She waits thirty minutes before she goes looking for him.
Probably should have made it an hour, because he's still glaring when she finds him in the console room. He's elbow-deep in a panel of wires on the dashboard, grease smudges peppering his bare arms and rolled up sleeves, and a particularly endearing one at the end of his nose. He must see her come in, because the valley in his brow deepens, but he doesn't look up.
She stands at the bottom of the stairs, as if waiting for permission to approach. He pointedly ignores her.
"Okay," she says, grudgingly. "I'm sorry."
At this, the Doctor straightens himself briskly, sniffing. The glare melts from his face, replaced with aloof nonchalance. He shrugs.
Amy groans. "Fine, I'm reallysorry."
"I believe you," he replies, softening somewhat. "That you're feeling remorse, I believe it. But while I am all for breaking boundaries, Pond—love it, actually, one of my favorite activities, right up there with water-skiing—it's important that we're not thoughtless with one another."
A little gauge in Amy's head flips from humility to indignation."I thought about those questions!" she shoots back.
"Really?" The softness evaporates, his mouth forming a hard line. "In the twenty minutes you were writing them up in that tower, you fully considered all the repercussions you asking me those things might have?"
"Twenty minutes is a long time," she says flatly. "Five is even longer."
She gives him a significant look, with more meaning and defiance than she could ever properly put into words. It's a stare with the kind of intensity that could stump even men who've lived for centuries—which it does.
He turns back to the console abruptly, a white-knuckled hand gripping the nearest lever. "I did mean it earlier, when I said enough."
"Fine." She folds her arms across her chest, as if it might guard her. "Are you going to take me home?" she demands, or tries to, since the words knot in her throat and come out affected.
"Would you like to go home?" She gapes a little, and he jumps on the silence, with a dutifully upbeat tone and a frownless face that do nothing to disguise his frustration. "Would you like to go and get married, right now? I could have you at the chapel in seconds, though he'll probably be a bit confused when you don't show up in the dress." He swings around again and marches towards her, now. "However, I'm sure he'd be more confused if you tried to explain to him what motive you could have possibly had for running away on the night before you were getting married."
His marching stops, destination reached—his face is a nose's length from hers, and he's riled her enough. Submission was never really her thing, and there's something especially titillating about arguing with the Doctor—maybe it's the stakes or the odds—maybe she's a bit turned on. Wouldn't be unheard of.
"So you're going to chide me for running away, when you lost your people hundreds of years ago and you're still in the denial stage?" Her words come out like darts and she grabs his arm instinctively, tugging him closer. He struggles against the contact, but not very hard. "D'you really think that's fair to them? Fair to their memories, pretending like it never happened?"
If there were a line in this conversation, she'd both found it and crossed it. The tension in his jaw breaks, eyes flashing dangerously. He jerks himself away from her, his face shielded from her view as he pushes his way past her, making for the stairs.
She feels a bit dumb, just then.
She chases him, though they're in the corridor before she finally catches him up and wraps about his torso from behind, burying her face in the tweed despite the itch, breathing deeply and smelling something that's probably space daisies. She doesn't say she's sorry, not with words, and after a few seconds he maneuvers himself, still encircled, to face her. He hugs back, and that's it for a while, hugging, as he shakes and sighs into her shoulder. Their embracing bodies feel oddly comfortable, like they fit together despite the angularity of their joints and jutting bones. Which is sort of like people in general, she thinks, who sometimes go together even when they shouldn't.
When he pulls away it's to press a kiss to her forehead, and she snivels loudly, an ugly bodily noise that brings them both back down to (metaphorical) Earth.
"You've got grease on your nose," she observes. Immediately his hand flies to his face and searches hopelessly for the spot, but she shoos it away. "Stop, I'll rub it off for you."
She thinks about that statement and snorts, and he catches on and smirks, and by the time she's returned his nose to normal they're both giggling uncontrollably, ready to fall over on one another.
"You are a terrible influence," the Doctor declares.
"Look who's talking, mister come away with me." Her eyebrows quirk—suggestively, as always.
His mouth twitches out a smile that she mirrors automatically. "Good night, Amy," he mutters, quieting, thumb on her cheek. He gestures down the hall towards her room, with a leading hand in the small of her back.
"'Night." She starts to go, but pauses, turning back to him. "Gotcha," she says breathily, like it's this dangerous test, like she's toeing the line again.
But he just laughs and turns on his heel and bounds down the stairs back into the console room.
She falls asleep smiling.
It takes her longer than it should have to yank the last of several yellow burrs from a bloody, punctured lesion on his back, mostly because his occasional, stifled whimpers are—distracting. When she's freed him, his whole body shudders.
"Thank you," he sighs, drooping.
Her nose wrinkles as she examines the burr. "This is disgusting." She looks to his wound and her forehead wrinkles, too. "That was disgusting."
"Oh, it'll heal," chirps the Doctor. "Rather quickly, I expect. My shirt?" She tosses the garment (now with a large red-rimmed hole in the back) over his shoulder, and scoots round to better face him. He hisses at the sight of the clothing infraction. "Never been so happy to have left my tweed in the TARDIS."
As he buttons himself up, she reexamines their surroundings—a cavernous, chilly all-marble reception hall in a great palace on some abandoned planet. The ghost planet, she'd called it at first. Then there'd been the signs-of-life reading, which had turned out to be an infestation of slithering, vine-like, carnivorous and burr-shooting plants.
Now, mostly clothed, his face crinkles, as he seems to sense some internal balance being violated. "Uck. Paralytic venom."
"Isn't the point of paralytic venom supposed to be that you can't feel it?" She throws him a bemused glance.
"Theoretically. But," he continues, pulling his braces back into place. "Most venomous species haven't evolved to deal with Time Lord bodies, or aren't even capable of doing so. It would take an exceptionally powerful, biologically specific poison to affect me." He clamors to his feet and she follows.
"You know," Amy observes conversationally. "You'd seem like a lot less of a prat if you just explained things as 'special alien rubbish' every once and a while." He sticks his tongue out, off her grin.
"My bowtie, Pond?" he asks, hand outstretched and collar turned up in preparation. Her face falls, remembering. Immediately sensing wrongness, his new tone reflects that urgency. "Where is it?"
"Well, I—" She smiles apologetically, and pulls the tattered remains of his prized neckwear from her pocket. He gasps. Dramatically. "I tried to save it, I swear! But one of them had it in its—mouth thing? And chewed it all up. I ran back to try and grab it, but…" She places the scrap in his open palm, trying not to let his forlorn expression condemn her. "I'm sorry," she winces.
"No, no. It's quite alright." He strokes the remainder, like the corpse of a recently departed pet, and then tucks it gently into his pocket.
They start out of the eerie stone chamber, down an equally eerie stone corridor. The most distinguishing features of this place are the echoes of their footsteps and the dust—not cobwebs, even, not without spiders to weave them. Despite the fact that no one has lived here for millennia, the Doctor told her when they'd arrived, the limited weather and absence of tectonic movement means the buildings, the once-great cities, will remain much the same through the ages, for hundreds of thousands of years, maybe. Which, Amy thinks, is sort of beautiful. Until you get attacked by evil plants.
"I apologize for the turn this jaunt has taken," he tells her, as they traverse the hallways. Both of them have their eyes peeled for more vine-things.
"Did you expect something non-dangerous when the TARDIS said there were life forms on a planet that everyone up and left a thousand years ago?" She fumbles for the torch in her coat, since the sun can be seen setting through one of the palace's glassless arching windows, bathing them in vermilion.
"Yes!" His eyes light up. "Perhaps a little flower in the middle of a rocky plain. Signaling a new era of life for a tired, ancient planet. A little bit of hope."
"Well," she sneers. "I hope your back heals up nicely." She catches him with a smile out of the corner of her eye.
"I'll give you one thing, Pond—your lack of optimism is certainly determined." A smile is one thing, but it's harder to tell if it's real admiration in his voice, or just disappointment dressed up in nice clothes.
"If you always expect the worst, you can never be let down," she affirms lightly, thoughtlessly, not stopping to consider the relevance of this statement. She's lived with the mantra since she was a little girl, and she tends to forget why—especially when she's with him, an ironic source-monitoring error. But she finds irony frustrating, out of her control: a toppling, mocking entity, and she prefers not to grapple with blame. "So I suppose I never really saw the point in optimism."
"That's because you're young." He's still smiling, but the character of it has changed. His age shows. She used to like that, when she first started to know it: very old and the very last. But as time goes on, she learns more, and doesn't just know; she understands, and it begins to hurt.
And normally she'd rebuke that kind of condescension, but anyway, she's got a nagging suspicion that he's right.
The Doctor insists that the plants sleep at night, so they will be safe once the sun has fallen. Whether or not he's right, they make it back safely to the TARDIS, which sits on a gravelly hilltop at the city limits.
"What was this place like when there were people here?" she asks as they reenter the ship. It's a hypothetical, but the Doctor is rubbish when it comes to hypotheticals.
A minute later they step out at the same spot they just left, but it looks very different.
It's still night, but the spectral metropolis they walked away from was shrouded in dead darkness, and the one they look out at is freckled with sweet gold lights from windows and doorways. There's a murmuring distant hum of traffic, people shouting, babies crying. You can see movement in the streets, the glimpses and outlines of dotty people going about their business—going home to their families, to the store, to the theater.
Amy lets out a noise that blends a yelp and a laugh, falling against the Doctor. He laughs too, and with an arm tight around her, explains—they're distant cousins of humans, actually. Were human entirely, once. Up and colonized this place to try and resurrect the aesthetics of ancient Grecian society. That's why there was all that marble and columns we saw earlier. Well, Amy? Do you want to go? Do you want to see?
She does, and they do.
They eat, first: a feast of foods she recognizes as Mediterranean, but with little kicks she can't place, spacey wacey spices. It's served to them in true Earth restaurant style, which is a bit odd when everyone's wearing togas, but no weirder than statutes that move and kill or Winston Churchill and the Daleks or a time travelling alien with a little-big blue box.
As he's making a big show of trying to eat this item, which looks like a gyro but is entirely orange, in only two bites, she observes that he looks quite different without his bowtie. Like he's… sort of normal? Something in the performance, the Time-Lord-TARDIS-Anywhere-You-Like showmanship, has broken down. She likes it; she knows it's temporary, that walls get built to keep people out, but she feels like he's on her level for once. She recalls the pale, splendid curve from his shoulders to his neck that made her take too long to tend him earlier.
Amy grins, and lets him think it's because he only managed to do it in three bites instead of two.
After dinner, they explore the after hours marketplace, which sounds like it would be more fun than it actually ends up being. It still ends up fun—but an after hours marketplace is, apparently, just a marketplace that's open at night. Rubbishy rubbish, Amy tells him, and he scoffs, and whisks her off to the next thing.
At first she doesn't understand. They're walking away from the town, back to the ship, and she asks, are we done? Is that it? He shakes his head and tells her: wait, Pond.They get to the TARDIS and they walk right past it, further into the blackened desert, darkness edging out the last patches of glow from the city like obtrusive, unshakable soot.
In the midst of all the dirt and endless dusty ground, and the wind howling out on across the plains, they find a grove. Olive trees, he tells her, and with hands linked they wander. They're bigger than most olive trees she knows, thick trunks twisting, lurid limbs inviting climbers. They find the biggest one they can, almost ten meters above her head, and scale it, until they're each sprawled across a branch and looking up.
The two moons and a semi-circle constellation turn the sky into a haunting sort of face mask and they spent a while discussing what, if the universe had a face, it would look like, and could this be it, right here and now? It feels like he should know, and when she says that he laughs and informs her that he hasn't a clue. She feels the showmanship dissipating again—she senses he might feel it too, because he's very quiet suddenly. Then he says,
"Amy."
"Yes?"
"I had two children."
"Thanks," she gulps, and spends the next ten minutes agonizing over the inadequacy of that reply. That's it, she assumes, for their conversation—that's all she gets to know, and it's no small sharing, not for him. And she's, what? Disappointed? No, that's not it.
But she's not satiated. Greedily, she wants to be the one to know him best, to be the one he remembers even if he lives forever.
She knows she'll die thinking of him and his stupid wooden time machine, so it's only fair.
Two hours after she tells him she's going to bed, Amy seeks him out in the library, a book across his lap.
With her hands behind her back, she stands a good distance from his armchair, smiling nervously. She hasn't been back to this room since the night of their argument, which feels like a long time ago, like she was a lot younger then—but it's been a few days at most. It's bizarre, it's time distorted, but what else is new in her life with him?
"Trouble sleeping?" he inquires pleasantly, pulling himself away from the page.
"I thought you could, like, read a book in a second or something," she says, avoiding the question. She hasn't slept well since the Angels, but he doesn't need to hear that from her. She's certain his ship does plenty of spying, as perversely intimate as that might be.
"I can, but it's a bit like chewing your food for a second and swallowing immediately." He drags a long, inelegant finger across the printed words, a movement she watches carefully. "Don't really get the full taste of it."
She nods, and then realizes that's basically the end of her stalling. She fingers the bowtie she's been hiding behind her back for the past minute, the one she spent two hours digging through the TARDIS wardrobe to find, as a gift and a necessity. It is a necessity, she reminds herself; it's part of who he is, an outward reminder, a thing she's got to honor. But it's been so nice. Another ten seconds of the bare neck, the broken barrier, of the human Doctor—the normal Doctor, she corrects, if uselessly. The one that's closer to her.
"Amy? Would you like to sit? Are you quite alright?" He squints at her.
"I brought you something." She reveals it, casting him the strip of cloth. He chuckles loudly in delighted surprise and begins to eagerly fumble with the neckwear.
"I knew there was another one in there!" The width of his grin is enough to make her happy she did it.
"Yeah, well, you were right," she replies, hoping he'll be too busy preening to notice her forced lightheartedness.
"Cool?" he asks, and gestures at his neck.
"Never."
She gives him her best laugh and he flails from the chair to wrap her in a hug, so enthusiastic her feet leave the ground for an instant. He spins them, which sends her giggling hysterically into the jacket fabric that scratches less every time she touches it.
"Have I told you lately that you're magnificent, Amy Pond?" he asks, with his fingers threading through her hair, clutching clumsily.
"No, but you better not forget it."
She can't see his face, but the timbre of his voice gathers together, concentrated but still with a gratuitous affection. So much affection, in fact, that she should end this embrace now and walk away whole, but she doesn't, she just clings tighter. She can hear him smiling, his breathe on her neck:
"Never."
Author's Note: So, this chapter is a bit short and isn't the most exciting thing ever (aside from the abundance of sexual references?), but chapter three is going to see some major development and will be up in a week at the longest, so stay tuned.
Also, reviews are hugely appreciated, since the more it has, the more people are likely to be reading it, and the more incentive I'll have to get stuff done.