Don't be alarmed, this is a kindness…
…
It's the look on her face that will haunt him for a long, long time. There have been so many faces, some more vivid than others, amalgams of expressions—eyes, noses, mouths, maws, beaks—flitting through his dusty, half-remembered memories like an old silent film going forwards and backwards too quick for his eyes and attention span to sit still and really focus, and they have been burned into his retinas throughout the 900 years of his old, old life. But the Doctor thinks it'll be Amy's look of unsurprised betrayal that will keep him up at night for a long time, long after she's finally left him for that ordinary apple-pie life waiting patiently for her in Leadworth, and she won't loose any sleep over it, none at all, he thinks. None of his companions ever do, not really, he hopes.
His gaze develops a tunnel vision when he looks at her, Amy, his Amelia Pond, The Girl Who Waited, all grown up and as hard as ice but still somehow the same fiery, willful redhead tucked away in his TARDIS, unconscious and swathed in his coat, protected and safe and just as real. The future Amy throws her weapons aside and sprints for the TARDIS, because she knows—even after 36 years, she knows the Doctor and she knows what he is about to do, and even before she had agreed to help Rory and her younger self, she had known it was hopeless all along.
The Doctor looks at her, eyes as wide as saucers, throat and lips going dry. It's a truly helpless look, and because he's so phenomenally self-deprecating the sting of words like "What's the point of you?" fill the spaces of his mind when he sees her running towards him, as hurt and helpless as he is in that very moment. But he forces himself to fight the "I don't want to!" screaming and hammering inside his hearts. He hopes that she can see how sorry he is before he closes the TARDIS doors, how much this will haunt him, how he'll suffer every time he looks at her now, and if she truly hated him then at least she'd have that.
"I'm sorry," He mutters, and it's almost a whisper because he barely trusts his own voice now.
Amy's punching and shaking and screaming outside the TARDIS, "Doctor! Doctor, I trusted you!"
The Doctor closes his eyes and tells himself, "No. No, she's not real." Except he knows that is not true, not really. But he has to believe it, needs to. If he does not, he knows he could not, would not do this to her, and then the paradox would consume them all, they'd all die, and everything leading up to this point would be for nothing. Not for the first time, he has to choose the lesser of two evils.
He'll fix this, he tells himself. The younger Amy is safe in the TARDIS, and once they've gotten far away from this damnable timeline, the Amy that had suffered 36 years alone, without her husband and without him, would have never existed, never have suffered at all. That's the best he can do, and he'll hate himself for it in the long run, but that isn't something new.
It's always the Doctor that has to make the hard decisions, the kind that lesser men wouldn't and couldn't. It's the Doctor that has to live with the darkness and the guilt underneath the pretense of charming quirks and good cheer and the occasional plucky feats of heroism, while everyone else can shrug it off and be relatively okay and get their happily ever after. All the while, he's alone, with nothing but the TARDIS and centuries worth of guilt in his hearts piling up with each so-called adventure.
Rory protests, of course, because he doesn't understand, he can't fathom these kinds of decisions, he's only human, the infernal bleeding-heart race. But the Doctor has lived a little over 900 years and he's done this before, and it almost gets a little easier each time but no, that's a lie, too. This is his life, he's the one that stands up and makes a decision because nobody else will.
He makes Rory understand by putting him in his shoes and making him choose, because the Doctor is just the Doctor and Rory is her husband and the Doctor has resigned himself to that, and because they are Amy's men, they have to make this decision together now, somehow. Only, the Doctor's already made up his mind and Rory will never understand, never.
The Doctor takes Rory's hands and places them over the silver locks of the TARDIS doors anyway.
"This isn't fair. You're turning me into you," Rory says, as if that's the worst thing he could ever possibly become and the Doctor doesn't blame him. The Doctor has always vaguely suspected that Rory resented him, but it was never made more apparent now. It's nothing compared to how much the Doctor resents himself, now and then and forever, it seems, so the Doctor doesn't let the sting of those words linger too long before he's off to do what he must, his hearts pounding and his movements frantic, urgent, frightened.
Quickly, he sprints off to the controls and pretends he doesn't hear them pour their hearts out to each other because it just doesn't help, it really doesn't. His hands are shaking as they furiously turn levers and knobs and switches, and even the TARDIS seems to protest because the old girl's controls don't cooperate as well as they should, they're not leaving fast enough. He just wants to be gone.
Even in the end Amy makes the decision for him.
The Doctor feels no relief when it's over even as he's offering Amy, smooth-faced and young and not so hard-hearted, a familiar self-satisfied smile that doesn't quite reach his eyes, and he's sticking out his tongue at her like a child for no reason, really, except to look more chipper than he really felt. She smiles in response and it's so sincere, he almost thinks he can cope with what he's done, almost.
He leaves them alone and he tells himself it's because Rory deserves to be with her after all they've been through, but really, he just can't bear to look at her.
…
Acknowledgements:
First Doctor Who fic ever, and it's really depressing. :C It's basically a telling of what I thought, or rather, what I saw going on in the Doctor's head during the last few minutes of "The Girl Who Waited". It's kind of done from memory, though, so I'm not entirely sure if the dialogue or scenes accurate.
What, too angsty? I wanted to sort of develop Eleven's deeply hidden self-loathing, but maybe I was being a little overdramatic. Lemme know. I'd really appreciate feedback and constructive criticism, especially character-wise, since this is my first DW fic ever. Pretty please with fish fingers and custard on top?
Incidentally, I love Eleven x Amy. I ship it like FedEx. I will go down with this ship because it's beautiful and the chemistry was perfect and it's worth it and season 5 was the best. But damn it all if season 6 isn't making their relationship, even their platonic one, practically nonexistent. ;n; Moffat, y u do dis?