fic: give my gun away [part one]
give my gun away. Doctor Who. ~3000 words. sort of, vaguely a TARDIS orgy, eventually. The sky is perfect in the desert. A picture postcard of a world, Amy the only point of red on the horizon but for the blood across the sand.
notes: this is the Who mafia au that I have been working on since the start of the series. It is currently in its art thief phase but I'm working towards mafia. I'm posting it in parts in hopes of motivating myself to finish. I'll be going on vacation with the family for the next three weeks so the next part probably won't be up until after that. I am an American, so my sincerest apologies for any Americanism I have committed. Point out anything that really bothers you and I will fix it.
They call him the Doctor. It reads something like a joke but the only person who ever laughs is Amy.
(Don’t tell anyone, but she’s his favorite.)
-
The sky is perfect in the desert. A picture postcard of a world, Amy the only point of red on the horizon but for the blood across the sand.
“I missed you,” she whispers into his neck and it is the wrong moment for this. It is always the wrong moment for them.
Rory sets fire to the body, to the boat as the sun kisses the sky one last time.
-
It begins as a game. It is always a game on some level but later they cannot claim the excuse of being children and it grows tiresome to try so they make up their own rules.
It begins as a game and it begins as Amy and the Doctor. Amelia Pond, eight years old and mad and dangerous and brilliant and so alone. Amelia Pond, lost little girl with an aunt who isn’t there and house that’s too big. They play make-believe. They save the world, save the universe, save all of creation.
Imagination, like the bluest blue ever, threading through the days, through the games and the Doctor’s games aren’t like those of anyone else. The Doctor is magic, with his fish sticks and custard. With his raggedy clothes and messy hair and too much laughter.
The Doctor is like no one else and when the summer ends, when the Doctor moves away, no one else is as good as the Doctor.
-
It’s hard to be the one left behind to pick up the pieces. It’s hard to be the one loved second best. That’s not strictly true though. Amy loves Rory with all her heart. But Amy loved the Doctor first, and that hurts. That hurts all the time.
They were children together. In a village where Rory wasn’t even the biggest freak, not with Amy and her doctor biting teeth around, they did their best to grow up. It didn’t quite work and that was more Amy’s fault than he’ll admit. Amy with her stories and games and endless imagination.
Amy ruined him. Made him dream too big where all his constitution wanted was happiness and now he’s stuck with it. Stuck with her and this life and this need for things to change. Always to change.
It isn’t quite so bad as some would have you believe.
-
He was sixteen when she was eight. Bright and bold and fearless, two years from university and the world was his. Until he met her and she was just a child and maybe he should have thought about that before he promised he’d come back. He meant it though. Always meant it.
She was eight years old and brave, not without fear, not just foolish and headstrong, but brave and it was too much. He left because he was a wanderer, still is, and for a brief second there was too much to stay for.
If things had been different. If he’d a home, a family, a constant place to sleep right next door he would have been her brother. Would have grown up with her and taken care of her and hugged her as she cried about boys that she wanted and girls who were mean to her because they couldn’t be as smart and lovely as she was (is, will be).
As it is, she was eight years old and then she is twenty. All legs and curves where he doesn’t remember them being. It’s scary. It’s terrifying. It’s something he can’t have and that makes it all the sweeter.
-
At nineteen Rory turns serious, gains a long-suffering air when Amy is at her games and she loves him all the more for it. He is a constant, a warm solid presence that has never abandoned her. But he turns serious, he grows up and she runs her hands through his hair and laughs at him and it is enough for a time.
Then the Doctor comes back.
-
At university he reads ten books for every one another student would. He studies everything he can: math and physics, Renaissance history and political philosophy and psychology and briefly (so briefly, and maybe a bit mistakenly) archeology. He reads until the words blur on the pages and then keeps at it until they right themselves again. It isn’t enough. There’s too much to know. Too much to learn and the halls are too narrow and the light too dim and there is more to see.
He buys a car (blue and old and creaking) and throws away a map and drives. Drives wherever the road leads and then he ends up in Leadworth by some twist of an intersection and there is Amelia Pond. Amy Pond now, still fearsome and mad and impossible. There is Amy Pond, all grown up, and there’s no leaving her behind this time.
-
It starts off as a game, a different game then it was once. They still call it lets save the world but they are older now. She is more broken and he more learned and saving the world isn’t what it used to be. But it is a game, their game with their rules and it starts as them running through museum halls, hand in hand, her hair bright and red and attracting guards and they laugh. It starts as helping children find their mothers and hide-and-seek in libraries with too serious academics and then one day Amy trips over Vincent and things change.
He’s a painter. He’s a genius. He’s a mad man and the saddest-happiest person she’s ever met.
He needs them. And maybe, just maybe, they need him.
-
They pull the first heist themselves. Amy and Vincent and the Doctor. There’s a plan. Well, there’s no plan.
“I have a thing. It's like a plan, but with more greatness.”
She doesn’t laugh but her mouth ripples from a smile to a brighter smile and he loves her a little bit more for it. Vincent watches them with worried eyes, still not used to them; still not quite sure they’re real.
He doesn’t get over that ever, not really and in hindsight that makes her cry more than anything else.
-
They start small. Well, sort of small. All right, they don’t start small at all.
They steal a Caravaggio
(“A small Caravaggio.”
“That hardly helps, Amy.”
“It helps a bit, Rory.”)
Hang one of Vincent’s finest in its place and the world goes mad.
The world was already mad but now it’s because of them and that’s somehow better.
-
There is a year of running from museum to museum. There is a year of drinking in restaurants where they don’t speak the language quite well enough to blend and laughing too loud and living too loud.
Sometimes Vincent doesn’t get out of bed. Sometimes Vincent curls on his side and screams at them to leave and they don’t know how to talk about it. The Doctor, with all his school and all his charm and all his brilliance can’t stop it. Can’t stop this sort of monster. Those days they wander alone, through parks and narrow streets, looking for things to make him smile again.
There is a year of running from museum to museum and Vincent proposes to Amy three times. There is never a ring, they don’t have the money for a ring (they don’t sell the paintings, not yet) but he gets down on bended knee and professes his love (“before god and nature. Amelia Pond, will you marry me?”) and she laughs. Helps him to his feet and they waltz down the streets to a discordant tune the Doctor hums.
There is wine for Amy and wine for Vincent and the Doctor pays and watches them with the sort of smile that sparks something warm in Amy.
There is a year and they start meeting people the Doctor calls friends but anyone else would hesitate to name as associates.
-
At cafe in the south of France, while Vincent paints a church and after the Doctor has complained about time, how it passes in the right order, one moment after the next, they sit at a table and drink coffee and stare at the sky.
“I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“About corrupting you.”
“Corrupting me?”
“I showed up one day and whisked you away into this life of crime. Sleeping every night in a different city, in hotel rooms that won’t be paid for, drinking too much and consorting with men a nice young girl like yourself shouldn’t be seen with.”
“Corrupting me?”
“See the thing is I had this idea about ‘finding myself’ in the countryside. It seems very American in hindsight, but you were suddenly there and it seemed too much like fate and I didn’t really think we’d end up as something sordid as art thieves but here we are and I’d rather like to apologize.”
“Apologize?”
“Yes.”
“For corrupting me?”
“Yes. I mean, I’m sure you had plans. Dreams. Ambitions. A nice job waiting for you.”
“Well, the day you came I had applied to be a kissogram.”
“What?!”
-
Vincent asks Amy to marry him three times. She never says no but the intention, the meaning is there. Amy means to say no to Vincent and back home there is boy, a ring, a promise she intends to keep.
The day she leaves Rory is there, quiet and slightly angry at her side as the Doctor asks, “Amy?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to Amelia?”
“She grew up.”
“Ah. Don’t worry, I’ll soon fix that.”
Rory was there. And Rory was there later when she threw her bag in the back of the beat up blue car and hugged him quick and strong. He slipped the ring off her finger, still warm from her hand.
“I don’t want you to lose it.” (I don’t want to lose you.)
“You worry too much.”
“Come back?”
Maybe it’s a weakness to ask but she smiles and he feels he’s done something right, something brilliant. Vincent asks her to marry him three times, but Amy keeps her promise. She knows too well what it feels like when someone doesn’t.
-
On her twenty-first birthday Amy wears a gold dress, hair pinned high on her head and they take her dancing. Some girls were made for it, all pale limbs and quick movements and the room watches her move. They drink expensive champagne, pay their tab this once and laugh as the world around them watches.
The night seems to linger longer than natural. The sky clinging to the stars and Vincent paints and paints, brush strokes swirl fast and furious and tonight it is the Doctor and Amy who waltz, to the tune of the stars, to all the blues in the sky and the way the wind tugs them across.
They talk and they fall silent in cycles, lying on the grass holding hands and whisper promises to their favorite stars and laughing when the silence demands it. In the morning, at the first touch of dawn, Vincent sits back, streaks of paint hiding half his face, and says, “There will never be another sky like that.”
There won’t. Not ever.
-
They sack the Musée d’Orsay. There is no other word for it. An entire exhibit, just for Vincent. Amy hangs the last piece, a vase of sunflowers, her vase of sunflowers.
“Are you sure you want to--”
“It deserves to be seen.” She wipes a tear with the edge of her hand, her wrist slender, more breakable than he remembers and it worries him. “Why? Why did he-- I thought we could help him. I thought we could save him.”
The Doctor’s hugs are warm and all consuming. But this once they can’t keep out the cold.
-
Vincent dies.
This happens in every version of the story. The ones the Doctor mentions in passing when trying to impress some wayward group of children; when Amy whispers to Rory late at night between the sheets; in other worlds and places and times where loneliness still holds people in an iron grip and doesn’t bother letting go. Vincent dies. And the world loses a bit more magic, a bit more color.
In this world, in this time that color could be called restraint. The Doctor’s restraint.
-
There are six rounds in a standard revolver. There are six chances to hit your target. River only ever uses one.
Bang.
The body hits the ground. Only a body. Only a body as soon as she thought to touch the trigger.
“I’m sorry,” says the Doctor, but he’s looking at Amy.
-
River Song grew up a little girl who dreamt of stars. There are lots of those, so many of those little girls, too brilliant by half and ready to rule the world, charm it to their will but in some places, with some people that isn’t considered a good thing. River Song grew up a brilliant little girl but the world pushed her to fit so she pushed back.
It never dawned on her to run away and if it had this story wouldn’t have happened, not in this way.
-
Sometimes it’s like there’s an extra room in Amy’s house, a place just at the edge of her eye that she can’t see into, a shadow too pale to notice. Rory doesn’t know what to do about it, never has.
Amy wasn’t his first girlfriend. There was Susan first, Susan before Amy (but not really before. Amy was always there. Always color and beauty and madness at the edge of his vision) and they were children, barely that. They were infants and he and Susan held hands in the school yard and these days Susan walks down streets pushing a stroller with a dark-haired little girl waving from inside and Rory looks at them and sees a future he never could have had.
It isn’t that it was always Amy and Amy alone. It’s that Amy is a too bright, too hot star. Burning and burning until everything and everyone around her is trapped. No one can get away, not nurses from tiny English villages nor international art thief geniuses and if that doesn’t exactly make Rory feel better it does make the Doctor seem more human.
-
Selling stolen art is more difficult than the films will have you believe. There’s a market but it’s not something you wander into without invitation, or at least something that looks like an invitation (and that doesn’t include red-heads with a penchant for short skirts).
River takes it well, considering.
“You want a favor, from me?” The thing she’s wearing could be called a Cheshire Cat Grin if one were predisposed to flights of fancy. “Well I never thought I’d see the day. The great Doctor, the man behind every legend, come to ask something of me.”
“River.”
“Doctor.”
-
Drawing lines across maps is the easiest thing in the world, or rather on it. A ticket (plane, train or automobile, it doesn’t matter), a hat and a good handle on the edge of your soul are all you need. This is the first thing the Doctor ever learned and its a lesson he took to heart, wrapped it around himself three times like a scarf and no one ever waits long before he’s gone.
River learned this the first time she met him and it was a hard lesson but fast was better, all she has to do is look at Amy to know that. River met the Doctor and he was odd and terrible and wonderful and too old to be younger than her. Introduction to Archaeology and he sat in the front row and she taught and looking back she can’t stand the sight of him.
He knew too much then, too much about the world and too much about her and she’ll always resent him a little bit for this. It’s the kind of resentment forevers are built on.
-
There’s an oath written beneath her skin, into her muscles and bones, etched so deep that when the sun shines bright enough the ghostly outlines of it are there for all the world to read. It hurts but during the night she presses her fingers against the raw edges of it. The places that read like the Doctor’s face the first time she met him and Vincent’s laugh and her childhood home on nights when she prayed to Santa.
There is an oath that she swore as a child and she holds to it, gives her heart away at every turn because it’s easier than trying to keep something so wild.
-
There are stories, whispered on dark nights, when even the moon isn’t there to hear, of the man who steals gold and the women who wear it like blood through their veins. There are stories about the girl who waited and the boy who waited longer and a love in the wrong order.
There are stories that they tell about the Doctor and his friends but they are not stories for children. And they do not give one a restful night’s sleep.
-
Somewhere west of the Mississippi River, in a desert that could look like paradise if you weren’t paying too much attention, the world falls silent for a beat. Light is a strange thing. Neither particle nor wave and when you close your eyes all the shapes and colors go away but the light is still there, pressing itself against your eyelids, refusing to yield. When the world ends, stops and doesn’t start up again in the right order, the light, the sun still burns hot against the sand.
The sunlight is endless. The Doctor makes a handsome corpse.
notes: this is the Who mafia au that I have been working on since the start of the series. It is currently in its art thief phase but I'm working towards mafia. I'm posting it in parts in hopes of motivating myself to finish. I'll be going on vacation with the family for the next three weeks so the next part probably won't be up until after that. I am an American, so my sincerest apologies for any Americanism I have committed. Point out anything that really bothers you and I will fix it.
They call him the Doctor. It reads something like a joke but the only person who ever laughs is Amy.
(Don’t tell anyone, but she’s his favorite.)
-
The sky is perfect in the desert. A picture postcard of a world, Amy the only point of red on the horizon but for the blood across the sand.
“I missed you,” she whispers into his neck and it is the wrong moment for this. It is always the wrong moment for them.
Rory sets fire to the body, to the boat as the sun kisses the sky one last time.
-
It begins as a game. It is always a game on some level but later they cannot claim the excuse of being children and it grows tiresome to try so they make up their own rules.
It begins as a game and it begins as Amy and the Doctor. Amelia Pond, eight years old and mad and dangerous and brilliant and so alone. Amelia Pond, lost little girl with an aunt who isn’t there and house that’s too big. They play make-believe. They save the world, save the universe, save all of creation.
Imagination, like the bluest blue ever, threading through the days, through the games and the Doctor’s games aren’t like those of anyone else. The Doctor is magic, with his fish sticks and custard. With his raggedy clothes and messy hair and too much laughter.
The Doctor is like no one else and when the summer ends, when the Doctor moves away, no one else is as good as the Doctor.
-
It’s hard to be the one left behind to pick up the pieces. It’s hard to be the one loved second best. That’s not strictly true though. Amy loves Rory with all her heart. But Amy loved the Doctor first, and that hurts. That hurts all the time.
They were children together. In a village where Rory wasn’t even the biggest freak, not with Amy and her doctor biting teeth around, they did their best to grow up. It didn’t quite work and that was more Amy’s fault than he’ll admit. Amy with her stories and games and endless imagination.
Amy ruined him. Made him dream too big where all his constitution wanted was happiness and now he’s stuck with it. Stuck with her and this life and this need for things to change. Always to change.
It isn’t quite so bad as some would have you believe.
-
He was sixteen when she was eight. Bright and bold and fearless, two years from university and the world was his. Until he met her and she was just a child and maybe he should have thought about that before he promised he’d come back. He meant it though. Always meant it.
She was eight years old and brave, not without fear, not just foolish and headstrong, but brave and it was too much. He left because he was a wanderer, still is, and for a brief second there was too much to stay for.
If things had been different. If he’d a home, a family, a constant place to sleep right next door he would have been her brother. Would have grown up with her and taken care of her and hugged her as she cried about boys that she wanted and girls who were mean to her because they couldn’t be as smart and lovely as she was (is, will be).
As it is, she was eight years old and then she is twenty. All legs and curves where he doesn’t remember them being. It’s scary. It’s terrifying. It’s something he can’t have and that makes it all the sweeter.
-
At nineteen Rory turns serious, gains a long-suffering air when Amy is at her games and she loves him all the more for it. He is a constant, a warm solid presence that has never abandoned her. But he turns serious, he grows up and she runs her hands through his hair and laughs at him and it is enough for a time.
Then the Doctor comes back.
-
At university he reads ten books for every one another student would. He studies everything he can: math and physics, Renaissance history and political philosophy and psychology and briefly (so briefly, and maybe a bit mistakenly) archeology. He reads until the words blur on the pages and then keeps at it until they right themselves again. It isn’t enough. There’s too much to know. Too much to learn and the halls are too narrow and the light too dim and there is more to see.
He buys a car (blue and old and creaking) and throws away a map and drives. Drives wherever the road leads and then he ends up in Leadworth by some twist of an intersection and there is Amelia Pond. Amy Pond now, still fearsome and mad and impossible. There is Amy Pond, all grown up, and there’s no leaving her behind this time.
-
It starts off as a game, a different game then it was once. They still call it lets save the world but they are older now. She is more broken and he more learned and saving the world isn’t what it used to be. But it is a game, their game with their rules and it starts as them running through museum halls, hand in hand, her hair bright and red and attracting guards and they laugh. It starts as helping children find their mothers and hide-and-seek in libraries with too serious academics and then one day Amy trips over Vincent and things change.
He’s a painter. He’s a genius. He’s a mad man and the saddest-happiest person she’s ever met.
He needs them. And maybe, just maybe, they need him.
-
They pull the first heist themselves. Amy and Vincent and the Doctor. There’s a plan. Well, there’s no plan.
“I have a thing. It's like a plan, but with more greatness.”
She doesn’t laugh but her mouth ripples from a smile to a brighter smile and he loves her a little bit more for it. Vincent watches them with worried eyes, still not used to them; still not quite sure they’re real.
He doesn’t get over that ever, not really and in hindsight that makes her cry more than anything else.
-
They start small. Well, sort of small. All right, they don’t start small at all.
They steal a Caravaggio
(“A small Caravaggio.”
“That hardly helps, Amy.”
“It helps a bit, Rory.”)
Hang one of Vincent’s finest in its place and the world goes mad.
The world was already mad but now it’s because of them and that’s somehow better.
-
There is a year of running from museum to museum. There is a year of drinking in restaurants where they don’t speak the language quite well enough to blend and laughing too loud and living too loud.
Sometimes Vincent doesn’t get out of bed. Sometimes Vincent curls on his side and screams at them to leave and they don’t know how to talk about it. The Doctor, with all his school and all his charm and all his brilliance can’t stop it. Can’t stop this sort of monster. Those days they wander alone, through parks and narrow streets, looking for things to make him smile again.
There is a year of running from museum to museum and Vincent proposes to Amy three times. There is never a ring, they don’t have the money for a ring (they don’t sell the paintings, not yet) but he gets down on bended knee and professes his love (“before god and nature. Amelia Pond, will you marry me?”) and she laughs. Helps him to his feet and they waltz down the streets to a discordant tune the Doctor hums.
There is wine for Amy and wine for Vincent and the Doctor pays and watches them with the sort of smile that sparks something warm in Amy.
There is a year and they start meeting people the Doctor calls friends but anyone else would hesitate to name as associates.
-
At cafe in the south of France, while Vincent paints a church and after the Doctor has complained about time, how it passes in the right order, one moment after the next, they sit at a table and drink coffee and stare at the sky.
“I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“About corrupting you.”
“Corrupting me?”
“I showed up one day and whisked you away into this life of crime. Sleeping every night in a different city, in hotel rooms that won’t be paid for, drinking too much and consorting with men a nice young girl like yourself shouldn’t be seen with.”
“Corrupting me?”
“See the thing is I had this idea about ‘finding myself’ in the countryside. It seems very American in hindsight, but you were suddenly there and it seemed too much like fate and I didn’t really think we’d end up as something sordid as art thieves but here we are and I’d rather like to apologize.”
“Apologize?”
“Yes.”
“For corrupting me?”
“Yes. I mean, I’m sure you had plans. Dreams. Ambitions. A nice job waiting for you.”
“Well, the day you came I had applied to be a kissogram.”
“What?!”
-
Vincent asks Amy to marry him three times. She never says no but the intention, the meaning is there. Amy means to say no to Vincent and back home there is boy, a ring, a promise she intends to keep.
The day she leaves Rory is there, quiet and slightly angry at her side as the Doctor asks, “Amy?”
“Yes.”
“What happened to Amelia?”
“She grew up.”
“Ah. Don’t worry, I’ll soon fix that.”
Rory was there. And Rory was there later when she threw her bag in the back of the beat up blue car and hugged him quick and strong. He slipped the ring off her finger, still warm from her hand.
“I don’t want you to lose it.” (I don’t want to lose you.)
“You worry too much.”
“Come back?”
Maybe it’s a weakness to ask but she smiles and he feels he’s done something right, something brilliant. Vincent asks her to marry him three times, but Amy keeps her promise. She knows too well what it feels like when someone doesn’t.
-
On her twenty-first birthday Amy wears a gold dress, hair pinned high on her head and they take her dancing. Some girls were made for it, all pale limbs and quick movements and the room watches her move. They drink expensive champagne, pay their tab this once and laugh as the world around them watches.
The night seems to linger longer than natural. The sky clinging to the stars and Vincent paints and paints, brush strokes swirl fast and furious and tonight it is the Doctor and Amy who waltz, to the tune of the stars, to all the blues in the sky and the way the wind tugs them across.
They talk and they fall silent in cycles, lying on the grass holding hands and whisper promises to their favorite stars and laughing when the silence demands it. In the morning, at the first touch of dawn, Vincent sits back, streaks of paint hiding half his face, and says, “There will never be another sky like that.”
There won’t. Not ever.
-
They sack the Musée d’Orsay. There is no other word for it. An entire exhibit, just for Vincent. Amy hangs the last piece, a vase of sunflowers, her vase of sunflowers.
“Are you sure you want to--”
“It deserves to be seen.” She wipes a tear with the edge of her hand, her wrist slender, more breakable than he remembers and it worries him. “Why? Why did he-- I thought we could help him. I thought we could save him.”
The Doctor’s hugs are warm and all consuming. But this once they can’t keep out the cold.
-
Vincent dies.
This happens in every version of the story. The ones the Doctor mentions in passing when trying to impress some wayward group of children; when Amy whispers to Rory late at night between the sheets; in other worlds and places and times where loneliness still holds people in an iron grip and doesn’t bother letting go. Vincent dies. And the world loses a bit more magic, a bit more color.
In this world, in this time that color could be called restraint. The Doctor’s restraint.
-
There are six rounds in a standard revolver. There are six chances to hit your target. River only ever uses one.
Bang.
The body hits the ground. Only a body. Only a body as soon as she thought to touch the trigger.
“I’m sorry,” says the Doctor, but he’s looking at Amy.
-
River Song grew up a little girl who dreamt of stars. There are lots of those, so many of those little girls, too brilliant by half and ready to rule the world, charm it to their will but in some places, with some people that isn’t considered a good thing. River Song grew up a brilliant little girl but the world pushed her to fit so she pushed back.
It never dawned on her to run away and if it had this story wouldn’t have happened, not in this way.
-
Sometimes it’s like there’s an extra room in Amy’s house, a place just at the edge of her eye that she can’t see into, a shadow too pale to notice. Rory doesn’t know what to do about it, never has.
Amy wasn’t his first girlfriend. There was Susan first, Susan before Amy (but not really before. Amy was always there. Always color and beauty and madness at the edge of his vision) and they were children, barely that. They were infants and he and Susan held hands in the school yard and these days Susan walks down streets pushing a stroller with a dark-haired little girl waving from inside and Rory looks at them and sees a future he never could have had.
It isn’t that it was always Amy and Amy alone. It’s that Amy is a too bright, too hot star. Burning and burning until everything and everyone around her is trapped. No one can get away, not nurses from tiny English villages nor international art thief geniuses and if that doesn’t exactly make Rory feel better it does make the Doctor seem more human.
-
Selling stolen art is more difficult than the films will have you believe. There’s a market but it’s not something you wander into without invitation, or at least something that looks like an invitation (and that doesn’t include red-heads with a penchant for short skirts).
River takes it well, considering.
“You want a favor, from me?” The thing she’s wearing could be called a Cheshire Cat Grin if one were predisposed to flights of fancy. “Well I never thought I’d see the day. The great Doctor, the man behind every legend, come to ask something of me.”
“River.”
“Doctor.”
-
Drawing lines across maps is the easiest thing in the world, or rather on it. A ticket (plane, train or automobile, it doesn’t matter), a hat and a good handle on the edge of your soul are all you need. This is the first thing the Doctor ever learned and its a lesson he took to heart, wrapped it around himself three times like a scarf and no one ever waits long before he’s gone.
River learned this the first time she met him and it was a hard lesson but fast was better, all she has to do is look at Amy to know that. River met the Doctor and he was odd and terrible and wonderful and too old to be younger than her. Introduction to Archaeology and he sat in the front row and she taught and looking back she can’t stand the sight of him.
He knew too much then, too much about the world and too much about her and she’ll always resent him a little bit for this. It’s the kind of resentment forevers are built on.
-
There’s an oath written beneath her skin, into her muscles and bones, etched so deep that when the sun shines bright enough the ghostly outlines of it are there for all the world to read. It hurts but during the night she presses her fingers against the raw edges of it. The places that read like the Doctor’s face the first time she met him and Vincent’s laugh and her childhood home on nights when she prayed to Santa.
There is an oath that she swore as a child and she holds to it, gives her heart away at every turn because it’s easier than trying to keep something so wild.
-
There are stories, whispered on dark nights, when even the moon isn’t there to hear, of the man who steals gold and the women who wear it like blood through their veins. There are stories about the girl who waited and the boy who waited longer and a love in the wrong order.
There are stories that they tell about the Doctor and his friends but they are not stories for children. And they do not give one a restful night’s sleep.
-
Somewhere west of the Mississippi River, in a desert that could look like paradise if you weren’t paying too much attention, the world falls silent for a beat. Light is a strange thing. Neither particle nor wave and when you close your eyes all the shapes and colors go away but the light is still there, pressing itself against your eyelids, refusing to yield. When the world ends, stops and doesn’t start up again in the right order, the light, the sun still burns hot against the sand.
The sunlight is endless. The Doctor makes a handsome corpse.