Title: Fashion Choices
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: G
Prompt: #021 - Friends
Claim: The Time War
Table:
Here Spoilers: Season 5 Finale
Characters: Eleventh Doctor, Rory
Summary: Rory has a hard time getting what the Doctor is talking about when evidently the Doctor has no clue himself.
Word count: 597
Note: This might make no sense unless you know that a) Rory, for some reason, terribly reminds me of Fitz Kreiner from the Eighth Doctor novels, and b) in my personal canon the ninth Doctor's leather jacket used to be Fitz's "lucky coat".
“You know,” the Doctor says one day, when he’s wearing something even weirder than his usual clothes, “you remind me of someone I knew before.”
“Yeah? Might be me.” Rory feels like giving the Doctor a meaningful look, so he does that. He also shifts a little uncomfortably, because having the Doctor’s undivided attention on him does that to a person. “You know, we’ve met before. Like, this morning. For breakfast.” Because the Doctor has a habit for forgetting things like that.
“No, no,” the Doctor says easily, still staring a little too hard, and then he does that thing where he runs around a person (except he does it slowly, which Rory suspects classifies as walking, hard as it is to associate that word with this particular man) to look at them from all angles. It’s not the first time he’s done it with Rory and it always makes him fear he didn’t clean his ears properly this morning or is wearing his shirt inside out, which is silly because he has been able to dress properly since he was five. “You see, if something big happens, like your species being torn out of history and stuff like that, you might lose some memories every now and then, because they get torn away along with them,” the Doctor explains. “It kinda makes it hard to keep track of your own lives,” he adds as an afterthought and is still staring.
“You know, it might still have been me,” Rory tries again. “We’ve met before, remember? Living plastic? That was me. And the guy who was not plastic you knew before the plastic? Also me. And I guess the universe nearly ending qualifies as something big.” Which would solve this riddle quite neatly and be, of course, far, far too easy.
“No, you don’t fit.” The Doctor finally stops circling him and only stares now, except not really at Rory.
“How would you know, if you can’t remember what you can’t remember?” asks Rory and feels slightly clever.
“Because you don’t fit,” the Doctor repeats in that slightly impatient voice, as if Rory wasn’t getting something obvious. “There is a memory shaped hole around me and you don’t fill it.”
“Obviously,” Rory replies, wondering if he has just been insulted. He’s feeling insulted in any case.
Having come to the conclusion that Rory is not missing from his mind and shared it, the Doctor apparently is all done with the topic and turns away to fiddle with his console, at the same time humming something under his breath, the same fragment of an unfamiliar melody over and over again.
Rory is quite annoyed and slightly unnerved and feels like insulting someone back. “I wouldn’t dream of insulting your fashion choices,” he begins - except he would dream of it, and has, and is going to do it - “but that leather jacket really, really doesn’t go with the bowtie.”
Instead of being appropriately insulted, the Doctor just looks down on the offending piece of clothing and runs his hand over the leather. “It reminds me of someone.” And they’re back to that again.
“Might be you,” Rory smirks. He has seen the pictures of the guy in exactly that jacket after all, the guy who the Doctor claims has been himself. After everything he’s seen, Rory is almost inclined to believe that.
“Might be,” the Doctor agrees thoughtfully. “But I doubt it.”
Then he goes back to humming and Rory goes back to Amy to complain about the Time Lord for the rest of the day.
September 19, 2010