Because of the demand of this story (almost 30 favourites?!) and as a suggestion from WayWorseThanScottish, I've decided to add two "bonus" chapters to this previous one-shot. Hope you enjoy and thank you for all your kind reviews!
Amy Pond stood near the captain's chair in the TARDIS, watching the Doctor race around the console, pulling levers and pushing buttons. She was still panting from their narrow close call at the Dalek Asylum.
And though she knew that nothing would be the same after that encounter, Amy couldn't deny that everything just felt right at that moment. She was back in the TARDIS with the Doctor. Rory and her had reconciled and were planning to revoke their divorce papers. The Ponds and the Time Lord had gone on yet another adventure, saving the universe. Everything had been fixed like the Doctor fixed his bowtie. It was the way things were supposed to be.
But something was also tugging at her mind, saddening her, and it wasn't just because of the Asylum. There seemed to be so many words she wanted to say to this man, but she just couldn't get those words out, her mouth opening and closing like a fish. She was so preoccupied that she didn't even see the man himself turn to look at her.
"You alright?"
Amy jumped at the comment, happy to see it was just the Doctor and soon calming herself down. "Yeah, of course I'm fine. Absolutely fine."
The man raised his eyebrows, clearly not believing her. "Are you sure you don't have anything to say, Amelia?"
Yes. There were so many things she wanted to ask him. But she just couldn't. No matter how much she felt she needed to, the sentences just wouldn't come out of her mouth. So the woman shook her head. "No, of course not," she replied, and then busied herself with a weird swirl-y thing attached to the TARDIS console.
The Doctor looked suspicious at first, but then shrugged as he went back to typing on a typewriter. And the more Amy watched him, the more she knew her chances of at least understanding this mysterious man a bit were escaping her. And she couldn't pass up that opportunity, could she?
"Why did you leave us?" she found herself blurting.
The Doctor suddenly swivelled around at this statement, staring at her with his great big green eyes, a look of disbelief and sadness on his face. "Leave you?" he asked, obviously uncertain.
"Yeah, leave us," Amy said, realising how harsh it sounded. "Ever since April, when you dropped Rory and me off in London, we always got a call from you. A visit even, if we were lucky. But for one whole month, you just disappeared. No answering machine messages. No phone calls. Nothing." The woman realised just how flushed and angry she was getting now. "And that's when you were missed the most, Doctor. That's when we split up! You weren't there, raggedy man! Of all the times we needed you, you weren't there!" Amy yelled, feeling little tears fall down her cheeks.
For a few moments, the Time Lord just looked flabbergasted. But after this brief second of shock, the Doctor immediately walked over to Amy and hugged her as tight as he could. And even though she was still utterly, stupidly mad at him, the Scottish girl returned his embrace.
He soon let go and looked at her eye to eye, still holding one of her hands in his. "Amy," he began, smiling. "Remember Pond, my Helmic regulator wasn't working properly. And besides… Nobody ever truly leaves."
Against her will, Amy could feel the anger resurfacing. Helmic regulator? A stupid, stupid, stupid technical term. And how dare he just put her feelings off to the side with such an idiotic philosophical sentence? By god, he wasn't even the person who had said that to her so many years ago!
That person so many years ago…
For some reason, amidst all her frustration, Amy was transported back to that day when she was ten, when she drew her raggedy man's time machine on that sheet of paper. Handing it to that Mr Smith who was her psychiatrist for a day. He was the only person who ever really, truly believed her. And she remembered in every detail what he had said to her before she left, to be taken home by Aunt Sharon and go back to Leadworth, to boring, everyday regular life.
"Remember Amelia… no one ever truly leaves."
"And he's right you know. They never do."
Amy stared at the Doctor, eyes wide. "How did you-"
The man chuckled and sat down beside her on the captain's chair, where she had relayed her story to him. "You really should know when you're thinking to yourself and when you're talking out loud."
She punched him very hard in the arm, and after the resounding "OW!" came from him, they sat in silence, just enjoying their time alone together- all enmity forgotten. Until the Doctor suddenly stood up and looked at her with an inquisitive eye.
"Do you think I keep a lot of secrets, Amy?" he said after a few moments of quiet, twiddling his thumbs.
Amy laughed as she stood up from the chair. "Are you kidding me, Doctor? You have too many damn secrets. It drives me mad," she replied.
The Time Lord smiled softly. "Then consider this your consolation prize," he whispered, as he pulled a scrunched-up piece of paper from one of the seemingly never-ending pockets in his pants.
She took it from him, chuckling. "Only a consolation prize, Doctor? I think I'm more in the lead for a grand prize that involves going to a leisure planet or something, not just an idiotic scrap of paper. What could this ever possibly have to do-"
Now Amelia Pond had battled pirates, seen the second Big Bang and watched the world come back again, met Vincent Van Gogh, and saved a starwhale in outer space- but the girl had never been so dumfounded as she stared now at what was in her hand- a scribbled crayon drawing of the TARDIS, looking like it had been drawn by a seven year old.
And in fact, it had been drawn by a seven year old. Because, though she hadn't seen it in so many years, there it was. She now held the picture that she had given that mysterious Mr. Smith in that psychiatric office.
Amy stared into her Raggedy Man's deep green eyes, a mixture of grief and anger bubbling up underneath her. She raised the drawing to his face, tears threatening to spill from her eyelids. "How did you get this?" the girl sniffled, waving it in the Time Lord's face as if that would somehow make him more sympathetic towards her plight. "What happened to him?" Receiving no response, Amy began to cry even louder. "Doctor, what happened to him? Is he all right? Please tell me he's alright." The tears that she had tried so hard to keep back were now flowing freely as she waited for an answer.
Slowly, the Doctor came over to her and grinned weakly. "It's okay, Pond," he started, a strangely sorrowful look on his face. "Mr. Smith is fine, I can assure you." The man reached out to gently put his hand on her face. "Don't worry, Amelia."
"But how do you know?" Amy questioned, the tears beginning to subside but still stinging her face as she reached for his hand. "When did you meet him? How do you know?"
The Time Lord withdrew his hand from her face and quietly chuckled, much to the girl's confusion. Then, those old, old eyes locked on to hers, and the man began to speak. "I know. Because- because I am him. I'm Mr. Smith, Amy."
His companion stepped backwards, obviously overwhelmed by the statement. "No," she said, shaking her head, looking like a deer caught in the headlights. "No, you can't be. You look completely different!"
"Didn't I ever tell you about regeneration?" the Doctor explained, coming towards her again. "That night that I landed, well more like crash-landed, I guess, in your garden- when you were just little Amelia Pond? I had just regenerated, hence all the swirly gold-y stuff. Changed every cell in my body to become a new man. The Time Lords' little trick of cheating death, I like to say." He smiled at her, then frowning again as he continued to tell his story.
"When I first met you, in that psychiatrist's office, I had gotten stuck in 1999 with my current companion, Martha. Courtesy of the Weeping Angels, you see." The man made a face that amidst her bafflement and shock caused Amy to giggle. "It was my tenth regeneration, and that woman kept bugging me all the time to get a job, to support us until we could go back to our own time. So I became a psychiatrist, and one day I ended up doing a favour for that lovely girl-"
"Ms. Austen," his companion realised, finishing for him.
"Right, Ms. Austen- and she wanted to go on a date with Mr. Fisher, so I took you on for that night. And then I met Miss Amelia Pond." The Time Lord reached out to hold her hand again. "And my life was changed forever."
"But if you knew me before your TARDIS crashed into my shed," Amy whispered, slowly coming to terms with everything that she had just been told. "Then that means that you heard everything I told you that night- about you, about how you abandoned me." For some reason she started to shake with fury. "So why didn't you change it? You knew what was going to happen. Time can be rewritten. So why didn't you rewrite it?" the girl emphasized, staring into the face of her Raggedy Man.
"Not that moment, Amy." the Doctor whispered, a deep pain in his features like his companion had never seen before. "There is certain instances in time that can't be changed, that have to stay the way they are, or else the universe will stop in its tracks. Like with River and Lake Silencio," he said. "And leaving you, I realised I couldn't rewrite that. No matter how much I wanted to, I couldn't. But know that if I could," the Time Lord said, a determined look on his face. "I would have. Because I would do anything for you, my Amelia."
Then suddenly, those tears were flowing again as Amy stared into the face of that young yet impossibly old lonely man. The girl soon found her arms embracing the man in a tight hug and murmured softly into his ears as she felt the embrace returned. "Thank you, Mr. Smith."
"Thank you, Amelia Pond," she heard back through her sniffles." For a great session."
And as they chuckled and grinned in their embrace, their crying splotching their faces red as they rocked back and forth with each other, Amy knew that this was where she wanted to be.
Because the tale of her and her Doctor was just too wonderful to not be told.