A Crack in the World (Doctor Who, Amy Pond, PG)
Title: A Crack in the World
Author: rosamund
Fandom: Doctor Who
Prompt: 65) I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. -- Emily Bronte (1818-1848), English novelist.
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a girl named Amelia Pond who met a man with a magic box. When he slew the evil dragon disguised as a crack in her wall and vanished, she became one of the Left Behind.
Wordcount: 4053
Rating: PG
Warnings: Violence towards psychiatrists, derogation of the University of Leeds, uncomfortable truths, psychiatrist jokes. Spoilers for The Eleventh Hour (S5).
NB My eternal thanks go out to my wonderful beta reader, lareinenoire. A few more notes appear at the end.
i
Amelia Pond sits on the big leather chair, hating the fact that her feet don’t touch the floor. She doesn’t know why she has to go to a special doctor when she’s not sick.
The man opposite smiles like teachers do when they say they want to be your friend. She hopes he isn’t going to say that. She may not have very many friends but she certainly doesn’t need one who stares so much. Anyway, not without a reason.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks. If Aunt Sharon was there, she’d be shocked and tell her to mind her manners but she had to stay in the waiting room with the old magazines. “It’s rude to stare, you know.”
“Normally, yes.” He doesn’t say any more than that, just keeps staring. He smells of old cigarettes, even pongier than the usual kind and she has to work hard not to make a face.
She can feel her chin lift as she deliberately stops blinking, making a staring contest out of this. Nobody at the village school could beat her at those; maybe no one at her new school can either, but she hasn’t had time to make sure.
He looks away first. “Do you miss your father, Amelia?”
It’s a stupid question, so she changes her stare to a glare. “What do you think?”
He laughs; it’s not catching. “Yes, I suppose that was a bit of a silly question.”
“It’s not your fault,” she says, after some consideration. “Silly people ask silly questions.”
“You think I’m silly.”
Not just that, she thinks. He’s rude and probably a pig. Aunt Sharon sometimes calls Paul who used to come round a pig, but she always adds a big word that Amelia can’t really say. Something like missy-oggy.
But, of course, she has to mind her tongue. She says nothing. There’s a crack in his ceiling, but it’s nothing like the crack in her wall - it’s all spider-webby and unscary.
Aunt Sharon hasn’t said a word about that crack since the Raggedy Doctor mended it, almost like she doesn’t remember. She acts like it’s all a story Amelia made up.
It’s not - she knows it’s not. The Doctor was here, even if he never came back for her.
“I think you miss him so badly you’ve convinced yourself he came back.”
“Miss?” she says, wondering what she’s missed in the moments that she’s been woolgathering.
“It’s not unusual, Amelia. To think we see those who are gone. Flashes of them, in someone else, what seems a chance glimpse in a crowd. You know you can’t really have seen your father though, don’t you?”
“Who says I’ve seen my father?” she wants to know, utterly confused.
“This doctor of yours-”
“Isn’t my father,” she bursts out. “I’d know my own father. He doesn’t-” She breaks off just then, unsure of how the sentence ends. Her thoughts seem to shy away when she tries to focus them on either of her parents.
“The mind is a very funny thing, Amelia,” he says, with a laugh as fake as his earlier smile. “It can play all sorts of tricks on us if we let it. The trick is not to do so.”
Amelia thinks she’s beginning to see what he’s driving at; she doesn’t like it one bit.
“The Raggedy Doctor is real and he’s not my father,” she states with just a hint of a pout, arms folded.
“Of course, he seems real to-” She doesn’t let him finish. Aunt Sharon and the lady behind the desk come running when he screams but, by that time, his hand has a perfect impression of her teeth on the fleshy part.
ii
Amelia is twelve today, staring at the door barring her from the proper world and wishing she was like Cyclops in the comics Rory likes and could burn right through it and into Aunt Sharon. Her birthday, and she has to waste an hour of it in another trying too hard office.
Aunt Sharon says it’s all her fault and if she hadn’t driven Dr Burton to a nervous breakdown with all her biting, she wouldn’t have needed to come today which was the only time the new doctor had free.
“Amelia,” the scrubby-bearded man she knows to call a psychiatrist now is saying, “would you look at me, please?”
She doesn’t, only presses her lips together to contain a sigh. There are Disney figures on the wall - Winnie the Pooh.
The man - whose name she’s already forgotten - is talking again, but Amelia is good at not hearing what she doesn’t want to. All her teachers say so.
Right now, she’s thinking about the walls and whether they’re what the fierce lady who teaches French calls gender-neutral. Ms Hart says that English would be better if it had a proper word like ‘on’ instead of having to make do with ‘he’ all the time. Maybe Winnie the Pooh is like ‘on’, not like Disney princesses or aliens and guns.
Amelia didn’t really like any of the princesses, especially after the Doctor came. Then she found the Greek myths and a princess - well, queen - she could like. Penelope never gave up waiting, and she never will, either.
Five years - five years is nothing. Penelope had to wait twice that. The Raggedy Doctor said he wasn’t people, so maybe time is different for him. Or he got the wrong word and meant years when he said minutes. That could happen.
When she tunes in again, the psychiatrist seems to be talking to himself as he writes, using plenty of jaw-cracking words. It’s all rather boring, so she gets up and starts wandering around the office. “Please sit down, Amelia.”
“Make me,” she retorts, barging past his desk to look at the framed bits of paper. According to them, he went to the University of Leeds; it’s not one she’s ever heard of. And then there’s this date…
“Am I your first patient?”
“What?” he yelps, dropping his pen so that he has to scrabble around on the rather thin carpet after it.
“You shouldn’t say what like that,” she says rather too smugly. “It’s bad manners.”
She thinks he might say something about her own manners, but he doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t say anything at all - just blinks at her through NHS specs. Maybe he didn’t hear her question. “I said, am I your first patient?”
“Um, I…don’t see what difference that makes. We’re here to talk about you, Amelia.”
“I didn’t know Leeds had a university.”
“There’s no reason you should, I’m-”
Amelia speaks over him, sure that she’s missing nothing of interest. “Aren’t you clever, then, mister?”
“You can call me Jim.” He’s fiddling with his glasses so much she thinks he might knock them off. At least that might be good for a giggle.
“I’d rather not, mister. We’re not friends and I don’t want us to be.”
Almost at once, she can tell that was the wrong thing to say. He leaps on the word as if he was a dog after a Frisbee. “Friends. Yes, friends. Do you have friends, Amelia?”
She’s tempted to say it’s none of his business, but he’d probably only say that Aunt Sharon is paying for it to be like Dr Burton did. Well, maybe he wouldn’t, because he’s all nervous and his Adam’s apple looks like a yo-yo, but she’s learnt it doesn’t pay to give psychiatrists an inch. Forget that mile, they’ll take it halfway round the world.
“Yes, and I’d much rather be with them.”
“That’s good, Amelia.” If he can sound any more condescending, she doesn’t want to find out. “What do you like doing with your friends?”
She shrugs. “Stuff.”
“I’m going to need you to be a little more specific than that, I’m afraid, Amelia.”
The way he keeps saying her name is giving her a lump in her throat for no good reason. It’s not even as if he sounds a little bit like the self-confessed strange man who said Amelia Pond was out of a fairytale. “What sort of stuff do you like doing with your friends?”
“Why?” She’s halfway through the question before a better one comes to her aid. “What do you like doing with your friends?”
“I…erm…” She has to bite back a smile as she brushes past him and sees him draw his hand back so fast he almost loses the notebook as well as the pen. So he’s been told about the biting. He makes an effort and dredges up a stern expression that seems in danger of vanishing at a sharp word. “We’re here to talk about you, not me.”
“That’s all very well,” she says, voice practically dipped in honey, “but I swore never to tell. Crossed my heart and hoped to die and everything. So-”
But Mister Jim is cheating and has taken out a cartoon she did of the Doctor and her fighting crime at Chedworth. It’s the one with the full-page mosaic and, if she has to say so herself, is actually rather good.
“Where did you get that?!” she demands, anger heating her face and making her skin feel two sizes too small with anger. As if she didn’t know. “It’s private.”
“Your aunt-”
“Should learn to butt out,” she snarls. Tears of outrage are threatening, but she pushes them back with only a very little difficulty. Amelia despises girls who burst into tears whenever the going gets tough. They should learn to show a little backbone, as her aunt would say.
Her aunt…Now there’s a woman with far too much backbone, if you ask her. Not to mention cheek. That cartoon was in the drawer Aunt Sharon is never ever supposed to touch, even to clean. “She’s a nervy old…old…” No word awful enough seems to exist, so she settles for a word she remembers from Scotland. “Sassenach!”
“She’s worried about you,” he says quietly. “She’s your aunt, Amelia. She can’t just stop caring about you.”
That makes her feel all small and crawly inside, which in turn makes her snappish. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she insists. “I’m not failing at school, I have friends who I do stuff with and I stopped having nightmares years ago. What call is there for her to go in my private drawer?”
It’s true. The nightmares were always about the crack and Prisoner Zero so they stopped when the Doctor made the crack go away.
“Imaginary friends are usual, Amelia, when you’re a child,” he says, not answering the question. That’s something adults are very good at, in her experience. “But-”
He’s very easy to talk over, she’s discovering. He just flaps his mouth and gulps, looking for all the world like her fish, which Aunt Sharon still hasn’t replaced. She promised to, weeks ago, but apparently she doesn’t think promises matter very much. “I still am one.”
“One what?”
He really isn’t very bright, Amelia decides, and feels extremely virtuous for stopping herself from saying so. “Child, of course.” Not even Mother Teresa would have been able to resist adding the ‘of course’.
“You’re not, really.”
“Then why does it say ‘child psychology’ on that certificate?” she wants to know, pointing at the framed paper.
“Nobody’s created a course in Adolescent Psychology yet,” he tells her as if it’s a joke. She gives him a blank look and she can actually see the smile slide off his face. So it isn’t something people just write in books.
Finally the alarm on her new watch goes off, startling him so badly he jabs himself in the hand with the pen he was fiddling with. There’s a black line across it, she sees, before he raises it to his mouth. Amelia tells him, as seriously as she can manage between giggles, “You shouldn’t do that. You’ll get ink poisoning and die.”
Before he’s pulled himself together enough to reply, she’s walking towards the door. “Where are you going?”
“Home,” she says, as if that should be obvious. “Our hour’s up and I have to-”
“Do stuff,” he interrupts with a surprisingly nice smile. “Is this some kind of a record for you, by the way?”
“Record?”
“You’ve been in a room with a psychiatrist for an hour now with no biting.”
She looks pointedly at the mark on his hand. “No need. I had my trusty sidekick.”
“What?”
Amelia rolls her eyes at the idiocy of the man. “The pen.” She’s no saint, so she adds, “Dummy. Why would I bite you when you stab yourself?”
Which is such a good line that Amelia exits on it, holding the cartoon he might be pretending not to notice she snatched. Cartoon-snatcher. It has a ring to it.
iii
“Your teachers are concerned about you,” Dr Opara tells her in a carefully non-judgemental tone. Warning sign number one. Normally the psychiatrist doesn’t bother to pretend not to disapprove or otherwise. A practical approach, she calls it. “You’re not participating in lessons.”
“You know that’s creepy, don’t you?”
“I know that you’re avoiding the subject.” The only sound for a few seconds is the clash and tinkle of her frankly enormous earrings before Dr Opara continues. “Why don’t you answer when they ask questions?”
“They don’t use my name.”
She looks down at her notes, handwriting too small and loopy to be read upside down. “Mr Saunders says he tried calling you by name at least four times while you just sat at your desk, doodling.”
“My proper name.” Dr Opara comes as close to looking confused as she can probably manage, looking at the label with the name ‘Amelia Pond’ clearly printed on it. “Amy.”
“Your proper name is the one your parents gave you,” the psychiatrist points out, “the one you’ve had for nearly fourteen years now.”
“I’m over it,” Amy shrugs, all nonchalance. The wrong reaction, she realises almost immediately.
“I think we need to discuss this, Amelia.” As Amy pulls a face, Dr Opara backtracks quickly. “I mean, Amy. Now, it’s perfectly normal for people to use - even prefer - shortened forms of their names, but refusing to answer when somebody calls you Amelia is another thing entirely. It argues that-”
Before she can get stuck into the psychobabble all psychiatrists seem to delight in, Amy breaks in with, “I just don’t think Amelia suits me, that’s all.”
“No, my dear, that is not all. That wouldn’t explain such an extreme reaction.”
It’s Amy’s turn to look confused. “What extreme reaction?”
“My dear,” she begins, affecting to ignore Amy’s twitch at her use of the phrase as always, “refusing to answer teachers when they call on you to the extent that they are reduced to putting you in detention would be classed as extreme in anyone’s book.”
“I prefer films,” Amy says flippantly. She receives what she has previously decided is what’s called a speaking look in return. “And, anyway, only Mr Saunders put me in detention. The others just gave me lines.”
“Your headmaster had to send your aunt a note.” As if this was the worst thing ever to happen in the history of the world!
Amy presses her lips together, catching one with a tooth, so as not to say the things she wants to. There’s something Mister Jim told her before Aunt Sharon decided he wasn’t helping enough. Okay, so she kept biting him but he understood and she always made sure to bite the right hand. That is to say, his left hand, since he’s right-handed. But the right hand so he could still write stuff down and everything.
Actually, it was the very last thing he told her. Discretion is the better part of valour. She looked it up on the computer at school and found out it sort of comes from one of Shakespeare’s Henry plays, but Shakespeare doesn’t really interest her. Art is more up her street. But she supposes he was meant to be clever and all that, so maybe she’ll try not saying everything she thinks.
“Amy!” Dr Opara never sounds long-suffering like her first psychiatrist, but she does get a bite to her voice. The Doctor of Amy’s cartoons would laugh about that; he likes silly wordplay. Now she’s pushing down a little jet of unhappiness. Even a lecture is better than that, so she puts on a brave face.
“Hmm?”
“We haven’t finished this discussion and, before you say anything, our time is not up. You will sit here and talk about this, since it’s obviously important to you.”
“What is there to say?” This isn’t just her being facetious. A person’s name is the most personal thing about them. Like her friend who never wants to be Jeffrey, but always Jeff. There’s a world of difference when you think about it, but she doesn’t really know how to explain that and, even if she did, why would she to somebody who’s only paid to take an interest and never believes what she says?
Dr Opara’s lips purse, but not so as to hold anything back. “My dear, whatever you feel. Obviously this is linked to your particular brand of delusion.”
Amy really and truly hadn’t planned to, but it’s like all the other times. Something snaps inside her and before she knows it, Dr Opara’s wrist is bleeding slightly from where her teeth must have scraped against it.
“I do not have delusions,” she rages, “even if he hasn’t come back. Maybe he’s left me behind - even forgotten me completely - but he was here.”
She rushes out, even though their hour isn’t yet up, and nearly collides with Rory. With tears rolling down her cheeks and her nose running, she must look a sight. At least she remembered to put on waterproof mascara, so there’ll be no black streaks to compound her shame. “Amy, wait!”
Knowing he'll follow, she doesn’t. It’s better in the fresh air and she slows down as they pass a small park that has a large fir tree of some description.
The kinked branches growing near its base make perfect seats and it feels more private than the grass. Something occurred to her as she-not ran, because that would imply running away, but more than walked-escaped the offices. “You always call me Amy.”
“That’s what you said you wanted,” he says, apparently bewildered by the statement.
“Yes, but even before.”
Amy has never really noticed how sweet his smile is before. “It means beloved.”
“You what?”
“Amy,” he says, looking away from her. “That’s what it means. And, um, that’s what you should be.”
“What does your name mean, then?”
“I don’t know,” he says, picking at a splinter. “I only looked up yours, but it means work or something. I thought maybe that was why you changed it - because you didn’t like being called after work.”
“Not even.” It’s strangely restful being with Rory in a way that it isn’t with her other friends. “It’s just…Amelia Pond was a fairytale girl with a crack in her wall that talked to her. And everybody keeps telling me that wasn’t real, so Amelia isn’t either. See?”
“Amy Pond is a wonderful girl who’s special to me.” Which doesn’t really answer the question but, surprisingly, that’s okay.
iv
Amy Pond is simmering after she leaves the office of her fourth psychiatrist, Dr Sissons. Just because she has no grand plans about her life in twenty years does not mean she is delusional or depressed or any other d-word you can mention.
Also, let it be known that psychiatrists have no sense of humour. Just because she mentioned being Lolita…and, okay, there may have been a hitching up of her admittedly short skirt, but she has nice legs and it’s a hot day. Anyway, Dr Everybody-Calls-Me-Robbie needn’t have looked if she didn’t want to.
Rory has fallen in beside her almost without her noticing, smelling of hospital. “What’s that?”
Amy twists the cord of the laminated sign she made as part of a Design project, featuring a hand caught in a stylised set of teeth within the standard black triangle on a yellow background. “It’s my coat of arms, of course. What does it look like?”
“Umm, like those signs they have on chemicals and things?”
“Give that man a medal!” she snaps before softening a little. “It’s for psychiatrists. To warn them I bite.”
“I thought you’d stopped doing that,” he says, sounding rather out of breath.
“I haven’t ruled it out,” Amy mutters darkly.
He sounds bewildered when he eventually speaks. “But you agreed that it was just your imagination months ago, didn’t you? I thought you only bit them when they said the Raggedy Doctor wasn’t real.”
“Telling me I’m delusional or whatever because I lack ambition should count. But I’m wise and mature now, so I didn’t bite her. I didn’t even stand on her toes, which was also an option. She was wearing flip-flops.”
She might have gone on in this vein if Rory hadn’t headed her off at the pass, so to speak, by saying, “But I thought we agreed that you were going to do your pre-registration and work with me at the Royal Leadworth.”
“We agreed?” It’s almost a relief to have a reason to lash out at someone safe, like lightning heading for the conductors on buildings. “Excuse me, I think you’ll find that was your plan, Rory Williams. What if I want to get out of Leadworth? Had you thought of that?”
He looks surprised and a little hurt - a familiar look - and there’s something a little choked about his voice. “But you don’t.”
“What? How do you know I don’t want to be an air hostess and travel the world?”
“I think they call them flight attendants now.”
“Who cares what they call them?” Amy marches across the zebra crossing, taking no notice of the driver making a rude sign at her as he has to brake hard, although Rory yells that they’re sorry. “Answer my question.”
Rory looks frightened but determined and does so. “Because he came to Leadworth.”
She feels as if the wind has been knocked out of her but has enough presence of mind to make a pretence at not knowing what he means. “If you don’t start making sense, I’m going to stop talking to you.”
No other threat could work half so well, she knows. His eyes are even more wounded and his voice has progressed to full-on wobbling. “The Raggedy Doctor came to Leadworth and you think if you go anywhere else he won’t be able to find you. It’s like that story you used to like so much where all the evils were let out of the box and there was one last thing hiding right at the bottom. You keep hoping, Amy Pond. And that’s okay because it’s like the story says: we all need hope. But what I want to know is why does hoping mean you have to stop living? Why can’t you have a nice life with…”
She thinks he’ll say ‘me’, but he bottles it. “…people who care about you until whatever happens happens?”
It’s lucky that Aunt Sharon’s car pulls up at that moment because, for once, Amy cannot think of anything to say. Or, that is, there’s too much to say and it’s all contrary and anyway the madman with a box is not the reason she doesn’t want to plan too far ahead.
***
That night, as too many others, Amy dreams of a man who eats fish custard and has a swimming pool in a library. His world is extraordinary and she, as a part of it, is extraordinary too.
As every one of those nights, she runs to his box and Van Gogh’s stars blaze and swirl in the sky around them and there are sunflowers in every one of the thousand rooms.
But this night is different. This night, when the box fades from her dream she can see-just out of the corner of her eye-a crack. Not just any crack - the one from her bedroom wall that went all the way through.
NB: This fic owes its conception to a title that appeared in my head out of nowhere and everything else to the aforementioned wonderful beta reader who rescued the end of the second section and held my hand through the third and fourth. Any mistakes are completely mine, especially in the realms of psychiatry.
Author: rosamund
Fandom: Doctor Who
Prompt: 65) I've dreamt in my life dreams that have stayed with me ever after, and changed my ideas; they've gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind. -- Emily Bronte (1818-1848), English novelist.
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a girl named Amelia Pond who met a man with a magic box. When he slew the evil dragon disguised as a crack in her wall and vanished, she became one of the Left Behind.
Wordcount: 4053
Rating: PG
Warnings: Violence towards psychiatrists, derogation of the University of Leeds, uncomfortable truths, psychiatrist jokes. Spoilers for The Eleventh Hour (S5).
NB My eternal thanks go out to my wonderful beta reader, lareinenoire. A few more notes appear at the end.
i
Amelia Pond sits on the big leather chair, hating the fact that her feet don’t touch the floor. She doesn’t know why she has to go to a special doctor when she’s not sick.
The man opposite smiles like teachers do when they say they want to be your friend. She hopes he isn’t going to say that. She may not have very many friends but she certainly doesn’t need one who stares so much. Anyway, not without a reason.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks. If Aunt Sharon was there, she’d be shocked and tell her to mind her manners but she had to stay in the waiting room with the old magazines. “It’s rude to stare, you know.”
“Normally, yes.” He doesn’t say any more than that, just keeps staring. He smells of old cigarettes, even pongier than the usual kind and she has to work hard not to make a face.
She can feel her chin lift as she deliberately stops blinking, making a staring contest out of this. Nobody at the village school could beat her at those; maybe no one at her new school can either, but she hasn’t had time to make sure.
He looks away first. “Do you miss your father, Amelia?”
It’s a stupid question, so she changes her stare to a glare. “What do you think?”
He laughs; it’s not catching. “Yes, I suppose that was a bit of a silly question.”
“It’s not your fault,” she says, after some consideration. “Silly people ask silly questions.”
“You think I’m silly.”
Not just that, she thinks. He’s rude and probably a pig. Aunt Sharon sometimes calls Paul who used to come round a pig, but she always adds a big word that Amelia can’t really say. Something like missy-oggy.
But, of course, she has to mind her tongue. She says nothing. There’s a crack in his ceiling, but it’s nothing like the crack in her wall - it’s all spider-webby and unscary.
Aunt Sharon hasn’t said a word about that crack since the Raggedy Doctor mended it, almost like she doesn’t remember. She acts like it’s all a story Amelia made up.
It’s not - she knows it’s not. The Doctor was here, even if he never came back for her.
“I think you miss him so badly you’ve convinced yourself he came back.”
“Miss?” she says, wondering what she’s missed in the moments that she’s been woolgathering.
“It’s not unusual, Amelia. To think we see those who are gone. Flashes of them, in someone else, what seems a chance glimpse in a crowd. You know you can’t really have seen your father though, don’t you?”
“Who says I’ve seen my father?” she wants to know, utterly confused.
“This doctor of yours-”
“Isn’t my father,” she bursts out. “I’d know my own father. He doesn’t-” She breaks off just then, unsure of how the sentence ends. Her thoughts seem to shy away when she tries to focus them on either of her parents.
“The mind is a very funny thing, Amelia,” he says, with a laugh as fake as his earlier smile. “It can play all sorts of tricks on us if we let it. The trick is not to do so.”
Amelia thinks she’s beginning to see what he’s driving at; she doesn’t like it one bit.
“The Raggedy Doctor is real and he’s not my father,” she states with just a hint of a pout, arms folded.
“Of course, he seems real to-” She doesn’t let him finish. Aunt Sharon and the lady behind the desk come running when he screams but, by that time, his hand has a perfect impression of her teeth on the fleshy part.
ii
Amelia is twelve today, staring at the door barring her from the proper world and wishing she was like Cyclops in the comics Rory likes and could burn right through it and into Aunt Sharon. Her birthday, and she has to waste an hour of it in another trying too hard office.
Aunt Sharon says it’s all her fault and if she hadn’t driven Dr Burton to a nervous breakdown with all her biting, she wouldn’t have needed to come today which was the only time the new doctor had free.
“Amelia,” the scrubby-bearded man she knows to call a psychiatrist now is saying, “would you look at me, please?”
She doesn’t, only presses her lips together to contain a sigh. There are Disney figures on the wall - Winnie the Pooh.
The man - whose name she’s already forgotten - is talking again, but Amelia is good at not hearing what she doesn’t want to. All her teachers say so.
Right now, she’s thinking about the walls and whether they’re what the fierce lady who teaches French calls gender-neutral. Ms Hart says that English would be better if it had a proper word like ‘on’ instead of having to make do with ‘he’ all the time. Maybe Winnie the Pooh is like ‘on’, not like Disney princesses or aliens and guns.
Amelia didn’t really like any of the princesses, especially after the Doctor came. Then she found the Greek myths and a princess - well, queen - she could like. Penelope never gave up waiting, and she never will, either.
Five years - five years is nothing. Penelope had to wait twice that. The Raggedy Doctor said he wasn’t people, so maybe time is different for him. Or he got the wrong word and meant years when he said minutes. That could happen.
When she tunes in again, the psychiatrist seems to be talking to himself as he writes, using plenty of jaw-cracking words. It’s all rather boring, so she gets up and starts wandering around the office. “Please sit down, Amelia.”
“Make me,” she retorts, barging past his desk to look at the framed bits of paper. According to them, he went to the University of Leeds; it’s not one she’s ever heard of. And then there’s this date…
“Am I your first patient?”
“What?” he yelps, dropping his pen so that he has to scrabble around on the rather thin carpet after it.
“You shouldn’t say what like that,” she says rather too smugly. “It’s bad manners.”
She thinks he might say something about her own manners, but he doesn’t. In fact, he doesn’t say anything at all - just blinks at her through NHS specs. Maybe he didn’t hear her question. “I said, am I your first patient?”
“Um, I…don’t see what difference that makes. We’re here to talk about you, Amelia.”
“I didn’t know Leeds had a university.”
“There’s no reason you should, I’m-”
Amelia speaks over him, sure that she’s missing nothing of interest. “Aren’t you clever, then, mister?”
“You can call me Jim.” He’s fiddling with his glasses so much she thinks he might knock them off. At least that might be good for a giggle.
“I’d rather not, mister. We’re not friends and I don’t want us to be.”
Almost at once, she can tell that was the wrong thing to say. He leaps on the word as if he was a dog after a Frisbee. “Friends. Yes, friends. Do you have friends, Amelia?”
She’s tempted to say it’s none of his business, but he’d probably only say that Aunt Sharon is paying for it to be like Dr Burton did. Well, maybe he wouldn’t, because he’s all nervous and his Adam’s apple looks like a yo-yo, but she’s learnt it doesn’t pay to give psychiatrists an inch. Forget that mile, they’ll take it halfway round the world.
“Yes, and I’d much rather be with them.”
“That’s good, Amelia.” If he can sound any more condescending, she doesn’t want to find out. “What do you like doing with your friends?”
She shrugs. “Stuff.”
“I’m going to need you to be a little more specific than that, I’m afraid, Amelia.”
The way he keeps saying her name is giving her a lump in her throat for no good reason. It’s not even as if he sounds a little bit like the self-confessed strange man who said Amelia Pond was out of a fairytale. “What sort of stuff do you like doing with your friends?”
“Why?” She’s halfway through the question before a better one comes to her aid. “What do you like doing with your friends?”
“I…erm…” She has to bite back a smile as she brushes past him and sees him draw his hand back so fast he almost loses the notebook as well as the pen. So he’s been told about the biting. He makes an effort and dredges up a stern expression that seems in danger of vanishing at a sharp word. “We’re here to talk about you, not me.”
“That’s all very well,” she says, voice practically dipped in honey, “but I swore never to tell. Crossed my heart and hoped to die and everything. So-”
But Mister Jim is cheating and has taken out a cartoon she did of the Doctor and her fighting crime at Chedworth. It’s the one with the full-page mosaic and, if she has to say so herself, is actually rather good.
“Where did you get that?!” she demands, anger heating her face and making her skin feel two sizes too small with anger. As if she didn’t know. “It’s private.”
“Your aunt-”
“Should learn to butt out,” she snarls. Tears of outrage are threatening, but she pushes them back with only a very little difficulty. Amelia despises girls who burst into tears whenever the going gets tough. They should learn to show a little backbone, as her aunt would say.
Her aunt…Now there’s a woman with far too much backbone, if you ask her. Not to mention cheek. That cartoon was in the drawer Aunt Sharon is never ever supposed to touch, even to clean. “She’s a nervy old…old…” No word awful enough seems to exist, so she settles for a word she remembers from Scotland. “Sassenach!”
“She’s worried about you,” he says quietly. “She’s your aunt, Amelia. She can’t just stop caring about you.”
That makes her feel all small and crawly inside, which in turn makes her snappish. “There’s nothing to worry about,” she insists. “I’m not failing at school, I have friends who I do stuff with and I stopped having nightmares years ago. What call is there for her to go in my private drawer?”
It’s true. The nightmares were always about the crack and Prisoner Zero so they stopped when the Doctor made the crack go away.
“Imaginary friends are usual, Amelia, when you’re a child,” he says, not answering the question. That’s something adults are very good at, in her experience. “But-”
He’s very easy to talk over, she’s discovering. He just flaps his mouth and gulps, looking for all the world like her fish, which Aunt Sharon still hasn’t replaced. She promised to, weeks ago, but apparently she doesn’t think promises matter very much. “I still am one.”
“One what?”
He really isn’t very bright, Amelia decides, and feels extremely virtuous for stopping herself from saying so. “Child, of course.” Not even Mother Teresa would have been able to resist adding the ‘of course’.
“You’re not, really.”
“Then why does it say ‘child psychology’ on that certificate?” she wants to know, pointing at the framed paper.
“Nobody’s created a course in Adolescent Psychology yet,” he tells her as if it’s a joke. She gives him a blank look and she can actually see the smile slide off his face. So it isn’t something people just write in books.
Finally the alarm on her new watch goes off, startling him so badly he jabs himself in the hand with the pen he was fiddling with. There’s a black line across it, she sees, before he raises it to his mouth. Amelia tells him, as seriously as she can manage between giggles, “You shouldn’t do that. You’ll get ink poisoning and die.”
Before he’s pulled himself together enough to reply, she’s walking towards the door. “Where are you going?”
“Home,” she says, as if that should be obvious. “Our hour’s up and I have to-”
“Do stuff,” he interrupts with a surprisingly nice smile. “Is this some kind of a record for you, by the way?”
“Record?”
“You’ve been in a room with a psychiatrist for an hour now with no biting.”
She looks pointedly at the mark on his hand. “No need. I had my trusty sidekick.”
“What?”
Amelia rolls her eyes at the idiocy of the man. “The pen.” She’s no saint, so she adds, “Dummy. Why would I bite you when you stab yourself?”
Which is such a good line that Amelia exits on it, holding the cartoon he might be pretending not to notice she snatched. Cartoon-snatcher. It has a ring to it.
iii
“Your teachers are concerned about you,” Dr Opara tells her in a carefully non-judgemental tone. Warning sign number one. Normally the psychiatrist doesn’t bother to pretend not to disapprove or otherwise. A practical approach, she calls it. “You’re not participating in lessons.”
“You know that’s creepy, don’t you?”
“I know that you’re avoiding the subject.” The only sound for a few seconds is the clash and tinkle of her frankly enormous earrings before Dr Opara continues. “Why don’t you answer when they ask questions?”
“They don’t use my name.”
She looks down at her notes, handwriting too small and loopy to be read upside down. “Mr Saunders says he tried calling you by name at least four times while you just sat at your desk, doodling.”
“My proper name.” Dr Opara comes as close to looking confused as she can probably manage, looking at the label with the name ‘Amelia Pond’ clearly printed on it. “Amy.”
“Your proper name is the one your parents gave you,” the psychiatrist points out, “the one you’ve had for nearly fourteen years now.”
“I’m over it,” Amy shrugs, all nonchalance. The wrong reaction, she realises almost immediately.
“I think we need to discuss this, Amelia.” As Amy pulls a face, Dr Opara backtracks quickly. “I mean, Amy. Now, it’s perfectly normal for people to use - even prefer - shortened forms of their names, but refusing to answer when somebody calls you Amelia is another thing entirely. It argues that-”
Before she can get stuck into the psychobabble all psychiatrists seem to delight in, Amy breaks in with, “I just don’t think Amelia suits me, that’s all.”
“No, my dear, that is not all. That wouldn’t explain such an extreme reaction.”
It’s Amy’s turn to look confused. “What extreme reaction?”
“My dear,” she begins, affecting to ignore Amy’s twitch at her use of the phrase as always, “refusing to answer teachers when they call on you to the extent that they are reduced to putting you in detention would be classed as extreme in anyone’s book.”
“I prefer films,” Amy says flippantly. She receives what she has previously decided is what’s called a speaking look in return. “And, anyway, only Mr Saunders put me in detention. The others just gave me lines.”
“Your headmaster had to send your aunt a note.” As if this was the worst thing ever to happen in the history of the world!
Amy presses her lips together, catching one with a tooth, so as not to say the things she wants to. There’s something Mister Jim told her before Aunt Sharon decided he wasn’t helping enough. Okay, so she kept biting him but he understood and she always made sure to bite the right hand. That is to say, his left hand, since he’s right-handed. But the right hand so he could still write stuff down and everything.
Actually, it was the very last thing he told her. Discretion is the better part of valour. She looked it up on the computer at school and found out it sort of comes from one of Shakespeare’s Henry plays, but Shakespeare doesn’t really interest her. Art is more up her street. But she supposes he was meant to be clever and all that, so maybe she’ll try not saying everything she thinks.
“Amy!” Dr Opara never sounds long-suffering like her first psychiatrist, but she does get a bite to her voice. The Doctor of Amy’s cartoons would laugh about that; he likes silly wordplay. Now she’s pushing down a little jet of unhappiness. Even a lecture is better than that, so she puts on a brave face.
“Hmm?”
“We haven’t finished this discussion and, before you say anything, our time is not up. You will sit here and talk about this, since it’s obviously important to you.”
“What is there to say?” This isn’t just her being facetious. A person’s name is the most personal thing about them. Like her friend who never wants to be Jeffrey, but always Jeff. There’s a world of difference when you think about it, but she doesn’t really know how to explain that and, even if she did, why would she to somebody who’s only paid to take an interest and never believes what she says?
Dr Opara’s lips purse, but not so as to hold anything back. “My dear, whatever you feel. Obviously this is linked to your particular brand of delusion.”
Amy really and truly hadn’t planned to, but it’s like all the other times. Something snaps inside her and before she knows it, Dr Opara’s wrist is bleeding slightly from where her teeth must have scraped against it.
“I do not have delusions,” she rages, “even if he hasn’t come back. Maybe he’s left me behind - even forgotten me completely - but he was here.”
She rushes out, even though their hour isn’t yet up, and nearly collides with Rory. With tears rolling down her cheeks and her nose running, she must look a sight. At least she remembered to put on waterproof mascara, so there’ll be no black streaks to compound her shame. “Amy, wait!”
Knowing he'll follow, she doesn’t. It’s better in the fresh air and she slows down as they pass a small park that has a large fir tree of some description.
The kinked branches growing near its base make perfect seats and it feels more private than the grass. Something occurred to her as she-not ran, because that would imply running away, but more than walked-escaped the offices. “You always call me Amy.”
“That’s what you said you wanted,” he says, apparently bewildered by the statement.
“Yes, but even before.”
Amy has never really noticed how sweet his smile is before. “It means beloved.”
“You what?”
“Amy,” he says, looking away from her. “That’s what it means. And, um, that’s what you should be.”
“What does your name mean, then?”
“I don’t know,” he says, picking at a splinter. “I only looked up yours, but it means work or something. I thought maybe that was why you changed it - because you didn’t like being called after work.”
“Not even.” It’s strangely restful being with Rory in a way that it isn’t with her other friends. “It’s just…Amelia Pond was a fairytale girl with a crack in her wall that talked to her. And everybody keeps telling me that wasn’t real, so Amelia isn’t either. See?”
“Amy Pond is a wonderful girl who’s special to me.” Which doesn’t really answer the question but, surprisingly, that’s okay.
iv
Amy Pond is simmering after she leaves the office of her fourth psychiatrist, Dr Sissons. Just because she has no grand plans about her life in twenty years does not mean she is delusional or depressed or any other d-word you can mention.
Also, let it be known that psychiatrists have no sense of humour. Just because she mentioned being Lolita…and, okay, there may have been a hitching up of her admittedly short skirt, but she has nice legs and it’s a hot day. Anyway, Dr Everybody-Calls-Me-Robbie needn’t have looked if she didn’t want to.
Rory has fallen in beside her almost without her noticing, smelling of hospital. “What’s that?”
Amy twists the cord of the laminated sign she made as part of a Design project, featuring a hand caught in a stylised set of teeth within the standard black triangle on a yellow background. “It’s my coat of arms, of course. What does it look like?”
“Umm, like those signs they have on chemicals and things?”
“Give that man a medal!” she snaps before softening a little. “It’s for psychiatrists. To warn them I bite.”
“I thought you’d stopped doing that,” he says, sounding rather out of breath.
“I haven’t ruled it out,” Amy mutters darkly.
He sounds bewildered when he eventually speaks. “But you agreed that it was just your imagination months ago, didn’t you? I thought you only bit them when they said the Raggedy Doctor wasn’t real.”
“Telling me I’m delusional or whatever because I lack ambition should count. But I’m wise and mature now, so I didn’t bite her. I didn’t even stand on her toes, which was also an option. She was wearing flip-flops.”
She might have gone on in this vein if Rory hadn’t headed her off at the pass, so to speak, by saying, “But I thought we agreed that you were going to do your pre-registration and work with me at the Royal Leadworth.”
“We agreed?” It’s almost a relief to have a reason to lash out at someone safe, like lightning heading for the conductors on buildings. “Excuse me, I think you’ll find that was your plan, Rory Williams. What if I want to get out of Leadworth? Had you thought of that?”
He looks surprised and a little hurt - a familiar look - and there’s something a little choked about his voice. “But you don’t.”
“What? How do you know I don’t want to be an air hostess and travel the world?”
“I think they call them flight attendants now.”
“Who cares what they call them?” Amy marches across the zebra crossing, taking no notice of the driver making a rude sign at her as he has to brake hard, although Rory yells that they’re sorry. “Answer my question.”
Rory looks frightened but determined and does so. “Because he came to Leadworth.”
She feels as if the wind has been knocked out of her but has enough presence of mind to make a pretence at not knowing what he means. “If you don’t start making sense, I’m going to stop talking to you.”
No other threat could work half so well, she knows. His eyes are even more wounded and his voice has progressed to full-on wobbling. “The Raggedy Doctor came to Leadworth and you think if you go anywhere else he won’t be able to find you. It’s like that story you used to like so much where all the evils were let out of the box and there was one last thing hiding right at the bottom. You keep hoping, Amy Pond. And that’s okay because it’s like the story says: we all need hope. But what I want to know is why does hoping mean you have to stop living? Why can’t you have a nice life with…”
She thinks he’ll say ‘me’, but he bottles it. “…people who care about you until whatever happens happens?”
It’s lucky that Aunt Sharon’s car pulls up at that moment because, for once, Amy cannot think of anything to say. Or, that is, there’s too much to say and it’s all contrary and anyway the madman with a box is not the reason she doesn’t want to plan too far ahead.
***
That night, as too many others, Amy dreams of a man who eats fish custard and has a swimming pool in a library. His world is extraordinary and she, as a part of it, is extraordinary too.
As every one of those nights, she runs to his box and Van Gogh’s stars blaze and swirl in the sky around them and there are sunflowers in every one of the thousand rooms.
But this night is different. This night, when the box fades from her dream she can see-just out of the corner of her eye-a crack. Not just any crack - the one from her bedroom wall that went all the way through.
NB: This fic owes its conception to a title that appeared in my head out of nowhere and everything else to the aforementioned wonderful beta reader who rescued the end of the second section and held my hand through the third and fourth. Any mistakes are completely mine, especially in the realms of psychiatry.