, pressed into the carpet, to trace the features she has drawn so many times they are far more familiar than they perhaps should be. His skin is cool but with something hot somewhere far beneath; he exhales and a string of gold spills from between his lips to dissipate into the air. For a moment the house is very, very quiet and very still, and her fingers slip to stroke across his mouth.
Amy withdraws her hand swiftly, feeling caught, and straightens up again. She doesn’t have much time and she’s still dressed from the last party she attended; a police woman’s outfit that leaves little to the imagination, though at least her stocking seams are straight. She looks down at the Doctor and an idea begins to form.
“Bloody hell, you’re heavy,” she groans, dragging him down the hall, all gangly loose limbs and torn clothing. “You should eat fewer fish fingers.”
Amy takes the cuffs from her belt and snaps one around the Doctor’s wrist and the other around the radiator. Then she pulls the window open and flicks the key into the garden, quick, before she can think twice and relent. Sprawled against the radiator, the Doctor looks almost reproachful, blacked-out or not.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Amy whispers, “the whole village thinks I’m harmless but insane and I had four psychiatrists and one of them was really confusing and I had some very messed-up teenage fantasies as a result. This is less than you deserve.”
He says nothing, and she goes to retrieve her hat.
Six. Two Birds ~ Regina Spektor
{I’ll believe it all;
There’s nothing I won’t understand
I’ll believe it all;
I won’t let go of your hand}
“He didn’t even say goodbye,” Rory says behind her, voice blank and confused.
Amy blinks furiously because this isn’t waterproof mascara and in any case this is hardly the first time this has happened. “He doesn’t,” she replies, and is startled by the bitterness in her tone.
They’re silent for a long moment. “At least he didn’t crush my shed this time,” she accedes, still not turning around because she can’t school her expression into something decent and well-behaved and calm. For a moment she’s herself, seven and raw and sleeping in the garden most nights until her aunt dragged her off to psychiatrist number one, who used finger puppets and advised round white medication.
“I still can’t believe he’s real,” Rory says, sounding awed. “I mean, he’s real, you didn’t make him up after all.”
“So you’ve spent the last twelve years thinking I’m insane,” Amy half-snaps. “Well, that’s nice to know.”
“Amy...” Rory sighs. “Come inside. I’ll make you a cup of tea.”
She follows him in, sits dumbly at the kitchen table as he boils the kettle, and obediently drinks the resulting mug of PG Tipps. They don’t speak, maybe can’t speak, and Amy stares down at her kitchen table, a scratch the Doctor put there twelve years ago still visible beneath her palm.
“We nearly died,” Rory breathes at last, and Amy realises dimly that they’re both trembling, fizzing with stale adrenalin. “I mean, the whole world was nearly bloody incinerated.”
Amy’s feet hurt and her skirt has ridden up her thighs and when he stands to try and collect her mug she grabs his wrist, pulls herself upright and kisses him. They do this sometimes, Rory and her, fumbling around each other and never sure exactly what it is they think they’re doing. Boyfriend is far too clean-cut for this and kind of a lie but on the other hand she isn’t anybody else’s either; Rory’s hands tangle in her hair and she tugs almost frantically at his shirt. It’s never been like this before but then they’ve never saved the world by the skin of their teeth before either, and the stupid policewoman’s costume falls around her feet.
She runs her hands down the warm skin over Rory’s spine, eyes closed, and does not think about the shifting muscle of the Doctor’s bared shoulders or about the fact the first time she reached a tentative hand between her legs she really, really wasn’t thinking about Rory.
Seven. Extraordinary Machine ~ Fiona Apple
{If there was a better way to go then it would find me
I can’t help it; the road just rolls out behind me
Be kind to me, or treat me mean
I’ll make the most of it, I’m an extraordinary machine}
The next day, Amy is lying on Jeff’s bed feeling sorry for herself and nursing the confusion with lots more tea.
“It’s like The Time Traveller’s Wife,” Jeff enthuses brightly.
“Oh my God, shut up,” Amy moans, “I’m meant to be helping you pick a job, not hearing your theories about the Doctor.”
“Who’s real, by the way,” Jeff points out. “Who saw that one coming?”
Amy sits up, hair tumbling around her shoulders. “Um, me?”
“Right.” Jeff turns his attention back to his computer screen. “UNIT means I get to wear a pretty nice uniform.” He pauses. “He came back for you. It’s sort of romantic.”
“You sound like psychiatrist number three,” Amy tells him. “If you use the phrase ‘burgeoning sexuality’ I’m outing you in the form of weed-killer letters on the green.”
“The Doctor thinks I should get a girlfriend,” Jeff remarks.
“The Doctor is kind of narrow-minded when it comes to sex,” Amy responds, “he was very judgy about the whole kiss-o-gram thing.” Jeff snorts and she ignores him, a thought occurring. “Oh please, please tell me he didn’t walk in on you wanking. Please.”
“I wasn’t wanking-” Jeff begins irritably, but he is interrupted by his bedroom door opening. A tall man with blue eyes and an old-fashioned military coat is standing there, with Rory hovering behind him.
“Feel free to start,” the man tells Jeff in an American accent, grinning with very white teeth. He turns to Amy and she sees that behind the entity that is the man’s smile, he’s very tired. More tired than anyone she’s ever seen before, more tired than she knew anyone could be. “Miss Pond, I’m assuming?”
Amy has had enough, but she doesn’t see the point in saying this aloud. “I’m Amy,” she corrects the man lightly. “And you would be?”
“Captain Jack Harkness,” he replies brightly. “If you could come with me?”
Well, the week can hardly get any weirder.
Amy and Rory are driven to the hospital in a gigantic black SUV with Captain Harkness - “he hit on half the village tracking you down!” Rory whispers urgently - who questions them intently about the Doctor while leading them through the corridors. Amy answers half his questions and ignores the other half but Harkness doesn’t seem to mind too much. They enter the still-deserted locker room, a mess of other people’s clothes left around by the Doctor, and a sad little heap of his old ragged clothes.
Harkness sighs when he sees them; the abandoned converse, tattered pinstriped trousers, torn shirt. It’s a sigh and nothing more but there’s something hurt, something saddened in it nonetheless, and Harkness gathers up the clothing with an attitude resembling reverence.
“These deserve a better resting place than a hospital incinerator,” is all he says. “Oh, and tell your friend not to go for UNIT. NASA’s probably a safer bet.”
Eight. Starry Eyed ~ Ellie Goulding
{You look at me
It’s like you hit me with lightning
Oh; everybody’s starry eyed}
When she sees the blue box in her garden for the third time, Amy contemplates, just for the smallest of seconds, going back to bed. But her feet make the decision for her, carrying her downstairs so quickly she almost slips twice. She’s curious about excuses, about what the Doctor has to say now, wondering how long it’s been for him.
She thinks of Rory, fleetingly, because she’s not heartless and she’s marrying him tomorrow; the dress is upstairs in her wardrobe, selected after what felt like a million fittings. Jeff accompanied her to most of them, when he could; smartly suited and bubbling with classified information. Amy’s not jealous at all, though she sometimes thinks she ought to be. But if she really wanted to get out of the village she would have done it by now, not accepted Rory’s proposal and started making plans.
She shouldn’t go. She really shouldn’t.
Fourteen years of her life and one day of his; it seems impossible and ridiculous and she really, really wishes she’d kicked his unconscious body just once when it was on her hallway floor two years ago. Just so she could do it once, because she never will now and she thinks the Doctor deserves something swift and painful for shaping the course of her life so very perfectly, though of course she’ll never tell him that. Amy has always made her own decisions as best she can but it’s always been done with tied wrists, done by the Doctor fourteen very long years ago.
Amy slides her engagement ring off her finger with her thumb, burying it safely in the pocket of her dressing gown. It feels weirdly, unnaturally heavy. She contemplates telling the Doctor and then recalls him referring to Rory as “nurse boy”, wonders what he would think of her getting married. She doesn’t know how to say it. Maybe it doesn’t need saying. Just as long as she’s back in time for the wedding, that’s all that matters.
She slides her hand into her pocket, curling it around the ring and clutching it tight until it cuts into her palm. And then the Doctor’s time machine - the Tardis, apparently - starts whooshing and whirring and screeching with that noise that has stayed with her since childhood and she laughs as it surrounds her, the Doctor’s shoulder warm against hers. Somehow, she manages to forget that he has no sense of time whatsoever, whatever he claims, and there is a distinct possibility that she’ll arrive for her wedding day two years too late.
Nine. Short Skirt/Long Jacket ~ Cake
{I want a girl with a mind like a diamond
I want a girl who knows what’s best}
“I need tea,” the Doctor remarks distractedly when Amy has found herself some clothes to wear in the Tardis’ terrifyingly extensive wardrobe, which is approximately the size of her entire village and the roads surrounding it, full of clothing of all shapes and descriptions. There were a number of intact pinstriped suits in one corner, accompanied by a variety of different coloured converse hightops, and Amy fleetingly recalled Captain Harkness, gathering up the remains of the Doctor’s suit.
“Do you like tea?” Amy asks a little warily, remembering the way her aunt yelled when she came home to find the kitchen full of half-eaten food and messy plates.
“I think tea is a universal constant,” the Doctor informs her cheerfully. “And it has all the stuff you need to look after a brand new body. Should’ve got you to make me one earlier, really.”
“By ‘earlier’, do you mean fourteen years ago?” Amy asks, following him down one of the Tardis’ corridors.
“I mean about twelve hours ago,” the Doctor responds.
“I wasn’t here twelve hours ago,” Amy reminds him.
“Oh, maybe I do mean fourteen years ago.” The Doctor grins at her. “We’ll figure it out. Make a future together in the same time zone and then you can stop yelling at me.”
“I think you like being yelled at,” Amy mutters, following him into a kitchen so large you could lose an army of cooks in it. In the centre is a rather incongruous little wooden table, covered with a gingham cloth and with two chairs sitting at it. She takes one of the chairs and watches the Doctor haphazardly making a pot of tea before carrying it and two mugs over to her.
“You know,” he remarks brightly, without any sort of preamble, “the last woman I met when she was a child and then again when she was an adult fell in love with me.”
Amy arches an eyebrow. “Were you better-looking then?”
The Doctor laughs but looks rather offended. “I'm terribly good-looking now, I'll have you know,” he informs her. “I've never been this young. I turn heads and everything.”
“Well,” she says, “that's very nice. But I didn’t fall in love with you.”
“No,” the Doctor agrees bluntly, “you became a stripper instead. I've never had that happen to me before.”
“I'm not-” Amy splutters automatically, spilling her tea all over the table. “I mean, how do you even know what-”
“I can know about these things,” the Doctor responds loftily. His expression is largely curious but she can see disapproval glittering in his eyes. “So just how many outfits did you dress up in?”
“Oh my God,” Amy says, covering her face with her hands, “oh my God, we are not having this conversation.”
“Why not?” the Doctor asks, tone disarmingly innocent.
Amy reaches for more tea. “It’s none of your damn business.” She pours herself a fresh mug. “I went to parties. I kissed people. Sometimes I took my clothes off for money. I once broke a man’s finger for trying to touch me. It was a living. I don’t do it anymore.”
“Fair enough,” the Doctor says, taking a huge mouthful of his tea and mercifully not spitting it across the table. “Ah, that’s the stuff.”
Ten. Mowgli’s Road ~ Marina and the Diamonds
{There’s a fork in the road
I do as I am told
And I don’t know who I wanna be}
The Tardis seems to have an almost infinite number of rooms, so it’s really no wonder the Doctor hasn’t yet found the swimming pool or the promised library. Amy spends vast amounts of time exploring and has yet to visit the same room twice, except for the kitchen, the console room and the room which has apparently become her bedroom. It’s also very difficult to track the Doctor down when they’ve been separated.
She walks in on him standing in front of a mirror prodding thoughtfully at his face. Amy stands in the doorway for a moment watching him, but can’t work out what the Doctor thinks he’s doing. She frequently feels this way around him and suspects it isn’t going to wear off anytime soon.
“Uh...” she begins. “Do I want to know?”
“New face,” the Doctor responds, pressing his nose flat with a fingertip. “Well, new everything, but new face. Makes interesting expressions, you know?”
“You keep saying that,” Amy says, “and that big eye thing showed all those men. Is being the Doctor like a job that you take over or something?”
“No,” the Doctor responds, picking up a round metal thing from a table near him and throwing it to her before turning back to poking his cheeks. Amy looks at the device he’s given her; there are a variety of buttons on it and a glass panel in the centre. “Blue button,” the Doctor adds, and she pushes it.
A slightly wavery hologram of an old man in a hat appears, and she holds the device at arm’s length to stop herself from being blinded.
“That’s me,” the Doctor tells her, before baring his teeth and studying them.
Amy squints at the old man but can’t see anything of the Doctor in him. She frowns, and sees a button with an arrow on it. She pushes that one, and the old man is replaced with another man with a dark, Beatles-like haircut.
“That’s me too,” the Doctor adds without turning around, spreading his skin flat along his cheekbones with his palms.
Amy keeps pushing the button and a succession of other men appear, with various outlandish outfits and stupid haircuts.
“So you’re like a... shape-changer?” she suggests, trying not to laugh at one man who appears to have stumbled off the set of a BBC costume drama, all long curly hair and velvet.
“When I’m dying my body changes itself into a new one,” the Doctor informs her, turning to one side and then the other. “New personality, new body, new everything really.”
Amy pushes the button again, revealing a man with large ears and a leather jacket, and then again. When she presses the arrow one more time, the image flickers but doesn’t change, implying it’s the last one. She studies the skinny man with a shock of hair and a slightly wistful expression before noting that he’s wearing an intact but nonetheless familiar brown pinstripe suit and cream converse allstars.
“So this is what you looked like before you met me,” she says.
The Doctor glances over his shoulder and then turns back to the mirror. “Yep,” he agrees. “Up until thirteen minutes and forty seconds before I first met you.”
Amy turns all this information over in her head. “So you died less than a quarter of an hour before you turned up in my garden?”
“Yep. Well, in a manner of speaking, anyway.”
“Wow,” Amy says. “No wonder you were so fucked-up.”
“Language,” the Doctor admonishes softly, before turning around and grinning at her. “So yes. All new and shiny.”
Amy looks back at the previous Doctor, hands in his pockets and eyes staring somewhere very far away. “Pity really,” she remarks, “I like this one. He was pretty.”
The Doctor looks hurt. “I can be pretty,” he protests. “Well, from certain angles, anyway.”
Amy stares at him. “Really? You’ve spent the last however long prodding your face and you still think you’re pretty?”
He shrugs. “I thought I was a girl when I first changed. The hair was terribly misleading.”
Amy presses a red button and the hologram disappears. She looks at the Doctor and smiles slightly. “So I’ve known you for most of your life, then.”
“Yes, you have,” the Doctor agrees. “It’s still early days yet, we’re figuring me out.”
“Figuring you out?” Amy echoes.
“Well,” the Doctor shrugs, “you don’t really know who I am and neither do I.” He grins at her, broad and excited and just a little mad. “Isn’t this fun?”
Eleven. Dog Days Are Over ~ Florence + the Machine
{Leave all your loving behind
Can’t carry it with you if you want to survive}
“We’ve got a wedding to go to,” the Doctor informs her cheerfully after about a week.
Amy’s heart stops in her chest. Rory’s ring is burning a hole in her pocket and she wonders what she gave away and when.
“We do?” she asks, trying to keep her voice steady and not sound like she’s having a panic attack. The Doctor frowns at her. “Whose?”
“A couple of old friends of mine,” the Doctor responds. “I’ve had the invitation for a while but I haven’t had the time to go until now. Are you all right, Amy?”
“Uh, yeah,” she says quickly. “Fine. So, um, who are these old friends of yours?”
For the first time since she’s met him, the Doctor actually looks momentarily uncomfortable. “I’ll explain when we get there,” he says after a pause that’s just a little too long, and starts pushing things around on the Tardis console. Amy leaves him to it and goes to find a dress in the wardrobe, eventually selecting a pretty but simple black one. The label, she learns, has been scrupulously labelled M. Jones by someone with a permanent marker and tidy handwriting. A lot of the clothes in here have been labelled, she’s discovered in time; she likes exploring in here. She once found a pair of blue jeans crumpled in a corner with J. Harkness written over Topshop on the label, which explains really rather a lot.
They arrive at the wedding in time for the reception; the newlyweds look very happy and a little sheepish as they’re covered in confetti. Amy watches the bride for a moment; a beautiful woman with rich dark skin, looking a little uncomfortable in the ivory gown.
“Who is she?” she asks, looking at the Doctor, who has a strange little smile flitting about his mouth.
“Martha Jones,” he says after a moment. “And the man she’s just married is Mickey Smith.” Something reminiscent flickers across his features. “Smith and Jones,” he mumbles, apparently to himself. He clears his throat, turns his attention back to Amy. “She used to travel with me,” he explains. “Well, they both did.”
It appears that Amy has come to Martha’s wedding in Martha’s own dress. Well, that’s an interesting thought. She notes the way they’re hovering at the back of the room, not going over to greet Martha or Mickey, and looks at how the Doctor is looking at Martha.
“Did you ruin her life like you ruined mine?” she asks, keeping a smile in her voice.
“I prefer to think I saved your life,” the Doctor replies cheerfully, tucking a stray lock of hair behind Amy’s ear.
“All right,” she says, mostly because she agrees, “so it was just her life you ruined then.”
“I didn’t ruin her life,” the Doctor protests, awkwardness still tight on his features, “well, I mean, I might have ruined a few years of it but it wasn’t really my fault and she never held it against me and anyway, she’s married now, and she’s happy. I think she looks happy now, anyway, don’t you think she looks happy? I think she’s happy. Do you want cake? Let’s get cake, I want cake.”
Amy lets him drag her over to receive a slice of cake in a napkin, smiles slightly when he takes a bite and mumbles something like eugh, cake is horrible, how did I not know this and then suggests, gently, that they leave. He agrees and they sneak over to the doors. Amy looks back to find Martha is looking at her dress before her eyes slide sideways to look at the Doctor. Amy knows enough about Time Lords to know that Martha won’t recognise him but there’s something in Martha’s eyes anyway, and she smiles sadly before she turns back to her husband, laughter ringing bright.
She really, really, sincerely hopes that her wedding day won’t be like this.
Twelve. The Cactus That Found The Beat ~ Missy Higgins
{‘Cause I know that there will always be a life for me
Because I found my place in history}
“You wrote comics about me,” the Doctor remarks cheerfully.
“I did,” Amy allows, refusing to allow herself to blush because that would be ridiculous.
“And you drew pictures of me,” he adds. “Which must have been quite good because half your village recognised me on sight.”
“I also made puppets of you out of toilet roll tubes,” Amy responds sharply. “Are you going somewhere with this?”
“Do you have photos of nurse boy dressed as me?” the Doctor enquires, teasing.
They stole one of Rory’s father’s ties and cut it with nail scissors and ripped half the collar off one of Rory’s shirts, strictly for best and visiting his grandma, and ran around all afternoon with a sonic screwdriver made out of a biro pen until Amy’s tights were laddered to hell and Rory’s trousers had holes in the knees and mud all down the hems. Rory’s dad was not impressed, but Amy took responsibility and since everyone thought she was having a mental breakdown as a result of no longer having parents and having an aunt who didn’t really give a shit about her they got away with it. There aren’t photographs.
“You could call him Rory rather than ‘nurse boy’,” Amy suggests without thinking. She has been trying to avoid bringing him up or correcting the Doctor’s blithe use of ‘nurse boy’ in case the Doctor will suddenly see something in her, read something into her tone, and go you’re marrying him tomorrow! That’s what ‘stuff’ is! Amy still isn’t sure why she doesn’t want him to know, but she doesn’t, and she protects her upcoming wedding and the ring in her pocket with a ferocity that unsettles her a little.
“Is he a real actual boyfriend now?” the Doctor asks, eyes lighting up, eyebrows arching almost comically.
“It’s like travelling with my aunt,” Amy mutters. “I may not be nine-hundred odd years old but I am a grown woman and it really isn’t any of your business.”
He laughs, scrunching up his face. “Can I have one of your toilet roll puppets?”
“No,” Amy replies, elbowing him. “That’s really narcissistic, you know.”
“I’ve never had puppets made of me before,” the Doctor remarks thoughtfully. “There’s a planet in the Rygas system who’ve made action figures of me but they’re a bit of a weird lot, their atmosphere has all sorts of strange chemicals in it.”
Amy smirks, resisting the urge to ask if they can go there. Maybe she could give Rory a little figurine of herself as a wedding gift.
“I did try and publish the Raggedy Doctor stories when I was about fifteen and needed the cash,” Amy offers. “Simon and Schuster were really quite interested.”
“What happened?”
“Some men in black suits arrived in the middle of the night to tell me not to publish them and then assured me that they didn’t really exist and they were figments of my imagination,” Amy says lightly.
The Doctor looks confused. “Oh. Well, that’s a bit ridiculous.”
“Most of my childhood was a bit ridiculous,” Amy sighs, momentarily tempted to ask for an apology.
Thirteen. All This Beauty ~ The Weepies
{All this beauty; you might have to close your eyes
Slowly open wide
All this beauty; we travelled all night
Drank the ocean dry and watched the sun rise}
The swimming pool turns up in what her watch says is the early hours of the morning, though really Amy has no way of knowing what time it actually is or if the Tardis feels the need for there to be time at all.
She’s come to love living inside the world within the blue box, which is so much more beautiful and rich than anything her fevered and slightly bitter imagination came up with when she was a child with pencils and crayons and the mental image of thousands of books floating in chlorinated water. The library in her head, she has realised belatedly, was heavily based on the library in the Disney version of Beauty and the Beast, because although all the Disney movies lied to her and by the time she was seven she’d renounced all that princesses and singing animals shit, pieces of them have lingered around, impossible to stamp out.
The Tardis’ library is nothing like the library in Beauty and the Beast but that doesn’t matter because it’s bigger, better, breathtaking. There are balls of string beside the door to help you find your way back there again; the old-fashioned minotaur labyrinth method. Amy doesn’t think that the Tardis would let her get lost forever, though, not unless she wanted her to. And Amy thinks that they’re friends, the Tardis and her, or at least there’s a kind of mutual respect there. She ignores the little voice inside her that whispers she’s only trying to befriend the Tardis in the hope the time machine will do her utmost to get Amy back in time for her wedding. That’s something in the future, something to worry about later, the eternal tomorrow.
The swimming pool is about three times the size of the village green, the water still and breathtakingly blue. Amy hesitates, wondering if she will be able to find it again if she goes and gets herself something to swim in, and then reasons that there are only two of them on the ship and anyway her underwear is black and not likely to become transparent. She piles her clothes on the side and dives in, thinking this is for you, Amelia as she cuts effortlessly through the water. She tried hard in swimming lessons at school, preparing for this exact moment; swimming in the pool inside the Doctor’s ship.
“Ah, so this is where it got to,” the Doctor says, sometime later, appearing in the doorway.
Amy stands up in the shallow end, wet hair sticking to her arms. “You coming in?” He dithers, possibly distracted by the fact she’s not really wearing very much. Amy simply looks back at him, entirely unashamed. “It’s nothing I haven’t seen before,” she adds brightly.
She’s never seen the Doctor visibly flustered before. It’s a little magical. “I told you to turn your back,” he points out.
“I didn’t,” Amy shrugs. “Come on, the pool’s turned up, you should be in here already.”
He dithers for another moment and then begins piling his clothing next to hers; she’s almost disappointed that he doesn’t leave the bow tie on. Clad in tasteful boxers, he jumps in with far less grace than Amy did and swims over to her with an endearing lack of coordination.
“This body isn’t terribly good at swimming,” he explains, hair looking particularly silly plastered to his head. Amy laughs. “You’re utterly shameless, aren’t you?” he says, smiling, though there’s something in his eyes.
“And you’re judgy,” she responds crisply.
“Hmmm,” the Doctor says thoughtfully. “I haven’t been properly judgy in a while. It makes quite a nice change.”
It dawns on her that the two of them are in their underwear in a giant swimming pool. “Psychiatrist number three would have a field day,” Amy murmurs, grinning, diving under the surface again.
Fourteen. Child Among The Weeds ~ Eliza Carthy
{The day is only dazzling
Fly, bird, fly, on your raven wing
Take to the sky
And sing for the love of wheeling and turning}
The surface of the planet Prygoria is extremely cold and covered with a thick film of lilac ice, which glows with something bright under the surface, like amethyst held up to the light. It is, Amy thinks, very possibly the most beautiful thing she has ever seen, lying on her back on a thick blanket the Doctor procured from somewhere and looking up at the sky. There are stars here, thousands upon thousands of them, tinted lilac too by the planet’s atmosphere and sparkling bright and brilliant.
They have a picnic too - the main feature of which is still custard, though Amy still can’t touch it - though it has been long forgotten in favour of staring upwards.
“We could make a list,” the Doctor offers. “Places you’d like to go, things you’d like to see. You know, before it’s time for stuff.”
Amy cannot figure out if he knows or not, if he’s pretending to have no idea for her sake or for his, or if he truly is ignorant. She shifts a little and feels the ring in her pocket, small and hard against her hipbone.
“Has anyone ever done this forever?” she asks, curious, impatient to get the Doctor’s mind away from stuff. “You know, just stayed with you for their entire life?”
“No,” the Doctor responds, and he looks almost wistful, face bathed in purple starlight. “No, they always move on. Go home, or somewhere enough like it.” He looks thoughtful, and Amy swallows back further questions, waiting. “The last person I was travelling with before I met you, she said she was never going to leave. But... she didn’t have a choice.”
Amy looks up at the stars. She wonders what it would be like to do this forever and ever, in the promise of endless tomorrows, and then return to get married grey and quiet and a whole new person. But she doesn’t want that; not for herself and not for Rory.
“I’m sorry,” she says, because the Doctor looks grave and tired.
“Don’t be,” he replies, immediate and quick with a bright smile. “Come on, think of places or times you’d like to go. Who do you really want to meet?”
Amy thinks back through her history classes. “Elizabeth the First,” she suggests.
“Ah.” The Doctor grimaces. “That might be a problem. We have a bit of a history.”
She raises her eyebrows but he doesn’t elaborate, and after a moment she says: “Victoria?”
“Bit of history there, too,” the Doctor admits.
“Oh my God,” Amy says, “and you judged me for taking my clothes off at birthday parties.”
“Not that sort of history!” the Doctor protests quickly, though it’s hard to tell if he’s flushing or if it’s just a trick of the coloured light. “I’m not Jack.” He glances at her. “Not that you know who Jack is, but-”
“Jack Harkness?” Amy suggests, and is gratified when the Doctor actually looks startled. “Propositioned half my village and an ornamental lamppost, if I remember correctly,” she adds.
“When did you meet Jack?” he demands.
Amy is about to reply and then recalls the look on Jack’s face as he looked at the Doctor’s abandoned shoes and thinks that there’s history there she doesn’t understand and shouldn’t get involved with.
“A long time ago,” she replies, and keeps her eyes on the stars.
They’re silent for a long while, while above them the sky twinkles sharp and bright. “He kept my severed hand in a jar for years,” the Doctor remarks, lightly, at last.
Amy thinks about asking, and then decides that she doesn’t want an answer. “That does not surprise me at all.”
Fifteen. She’s A Handsome Woman ~ Panic! At The Disco
{Accidents let the evening in the backdoor
Filled the room ceiling to the floor}
“You two do make a very attractive couple,” the guard says, somewhat apologetically, as he locks the door.
“See?” the Doctor says, turning to Amy, “he thinks I’m attractive.”
Amy ignores him, banging a hand against the bars and getting a mild electric shock for her troubles. “We’re not a couple!” she yells after the retreating guard, “he’s a madman with ridiculous hair and I take my clothes off for a living! And sometimes I kiss strangers for money!”
“I’m pretty sure that’s the plot of Pretty Woman,” the Doctor remarks cheerfully, walking across to a bench and sitting himself down.
Amy sighs through her teeth, banging the bars again in spite of the pain. “I am going to pull off all his tentacles and feed them back to him,” she mutters.
The Doctor tips his head to one side. “You’re quite an angry young woman, aren’t you?”
“And whose fault is that?” Amy demands, but decides that being this cross is really not going to help matters.
“Mine?” the Doctor suggests, in his we’re going to have that fourteen years discussion again, aren’t we? voice.
“Hardly,” Amy sighs, moving to lean against the wall. “You weren’t the only one to let me down. The psychiatrists just fixated on you because you were the one who made me seem like a crazy person. You know, box falls out of sky, man falls out of box, man eats fish custard. Girl who saw all this needs medication.”
The Doctor grimaces.
“I’ve heard every possible theory about you,” Amy adds, before he can say anything. Something occurs to her. “Oh, if we make it out of here without being killed by the tentacle people, can I go meet Freud? I’d quite like to kick him.”
“I did not invite you to come along just so you could go around the universe kicking people,” the Doctor informs her, but he’s smiling.
Amy smiles back, then remembers they’ve been chucked into a prison by some random tentacled aliens who seem to think they’re in a relationship. “By the way, have we worked out why we’re in here yet?”
“Not yet,” the Doctor admits, “but they haven’t confiscated my sonic screwdriver, so we’ll just wait for matey-boy out there to take a tea break and then we’ll escape.”
“Oh,” Amy says, and firmly reminds herself that escaping with ease from an alien prison should not in any way be looked on as an anti-climax. She goes to sit on the bench beside the Doctor.
“So we’ve got about half an hour to kill,” the Doctor tells her. “I-Spy?”
“Really no,” Amy replies, leaning back against the wall and sighing. “Also, when did you see Pretty Woman?”
Sixteen. Someone To Fall Back On ~ I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On
{I am no prince, I am no saint
I am not anyone’s wildest dream
But I will stand behind
And I will be someone to fall back on}
They don’t win all the time, Amy eventually learns. Her inner seven-year-old self is devastated to discover this because disenchanted as she was when he never returned and the sun rose on an empty day, she has always believed in him. Her aunt was never adequately able to work out what had happened to the crack in Amy’s bedroom wall, and trying to explain it only ended in prescribed medicine and Amy biting her first psychiatrist so hard he apparently still has the scar. Her outer twenty-one-year-old self is almost equally upset to learn that the Doctor cannot win everything, cannot save everyone’s life, cannot rearrange the universe to fit to her exact wishes.
The first time they don’t get there fast enough and people die, Amy’s heart shatters in her chest and she can’t even look at the Doctor, at the horror on his face. He’s been around for centuries and he’s got to have fucked up before, this can’t be his first ever mistake. But Amy’s never been on the losing side and it’s like a punch to the stomach.
“I’m not a god,” the Doctor tells her on the walk back to the Tardis when they’ve fixed things as best they can, but they can’t save the people who are already gone. “I tried that once, a while back, and... and it was dangerous and it was wrong and I can’t make everything work out. I really can’t.”
Amy still doesn’t look at him, eyes on her boots, as in her head the pictures she drew flutter and burn because they’re lies. They’re lies; the Doctor is just a man with a lot of knowledge and a larger-than-average pinch of luck, but it doesn’t make him magical or infallible or able to make everything be ok all the time. She can’t admit it - she’d hurt anyone who tried to say it to her, and in fact that’s why psychiatrist number four told her not to come back - but she needs her scaffolding, her stability, her certainty. She needs it and the Doctor has pulled away all that trust and left her naked and gasping.
“I’ll be fine,” Amy mumbles at last, in answer to the question he hasn’t asked.
“Good,” he says, and she finally manages to turn to him, sees how pale and tired and shocked he really is. It occurs to her that it’s the first time he’s got it wrong, this new man and this new body, and it can’t be entirely easy to cope with either.
“Are you going to be all right?” she asks.
He shrugs, smile lopsided and not entirely sincere. “I will be,” he replies. “Sometimes, I’m not fast enough. Sometimes, I make the wrong choice. Sometimes, I have to make the wrong choice. Sometimes, for the greater good, I have to destroy entire planets or races of people or my own race or... Pompeii. Sometimes that has to happen.”
Amy has heard snatches of information about Gallifrey, though the Doctor tries not to talk about it often and she knows not to bring it up. “Pompeii?” she echoes, because the Doctor can’t have been responsible for that, that’s just insane.
“Pompeii,” he agrees, hands in his pockets, hair uncharacteristically limp. “I’m sorry,” he adds after a while.
“You don’t have to apologise,” Amy replies. “Really. I mean, nobody can be magically right all the time, that would be stupid.”
“I seem to be very good at letting you down,” the Doctor remarks, voice too light. “I mean, I’m the king of cock-ups over here, you can be angry if you want to be.”
Amy stops walking and just looks at him. “I’m not angry,” she tells him. “I might be disappointed, but that’s my own fault for not leaving fairytales behind with Amelia.”
“Fairytales are important,” the Doctor tells her, looking mildly wounded.
“Sometimes,” Amy agrees, “but I can’t spend my life thinking you’re infallible and neither can you.” She manages a smile because it’s his fault but it isn’t, not really. “Come here, I’m going to hug you now.”
“Oh.” The Doctor frowns, like he’s considering refusing, until Amy kicks her glare up a notch. “Ok then.”
They hold each other for a long, quiet moment, and Amy closes her eyes and breathes him in and says nothing at all.
Seventeen. The Pageant of the Bizarre ~ Zero 7
{It’s never gonna be normal, you and me
What you’re signing on for is a storm at sea
So if you think you’re tough, give me all your love
And I’ll give you every little piece of me}
“Do you think you’ll ever stop?” Amy asks. The kitchen is quiet, the soft hum of the Tardis little more than background noise, and she’s carved faces onto every last apple in the fruit bowl from force of habit. “I mean, you know, do you think you’ll settle down somewhere, take up beekeeping or something?”
“Well, if it was good enough for Sherlock Holmes...” the Doctor smirks. He flicks his tea mug with his thumb. “That’s a very weird question, Amy,” he adds.
It is. Mostly, Amy is thinking about the ring in her pocket and the fact tomorrow still hasn’t come but it will and part of her is wondering whether she’ll even fit into the dress. She has split-ends and a scar on the heel of her hand she didn’t have before and she’s going to go home older by some degree, though time is sort of fluid here and she really isn’t sure how long it’s been. Rory will notice, she knows, and he won’t care, which makes her relieved and makes her sort of sad too.
“I’m just curious,” she shrugs. “Are you going to wander around the universe by yourself for forever?”
“Yes,” the Doctor says, simply. “Of course.” He smiles slightly, not looking at her. “I’ve done settled down. I’ve done having a family and a home and I was happy but that was a long time ago and I’m not that person any more. I wouldn’t even know how to be that person anymore.” The last bit seems to be largely addressed to himself and Amy isn’t even sure why she thought bringing this up would be a good idea.
“You don’t think... you don’t think you’ll ever meet someone and want to stay with them somewhere for... forever?”
“No,” the Doctor shrugs. His eyes narrow. “I don’t think we’re really talking about me anymore. Is there anything you want to tell me, Amy?”
“No,” she says quickly. “I’m just being hypothetical here.”
He doesn’t believe her but he also doesn’t push it. Amy suspects he’s worked out exactly what her stuff is but is privately grateful for him not saying it aloud.
“Fine,” he says, and pours them both more tea. “Well, any more hypotheses you want to suggest while we’re just sitting here?”
Amy shrugs. “Psychiatrist number three said I was in love with you.”
The Doctor looks both surprised and uncomfortable. “I’d rather you weren’t.”
“I don’t think I am,” Amy says, praying it’s not a lie because there are moments when she’s not entirely one hundred percent sure, but in any case she’s marrying Rory and he’ll make her happy and also she’s worked out enough about Martha Jones to learn she doesn’t want to be the next one to get her fingers and feelings burnt. “Also, he basically said your sonic screwdriver was a nice big phallic symbol you were waving about.”
It’s quite satisfying, watching the Doctor choke on his tea. Amy smirks and sips at her own drink and tries not to think about the fact her days here are numbered and just starting to tick.
Eighteen. Drops Of Jupiter ~ Train
{Well tell me, did you sail across the sun?
Did you make it to the Milky Way
To see the lights all faded
And that heaven is overrated?
Tell me, did you fall for a shooting star?
One without a permanent scar?
And did you miss me while you were looking for yourself out there?}
When Amy knows it’s time - and she honestly wouldn’t be able to explain how she knows, just that she does - it’s sharp and sudden and irreversible as a hammer to the skull. When she knows, she can’t un-know it, can’t put it off by a single minute. When it’s time, she composes herself by counting the chips in her nail varnish and then goes to find the Doctor. He’s in the console room, sleeves rolled up and history teacher jacket slung over a railing. He looks at Amy, dressed once more in her nightie and dressing gown and slippers.
“It’s time for stuff,” she says, voice steadier and calmer than she expected it to be.
“I can see that,” the Doctor replies. He studies her for a moment before trying to smile and adding: “do you want to have a sleepover in here instead? We could have marshmallows.”
“You don’t like marshmallows,” Amy points out.
“I could pretend,” the Doctor protests.
“You are the fussiest eater I have ever met,” Amy tells him firmly, “and how do you even know what a sleepover is?”
“I’ve travelled with a variety of young women,” he explains, “you learn these things.”
Amy is privately impressed at how he manages to say that without sounding the slightest bit creepy or perverted. It’s quite the achievement.
“Tempted as I am to sit in here in my nightie watching you ponder the existence of marshmallows in an irritated fashion until you go and harass their inventor - again,” Amy says, “I have to go back to stuff. For stuff.”
“Right,” the Doctor says, and begins flipping switches.
“You will get me back in time for morning, won’t you?” Amy tries not to sound accusing or anxious. “Because if you don’t I may actually have to start believing what psychiatrist number two said about you being an evil malevolent spirit my brain decided to conjure up to cope with moving to England.”
The Doctor frowns. “A psychiatrist said that to you?”
“She said she was one,” Amy shrugs, “and since psychiatrist number one put me on all sorts of anti-hallucinogenic medication I was pretty much prepared to like number two by default.”
The Doctor presses more buttons, looking worried. “I really messed up your childhood, didn’t I?”
“Don’t give yourself so much credit,” Amy scoffs, “it was messed up long before you arrived. And anyway, I was the one who made bloody puppets, which was apparently the action of a disturbed mind. According to number four, anyway.”
“Can I have one of those now?” the Doctor asks.
“No.”
The Doctor slides two levers, smiling crookedly at her. He doesn’t try talking her out of it or telling her to stay, though she knows he wants to, and she loves him just a little more for that. Amy takes a step closer, sliding her hand into her pocket and closing it around her ring.
“I’m getting married,” she says.
“I know,” the Doctor replies.
Amy hesitates, but doesn’t ask. “Ok,” she murmurs. “Ok.”
“I’m assuming you’re marrying nurse-boy,” the Doctor says after a moment of silence, then immediately corrects himself: “Rory.”
“I love him,” Amy tells him.
“I know,” the Doctor smiles. “I wouldn’t take you back if I thought you didn’t.” He presses a few more things and the Tardis starts whooshing around them. “There. Back in time for you to have extra beauty sleep and everything.”
He eases himself to the Tardis floor and, after a moment, Amy comes to sit beside him. He puts an arm around her shoulders and she leans into him. “Thank you,” she murmurs into his collarbone.
“Thank you,” he replies.
They say nothing and hold each other until the Tardis finally stops moving. There’s a crunching sound and it definitely doesn’t come from inside.
“Ah,” the Doctor says, “I appear to have crushed your shed. Again.”
{end}
There’s no zip because I have yet to work out how to make that happen and if I even want that to happen, but there may be one in the future. Personally, I like mixes with separate tracks because then I don’t get tangled up with tracks I’ve already got. Please let me know if various tracks don’t work/stop working and so on and so forth and I’ll re-upload. And if you only download one track out of this lot, download Drops of Jupiter, because it is one of my favourite songs of all time and I love it. Really, if you don’t have it, acquire it now.