Written for Dreamwidth's A Ficathon Walked Into A Bar.
If You Don't Like The Weather, Just Wait Five Minutes
The sky was red; Amy tasted red dust as she strode up the darkening street, pulled her collar up as her cheek was flecked with a few drops of rain. Then thunder rolled, and she ran for the nearest doorway as the sky opened up in earnest.
The door was swinging open as she reached it, and her shoulder collided with that of a brown-haired man in a bright vee-necked shirt. Now that looked like something an alien should wear - with a shiny badge on the front and no bowtie in sigh - and she suppressed a smile as the man apologised briefly before turning back to swear into his cell phone.
On second glance, he looked completely human.
She'd never taken appearances for granted.
There seemed to be a public area past the door, so Amy pushed on through, and her smile grew as the steps led own into a pleasant little cafe. "And this is why you can't have nice things, Doctor," she smirked, swinging down onto a bench by the window. Backwater and boring, he'd called this planet, and she'd have been able to guess before ever passing his flying box's blue doors that those were code words for "not trying to kill us".
"Sorry, why's that again?"
Blinking, she looked back up. The blue-shirted man, his shoulders spotted with rain, had come back in behind her, swiping the water out of his hair with one broad hand.
She grinned and shook her head, wondering whether the earpiece she'd nicked out of the Doctor's pocket was activated and whether his repair jobs had left him bored enough to listen in yet. "Oh, nothing at all! I was just havin' a conversation with someone who's too busy to be here to answer back."
No answer from the earpiece; it wasn't on, then. The stranger smiled politely, half smirking as though he understood the sentiment; and since Amy was curious and there didn't seem any harm in asking, she added, "Is that some sort of uniform?"
His eyebrow shot up. It was kind of cute, really. "You're joking, right?"
"Pretend I'm... a time traveler from hundreds of years ago who's oh-so-curious about what the future's like."
"In that case, I'd tell you it's because I'm a doctor."
Oh, surely not. Amy leaned back, fighting an urge to giggle. "Oooh. Heard that one before."
He chuckled. "Figures. Pretty girl like you has probably heard them all before."
"Most of 'em, yep." She saw him glance at the bench opposite and waved him towards it, and he sank onto it with a tired sigh.
"Still coming down out there. I hope they don't expect me to be running back to the shuttlecraft through that."
A shuttlecraft... that had to mean some sort of space ship. Which would suggest that this mild-looking fellow was some sort of space traveler. How wonderful to reflect that only a few months back, she would have found that far more impressive.
"I've never seen a storm develop that fast. So, Doctor, do you have a name?"
He nodded, still watching the rain pound the red dust into mud. "McCoy, ship's chief medical officer on the Enterprise."
"Amy Pond, civilian, not from around here."
"You don't say." Eyes twinkling, he shook her hand.
The light suddenly fell red on their faces and she turned sharply back to the window, half expecting to see rooftops ablaze and the Doctor being chased out of the nearest alley by a horde of malevolent aliens. But the sun had slipped below the cloud-cover, flushing the hills and clouds with ruddy gold, and for a moment her breath caught at the beauty.
"The rain's stopped," McCoy murmured, but his voice said that the colors weren't lost on him either. "Now that's more like it."
Then his cell phone chirped and he flipped it open - just as Amy's earpiece whined with static and bellowed, "Right, that's fixed then! Get back here, Pond, twenty minutes to the Apocralypse!"
The what? She made a mental note to rib the Doctor for that later. Knowing him, though, it would be more likely to involve the-fiery-end-of-the-world than some lost footnote or a modern phrase written in an ancient script.
McCoy was also standing, slapping the cell phone back on his belt and glancing over at her curiously as she scowled and rubbed her ear.
"Twenty minutes to the Apocralypse," she explained as they both ran for the door.
"Better hurry then," he laughed. "In another five minutes, there'll probably be hail."
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