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i.
In a smoky cafe hidden in the capital city of a planet on the far side of a distant solar system, they stop for afternoon tea. It's still early for the two of them.
“I just don’t understand,” she tells him, leaning across their small table. “What exactly do you do?”
They will always have their questions and he will give each the same answer for there is really nothing else. He shrugs with the idea of nonchalance and somehow knocks his cup, tea brimming over the edge and into his saucer. “I’m the Doctor.”
Amy lets out a small laugh and runs a finger around the edge of her cup. “But you’re not a real doctor.” Beneath the table, his knee knocks passed hers and she grins. “Are you a historian? Space-age solicitor? With that bowtie, you could be a professor. Or do you just flit around the universe and skip rope with the alien children and save things?”
In the middle of explaining why ‘time travel’ and ‘flit’ are not synonymous verbs, there comes a scream from the street, followed by a crash, and then the usual sounds associated with pandemonium.
That, he thinks. That right there is what I do.
The bottom of her chair harshly scrapes the floor and she’s already halfway to the door, teacup still in hand. He looks at her, surprised. Amy Pond is still a little girl, but then again she’s not. He doesn’t know it just yet, but she’s the best thing that’s happened to him in a while.
“Coming?” she asks.
“Don’t be silly, Pond.”
He follows her out of the shop and as they run towards what everyone else is running away from, she glances at him from over her shoulder. Something inside of him involuntarily contracts because her eyes are alight and gleaming - like this is the happy ending and everything else is just footnotes and acknowledgments.
ii.
It is snowing again when they leave the Musée d'Orsay for the third time, but now, instead of walking to the TARDIS, he follows her towards the river, their steps quiet in the cold. There at the riverbank, the winter sun is low in the sky and the lights of Paris flicker against darkening clouds. They stand directly next to each other beneath a streetlamp, her hands wound beneath his jacket and snug around his waist. The smoke from his breath mingles with hers and it all feels too intimate. Yet for all he says that he's a lord of time, he's not exactly sure how long they've been standing there, watching the Seine. For all that he's been trying to push her away, he can't seem to now.
“I never told you,” she says slowly, her expression soft. “But I’m glad that you came back.”
He looks down at her and for a moment, he thinks he might see what Vincent saw.
iii.
She brings him to a party.
“You know,” she explains as he follows her up the front steps of a suspicious-looking flat in a neighborhood of Leadworth he didn’t even know existed. “A proper party - with broken furniture and people you’ve only met once or twice and that really catchy Girls Aloud song that sometimes get stuck in your head.” A pause. “I hope it’s not too alien for you.”
“I think I’ll be more than able to handle it,” the Doctor replies. "I like parties."
She turns the doorknob open and the inside of the flat is filled with humans, cans on the floor, and questionable floral wallpaper. Suddenly, the list of places he’d rather visit is quite long, but she had wanted to come here and he had promised.
So he hovers by a bookshelf, running his fingers over the tattered bindings of someone’s secondhand Shakespeare collection and politely ignoring the poor lad next to him retching into a vase. (On his other side, there is empty air. He imagines he knows who is supposed to be standing there, drifting at the fringe of a memory.) Across the room, Amy is laughing at someone else’s joke and jealousy, he reminds himself, requires possession.
“Great company you keep, Pond,” he says, the sarcasm heavy in his voice as they walk back down the street towards the TARDIS a while later. It’s critical and unfair of him to say, and he expects a frown and possibly even a shove, but Amy Pond just tucks a wayward strand of hair behind her ear and laughs like there's something obvious that he doesn't know. He wants to ask, but doesn't feel as if he deserves to find out.
But when he slides the key into the lock, he feels her hand on his shoulder. Her lips, warm and human, brush the hollow of his cheek.
“Thank you,” she adds before yawning deeply and pushing past the blue doors.
It’s another minute before he follows her inside.
iv.
In a dream, he clutches the keys to a van.
He follows her through the garden, past the bushes and unhinged retirees wielding stones. Ten distinct voices inside of his head are shouting at him to stop and reevaluate, but above the fray her words are as clear as they were in the yellow nursery; it’s all he can hear.
He gets into the passenger seat, his reflection, caustic and quiet, watching from the other side of the glass window.
An engine revs and the front of the house comes at the van a bit too quickly. Even though it isn’t reality, it will still take him a while to recover from this.
v.
A few miles past the Belgian border, they come to a fork in the lane. The year is 1915, he owes the first Queen Elizabeth a favor (multiple favors of a wide variety, actually, but nevermind), and the road has so inconveniently divided, without signs, without directions, without anything. There are also shells exploding not so far away and secret documents hiding in his left jacket pocket.
South, he thinks. Straight south - but the lane diverges: one route heading east and the other west.
“Wrong,” he says. “So incredibly wrong. It wasn’t like this before."
Amy Pond, brilliant and intrepid Amy Pond, steps forward, her eyes fixed on the last of the stars in the early morning sky.
“Any ideas?” he asks, hoping that somewhere, she caught something that he missed. Something human, something still foreign to him.
“Come along, Doctor,” she calls over her shoulder, but before she’s two steps down the eastern road, he lunges forward to stop her, his hand circling her wrist.
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” It comes out much more sharp and ragged than he intends, but history hangs in the balance and there are consequences. He knows there are consequences.
She turns to face him and then looks down at where his hand is clasped around her wrist, right above her pulse point. She smiles and then moves her fingers to link with his.
“No, raggedy man” she replies like it’s a well-known fact. “I don’t.”
“After you then,” he says and follows her towards the rising sun.