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Amy Pond is alone.
In an empty tearoom, she sits and reads and rereads lines of Ovid in the dim light of an antique lamp.
She finds a Van Gogh print beneath a torn map of the Dreading Sea on R-342 and hangs it on the wall. The irises do nothing to brighten the room.
Six thousand years prior and four dimensions to the left, she’s playing hopscotch with alien children on the second planet of a far off solar system. The Doctor folds his newspaper along the crease and gestures wildly for her attention. He catches her eye as she’s balancing on one foot, reaching down to scoop up the pink pebble in the box marked 4. He says something about examining that gorgeous shrubbery across the square and she dismissively waves him off.
“I’ll still be here,” she says more to herself than to him, and Amy Pond doesn’t know it yet, but it’s a lie.
This time, she’s the one who doesn’t keep her promises. She won’t be there when he turns around.
In the tearoom, her chair is next to a wide window with a view of a city street. Beyond the glass are sleek stone buildings wet with the afternoon rain, cars parked haphazardly by the curb, and sidewalks scattered with people in trench coats holding umbrellas.
When she first opens her eyes and finds herself displaced in time and space, she trips on a pile of lacy decorative pillows lying idly on the floor and surveys her surroundings from the ground. She tries to throw open the front door, hunter green with a brass handle, but no matter how hard she pulls, it doesn’t give. At the wide window, her eyes search the avenue for the Doctor; the corners are hopelessly devoid of blue boxes. A little boy glances up from beneath his umbrella as he passes and then says something to his mother, but the end of his sentence barely penetrates through the glass. She inhales sharply because the words are foreign and unfamiliar and unsettling for a reason that isn’t immediately obvious.
But the math is simple:
The translator microbes in the TARDIS aren’t working because the TARDIS can’t translate to where she is.
Amy Pond is alone. She will wait.
In a moment of anger, she imagines him on his knees next to the console, hands grasping at his cranium, breathing through sharp gasps, pleading with his mind to hurry, hurry, and put the pieces together. He always keeps her waiting.
She blinks, feeling guilty even though she shouldn't, and forces herself to not think about it at all. Outside, a young man with short light brown hair and a down gilet presses his hand across the shop window, but her gaze is fixed downwards. He's gone when she looks up, but the fingerprints linger.
The cage binds:
The carpets are not hiding trap doors leading down into the damp earth below, the cupboards are not portals to somewhere else. The chandelier is only a chandelier; the yellow wallpaper with faded fleur de lis hides a normal wall beneath and nothing more.
Time is somehow both all important and totally irrelevant and that bothers her more than the idea of a room with no exit.
Here, days are the same as hours that are the same as minutes that are the same as seconds. A clock with five hands sits on the desk across the room and incessantly ticks, but the arrows never move. Outside, the sky never darkens, the people never go home, and the rain never stops. Inside, she never grows tired, never grows hungry, never feels anything other than her own heart beating. She makes herself tea, but that’s out of desperation for routine. She doesn’t drink from her cup and tries to fight whatever this is with a heavy book of Roman literature.
Tempus edax rerum. Time devours all.
Smart bloke, that Ovid was.
She watches the rain trail across the windowpane and people in the street and wonders if this is the space version of the princess locked in the high tower, waiting for the errant knight to emerge from the fog.
“I was never keen on Rapunzel,” she says to no one at all.
River Song walks like she's going somewhere, a bright red umbrella partially obscuring her face. A familiar twenty-first century mobile is crooked between her shoulder and her ear and she gestures with her hands, expressive.
Amy watches until River stops mid-step to stare at where Amy hovers behind the glass. Whether Amy says or whispers or shouts River's name she does not know, but she has to strain to hear the quick staccato of high heels on wet pavement as River walks away.
From the outside, the tea room is very empty.
Amy considers the cracks in time and wonders if she’s ever existed, if this is the net result of not running fast enough.
She considers the Daleks and wonders if they killed her when she wasn’t looking, if this is all that’s left.
She briefly considers the Doctor and wonders if this prison masquerading as a tea parlor was meant for him, if there was some kind of cosmic misunderstanding.
There are other things: psychic pollen, perception filters, time loops, time tracks. There are things she’s forgotten, things that she’s missing, things she will never know.
She sometimes wishes she had paid more attention, but is not sure if it would have made much of a difference.
She toys with the idea of burning it all down.
It is increasingly looking like the most viable option.
The shop door groans open, Amy’s head snaps up from her book, and it is nothing like the movies or on telly. She doesn’t laugh or shout his name or say the things she’s suppose to say (you’re late, took you long enough, you found me). She doesn't say anything at all, but instead stands up, frames his face with her hands and rests her forehead against his. It's been a long time.
His skin is cold with rain and it’s familiar like this, but still strange. There are rips and tears in his clothing, a missing bowtie. Her arms tighten around him when he sways where he stands.
Time is moving, devouring, so she asks about monsters, aliens, machines. Asks if they need to run and frowns when he shakes his head against her shoulder. She suggests he should sit down and her frown deepens when he complies without fighting.
“Are you all right? What happened?”
“I’ve missed you, Pond.”
“We should-”
“No, not yet. This is important.”
She doesn't know what she expects from him, but she gets a story about a planet with an orange sky, red earth, and white snow. He tells her about its rotation, coordinates in space, the composition of the atmosphere. This planet doesn't exist anymore, only as fragments in an old man's memory.
He speaks so slowly, hesitantly, that she thinks that this person in front of her cannot possibly be the same as the one she left behind.
“Why are you - " she starts, then stops.
It would be so much easier if he'd just say it.
I'm from the future. and You can't come with me.
“How are you here?” she asks.
“I already knew where to go.”
“And where are you now?”
“Searching the stars. I don’t stop.”
He looks so tired and slightly golden sitting there. Something about it reminds her of bright yellow sparks disappearing into the night.
“I have to go,” he says to the ceiling. So indirect, so like and unlike him.
“But I can’t,” she adds, mostly out of the need to hear one of them say it. “You haven’t found me yet.
He manages to get up from his chair, staggering beneath the weight of hazy yellow light. She gets up too because there's a story here and although she can barely follow the plot, she knows that one day, there will be an ending.
His fingers tangle themselves in her hair and then rest on her shoulders. He kisses her before she can register it, the brush of his lips on hers, something to hope for and run from. Or maybe an apology, a promise, or a goodbye.
“I don’t think I’ll ever know who saved who,” he says before shutting the door quietly, gently behind him.
Amy Pond is alone. She will wait.
There is no way to measure how long it is before the Doctor she knows crashes through the dark green door with something similar to a bassoon, laughing about shrubs and space sharks and his Amelia Pond. She sprints from her chair and crashes into him, burying her face in tweed as they spin once, twice. She doesn't really care about the fast half-arsed explanation he has to share (temporal anomalies, breaches in the Time Vortex, the translation of infinity into a particularly gloomy segment of 125th Street on New Galdron) because for now, Amy Pond knows exactly why she's crying.
"Let's go," she says, and leaves the door open behind them.