Fic: Roses and Chocolate
My first fanfic! How exciting.
Title: Roses and Chocolate
Word Count: 2,113
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Rory/Amy
Spoilers: up through The Big Bang
Rating: PG
A/N: Some adorable Rory/Amy fluff, inspired by the season finale. Title is subject to change if I think of anything better.
~
“Amy, were you planning on changing out of that dress at some point?”
“No.”
“Hm. Well, it’s just that it’s hardly practical to go flitting about the universe in that mountain of satin and lace. Wouldn’t you say, Rory?”
“Huh?” Rory looked up and blinked a few times. He had been too busy staring in awe at the extraordinary beauty that was Amy, his Amy, all fire and ice with that ginger hair and that pale skin, perfectly paired with the cascading layers of embroidered white cloth (he was sure there was some sort of fancy technical name for the style but he didn’t care), to really follow the conversation being had in the center of the TARDIS between his two favorite people in the world. There, on one side, was Amy, the love of his life, and on the other-
Maybe he should have been paying more attention. The Doctor had taken off his corsage, which was now adorning one of the controls of the time machine, but he had somehow managed to acquire a vibrant purple fez hat, around which he had tied that shawl he had worn to the wedding-a tallit, was it?-in a large, gnarled knot. Still in his tuxedo and bowtie, with arms held out in supplication, the Doctor was nothing but the final realization of Amy’s Raggedy Doctor of so long ago, dressed for her wedding day.
“Oh wonderful, they’ve both gone mad with happiness!” In the Doctor’s absurd ensemble and huge grin, he did not sound the least bit sarcastic. “Now then, my lovely newlyweds, where shall I take you for your honeymoon? Paris at the opening of the Eiffel Tower? The Sistine Chapel while Michelangelo was still painting it? The beautiful ice cities of the Ood Sphere? Just consider it your wedding present, from me.”
“I don’t know,” Amy replied softly, staring off into space. “What do you think, honey?”
“It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to me,” Rory said, and smiled. He couldn’t remember ever being this happy in his life.
“All right, then,” the Doctor said abruptly, jumping in the middle of and breaking the couple’s loving gaze. “Once you’re done being all gooey, we can go. Until then, I think I’ll go press a bunch of exciting little buttons in the engine room and leave you two on your own. And stop playing with the Vortex Manipulator, Rory, it’s dangerous.”
Rory jumped slightly in his chair and looked down; he hadn’t realized he had been playing with the device left on the armrest, likely for the past several minutes. “Sorry.” After a pause, he added, “Say, Doctor, how does this thing work again?”
“A funny little gadget, that one is,” the Doctor began, in the bordering-on-unintelligible rapidity that let you know he would be going on for a while. “Fantastically useful if you don’t have a TARDIS, incredibly risky if you have anything even slightly higher quality to use. Think of it as a sort of space hopper that takes you wherever you want to go-give or take a few decades. The higher your concentration and the more specific your mental picture of where you’re going, the better your results. This little red button here does the actual transport. This lever here, on the other hand…”
Once the Doctor got into his technical jargon, Rory tuned out. The Vortex Manipulator looked to him like a sort of wristwatch, only with two little metal plates with gears and buttons on them instead of the face of the clock. More importantly, it looked like a smaller, simpler version of time travel, one that even a layman like himself could use. An idea began to form in Rory’s mind, and the more he thought about it, the more he liked it.
Eventually he looked up again, to find that the Doctor had wandered off somewhere and Amy was still sitting in the corner, flipping through greeting cards they had received. “I’ll be back in just a minute, sweetheart,” he called to her and, upon receiving a quiet grunt of approval, grabbed the Vortex Manipulator and wandered off.
“Hey, if the Doctor gets to use time travel for his present to Amy…” he murmured. He picked up a rose from one of the many bouquets now decorating the TARDIS, remembered when he had first fallen for her, and pressed the little red button.
~
“Oh, wow, Rory, I don’t…” Rory threw himself flat against the wall of the house and slowly peered around the corner. He was at Amy’s house, and standing on the front steps were two very familiar figures. The girl with her back to him, all miniskirt and red hair shining in the sunlight, was clearly a younger Amy Pond, gorgeous as ever. Facing her was a teenage boy, gangly, pimpled, and awkward; Rory would recognize his sixteen-year-old self anywhere.
“I mean,” Amy was telling younger Rory, with words that his older self could still recite from memory, “it’s just so sudden, so out of nowhere. Could you give me some time to think about it?”
Twenty-one-year-old Rory watched silently in remembered pain and anguish as his teenage self, shoulders slumped, eyes blank, walked away. The love of his life, the first girl he had asked out since old Sally Angelo when he was thirteen, had just practically turned him down, and he could barely face himself. “Stop! Wait!” Rory wanted to shout at that dejected figure of a boy. “She’s going to do it! She’s going to say yes!” Instead, he had a better idea.
Rory waited for Amy to leave the front of the house and wander down into the garden in the backyard. Then, he snuck in through the unlocked front door and up to Amy’s bedroom. Once there, he glanced around and smiled; the room looked just like it always did. Books and CDs littered every surface, and the walls were covered in photographs, though significantly fewer of them than there would be five years later. Rory suddenly felt sixteen again and couldn’t wait to make all of those fantastic memories happen.
Digging though piles of paper on the desk, Rory unearthed a blank piece of paper and a pen, and scribbled a short note. Then, he laid the single, long-stem red rose he had brought with him on Amy’s bed, leaving the piece of paper on her pillow. Written in Rory’s untidy scrawl were the words, “Please say yes.”
A few seconds later, Rory heard the soft wooden thumping that meant someone was coming up the stairs. Quickly, he hid himself in the closet, leaving the door open just a crack. Amy came bounding into the room, then stopped dead as she saw the rose and the note. She was still for a long time, then sighed and gave a little smile. “Oh Rory…” she breathed.
Rory grinned and pressed the little red button.
~
Rory practically skipped out of the convenience store, whistling cheerfully, a heart-shaped box under one arm. Oh, how Mr. Henderson had been surprised at how “mature” he looked, the boy he had known since Rory was an infant. Rory was even a little insulted; surely he hadn’t still looked that bad when he was eighteen, right?
Still, he decided not to worry about it. It was February 14, 2007, the Worst Valentine’s Day Ever, and he was determined to change it.
Rory walked back to his house, greeting various neighbors and friends along the way. Once he got there, he went inside, brushed off his mother’s call of “Do your laundry!” from the living room, and hurried up to his own bedroom. Unlike Amy’s, his looked significantly different from the way it did now. At eighteen, Rory was still decorating his room with magazine cutouts of cars and famous actresses in a misguided attempt to look “cool” in front of the other boys at school, and dirty clothing and trash covered the wooden floor. But there, sitting on the dresser, was what he was looking for.
It was another heart-shaped box of chocolates, just like the one he had bought at the store but pink instead of gold and without a red ribbon tied in a bow around it. Rory swapped the boxes, and wrote another little note on a scratch piece of paper from the room: “Amy’s allergic to coconut. Try these instead.”
He wasn’t sure exactly what his eighteen-year-old self would think when he saw the note, but he was sure no harm would come of his meddling. After all, the Doctor interfered with the past in much worse ways than this, and he always turned out fine. And a Valentine’s Day not spent in the hospital watching his girlfriend recover from anaphylactic shock would certainly be a wonderful gift to Amy and to himself.
Rory clapped his hands a few times, pleased with himself for a job well done, and pressed the little red button.
~
Rory Williams stood in the middle of the most expensive jewelry store in Leadworth, at dawn on the day of Amy’s twenty-first birthday. The first time around, he had gotten her a miniature replica of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers as a present, but he knew he could definitely do better now.
He scanned the display cases around the empty store and soon settled on the most beautiful piece of jewelry in the room: a fourteen karat diamond-studded gold necklace, priced at a whopping two thousand pounds. Rory had left his credit card in the TARDIS, but that was no problem for a seasoned time traveler like himself. Using the Vortex Manipulator, he jumped himself into the locked back room of the store and found the keys to the display case. He came back out, unlocked the glass box, and picked up the necklace, feeling the weight of his love for Amy in his hands. Hurriedly, he stuffed it into a pocket, and once more pressed the button on his wrist.
~
Now it was evening, in the kitchen of Rory’s brand new flat. He had cooked dinner himself for Amy, and from the looks of it, his past self was just finishing up. A few pots on the stove were filled with simmering concoctions of varying levels of edibility, and the sink was piled high with used dishes and utensils.
Rory knew just what to do. Heading into the dining room, he walked over to the place set for Amy. He reached into his pocket and was just about to pull out the necklace to leave at her seat when a very familiar voice shouted, “Oy!”
Rory straightened and turned, only to find himself face to face with a nearly identical version of himself, wearing a ratty old t-shirt and stained apron. “Hello, Rory,” he said hesitantly, and chuckled slightly.
“Who are you?” his duplicate replied. “What are you? Why are you in my flat?” Before he could respond, his younger self slammed into him, wrestling him down to the floor. Rory kneed him in the stomach, freeing himself enough to stand back up. That only lasted a few seconds, however, as the younger Rory followed him and promptly punched him in the face. Rory staggered back a few steps and hit a wall, taking the opportunity to inch around a corner and out of the room.
“I think it’s about time to be heading back, don’t you?” Rory gaped in shock at the miraculous figure standing in front of him. It was the Doctor, back in his normal garb of jacket, suspenders, and bowtie, but still with that absurd purple fez hat and what appeared to be a small rose bush growing out of the top of it. “Here, Mr. Pond,” he said, grabbing Rory by the arm. Then he pushed up the sleeve of his jacket to display a second Vortex Manipulator, and pressed his own little red button.
~
Back in the TARDIS, Rory collapsed on the floor and began taking loud, heaving breaths. “Now then,” the Doctor said, reaching into Rory’s pocket and retrieving the necklace, “why don’t I return this, and you go try to explain everything to Amy?” Without waiting for a reply, the Doctor hit the button on his wrist and vanished.
After a few moments, Rory managed to get himself into a standing position and stagger into the main control room of the TARDIS. Amy was still curled up in a corner looking at presents, just as he had left her only minutes before. He walked over to join her, but remained standing, staring at her face, unable to speak. Eventually, he reached out to brush the hair out of her face.
“I love you,” he said.
Title: Roses and Chocolate
Word Count: 2,113
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Rory/Amy
Spoilers: up through The Big Bang
Rating: PG
A/N: Some adorable Rory/Amy fluff, inspired by the season finale. Title is subject to change if I think of anything better.
~
“Amy, were you planning on changing out of that dress at some point?”
“No.”
“Hm. Well, it’s just that it’s hardly practical to go flitting about the universe in that mountain of satin and lace. Wouldn’t you say, Rory?”
“Huh?” Rory looked up and blinked a few times. He had been too busy staring in awe at the extraordinary beauty that was Amy, his Amy, all fire and ice with that ginger hair and that pale skin, perfectly paired with the cascading layers of embroidered white cloth (he was sure there was some sort of fancy technical name for the style but he didn’t care), to really follow the conversation being had in the center of the TARDIS between his two favorite people in the world. There, on one side, was Amy, the love of his life, and on the other-
Maybe he should have been paying more attention. The Doctor had taken off his corsage, which was now adorning one of the controls of the time machine, but he had somehow managed to acquire a vibrant purple fez hat, around which he had tied that shawl he had worn to the wedding-a tallit, was it?-in a large, gnarled knot. Still in his tuxedo and bowtie, with arms held out in supplication, the Doctor was nothing but the final realization of Amy’s Raggedy Doctor of so long ago, dressed for her wedding day.
“Oh wonderful, they’ve both gone mad with happiness!” In the Doctor’s absurd ensemble and huge grin, he did not sound the least bit sarcastic. “Now then, my lovely newlyweds, where shall I take you for your honeymoon? Paris at the opening of the Eiffel Tower? The Sistine Chapel while Michelangelo was still painting it? The beautiful ice cities of the Ood Sphere? Just consider it your wedding present, from me.”
“I don’t know,” Amy replied softly, staring off into space. “What do you think, honey?”
“It doesn’t make the slightest bit of difference to me,” Rory said, and smiled. He couldn’t remember ever being this happy in his life.
“All right, then,” the Doctor said abruptly, jumping in the middle of and breaking the couple’s loving gaze. “Once you’re done being all gooey, we can go. Until then, I think I’ll go press a bunch of exciting little buttons in the engine room and leave you two on your own. And stop playing with the Vortex Manipulator, Rory, it’s dangerous.”
Rory jumped slightly in his chair and looked down; he hadn’t realized he had been playing with the device left on the armrest, likely for the past several minutes. “Sorry.” After a pause, he added, “Say, Doctor, how does this thing work again?”
“A funny little gadget, that one is,” the Doctor began, in the bordering-on-unintelligible rapidity that let you know he would be going on for a while. “Fantastically useful if you don’t have a TARDIS, incredibly risky if you have anything even slightly higher quality to use. Think of it as a sort of space hopper that takes you wherever you want to go-give or take a few decades. The higher your concentration and the more specific your mental picture of where you’re going, the better your results. This little red button here does the actual transport. This lever here, on the other hand…”
Once the Doctor got into his technical jargon, Rory tuned out. The Vortex Manipulator looked to him like a sort of wristwatch, only with two little metal plates with gears and buttons on them instead of the face of the clock. More importantly, it looked like a smaller, simpler version of time travel, one that even a layman like himself could use. An idea began to form in Rory’s mind, and the more he thought about it, the more he liked it.
Eventually he looked up again, to find that the Doctor had wandered off somewhere and Amy was still sitting in the corner, flipping through greeting cards they had received. “I’ll be back in just a minute, sweetheart,” he called to her and, upon receiving a quiet grunt of approval, grabbed the Vortex Manipulator and wandered off.
“Hey, if the Doctor gets to use time travel for his present to Amy…” he murmured. He picked up a rose from one of the many bouquets now decorating the TARDIS, remembered when he had first fallen for her, and pressed the little red button.
~
“Oh, wow, Rory, I don’t…” Rory threw himself flat against the wall of the house and slowly peered around the corner. He was at Amy’s house, and standing on the front steps were two very familiar figures. The girl with her back to him, all miniskirt and red hair shining in the sunlight, was clearly a younger Amy Pond, gorgeous as ever. Facing her was a teenage boy, gangly, pimpled, and awkward; Rory would recognize his sixteen-year-old self anywhere.
“I mean,” Amy was telling younger Rory, with words that his older self could still recite from memory, “it’s just so sudden, so out of nowhere. Could you give me some time to think about it?”
Twenty-one-year-old Rory watched silently in remembered pain and anguish as his teenage self, shoulders slumped, eyes blank, walked away. The love of his life, the first girl he had asked out since old Sally Angelo when he was thirteen, had just practically turned him down, and he could barely face himself. “Stop! Wait!” Rory wanted to shout at that dejected figure of a boy. “She’s going to do it! She’s going to say yes!” Instead, he had a better idea.
Rory waited for Amy to leave the front of the house and wander down into the garden in the backyard. Then, he snuck in through the unlocked front door and up to Amy’s bedroom. Once there, he glanced around and smiled; the room looked just like it always did. Books and CDs littered every surface, and the walls were covered in photographs, though significantly fewer of them than there would be five years later. Rory suddenly felt sixteen again and couldn’t wait to make all of those fantastic memories happen.
Digging though piles of paper on the desk, Rory unearthed a blank piece of paper and a pen, and scribbled a short note. Then, he laid the single, long-stem red rose he had brought with him on Amy’s bed, leaving the piece of paper on her pillow. Written in Rory’s untidy scrawl were the words, “Please say yes.”
A few seconds later, Rory heard the soft wooden thumping that meant someone was coming up the stairs. Quickly, he hid himself in the closet, leaving the door open just a crack. Amy came bounding into the room, then stopped dead as she saw the rose and the note. She was still for a long time, then sighed and gave a little smile. “Oh Rory…” she breathed.
Rory grinned and pressed the little red button.
~
Rory practically skipped out of the convenience store, whistling cheerfully, a heart-shaped box under one arm. Oh, how Mr. Henderson had been surprised at how “mature” he looked, the boy he had known since Rory was an infant. Rory was even a little insulted; surely he hadn’t still looked that bad when he was eighteen, right?
Still, he decided not to worry about it. It was February 14, 2007, the Worst Valentine’s Day Ever, and he was determined to change it.
Rory walked back to his house, greeting various neighbors and friends along the way. Once he got there, he went inside, brushed off his mother’s call of “Do your laundry!” from the living room, and hurried up to his own bedroom. Unlike Amy’s, his looked significantly different from the way it did now. At eighteen, Rory was still decorating his room with magazine cutouts of cars and famous actresses in a misguided attempt to look “cool” in front of the other boys at school, and dirty clothing and trash covered the wooden floor. But there, sitting on the dresser, was what he was looking for.
It was another heart-shaped box of chocolates, just like the one he had bought at the store but pink instead of gold and without a red ribbon tied in a bow around it. Rory swapped the boxes, and wrote another little note on a scratch piece of paper from the room: “Amy’s allergic to coconut. Try these instead.”
He wasn’t sure exactly what his eighteen-year-old self would think when he saw the note, but he was sure no harm would come of his meddling. After all, the Doctor interfered with the past in much worse ways than this, and he always turned out fine. And a Valentine’s Day not spent in the hospital watching his girlfriend recover from anaphylactic shock would certainly be a wonderful gift to Amy and to himself.
Rory clapped his hands a few times, pleased with himself for a job well done, and pressed the little red button.
~
Rory Williams stood in the middle of the most expensive jewelry store in Leadworth, at dawn on the day of Amy’s twenty-first birthday. The first time around, he had gotten her a miniature replica of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers as a present, but he knew he could definitely do better now.
He scanned the display cases around the empty store and soon settled on the most beautiful piece of jewelry in the room: a fourteen karat diamond-studded gold necklace, priced at a whopping two thousand pounds. Rory had left his credit card in the TARDIS, but that was no problem for a seasoned time traveler like himself. Using the Vortex Manipulator, he jumped himself into the locked back room of the store and found the keys to the display case. He came back out, unlocked the glass box, and picked up the necklace, feeling the weight of his love for Amy in his hands. Hurriedly, he stuffed it into a pocket, and once more pressed the button on his wrist.
~
Now it was evening, in the kitchen of Rory’s brand new flat. He had cooked dinner himself for Amy, and from the looks of it, his past self was just finishing up. A few pots on the stove were filled with simmering concoctions of varying levels of edibility, and the sink was piled high with used dishes and utensils.
Rory knew just what to do. Heading into the dining room, he walked over to the place set for Amy. He reached into his pocket and was just about to pull out the necklace to leave at her seat when a very familiar voice shouted, “Oy!”
Rory straightened and turned, only to find himself face to face with a nearly identical version of himself, wearing a ratty old t-shirt and stained apron. “Hello, Rory,” he said hesitantly, and chuckled slightly.
“Who are you?” his duplicate replied. “What are you? Why are you in my flat?” Before he could respond, his younger self slammed into him, wrestling him down to the floor. Rory kneed him in the stomach, freeing himself enough to stand back up. That only lasted a few seconds, however, as the younger Rory followed him and promptly punched him in the face. Rory staggered back a few steps and hit a wall, taking the opportunity to inch around a corner and out of the room.
“I think it’s about time to be heading back, don’t you?” Rory gaped in shock at the miraculous figure standing in front of him. It was the Doctor, back in his normal garb of jacket, suspenders, and bowtie, but still with that absurd purple fez hat and what appeared to be a small rose bush growing out of the top of it. “Here, Mr. Pond,” he said, grabbing Rory by the arm. Then he pushed up the sleeve of his jacket to display a second Vortex Manipulator, and pressed his own little red button.
~
Back in the TARDIS, Rory collapsed on the floor and began taking loud, heaving breaths. “Now then,” the Doctor said, reaching into Rory’s pocket and retrieving the necklace, “why don’t I return this, and you go try to explain everything to Amy?” Without waiting for a reply, the Doctor hit the button on his wrist and vanished.
After a few moments, Rory managed to get himself into a standing position and stagger into the main control room of the TARDIS. Amy was still curled up in a corner looking at presents, just as he had left her only minutes before. He walked over to join her, but remained standing, staring at her face, unable to speak. Eventually, he reached out to brush the hair out of her face.
“I love you,” he said.