title: jump

pairing: amy/eleven

genre: romance/fluff/humor

rating: teen/PG-13/T

summary: Living with this man is the strangest thing Amy has ever done.

author's note: Sequel to hung aloft the night, based on 26 prompts, each a different letter of the alphabet. Absurdly long. Hopefully worth it anyway. For a list of the prompts alphabetically, and for a chronological timeline of the Doctor's and Amy's adventures in my inextricably series, see my LiveJournal. Thanks to my friend Kristin for beta'ing, and to pictash, karu_mila, define_serenity, liz_hollis, shaz_bananas, noallu and snappop on LJ for submitting prompts.

[time machine]

The world has always been strange for Amy. Box falls out of the sky, man climbs out of a box, man eats fish custard, and look at her. Just sitting there.

But living with this man is the strangest thing Amy has ever done. He doesn't just travel in a time machine, he lives in one.

It changes everything, she realizes the first time she falls asleep in the thirty-third century and wakes up in 1941.

[enigmatic]

On the moon of Daar, the Doctor comes from the future with a message for Amy.

She doesn't know the difference at first, just sees the Doctor strolling up to her with a secret smile on his face. She's sitting outside the communal tent on a whistling plain and letting the wind wreak havoc upon her hair, and the Doctor has taken the TARDIS over to a neighboring continent to finish peace negotiations with the Grand Moff, who looks like three fish put very poorly together, and she assumes he's just forgotten something and has come back to grab it.

Before she can say anything, he catches her up in his arms and puts his mouth in that warm part of her neck and murmurs, "Do it. You won't get hurt, and it'll be the most beautiful thing you've ever seen."

"What," she inquires politely once she's gotten her breath back, "could you possibly be talking about?"

"You'll see," he whispers into her ear, and then he's gone.

She ponders this for the next half hour, and then the Doctor shows up again in a smoking TARDIS coughing out The negotiations didn't really work! and they have to traipse off again to save another world and by the time things have slowed down and they're alone in the same whistling field under the moon of the moon of Daar, she's forgotten the enigmatic prophecy he whispered into her ear. He whispers other things into her, prophecies that are much less enigmatic, and by the time things have slowed down even more, she's forgotten everything else.

[night]

There is no such thing as night or day on the TARDIS. It hangs there in space, or space hangs there around them, in a constant glow, bright inside, stars just outside her window. Her body becomes confused, it doesn't know when to sleep. She has to teach it, and there's nothing odder, she decides, than trying to convince a brain which has just seen the pyramids of Giza at high noon that it's actually midnight and she really, really needs to get some rest before the morning, which will be dark. (The Doctor is taking her to Haridaan.)

But she assumes, for some reason, that the Doctor doesn't sleep himself, that because he is immortally young, he must be immortally awake, wandering the halls of his silent spaceship lost in thought as the rest of the world dreams. He raises an eyebrow at her when she throws that out there. Don't be ridiculous, Pond. I get my four hours a night same as anyone else.

Uh-huh, she smirks. Why don't you show me your bedroom then.

He turns around and doesn't answer her, and for a moment—for months—she is afraid she's said something wrong.

He does show her his pajamas, though, to prove his point. They are snazzy.

[war]

"No."

"Don't be ridiculous, Amy."

"You are not wearing that. I've been letting the bowtie slide for years, don't you even think about trying your luck with this one—"

"It's brilliant! Look at it, it accentuates my hair!"

"…It what."

"Accentuates my—"

"No. Just…no."

"Pond."

"…"

"…Give it back, Pond."

"…"

"…Don't. You. Dare."

[grief]

She throws his brand new fez into a supernova. He declares a period of mourning and refuses to eat for the rest of the day.

[birthday]

Birthdays threaten to become an issue, in a world without time, and Amy wakes up one day and realizes she's lost count of her age, and she has no idea why but the thought terrifies her beyond belief. She tries to work things out in her head as she stands in the light of the time rotor and watches the Doctor bounding about the console and making things beep and whirr.

"Amy?"

She was twenty-one when they ran away together, she reminds herself, and she reckons it was about a week between Leadworth and Venice, and maybe…a month afterwards that they crashed on Haur Dhurri, and another few months until the fiasco in Colchester…

"You're quiet this morning."

She clears her throat awkwardly. "Just realized I don't know how old I am," she mumbles.

The Doctor leans over and licks her cheek, and then stares up at the ceiling in thought, pursing his lips and ostensibly sucking on his own tongue. "Twenty-two years, three months, six days and…" He smacks his mouth. "…eighteen hours, I think."

Amy is gaping at him.

He glances back down at her and grins. "Happy birthday."

[feast]

They end up finding most of their meals during their travels, offered to them by their hosts or picked up from a market with some of the Doctor's infinite pocket money. Fruit liquors and fried dazhaaj on Haur Dhurri. Dried fish, figs and goat cheese in the shade of the brand new Parthenon. Honey cakes and zmuffins, a goodbye present from the vice-king of Sphevver. Burgers and chips on the Dewfang between starshifts. Dumplings and spiced milk and blackberries on Aularind, while no less than twenty village children all try to sit on the Doctor's lap at once. Boiled lentils in Varanasi, India—plain fare, flavored by the sunset and their arms around each other.

Sometimes it doesn't work out, though—things move too quickly, or too dangerously, and grabbing a bite to eat doesn't exactly register on their list of priorities. After these occasions, the Doctor will throw open a set of massive double doors in the TARDIS—doors behind which Amy is expressly not allowed—and raise a symphony of clangs and splooches and chops and fwooms which sound disturbingly like sudden bursts of flame, while Amy will sit on a bench outside, kicking her legs idly and feeling her stomach growl. After forty-five minutes he will emerge, invariably with singed eyebrows and some sort of vast tureen. They will feast on the floor of the console room, and they will throw food at each other.

[quiet]

The first time she gets sick on the TARDIS, they've just come back from Fourth Yetchly drenched in rainwater and shivering, and she doesn't even make it to her bed, the Doctor has to carry her and help her out of her wet clothes and take her temperature and pulse and…well, basically be a doctor, which shouldn't make her giggle like it does, but then again she does have a very high fever. The next four days are nothing but endless hours of phlegm and nausea and clogged sinuses and used kleenex and chicken soup, and Amy feels miserable.

The Doctor doesn't complain, even though she knows he must be bored out of his mind, waiting for her to get better. He sits on her bed and plays cards or reads, somehow knowing to toss her some fresh kleenex before she has to ask, thinking out loud in rambling, sprawling stories (Amy's lost her voice, she can't speak a word), and getting up to fetch her the smallest, silliest thing, without a single protest, every time she tries to ask for it in a clumsy attempt at sign language.

On the third day, he's just thrown out a bucket of her sick and is settling down again on the edge of the bed with Gulliver's Travels, and Amy feels a wave of inexpressable gratitude rush over her. She reaches out and tugs on the Doctor's sleeve, and when he glances over at her she points to herself, makes a heart shape with her fingers, and then points at him. I love you.

It's ridiculous, and cheesy, and she's embarrassed as soon as she's done it. But the Doctor's face lights up with a brilliant smile, and he points back at her and holds up two fingers. You too.

Amy blushes and beams.

He spreads out his arms. A lot.

She smiles.

He wiggles his hands and motions towards the ceiling and moves both arms sideways and makes an explodey gesture by the side of his head and twiddles one thumb while the fingers on his other hand dance upside down in front of him and waves at the air and points to her and gives her a thumbs up.

She stares at him.

He sighs. "Right…never mind."

[dive]

She used to swim in school, won a couple of trophies for it even. Water delights her. The TARDIS's swimming pool actually comes to her when she calls. She can hold her breath for two and a half minutes, and she jumped off the high diving board when she was five.

So when she finds herself standing at the top of a sheer white cliff on Daar, two days after she's saved their planet's moon, looking down at an ocean below her that sparkles like a trillion trillion diamonds floating in nothing but light, feeling the wind whip at her bare skin and sing her towards the edge…she can't help it, really.

Do it, he whispered. You won't get hurt, and it'll be the most beautiful thing you've ever seen.

She lets her dress drop to the ground, and she runs, and she leaps.

The air screams around her, and all that terror that she'd somehow not noticed stings through her like fire—and then, in an instant, it is snuffed out. She flies. She spreads her arms and stops breathing and falls through the cloudless sky like a drop of water into the sea.

[awkward]

The TARDIS has a single bathroom, which is awkward at first, when Amy "forgets" to knock or the Doctor takes one of his interminable baths without asking if she'll need the toilet anytime in the next hour and a half; but at a certain point, after enough adventures, they simply run out of embarrassment. Familiarity doesn't dull the edge of their relationship—Amy's heart still pounds faster when she sees the Doctor wander out into the corridor in nothing but a towel, and the Doctor…well, he still wanders out into the corridor in nothing but a towel. (His timing is always curiously spot-on.)

But familiarity smooths out the wrinkles. They get on—they laugh—they develop stupid, hilarious inside jokes. The Doctor shaves while Amy showers, turns on the hot water in the tap just to hear her shriek from behind the curtain, and laughs uproariously when she swears out loud. She hides his toothbrush. He hides her bras.

…Well, some of the wrinkles, anyway.

[piano]

Sometimes, Amy needs to hear music. When she was growing up, her aunt had a piano in the living room, and she used to mess about on it, stumbling out little tunes and trying to sit like Aunt Sharon told her students to sit: straight-backed, elbows in, pretending she was holding a bubble in each of her hands so that her fingers would stay curled in perfect shapes. She never had any illusions about her talent, but what was the point, she thought, of playing if you had to worry about being any good?

The TARDIS has no piano, but the Doctor sneaks her into Carnegie Hall after midnight, when the custodians have gone home for the night and the security system is easy to override with his sonic. He turns off all the power in the building, in fact, and he and Amy feel their way through the hall in the dark, stubbing toes and bumping shins. They find the piano in the middle of the stage, invisible in the darkness. Amy stands behind it, leaning on the edge where it dips down into the wires and cogs of itself, and rests her fingertips on the cool, ebony surface, and waits.

In the dark, the Doctor begins to play for her. His notes are strong, and sure, and beautiful: they curl in perfect shapes, pulling themselves out of the air and landing with a swift, heavy taste on her tongue and in her hair. She swallows, and breathes. It is like floating in the stars with only an ankle pinned down to solidity. She feels the trembling of the piano beneath her fingertips, and she wonders how she could ever have called the Doctor familiar.

[metaphor]

"Ugh, they're vile."

"Now, be fair, Amy. In Hlelinlan mythology these little things are supposed to have been pieces of a god's soul that rained down to earth when he exploded."

"Delightful mythology."

"Well, you can't blame them, they saw a starship get blown up in the night sky, they had no concept of that kind of technology. They believed the god of music and poetry had destroyed himself in order to give their people a gift."

"The gift of beetles."

"The gift of art. It's a metaphor, Pond."

"Mmm. Hold still, Doctor."

"…Amy…?"

"You've got a metaphor in your hair."

[itch]

Sometimes she misses…she doesn't even know what. It can't be Leadworth. It can't be her tiny, slow life lived between endless school and boring friends and a job she's embarrassed to talk about. It can't be her aunt, her kind but distant Aunt Sharon, Aunt Sharon who gave her pencils and dolls and a fish but never any hugs, who left her dinner in the fridge and worked the night shift at the hospital while Amy tried to sleep alone in a big house—she's never missed Aunt Sharon in her life, even on those nights when she had no one to tuck her in. She doesn't think it's her parents, because they've faded away back into that fuzzy part of her childhood, and she thinks of them fondly now, with a little sadness but nothing like real pain.

She wonders, sometimes, if it's Rory she misses—his friendship, his good humor, his quirky turns of phrase, his irrational fear of anything with wings. He was her best friend, for years. You don't just break up with someone and then forget about them like that. She'd be back with him, if the Doctor had never come for her. She'd marry him, and they'd love each other, and she'd stay in her tiny, slow life and be happy. Just…not as happy as she is now.

Because she is happy, and she's not sure she's allowed to be quite this happy, after dumping her fiance and abandoning her family and leaving everything in her old life hanging. She feels like there should be consequences. There aren't. Nothing in her world has consequences anymore. It doesn't matter where she is or what she's just done: one glance at the Doctor, his eyes understanding hers with that hidden reckless grin behind them, and they're off. The TARDIS is freedom. They run across the universe without dragging their feet.

Maybe she misses missing things. There's nothing she can't have now, and it's making her heart go dizzy.

[oranges]

The trees on Onderon are upside-down—their roots begin in the clouds, twisted into pastel billows and hanging thickly down through the chilly air. It is early morning, but the clustered branches of the orchard hide the sun, and Amy steps into a world of darkness, laden fruit trees sagging and swaying above her head, pale golden lights bobbing at the ends of the branches, tiny lamps among the oranges, or what look like oranges. The Doctor jumps as high as he can and grabs one, the color of dawn, and when he takes a bite, a clear tone spills out, a perfect musical note, hanging in the air around them, dancing through their ears and mouths and across their skin. Ildth-druia, the Doctor names them with satisfaction on his face. The singing fruits of Onderon. One note, trapped in the very center, never know what it'll be until you break the skin. At weddings here they throw them into the air, and the newlyweds eat the song that comes down.

Amy sits on the Doctor's shoulders and reaches into the sky, and she plucks D flats and A's and C sharps from the rustling leaves, and they lie together on the dark grass and make music. When the notes are fading away and the Doctor's mouth has lost the flavor of oranges, Amy feels the air grow heavy and hot, and she looks up through the trees to see the sky roiling with color.

It's about to storm, murmurs the Doctor into her ear. Best find some shelter.

Won't the trees keep us dry? asks Amy, because she doesn't want to get up, because the grass is so soft and the Doctor is so warm curled around her.

He chuckles softly. You don't want to be under any trees in a storm like this.

He pulls her to her feet, and they hurry out into the rain, their hair plastering to their foreheads and the new wind teasing at their clothes. When they're past the ildth-druia grove, they turn, shielding their eyes to watch the tree-clouds shudder and bob in the growing tumult.

A great arm of lightning snaps through the sky. The orchard falls, hitting the earth with a symphony. All the fairy-lights go out.

The Doctor turns to her and takes her hand, and says over the roar of the thunder, Come run with me.

[zigzag plotter]

He's been trying to teach her some tricks here and there, in case she's ever alone in the TARDIS and he can't help her. She's learned how to activate Emergency Protocols 1 through 8, she knows which buttons mean "explosion" and which mean "airy waltz," and she thinks she's figured out how to run the laundry machine, although sometimes her knickers still come out glowing. But she's absolutely rubbish with the zigzag plotter.

The Doctor tries to explain it to her without using "sciency words." It's sort of like that pendulum thingy that you can hang from a bike on a tightrope and then the bike stays balanced and you can pedal across the tightrope without falling off…no? She's never seen one of those? Seriously. Well imagine the TARDIS is a bike and the tightrope is time, and if something smacks into the side of it and makes it go wibbly—he doesn't know, a rogue trapeze artist, does it matter?—then the zigzag plotter is what you do to unwibblize it, it's perfectly simple, and if she would just pay attention and stand in the right place when she—yes, it matters where you stand, how on earth could you balance a bicycle if you're standing in the wrong place?—never mind, we're done with the bicycle imagery now, if she could just—that's hardly—Amy, pay attention—Amy, what are you—AMY! That is NOT fair!

One thing she has gotten very good at, and that's distracting the Doctor.

[saltwater]

When she wanders out of the Daaric sea and goes back to look for her clothes, she finds him crumpled in shock at the top of the cliff, her dress in his hands. The horror rushes over her like a flood. "Doctor!"she shouts hoarsely, and he falls over himself turning around, throwing himself around her, clinging to her as though she's the cliff and he's desperate not to fall off.

"What were you…How could you…Why would you ever…" He starts and stops in the voice of a man who can't get enough air.

She tries to explain: that he told her it would be safe, that she trusted him, that, look, she's fine, isn't she? it was exhilarating, she didn't know he was watching her, he didn't say anything!

He pulls back and looks at her with solemn, shining eyes. "I screamed when you jumped."

She stares at him miserably. "I'm sorry."

He sighs and kisses her, and kisses her again, and holds her tight against him, and when she's pulling her dress back on and wringing the saltwater out of her hair he touches her arm and asks quite seriously, "Was it worth it?"

"I suppose it was," she replies thoughtfully. "Didn't really see anything though. Future You says I'm supposed to've seen something beautiful."

Something shifts toward the sunlight in the Doctor's eyes, and he grabs her by the hand. "TARDIS," he says, and pulls her.

[jealous]

He's far too obsessed with her hair than is normal, even for a man in love. Not even Rory was quite this…fixated. He spends an inordinate amount of time putting his hands in it and touching it and smelling it (sometimes really enthusiastically), and when he says goodbye to her—that impossible, nightmare goodbye, before he flies the Pandorica into the TARDIS so that she can have a mum and dad again—he touches a stray red curl of it to his lips almost reverently, as if he and her hair deserve their own private farewell.

"I've always wanted to be ginger," he protests when she wakes up one morning next to him and he's tasting her hair, actually tasting it, like it's candy floss and she's some sort of giant human spool. "I've been everything else! I've had far too much brown. Brown is nothing. Brown is eugh."

So naturally she dyes his hair ginger when he's asleep the next night. It's the only course of action.

[last night]

"AMY, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?"

[vagabond]

The TARDIS can be a bit of a…well, to put it politely, she can be quite uncooperative at times. They want to go to Space Florida, but sometimes she sends them to Mkhedruli instead. They try to end up on Xesh at high noon so as to miss the atmosphere traffic, but she thinks they'd enjoy seeing the sunrise so much more (and really where does she get off trying to play matchmaker, they've already been matchmade, is she hinting she wants grandkids or something?). They aim, with as much precision and calculation as is possible on a type 40 machine, to materialize three degrees to the left of the horrible giant supernova threatening to kill them all, but the TARDIS is still angry about that tiny little explosion from last week, and so she decides to materialize two degrees to the left so they get just enough of a toasty little burn to singe the door handles and make them think they're going to die.

Neither Amy nor the Doctor make any effort at keeping their language polite in these circumstances.

[kiss]

On Ibber, though, they nearly lose her, when she's stolen by Ibberese bandits and taken away on a faster-than-light starship. They do everything they can think of to track them down and get her back, but it takes almost a month before they finally find her in the corner of a dusty, beaten-down warehouse, singed and covered in spiderwebs and peeling paint everywhere. The Doctor runs to her, but Amy beats him. She throws herself against the big blue door with her arms outstretched and whispers, "You mad old thing," and plants a kiss right on the St. John Ambulance sticker.

The TARDIS hardly ever gives them cheek after that—but if she does, it's Amy, not the Doctor, who can coax her into compliance now.

[xenophobia]

"Would it bother you, if I regenerated?" he asks after they've just escaped chewing spidercrabs and he's bleeding all over the infirmary and trying to make his body metabolize antidote faster than it can metabolize poison.

Amy stares at him in horror and he quickly waves his hands at her. "No, no, not right now, I'll be fine. I mean—if it ever did happen. Would it…bother you."

She grits her teeth and pulls another barb out of her own arm. "Same man, new face, yeah?"

"Well, yeah. Well, mostly. Aaaah…" The Doctor closes his eyes and shudders, gripping the edge of the stretcher he's using to keep himself upright. His face goes pale and his breath comes in gasps for a few seconds, and then stops completely. Amy jumps up to go to him, but he holds out a trembling hand. "'sokay," he manages hoarsely. "Bypass. Just. Wait."

She waits. Slowly his color returns to normal and he begins breathing again, sagging against the stretcher in visible exhaustion.

"Right." He exhales loudly and wipes the sweat off his face. "Antidote's working, gimme your arm, you're doing that wrong."

Amy complies wordlessly. "You'd still be you," she ventures as he plucks spidercrab spines out of her skin with surprisingly steady hands.

He doesn't look up. "Yep."

"Maybe a little madder, maybe not quite as mad?"

"Definitely still mad."

"Still handsome?"

"Still the sexiest Time Lord ever."

He pulls on a deeply-embedded barb, and she flinches, hissing in pain. "Sorry," he murmurs distantly, eyes intent on his work.

Amy watches the way his whole body is concentrated on her, feels the gentle pressure of his hand around her forearm and the impossible precision of his fingertips meticulously removing one spine at a time, pulling poison out of her before he himself is fully recovered.

"Still love me?" she finds herself asking in a low voice.

The Doctor lifts up his head and looks at her. "Nope. Not in the slightest. I'd probably hate you, in fact. Blame you for my regeneration. Kick you out of the TARDIS. Say horrible things about your mother."

She smiles weakly, and the smirk vanishes from his face. "Amy."

"Oh, shut up," she says, suddenly not needing to hear it.

"Amy…"

"Shut up."

"Am—"

She shuts him up.

[hero]

He's always been her hero. Ever since he took hold of her seven-year-old hand and magicked away the crack in her wall. Ever since he came back twelve years later and saved the world in twenty minutes. Ever since he rescued her from angels and vampires and Eptilune priests and time loops and Lymician scientists and Tne' policemen with a weird penchant for handcuffs. Ever since he stole her away on the morning of her wedding and married her himself, with all the bells and whistles and ridiculously useless ceremony he could think of.

It would be silly, then, after all of this, for him to call her his hero, if all she were doing was making him the perfect cup of tea or killing the spider that's got him wrapped up in the shower curtain on the other side of the bathroom. It would be even sillier for her to feel an absurd rush of pleasure every time she heard him say it.

Absolutely silly.

Superbly silly.

Yeahp.

[rules]

She finds them written on scraps of paper stuffed into his jacket pockets, that one epic laundry night after the Olgabrian fiasco:

"Rule the Seventeenth: No using River Song's blue boringers. Because, really. What's the point."

"Rule the Twenty-Sixth: Always turn off the sonic before putting it back in your jacket pocket. Or, alternatively: never keep sonically-ignitable diamonds in your coat."

"Rule the Thirtieth: Don't bring animals into the TARDIS. If you must, make sure they're housetrained."

"Rule the Thirty-First: Forget Rule the Thirtieth. Never bring animals into the TARDIS, period."

"Rule the Ninth: Carefully mark all boxes containing items which might (a) inadvertantly poison your air supply, (b) try to eat you, (c) prompt troubling questions from your traveling companion, or (d) burst into song without warning."

"Rule the Tenth: Especially (c)."

"Rule the Twenty-Third: Don't let anything bad happen to Amy, ever. Ever ever ever ever ever."

"Rule the Twenty-Fourth: If something bad does happen to Amy, save her."

"Rule the Twenty-Fifth: If Amy is unsaveable…[will finish later, unsure]"

"Rule the Nineteenth: Respect the tweed."

"Rule the Eighty-Fourth: Avoid Plutonian flu. People won't listen to you if you're vomiting."

"Rule the Fifty-First: Sometimes a grape is just a grape. Sometimes a grape is laced with tranquilizers. Make sure to double-check before eating."

"Rule the Third: Don't wander off."

"Rule the Fourth: I mean it."

"Rule the Forty-Seventh: See Rule the Third."

"Rule the Seventy-Fourth: No sex in the console room, under any circumstances, no matter how insistent Amy may be."

"Rule the Seventy-Ninth: Rule the Seventy-Fourth is redacted. Also: buy new suspenders."

"Rule the Thirty-Third: Leave being ginger to those who can pull it off."

"Rule the Sixty-Second: Fezzes are cool."

"Rule the Sixty-Eighth: Under duress, it is wise to deny Rule the Sixty-Second."

"Rule the Fifth: Don't fall in love with a traveling companion."

"Rule the One-Hundredth: Break rules often. Rules are boringers."

Amy smiles, and writes, "Rule the Hundred-and-Oneth: Jump."

[unfold]

"This is a terrible idea, you know," the Doctor remarks as he revs the temporal isometry pump with one hand and scratches Amy's back absent-mindedly with the other.

She scoffs. "It's YOUR terrible idea."

"Well, yes," he admits lazily. "Just wanted to make sure you were aware."

The TARDIS materializes silently at the top of a cliff on Daar, and they tiptoe out, latching the door carefully behind them. The Doctor leads Amy carefully to the precipice and points.

A few cliffs away, a hundred feet above the gleaming water, a figure in a dress is backing away from a long drop.

"Oh my god that's me" tumbles incredulously out of Amy's mouth.

"That's me, too," the Doctor reminds her, nudging her a little to the right. She shields her eyes from the sun glinting off the waves and giggles a little at the lanky, be-bowtied younger Doctor, several hundred yards away from her past self, standing motionless in the grass.

She looks over her shoulder and quirks a frown at him. "How long were you watching me, ya weirdo?"

"Shut up," he retorts affectionately. "Watch yourself."

She does. The dress falls off of her younger body. The bowtied figure dashes forward, but nowhere near fast enough.

"Now," breathes the Doctor.

Something white and shining flies off of the cliff in perfect slowness, and she blinks before she realizes it's her. She is less falling and more floating—in a flawless curve she plummets down the side of the white cliff, her red hair trailing startlingly behind her, her body unfolding from a snowflake into a raindrop into a spume of mist that sinks silently into the blinding water and disappears.

She doesn't realize she's holding her breath until it falls from her mouth, and she has to make herself pick it up again.

"Wait here," the Doctor is saying behind her, and he runs—runs—back into the TARDIS. Amy couldn't do anything else. She holds her plain white arm out and stares at her own skin, dumbfounded, as if she could somehow transform herself again into the bird that she just saw.

The TARDIS fades out of sight for a moment, and then fades back, slightly to the left of where it was a moment ago. The Doctor lets himself out, and Amy comes to him wordlessly.

"Sorry," he says, a little out of breath. "Had to go back and tell you to jump. Make sure this happened."

"This…Doctor, this…I'm…"

"Amy Pond," he finishes. "The most beautiful thing you've ever seen."

He touches their foreheads together, so she can see the little wrinkles around his eyes when he smiles.

"Welcome to my world," he whispers.

[centuries]

He shows her his bedroom the day after.

She's learned long ago not to let herself imagine what any room in the TARDIS might look like. The library is tiny and the laundry room is vast; the swimming pool is half alive and the wardrobe is like an Aplan mausoleum. So she tries not to build up any expectations for what must be the Doctor's innermost of inner sanctums. Just closes her eyes and lets him push open the door.

The room is big. And dark. And there's a bed. At first that's all she sees. She wouldn't put it past him to have a giant dark room with a single bed in the middle of it and nothing else. He doesn't sleep much—not nearly as much as she does. She supposes a bedroom could be purely functional for a Time Lord in a way it wouldn't be for a human.

But then he presses something on the wall, and a soft light fills up the room, and Amy's heart rises in her throat.

The room is covered in pictures. They cluster across the wall like scales on a fish and hang from the ceiling from bits of string and wires. Photographs. Holograms. Looped vid cells. Newspaper clippings. Even the corner of the floor has its share, littered in piles or propped up in frames. Only the bed is bare, hovering silently a few inches above the center of the floor.

Amy walks slowly around the perimeter of the room, running her fingertips here and there across curled landscapes and faded, static-ridden video loops. There are so many faces. Some of them are repeated—some of them are repeated quite a lot. There are alien faces she's never seen before, creatures that don't look human but look so very very people. There are old men and babies and cats and beautiful women and octopus things and smiling children and grinning young men and laughing blobs and dogs with no noses and suddenly she has to sit down on the bed because with all of his nine hundred years she has never realized how ancient her Doctor is.

He is staring at her from the doorway, young and handsome and sad, and she swallows. "Are these all your friends?" she dares to ask.

"Most of them." He walks over and sits down heavily on the bed beside her, looking up at the portraits dangling from the ceiling. "Sometimes there isn't a camera, or…time."

"Where am I?"

He looks down at her and says quite seriously, "Amelia Pond, I have no intention of ever letting your picture end up in here."

She leans her head on his shoulder. "Are these all people you've lost, then?" she asks quietly, looking up at him.

"One way or another. Some leave. Some never come at all. Some die, sometimes because of me."

They are silent together. Amy feels the centuries swirl around them.

"Your room's bigger than mine," she says after seconds have stretched into minutes.

She can barely hear him, he says it so quietly. "It could be your room, too."

Neither of them speaks. Amy listens to both of his heartbeats thrumping steadily against her body. They've been lovers for ages, married on a dozen different planets in a dozen different ceremonies. He's not offering her sex.

He's offering her centuries.

"If you want," he amends softly.

[yesterday]

She doesn't think she's ever wanted anything more.

They fall asleep together in the fourth millenium and wake up yesterday, and the Doctor makes eggs for breakfast and Amy moves her pillow into his room, and after they get back from Felspoon she hangs the newest portrait from their ceiling: a girl with pink skin and blue hair, lost forever in time. She watches it spin slowly on its string. Box falls out of the sky, girl climbs out of a box, girl throws down political superpower with alien wearing a bowtie, and look at them. Look at them all. All those stars and faces, just sitting there.

The world has always been strange for Amy.

She hopes it never changes.

[the end]