Gift for apple_pathways
To: apple_pathways
From: puppetdumbly
Title: 2000 years of boredom, or how Rory Williams made some friends.
Characters and/or Pairings: Plastic!Rory and mentions of Amy and 11, implied Rory/Amy
Rating: PG for some swears
Warnings: None
Summary: Rory gets bored, resentful, and starts talking to himself. So he figures he’s allowed to get out a little, right?
Notes: I basically took the prompt Exploring Rory's 2000 year Vigil of Awesome and ran with it. I just really like Rory, okay?
Words: ~2,000
Rory likes to think that the Doctor might be nice enough to consider visiting him. After all, the universe is a really small place now and it’s not like he really has anything else to do, right? And if this really is the universe from now on, then shouldn’t the Doctor be getting really, really bored and looking for a distraction?
To pass the time on particularly boring days, he tries to imagine what would happen if the Doctor did pop by for a visit. He’d probably bring Amy with him, since he’s got a plan to rescue her. He doesn’t have the TARDIS anymore, but he does have that weird bracelet thing, so that’s got to help. And from the looks of it, it takes about five seconds to pop back and forth when you’re using that bracelet thing, so, really, the Doctor should be popping up any minute now with Amy in tow and a grin on his face, pointing at her and saying, “Look, Rory, we did it!”
Because while Rory is happy to be here for Amy and to make sure nothing happens to her, it would be nice to have proof that he’s not wasting 2000 years of his painfully long life. Sometimes he thinks about everything that could go wrong. Maybe the statues of long-gone enemies will spring back to life and he’ll have to fight them all by himself. Maybe something will happen to Stonehenge - after all, in this universe it might not stay standing forever - and he won’t have anywhere to hide the Pandorica.
On really, really dull days, Rory starts feeling regretful. It’s not like it’s the easiest thing in the world, sitting here and talking to himself to pass the time. He almost wishes that something bad would happen, just so he has something to do to break the monotony. He’s found that he can’t quite remember the exact shade of Amy’s hair anymore, and he has to remind himself daily of all the Doctor’s little quirks just to remind himself that he didn’t make all this up.
He starts to wonder if the Doctor was telling the truth when he said that all damage is permanent. Sometimes he pulls his sword out of its sheath and stares at it, wondering if he’ll feel it if he nicks himself or if he’d be able to heal himself by dripping candle wax on a cut.
He never tries that, because while he may be bored and curious, he’s not suicidal. For all he knows, a little nick with a sword will slice open his arm and the candle wax would make his entire arm melt rather than seal it back together, and he’s not about to spend however many years he has left walking around with one arm.
After about three months, he figures he’s allowed to go for a walk. He’s catalogued every inch of the underground chamber, measuring it with his footsteps and memorizing it so he’ll know in a split second if something’s off. It’s kind of smelly in here, and he misses the sun. But when he comes out, it’s raining and it just keeps raining and there isn’t even a rainbow when the sun manages to peek out for about half a minute.
He’s bored. He is unbearably and unbelievably bored, and there is nothing he can do to fix it. At first he’d thought that this would be the perfect way to prove to Amy just how much he loves her. He’ll spend an eternity at her side, guarding her forever, finally doing what the Doctor can never do and proving that he’ll never leave. Now that decision seems rash and impulsive and just plain stupid, because he can’t even fall asleep or take a proper bath or sneak a peek at the woman he loves while she sits in the Pandorica, waiting.
It’s days like that when he wishes he’d kept the sonic screwdriver with him rather than actually listening and putting it in Amy’s pocket like the Doctor told him to.
He’s finding it hard to remember what Amy’s voice sounds like after about six months. He’s started faking a Scottish accent whenever he starts to wonder if she really had been from Scotland. He catalogues their conversations like he did the chamber, playing them back in his memory whenever he feels lonely and wishing bitterly that his plastic form had tear ducts, because dammit, sometimes he just wants to cry.
Rory’s never been good on his own. He thinks he has quite a good idea of how the Doctor felt before he let Amy come with him. Being on your own is no fun. You do start talking to yourself, and if you have statues available for company, you start talking to them, too. Rory even has names for them, calling Dalek number one “Ginger” and Dalek number two “Ogg” and giving all the other creatures whose species he doesn’t know names ranging from “Samantha” to “Lampshade.”
So he decides that maybe it’s a good idea to give himself some time away from the Pandorica. He’s forgotten how to talk to people - real people - and if he ever wants to get out of this mess and get his old life back, he’s going to have to learn how to talk to people again. He goes for another walk, wondering what day it is and what month it is and whether it’s a new year of if he’s still stuck in the old one. The sun is shining and it’s kind of warm, so Rory decides that it’s the beginning of summer.
The Romans are still in Britain, even though there are only about twenty of them now. It’s a little strange, knowing that the entire population of the Roman army sent to Britain can be counted on his fingers and toes, but he remembers what the Doctor said about the universe shrinking. Maybe the Earth shrunk along with it.
He joins up with them, making up a bogus story about being sent over from Africa - the men’s wide eyes when he’d tried that story out made him realize that they all equated Africa with Mount Olympus - and asks them to tell him all about their own travels. They accept him into their little group, so Rory starts spending the days with them and sneaking off to Stonehenge when everyone’s asleep, telling the Pandorica and Ogg and Lampshade all about his day. He’s started to equate coming back to that underground chamber to coming home to his wife and kids.
(He manages to shake that particular delusion quickly, remembering just how terrifying Ogg the Dalek had been in real life because while he may be going mad, he’s not crazy enough to want a Dalek as his firstborn son.)
Time passes more quickly now, and he’s starting to actually enjoy himself. He’d never been that much of a history person in school, but it was fascinating watching it all happen in front of him. He just had to be careful to watch how the men aged, because that was how he kept track of time. He faked stubble from time to time and it became a game of his to come up with fake injuries and see how long he could keep the act up before it was supposed to heal itself. He started walking with a limp after he’d fallen off a horse, so he kept that act up, pretending to have done permanent damage. It gave him something else to occupy his mind.
This became the norm until Rory realized that he was going to have to fake his own death sooner or later. The men had all made this their permanent home, building houses and setting up a nice little village alongside the locals. Some had even taken wives and started families. That was another way of keeping time; he watched the men’s children grow up.
Sometimes he considered telling the men that he wasn’t really human. That was on days when Rory was getting particularly desperate to just spill his life’s story and be done with it. He knew that he could never actually tell anyone. If he went up to one of the men and said, “Oh, just by the way, I’m made of plastic and I don’t age or die,” he’d probably be branded the town fool and forced out. Besides, he’d been doing so well with faking his own would-be age, powdering his hair to make it look like it was graying and keeping his face dirty so nobody would notice the absence of wrinkles.
He thinks he knows why the Doctor never sticks around in once place for too long.
He’s gotten attached to his little house and his friends and neighbors, who are lovely people despite their lack of education and hygiene. He doesn’t want to have to fake his own death then wait twenty or so years before popping back into civilization. And he can’t just leave; he still goes back to the Pandorica every night, making sure that everything is still untouched.
His mind is made up for him when someone from town decides to go snooping around. The boy follows him to Stonehenge, sneaking along quietly behind him, and only reveals himself after Rory has cleaned his face and stopped walking with a limp. The boy is young enough to excuse his snooping to curiosity, but old enough to want an explanation, and for the first time, Rory doesn’t really know what to say. He’d planned this speech a dozen times (Oh, it’s nothing, it’s just a mystical object that’s very evil, so STAY AWAY), but it suddenly sounds so silly and stupid and dumb, so he just sits there and tells the boy his entire story form beginning to end, about how he was Rory Williams from Ledworth and how he’d been sucked into this adventure full of time travel and aliens and time traveling aliens and how now he’s made of plastic and look, little boy, I can bend myself into all sorts of weird shapes because I have no bones and now I’m stuck here until it’s 2010 again and what the hell am I supposed to do now?
And the boy, to his merit, doesn’t mark this whole thing off as a wild fairy tale that Rory made up on the spot because he’s a patronizing old man who’s not really twenty-three like he says. He just grins and asks if Rory can show him the weird laser thing he has in his hand. So Rory does, and he finds that having a confidante who’s that excited about the future and actually wants to listen and is old enough to not go blurting this whole thing out to his parents is actually kind of awesome.
The boy is also the one who talks Rory into leaving. He says that Rory might as well go off and see the world while he can, because it’s not like he’s got anything else to do. It’s that or sit alone for twenty years, the boy reasons, and when he promises to come back and check on the Pandorica every day, Rory actually believes him and decides it’s time to go.
This becomes a cycle, every five years or so. Rory will leave for some faraway place and then when he comes back, he speaks a whole other language and has a fake beard and manages to fool everyone into thinking that he’s someone completely different. The boy grows into a man and he still keeps his promise, checking on the Pandorica when Rory is away and telling his own son about it once he’s old enough. It’s really nice, having friends he can count on to help him out. He thinks the Doctor would be pleased with him, but then he gets an angry pang in his stomach, because he’s not truly guarding the Pandorica like he said he would, so maybe the Doctor would be disappointed instead.
It takes Rory about three hundred of his two thousand years to finally realize that no, the Doctor wouldn’t be disappointed in him. After all, just because he’s living plastic doesn’t mean he can’t live a life. And he is guarding Amy, he’s just learned that trusting others is a good thing and that there is no shame in asking for help. And it’s really quite a large improvement on talking to Ogg and Lampshade and Samantha all day.
From: puppetdumbly
Title: 2000 years of boredom, or how Rory Williams made some friends.
Characters and/or Pairings: Plastic!Rory and mentions of Amy and 11, implied Rory/Amy
Rating: PG for some swears
Warnings: None
Summary: Rory gets bored, resentful, and starts talking to himself. So he figures he’s allowed to get out a little, right?
Notes: I basically took the prompt Exploring Rory's 2000 year Vigil of Awesome and ran with it. I just really like Rory, okay?
Words: ~2,000
Rory likes to think that the Doctor might be nice enough to consider visiting him. After all, the universe is a really small place now and it’s not like he really has anything else to do, right? And if this really is the universe from now on, then shouldn’t the Doctor be getting really, really bored and looking for a distraction?
To pass the time on particularly boring days, he tries to imagine what would happen if the Doctor did pop by for a visit. He’d probably bring Amy with him, since he’s got a plan to rescue her. He doesn’t have the TARDIS anymore, but he does have that weird bracelet thing, so that’s got to help. And from the looks of it, it takes about five seconds to pop back and forth when you’re using that bracelet thing, so, really, the Doctor should be popping up any minute now with Amy in tow and a grin on his face, pointing at her and saying, “Look, Rory, we did it!”
Because while Rory is happy to be here for Amy and to make sure nothing happens to her, it would be nice to have proof that he’s not wasting 2000 years of his painfully long life. Sometimes he thinks about everything that could go wrong. Maybe the statues of long-gone enemies will spring back to life and he’ll have to fight them all by himself. Maybe something will happen to Stonehenge - after all, in this universe it might not stay standing forever - and he won’t have anywhere to hide the Pandorica.
On really, really dull days, Rory starts feeling regretful. It’s not like it’s the easiest thing in the world, sitting here and talking to himself to pass the time. He almost wishes that something bad would happen, just so he has something to do to break the monotony. He’s found that he can’t quite remember the exact shade of Amy’s hair anymore, and he has to remind himself daily of all the Doctor’s little quirks just to remind himself that he didn’t make all this up.
He starts to wonder if the Doctor was telling the truth when he said that all damage is permanent. Sometimes he pulls his sword out of its sheath and stares at it, wondering if he’ll feel it if he nicks himself or if he’d be able to heal himself by dripping candle wax on a cut.
He never tries that, because while he may be bored and curious, he’s not suicidal. For all he knows, a little nick with a sword will slice open his arm and the candle wax would make his entire arm melt rather than seal it back together, and he’s not about to spend however many years he has left walking around with one arm.
After about three months, he figures he’s allowed to go for a walk. He’s catalogued every inch of the underground chamber, measuring it with his footsteps and memorizing it so he’ll know in a split second if something’s off. It’s kind of smelly in here, and he misses the sun. But when he comes out, it’s raining and it just keeps raining and there isn’t even a rainbow when the sun manages to peek out for about half a minute.
He’s bored. He is unbearably and unbelievably bored, and there is nothing he can do to fix it. At first he’d thought that this would be the perfect way to prove to Amy just how much he loves her. He’ll spend an eternity at her side, guarding her forever, finally doing what the Doctor can never do and proving that he’ll never leave. Now that decision seems rash and impulsive and just plain stupid, because he can’t even fall asleep or take a proper bath or sneak a peek at the woman he loves while she sits in the Pandorica, waiting.
It’s days like that when he wishes he’d kept the sonic screwdriver with him rather than actually listening and putting it in Amy’s pocket like the Doctor told him to.
He’s finding it hard to remember what Amy’s voice sounds like after about six months. He’s started faking a Scottish accent whenever he starts to wonder if she really had been from Scotland. He catalogues their conversations like he did the chamber, playing them back in his memory whenever he feels lonely and wishing bitterly that his plastic form had tear ducts, because dammit, sometimes he just wants to cry.
Rory’s never been good on his own. He thinks he has quite a good idea of how the Doctor felt before he let Amy come with him. Being on your own is no fun. You do start talking to yourself, and if you have statues available for company, you start talking to them, too. Rory even has names for them, calling Dalek number one “Ginger” and Dalek number two “Ogg” and giving all the other creatures whose species he doesn’t know names ranging from “Samantha” to “Lampshade.”
So he decides that maybe it’s a good idea to give himself some time away from the Pandorica. He’s forgotten how to talk to people - real people - and if he ever wants to get out of this mess and get his old life back, he’s going to have to learn how to talk to people again. He goes for another walk, wondering what day it is and what month it is and whether it’s a new year of if he’s still stuck in the old one. The sun is shining and it’s kind of warm, so Rory decides that it’s the beginning of summer.
The Romans are still in Britain, even though there are only about twenty of them now. It’s a little strange, knowing that the entire population of the Roman army sent to Britain can be counted on his fingers and toes, but he remembers what the Doctor said about the universe shrinking. Maybe the Earth shrunk along with it.
He joins up with them, making up a bogus story about being sent over from Africa - the men’s wide eyes when he’d tried that story out made him realize that they all equated Africa with Mount Olympus - and asks them to tell him all about their own travels. They accept him into their little group, so Rory starts spending the days with them and sneaking off to Stonehenge when everyone’s asleep, telling the Pandorica and Ogg and Lampshade all about his day. He’s started to equate coming back to that underground chamber to coming home to his wife and kids.
(He manages to shake that particular delusion quickly, remembering just how terrifying Ogg the Dalek had been in real life because while he may be going mad, he’s not crazy enough to want a Dalek as his firstborn son.)
Time passes more quickly now, and he’s starting to actually enjoy himself. He’d never been that much of a history person in school, but it was fascinating watching it all happen in front of him. He just had to be careful to watch how the men aged, because that was how he kept track of time. He faked stubble from time to time and it became a game of his to come up with fake injuries and see how long he could keep the act up before it was supposed to heal itself. He started walking with a limp after he’d fallen off a horse, so he kept that act up, pretending to have done permanent damage. It gave him something else to occupy his mind.
This became the norm until Rory realized that he was going to have to fake his own death sooner or later. The men had all made this their permanent home, building houses and setting up a nice little village alongside the locals. Some had even taken wives and started families. That was another way of keeping time; he watched the men’s children grow up.
Sometimes he considered telling the men that he wasn’t really human. That was on days when Rory was getting particularly desperate to just spill his life’s story and be done with it. He knew that he could never actually tell anyone. If he went up to one of the men and said, “Oh, just by the way, I’m made of plastic and I don’t age or die,” he’d probably be branded the town fool and forced out. Besides, he’d been doing so well with faking his own would-be age, powdering his hair to make it look like it was graying and keeping his face dirty so nobody would notice the absence of wrinkles.
He thinks he knows why the Doctor never sticks around in once place for too long.
He’s gotten attached to his little house and his friends and neighbors, who are lovely people despite their lack of education and hygiene. He doesn’t want to have to fake his own death then wait twenty or so years before popping back into civilization. And he can’t just leave; he still goes back to the Pandorica every night, making sure that everything is still untouched.
His mind is made up for him when someone from town decides to go snooping around. The boy follows him to Stonehenge, sneaking along quietly behind him, and only reveals himself after Rory has cleaned his face and stopped walking with a limp. The boy is young enough to excuse his snooping to curiosity, but old enough to want an explanation, and for the first time, Rory doesn’t really know what to say. He’d planned this speech a dozen times (Oh, it’s nothing, it’s just a mystical object that’s very evil, so STAY AWAY), but it suddenly sounds so silly and stupid and dumb, so he just sits there and tells the boy his entire story form beginning to end, about how he was Rory Williams from Ledworth and how he’d been sucked into this adventure full of time travel and aliens and time traveling aliens and how now he’s made of plastic and look, little boy, I can bend myself into all sorts of weird shapes because I have no bones and now I’m stuck here until it’s 2010 again and what the hell am I supposed to do now?
And the boy, to his merit, doesn’t mark this whole thing off as a wild fairy tale that Rory made up on the spot because he’s a patronizing old man who’s not really twenty-three like he says. He just grins and asks if Rory can show him the weird laser thing he has in his hand. So Rory does, and he finds that having a confidante who’s that excited about the future and actually wants to listen and is old enough to not go blurting this whole thing out to his parents is actually kind of awesome.
The boy is also the one who talks Rory into leaving. He says that Rory might as well go off and see the world while he can, because it’s not like he’s got anything else to do. It’s that or sit alone for twenty years, the boy reasons, and when he promises to come back and check on the Pandorica every day, Rory actually believes him and decides it’s time to go.
This becomes a cycle, every five years or so. Rory will leave for some faraway place and then when he comes back, he speaks a whole other language and has a fake beard and manages to fool everyone into thinking that he’s someone completely different. The boy grows into a man and he still keeps his promise, checking on the Pandorica when Rory is away and telling his own son about it once he’s old enough. It’s really nice, having friends he can count on to help him out. He thinks the Doctor would be pleased with him, but then he gets an angry pang in his stomach, because he’s not truly guarding the Pandorica like he said he would, so maybe the Doctor would be disappointed instead.
It takes Rory about three hundred of his two thousand years to finally realize that no, the Doctor wouldn’t be disappointed in him. After all, just because he’s living plastic doesn’t mean he can’t live a life. And he is guarding Amy, he’s just learned that trusting others is a good thing and that there is no shame in asking for help. And it’s really quite a large improvement on talking to Ogg and Lampshade and Samantha all day.