(no subject)
900 words of NOTHING HAPPENING, but the first scene had to be moved out of my head and so it was stalked by another 600 words of nothing. The wait. Rory and a box, G, spoilers for the Doctor Who finale (which was fabulous, in case you were wondering). Rory/Amy, bizarrely enough. All introspection because I haven't got their voices down for anything else.
I WILL NEVER POST TWICE A DAY AGAIN.
*
"So," he says.
"Well," he says.
"Um," he says.
In the end, he sits with his shoulder to the box, half-leaning against it with his sword laid across his knees. What to say, where to start. He'd feel a bit stupid confessing his love to a box, he knows that, for all that it's Amy in there, and not just because it's a box, but because it's Amy and she knows, of course she does, and she'd tell him to shut up and not to be stupid. Except the Doctor's been gone less than ten minutes and Rory thinks that he might go mad with the wait, madness fritzing up his programming (his Roman programming? do Romans program with numerals? it's a clever bit, so he tucks it away for a joke someday, later), unraveling him into nervous bits of nurse and centurion and devotion. The two-thousand year wait.
Can't sleep, can't eat--
The thought fusses at him, and Rory fusses back at it, palming the hilt of a sword he knows as well as he knows the bones of the human hand. What'll he be doing in a thousand years, tasting dust or something? For the sheer sake of feeling. It would be the human thing to do, and as the Doctor pointed out, he is very human, staying for madness in the dark and the not-cold and the empty sounds sitting on the cusp of hearing outside.
No, it's not like that. Staying for her.
Until she wakes up.
Two thousand years.
He thinks about it slowly, giving himself space over days. That's, well. That's longer than he's ever been alive for a start. Even counting the parts he remembers more than once, soldier and student. It's a few hundred times over. Actually, Rory thinks, putting together all the bits he really remembers with enough surety and image to count as real memories, it's probably more like a thousand times.
He walks the length and breadth of the room - doesn't pace, because he's got centuries to work his way up to it - and, when he grows bored, stares at the box and wonders how she's doing in there. Does she register the passing time? Has her internal clock skewed to some slower function as she heals: days as seconds, months as hours, years as days? Does she dream of anything: white lace, or stars, or him?
Between the two of them, he'd always been the one good at not getting bored, at being invested in whatever he was doing. Amy had a habit of flitting off, distracted, arrowing to the heart of whatever she wanted for the time being. It hadn't been him, not for a long time. But he's got good at being the constant, not boring enough to be written off, and that's just right. Even his existence is proof of that. He's still here, isn't he? Long after everything else.
He learns to tune everything out: the earth overhead, the air crumbling to dust, the still lights. The sameness is a comfort: it tells him what should be. Amy remains. As long as that's true, everything's still all right.
He talks to her sparingly, imagining her quirking blank look at being told that her fiance had started communicating with inanimate objects. ("Rory," Amy says. "Rory Williams," and she'd remembered his name then, stark-eyed with pupils like pinpoints, her nails digging into his arm, seeing him with all clarity. She'd remembered. That was important.) He tells her stories sometimes just to ascertain the existence of a voice in his throat, a voice like the ones that had talked back to her years ago. The stories aren't very good ones, though he gestures to go along with them, hands communicating shapes until he forgets himself and nearly loses something fairly vital to the point of the ever-sharpened blade. Come to think of it, they're usually things she told him as a kid: a little girl sharp with certainties, authoritative and slightly stern as she talked back to him. To the boy who never could stop gaping, never could be angry with her for long even though she left him tied up in bowties and his own confusion, or dragged him along too quick, and that thought's getting a bit mixed up, isn't it? It's all a mix.
He stumbles over the replays, and his laughter sounds a little hollow at the punchlines. But they're things to tell. He thinks she ought to know.
It's not exactly like waiting, as if this time is just the means to an end. He needs to be where she is. He always has.
Years are passing. Eventually, he thinks of the fact with some surprise: it feels normal for this to be endless, all noise insignificant to the enduring silence and the unbreathing box. The idea of an end is so striking that he actually puts down his sword and goes over to the Pandorica, traces the same familiar patterns as if he can wear them deeper into the stone, or... poke some warmth through. Or something. To Amy breathing in the cool, a burning signal of the outside world: he's still here, he exists, he knows her name and the whole shape of their lives together. He wonders how long it'll be: Amy again, whole and old and new (though hopefully neither borrowed nor blue). He hasn't constructed fantasy futures in a long time, but he puts them together now, at the thought of a future. One day, he thinks, Amy will wake up.
One day she will wake up and she'll say--
She won't have to say anything. She'll be, and that is all he's asking.
The Doctor was wrong. He isn't human enough, not now. He's the memory of something human. He doesn't have the capacity to change. As long as he hangs onto this, he will be guard and Rory and enough.
He waits.
I WILL NEVER POST TWICE A DAY AGAIN.
*
"So," he says.
"Well," he says.
"Um," he says.
In the end, he sits with his shoulder to the box, half-leaning against it with his sword laid across his knees. What to say, where to start. He'd feel a bit stupid confessing his love to a box, he knows that, for all that it's Amy in there, and not just because it's a box, but because it's Amy and she knows, of course she does, and she'd tell him to shut up and not to be stupid. Except the Doctor's been gone less than ten minutes and Rory thinks that he might go mad with the wait, madness fritzing up his programming (his Roman programming? do Romans program with numerals? it's a clever bit, so he tucks it away for a joke someday, later), unraveling him into nervous bits of nurse and centurion and devotion. The two-thousand year wait.
Can't sleep, can't eat--
The thought fusses at him, and Rory fusses back at it, palming the hilt of a sword he knows as well as he knows the bones of the human hand. What'll he be doing in a thousand years, tasting dust or something? For the sheer sake of feeling. It would be the human thing to do, and as the Doctor pointed out, he is very human, staying for madness in the dark and the not-cold and the empty sounds sitting on the cusp of hearing outside.
No, it's not like that. Staying for her.
Until she wakes up.
Two thousand years.
He thinks about it slowly, giving himself space over days. That's, well. That's longer than he's ever been alive for a start. Even counting the parts he remembers more than once, soldier and student. It's a few hundred times over. Actually, Rory thinks, putting together all the bits he really remembers with enough surety and image to count as real memories, it's probably more like a thousand times.
He walks the length and breadth of the room - doesn't pace, because he's got centuries to work his way up to it - and, when he grows bored, stares at the box and wonders how she's doing in there. Does she register the passing time? Has her internal clock skewed to some slower function as she heals: days as seconds, months as hours, years as days? Does she dream of anything: white lace, or stars, or him?
Between the two of them, he'd always been the one good at not getting bored, at being invested in whatever he was doing. Amy had a habit of flitting off, distracted, arrowing to the heart of whatever she wanted for the time being. It hadn't been him, not for a long time. But he's got good at being the constant, not boring enough to be written off, and that's just right. Even his existence is proof of that. He's still here, isn't he? Long after everything else.
He learns to tune everything out: the earth overhead, the air crumbling to dust, the still lights. The sameness is a comfort: it tells him what should be. Amy remains. As long as that's true, everything's still all right.
He talks to her sparingly, imagining her quirking blank look at being told that her fiance had started communicating with inanimate objects. ("Rory," Amy says. "Rory Williams," and she'd remembered his name then, stark-eyed with pupils like pinpoints, her nails digging into his arm, seeing him with all clarity. She'd remembered. That was important.) He tells her stories sometimes just to ascertain the existence of a voice in his throat, a voice like the ones that had talked back to her years ago. The stories aren't very good ones, though he gestures to go along with them, hands communicating shapes until he forgets himself and nearly loses something fairly vital to the point of the ever-sharpened blade. Come to think of it, they're usually things she told him as a kid: a little girl sharp with certainties, authoritative and slightly stern as she talked back to him. To the boy who never could stop gaping, never could be angry with her for long even though she left him tied up in bowties and his own confusion, or dragged him along too quick, and that thought's getting a bit mixed up, isn't it? It's all a mix.
He stumbles over the replays, and his laughter sounds a little hollow at the punchlines. But they're things to tell. He thinks she ought to know.
It's not exactly like waiting, as if this time is just the means to an end. He needs to be where she is. He always has.
Years are passing. Eventually, he thinks of the fact with some surprise: it feels normal for this to be endless, all noise insignificant to the enduring silence and the unbreathing box. The idea of an end is so striking that he actually puts down his sword and goes over to the Pandorica, traces the same familiar patterns as if he can wear them deeper into the stone, or... poke some warmth through. Or something. To Amy breathing in the cool, a burning signal of the outside world: he's still here, he exists, he knows her name and the whole shape of their lives together. He wonders how long it'll be: Amy again, whole and old and new (though hopefully neither borrowed nor blue). He hasn't constructed fantasy futures in a long time, but he puts them together now, at the thought of a future. One day, he thinks, Amy will wake up.
One day she will wake up and she'll say--
She won't have to say anything. She'll be, and that is all he's asking.
The Doctor was wrong. He isn't human enough, not now. He's the memory of something human. He doesn't have the capacity to change. As long as he hangs onto this, he will be guard and Rory and enough.
He waits.