fic: stories we tell our children (eleven, amy, river, rory)
Title: Stories We Tell Our Children
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: G
Characters: Eleven, Amy, River, Rory
Summary: Tell stories; be kind; remember. A response to The Big Bang.
Spoilers: For season 5.
Stories We Tell Our Children
This is happily ever after:
This is a story about a little red-haired Scottish girl who lives in a big house full of empty rooms and forgotten people. The girl is called Amelia and she isn’t afraid of strange things because the strangest thing of all is the crack in her wall that she’s lived with all her life.
Amelia is waiting. The crack in her wall is getting bigger and Amelia knows that on the other side is the universe and all the people and planets and stories that everyone has forgotten; all the light of the stars she’s never seen; all the sound and fury and meaning that’s been lost to the skies. Eternity swirls around her thoughts and she knows that the universe is wrong, wrong, wrong. But there’s a story that tells the truth, that can make the sky shine at night, and it’s close now and she’s a part of it. She’s going to be a princess and a hero and find treasure and fight pirates and aliens and save the world.
Her dreams are the stuff of the universe and Amelia remembers the stars. She looks up into the coal black sky of a small, dark existence and knows it should be blazing with tiny pinpricks of light, each one a sun, and maybe they have their own planets, and people, and little boys and girls looking up and seeing her star and wondering what sort of people live on its planets.
But there are no stars, so every grown-up tells her as they look at her with pity and sadness and the anger born of knowing there’s something important that they can’t quite remember. Amelia paints them anyway and ignores a world full of hurried whispers and frightened people and silent spaces.
Little Amelia Pond believes in impossible things and everyone tells her that she is wrong: there are no stars, no universes inside cracks in her wall and no wizards.
Amelia Pond doesn’t listen to any of them because she knows the difference between a story and a lie.
Come along, Pond.
It’s time now: time to visit the puzzle box, time to solve a mystery thousands of years old, time to meet her imaginary friend. Time for Amelia Pond to become a part of the story, the fairy tale that will save her, save them all: all the people that exist and all the people that have been forgotten.
Time to shout into the silence.
Run, run as fast as you can...
Amy wears short skirts and sensible shoes and that’s enough to outrun most monsters, but it’s not enough to outrun the universe and the universe is cracking into pieces, sharp cutting fragments that make never-weres out of could-have-beens.
Her friend can save it, her Raggedy Doctor, who showed her all sorts of worlds and all sorts of stories. Who taught her about his story and all the stories he’s a part of; about heroes and villains and cruelty and kindness, that true things might not exist and that what exists can be hollow and false. She learned to look and to see and to understand. She helped a robot become human and helped humans remember how to be kind. She has swum amongst the stars and been swallowed by the earth. She has seen beginnings and endings and has so many stories to tell, and so many stories told about her.
She is Amy Pond, the girl who waited, the girl who didn’t make sense, the Wendy-bird who flew away on her wedding night, and there are tears on her face, as she says goodbye to the Doctor, and they aren’t made of diamonds at all; they’re just salt and water, running down her cheeks, making her eyes all blurry and red.
And he’s going now, because her house is too big, and there are too many empty rooms; because she’s alone when she shouldn’t be; because her family never existed and they should and so should she and so should everything else and he was never real anyway. Just a story she told herself when she was a little girl and frightened of cracks in her wall, as silly and childish as being frightened of shadows and statues.
Her life isn’t whole; she’s a mystery, incomplete, and he can make her whole again. He can make everything whole again and she can bring back her family. She can, he tells her, if she remembers; she can if she believes in impossible things and that we are all made of stars and that nothing is ever forgotten.
Her imaginary friend smiles. His eyes say to her: tell stories; be kind; remember.
Remember.
When Amy wakes, the sky is full of stars and all is right with the universe.
-
This is a story about a boy made of plastic who believes he is human. He kills the woman he loves and watches the universe end. He believes in miracles.
One day, (so Amy’s imaginary friend says) his love will live again, and until then she will sleep, and he will not leave her. He is more human than he’s ever been, because he has to be, he must be, or he is a monster. He is a plastic copy of a dead man and he is alive, with all the heart and soul that makes Rory Williams who he is.
Rory, the only Rory he knows how to be, sits, short sword in hand, in the darkness. The long night has begun.
He marches through the centuries. He marches as a Roman, a Frank, a Knight Templar, though always he answers only to centurion. He meets a Venetian named Marco Polo and hears the story of an old man and a blue box, and the three strange and wonderful people who travelled with him and Rory smiles. It is not the first time he hears tales of the Doctor; it will not be the last.
Always, he guards his own box, the Pandorica. Relentless and brave, he faces down Normans and Vikings, queens and popes, emperors and prime ministers and he tells them no, he will stay and he will watch over his charge. They will ask him what he guards, truly, and he will tell his story, a story all will find impossible to believe.
Rory does not sleep or eat, but he has learned patience now and understands it in that strange and subtle way that comes with knowing the world will twist and change and move on and on and on and you will remain the same. Sometimes he will close his eyes and he will not feel himself breathe or his heart beat. He isn’t real, not like that, but he is, he is. He remembers what it felt like for his heart to beat so hard and so fast he could barely breathe; he remembers asking Amy to marry him; the first time she kissed him; the first time he woke up and realised he was lying next to a woman he loved more than the world. He remembers how fast he’s had to run from vampires and reptilians, how each breathe caught hard and sharp in his lungs, and what it’s like to be so cold you feel like your skin’s on fire. He remembers and so he is human; that’s the story he tells himself each morning, each sunrise, each new day when everything is poised to change.
When the bombs fall and the blaze starts and flames rise up around his beloved he does not hesitate. He’s not wood, after all, and he doesn’t burn, though he does melt, just a little.
-
This is the story of a woman who loves a man who doesn’t know her, not yet. But she’s patient and clever and knows her own story and the difference between a temporal hyperlink and an inverse warp field. She’s caught in the loop of the snake eating its own tail and it’s her protection and her trap, it’s this moment and her life.
I’m sorry, my love.
She’s in the heart of the explosion, the heart of a dying TARDIS whose light is just enough to keep one world alive, one tiny corner of the universe where time hasn’t quite run out, not yet. The TARDIS keeps her safe, trapped in a handful of seconds, a tiny slice of life that she repeats, that will repeat on and on until...
The Doctor comes back, and she doesn’t even realise he’s been gone.
For a moment, he looks at her like he knows her, but it’s a moment in an eternity and then they are where they were before; this story’s barely started for him and she knows there are consequences for spoiling the twists. She loves him. It’s hard to look at him and see the past, not a reflection, but there’s a glimmer and that’s enough, for now.
She would die for him, she thinks, and she will certainly kill for him.
River is not afraid of monsters.
(The monsters are afraid of her.)
The Doctor lies, and so does she. Lies of omission, of choice, by smile or by glance. Lies to keep each other safe or amused, lies to tease and to test. They both love more easily than they trust, especially each other. There is nothing that she can say to stop him flying the Pandorica into the heart of his TARDIS, and nothing that she should say. She doesn’t know how to say goodbye to him, not here, not now, and so she turns away and tries to remember that she is the strong one.
-
This is the story of a lonely old man, a wizard and a thief, a madman in a box who keeps his swimming pool in the library.
He’s going to step into the deepest, darkest hole in the universe and he will fall so far and so fast and so completely that he’ll have no stories left at all and there have been so, so many, across more galaxies and centuries and planets and lifetimes than he can possibly remember. And maybe it’s better this way, better for him to end like this, not in a blaze of glory, but quietly, like a dream that fades as you wake.
His family sleep in his mind but he wakes them now, and he remembers: his wife, his children, his dearest grandchild. All gone now, gone to time and dust and the choices he made. He remembers the boy with dark eyes, and how he loved him and loved him still when he was monstrous and cruel. He remembers Barbara, who would face down history if she believed she was right and it was wrong, who’d been so brave, so kind, so ready to argue with a cantankerous young man in an old body. He remembers Jamie, quick to fright, and ever ready to defend him against any threat. And Zoe, so clever, and Liz, and Sarah Jane saving the Earth with those impossibly young children of hers. Alastair, ready to blaze away at any alien menace who dared set foot on his world; Ace, whose trust and understanding had reminded him of who he should be. He remembers Romana, as she was before the War, so brilliant and shining with life.
There are so many lives to remember, so many so intimately entwined with his own.
He closes his eyes. It’s not just his own story, it’s all of them, all of their stories that he takes too. He sacrifices himself, he sacrifices them all. How much of them will he take with them? How much will remain? So many adventures, smiles and glances, arguments and dances, all gone, blotted out of existence.
(Does he have that right?)
With a shudder, he remembers River’s death. “Not those times. Not one line. Don’t you dare!” Her eyes blazed at him, furious, defiant and certain. She died to protect him and she died to protect who she was.
There isn’t a choice. It’s all of them, or all of everything. There’ll be new stories in the new universe, new heroes, new choices to make. And they’ll be there too, all of them, all with their lives and their potential, all ready to forge new paths, without his mistakes and his hubris and his vanity.
Everything has its time and everything dies and even stories will fade forgotten into history. He’s an old man now, an old man in this absurd young body, and he’s going to be brilliant, one last time.
As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there...
He’s going now, into the heart of explosion, the beginning of history. The Pandorica rushes towards the fire, his beloved TARDIS, burning lonely in a silent sky. He closes his eyes. He sees stars, a great map of the universe so bright, so many worlds, that he’s travelled for so long that he’s forgotten what’s true and what’s not. It’s okay, he thinks, it’s okay because sometimes the truth doesn’t matter, just the memory, and he’s got eleven lifetimes of those. He’s been cruel and kind and wise and foolish and all the things he wanted to be and many things he didn’t. He’s been a student and a scientist, a renegade and an exile, a criminal, a president, a husband, father, brother...he has tried to be a good man.
Time can be rewritten. Time can be unwritten. He takes a deep breath.
Just one last story, he begs of the universe as time slips away like water through his fingers, just one. And so he spends his final minutes sitting by the bedside of a little girl and tells her the tale of a mad old man who ran away from home in a magical blue box.
-
There are no monsters at her wedding. Amy isn’t disappointed, she isn’t; she’s not sure how well she’d fare at running in her wedding dress, after all. She shakes her head and scolds herself for being so silly: monsters aren’t real.
She dreams about them though, dark and terrible things creeping through shadow and, sometimes, she dreams of a box, a stolen box. She dreams about her imaginary friend and how she loved a plastic man and slept through two thousand years of history and when she woke up the universe was very small indeed. (And though her prince watched over her deathly sleep, he did not free her because she freed herself, when she was a little girl who believed in stars.)
She dreams of vampires and Venice, of sunflowers and Van Gogh, of magic, of miracles, of impossible things. She dreams of the Doctor and Amy Pond and the days that should have come.
“If something can be remembered, it can come back,” whispers the universe.
Amy has forgotten something important. But there’s a song to remind her. She’s crying and she doesn’t know why. It’s her wedding day and she’s so very sad and she doesn’t know why. She flicks through a through a blue book, and all the pages are blank, ready to be written in... no, no, not ready: erased, gone, wiped out, wrong.
She looks and she sees: a blue book, a bowtie, braces. She understands. A single tear falls from her eye and it’s a diamond, a perfect shining gem; a memory.
Her imaginary friend, her wizard, her Raggedy Doctor, has saved them all.
And they’ve forgotten. She’s forgotten.
She stands up and she looks around her wedding and everyone is looking at her and she can see what they’re thinking: “Mad, impossible, Amy Pond.” Fine, she thinks, fine I am, I am and I don’t care.
She tells them about her friend, a silly old Doctor, she shouts into the oh-so-awkward silence and no-one believes her but she believes in him.
He’s just a story, but he’s real. And she remembers. How could she possibly have forgotten?
She can save him. She can save him with memory and story and words. She can shape the universe.
(Rory remembers. He puts his hand over his heart and he takes a deep breath and he’s flesh and blood all right, but he remembers.)
Amy knows the difference between the real and the imaginary and she doesn’t care at all. She remembers, she believes, she tells the story to herself and she knows it’s true. The Doctor is late for her wedding, and she’s not having that.
She remembers.
She casts her spell, her story; she has the magic now and she can feel the air tingling around her, alive with impossibilities.
“Something old,” she says, and the world trembles; there is a distant rumbling. “Something new, something borrowed, something blue.”
The spell is cast, the ice caves melt, the darkness recedes.
-
The Doctor dances. He dances like an old man, like an unselfconscious child, like a Time Lord without a care in the universe. He’s alive and his best friend is getting married to the man she loves. And he loves him too, he supposes, he loves him and Amy and Augustus and, oh, all of them. Isn’t it brilliant? Isn’t it ridiculous and wonderful?
“Did you dance?” River asks, before he can slip away.
“Are you married, River?”
He watches the corner of her lips as she says yes to questions he’s not sure he’s asked and thinks about kissing her. He loves her too, he realises. It’s not the same, because he can be proud and stubborn and he doesn’t understand her at all, but it’s love; a wary, cautious love, one that shimmers like a secret.
(River knows how to be impossible and knows how much the Doctor delights in a puzzle. After all the fun he’ll have, she’s never going to give him any easy answers and she knows he wouldn’t want it any other way.)
The future’s waiting, and he’s ready to leave, alone. He knows how weddings go. He knows all about humans and their roots and settling down and nice timely lives where one thing happens after another, all in right order. He stayed this time, for a while at least, and he’s a little bit proud of that. He thinks back to Jo, to Leela and Susan and Peri...
...he thinks he’s about to leave, when the door opens. I can do this, he thinks; he’s getting better at goodbyes too.
-
Amy takes Rory’s hand and he looks at her and she looks at him and they don’t need to say anything at all before they slip away.
Outside, Amy squeezes his hand. Rory smiles.
They look up together - the stars are bright, a tapestry of possibilities - and then they run into the TARDIS.
“I grew up,” Amy told the Doctor once. And she’s a grown-up now, a grown-up running away with her husband and her best friend, a grown-up off to have impossible adventures in extraordinary stories.
-
Once upon a time there was a story, an old story, probably, perhaps nine hundred years old, perhaps as old as the universe itself, perhaps it was but forty-three, but it was a story about who we are and what we want and where we’re going and where we’ve been.
It was about a box, a magical blue box and once upon a time...
... there was a child who lived in a junkyard with her mad old grandfather...
...there was a girl with a taste for explosives who was swept away in a time storm to a distant world...
...there was a young doctor who walked a war-ravaged Earth...
... there was a girl and a boy and a Doctor, and a TARDIS...
...and they lived.
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: G
Characters: Eleven, Amy, River, Rory
Summary: Tell stories; be kind; remember. A response to The Big Bang.
Spoilers: For season 5.
Stories We Tell Our Children
This is happily ever after:
This is a story about a little red-haired Scottish girl who lives in a big house full of empty rooms and forgotten people. The girl is called Amelia and she isn’t afraid of strange things because the strangest thing of all is the crack in her wall that she’s lived with all her life.
Amelia is waiting. The crack in her wall is getting bigger and Amelia knows that on the other side is the universe and all the people and planets and stories that everyone has forgotten; all the light of the stars she’s never seen; all the sound and fury and meaning that’s been lost to the skies. Eternity swirls around her thoughts and she knows that the universe is wrong, wrong, wrong. But there’s a story that tells the truth, that can make the sky shine at night, and it’s close now and she’s a part of it. She’s going to be a princess and a hero and find treasure and fight pirates and aliens and save the world.
Her dreams are the stuff of the universe and Amelia remembers the stars. She looks up into the coal black sky of a small, dark existence and knows it should be blazing with tiny pinpricks of light, each one a sun, and maybe they have their own planets, and people, and little boys and girls looking up and seeing her star and wondering what sort of people live on its planets.
But there are no stars, so every grown-up tells her as they look at her with pity and sadness and the anger born of knowing there’s something important that they can’t quite remember. Amelia paints them anyway and ignores a world full of hurried whispers and frightened people and silent spaces.
Little Amelia Pond believes in impossible things and everyone tells her that she is wrong: there are no stars, no universes inside cracks in her wall and no wizards.
Amelia Pond doesn’t listen to any of them because she knows the difference between a story and a lie.
Come along, Pond.
It’s time now: time to visit the puzzle box, time to solve a mystery thousands of years old, time to meet her imaginary friend. Time for Amelia Pond to become a part of the story, the fairy tale that will save her, save them all: all the people that exist and all the people that have been forgotten.
Time to shout into the silence.
Run, run as fast as you can...
Amy wears short skirts and sensible shoes and that’s enough to outrun most monsters, but it’s not enough to outrun the universe and the universe is cracking into pieces, sharp cutting fragments that make never-weres out of could-have-beens.
Her friend can save it, her Raggedy Doctor, who showed her all sorts of worlds and all sorts of stories. Who taught her about his story and all the stories he’s a part of; about heroes and villains and cruelty and kindness, that true things might not exist and that what exists can be hollow and false. She learned to look and to see and to understand. She helped a robot become human and helped humans remember how to be kind. She has swum amongst the stars and been swallowed by the earth. She has seen beginnings and endings and has so many stories to tell, and so many stories told about her.
She is Amy Pond, the girl who waited, the girl who didn’t make sense, the Wendy-bird who flew away on her wedding night, and there are tears on her face, as she says goodbye to the Doctor, and they aren’t made of diamonds at all; they’re just salt and water, running down her cheeks, making her eyes all blurry and red.
And he’s going now, because her house is too big, and there are too many empty rooms; because she’s alone when she shouldn’t be; because her family never existed and they should and so should she and so should everything else and he was never real anyway. Just a story she told herself when she was a little girl and frightened of cracks in her wall, as silly and childish as being frightened of shadows and statues.
Her life isn’t whole; she’s a mystery, incomplete, and he can make her whole again. He can make everything whole again and she can bring back her family. She can, he tells her, if she remembers; she can if she believes in impossible things and that we are all made of stars and that nothing is ever forgotten.
Her imaginary friend smiles. His eyes say to her: tell stories; be kind; remember.
Remember.
When Amy wakes, the sky is full of stars and all is right with the universe.
-
This is a story about a boy made of plastic who believes he is human. He kills the woman he loves and watches the universe end. He believes in miracles.
One day, (so Amy’s imaginary friend says) his love will live again, and until then she will sleep, and he will not leave her. He is more human than he’s ever been, because he has to be, he must be, or he is a monster. He is a plastic copy of a dead man and he is alive, with all the heart and soul that makes Rory Williams who he is.
Rory, the only Rory he knows how to be, sits, short sword in hand, in the darkness. The long night has begun.
He marches through the centuries. He marches as a Roman, a Frank, a Knight Templar, though always he answers only to centurion. He meets a Venetian named Marco Polo and hears the story of an old man and a blue box, and the three strange and wonderful people who travelled with him and Rory smiles. It is not the first time he hears tales of the Doctor; it will not be the last.
Always, he guards his own box, the Pandorica. Relentless and brave, he faces down Normans and Vikings, queens and popes, emperors and prime ministers and he tells them no, he will stay and he will watch over his charge. They will ask him what he guards, truly, and he will tell his story, a story all will find impossible to believe.
Rory does not sleep or eat, but he has learned patience now and understands it in that strange and subtle way that comes with knowing the world will twist and change and move on and on and on and you will remain the same. Sometimes he will close his eyes and he will not feel himself breathe or his heart beat. He isn’t real, not like that, but he is, he is. He remembers what it felt like for his heart to beat so hard and so fast he could barely breathe; he remembers asking Amy to marry him; the first time she kissed him; the first time he woke up and realised he was lying next to a woman he loved more than the world. He remembers how fast he’s had to run from vampires and reptilians, how each breathe caught hard and sharp in his lungs, and what it’s like to be so cold you feel like your skin’s on fire. He remembers and so he is human; that’s the story he tells himself each morning, each sunrise, each new day when everything is poised to change.
When the bombs fall and the blaze starts and flames rise up around his beloved he does not hesitate. He’s not wood, after all, and he doesn’t burn, though he does melt, just a little.
-
This is the story of a woman who loves a man who doesn’t know her, not yet. But she’s patient and clever and knows her own story and the difference between a temporal hyperlink and an inverse warp field. She’s caught in the loop of the snake eating its own tail and it’s her protection and her trap, it’s this moment and her life.
I’m sorry, my love.
She’s in the heart of the explosion, the heart of a dying TARDIS whose light is just enough to keep one world alive, one tiny corner of the universe where time hasn’t quite run out, not yet. The TARDIS keeps her safe, trapped in a handful of seconds, a tiny slice of life that she repeats, that will repeat on and on until...
The Doctor comes back, and she doesn’t even realise he’s been gone.
For a moment, he looks at her like he knows her, but it’s a moment in an eternity and then they are where they were before; this story’s barely started for him and she knows there are consequences for spoiling the twists. She loves him. It’s hard to look at him and see the past, not a reflection, but there’s a glimmer and that’s enough, for now.
She would die for him, she thinks, and she will certainly kill for him.
River is not afraid of monsters.
(The monsters are afraid of her.)
The Doctor lies, and so does she. Lies of omission, of choice, by smile or by glance. Lies to keep each other safe or amused, lies to tease and to test. They both love more easily than they trust, especially each other. There is nothing that she can say to stop him flying the Pandorica into the heart of his TARDIS, and nothing that she should say. She doesn’t know how to say goodbye to him, not here, not now, and so she turns away and tries to remember that she is the strong one.
-
This is the story of a lonely old man, a wizard and a thief, a madman in a box who keeps his swimming pool in the library.
He’s going to step into the deepest, darkest hole in the universe and he will fall so far and so fast and so completely that he’ll have no stories left at all and there have been so, so many, across more galaxies and centuries and planets and lifetimes than he can possibly remember. And maybe it’s better this way, better for him to end like this, not in a blaze of glory, but quietly, like a dream that fades as you wake.
His family sleep in his mind but he wakes them now, and he remembers: his wife, his children, his dearest grandchild. All gone now, gone to time and dust and the choices he made. He remembers the boy with dark eyes, and how he loved him and loved him still when he was monstrous and cruel. He remembers Barbara, who would face down history if she believed she was right and it was wrong, who’d been so brave, so kind, so ready to argue with a cantankerous young man in an old body. He remembers Jamie, quick to fright, and ever ready to defend him against any threat. And Zoe, so clever, and Liz, and Sarah Jane saving the Earth with those impossibly young children of hers. Alastair, ready to blaze away at any alien menace who dared set foot on his world; Ace, whose trust and understanding had reminded him of who he should be. He remembers Romana, as she was before the War, so brilliant and shining with life.
There are so many lives to remember, so many so intimately entwined with his own.
He closes his eyes. It’s not just his own story, it’s all of them, all of their stories that he takes too. He sacrifices himself, he sacrifices them all. How much of them will he take with them? How much will remain? So many adventures, smiles and glances, arguments and dances, all gone, blotted out of existence.
(Does he have that right?)
With a shudder, he remembers River’s death. “Not those times. Not one line. Don’t you dare!” Her eyes blazed at him, furious, defiant and certain. She died to protect him and she died to protect who she was.
There isn’t a choice. It’s all of them, or all of everything. There’ll be new stories in the new universe, new heroes, new choices to make. And they’ll be there too, all of them, all with their lives and their potential, all ready to forge new paths, without his mistakes and his hubris and his vanity.
Everything has its time and everything dies and even stories will fade forgotten into history. He’s an old man now, an old man in this absurd young body, and he’s going to be brilliant, one last time.
As I was going up the stair, I met a man who wasn’t there...
He’s going now, into the heart of explosion, the beginning of history. The Pandorica rushes towards the fire, his beloved TARDIS, burning lonely in a silent sky. He closes his eyes. He sees stars, a great map of the universe so bright, so many worlds, that he’s travelled for so long that he’s forgotten what’s true and what’s not. It’s okay, he thinks, it’s okay because sometimes the truth doesn’t matter, just the memory, and he’s got eleven lifetimes of those. He’s been cruel and kind and wise and foolish and all the things he wanted to be and many things he didn’t. He’s been a student and a scientist, a renegade and an exile, a criminal, a president, a husband, father, brother...he has tried to be a good man.
Time can be rewritten. Time can be unwritten. He takes a deep breath.
Just one last story, he begs of the universe as time slips away like water through his fingers, just one. And so he spends his final minutes sitting by the bedside of a little girl and tells her the tale of a mad old man who ran away from home in a magical blue box.
-
There are no monsters at her wedding. Amy isn’t disappointed, she isn’t; she’s not sure how well she’d fare at running in her wedding dress, after all. She shakes her head and scolds herself for being so silly: monsters aren’t real.
She dreams about them though, dark and terrible things creeping through shadow and, sometimes, she dreams of a box, a stolen box. She dreams about her imaginary friend and how she loved a plastic man and slept through two thousand years of history and when she woke up the universe was very small indeed. (And though her prince watched over her deathly sleep, he did not free her because she freed herself, when she was a little girl who believed in stars.)
She dreams of vampires and Venice, of sunflowers and Van Gogh, of magic, of miracles, of impossible things. She dreams of the Doctor and Amy Pond and the days that should have come.
“If something can be remembered, it can come back,” whispers the universe.
Amy has forgotten something important. But there’s a song to remind her. She’s crying and she doesn’t know why. It’s her wedding day and she’s so very sad and she doesn’t know why. She flicks through a through a blue book, and all the pages are blank, ready to be written in... no, no, not ready: erased, gone, wiped out, wrong.
She looks and she sees: a blue book, a bowtie, braces. She understands. A single tear falls from her eye and it’s a diamond, a perfect shining gem; a memory.
Her imaginary friend, her wizard, her Raggedy Doctor, has saved them all.
And they’ve forgotten. She’s forgotten.
She stands up and she looks around her wedding and everyone is looking at her and she can see what they’re thinking: “Mad, impossible, Amy Pond.” Fine, she thinks, fine I am, I am and I don’t care.
She tells them about her friend, a silly old Doctor, she shouts into the oh-so-awkward silence and no-one believes her but she believes in him.
He’s just a story, but he’s real. And she remembers. How could she possibly have forgotten?
She can save him. She can save him with memory and story and words. She can shape the universe.
(Rory remembers. He puts his hand over his heart and he takes a deep breath and he’s flesh and blood all right, but he remembers.)
Amy knows the difference between the real and the imaginary and she doesn’t care at all. She remembers, she believes, she tells the story to herself and she knows it’s true. The Doctor is late for her wedding, and she’s not having that.
She remembers.
She casts her spell, her story; she has the magic now and she can feel the air tingling around her, alive with impossibilities.
“Something old,” she says, and the world trembles; there is a distant rumbling. “Something new, something borrowed, something blue.”
The spell is cast, the ice caves melt, the darkness recedes.
-
The Doctor dances. He dances like an old man, like an unselfconscious child, like a Time Lord without a care in the universe. He’s alive and his best friend is getting married to the man she loves. And he loves him too, he supposes, he loves him and Amy and Augustus and, oh, all of them. Isn’t it brilliant? Isn’t it ridiculous and wonderful?
“Did you dance?” River asks, before he can slip away.
“Are you married, River?”
He watches the corner of her lips as she says yes to questions he’s not sure he’s asked and thinks about kissing her. He loves her too, he realises. It’s not the same, because he can be proud and stubborn and he doesn’t understand her at all, but it’s love; a wary, cautious love, one that shimmers like a secret.
(River knows how to be impossible and knows how much the Doctor delights in a puzzle. After all the fun he’ll have, she’s never going to give him any easy answers and she knows he wouldn’t want it any other way.)
The future’s waiting, and he’s ready to leave, alone. He knows how weddings go. He knows all about humans and their roots and settling down and nice timely lives where one thing happens after another, all in right order. He stayed this time, for a while at least, and he’s a little bit proud of that. He thinks back to Jo, to Leela and Susan and Peri...
...he thinks he’s about to leave, when the door opens. I can do this, he thinks; he’s getting better at goodbyes too.
-
Amy takes Rory’s hand and he looks at her and she looks at him and they don’t need to say anything at all before they slip away.
Outside, Amy squeezes his hand. Rory smiles.
They look up together - the stars are bright, a tapestry of possibilities - and then they run into the TARDIS.
“I grew up,” Amy told the Doctor once. And she’s a grown-up now, a grown-up running away with her husband and her best friend, a grown-up off to have impossible adventures in extraordinary stories.
-
Once upon a time there was a story, an old story, probably, perhaps nine hundred years old, perhaps as old as the universe itself, perhaps it was but forty-three, but it was a story about who we are and what we want and where we’re going and where we’ve been.
It was about a box, a magical blue box and once upon a time...
... there was a child who lived in a junkyard with her mad old grandfather...
...there was a girl with a taste for explosives who was swept away in a time storm to a distant world...
...there was a young doctor who walked a war-ravaged Earth...
... there was a girl and a boy and a Doctor, and a TARDIS...
...and they lived.