fanfiction: like a name in a fairytale
He’s waiting when she opens her eyes. His clothes are different, and the first thing she says to him is:
“Oh my God, you’ve gone native!”
Rory’s laugh cracks halfway through, but even so it’s just as familiar and beloved as ever, and then he’s pulling her into his arms.
“God I missed you,” he mumbles into her hair, and she pushes away and fixes him with her best ‘answer me honestly’ stare.
“How long?” she demands.
“It wasn’t so bad,” he hedges, and his mouth does that weird slanty thing it does when he’s being evasive.
“How. Long.”
“About three years,” he admits, and she sighs and leans back into his embrace. “Really not that much in the grand scheme of two thousand years.”
She kisses him, soundly, and then adds, “He won’t… he can’t come for us, he said. So I guess we’re kinda stuck with each other.”
Rory squeezes her a little tighter and gently pinches her waist.
“No one I’d rather be stuck with,” he teases, and she presses another quick kiss to his lips. “What now?” she asks.
“Well, I’ve been thinking…” Rory says, in that long, drawn-out way he does when he’s not sure she’s going to like something, “and, uh, we always wanted kids, right?”
Amy frowns at him, because he knows… as well as she does…
“I thought we could maybe, you know, start an orphanage. It’s 1941, by the way. I, uh, apparently I lost an uncle who left me quite a lot of money in 1940, so we can… well, there’s this big old house in Florida that just needs buying and fixing up. It’s called Graystark Hall.”
She sucks in a sharp breath. “Rory, we can’t-”
“No,” he agrees, and bites his lip, “but we can make sure it’s… for her…”
Amy closes her eyes.
“And we can help lots of children, I mean, I thought maybe… I haven’t done anything yet, I was… I was waiting to see if you’d come and then I was going to ask you what you thought, damn, I’ve kind of botched this haven’t I?”
“Rory,” Amy says, and she pulls away because she wants to look him in the face as she says this. “You are the stupidest man I’ve met in my entire life.”
And Rory grins, because he understands what she means by that.
***
Greystark Hall
With love and hope for all children who walk through these doors.
-A&R