Ahaha, I just remembered I had an FFN account. Hey there, it sure has been a while.
Title: Stationary Orbit
Author: silver_sandals
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: Amy/Rory/Eleven/River, Asexual!Eleven, Rory POV
Warnings: psychological torture, House-style; imaginary character death
Word count: 2,567
Spoilers: up to 6x04
Summary: Rory is trying to find out what happened to his polyamorous space marriage, but neither Amy nor the Doctor want to talk about it. It's hard being the adult on the TARDIS sometimes. And then there's River.
"Here we are," the Doctor said with a dramatic flurish of the arms. "Leadworth, twenty-seven June two-thousand ten, the morning after your wedding. Out you go, and cheer up, both of you, you've just had your wedding night."
He looked about as cheerful as Rory felt. Amy had on her mercurial frown. Rory had somehow ended up with both suitcases. He followed Amy out of the TARDIS, and stood there in Amy's back yard, blinking in the sunlight for a moment.
"Wait," he said, and turned around, but the door was closed and the TARDIS was already fading from sight, wheezing and spluttering back into the vortex.
"He's terrible at goodbyes," Amy mumbled. She punched Rory half-heartedly. "He said he'd be in touch, remember? He's not gone forever."
Rory looked around the garden. It seemed so suddenly small. He saw the old rotted tree stump he'd once stood on to escape from deadly lava. Amy had clambered up next to him and they hadn't both fit very well, so they'd had to cling to each other desperately for a wild moment before both collapsing in a heap on the muddy ground. He looked at the shed. It had never made a good Magic Blue Box, and they'd had to wash off the paint that one time, but they'd tried their best anyway. They'd tried.
"Where to now?" Amy said. Rory saw she was trying to be brave, to make this just one more adventure, and he felt the knot at the bottom of his stomach dissolve a little in a wave of affection.
"The new flat, I suppose," he said. That had been the plan, in that quiet almost-universe without the mad man in the box. "We can get the bus. We're supposed to have been there last night, we'd better hurry up and make the place look lived in."
He took her hand. She let him. They quietly sneaked out of that small damp garden together.
The flat filled up with things. Rory got a pay raise, despite the economy. Amy was fired, for circumstances which she insisted were not her fault, but she landed a job a week later at her father's friend's video store. She wore her frowny face and stormed about nepotism but Rory could tell she was happy about it. Maybe that was the problem. Amy sometimes felt guilty about happiness.
Rory was happy too, or at least, he told everyone he was. He had everything he'd ever allowed himself to dream of, and if he sometimes started to tell a joke to thin air, if he woke up at night reaching for a third warm body on the other side, if he found himself sleepwalking, that was just a natural consequence of readjusting to somewhat smaller dreams.
"Look," he tried to say once, while he was chopping up onions in their tiny kitchen, "did you two ever have a conversation when I wasn't there, I mean, do you know why-"
"No," she said. "Hey, do you need me in here or can I go? The onions are making my eyes water."
"Mine too," Rory said quietly. The words pressed heavy on his tongue. What happened? Whatever it was, I wish it hadn't. I liked things the way they were. I didn't want it to end, whatever it was. Whatever we had.
The kitchen was bright and deceptively peaceful, but Rory had traveled for long enough to know that any kind of safety was always just an illusion. He hadn't thought he'd miss the adrenaline rush this much. He twisted the metal band on his ring finger. It didn't feel as right as it should, somehow.
Pushing the Doctor's funeral boat out into the Great Salt Lake wasn't the most horrible moment of Rory's life, but it definitely made the top ten, at least. He knew he'd be reliving that in his dreams for a while. Amy's screams were the worst thing about that day.
He thought his knees might give way when the Doctor hugged him in the diner, that familiarly strange combination of frailty and strength heightened by the memories heavy in Rory's mind. He wanted to protect the Doctor. He wanted to impress him. He kind of wanted to hit him. In the end, all he did was poke the skinny chest and marvel once more at the incomprehensibility of the universe.
In 1969 the Doctor kissed him on the forehead when he was unzipping him from that horrible body bag, and for a moment Rory's heart leaped, but then there was a lot more running around and then they lost Amy. "I really love you," she said. "I know you think I shouldn't, that I should love him, but I don't, I love you," and Rory held the little button to his heart and whispered, "I'll bring you the Doctor, I promise," because protecting Amy was, ultimately, the only thing that mattered.
The Doctor crouched down next to him with worry and affection in his dark eyes and Rory felt like snogging him or punching him or maybe just screaming, but it wasn't important, it didn't matter. Amy mattered.
"Stupidface," she said, and for a second everything was still. She'd always had the ability to do that to him, freeze his world, at those moments when he was least expecting it.
"You do love the Doctor, though, right?" he wanted to say later, but he couldn't quite get the words out. Plus, he didn't think the answer would be at all helpful. Amy wasn't a helpful person. She was just herself. And the post-adrenaline sex was pretty fantastic, so it wasn't until morning that he thought about it, and then he just filed it to the back of his head to think about later. There were a lot of papers in that filing cabinet now. Two thousand years and several deaths among them. Don't think about that. Not important.
They didn't discuss it. It was just understood that Rory and Amy were traveling in the TARDIS again. He'd stupidly expected things to go back to the way they were before. They did, sort of. Except whenever he tried to kiss the Doctor, or even just take his hand, he shied away like a frightened horse.
"I thought you liked kissing," Rory said.
"Well, yes," said the Doctor. "But there are so many other fun things to do. Like eat ice cream! Have you ever tasted the ice cream on Regel Four? Fifty million flavors, and most of them aren't hallucinogenic- though if that's your thing, that's fun too!"
"Doctor," said Rory, but he was gone, spinning around the console, pressing buttons and pulling levers. He'd taken to touching the TARDIS more since they'd left, Rory noticed. As though to make up for a lack of human touching.
Maybe he should have just let House kill them. He'd read enough science fiction and experienced enough of the real thing to know that there were definitely some fates worse than death. But he also knew from experience that however awful the fate it wasn't usually permanent, and as long as he and Amy and the Doctor could find their way back to each other eventually the bad memories could be filed away and all the pain would be worth it. So he ran.
He thought House had probably read a lot of science fiction too. It split them up. Rory turned a corner and Amy wasn't there and he pounded at the walls and screamed "Give her back to me!" and probably a lot of other equally stupid stuff. After a while he stopped, and listened instead. There was someone else screaming, a long way off. Rory ran, and ran, down endless green corridors, and then he skidded to a stop before he ran into the Doctor, who was on the floor, curled up and screaming, a terrible scream, a sound Rory had never wanted to hear from any animal, a soul-rending sound of pure pain.
Rory tried to get him to uncurl but as soon as he touched the other man he spasmed with a sound uncomfortably like cracking bone. The screams died down into ragged sobs. There were no visible marks on him. Rory stroked his damp hair. "You're going to be all right," he said. He looked up at the walls. "What're you doing to him?"
"I'm eating him," House chuckled in that mahogany voice. "He tastes delicious."
"Let him go," Rory said. He tried to sound dark and dangerous. He remembered being Roman, the feel of the sword in his hand and the gurgling sound when it stabbed into a human body.
"Or what?" said House.
"Amy," the Doctor whispered.
"I don't know where she is, Doctor," said Rory. "We got separated."
"You're supposed to look after her," said the Doctor. "You've lost her. Humans. You never listen, do you? If only you hadn't wandered off."
"You're the one who locked us in the TARDIS," Rory pointed out. He wiped the sweat from the Doctor's forehead and felt more helpless than he'd ever felt in his life.
"I wanted you to be safe," the alien croaked. "I loved you, Rory. Why didn't you love me back?"
"I did," Rory said, throat tight with tears. "Of course I did."
"Then why didn't you tell me?" the Doctor said. "You're just saying it now to be kind. Kind nurse Rory... you couldn't save Amy, you can't even save me, so what are you good for?"
His breathing stopped.
"No," Rory wailed, and he pressed the Doctor's hand to his chest and struggled to take his own breaths. "You can't, you can't die, we all need you, why do you think I took a shot for you the first time you idiot, come on, please- oh god, I'm so sorry, I'm sorry I'm such a failure-"
"Rory I'm sorry!" Amy cried.
Rory blinked. He was holding on to nothing. The Doctor had vanished. The corridor was filled with a gentle green glow, and Amy was crying nearby.
"It was playing with our minds," he shouted. She just held on to him, as if she was afraid he might not be real. There was a deep, dark horror in her eyes. Rory would have eagerly given ten years off his life for the Doctor to be here now. But he wasn't. It was up to them.
So he pulled himself together and saved the day. And the TARDIS died. Kind of. Rory reached for Amy for reassurance, and she let him hold on to her. They held on to each other. The Doctor looked so sad, and there wasn't anything Rory could do to fix him.
None of us are all right, he thought. We just go on anyway.
They lost the bunk beds, which was good. He gave it one last desperate try. "Do you have a room?" he asked, trying to put as much meaning as possible into five words. The Doctor glanced at him, startled, and then Amy was pulling him away.
"What?" he asked. "I was trying to get somewhere, why did you-"
"Can't I just have you to myself tonight?" Amy said.
He glared at her. "Some time you're going to have to tell me what happened with you two."
She didn't say anything, just started pulling off his jacket. Rory gave in.
And then there was River, who was a whole other level of complicated. She was cool and collected and everything Rory had tried to be when he was playing the Raggedy Doctor at age eleven, back in Leadworth. He saw the look in her eyes when she talked to the Doctor, but he didn't feel particularly threatened on that front- the Doctor really didn't know her, probably wouldn't for hundreds of years, by which time Rory and Amy would be comfortably dead. He was more worried when he saw the way Amy looked at River.
They discussed it once, on their extended space honeymoon, during a thirty-hour stay in a dank, shoddily constructed alien prison, after they'd already exhausted all the variations of Truth and Dare they could remember.
"Did you?" he asked.
"What? No!"
"Do you want to?"
She looked away for a moment, and then, "Yes," because she was Amy and he was Rory and they'd learned the hard way that honesty is sometimes the only possible defense. Then she said "Er," because it was still an incredibly awkward conversation, "of course I won't- I mean- er," and Rory realized it was his turn to pick up the conversational ball there.
Okay, so it wasn't like he hadn't thought about it, what it would mean, to share her that way, of course he'd thought about it before he realized the Doctor wasn't interested in sex. But that was different, it was the Doctor, it was the person he'd been reluctantly sharing Amy with all their lives. Maybe it would be different, if there wasn't any of that emotional- stuff, there. He hadn't minded when she was a kissogram. It wasn't really the same thing though.
She was Amy. She was an adventurer, he'd had years to come to terms with that. If he had to explain to someone why he loved her- which he couldn't really, there were no reasons, he just loved her like he breathed air, like he needed to help people- that adventurous side of her might be a big part of it. She was impulsive. She was weird.
"Well," he said, and that was when the cell door imploded in a shower of pebbles to reveal a very dusty Doctor, who immediately began shouting at them to run, and maybe that was a good thing because he hadn't a clue what he was going to say anyway.
And then a year later there was 1969 and she was confiding in him, and he almost hated her a little for that, for letting him see her so weak, because he couldn't help but feel for her, and maybe empathize a little because, well, he was sort of pining after the Doctor too. And then the Doctor explained his brilliant, stupid plan, and Rory realized he was going to have to get over himself, for Amy's sake. And after they'd all spent some time cooped up together in tiny hotel rooms, him and Amy and River, he did start to see why Amy and the Doctor liked her so much. She never spoke down to him, she sometimes even enlisted him in plans to cheer Amy up. And sometimes she told them stories, and sometimes they all sat on the floor and missed the Doctor together, and it was so much easier, like that.
He came to his decision in one of those hotel rooms, but he didn't say anything, because they were all so tired and so stressed and they might die at any moment. And yes, maybe there was never going to be a good time, but that was the way things were, that was life as an adventurer.
And then they didn't see her for a while after that, and Amy and Rory slept in their double bed in their new room and Rory lay awake and watched Amy sleep and listened to the Doctor pottering about somewhere and wished chronic insomnia was the worst of his problems.