"I'm bored," the Doctor declared, flopping down on the couch. "I want to play with Kate."
"Welcome to our life, Doctor," Rory said.
"I don't like it," the Doctor pouted. "It's too quiet. Nothing fun ever happens."
"And you can't go play with Kate, she's busy," Rory said. "Don't you have anything to do?"
"Amy told me to stop reseeding the yard."
"We didn't need it- ugh. You've done enough chores for the day. For the week." Rory shuffled through the papers he had been reading for work. "Go find Amy."
"Someone looking for me?" Amy walked into the room, a tote bag slung over her shoulder.
"The Doctor says he's bored," Rory said.
"We could play chess," the Doctor offered.
"Ah, no."
"Why not?"
"Because one, I'm busy with my job you keep making me miss, and two, you're a sore loser."
"If you're bored, then you can come with me," Amy said. "I'm going to the library to work on my genealogy project."
"The library?" The Doctor asked.
"If you don't want to work with me, then you can look at books or something."
"No, sounds fun! I'll get in the car."
-
"This is boring."
The Doctor was sitting on an uncomfortable computer chair next to Amy, who was scrolling through census records on .
"I thought you liked history," Any said, switching back to her family tree to type in some information.
"Not when you've seen it like I have," the Doctor said. "We've gone into the future. Ridden dinosaurs. Met Vincent van Gogh. Reset the universe. And you want to look up your family from World War II. We were IN World War II."
"Oh, stop whinging. Hey, I've got my family back to the 18th century!" Amy pointed at the computer screen. "Look at this!"
"That is something!"
"I started with what I knew about my family, then used census records from there. The census doesn't go back very far, just to 1841, I think. Before that I had to rely on parish records, which can be spotty."
"I see you put Rory' s family in too," the Doctor said, looking at the bottom of the tree. He looked at the next level and saw a pink box that said "Melody Pond," connected to a pink box that said "Amelia Jessica Williams (Pond)" and a blue box that said "Rory Arthur Williams." "And you put River."
"She is our daughter, even with everything that's happened. "She's still Melody Pond." Amy paused. "Which reminds me, I'm missing someone." She brought up a dialogue and made a new, blue box on the family tree, and typed "The Doctor." It was attached to Melody's box. "There, I just put you in the tree as our son of law."
"Why?" The Doctor asked.
"Because you married our daughter. No arguing," Amy replied. "So, you get to be part of our family, with Rory and Brian and me. Part of the Pond and Williams Clan."
"I haven't been part of a clan in a long time," the Doctor said. "My friend Jamie adopted me, he said I could be part of his clan. He was attached to Clan McClaren."
"McClaren?" Amy repeated. "I have some McClarens back in the 1700s, I think." She scrolled up to the earliest names. "Here they are, I'm a descendant of Kirsty McClaren."
"Kirsty?" the Doctor said, looking at the tree. "Ah, daughter of a laird!"
"Yeah, that's why I was able to find records. Unless you were landed gentry, they didn't do a particularly good job on archive keeping."
The Doctor then noticed the box next to Kirsty. James Robert McCrimmon.
"She married a McCrimmon, and they had five children," Amy continued. "I'm a descendant of their daughter Victoria. She married Colin Pond."
"And from Clan McClaren to Clan Pond," the Doctor observed.
"I found it interesting," Amy said.
They sat there for a while, the Doctor living in the past and Amy typing in names. Finally the Doctor said something. "I'm going to look at the videos." He stood up and began to walk away. He then turned back to Amy. "So, James Robert McCrimmon. How long did he live?"
"He was born in 1727," Amy said. "And he died in 1807."
"Eighty years!" the Doctor said. "And I bet he had a great life. Thank you, Amy." He walked off to the videos. Amy didn't know who Jamie McCrimmon had been. Jamie wouldn't have remembered their time together. But the Doctor remembered both. That was part of being a family. Shared experiences. Memory and love, even in the face of loss. Discoveries and connections, things drawing seemingly random people together. Sandwiches and fish fingers and custard, yetis and angels, time and space, all binding with strong ties and blessing them. The highlander, the girl who waited, and the raggedy hobo. This was his life, the TARDIS was his home, and all his friends, throughout time and space, were his family. All part of being one of the clan.