A more introspective chapter, this one. If people feel it's getting a little too heavy and needs a bit more light fluffiness, let me know. I will warn you that some of the stuff I have planned makes what has come thus far look featherweight in comparison. Oh, and if you hadn't twigged, telepathy isn't just another of Amy's Time Lord abilities - it's a critical theme of this story, and will become increasingly so as we go along. Which means I may do things that contravene parts of the utterly confusing mess of canon on the subject - so another warning there.
Similarities to the finale (specifically, that frankly brilliant garden scene near the end. Amy being the Doctor's mother in law would be so much fun to play with, but not here) are coincidental, one obvious line of dialogue aside - I had the key outline of this chapter planned well in advance.
In war, there are no unwounded soldiers.
~ Jose Narosky
CHAPTER 13. Nebulae, Textbooks and Tennis Racquets: 13 – 22 October 2010
They didn't stay around to join the planet-wide party that was about to go into full swing. As much as they – especially Amy – had wanted to, they were all dead tired after the experiences of the past few days, and needed some downtime badly. So they dropped off the surviving soldiers, Heviniye and Nadezhda, promising to return one day to see how they were getting by. It had taken a while – Heviniye couldn't stop shaking their hands, repeating phrases like "can't thank you enough", "forever in your debt" and the like. At one point, she had promised that new prestigious medals would be named after Amy and the Doctor – Rory, unfortunately, didn't get that honour. He didn't mind.
"You think we'll see them again, General?" she asked as the police box faded in and out, the now familiar whirring noise slowly dissipating.
The General laughed, the first time he had done so in months. "I both hope we do, someday, and pray to heaven that we don't. Ever. Trouble follows them."
"I know what you mean by that."
The Doctor was sitting in bed, propped up on several pillows, perusing through the greatest work of a famous Ryelli novelist. Amy and Rory had departed to their room an hour beforehand, and he was about to drift off himself when a shudder ran through the floor. Recognising it instantly, he grabbed his jacket and raced for the console room, his hearts beating frantically.
Where's she going now? Why isn't she asleep?
He sprinted into the console room, then suddenly halted as he sighted a mane of shining red hair in the entrance doorway. Beyond was the instantly recognisable wash of colour of a planetary nebula, and he stopped for a moment to admire the interweaving of the golden, reddish and deep blue hues against the perfect blackness of space, speckled with little pinpricks of starlight.
He walked over softly, and sat in the doorway next to Amy, their legs hanging out of the TARDIS into space. She was slightly hunched over and a faraway expression etched onto her face.
"Hey."
She turned, smiling softly. "Hi."
"Got the randomiser working, did you?"
Her smile widened briefly, but then faded as she returned her gaze to the shimmering colours outside.
"You know, I recognise this place. Called Omega Zero. It's the last remnants of a dead star, which one day blew itself all over the cosmos. In fact, if I recall correctly, it's your star. You're looking at its – well, it's corpse."
"Gee, Doctor, trust you to be so morbid."
He punched her lightly on the arm, receiving a not-so-light one in return. "Sorry for being so honest."
"Apology not accepted," she retorted, laughing. Once again, however, the light moment was short-lived and her face returned to its previous wistfulness. They sat quietly for a minute, the Doctor eyeing his friend carefully.
"Amy, can I ask you something?"
"Shoot."
"Rory told me you didn't have any dreams. Proper dreams, I mean. I know how human and Time Lord brains work, dreams can't be exclusively be memories, not for weeks on end. You're hiding them for some reason. Now that in itself is a pretty impressive achievement for a novice telepath like you, but – why? Is there something you don't want anyone to see? Something you're locking away from the world?"
She took a moment to answer. "Doctor, I appreciate your concern, but this isn't really something I want to talk about. Not today." Not ever, she didn't need to say. Her voice remained quiet, but there was a certain edge to it which told the Time Lord that now was not the time to push his curiosity further.
At least not directly, not right now. He had other ways of finding out information.
And this is probably something I need to know.
"I understand," he replied sincerely. "I'm just a bit worried about you, Amelia."
"You always worry about me. Big worry-wart, you are."
"Guilty as charged," he admitted, his cerulean eyes twinkling in the starlight. "So is there a reason you're out of bed now, or were you just filled by a sudden urge to admire the magnificence of the cosmos?"
She leaned forward, resting her chin on her fists, her elbows digging into her knees. After a minute, she opened her mouth, her voice a near-whisper. "I killed someone yesterday."
Silence.
Amelia continued. "I pulled the trigger. What does that make me now?"
The Doctor didn't answer. He couldn't answer – because he had asked the same question of himself, and drawn nothing. For his centuries of life, everything he'd experienced, everything he'd seen and done, nothing could help him answer this one question, this single question, in a way that didn't leave him paralysed with guilt and despair. And now she would have to answer it too.
What does that make us now?
In some ways, this was his worst nightmare realised – his darkest, most closely-held fear, his deepest doubt now shared with the one closest to him. The curse of the Time Lords, indeed.
After several minutes of silent contemplation, he reached out an arm and laid it across her back, pulling her into him. "You did a lot of good there. Don't forget that."
The girl shut her eyelids. "I was talking to him before we went to get you. The Captain. He had just gotten married, you know. Two months ago. He was planning to buy a little blue hut on a beach somewhere, enjoy the surf and the sand for a while once we succeeded. He was so sure we were going to win. So sure he'd get that little house with his wife."
A tear rolled down her left cheek, and the Doctor lifted his hand to wipe it away and brush a lock of fiery hair out of her face, gently tucking it behind her ear. He pressed his lips to the curtain of flame at the side of her head.
"You can't always save everyone, Amy."
"I took them there. They trusted me. They relied on me. And I failed them. Fifteen of them."
"But you saved so many more. Ten billion more. All alive, Amelia Pond, because of you. Don't ever forget that."
She smiled and closed her eyes, resting her head on the shoulder of the Doctor's tweed jacket, wrapping her arm around the Doctor's back in a mirror image of his. The Doctor reciprocated by placing his cheek on her thick red hair, gently massaging her arm. They sat there for time uncounted, perched at the edge of the police box, gazing at the intermingled smear of colour, the last of their kind.
It took several days, but at last Amy's sense of guilt and shame seemed to be subsiding. Her aura was returning, the vibrancy in her eyes glinting in the light once more. The fire in her voice once again began to match the colour of the hair, and the spring in her step was becoming as pronounced as it had been previously. They'd even gotten into arguments about the TARDIS again, for which the Doctor was secretly glad – although dodging heavy books wasn't exactly a pleasant experience. He'd already spent several hours having Rory nurse a rather nasty bruise on his chest where he'd been struck by 'A Time Traveller's Guide To The Universe, Fifty-Fourth Edition'.
The Doctor now knew her intimately, though, and he knew the burning doubts weren't gone - just buried within the sprawling defences that covered her emotions. He was aware from personal experience that the questions would never go away, but he was glad his Amelia Pond was coming back, with all the exasperation that occasionally brought. He knew she hadn't quite come completely to terms with it yet, so by unspoken agreement they'd stayed in the TARDIS for the last four days.
A break from saving alien planets wouldn't go amiss from time to time, eh?
Somehow, he was aware that she hadn't told Rory about their conversation at the Omega Zero Nebula, nor the several hours afterwards they had spent in each other's arms, sitting out of the TARDIS doors. He certainly knew that she hadn't shared any of what she had told him that evening with Rory. This worried him somewhat, as he feared that the pair was drifting apart.
Amy was his closest friend, the closest he'd had in... well, too long, and the closest thing he had to an equal. She could see things the way he could, think the way he thought, have a glimpse into the way he felt. A decade previously, he had despairingly come to the conclusion that he would never feel such a special kinship again, the one that only came with another of his species. To be able to experience it again... there were no words. Nonetheless, he worried, as she was still at her core Amy from Leadworth (not Amy from the TARDIS... yet) and she belonged to Rory. Not to him. Even though they, together, were the last of their kind... he shut out the dark voices milling in the depths of his psyche, refusing to acknowledge that they were becoming less and less dark.
However, he made no attempt to draw away from her or to lessen the amount or quality of time they spent together, for that wasn't his biggest worry. His dreams – when he had them – now constantly centred on that wave of fear, the impossible surge of terror, emanating from billions and billions of miles away. Intellectually, he wondered how she was capable of generating such an immensely strong psychic impulse – he certainly had never done so – but that was very much a secondary concern. It was the nature of the impulse that left him cold and shivering.
What could possibly have made her feel such an instantaneous but powerful sense of fear? What could trigger that?
He was determined to find out by any means possible. He'd asked Rory what dreams she'd shared with him.
"Yeah, about that," Rory had said over his breakfast cereal. Amy was in the middle of her half-hour long shower. "I'm not getting anything from her now, an image here or there, but other than that... is there something wrong?"
"No, no," the Doctor reassured absent-mindedly. "She's just getting better control of her psychic abilities, that's all. I'm sure she's fine."
The first part of that sentence was true, but he knew full well the second part wasn't. This wasn't just them drifting apart. This was more. Hence, he buried his doubts about becoming too close, for when she was happy, teasing, hugging and occasionally hitting him, her usually-imposing psychic barriers were low. Whenever they were close he entered into her mind under the cover of a twinkling smile and took a little peek. He was careful to ignore anything that wasn't directly relevant to his search, knowing he was already launching an appalling invasion of her privacy. He judged it was worth the risk.
This is something I need to know, he told himself as justification. I need to do this.
He just wished that Amy would stop bloody flirting with him whilst he did so.
The gentle tickling of the softly flowing pool water against her feet had to be one of Amy's favourite small pleasures. It was her preferred form of alone-downtime, idly draping her legs over the edge of the pool whilst leaning against one of the fluffy-padded bookshelves. She'd sit for hours, feeling the sensations of the crystalline-blue water sliding between her toes, whilst she flicked through a novel, watched a 22nd century sitcom on a small tablet screen or browsed through some manual or textbook – the latter generally being an irritated response to some disagreement (Amy avoided the term 'catfight') with the Doctor.
Today was an exception, as she flicked through the ancient (she'd taste-guessed it to be about four millennia old) Gallifreyean text. She wasn't a naturally bookish person unless she had to be – as was the case at school, especially high school – but right now she had to be.
It had been over a week since they'd left Stroyet. A week since I killed that man... she hammered down on the thought, crushing it out of existence. Her actions that day had haunted her ever since, intruding into her dreams and leaving her staring aimlessly into space on more than one occasion. She felt akin to Lady Macbeth, remembering the play she'd studied when she was sixteen. These spots won't go away, will they?
She hoped she wouldn't become that. Hadn't become that.
Over time, the Doctor's final words to her that evening at the nebula began to assuage her conscience – pride for what she'd done was most certainly beyond her, but at least she could live in the knowledge that if it hadn't been for her actions that day, a hell of a lot of nice people would have died. So that made it alright... she hoped.
Out of kindness and understanding, the Doctor had decided to take a break from adventuring and saving planets for a while, knowing that she needed room to breathe and reassess. Whilst she couldn't bring herself to tell him aloud, she was immensely, endlessly grateful for it. No one, not her teachers at school, not Aunt Sharon, not even Rory, had been so quick to grasp her feelings, so in-touch with her emotions – a result of all those barriers she'd been building ever since she was a little girl. The Doctor seemed completely capable of simply going straight through them.
Well, we are the last of our kind, he and I. Guess there's some kind of connection there that goes beyond just average human friendship.
However, as General Gordost had astonishingly surmised aboard the starship, she didn't let him through all her barriers – especially not her most critical ones. As important as he was to her, as much as she loved both Rory and the Doctor with all her soul, there were some things she had sworn never, ever, ever to show them. Or anyone else. Not even Prisoner Zero, with his horrible magic tunnel into her mind, had forced his way through these walls, although the effort to keep him out of these most secret of places had come far closer to breaking her than she realised.
Hiding these things was all well and good as far as Rory was concerned, her normal coarse exterior shell worked fine... but the Doctor was telepathic. And an expert.
She wasn't stupid. She knew what that strange presence, that odd feeling in her brain was, sifting, poking, peeking. He was subtle, very, very subtle, and it took all her skill to even gain the merest flicker of a suspicion. But her intuition, always her driving force, knew. She'd tried asking the Doctor once, but he'd diverted, chuckled kindly and, of course, lied to her about it. That annoyed her as much as it didn't surprise her, and she told herself off for being so direct. Then got her revenge by flirting with him until he physically started to colour under her gaze.
Amy knew he'd never, ever deliberately hurt her. He was only trying to help, trying to find out what was clearly her causing her pain. Maybe to try and understand. One part of her hearts ached with gratitude and love that he was making such an effort to try and reach out to her, but another part, colder, harder, stronger, was resolute. No one – not Rory, not the Doctor, no one – ever got inside Amelia Pond's head without her permission. That was her Rule One.
She had no intention of breaking it.
So she'd spent the best part of the last three days in the TARDIS library-pool, poring feverishly over every single book on telepathy, psychic powers and the Gallifreyean mind she could find, including a few that she suspected had never been touched. She'd told the other two that there was something important she needed to do and she would prefer not to be disturbed for quite a while, sonic locking the door to make sure they didn't. A sleeping bag and a rucksack full of food later, she quite literally camped next to the pool.
Unlike on previous occasions, she didn't skip the more difficult sections that would usually make her eyes glaze over. She'd read, re-read, cross-check, pull out every other book she'd need to understand every single sentence, every single little Gallifreyean accent that she saw. Then she made absolutely sure to commit it all to memory. It stayed.
She wouldn't confront him directly. Not, at least, whilst she was in control. Her greatest fear is that eventually his discreet probings would unleash the trapped storm within her, and she would lash out, doing something horrible, taking her revenge on him for an act of pure kindness. Once out of control, even she didn't know what she was capable of in her fury – as the leader of Them had found out to his cost. The last thing Amy wanted to happen was for her rage to be focused upon one of the only two people in her entire lifetime she genuinely felt close to. Nevertheless, she would shut him out in her own way. He was strong telepathically, so it would be hard for her to do so.
But she knew that she would be stronger. She had to be.
"I swear, Doctor, you've gotta be cheatin' somehow," Amy accused, out of breath and a sheen of sweat glistening on her forehead as yet another green streak sailed just beyond the reach of her racquet. She'd finally left the library, nine days after Stroyet, having more or less completed the bulk of her task – there were still a few ancillary texts she wanted to peruse, but they could wait. The Doctor had challenged her and Rory to a tennis match, and she'd immediately replied "You're on." How could she refuse?
Rory had had a bad feeling about the whole endeavour, though, feelings that had turned out to be very well-founded.
"Yeah, that's what Roger said too."
"Roger? As in the Roger?" Rory asked, astonished.
"Well, yeah. Competitive bloke, him," the Doctor replied off-handedly, as he whacked another ball into play. He leaned against the net of the TARDIS tennis court. "Gotta say, though, trying to serve with the wrong hand is one of the more interesting things I've done of late."
Amy snorted as she returned. "Show-off."
The Doctor grinned. "Hey, I have to make it fair somehow, me versus you two. Although I gotta say, Pond, you aren't exactly pulling your weight here," he noted as he smashed another winner between Amy and Rory.
Amy made a face. "I so am," she lied. What she'd lacked in competence with racquet in hand – especially in comparison to Rory, let alone the Doctor – she made up for in swagger.
"Mm-hmm. Anyway – what are we doing tomorrow? Should we rebuild the snooker table? Think Amy should take the lead on that one, seeing as she was the one who destroyed it in the first place."
"Could we go somewhere? Nothing too fancy, just, umm, somewhere normal? Like London, 21st century. Just for a change."
Rory frowned at her. "Didn't you say you were bored of Earth a while ago?"
"That was last week. I could use a break from the running round starships thing, but it's getting kinda dull in here."
"No surprises there, given how you locked yourself in god-knows-where for three days." Amy ignored him.
Her eyes locked onto the Doctor's for a mere fraction of a second from across the court, but that was all he needed. Welcome back, Amy Pond.
"Normal, eh? Well, I guess we can do normal just this once. So, London, 21st century, you say? Hmm... let's see. 2047 – no, don't want to do that, nasty tornado there."
"A tornado? In London?" Rory asked, incredulous.
"Er, yeah. Someone accidentally pumped a few million volts into an experimental weather control station... don't really know about the rest."
"Someone? Who?"
"Er... no idea. 2012... no, Olympics on, far too busy. 2086, ditto. Plus the whole Earth-Mars war thingy kind of put a damper on the night-life. Let's stick to the mid-tens, nice quiet decade. Actually..." he trailed off, an idea striking him. He racked this eidetic memory for the entries of a list he'd seen a few weeks ago. London, 2014, nice unoccupied point in his time-stream. Yep. So he's there. Perfect distraction for Amy while I do my thing, someone else for her to flirt with. So if I could find him...
"Doctor? You with us?"
"Hmm? Oh! Yes. Got a better idea, actually. Got a friend living in London in 2014, someone you'll want to meet."
Amy narrowed her eyes. "And is he normal?"
"Well, he's human, I'll give you that," he remarked airily as he hammered another ball past Amy's reach.