Fic [Doctor Who]: Relics
Title: Relics
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Eleven and Amy friendship, with implied Nine/Rose and Jack
Word Count: 1903
Prompt: Written for who_contest challenge #15, Treasures - 1st Place!
Summary: An organizational crisis leads Amy to a startling discovery. Also, the Doctor has never heard of Monty Python.
“Oh, no,” the Doctor murmurs, eyes wide. “Oh no. Not like this…”
Amy steps briskly around him and takes in the damage. The pile of junk-and that’s what it is, junk-on the floor is extravagantly large, considering that it all came out of the Doctor’s jacket pockets.
“Thought that couldn’t happen,” she commented. “Thought your dimensionally-transcendent pockets were so amazing and waterproof and holeproof and…oh look, not turn-the-jacket-arse-over-tip-proof.”
“Obviously,” the Doctor manages around his horror. “Have to work on that…”
They both stare at the mess, Amy with exasperation and the Doctor with something close to terror. Finally she sighs dramatically. “Need a hand?”
“No, no, that’s all right, I can just-the TARDIS can just-” he taps his boot-toe on the floor uncertainly and looks up. “Are you sure? You don’t have anything else…?”
“Well, I was planning to go traipsing in the Time Vortex and see if I could find a nice spot for tea with a Dalek, but I suppose-of course, idiot. We’re not going anywhere until you can get to the controls, are we? Besides, you’re not exactly the cleaning type. If Rory were here he could do it, but we’ll make do.” She sighs, and the Doctor takes a moment to miss Mr. Pond. Rory is the best dish-washer and compulsive library-neatener that he’s ever traveled with. Unfortunately, he is also off with River on something she called a “father-daughter bonding experience” and refused to explain further. The best they can hope for is that he makes it back in one piece.
“Could we use this as an opportunity,” Amy queries, “to organize your pockets a bit? Last week it took you ten dark, very stressful minutes to find your hand-torch.”
“Well, that was the telepathic transdimensional field mucking up again. It was the TARDIS, not the jacket…” Amy glares at him sternly.
“We were in a cave, with Sontarans, without a torch. Maybe the TARDIS was telling you to clean out your pockets.”
“Okay, okay,” the Doctor raises his hands in defeat. Score one, Amelia Pond, Amy thinks triumphantly.
“So,” she declares, seating herself on the glassy floor beside the console, “this is where we put stuff that goes back in the jacket.” She indicates her right. “And this,” she gestures to a much larger area on her left, “is everything else.”
*
Thirty minutes later, Amy is beginning to regret her victory. She’s spent half her time sorting through an astonishing array of…things, and the other half vetoing what the Doctor wants to leave in his pockets.
“No,” she says for the hundredth time, batting away another scrap. “That’s a wood chip. Not in your pockets. Bin room.” She’s started a pile for that too, to the Doctor’s dismay.
“Amy, this is a piece of the True Cross. The real one,” he retorts.
“And what’s this?” she fires back with a snort, reaching for a piece of yellowed fluff in the immense heap of things they still haven’t sorted. “A bit of the Golden Fleece?”
The Doctor pauses. “Yes.”
Amy looks up at him sharply. His silly face is entirely serious, and despite Rule Number One, she’s almost inclined to believe him. She reaches for a plain cup, shiny with age.
“The Holy Grail?”
He nods.
“Have you got the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch in here too?” she huffs.
He furrows his brow. “The what?”
“Monty Python?” The Doctor’s face is still blank. “God, you’ve spent how many years saving Britain and you don’t know Monty Python?”
“No?” he replies querulously.
“You’re not joking, are you,” Amy finally decides, leaning back on her hands to study him like he’s a bizarre alien specimen that might grow a second head. Which he is.
“About Monty Python? No, I’ve never met anyone on Earth named after a snake. Well, anyone real, in the strictest sense-once when I got trapped in JK Rowling’s notebooks-”
Amy rolls her eyes and cuts him off. “No, Doctor. About the quest objects. The ones that disappeared throughout human history and mysteriously ended up in your pockets.”
“Where else would I keep them? I’m sure I’ll give them back someday,” the Doctor answers guilelessly.
She stares at him for a long moment, then shakes her head in fond resignation. “You really are a madman in a box, do you know?” She reaches for the Grail, the Cross, and the Fleece. “But until you return these, I think they need to live somewhere safer than your pockets, don’t you?”
Stretching, she places them safely on the console and turns back to find the Doctor staring at her oddly and fiddling with what looks like his old, Raggedy-Doctor screwdriver.
“What?” she asks.
“I-oh, it’s nothing.” He starts to drop the broken sonic in the bin pile and hesitates. “Why do you treat them like that? What do they matter to you?”
“I liked The Da Vinci Code,” Amy quips, pulling another handful of pocket stuffing into her lap. “Besides, didn’t the Time Lords have any great cultural relics?”
“Naturally. Time Lords were a big, superior race-” the Doctor gestures extravagantly “-and they-we-had lots of big, superior artifacts, most of which were reminders of egomaniacs and wars. Souvenirs,” he says with a scowl, “of the worst bits of history. Just like those. I don’t do souvenirs. They're for archaeologists. Take the Shroud of Turin, for instance. It's interesting enough, but-”
And he’s off again, blazing through the oddities of human history and the incomprehensible notion of venerating things as if they mattered more than the people and events they represented. Not to mention the potential that huons could create an image on linen.
Amy tunes him out, sorting through the things in her lap. Spool of thread? Nope. Glowy green crystal thing? That’s probably important. Used takeaway plastic fork? God, he is such an alien. Bent photograph-bin probably, but-
She turns the photo over to find an image, dirty and worn, of three people with the TARDIS in the background. The woman with the gleeful grin seems distantly familiar, but Amy can’t place her. The two men are strangers. One is mischievous…and gorgeous. That smile could sell anything. The second grins to rival the first, a shocking glow of energy across his awkward face, but something dark and grief-stricken lurks behind the smile and leather coat. And for some reason she can’t quite understand, it breaks her heart.
“Thought you didn’t keep souvenirs, Doctor,” she says. Staring into the grainy image of haunted, icy eyes, it doesn’t come out in quite the teasing tone she intended.
“What?” he asks absently, holding what looks like a lipstick between his boot soles while poking its insides with two pairs of impractically long tweezers.
Amy extends the photo and pokes him with her toe, jarring the object he’s working on. He huffs irritably at her and glances up. “Amy-”
As soon as he catches sight of the photograph, his eyes go wide in shock and he drops his project unceremoniously on the floor. “What-no, give me that, that’s-”
Amy jerks the photo back and guards it close to her chest. “Uh-uh,” she insists, deflecting his arm. “Who are they? I’ve seen the girl before, I know I have, so there’s no reason not to tell me, right? Are they friends of yours? You took them to Cardiff? And most importantly, where did this man get his ears?”
Thwarted, the Doctor sits back. “Everyone keeps one or two souvenirs,” he says quietly, gaze not leaving hers, “no matter what. Even if the memory is far more important than the object. May I have that, please?”
It’s said in a tone she so rarely hears from him, close to the last words he said to her that terrible day at Lake Silencio, and it makes her want to shove the picture back at him and change the subject. But she hesitates. Her Raggedy Doctor is still such a mystery, and as she uncurls the hand holding the photo from her chest, she takes a second look. The girl looks so young and happy it’s almost blinding, and her light bleeds over across the two men. The younger of them carries himself as though the ease he feels with his companions is an unsought but treasured gift, one he can’t quite believe but embraces wholeheartedly. And the older man, the awkward, dark, scarred man who nonetheless reflects the joy radiating off the woman on his arm-
Amy realizes abruptly that she’s only seen eyes that ancient, happy and so so sad at the same time, on one person before. She bites her tongue and hands the picture back. The Doctor takes it and starts to fold it, to, she supposes, stash it in his trouser pocket until it can go back in his jacket. He stops himself and unfurls the worn paper, running a finger down the crease that separates the older man-him, Amy’s gut insists-from the other two. He stares quietly for a moment, only a moment, and nods slightly, a gesture that feels like farewell.
“Thank you,” he murmurs softly, and Amy is quite sure he’s not really speaking to her. Then the moment is over, and he sets the photo carefully to one side.
“Should take better care of that. 20th-century paper is so fragile.” The Doctor picks up his tools again. “Right,” he begins brightly, as if nothing odd has happened, “I’ll just patch this up so we can sort it, shall I?”
Amy shakes her head at the abrupt change. This didn’t happen, move along is as crystal clear as the glass floor. She takes a deep breath and plays along, arch and Scottish: “What, so I’m cleaning up the rest of this while you…tinker? You owe me dinner, Doctor. A really nice one too. No delicacies that turn out to be alive. And shopping. With no complaints.”
The Doctor uh-huhs absently, head bent over his project (which, if past experience is any clue, will probably turn out to be an incredibly complicated laser breadknife that still shouldn’t be in his pockets). Amy vows to hold him to it, and adds that to her little store of victories, next to hand-torches in caves and the unforgettable image of his eyes laughing in a stranger’s war-torn face.
*
She does get her dinner and shopping on the Doctor’s endless credit eventually, after listening to a detailed explanation of the laser breadknife, which turns out to be a sonic lipstick. After much persuading, some quite forceful and more mother-in-law-like than she cares to think about, he agrees to leave some of the useless objects on the TARDIS. He even offers her the Grail, Cross, and Fleece to decorate her room until such time as he returns them, as if they are simply curios for decorating spare shelves. She suspects that by the end of their next adventure, he will have forgotten the detritus and she’ll stumble over it one day in the library or galley or one of the storage rooms, covered with dust. More than once, she does.
Amy never sees the photograph again. But she notices, after a time, that there is one inner pocket of the Doctor’s jacket, nicely sized for a small piece of paper, that he never seems to use.
--
Notes:
This story was inspired partly (as was a brief reference in my story Message in a Bottle) by a passage from Bored of the Rings, in which the Strider character contributes some unexpected things to the Council of Elrond. It got somewhat more serious after that, but I give you the source nonetheless:
"Well," said Stomper, "I guess it’s time we all laid our cards on the table," and with that he noisily emptied the contents of a faded duffel into a heap in front of him. When he was finished, there was a large pile of odd objects, including a broken sword, a golden arm, a snowflake paperweight, the Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece, the Robe, a piece of the True Cross, and a glass slipper.
"Arrowroot, son of Arrowshirt, heir of Barbisol and King of Minas Troney, at your service," he said, rather loudly.
Bored of the Rings belongs to the Harvard Lampoon, and Doctor Who belongs to the BBC. I don't own the Fleece, Cross, or Grail either.
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Eleven and Amy friendship, with implied Nine/Rose and Jack
Word Count: 1903
Prompt: Written for who_contest challenge #15, Treasures - 1st Place!
Summary: An organizational crisis leads Amy to a startling discovery. Also, the Doctor has never heard of Monty Python.
“Oh, no,” the Doctor murmurs, eyes wide. “Oh no. Not like this…”
Amy steps briskly around him and takes in the damage. The pile of junk-and that’s what it is, junk-on the floor is extravagantly large, considering that it all came out of the Doctor’s jacket pockets.
“Thought that couldn’t happen,” she commented. “Thought your dimensionally-transcendent pockets were so amazing and waterproof and holeproof and…oh look, not turn-the-jacket-arse-over-tip-proof.”
“Obviously,” the Doctor manages around his horror. “Have to work on that…”
They both stare at the mess, Amy with exasperation and the Doctor with something close to terror. Finally she sighs dramatically. “Need a hand?”
“No, no, that’s all right, I can just-the TARDIS can just-” he taps his boot-toe on the floor uncertainly and looks up. “Are you sure? You don’t have anything else…?”
“Well, I was planning to go traipsing in the Time Vortex and see if I could find a nice spot for tea with a Dalek, but I suppose-of course, idiot. We’re not going anywhere until you can get to the controls, are we? Besides, you’re not exactly the cleaning type. If Rory were here he could do it, but we’ll make do.” She sighs, and the Doctor takes a moment to miss Mr. Pond. Rory is the best dish-washer and compulsive library-neatener that he’s ever traveled with. Unfortunately, he is also off with River on something she called a “father-daughter bonding experience” and refused to explain further. The best they can hope for is that he makes it back in one piece.
“Could we use this as an opportunity,” Amy queries, “to organize your pockets a bit? Last week it took you ten dark, very stressful minutes to find your hand-torch.”
“Well, that was the telepathic transdimensional field mucking up again. It was the TARDIS, not the jacket…” Amy glares at him sternly.
“We were in a cave, with Sontarans, without a torch. Maybe the TARDIS was telling you to clean out your pockets.”
“Okay, okay,” the Doctor raises his hands in defeat. Score one, Amelia Pond, Amy thinks triumphantly.
“So,” she declares, seating herself on the glassy floor beside the console, “this is where we put stuff that goes back in the jacket.” She indicates her right. “And this,” she gestures to a much larger area on her left, “is everything else.”
*
Thirty minutes later, Amy is beginning to regret her victory. She’s spent half her time sorting through an astonishing array of…things, and the other half vetoing what the Doctor wants to leave in his pockets.
“No,” she says for the hundredth time, batting away another scrap. “That’s a wood chip. Not in your pockets. Bin room.” She’s started a pile for that too, to the Doctor’s dismay.
“Amy, this is a piece of the True Cross. The real one,” he retorts.
“And what’s this?” she fires back with a snort, reaching for a piece of yellowed fluff in the immense heap of things they still haven’t sorted. “A bit of the Golden Fleece?”
The Doctor pauses. “Yes.”
Amy looks up at him sharply. His silly face is entirely serious, and despite Rule Number One, she’s almost inclined to believe him. She reaches for a plain cup, shiny with age.
“The Holy Grail?”
He nods.
“Have you got the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch in here too?” she huffs.
He furrows his brow. “The what?”
“Monty Python?” The Doctor’s face is still blank. “God, you’ve spent how many years saving Britain and you don’t know Monty Python?”
“No?” he replies querulously.
“You’re not joking, are you,” Amy finally decides, leaning back on her hands to study him like he’s a bizarre alien specimen that might grow a second head. Which he is.
“About Monty Python? No, I’ve never met anyone on Earth named after a snake. Well, anyone real, in the strictest sense-once when I got trapped in JK Rowling’s notebooks-”
Amy rolls her eyes and cuts him off. “No, Doctor. About the quest objects. The ones that disappeared throughout human history and mysteriously ended up in your pockets.”
“Where else would I keep them? I’m sure I’ll give them back someday,” the Doctor answers guilelessly.
She stares at him for a long moment, then shakes her head in fond resignation. “You really are a madman in a box, do you know?” She reaches for the Grail, the Cross, and the Fleece. “But until you return these, I think they need to live somewhere safer than your pockets, don’t you?”
Stretching, she places them safely on the console and turns back to find the Doctor staring at her oddly and fiddling with what looks like his old, Raggedy-Doctor screwdriver.
“What?” she asks.
“I-oh, it’s nothing.” He starts to drop the broken sonic in the bin pile and hesitates. “Why do you treat them like that? What do they matter to you?”
“I liked The Da Vinci Code,” Amy quips, pulling another handful of pocket stuffing into her lap. “Besides, didn’t the Time Lords have any great cultural relics?”
“Naturally. Time Lords were a big, superior race-” the Doctor gestures extravagantly “-and they-we-had lots of big, superior artifacts, most of which were reminders of egomaniacs and wars. Souvenirs,” he says with a scowl, “of the worst bits of history. Just like those. I don’t do souvenirs. They're for archaeologists. Take the Shroud of Turin, for instance. It's interesting enough, but-”
And he’s off again, blazing through the oddities of human history and the incomprehensible notion of venerating things as if they mattered more than the people and events they represented. Not to mention the potential that huons could create an image on linen.
Amy tunes him out, sorting through the things in her lap. Spool of thread? Nope. Glowy green crystal thing? That’s probably important. Used takeaway plastic fork? God, he is such an alien. Bent photograph-bin probably, but-
She turns the photo over to find an image, dirty and worn, of three people with the TARDIS in the background. The woman with the gleeful grin seems distantly familiar, but Amy can’t place her. The two men are strangers. One is mischievous…and gorgeous. That smile could sell anything. The second grins to rival the first, a shocking glow of energy across his awkward face, but something dark and grief-stricken lurks behind the smile and leather coat. And for some reason she can’t quite understand, it breaks her heart.
“Thought you didn’t keep souvenirs, Doctor,” she says. Staring into the grainy image of haunted, icy eyes, it doesn’t come out in quite the teasing tone she intended.
“What?” he asks absently, holding what looks like a lipstick between his boot soles while poking its insides with two pairs of impractically long tweezers.
Amy extends the photo and pokes him with her toe, jarring the object he’s working on. He huffs irritably at her and glances up. “Amy-”
As soon as he catches sight of the photograph, his eyes go wide in shock and he drops his project unceremoniously on the floor. “What-no, give me that, that’s-”
Amy jerks the photo back and guards it close to her chest. “Uh-uh,” she insists, deflecting his arm. “Who are they? I’ve seen the girl before, I know I have, so there’s no reason not to tell me, right? Are they friends of yours? You took them to Cardiff? And most importantly, where did this man get his ears?”
Thwarted, the Doctor sits back. “Everyone keeps one or two souvenirs,” he says quietly, gaze not leaving hers, “no matter what. Even if the memory is far more important than the object. May I have that, please?”
It’s said in a tone she so rarely hears from him, close to the last words he said to her that terrible day at Lake Silencio, and it makes her want to shove the picture back at him and change the subject. But she hesitates. Her Raggedy Doctor is still such a mystery, and as she uncurls the hand holding the photo from her chest, she takes a second look. The girl looks so young and happy it’s almost blinding, and her light bleeds over across the two men. The younger of them carries himself as though the ease he feels with his companions is an unsought but treasured gift, one he can’t quite believe but embraces wholeheartedly. And the older man, the awkward, dark, scarred man who nonetheless reflects the joy radiating off the woman on his arm-
Amy realizes abruptly that she’s only seen eyes that ancient, happy and so so sad at the same time, on one person before. She bites her tongue and hands the picture back. The Doctor takes it and starts to fold it, to, she supposes, stash it in his trouser pocket until it can go back in his jacket. He stops himself and unfurls the worn paper, running a finger down the crease that separates the older man-him, Amy’s gut insists-from the other two. He stares quietly for a moment, only a moment, and nods slightly, a gesture that feels like farewell.
“Thank you,” he murmurs softly, and Amy is quite sure he’s not really speaking to her. Then the moment is over, and he sets the photo carefully to one side.
“Should take better care of that. 20th-century paper is so fragile.” The Doctor picks up his tools again. “Right,” he begins brightly, as if nothing odd has happened, “I’ll just patch this up so we can sort it, shall I?”
Amy shakes her head at the abrupt change. This didn’t happen, move along is as crystal clear as the glass floor. She takes a deep breath and plays along, arch and Scottish: “What, so I’m cleaning up the rest of this while you…tinker? You owe me dinner, Doctor. A really nice one too. No delicacies that turn out to be alive. And shopping. With no complaints.”
The Doctor uh-huhs absently, head bent over his project (which, if past experience is any clue, will probably turn out to be an incredibly complicated laser breadknife that still shouldn’t be in his pockets). Amy vows to hold him to it, and adds that to her little store of victories, next to hand-torches in caves and the unforgettable image of his eyes laughing in a stranger’s war-torn face.
*
She does get her dinner and shopping on the Doctor’s endless credit eventually, after listening to a detailed explanation of the laser breadknife, which turns out to be a sonic lipstick. After much persuading, some quite forceful and more mother-in-law-like than she cares to think about, he agrees to leave some of the useless objects on the TARDIS. He even offers her the Grail, Cross, and Fleece to decorate her room until such time as he returns them, as if they are simply curios for decorating spare shelves. She suspects that by the end of their next adventure, he will have forgotten the detritus and she’ll stumble over it one day in the library or galley or one of the storage rooms, covered with dust. More than once, she does.
Amy never sees the photograph again. But she notices, after a time, that there is one inner pocket of the Doctor’s jacket, nicely sized for a small piece of paper, that he never seems to use.
--
Notes:
This story was inspired partly (as was a brief reference in my story Message in a Bottle) by a passage from Bored of the Rings, in which the Strider character contributes some unexpected things to the Council of Elrond. It got somewhat more serious after that, but I give you the source nonetheless:
"Well," said Stomper, "I guess it’s time we all laid our cards on the table," and with that he noisily emptied the contents of a faded duffel into a heap in front of him. When he was finished, there was a large pile of odd objects, including a broken sword, a golden arm, a snowflake paperweight, the Holy Grail, the Golden Fleece, the Robe, a piece of the True Cross, and a glass slipper.
"Arrowroot, son of Arrowshirt, heir of Barbisol and King of Minas Troney, at your service," he said, rather loudly.
Bored of the Rings belongs to the Harvard Lampoon, and Doctor Who belongs to the BBC. I don't own the Fleece, Cross, or Grail either.