A Long Life (But One Worth Living): Chapter Eleven

[rumpelsnorcack]

Title: A Long Life (But One Worth Living)
Author/Artist: rumpelsnorcack
Rating: R this chapter, PG-13 generally
Characters & Pairings: This chapter: Rory/Amy
Word Count: 1827 this chapter
Summary: The story of Rory's life, from meeting Amy to death.
Notes: Many thanks to the wonderful a_phoenixdragon and mollywheezy who have been extremely supportive through this whole process.  I've been writing this on and off for a while.  It's still not finished, but is getting there.  Not sure how many chapters there will be, but each one is intended as a short one-shot in its own right so all can be read independently.  However, they do all build together to give a picture of Rory's life, complicated timelines and all.  It's all roughly chronological, but each piece doesn't necessarily exist in the same timeline as each other piece.  So some are pre-reboot, some post, some exist in a universe which includes Mels, others don't.
Disclaimer: Sadly none of the characters are mine, I just enjoy hanging around in their sandbox.

Rory was furious.  That evil old cow of a woman had just plain ignored his logic and hard work, and dismissed him.  He knew he wasn't good at standing up for himself, especially when faced with the very intimidating doctor on his ward, so he'd gathered evidence to back him up.  He'd intended it to help him overcome the stutter he developed in her presence.  Frustratingly, she had instead assumed he was somehow mentally deficient because he had collected evidence she assumed couldn't possibly show what he knew it did.  She didn’t even look at it.  Not only that, but she heard the patients calling out, ‘doctor’ and she still refused to look at his pictures.  Obviously Rory knew there was no possible way for the people on the ward to be out and about in the village, but he kept seeing them.  Why was no-one else even vaguely interested in his discovery?  Even Amy, who was still obsessed with the Raggedy Doctor (though she had thankfully stopped insisting Rory play the role), didn't care.

'Maybe they have relatives who look like them, Rory.  They're, like, basket cases aren't they? It can't be them,' she'd said, then pounced on him, dragging him off to the forest nearby to have sex.  The terror that they'd be discovered coupled with the intense desire he felt whenever she was nearby pushed the thoughts of the coma patients out of his mind.

Not today, though.  Today his fury was white hot.  He'd been put on leave over this thing, and even though evidence hadn't got him anywhere so far, he determined to get some more when he saw the man with his dog on the edge of the common.  Surely this time he could convince Doctor Ramsden he was right.  He knew he needed to stand up for himself more, and every time he spoke to the doctor he kicked himself afterwards for not being more assertive, but she was so intimidating that he could never carry through on his intention to hold his own ‘next time.’   Consumed by his anger, and his self-appointed task to gather more evidence, Rory was so focused on what he was doing that he was completely startled when the man in rags grabbed his phone.

He stared in shock as the man examined his pictures of the coma patients, but under the shock was a hint of gratitude that someone seemed interested in his findings.  The man handed back Rory’s phone, while looking Rory over in a disconcertingly thorough manner, invading his personal space with a puppyish ease as if this was perfectly natural behaviour.

‘The sun’s going out and you’re photographing a man and a dog.  Why?’

Opening his mouth to answer, Rory instead found himself bugged by the idea that the man was familiar somehow, but that was absurd because Rory knew everyone in the village and he was sure he’d remember someone as odd as this guy.  But the feeling still persisted.  Before he could tease out the issue, Amy came running up.

‘Amy,’ Rory said, the delight he felt in seeing her obvious in his voice – he was still so stunned that she was inexplicably interested in him that he still felt giddy whenever she touched him.

‘Hi,’ she said, clearly distracted, then introduced him to the weird man.  But not, Rory was quick to notice, telling him who the man was.  ‘Oh.  Uh.  This is Rory.  He’s a friend.’

‘Boyfriend.’  Rory couldn’t keep the pride out of his voice.  They hadn’t been together long, so it still gave him a thrill to tell other people that she had chosen him.  Amy, however, was still insecure about claiming him so she always fell back on the same comment: ‘kind of boyfriend,’ which always stung Rory a little, but he tried not to show it.  That was just Amy for you – she was never one to believe anyone would stick around, so she always held people at arm’s length.  The worst legacy of her faith in her childhood friend being shattered was this emotional distance she had built up over the years.  Then it suddenly struck Rory why the man looked so familiar – he’d seen him in art form for years.

‘Oh. My. God.  It’s him.’

All that time believing the Raggedy Doctor was just a figment of Amy’s imagination – gone.  He was here now, totally real and solid looking and somehow even bigger – taking up more emotional space than he should – than Rory’s imagination had painted him.  Stunned, Rory stared at the man and tried to work it out, stuttering a little as he questioned Amy.  While he was still trying to process, the Doctor grabbed him by his sweatshirt and pulled him close, his frustration obvious in his tone.

‘Man and dog. Why. Tell me. Now.’

‘Sorry,’ Rory apologised quickly. ‘Because he can’t be there, because … he’s in a hospital. In a coma.’  The Doctor chorused the last with him and Rory nodded, feeling awkward.  How on earth did this guy know what he was going to say?  He felt off-kilter and out of sorts.  First his superior in the hospital had dismissed Rory’s carefully collected data and now this impossible man had turned up and turned out to be real.  His realness impossible and yet indisputably present.  Rory didn’t bother wondering if this was someone else Amy had coerced to play the role; this man had a presence that exuded age and experience despite his youthful appearance.  He was, very obviously, the person Amy had met all those years ago.

‘Knew it. Multiform, you see.  Disguise itself as anything, but it needs a live feed - a psychic link with a living but dormant mind.’

While the Doctor’s push on his head made Rory feel even more unsettled than his familiar but weirdly careful smoothing down of Rory’s clothing, the man’s ‘knew it’ had made him feel vindicated.  Here was someone finally, no matter how odd, who was taking Rory seriously.  He had noticed something weird in the village, it was real and he was right.  He wasn’t going insane, though right now insanity did hold some appeal – it might be less difficult to deal with than a man with a time machine turning up out of the blue and being all obnoxiously real at him.  Rory shifted uncomfortably under the intense gaze.

The dog he’d been photographing barked, and the Doctor’s intimidating and unsettling gaze moved from Rory to the man it was with.  Rory risked a glance sideways at Amy as the Doctor named the creature.  Prisoner Zero.  So that was real too – she’d been right all along.  They did have to save the world from Prisoner Zero so her desire to recreate the moment with the Doctor hadn’t been ridiculous after all.  Shame flooded through him as he remembered how dismissive he’d been in his own head when they played the game.

Rory barely noticed as the village exploded into chaos around them.  He was too caught up in the shame of the way he’d dismissed Amy’s stories when they were younger, and the horrid reality of the Raggedy Doctor and all the upheaval he was dragging along with him.  Amy was thriving in this situation, Rory could tell, and his own hesitation ate at him.  Gone was the impulse to photograph and document the oddness around him, replaced with a burning desire for everything to just calm down and be normal again.  By contrast, Amy looked confident and in control.  She looked, in short, the way she had before the psychiatrists and the village people had worn her down and hollowed her out.  Heart clenched inside him at the contrast, Rory saw she was now headed for the drain where she had just noticed the man and dog disappear.  Following her, Rory felt all the strength of his inadequacy – the Doctor seemed to know what he was doing even as things crumbled around him, and Amy … Amy had blossomed, all while Rory had diminished.

Those feelings returned in full force mere minutes later when the Doctor compared him to Jeff; Jeff who had always been the other boy in Amy’s life, the one everyone expected her to end up with.  ‘The good looking one,’ as Rory had been reminded on so many occasions, the one who matched her for looks and poise and charm.  It had been bad enough competing with the Raggedy Doctor all his life, but at least he hadn’t been real (Rory’s mouth twisted as he recognised the bitter irony of that thought), whereas Jeff was right there in front of him and regularly held up by well-meaning friends, who didn’t understand why it was so painful, as another sort of competition for Amy’s attention.

Once Amelia had become Amy, put her games behind her and grown tall and beautiful everyone had suddenly fallen all over themselves to be around her, and it had seemed inevitable to most that she would end up with Jeff and have beautiful babies with him.  She still spent the bulk of her time with Rory, and she had chosen to be with him rather than Jeff.  But she’d never admitted any feelings for him that went deeper than ‘like,’ and Rory still felt like he was walking on a precipice waiting for the penny to drop, as Mels had so succinctly suggested.  After all, Amy had thought he was gay, and whispering in Rory’s most insecure thoughts was the worry that the reason she thought he was gay was because somewhere deep inside her she wasn’t really attached to him in the way he was to her.  And there was Jeff … always there too and always so aggressively handsome, as the Doctor had now so cheerfully reminded Rory.

Rory didn’t have time to reflect further, though, as suddenly all his energy was thrown into trying to keep up with Amy as she followed the Doctor’s every instruction.  His day just kept getting stranger and as Rory ran around the hospital and confronted strange alien creatures, he found himself longing for a breather, a break … time to figure out this weird and upsetting situation.

Twenty minutes’ later, however, it was all over, and Rory was left stunned and holding a pile of discarded clothes as the giant eye turned tail and ran away.  Metaphorically, obviously.  Snowflake … things … weren’t capable of running (or having tails), but it was clear in the demeanour of the thing (and how, Rory mused irrelevantly, did something so machine-like seem to have a personality … feelings … expressions?) that it was having about as not-fun and very-weird a day as Rory was.  He very much wanted to run away himself, but Amy was suddenly distressed as she chased the Doctor, suddenly vulnerable again after her moments of blinding vibrancy, and Rory instinctively knew she would need him.  So he ran, but not away.  He ran towards her.

Prologue

Comments

[a-phoenixdragon.livejournal.com]

Poor Rory!! What a miserable day he had!

*HUGS*