*Spoilers!* If you haven't heard yet, Moffat has tweeted, and I quote, "Amy & Rory will leave in a final encounter w/ the Weeping Angels in ep 5. Not everyone gets out alive & I mean it this time"

A friend of mine mentioned the saddest way I could possibly think of for them to leave, and now I have to write it. Please grab tissues while you have the chance... I'm sorry. I really, really am.

This was wrong. All of it. It was so utterly, completely wrong that it made his blood boil and his bones freeze. He was pacing frantically while Amy's voice, shrill and panicked, filled the background.

Legend said this planet had been abandoned thousands of years ago. But it hadn't been abandoned; everything that landed on the planet ended up dying very quickly, and it wasn't a result of the atmosphere or lack of food.

It was the Angels.

Weeping Angels, the scourge of the Universe. The Doctor thought he hated them before, but it was more than just hate now. It was pure, unbridled rage.

And he wasn't ready. He wasn't ready for this, not again.

"Amy, let me think!" he roared, waving the sonic in her direction. The three of them were in the TARDIS after successfully getting half a dozen Angels in various predicaments to look at one another, and thus stay quantum-locked forever.

"Rory, keep your eyes closed!" Amy exclaimed, putting her fingernail polish hands over his eyes.

"If I'm going to die, I'd like the last thing I see to be my wife, thank you very much."

"You aren't going to die!" The Doctor declared, scratching his head. "I'll think of a way out of this."

It wasn't like last time. The Angels fell into a crack in the Universe last time. It erased the Angel in Amy's head permanently, as if it had never been. But this time was different. They had split up to investigate the surface, an idiot idea on his part.

Rory ran into them first. He didn't know not to look them in the eyes.

There were no Universe-sized cracks to save them this time. And he had no idea how to get the Angel out of Rory's head.

"Can't he just keep his eyes shut?" Amy asked loudly.

"For the rest of my life?" Rory asked.

The Doctor paused in his pacing and rubbed his eyes. "That would be enormously difficult. Rory counted back to one before we found him. The Angel is mere seconds from being born. The longer it lives in his head, the more opportunity it can find to tear him apart from the inside out. It's almost a full-fledged Angel. He might be able to live like that for a short while, but not forever. Even if we took his eyes out, the Angel would still be in his mind. It would torture him."

"So what do we do?" Amy asked, delicately wiping the tears from beneath her eyes.

"...I don't know."

"Doctor..." Rory paused, hoping that he'd gotten the Time Lord's attention. "You said I could live like this for a little while, yeah? But then what happens?"

The Doctor stayed silent for a very long time. Rory repeated his question, and only then did the Doctor answer it. "You would die and an Angel would come out of your eyes, essentially."

"It would attack everyone." It wasn't a question.

"Yes. It would," the Doctor murmured.

"If I'm near Amy... Then she'd die."

"Oh, no," Amy's voice rose high and shrill. "You are not leaving me again." She grasped Rory's hands in her own. "You already died once, that's all you get. According to the rules, now you have to live forever."

Rory's mouth turned up into a smile. "Technically you died too. Guess we get to live forever together."

"Good." The Doctor was pacing around the console in a circle, something with made Amy, frankly, very dizzy. Suddenly, a thought blossomed in her mind. "Doctor?"

"Yes, Amy?" The Time Lord froze and looked expectantly at her, as if she were about to blurt a genius idea.

"If Rory does... die and the Angel comes out of his head, there won't be another Angel anywhere to look at it. The same problem will happen."

The Doctor looked puzzled. "...You're right. What are you-"

"I'll do it."

The Doctor quickly descended the steps, sonic screwdriver flailing. "You'll do what?"

"I'll look into the eyes of an Angel. When the Angel comes out of my head, it can look at the one that comes out of Rory's."

"You are not allowed to die, Amy! Husband's orders!"

"Yes, Amy, listen to your husband!"

"What choice do we have?" she shrieked, trembling from fear and preemptive grief. Both men fell silent. "If I don't, anyone else that ever comes to this planet will die. We can't have an Angel running around the TARDIS. Or on Earth, or anywhere else! The only safe place for it is here."

They both started to speak, "Amy-"

But she cut them off. "No!" She knelt next to the spot where Rory sat, eyes closed and awaiting his fate. "I've lost you so many times, Rory. I don't want a life without you in it. I don't want it."

"Amy..."

The Doctor rubbed his eyes in frustration. As much as he didn't want to admit it, she was right. There was not a single safe place they could take it. It was bad enough that there were four of them quantum-locked in a basement on Earth.

But he couldn't tell the Ponds what not to do. Not really; Amy always just did what she wanted anyway. Rory was prepared to give his life - again - to protect other people. The Nurse.

"How long have I got?" Rory asked, turning in the direction that he thought the Doctor might be standing.

It took him a moment, but the Time Lord finally replied, "Three, maybe four days. The longer you keep it, the more it will hurt you. I'm sorry."

Amy began to sob. Rory gathered her up and they carefully made their way back to their bedroom. Neither of them slept for a very long time.

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Four days later, the Doctor hadn't slept either. Four days wasn't an extraordinary amount of time to be awake for a Time Lord, but he'd been awake for seven days before that, and was starting to seriously consider taking a nap right on the console.

But when Amy and Rory appeared on the steps, he was awake and alert.

"How are you feeling, Rory?"

"It feels like a sledgehammer," he mumbled. "I had a migraine before that felt a bit like this. But it wasn't as bad."

"Doctor..." Amy said, helping her husband down the stairs. "Are you sure there's nothing you can do?"

The Doctor couldn't look at her. He only stared at the wibbly lever and replied, "I'm so sorry, Amy. And you, Rory."

"It's not your fault," Rory replied immediately.

"Of course it's my fault," he said. "You wouldn't be like this if I wasn't selfish. I should have left you both on Earth."

"Don't talk like that," Amy said, crossing to her best friend. "We didn't want to stay on Earth."

"And now you're both going to die," he murmured in response.

Amy straightened herself up. "Together."

"Once you do this, there's no turning back," he said, the customary statement for someone about to do something foolish and dangerous.

"I don't want to live the rest of my life without him," she whispered, grabbing the Doctor in a fierce, Scottish hug. "I'd rather die."

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Soon, the group of three were standing amidst the ruins that the other Angels were found in. The Doctor stood some distance away, ready to accept death should this plan not succeed. He was to help Amy stare at Rory's head-Angel until she had properly counted down to zero herself. Then they would be quantum-locked forever.

"This is your last chance to stop this!" The Doctor shouted at them, angry at them and at himself. This was what he did to them. He tried to keep them safe before, but they weren't having any of that. And now they were both going to die. His Ponds.

Rory and Amy embraced each other tightly. They had spent every moment together the last four days. "You always said I'd be the death of you," Amy murmured.

"Other way around this time, I guess," Rory replied. They kissed, then carefully stepped away from one another. The Doctor looked on, fists clenched and face red with anguish.

"Whenever you're ready, Rory."

"Okay, I'm ready. Here I go." He paused for a moment, then opened his eyes to stare directly at his beautiful wife.

If only they could have had more time. More anniversaries. More birthdays. More children.

"I love you, Amy."

"I love you too."

"Zero." Rory's body suddenly seized up in a convulsion that could only be described as epileptic. Amy sobbed with her hands over her mouth as she watched her husband die. His eyes rolled back into his head as the Angel took over, and he collapsed dead as the stone monster burst from the whites in his eyes. It left no external physical marks on the human, except for the blood trickling from his ears.

The Doctor shouted and quickly moved to Amy's side, to help her stare at the Angel. She was shaking, sobbing like he'd never seen. "I'm going to make sure you never kill anyone else!" she screamed, staring straight into the monster's eyes as tears rolled down her face.

The Doctor took the opportunity to hug her, alive, one last time.

"Doctor?"

"Yes, Pond?"

"Is it going to hurt?"

"...I don't know. Maybe."

"Okay." She continued to stare, and felt the too-familiar urge to begin counting backward. "Bury us together, yeah?"

"Of course," he replied immediately.

"...In Leadworth."

"In Leadworth."

Amy's counting took quicker than she expected. "Thank you, Doctor. For everything."

"You were amazing," he murmured. "Rory too."

She nodded. "Rory too."

Then the Angel took her, and she convulsed and fell just like her husband.

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It was little consolation to the Doctor, but their plan worked. The Angels from their minds were quantum-locked now, keeping the rest of the planet safe from harm. No longer would they run around the planet, killing everything in sight. They protected the whole universe, essentially. A single Angel in any place, unchecked, could spell doom for countless people.

He gathered both bodies into the TARDIS with the heaviest of hearts, setting her course for Leadworth, finding that the Ponds were far more than he deserved.