The Lone Centurion and the Old Man

by Fawe

Rory should have gone mad, guarding the Pandorica alone for 1,894 years. But if he had had someone to keep him company, perhaps not.

"Ave, Centurio."

Of course, Rory didn't hear the words like that. In his brain, the words "Hail, Centurion" formed as clearly as if the man had spoken English. He knew they weren't English, though. The English language wasn't even in its infancy yet. The Angles had yet to settle throughout the remains of the old Roman province of Britannia, Alfred the Great had yet to watch the cakes burn.

The man who had spoken was, by his clothing, bearing and presence, an Imperial freedman. There was something very faintly familiar about him, but that was true of most people Rory saw. Of the three hundred-odd years that Rory had guarded the Pandorica, it had been on public display for at least two hundred. Faces would appear from all over the Empire to see the mysterious treasure of the Druids, and the Centurion sworn to guard the treasure. So many faces, each logged for eternity in the near-perfect memory of a Nestene. All faces were familiar now; there are only so many combinations facial features can have.

"Ave, liberte." Not the words he thought, but the words he spoke. The man did not seem surprised by them, nor by the fact that he spoke at all, for all Rory had not spoken a word in more than a century. People had for the most part already got the hint that the Pandorica was not to be opened. And Rory had nothing else to say to them. Standing by a box as the years turned into decades turned into centuries did not really provide him with much by the way of interesting conversational gambits.

The man spoke again, and the words were important enough that he stopped thinking about the difference between what he heard and what he thought he heard.

"The Franks are coming. The Visigoths may have left you here, respected your vigil, but the Franks won't. I've heard the mutterings from their camps. Something's been stirring them up, or someone. They think the might of Rome is tied up in the Pandorica, and that if they take the Pandorica, Rome will fall. They may be right. But I think they'll let you go with it, though I'd suggest you emphasise the holy nature of your duty."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Because the Pandorica is a legend, and you are part of that legend. I have a great respect for legends. And because there are so few of us left."

"Us?"

"People who remember when the night sky was strewn with stars. People who can read the old poetry, read Catullus, and know what it means when the poet describes the wonders of the heavens. So few of us left now, fewer all the time." There was a melancholy in the man's voice. Rory didn't understand what the man was talking about, but as a plastic Centurion from the future defending an alien prison containing the not-quite-dead body of his fiancee, he didn't have the luxury of believing that everything in the universe could be understood by any one person.

The man seemed to drift off into a world of his own for a few minutes, then to come back with a wry smile and a shake of his head. He held out his arm to Rory, who gripped him by the wrist in the old Roman style that was even now beginning to die out as Rome fell from her pedestal.

"Vale, Centurio. I suspect we will meet again."

They did meet again, though not for several centuries. The Franks, unsure what to do with the Pandorica once they had it, had hidden it and Rory away in the ruins of Trier Cathedral. When they rebuilt the building, they built it with Rory and the Pandorica inside, but hidden away from the eyes of those who came to worship. Rory was not exactly an expert on cathedrals, but he suspected that the design of the building ended up somewhat different to what it had been in the time-line in which he had grown up.

Time passed. Tucked away as he was from the light of day and well on the way to being completely insane, Rory's only awareness of the passage of time came from the gentle vibrations of the stones around him as the cathedral bells marked the services of the day. The stones always vibrated more on each seventh day, and Rory assumed that that was Sunday.

Going by his approximation of Sundays and the different bells that marked the different services, it was early in the morning on a Wednesday when the man came again. Dressed differently, now in a clerical garb which judging by the sword hidden under its folds was clearly not one to which he was entitled, but definitely the same man, bearing before him a burning torch.

"Ave, Centurio."

It was a long time, oh such a long time, since he had heard a human voice. Occasionally, very occasionally, people would come down to Rory's vault. No-one had ever told him that the first thing every new bishop did upon his investiture was demand to see the Pandorica, accompanied by a small retinue. They had never told Rory anything. He didn't always even appear to them, often choosing instead to lurk in the shadows, uncomfortable in the presence of other people, especially now that even Latin was beginning to change, its sounds shifting, its grammar loosening up. He probably shouldn't have been able to understand it perfectly any more, but he did. He didn't like the implications of that.

But this man used the old intonations, the intonations that would not have been out of place in the Forum Romanum of Trajan's day. For the first time in a very, very long time, Rory felt himself smile.

"Ave, liberte."

"Sorry it's been so long. I meant to come and check on you before now. Possibly even stay around a while, keep you company; sometimes a few years on Holy Ground is just what you need to get some perspective. And stay alive, of course."

"Of course," said Rory, who had no idea what the man was talking about.

"But for a while I had some business to attend to, and then I ended up going to Iceland with some monks, and it took a while before I was willing to even look at a boat for long enough to make the trip back. And you rather slipped my mind. But then I heard what the Knights Templar were planning and thought I should let you know."

"Because there are so few of us left."

"Quite." A pause. "It's a little hard to keep track of who's still around. But I think we could be down to less than fifty. Maybe less than twenty. So many people lose their edge around the millennium mark, and it's been more than that since the stars went out."

Over half his vigil gone. Would the rest of it be like this? No human contact except for a mysteriously ageless man turning up every few centuries talking about rumours he'd picked up about what was about to happen to him? On the subject of which...

"What are the Knights Templar planning?"

"They're going to take your Pandorica away, keep it among their treasures. Probably use it in their initiation ceremony in some way. I'm not sure how. The Templars are one group I have no intention of infiltrating. At the moment, anyway. Things change."

"Things do that."

"Except you, Centurion. You don't seem to change."

"Says the man who hasn't aged a day in however many centuries it's been since I last saw you."

"You have a strange way of speaking, you know that? Accent and idiom perfect in many ways, and it doesn't feel like what you're saying should make sense, even as it does."

"I wasn't born a Roman."

"That, my friend, was obvious." Was it? No-one else had ever seemed to think so. No-one else had ever said more than the occasional word to him. "The Templars will let you stay with the box, I think. Or they will if you look threatening enough. And play the Holy Duty card." Whatever the man was actually saying, Rory heard it in his own idiom. Was that the Nestene technology, or some remnant of the TARDIS' influence? Perhaps he'd find out one day.

Not for a while.

"I'll try and visit, when you're with the Templars. I may not want to be one of them, but visitors at their Temples stand out less than a stranger around here."

"I'd..." How on Earth do you express the right level of gratitude for an offer like that? Even an offer only to 'try'. In fact, especially an offer only to 'try'. It wasn't a promise to come back. Rory knew about promises to come back. They ruined people's lives. That was one of the reasons he'd chosen not to leave in the first place, for all he couldn't phrase it quite like that for the Doctor. "I'd appreciate that." And hope that whatever was making his words intelligible to this man was able to get the meaning across properly.

The man gave a small smile.

"Vale, Centurio. Until next time."

"Vale, amice." The smile quirked slightly at that, an appreciation of what he had said. While 'amicus' would one day be learned by children as the Latin word for 'friend' and the root of words like 'amity' and 'amicable', there was more to it in the Roman sense.

Ally.

He did more than try to come back. He came often while the Templars held the Pandorica, about once a decade. He taught Rory to play chess. Like most people he knew, Rory had been taught the basic rules as a child, but detailed strategy had never been thrown at him. A couple of times, the man left with a game still in progress. It gave each of them a long time to think over their next moves. Particularly Rory, who didn't often have much else to think about. He suspected the other man led a much busier life, though they never talked about it.

They never talked about anything to do with their lives, unless it was a warning that someone was hatching some sort of plot to do with the Pandorica. They never even exchanged names. With only the two of them, names weren't exactly needed, even the time towards the end of the twelfth century when he stayed for six months, his meagre possessions hidden at the back of the vault where the Templars who came down twice a week for their mysterious rituals wouldn't see them.

They talked about history. They reminisced about the stars. The man, who claimed to know what it was like to be starved of human company and all but buried alive, brought him scrolls of poetry in the golden Latin they both now spoke only to each other. The other man kept Rory sane. Or as sane as anyone in his position could be, and far saner than he probably should have been.

He warned him when the Vatican, after a round of acrimonious politicking with the Templars, seized control of the Pandorica. Warned Rory that it might be difficult for him to come and visit, and suggested that he hide as many scrolls as he could beneath his breast-plate, because it might be a while before he could get him any fresh ones. And their last meeting before the Pandorica was carted off to Rome was the usual one.

"Vale, Centurio."

"Vale, amice."

Rory had no great hope of seeing his old friend again, or at least not for a while. The Pandorica was deposited deep in the bowels of the Vatican, and him with it, the Papacy having made it very clear that the Pandorica, for all the Lone Centurion's talk of a holy duty to guard it until the right day came, did not fit in with Church doctrine. And because the workings of that most dedicated of the old gods, Rumour, were what they were, people who didn't have quite the respect for the Papal interpretation of holy writ that the Papacy thought was proper were beginning to think that the Pandorica held the bones of Christ.

Things were for a while very, very political, and from the little Rory was able to pick up from listening to the words of the groups of Cardinals that occasionally descended into his domain, he was well out of it. He was also something of a legend; the stories about him varied, but on one memorable occasion a group of wild-eyed young men burst into his vault and fell to their knees before him, gibbering incoherently about how his were the last eyes that had seen the stars that went out at Christ's crucifixion, the last eyes to look upon the living body of Christ the Redeemer, the first eyes that would see him again at the Second Coming.

They hadn't been there long when a group of guards came and dragged them out bodily, to a fate that Rory was eerily certain involved being burned alive for heresy. One of the guards, however, remained behind and looked across at where Rory stood, slightly shell-shocked and wondering whether there was a chance in hell that Amy would believe this, when he finally got the chance to tell her to her face.

"Ave, Centurio."

That brought Rory's attention back squarely to the here and now, or was it the there and then from his perspective?

"Ave, custos."

"Sorry it took me so long. I always have to be careful with the Church, there are things about me that can really upset them. But guard at the Vatican lets me live on holy ground without having to take inconveniently limiting vows, and it turns out I could really use some security for a while, so here I am."

"Thankyou."

"I assure you, it's not just for your sake. As I said, holy ground, useful."

"I'm fairly certain this isn't the only holy ground available."

"True." The man looked at him thoughtfully. "I imagine you do know a lot more than one might expect for a man living in a hole in the ground. I've had occasion to be locked away from the rest of the world in the past, and never knew what world I was going to step out into. But you always seem vaguely aware of how the world's shaping itself, even if there's no way you could possibly know."

"Perhaps God has given me knowledge." Very wry smile there, not the sort of smile you'd expect when talking about God in the Vatican. Or anywhere in Christendom before the more liberal end of the twentieth century. But then, this man had been around a long time. Probably pre-dated Christendom. Possibly by quite a long time.

"Perhaps. Or perhaps St Peter comes to you in visions and tells you of the world outside, a reward from the holy saint for your faithfulness."

Well, the man definitely knew how to create a cover story appropriate to his audience.

"I'll be around, Centurion. Can't say for how long, but I thought I'd make this a lifetime rather than a visit. My lifetimes have to be short, though. Sooner or later people always notice what you'd rather they not. Sometimes I miss the old days, when people could just accept my kind as minor gods and get on with their lives."

"Just sometimes?"

"Well, for every tribe that thought you were a god, about three thought you were a demon and tried to do very nasty things to you. And I had a bit of a wild youth, did some things I'd rather not be reminded of too often."

"I know how that feels."

The man cast him a strange look at that. "I doubt you did anything quite on my scale, Centurion, but something tells me you do understand. I suppose you have a lot of time to think about things."

"That's one way of putting it." He got a strange look for that, one of the ones he got when the weird thing happened with his choice of idiom. He supposed one day they'd both get used to it. Or they'd catch up with Rory's natural idiom.

"Well, if I don't get back up there someone will probably think up some unpleasant questions for me, and burning to death's a horrible way to go. Vale, Centurio."

"Vale, custos."

The next fifteen years passed more quickly than most Rory could remember. It seemed that when off-duty the Vatican's guards, not yet the Swiss Guard of course, were left pretty much to do whatever they wanted, up to and including things that the Catholic Church on the whole frowned upon. Which meant that being unable to find someone in a hurry wasn't that unusual, and Rory's friend could sneak down for a game of chess most evenings. And slip him enough information about patrol timings and routes that Rory could on occasion slip away from his post and take a look around.

He would have thought that the few occasions when he felt able to slip away from the Pandorica, secure in the knowledge that the Papacy wasn't going to do anything to it if it hadn't by this point, would be freeing times when he could for a few hours forget the burden of his duty and explore a past that should never have happened, even if only small, uninhabited bits of it. But every minute spent away from the Pandorica was a minute filled with anxiety. The Pandorica had been his constant companion for over a millennium; it was the anvil upon which his current existence had been forged. Away from its looming presence, he was absolutely terrified of the situation in which he found himself.

And so though he did explore the deserted underbelly of the Vatican, a Vatican as yet untouched by the genius of Michaelangelo, he did it more because he thought Amy would laugh at him if he woke her up and told her that he hadn't even taken a peek at two thousand years of history than because he actually enjoyed the exploration.

His companion understood that, but also seemed to understand that the Centurion would go absolutely insane if he didn't feel the wind on his face except when the Pandorica was being moved somewhere. And one long midwinter's night when he had sacrificed a month's pay for one night without any duty, he stood Rory's watch for him, alone in the dark with the Pandorica. Sent the Centurion out into the Rome that was the same as and yet oh so different from the Rome in which the two of them had first met, and let him feel the air and see the moon of the planet on whose history he had made such a deep impression.

Rory didn't feel so bad about leaving the Pandorica, that night. Someone he trusted was watching it. The box still had a guard, even if it wasn't its guard. He hadn't left Amy alone, and if Amy wasn't alone she must be with him. Because it was just the two of them.

Being slightly insane has its uses, where logic is concerned.

It was a few weeks after that that the man stopped coming. No-one told Rory why. It's not the sort of thing that a visiting dignitary would have been likely to mention in passing when viewing one of the great treasures of the Church. But they had, as they did at every parting, even one likely to be only a few hours in length, said their farewells.

"Vale, Centurio."

"Vale, custos."

The next few hundred years were really quite action-packed, comparatively speaking. Rory never really understood how Marco Polo came to get control of the Pandorica and then sell it, but not understanding what was happening in his life was something he was by now more than used to.

It got him out in the fresh air, at least. The lengthy days on the Spice Road, days made even lengthier by the almost impossibly slow speed the size and mass of the Pandorica forced their carts to move at, would probably work up into a nice two-hour anecdote for the next time he had someone to share it with, be it the Doctor, Amy or his old friend.

It was not, of course, practical to be the Lone Centurion all the time on long journeys. He made his by now rather cliched appearances at the beginnings and ends of journeys, and spent the journeys themselves wrapped in a cloak, gradually collecting a serviceable set of nondescript ordinary clothing by the simple if morbid method of going through the possessions of those who died on the road, from disease or banditry or malnutrition. The armour he kept bundled up by the base of the Pandorica, usually hidden amongst the ropes and sacking that secured the box to whatever it was being transported on at the time.

He began to learn how to blend in with his surroundings rather than just sink into the shadows cast by the Pandorica. But at nights, when no-one was paying close attention because frankly, a box that size wasn't going to be the easiest thing in the world to steal so guarding it would have been a bit of a waste of effort, he would lean against the box, his hand casually on the sword he still wore even without the armour that went with it, and under his breath he would tell Amy how the day had gone, where he thought they were, and how lonely the night sky looked without any stars in it.

All over Europe and Asia they travelled as ownership of the Pandorica was bandied about, then finally, for the first time in over seventeen hundred years, Rory Williams found himself back on British soil. Even without the stars to navigate by British sailors had long ruled the seas, and the realm was wealthy enough for a young Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to err on the unique and expensive side when choosing a present for his new wife.

Odd, how Queen Victoria was so much more intimidating to Rory than the Roman Emperors and Popes and other incredibly powerful people who had come to see the Pandorica over the centuries. Was it because she was more recent? Because she was so famously, if probably apocryphally, Not Amused? Or because while you learn about Popes and Roman Emperors at school, Queen Victoria is far, far more real, especially to the English mind. Even if the mind in question is by this point considerably older than England herself.

He put on a good show when the Pandorica was set up where Victoria's own monument would stand in later years. The full Roman Centurion's armour, polished to the best of his ability.

She was shorter than he had expected. The effect of her stood next to Albert would have been almost comical but for the force of her personality.

"You are the Lone Centurion?" Only the very slightest of modulations to her tone showed that it was indeed a question demanding an answer.

He brought the sword to his chin in formal salute. It might not be the way Romans saluted with swords, but Rory had watched enough television and seen enough films to know how this sort of conversation was supposed to go.

"Yes, Your Majesty."

She seemed mildly surprised at this. "I was informed that you only spoke Latin, Centurion." Which raised the question of why she had addressed him in English, but she was not the sort of person you asked that sort of question. Or indeed any question you could possibly avoid asking.

"The Pandorica is British, Your Majesty, and I am the guardian of the Pandorica." Not exactly true, but close enough for government work.

"I see. I understand you have some sort of warning for me, Centurion?"

"The Pandorica must not be opened before its time, Your Majesty."

"Why not?"

"Because if it is, the world will end." Rory's world, at any rate.

The answer did not seem to satisfy Victoria, but it was the only answer she was going to get and it was clear she'd been told this in advance. She should really have felt flattered; Rory had accorded her more respect than he usually gave the Pandorica's 'owners'.

She left not long afterwards, and the crowd of courtiers that had kept a respectful distance followed her. All except for one man, dressed more sedately than most, who idly walked up as if to examine the Pandorica more closely now that the Queen had left. There was a slight smell about him that Rory's Nestene senses had no difficulty in detecting and his nurse's experience had no trouble at all in identifying.

"Ave, Centurio."

"Ave, medice."

The man smiled at that. It was a gentler smile than Rory was used to from him, and with a degree of melancholy behind it that in the past had only cropped up occasionally. "I'm impressed, Centurion."

"I've known doctors before." The man, now as Rory had correctly inferred a doctor, heard the thick layer of irony beneath the Centurion's actual words, but did not choose to pry. Though the comment was an interesting one for a man who rarely left his post, and who probably, like himself, didn't have much call to make personal use of the profession.

"You handled the Queen well. Better than most of the court were expecting. Some of the more adventurous were rather hoping you'd offend her."

"That was Queen Victoria." It truly hit Rory, then, that he had just basically stonewalled the longest-reigning monarch in English history on her own doorstep. "God, that was Queen Victoria. I mean, it was really Queen Victoria. I basically just told Queen Victoria to go away and leave me alone. Queen Victoria. Like on the old stamps." He felt weak at the knees, and despite being aware that it was completely psychosomatic he put his hand against the side of the Pandorica to steady himself. For a moment he fancied he could feel Amy's amusement radiating out of it. She was never going to let him live this down.

Unspoken gentlemen's agreement or not, the man could not let that pass. "I've never seen you react like that about speaking to anyone. And I've heard you be a lot less polite about it. What's so special about Queen Victoria?"

"She's Queen Victoria!"

That didn't really answer the question. In fact, it didn't answer the question in the slightest. But it suggested to the man, for the first time in their long acquaintance, that his old friend was not just someone a bit like himself, living forever and with an unusual view of the world, but that something else was at play. Something tickled at his mind then, something he'd read recently (and by recently he meant within the last decade or so; get to his age and subjective temporal terms develop unorthodox meanings) about the Venerable Bede. Someone sitting under a tree waiting for a coach suddenly finding himself in the past and telling the Venerable Bede about the future.

No. That sort of thing was impossible. And yes, the word 'impossible' was not one that was really fair coming from someone who'd been killed as often as he had over the millennia, but it was still an appropriate word. The only appropriate word other than 'insane' that really sprang to mind for the idea.

"Have you got anywhere to stay?" He didn't know why he said it. It's not as if he could have offered the Centurion a room, even if he had learned to blend in since the last time they met. Perhaps it was simply to hear how the Centurion would refuse him. He may have known better than anyone else living or dead that people change across the centuries, both as individuals and as races, but if there was one constant in the universe it was that the Centurion would not willingly leave his box.

"Yes. Here." So simple. So solid.

"The weather in England is not known for being conducive to staying outside at all hours of the day and night. And the atmosphere can get a bit thick."

"Cold doesn't bother me. I doubt smog will bother me. And hey, how many people can say they spent the nineteenth century standing with a box outside Buckingham Palace?" There was a faint note of hysteria in the Centurion's voice now. "She'll never believe I talked to Queen Victoria."

'She' had come up in conversations in the past, but had never had a name attached to her. And with his new, if impossible, theory about the Centurion's origins, he was forced to wonder whether he was doing this to impress a woman. Some impossible task set by his would-be bride's father in the hope of getting rid of an unwanted suitor, perhaps. He'd set some rather nasty ones himself for would-be stepsons-in-law in his time. Particularly in the years following his more aggressive phase, when he hadn't quite got the mass-murdering mentality out of his system.

Life had been a lot more fun in the days when that was a socially acceptable way to behave. Bloody dangerous at times, but a lot more fun.

He idly wondered what Byron was up to at the moment. They'd split up in Greece after Byron's rather public 'death', and somewhat to his surprise he hadn't heard even a whisper of a rumour regarding the poet's whereabouts in the years since. Perhaps the kid was finally learning some discretion. Anything was possible.

"Would you like me to bring you anything? The books I have easy access to at the moment are mostly medical, and you'll have to find yourself somewhere quiet where you can read without being noticed, but I'm sure I can manage something."

The Centurion had that strange look in his eye again, the look he got when the man had said something amusing without meaning to or realising. "Medical books would be great, actually. And there are a couple of gardener's huts in the Park where I'd be nearby if anything happened."

Sometimes, the man wondered what the Centurion thought might happen to the great box after all these years.

"I'll see what I can do. Do you need any... less ostentatious clothing?"

"I'd be grateful if you could spare something. Simple, hard-wearing. Something that could pass for workman's clothing if you can manage it."

"Of course. Vale, Centurio."

"Vale, medice."

Rory learned a lot about medicine in the next few years, though by his standards a lot of what he learned was out of date, to put it mildly. Lethally out of date, in many cases. And somewhat lacking in understanding of basic hygiene in some cases. He was pretty confident within a decade that he could if needed have created a perfect, life-size model of the human body out of mud and water with his eyes closed. Which could come in useful, in some particularly bizarre set of circumstances. After two, he could probably have completely disassembled and reassembled a human body with his eyes shut and one hand tied behind his back. Which was also unlikely to come in useful as such.

After the death of her husband, Queen Victoria did indeed, as history said, go into deep mourning and cut herself off from the world, clad always in black. What Rory had not expected to happen was that she would develop a profound attachment to the Pandorica, his greatest gift to her.

She came daily to see the Pandorica, when she was in London. It was, to be frank, rather inconvenient from Rory's point of view. She expected the Centurion to be present, smartly turned out in the uniform by which history knew him. She would acknowledge him with a curt nod of the head, to which he would return a formal salute before returning to simple attention and waiting out the remainder of her visit in stony silence.

This went on for the better part of forty years. It was in the year 1900, the last year of the nineteenth century, that Victoria came to him for the last time, shortly before she departed for the Isle of Wight where she was to die. She was past eighty by now, and it showed, but she had not lost her force of will.

"Centurion."

"Your Majesty."

"You have stood before my house for more than half my life. You have seen me more often, perhaps, than any man alive. Why do I know nothing of you?"

"You have had more important things on your mind, Your Majesty. I'm just the guardian of a big box."

"Perhaps. Tell me Centurion, why do you guard it?"

"Because it must not be opened before the right time, Your Majesty."

"So you told me before, Centurion. But why do you guard it? Why you?"

"Because it is my duty, Your Majesty."

Oddly, that seemed to satisfy her somewhat. Perhaps, as England's longest-reigning Queen, she understood duty better than most, even than the Victorians who took her name.

It was a few minutes before she spoke again.

"You have held to your duty for a long time."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"Far longer than a mortal lifetime."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"Tell me, Centurion, what do you know of death?"

Rory was, slightly to his surprise, feeling sorry for the old Queen. In history lessons at school he, like most kids, had felt that she'd taken the whole mourning thing a bit too far. Only the girliest of girly girls had thought it was romantic to pine away like that for a man who probably hadn't cared nearly as much for her as she did for him.

Perhaps it was the nurse in him, perhaps it was that he knew what it was like to live without the person you loved. Perhaps it was just because she was Queen Victoria. But he felt compelled to answer her truthfully.

"I died once. A long time ago. I was brought back, to guard the Pandorica until the time comes for it to be opened." That was the truth of it, the pure and simple truth. The Doctor may not have known why Rory came back, why his soul was brought back and not just a plastic imitation of it, but he knew. He had been brought back to keep Amy safe.

"And what will happen then?"

"Then my duty will be done. And I will see my wife again." She was his wife. In every way that mattered, she was his wife.

She seemed very slightly taken aback by that. She gained control of her features with lightning speed, but for a brief instant he thought he saw understanding in her eyes. And sympathy. And gratitude.

"I will not see you again, Centurion."

"No, Your Majesty."

"You told me once you were of Britain."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"Then you will hold to your duty. And you will see your wife again."

"Yes, Your Majesty."

A brief pause. "Thank you, Centurion."

He saluted, and she turned and left. The next day she left the Palace in a carriage with blacked-out windows. He never saw her again.

The first quarter of the twentieth century passed in something of a blur, only briefly enlivened by the day someone tried to conscript the Lone Centurion into the British Army and send him to the trenches. Rory's flat refusal to move an inch from where he stood had put paid to that without his even having to risk using his hand gun. In the early days the hand gun had been useful for scaring people; by this stage, it was more likely to attract very, very unwelcome attention.

It was during the twenties that the Pandorica was moved. It had spent the previous decade sharing the front of the Palace with the new Victoria Memorial, and didn't really fit in with the decor. It was put, after a lot of political wrangling between various museums, in the main atrium of the British Museum. It was at this point that Rory hit upon the idea of getting himself a job as a security guard to enable him to stay with the box without becoming a tourist attraction.

He arranged this by the stunningly simple means of mentioning the idea to his old friend, one day not long after the Pandorica's installation in the museum. He had given him a slightly admiring look, and mentioned that he knew someone in a position to arrange that the Centurion get the job and not ask too many questions, even questions about why he wanted to do both day and night shifts and didn't actually need to be paid. Rory did not ask how this was going to work; though he had no confirmed date for when the Doctor would turn up with this time-line's version of Amy, he was certain he was into the final straight now, the last century, and was allowing himself to hope that things would continue to run smoothly.

He really should have remembered about the Blitz.

Rory did not enjoy the second world war. As he had an identity now, John Smith, security guard, he had once more narrowly avoided getting called up, this time by the slightly risky means of abandoning his security guard's uniform for his old Roman garb and spending his days hiding in the bowels of the museum, only coming out at night to guard the box in person.

This worked for a time, but did mean that he came very close to missing the moment when workmen arrived to transport the Pandorica to a warehouse in another part of London for safekeeping. Only crashing sounds made by a group of young idiots coming perilously close to smashing the Rosetta Stone had alerted him to the fact that something was going on, and he had been able to make his traditional appearance and demand that he accompany the box.

The workmen were too astonished by the revelation that the Lone Centurion was real and not an old story put about by historians to maintain public interest in the Pandorica to argue against Rory's accompanying the box, and so a few hours later he found himself established in an old warehouse in a part of London he had never seen before, surrounded by a few of the larger treasures of the British Museum. It rather reminded him of the old days, first under Stonehenge and later in the vaults of Rome, the Franks, the Templars and the Vatican. He settled in to wait for it all to be over.

One night, an incendiary hit the warehouse. It jolted Rory out of the state of semi-consciousness into which he had over the centuries learned to fall when he was left by himself for long periods of time. His mind never stopped working, but he was able to slow his thoughts down, let himself drift in memories of a time before he was a plastic killing-machine with a box to guard.

The warehouse began to burn, and Rory had a brief flash of memory, of the Doctor telling him to stay away from heat sources.

The Pandorica would probably survive the fire. It had, after all, been designed to withstand anything, probably up to and including being dropped into a supernova.

But he couldn't take the risk. Couldn't leave Amy there to burn. If she burned, it would be just him. All alone until the end of the universe.

He looked around him, his training as a nurse taking over and forcing him to look for a solution to the problem rather than giving in to the panic he felt rising in his plastic breast.

Ropes. The workmen who had brought the Pandorica here and left behind the ropes. Odd thing to do, during a war when everything was in short supply, particularly everything useful, but now was not the time to look a gift horse in the mouth.

It was the work of only a couple of minutes to get the rope formed into a rudimentary harness around the Pandorica, but even so by the time he had finished the flames had taken a firm hold and it was obvious that the warehouse wouldn't last long. Just as he was trying to work out what the best way of getting the Pandorica out of the building was, the main door at the front of the building was hauled open from the outside and a man in a smouldering Army trench coat stood in the opening, breathing harshly.

"Ave, Centurio. Need a hand?"

"Ave, medice." Rory's plastic eyes were good enough even in the dark to make out the red cross on the man's sleeve. "I need to get it into the open."

"The road outside's wide enough to get it along, and there's some open ground a couple of hundred yards away." He looked at the Pandorica with misgivings clear in his eyes. "That thing's always bigger than I remember it. How heavy is it?"

"I'm stronger than I look. If I pull and you push, we should be able to move it far enough to be away from the fire at least."

"Well then, let's get started."

Rory hadn't really felt pain since he'd died and come made of plastic, but he came close to it when he felt the strain of the Pandorica's weight behind him. It was a peculiar sensation, and as he dragged the Pandorica slowly but surely away from the flames he decided that if he and Amy ever by some miracle came to have kids, damaging an Action Man would be a serious offence.

His breast-plate was hot. Very hot. Every part of his uniform that was made from metal was hot, but he couldn't stop to get rid of it. He could see ahead of him the open space his old friend had mentioned, and all that mattered now was getting the Pandorica there. Getting Amy away from the fire.

They made it. Rory couldn't, if asked, have said how long it took them. It could have been two minutes, it could have been six hours. The first hints of false dawn were visible in the east when Rory dropped the rope, made for the shadows and pulled off his armour before it could fuse to his plastic body, but as he hadn't known what time it was when the bombs started dropping, or even what time of year it was, that didn't tell him anything.

A hand grabbed his wrist. "We need to get out of here, and we need to get you something to wear." The man's clothes were burned all the way down to the skin in places, but there wasn't a trace of injury on him, though he was covered in soot and ash.

"I need to guard the Pandorica."

"Centurion, the last thing on anybody's mind today is going to be harming that thing. You may not have noticed, but there were people around. You were definitely seen. As long as the legend of the Centurion is alive, no-one's going to open that box. You've told people the end of the world would come if they did; that's not something an empire involved in an all-out war for survival is going to risk. How no rumours ever started that that thing contains a weapon capable of defeating Hitler is beyond me. We've got to go. Now, while it's still dark enough that we won't attract any unwanted attention."

And Rory let himself be dragged away, though as long as the Pandorica remained in line of sight he stared over his shoulder at it. The other man had taken up Rory's armour and wrapped it as well as he could in what remained of his trench-coat, leaving a long sword visible at his side.

They ducked through alleyways, keeping always to the shadows. The sun was nearly fully up by the time the two of them half crept, half fell up a flight of stairs into a flat above a second-hand bookshop in Soho.

"Why did you bring my armour?" The two had dressed in worn but neat civilian clothing and were seated at a small kitchen table, a game of chess between them.

"The legend of the Lone Centurion needs to live on. You've put a lot of time into it. If someone finds a set of charred, dented Roman armour near the Pandorica that puts the legend at risk. As it is you can never be the Centurion again, but without any physical proof the legend will only get stronger. That's how legends work."

"I suppose. And if some people don't believe, that makes those who do believe all the harder." Amy had really not had an enviable childhood.

"Exactly." The man downed the contents of the mug by his hand, and stood. "I have to be at work in a couple of hours, I'll try and get some sleep. You're welcome to stay here, though I can't promise it'll be interesting. It's safer than going out onto the street. People will wonder why a man your age isn't in uniform, and I can't afford to risk my own position to get you a set of papers that'll keep you safe from call-up. You don't eat, you don't sleep, you can hardly go back to guarding the Pandorica without your armour; here's as good a place for you as any."

"Thankyou."

"Don't mention it, I could use the company. Help yourself to anything on the bookshelves up here or in the shop; it's mine, and it's closed for the duration."

"Really, thankyou. I don't know why you're doing this, but thankyou."

"Those of us who remember the stars should keep together. It's down to less than ten, last count."

There was nothing Rory could really say to that, so he let the other man head into the small, poky bedroom and himself went into the small, poky living room. It felt like an extension of the shop below, books covering the walls and stacked in slightly haphazard piles on the floor. He picked one up at random.

'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon.' Rory gave a muted bark of laughter, and put it back down. On the top of the pile next to it was 'War and Peace'. Well, it wasn't as if he didn't have time to kill. If this was the Blitz, and the war went the way it had before, he'd be in this building for the better part of five years. Plenty of time to work his way through the longer classics.

He settled down in the room's one dilapidated armchair to read. After a couple of hours his new flatmate awoke and left, and the two exchanged their traditional farewells, but after that he just kept on reading.

And that was what Rory did during the War.

When the War was over, things took quite a while to get back to normal. Not that anything about Rory's existence, or that of his only friend in the universe, was normal. However hard they both tried at times.

Rory's normality only returned when it was announced in the press that the Pandorica, which now for some reason was beginning to be known at the Anomaly, was to be re-housed at the National Museum in Cardiff. As his flatmate read this announcement out of the paper, the two of them exchanged glances. They both knew it was time for him to go, time for them both to be alone again.

"It won't be as easy to get you a job at the museum this time. My network for that sort of thing's a little out of date, and there are a lot of men just demobbed looking for work."

"It's not as if I actually need a job. I can visit during the day, walk around the city at night."

His friend shook his head. "You've had the security of that armour of yours for too long. You turn up in the same place all day every day, especially in the same set of clothes all the time, people are going to notice. You'll need somewhere to use as a base of operations, even if it's just a room, and rooms cost money. And if you don't use gas or electricity, you'll attract attention to yourself. I do have a place in Cardiff. A small place, not very central. Second-hand bookshop, just like this one. They're useful things to have; no-one looks twice at a second-hand bookshop, and no-one's surprised if they don't see any sign of life from one for years at a time. There's a chance it's had some bomb damage, but it's not in one of the areas that was badly hit."

"Are you going to stay here?"

"No. I'm not needed at the War Office any more, for obvious reasons, and a lot of people need doctors at the moment. I've found myself a job at a hospital for former PoWs where I think I can do some good."

"I almost wish I could go with you."

"Your duty has always been to the Pandorica, Centurion."

"Not always. But always in this life."

They had still never exchanged details of their lives before they'd met. They'd never even exchanged names, since when there are just two of you names really don't matter, especially when you have centuries of addressing each other by titles to fall back on if needed. Rory knew that the other man had identity papers in the name of John Crowley, but knew equally well that that was not his real name.

They parted for the last time a week later, each heading off across London with a small suitcase to catch a train to a far-off city. Rory was heading home, to a place he'd never been before. It was a strange feeling. Since he'd learned where the Pandorica now was he had felt it constantly tugging at his heart, and now that he was actually moving towards it the tug strengthened into a pull he couldn't have ignored had he wanted to. And he realised that the tug had always been there, through those hours alone in a dusty old bookshop, but that he had ignored it, been forced to ignore it, because he knew that if he wanted to be with the Pandorica at the end, when Amy was freed from it, he would have to let it be during the War. He must not call attention to himself now that he did not have the Centurion to fall back on.

He lived a quiet life in Cardiff, keeping himself to himself. Saturdays were spent in the museum, keeping the Pandorica always in his line of sight. The rest of the week was spent in his bookshop.

He was not as alone as he could have been. Many of Cardiff's mothers were now lacking sons, and they saw in Rory's lonely, haunted eyes and quiet demeanour another victim of the war that had taken their sons from them. Those who had the time to spare would often find themselves dropping into the bookshop for a quiet chat, and Rory quickly realised that though they sought on some level to heal him, talking to him helped, a very little, to heal the holes in their hearts where their sons had once lived.

Seeing that he lived alone and pitying him for it, they brought him food from time to time. Never much, because rationing was still in force, but what they could manage. Rory couldn't throw that back in their faces, so he accepted the gifts graciously, gratefully, and quietly passed them on to the underfed street kids that he let sleep in his back room in cold weather.

One or two of them had followed him to the museum on Saturdays, curious to see where he went. When he always went to the Pandorica's room they formed their own conclusions about why he was there. They saw him standing by the exhibit of the Nile Penguins and reasoned that he was one of Monty's Desert Rats. He did not disabuse them of the notion.

As time passed, he was faced with the problem universally faced by those who don't age; the fact that people notice that sort of thing. He was luckier than he should have been. All those middle-aged women who saw him as their lost sons were more than happy to believe that it was only in their minds that he remained forever the quiet young lad just returned from war, and as the years passed most of them were able to set aside their grief, keep it somewhere safe, and move on with their lives. They let themselves forget the young man with the bookshop.

The fifties turned into the sixties, and the War began to fade into history. Rory's apparent generation was now the one born at the end of the War, not haunted by its memory. Rory had managed to save up some money from the bookshop, given that he didn't exactly have much to spend it on, and moved to a slightly larger building on the other side of the city where he could start more or less afresh. A change to his style of clothing and he was a completely different person. Come the seventies, the registration of the birth of a phantom infant and he had a birth certificate good enough to give him a solid identity and get him a job as a security guard at the National Museum in the early nineties. Then he just had to wait.

When Methos woke up in the morning, he wasn't initially certain what was wrong. He couldn't feel a Buzz, nor could he hear any evidence of a mortal presence. He was alone in his bed, alone in his flat.

Unnerved and wary, he got out of bed, got quickly dressed and made himself breakfast. It was when he opened the fridge to get out the milk that he froze. He distinctly remembered having opened a new bottle of milk the previous day. He also distinctly remembered having been only half-way through a bottle of milk the previous day, and therefore not having needed to open a new one.

He had two sets of memories for the previous day. Similar, but not identical. And in one of them, stars didn't exist, and hadn't for a long time.

He ran his mind back a little further, and consistently found two sets of memories, sometimes very similar, sometimes vastly different. His breakfast forgotten, he walked quickly through to his living room to stare at his bookshelves. A couple of seconds and he pulled out a dictionary, flicking through to the letter 's'. 'Star' was there in black and white as if there was never any doubt about its right to be there; no mention of a dark night sky and star cults throughout the ages, only of burning balls of gas scattered across the universe.

He slammed the book shut, thoughtful. He sent his memories hurtling back over the centuries and came skidding to a halt at the beginning of the second century AD, when on the night the stars went out the people of Rome rioted in the streets and the blood of priests and soothsayers flowed like water. The Night of Black and Crimson, they called it, though in the years that followed people forgot why. Surprisingly few years, for a long-lived, well-documented race of bureaucrats like the Romans.

Glad that Adam Pierson was a historical researcher, Methos ran his fingers along his books until he found a reliable history of Rome. It was the work of seconds to establish that the Night of Black and Crimson had never happened.

Interesting. Worrying, alarming even, but still interesting.

By his calculations, he had 1894 years of duplicate memories. Sometimes the two sets of memories were almost identical, sometimes they were very, very different. Sometimes entire centuries were almost impossible to reconcile with one another. And a few things were just... anomalous.

Such as the Anomaly. The Pandorica. That definitely existed in only one set of memories. The Pandorica did not exist when there were stars.

The Centurion had always said that if the Pandorica was opened before its time, the world would end. Perhaps, unable to be the Centurion in appearance any more, he had failed in his duty to the box.

Methos suspected he would never know. He also suspected that if he spoke of this to other Immortals, or looked in the Chronicles, only those over 1900 years old would have any feeling that anything strange had happened, or that they had ever lived in a world with no stars.

He would not mention it to anyone. He would not add 2000 years to his age; it wasn't as if he wasn't considerably more than the 5000 he generally claimed anyway. 5000 was a nice round number, so he'd used it for a long time without ever feeling the need to update it. Few people hung around long enough to question this.

Methos went back to his kitchen. Instead of continuing with breakfast he took a beer out of the fridge and drank a quiet toast to the Lone Centurion, whatever had happened to him.

"Centurio Romane, ave atque vale."

The next fifteen years for Methos were basically concerned with living out Adam Pierson's useful life, avoiding getting too involved with anything Duncan MacLeod was doing and preparing his next identity. He rather liked the idea of going back to medicine for a while, maybe going back to England for a while as a country GP doing his rounds with a dog in the car. He therefore invested some time in picking up the necessary qualifications under the name of Benjamin Adams. Real qualifications, GCSEs, A-Levels and later the pre-clinical stage of a medical degree, lent validity to an otherwise entirely false identity. For the clinical stage, of course, distance learning wouldn't cut it, and he headed to London for his three clinical years, taking the opportunity to build up a network of contemporary acquaintances.

Ben Adams qualified as a GP in the spring of 2011 and did not take long to find a job; a practice in rural Gloucestershire covering a few small villages was looking for a new junior partner, the set-up was almost exactly what he was looking for and the existing partners thought he came across very well in the interview.

The partners themselves were spread across the villages the practice served, so that in the event of a call-out someone was always close at hand, though technically only one a night was nominally on-call.

Ben found himself a small house in a village called Leadworth, which he could afford despite Ben Adams' relative youth and inexperience due to a helpful inheritance from a distant relative.

The first couple of months in his new job were quiet, relaxing and exactly what he'd been looking for. Dealing day-to-day with simple ailments and village hypochondriacs, occasionally referring someone to a specialist probably less knowledgeable than Methos was himself. Life was so quiet, in fact, that he was thinking of getting himself a cat just so that he would have someone to keep him on his toes.

It didn't last. It never does.

I know, I know, it's London's skyline you see when they get onto the roof of the National Museum, but the National Museum is in Wales and the universe is, after all, shrinking. London is the centre of the universe, so it makes sense that the museum would be drawn there as the universe ends.