A/N: Sorry about the delay everybody. Things are quite difficult right now, so even though I want to write, I don't have much chance to do so, what with one obligation and another piling up and up and up. Oh, how I wish a blue police box would appear in MY back yard one evening...


I don't care about my future
I don't care about your past
those things come from and lead to right now
they can get the hell out fast

so I am yours if you want me
you know what now I think you should
cause I want you to be mine so bad
I promise I will make it good

"I'm Yours If You Want Me" ~ Chris Thile


I.

Amy pushed her sodden hair from her face and sat up sputtering. She crawled across the rubble-strewn stones of the courtyard to where the Doctor lay sprawled.

Doctor? Doctor? Can you hear me?

She ran her hands over his face, feeling for a pulse at his neck. There didn't seem to be one. She leaned over, tears filling her eyes, and she pressed her ear to his chest to listen for his heartbeat. There was no sound.

She wept. Too late. I was too late. I didn't remember in time and I...

His arms closed around her with a convulsive clutching grasp as he drew in a noisy gulp of air.

*That's not for me, is it, Pond? Oh, come now. Remember, respiratory by-pass? And besides...in this place...everything is possible, isn't it?*

She looked at him with astonishment as he gently wiped away her tears with his fingers. She couldn't help but notice his hands, despite his unconcerned tone, were just a little bit unsteady. She wrapped her arms around him in return and for a time, they simply lay there holding each other tightly.

It occurred to her how uncomfortable it was to be wet and cold, how much more she would like it if she weren't, if he wasn't, and with the whim of her mind, they were clean and dry, the rubble of the destroyed wall vanished and all traces of the water from the storm gone as well. The only indication that any of it had ever happened was the large uneven gap in the wall before them.

*We'll want to do something about that, I imagine.*

We will? She was tired. She didn't want to build anything else. She just wanted to rest. Building walls took so much effort. Building walls took a very long time. Didn't he know that?

He smiled, kissed her hair. *What if we don't make this bit a wall?*

She looked at him in curiosity. How will I keep them out if it's not a wall? Gates are no good...

*Oh yes. I quite agree. And about that. I think I have something you might like...*

II.

When they were done, the gap in the white stone walls had been filled in with a small, shining, and very familiar bright blue wooden set of double-doors. The entire area around those doors was refilled with stone. They stood in front of the double doors, and the Doctor watched as Amy ran musing fingertips over the white and black porcelain sign there, over the small round lock that held them closed. She turned to him finally and smiled.

*Much better than a gate, right?*

His tone bordered on that smugness he often had when one of his plans had turned out the way he wanted. She resisted reminding him that those same plans often resulted in the two of them fleeing in panic from weapons fire not long after, but she couldn't quite stop the eyeroll that accompanied the thought. He saw it and just grinned.

Yeah, so, score one for you.

* Pond, you're missing the most brilliant part of the whole brilliant thing!* He rubbed his hands together eagerly. *Open the door,* he urged.

She looked at it somewhat uneasily, back to him.

*Go ahead. Nothing in the world to worry about.* He was rocking back and forth on his heels, arms folded behind him, happy smug little expression on his face.

Muttering to herself, she pushed against the TARDIS door lightly with the tips of her fingers. It swung open easily. She edged forward to peer through the opening. What she saw made her pause in confusion before stepping across that familiar threshold.

What have you done? What is this? She asked, puzzlement written in every line of her face.

*I know!* He crowed, following her. *See? Come on! Look around. Fantastic, isn't it?*

III.

Through the TARDIS doors she was standing in a small chamber with high arched ceilings. A warm golden glow pervaded the air. The walls of the little room were lined with shelves filled with books, bits of machinery, artifacts, and objects that seemed to flicker in and out of existence. Only about every third thing she saw was even remotely familiar. Above her, the ceiling was a glass dome and the skies it revealed were spiraling stars in patterns that shifted like the shimmering fragments in a giant kaleidoscope.

Although she had never been in this place before, she somehow recognized it immediately. The feel of it was somehow utterly...

Him. This is him. This is...his place...

She turned in a slow circle, taking it all in. Safety and warmth wrapped around her. He stood just behind her and watched her, expectation written on his every feature.

So you've put in a connecting door?

He nodded. She had the distinct feeling that he was waiting on something else, though. She continued looking at the chamber, noticed for the first time that there were three doors leading out from that space like spokes from a central hub. She felt the need to know what was behind those doors. She began to drift toward one of them, the nearest with its large round strangely familiar seal, but he stayed curiously still behind her.

She placed her hand on the knob of the door and it disappeared in front of her. Before her was a familiar vista, a rolling sea of reddish grass overspread by an orange sky. Distantly, she could see a small hill topped by a silver-leafed tree rising from the grasslands. Beyond that she saw a shimmering dome rising up and a great city within, like something out of a fairy tale.

She knew that place. Gallifrey. She smiled, fond remembrances crowding into her mind, and she turned to say something to him, but he was no longer there.

Doctor?

Her voice came back to her echoing off the high ceiling. She paused, scanning the room to see where he might be, but there was no sign of him. She sighed. Perhaps he'd disappeared behind one of the other doors, then...

She walked to one of the others and studied it. There were no markings on it. It appeared to be just a door. It was made of sturdy dark wood, and when she pressed her hand to it, it swung open with the quiet creak of seldom used hinges. She could see nothing in the dim lighting beyond, but there seemed to be a persistent hum coming from somewhere inside. It was not unlike the purr of the TARDIS as she spun through space and time.

Maybe he's gone in here?

Uncertainly, she stepped across the threshold. The world fell out from under her on her third step away from the door.

IV.

Images swirled around her, faces, places, objects, beginnings, endings. She was suddenly Alice tumbling down a rabbit-hole of 900-odd years of bold adventures in space and time. It was as if a voice was in her head telling her what she was seeing, a changing narrating voice as the events encased her like a multicolored flame.

She saw Daleks and armies of metal robotic men – Cybermen, the clipped formal voice told her – and she watched them appear over and over, changing slightly, but always wicked, always bringing destruction with them; she saw strong troops of odd potato-ish creatures that could only be destroyed through a knife-slit in their armor – Sontarans, said a voice somewhat grumpy and fussy – and she felt the fear of being chased through the TARDIS by them, of watching the Earth be brought to its knees by them; she saw tall lumpy, long-limbed and clawed green monsters who hid inside of human skins; she saw robots as tall as sky-scrapers, creatures from myth, and a real Egyptian god – Sutekh, intoned a voice that was deeper, more sonorous than the others – who'd been trapped inside an ancient pyramid. She saw a clever enemy who pursued and changed through time; she saw his face morph and shift, bearded and hawk-eyed one moment, something horrible and decaying the next, slender and dark again before changing suddenly to something innocuous and gray-haired before finally settling into something blond and smiling and smug that she almost recognized. She heard the raw despair and mixed emotion in the voice that named him over the image of that maniacally-grinning face disappearing into the unknowable – the Master. She saw faces of people she instinctively knew were travelers with the Doctor – the companions – and their names came to her with affection and sometimes with grief as she saw them. And through it all, she saw – the Doctor – only not her Raggedy Doctor – not the young face with the old eyes that she had known the night he'd dragged himself out of a tipped-over blue box in her midnight garden while she stood in her red sweater and watched with child eyes. These Doctors were a mixed bag of men, but always, always no matter whether they were old or youngish, tall or short, dark or fair, clad in scarf or leather jacket, she saw that they were same man underneath, racing from adventure to adventure, from joy to joy, and all-too-often, from grief to grief.

Suddenly, just as abruptly as it had begun, it ended, and she realized she was still standing just inside that semi-darkened room. She took a deep breath, and she turned and walked unsteadily out of the room. The door swung shut behind her.

He had reappeared from wherever it was that he'd gone to before, and now he was standing in the middle of the room again. She would have spoken, would have gone to him to relate the experience she'd just had, but something about his expression stopped her. There was such sadness in it. His hands were clasped behind his back, and he rocked back on his heels. He gestured with his head toward the third door, and she glanced at it. When she looked back at him, he had turned and was walking away. As she watched, his form became somewhat indistinct, then faded away altogether.

A heavy feeling of dread sat upon her as she considered the third door again. It was smooth, black, and totally featureless. It reflected no light. It looked as though it might be made of metal, but if it were metal, it was one solid-forged piece. No bolts or welds marred its oppressive surface. There was no knob, no visible means of opening it. She approached it, but for a long moments, she could not make herself reach out to touch it. There was something vaguely...repulsive...about it somehow.

I guess I have to go in here, too, though. He obviously wanted me to. I wonder if this one is open, too, like the last one was. Come on, Pond. It's just a door...

She reached up to place her hand on that flat-black surface, and she pushed. With a sound like something screaming, it shifted slightly, but did not open. She pulled her hand back and looked at it in distaste. There was a residue, something brown and flaky, coating her skin where it had touched the door. She dusted her hands together, but it clung.

Bloody wonderful.

She put both hands on the door and shoved hard. The door swung inward, and she stumbled inside prepared for some sort of scenario as she'd had in the previous room. However, nothing happened. The room beyond the door was lit with a reddish light. In the center of the space was a statue of a humanoid figure standing on some sort of pyre. Its body contorted as if in agony. She could barely see it in the dim light so she cautiously walked forward. As she got closer, she could see the detail of the carving. The arms lifted above the head both in a gesture of supplication and in warding. The face was a nightmare mask, a rictus of pain and despair, and she found that she couldn't bear to look at it very long. There was something about the eyes that was too lifelike for the abstract work, somehow too...aware...

And yet, there was something so compelling about it. There was something about the texture of the material it was carved from that seemed to be crying out to her to run her hand along it, to feel the curving edge of the clear crystal flames that were snaking up the dark stone body from the base of the plinth. Yes. She wasn't going to be able to stop herself from touching it, she realized, and even though she suddenly knew it was a very, very bad idea, she watched as her hand stretched forward, felt her mouth forming a silent denial, a silent scream, as her fingertips brushed ever-so-lightly against the outermost tip of the curling flames and she found herself plunged into the burning heart of hell...

V.

When the images stopped, she realized she was still screaming, but no sound was coming from her anymore. Her throat was too raw to produce sound. Her hands were wrapped tightly around the sharp edges of the protruding crystal flames, and trails of her own blood streamed down her arms and the clear sculpture from the large cuts on her hands. The stone of the statue had taken on a disturbingly rosy hue near its base where her blood was slowly pooling. She tried to let go of the carving, but she could not make her cramped hands release it. Amy whimpered softly as she finally managed to prize her fingers open and promptly collapsed on the floor, staring up at the twisted face above.

The Doctor's voice came to her softly from the door. *Now you know the worst of it, Amelia. Now you know it all, the good and the bad.*

She did not move, could not. Part of her wanted so very much to roll into a ball to defend herself from that voice, to get up and run as far away as she could from this shadowy figure so close to her now, this god-man who could destroy and had destroyed worlds with the touch of his hand; part of her wanted to get strength from somewhere to run to him, for him to hold her and keep her safe; part of her, a small, dark, sad voice, said with utter despair that it did not make any difference at all what she did, really, any more. She'd seen them all burn...

*Yes. And I did that. There was no other choice in the end. The Time War had to stop. The Time Lords...they had to be a part of that price...* The grief in his voice was measureless, beyond counting, even though she knew he was trying to hide it.

She shifted slightly, and her bleeding hands flexed. She knew. She'd seen. Oh God, how she wished she could unsee it. How she wished she could unknow it. Unknow the feeling of an entire world being ripped from the universe, from space, from time, from him...

*You have it all, now, Amy. We have all of each other. There are no more secrets left, no more walls, no more barriers. Everything that was separating us has been removed now and the way is clear and open...* He had not moved away from the entrance to this room, this shrine, she realized. This place where he kept all that was lost, all that had been taken, all that he had done and been made to do. There was something slightly pleading in his voice. He was asking her for something...

His words from so long ago came back to her. "The Mate holds all the power in the bond. She must choose. She must choose to establish it initially, to intertwine their minds. She must choose to allow all true forms of intimacy. He can court, entreat, can seduce, can pursue, but only She can release him fully..."

She turned her head and she looked at him from where she lay, broken and exhausted on the rough floor. Using the last of her waning strength, she slid her hand out toward him and she waited. She drew in a breath and by the time she was ready to let it out, he was holding her, cradling her. It felt good. She closed her eyes, leaned against him.

When she opened her eyes again, they were no longer in the third chamber with its incarnadine light and its horrific monument to loss. Instead, they were sitting under the silver-leafed tree and a cool, sweet-scented breeze was blowing, stirring waves in the red-orange grass that stretched before them. He held her close to him, pressed a kiss to her temple, gently smoothed her hair away from her face. He took her hands in his own and began to stroke his thumbs very lightly over the jagged tears in her palms. As she watched the livid red rips started to disappear. At once, the pain of those wounds diminished, and in a few moments, only two small white lines, one in each palm, remained to show that she'd ever been injured there.

That feeling of being connected to him was present as it never had been before. She felt tired beyond her ability to express, as though she could sleep for a hundred years, but also a peacefulness that she hadn't had since...well, Amy really couldn't remember when, actually. There was no sense of intrusiveness. There was simply the sense that he was in a way that she hadn't felt before. She felt as if she'd been of the blind philosophers in the old joke before who had been confronted with an elephant, this one thinking it a snake, this one horse, this one a tree... She laughed softly.

*What?*

Don't imagine you'll find it very flattering, being compared to an elephant.

He considered. *Oh, I don't know. They're properly smart, elephants. I'll have to take you to Telios IV sometime and introduce you to the Elephant Emperor. Entire planet ruled by elephant kind. It's rather fantastic.*

She smiled drowsily. She could feel his excitement buzz through her like a giant release of cola fizz. This, too, felt good. His joy was her own.

Will it always be like this now?

He smiled down at her. *This? This is just the beginning. But yeah. This is what it's supposed to be, Amelia. Is it...Are you...Is it okay?*

She could feel the sudden nervousness in his question. For an answer she placed her hand over the heart her head wasn't resting against and she sighed in contentment. Then she turned her face up to his and she pressed her lips against his very softly. She felt his hands tighten around her, but he kept the kiss very, very gentle.

When they parted, she asked him, Is this everything, then? Got any more little bombshells to drop? If so, let's have 'em while we're at it.

He chuckled softly. *I'm afraid you've got the whole kit and kaboodle now, Pond.* Then he paused. *Well, except for one little thing...*

She looked up at him and she stared. What could possibly be left? And before you answer that question, is it going to cause me to wind up feeling like I've been hit by a freight train?

He ran his thumb lightly over her bottom lip. *No. I promise. This won't hurt a bit. And it's something that I think you've been wanting to know for a long time. I would have told you before, but until the bond was whole, I couldn't. You see, I can't tell just anyone this, and really, Pond, I had to wait to tell you here, too...*

She would have cracked a joke, would have made a smart-aleck comment, but there was that air of anticipation around him again. She was suddenly reminded of a little boy holding a present behind his back, scuffing his toe in the dirt, unsure of the reception of his gift. She cupped his cheek.

Okay. So we're here. Everything is in place. Don't keep me in suspense, then.

He looked at her for just a minute more and then he leaned down and whispered in her ear. He spoke only a few words but her hands clamped down on his arms and her eyes grew wide. Tears pooled in them, and her lips parted on a soundless little gasp as what he was telling her sank in. He pulled back and looked at her with some concern.

*Amy? Pond? Are you okay? I didn't want to upset you, but now I can tell you, and I've wanted to tell you for so long. Possibly I should have waited. You're clearly not at your best, but I thought that maybe you'd like to know it now. I thought you would. I mean...*

Her tear-bright eyes locked with his for seconds before her fingers twined in his hair and she pulled him down into a deep, hot kiss.

*Ah, so, you ARE pleased with that bit of information, then, I take it?*

You have no idea. But let me see if I can show you.


This was one of the most difficult chapters of this I've ever written. How was I going to accomplish the things I needed to do here, since so many of them are "theoretical" and since there is so very much of it to deal with when you start talking about all the history involved, especially since a lot of it has not been worked out in the canon? I have agonized over how to show the Doctor's mind for awhile now. I've been turning over how to visualize 907 years of history, especially the "tough stuff" for about a month now, knowing this chapter was eventually coming. This is what I finally came up with. I hope it passes muster. I also decided Not to Deal with What His Name Is. Others far better equipped to handle this than I have done so. I don't think I'm wise enough to name the Doctor. I'm leaving it between him and his Mate. I hope you'll understand.

Your feedback is most appreciated.