Fic: still better with two (Doctor Who, Ace/Amy, Eleven)
Title: Still better with two
Fandom/characters: Doctor Who, Ace/Amy, Eleven
Rating: teen and up, probably, though the sex is mostly up to your imagination.
Word count: approx. 2900 words
A/N: for glinda_penguin for the dw_femslash ficathon, who requested Ace/Amy as a potential pairing, which fell nicely into my ongoing plot to have Ace shag every female companion ever. Takes place for Amy and Eleven somewhere between “Vincent and the Doctor” and “The Pandorica Opens.”
Summary: “I prefer to think of us as space pirates, actually.”
“Doctor!” Amy called, walking down yet another Las Vegas street next to the Strip. “Doctor, where are you? You really shouldn’t complain about everyone else wandering off when you’re the one who disappears half the time,” she added in a mutter, and then she ran into somebody, toppling them both to the ground. “Ooof. Oh my god, I’m so sorry! I should have been paying more attention where I was going!”
“Oh, that’s alright,” the other woman said, brushing down both her own leather and Amy’s denim jackets as she gave Amy a hand up. “You’re looking for the Doctor?”
Amy blinked. “You know him?” she asked and then answered her own question, rolling her eyes. “Of course you do, everyone bloody knows the Doctor. You’re not an evil megalomaniac or something, are you?” she added, drawing back a little and darting a look around for something handy that could be used as a weapon, just in case.
The other woman laughed. “Not last I checked, sort of in the other line, in fact. Do you want a lift? I have a bike.”
“Yeah?” Amy considered her. She was older than Amy by a few years, long brown hair scraped back into a ponytail, probably a Londoner, and fit. “That would be brilliant, actually.” She held out her hand. “Amy.”
“Ace,” said the other woman, with a grin.
*
“When you said you had a bike,” Amy said in exasperation a couple hours later as she and Ace ran away from some extremely angry dinosaurs in a muggy swamp, “you failed to mention it traveled through time and space.”
“Did I?” Ace said. “Sorry. Save your breath for the running, yeah?”
*
“So is this how you spend all your days?” Amy said a few hours even later, lurking with Ace in the hold of a spectacularly grimy spaceship and trying not to notice the swamp smell that clung to them both. “Hiding out and running away from things?”
“Not all my days,” Ace said. “Sometimes I get shot at. Or locked up in prison.”
“You really do know the Doctor, don’t you,” Amy muttered under her breath, and then Ace put a hand over her mouth, shushing her as a couple crew members walked past their hiding spot. Amy thought about biting Ace’s hand, just to see how the other woman would react, and then decided that since they weren’t actually supposed to be on this spaceship and didn’t want to get caught, that would probably not be in her best interest.
Ace took her hand away a few seconds later, but Amy could still taste the salt from her skin.
*
“Don’t say I never take you nice places,” Ace said what could be considered the next day, subjectively speaking if nothing else. Amy wandered out of the bathroom and into their living room to admire herself in the gilt-edged full-length mirror in their mahogany-paneled suite on the luxury space liner. She wore an evening gown of red silk under an overlay of black lace, full-length and flowing, accompanied by a pair of absolutely ravishing red heels. She reminded herself to hang onto the shoes for her wedding-and then wondered why on earth she thought she was going to get married. Even her nail varnish matched her dress; they’d made it up for her specially at the beauty shop onboard. “See? It’s not all dinosaurs and lurking, is it?”
“Let me get this straight,” Amy said, still checking herself out in the mirror, turning first one way and then the other and admiring the swish of the skirt. She’d always had a fondness for dress-up. “We are on this luxury space liner in order to steal some priceless doodad from somebody who already stole it from somebody else.”
“The priceless doodad in question is a sacred relic that actually controls the weather for an entire planet, which is currently in meteorological chaos, but yeah, you’ve got the general idea.” Ace stepped into view of the mirror as well, wearing black tie with a cummerbund the same shade of red as Amy’s dress. “Tonight we case the joint and flirt with the blokes in question, try to find out what’s going on, and where they’ve stored the priceless doodad.”
“And what was on that cargo ship earlier?” Amy said.
“Thousands of kilos of grain that was supposed to go to a start-up colony but had been diverted so that somebody could make a profit. We made sure the grain went to its original destination.”
“So that’s what you do with your days,” Amy replied.
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Why are you wearing a tuxedo?”
“I like tuxes,” Ace said, shooting her cuffs. Her cufflinks were gold, with tiny rubies. “Always have, way nicer than dresses.” She put her hands on her lapels, pulled a pose. “What, don’t I look good?”
“You look great,” Amy said frankly.
Ace grinned slowly and put her arm around Amy’s waist. It fit quite nicely. “You too.”
Amy considered their reflections in the mirror. “If we’re always stealing from other people…and giving it to people who could conceivably deserve it more…are we space Robin Hoods or something?”
“I prefer to think of us as space pirates, actually.”
Amy grinned. “Brilliant.”
Ace grinned back. “No, no,” she corrected, “Wicked.”
*
“Ace!” Amy hollered. “Have you bloody well set those explosives yet or not?!”
“Would you bloody well relax?” she heard the other woman call back faintly. “A person can barely hear herself think the way you’re carrying on!”
“Bad guys coming this way,” Amy pointed out. “Bad guys with guns who would rather like to see us dead so they can take back what we stole. I think I have every right to be quite a bit worried, thank you very much.”
“It’s not like it was rightfully theirs, anyway,” Ace pointed out. She was at the other end of a long corridor underground on yet another alien world, a corridor mostly held up by thick wooden beams. They were sheltering in a disused tinclavic mine on a miserable backwater, all red dust and rock. Amy had a feeling she’d still be washing the dust off weeks from now in places she didn’t care to think about.
“I’m not sure they care about that,” Amy hissed as Ace jogged back down the corridor toward her. They’d both started out in olive drab jumpsuits-Amy’s nail varnish once again matching-but now they were a uniform red-brown like the earth around them. Ace had said something about blending in better that way; Amy’s reply had involved a fair amount of inventive cursing. “They’re the ones with the guns, remember? I think they feel entitled. Or mad with power.”
Ace slung her arm around Amy’s shoulders. “You worry too much,” she said.
“Who says I’m worried?” Amy answered, opening her eyes wide. “I just like all my inside bits inside me and all my outside bits still attached to the rest of me. That will happen, right, even after your little bomb goes off?”
“I’ve got the timing mechanism completely worked out now,” Ace assured her. “Well, for the most part.”
“What?!”
Ace laughed and gave her a kiss. Amy blinked. “Better start running,” Ace suggested, and they did.
*
“Oh, marvelous,” Amy said sourly. “Tied up in a confined space, my favorite place to be.”
“Could be worse,” Ace said laconically from behind, or under, her; it was all a bit confusing in the dark, damp cell. “You could be tied up with the Doctor instead of with me.”
“He isn’t nearly as squishy,” Amy agreed.
“Oi!”
“I mean that in the nicest way possible!” Amy said. “You’re very soft to lie on.” She felt her skin heat up. “Um. Er. That is…” She squawked, then. “How the hell is your hand over there?!”
Ace grinned up-over-whatever-at her (Amy could see her teeth in the dark) and then started rubbing her suddenly freed hands all over and around Amy, sending Amy’s skin tingling. “I spent some time with Houdini once,” she said, while Amy squirmed ineffectually to free her own limbs, and then Ace snogged her. Thoroughly.
“Mmmm.” Amy almost bit Ace’s tongue in surprise, and then she thought, Hell with it, she’d sort of wanted to snog Ace ever since she met the woman, and went with the flow. When they finally broke it off, they were both rather breathless, and Amy was sure her skin was flushed as red as her hair. “Well,” she said after recovering her breath, “the Doctor also wouldn’t have done that. No matter how often I’ve tried. So there’s another plus.”
Ace slapped her on the bum. Amy squawked again in protest. “The least you can do is untie me so I can return the favor!”
“I dunno,” Ace said, “this is sort of fun.”
Amy glared, though she wasn’t sure how much of it Ace could see. “I could scream,” she pointed out. “Really, really loudly.”
“Actually,” and there were Ace’s hands all over her again, and Amy was sure it was getting hotter in their damp cell, but this time Ace was just untying her finally, “that’s not a bad idea. It could distract the guards.”
Amy’s glare melted into a grin. “Is this a cliché? I think this is a cliché. I’m sure I’ve seen this in every action film ever made, only it’s always been boy and girl.”
“Girl and girl can be loads more fun sometimes,” Ace said, and there were her hands in the dark again, and a flash of her white teeth, and Amy gasped. “Trust me.”
*
Amy wrapped her arms around Ace’s waist tightly, putting her chin on Ace’s shoulder. “All set?” Ace asked from under her helmet, without turning to look back.
“Set,” Amy confirmed, and Ace kicked the bike into action. Amy initially had worried about clinging so tightly, but Ace hadn’t complained and Amy liked to be close. Traveling on the bike was very different from traveling in the TARDIS; while Amy might get thrown around quite a lot on the TARDIS, at least there were walls and a floor and a ceiling to catch her, no matter how painfully.
Nonetheless, she had to admit she loved traveling on the bike. Free falling in a controlled way, it was like the best and worst feeling of being on the best roller coaster ever. Ace obviously also loved traveling this way; she always let out a whoop as she plunged them into a new world and time.
“What next?” Amy yelled into Ace’s ear over the roar of a non-wind.
“Some grand larceny, I think,” Ace yelled back. “How does that sound?”
“Wicked,” Amy shouted with a whoop of her own.
*
Ace was pretty fearless in bed too. It probably helped when you’d already had sex in every conceivable environment that could sustain human life, and-creatively-a few that couldn’t. Amy really had to admire Ace’s sense of adventure. And her flexibility, both physically and metaphorically.
And she was totally going to do that thing in zero-g again, just as soon as she got another chance.
*
Ace stomped into the crowded party and shot her blaster up into the ceiling. She made sure to angle it so the bits of plaster dust would not fall onto her (Amy had given her a lecture last time that happened; she said it made them look unprofessional). “Oi! This is a stick-up!”
Amy slipped in behind, carrying a large cloth bag to hold any items they might grab-they were mostly focused on a very particular timepiece that could in fact freeze time, but as Ace said, you never knew what else you might come across.
“Now if everyone just plays nice and cooperates, this will all be over quickly and painlessly!” Ace was wearing her mirror shades. Amy had lectured her about that too-who wears sunglasses inside?-but Ace refused to listen to common sense. “If you would all please just let my associate frisk you!”
Amy rolled her eyes at Ace, but Ace was too busy commanding everybody else’s attention to notice. Amy got back to her job, scanning the guests and wait staff as efficiently as she could. “Nobody move! Oi!” Ace swung around on one of the Cheem guests attempting to slip unnoticed out of the ballroom. “I said, stay put!”
“Bingo,” Amy said softly to herself and looked up at the Cat Person standing in front of her. “If you wouldn’t mind handing over what never should have been made in the first place? Thanks,” she added with a sunny smile when the Cat Person reluctantly handed her the enhanced watch. “Oi!” she added, turning back to Ace. “Time to go?”
“Time to go,” Ace confirmed and tipped a nod to the room at large with that wide, wide grin of hers. “Thanks, everyone! And we do apologize for the inconvenience.”
They ran like hell, just as security finally arrived.
*
“I’m getting quite good at the cells, aren’t I?” Amy said as they were locked into their latest, all gleaming silver and thoroughly pristine. Two narrow bunks, a semi-private loo in the corner, all the comforts of home. Then again, not even the bike had a loo. “I’ll be an expert soon enough like you.”
“It’s good to have goals,” Ace said, dropping her rucksack and sprawling on one of the beds. Amy sat next to her, and Ace began rubbing her back.
“Any thoughts on how to escape this one?” Amy asked, settling back into Ace’s touch.
“Lots of thoughts,” Ace said, “none of them useful yet. I’m sure we’ll come up with something.”
Two hours later, the cell door slid open, and they looked at each other suspiciously. They stood up, not holding hands-Ace had taught Amy to give her space, just in case-and then saw who was leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, giving them both a patient, if long-suffering, look.
“Ace,” said the Doctor, “would you mind terribly returning my companion to me?”
Ace studied the Doctor, taking in his new appearance. Finally she glanced at Amy before returning her gaze to the Time Lord. “Dunno,” she said, “depends on what your companion wants to do, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, damn,” Amy said, looking between them, “you mean you’re going to make me choose, are you?”
The Doctor straightened up. “Entirely up to you, Pond. Bike or the TARDIS?”
She looked at Ace appealingly. “You couldn’t travel with the Doctor again, could you?”
Ace started laughing. “Not bloody likely,” she said at last, when she got her breath back. She looked over at the Doctor in amusement. “I can’t imagine you’d enjoy it very much, would you?”
“I quite liked traveling with you,” the Doctor protested, “even when you did continually blow up my lab trying to perfect your Nitro-9.”
Ace shook her head. “He’s all yours, Amy,” she said, leaning over to kiss Amy on the corner of her mouth. “We had our time already.”
The Doctor looked between them, then turned, inviting them out of the cell. “You’re both free to go,” he said. “I, er, made arrangements.”
Amy narrowed her eyes as she walked past him out of the cell, Ace behind her. “You’ve been here before, haven’t you,” she said.
“There may have been an incident with a former nasty little government and an overnight bloodless revolution,” the Doctor confessed, ambling down the corridor with them. “What can I say? I think they just like me,” he went on in a confidential whisper as they left the prison building, the TARDIS standing not far away. Parked next to it was Ace’s bike. “I took the liberty of bringing your bike over,” the Doctor added unnecessarily.
Ace glared at him. “You didn’t mess with it, did you?”
“Absolutely not.” He held up a hand. “On my honor.”
“Right.” She gave him another suspicious look before checking the bike over thoroughly. Then she pulled a small messenger bag off the back of it and handed it over to Amy. “Wouldn’t want you to forget your fancy shoes,” she said, with a grin.
“Are you sure?” Amy said, framing Ace’s face with her hands and searching the older woman’s eyes. “It’s been-well, it’s been wicked.”
Ace gave her a long, slow, thorough kiss, like the first time they’d kissed, tied up together in another cell, not so long ago. “Yeah,” she said at last, stepping back from Amy and breaking their physical contact, “it has.” She looked over Amy’s shoulder at the Doctor, who had carefully kept his gaze fixed on the distant horizon for the past couple minutes. “You,” she said, “don’t screw things up, right?”
“When have you ever known me to do that?” The Doctor held up his hands. “Don’t answer that.”
Ace swung one leg over the bike, settling herself onto it with a grace of long familiarity. “See you later,” she said. “Both of you.”
With a squeal of tire on pavement, and a whoop, she was gone.
Amy turned to look at the Doctor. He had been staring at her; now he studiously turned his gaze away, rummaging in a pocket for the TARDIS key. “So, Ace,” she said, leaning against the police box shell and watching the Doctor’s search. “Did you ever snog her?”
The Doctor opened the main doors and looked down his nose at her. “In,” he said, with a gesture.
“You’re no fun,” Amy sighed and went back into the TARDIS.
Fandom/characters: Doctor Who, Ace/Amy, Eleven
Rating: teen and up, probably, though the sex is mostly up to your imagination.
Word count: approx. 2900 words
A/N: for glinda_penguin for the dw_femslash ficathon, who requested Ace/Amy as a potential pairing, which fell nicely into my ongoing plot to have Ace shag every female companion ever. Takes place for Amy and Eleven somewhere between “Vincent and the Doctor” and “The Pandorica Opens.”
Summary: “I prefer to think of us as space pirates, actually.”
“Doctor!” Amy called, walking down yet another Las Vegas street next to the Strip. “Doctor, where are you? You really shouldn’t complain about everyone else wandering off when you’re the one who disappears half the time,” she added in a mutter, and then she ran into somebody, toppling them both to the ground. “Ooof. Oh my god, I’m so sorry! I should have been paying more attention where I was going!”
“Oh, that’s alright,” the other woman said, brushing down both her own leather and Amy’s denim jackets as she gave Amy a hand up. “You’re looking for the Doctor?”
Amy blinked. “You know him?” she asked and then answered her own question, rolling her eyes. “Of course you do, everyone bloody knows the Doctor. You’re not an evil megalomaniac or something, are you?” she added, drawing back a little and darting a look around for something handy that could be used as a weapon, just in case.
The other woman laughed. “Not last I checked, sort of in the other line, in fact. Do you want a lift? I have a bike.”
“Yeah?” Amy considered her. She was older than Amy by a few years, long brown hair scraped back into a ponytail, probably a Londoner, and fit. “That would be brilliant, actually.” She held out her hand. “Amy.”
“Ace,” said the other woman, with a grin.
*
“When you said you had a bike,” Amy said in exasperation a couple hours later as she and Ace ran away from some extremely angry dinosaurs in a muggy swamp, “you failed to mention it traveled through time and space.”
“Did I?” Ace said. “Sorry. Save your breath for the running, yeah?”
*
“So is this how you spend all your days?” Amy said a few hours even later, lurking with Ace in the hold of a spectacularly grimy spaceship and trying not to notice the swamp smell that clung to them both. “Hiding out and running away from things?”
“Not all my days,” Ace said. “Sometimes I get shot at. Or locked up in prison.”
“You really do know the Doctor, don’t you,” Amy muttered under her breath, and then Ace put a hand over her mouth, shushing her as a couple crew members walked past their hiding spot. Amy thought about biting Ace’s hand, just to see how the other woman would react, and then decided that since they weren’t actually supposed to be on this spaceship and didn’t want to get caught, that would probably not be in her best interest.
Ace took her hand away a few seconds later, but Amy could still taste the salt from her skin.
*
“Don’t say I never take you nice places,” Ace said what could be considered the next day, subjectively speaking if nothing else. Amy wandered out of the bathroom and into their living room to admire herself in the gilt-edged full-length mirror in their mahogany-paneled suite on the luxury space liner. She wore an evening gown of red silk under an overlay of black lace, full-length and flowing, accompanied by a pair of absolutely ravishing red heels. She reminded herself to hang onto the shoes for her wedding-and then wondered why on earth she thought she was going to get married. Even her nail varnish matched her dress; they’d made it up for her specially at the beauty shop onboard. “See? It’s not all dinosaurs and lurking, is it?”
“Let me get this straight,” Amy said, still checking herself out in the mirror, turning first one way and then the other and admiring the swish of the skirt. She’d always had a fondness for dress-up. “We are on this luxury space liner in order to steal some priceless doodad from somebody who already stole it from somebody else.”
“The priceless doodad in question is a sacred relic that actually controls the weather for an entire planet, which is currently in meteorological chaos, but yeah, you’ve got the general idea.” Ace stepped into view of the mirror as well, wearing black tie with a cummerbund the same shade of red as Amy’s dress. “Tonight we case the joint and flirt with the blokes in question, try to find out what’s going on, and where they’ve stored the priceless doodad.”
“And what was on that cargo ship earlier?” Amy said.
“Thousands of kilos of grain that was supposed to go to a start-up colony but had been diverted so that somebody could make a profit. We made sure the grain went to its original destination.”
“So that’s what you do with your days,” Amy replied.
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“Why are you wearing a tuxedo?”
“I like tuxes,” Ace said, shooting her cuffs. Her cufflinks were gold, with tiny rubies. “Always have, way nicer than dresses.” She put her hands on her lapels, pulled a pose. “What, don’t I look good?”
“You look great,” Amy said frankly.
Ace grinned slowly and put her arm around Amy’s waist. It fit quite nicely. “You too.”
Amy considered their reflections in the mirror. “If we’re always stealing from other people…and giving it to people who could conceivably deserve it more…are we space Robin Hoods or something?”
“I prefer to think of us as space pirates, actually.”
Amy grinned. “Brilliant.”
Ace grinned back. “No, no,” she corrected, “Wicked.”
*
“Ace!” Amy hollered. “Have you bloody well set those explosives yet or not?!”
“Would you bloody well relax?” she heard the other woman call back faintly. “A person can barely hear herself think the way you’re carrying on!”
“Bad guys coming this way,” Amy pointed out. “Bad guys with guns who would rather like to see us dead so they can take back what we stole. I think I have every right to be quite a bit worried, thank you very much.”
“It’s not like it was rightfully theirs, anyway,” Ace pointed out. She was at the other end of a long corridor underground on yet another alien world, a corridor mostly held up by thick wooden beams. They were sheltering in a disused tinclavic mine on a miserable backwater, all red dust and rock. Amy had a feeling she’d still be washing the dust off weeks from now in places she didn’t care to think about.
“I’m not sure they care about that,” Amy hissed as Ace jogged back down the corridor toward her. They’d both started out in olive drab jumpsuits-Amy’s nail varnish once again matching-but now they were a uniform red-brown like the earth around them. Ace had said something about blending in better that way; Amy’s reply had involved a fair amount of inventive cursing. “They’re the ones with the guns, remember? I think they feel entitled. Or mad with power.”
Ace slung her arm around Amy’s shoulders. “You worry too much,” she said.
“Who says I’m worried?” Amy answered, opening her eyes wide. “I just like all my inside bits inside me and all my outside bits still attached to the rest of me. That will happen, right, even after your little bomb goes off?”
“I’ve got the timing mechanism completely worked out now,” Ace assured her. “Well, for the most part.”
“What?!”
Ace laughed and gave her a kiss. Amy blinked. “Better start running,” Ace suggested, and they did.
*
“Oh, marvelous,” Amy said sourly. “Tied up in a confined space, my favorite place to be.”
“Could be worse,” Ace said laconically from behind, or under, her; it was all a bit confusing in the dark, damp cell. “You could be tied up with the Doctor instead of with me.”
“He isn’t nearly as squishy,” Amy agreed.
“Oi!”
“I mean that in the nicest way possible!” Amy said. “You’re very soft to lie on.” She felt her skin heat up. “Um. Er. That is…” She squawked, then. “How the hell is your hand over there?!”
Ace grinned up-over-whatever-at her (Amy could see her teeth in the dark) and then started rubbing her suddenly freed hands all over and around Amy, sending Amy’s skin tingling. “I spent some time with Houdini once,” she said, while Amy squirmed ineffectually to free her own limbs, and then Ace snogged her. Thoroughly.
“Mmmm.” Amy almost bit Ace’s tongue in surprise, and then she thought, Hell with it, she’d sort of wanted to snog Ace ever since she met the woman, and went with the flow. When they finally broke it off, they were both rather breathless, and Amy was sure her skin was flushed as red as her hair. “Well,” she said after recovering her breath, “the Doctor also wouldn’t have done that. No matter how often I’ve tried. So there’s another plus.”
Ace slapped her on the bum. Amy squawked again in protest. “The least you can do is untie me so I can return the favor!”
“I dunno,” Ace said, “this is sort of fun.”
Amy glared, though she wasn’t sure how much of it Ace could see. “I could scream,” she pointed out. “Really, really loudly.”
“Actually,” and there were Ace’s hands all over her again, and Amy was sure it was getting hotter in their damp cell, but this time Ace was just untying her finally, “that’s not a bad idea. It could distract the guards.”
Amy’s glare melted into a grin. “Is this a cliché? I think this is a cliché. I’m sure I’ve seen this in every action film ever made, only it’s always been boy and girl.”
“Girl and girl can be loads more fun sometimes,” Ace said, and there were her hands in the dark again, and a flash of her white teeth, and Amy gasped. “Trust me.”
*
Amy wrapped her arms around Ace’s waist tightly, putting her chin on Ace’s shoulder. “All set?” Ace asked from under her helmet, without turning to look back.
“Set,” Amy confirmed, and Ace kicked the bike into action. Amy initially had worried about clinging so tightly, but Ace hadn’t complained and Amy liked to be close. Traveling on the bike was very different from traveling in the TARDIS; while Amy might get thrown around quite a lot on the TARDIS, at least there were walls and a floor and a ceiling to catch her, no matter how painfully.
Nonetheless, she had to admit she loved traveling on the bike. Free falling in a controlled way, it was like the best and worst feeling of being on the best roller coaster ever. Ace obviously also loved traveling this way; she always let out a whoop as she plunged them into a new world and time.
“What next?” Amy yelled into Ace’s ear over the roar of a non-wind.
“Some grand larceny, I think,” Ace yelled back. “How does that sound?”
“Wicked,” Amy shouted with a whoop of her own.
*
Ace was pretty fearless in bed too. It probably helped when you’d already had sex in every conceivable environment that could sustain human life, and-creatively-a few that couldn’t. Amy really had to admire Ace’s sense of adventure. And her flexibility, both physically and metaphorically.
And she was totally going to do that thing in zero-g again, just as soon as she got another chance.
*
Ace stomped into the crowded party and shot her blaster up into the ceiling. She made sure to angle it so the bits of plaster dust would not fall onto her (Amy had given her a lecture last time that happened; she said it made them look unprofessional). “Oi! This is a stick-up!”
Amy slipped in behind, carrying a large cloth bag to hold any items they might grab-they were mostly focused on a very particular timepiece that could in fact freeze time, but as Ace said, you never knew what else you might come across.
“Now if everyone just plays nice and cooperates, this will all be over quickly and painlessly!” Ace was wearing her mirror shades. Amy had lectured her about that too-who wears sunglasses inside?-but Ace refused to listen to common sense. “If you would all please just let my associate frisk you!”
Amy rolled her eyes at Ace, but Ace was too busy commanding everybody else’s attention to notice. Amy got back to her job, scanning the guests and wait staff as efficiently as she could. “Nobody move! Oi!” Ace swung around on one of the Cheem guests attempting to slip unnoticed out of the ballroom. “I said, stay put!”
“Bingo,” Amy said softly to herself and looked up at the Cat Person standing in front of her. “If you wouldn’t mind handing over what never should have been made in the first place? Thanks,” she added with a sunny smile when the Cat Person reluctantly handed her the enhanced watch. “Oi!” she added, turning back to Ace. “Time to go?”
“Time to go,” Ace confirmed and tipped a nod to the room at large with that wide, wide grin of hers. “Thanks, everyone! And we do apologize for the inconvenience.”
They ran like hell, just as security finally arrived.
*
“I’m getting quite good at the cells, aren’t I?” Amy said as they were locked into their latest, all gleaming silver and thoroughly pristine. Two narrow bunks, a semi-private loo in the corner, all the comforts of home. Then again, not even the bike had a loo. “I’ll be an expert soon enough like you.”
“It’s good to have goals,” Ace said, dropping her rucksack and sprawling on one of the beds. Amy sat next to her, and Ace began rubbing her back.
“Any thoughts on how to escape this one?” Amy asked, settling back into Ace’s touch.
“Lots of thoughts,” Ace said, “none of them useful yet. I’m sure we’ll come up with something.”
Two hours later, the cell door slid open, and they looked at each other suspiciously. They stood up, not holding hands-Ace had taught Amy to give her space, just in case-and then saw who was leaning in the doorway, arms crossed, giving them both a patient, if long-suffering, look.
“Ace,” said the Doctor, “would you mind terribly returning my companion to me?”
Ace studied the Doctor, taking in his new appearance. Finally she glanced at Amy before returning her gaze to the Time Lord. “Dunno,” she said, “depends on what your companion wants to do, doesn’t it?”
“Oh, damn,” Amy said, looking between them, “you mean you’re going to make me choose, are you?”
The Doctor straightened up. “Entirely up to you, Pond. Bike or the TARDIS?”
She looked at Ace appealingly. “You couldn’t travel with the Doctor again, could you?”
Ace started laughing. “Not bloody likely,” she said at last, when she got her breath back. She looked over at the Doctor in amusement. “I can’t imagine you’d enjoy it very much, would you?”
“I quite liked traveling with you,” the Doctor protested, “even when you did continually blow up my lab trying to perfect your Nitro-9.”
Ace shook her head. “He’s all yours, Amy,” she said, leaning over to kiss Amy on the corner of her mouth. “We had our time already.”
The Doctor looked between them, then turned, inviting them out of the cell. “You’re both free to go,” he said. “I, er, made arrangements.”
Amy narrowed her eyes as she walked past him out of the cell, Ace behind her. “You’ve been here before, haven’t you,” she said.
“There may have been an incident with a former nasty little government and an overnight bloodless revolution,” the Doctor confessed, ambling down the corridor with them. “What can I say? I think they just like me,” he went on in a confidential whisper as they left the prison building, the TARDIS standing not far away. Parked next to it was Ace’s bike. “I took the liberty of bringing your bike over,” the Doctor added unnecessarily.
Ace glared at him. “You didn’t mess with it, did you?”
“Absolutely not.” He held up a hand. “On my honor.”
“Right.” She gave him another suspicious look before checking the bike over thoroughly. Then she pulled a small messenger bag off the back of it and handed it over to Amy. “Wouldn’t want you to forget your fancy shoes,” she said, with a grin.
“Are you sure?” Amy said, framing Ace’s face with her hands and searching the older woman’s eyes. “It’s been-well, it’s been wicked.”
Ace gave her a long, slow, thorough kiss, like the first time they’d kissed, tied up together in another cell, not so long ago. “Yeah,” she said at last, stepping back from Amy and breaking their physical contact, “it has.” She looked over Amy’s shoulder at the Doctor, who had carefully kept his gaze fixed on the distant horizon for the past couple minutes. “You,” she said, “don’t screw things up, right?”
“When have you ever known me to do that?” The Doctor held up his hands. “Don’t answer that.”
Ace swung one leg over the bike, settling herself onto it with a grace of long familiarity. “See you later,” she said. “Both of you.”
With a squeal of tire on pavement, and a whoop, she was gone.
Amy turned to look at the Doctor. He had been staring at her; now he studiously turned his gaze away, rummaging in a pocket for the TARDIS key. “So, Ace,” she said, leaning against the police box shell and watching the Doctor’s search. “Did you ever snog her?”
The Doctor opened the main doors and looked down his nose at her. “In,” he said, with a gesture.
“You’re no fun,” Amy sighed and went back into the TARDIS.