two months
between "the doctor's wife" and "the rebel flesh"
The Doctor spends hours trying to get the TARDIS to talk again, and when the lever suddenly pulls down on its own, the Doctor's spirits soar. He laughs and lets the TARDIS, his good old sexy TARDIS, steer them to the next location, which is most certainly not the Eye of Orion.
He is so excited that the TARDIS is communicating with him again, perhaps not verbally but still as glorious all the same, he rushes into Amy and Rory's room. Which, in retrospect, could have potentially been highly awkward and the Doctor really needs to learn the concept of knocking. Thankfully, Amy and Rory were asleep and clothed and the Doctor breathes a sigh of relief.
"Amy, you have to see this!" he shouts gleefully, taking her hand and pulling her half-asleep self out of bed.
She stumbles around and has to lean against the Doctor to keep her balance. She tiredly rubs the sleep from her eyes and grumbles a complaint which the Doctor completely ignores. From across the room, Rory stirs, sits up in the bed, half-listens to the Doctor ramble on about how the TARDIS is back and took them to the amazing crystal planet. Rory seriously considers getting up to join them for a second, then decides otherwise, and falls back into his slumber.
"Doctor, I'm tired," Amy yawns as she continues to be dragged down the corridor by the eager Doctor.
Then he pushes her out the doors of the TARDIS.
Then she isn't so tired anymore.
The planet is absolutely breathtaking, composed entirely of clear crystals. Small crystalline prisms jut out from the clear, shiny ground, and marvelous mountains of sheer crystal capture the light of the stars in the distance. It's the thing of fairytales and dreams.
"Beautiful, isn't it?" the Doctor smiles. "Just don't touch any of the crystals."
Amy wanders through the translucent pillars of crystal and tries really hard to take in the wonder of the planet, but the sight is so magnificent that her brain can hardly process its grandeur. She is so overwhelmed by the simple beauty that she trips over a crystal rock and cuts her knee open.
A small drop of blood falls onto the ground, but immediately upon contact, it also crystallizes. So, there's now a little bit of Amy Pond is part of the landscape. It's such a nice thought that she almost wants to cut herself some more, just to watch her blood grow into such pretty crystals...
"Don't touch!" the Doctor warns again. Amy doesn't listen and mindless reaches for a nearby crystal formation. Recognizing the awed gaze in her eyes, the Doctor quickly wraps his arm around her waist and half-carries her back to the TARDIS. "And now it's time to go."
"But I want to stay," Amy complains, "I want to stay on this beautiful planet."
"It's not just a planet, Pond. It feeds off living organisms by absorbing the life out of them and turning them into crystal growths. One touch and you become a crystal statue forever."
"Oh."
"Yes. Oh."
Once inside the TARDIS, and away from the deceptively beautiful crystal planet, the Doctor sits Amy down on a chair by the console and holds his sonic up to her skinned knee. The wound quickly closes and everything would have proceeded as normal, except the Doctor catches the sonic's readings in the corner of his eye. And something is terribly off.
To make sure it wasn't just an error, the Doctor scans Amy with his sonic once more. Again, the reading is still the same. There seems to be some sort of wavelength surrounding Amy, an intergalactic signal shooting across the universe right into Amy. The readings also show that at the same time, faint traces of the TARDIS's time vortex is being absorbed by Amy, as if her body required the energy to...to what? What does a perfectly human body need external energy for, and why is it receiving a signal?
Unless.
No. It couldn't be. Could it?
"Doctor?" Amy softly touches his arm. "Is everything okay?"
"How long did you and Rory live on your own in Leadworth? How much time passed before we met again in America?"
"Two months. Why does that matter?"
But the Doctor was already making the calculations in his mind. Two months. A lot could happen in two months. Before that, the Doctor had sent them on three honeymoons in three different solar systems, a month each. Then three months they were in America 1969. It's starting to add up to very bad news.
Amy yawns again, so she hops off her seat and goes back to bed, fortunately forgetting the subject. The second she is out of the console room, the Doctor pulls up the screen again and runs the full body scan on Amy. It continues to flicker between positive and negative, pregnant and not pregnant. Hours later, after Amy and Rory have awoken, the scanner is still oscillating.
The Doctor looks over at Amy, playing darts with Rory as if it's just another day aboard the TARDIS, as if she's just normal old Amelia Pond. But she's not just normal old Amelia Pond, as the scanner would gladly show otherwise, and the Doctor finally has a theory.
He despises that theory.
However, the most despised theories are often the truest.