She doesn't really know what happens when the Weeping Angel zaps her back – it's a strange, kind of out-of-body experience, but she's had a pretty good number of those from travelling with the Doctor. It's not all that surprising.

Amy strongly expects to see Rory waiting for her when she lands with a whump on the ground, but notices two very, very key things when she lands.

First of all – she certainly isn't in New York. No, New York doesn't have that many trees in the whole of the city, and there's not a castle – oh, there's a saltire flying at the castle.

She's in Scotland. Bloody Scotland, where she hasn't been for ages and ages (and it's been a really long time, and though she tries she has never, ever learned how to keep track of time when she and Rory are travelling with the Doctor). There is no positive indication of what year it might be, but it's recent enough that the castle that she's standing next to is in ruins. That's about a two to three hundred year range, which is completely and utterly unhelpful.

"Rory!" she yells, and her name echoes around the lake. She runs up the hill and stands by the castle ruins, eyes scanning the lake. No, he can't be far, he probably ended up here too – he has to be waiting somewhere on the shore. He has to be!

There's no answer to her first call, but Amy Pond is not someone who gives up easily. "Rory!" She shouts again, and it echoes through the woods, but there's no response.

The Doctor never explained that much about the Weeping Angels to her – aside from the fairly obvious no blinking – but he had never guaranteed that they would zap two people back to the same place or the same time.

No. No, this cannot be happening.

"Rory!" She yells, one last time, to no avail.

Apparently, she's now captured someone's attention, and an elderly man ambles up the hill and gives her a rather strange look.

"And what d'ya think yer doin 'ere?" He says in a Scottish accent so thick that she can barely understand him.

"I'm sorry," Amy says, trying her best to play up the Scottish, "but 'm a wee bit lost – ye haven't seen a young man with a white shirt and some blue jeans 'round here?"

He stares at her like she's got three heads.

"No," he replies, "and I don't know what yer doin' oot 'ere in those clothes, lass, but if ye want to have any decent company you ought to change."

Her heart starts pounding in her chest because something horrible is dawning on her at this moment. "If y'don't mind my asking, where are we?"

The man looks around, and then looks back at Karen with surprise. "Loch Ness! This 'ere's Urqhart Castle!"

Right. Well, I'm definitely in Scotland. "And, when are we?"

He struggles briefly with how to answer that question. "It's 1946. May, so the wind's not too bad!" He smiles. "Sunday, today is. 's why there's no one 'ere."

So she ends up nearly 56 years in the past, but without the person for whom she let herself get sent back for. Well.

"Sir," she says, "'m a little lost and very cold. D'ya think you could take me in 'til I find out where I'm meant to be goin'?"

The man nods. "Follow me. I'll take you home and get you some proper clothes."

Rory will show up. Rory's good at showing up.

Her stay with Hugh, the groundskeeper at Urqhart Castle, and Jane, his wife, starts out at two weeks, because, as she tells them, her husband is coming for her. Rory wouldn't leave, he wouldn't give up. Not like this. She gets caught on this insane hope, and since 1946 Inverness is an incredibly boring place, it's the only thing that keeps her going.

She writes and sketches too – pictures of the Doctor, and the TARDIS, but when Jane comes to ask her what they are, she realises that she can't without sounding like more of a total loony than she already does to Jane and Hugh.

"They're things out of my imagination," she says.

"Have you ever thought of writing books, young girl?" Jane says. "Woman aren't writing novels like men, but you could write for children!"

Amy nods.

Jane and Hugh don't have any children, and they're both getting on in years, and it drives Jane insane. Amy doesn't go out much, except with Jane to buy food and fabric to make clothes, so the two of them talk a lot.

She tells her, and Hugh when he's not taking care of the castle, about Rory and Leadworth and her old life, but a bit time-warped so that it seems like she's genuinely disoriented and confused rather than the kind of crazy that could get you locked up.

Six months in to her stay in Inverness, her resolve begins to flag and she starts to wonder whether Rory is actually going to come and find her.

She hears Jane and Hugh whispering one night from her bedroom.

"She's not right, Jane!" Hugh says. "All that natterin' on 'bout a man that's never goin' to come! We can't keep 'er 'ere! People are talkin'!"

"She's good company," Jane replies, "and I ain't turnin' 'er out. She got nowhere to go!"

The conversation ends there because Amy tries to get up and makes the floor creak. She assumes they keep talking, but she doesn't hear about it until it's nearly a year later and she's almost certain that Rory isn't going to come back, and that the Weeping Angel did its last bit of cruelty by not only separating her from the Doctor, but also by taking her away from Rory.

The only two people that she felt that actually loved her mostly unconditionally.

One year to the day that she landed on the shores of Loch Ness, Hugh and Jane sit Amy down at dinner.

"Dearie," Jane says, "we think it's time that you… spread yer wings a little."

Hugh nods. "Yer Rory – is it? He ain't comin' back. You know. We know."

Those words hurt Amy worse than anything ever possibly could, but she knows that at this point, it's probably true.

"My family," Jane says, a little hesitantly, "left me a flat in Edinburgh. We've got some money to give, and you've got your clothes and things, so we're going to send you there. You can sell your paintings, and your writings. You'll do fine, Amy."

She gets a couple of days to pack the small of personal possessions that she's acquired during her stay in Inverness, and then Hugh and Jane give her a hug and a kiss and drop her off at the train station to make her way to Edinburgh.

On the platform, just as the train pulls in, she catches sight of some very familiar curly blonde hair, and realises that if River's here, it generally doesn't mean good things.

River doesn't find her until an hour in to the train ride when the person sitting beside Amy vacates her seat, at which point she slinks out of nowhere and plops down beside her.

"Have you seen Rory?" Amy asks, because there isn't a whole lot else between the two of them at this point.

River nods, but doesn't say anything else.

"Well?" Amy says, trying to catch her attention.

"I'm not sure you're going to want to know the answer to that."

Her stomach falls, but for some reason she needs to know. This is closure for her. "River, tell me. Tell me the truth. Everything is just so screwed up right now, and I need to know if I'm going to see him again."

"He ended up in 1938, New York," she says. "He's married."

Her jaw drops.

"To another woman named Amelia."

No.

"And she's having a baby in about six months."

Amy begins to cry after that, because she misses Rory, and she is shocked, absolutely shocked, that he didn't feel the need to find her, or at least wait for her like he always does. Did. What's worse is that he found someone who could give him the one thing that she never could. The pain of her infertility had faded a little after she and Rory were briefly reunited in their normal time, but now it was back again full force.

"Amy, he thought you were dead," River says quietly, placing a hand on her shoulder. "I did too. We mourned. We all did. I tried and tried to find you, because I thought that I had people everywhere." She pauses, and looks down. "It turns out I don't."

Amy shakes her head and shrugs River's hand off of her shoulder. They sit in silence for a while and she watches the Scottish countryside zip by.

"And the Doctor?" Amy asks, once she's a little over the combination of sad and angry that was previously keeping her from doing much in the way of talking.

"I wrote him an afterword in your name," River says. "You lived happily with Rory until you both died."

"Except the Amelia Williams on that gravestone isn't me," Amy says bitterly.

"Sometimes with the Doctor," River says, sighing, "a lie's a bit better than the truth. He thinks you're gone, Amy. You know that if he finds you, he's going to lose you a second time, and that will not be good for him."

As much as she really hates River right now, she knows that she's entirely correct about that. She doesn't want to go through the pain of being separated from the Doctor again either. In a strange way, it's probably better that he never finds her.

River does as River does and completely melts in to the crowd without a proper goodbye as soon as they disembark in Waverley station. Amy collects her things, and shows a small piece of paper with the address of her new flat on it, and when he drops her off there she is please to discover that its location is relatively central. (She also notices a publishing house nearby, which she resolves to visit once she's finished the first draft of her book. The money that Jane and Hugh left won't last her for long, and she's got to find a way to make money that doesn't involve getting married, because she'll be damned if she does that again.)

The flat is airy and bright, and has a large window in the kitchen that looks over a small back garden.

"It'll do," Amy mutters as she unpacks her clothing in her bedroom. "It'll definitely do."

The publishing house that she drove by on her cab ride through Edinburgh rejects her book, as do two others before she finally finds someone that's willing to take a chance on single, female author. (She's forgotten a bit how much that mattered and how much she'd give almost anything for people not to look at her strangely when she tells them that she's not married. Or for a cellphone. She kind of misses that.)

The book, Summer Falls, is published with moderate success, and certainly enough that the publisher asks to write another as a sequel. With the money from the first printing, she buys herself a little table and chair for the back garden where she goes and draws when the weather's decent enough. There are times when she's out there that she hopes that a mysterious blue box will land in front her suddenly, but then she remembers – the Doctor isn't looking for her. He's hopefully found another person to travel with, because he changes when he's alone for too long.

(Even though he's never going to show up, she still waves up at the stars before she goes to sleep at night.)

Three years pass, and she becomes accustomed to living on her own, and starts to feel like she's properly leading a life.