In a house, very far away from here, or perhaps not so far way at all - as it depends where in this universe you are- there is a kitchen; and in this kitchen is sat a little girl. (Amelia Pond, like a name in a fairytale.)
Her short fingers clutch tightly the handle of a small knife she dug out of a cupboard she could hardly reach, and she etches patterns into the flesh of an apple, peeling back the skin with ragged fingernails. When she's done she sets it down on the wooden table and looks at it for a minute, a shiny red gaping smile that watches her just as silently back.
Her copper coloured hair falls over her face, the knife clatters to the floor, and she pushes the kitchen stool across the tiles, not even wincing at the marks it leaves.
The window pane is ice cold and damp against her forehead. The garden is dark and shadowy, a spectrum of grey merging together to form something she can not see through. It is empty though, she can tell that right away; no movement except the creaking of old branches, protesting quietly in the wind's nimble fingers.
She stares at at the sky through the gloom. Tonight the stars are bright bright bright.
As she buries her head below the covers she traces the constellations behind her eyes.
/
A gold thread, then. Weaving through the night sky, invisible to all but the birds who fly along it to find their way home. A thread that crosses supernovas; that defies black holes and twists around the rings of saturn, that soars through the vacuum and bends to entire planets in its path. Never breaking, only stretching, pulling, expanding to snap back again whenever it can.
It is the one thing he is unaware of. He knows secrets you can not imagine in your wildest most absorbing daydreams, or in your loneliest darkest nights. This universe is here to serve him, or so he once thought. Now he thinks he must travel alone.
Until that gold thread wraps itself around that box of brightest blue, and yanks it straight back to Earth, to a girl with hair of fiery red; a girl that has been waiting for quite sometime.
He is both very very old and very very strange. She spent twelve years describing the upturn of his lips, the curve of his chin, the fantastical stories he has to tell, and why being old and strange doesn't matter at all. Hours spent over a desk where she was treated with indulgent nods and sympathetic smiles.
(Amy dear, don't you think it's time to let your friend go?)
No-one believed the story of her Raggedy Doctor, until even she found her story curling at the edges, buckling under the weight she pressed upon it time after time. So she stooped answering back, stopped trying to prove the world wrong, just clung to what she had left.
A man in a pale blue shirt, such a beautiful kind of mad. Such a beautiful person to love when no-one is watching.
/
He stumbles into the garden once more; burning, wild, at war with himself. And he stops, and he pauses. Because she is here, and she is Amelia Pond.
And she is oh so beautiful.
He can recognise in her the small girl he left not five minutes ago; hazel eyes, flaming hair, small rosebud smile. Most of all, he recognises in her the strength of steel- hit with a clang right over the heart- defiance, and a sadness fermented over time.
Her raggedy Doctor is real, and his promise to travel alone is rendered useless, because Amy Pond will not allow herself to be left behind again.
/
He takes her with him, and the house in the village falls silent without her.
He takes her to see planets alive with stories, alien space ships circling galaxies with names she can't pronounce, all laid out beneath her feet; and he saves them, time after time.
Once or twice she does some saving of her own; a space whale, The Doctor, and herself from being alone.
He continues fixing things- but he can not fix himself, and he can not stop her from tracing his palm in the moonlight and pressing her lips to his forehead in the dark.
His mind is infinite, the beating of both his hearts is quick, but she is thinking too. She's had twelve years to think.
Her thoughts are of him.
/
This is the problem.
He kisses her only when the stars are exploding; when he can do little more than cling to her and squeeze his eyes shut as planets crumble in places he can not control.
And it is never enough.
The gold thread winds around them both, feeds into the dark corners of the Tardis where he hides his soul, into the crevices her slim fingers can not reach, into the parts of his heart her whispered words have not yet seeped through.
(My soul? I'd like to believe I am not a monster; I'd like to believe I deserve love, Amelia Pond. I'd like to believe I have a soul.)
(I love you, I love you, I always have. But I will never ever tell you. You wouldn't believe me if I did.)
She dusts off his jacket, smooths her hand over the lapels to grip his shoulders tight tight tight.
Presses their mouths together, tells herself it's one last time.
And when she sleeps she dreams of a garden such a long time ago, and a mad man in a blue box; and the curse of loving him burns in crimson patterns behind her eyes.