ii.
The Doctor is alive, and Amelia Pond waits for him in the great big house with Rory. Modelling is fun, and then it's dull, so she bottles the rain, but she gets it all wrong and the scent stagnates. It's enticing and fresh, dewy, but they can only sell the formula in small bottles-the chemicals decay quickly and the perfume takes on a deep, pervading melancholy.
Rory lives passionately as ever, scrambling eggs for her mornings, bringing a tray upstairs when the bed swallows her up like sand as the waves roll out. Thursdays he goes to tea with his mother, bikes down to Lower Leadworth and returns with hot cookies and fresh bread and once an entire shepherd's pie they put in the freezer, in case of company that never comes.
The smell of rain fills the house. It starts benignly, one of several perfume bottles on the dresser, spritzed into her drawers of underthings. Next, she's dabbing the scent on before she leaves for errands, then nestling a soaked-and-dried handkerchief in her sleeve. She begins tucking a bottle into her waistband to carry about the house.
Rory keeps the windows open and wishes the Doctor would come back, misses his Amy.
One day he comes home to find her on the couch, drenched. The wall is soaked, the carpet sprouts broken glass, Petrichor puddles the living room. The house reeks. Amy reeks. It all reeks of longing, of waiting.
They have to do something, go somewhere. Take action, be agents, leave. They pack the house that night. Rory wraps the china in newspaper while Amy showers. When he creeps upstairs for the lamps, he finds her in her knickers tossing jumpers and tights, jeans and skirts and khaki shorts into any and all of the suitcases and hampers strewn about the room. She turns when he notices him and there's a blue flame burning in her eyes. "Just our stuff," she says. "Nothing else. Nothing we didn't have to start with."
Rory picks up a jewelry box. "This was my mum's. Passed down from my great-grandmum, always to the daughters at their wedding." A sheepish grin spreads. "And to me. I thought about giving it to Mels, you know, before. It just seemed right."
The flame blazes up, and there's Amy again. "He. Left. Her." The fire burns her black and cold and calm, so calm. "He left her. Left us. Left me."
They're gone by first light. And so is Amelia Pond, who waits no more.