Author's note: Hey guys. So, watching 'The Girl Who Waited' the other week got me all moved and inspired - and this was the result.
It was a wonderful episode and I hope that I do it justice here.
I've written a few stories but this is my first attempt at The Whoverse.
Comments and helpful criticism are welcome with open arms. Enjoy!
Moving on
Rory quietly closed the door to the bedroom that he and Amy shared. He stood there for a moment, staring at his hand on the metal doorframe, but without really seeing it, lost in the terrible thought of how close he'd come to losing her. Amy was everything to him. She was the reason that he risked his life on a daily occurrence and lived through the agony of watching Amy risk hers just as frequently. She was the one and only reason that he had ever set foot on the TARDIS to begin with. It certainly hadn't been for laughs that he had decided to board the volatile time machine.
He rested his head against the door and sighed. He'd just put Amy to bed, making sure she was perfectly comfortable and kissing her on the forehead before leaving, promising that he'd join her soon.
He thought that she'd fallen asleep even before he was properly out of the room. She'd been through so much that day.
Again.
Rory felt his hand clench into a fist in anger.
How many more times?
His knuckles turned white.
He pushed away from the door and walked purposely back down the hallway. He needed to find the Doctor.
That day Rory had witnessed his wife as someone so twisted and angry, that she had almost been unrecognisable. It had all been so wrong. Tears swam into his vision and he let them. As much as the Doctor liked to deny otherwise, she had been Amy. Thirty-six years older perhaps, bitter and broken perhaps, but still a real, alive human being with blood and feelings and consciousness.
Rory's simmering anger flared and he wiped at his eyes furiously.
She was dead now, that Amy. Left to die. In fact, Rory might as well have dropped the guillotine blade himself.
The TARDIS noise might have overrode the sound of her unconscious body hitting the floor; of the Handbots moving forward to surround her, their calm voice-boxes explaining that there was no need to be alarmed - the words a bittersweet irony - and the closed wooden doors of that great time-travelling Police Box might have stopped him from seeing the lethal injection that entered her bloodstream and killed her, but Rory could envision it all in his minds-eye. It would follow him - the things he'd never seen but could imagine. He could see his wife die - and it tortured him.
Rory slammed into the TARDIS control room, startling the Doctor so spectacularly that he managed to whack his head on the central console as he tried to stand up from his kneeling position at its base. He yowled out in pain and clutched at his head. The Doctor, looking every bit like a wounded puppy, stared up at Rory like it was all his fault - which, it kind of was - before carefully, he got up to his feet.
"Careful now, Rory," admonished the Doctor. "I'm working on something extremely...uh, temperamental here. One wrong slip, one wire out of place and we could all end up plummeting into a Black Hole for all eternity...or something similarly not good." He grinned madly, as if the thought of such an occurrence sounded like great fun.
The Doctor's oddly-placed excitement was usually quite infectious. After all, it was always pretty reassuring when you were hurtling through time and space at one million light-years an hour, trying and failing to hang on for dear life, that there was the Doctor - smiling away like it was all brilliant. It made you feel safe. But that day, Rory found the Doctor's smile cruel and misplaced, and it did nothing but fuel the fire within him.
"I need to talk to you," Rory said bluntly.
The Doctor's smile faltered. His eyes flicked back to the TARDIS console.
"No!" snapped Rory, stamping down the flight of stairs and roughly dragging the Doctor around to face him. "No. I want you to concentrate, alright?"
The Doctor's eyebrows rose in surprise and he put up his hands gingerly in truce. Rory let go of him and started to pace. The Doctor straightened up his collar. He leaned against the console and watched Rory march back and forth.
"Are you quite alright, Rory?"
Rory stopped suddenly and glared at the Doctor. "Alright?" he said, as if not understanding the word. "Oh yeah. Oh yeah - just, just great. I just sent my wife to her own execution by a bunch of needle-happy robots, but yeah, I'm fine. Brilliant!"
"She wasn't real - she doesn't exist anymore, Rory," the Doctor said quickly. Quietly.
His voice was infuriatingly calm.
"She does to me, alright?" cried Rory, thumping his chest with one hand. "You might be able to just forget her and move on, but deep down you know that she was flesh and bone and - real! And we left her there to die...and how can you not care about that?"
The Doctor took in a breath. "Of course I care, Rory - but that Amy doesn't exist now. Technically, she never existed. Our Amy wasn't left. She doesn't have that memory. I got the real Amy, our Amy, back to you safe and sound as I promised. She's here now. She's real."
"And that makes it all ok, does it?"
Rory was seething - so angry that he could feel himself shaking.
"No."
Rory looked to the Doctor. He had expected him to say something completely insensitive and along the lines of 'yes, of course it's ok. She's alive, isn't she?' He wasn't sure how to respond now.
"No," the Doctor repeated quietly. "That doesn't make it all ok. Nothing about this situation is ok. But I had to get you and Amy out of there - I had to save you. ...And that was the only way I could do it." The Doctor paused for a moment, looking down to his feet, shuffling them about a little. "So you can shout at me Rory, but answer me this - right now, would you rather we had saved our Amy or the other one? The one who had suffered so much. Would you rather Amy had gone through all that?"
The Doctor met Rory's gaze and Rory looked away, ashamed at knowing what his answer would be.
The Doctor nodded gravely. "Me neither."
They were silent for a moment, the human and the alien, both lost in their own thoughts.
"I have had to make terrible decisions in my lifetimes, Rory" said the Doctor. His voice had taken on a haunted tone. "And I inevitably regret stuff. ...They say the older you get the more you regret. And I'm, well, lots - sqillions of years old...can you imagine? But I think that if I dwelled on it all -I'd just end up going insane. ...Insaner. ...Insanerer? ...Is that a word?"
Rory shook his head, suddenly feeling exhausted. His eyes were still rimmed with tears. "How do you...stand it?" he uttered.
"I do what I can...make things as good as I can. ...And then I move on."
That's when the TARDIS engines started to make some very unreassuring noises. "Oh, that'll be the transmodolar income majigga ...thingie. I should probably plug that back in!" The Doctor whirled back around to the console and promptly came to life, hands flying over the console, pulling and jabbing seemingly randomly at buttons and levers. His eyes shone with the excitement of the moment.
Rory stood back, staring numbly at the Doctor. He supposed this was them - moving on.
All feedback welcomed :D