There is a wall behind him, he is almost positive. His back is pressed against a flat surface. Finally. The end of the hall. But he has sworn to Amy not to look at it. Perhaps it is his exit.
She stands a meter or so in front of him and off to the side, keeping a careful distance. Except for her quick embrace earlier, the vivacious ginger had not spoken a word to him.
The silence breaks like shattering glass, the unexpected sound of her accent almost making him jump.
"What do you see, Doctor?"
He takes a few steps forward, pushing himself off the wall he is not allowed to look at for one reason or another. The Timelord stands beside her, near the top of the staircase they had climbed to reach this point. Each step is adorned with candles and glows softly; for some reason, this particular area is very sensitive to him. Every time he takes a step, a faint echo of his footprint shines on the tile, fading slowly. Footprints on a beach, washed away by an invisible tide. But only him. Where ever Amy treads, the marble floor does not react.
He stands next to his best friend, overlooking the long hall. Thousands of figures crowd into small clusters, talking and laughing, while the mysterious golden light flits around the room.
"I see almost every person I have ever known in one, impossible place," the Doctor replies gravely. "And I would like to know why."
"Don't worry, we can talk now," she says, relaxing visibly and taking a seat on the top stair. She pats the empty space next to her, gesturing that he should sit with her. No longer cold and distant, she is once again just Amy from Leadworth. "You've got questions."
"Who are these people?" he asks, taking a place next to her.
"They're your friends. Everyone who has ever touched any part of the TARDIS – a key, a console, the outside – they end up here. The TARDIS, she saves us all in a database."
"You're not real," he says, the sound of his heart breaking bleeding into his short comment. He stares at her with shining eyes, a child betrayed by his parents.
"Don't be like that. I'm real enough." She reaches over and takes his hand. "I've still got all my memories and such."
The Doctor sniffs, his likeness to a child increasing tenfold. "What's the light? It looks like – "
"Regeneration energy? It is, sort of. It's the TARDIS, updating us. All of time and space, she follows our time streams and keeps us up to date. The longer we're in here, the more updates we need to keep us... functioning."
When he doesn't say anything, Amy continues, "Like this morning, I got an update about the real Amy Pond. She's in Manhattan, yeah? And my son, Anthony, his second birthday was today. He couldn't figure out how to blow out the candles, so Rory had to help him." She smiles slightly at the memory.
"All of you, I thought you were lost, but you're all in here. Two doors down, this entire time," the Doctor says, his eyes scanning the hall.
"There you go, you're catching on," Amy says, smiling tightly and leaning her head against his shoulder.
"But there's one thing I don't understand. I talked to a future version of myself. He said I'd have to get through another obstacle to get to the exit. And I have the funniest feeling the exit is right behind us. You don't seem like an obstacle."
Amy clears her throat, pushing her glasses up her nose. "Well, time can be rewritten, right? Now, do you want to get out of here or not?"
"Yeah, 'course I do, Pond," the Doctor says with a wide smile. He helps hops up, displacing Amy. "So, when can I visit again, hm? This room doesn't have a timer, or anything, right? Now that I know how to get here without the time panels, it'll be much better, I won't be such a wreck next time. Maybe I'll bring us some fish fingers and custard! Or I could work on the matrices and see if I could download you lot and let you see some other places outside this room! How would you like that, Pond?"
But when he looks up from his ramblings, Amy looks far from thrilled. She won't look him in the eye and something is sparkling on her cheek. He rushes over to her, taking her face in his hands and brushing away her tear. "Amy? What's wrong?"
"It doesn't work like that," she says softly.
"What doesn't work like that?" he asks, a creeping sense of dread stealing over his hearts.
"The room. Us. All of us." He freezes, only his hearts beating as they work overtime to compensate for everything else's lack of movement.
"Explain."
"Can't you just go?" she asks, her voice wavering dangerously. "The door is right there. Please." The Doctor turns, the ice in his hearts jabbing painfully. There is a wall, all right, and an exit. Unconsciously, he takes a step away from Amy and one closer to the door.
A silver door, with the word Ponds scrawled along its surface and Rory's warning underneath.
"Do what you came here to do. Lock us up and move on, Raggedy Man." He looks back at her, a look of pure horror on his face. Her tearstained stare carefully gauges his reaction.
"Explain this, you explain this right now, Amelia Pond!" he demands, walking back towards her.
"You can't come back," she whispers softly, closing her eyes. "I think you knew that already."
"But you'll still be here! I can find a way to get you out!" the Doctor says desperately, the rage draining from him and more tears taking its place.
"No. We exist because you're here. We're like trash, already thrown away, but waiting in the bin. Waiting for you. When you leave, the trash gets taken out. We get deleted," she explains in the same quiet voice, her eyes pressed shut.
"Then how can I leave?" asks the Doctor pitifully, taking her hands in his. "How can I leave?" he repeats quietly.
Her eyes fly open; the fire that has always characterized Amy rekindles with a passion. "Because you're the Doctor. Because we are just ghosts and there are real, breathing people out there who need you, Raggedy Man!"
"I can't ," he says, trembling. "I can't kill you all again."
"Doctor, there is a time to live... and a time to sleep. Some of us have been here too long. We're tired. I have a son, in New York, that I will never meet. He was never saved by the TARDIS. I remember everything about him. Right now, in 1949, I'm reading him a bedtime story from a book I've never even held. His first word was "Daddy" and tonight he has a fever. And I can't hold him." Her tears have restarted. She brushes them away angrily. "I love him so much and I can never speak to him. We are not the people you lost, Doctor. We're their ghosts."
"But..."
Her hands shaking as well, Amy reaches inside his pocket and draws out his sonic. "We're not here, Doctor. Not in this room. We're alive."
She presses a button on the sonic and the room begins to static. Suddenly, everything around him disappears. He's standing in a busy street surrounded by infinitely tall buildings. People swarm past him, oblivious to his existence. And then he sees them. Rory and Amy, a small boy in between them, walking across the street. They all hold hands, swinging the boy occasionally between them. Laughing.
We're alive, Doctor.
With a sudden crack, New York vanishes and he's in a small house. Rose and her Doctor sit across from each other at a small breakfast table, each reading the paper and sipping coffee. The half human Doctor absent-mindedly reaches across the table and Rose takes his hand without looking up from her paper.
We're living our lives every day.
Crack. A supermarket. Martha reads off their shopping list as Mickey heaves two gallons of milk into the cart.
To you, we seem dead.
Crack. A warm living room. Donna bosses Shaun around as he assembles a cabinet.
But we're not.
Crack. A nursery. Sally Sparrow lifts a young toddler from a crib and places her on her hip.
We aren't bunches of pixels in a TARDIS.
Crack. Susan reading. Crack. Jack typing something into a computer. Crack. Sarah Jane planting flowers.
We're out there. In the past, but still alive.
Crack. Amy Pond is standing in front of him, holding his sonic screwdriver. "Do you understand, Doctor?"
The Doctor nods silently, wiping something from his eye.
"You have to go." She tucks his sonic back into his jacket. "You're going to need to be brave, but I'm not worried." Taking his hands, she slips something into his palm and closes his fingers around it. "We will love you always, no matter what." He opens his hand. Cradled in his palm is Amy's silver key. The key to their room. His escape. "And that goes for all of us."
He looks up at her smile and then glances to his left for one last look at the hall. A quiet gasp escapes him as he looks out over the crowd of people who have ventured from their places in the hall to congregate around the stairs. An endless sea of familiar faces that all smile at him. Several give him a salute and more than a few wave sadly. Rose, clinging to her Doctor, smiles through her tears.
He turns back to Amy and has the most irrelevant thought. Panicking slightly, he says "Amy. Your glasses. I left them in your garden."
She smiles at his expression and then removes her glasses. Folding them up, she slips them into his tweed pocket. "For luck, Raggedy Man." She places her hand on his cheek and smiles sadly before turning and joining the crowd. She takes a place next to Rory and River, taking her husband's hand.
He clears his throat and says thickly, "Thank you. All of you." His statement is received with a few nods and more smiles.
The entrance of the hall is no more than a black speck, but the Doctor watches as, like a black hole, all the golden TARDIS energy flows towards it. There is a quiet boom and the floor quivers beneath his feet. Like a great tidal wave, the golden light pours from the entrance where the blackness has been lost in the endless gold.
As it approaches, he watches as the wave crashes over the crowd. No one flinches or tries to run. They simply close their eyes and continue to smile. Not dying or disappearing – just going home. The room itself begins to fade as well, crumbling away in microscopic pixels where the energy touches the walls. The wave finally crashes over the first row, returning the Ponds to a string of computer code. The room succumbs to empty blackness, the stairs crumbling. Finally, the energy and hungry darkness stops just meters from where the Doctor stands. From the wall of golden mist forms a figure that steps toward him. The outline is vaguely human, but the energy doesn't stand still enough to create a solid figure. First she looks like Rose, then like Susan, then Martha and Amy and River and Donna. By the time she reaches him, the Doctor cannot even tell who she is supposed to be. Perhaps she is someone he cannot recall, or someone he has yet to find. Whoever she is, she places her hands on his shoulders and reaches up on her tiptoes to kiss him gently on the forehead.
Brave heart, my Thief.
She dissolves into a swirling mist of TARDIS energy that circles gently around him. Slowly, he turns and makes his way to the door. Behind him, the floor disappears into nothingness. Just as before. The only way out is forward.
He inserts the silver key into the lock and the door swings open.
Without looking back, he steps over the threshold and into the Ponds' room, closing the door behind him.
Everything is just how they left it, the bed unmade and the closet ransacked. He looks around and treads carefully, as if not to disturb the chaos. He pauses at one of the shelves. Carefully, he pushes aside the dusty picture frames – one of him and River in Barcelona, the other of the entire family in a city called Gwag in a distant star system – and picks up Amy's old handmade TARDIS. Just as always, he will take one souvenir for his room of memories. He will put it on a shelf and lock the door and try not to think of what he is doing.
Having gotten what he came for, the Doctor opens the door once more. Something deep inside him wishes for a moment to see a pale hall, to see everyone waiting for him –
But he is greeted with a blue-circuited corridor. Even the doors of his old companions are gone from their earlier position.
He takes a step forward into the hall in the direction of the console room, when suddenly –
There is nothing but darkness.
