The Passing Youth of Miss Amelia Pond: Chapter 01: Cannonballs
The Passing Youth of Miss Amelia Pond
Characters/Pairings: The Doctor, Rory, River, Amelia/Amy
Rating: PGish
Spoilers: Up to current episodes
Summary: Amy wakes up changed and her life on the TARDIS is altered
Chapter 1:
Cannonballs
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong here, ain’t nothin’ goin’ on here. Don’t need no help I didn’t ask for,” the old woman said. To say she was agitated would be what is called, a gross understatement. It wasn’t likely that her body language could convey even more strongly that she wanted the two men to leave her doorstep as soon as physically possible. She glared at the blank identification and looked up between the Doctor and Rory. “Especially no unsolicited medical help, mind you.”
The woman, standing half guarded by her heavy steel door set into metal core brick walls, squinted at the psychic paper once more and then to the Doctor. “Rubbish is what that is. Can’t make out the name. Doctor who, exactly?”
He snapped away the wallet and painted a bright grin on his face. “Just, ‘the Doctor,’” he replied. Oddly enough, the old girl was seeing through the perception filter but instead of seeing blank paper, she was looking through to the truth. Fascinating.
“Well, ain’t we posh. He thinks he’s Bono, is what.”
Rory snorted. She turned her fully grey head towards him and her sharp blue eyes withered him, disintegrating his smile.
“And I suppose you’re ‘Nurse.’” She’d of course intended it as an insult and Rory considered how odd he felt in that moment to actually feel as insulted as he did when all she really said, however disdainfully, was the truth and he’d always been particularly proud of his career.
He swallowed his bruised pride and nodded, “Perhaps, the Nurse.”
She slammed the door in their faces.
The Doctor frowned askance to Rory and said very dryly, “We need to work on your sarcasm.”
That wasn’t exactly what he was expecting in that moment but nevertheless . . . “My sarcasm is fine,” he retorted.
Turning away, the Doctor huffed, mouthing, “The Nurse. Ridiculous.”
Rory’s jaw dropped and he was immediately on the Doctor’s heels. “You of all people-”
“Nurse who, exactly?” The Doctor asked, imitating the question that had just been set to him.
“If I’m going to work on my sarcasm, Doctor, you’re going to work on a name.”
“A name?”
“Yes. A name. Your own name.”
“I have a name-”
“Not a title and not a name that’s comprised of concentric circles no one can read and of which you’ve never spoken. A name that can actually go on, say, a driver’s license.”
“Ah, well. John. John Smith.”
Rory paused then clamped his eyes shut and raised his hand as if he’d seen it all. “Please tell me you don’t actually go by ‘John Smith.’ That is possibly more generic than ‘Hey, you over there.’” With an added huff of indignation he said, “or, ‘the Doctor.’”
“As you wish, Mr. Pond-”
“I will ignore that for a moment,” Rory said, tempering his ire. He pointed to the breast pocket where the Doctor kept his psychic paper. “And on the off chance we meet with many more of the psychically inclined, you may want to invest in some actual credentials, at least for Earth, 21st century. You spend enough of your time here.”
“Yes, Rory,” the Doctor began to say, his voice absent and dismissive as he looked up and down the street. “That will solve all of our current problems: a print shop.”
Ignoring him once more, Rory said, “I’ll ask River. She knows all the best places in Leadworth.”
“Is she the one who fabricated your nametag?” The Doctor asked, just as absently as before, his eyes roaming the neighborhood.
Rory gave him a shocked look before he understood. “Oh. Well, Amy lost the real one. Don’t ask me what she did with it-”
“Probably lost in the crack-” the Doctor hummed, dropping to the road and sniffing the asphalt.
Rory blinked. “Oh. I hadn’t considered that. Anyway, it was a ten quid replacement fee-”
“And you decided to allow your daughter to exercise her forgery skills.”
“When you say it like that-”
“It would still be the truth,” the Doctor mumbled, rising from the street and looking worrisomely back towards the steel-doored house at the end of the road. “It’s alright. It’s a funny joke.”
“She made me almost two decades older than I am.”
“And you’re her father. Like I said: a funny joke.”
“Ha.” He looked from the Doctor and back to the old woman’s house. “Are you quite done yet because it’s obvious she’s our bad guy unless she somehow thinks an army battalion is going to roll up her driveway.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Rory,” the Doctor said, straightening his bowtie. “You honestly don’t need to be the Nurse to see she’s clearly not a guy.”
“Ha. Again.”
“I’m looking for a way in.”
“She’s nearly a hundred. We can go in through the front door.”
Pulling out his sonic screwdriver, the Doctor said very quietly, “Blink and you will miss it.” Activating the beam and sending out a small, whisper-like pulse of energy, the area just above the house went from transparent sky to an acre wide alien spaceship that stretched over them, throwing them into immediate shadow. Rory flinched backwards in that split second before the sky regained its transparency and afternoon light shone down on them.
“Front door, bad idea,” Rory muttered with a stiff nod.
“This road hasn’t felt rain in years. Faint and continuous watermarking on the side of the trees to show they’ve been watered by hand with the tap and the leaves and roofs have an accumulation of dust. It’s almost well enough but not quite and when it’s not quite it all falls apart. It’s most assuredly dormant so we don’t have to worry about it zipping off anytime soon. Those engines need at least a day to power up.”
“Is that what’s causing the magnetic disruption?”
The Doctor seemed genuinely pleased if not a little surprised. “I see you’ve been studying the propulsion notes.”
“After you incapacitated yourself on Amy’s face wash and I had to steer the TARDIS, of course I’ve been studying the propulsion notes and every other note in the library.”
Gravely the Doctor opined, “Salicylic acid will get you every time.”
To himself Rory muttered, “Imagine a person with two hearts allergic to aspirin.”
Back to the spaceship the Doctor answered Rory’s question with, “Yes, the magnetism is repelling the gravitational pull of the planet without stressing the engines. You can almost taste it in the air.”
“Is this a perception filter as well?” Rory asked, pointing up to where he knew the ship to be hovering above them.
“No, this beautiful monstrosity is set to invisible,” the Doctor said, a bright smile on his face as he slipped the screwdriver away.
“Is there anything else you saw that I clearly didn’t?”
“That old woman?”
“Yeah?”
“Easily not a hundred.”
Rory exhaled. “That was hyperbole-”
“She’s much closer to five thousand.”
“Five-”
Rory’s earpiece chirped. “Dad?”
That gave him a pause that cut through his shock with a whole new and still unfamiliar shock. He had to admit it was still a foreign feeling to hear that word come along on River Song’s voice. Compound that with the fact that she was also his best friend who he’d known most of his life, the feeling overshot ‘foreign’ by a country mile. But of course, it changed nothing in the end. She absolutely was his daughter and he loved her. Also, strictly speaking, he was still north of two thousand years old so she was technically his ‘little girl.’ Her apparent relationship with someone barely pushing a millennium was less uncomfortable when put in that perspective.
“Here, River,” he answered.
“Sweetie?” The Doctor’s earpiece chirped.
Feeling a bit mischievous, the Doctor turned glittering eyes to Rory and answered River, “My darling?”
Rory thumped him in the chest with the back of his hand and warned, “Steady on.”
“I’ve tracked down the source of the magnetic disturbance-”
“Would it be the giant spaceship hovering above us?” The Doctor asked, squinting to the horizon.
River let out a throaty and amused chuckle. “Of course. Should have expected that. But . . . I guarantee you don’t know-” Rory’s earpiece went radio-silent for a moment. In that moment, the Doctor’s cheeks turned beet red and the kind of grin whose meaning a man instantly recognized in another spread over his face.
“Hee. Red, black or none of the above?-” the Doctor asked quietly enough that Rory did not hear him even standing next to him but he heard him clearly over the earpiece.
Rory pulled the communicator from his ear and held it out as far from him as physically possible. “May I remind people that I still own a sword!”
The Doctor spun to him, his face blanched. “Oh . . . you heard . . .” Rory reached over and snatched the small comm. unit from the Doctor’s ear.
“Heard and will never, ever forget.” Holding the earpiece like a microphone he said, “River Song Melody Pond Williams, I will talk to you about this later. We’re coming back to the TARDIS.” Shutting them both off, he shoved them at the Doctor. “As for you, hope we don’t talk about this later.”
The Doctor swallowed hard. He may be the Doctor but Rory was still the Father.
---
Amelia Pond had her arms completely full in a giant bear hug. She was seated on the stairs leading to a corridor and her view of the control room was blocked by the enormous thing in her arms. The thing . . . she was biting into.
“What on earth-” Rory exclaimed, walking in through the front doors.
The Doctor looked past him to see a giant fluffy white . . . thing lying on top of Amelia’s little legs and the sound of soft chewing emanating from the other side.
“River . . . have you noticed that an Adipose is eating your mother’s face?”
River rolled her eyes at him. “It’s a marshmallow.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” Rory said, going over to his wife. Amelia Pond’s tiny hands were wrapped about the super-sized confection and her face was practically buried in it. As close as she held it, her hands were still at least a foot apart at the back of it.
“How did this-” Rory asked, looking to his daughter.
“She wanted hot cocoa so I followed her to the kitchen. I started to make it when that appeared. It just fell from the ceiling.”
Amelia turned to Rory, her nose and chin covered in powdered sugar and cornstarch. Her eight-year old face was lit in pure child-like glee. “Crimson-Eleven-Delight-Petrichor!” She leaned her head against and cuddled her new best friend, Mr. Marshmallow.
“What?”
“I imagined the biggest marshmallow ever and the TARDIS gave me the biggest marshmallow ever!”
“Amy, that’s going to make you so sick,” Rory warned.
Gleefully blissful she sighed, closing her eyes, “Don’t care.”
His wife was a child. They’d woken up that morning in their respective bunk beds, as they always did since the last time they shared a bed on the ship resulted in . . . well, much drama, but he was shocked to find his wife on the top bunk snoring through the mouth of a child. There had been a faint psychic thread between the TARDIS and that neighborhood in Surrey and for the past hour he and the Doctor had been going door to door trying to find out where that thread originated and how it had changed Amy into Amelia.
“Doctor, undo this, oh God, you have to undo this.”
“It’s been a while since there’s been a child in the TARDIS. I imagine she was just being friendly-”
“I don’t mean the marshmallow!” Rory snapped.
Amelia sighed. “Oh come on, you all know you’ll figure this out,” she said, looking up to them. There was so much trust in those bright eyes. “So, let me have some fun.” She put the marshmallow on the walkway-
“Well, you can’t eat that now.” Rory warned her, sounding so much like the father he still didn’t fully feel he was.
“I can’t eat the bottom,” Amelia amended and pushed up to stand, dusting sugar off of her. She was in the only thing in the TARDIS wardrobe that fit and that was an oversized Bob Marley t-shirt that she wore as a dress and basketball shorts knotted at the waist. On her feet were slip-proof socks. It really had been a long time since a child had been there.
She ran over to the Doctor and, standing on her tiptoes she fished into his jacket and ferreted out his sonic screwdriver. Whipping around she flicked it open and sent out a spark that roasted a coaster-sized burn into the marshmallow. Spinning back to the Doctor she pushed the screwdriver into his hand and ran back to the candy. Digging out a now black and brown crispy piece, the underside melted and stringy, Amelia jogged to River and took her hand. “Cannonballs!” Without waiting for her to agree or to disagree, Amelia Pond pulled her daughter to the doorway and out towards the pool, eating the entire way.
Rory deflated, his head leaning against the un-roasted side of the giant marshmallow as if it were a pillow. “My wife is the age of my daughter; my daughter is the age of my mother; there’s a giant invisible spaceship drifting over Surrey and a five thousand year old crone who not only saw right through your psychic paper but actually hacked it which implies she won’t be the easiest creature to defeat and who knows what else is in that ship and if we can even get Amy back to what she was.”
The Doctor hummed, looking down and away, “All very true.”
“There is obviously only one thing to do,” Rory said with a determined nod as if the mysteries of the universe had just been solved.
“Storm the Bastille and hope for the best?” The Doctor offered with an ironic smile, presenting a suggestion he imagined Rory would most like to hear in the moment.
Rory Pond Williams stood up quite straight and gestured to the doorway Amelia and River had disappeared through. “Spend some quality time with my family.”
That was a welcome suggestion. “Agreed.” The Doctor said, moving to the console. He planned to research the ship above the house and find out how best to infiltrate its defenses while the Pond’s had pool time when Rory placed a firm hand on his shoulder. Reaching over, Rory pulled up the portable interface and handed it to the Doctor.
“And on our way we’ll discuss conversations not to be had with my daughter-” Rory said before steering him towards the corridor.
The Doctor cleared his throat and grinned, looking back to the console as if it were a life line. “Didn’t you want alone family time?”
“The entire family, Doctor, and you had better hope River’s ‘spoilers’ include a wedding or this conversation is about to take on a whole new tenor, I can assure you.”
The Doctor simply nodded and said very quietly, “Cannonballs.”
Chapter 02