Author's Notes: Welcome to my first Doctor Who story! Please note this takes place in a completely human AU. And remember, reviews are chicken soup for an author's soul!
Disclaimer: I don't own Doctor Who, unfortunately. But if anybody's offering… No? Oh. Okay.
Anyways… Enjoy!
No day was normal when the Doctor was involved, but most of them were peaceable enough, and for that Rory was thankful. If every day was full up with alien vampires in the middle of Harrods, he didn't think he would be able to handle the sheer insanity. But most days weren't adventures. Usually they were just the stories, and the tours of things that weren't quite there.
Whenever he woke up at Amy's house in the morning, which had become a more frequent occurrence as time went by and their relationship progressed, the Doctor would be making breakfast. It didn't matter how early Rory awoke, the Doctor was always up first as if he had never slept in the first place. He didn't particularly mind, though. Rory would never dream of saying it out loud, but the Doctor could cook the best egg omelet he ever tasted. And every morning Rory spent in the company of his girlfriend, the Doctor would be there too, prancing merrily around the kitchen and telling stories about things that were never there. An egg omelet for Rory, stuffed with whatever meats and vegetables the Doctor could find in the fridge, a stack of hot syrupy pancakes for Amy. It would have been a perfectly nondescript breakfast, if not for the fact that the Doctor himself insisted on eating fish fingers dipped in custard most of the time. He proclaimed it the most spectacular dish in all of creation, and commended humankind for inventing it, as if he was somehow outside the sphere of humanity.
That was the most emergent detail about the Doctor in Rory's opinion, aside from the fact that he didn't seem to have a real name besides the title he always introduced himself by. He thought he was an alien, born and raised on a different planet altogether, and claimed to be able to travel throughout all of time and space in the old blue Corsica he drove everywhere. Of course, in the Doctor's world, it wasn't a Corsica. It was a spaceship and a time machine.
Rory hadn't the faintest clue how to respond when Amy first told him that an alien had crashed his spaceship into her back garden, so he just told her to take some photographs for posterity. The situation became even more ridiculous when she claimed that same alien was now in her house, showing her an invisible prison escapee from another dimension that had been hiding in a nonexistent closet for the past fourteen years. As it turned out, of course, he had accidently driven his car straight into her backyard, and she had invited him in because she thought he was in some sort of shock. That was when he started telling her about the aliens. Somehow, though, the thought never occurred to Amy that the Doctor might be a bit insane, and Rory secretly related that back to Amy's own tendency towards instability. She never felt that the Doctor was threatening her, because he was always pacifistic, if rather manic. She called him a sweetheart who liked to make up wonderful stories, a child that wanted to see the stars trapped in the body of a man. He never did tell her where he was from, or even a first name, and so she took a degree of pity and invited him to stay in the spare room of her home.
That, Rory reflected, was how they came to this. A glass bowl of custard slowly depletes as it does every morning, and the Doctor tells them stories about aliens in distant worlds, featuring people that may be real or may just exist in the vast imaginary universe the Doctor had invented. Amy laughed and nodded in all the right places, asked sincere questions about the complicated tale, and Rory just stayed silent as he ate his spectacularly crafted omelet.
The stories were harmless, unlike the plays, as Rory referred to the fantasies that the Doctor acted out in the streets of the city with the willing participation of Amy and the completely baffled participation of himself and the occasional random passerby. The stories were simply words after the meaning had been stripped away, and besides that they were always lighthearted and fun, tales of swashbuckling and intergalactic pirates and the occasional saving of the universe and all its occupants. The stories could never hurt Amy, because the Doctor only ever seemed to remember the beautiful days, never the dark ones. The plays were his adventures in progress, and his adventures, like life itself, could end in heartbreak. The adventures had the power of destruction.
Rory returned to Amy's house straight from his shift at the hospital one cloudy day in early spring, intent on taking her out for their first real date night since the Doctor had crashed literally into their lives, to find them both in the living room with something invisible clearly in progress. Amy had pressed herself against the paneled wall with a vaguely frightened expression etched onto her pale features, and the Doctor stood across from her, pacing and stumbling about the room with dizzying speed, alternating at the drop of a hat between his usual zany self and the personality of a different man altogether. It was like he was still himself, but a different version of himself, whose face was lined with malice and revenge and soul-crushing grief. He grasped Rory by the shoulders when he saw him, his eyes black and hollow, and it was the first time Rory had ever really been scared of another person.
The Doctor told Amy she had to choose between him and Rory.
"He hates me," the Doctor said tauntingly, still holding Rory so they were standing next to each other. Amy stared at the Doctor, looking sad and confused and like she wanted to soothe him, talk him down from the frenzy he had worked himself into. Rory had the feeling she had already tried that. He debated whether he should knock the Doctor unconscious, but he truly had no desire to addle the man's brain even further unless it was absolutely necessary.
"He hates me," the Doctor repeated. "So you have to choose between us."
She resisted. Rory protested. The Doctor insisted.
In the end, Amy chose Rory. And they didn't see the Doctor for eleven days.
"I'm worried about him, Rory," Amy confessed on the third day of his absence, when unfounded assurances that the Doctor was perfectly fine had ceased to placate her. She paced around the living room in a way that was much too reminiscent of a few days ago and wrung her hands as she was wont to do when nervous. "What if he's gotten himself hurt or something?"
"Look, he can take care of himself," Rory sighed from his position in his armchair, secretly growing annoyed at how worried his girlfriend had gotten over this. It wasn't as if the Doctor hadn't disappeared temporarily before, but of course this time was different. His car wasn't in the garden.
Worried about her zany roommate, Amy had refused to leave the house for anything other than work since the disappearance, and when she did she insisted Rory stay behind so if the Doctor returned while she was away, it wouldn't be to an empty house. Rory was too empathetic with her to say no to the request.
"No, he can't!" she snapped back at him, her voice actually seeming to fray around the edges. "He's confused, and alone, and nobody understands him-"
"That's because he's a nutcase!" Rory replied imploringly, flipping the day's newspaper away from his face with the dramatic snap produced by cheap newsprint folding. "Look, I know you care for him and everything, but maybe it's best that he's gone. I mean, he's completely insane! He won't even tell us his name and you trust him more you do me!"
Ah, yes. There was the heart of the matter, uncovered at last.
"That's not true, and you know it." Amy's voice had dropped dangerously low, and her eyes were swirling with anger. She had stopped her fretful pacing across the living room and was standing stock still behind the coffee table. Usually, these cues would have alerted Rory to the fact that it was time to back down, acquiesce to her side of the argument, but he was much too incensed to care.
"He could have hurt you, Amy!" He shouts, teeth gritted in frustration, and now he's out of his chair and standing across from her. The coffee table is all that separates them, as if the inanimate piece of wood is somehow standing in for self-proclaimed alien who usually drove the wedges in their relationship.
"The Doctor couldn't do that! He never would!" Amy's eyes are brimming with tears, but the anger is still there, and so when Rory reaches out a hand to comfort her she smacks it away harshly. He has enough sense not to try that again.
She continues. "He was sad, Rory. He was sad, and he felt like he wasn't good enough! And I-" her voice breaks, and she angrily swipes a tear away from her eye. "And I chose you."
It's quiet now. Everything is so terribly quiet.
"I chose you, Rory, because I love you more than I've ever loved anybody. Because I thought you would leave me if I didn't choose you. And now… now, he's broken, and it's all my fault! Because I chose you!"
"Amy," he whispers brokenheartedly, shocked into numbness. "I would never leave you."
"Would you?" she asks, so softly he can barely hear her. And before he can even open his mouth to respond, she's gone.
Whichever hours of the day Rory isn't at work or asleep or trying unsuccessfully to apologize to Amy, he spends searching for the Doctor.
It proves to be a much more difficult task than he originally thought, though, considering that he doesn't even know the name of the man he's looking for. He phones Amy's neighbors and explains the situation to him the best he can, and makes them promise to call him right away if they ever see anything. He visits every park and every store he knows the Doctor has involved in one of his adventures, and once all that is done and has yielded no results he simply wanders down the streets in the faint hope he'll see a blue Corsica parked on the street with its driver behind the wheel, babbling to nobody about monsters and aliens and time travel. He sees a few of the same type of car, but it's never the Doctor's car, because it doesn't have the telltale collection of bumper stickers pasted to the back and extraneous knobs attached to the dashboard. It's as if the man simply vanished off the face of the earth.
In a fit of doubt and pessimism, he calls all the Accident and Emergency wards in the area. None of them have any reports of a patient being admitted that matches the description he gives of the Doctor, and he doesn't know whether he should be relieved at the news or not.
On the ninth day, his father comes up with the idea that fixes everything.
"Have you tried calling psychiatrists?" he asks his son suddenly, breaking the lull of silence that permeates the house once Rory has finished telling the whole sordid tale in a single breath.
Rory looks at him quizzically and shakes his head. "What's the use in hiring a psychiatrist for a missing person?" he asks with a huff of exasperation that probably wasn't quite necessary. He leans forward in the heard wooden chair and presses the heels of his palms into his eye sockets in an attempt to stave off an oncoming headache. He feels like he hasn't slept in a year.
"Not that Rory. I mean, a person like this Doctor fellow… He's bound to have some sort of professional on his case. He'd have been committed to some sort of special hospital already if he didn't."
It makes so much sense that it sends a veritable jolt through Rory's spine. He sits back up and watches as his father begins to boil another kettle of water for their tea, wondering why he didn't think of doing that earlier.
"Of course," his father adds with a mischievous wink, "Why listen to the ramblings of an old man?"
On the tenth day since the Doctor's disappearance, Rory's searching finally reaches an end.
Dr. Martha Jones, PhD is the thirty-sixth psychiatrist in the city phonebook that he calls, and the fourth to be named Jones. Before her entry in the section of the White Pages devoted to mental health offices is thirty-five other names crossed through angrily with a red permanent marker.
She answers the phone personally instead of having a receptionist filter the call, which is a little strange but Rory is long since past questioning things that are only a little strange. Her greeting is crisp and professional, and Rory describes the Doctor to her as he did to all the other psychiatrists. He drones on wearily in the robotic monotone typical of a man who had spent his day conducting the same conversation with a revolving door of strangers.
He finishes his story, but instead of an apology, Dr. Jones replies to him brightly with "Oh, so you must be his companion then. I was wondering what had become of you."
He freezes when she mentions the word companion. It's the exact same term the Doctor always used to describe Amy, and sometimes even Rory. His companions. "Yes," he splutters, "I-"
"John's told me about you," Dr. Jones continues, cutting off his embarrassing stuttering as if she somehow senses that Rory's not going to find the words to finish his sentence. Being a psychiatrist, that might be exactly it. "He mentioned that he's been living with your girlfriend, but he wouldn't tell me your names. He just said you were lost. I assumed you got freaked out and had him leave like the others did… you're saying he ran away?"
She sounds genuinely concerned for him in much the same way Amy did, although with a slightly more clinical tint to it probably borne from her role as his psychiatrist. He recounts to the woman on the phone everything that has happened since the Doctor dropped into his and Amy's lives. He recalls Amy's story of the first day the Doctor, who was apparently once called John, parked his car in the rose garden and invited her on an adventure. He rehashes every adventure they experienced and every story they were told, and he even talks about such mundane things as how the Doctor spent the mornings fixing eggs and dipping fish fingers in custard. Dr. Jones, tells Rory he can call her Martha, doesn't seem surprised by single detail.
"You know where he is, then?" Rory asks eagerly.
"Yes," affirms Martha, and Rory lets out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding. "I could take you and Amy to him, if you want. I'm sure he would be glad to see you."
Rory thanks her profusely and gives her Amy's address. She promises to pick them up the next morning, a Saturday, at noon, and he hangs up the phone with a feeling of giddiness that he hasn't known in a very long time.
"I found him," he says to her the next day as soon as she throws open the door. The words fall from between his lips so quickly the syllables are almost indistinguishable. He knows if he had paused she would have only slammed the door in his face.
As it is, the words reach her ears before she has the chance to do so. "You what?" she asks, one hand flying to her mouth. Her eyes are owlishly wide.
"I called all the psychiatrists in the area, and this one, Dr. Martha Jones, she has him as a patient. She knows where he is." A smile spreads across Rory's face as Amy goes suddenly from anger and despondence to delight.
Amy laughs incredulously, like she doesn't quite believe what her boyfriend is telling her, but when her hand drops away from her mouth it reveals a wide, toothy grin. "Can we see him?" she asks hopefully, the eagerness unmistakable in her voice.
Rory nods once, and suddenly she pounces on him with such incredible force that he nearly falls off the front step and onto the grass behind him. Her arms wrap around his neck in the kind of embrace Rory realizes he's been missing for a while, the kind that seems to come close to squeezing the life from him. He can hear the peals of laughter bubbling from her lips and smell the soft, floral scent from the mane of her knotted, coppery hair tickling his nose.
"Dr. Jones is going to be here at noon to bring us to him," he murmurs, hugging her back. "Amy, I'm sorry. I'm so, so-"
"It's okay," she says before he can finish, pulling away from the embrace just enough to put them face to face, her arms still twisted behind his head. She's the same height as he is so their foreheads touch, and his eyes cross as he tries in vain to focus on her face. "Oh god, it's so okay. Rory, I love you, and I'm sorry too." She says quietly, with a watery smile.
Their reconciliation is sloppy and messy; a jumbled sea of tears and apology, but it somehow fits them. Their lives have never managed to be perfect, and with the Doctor it's even more so, but Rory wouldn't have it any other way.