The Most Beautiful Thing
"D'you think I should dye my hair?" asked Amy, twirling a strand of it around one finger as she frowned at herself in the vanity mirror.
"What?" Rory, already in bed, sat up and shook his head in sleepy irritation. "Why?"
"I've never liked it," Amy confessed. "It's so … carroty. I always wished it was black or something more dignified like that. Think I should dye it?"
He sighed. It felt like junior high all over again, when she had worried about her freckles and her bust size and even the strangest things such as the size of her pores, and he was just about to tell her to stop being stupid, when something about her statement finally clicked into place. Black hair?
"Hold on," he said, climbing out of bed and walking up behind her in his striped pyjamas. "Don't tell me you're still jealous of the siren – I mean the medical hologram."
"I am not!" she bristled.
"Really?" He placed his hands on her shoulders and raised an eyebrow at her reflection in the mirror.
"I just – ugh, you should've seen yourself. 'The most beautiful thing you've ever seen …' I mean, of course the music was a drug, sort of, and it worked for the others, but they hadn't seen a woman in months! What if she hadn't been harmless?" She swung around in her chair and glared up at him. "What if she was luring you to her death? You, you completely lost your head back there. You weren't you anymore!"
So that was the problem. Rory wished, uneasily, that he had a clear memory of how he'd behaved. He took her hands in his and pulled her to her feet.
"Amy … listen. First of all, you can't hold something against me that I said under the influence of … whatever that was."
"I know," she said ruefully. "I wasn't gonna say anything, I just … "
"Amy, I love you." He linked their fingers together and raised her hands, showing her both their wedding rings glinting in the lamplight. "Don't you ever, ever doubt that. It's nothing any amout of sirens could change."
"That's good." She smiled shakily.
"And you know what?" He took a step backward, then another, slowly leading her across the plush carpeting to the big, warm canopy bed behind them.
"What, Rory?" The playful sparkle was returning to her gray-green eyes; she knew exactly what he had in mind.
"The most beautiful thing I've ever seen … and note that I'm saying this at full mental capacity … "
"Go on!" They reached the bed and she went to work on his pyjama shirt buttons, slowly, just the way she'd unwrap a candy bar to maximize the ."
" … is you."
She beamed.
"You saved my life, Amy," he said seriously. "I woke up and there you were, crying, with the light catching your hair like some sort of halo. Your hair is perfect. Don't ever change it, okay?"
Just to prove his point, he ran his fingers through the whole long, fire-red length of it, feeling it slide like warm silk.
"Never," she breathed. "Now c'mere, husband of mine. I'll show you perfect!"
She pounced on him like a little lioness, making them both fall across the bed in fits of laughter. Perfect is right, thought Rory, smiling up into his wife's luminous face. It was the last coherent thought he had for a long time.