When Rory was eight, Amelia Pond made him steal a tie and a button-down shirt from his dad's closet and play Doctor with her. Only, Amelia Pond wasn't like any of the other kids in the village, so playing Doctor with her didn't mean making up diseases and telling each other how long they had to live, and it didn't even mean taking their clothes off and seeing what each other looked like underneath. It didn't even mean drawing cuts and stitches on all over with marker.
It meant going out into the woods (which were Mars) and fighting Martians (which were logs). It was a marvelous game: they dashed back and forth over the creek, and built a base out of branches and dead leaves, and made bombs out of moss, and appointed Rory Lord High Doctor Of Everything. Only then Amelia fell out of a tree on to some rocks, which wasn't part of the game at all.
She screamed and grabbed at her leg, but she didn't cry. Amelia Pond never cried, no matter what happened to her.
"Is it broken?" she asked.
Rory felt at her leg, through the blood and the dirt, but he didn't feel anything really wrong. It was just scraped badly along one side, where she'd hit the rocks and slid.
So he carried her over to the creek, and washed off the dirt as best he could, and then tied his dad's tie around the worst of the injury. It wrapped three times. After a moment's hesitation, he also kissed the fabric.
"There," he said authoritatively, patting her shoulder. "It'll heal just fine."
"It's almost like you're a real Doctor," Amelia said.
"I am a real doctor," Rory said, "I just doctored you, right there. So I'm your Doctor."
Amy looked up at him, and there was something in her eyes that made him feel proud and scared at the same time. She said, "Yeah. You are."
He got yelled at by his dad for ruining his favorite tie, but his mum let him have seconds on cake after dinner, because it was her least-favorite tie. He didn't tell either of them what he'd done with it, that he'd saved someone with it. He didn't know how to put in words what it really meant, and if he couldn't say what it meant, he shouldn't say it at all.
But at night, when he couldn't sleep, he rolled against the wall and traced out with his finger against the cool plaster: Doctor.