All characters © BBC
Summary: Rory makes a late-night discovery. Takes place in season 6, some unspecified time between Night Terrors and The Girl Who Waited.
The Old Have Bad Dreams
It's the faint whirring of the TARDIS that Rory awakens to, sometime after two a.m. and somewhere in the Xebatas galaxy god knows how far from home. The TARDIS always thumps and hums away, even in the dead of night and space. It is one of those things, like the weather or a birthmark or the way the radiator in his old house used to clank during the winter; something that Rory acknowledges but has never really bothered to give much thought unless he absolutely has to. The TARDIS makes those sounds well into the night, Rory knows, because he is often awake. As he is now.
After being chased by motile peg dolls in a giant dollhouse last week Rory should have anticipated troubled sleep. But no, that is not the cause of his perturbable repose. It never is. He rarely dreams of their adventures, despite all of the vampiric fish and flesh doppelgangers and monks without heads and almost drowning (although there had been that one dream last month in which President Nixon had offered him crab pâté in an astronaut suit, but that is beside the point). No, Rory dreams of being a Roman. He dreams of his times with King Harold. Of Marco Polo and the Franks on the Rhine. He dreams of Isca and the Crusades and the fall of his Empire, among other things.
During the day he is too busy running from Sirens or socking Hitler to really think about the time he spent protecting the Pandorica. He pushes those times behind a cerebral rampart of steel and stone where they can (hopefully) gather rust, even if he knows that it's not that simple.
Hence, two thousand years of suppressed memories have to emerge somewhere.
He is never Rory from Leadworth; he is always Rory the Roman in his dreams, when the night (or whatever passes for night in space) comes. He wears a breastplate of burnished pewter, carries a shield embossed with a golden eagle and speaks in Latin. He doesn't tell Amy about his dreams, but sometimes she stirs in the bed beside him when he sits up, gasping quietly behind a hand.
Tonight he had watched as the Silence took Asian black rats, still alive and squealing, and had dropped them into the fountains of Constantinople. He had seen the red spots, the blackened skin, but could not save them despite his admittedly profound cache of medical knowledge.
Rory knows that the dream had been illogical; he had fled to Africa during the first Plague and had not met the Silence until the Doctor's little death party in Utah. The scary part of the dream had been the symbolic meaning behind it all, and from his bed Rory scrubs a hand over his face and groans. He needs to walk around.
Walking through the TARDIS's corridors calms him somewhat. Rory doesn't know if it is due to that somehow soothing hum of machinery or the fact that he can literally feel the presence of the TARDIS watching him (which should unsettle him by all means but does not, strangely).
As Rory nears the main room he can vaguely make out the shape of the Doctor in his hammock beneath the glass floor of the console. Doesn't that man ever sleep?
He gets closer and realizes that the Doctor has indeed fallen asleep, slouched forward on the hammock. He has even forgotten to take off those Swiss motorcycle goggles that he wears when fixing wires. They always make Rory think of Snoopy pretending to be a pilot and flying his little dog-house (because the alternative is associating them with the goggles that Vin Diesel wears in Riddick, and that proves to be a less comforting image in the middle of the night).
Rory has often wondered if the Doctor has his own room. He assumes the latter does, but then again he has never really seen the Doctor sleep. Unconscious, multiple times, but never sleeping. It seems to go against his ever-present impulse to move and bustle about. Asleep and stationary apart from the slight sway of the hammock, the Doctor almost looks normal.
"Doctor," Rory says quietly. It is almost a question.
In response, he hears another hum from the TARDIS and realizes that it (she, Rory reminds himself) has the Doctor's head encased in a muted golden light. A light the color of fresh mangoes, almost. As little wisps of the light fan out they darken to liquid topaz before fading into the air. The Tiger's Eye.
It seeps gently from somewhere inside the console down to the Doctor. Rory comes closer to the edge of the upper platform and reaches out his hand. After a moment he withdraws it from the TARDIS's light; some strange notion tells him that he would do best not to touch it.
Rory frowns at the light. "What are you doing?"
The light merely swishes about, pulsing faintly. Rory descends the steps charily, as not to wake the Doctor, and stops at the bottom. He can hear it now; the burble of voices and laughter. More curious than ever, Rory leans in and closes his eyes, concentrating.
And suddenly he is happy.
The TARDIS is singing. Not with words, precisely, but with images and people and things that smile in resplendent brilliance. Sometimes Rory can catch a phrase here or there ("You are not alone...the leaves on the trees were silver...Everybody lives..."), but mostly it is just warmth, strength. Rory can only catch snippets of all this, as the light is not meant for him.
"You..." He stares up at the TARDIS's console through the glass ceiling, because now he's starting to understand. You're giving him good dreams.
Even from his place at the foot of the stairs, just a few feet away, he feels a sense of overwhelming calm; the feeling that everything is right. He notices that the Doctor's brow behind those ridiculous goggles is smooth as cream. Too smooth for someone who should be wrinkled and old, but blessedly so.
The impossibly old have impossibly bad dreams. Rory knows this well. His body is just over twenty-two, but his mind is about one thousand nine hundred thirty one, give or take a few years. He is eerily like the Doctor in these regards; an old man pretending to be young again. So much to remember, to joy and to mourn. So restless are the nights when he actually allows himself to.
"He doesn't know, does he?" Rory murmurs. The TARDIS gives a thrum, and the ethereal golden light continues to envelop the Doctor like some odd sort of liquid pillow. Amy is his anodyne, Rory concludes, as the TARDIS is the Doctor's.
Rory doesn't even pretend to understand the relationship shared between the Doctor and his sentient alien spaceship. He had gotten to meet the TARDIS in person, quite literally, during that whole fiasco with House and Nephew and the people that didn't match. She had been brilliant and every bit as insane as the Doctor himself, which explains why they get along so well. Rory has witnessed the Doctor slapping the console in sheer frustration, yanking some oddly-shaped levers or, one time, yelling at what had appeared to be a metal dashboard. Yet he has also seen the Doctor work for hours upon hours on fixing the controls, has seen him stroke the screen with the tenderness of a mother or lover.
They act like the world's oddest married couple, Rory muses with a small smile. Heck, they've had seven hundred years together. Rory wonders dimly if he and Amy are going to have that kind of love-hate thing going on when they are older (yet hopefully not that much older).
Rory also wonders what kinds of dreams the TARDIS is giving the Doctor. He wonders if the Doctor is seeing those silver leaves and orange skies of Gallifrey. If he's seeing the smiles of those who he has lost. If he's feeling the warmth of their hugs.
Rory swallows and closes his eyes against that puissant glow, though his eyelids remain illuminated with a darkened gold. Sometimes he dreams of two millennia and a starless sky that never happened. He dreams of the centuries going by, of all the people he met and of all of those he'd slain to protect what could never be opened. Sometimes he wakes up and has to grope around in the dark until he finds Amy's long red hair, wrapping it around his fingers to assure himself that she is here and not inside the Pandorica. He is Rory from Leadworth now, he has Amy, and he is lucky.
The Doctor is also lucky, even if he does not know it.
"Don't worry," Rory says, looking up at the console and nodding. "I won't tell him."