Title: Teach me what to do with you

Author: Howlinchickhowl

Rating: K

Spoilers: Series 5 up to and including The Time of the Angels

Summary: A missing scene and some thoughts between Amy and the Doctor. Romantic if you tilt your head just so and squint your eyes in just the right way.

Disclaimer: I do not own Doctor Who or any of the characters involved in this fic.

"Explain. Who is that and how did she do that museum thing?" Questions. Always questions. He hates questions when he doesn't know the answers, and he especially hates questions about River because he's not supposed to know the answers and that frustrates him. He's the Doctor. He likes to know.

"It's a long story and I don't know most of it. Off we go" He doesn't have time to think about it now, he just wants to get out of here while he still can, before she drags him into something he doesn't want to be dragged into. He just wants to put as much distance as possible between him and Amy, and River. That's all.

"What are you doing?" GOD! She's so sneaky, Amy Pond. One minute she's over there and the next she's right up beside him, smirking and asking questions like she already knows the answer and he really wishes she'd just stand back over there and let him get them out of there.

"Leaving, she's got where she wants to go, let's go where we want to go." He's pulling levers and pushing buttons almost frantically, preparing them for take-off, but Amy obviously has other ideas, because she's still all up in his face, in his space, in his way.

"Are you basically running away?" Ha! As if he's going to respond to that teasing tone, she forgets sometimes, Amy Pond, that he's not human, and being not human as he is, calling him chicken is going to do nothing to deter him from, yes, running away.

"Yep"

"Why?"

"Because she's the future, my future" No time for this, buttons to press, time-machines to fly, what is this life if full of care? There is no time to stop and stare.

"Can you run away from that?" She asks, obviously confused. One of these days he's going to have to explain her everything about him and Time and the proper order of things and who's in charge of whom around here. For now he'll have to settle for the abridged version.

"I can run away from anything I like, Time is not the boss of me." They have to get out of there, before River comes back, before something happens, before -

"Hang on, is that a planet out there?" Before that.

"Yes of course it's a planet" And then she gets that grin on her face, and her eyes light up and he knows he's in dangerous territory here.

"You promised me a planet. Five minutes?"

Amelia Pond was tricky. A difficult nut to crack. She was a pocket of warm air on a cold November afternoon, that you can't quite fathom but are grateful for nonetheless.

The Doctor had had many companions over the years, in all shapes and sizes and colours and circulatory systems, and he'd come to love each one individually in different ways; wildly and deeply and overtly and quietly and sometimes even physically (soft touches to faces, kisses laid on foreheads, a stroke of a hand across the back of a neck, these things he counted as tokens of love). He loved Amy Pond, too, he knew he did. Had from almost the first moment he saw her really, couldn't help it. But he didn't yet quite know how he was going to love her, because he didn't quite understand her yet.

He's been travelling a long time, through time and space and history which is a different thing altogether, and when you think about it without history there's no time because everything is just a product of what's come before it, every moment only significant because of the moments surrounding it and without the notion of what's come before, what's to come would be no more and that is an interesting thought.

He's been travelling a long time, and he's always liked to surround himself with young people. Of course being the age he is everyone seems young in comparison, but young people, the really young ones who have yet to be tainted by disappointment or heartache, the ones who still allow their dreams and imaginations to take hold of them once in a while and lose control of themselves every so often, those are the ones that he likes to have around. Those are the ones that excite him.

And Amy Pond is possibly the youngest person he's ever met. Or she was when he met her. Or, no, she wasn't really, isn't really, but she seems like she is and it's very difficult to make sense of these kinds of things because Amy isn't really her age, never has been. And that's the problem. That's what's got him unable to completely figure her out.

When he met her she was a child. Only not really, because she had lost so much already. She had felt the pangs of grief and loneliness and had come to terms with being on her own. She knew things no child her age should know, that life was fleeting and fragile, that happiness was not guaranteed, that people leave you, willingly or not they always leave you and that whatever way we make in the world, we always make it alone. Amelia Pond as he had known her then was a tiny little adult who was not at all surprised or scared to find a strange man in a police box in her back garden in the middle of the night. Amelia Pond as she was then, was unable to be surprised. Until he made her a promise that she believed and then surprised her by not keeping it.

The Amy he knows now is more of a child than the child that he met when he first met her, back then, when they met. She is stubborn and excitable and so incredibly whiny when she's not getting her way, but she's effusive and magnificent and he finds that really, he can't deny her anything if she asks him for it directly. So when she looks at him after River Song strolls out the door, all bright eyes and red hair and hopefulness, and asks him for just five minutes, just five minutes to spend on an actual planet, and she's practically bouncing up and down on her little feet and biting her lip and begging him, he simply cannot say no to her, he cannot do it. Just cannot do it.

She's impossible. She's a stiff-lidded jam jar filled with the only kind of jam you want to eat in a cupboard surrounded by hundreds of other types of jam in loose-lidded jars. She's intriguing. And until he has her completely figured out, and maybe for a little while after that, where she goes, he goes. Even if he has the worst feeling about where she's going.

"Doctor, what are the Weeping Angels?" Amy's confused. About pretty much everything at this point really. She doesn't know who River Song is (though she likes her quite a lot already, if only because she's got the Doctor all flustered, and Amy's never seen the Doctor flustered before. She likes learning new things about him, new aspects of him. This one is unexpected.) or where they are, or what the Weeping Angels are, but the second River mentioned them the Doctor got a very serious look on his face and has been quiet ever since.

She's seen him in many different situations, in many different moods and states of being, she knows by now that when he gets quiet, something really bad is just around the corner. Usually he'll talk his way through every situation, talk around it, into it, above and below it and straight through the middle of it until he gets to where he wants to be. It's how he processes, how he figures things out, and she loves that because she gets to see how his unimaginable mind works. (She gets to see it but she doesn't really know it because as much as he talks his way in and out of things, usually what he's talking about is fairly well gibberish and he goes too fast and gets her muddled.) So she's somewhere between liking and understanding at the moment, which is fine, but she thinks once she gets to understand him there's something more waiting for them there.

But when he's quiet, like this, that's when she worries, that's when she starts to think about home and Rory and the wedding dress hanging on her wardrobe and how it was really stupid of her to just run off and not even tell anyone what was happening because what if she dies out here in the middle of God-knows-when? There'll be a wedding tomorrow, back then tomorrow, and he'll be there and she won't and he'll think awful, awful things about her that aren't true at all. When he's quiet, she knows she should be worried, because if he even thought that there was a solution, he'd be dancing about all over the place trying to talk himself into finding it.

But he's not, he's just standing there looking at the crashed spaceship and moving his lips from side to side, like he's testing his mouth for something.

"Doctor?" She says again, and he whips around to face her, looking surprised that she's there. Yep. Definitely time to be worried now.

"What? Nothing. They're um- well they're nothing for you to worry about." He quirks a little smile at her and fiddles with his bowtie a little.

"Really?" She hates it when he does this, which granted isn't often, mostly when she asks him questions he tells her the truth, more truth than she really wants to know, actually. But sometimes, when he feels especially protective of her, he'll lie to her and she hates it. It's like he still thinks she's that seven year old child he met for the first time who was scared of the crack in her wall and who needed him to hold her hand as they went to inspect it.

He's nodding at her, hoping she'll buy it and just not question him for once. Well, she's sorry, but that's just not how she says cricket.

"Really?" She says again, hands on hips for emphasis. "Because you seem awfully worried."

His mouth forms into a tight little "o" and he fiddles with his bowtie a little bit more before finally saying,

"Yes. Right. Well. You're not me are you? If it were something for you to be worried about you would be worried, but as it is it's just something for me to be worried about and I am worried about it so there's no real reason for you to worry about it when it's not something for you to worry about. I'll do the worrying, don't you worry about that."

Sometimes he talks around and around in so many circles she gets sort of dizzy, and is unable, in those moments to form any sort of a response, so just stares at him kind of blankly. That's usually when he smiles again.

"What you should be worrying about," he says as he wraps an arm around her shoulder and starts walking her back across the beach, "is staying inside the Tardis. Yes, that's a very good idea. Occupy your mind solely with staying in the Tardis, best thing for you, honestly. Just, stay in there, and err, don't come out until I say so, and everything will turn out alright. Alright?" He asks her as they reach the big blue box, but she's sure he's not really asking. She's about to say no just to see what happens, when he cuts her off, "Excellent. Good job then, in you get." He says as he opens the door and practically pushes her inside.

"But Doctor!" She yells as he pushes the door shut after her, she really wishes he'd stop trying to protect her and just let her go with him. She would go with him, she thinks, to the ends of anywhere. And she doesn't really know why. She doesn't love him as such, she doesn't think anyway, but she's drawn to him, to be near him. She'd probably die for him, she thinks, if he asks her, which is ridiculous because she wouldn't even die to save her own life, but his she would willingly sacrifice everything for. She doesn't know what she feels for this wacky, wonderful, impenetrable creature, but she feels like he's just really important in her life right now, and she wants to be as near to him as possible, for as long as possible, before she has to go home and get married.

"Just stay there Amy, and don't do anything stupid. I'll see you in- err, well, I'll see you a little later." He shouts through the door, giving it a final bang as he walks away.

See you in a little while? She thinks. Screw that, he'll see her bloody now. Should have locked the Tardis Doctor, because concerned words and time-machine doors can do nothing to hold Amelia Pond against her will.