Author Note: River has red shoes when Amy first meets her and Amy has red shoes at her wedding. It was playing on my mind and then I started to see red everywhere, which is kind of funny when I think that Doctor Who is usually associated with TARDIS blue. If I was a meta kind of person there may have been meta, but nope. Here be fic.


Illustrations In Red

River wears red shoes that she hangs by their heels on the handle of the viewfinder in the TARDIS. They're a glorious colour, deep and rich. Fighting colours for battle shoes.

Oh, I like those, Amy thinks.

Amy has always liked red. It's bright and bold, it's danger and adventure, and it suits her hair.

Red is the colour of River's shoes and the box Amy's engagement ring lived in. It's the colour of Rory's centurion cloak and his stag night t-shirt, the Doctor's fez and his bow tie, but she doesn't remember those days when she puts together her wedding outfit.

Amy slips her feet into bright red shoes for her wedding because she's always liked red, a fondness that echoes through times that no longer exist but routed in times that do. If they remind her of another pair of shoes she can't recall where or when she saw them.

"Oh, you know the old saying," Rory says when she questions the blank book. She does. Something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue.

Amy's wedding dress is new and her veil is both borrowed from her mum and old, being her grandmother's originally, but no one mentioned to her about having something blue. She supposes that her mum and Aunt Sharon warned people away from mentioning something that might recall her childhood obsession. It was the Doctor who brought blue into her life with his TARDIS, his raggedy outfit, and his blue tipped sonic screwdriver.

How is it that they can remember her stories, but she couldn't until Rory said those words and blue came flooding back into her life?

A single tear falls on the book in her hands and she stands up. She speaks as if she can tap the heels of her ruby red shoes together, tell the world that there's no place like home, and home will appear.

It does.

"I only came for the dancing," the Doctor says.

Amy wears red shoes to her wedding and feels that she could dance all night, like the girl in the fairytale who was told to buy sensible shoes and bought red ones instead, because they were pretty, and couldn't stop dancing until someone cut off her feet and the shoes with them. She wears battle shoes in fighting colours, for making this life how she wants to it to be and dancing through it.

When her feet start to hurt and she kicks them off Rory picks them up and carries them for her.

Someone takes a photo of them dancing; Rory's hands wrapped about Amy and holding her high heels.

"We're all stories in the end," she remembers hearing the Doctor say a long time ago.

River curls up on the couch next to her mum as they look through the wedding album, a few years old now, and her index finger traces the shape of Amy's shoes in that photograph.

"Oh, I like those," she says.