Not Quite a Gardener
Summary: She should have been taking care of their newborn baby girl instead of taking care of flowers. Amy Pond, gardening, and the baby she never got to nurture. One-shot set after 6x07 (AGMGtW).
Author's Note: Written for the prompt 'water'.
Disclaimer: Don't own it; don't sue me.
Once, in a half-remembered dream world, Amy had loved gardening.
She started tending the flowerbeds when she found out she was pregnant. All of a sudden, she was overcome with the fear that she would be terrible at being a mother, and since Rory was allergic to dogs and cats and she wasn't much of a fan of fish unless they were fried, that left one thing to practice with: plants.
It gave her something to do in sleepy Upper Leadworth while Rory was working. She would waddle about their garden under a floppy straw hat with her watering can in hand. She discussed her plans for the garden with Rory, who patiently drove her to the nursery every weekend and bordered and re-bordered the garden beds when she changed her mind about how everything looked.
As the months went by and her stomach expanded, she watched in triumph as shoots became buds which then blossomed into bright and perfect flowers. She loved walking along the garden beds and drinking in the colours: each bloom seemed to say, See? You can nurture life. You can make things grow up the way they should, and the baby often kicked her as if to agree. When she got too big to bend over, Rory took over most of the work, and she would watch him in the late afternoons from the comfort of a nearby lawn chair, her hands absent-mindedly stroking her rounded belly, a smile on her face. And for all its smallness, she found that she liked this world of theirs. It was just them, Amy and Rory and their as-yet-unnamed baby, in their little house with their little garden.
It might have been a dream, but the memory of the colours in the flowerbed and that feeling of life growing inside her lingered on long after she woke up on the TARDIS.
After Demon's Run, Amy took up gardening in the real world. They didn't have a proper garden, but she made Rory drive her to the nearest nursery so she could buy some pot plants to scatter around their small flat.
She was fiercely protective of them, constantly moving them so they could catch the best sunlight, reading magazines and books to figure out the most nutritious combination of water and plant food, watering them with a strange and tender look in her eyes. It gave her something to do, instead of staring at her phone or wandering aimlessly around their flat - a flat that was perfect for a young couple of newlyweds, a couple without children.
But they weren't just a couple of newlyweds. They had a baby. They had a baby, and she had disappeared, and now they were back in their lives with everything the same as when they'd left for Utah, as if nothing had ever happened, as if Melody had never existed.
The worst part was that Amy couldn't even remember how it felt to have her baby growing inside her. She didn't get to watch her belly expand; she didn't get to send Rory out on emergency grocery runs whenever she had a weird craving; she didn't get to see his face light up when he felt their baby kick for the first time or have him hold her hair back when she threw up from morning sickness.
She and Rory should have been taking it in turns to wake up to Melody's cries in the early hours of the morning instead of taking it in turns to water the plants. They should have been arguing about whose turn it was to change dirty nappies instead of arguing about whether it was time to re-pot. She should have been taking care of their newborn baby girl instead of taking care of flowers.
Despite her best efforts, all the energy and time she spent poring over gardening magazines and watching home and garden programmes, slowly but surely, her flowers began to fade.
Rory came home one afternoon to find Amy kneeling in front of a dead plant, crying bitterly. He joined her on the floor and wrapped his arms around her, his hands resting over hers on her stomach.
"It's gone," she sobbed, over and over again. "I can't even look after a stupid pot plant."
Here they were, just Amy and Rory once again, alone in the small, cheap flat that felt too big for just the two of them now.
Fin