Title: "Suzie Gallespie"
Author: brokenheartedshipper/Dori
Characters, Pairings: Eleven, Amy, Eleven/Amy (big surprise there), OC from Gallifrey, Rory
Summary: One simple Wednesday aboard the Tardis, Amy decides she simply must know if the Doctor has ever had a puppy love.
Warnings: Imagination involved. If that scares you, flee!
Rating: T for suggestiveness (I love me some suggestiveness!)
Notes: (1) After listening to "Thirteen" by Big Star, I started playing around with ideas about what the Doctor must have been like as a teenager. A Gallifreyan puppy love sprang to mind. This is what became of it. (2) In case you are a music buff (kudos to you!), I am aware that the song "Puppy Love" was actually written originally by Paul Anka in 1960, but it was made famous by Donny Osmond in 1972, so for the story's sake, please pretend he was the author. Thank y'much (regretting saying that)!
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"Doctor," Amy said one Wednesday, chin resting in her palms, elbows on the console, "did you ever have a puppy love?"
"Puppy love?" the Doctor repeated, twisting a knob fervently as he launched into a lecture: "Of course! Donny was having trouble finding inspiration, what with him and Marie being in a terrible row—horrible row it was, really, quite horrible—so when I crash-landed in 1972—on purpose, of course—I gave him a shoulder to cry on and—whoop!—whaddya know: he's going on about a girl he'd met the summer before, lovely girl by the sound of it. So I told him he'd best write it all down, which he did, in song-form, and a few months later, there you have the number one single!" The Doctor appeared absolutely jubilant in his reminiscence, pausing his knob-twirling momentarily to stand there proudly. "Marvelous. It was just...marvelous." He looked over to Amy for a pat on the back. She was smirking at him, eyebrows raised as if to say, You finished?
"Well," the Doctor said, his smile fading, "I take it that was not what you meant." He pointed emphatically with his finger, then pranced a few feet over to begin fiddling with a different set of knobs.
"No, Doctor, it wasn't," Amy confirmed. "What I meant was..." She exhaled sharply, pursing her lips and narrowing her eyes in thought. She sat back against the railing. "Did you ever have a crush on someone when you were ten, which a few years later blossomed into this sort of...oh, I don't know, teenage romance, where you carry her books and blush when she looks at you, etcetera etcetera, and then a few years later you lie under the stars together—or, in your case, the suns?—and on one night you sneak in her window and make sweet, innocent love for the very first time—" The Doctor blushed furiously, and Amy grinned, devious— "and it's brilliant and thrilling and new all at the same time…? Puppy love, Doctor. Have you ever had a puppy love?" Amy was smirking again, expecting the Doctor to bumble about and avoid the question and scratch behind his ears and straighten his bowtie nervously, and tell her she was a devilish little Pond, now wasn't she.
But instead, the Doctor stopped. He stood up straighter. His hands hovered over the buttons and dials, unmoving. And then he smiled, rather nostalgically, Amy thought.
"Suzie Gallespie," he answered. Upon catching sight of Amy's subsequent facial expression, he immediately regretted this admission.
Amy was nothing short of euphoric at this new, juicy information. She leapt onto her feet and hurried over to the Doctor's side, eyes burning with hungry mischief.
"Suzie Gallespie, Doctor?" she teased, pinching his upper arm beneath the tweed jacket. "Do tell!"
The Doctor glanced to her at his side, aware that he would never live this down so long as Amy Pond lived. Circling the Tardis, a skipping Pond in tow, he went on,
"Well," he began, "she had the tiniest little button nose, and brown puppy-dog eyes, and hair the color of...of..." He searched for an analogy Amy would understand, therefore, one pertaining to her own planet, "of the wheat fields in Midwest America in the summertime," he offered. Pausing, he reflected, "Great hair. Lovely hair. Beautiful hair."
"They do say, gentlemen prefer blondes!" Amy sing-songed gleefully. He leaned forward over the console, focusing in on a stuck lever, and Amy leaned her back against the console and stretched back so her face was right in his way, her great big evil smile staring up at him.
"Ooh, tell me more, Doctor! What was Suzie Gallespie like?"
"She was a lovely girl," the Doctor answered cautiously. "A sweet little thing. She loved children. One day we sat in the Prowëan canyon and watched the two suns set, and she told me what the names of all our children would be. Seven, she said. I was sixteen, so naturally I got all stiff and frightened and didn't contact her for a week, but we went right back to normal after that. Young lovers are quite quick to forgive."
"Yes, I'm sure! Now indulge me, Doctor: where did you go for a date? Certainly not a lowly movie or menial restaurant for a Time Lord romance!"
"No, no, no, no," the Doctor said, shaking his head disgustedly. "We went to 3127/acorn to watch the creation of the first artificial planet."
"Of course," Amy said, her grin gone momentarily to be replaced by an eye-roll. "Travis Fader took me to see Transformers in the $2 theatre and then we had awkward sex in the back of his Honda; meanwhile two Time Lords spend a casual Friday night witnessing the creation of a planet."
"Well," the Doctor began, stopping his work on the stubborn lever, "technically mine and Suzie's date was not occurring while you and Travis Fader were—" He cleared his throat "—er, you-knowing in the back of his Honda. It was nine hundred years earlier, give or take a few, although I suppose if you're viewing it as different and separate timelines progressing in a non-linear fashion, then yes—"
"All right, Doctor," Amy interrupted, "you can go back to Suzie Gallespie now. I much prefer her to, oh, Time lectures and such." She waved her hand dismissively.
Slightly miffed, the Doctor went on anyway, "Well...Suzie's father was a very important man on Gallifrey—he was on the Time Council and everything."
"Oh yes, the Time Council, of course."
"He didn't dislike me, but he was...rather intimidating. He was, er, big and...strong."
"Oh my god!" Amy squealed, hands going to cover her elated O-shaped mouth. "Were you threatened by your girlfriend's dad? That's just priceless! I suppose there're some things that are the same all over the universe! There was this one time when Paul Berching tried to sneak in through my window at night, but my dad caught him and told him off for an hour straight." Amy put on an angry-dad face, shook her finger and said in a gruff voice, " 'Never come near my daughter again!' and all that. I thought Paul'd get away with it, too. He brought a rope and everything!"
"Now, see, that's where Paul Berching went wrong," the Doctor informed her, waggling his finger. "Rope-climbing makes far too much noise against the side of the house; you've got to climb a tree. A surprising amount of teenage girls' windows have a tree directly outside. You'd think fathers would've learned their lessons since the whole Romeo and Juliet fiasco, but no-no!"
"Doctor, you sly thing!" Amy said, impressed.
"Yes, yes..." The Doctor smiled and both he and his companion fell silent for a moment, remembering simpler days.
"So Doctor," Amy said conspiratorially, scooching closer to him and bumping her hip against his. "Tell me the sexy part."
The Doctor had only so much unpredictability in him for a day (which was odd, when Amy thought about it: he was the least predictable person she'd ever met, and yet she knew him so well she could guess everything he was going to say before he said it). He blushed madly.
"There is no sexy part!" he declared, bustling away from his redheaded friend and unnecessarily pushing and pulling on levers as he went. "Nope, no sexy part. Just plain old, innocent, puppy love. Nothing sexy. Nothing at all."
"Doctor, you're blushing," Amy informed him, grinning even wider than before. "Plus," she squealed, trotting along beside him as he tried to move away, "you've just admitted you climbed through her window! And that was to do what, talk, I suppose?"
"Yes!" the Doctor insisted. "Talk! Talk! We talked!" He tried to look nonchalant, but first he had to stop his hands from flailing as he spoke. Casually, he disguised his movements as 'straightening-my-bowtie.' He thought it was quite clever.
"But you'd had all day to talk," Amy conjectured. "You're telling me you had to talk to Suzie Gallespie so desperately that you risked a beheading by the hand of her father and snuck in through her window in the dead of night? To talk? Was it worth the risk, Doctor? All that great talking you did?"
"It was a very stimulating conversation," the Doctor insisted.
"Oh, I've no doubt it was stimulating."
"I—" Realizing the suggestiveness of her comment, the Doctor stopped and blushed redder still. He slumped down to sit against the console with his head in his hands.
"Oh, Pond," he said defeatedly, his voice muffled by his arms. "Why do I ever answer your questions?"
Amy stood over him, arms crossed, triumphant.
Finally the Doctor sighed and looked up. "Oh, all right," he relented. "If you must know, Suzie and I...we...we..."
"Took each other's virginities?"
The Doctor winced. "Well when you say it like that, Pond..."
"How else would I say it?" Amy laughed, slumping down beside him.
"I don't know..."
"'Deflowered each other'?" Amy suggested.
"No, no, that's worse!"
"Popped each other's cherries?"
"Amy! That is crude, that is very, very crude."
" 'Became man and woman together' ?"
"That wouldn't be so bad, if Suzie and I were man and woman, which we were not. We were—"
"Time Lord and Time Lady, yeah, yeah."
"Actually, 'Time Lord' is unisex, so—"
"Oh, shut up, will you?" Amy leaned her head back, thinking.
"You know," she said, "Suzie Gallespie is a pretty normal name, yeah?"
"Well obviously she wasn't Suzie Gallespie for all her life," the Doctor explained as though this were common knowledge. "She grew up to be called the Madonna."
"No way! You're kidding! 'The Madonna?' She named herself after Jesus's mum? Mother Mary?"
"Yes, that or she had a fondness for 1980's Earth pop music." Amy laughed and nudged his shoulder with her own. They sat that way together, shoulders touching, heads leaned back, eyes closed. Amy could feel the heat of his head touching hers.
"Isn't it exciting," Amy said after a minute or two of silence. Her voice was softer now, not mischievous, but intense. "To be doing something so brilliant and thrilling and new with someone, and knowing it's kind of wrong, and there's someone just down the hall who could catch you at any moment?"
The Doctor opened his eyes and looked at her, frowning. "I thought Paul Berching got caught."
"He did, but Warren Fontaine didn't."
"…You had an awful lot of lovers, Pond," the Doctor said, and it was meant to sound teasing, but instead it sounded like...something else.
"I was..." Amy said, her voice trailing off. "...lonely," she finished with a huge exhalation. "Just trying to fill a void," she said with a sigh.
The Doctor did not press further, did not ask what void she was filling, because he knew—they both knew—the answer to that. And it was not to be spoken aloud.
"Yes," he said. "It is."
"What?" Amy asked.
"To answer your question, it is exciting. Sneaking around." He paused. "Someone right...down...the hall."
Rory, Amy thought. Rory's down the hall.
And yet...their faces were so close...incredibly close...She could feel his warm breath on her face and neck, his sweet-smelling breath...Their eyes were locked...Their noses touched, and her eyelids fluttered shut—
"So I know you wanted me to find the library again," came a voice, and Amy and the Doctor jumped apart, "...but I've been looking around for about forty-five minutes now and I just can't seem to find it." Rory looked up at his friends to find two pale faces staring at him attentively with eyebrows raised and knees hugged to their chest. They sat an entire foot apart, which was...odd, at least for Amy and the Doctor, who (Rory knew only all too well) liked to be all over each other in every way but the obvious; they were constantly bumping hips, nudging shoulders, kissing foreheads, tapping noses, embracing for abnormally long periods of time, even grasping forearms and jumping up and down.
But here they were, a foot apart, refusing to look at each other.
The conclusion Rory Williams should have drawn was that, frankly, something was up. That the only reason two people with such regular disregard of typical personal-space boundaries were 1) seated so far apart from each other, 2) refusing to make eye contact with each other, and 3) paying very much attention to him, Rory, instead of to invading each other's personal space, was because something had happened which caused them to want to illustrate to him that they had no interest whatsoever in touching each other affectionately for extended periods of time.
Instead, Rory Williams being Rory Williams, he surmised that their hobby of, well, touching each other excessively, had simply disappeared, all of a sudden, in just one day, and with no apparent reason. He grinned delightedly.
"Have I missed something?"
"Nothing!" said Amy and the Doctor at the exact same moment. Recovering from her stupor, Amy put on a casual face, hoisted herself up, and said,
"Well, actually, you did miss a bit of a conversation about Suzie Gallespie."
"Suzie Gallespie? Who's Suzie Gallespie?" Rory asked, smiling.
"Suzie Gallespie," said Amy, staring at the Doctor with a fierceness he had so come to love in her, "is who helped the Doctor discover the wonders of sneaking around."
THE END
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