Authors Note:

Wow, and we're updating again! This is a bit of a surprise- yesterday I updated because I thought I wouldn't have time to update again for a while, but here I am...

Reviews are always welcome. And now I have no idea when the next update will arrive, but maybe I'll get used to updating more frequently- who knows!

Amy appeared to be in a bit of a pickle. She opened her eyes a crack and looked around. What on Earth?! She was secured in some sort of metal... gurney...thing, and her mouth was held open with metal clamps. Its like a psychotic dentist office, she thought subconsciously.

But that didn't make sense. If she was still travelling with the Doctor and Rory, yes, this was to be expected. But she was working as a shopgirl! She was working as a shop girl in a normal London shop! Well, granted, London's sky was filled with zeppelins, but that was beside the point.

And of course there was no magical Doctor to save her, because she had been left behind. She had to get out of this situation on her own.

And what about Rose? Assuming that she somehow managed to escape, Amy would probably be a bit too banged than what would be a bit too banged up than what would make sense for someone who was cleaning bathroom for two hours, so Rose would be full of painfully mundane and normal questions that Amy wouldn't have answers to. Amy tried to groan when she realized this, but she just made a half-strangled gurgling sound instead. Hearing a rhythmic clanking outside the dim doorway, Amy squeezed her eyes shut and pretended to be unconscious. She needed to think.

Her next realization sent her eyes flying back open. And of course she'd have to warn Rose and her boss and everyone that there were psychotic dentists kidnapping shopgirls from the ladie's room, because she wouldn't want anyone else to end up in a situation like hers. Which would make everyone think she was nuts. Which would mean Rose wouldn't be her friend or roommate or anything anymore. Which would mean more therapy sessions.

Amy almost attempted to laugh with how quickly she had screwed up in finding a normal life for herself. The situation was so lopsided, so alien, that she was surprised the Doctor wasn't there after all.

She needed to find a way out, though. She shouldn't be worried about losing friends and a domestic life that she didn't even want, not really- she should be worried about staying alive. Amy strained against her wrist and ankle cuffs, trying to gage how best to break them, when she heard a rattling noise. Immediately she went back to being a limp, unconscious corpse, though she was primed to knee anyone who tried to touch her in the nuts.

But then she heard a gasp that seemed distinctly feminine, and she heard a familiar cockney accent whisper- "no, not Amy, not this, not now- no."

Amy opened her eyes slowly to see Rose crouching down to remove her from her restraints, and started to let forth a stream of excuses, forgetting completely about the odd structure around her lips.

"Hold on," Rose popped back up, anguish in her eyes. "You'll cut your mouth."

She gently released Amy's mouth, to which Amy gasped, "What the hell is going on?!"

"I...I don't know," Rose replied.

Amy felt her heart falter. Rose's eyes were wide, her bleach blonde hair disheveled. She seemed terrified. Amy spoke in a softer tone, trying to calm herself and her friend down. "Rose, it's going to be fine. Just get me out of these restraints and we can get free." Rose looked at her in shock, and she took a shaky breath. "How did you even get in here?"

Rose gulped. "Through the air vents. I couldn't find you, and people were asking me for toilet paper, and there was a boy on a scooter..."

Amy took in her expression and laughed. "It's fine, really. Great, actually, seeing as how I'd really like to live to clean those bathrooms."

Rose broke out in a grin, and Amy smiled cautiously in return. There was no way she was going to lose Rose as a friend. No way.

"Alright," Rose began. "Escape now, investigate later. Then we can bring John. Everything is going to be okay.

Amy's mind reeled. She wanted to investigate, yes, and stop anyone else from being taken captive, but she wanted to do that alone. Alone as in not with Rose and John. Not only would she not want them to get hurt, but she wanted their brains to stay nice and naive and optimistic and human. Sometimes she wondered if travelling with the Doctor screwed with her anatomy, if it made her any less human. She would probably never know the biology of time travel, but she could ascertain that it definitely did something to your head. It was almost impossible to return to a normal, domestic life when you dreamt of dalek attacks and ood butlers every night. Rose and John were better off without that in their lives.

But she could talk Rose out of investigating later. For now, she nodded her head as much as she could. "Yes. But now we should focus on getting out."

Rose bent down to face Amy's restraints again, just as the noises Amy had heard earlier filled the hallway once more. "Bloody hell," Rose whispered fervently. Amy said nothing in reply; she had already gone limp on the gurney, pretending to be unconscious again. Rose muttered a stream of profanities under her breath as she opened Amy's mouth. "I'm so, so sorry." Shots of fiery red pain ran through Amy's nerves, and she felt the warm, salty taste of blood dance across her tongue. Rose stepped back. "I had to-"

Amy widened her eyes at her in response, and Rose turned around, shaking her head softly as she climbed back into the air vents. Through the grate, she could see the legs of the metal dentist chair Amy was tied to, but Amy couldn't see her, which was good. Amy closed her eyes as the clanking came closer, priming her knee for crazy dentist nut-splitting action.

They were no longer alone in the room.

Rory wanted to scream out every curse word he knew, take a breath, and scream them out again- he couldn't believe that they had lost Amy. The Doctor had said that he was almost eighty percent sure that Amy was perfectly safe in another dimension, but he didn't know which dimension they were looking for, and there was always that extra twenty percent...

The black box had looked too much like a grave for Rory's liking, too.

"Aha!" The Doctor came spinning into the room, causing Rory to spill all of his tea on the kitchen table in reply.

"Did you find something?" Rory asked urgently.

"I did! I most definitely found something!" Seeing Rory's hopeful face, the Doctor paused. "About Amy? Oh no, Rory, I'm sorry, but nothing new has come up about Amy. I did, however, find my knitting needles in the wardrobe room. I've been looking for them for centuries. It's about time a regeneration had a scarf!" The Doctor seemed to figure skate out of the room, and it was then that Rory realized that the Doctor was floating around the TARDIS in his socks.

How was the Doctor so calm? He had lost his best friend in another dimension, and what was he doing about it? He was knitting himself a scarf. Rory attempted to push the bitterness down into the pit of his stomach, but he couldn't stop the unaltered anger from bubbling up inside him. With Amy missing, there was no one to solve the awkward silences after the Doctor made a self-centered sort of comment, no one to fix the competition that always seemed to hang between Amy's two favorite boys. Rory felt a tang of unwanted resentment towards the Doctor who seemed so nonchalant that Rory was without his wife, and it was all his fault.

At the same time, he supposed, the Doctor's reaction made sense. Amy once told him that the Doctor was over a thousand years old, and though Rory hadn't believed her at the time, he could certainly see it in his eyes sometimes when he saw a crying child. Perhaps the Doctor's only way of dealing with all the horrible things, all the deaths he had seen in his long, long life was to pretend it never happened.

Rory was so full of emotion, of remorse, that he didn't notice when he dropped his head onto the table that his fringe was soaking in the last of his morning tea.

When he realized, the swearing started all over again.