FIC: Aimless (7/?)
Category: Fanfiction
Title: Aimless (7/?)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters/Pairing: Rory/Eleven, Amy, mentions of OMC
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Mentions of slash, AU
Spoilers: Possible mentions of all early Series 5 episodes
Word Count: 2,061
Chapter Summary: The virus gets smart and Rory gets scared.
A/N: I'M BACK! So sorry about the wait, there was just so much going on! I participated in National Novel Writing Month (and won!) this past November, and I had hoped to get another chapter up before that started because I knew it was going to take away all my time, but I was so busy between school and preparing for that, that I just didn't have the time. Then I meant to get it up during December, and I couldn't find the time to write. Oh well, here I am now! Sorry if this chapter's kind of dry. It came out a little forced for me, but I hope you all enjoy anyway. :)
Chapter 6
Rory wakes with a jolt, an inexplicable panic settling in as his hands suddenly go clammy. Something feels wrong, he realizes, and he hastily shoves himself up into a sitting position, his back pressed against the wall. The Doctor’s not there, but Rory wasn’t really expecting him to be.
He tries to calm his breathing enough that he can listen for the sound of knocking, but there’s nothing. With a relieved sigh that’s half a sob, he lets his head fall back against the wall.
The virus is stupid, that much is a relief. The Doctor explained to him, while they were both trying to recover after Rory’s rocky seventh year of life, that it could see all the same memories they could, but it couldn’t get at them. It makes Rory think of a little kid, tall enough to see the cookie jar sitting on top of the counter, but just short enough that he can reach it, and there’s nothing around for him to boost himself up with. The Doctor then went on to explain that it’s through the memories it sees that the virus picks the people it uses to try to trick Rory into opening the door.
The thing is utterly stupid, though. It’s only picked two people who’ve managed to get at Rory at all - Mum and Dad. But other than them, it’s picked Mels (which, no; if anything, that only served to push him further away from the door) and Adam Riley (which is possibly an even worse choice than the first, though neither the virus nor the Doctor knows that).
Rory keeps waiting for it to use Amy, but it doesn’t. He wonders if it’s so thick that it doesn’t realize who she is, or maybe the name change confused it - the switch from Amelia to Amy.
He tries to close his eyes, to let himself rest a bit, but he’s in that weird state of tired where you’re so exhausted that you can’t fall asleep. Eventually he admits failure and gets up to stretch his legs.
He’s probably walked about a mile in laps around the tiny gray room when the door opens. Rory always tenses when it does. He’s constantly expecting the virus to come in (he’s not sure what it looks like, but he pictures it like a menacing cloud of black with a jagged purple smile and never-ending pits for eyes) whenever the door opens, but this time, just as every time before, it’s not.
The Doctor looks more tired than any of the previous times, and his knees give out before he’s even all the way inside. Surprising himself with his speed, Rory just barely manages to catch him before he can crumple completely to the ground and pulls him away from the door so he can close it firmly.
Slowly, he lowers the Doctor to the floor, his heart pounding loudly in his chest. The Doctor lets out a faint groan and presses the palms of his hands to his eyes. Rory just hovers anxiously, not knowing what else to do.
“Don’t worry about me,” the Doctor croaks out. “Just need a minute.”
“Right, of course,” Rory responds automatically. To himself, he thinks that the Doctor needs more than just a minute - he needs a whole year.
Finally, the Doctor lowers his hands from his eyes and cracks his neck. Then, like that’s all he needed, he hops up to his feet. “Right, then, best be back at it,” he says. His voice is too cheerful, just a shade too high. He sways a bit on his feet.
Rory’s hand flashes out and latches onto the hem of the Doctor’s sleeve. With surprising strength (maybe to match his surprising speed from before), he pulls the Doctor back down, and the ever-so-graceful Time Lord lands heavily in a heap on the floor next to him.
“Rory!” he protests, and Rory just fixes him with a flat glare.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he informs the Doctor. “You’re practically dead on your feet. Even you’ve got to slow down and get some sleep every now and then.”
“Maybe if we were in the real world, yes.” The Doctor grimaces, like he didn’t want to admit that, but had no other choice. “But we’re not. We’re inside your head.” He shakes his own-shaggy-haired-head. “This is all just mental exertion. About the equivalent of trying to build a TARDIS from scratch. I’ll be fine once I’m back in my own body.”
Rory doesn’t like the sound of that, but he’s not willing to give in just because the Doctor tells him to. “Doesn’t change the fact that you’re staying till you’ve gotten some rest,” he shoots back, and the Doctor frowns at him, but he doesn’t back down.
Finally, the Doctor sighs and grumbles, “Oh, all right.” Rory tries not to grin triumphantly at his success.
The feeling doesn’t last long, though. They’ve barely been sitting there five minutes when there’s a hollow knocking sound from the other side of the door.
“Oh, God, no,” Rory groans, a helpless, desperate feeling rising up inside him. He buries his face in his hands. He doesn’t want to deal with this anymore. He wants the goddamn virus to find someone else to terrorize. He doesn’t want to be afraid of forgetting everything - Mum, Dad, Amy, the Doctor, all those people in his life. He doesn’t want to be afraid of dying, and then figures that’s pretty hypocritical of him, considering who he runs around with and what they do.
“Ignore it,” the Doctor orders. He’s sitting with his head resting against the wall, the picture of serenity and calm. Rory doesn’t understand how it could possibly not scare him. The thing on the other side of the wall could kill him.
“Isn’t there a way to get rid of it?” Rory asks hopelessly. He just wants it to go away.
The Doctor shakes his head without opening his eyes. “No. You just have to wait it out, Rory, I’m sorry. If there were any other way, believe me, I would tell you.”
“Rory?” calls a voice from the other side of the door, and Rory’s blood runs cold.
Well, he supposes in the back of his mind, it’s finally figured out Amy, then.
“Rory, are you there?” the virus calls in Amy’s voice, and Rory feels an inexplicable rage he hadn’t felt in accompaniment to any of the others. This is Amy, he thinks. This is his Amy, his best friend. He wants that thing to drop her voice, to go back to knocking. He’d rather it was his mother’s voice, his father’s, hell, even Adam Riley’s, than Amy’s.
It doesn’t just make him angry. It makes him ache for home.
After a few minutes of the virus’s whining, begging, and pleading, Rory realizes, with a jolt, that it’s not Amy’s voice, technically. It’s Amelia’s-the little girl who sat with him on the swing set and had play dates with him even though all her friends told him he was weird. It makes him feel sick, like he’s about to lose his lunch. Hearing Amelia’s voice is even worse than Amy’s.
“Ignore it,” the Doctor repeats, like he knows what Rory’s thinking, like he knows that the fact that it’s Amelia’s voice, the last remnant of Rory’s childhood, is tearing Rory up inside.
But he tries. He really does. It aches, it hurts, to ignore that voice, especially once she starts crying - because they always cry - but he knows he has to ignore it. He has to stay away from it. He drops his face into his hands and stuffs his fingers in his ears and tries to pretend it’s just not there.
At some point, the Doctor slides up next to him and slips an arm around his shoulders, pulling him close and resting his chin on top of Rory’s head. He lets the Doctor rock him slowly back and forth until eventually, his eyes begin to slide shut and he drifts off to sleep.
The next time he wakes, it’s because he’s being pulled into yet another memory.
--
They’re thirteen and Amy is skipping her French class to sit with Rory, who has a different lunch than she does. With a school as small as theirs, one wouldn’t imagine that there would even be a need for separate lunches, but that’s not really up to them.
“What happened to your face?” Amy asks when she walks up and plops down next to him at his lonely, empty lunch table.
Rory grimaces and rubs at his eye, even though it aches when he touches it. “You know, the usual.”
Amy scowls in his direction. “I’ll rip off his-”
“Amy.”
“Well, he’s a coward!” she snaps. “He can’t just politely disagree, he’s gotta harass you and be stupid about it. He just… ugh!” She crosses her arms over her early-bloomer chest - not that Rory’s really paid attention, to be honest. He’s spent too much time trying very hard to ignore the fact that Jeremy Jefferson, despite his complete lack of attention in Rory’s direction, is being treated very, very well by puberty. Not that he’s really paid attention, of course.
“There’s nothing to disagree on,” Rory mumbles, but Amy doesn’t seem to really notice. She’s too caught up in her tirade.
“Then again,” she says, “even if he did just politely disagree, he’d still be a stuck-up snob. If he can’t accept people who are even a little different from him, then he really doesn’t deserve to even live on this planet.”
“Amy, that’s horrible!” he protests. Okay, so he doesn’t exactly likeAdam Riley (no one does, even though the popular kids won’t admit it; and he has even more reason to than they do), but that doesn’t mean the guy deserves to die.
“It’s true!” Amy ducks suddenly as a teacher passes by, and then waits for Rory’s casual hand signal before she pops back up. With a sigh, she admits, “Maybe you’re right. Either way, if he hits you again, I’m gonna rip off his testicles and feed them to the slugs we’re raising in biology.”
“Amy, no one says testicles.” Rory makes a face. “And what kind of biology class raises slugs?”
“Remedial biology,” Amy says with a shrug.
Rory gives her a flat look. “Maybe if you actually showed up to class there wouldn’t be this issue with you having to take remedial biology, yeah? Like right now, don’t you have a test in French?” He’d heard a couple other kids in one of his earlier classes talking about it.
“That’s why I’m skipping, stupid.” Amy shakes her head.
“You’re gonna fail French just like you failed biology,” he informs her, but she just smirks.
“Please,” she says with one of her patented Amy Pond looks. This one Rory knows well. It’s ‘I’m Amy Pond and I get what I want’. “I’m Amy Pond. I get what I want,” she says.
“Your teacher’s a woman,” he points out. It’s easy for Amy to charm the male teachers - they all either are afraid of her or think she’s little-kid-cute. But the female teachers are wary of her, with the exception of the ancient librarian, who’s let Amy and Rory hide out in her office on more than one occasion while waiting for Adam Riley and his groupies to clear out so they can get home safely.
Amy waves a dismissive hand. “Doesn’t matter, she loves me. She’s like thirty and it’s her first year teaching. We all get away with everything.”
Rory just sighs, “You should really go before someone catches you. You really can’t be getting in trouble all the time like this. Your aunt’s gonna get mad.”
“Ha! She never gets mad at me.”
“Lucky,” Rory grumbles, thinking of his own dad and how angry he got the one time Rory got in trouble. “But seriously, go.”
“You’re no fun anymore,” Amy groans. Then she leans over and gives him a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll see you later, yeah? We’re going to your house?”
“Don’t we always?” Rory points out, which just earns him an eye roll and a wave over the shoulder as she stealthily slips out of the lunch room. After that, it’s just Rory at the big round table, and he sighs and turns to his backpack to do homework.
Chapter 8
Title: Aimless (7/?)
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters/Pairing: Rory/Eleven, Amy, mentions of OMC
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Mentions of slash, AU
Spoilers: Possible mentions of all early Series 5 episodes
Word Count: 2,061
Chapter Summary: The virus gets smart and Rory gets scared.
A/N: I'M BACK! So sorry about the wait, there was just so much going on! I participated in National Novel Writing Month (and won!) this past November, and I had hoped to get another chapter up before that started because I knew it was going to take away all my time, but I was so busy between school and preparing for that, that I just didn't have the time. Then I meant to get it up during December, and I couldn't find the time to write. Oh well, here I am now! Sorry if this chapter's kind of dry. It came out a little forced for me, but I hope you all enjoy anyway. :)
Chapter 6
Rory wakes with a jolt, an inexplicable panic settling in as his hands suddenly go clammy. Something feels wrong, he realizes, and he hastily shoves himself up into a sitting position, his back pressed against the wall. The Doctor’s not there, but Rory wasn’t really expecting him to be.
He tries to calm his breathing enough that he can listen for the sound of knocking, but there’s nothing. With a relieved sigh that’s half a sob, he lets his head fall back against the wall.
The virus is stupid, that much is a relief. The Doctor explained to him, while they were both trying to recover after Rory’s rocky seventh year of life, that it could see all the same memories they could, but it couldn’t get at them. It makes Rory think of a little kid, tall enough to see the cookie jar sitting on top of the counter, but just short enough that he can reach it, and there’s nothing around for him to boost himself up with. The Doctor then went on to explain that it’s through the memories it sees that the virus picks the people it uses to try to trick Rory into opening the door.
The thing is utterly stupid, though. It’s only picked two people who’ve managed to get at Rory at all - Mum and Dad. But other than them, it’s picked Mels (which, no; if anything, that only served to push him further away from the door) and Adam Riley (which is possibly an even worse choice than the first, though neither the virus nor the Doctor knows that).
Rory keeps waiting for it to use Amy, but it doesn’t. He wonders if it’s so thick that it doesn’t realize who she is, or maybe the name change confused it - the switch from Amelia to Amy.
He tries to close his eyes, to let himself rest a bit, but he’s in that weird state of tired where you’re so exhausted that you can’t fall asleep. Eventually he admits failure and gets up to stretch his legs.
He’s probably walked about a mile in laps around the tiny gray room when the door opens. Rory always tenses when it does. He’s constantly expecting the virus to come in (he’s not sure what it looks like, but he pictures it like a menacing cloud of black with a jagged purple smile and never-ending pits for eyes) whenever the door opens, but this time, just as every time before, it’s not.
The Doctor looks more tired than any of the previous times, and his knees give out before he’s even all the way inside. Surprising himself with his speed, Rory just barely manages to catch him before he can crumple completely to the ground and pulls him away from the door so he can close it firmly.
Slowly, he lowers the Doctor to the floor, his heart pounding loudly in his chest. The Doctor lets out a faint groan and presses the palms of his hands to his eyes. Rory just hovers anxiously, not knowing what else to do.
“Don’t worry about me,” the Doctor croaks out. “Just need a minute.”
“Right, of course,” Rory responds automatically. To himself, he thinks that the Doctor needs more than just a minute - he needs a whole year.
Finally, the Doctor lowers his hands from his eyes and cracks his neck. Then, like that’s all he needed, he hops up to his feet. “Right, then, best be back at it,” he says. His voice is too cheerful, just a shade too high. He sways a bit on his feet.
Rory’s hand flashes out and latches onto the hem of the Doctor’s sleeve. With surprising strength (maybe to match his surprising speed from before), he pulls the Doctor back down, and the ever-so-graceful Time Lord lands heavily in a heap on the floor next to him.
“Rory!” he protests, and Rory just fixes him with a flat glare.
“You’re not going anywhere,” he informs the Doctor. “You’re practically dead on your feet. Even you’ve got to slow down and get some sleep every now and then.”
“Maybe if we were in the real world, yes.” The Doctor grimaces, like he didn’t want to admit that, but had no other choice. “But we’re not. We’re inside your head.” He shakes his own-shaggy-haired-head. “This is all just mental exertion. About the equivalent of trying to build a TARDIS from scratch. I’ll be fine once I’m back in my own body.”
Rory doesn’t like the sound of that, but he’s not willing to give in just because the Doctor tells him to. “Doesn’t change the fact that you’re staying till you’ve gotten some rest,” he shoots back, and the Doctor frowns at him, but he doesn’t back down.
Finally, the Doctor sighs and grumbles, “Oh, all right.” Rory tries not to grin triumphantly at his success.
The feeling doesn’t last long, though. They’ve barely been sitting there five minutes when there’s a hollow knocking sound from the other side of the door.
“Oh, God, no,” Rory groans, a helpless, desperate feeling rising up inside him. He buries his face in his hands. He doesn’t want to deal with this anymore. He wants the goddamn virus to find someone else to terrorize. He doesn’t want to be afraid of forgetting everything - Mum, Dad, Amy, the Doctor, all those people in his life. He doesn’t want to be afraid of dying, and then figures that’s pretty hypocritical of him, considering who he runs around with and what they do.
“Ignore it,” the Doctor orders. He’s sitting with his head resting against the wall, the picture of serenity and calm. Rory doesn’t understand how it could possibly not scare him. The thing on the other side of the wall could kill him.
“Isn’t there a way to get rid of it?” Rory asks hopelessly. He just wants it to go away.
The Doctor shakes his head without opening his eyes. “No. You just have to wait it out, Rory, I’m sorry. If there were any other way, believe me, I would tell you.”
“Rory?” calls a voice from the other side of the door, and Rory’s blood runs cold.
Well, he supposes in the back of his mind, it’s finally figured out Amy, then.
“Rory, are you there?” the virus calls in Amy’s voice, and Rory feels an inexplicable rage he hadn’t felt in accompaniment to any of the others. This is Amy, he thinks. This is his Amy, his best friend. He wants that thing to drop her voice, to go back to knocking. He’d rather it was his mother’s voice, his father’s, hell, even Adam Riley’s, than Amy’s.
It doesn’t just make him angry. It makes him ache for home.
After a few minutes of the virus’s whining, begging, and pleading, Rory realizes, with a jolt, that it’s not Amy’s voice, technically. It’s Amelia’s-the little girl who sat with him on the swing set and had play dates with him even though all her friends told him he was weird. It makes him feel sick, like he’s about to lose his lunch. Hearing Amelia’s voice is even worse than Amy’s.
“Ignore it,” the Doctor repeats, like he knows what Rory’s thinking, like he knows that the fact that it’s Amelia’s voice, the last remnant of Rory’s childhood, is tearing Rory up inside.
But he tries. He really does. It aches, it hurts, to ignore that voice, especially once she starts crying - because they always cry - but he knows he has to ignore it. He has to stay away from it. He drops his face into his hands and stuffs his fingers in his ears and tries to pretend it’s just not there.
At some point, the Doctor slides up next to him and slips an arm around his shoulders, pulling him close and resting his chin on top of Rory’s head. He lets the Doctor rock him slowly back and forth until eventually, his eyes begin to slide shut and he drifts off to sleep.
The next time he wakes, it’s because he’s being pulled into yet another memory.
--
They’re thirteen and Amy is skipping her French class to sit with Rory, who has a different lunch than she does. With a school as small as theirs, one wouldn’t imagine that there would even be a need for separate lunches, but that’s not really up to them.
“What happened to your face?” Amy asks when she walks up and plops down next to him at his lonely, empty lunch table.
Rory grimaces and rubs at his eye, even though it aches when he touches it. “You know, the usual.”
Amy scowls in his direction. “I’ll rip off his-”
“Amy.”
“Well, he’s a coward!” she snaps. “He can’t just politely disagree, he’s gotta harass you and be stupid about it. He just… ugh!” She crosses her arms over her early-bloomer chest - not that Rory’s really paid attention, to be honest. He’s spent too much time trying very hard to ignore the fact that Jeremy Jefferson, despite his complete lack of attention in Rory’s direction, is being treated very, very well by puberty. Not that he’s really paid attention, of course.
“There’s nothing to disagree on,” Rory mumbles, but Amy doesn’t seem to really notice. She’s too caught up in her tirade.
“Then again,” she says, “even if he did just politely disagree, he’d still be a stuck-up snob. If he can’t accept people who are even a little different from him, then he really doesn’t deserve to even live on this planet.”
“Amy, that’s horrible!” he protests. Okay, so he doesn’t exactly likeAdam Riley (no one does, even though the popular kids won’t admit it; and he has even more reason to than they do), but that doesn’t mean the guy deserves to die.
“It’s true!” Amy ducks suddenly as a teacher passes by, and then waits for Rory’s casual hand signal before she pops back up. With a sigh, she admits, “Maybe you’re right. Either way, if he hits you again, I’m gonna rip off his testicles and feed them to the slugs we’re raising in biology.”
“Amy, no one says testicles.” Rory makes a face. “And what kind of biology class raises slugs?”
“Remedial biology,” Amy says with a shrug.
Rory gives her a flat look. “Maybe if you actually showed up to class there wouldn’t be this issue with you having to take remedial biology, yeah? Like right now, don’t you have a test in French?” He’d heard a couple other kids in one of his earlier classes talking about it.
“That’s why I’m skipping, stupid.” Amy shakes her head.
“You’re gonna fail French just like you failed biology,” he informs her, but she just smirks.
“Please,” she says with one of her patented Amy Pond looks. This one Rory knows well. It’s ‘I’m Amy Pond and I get what I want’. “I’m Amy Pond. I get what I want,” she says.
“Your teacher’s a woman,” he points out. It’s easy for Amy to charm the male teachers - they all either are afraid of her or think she’s little-kid-cute. But the female teachers are wary of her, with the exception of the ancient librarian, who’s let Amy and Rory hide out in her office on more than one occasion while waiting for Adam Riley and his groupies to clear out so they can get home safely.
Amy waves a dismissive hand. “Doesn’t matter, she loves me. She’s like thirty and it’s her first year teaching. We all get away with everything.”
Rory just sighs, “You should really go before someone catches you. You really can’t be getting in trouble all the time like this. Your aunt’s gonna get mad.”
“Ha! She never gets mad at me.”
“Lucky,” Rory grumbles, thinking of his own dad and how angry he got the one time Rory got in trouble. “But seriously, go.”
“You’re no fun anymore,” Amy groans. Then she leans over and gives him a kiss on the cheek. “I’ll see you later, yeah? We’re going to your house?”
“Don’t we always?” Rory points out, which just earns him an eye roll and a wave over the shoulder as she stealthily slips out of the lunch room. After that, it’s just Rory at the big round table, and he sighs and turns to his backpack to do homework.
Chapter 8