fic: good enough
“Amelia Jessica Pond! We have got to go now!”
Amelia barely has time to set down her dolls, much less to hide in the closet, before Aunt Sharon stomps into the bedroom. The stormy look on her aunt’s face would make any normal nine-year-old girl cower and quickly comply. Amelia is no normal nine-year-old girl.
“I’m not ready, and my shoes have gone,” she announces, wiggling her bare toes to prove her point. “I think you’ll have to go without me.”
Aunt Sharon peers into the closet, then crosses to the open window and looks down. “It is truly startling how often my petunias end up looking like your loafers, Amelia,” she comments sharply, turning to face her niece and crossing her arms.
Aunt Sharon, Amelia thinks, is getting too smart. “I won’t go to the stupid party,” she insists, mirroring her aunt’s defiant position.
“For goodness sake, Amelia, they’re our new neighbors! We have to go at least stop by, or what will they think of us? And besides, the Williams have a little boy around your age.” Amelia notices that Aunt Sharon has abruptly switched from her cross voice to her sugary voice, but decides not to point it out; it would only bring the cross voice back. “That’ll be nice, won’t it dear? A new friend down the street?”
Amelia reaches behind her to lay a hand on the blue-clad doll she had been playing with before the interruption. “I don’t want a new friend,” she mutters, not meeting her aunt’s eyes.
Aunt Sharon stiffens. “Fine,” she bites out. “You can stay here and play with your dolls, and I’ll call Dr. Moony and tell him you’ll be needing an additional session this week. Or you can get your shoes out of my garden and come with me and make a real friend.” She doesn’t add like a normal girl, but Amelia hears it anyway. “It’s your choice,” her aunt says over her shoulder as she leaves the room.
Amelia doesn’t move for a moment. Then she lifts the Raggedy Doctor doll to her eye level and regards him with a frown. “What would you do?” she whispers. When the answer comes to her-rather quickly-it hurts: he would go, of course.
She drops the doll and runs after her aunt, calling “wait for me!” Maybe the Williams’ party won’t be so bad.
***
Aunt Sharon is quite taken with Mrs. Williams. Aunt Sharon is gossiping and laughing and sipping wine. Aunt Sharon seems to have completely forgotten that Amelia is there.
Amelia is bored out of her mind.
She has been standing in the corner of the room, pulling at a thread in the sleeve of her blue jacket and wishing she had put the Raggedy Doctor in her pocket before she left. She has also been looking for the boy her aunt promised, but so far it looked like Aunt Sharon was either mistaken or lying. Neither would greatly surprise Amelia.
“Apple?”
Amelia gasps and whirls around to find herself face to face with a boy-the wrong boy-holding out an apple. Apparently Aunt Sharon wasn’t lying after all. “You haven’t come by the snack table yet,” he goes on, hesitant but not quite shy. “I thought you might be hungry. Everyone likes apples!”
She is seized by an urge to inform the boy that apples are rubbish, but she feels that she ought to at least try not to scare this boy off right away, and besides she does like apples, so she takes it from him. “Thanks,” she mutters.
He nods and smiles; she looks at him with mild curiosity and takes a bite of the apple. “I’m Rory,” he says, extending a hand, “and I like your hair.”
That makes her smile a bit and she gives him her name around a mouthful of apple. Then, instead of accepting the handshake, she lifts her free hand to tug on a strand of his hair, which she has just noticed is kind of…large. Not quite the right kind of large, but enough to count, she thinks.
“Do you have a blue dress-up shirt?” she asks him, keeping her eyes trained on his hair and trying to keep that twinge of hope out of her voice.
Rory seems taken aback by that. “I…don’t think so. I don’t have many dress-up shirts at all.”
Amelia knows that she shouldn’t be disappointed, and she tries to give a neutral nod as she leans back, away from Rory and his large hair. “Oh,” she says, because she can’t think of anything else.
“My dad might, though!” Rory squints his eyes, apparently trying hard to remember. “I’m sure I’ve seen him wear one. D’you want me to go look?”
Amelia meets his eyes then, and this time she does let herself feel hopeful. “Really?”
Rory has no idea why the shirt is so important to this orange-haired girl and he has no idea why he wants so badly to come through for her, but he responds with a rapid nod and a step backwards. “Dad’s room is upstairs, I’ll just go check, I’ll be right back,” he says, turning away from the girl.
“No!” Rory stops so quickly that Amelia runs right into him and they almost fall. He is about to ask if she’s okay when she lurches to catch his arm and rushes on, “I mean, can’t I just…can I come with you?”
Rory isn’t sure how he feels about being arm-in-arm with a girl, especially one whose act of introduction was to imply he should change shirts, but he doesn’t have any friends yet in Leadworth and she seems…interesting, at least. “Yeah, all right,” he replies, and is relieved when she smiles again.
A quick glance through the closet produces a shirt that is almost exactly the right shade of blue and a brown tie with a small blue diamond design that isn’t perfect but is close enough. The shirt is so big on Rory that it slips on over his head fully buttoned, and after puzzling at the tie for several minutes he resorts to tying it in a kind of shoestring bow. The end result makes Amelia giggle, which pleases Rory, though he is still not sure what exactly is going on.
“Will you be my friend, Rory?” Amelia asks quietly, and the intensity in her brown eyes makes Rory feel confused and sad all at once.
“Of course I will, Amelia,” he says with what he hopes is a reassuring smile. The corners of her lips curl up ever so slightly and he tugs at the collar of the oversized shirt, and they both decide that it’s good enough for now.
***
“Amelia?”
“Rory! Up here!”
Amelia’s voice echoes down the staircase to where Rory stands with his hands shoved in his pockets. Amelia begins talking a mile a minute about their plans for the day-something about how Aunt Sharon was supposed to buy custard but probably didn’t-as Rory climbs the stairs to her room. As usual, she doesn’t see him when he stands in her doorway.
“…so if not we should go to the shop and get some, and maybe some bread to feed the ducks, ha…what?” Amelia tilts her head at Rory, who has not moved since he appeared in the doorframe.
Rory shakes his head, watching her with an expression on his face that she doesn’t recognize. “Nothing.”
There are a few beats of silence in which they stare at each other, and then Amelia’s eyes shoot upward and widen in surprise. “You’ve cut your hair.”
He nods, still watching for a look of disappointment to cross her face. “About to turn 13…Mum said it was time for a sensible haircut.” It was only a white lie; the cut had been his idea, but his mother had approved of it with almost those exact words.
Amelia stares at the empty space above her friend’s now-close-cropped hair for another moment before turning away. “Well, are you ready to play? I’ve got your Doctor tie over-”
“Actually, I think…I think I want to be just Rory today.” He clenches his hands into fists and holds his breath as he waits for her to react. She will be disappointed in him, he is sure, and probably also quite angry, in which case it’s a good thing he’s still standing by the door. This is the first time in three years that he has ever refused to be the Raggedy Doctor, though he has considered it several times before now. He is never sure whether it’s really him she wants to be playing with, really him she gets excited to hear on the stairs every day, and earlier this morning he decided it was high time he found out. Now he finds himself desperately hoping it won’t prove to be a mistake.
He is about to open his mouth to apologize when she finally speaks, in a whisper he strains to hear: “Okay.” He exhales in a rush of relief and begins to move into the room, but stops short when she turns to face him with a startlingly intense look in her eyes. “Okay,” she repeats, “fine. But then I want to be Amy.”
“Amy Pond…” Rory tests the name slowly, cautiously, keeping his eyes on his best friend. “I like it. Today I’ll be Rory and you can be Amy.”
“No.” She shakes her head, sending orange locks whipping around her face. “I think I want to keep being Amy. Every day.”
“Every day,” he agrees quickly, startled by the waver in her voice. He moves to stand beside her. “Amy and Rory, every day.”
She bites her lip and nods, and they fall silent again, both staring at the floor. Just when Rory thinks she might want him to leave, she looks up at him with eyes full of hope and asks, “do you still want to go see about the custard?”
He breaks into a grin, which she slowly returns. “Absolutely! In fact,” he adds, attempting to waggle his eyebrows, “I’ll race you there!” He waits until she joins him in the hallway so as not to have an unfair advantage, and then they are off, scurrying down the stairs in a fit of laughter, Amy Pond and Rory Williams, and he thinks to himself that it should always have been this way.
***
In the next seven years Rory feels that he gets to know Amy Pond quite well.
He learns the truth about why all of her psychiatrists move away. He learns that Amy prefers the taste of fish sticks by themselves, but periodically eats them dipped in custard because “it has a, er, an interesting texture.” He learns how to tell when she is lying, and when the lie has something to do with the Doctor. He learns that she is amused by the way he squirms when she mentions other boys and that she is afraid of words like “dating” and “boyfriend,” but also that he was her first kiss (and her only second kiss).
He thinks, however, that his relationship with Amy is defined more by the things she hasn’t let him learn about her.
He doesn’t know, for example, why Aunt Sharon is the only family she ever mentions, or why she always frowns when she walks the upstairs hallway and then denies it when he asks why, or how serious she considers their relationship to be, or whether she notices that he is the only one in Leadworth who has never called the Doctor her “imaginary friend.”
And he definitely doesn’t know what she needs when that non-imaginary childhood friend comes back for her twelve years too late and abruptly leaves again.
Rory finds Amy kneeling in the garden, shouting at the spot from which he guesses the Doctor disappeared moments ago.
“Come back!” she shouts, her voice increasingly frantic, “come back, do you hear me? I waited for seven years for you to come back and I am done waiting!”
She fists her hands around some dirt and Rory sees her shoulders begin to shake. She has never cried in front of him before, has always left or made him leave if talking about the Doctor or the psychiatrists brought her close. The sight of Amy Pond crying hurts more than he had imagined it would, and he suddenly feels as if he is intruding into one of the things he has always let his best friend keep from him.
“Come back,” he hears her whisper again as he turns to leave the garden. She’ll come to him when she’s ready, he knows, and if he is lucky he will have figured out by then what to be for her.
When she yells after him it is not with the volume or the confidence he is used to, and her voice cracks on the last word: “Rory, I was talking to you, you idiot.”
He runs back to the garden to find Amy staring over her shoulder at the spot from which he had vanished. She scrambles to her feet when she sees him and flings herself into his ready arms, and if she is crying into his scrubs he is just relieved that he can’t hear it.
“I’m sure he’ll come back soon,” Rory murmurs, narrowing his eyes over her shoulder at the empty garden.
She shakes her head against him. “Don’t say that. Please.”
He holds her loosely for several minutes, expecting her to recover and shake him off. She doesn’t. “Do you need…” He trails off, unsure of what to offer, suspecting that this time it won’t be good enough.
She surprises him by slipping her hands into his and looking up with watery eyes. “Will you be just Rory, today?”
He so wants to tell her that of course he will, or how happy her simple request has made him, or how madly he loves her, but his brain doesn’t seem to be communicating with his mouth so he settles for wrapping her tighter in his arms and burying his nose in her hair. In this moment, for the first time, he allows himself to think that even if the Doctor never comes back, just Rory Williams might be good enough for brilliant Amy Pond.
Amelia barely has time to set down her dolls, much less to hide in the closet, before Aunt Sharon stomps into the bedroom. The stormy look on her aunt’s face would make any normal nine-year-old girl cower and quickly comply. Amelia is no normal nine-year-old girl.
“I’m not ready, and my shoes have gone,” she announces, wiggling her bare toes to prove her point. “I think you’ll have to go without me.”
Aunt Sharon peers into the closet, then crosses to the open window and looks down. “It is truly startling how often my petunias end up looking like your loafers, Amelia,” she comments sharply, turning to face her niece and crossing her arms.
Aunt Sharon, Amelia thinks, is getting too smart. “I won’t go to the stupid party,” she insists, mirroring her aunt’s defiant position.
“For goodness sake, Amelia, they’re our new neighbors! We have to go at least stop by, or what will they think of us? And besides, the Williams have a little boy around your age.” Amelia notices that Aunt Sharon has abruptly switched from her cross voice to her sugary voice, but decides not to point it out; it would only bring the cross voice back. “That’ll be nice, won’t it dear? A new friend down the street?”
Amelia reaches behind her to lay a hand on the blue-clad doll she had been playing with before the interruption. “I don’t want a new friend,” she mutters, not meeting her aunt’s eyes.
Aunt Sharon stiffens. “Fine,” she bites out. “You can stay here and play with your dolls, and I’ll call Dr. Moony and tell him you’ll be needing an additional session this week. Or you can get your shoes out of my garden and come with me and make a real friend.” She doesn’t add like a normal girl, but Amelia hears it anyway. “It’s your choice,” her aunt says over her shoulder as she leaves the room.
Amelia doesn’t move for a moment. Then she lifts the Raggedy Doctor doll to her eye level and regards him with a frown. “What would you do?” she whispers. When the answer comes to her-rather quickly-it hurts: he would go, of course.
She drops the doll and runs after her aunt, calling “wait for me!” Maybe the Williams’ party won’t be so bad.
***
Aunt Sharon is quite taken with Mrs. Williams. Aunt Sharon is gossiping and laughing and sipping wine. Aunt Sharon seems to have completely forgotten that Amelia is there.
Amelia is bored out of her mind.
She has been standing in the corner of the room, pulling at a thread in the sleeve of her blue jacket and wishing she had put the Raggedy Doctor in her pocket before she left. She has also been looking for the boy her aunt promised, but so far it looked like Aunt Sharon was either mistaken or lying. Neither would greatly surprise Amelia.
“Apple?”
Amelia gasps and whirls around to find herself face to face with a boy-the wrong boy-holding out an apple. Apparently Aunt Sharon wasn’t lying after all. “You haven’t come by the snack table yet,” he goes on, hesitant but not quite shy. “I thought you might be hungry. Everyone likes apples!”
She is seized by an urge to inform the boy that apples are rubbish, but she feels that she ought to at least try not to scare this boy off right away, and besides she does like apples, so she takes it from him. “Thanks,” she mutters.
He nods and smiles; she looks at him with mild curiosity and takes a bite of the apple. “I’m Rory,” he says, extending a hand, “and I like your hair.”
That makes her smile a bit and she gives him her name around a mouthful of apple. Then, instead of accepting the handshake, she lifts her free hand to tug on a strand of his hair, which she has just noticed is kind of…large. Not quite the right kind of large, but enough to count, she thinks.
“Do you have a blue dress-up shirt?” she asks him, keeping her eyes trained on his hair and trying to keep that twinge of hope out of her voice.
Rory seems taken aback by that. “I…don’t think so. I don’t have many dress-up shirts at all.”
Amelia knows that she shouldn’t be disappointed, and she tries to give a neutral nod as she leans back, away from Rory and his large hair. “Oh,” she says, because she can’t think of anything else.
“My dad might, though!” Rory squints his eyes, apparently trying hard to remember. “I’m sure I’ve seen him wear one. D’you want me to go look?”
Amelia meets his eyes then, and this time she does let herself feel hopeful. “Really?”
Rory has no idea why the shirt is so important to this orange-haired girl and he has no idea why he wants so badly to come through for her, but he responds with a rapid nod and a step backwards. “Dad’s room is upstairs, I’ll just go check, I’ll be right back,” he says, turning away from the girl.
“No!” Rory stops so quickly that Amelia runs right into him and they almost fall. He is about to ask if she’s okay when she lurches to catch his arm and rushes on, “I mean, can’t I just…can I come with you?”
Rory isn’t sure how he feels about being arm-in-arm with a girl, especially one whose act of introduction was to imply he should change shirts, but he doesn’t have any friends yet in Leadworth and she seems…interesting, at least. “Yeah, all right,” he replies, and is relieved when she smiles again.
A quick glance through the closet produces a shirt that is almost exactly the right shade of blue and a brown tie with a small blue diamond design that isn’t perfect but is close enough. The shirt is so big on Rory that it slips on over his head fully buttoned, and after puzzling at the tie for several minutes he resorts to tying it in a kind of shoestring bow. The end result makes Amelia giggle, which pleases Rory, though he is still not sure what exactly is going on.
“Will you be my friend, Rory?” Amelia asks quietly, and the intensity in her brown eyes makes Rory feel confused and sad all at once.
“Of course I will, Amelia,” he says with what he hopes is a reassuring smile. The corners of her lips curl up ever so slightly and he tugs at the collar of the oversized shirt, and they both decide that it’s good enough for now.
***
“Amelia?”
“Rory! Up here!”
Amelia’s voice echoes down the staircase to where Rory stands with his hands shoved in his pockets. Amelia begins talking a mile a minute about their plans for the day-something about how Aunt Sharon was supposed to buy custard but probably didn’t-as Rory climbs the stairs to her room. As usual, she doesn’t see him when he stands in her doorway.
“…so if not we should go to the shop and get some, and maybe some bread to feed the ducks, ha…what?” Amelia tilts her head at Rory, who has not moved since he appeared in the doorframe.
Rory shakes his head, watching her with an expression on his face that she doesn’t recognize. “Nothing.”
There are a few beats of silence in which they stare at each other, and then Amelia’s eyes shoot upward and widen in surprise. “You’ve cut your hair.”
He nods, still watching for a look of disappointment to cross her face. “About to turn 13…Mum said it was time for a sensible haircut.” It was only a white lie; the cut had been his idea, but his mother had approved of it with almost those exact words.
Amelia stares at the empty space above her friend’s now-close-cropped hair for another moment before turning away. “Well, are you ready to play? I’ve got your Doctor tie over-”
“Actually, I think…I think I want to be just Rory today.” He clenches his hands into fists and holds his breath as he waits for her to react. She will be disappointed in him, he is sure, and probably also quite angry, in which case it’s a good thing he’s still standing by the door. This is the first time in three years that he has ever refused to be the Raggedy Doctor, though he has considered it several times before now. He is never sure whether it’s really him she wants to be playing with, really him she gets excited to hear on the stairs every day, and earlier this morning he decided it was high time he found out. Now he finds himself desperately hoping it won’t prove to be a mistake.
He is about to open his mouth to apologize when she finally speaks, in a whisper he strains to hear: “Okay.” He exhales in a rush of relief and begins to move into the room, but stops short when she turns to face him with a startlingly intense look in her eyes. “Okay,” she repeats, “fine. But then I want to be Amy.”
“Amy Pond…” Rory tests the name slowly, cautiously, keeping his eyes on his best friend. “I like it. Today I’ll be Rory and you can be Amy.”
“No.” She shakes her head, sending orange locks whipping around her face. “I think I want to keep being Amy. Every day.”
“Every day,” he agrees quickly, startled by the waver in her voice. He moves to stand beside her. “Amy and Rory, every day.”
She bites her lip and nods, and they fall silent again, both staring at the floor. Just when Rory thinks she might want him to leave, she looks up at him with eyes full of hope and asks, “do you still want to go see about the custard?”
He breaks into a grin, which she slowly returns. “Absolutely! In fact,” he adds, attempting to waggle his eyebrows, “I’ll race you there!” He waits until she joins him in the hallway so as not to have an unfair advantage, and then they are off, scurrying down the stairs in a fit of laughter, Amy Pond and Rory Williams, and he thinks to himself that it should always have been this way.
***
In the next seven years Rory feels that he gets to know Amy Pond quite well.
He learns the truth about why all of her psychiatrists move away. He learns that Amy prefers the taste of fish sticks by themselves, but periodically eats them dipped in custard because “it has a, er, an interesting texture.” He learns how to tell when she is lying, and when the lie has something to do with the Doctor. He learns that she is amused by the way he squirms when she mentions other boys and that she is afraid of words like “dating” and “boyfriend,” but also that he was her first kiss (and her only second kiss).
He thinks, however, that his relationship with Amy is defined more by the things she hasn’t let him learn about her.
He doesn’t know, for example, why Aunt Sharon is the only family she ever mentions, or why she always frowns when she walks the upstairs hallway and then denies it when he asks why, or how serious she considers their relationship to be, or whether she notices that he is the only one in Leadworth who has never called the Doctor her “imaginary friend.”
And he definitely doesn’t know what she needs when that non-imaginary childhood friend comes back for her twelve years too late and abruptly leaves again.
Rory finds Amy kneeling in the garden, shouting at the spot from which he guesses the Doctor disappeared moments ago.
“Come back!” she shouts, her voice increasingly frantic, “come back, do you hear me? I waited for seven years for you to come back and I am done waiting!”
She fists her hands around some dirt and Rory sees her shoulders begin to shake. She has never cried in front of him before, has always left or made him leave if talking about the Doctor or the psychiatrists brought her close. The sight of Amy Pond crying hurts more than he had imagined it would, and he suddenly feels as if he is intruding into one of the things he has always let his best friend keep from him.
“Come back,” he hears her whisper again as he turns to leave the garden. She’ll come to him when she’s ready, he knows, and if he is lucky he will have figured out by then what to be for her.
When she yells after him it is not with the volume or the confidence he is used to, and her voice cracks on the last word: “Rory, I was talking to you, you idiot.”
He runs back to the garden to find Amy staring over her shoulder at the spot from which he had vanished. She scrambles to her feet when she sees him and flings herself into his ready arms, and if she is crying into his scrubs he is just relieved that he can’t hear it.
“I’m sure he’ll come back soon,” Rory murmurs, narrowing his eyes over her shoulder at the empty garden.
She shakes her head against him. “Don’t say that. Please.”
He holds her loosely for several minutes, expecting her to recover and shake him off. She doesn’t. “Do you need…” He trails off, unsure of what to offer, suspecting that this time it won’t be good enough.
She surprises him by slipping her hands into his and looking up with watery eyes. “Will you be just Rory, today?”
He so wants to tell her that of course he will, or how happy her simple request has made him, or how madly he loves her, but his brain doesn’t seem to be communicating with his mouth so he settles for wrapping her tighter in his arms and burying his nose in her hair. In this moment, for the first time, he allows himself to think that even if the Doctor never comes back, just Rory Williams might be good enough for brilliant Amy Pond.