Title: Afterwards; scenes from the life of Rory Williams
Rating: PG-13
Show: Doctor Who
Characters: Amy Pond, Rory Williams, River Song (maybe cameo's by the Doctor)
Synopsis: Life, as witnessed by Rory Williams (proud husband to Amy Pond and befuddled father to River Song). Even without the Doctor it's confusing and sometimes difficult. He wouldn't change it for the world.
Spoilers: Starts after The God Complex, but with spoilers through season 6. I'll do my best to make it all fit, but with the Eleventh Doctor's wibbely-wobbely timelines, I'm bound to screw up continuity…
Author's Notes:
After seeing River pop by her parents' house in River Song's Wedding, I wanted to know more about their little dysfunctional family. Do they see each other often? Does she escape from prison to see them? Does she call them Mum and Dad? How do they not get embarrassed every single time they realise they grew up together? And how does Rory deal with the fact his daughter is married to the Doctor?
I'm terrible at updating, as you might have notice from my other stories… So while this story is set as on-going and I'll try adding new chapters, I'll make sure all chapters can be read as though they were separate stories…
The first two stories deal with loss (in one form or another) and are a bit sad. The next few will be more upbeat. More 'Doctorish' so to speak.
Rebuilding
After the Doctor left them in their new house, it was up to them to make it a home.
Warning: quite sad.
Afterwards, Rory realised, what was truly amazing were not the adventures they had had with the Doctor, nor the wonderful people and sometimes scary things they had met during.
( Rory had decided early one that finding out who their daughter– their brilliant daughter they had found and lost and grew up with (which would never not be weird) and found again in River Song – really was, was in a category of its own, and not to be defined by mere words like amazing, wonderful and terrifying )
What was truly amazing, was the fact that the doctor, for all his screwing up timelines - and their lives in general (he admired the doctor, he even liked the guy, but he didn't think he could ever forgive him) - had actually brought them home on time. With time to spare even: they even had a few days left before anyone expected them home from their 'holiday'.
When the plan of a crop circle to call the doctor to Leadworth had been decided upon, Rory requested a week off from work. His colleagues had understandably grumbled about it: he had already taken 'his honeymoon' that year and then later two weeks for "their trip to America". And all that without bringing them pictures! (Rory had lied about being mugged in Utah, their very first day. How else was he to explain the lack of pictures and exciting travel stories?)
His boss however had just smiled and told him to go for it. 'They're still newlyweds', she had chastised his colleagues. 'He has built up loads of overtime anyway.' That was true: after returning from his first trip with the Doctor, Rory had volunteered for the shifts nobody else wanted and filled in for every sick colleague. Partly out of guilt for disappearing so long (not that they noticed), mostly to forget, but also simply because he needed the practice (needed to get used to modern medicine again).
As for his bosses sudden seal of approval, Rory privately thought she was still feeling guilty about not believing him about the coma patients a few years earlier. Not that she ever mentioned that.
Not that anyone ever mentioned having seen the Atraxi hanging in the sky that day …. It seemed like everyone had simply forgotten those events and that without the help of the Silents. He had mentioned these suspicions to the Doctor once. The Timelord had just smiled and told him most humans try to only see what they wanted to see.
Rory guessed his and Amy's eyes had been opened by their travels. Then again, he couldn't put it all on the Doctor and his blue box. His live had been changed much earlier – for the better, no doubt about that - from the moment little Amelia Pond's family had moved to Leadworth. Most of the times he remembered just Amelia and her aunt living in that big house. A house with a crack in the bedroom wall and an alien prisoner hiding in a spare room... Meeting the Doctor had probably been inevitable. It could have been worse.
After celebrating the first night in their new house, they spent the remaining days cooped up inside, trying to make it a home.
Rory contacted their landlord, in order to end their old lease. Somehow the Doctor had managed to move all their stuff. He had even brought in new items, like the champagne flutes Rory had discovered in the kitchen when they first arrived.
Rory didn't know how he'd managed, but didn't wonder. He had stopped wondering about the how with Doctor a while back –why however he would probably never stop asking. He was just thankful however the few purchases (a crib, a baby blanket, some toys, …) they had made thinking their daughter would be home soon (placed in the old spare room painted sky blue), hadn't found their way over.
(Months later he would discover cardboard boxes labelled 'baby Pond' in the attic.)
They also fabricated stories:
* How their holiday went – good, relaxing, nothing out of the ordinary.
* How they found this house and how they would be able to afford it – a very pricy loan.
* Where the new car came from – a gift from their weirdo (but rich) friend, which they all met at the wedding. ('Remember the strange guy who pretended to be Amy's childhood imaginary friend? Who kept dancing with everyone at the wedding?')
Rory then spent hours photo-shopping their old holiday portraits into images of Rome he had downloaded from the net. (He had blurted out the name of the ancient city when his co-workers had asked him where they were travelling this time.) He never expected it would hurt, looking at pictures of the remains of the city where he spent his other childhood.
In the end it didn't matter. Like the Doctor said: people only heard what they wanted to hear. So yeah, nice trip, new house, how wonderful for you, could you pass the salt please?
Their last day together, home alone before they had to face the outside world again, he and Amy looked at old pictures of Melody. Not that the pictures were that old…
Some had been taken only a month before (in linear time, another thing to get used to again). It all just felt like a lifetime ago. They mourned their lost childhood friend, because Mels had in fact died, having been shot by Hitler.
They also talked about their daughter who was recuperating far (ages) away from them, wishing they could see her, hug her, tell her it would all be all right and that she would be amazing. They knew she would. They had met her after all. They had met the imposing woman – River - that she would become.
Only when they had left her, she had been all alone. Having just sacrificed her lives for the man she was raised to hate. A man she would grow to love, Rory knew – had seen it - . He did not how to feel about that yet.
Only then they cried for Melody…
'I don't even remember what my baby looks like,' Amy admitted tearfully at three o'clock, the night before Rory was expected back at the hospital. He had woken up in an empty bed and had finally found her wrapped in a blanket sitting in their garden, looking at the stars.
You were only together for a few moments, he wanted to console her, it's only natural you wouldn't remember. He kept his silence however, knowing better than to try and be reasonable at an emotional moment like this.
'Do you remember,' she asked. 'Do you remember our little girl?'
Rory kept quiet and turned to hug her. He just held her in his arms until they were both cried out. Exhausted, from having lost so much, and not even being allowed to remember how much they had missed.
Only, he did remember.
He could see their tiny little daughter picture perfect in his mind's eye. How she had cooed in his arms and had glanced up at him entranced by his shiny armour. He could even remembered the colour of her eyes and the smell of her skin.
He refused to, with all his strength. Because that memory was linked to other memories:
* The nightmare of watching his daughter's facsimile melt in her mother's arms.
* The moment of realising that Madam Kovarian – whom he had shown *mercy* by letting her escape empty-handed but alive - had tricked them into losing their daughter.
* The fact that she did succeed in brainwashing his little girl into a psychopath that killed people without blinking.
*The knowledge he would never see his little baby girl again.
He'd rather, no, he choose
* To remember growing up with Mels, the initially gloomy foster kid from down the street.
* To fondly recall how the three of them used to play tag.
* To never forget the bottles of wine they had shared on his eighteenth birthday, all getting rather pissed and very much in trouble.
* To recall the awe he felt for the woman pretending to be Cleopatra, the first time they met.
* To cherish the pride he felt at hearing that that woman, the only one ever really able to handle the Doctor, was his daughter.
So yeah, maybe he was only human too.
