A.N.: I hadn't actually planned to write anything during Series 6 in my original timeline of the stories in this Verse, but I had this idea when I was re-watching The Pandorica Opens and The Big Bang for The Doctor's Prayer, and I just had to write it.
Warnings: Reference to psychological torture, Rory self-bashing/self-hating, mild violence, strong religious themes, Doctor self-hating/self-bashing
Series summary: The TARDIS doesn't always take the Doctor where he wants to go, but it always takes him where he needs to go; Time Lords hold a secret behind their backs, and they have a duty to follow.
Disclaimer: Don't own Doctor Who
Rory batted away the hand that was attempting to stroke his cheek. "Get off of me! Stop it!"
"Ah, come on!" the man drawled, his vowels drawn out by the alcohol in his system. "I'll buy you a drink first!"
"I'm married," Rory told him forcefully, but that only seemed to fuel the mischievous fire in the man's slightly glazed-over eyes.
"Brilliant!" he exclaimed, a lopsided grin forming on his face. "Is it a she or a he? It doesn't matter, they can come along anyway."
With a shove, Rory and the Doctor pushed the disastrously inebriated man into the Zero Room and quickly locked the door behind him. The sight of just a glimpse of the inside of that room was still enough to send shivers of fear down Rory's spine, but the apprehension quickly morphed into anger when the Doctor leaned back against the now closed door and began to laugh.
"Who is he, anyway?" Rory asked harshly, gesturing towards the door to the Zero Room. The Doctor had neglected to tell Rory of many of the identities of the soldiers in the army that they had been gathering over the last few months with which they were going to attack Demon's Run, and for the most part, Rory could forgive him for that; but when the soldiers were drunk and far too handsy for his liking, he felt that he needed to at least know their names.
"Jack Harkness," the Doctor explained as his mirth began to die down and he pushed himself up off of the door to head back to the control room. Rory went to follow him, casting the door to the Zero Room a wary look before he jogged slightly to catch up with the Time Lord. "Captain Jack Harkness, actually. He wasn't worthy of that rank when he… acquired it, but he's certainly worthy of it now. When he's sober."
But, by this point, Rory was only half-listening. Despite his desperate attempts to stay on track with the conversation and not slip into dreadful memories, he found that he was failing in that task, and suddenly he was back in a House-controlled TARDIS being used as 'entertainment'.
He wasn't entirely sure what had happened to Amy when the door in the corridor of the TARDIS had closed between them and separated them from each other – only that when he had finally been reunited with her, she had been staring into space in the middle of another corridor and sobbing. It was clear from that moment on that House had been messing with both of them, and if what he had put Amy through was even half as bad as what he had subjected Rory to, then the death that he had experienced hadn't been nearly slow or painful enough for the Roman's liking.
When the door had slammed shut between the two of them, Rory had immediately searched for a way to get back to Amy. The corridors moved and changed and the doors all looked the same but were different, until he had pulled open a large, metal door and was faced with a room rather than a corridor.
Cautiously, his warrior brain on full alert, he had stepped inside the bright white room, looking for any signs of the fiery red hair of his wife. He had seen nothing of the sort by the time the door behind him slammed shut, clanging ominously across the walls of whatever room this was.
Now knowing that Amy wasn't in this room, Rory had raced up to the door and tried to open it again, but it wouldn't budge.
"Welcome to the Zero Room, Rory," declared the horrible deep, slow voice of House, amusement drenching his tone.
Rory had growled in frustration, stepping back from the door and looking all around the white walls – brighter than anything else that he had ever seen – trying to find another way out.
That was when the torment had started: a form of torture that was impossible to escape and impossible to ignore. House didn't employ bright lights or loud noises or thumb screws or some kind of laser beam that attacked his very cells. He didn't harm Rory physically at all.
He just talked.
At first, Rory merely brushed off the things that he was saying, but eventually, after what seemed like hours and hours of repetition of the same things over and over and over again, he had begun to believe what he was being told. He began to believe all of the horrible things that House was telling him about himself; things that he had always, deep down, feared were true, but that he had never dared to let himself dwell on for too long.
The sight of Amy once more after finally escaping from the Zero Room was enough to banish those things to the recesses of his mind, and the rush of getting to the control room and Idris dying and getting a new bedroom – this time without bunk beds – was enough to make him forget about the awful time that he had spent trapped in the Zero Room, and the terrible things that he had been forced to listen to.
That was, until he had gone back to the Zero Room to put this Jack Harkness in there to sober up, and the memory of what had happened to him in there returned with a vengeance.
In the time between Idris dying and that moment, Rory still would have denied the truth of all of the things that House had told him when he had been locked in the Zero Room. But now, as he and the Doctor travelled across the cosmos and the Time Lord collected his debts from all across space and time, he couldn't help but wonder if maybe – just maybe – House had been right all along.
After all, the Doctor was calling in favours from hundreds of years' worth of his life and asking people to risk their lives for him, all for Amy's sake. Of course, Rory didn't doubt for a second that Amy was worth it, and if he had had people in his debt who he could ask to do the same thing, then he would be at their door in seconds, but still…
It made him wonder…
"Rory? Rory!"
Rory jumped as he saw a hand being waved in front of his face. He shook his head and blinked rapidly, tearing himself from his reverie. The hand was removed to reveal the Doctor's face – which was much closer to his own than Rory was entirely comfortable with – and which was wearing an expression that held a mixture of both concern and annoyance.
"Are you listening to me?" the Doctor asked impatiently, and Rory had half a mind to lie – that was, until he looked around himself and saw that he had been inside his head for so long that they had made it all the way back to the control room without him noticing.
Knowing the speed with which the Doctor could witter on, Rory realised that he'd probably missed something important that the Time Lord had said somewhere along the corridors, and it would be far less embarrassing to just admit that he hadn't been listening now than to find himself without a clue as to what was happening at some unspecified time in the future.
"Uh, no," he admitted apologetically, finding himself not quite able to meet the Doctor's eyes.
The Doctor sighed impatiently, whipping around on his heel and racing to the control panel. A few seconds later, there was a violent jerk and both of them nearly lost their footing.
"I said," the Doctor shouted over a loud fizz that began emanating from some circuit on the control panel; a handful of sparks flew from the console and landed atop the plastic floor, "we're staying overnight on a hospital planet just outside of the Oort Cloud – about the 42nd Century. By that time they've developed a universal cure for hangovers. Should sort Jack right out, when he wakes up.
"Besides," he added, as the TARDIS lurched again and they both ended up on the floor, "I doubt he'd really appreciate being thrown all around the Zero Room when he's had that many hyper vodkas," he finished, his voice slightly strained as he pulled himself to his feet, using the console to balance himself.
But the mention of the Zero Room only sent Rory's memory back to House, and – as the TARDIS righted itself and the control room was filled with the familiar wheezing sound as they came in to land, and he could stand up again without fear or being thrown to the ground again – this time, the Doctor noticed.
"Rory," the Time Lord began quietly, slowly, walking over to where the Roman was standing by the stairs that led to the rest of the TARDIS, "is there something wrong?"
Rory gulped nervously. He didn't have any particular desire to talk about what had happened to him while House had had control of the TARDIS, but there was something about the Doctor's age-old eyes as they bore into his own – some wise and powerful quality – that made him second-guess himself. Even so, he still preferred the lie.
"No," he shook his head, but the Doctor didn't seem convinced; the Time Lord's eyes just narrowed slightly with suspicion, and he didn't move away.
"We're going to get Amy back," he assured him.
"It's not that," Rory told him, wishing that he would leave him alone.
"Then what is it?" the Doctor all but snapped, the impatience evident in his voice. His eyes began flicking from side to side, taking in each element of Rory's face to look for any signs of what the concealed truth might be.
"It's nothing," Rory lied, now finding it very difficult to look at the Doctor's face.
The Doctor pursed his lips in annoyance. "What's rule number one?"
The question caught Rory by surprise. He looked back over at the Doctor, his brow creasing in confusion. "I'm sorry?"
"Rule number one; what is it?" he repeated.
"Uh… the Doctor lies?" Rory asked, not quite sure of where this conversation was going.
"Exactly. I lie, you don't. Now tell me the truth: what is wrong?"
Rory had seen how easily the Doctor could get distracted; he'd seem him stop mid-lecture to stare at a 'pretty light' on the console not so long ago. But when the Doctor was concentrating – reallyconcentrating – there wasn't a single thing in the entire universe that could drag his attention away from whatever it was that he was doing. At that moment, there could be a marching band in the control room playing a medley of all of the national anthems on Earth backwards, and the Doctor wouldn't even bat an eyelid – not until Rory answered his question honestly.
The Roman sighed, knowing that it was foolhardy to try and outwit the Doctor. He had no choice but to admit the doubts that were going through his head – the doubts that House had brought to the surface when he had been locked in the Zero Room.
"Am I… important?"
The Doctor couldn't believe what he was hearing. How could Rory have just asked him that? He could think of only one suitable reaction: he lifted his hand, and slapped him in the face.
"Ow!" Rory complained, as he lifted his hand up to the offended cheek, but the Doctor was already walking passed him and up the stairs.
"Follow me," he called back to the Roman, keeping his eyes fixed ahead of him as he made his way further into the depths of the TARDIS. He didn't need to look back to know that his instruction was being followed.
"You slapped me!" Rory exclaimed, his voice rife with indignation.
"Yes, I did. And there's more where that came from, if you're going to keep asking such stupid questions. Now, come on; there's something you need to know."
The two of them walked in silence through the corridors of the TARDIS, passed countless rooms and endless hallways, until they finally reached the door that the Doctor wanted. It was a large door, reaching at least eighteen inches above his head, the metal betraying the room on the other side. There was no door handle or knocker or anything else to distinguish it: it was a blank, grey expanse that was rather unremarkable. The Doctor stopped next to it, waiting for Rory to stand by the wall on the other side of the door.
"What is this?" Rory asked, looking the door up and down.
The Doctor smirked, saying nothing, and pushed the door open with one hand.
Rory looked inside as the room beyond the door was revealed, his eyes widening and his jaw dropping as he saw what room was there. As though transfixed, he slowly walked into the room, and the Doctor followed him as soon as there was enough space for him to, closing the door carefully behind him and turning into the room.
If the door had been large, then it was nothing compared to the room beyond. The ceiling was at least fifty feet over their heads, made of stone and decorated with figures that were slightly too far away to properly distinguish.
The floor was covered in a thin red carpet, and two rows of pews on either side made an aisle across the centre of the room, leading from the door to a slightly raised platform at the far end of the room. The far wall was made of Gallifreyan stained glass, designed to shine as brightly as Earth stained glass did even when it had no sun- or starlight shining through it.
By the time that the Doctor had closed the door and turned away from it, Rory was halfway to the platform at the front, looking around at the stone walls and the stone ceiling and the stained glass with wonderment in his eyes. It forced a warm smile onto the Doctor's face.
"It's a church," Rory said, sounding astonished – as though he could believe that the TARDIS could exist in one dimension on the outside and another dimension on the inside and was infinite and sentient and provided continually for the needs of all of its residents, whoever or whatever they may be, but it was impossible for him to comprehend that it could contain a room such as this.
"It's a chapel," the Doctor corrected him, taking a few steps down the aisle. Rory turned back to him.
"You could fit two hundred people in here," he observed. "It's a church."
The Doctor shrugged, leaning back against the end of the nearest pew and folding his arms over his chest. Rory was still looking all around the room, taking in new details and features of the complicated designs that were etched into every aspect of the room.
"But… why?" Rory asked, finally tearing his gaze away from the side wall and looking over at the Doctor.
"Why what?" the Doctor countered, feeling the corner of his mouth twitch slightly with amusement; he loved astonishing people.
"Why is it here? Why does the TARDIS need a church?"
"Why does anywhere need a church?" the Doctor replied quickly, seeing a flash of annoyance shoot through Rory's eyes at his continued answering of questions with questions.
"I wouldn't have put you down as religious," Rory commented.
"People rarely do," the Doctor said sadly, briefly casting his gaze down at the red carpet before looking back up at Rory. There was a momentary pause, before Rory spoke.
"Why are you showing me this?" he asked quietly, lifting his arm a little from his side to gesture ambiguously at the room before dropping it back down again. "What does this have to do with… what I said?"
The Doctor smiled sadly at him, and prepared to tell a long story.
"Time Lords don't need as much sleep as humans," he explained, "so when you and Amy go off to bed, I'm usually still up. Most of the time, I tinker in the control room or read in the library, and sometimes… sometimes, I come here.
"Then we faced a total event collapse. The universe was ending far before its time, because I've been to the end of the universe, and it certainly didn't end by the TARDIS exploding, and it certainly didn't end in what humans refer to as the early 21st Century. I didn't understand why something like that could have been allowed to happen. So I began to ask the only person who would have the answer."
"God?" Rory asked sceptically, and the Doctor nodded before continuing.
"I spent a lot of time in here, praying, after the Pandorica opened. It took so long for me to get an answer to my question, and when I did, it was only one word long. The entire universe nearly ended, all because of one word."
Rory gulped nervously. "What word?" he whispered, his voice small and slightly scared.
The Doctor smirked, though it didn't quite reach his eyes. "'Rory'," he said softly. A shiver ran visibly through Rory's body, and he reached out for the end of the pew that he was standing next to, gripping so tightly to the wood that his knuckles began to turn white.
"Wh-what do you mean?" he breathed, his eyes filling with fear.
The Doctor unfolded his arms and stood up a little straighter; he had a feeling that gesticulation would be necessary for this next bit.
"There are two kinds of points in time: fixed points, and points that are in flux. Points that are in flux can be changed, and altered, and there will be minimal consequences for the rest of reality.
"Fixed points, however, cannot be changed – under no circumstances can a fixed point ever be changed. They can be bent slightly, like a butterfly flapping its wings half a second later than it was supposed to, but they have to happen. Their links within the timelines are too ingrained and integral to the course of history that if they are prevented from happening, all of reality would collapse.
"Your death was one of those fixed points."
"Which one?" Rory joked, but there was still a hint of apprehension in his voice.
"The first one," the Doctor clarified with a sad smile. "No matter how events played out, you would always die in that cave in the Silurian city. It had to happen; it could not have been prevented."
"But it was," Rory said, sounding confused. "I didn't die in the cave."
"Yes you did, you were just erased from history and brought back as a Roman; that's not the same thing. In that cave, in the Silurian city, you died, and nothing anyone – not even I – could have done would be able to stop that from happening. Not without disastrous consequences for reality."
"But I'm still here." Rory's voice was thick as he spoke, small and terrified and almost tearful.
The Doctor smirked slightly. "And that's why the universe nearly ended."
"The universe nearly ended because I didn't die?"
The Doctor sighed impatiently, frustrated that Rory didn't understand what he was trying to tell him.
"No!" he exclaimed, pushing himself off of the end of the pew and turning so that he was facing Rory. "You did die. Your death was a fixed point in time. All of reality would have collapsed if you hadn't died – but that didn't mean that you had to stay dead."
Rory blinked at him, obviously still confused. "What?" he breathed.
The Doctor took a deep breath and got ready to explain himself more clearly. "You died. That had to happen. You had to die; but you didn't have to come back. You shouldn't have been able to come back. But you're here."
"Wait," Rory interrupted, holding his palms up, "so… what exactly are you saying?"
"The universe didn't nearly end because you didn't die in the Silurian cave; it nearly ended because you did. It nearly ended so that you could come back – so time would still be alright, and you could still be alive."
Rory said nothing, so the Doctor took that as licence to continue.
"Everything about the cracks – the Pandorica, the TARDIS exploding, the Alliance – it all happened to bring you back. So that when you died, in the Silurian cave, you wouldn't just die; no, you would be erased from time.
"Because just being dead wasn't enough – you had to have never existed; you had to have been fiction, otherwise the Alliance couldn't have rebuilt you as plastic from Amy's memories. They couldn't work from something that actually existed; they took a fictional box and fictional Romans and a fictional Rory and made them real, and brought them back, so that the cracks could be fixed with the box that they had built and you could be brought back, because you hadn't just died – you'd been erased from time itself.
"When we were standing underneath Stonehenge, you asked me how you could have been there, and I said it was a miracle, because it was. But miracles happen for a reason; miracles happen because people are important. So don't you ever ask me if you're important ever again, do you understand me?"
Rory gulped and nodded nervously. He had paled considerably during the Doctor's monologue, and had begun to tremble slightly. Now that the Time Lord had finished, the turned into the pew next to him and sat down with a flop, staring into space with eyes that had glazed over.
The Doctor watched him for a minute, not quite able to comprehend what was going through his head. He found himself doubting for a moment whether or not he should have told Rory about what he had discovered about the near demise of the universe throughout all of the nights that he had spent on his knees in this very room, begging for some kind of explanation as to why such a thing could have been allowed to happen, but there was a gentle, affirmative nudge at the edge of his mind, and he relaxed slightly, knowing that he had done right by the Roman.
"I…" Rory tried, but he didn't seem to have anything to say. "I don't…"
The Doctor chuckled lightly. "I didn't expect you to."
"What?" he asked forcefully, looking over at the Doctor, who merely shrugged.
"I'd give you a hug, but I don't have Amy's permission."
Rory let out a breathy laugh, reaching up to scratch at his brow. "That works both ways, does it?" he asked, dropping his hand back down.
"Of course," the Doctor insisted. "You don't think I operate any double standards, do you?"
That was rewarded with a proper laugh: a contagious laugh, followed by a thick silence.
Rory looked away, his head dropping so that his chin was on his chest, and his gaze was fixed on the red carpet of the aisle between the two rows of pews. The Doctor, however, did not look away; he stared at the Roman, trying to understand what was going through his head.
The Doctor had never really had to deal with anything quite as life-changing as this. The universe had certainly never conspired to save him before; certainly not to the same extent that it had to ensure that Rory didn't stay dead. He really didn't know how to proceed from that moment on – which was an incredibly odd feeling.
Yet, thankfully, he was spared the responsibility of having to think of something to say by Rory speaking himself.
"How am I supposed to believe that?" he asked, turning slowly to the Doctor once more.
"What, that I don't operate a double standard?" the Doctor joked softly, but Rory only gave him a small smile and shook his head.
"That that could happen. I don't believe in stuff like this-" he gestured towards the stained glass window, "but then you tell me that-" he waved his hand over at the Doctor, "and I just… how do I believe that?"
The Doctor's mouth twitched slightly. "You don't have to. But it's true."
"Give me proof," Rory demanded, banging his fist against the back of the pew behind him. There was a determination in his eyes – a quality that was just so Roman – that the Doctor was almost frightened to deny his request.
"Okay," he nodded, walking forward to the pew in which Rory was sitting, and standing in front of him. Rory rose to his feet, a slight confusion in his eyes as to what the Doctor was going to do.
The Doctor shifted slightly on his feet, clasping his hands in front of him and fidgeting with his fingers. He flicked his eyes from side to side, trying to choose which eye he wanted to look at – for he had discovered that it was impossible to actually look at someone in both of their eyes at the same time. Settling on the left one, he spoke softly to explain what he was going to do.
"I'm going to need access to your mind for a few seconds," he explained. "I promise I won't look at anything in your head, I just need to… do something."
"You're going to alter my mind?" Rory asked bitterly, and the Doctor realised that he wasn't explaining himself very well again.
"No," he corrected himself, choosing a different wording. "It's like there's a switch inside your head, and I'm going to flick it from the 'off' position to the 'on' position. Except it isn't like a switch, it's more like a door. Do you understand?"
Rory looked at him, incredulous. "What? No!"
The Doctor sighed. "The point is, it's perfectly safe, and I'll reverse the change after a minute or so. And it'll give you the proof you need."
Rory gulped, looking rather unsure. It was an excruciating age – but was probably more like three seconds – before he nodded, and stood himself up a little straighter. The Doctor tried to ignore how much like a soldier he looked when he did that. A twinge of guilt always pulled at the Doctor's hearts when he was reminded of what he had done to the man who was currently standing before him – he'd taken a nurse from a small town and turned him into a warrior.
Bad Doctor.
He tentatively reached out his long fingers, pressing them into Rory's temples and closing his eyes.
His personal telepathic field surrounded his head like a bubble, pressing closely against his head and his hair and his face. Picturing that bubble in his head, he extended it, pushing it forward to loop around Rory's head as well. A door appeared before him, and he knew that the Roman was standing on the other side, and the door itself was locked.
The Doctor reached into his mental pocket and plucked out his mental sonic screwdriver and pointed it at the door. The buzzing wouldn't have been heard from the other side of the door as he unlocked it with the screwdriver and it opened slightly, just enough for Rory to be able to squeeze through.
Before Rory could go through the door, the Doctor began to recall his telepathic field, releasing Rory's head from the bubble and returning it to its original place around his own head. When he opened his eyes and pulled back his hands – dropping them down to his sides – Rory's eyes were still closed. It was a couple of minutes before he opened them – and they immediately widened.
Rory stumbled back, away from the Doctor. The heels of his feet caught the slight step up into the pew behind him, and he had to reach out for the back of both the pew into which he was retreating and the pew in front so as to prevent himself from falling backwards onto the floor in front of the bench. He stopped half-way into the pew; the Doctor didn't move from where he stood just beyond the front of the pew.
"You have wings?" Rory asked, stunned, looking at each of the Doctor's wings in turn. The Doctor flexed them slightly, flapping the very ends gently to send a small gust of air in Rory's direction; it gently ruffled the nurse's hair. Rory nodded, almost absent-mindedly. "Okay."
The Doctor shifted slightly from side to side, a smirk on his lips as he showed off his pinions like a peacock displaying its feathers. He hadn't yet had the chance to really show these new blue wings off yet – the only person who could see them now was River, and every version of her that he had met so far had already seen them before in her personal timeline. Up to this point, he hadn't been entirely sure how he would act when showing them to someone for the first time – now, he knew that he was a massive show-off.
"What do you think?" he asked smugly, holding out his arms. The tips of his fingers barely reached the middle of the limbs, so he stretched the wings out as well – reaching out with the feathers as far from his spine as he could make them do so.
"You have wings," Rory repeated, apparently still too in shock to form a proper opinion. The Doctor found that rather irritating; he dropped his hands back down to his sides with a muffled slap in disappointment. "Why can't I always see them?"
"Humans can't," the Doctor explained. "They're not strong enough; it would be like looking at the sun for too long."
"What about when I was plastic?" Rory queried, now beginning to visibly relax.
The Doctor shook his head. "Autons aren't strong enough either. There aren't many people who are."
"Oh," Rory mumbled, nodding slightly. A moment passed before the nurse was bold enough to approach the Doctor again – though he took very small steps across the pew until he was once again standing before the Doctor. He was looking out at the wings, his head turned to the side and away from the Doctor's face.
"What did Amy say?" he asked, turning back to the Doctor. "When she saw them?"
The Doctor's frustration at Rory returned, prickling irritatingly at his very skin. Even after all that had happened between them since Rory had first boarded the TARDIS, and everything that the Doctor had told him since they had entered this room, he still thought he was second best to everyone: that he was second best in Amy's book behind the Doctor, and that he was second best in the Doctor's book behind Amy.
"She hasn't seen them," the Doctor told him, and Rory's brow furrowed in confusion.
"What do you mean, she hasn't seen them?"
"I mean, she hasn't seen them," the Doctor repeated. He reached around with his left wing, placing the tip on Rory's shoulder. The Roman looked down at the feathers now touching him briefly before he returned his gaze to the Doctor's face. "You're the first."
"Why?"
The Doctor gave him a small smile. "Because you're important."
A pregnant pause followed, and this time, the Doctor knew just how to break it: he lifted his wing from Rory's shoulder and battled the very last feather against the tip of his nose.
Rory's entire face screwed up, his nose twitching rapidly from side to side before he sneezed rather loudly. The Doctor chuckled as Rory recovered, reaching up to scratch his nose aggressively before shooting a quick glare at the offending wing.
"Now come on," the Doctor grinned, reaching out to Rory's head to close the door in the Roman's mind, "let's go get Amy."
A.N.2: The next story will be a lengthy oneshot like this one, but I just want to warn you before I post it: it is slash! There will be slash! This will happen. Just thought you ought to know about it in advance...
UPDATE 13/08/14: The next part of the Angel!Verse, Bright and Colourless, is up now.