Fic: Here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break
Here shall John always stumble; there shall Jane's heart always break
Eleven/Amy, R, ~2,000 words. It's a January-December sort of thing.
Spoilers up to "Vincent and the Doctor".
1.
Amy Pond wants to kiss him. Amy Pond wants to have him, companionably, uncomplicated, just for the physical joy of it, like eating popsicles on the longest hottest day of summer. Amy Pond doesn't quite remember why she wants him: the fear, what she was running from, avoidance and making bad decisions just because she could. She wants him in a sweet, no-nonsense sort of way, or she only thinks she does, or maybe she really does and it's just him putting the sadness into her eyes.
The first time she kissed him, he went to find her fiance and inform him of this development in their relationship, alert him to these situations that make people want to hold on to each other, and to invite him along. The second time she kissed him, she'd never been engaged, so he had no one to inform.
Amy Pond wants to kiss him like it's the simplest thing in the world, she wants to undress him and map him and tell jokes along his spine, she wants him limb to limb like it's an intramural sport, or yoga, or movie night. She wants him human, she wants a boy, she wants all the easy mistakes and long nights of coltish youth. She wants Rory, except Rory never existed.
So the second time she kissed him, her fingertips pressed into the soft spots behind his ears, hips tilting up against him, he felt like the worst person in the world. He felt like a traitor and a fraud, and a pathetic old man. Because for all the youth in him, for all he's only a year old, he's - well.
Also, he'd just gotten her fiance killed and then removed from history. These two things contributed to his reluctance.
2.
Amy Pond wants to know all about him. She sits on the chair he put out for her, the one that's duct-taped to the floor so she won't go sliding, with her legs stretched out long as highways, and she laughs at him and his accent and asks him questions. Like where are you from? And what are your people like?
He thinks maybe telling her will put her off. Maybe if she knew what he was, she'd stop watching him, stop noticing the way he watched her. So he tells her, I'm a Time Lord, I'm the only one left, and I'm from a planet called Gallifrey, but it doesn't exist anymore.
She looks stricken. I'm sorry, she says.
Don't be, he says. I was the one who killed them off. I had to make the decision between them and the rest of the universe. The rest of the universe won.
She makes a face like it's all very sad, but she has no idea how to react because she's a human and humans have no words for this. She makes a face like can we talk about something else now.
He wonders if she even believes him. He knows she hasn't quite accepted that he's actually older than dirt, he knows she just laughed and punched him on the arm when he showed her pictures of the men he used to be. There is a word humans have for it which is 'reincarnation' and that is, he thinks, the word she applies to him, a reincarnated man, which is not strictly speaking true at all but it's probably the closest she'll ever get. Unless she sees him die, in which case they'll have the Regeneration Talk again.
Sometimes he is conscious of letting her pretend he's the sort of alien who's basically human but slightly more wonderful. It's a lie they can both believe, that the TARDIS and the two hearts and the jiggery-pokery is as strange as he gets. She kisses him for the third time and her hands find his heartbeat, and then the other heartbeat, and through their skin he feels her giddy, fairy-tale acceptance of it. Of him. She suspends her disbelief. He's the madman in the box who fell from the sky, to take her away with him forever.
And when she pulls away, crying, she looks suprised at herself, like she's completely disconnected from the action of tears from tearduct. He thinks he made a place in her that will always remember, a place that will taunt him, that will forever tell him about how she used to love someone better than she'll ever love him.
3.
The Doctor remembers Rory Williams. He feels obligated. He tries to balance keeping him firmly in mind, and not ever mentioning his name; he slips, of course, sometimes, but Amy never gets that fabled flash of memory like amnesia patients can get, so he's shamefully thankful. When she cries she does't know why she's crying. Maybe she thinks she's crying about the Doctor, or Vincent, or just the injustice and uselessness all first-time time-travelers rail against. Why can't we fix it? Why can't we fix him?
Rory was not the first person the Doctor let die, but he was the first to disappear entirely. He wonders if this makes it better or worse, this lack of repercussions, if you can even have killed a man if the man never lived. He wonders at the shape of that, the feeling of something missing that Amy will not let go of, the guilt in him when he looks at her, the cruelty of a universe that gets on just fine without a Rory in it.
The Doctor remembers Rory Williams for Amy, and for Rory, and for himself, because it's something he needs to do. Rory was a man Amy loved better than she'll ever love anyone else. This is a thing the Doctor pushed to the line, this question, him or me, and it might have been accidental but it's not like he really truly had no idea there might be psychic pollen. Amy Pond doesn't remember making a choice between her fiance and her childhood hero because her fiance never existed. By default, she now chooses the Doctor.
He holds all these memories for them both, saving them for later in case she ever wants to know. He holds them because no one else can, because everyone who might have is dead. He feels sometimes like he imagines a monk would. Or a Cabbalist, or a Catskills magician: he's become a keeper of secrets, these awkward things with a shape and weight to them. He keeps secrets and history and so many names, and a culture that breathes through him imperfectly, and a language he changes and lets die and perverts every day, and a cartography of walled cities and red untended wilds, and the politics of us-versus-them he never believed in anyway. He is the keeper of the legacy of Rassilon, the protector of Gallifrey. Who'd have thought, the Doctor himself, the exiled, completely in charge of everything about Time Lord society.
So when he finds her in a room like a broom closet but with no brooms and brushes her hair out of her eyes, that's what Time Lords do, that's the new Gallifrey. And when he pushes her shirt off her shoulder, and realizes he no longer remembers how to do this. And when he can taste the briefness of her, the flash-quick span of her, not even a hundred years. And when he relearns what to do with nylon stockings, and when she looks lost, and when the idea of her outweighs what he thinks of himself for doing this. This is the nation he's rebuilding, clumsy and unstable; this is what Time Lords do.
4.
He takes her to places as an apology for the thing she doesn't know he did. The thing he didn't do, technically speaking. He takes her to warm, happy places, with beaches to nap on and oceans to swim in, with museums to wander through, with parades to revel in. He orchestrates things to make her smile, to make her laugh. He takes her to the most impressive places - although not too impressive, not terrible-impressive, he's no longer the kind of man who thinks people want to visit wars and dying planets and cosmic explosions. He takes her to sunsets and snowfalls and rare meteorological events. He takes her on picnics and she wears sundresses and sneakers and kisses him on tip-toe.
He takes her to a planet where plants grow geometric like chemistry diagrams, and realizes he's been there before. He's been there more than once. At the cafe eating food she doesn't understand, she stares past him at the tree that climbs upwards as scaffolding for an airship landing pad, creaking under the weight of settling metal, she stares past him with a glow and an affected world-weariness and he remembers being here, before. With others.
She knows about them, most of them, or she knows the concept of Them and a few names, here and there, who knows which ones stuck. Maybe she kept all the names he threw at her and held them close to her chest, maybe they fill her head, or her heart, with the same feeling she gets when visiting a war memorial, all these abstract names pointing to unknowable suffering. These people that were his life. As she is his life now.
Amy Pond was a child when he met her, tiny little Amelia Pond cooking for him on a stove she could barely reach, and then ten minutes later she was twenty-one. This is how time passes. Amelia Pond will outgrow her raggedy Doctor, sooner or later. Amy Pond who wants to kiss him like a ten o'clock curfew will outgrow this life, all the running and fighting and caring only just so much, and never living more than a few days in a row, and she will outgrow the strange old man in the police box. This is what these humans do. After all is said and done, they never want to live like this, not the way he does. Even Martha, even Jack, whom he ruined, or Ace, whom he ruined in a different way, standing astride their rifts in time and space, fighting the war he taught them to fight, they do it like humans do. Second by minute by hour by day. All their days in a row. With families, and pets, and curtains on the windows, and tea. This is what Amy Pond will one day run back to.
But right now, she wants him and she takes him and he can't bring himself to tell her to stop. She's not the first one he's loved but she's the one he loves right now, the one making his heart and his heart curl in on themselves. Amelia Pond, like from a fairy tale, her nails scratching into his skin. She likes him and idolizes him and he loves her, yes he does love her, for her spirit and youth, for her compassion. He loves her because she's sad and she doesn't know why, because she has red hair, because she carries Leadworth with her, inside her, slow and staid and cobblestoned, the way he carries Gallifrey inside himself. This love is him in the depths of the battle cruiser dismantling the bomb while she's upstairs making friends. This love is him knowing the real names of all the stars, that all the stars are suns and most of the suns are dead, and she still sees constellations, still marvels at all the possibilities. This love is all the ways it will never work.
And on the planet where everything grows with precision and structural integrity, she reaches out to hold his hand, and squeezes, and does not notice the silences between all her words, in the spaces between their bodies. She smiles at him; time passes.