Whofic: The Other Choice
Title: The Other Choice
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~1,700
Warnings/Spoilers: Indirect spoilers for everything up to 5x07
Summary: Amy's future self pops by with a message, and ends up revealing a bit more than she'd meant to. Set sometime after 5x07.
A/N: Because "Amy's Choice" made me sad. (In other news, shiny new fandom is shiny!)
More seriously, I'm really quite new to the 'Who fandom, and I'm sure I don't have the voices quite right yet, so constructive criticism is most welcome!
*
:: the other choice ::
*
“Oh. You’re not supposed to be here.”
Amy stared at the stranger who had just materialized in the TARDIS, finding herself completely without words, which was a first, for her. She opened her mouth and closed it again in complete failure to produce a response, and probably would have been embarrassed by her fish-like behaviour if she wasn’t too busy being stunned.
She flicked a look at the Doctor, who was watching the visitor closely from the other side of the TARDIS console. Probably sensing her gaze, he turned and shot her a grin of pure glee. She could only give him an overcome look in response, because this inexplicable stranger really did look an awful lot like Amy Pond.
“Although, it’s not exactly surprising that he messed up again,” the disturbing person continued. “So, what? How much am I off this time? Five years? Fifteen? Maybe negative numbers so I’m now in the future instead of the past and you all know what I’m about to say before I say it?” A thoughtful pause. “Actually that would brilliant, I could-no.” The stranger shook herself and gave Amy a stern look. “What year is it? How old are you?”
Amy didn’t bother asking why she - it? - would need to know; she was becoming very familiar with the headaches involved in time travel. “When I left it was 2010, I guess it still is. I’m twenty-one.”
Her doppelganger grinned at her. “Good. That’s good. That’s perfect. Well, almost, but at least I’m early enough.”
“Early enough for what, exactly?” the Doctor spoke up finally, stepping around the TARDIS’s console to confront the ginger woman directly.
“Oh, just a warning. You’ll know when you see it, but just - don’t press the red button. It’s the blue one you want.”
The Doctor, incredibly, didn’t look at all confused by this. He nodded and seemed about to say something, but Amy had had enough of standing in silent astonishment.
“Wait, hold on,” she interrupted, stepping closer to the visitor herself. “Just who are you?”
“I’m you, of course,” the stranger grinned. “Amelia Pond. I thought that was obvious.”
Amy blinked. “You’re…me? From…the future? But how…the Doctor said that was impossible.”
“We never did follow rules well,” Amelia laughed. “I’m a little…different. There are exceptions. I can’t do it for long though, he said I’d only have five minutes…” She glanced at the watch on her wrist - which did not, by the way, look anything like a normal watch - and gave a long suffering sigh. “…which has already passed. And oh, look, I’m still here. What a surprise.” This last was growled at the Doctor, who gave her his most innocent stare.
Something else glinted on Amelia’s hand, and Amy’s mind flashed to the decision looming before her, as it often did these days. She thought she’d already made her choice - to the extent that she actually had a choice, because it’s not like the Doctor would let her grow old in the TARDIS - but that didn’t ease her dread of the event itself. Knowing the shape of the cage didn’t change her eventual imprisonment. And doubtless that thought would break Rory’s heart if he was ever privy to it - which he wouldn’t be, because she did love him and didn’t want to hurt him, he was her best friend - but after tasting freedom and adventure with the Doctor she couldn’t think of her impending marriage as anything else. Sometimes it seemed like everything she was, her entire life and the person she’d become, was because of him; because he’d crashed into her shed when she was seven and said five minutes when he really meant twelve years, and had made her wait and dream and never be satisfied with what her normal life could offer her. It was his fault she thought marrying an amazing man like Rory was settling, his fault that her wedding day would probably be the unhappiest day of her life, and he wouldn’t even offer her another option.
She had grown up, during those fourteen years of waiting. And grownups knew that happiness didn’t last; that in the end, fairytales just weren’t real.
And so she noticed the ring on Amelia’s finger with a distant sort of resignation, because the Doctor’s ability to use her as an impossible, trans-temporal messenger notwithstanding, apparently she’d gone through with it.
The ring was abruptly hidden from her stare by Amelia’s second hand as she reached down to fiddle with it self-consciously. “I guess I should’ve taken this off, eh?” Amy raised her eyes to Amelia’s, and she didn’t know what her future counterpart saw there, but it made her eyes soften. “It’s not what you think.”
“What is it then?” Amy asked dully.
“It’s…” Amelia flailed a bit. “I shouldn’t be telling you this. Right, Doctor? Shouldn’t you be telling me to shut up right about now?”
Amy turned to regard the Time Lord, curious herself about why he was being so quiet. She found him leaning on the console of the TARDIS, regarding them both with blatant fascination.
“No, no,” he said, waving a hand in their direction. “No. Your whole existence is contingent on events occurring in the same fashion as they did for you, or rather continuing to occur. Nothing you say can alter the timestream significantly, because in order for events to change you need to exist, and in order for you to exist the events cannot change, and, well…wibbley wobbley, timey wimey.” He hooked his thumbs under his suspenders and leaned more fully against the TARDIS. “Please, continue.” His eyes practically shone with delight.
Both Ponds stared at him for a long moment while the implications of that sunk in. When they turned back to each other in perfect sync, wearing identical expressions equal parts wonder and exasperation, Amy was struck with the sudden conviction that this person before her really was herself. Really.
Really, really.
It was more than a little unnerving.
Amelia cleared her throat. “Well then. I don’t know how this works, but I guess something will stop me if I’m about to say something dangerous?”
“What I’d like to know,” the Doctor piped up again, completely ignoring the reasonable question, “is how this is possible.”
“Oh,” Amelia said, looking nonplussed. “I doubt I can tell you that. But it’s because…well, I’m not completely human.”
Amy’s mind stalled.
“Wot?” Apparently the Doctor’s had done something similar.
“Anymore,” Amelia rushed to clarify. “I was. She is. It was…an accident, sort of.”
“Explain,” Amy demanded, probably beating the Doctor by about a millisecond.
“It’s do to with the cracks. And him, but then everything’s always his fault anyways.” The Doctor looked vaguely affronted at that, but was too interested to interrupt. “I was seven, and I slept a meter away from a crack for months. It forged a…connection, or something. Then he crashes into my shed, and suddenly I’m living a completely different life, on a path I was never supposed to be on. It gets complicated here, but as near as I can understand it I’d already lived that other life - something about time being circular - and my going off and doing something completely different didn’t really fit. So the universe tried to split, to accommodate it, only it just cracked instead.
“The day of my wedding…” Amelia trailed off, her mouth moving soundlessly for a few moments before understanding dawned. “Right. Well, something happened, and I was a bit key. The end result is me. I guess I’m still human, technically, but I’m outside of time.”
Amy risked a glance at the Doctor to see if he was following, but the wonder on his face was almost too powerful to look at. She looked back to Amelia.
“So…what does that mean then?”
Amelia shrugged, as if she was informing Amy about the weather rather than future life-changing events. “Time doesn’t affect me anymore. I don’t age. Most time travelling rules don’t apply to me. That sort of stuff.”
“You’re immortal?” Amy squeaked. She felt almost ridiculous saying it, because Time Lords and Weeping Angels she could accept, but now she was talking about herself, Amy Pond, the Girl Who Waited, and this just wasn’t possible.
“More or less,” was the impossible reply. “I can still be killed, of course, like you. But I won’t just…wither away.”
Hope - ridiculous, insane hope was fluttering to life in Amy’s chest. “You can’t have married Rory. Not after…”
“No.”
“So then…” Amy was focused on the ring now, like nothing else existed at the moment besides her and that simple golden band. She didn’t think she was even blinking.
The silence stretched on, and eventually Amy managed to rip her eyes up to meet Amelia’s. Her future self gave a tiny smile.
“I can’t say.”
But the smile that glittered on her face and the way her eyes travelled minutely towards the TARDIS console told Amy more than enough. It told her she did have another option, after all. She felt like she was waking from a bad dream. The universe was filled with glittering possibilities again, her future stretching out in an endless horizon of adventure and excitement and maybe, just maybe, love. Amy decided it was quite nice having a future she could look forward to.
Suddenly the woman in front of her grew blurry and Amy’s hand was half raised to rub at her eyes when she heard Amelia’s gasp of surprise. Her counterpart came into focus again, and then blurred, and then returned. The process reminded her of the TARDIS, actually, when it had disappeared before her eyes when she was seven, and again at nineteen. She felt an inexplicable urge to reach out and stop her.
“River Song,” the Doctor stated, seemingly apropos of nothing. “All lies?”
“Not quite,” Amelia corrected, her voice fading in and out weirdly with her appearance, at times normal and at others as if she were speaking from a great distance. She disappeared entirely for a moment, and Amy thought she would leave them with that, but she wasn’t finished. She reappeared in blurry focus one last time and her words, when they came, were no more than a distorted whisper.
“Time can be rewritten.”
::end::