i.
It's a tragedy. They all agree on that with the sort of certainty that comes from no certainty at all.
There's a certain sort of logic to it, stress and superstition and god only knows what else, but the memory of a loving husband-and-father superimposed on what's left after it all is hard to reconcile.
Nobody's talking. Augustus because he can't, dead by his own hand, all tangled up in the makeshift noose of gaol sheets and flickering light.
Amelia because she won't. They say she's in shock, that it's her young mind's attempt to cope with what she saw.
There's no question that she saw. The paramedics called to the scene at the sound of screams all but dragged her out from under the dinner table, coiled around the leg of it as though it were a lifeline. They wiped the blood off of her face, wrapped her in a scratchy blanket, told over-used jokes to nothing so near a twitch of her lips.
ii.
There's someone in her head, or something, and she can see it when she closes her eyes.
It's not so much that she sees it, really; she can't say what it looks like, what it sounds like, but she can pick it out of a lineup all the same.
'It's your fault, you know,' says the creature. 'Your mum. If you weren't wrong,' and here it says the word like it has a specificity she knows it doesn't (she looked it up in the dictionary), 'he wouldn't have killed her.'
Amelia flinches as if struck, but her eyes are still shut so hard she sees nonsense patterns behind her eyes.
'You're broken,' the thing continues gleefully, 'you're missing what makes you a person, my darling ginger.' It grins wider and wider and wider and the only thing Amelia can see on her eyelids is teeth.
She opens her eyes but the thing is still there.
iii.
It's wearing a person.
It certainly isn't one itself.
Amelia jerks backwards like a puppet on a string, bare feet pulling loose the pinned sheets on the hospital mattress as she presses herself against the wall in terror.
The man it wears like an ill-fitting suit is young, but to Amelia's child-eyes seems ancient and timeless, with long brown hair that falls in his eyes as it tilts his head, looking at Amelia with undisguised curiosity.
'What are you?' breathes the thing, nearly worshipfully. 'Your timeline is... stunning,' it continues, tasting the word like a centuries-old wine, and licks his lips, teeth dyed crimson with blood.
"I'm Amelia Pond," she says defiantly.
iv.
The thing doesn't go away, not even when she closes her eyes and tells it to be gone when she opens them again, like some twisted game of hide-and-seek. It doesn't say anything, at least, and the body it wears slumps not-at-all-gracefully in the chair beside the bed while she sleeps in fits and starts.
The nurses, when they come in, don't seem to notice him; she points and points and they ask what is it? as their eyes shift away as soon as they look in his direction, and it smirks at her from under his fringe.
'Human perception is so fickle,' it says, and his eyes bleed black.
v.
The devil in her head calls itself the Doctor. 'I'll make you better, Amelia,' it promises with a shark-sharp grin.
"Is that what you did to him?" Amelia asks, and it looks lost for words, which it's never before. "Your body," she adds unnecessarily, with all the naïveté of a child.
'Matt,' says the Doctor slowly, 'is a special case. Yes, I made him better. But not like I will you.'
Amelia isn't sure what it means when it says better, then, and even less if that's what she wants to be, but she finds she can't quite bring herself to care.
vi.
Her mum's sister, who lives in a town called Leadworth a bit north of Gloucester, takes her in. It's not so far away that nobody knows what happened, but it's far enough that connections aren't immediately made, which is nice.
Aunt Sharon works a lot, and isn't really cut out for having people to take care of, as such, but she means well. Her house is old and empty and the floorboards creak, most of all at night. There's a crack in the wall of her new bedroom, and she has dreams that it will open up and the Doctor will steal her away in her sleep.
vii.
She makes a few friends at her new school, a girl named Melody and a boy named Rory. They're like her, she thinks. Melody seems the most like her, really, with slight, innocent Rory tagging along behind, but one day the girls gut a dog in Amelia's garden and he grins when he sees its innards.
The Doctor leans against the garden shed, his hair casting a shadow on its smile, and Amelia feels cold rush through her like a virus.
viii.
"He's gay," she tells the Doctor that night. "I mean, I think he is."
Matt's lips twitch with the Doctor's humour. 'I'm sure,' it says.
She hits him with her pillow. "Shut up," she says, and crow-black eyes blink slowly, the only part of the body's which is well and truly the Doctor's, in a satire of balefulness.
'Why should I?' it says. 'This is so much fun.'
ix.
Rory likes it best when he can see the flesh sliced open beneath his hands, so for his 11th birthday Amelia steals one of Aunt Sharon's shaving razors and methodically strips all the fur off a stray dog.
She closes it up inside a cardboard box with little holes for air on the side, and gives it to him in the afternoon, in the woods behind the school, and they kiss for the first time, dog's blood like a handfasting ribbon.
x.
The Doctor sees her off to her first day of secondary school with a "goodbye, Amelia".
She introduces herself as Amy.
xi.
Amy is twelve, Melody is Mels, and Rory has hit his growth spurt, standing a full centimetre above Amy and ridiculously proud of the fact. "I don't look menacing next to you, Amy," he says dejectedly.
"You don't look menacing at all, you twat!" laughs Amy, and hits him over the head with a pillow.
The Doctor frowns from its corner of the room and mutters something under his breath. Amy is happy, and doesn't pay it any heed.
xii.
The Doctor's begun to pester her again at all hours, and if she has to hear one more story about its best friend Koschei, who it'd worked with for centuries, had abandoned it for some stupid job in the sixth circle (and it wasn't even a very good job!), she's going to strangle something, and the only thing at hand is her old teddy-bear and that won't do at all.
'There was this one job we'd been assigned to, a politician. And, and I know what you're thinking, you're thinking politicians are easy, but they really aren't, because they're so self-absorbed, it's nearly impossible to get them to do anything that'll make themselves look bad, you know? But anyway, we had to get him to drop a nuclear bomb on this one city, and it took years. To pull it off, I had to possess this kid and kill this one really important couple so that there would be an international incident which would start a war which would, years in the future, make him nuke that city...'
"Doctor," says Amy calmly.
'Hmm?' says the Doctor, turning to look at her as it tries to straighten his hair somewhat.
"I don't care."
It looks so heartbroken, for a moment Amy nearly feels sorry.
xiii.
Nearly.
xiv.
Amy's twelve, Mels is a delinquent, and Rory is getting on the Doctor's nerves. 'You should kill him,' it says one day as it inspects the crack in her bedroom wall. It's a very interesting crack, it thinks, the sort of crack that could hold monsters and nightmares and all manner of hellish things. That crack could hold it.
"Kill who?" says Amy distractedly, flipping through her assigned reading. "I'll think about it."
'Rory.'
The Catcher in the Rye falls from Amy's hands and lays forgotten on the floor, pages bending.
"What?"
The Doctor smiles and his teeth glint.
xv.
The Doctor doesn't stay at school with her and that's the only time she's ever really alone; it says it can't stand the tedium. Usually it makes her uncomfortable not to have her demonic best friend at her side, to not see it rolling his eyes in a lesson on an historical event it had witnessed first-hand, to not see it, out of the corner of her eye, as it walks in licking blood off his lips. But that's a blessing, now; she can't have it overhearing this.
xvi.
There's a disused laboratory in the science hall which smells like death, like home. Amy tears open salt packets from the cafeteria and makes a careful line on the window-ledge and in the doorway.
"Amy?" says Mels, uncertainly. "What's with the salt?"
"The Doctor told me to kill Rory."
"What does salt have to do with that?" Rory asks, blanching and backing away. "Did he tell you to make a ritual of it, or something?"
"What? No! I'm not going to kill you!"
Mels and Rory share a visible sigh of relief.
"The salt will keep the Doctor out, if he realises we aren't in classes and comes looking for us. We need to talk about what we're going to do with him."
Mels frowned. "Amy, you know the Doctor... isn't real, right? He's just a voice in your head. Salt isn't gonna keep out a voice in your head."
xvii.
'How were classes?' asks the Doctor, and for a few terrifying moments Amy is sure it knows everything.
"Oh," she says, trying for casual and probably failing, "they were fine."
'You had a test in history, didn't you?'
"Oh, yeah." She'd forgotten. They'd skipped the second half of the day talking about how to kill what might have just been a voice in Amy's head.
'And?' says the Doctor. Matt, its host, doesn't have eyebrows, as such, so the Doctor doesn't raise his eyebrows, but it gives off the impression that if he had eyebrows, they'd be raised. 'I know you struggle in that class. How was it?'
"It was, it was fine, Doctor. You've been coaching me through history. I did fine! What's with the sudden obsession with my schoolwork?"
The Doctor drops his gaze. 'I was only wondering.'
"Well, then stop," she says. He looks dejected, which hurts, but she tells herself she needs to get over a bit of dejection, considering she's soon to gut him. Besides, it's playing well into their plans. She sighs. "Why don't we go out for a bit?" she suggests. "The weather's nice. Maybe we'll find a hiker out in the woods."
The Doctor smiles uncertainly, and for a moment she feels something like bad.
xviii.
The look in his eyes when it realises is awful. Amy giggles.
'What have you done?' it shrieks. 'What have you done?' It throws himself against a wall that Amy can't see, formed with chalk and blood.
"You're trapped," says Amy, wonder in her voice. "You're helpless. You can't do a thing from in there, can you?"
'Let me out!' the Doctor screams. 'Let me... Amy,' it pleads with its human voice. 'Amy, Amy, Amy, Amy, Amy. Please, just let me go. This isn't like you, Amy. You need me.'
"No, I don't."
'Amy!' and the Doctor is crying as she brings the knife up to his throat. 'Amelia. Please.' Its voice breaks and dark blood runs down his neck where the blade has cut into him. 'I love you.'
"My name isn't Amelia," says Amy, and presses the knife hard into him until the hilt comes up against skin.
The Doctor collapses, and it's anticlimatic, no flash of lightening or gust of wind, no demonic glow stuttering and fading into the dead flesh. He falls, and the gasp from Mels and Rory tells her they see him as he does.
xix.
"He..." says Mels, her voice shakey, "he's real? I mean, no offense, Amy, but I thought you were bonkers, I didn't think you actually had an actual demon in your head."
They're in Amy's sitting room and watching the news reporter from the Beeb talk about the body of the Uni student who'd gone missing six years ago, found in the woods a few miles outside of Leadworth by a few hikers. They've been forbidden from going outside except to go back and forth from school; the whole town's on lockdown from killers in their midst.
xx.
Amy wakes in the middle of the night to the Doctor standing at the foot of her bed.