Warnings: Reference to drinking
Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who (or the quotes from Parting of the Ways)
There had been no reason for the Doctor to think that anything was wrong in the few hours since they had run away from the wedding. Well, they had been nearly killed by an Egyptian goddess on an outer space version of the Orient Express, but that wasn't indicative of anything being wrong – that was just another Saturday for the three of them (or was it Sunday?).
Indeed, the Doctor had not noticed anything wrong – though his concentration had been slightly more focused on the panicking aliens threatening to shred his bow tie with their razor-sharp teeth unless he helped them than the overall wellbeing of his seemingly uninjured companions.
Even after they'd returned to the TARDIS, he hadn't noticed nothing out of the ordinary. Well, admittedly, a wedding dress with a gigantic hole ripped out of the front was not necessarily something that he saw every day, but considering what they had just been through, it wasn't weird or unusual in the slightest; he'd merely sent the Ponds off to bed with a cheerful wave while he absent-mindedly fiddled with the controls.
There was nothing wrong with the silence after either; the Doctor was used to working on his own in the control room while his companions slept – boring – and so the first really unusual thing that occurred was when Rory stumbled out of the depths of the TARDIS, still wearing his pyjamas and a loose dressing gown and looking considerably worse for wear.
At first, the Doctor didn't even notice that one of his companions had walked into the console room; thinking that they had both retired for the night, he hadn't been looking out for one of them to suddenly barge in as he was fixing the mustard dispenser so that it produced custard instead. In actuality, he was only made aware of the fact that he was no longer alone when he was directly addressed.
"Doctor?"
Admittedly, the Doctor was surprised that someone wanted to speak to him at such a (relatively) early hour of the morning, but merely assumed that Rory had decided that sleep really was as boring as the Doctor had always insisted that it was and so had come to help him out with the mustard-to-custard reconfiguration.
"Good night, Rory!" the Doctor grinned as he made the final adjustment to the custard dispenser. "Or is it good morning? At what time does 'extremely late' become 'extremely early'?" He turned to the staircase, ready to continue his rambling face-to-face with the Roman (for he was sure that the prospect of having custard virtually on-demand had left him more than slightly hyper and at this point it would take something monumental to shut him up), when he saw something monumental and shut up.
Rory looked awful.
The Roman was white as a sheet and trembling, a sheen of sweat brushed across his brow as he curled a trembling hand into his short locks while his other gripped onto the balustrade of the stairs, the knuckles turning white with the tightness of his grip. He looked down on the Doctor, somehow looking so much smaller than he actually was, his face contorted into a pained grimace. Once he had seen that image before him, the Doctor realised that the voice who had spoken his name just a few moments before had not truly sounded like Rory: it had been cracked and broken, as though he was suffering from a cold.
"Rory?" he asked slowly, taking a few tentative steps toward the Roman. If he did indeed have a cold, then the Doctor was slightly apprehensive about getting too close; he couldn't remember if the variants of the common cold found on Earth were transferable to Time Lords, and, if they were, how he would be affected if he became infected. Nevertheless, he thought that it was both in his interests and in the interests of the universe as a whole that he avoid that possibility. He stopped just at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at Rory and wondering why he had sought help from him rather than his wife. "What's wrong?"
Rory inhaled a shaky breath, his eyes glazing over and clearing again as they slipped in and out of focus. "I lived for two thousand years," he gasped, a shiver wracking his body so violently that he nearly tumbled to the ground there and then.
Now understanding that what was wrong with his companion was nothing to do with anything as mundane as a bought of the common cold, the Doctor hurried up the stairs, taking the last two in one stride and stopping by Rory's side, placing a steady hand on his shoulder to keep him from falling. He was shaking so violently that it was a surprise that he had managed to stay upright for this long, and the Doctor felt both of his hearts twinge as he saw just how much pain his companion was in.
"How much do you remember?" he murmured, keeping his voice low so as to not worsen the storm that was no doubt raging in Rory's mind.
Rory took a deep breath, as if trying to draw in enough energy to talk. "A-all of it," he breathed, his eyes filled with agony. "Every second; I can see everything. Why do they hurt?" he whispered desperately.
"That's a lot of memories to have in a single human mind," the Doctor explained softly, trying to forget about a certain redhead who had suffered from the same problem. Surely the solution wouldn't have to be the same? Surely he could find another way...
"My head," Rory whimpered, "is killing me."
The Doctor's hearts stopped for a single split-second as he was suddenly transported back so many years and two bodies, to the last time he had heard those words, coming from the mouth of the wonderful human trapped inside the big, Bad Wolf. He could almost hear the singing again: that ominous, hauntingly beautiful song that sung his ninth self from the universe as the Ood had done for his tenth self. Those songs meant death to him, but not this time: this time, he would save his companion, and survive himself as well.
"Pick one," he told Rory, and was met with the furrowing of his companion's brow, confusion replacing a small amount of the pain in his eyes. "A memory," he clarified. "Out of two thousand years' worth of events, of conversations, of experiences – pick a single memory which you want to keep; just one."
Rory huffed softly, closing his eyes as he thought back through all that time – too much time, far too much time for a human – and chose a single moment to remember while the rest would be lost. When he had decided, he opened his eyes again.
"Keep that at the front of your mind," the Doctor instructed him, reaching forward to Rory's head and carefully applying his forefingers to his temples. He closed his eyes and extended his telepathic field, briefly seeing the memory that Rory had chosen as he bypassed it, deleting everything else from that long, long time that he had waited faithfully outside the Pandorica.
One by one they were removed, and the Doctor could feel the strain on Rory's mind lessening as they disappeared, until all of them were gone. He pulled back, out of Rory's mind and back into the external world, a flash of recognition shooting through his own mind as he saw the face of the man whom Rory had chosen to remember.
He lowered his hands from the Roman's head, and was met with a grateful smile. The colour had yet to return to his cheeks, but they were gradually reddening before his eyes. He responded with a reassuring smile of his own, clapping him on the shoulder once more before turning swiftly on his heel and racing back down the stairs.
"Back to bed, Mr Pond," he instructed, waving his hand abstractly behind him as he retrieved a cup from under the control panel and held it under the tap of, what was now, the custard dispenser. "Long day tomorrow, probably."
"Good night, Doctor," Rory answered, "and thank you."
The Doctor waved that off, pulling down the tap and watching the yellow goop flow out into the cup as the Roman returned to his bedroom.
As he sucked the foodstuff off of his finger – noting that he had made a mistake somewhere and that the tap was still producing mustard – the Doctor thought back to the time, so long ago, when he had still been consumed by the memories and the guilt of destroying Gallifrey and losing all of the other Time Lords in existence.
Somewhere along the road, he had ended up in 17th Century France, drinking wine with a Roman who looked rather out of place, but seemed mostly unaffected by the alcohol. By the time that the Roman had got round to telling the Doctor that he was made of plastic and that he couldn't get drunk, the Time Lord himself had been far too plastered to ponder on the significance of that fact. Instead, he had ended up – somehow – waking up hours later in the bed of an upper class gentlemen, with the upper class gentleman himself, wearing nothing but his trusty leather jacket and with a headache pounding through his skull.
Maybe he should dig out that jacket from the wardrobe once more; after all, he could still do a Northern accent...