Okay, okay, I lied. But not deliberately - it's just that I suddenly got a sense of where this was going for the next little while. I assure you, the update frequency will drop off quite sharply soon.

Apologies if there seems to be a lot of talking and a lot of covering-old-ground. I know it says "Adventure" on the tin and I promise we'll get back to the running soon, but there's some important stuff I need to get down first.

As always, reviews and advice loved.

CHAPTER 5. Awkward Silences: 28 September 2010

The twenty-three year old man paced the console room nervously. He wasn't a naturally curious person, and he definitely didn't want to touch the array of odd buttons, levers and various implements on the central console for fear of blowing something up, or sending them into a supernova.

Unlike most who entered the TARDIS for the first time, Rory Williams didn't find himself over-awed by the impossibility of being inside a box that was bigger on the inside. He'd done a lot of research after the events of two years previous, and wasn't going to be caught unawares again.

He glanced up at the oddly makeshift calendar-clock on the wall. Two hours. He said he'd be five minutes.

Where the hell is he? And where's Amy?

Just as he was about to lose patience and leave, he heard a familiar peal of laughter from one of the entrances above him. A very familiar laugh. Amy!

"So now you're not the only one who can wave it about showing off," he heard her say, voice tinged with smugness.

"Hey, mine is shiny and green. Yours is all pink and purple and wire-y and... stuff." the Doctor's voice retorted.

"Oh shut up," she replied, laughing, as she appeared at the top of the stairway. She caught sight of the young, large-nosed man and gasped, freezing in place. "Rory? What are you doing here?" Her eyes widened as the truth dawned on her. She rounded immediately on the Doctor.

"You're taking me home, aren't you?" she whispered demandingly.

"Amy," the Doctor replied, trying to soothe her.

"Don't Amy me. I'm not going home. I'm not going back. Not now. Not yet." Her voice rose with every syllable.

The Doctor held her arm, causing a stab of envy and suspicion to shoot briefly through Rory - but he held himself back.

"Amy, I'm not taking you home. I just need you to... have a chat." She was refusing to meet the Doctor's imploring eyes, but he continued nonetheless. "Amelia, please. This is important. What happened to you... we have to sort this out now." Hearing him, the suspicion flared in Rory's eyes.

"Sort what out, Doctor? What happened to her? What have you done to her?" Despite his best efforst, he couldn't keep the trace of anger out of his voice.

The Doctor closed his eyes and sighed.

"I can explain, Rory."

"It had better be a damn good explanation."

Another sigh. "Please, Rory, let's just sit down."

Rory stared at the Doctor's, gazing at his eyes as if trying to probe into his mind through them. Finding nothing untoward, he nodded tersely and took Amy arm.

He didn't miss how, for an instant, she had flinched at his touch as he took her down the stairs.

This has got to be the most awkward silence of my life, the Doctor thought, leaning against the console.

Amy and Rory were perched on opposite ends of the couch, board-stiff and adamantly refusing to meet each other's eyes. Amy had folded her legs over and was examining her hands as if searching for some valuable jewels hidden within.

At last, Rory broke the increasingly-unbearable silence.

"So..."

"So."

"What have you done to her?"

The Doctor sighed. "Rory, it's a long story."

The young man folded his arms and leaned back on the railing. His eyes were narrowed with suspicion.

"Fine by me. Actually, no, first-" he said, turning to Amy with outrage still glimmering in his pale blue eyes, "-what were you doing? We're getting married tomorrow, in case you had forgotten."

Amy swallowed nervously, still staring intently at her long, pale hands. "It's not like that. Please, Rory. It isn't like that."

"Well what is it then? What else is it supposed to be? You ran off with another man before your wedding night, what am I supposed to think?" He tried to keep his voice level and stable, but his control was nowhere near adequate, and by the end he was effectively shouting at her. Amy's eyes flashed dangerously and she snapped her gaze to his for the first time.

"It's not like that!"

"Rory." The Doctor's voice came in between them, softly, cutting through the sparks he could feel flying between the pair. "Please, listen. There is nothing going on between Amy and I of that kind. She came with me because she wanted to see the universe, all of space and time. She made me promise to return her to Leadworth, and you, first."

As he spoke, the Time Lord had pushed the memory of the kiss and attempted seduction out of his mind – he knew well that she was deeply, deeply embarrassed about the whole affair and out of kindness he had chosen to file it under things we do not talk about, ever.

Rory's piercing gaze searched his ancient eyes, mining them for any trace of a lie, for any hint of insincerity. After what seemed an age, it softened.

"Fine. I believe you. For now." The young man folded his arms together. "But you still haven't answered my first question – what have you done with her? There's a reason I'm here. I'm not stupid, you know."

"Of course not," the Doctor said sincerely. On first - well, second - impressions, he quite liked Rory. He'd been most surprised, impressed, though deeply irritated when the young man had more or less taken the nature of the TARDIS interior completely in his stride. And I was so looking forward to that too. "As I said, it's a long story."

"And as I said, fine by me."

The Doctor sighed. "Alright. What happened was that we went to a planet called Krylos to look at the universe's largest super-sized amethyst crystal forest." Rory blinked, processing the idea, then nodded.

"Go on."

"Well, bad stuff happened and I got hurt a bit. Well, more than a bit. Fatally injured, if we're being precise."

"But you're still here. And sort of alive."

"Yes. But my kind – we're called Time Lords, by the way, from the planet Gallifrey – well, we don't just die when injured like that. When we get fatally injured, we get a brand new body." He paused for a moment to let the information sink in.

"Right," Rory said slowly. "But I don't see what this has to do with Amy," he pointed out. He glanced over at his fiancée, who had resumed her thorough inspection of her fingertips.

The Doctor swallowed. Here comes the hard bit.

"She didn't know this. She genuinely thought I was dying, and tried to resuscitate me. In the process, she inadvertently absorbed almost all my regeneration energy – that is, the energy that heals me and gives me a new body. For me, that meant that all my severe injuries were healed, but I didn't get a new body."

"And... for her?"

The Doctor closed his eyes. You can't tell him this, he realised. You have to show him.

"Amy, give him your hand."

"What?" Telepathically, he could feel Amy's attention shift instantaneously to him. "Why?" Her voice could burn a hole in a wall, but the Doctor was in no mood for an argument.

"Amelia, do it." In Gallifreyean, the sharpness of his voice became even more pronounced – so much so that Rory (who of course had never heard a language even remotely like the one he'd just heard) recoiled slightly.

Amy, cowed for once, slowly offered her right arm for Rory to take.

"Check her pulse, Rory," the Doctor said quietly.

Rory took her wrist and expertly found what he was looking for.

"It's fine. I don't see the- hang on." His voice had changed completely - clearly, he'd noticed the strange rhythm beneath his fingers. He moved closer to Amy and felt the left side of the chest. "A normal heartbeat, so what the hell...?"

Trembling, he shifted his palm ever so gradually to the other side of her chest and felt another heart, beating at the same pace but out of sync as teh first. He turned slowly to face the Doctor, hot fury rising in his eyes.

"What the hell's happened to her?"

"A regeneration is only meant for a Time Lord," Rory heard a soft voice murmur beside him. He turned to met his fiancée's level gaze, her face unreadable. "And when a regeneration occurs, the energy rewrites your entire DNA."

"And so...?" he inquired softly, fearfully.

"And so..." She swallowed, knowing that this would be one of the hardest sentences of her life. "So... I'm not human any more."

Silence.

"No."

Amy simply nodded.

"No. No, it can't be."

"Rory, I'm sorry," the Doctor began quietly, "but-"

"Don't talk to me!"

"Rory," Amy crooned soothingly. "Rory, please. It's not his fault. It was my mistake, and besides, you wouldn't believe the things I can do now. The things I can see, hear. The things I can feel."

Rory seemed to barely hear her. He fixed his smouldering gaze on the Doctor.

"So, what is she now? Some sort of... of... human-Time Lord hybrid?" He almost spat the last four words.

The Doctor just sighed. He couldn't possibly be angry or indignant at the young man, since he knew full well that Amy was wrong – the situation was his fault and his alone.

"No, but that has happened once. The results were... interesting, let's say," he replied wistfully, remembering Donna and his own half-human clone that he'd marooned with Rose in a parallel universe, "but Amy's not like that. She's a full blown Time Lord-"

"Time Lady, mister," Amy interjected. The Doctor had to smile at her stubbornness despite the tenseness of the situation.

"Sorry, Amy. She's a full blown Time Lady now. She's basically like me, biologically, in every respect. Except she's a girl. And, well, she's Amy."

Rory seemed to calm at his words, but he remained suspicious. "And what, exactly, is the difference?"

"Well, for one, she's telepathic – and quite a good one, too, by Time Lord standards. She can automatically feel the emotions of the people around her, and can share and sense thoughts and memories with anyone simply by touching them. Eventually she'll be able to communicate telepathically with other psychically aware beings-"

"-like Time Lords?"

"Yeah, like me," he continued, catching Rory's drift. "On top of that, she's completely fluent in Gallifreyean, the language of the Time Lords, in speech and writing. You might have heard me speaking in it before," he said, pausing to allow Rory to nod his understanding.

He decided to continue. "All her senses, but especially taste and small, are way more advanced and more perceptive than any human's. She's now technically proficient in Gallifreyean technology, and she's already made a few things that require Time Lord construction techniques. Although she won't be winning art prizes any time soon," he remarked, glancing up at the strange clock on the wall and at the bulge in her skirt pocket where the sonic phone was. "There's a few more things on the same lines, but those are the biggies. Lastly..."

He stopped, pausing before giving the final life-changing revelation. And haven't there been a few of those today?

"...yes?" Rory didn't need to be telepathic to sense his hesitation.

"She has no body clock. She won't age at all. Technically, she's immortal – although I haven't worked out what's going on with regeneration yet. I'd rather not find out, frankly."

Rory leaned back on the railing, massaging his temples. His brain felt like it was close to overloading and shorting out from being assaulted by life-changing revelation after life-changing revelation. He closed his eyes to try and make sense of everything that had happened, everything he'd learned.

He didn't like that she'd run away with another man - despite knowing that the Doctor was a centuries-old alien, he still couldn't help but think of him as a man. Especially now that his fiancée was the same kind of alien as well.

He didn't like that Amy had not one but two methods of communicating with that other man in a way that he couldn't, and he definitely didn't like that one of those methods could take place without him knowing anything about it.

He didn't like that she was obviously being exposed to extreme danger on a fairly regular basis, remembering what happened with Prisoner Zero, and very aware that whatever had fatally injured the Doctor could have fatally injured her.

And she didn't have extra lives, did she? Not then, anyway.

However, he knew Amy – rather, he knew as well as anyone could, for she had been a deeply and stubbornly closed girl for her whole life. He knew what her Raggedy Doctor had meant to her. He knew that if he had showed up with his big blue box promising to show her the universe whilst she was saying her vows, she wouldn't have thought twice about running away. He'd seen the happiness in her eyes as she'd walked down the steps and heard the earnestness in her voice as she'd told him how amazing she was finding the experience of being an alien. Whatever made her happy made him happy and he knew, somehow, that she'd never been happier in her whole life than when she was gallivanting about time and space with a man wearing a bow-tie.

And now he'd learned that she was immortal. So I guess that makes marrying her kind of difficult, he realised. apart from the fact she's an alien. He'd die quietly, normally, and she'd just live on, and on, and on. How could they grow old together when she couldn't even grow old?

"Rory." Amy's voice came soft, beckoning, slicing through his confusion and torment. "Rory, please. Listen to me. Yeah, I might not be human, and marriage might be... complicated. But I promise you, I'm still Amy, and I am still yours. Please."

She grabbed his hand with both of hers and drew it against her chest. He could feel the gentle double heartbeat there, reminding him of how she had irrevocably changed. He looked up into her eyes, desperate and imploring. They hadn't changed, he noticed – still the most beautiful things he'd ever seen.

Finally, after what seemed like a lifetime, he nodded. She squeezed his hand tightly and let go. He stood.

"I should go – people will probably have noticed that I've disappeared for a few hours by now." He turned to head towards the door, but Amy stood and grabbed his arm, pulling him back.

"Rory, could you... stay? With us, for a while? I'd really love that."

He considered it briefly. He'd never been an adventurous man, and was apprehensive about the sort of dangerous lifestyle this all entailed, but he could see how much Amy wanted it, and he was loath to be separated from her again.

Alien or not, she was still his fiancée.

He looked over at the Doctor. The Doctor smiled sincerely back at him, seemingly happy that at least some of the difficulty of the situation had been resolved.

"Yeah. Yeah, sure. That'd be great."

Amy's face brightened instantly, a smile appearing on it for the first time since she'd seen him at the base of the stairs. She drew him into a tight hug. "I have to go clean up the workshop. Go explore, but be careful in the library. The swimming pool changes shape from time to time when you aren't looking." She let go and bounded up the stairs, pausing briefly at the top and spinning around.

"Well, look at this! Got my spaceship, got my boys. What more does a girl need?" She laughed and skipped down the corridor. Rory rolled his eyes.

"We are not her boys."

The Doctor chuckled and set about piloting the TARDIS away from Leadworth. "Yeah, we are."

"Yeah..." he repeated, "we are."

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