Amy + Rory
Melody wouldn't settle.
Amy rocked her and sang to her and tried to remember the bedtime stories she had once told to calm her daughter - a lifetime ago - but all in vein. Melody just cried in her mothers arms, and Amy's heart carried on breaking.
They'd left the books in the house. Her and Rory, neither of them had even thought.
Books. A small comfort. In a world that had been yet to go to hell.
It wouldn't have hurt to pick up a few, before they'd hit the road.
"We can't keep doing this." Amy whispered, voice hoarse. Rory looked over at her from across the fire, frowning.
"Doing what?"
"This. Running towards nothing."
"There's nothing else we can do."
"We can try."
Rory said nothing. Sat and watched his wife for a while. Her red hair was mussed and pulled back in a tangled ponytail, her brown eyes seemed to have sunken and she was pale and thin and drained.
He remembered a time, not that long ago, when there had been a point. A point of surviving. Before the sky had burned and the stars had died and the earthquakes devastated every point of the earth and there had been life. When there were cars and people and streets and shops and food and no threat of an apocalypse.
Melody would never know that world. All she would now was death and destruction and fear and isolation. Amy had been seven months pregnant when it had started. When they packed and left.
Sure, they had survived the apocalypse, travelled half the damn world in the process, but now what? How long until the solar flares changed course? How long until the food ran out?
"Maybe there's other people out there. We can't be the only ones who upped and left as soon as it started." Rory offered, twisting his wedding ring around his finger.
Amy weighed him down with her tired eyes but didn't answer. Standing up, she tucked Melody into the rickety plastic cot and unrolled her own dusty sleeping bag. Turning once more to her husband, she spoke.
"If there are others out there, it's about bloody time we found them."
Rory couldn't help smiling slightly. "Now you sound like you." Joining her, he wrapped his arms around her and pressed an affectionate kiss to her forehead. Amy buried her face in his shoulder, a soft moan escaping her.
"Why did this happen, Rory? Why now?" She whispered, tears slipping down her cheeks.
Chin rested on top of Amy's head, gazing sadly at their sleeping daughter - so young, far too young to be living in such a harsh world - Rory sighed. "I wish I knew."
John + Clara
"They're getting closer."
"What?"
"The solar flares."
"Oh, right. How can you tell?"
Clara shuffled closer to him, gaze following where his hand was pointing. Above them, a haze of gold rippled for a few seconds then disappeared, leaving warm air in its wake.
"There. Disturbances in the sky." John sighed and let his arm fall. "Not long now, Clara."
The couple lay on the roof of the old, battered car that John was so fond of, staring up at the early morning sky. Clara couldn't help noticing how close the Sun now was.
"You once asked me to show you the stars." John turned to her, playing with her hair.
Clara gazed up at him, a playful smile on her lips. "When we first met. I was drunk and you were pouring over those damn star charts. How did you go from Astronomy to medicine?" She laughed at the memory, then sighed. "And when you finally graduated and became a Doctor. Don't think I've ever seen you happier. Jesus. It feels like a lifetime ago."
John intertwined their fingers together, feeling the cold silver of the engagement ring he had given to her so long ago. "Because it was a lifetime ago. The world has changed so much, and we've adapted to it, learnt to survive for the past seven months."
"Seven months?" Clara frowned at him. "How do you know? I stopped counting."
He smiled at her. "Seven months and nine days. Calender. Marking off the days."
She laughed at him. "Course you are."
They lay in silence for what felt like hours, watching the sky brighten and the ever-close Sun rise. Clara rested her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat.
"If things were okay -" John started.
"You mean if the apocalypse hadn't happened." Clara corrected him.
"Well, yeah, that too. What do you think might've happened? To us, I mean."
Clara had had too many days and nights to think about that, about how different their lives would be if the damn Universe had worked in their favor.
The answer wasn't hard.
"We would have got married at St Peter's Church, and our honeymoon would've been in the Caribbean. We would've had three kids, to boys and a girl, and one of the boys would have taken after you, the other would like painting and the girl would bake souffle's and cakes with me after school while you were at work." She took a deep breath. "A family. We would have been happy."
John remained silent, quickly wiping the tears from his eyes so she wouldn't notice. "We still can be."
"The world's ending, John. We're going to die." Clara whispered, squeezing her eyes shut.
"But put it this way." He raised her hand to his lips and kissed it. "I'm glad I'm dying by your side."