Rory's face is both familiar and foreign, marked with years of age she doesn't remember, but instead feels. She knows she could map each line with her eyes closed even as she struggles to grow accustomed to them.
(The Doctor looks the same as ever and a part of her thinks that they must have just left him. Must have walked off the TARDIS five years ago and watched it disappear, not knowing that it was simply heading straight for them in another time.)
It hurts in that gratifying way, her back aching with each step and feet swollen painfully. Yet she's carrying a life inside of her, has been for what must have been months, and she almost wants this to be real.
(Then she knows it can't be the next second because it terrifies her. That something out there could have made her forget this small child she both loves and does not know. That she had embraced this type of life. This had never been her dream and the thought that one day—one day long ago—she would love Rory so much she would surrender her dreams for him is frightening. She had only loved one man enough for that before and even then she never gave up her dreams, but rather exchanged them for new ones.)
It feels as though she is being pulled apart again and again with each change. It is a vertigo unlike any other, to feel her fingers numbing from the chill only to open her eyes to cloudless skies and a warm breeze.
(Once she awakes in a room the color of autumn leaves. It is speckled with shelves that hold both toys and books and the carpet underneath her legs feels soft and plush. There is a crib of pristine mahogany wood against one wall, a small mobile hanging delicately above it. She is filled with a longing so deep it almost takes her breath away. She wants out, she wants out now.)
It is a surprise when it happens and for a second she doesn't believe it. Rory is invincible in that utterly human way. Where he would never leave her, so he simply wouldn't die. Would force his body to solidify, his heart to keep pumping, his lungs to keep expanding if it would please her. No, he wasn't leaving.
(She had only blinked for a second. She had blinked and suddenly he was falling and The Doctor looked too knowing and world weary. Why had she blinked?)
Rory doesn't so much as die as he does crumble, falling into dust that slips between her fingertips far too easily.
(And, suddenly, all she can hear is her own voice echoing back to her from before, telling him that they had forever. But they didn't and now she doesn't want it, she wants him.)
It's not real, though, can't possibly be. Rory doesn't leave. She was always the one who ran away and he was the one to follow.
(He had told her when she was eleven and he was ten that he would never abandon her. You know, he had begun, so serious for such a little boy; I wouldn't—won't—leave. I swear. She had given him a skeptical look and had continuously tried to prove him wrong. She had never succeeded. She supposed that, now, it was her turn to chase him.)
The keys felt solid and real in her hands, weighty in a way that must have been only in her mind. She wraps her fingers around them with relish and tries to remember what her wedding day must have been like here.
(The hood of the van crumples when it meets the bricks, glass shattering and cutting their skin. Blood leaks out slowly, almost reluctantly, and their bones break on what must be direct impact. It feels like hours—minutes, in reality—before their organs fail them. Her breath leaves her just as the image of Rory's face begins to fade away from behind her eyelids.)
She feels foreign now, as if waking up had taken her away from all of reality. Like the world is up and to the left of her rather than something she lives and breathes in. She can barely feel her body, the cold taking away that sensation entirely. Yet she knows that it is whole and unmarred. She wonders if she will ever get used to that sensation, now that she knows how it feels to die.
(Even so she can still feel him, can grasp at his hand as he opens his eyes. She can barely see his chest moving underneath the layers of fabric he is cocooned in, but she knows that he is breathing, that he is here with her. She thinks that might be all she needs, ever, and it should scare her, like it had before. It doesn't.)
That night he'll kiss her, chaste and sweet, and there might be a plea in there somewhere. She knows when he pulls away, slightly, and whispers against the corner of her mouth. If-if I, well. Continue on. Don't… I love you and I want to you to move on. Be happy, for me. She smiles and goes in for another kiss, but doesn't promise a thing.
(In the end they'll always be known as Amy and Rory. Even when she only knows him from a slip of the tongue from The Doctor and his last memory of her is bleeding out in his arms because of him for two thousand years. They'll always find a way back towards each other again.)