The Shape of This World in Which We Live, Eleven/Amy, 'Doctor Who'
Title: The Shape of This World in Which We Live
Summary: Amy’s living in wait; the Doctor’s living in hope.
Characters: Amy, Eleven, River, Rory
Pairing: Eleven/Amy, Amy/Rory (by proxy), River/Doctor (by proxy)
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: None for season 6. Set post Big Bang/pre-season 6
“Amy.”
She’s visualised this moment in her mind many times. In those imaginations, she’s on a precipice (a balcony, a cliff edge - she’s not bothered), the wind is blowing and there is always a cast of gold glinting across her features. What she has never imagined (although she should have, of course because this is reality) is that she would be standing at the TARDIS console of a normal day, that Rory would be pottering around somewhere else and that the only gold light is the blinking dots of the various contraptions surrounding her.
He’s approaching from behind her and if she closes her eyes she can picture him walking steadily, cautiously down the steps leading to the console. She can’t picture his face in this moment - she never has been able to.
“Yes?” She manages, spinning around to look at him and she can’t help but force a cheerful, querying smile onto her lips.
She’s felt this conversation coming ever since she remembered the Doctor into being all those long months ago. She’s wanted it, almost.
“Are you all right?”
She frowns even as she smiles bemusedly.
“Course I am.” She tilts her head as she watches him skirt the edge of the console, his hip skimming against the railing. “Why?”
He looks at her then darts his eyes to something on the console and Amy wants very much to go over to him, to press against his side in a way she would have before she… Before. He looks up then, his features flattening out a flinch she’s not sure was entirely there.
“No reason.”
It’s not the conversation she expects, although she knows it should be. She watches the Doctor for a long moment then mentally shifts it aside.
She’s not sure she wants to have that conversation outside of the setting of her mind, anyway.
Part of her wonders if the Doctor knows that.
--
She’s standing on a cliff edge and the sun on the horizon is setting and the beams reflect golden across the sea at her feet. They don’t quite reach her because, in a move that reminds her of Scotland, the rain is pouring down around her and she’s soaked to the bone. There’s even a rainbow.
“Amelia!”
She doesn’t turn and she can almost imagine that she can hear the Doctor run across the squidgy mud to her. She closes her eyes, imagines it and smiles slightly even as the guilt tacks itself onto the image.
There’s a hand at her arm and she jerks, turns quickly and finds the Doctor huddled under his tweed jacket (it’s not an effective umbrella, not by a long shot), his hand stretched out and gripping her shoulder.
“Doctor?”
“Come inside,” he shouts over the rain. She looks from him to the horizon and then over to the TARDIS. To Rory, standing in the doorway.
“Yeah.” She nods. “Yeah!”
The Doctor laughs as she shoulders her way under his jacket. Neither of them mention the arm he slips around her shoulder.
--
She’s walking back towards the console room (she’s been trying to convince the Doctor to take them back to Space Florida but he’s not playing along) when she hears Rory and the Doctor talking.
“Do you love her?”
There’s a long silence and Amy presses herself against the wall of the corridor even though she knows the Doctor won’t be able to see her anyway and stops breathing. Her lungs burn slightly and her chest aches a little from where her heart is hammering against the bone, suddenly very interested in giving her a coronary.
“I don’t think it’s possible for me not to.”
There’s another pause, during which Amy’s vision narrows down to just the tiny space of wall in front of her; her peripheral vision is clouded by tears she refuses to shed.
“That’s… What does that mean?”
Amy would quite like to know the answer to that, too, but the TARDIS has other plans and drops them out of the vortex rather unexpectedly. Even the Doctor is surprised.
Neither Rory nor the Doctor look at her when she walks into the room and she chooses to head under the console and find comfort in the jump seat. When she looks up, she catches the Doctor staring down through the floor at her. She doesn’t look away.
--
“The Doctor’s in love with you, you know.”
Amy scoffs and ducks her head, plays with the sand that surrounds her.
“No, he isn’t.”
Amy can see River turn to look at her and she bristles slightly at the condescending smile on the other woman’s face.
“He does. Ever since you brought him back from the other side of the crack - he can’t help it.”
Amy’s heard those words before and her heart pitter-patters in her chest. She looks up from her hands and over to where Rory and the Doctor are enjoying a rare, quiet walk along the rocky outcrop that borders the small beach the Doctor’d parked the TARDIS on.
“What does that even mean? Anyway, I thought you were his wife?”
River smirks but there’s something sad about it, something missing and Amy feels a pang in her chest at the sight of it.
“Time can be rewritten,” River tells her and Amy’s sick of hearing that. She really is. But River ducks her head and purses her lips even as her eyes follow Rory and the Doctor along their jaunt. “You just have to ask yourself who the author is.”
River is on her feet and calling to the boys long before Amy can muster a response to that.
--
“You said time could be rewritten.”
It’s late (by her watch, anyway) and she’d gone to bed three hours earlier but she’s still awake. She can still see River’s broken smirk, can still hear the words ringing in her head.
The Doctor looks up, startled, and his hair is all over his face, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck. She can see one end of his bow-tie hanging out of his trouser pocket and the sight is so endearing that Amy can’t not smile.
“Yes. It can. It was. Rewritten, I mean.”
“About that,” Amy interrupts because she can sense one of his monologues coming on and that’s not what she came down here for. “I’ve been thinking-“
“You’re always thinking so-“
“-And I’ve been wondering. Who rewrote it?”
The Doctor stills - his entire body just freezes and Amy can suddenly feel the air of the TARDIS pressing in against her from all sides. The Doctor’s eyes flicker up to her and then fix on her and Amy feels so entirely exhausted and naked and empty in the wake of that gaze that she feels her body list slightly to one side.
“Amy…”
“Was it me?”
“Yes.”
“How did I do that? I thought it was you, the TARDIS and the Pandorica?”
The Doctor closes his eyes and his body sags, his hip hitting the console so hard that Amy can hear the thud of impact.
“It was. It’s complicated, Amy.”
“Tell me,” she insists. He looks at her again and she steps down a step and drops to her bottom, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Please, Doctor.”
“You grew up sleeping next to a crack in your bedroom wall. It listened to you, created a new, cracked reality around your dreams. It took your parents - it took Rory! When the TARDIS blew up, it accessed every point in space and time and recreated it but without me and TARDIS as we were swallowed up by, essentially, the crack in your wall.”
“I get that,” Amy responds and hugs her arms tighter. “But how did I rewrite history?”
The Doctor steps around the console towards her, knelt at her feet and if Amy didn’t know better, she would say he was going to rest his head against her knee. He doesn’t and the moment passes and Amy refuses to acknowledge the disappointment that flares to life.
“The crack that helped recreate the universe had all of your knowledge, all of your dreams, all of your wishes stored in it. The TARDIS stores conversations and can listen in on dreams-“ at Amy’s incredulous look, he clarifies, “-part psychic, it’s very cool but that’s not the point. The TARDIS has an imprint of you in it; the Pandorica had an imprint of you in it; the crack had an imprint of you in it. This universe, Amelia Pond, was written, created and wanted by you.” The Doctor looks down. “Even me.”
Amy swallows the sudden lump in her throat, tries to fight off the impatient chill that is shuddering its way down her spine.
“What does that even mean?”
“You imagined me into being, Amelia. I’m here because you want me to be.” Amy stares. “I am what you want me to be.”
“So… you’re not real? I mean - not the real Doctor?”
“No, I am. I’m just… different. Just like the rest of the Universe. The TARDIS recreated us but used your imagination to… colour us in, as it will. For the bits of it you don’t know, the pens are at the ready waiting for you to rearrange it.”
“That’s…” Amy closes her eyes and when she does she feels the Doctor’s hands on her knees. They’re warm, comforting. Too much so. He lifts his hands and Amy opens her eyes to see him pivot on his feet and flop down on the stairs beside her.
“The strangest part of it is that I can still remember not being this way.”
Amy frowns, fights back tears because… because…
“How did I not notice you were different?”
The Doctor quirks a smile and it’s crookedness, Amy can see now, is exactly how she imagines it in her mind - how she imagined it when she remembered him and called him back into being.
Oh, God.
“Mostly I’m not. Some things are different, though.”
Amy looks down at him, sees his head tilted back, his eyes looking at her and lets out a quick breath.
“What’s different?”
He turns his body slightly towards her and she closes her eyes when she feels his warm breath high up on the outside of her thigh.
“Loving you, for one. Wanting you quite badly, for the other.”
“Oh, God.”
“I should have seen it coming. Maybe I did - maybe that’s why I left the suggestion that you love Rory.”
“Wait, what? The suggestion that I love Rory? What does that mean?”
The Doctor looks caught, his eyes fixed on a spot midway between Amy’s leg and his own nose.
“Subliminal messaging. If you couldn’t remember me, I wanted to ensure you would be happy. You loved Rory already; I’d seen your future, I knew you two were supposed to get married in the morning. What was the harm in making sure your life didn’t change too much after I was erased from it? Couldn’t have you ditching Rory at the altar after all.”
“That…” Amy knows she should feel outraged at that. She should be. But she’s not. She’s too many other things to even consider outrage. Confused is winning. “I’m sorry.”
The Doctor shakes his head.
“Don’t be. It’s quite nice, actually. Sort of… warm. Helps me remember being young again.”
Amy fights the urge to run her fingers through his hair and it’s difficult because… well, it’s right there and she wants to. God, she wants to.
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Yes.” He looks down. “Lots.” He looks back up at her again, his odd facial features even odder upside-down. “But I’ve been through worse.” He sits up straight again. “You just need to be careful what you want from me, Amy. I can’t help but cave into you in the end.”
“You didn’t cave in about Space Florida!” She exclaims and he smiles slightly again and Amy can’t help but smile back. She wants-
“Stop it. And I was giving you another hour of sulking before parking the TARDIS. That’s where we were going before we dropped out of the vortex.”
Amy bites her lip, oddly touched by that.
“Oh.” She reaches out to touch his shoulder but he flinches away. She halts, stares at her hand for a moment and then nods. “Sorry.” She watches as he bounces to his feet and jiggles from toe to toe. “Why don’t you just send Rory and I home?”
He turns back to her then, his face devoid of its mask of stoicism and if she hadn’t been sitting down already, Amy knows she would have been floored by that look alone.
“Right now it’s better… being around you.” Amy frowns and the Doctor quirks a smile at her. “They say a man can’t live on hope alone.” His smile deepens a moment before he flounces off to the console, fiddling with levers that Amy knows do nothing while the TARDIS is in the vortex. “Good thing I’m a Time Lord, then, eh?”
And Amy’s heart breaks a little more at that.
“Doctor?” She questions, her voice a whisper and a broken one at that. He ignores her and continues to fiddle with this and that and she pulls her lips in between her teeth and squeezes her eyes shut in an attempt to keep the tears back. It takes a few moments but she pushes herself unsteadily to her feet and makes to head back to bed. At the top of the stairs she pauses and turns to look at him; he’s watching her. Amy smiles; he looks away.
As she slides into bed beside Rory, a careful six inches between them, she wonders how much longer the Doctor will live in hope.
She wonders what will happen when it stops being enough.
Summary: Amy’s living in wait; the Doctor’s living in hope.
Characters: Amy, Eleven, River, Rory
Pairing: Eleven/Amy, Amy/Rory (by proxy), River/Doctor (by proxy)
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: None for season 6. Set post Big Bang/pre-season 6
“Amy.”
She’s visualised this moment in her mind many times. In those imaginations, she’s on a precipice (a balcony, a cliff edge - she’s not bothered), the wind is blowing and there is always a cast of gold glinting across her features. What she has never imagined (although she should have, of course because this is reality) is that she would be standing at the TARDIS console of a normal day, that Rory would be pottering around somewhere else and that the only gold light is the blinking dots of the various contraptions surrounding her.
He’s approaching from behind her and if she closes her eyes she can picture him walking steadily, cautiously down the steps leading to the console. She can’t picture his face in this moment - she never has been able to.
“Yes?” She manages, spinning around to look at him and she can’t help but force a cheerful, querying smile onto her lips.
She’s felt this conversation coming ever since she remembered the Doctor into being all those long months ago. She’s wanted it, almost.
“Are you all right?”
She frowns even as she smiles bemusedly.
“Course I am.” She tilts her head as she watches him skirt the edge of the console, his hip skimming against the railing. “Why?”
He looks at her then darts his eyes to something on the console and Amy wants very much to go over to him, to press against his side in a way she would have before she… Before. He looks up then, his features flattening out a flinch she’s not sure was entirely there.
“No reason.”
It’s not the conversation she expects, although she knows it should be. She watches the Doctor for a long moment then mentally shifts it aside.
She’s not sure she wants to have that conversation outside of the setting of her mind, anyway.
Part of her wonders if the Doctor knows that.
--
She’s standing on a cliff edge and the sun on the horizon is setting and the beams reflect golden across the sea at her feet. They don’t quite reach her because, in a move that reminds her of Scotland, the rain is pouring down around her and she’s soaked to the bone. There’s even a rainbow.
“Amelia!”
She doesn’t turn and she can almost imagine that she can hear the Doctor run across the squidgy mud to her. She closes her eyes, imagines it and smiles slightly even as the guilt tacks itself onto the image.
There’s a hand at her arm and she jerks, turns quickly and finds the Doctor huddled under his tweed jacket (it’s not an effective umbrella, not by a long shot), his hand stretched out and gripping her shoulder.
“Doctor?”
“Come inside,” he shouts over the rain. She looks from him to the horizon and then over to the TARDIS. To Rory, standing in the doorway.
“Yeah.” She nods. “Yeah!”
The Doctor laughs as she shoulders her way under his jacket. Neither of them mention the arm he slips around her shoulder.
--
She’s walking back towards the console room (she’s been trying to convince the Doctor to take them back to Space Florida but he’s not playing along) when she hears Rory and the Doctor talking.
“Do you love her?”
There’s a long silence and Amy presses herself against the wall of the corridor even though she knows the Doctor won’t be able to see her anyway and stops breathing. Her lungs burn slightly and her chest aches a little from where her heart is hammering against the bone, suddenly very interested in giving her a coronary.
“I don’t think it’s possible for me not to.”
There’s another pause, during which Amy’s vision narrows down to just the tiny space of wall in front of her; her peripheral vision is clouded by tears she refuses to shed.
“That’s… What does that mean?”
Amy would quite like to know the answer to that, too, but the TARDIS has other plans and drops them out of the vortex rather unexpectedly. Even the Doctor is surprised.
Neither Rory nor the Doctor look at her when she walks into the room and she chooses to head under the console and find comfort in the jump seat. When she looks up, she catches the Doctor staring down through the floor at her. She doesn’t look away.
--
“The Doctor’s in love with you, you know.”
Amy scoffs and ducks her head, plays with the sand that surrounds her.
“No, he isn’t.”
Amy can see River turn to look at her and she bristles slightly at the condescending smile on the other woman’s face.
“He does. Ever since you brought him back from the other side of the crack - he can’t help it.”
Amy’s heard those words before and her heart pitter-patters in her chest. She looks up from her hands and over to where Rory and the Doctor are enjoying a rare, quiet walk along the rocky outcrop that borders the small beach the Doctor’d parked the TARDIS on.
“What does that even mean? Anyway, I thought you were his wife?”
River smirks but there’s something sad about it, something missing and Amy feels a pang in her chest at the sight of it.
“Time can be rewritten,” River tells her and Amy’s sick of hearing that. She really is. But River ducks her head and purses her lips even as her eyes follow Rory and the Doctor along their jaunt. “You just have to ask yourself who the author is.”
River is on her feet and calling to the boys long before Amy can muster a response to that.
--
“You said time could be rewritten.”
It’s late (by her watch, anyway) and she’d gone to bed three hours earlier but she’s still awake. She can still see River’s broken smirk, can still hear the words ringing in her head.
The Doctor looks up, startled, and his hair is all over his face, his shirt unbuttoned at the neck. She can see one end of his bow-tie hanging out of his trouser pocket and the sight is so endearing that Amy can’t not smile.
“Yes. It can. It was. Rewritten, I mean.”
“About that,” Amy interrupts because she can sense one of his monologues coming on and that’s not what she came down here for. “I’ve been thinking-“
“You’re always thinking so-“
“-And I’ve been wondering. Who rewrote it?”
The Doctor stills - his entire body just freezes and Amy can suddenly feel the air of the TARDIS pressing in against her from all sides. The Doctor’s eyes flicker up to her and then fix on her and Amy feels so entirely exhausted and naked and empty in the wake of that gaze that she feels her body list slightly to one side.
“Amy…”
“Was it me?”
“Yes.”
“How did I do that? I thought it was you, the TARDIS and the Pandorica?”
The Doctor closes his eyes and his body sags, his hip hitting the console so hard that Amy can hear the thud of impact.
“It was. It’s complicated, Amy.”
“Tell me,” she insists. He looks at her again and she steps down a step and drops to her bottom, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Please, Doctor.”
“You grew up sleeping next to a crack in your bedroom wall. It listened to you, created a new, cracked reality around your dreams. It took your parents - it took Rory! When the TARDIS blew up, it accessed every point in space and time and recreated it but without me and TARDIS as we were swallowed up by, essentially, the crack in your wall.”
“I get that,” Amy responds and hugs her arms tighter. “But how did I rewrite history?”
The Doctor steps around the console towards her, knelt at her feet and if Amy didn’t know better, she would say he was going to rest his head against her knee. He doesn’t and the moment passes and Amy refuses to acknowledge the disappointment that flares to life.
“The crack that helped recreate the universe had all of your knowledge, all of your dreams, all of your wishes stored in it. The TARDIS stores conversations and can listen in on dreams-“ at Amy’s incredulous look, he clarifies, “-part psychic, it’s very cool but that’s not the point. The TARDIS has an imprint of you in it; the Pandorica had an imprint of you in it; the crack had an imprint of you in it. This universe, Amelia Pond, was written, created and wanted by you.” The Doctor looks down. “Even me.”
Amy swallows the sudden lump in her throat, tries to fight off the impatient chill that is shuddering its way down her spine.
“What does that even mean?”
“You imagined me into being, Amelia. I’m here because you want me to be.” Amy stares. “I am what you want me to be.”
“So… you’re not real? I mean - not the real Doctor?”
“No, I am. I’m just… different. Just like the rest of the Universe. The TARDIS recreated us but used your imagination to… colour us in, as it will. For the bits of it you don’t know, the pens are at the ready waiting for you to rearrange it.”
“That’s…” Amy closes her eyes and when she does she feels the Doctor’s hands on her knees. They’re warm, comforting. Too much so. He lifts his hands and Amy opens her eyes to see him pivot on his feet and flop down on the stairs beside her.
“The strangest part of it is that I can still remember not being this way.”
Amy frowns, fights back tears because… because…
“How did I not notice you were different?”
The Doctor quirks a smile and it’s crookedness, Amy can see now, is exactly how she imagines it in her mind - how she imagined it when she remembered him and called him back into being.
Oh, God.
“Mostly I’m not. Some things are different, though.”
Amy looks down at him, sees his head tilted back, his eyes looking at her and lets out a quick breath.
“What’s different?”
He turns his body slightly towards her and she closes her eyes when she feels his warm breath high up on the outside of her thigh.
“Loving you, for one. Wanting you quite badly, for the other.”
“Oh, God.”
“I should have seen it coming. Maybe I did - maybe that’s why I left the suggestion that you love Rory.”
“Wait, what? The suggestion that I love Rory? What does that mean?”
The Doctor looks caught, his eyes fixed on a spot midway between Amy’s leg and his own nose.
“Subliminal messaging. If you couldn’t remember me, I wanted to ensure you would be happy. You loved Rory already; I’d seen your future, I knew you two were supposed to get married in the morning. What was the harm in making sure your life didn’t change too much after I was erased from it? Couldn’t have you ditching Rory at the altar after all.”
“That…” Amy knows she should feel outraged at that. She should be. But she’s not. She’s too many other things to even consider outrage. Confused is winning. “I’m sorry.”
The Doctor shakes his head.
“Don’t be. It’s quite nice, actually. Sort of… warm. Helps me remember being young again.”
Amy fights the urge to run her fingers through his hair and it’s difficult because… well, it’s right there and she wants to. God, she wants to.
“Doesn’t it hurt?”
“Yes.” He looks down. “Lots.” He looks back up at her again, his odd facial features even odder upside-down. “But I’ve been through worse.” He sits up straight again. “You just need to be careful what you want from me, Amy. I can’t help but cave into you in the end.”
“You didn’t cave in about Space Florida!” She exclaims and he smiles slightly again and Amy can’t help but smile back. She wants-
“Stop it. And I was giving you another hour of sulking before parking the TARDIS. That’s where we were going before we dropped out of the vortex.”
Amy bites her lip, oddly touched by that.
“Oh.” She reaches out to touch his shoulder but he flinches away. She halts, stares at her hand for a moment and then nods. “Sorry.” She watches as he bounces to his feet and jiggles from toe to toe. “Why don’t you just send Rory and I home?”
He turns back to her then, his face devoid of its mask of stoicism and if she hadn’t been sitting down already, Amy knows she would have been floored by that look alone.
“Right now it’s better… being around you.” Amy frowns and the Doctor quirks a smile at her. “They say a man can’t live on hope alone.” His smile deepens a moment before he flounces off to the console, fiddling with levers that Amy knows do nothing while the TARDIS is in the vortex. “Good thing I’m a Time Lord, then, eh?”
And Amy’s heart breaks a little more at that.
“Doctor?” She questions, her voice a whisper and a broken one at that. He ignores her and continues to fiddle with this and that and she pulls her lips in between her teeth and squeezes her eyes shut in an attempt to keep the tears back. It takes a few moments but she pushes herself unsteadily to her feet and makes to head back to bed. At the top of the stairs she pauses and turns to look at him; he’s watching her. Amy smiles; he looks away.
As she slides into bed beside Rory, a careful six inches between them, she wonders how much longer the Doctor will live in hope.
She wonders what will happen when it stops being enough.