Title: Neonic Fishnetties
Author: janeausten4ever
Characters, Pairings: Amy/Eleven
Setting: Series 5, pre-Rory
Summary: Amy's PMSing. The Doctor must deal.
Notes: It's been an idea floating around in my head for a while, and then when I started PMSing last week it all just sort of...flooded out. And this does not mean that there won't be a second part to "like a name from a fairytale." This is not some of my best writing, but...oh well. This is not dark or angsty, unlike some of my other fics.
Neonic Fishnetties
The Doctor found himself in quite a dilemma. He stood tapping his foot nervously and biting the fingernails of one hand while the other held onto his elbow. What…to…do.
He'd found the Midol easily in the drug aisle (the Doctor wasn't entirely knowledgeable on human medication of recent years, but he knew that "drug" was a word most often associated with mind-altering substances. So where, he wondered, was the little green box labeled "Marijuana"? A young man of sixteen or seventeen had walked past him donning black leather pants and green hair in spikes so sharp they could be used as a weapon against the daleks. He had earrings in a giant jumble attached to both ears, and a face made up of more sterling silver than skin. One particular location which the Doctor could not quite comprehend was on his tongue. He wore a blue apron with a name-tag that said "Hello, My Name Is Slash." He did not offer the Doctor any help in locating the Midol, but he did give him a quite extraordinary sneer. Ah, the Doctor thought to himself as young Slash walked on, but he doesn't know I'm cool enough to have participated in the inhalation of marijuana toxins. At this the Doctor smiled, proud of himself).
But now here he was, in the Hygiene aisle, completely at a loss. There were so many options. Did he want mini? Maxi? Super-maxi? Should he call Amy and ask? (He then realized that to know the answer to this question he would have to be informed of the size of her…parts, and he also knew that she would take advantage of this question as best she could to humiliate him, so he wisely decided against a phone call). And what about brand? Tampax Pearl? Playtex Sport? Carefree? Didn't Amy mention something about High-Techs? Did he want maximum protection without flexibility, or flexibility with a gentle glide? What was a 'gentle glide,' anyway? (He figured it out, and blushed). Should he get the other things, too? The peanut-shaped napkin thingies? There were too many choices! In the past he'd fancied himself fantastic at making the right decision in two seconds flat, but this…this was a whole different ball-game.
"Excuse me…" The Doctor turned to his left to see a Madonna-esque twenty-something dressed in neon green fishnets and a hot pink sweatshirt with cut-off shoulders. Her hair was, to express the bare minimum, colossal. The Doctor could not comprehend how one could cultivate such mass and volume with mere Earth tools. Surely she was in possession of a super-sonic comb. There was no way she could—
"…noticed you seem to be unable to make up your mind, and I thought, why not help him out?" She gave him a sly grin and he attempted to detract his attention from the foot of blonde impossibility atop her head. It was a difficult task.
"Oh—yes, that—that would be lovely!" The Doctor heaved a sigh of relief, glad to have found such a trusty collaborator. That is, until he realized she was not headed for the High-Techs, but for—
"So…are you Magnum, or…" She slipped a pack of Trojans off the rack and wiggled an eyebrow at him suggestively.
The Doctor went positively crimson.
"No, I, uh—I'll have to be on my way now," he said, reaching randomly for a pack of hygiene products. "Off to the napkin aisle. Got a very important meeting with a…napkin. So I'll just—I'll be off, then! Nice meeting you!" He giggled nervously. "Goodbye!"
"What the fuck is this," Amy deadpanned when the Doctor handed her the plastic grocery bag.
"It's, you know…that thing you wanted."
Amy looked up at him from her bed, blinking. "Doctor," she informed him, "I sat up for this. And you give me this? This bullshit?"
"No-no, look!" The Doctor reached for the box, opened it quickly and pulled one out without thinking. "It's what you asked for! See? See?"
"No, dickwad," Amy growled, grabbing the vile object and unwrapping it with a vengeance. "Look. Look at this. Do you see this? This is cardboard. Cardboard, Doctor! And you're asking me to insert this into my body? You want me to have to endure cardboard embedded INSIDE OF ME? What do you think I am, some kind of cardboard whore?" She seized the box and hurled it at him with the velocity of a baseball swing, despite the fact that he was about two feet away from her.
The cardboard fiends erupted out of the box onto him, and the Doctor leapt about in a frenzy.
"I will not stand for this! I deserve plastic! Sweet, beautiful plastic, Doctor, do you hear me?"
"Yes, yes, I—" the Doctor wheezed, jumping towards the door while brushing Tampax off his body as though they were spiders.
"Now!" Amy roared with the equal lung capacity and potential for exacting decapitation of a lion.
She settled back into her pillows crossly as soon as the door shut behind the Doctor. Bloody cardboard…
The door opened and the Doctor's head popped in, his body too afraid to follow suit. "So I'm assuming that means you want 'gentle-glide'?" he winced.
"Yrghfrrr!" Amy heaved an errant Tampax at him, and he yelped, closing the door tightly behind him.
Amy had calmed down a bit by the time he returned the second time, and she'd also found time to mull over how depressing everything in her life was, and how she was fat and unlovable, and also where was all the food. All of this pondering left her in a considerably more fragile state than before.
"A-my," the Doctor hummed in the same cheerful and flat-out terrified tone with which one could assume Godzilla's mother wakes him for school. "Look what I brought you this time!"
Amy stared up at the Doctor with wide, hopeless eyes. Nothing was worth wishing for anymore. Everything was fucked. Also, where was all the food.
Sitting up with a resigned sigh, she opened the new box—which, oddly enough, didn't have a label on it—and out fell piles and piles of blue table napkins, cut in the wobbly fashion of a peanut.
Amy couldn't help it. She started laughing, softly at first, then louder and louder. Soon she was heaving in breaths and shaking, snorts unavoidable.
The Doctor was confused at first. Then, shakily, he laughed too, pointing at the napkins as if he'd gotten the joke all along (he still didn't). "Oh. Ha. Ha-ha. Yes, it's quite funny. Ha."
Just as he was starting to appreciate the true humor of the situation, and laughing harder now—blue peanut napkins! What an idiot!—he realized that Amy was sobbing uncontrollably.
"Oh, oh, oh, hey now, Amy, what's wrong? Sshh, sshh, what's wrong?"
"It's just—you're being—s-s ni-hi-hice to meee!" Amy answered, shoulders shaking. "No one's ever done that f-for me befo-beforrrre!"
"What, cut you up homemade hygiene products with blue dinner napkins?"
Amy smiled. "You're funny," she said. She chuckled, and then blew her nose into his shoulder.
"Hey, hey, it's all right. Sh, you're going to be all right," the Doctor chimed, rocking her back and forth.
When she'd surpassed the wheezing-and-sobbing stage and reached the sniffling-and-eye-wiping stage, Amy asked him,
"Why'd you decide to make them yourself?"
"The drug store didn't have blue ones," he answered simply. Amy looked at him for a moment, a small frown on her face, before laughing. Of course they had to be blue.
"Well, here. Let me help you out by being a tad more specific," Amy said, surprised by how well she was holding down the sarcasm. "Could you please go back to the Rite-Aid and get me some gentle-glide maxi-size Kotex, please?"
"Kotex, that's it!" the Doctor exclaimed, slapping his palm against his forehead. "I'll get you some. Only…I can't go back to that Rite-Aid."
"Why not?"
"There's, um…there's an unfriendly alien there. Yes. Unfriendly alien, very hostile, attempting to take over the earth as usual. Hm. Yes."
Amy looked concerned. "Well shouldn't we stop them?" she questioned, getting to her feet.
"Er, well, no," the Doctor improvised. "They, uh, haven't got much of a chance. Quite…stupid. Extremely low IQ."
"What're they called?"
"The, uh…the Neonic Fishnetties. Very stupid creatures. Very stupid."
Amy shrugged and sat back down. "All right then. Just wander around for a bit until you find another Rite-Aid, I suppose."
"Yes. Yes, that's what I'll do."
Later that night, the Doctor and a much more emotionally stable Amy sat in their seats at the Kodak Theatre to view the premiere of 'The Breakfast Club.'
"How did you get me into this, again?" the Doctor asked, reaching for some popcorn before Amy could devour it all.
"Well, first I yelled, then I cried, then I tried to seduce you, then it started working so you said if I'd be willing to put off the 'funny business' for a later date you'd cave and take me here."
"Ah, yes," the Doctor sighed. "You know you're quite volatile, Amy. Never do know what I'm going to get when it comes to you."
"Yes," Amy answered matter-of-factly. "I'm your mad, impossible Amy Pond."