Title: Confrontation
Spoilers for: The Girl Who Waited. Potential (mild) foreshadowing for The God Complex.
Rating: PG-13
Summary: Rory gets the chance to speak his mind after the events in "The Girl Who Waited".
Character: Amy/Rory (implied), Doctor, 11
Word Count: 891
Rory tucked Amy into the bed. She was still groggy from the anesthetic, otherwise he'd never have gotten off so easily with saying that they had lost the other Amy. She was fighting it, but her questions had become more mumbled and less intelligible very quickly.
He pressed his lips onto hers, but she'd already fallen back into unresponsive sleep. Helpless. His sleeping beauty. Rory shivered, knowing that death had only been a few footsteps behind them both. Again.
The tenderness drops from Rory's face, his features sharpening with the dark fury that he'd barely been able to conceal from his beloved. He stormed out of the room, clattering down the stairs across the empty control room and into the hallway. For a moment all the power and bravado of the roman empire is behind him again.
One by one he slams open the doors he finds.
Pool – empty.
Bedroom – empty.
Library – empty.
The mazelike corridor seems to circle him through long stretches of emptiness before opening into the console room again. Rory was gritting his teeth with frustration when he saw the lone figure standing calmly at the controls. The Doctor hadn't been there before.
"You!" Rory growls with unusual intensity. But this is his protective instincts that have been betrayed, his trust, his future, his failures. Everything forced upon him by the –alien- in front of him.
The Doctor looks up, using his fringe as a shield to peer through with calm, old eyes. There's nothing playful in his face this time. His jaw is set. Tense.
The Doctor jerks backward, once, shoulders hunching up reflexively as Rory runs at him, using the momentum to slam him into the wall. Rory knows the Doctor is letting himself be trapped, refusing to fight back.
The Doctor always did like to claim that he wasn't a man of violence. Or was it his own sense of guilt that made him feel like he deserved this?
"How dare you…" Rory's voice is low and furious.
The Doctor doesn't reply, but his grey-green eyes search Rory's face slowly, as if looking for clues.
"Because of you I just had to listen to my wife - who had been fighting for years to stay alive! – I had to listen to her die out there! They killed her!" His fingers spasmed at the Doctor's through, and he had to curl them into a fist and hit the TARDIS wall behind the Doctor to keep from strangling him.
The Doctor stayed infuriatingly calm. "That version of her never had to exist, Rory." His words were light. Pleasant. As if Rory should just accept that the last few hours could be erased and forgotten.
"But she did," Rory's own voice was ragged, breaking. "She did, and we failed her, and she was so strong, and so amazing, and we killed her. " The breath he tried to draw shook and shuddered, and his next words were half screamed. "You made me kill her!"
Rory was inches away. He could see the Doctor's lips twitch. Was that involuntary? Or just a ploy to try to seem sympathetic? "That timeline is gone, now."
"Is it?" Rory challenged darkly. "Is it really? Or is that just a convenient lie for you, to tell me that we didn't just let Amy wait for thirty-six years to just sit in the TARDIS and let her face death on her own?"
The Doctor's face stilled, and a part of Rory wanted to believe that it was guilt that shadowed those pale eyes.
He felt like that was enough, but something bubbled up inside him, a great rage that was twisting his heart and lungs and sitting heavy on his chest. "It is always your choice, isn't it?" Rory hissed bitterly. "You wanted this Amy. You wanted me to get her first – because she still looks at you and smiles. Oh god – she just smiled at you! And you could calmly shut the door and let her die alone out there." He shook his head. "You know, that other Amy had it right. She should hate you." Angry tears stung at the corners of Rory's eyes and he tried to blink them away. "Maybe the universe could have held them both here, in the TARDIS. Maybe it was you that couldn't face her."
The burst of anger sapped Rory's strength, and he slumped back from the Doctor.
The Doctor stared down at the floor, silent as he always was when he didn't want to answer. Other than catching his balance, he didn't move.
Rory just knew at that moment. He was done with this life, done with his wife being toyed with. All of time and all of space – and all of it just teetering on the edge of disaster and betrayal. "I am not going to explain this to her. You owe her that at least." He leaned against the railing, shaking with the emotion that was flooding his body.
Rory looked at the Doctor. The Doctor was steadily staring back at him. Calm. Quiet. Terrifying in his own right. It would have been easier if the Doctor had refused to meet Rory's eyes.
He'd stood with the Doctor, leading an army into battle to save his wife and child. He once thought that he'd trust this man.
No longer.
The Doctor lies.
