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rumpelsnorcackTitle: A Long Life (But One Worth Living)
Author:
rumpelsnorcack
Rating: PG-13 generally
Characters & Pairings: This chapter: Rory, Jack
Word Count: 818 for this chapter
Summary: The story of Rory's life, from meeting Amy to death.
This Chapter: Rory takes a moment to think about what he wants to say with his memoir.
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 laid down his pen, just so – everything had its place and the pen was carefully placed in its usual position at the top of the sheet of paper he was currently using. His hands shook a little as they unclamped from the unnatural position they’d been in while he wrote, and then wearily scrubbed over his lined face. He sighed and leaned back, feeling his back pop – a vivid reminder that he was no longer either young or plastic, and the last small push Rory needed to pull himself out of ancient history and into the present day. Amy looked up as he sighed, and smiled at him.
‘How goes the memoir, Centurion?’
Rory smiled at her. ‘It’s … it’s getting painful,’ he said, finally admitting something he hadn’t allowed himself to think before.
‘Painful how?’ Amy’s voice was warm, curious. She stood up and crossed to him, her figure as lithe as it had always been, but there was a stiffness in her movements which made Rory wince in sympathy with her. He held his hand out to her and she squeezed his as she bent to kiss his hair and read what he had written.
‘I don’t like remembering this time,’ he said as the silence as she read became unbearable to him. The words were too unhappy for him to relish her reading them. ‘It was long. And boring … and painful.’ The admission was so soft he wondered if she had even heard him. The slight pressure on his hand was all the response she needed to give him.
‘It can’t have been that bad,’ she said. ‘You saw so much history after all.’
‘No I didn’t. Not really. I sat by while history happened – it’s not the same thing. Besides … I missed you.’ Amy smiled again, then kissed his cheek.
‘I’m sure you did. Well,’ she said, standing up and heading for the kitchen, ‘you should do what feels right. If I’ve learned one thing from writing it’s that you should go with the story that wants to be told, not the one you think you want to tell.’
Rory snorted as she left the parting shot. He’d heard her ideas about writing every day for the past several months. His frail body resisted his efforts to sit for too long, so Amy was forever telling him to leave it, leave bits out. It was alright for her, Rory thought with an indulgent smile. She wrote fiction – well, fictionalised truth – and she had no qualms at all in changing details or turning what really happened into a fantastic tale. No-one was expected to believe her stories were real. In fact, if they did believe them there would be a problem. Rory, by contrast, felt an obligation to detail everything as perfectly as he could from his own memory. If this was to be his memoir, the thing he left for posterity, then he felt a duty to do it justice.
Sighing again, Rory picked up his pen one more time. He knew he had to be selective, but what did you leave out of two thousand years of a life? What did you deem unimportant? He didn’t know, but he did know that many of the years he lived were so repetitive that he couldn’t think of what to say about them beyond the fact that they happened.
Rory looked down at what he had just written, and tried to immerse himself in his past. All he could see were the flash of years as they flew past him. Time with the Franks … gone too fast. Time with various Germanic tribes … also gone in a flash. Nothing stood out to him, nothing interfered in the relentless blur of being passed from one tribe to another either through bloodshed or exchange of money. Rory never had a say in the transactions (the people who owned the Pandorica, and by extension himself, had learned quickly that he would docilely do what they wanted so long as they never harmed the box), but he had been allowed to stay with Amy. And that, after all, was the only thing that had mattered.
The first thing that stood out to Rory in the endless parade of his memories was the moment he found himself in the company of the Knights Templar. Their magnificence stood in marked contrast to the slightly grubby life he’d lived before they’d ‘liberated’ him from the last of a long run of tribes. Remembering how the nine knights, bedraggled and shabby, and yet nonetheless splendid in their dedication to their beliefs, had convinced the tribe to let the Pandorica go for a pittance, Rory grinned.
Still smiling, Rory bent his aged head to the paper in front of him. He knew what to do, finally. The words suddenly poured out as he thought about his time with the Knights.
Author:
rumpelsnorcackRating: PG-13 generally
Characters & Pairings: This chapter: Rory, Jack
Word Count: 818 for this chapter
Summary: The story of Rory's life, from meeting Amy to death.
This Chapter: Rory takes a moment to think about what he wants to say with his memoir.
Notes: Many thanks to the wonderful
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 laid down his pen, just so – everything had its place and the pen was carefully placed in its usual position at the top of the sheet of paper he was currently using. His hands shook a little as they unclamped from the unnatural position they’d been in while he wrote, and then wearily scrubbed over his lined face. He sighed and leaned back, feeling his back pop – a vivid reminder that he was no longer either young or plastic, and the last small push Rory needed to pull himself out of ancient history and into the present day. Amy looked up as he sighed, and smiled at him.
‘How goes the memoir, Centurion?’
Rory smiled at her. ‘It’s … it’s getting painful,’ he said, finally admitting something he hadn’t allowed himself to think before.
‘Painful how?’ Amy’s voice was warm, curious. She stood up and crossed to him, her figure as lithe as it had always been, but there was a stiffness in her movements which made Rory wince in sympathy with her. He held his hand out to her and she squeezed his as she bent to kiss his hair and read what he had written.
‘I don’t like remembering this time,’ he said as the silence as she read became unbearable to him. The words were too unhappy for him to relish her reading them. ‘It was long. And boring … and painful.’ The admission was so soft he wondered if she had even heard him. The slight pressure on his hand was all the response she needed to give him.
‘It can’t have been that bad,’ she said. ‘You saw so much history after all.’
‘No I didn’t. Not really. I sat by while history happened – it’s not the same thing. Besides … I missed you.’ Amy smiled again, then kissed his cheek.
‘I’m sure you did. Well,’ she said, standing up and heading for the kitchen, ‘you should do what feels right. If I’ve learned one thing from writing it’s that you should go with the story that wants to be told, not the one you think you want to tell.’
Rory snorted as she left the parting shot. He’d heard her ideas about writing every day for the past several months. His frail body resisted his efforts to sit for too long, so Amy was forever telling him to leave it, leave bits out. It was alright for her, Rory thought with an indulgent smile. She wrote fiction – well, fictionalised truth – and she had no qualms at all in changing details or turning what really happened into a fantastic tale. No-one was expected to believe her stories were real. In fact, if they did believe them there would be a problem. Rory, by contrast, felt an obligation to detail everything as perfectly as he could from his own memory. If this was to be his memoir, the thing he left for posterity, then he felt a duty to do it justice.
Sighing again, Rory picked up his pen one more time. He knew he had to be selective, but what did you leave out of two thousand years of a life? What did you deem unimportant? He didn’t know, but he did know that many of the years he lived were so repetitive that he couldn’t think of what to say about them beyond the fact that they happened.
Rory looked down at what he had just written, and tried to immerse himself in his past. All he could see were the flash of years as they flew past him. Time with the Franks … gone too fast. Time with various Germanic tribes … also gone in a flash. Nothing stood out to him, nothing interfered in the relentless blur of being passed from one tribe to another either through bloodshed or exchange of money. Rory never had a say in the transactions (the people who owned the Pandorica, and by extension himself, had learned quickly that he would docilely do what they wanted so long as they never harmed the box), but he had been allowed to stay with Amy. And that, after all, was the only thing that had mattered.
The first thing that stood out to Rory in the endless parade of his memories was the moment he found himself in the company of the Knights Templar. Their magnificence stood in marked contrast to the slightly grubby life he’d lived before they’d ‘liberated’ him from the last of a long run of tribes. Remembering how the nine knights, bedraggled and shabby, and yet nonetheless splendid in their dedication to their beliefs, had convinced the tribe to let the Pandorica go for a pittance, Rory grinned.
Still smiling, Rory bent his aged head to the paper in front of him. He knew what to do, finally. The words suddenly poured out as he thought about his time with the Knights.