[OOC] Secret Santa 2010

[borncaptain]

Dear Santa,

Thanks so much for doing this ♥ I am super excited! I'm sure you'll do fabulously!! Oh, and if you have any questions, ask away! I am at your beck and call, love.

Love,
Timmy

Comments

[anonymous]

Amy remembered the first wedding day she'd ever pretended to have.

She'd gone upstairs and made herself up with her aunt's makeup. She wasn't allowed in her aunt's room, but rules were debatable when there was fun to be had. She carefully applied her aunt's lipstick, smearing carefully, making sure it all stayed between the lines. She'd seen a lot of kids mess it up. She wasn't going to do that. When Amelia Pond set out to do something, she took it seriously.

She cut holes in an old tablecloth for her head and arms, slipped her feet into her aunt's second best shoes, and carefully hobbled down the stairs. Rory was waiting for her. He was just starting to get gangly then, she remembered. A little out of the shape he was supposed to be. They'd amended the Raggedy Doctor costume just for the occasion, tried to make him look a little less raggedy. Amelia had been sure that the Raggedy Doctor would get dressed up if he was to come to her wedding anyway, not that she'd really want to marry him. He was a bit old for her. Besides, he was far too flighty to be husband material.

It hurt that nobody had believed her. That she had to speak to all those adults with the soothing voices about him, that all that she had of him were the costumes she put on Rory and the drawings she drew late at night, so she'd never forget him. She'd read Peter Pan. When you grew up, you stopped believing in magic, in Neverland, in all the things that made life interesting. She didn't want that to happen to her. She wrote and drew reminders whenever she could, kept them in her suitcase.

Only Rory believed her. He didn't say he believed her, but he listened to her, added his own thoughts. He was a bit older than her, but Amelia had liked him anyway. He was easy to boss around, and when she wasn't bossing him around she found he was easy to talk to. When she'd come home angry from yet another therapist telling her that the Doctor was just a phase she would grow out of, he would sit and listen to her talk about it.

So she'd decided they would get married. And it wasn't going to be a nonsense affair, she was going to dress properly and so was he. Amelia had only ever been to one wedding, one where the whole village was invited and she'd had to wear an uncomfortable dress. She didn't really remember the vows. Rory did, and he told them to her solemnly. She wasn't sure about the one about telling her she looked nice when she was wearing pyjamas was a real one, but the others sounded genuine enough. He would pass. He could marry her, Amelia thought, as she gave him a lipsticky kiss on the cheek to seal the deal.

She had wanted to marry someone who was kind enough to believe. As she'd grown up, long-legged and long-haired, the boys in Leadworth began to take an interest in her. They were the same boys who had used to call her an idiot and whisper behind her back, so she ignored them. Amelia thought that bearing a grudge wasn't as bad a thing as people thought it was. It meant you wouldn't get hurt in the same way twice. Rory came to see her now and then, though he was finishing his A levels and he was really too busy to bother with her. But he never said that. They never played the Raggedy Doctor game anymore. Neither of them really mentioned it, except when he lightly teased her and she made him suffer for it.

Amelia was afraid of growing up. She didn't want to realise one day that what all those adults had said was true, that the Doctor was just a phase, that he had never existed at all. That she had been dreaming. That she was crazy. Some nights, she didn't think about it at all. She talked on the phone to the friends she had begun to have, made her own tea the way she always had, watched the television. Other nights, she stared out at the shed, willing him to just come back and validate every piece of suffering she had ever had in her life.

[anonymous]

The last night she did it was a Sunday. She was sixteen. She took her suitcase outside, of all the things that were the Doctor, and waited. It was a tiny suitcase now, a child's toy. She sat beside it, instead of on top of it, and she waited. She was determined. He would know she was waiting, he would hear it somehow, in the stars. He would come back and take her to see all the beautiful things she had missed out on living in this timeless, dead village. He was going to come back, she told herself. Before now she just hadn't believed hard enough.

He didn't come back. Rory found her sleeping outside, resting her face on her knees. He woke her up, took her indoors, made her some tea. She left the suitcase. She didn't want to see it. He made her beans on toast, told her to call him when she was feeling better, and left her alone. When she had traipsed upstairs to her room, to sleep in a proper bed, ultimately disappointed by her fantasy, she had found the suitcase where she had always kept it, in her closet, where he'd carefully placed it. He hadn't wanted her to be without it. He knew how important it was to her.

He was usually the one who called. When she called him, she found she knew the number off by heart anyway. When he answered the phone, when he said her name, she asked him to call her Amy. Then she asked him on a date.

She made herself Amy, who believed in the real world - boys, and dating, and not living with your head off in the clouds. Amy, who was loud and always tried to get what she wanted. She got used to living in the real world, which was a disappointing place. She dated Rory, because he had accepted her for what she was - whether she wanted to take Spanish classes so she could flirt with foreign boys, or whether she wanted to dress up in naughty outfits for money, he always accepted her. She wasn't serious about him, because Amy wasn't serious about anything yet. She'd believed in something with all of her heart, and she had been disappointed. She had wanted time to be frivolous and unconcerned and young. She'd just gotten used to being bolshy, brash Amy Pond, who told the world exactly what she thought of it. She had gotten used to tucking Amelia Pond, the girl who'd stared at stars and hoped, into a dusty cupboard in the corner of her heart.

Then the Raggedy Doctor came back, was real and solid and irritatingly sure that he'd never left her in the first place. He came back, showed her something spectacular, and he left. And Rory had been there, again. An unassuming man, in an unassuming job, who unassumingly waited for her to turn back and look at him.

When he asked her to marry him, she remembered her tablecloth dress, her aunt's too big shoes. His scraggly Raggedy Doctor tie that they'd pretended was also a groom's marriage garb, and the way he'd caught her elbow when she'd stumbled in the heels she wasn't used to wearing yet. And a little suitcase he'd put back in her closet, understanding that it was part of her.

She said yes. And on the night before her wedding, the Doctor finally came back to take her away. Amelia sat up inside her and smiled, and he took her into the stars, to the life she was always meant to have lived.

[anonymous]

The path had been terrible and beautiful. There were parts she regretted, parts she could never forget, though she'd managed to forget them anyway. She'd flitted through every emotion, remembered losing Rory, finding him again. Her path had been stunted and spotted, like the Doctor's return trips back and forth into her life. Rory's had been different. When the Doctor came back, when they remembered the Doctor, Rory was still solid and real and human but she could see the centuries she had stood outside her box and waited for her weighting his eyes.

She was a married woman. She slow danced with Rory, and she looked at the Doctor, who looked back at her. The smile on his face was genuinely happy, or achingly lonely. She understood it all. He wasn't some flight of fancy, some imaginary friend. He wasn't someone who was designed to take all her troubles away, or someone who was meant to be the love of her life. He wasn't her infant fantasies, or her adult ones. When she'd kissed him, when he'd pushed her away, it wasn't just because they were different species, or because he didn't feel that way. She felt Rory's hand tighten on her back, and when he looked down at her, he was smiling.

When he'd pushed her away, the Doctor was being kind to her. And now it was her wedding. She gave the Doctor a wink, and thought she ought to spend some time looking at her groom. She looked into his eyes for the rest of the dance, remembering the first time they had ever danced like this, the tablecloth dress and the silly tie she had never seen the Doctor wear again. When she looked back and he was gone, they both looked at the place he had left.

"Do you want to go?" he asked her, wrapping his arm about her shoulder. She looked at him. In this room were their families, whirling around in a constant dance of fancy clothes, of frank talking and small-town life. Their friends, their small world. This village was timeless. It would last forever and stay the same.

They could always come back to this moment. She looked up at him, and smiled.

"Do you really want to stay?"

[anonymous]

Santa loev you. ♥ I am not sure I'll get more stuff done than this!! NONETHELESS have a great holiday period.

[borncaptain]

omg that. that was utterly gorgeous and wonderful and ahh ♥♥♥♥ I AM IN LOVE WITH YOU. YOU ARE THE BEST SANTA BABY ♥♥♥♥