Author's Note: Thanks to everyone who commented on the last chapter. Feedback is always appreciated! The response has been wonderful, which makes it that much more fun.
This chapter is entirely from Amy's point of view. We get much more of the Doctor and their beginning travels in Chapter Three. I almost posted them together, but the length was just too much. It's coming very soon, though. (I tend to update every few days.)
As always, I do not own Doctor Who. Enjoy!
Chapter Two:
Good Madness
"You should have let me get my own jumper," Amy grumbled, huddled inside the Doctor's coat.
"I was afraid you'd change your mind," he told her, his grip on her hand just short of painful. "Besides, the pockets are bigger on the inside."
"Yes, I know," Amy grumbled again, but this time she was trying to hide a smile. So her presence, her decision to come, mattered to him then. And his pockets really were bigger on the inside. She'd managed to stuff them with a few important things before being hauled out of her bedroom, in her nightie, at a speed she fervently hoped wasn't what he considered normal. "I can't believe I'm doing this. Why am I doing this? I'm running away with my imaginary friend." Amy glanced at her too-large house, the neighboring ones she never visited, and the skeletal trees as the Doctor rushed her down the crumbling path. "I must be completely mental, just like all those doctors…"
He spun on her so fast she lost her footing and stumbled. Long cool fingers wrapped around her forearms, steadying her before she could fall. "Listen to me, Amelia Pond, because this is important." He held up a single finger between them as if feeling the wind, and then poked her right on the sternum. She winced. "I am a doctor, the Doctor, and I am most definitely mad. But the world always needs good madness, and in no way does it make you mental."
The sliver of moon painted everything around them in muted grays and deep shadows. Amy felt insubstantial as a ghost in the cold soft wind, the layers of her white nightgown pooling out around her knees. Of purest white, the fabric made her the brightest thing under the night sky, except for the banked fierceness she saw in the Doctor's eyes. They popped and sparked like a live thing. He held both of her hands now, the big blue box behind him shrouded in shadows. "I'll make it up to you, Amy," he said. It was the softest of promises, the most fervent of vows. "Whatever they did to your head, whatever they made you believe, about me, about yourself, I promise I'll make it right somehow." Coaxing now, he walked backwards with her towards the dark box, so familiar and yet totally surreal.
"I can't believe it," she whispered to him, as if telling a secret. "It's just like I remember. Just like all those models I made as a kid."
Amy expected to be embarrassed, confessing that she had made childhood toys out of the very man who was pulling her across her yard in a peculiar, shuffling dance. But he gave her a smile like the absent sun and patted absently at his pockets. Pockets in a coat that she was wearing haphazardly across her shoulders. And then Amy did flush a humiliating shade of scarlet underneath her pale skin, redder even than her hair, as he slipped a hand into a pocket at her hip.
"These." The Doctor smiled his best crooked smile and held up a paper mache Tardis. "It's lovely. You even got the sign right."
Amy flushed again. "You brought them." Her voice wavered.
"Of course. I love toys. But the real thing…" The door swung open behind him. "Is even better."
They were inside. The blue box with a swimming pool in the library that was, like his pockets, much bigger on the inside. And she was in it, with her Raggedy Doctor who was no longer quite so raggedy, and she was no longer a child. Amy dug in her heels, suddenly and powerfully terrified, but the floor in the Tardis console room slipped uselessly away beneath her feet. "I can't…" she gasped, alarms going off in her head. "There's Leadworth… and Rory… and my job and…"
"And?" He looked at her expectantly. "Your job, if indeed that's what it is, will just have to find another policewoman. You're not going back to that no matter what. Leadworth will keep. And Beak… I mean Rory… will wait. If he's worth it: He. Will. Wait." The Doctor pulled levers and smashed buttons and…was that a pinball machine? There was a whirring sound, like a madly purring cat, before Amy landed hard on her back as the Tardis careened out of control.
She couldn't help it; she started laughing. The Doctor looked at her, mildly interested in case she really had lost her mind, but then released his death grip on the console to help her up. "Wonderful, isn't it?" he boomed. "Love a good take off. Come on, Pond. Share the joke. What's so funny?"
Amy, who hadn't stopped giggling, smashed into his shoulder as the Tardis shook again. "I missed it," she gasped out at last. "I missed being able to say, 'It's bigger on the inside," and to ohh and ahh appropriately, because I got dumped flat on my back. I've dreamed of what I would say, ever since I was seven, and I missed my chance because… I'm in my nightie and a madman's coat, and I'll never have a first time on the Tardis again!"
The Doctor regarded her gravely for a moment, and then was all smiles and grand gestures. "Never say never, Amy Pond. Not to a time traveler. Now, where to next? We have all of time and space."
"World enough and time," she interjected excitedly. "It's like that poem I used to love. World enough…"
"Had we but world enough and time, to see the evening spread across the sky, like a patient etherized," the Doctor recited, laughing, into her face. "T.S. Eliot, 'The…'"
"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock!" The Doctor's lightning flash moods were so contagious. She smiled with him, like an overgrown child. "Yes! I remember now." The Tardis was stable enough to free her hands from their death grip on his arm. She tucked wild red hair behind her ears. "We have that, then? The world and time?"
"And more," the Doctor promised.
"Then surprise me," she said, and handed him his coat.
