Disclaimer: If I owned Doctor Who, this would not be fanfiction as free entertainment.

Author's Note: Thanks again to everyone who read, reviewed, or followed. Reviews especially make my day.

The room had changed. That was the first thing The Doctor had noticed. The bright light from the sunshine let him know that even more time had past. He ran his fingers along the dresser, which no longer held dolls or finger-paintings like it had before. The bed had been shifted, a pale peach comforter replacing the colourful quilt. Cautiously, he called out for the girl, hoping she was still here.

"Amelia?" He ran his fingers along her CD cases. "Just checking you're okay."

"Oi!"

The Doctor turned, surprised to see a redhead about Rose's age in a short skirt and a sweater, a long red scarf around her neck.

"Oh!" The Doctor said startled and slightly embarrassed. "Er...Hello. Uh...I was just looking for Amelia. This is still her room, isn't it? I've been away, not sure how long."

Before the redhead could answer, a voice called from elsewhere in the house. "Amy! Rory's here, and I have to get to work!"

The redhead gave The Doctor a small smirk, before calling an answer. "Go to work, Aunt Sharon! I forgot something. I'll be right down!" She waited until she heard a door close, and winked. "It took you long enough."

"Amy?" The Doctor repeated, somehow the name didn't seem to fit, and he couldn't help but smile. "Amelia!" Then, he realised that the redhead was moving closer, and he shifted slightly, trying to avoid being cornered by the Scottish girl. "Well, uh...goodness how you've grown."

"My psychiatrists thought acclimating to a new name would allow me to get past the childish need for an imaginary friend who comes out of my fireplace to save the day." Amy explained. Despite the topic, she was smiling at him, though. "And yet, you're no older. If I didn't know better, I'd think I was crazy."

The Doctor was beginning to se how badly this had gone for her over the years. Psychiatrists were no one's idea of fun. "Right, yes, sorry. Listen, lovely to catch up, but better be off, eh? Don't want your mother finding you up here with a strange man, do we?" He grinned. "Might send you off to another psychiatrist."

"Don't have a mother, just an aunt." Amy corrected. "And you're not a stranger, I've known you since I was seven."

The Doctor had a hard time putting this girl in the same context as the seven-year-old he had saved from the clockwork android. "Yeah, I suppose you have. I came the quick route."

Amy leaned in and touched his cheek. Her hand was warm, and it made The Doctor jump slightly. "You're real." She breathed in something like awe. "I had half started to believe what everyone said. How can you be here? It doesn't make sense."

The Doctor chuckled. "The best things in the universe never do."

Amy looked as though she was about to reply, when a male voice filtered into the room. "Amy! Amy, we're going to be late!"

"Just give me a minute!" Amy snapped at the voice, angry for the moment being interrupted. It reminded her, however, how fleeting this moment was. "I have so many questions." She admitted. "But so little time." She gave up on questions, and instead, fisted her hands in the lapels of the pinstriped suit and kissed him hard, propelling them both back towards the fireplace.

The Doctor was surprised by the kiss, and for a half-a-second he realised how wrong this could be, but something in the kiss was making his brain go haywire, and he couldn't help but kiss back as he hit the wall. There would undoubtedly be excuses later, but he let them slip away as his arms slid around her waist.

"Amy!" The voice was closer.

Before The Doctor knew what was happening, Amelia...Amy...had grabbed a bag and ran from the room, leaving him slightly shell-shocked, and his eyes glazed over. As he was recovering, he caught sight of a sketch tacked on the wall, and ripped it down, just as a young man came into the room, dressed in light blue scrubs. "No! No, no, no, no, no way." He said firmly, waving the drawing of the ouroboros at the man. "It's not possible, not Anshar, later Kishar, later still, The Corsair - face of the Celestial Intelligence Agency, thief of the Callisto Pulse, infamous pirate known as The Red Lady who would trick her way onboard a ship and take it as her own whenever she got bored." He shook his head. "It's not possible. It can't be!"

The man seemed to have found his voice during this rant. "Who the hell are you?"

The Doctor laughed. "I'm The Doctor, and I may not be the last!" He turned at the fireplace and hit the mechanism, letting the fireplace turn again, the paper crumbled into his hand. He looked about for his companions as he returned to the spaceship. His glee gave way to frustration as he found that his companions had wandered off. Again."Rose! Mickey! Every time!" Someday, someday he would say to stay put and they actually would. "Every time, it's rule one. Don't wander off. I tell them, I do. Rule one." He shook his head, putting the drawing in his pocket. "There could be anything on this ship!"

He turned the corner of a corridor as he said it to find a white horse. When he had said anything, that wasn't quite what he had expected.

Mickey Smith was enjoying his adventure, especially since The Doctor wasn't about as much as he anticipated, which meant that he wasn't watching Rose get all jealous again like she had before. He had gotten over her a long while back, being suspected of murder of someone who had dumped you for an alien would do that, but he still cared about her. He turned a corner like he was in an adventure movie, brandishing his fire-extinguisher-ice-gun in case there were any threats in the supposedly abandoned spaceship.

Instead, he found something, or something like a thing. Well, it had an eye at any rate. "Are you looking at me?" The thing extended itself down, and Mickey let out a less than dignified noise, glad that Rose had come up behind him. "Look at this. That's an eye in there. That's a real eye."

Rose watched the eye retract back into the fitting in the wall with some sort of grim shock. but as it did, she heard something even more horrifying. Not truly wanting to know, but needing to know, she found herself taking a few steps back and opening up a burning hot hatch like a petrol cover in the wall.

Mickey stared down the twisted cables and wires within the wall, at the lump of something in the middle, bright red and bloated. Part of him knew what it was, but he couldn't believe it. He needed to hear it from someone else. "What is that? What's that in the middle there? Looks like it's wired in."

Rose's voice, when she spoke, was tinged with disgust, amazement and horror. It was like something out of a horror movie, rather than their adventures. Or maybe a bit more like their adventures than she had wanted to admit. It was a pale echo of how she remembered feeling when she had watched the Auton copy of Mickey's head melt. "It's a heart, Mickey. It's a human heart."

A human heart, pumping life into a spaceship rather than keeping someone alive. Part of her hoped that it had been cloned or something like that, but she remembered all to well that the crew were missing. They hadn't gone down with the ship, they had gone into it.