Set: After Vampires of Venice and before Amy's Choice

Note: The idea of the Doctor's humming comes from DameRuth's An Inordinate Fondness—one of my absolute favorite fics of all time which never fails to make me laugh

Disclaimer: Doctor Who does not belong to me! I'm just borrowing the characters.

Two Left Feet

The halls of the TARDIS were unusually quiet. After a few days in the vortex to recuperate from their last terrifying adventure, the ship had landed on a small space colony a couple thousand light-years from Earth and a comparable distance into the future. Amy, of course, had immediately headed outside, spotted the busy city with it's multitude of malls and shops, and turned right back around to accost the Doctor. Pinned down by her pointed look, the ancient and legendary being had immediately quailed and handed over his psychic paper. Even he knew not to get between Amy and her shopping. Smiling smugly, she had innocently asked to be accompanied (How she had pulled both of those expressions off at the same time, Rory couldn't understand).

The Doctor, of course, had immediately proclaimed that there was a certain circuit that absolutely had to be fixed right this second or terrible things would ensue and certain doom would befall them all.

Rory had claimed a headache.

It was clear that Amy didn't believe either of them, but she had evidently been satisfied with extracting a promise that they would catch up to her soon and had departed alone, leaving the boys to their own devices.

It was the first time since boarding the TARDIS that Rory had the promise of a bit of uninterrupted time alone. Creeping forward, he peered around the wall at the end of the hallway. Ah ha. Just as he'd expected. The Doctor lay flat on his back beneath the control panel, ankles crossed and one foot bobbing slightly as he hummed merrily. The nonchalant manner in which he was working confirmed that the "dire emergency" was anything but. Rory blinked as he abruptly realized that the Doctor was humming two different tunes at the same time. How did he…? No, never mind. He just needed to be sure that he knew where the other man was. The Doctor could spend an entire day buried within the circuitry of his beloved ship, so Rory wasn't too worried about being interrupted.

Then again, he knew his own karma.

Slinking back, he hurried farther into the ship. He needed a big room with plenty of empty space…the library perhaps? Yes, the library would be perfect.

At least he had been right about his karma, thought Rory, as the door to the library swished open not fifteen minutes later.

"RORY! There you are! Just wanted to let you know that I need to go buy a spatial re-distributor at…the…" The Doctor crossed his arms over his chest and leaned against the doorframe. A lazy grin spread over his face. "Why, Rory. Are you dancing?"

Rory dropped his arms back to his sides, cleared his throat, and shifted uncomfortably. "Well…I mean…I…I've got to keep in practice for the wedding," he muttered. Though, honestly, a part of him was beginning to doubt that there would ever be a wedding. He shoved the dismal thought aside as he sat uneasily on the edge of one of the tables. "I've never been a great dancer," he confessed, "and with us spending so long on the TARDIS, I'm worried that I may forget. Although it probably won't make much of a difference," he shrugged. "Amy already says I have two left feet anyway."

The Doctor eyed him. Rory began to shift uncomfortably once more, jumping violently when the other man suddenly started across the room toward him.

"You know," the Time Lord said brightly, "I actually have met a man with two left feet! Well, actually everyone from his planet had two left feet. And two right hands, as well, come to think of it-" And then suddenly the alien was shrugging out of his tweed jacket, grabbing Rory's arms, and tugging him to his feet. Rory choked a bit as the Doctor pulled Rory's arm around his own waist, set his hand on the human's shoulder, and then clasped their free hands together without even pausing in his rambling. One quick whirr of the sonic screwdriver and a lovely waltz filled the room. "-and then he named his shoe after it! Oh, we had a right laugh about that!"

Rory wasn't sure if he was supposed to be laughing along as well, but, then again, he really couldn't find it in him to be too worried about social niceties at the moment. He was far too busy trying to keep up with the Doctor's quick, surprisingly sure movements. For all that the other man seemed to trip and tumble his way through life sometimes, none of that clumsiness was showing now.

"Come on now, Rory! I realize you're not the most graceful of men –step back a bit further with your left foot there– but I'm sure we can cobble something together here. Don't slouch! Amelia isn't marrying you for your dancing skills, but," here the alien leaned uncomfortably far into Rory's personal space, "women absolutely love to be surprised don't they?" Rory smiled back weakly at his partner's rather manic grin. And with that the Doctor swung them into a spin that was most certainly not a part of this particular dance and in a manner which was decidedly not typical of the partner who was supposed to be following the other's lead. Rory stumbled in a circle, clutching at the other man's fingers to keep from being hurled into a nearby chair.

He was waltzing with an ancient alien inside a living, dimensionally transcendental space-and-time-ship that looked like a 1960's police box. Rory sighed and tried to tune out the Doctor's enthusiastic dual-tone humming (He was fairly certain that it was an entirely different song than the one that was currently playing anyway). When had his life gotten so unimaginably weird? Better question: when had he gotten used to it?

It was only after he pulled away from his inner debate several minutes later (He was beginning to suspect that his life had been utterly absurd from the moment he had met Amy and her crazy friend Mels–and thus heard about the Doctor for the first time—and that he just hadn't realized it before.) when he became conscious of the fact that they had managed to fall into a smooth rhythm while he was lost in thought. Rory blinked at the Doctor in surprise and received a proud, toothy grin in reply. "Now you're getting it. Try not to over-think it too much." They spun smoothly into the next song and Rory felt his shoulders beginning to relax, stepping more confidently as the Doctor's corrections grew sparser.

"Doctor," Rory ventured after a while, "where did you learn to dance like this? I mean, uh, I don't imagine that the dances from your planet were the same as ours…"

The Doctor's face went blank for a second, so quickly that Rory was convinced that he had imagined it, and then he was smiling softly, spinning once under Rory's arm as the song ended and the room fell silent. They halted and the Time Lord immediately sprawled into one of the nearby armchairs, one hand fiddling with his bowtie absently. "Well I've been around for quite a while, you know. Besides, you can't really survive in the American 1920's without knowing the Lindy Hop! Ha! And some your Earth dances are surprisingly similar to Gallifreian ones." Rory slowly lowered himself into a chair opposite, studying his companion intently. The Doctor's eyes had dimmed a bit. He was staring at a painting on the wall that Rory suspected was an original Monet, but seemed to be looking far, far past it. "But…originally I suppose…I had to learn to dance for my wedding. Didn't do me any good of course. I was so nervous that I froze up and she had to lead me about the dance floor like a scared skertleet!" The soft smile had returned. "She never lost a chance to tease me about it really..."

Rory stared at the other man in shock. "You're married? But…"

The Doctor nodded slightly. "I was. A long, long time ago. I was so young. Too young really; we both were. But she was beautiful and brilliant and so very, very kind." He fell silent once more, his face, Rory thought, looking more ancient than he had ever been witness to before. "But she's gone now. They're all gone."

They sat for another long moment in a melancholic silence that Rory feared to break, until that same soft smile crossed the Doctor's face once more and he turned his eyes back to meet Rory's. "Have I ever told you two about Susan?" he asked. "She was my granddaughter. Oh, she was quite the girl! Never would take 'no' for an answer and so very determined to see the universe! Susan was my first companion you know. The moment she realized I was setting off in the TARDIS on my own, she refused to be left behind. Didn't want to leave her poor, doddering old grandfather all on his lonesome I suppose. She would have liked you lot."

Rory nodded along, still reluctant to speak in case he should knock the Doctor out of this strangely divulging mood. He'd never heard the other man speak about himself like this. Normally the skinny alien was impossibly tight lipped about anything to do with his past (Unless it involved some ridiculous adventure with someone famous-then he absolutely couldn't resist mentioning it) and to be granted a glimpse into his personal life seemed to mark a friendship he had doubted existed between them. After the hurtful things Rory had said to him during that vampire-fish fiasco back in Venice, the Doctor's rather tactless arrival at his stag party, and his own suspicions about the feelings that existed between the alien and his fiancé, Rory had found himself uncomfortable in the Doctor's presence, unsure of where they stood with each other. Amy had actually called him out on it a few times, clearly upset that her "two favorite boys" just couldn't get along.

But this…this was an olive branch he realized suddenly. This was the Doctor attempting to bridge that gap, offering rather more of himself than Rory would ever have anticipated. The ball was in his court now.

"I would have loved to meet her." He paused. "Although, honestly, it sounds as though she and Amy together would have been a right terror."

The Doctor let out a startled laugh. "Oh, they would. Especially with the TARDIS taking their side most of the time. Wouldn't you, dear?" He cast a fondly exasperated look toward the ceiling. Suddenly he froze, frowned, and then twisted his head about in a familiar manner to peer at his watch. He leapt frantically to his feet, scrambling for his jacket. "Oh no!"

Rory stumbled upright as well. "What? What is it?"

The alien met his eyes with the same deadly serious gaze that he had leveled at the seven-meter-tall alien carnivore they had encountered the week before. "We've left Amy," he explained, "alone at the shops for over two hours."

"Oh no." Rory agreed numbly.

Never again, Rory decided, would he ever be leaving Amy alone in an alien city for any stretch of time when she had access to an infinite amount of credits via the psychic paper. Struggling to balance the load of bags and boxes in his arms, he shared a long suffering look with the Doctor. Glancing forward at Amy to be sure she was too busy unlocking the TARDIS doors to pay attention to them, he leaned toward his fellow pack-mule. "Do you need a hand looking for that spatial disruptor thingy?" he whispered hopefully.

The Doctor raised his eyebrows, and they exchanged conspiratorial grins. "Spatial re-distributor," he corrected. "And yes, I think I might. On three then? One…two…GO!"

Together they dumped their cargo just inside the TARDIS doors and then made a break for it down the hill, an angry, Scottish ginger shouting after them.

Yeah. His life was definitely weird. But at least it was the good kind of weird, Rory decided as he grabbed the Doctor's arm to keep the alien from falling on his face as he tripped in what Rory was sure he would later claim to be an "exceptionally clever and calculated fashion".

Fin.