31_days | [Sept 6] [Doctor Who] now there's just the three of us

Title: now there's just the three of us- me, your shadow, your echo
Day/Theme: Sept 6 - "the cold only kills"
Series: Doctor Who
Characters: Amy Pond, Eleventh Doctor, mentions of Rory Williams, Amy/Rory
Rating: G

(a/n title from Heart Swells/100-1 by Los Campesinos!)

She will go looking for ghosts. No, not even ghosts, because ghosts existed once. Ghosts are the imprint, the memory of what once was, and there is no memory there, nothing to fill in the blanks, nothing to smile sadly at over tea and whisper remember when he...? Because there is no he to remember, and he did not do these things, and she does not look for him, because he is not real.

(when Amelia Pond was little, she had an imaginary friend. now he has one too)

Sometimes, he will find her sitting in the middle of the floor with the contents of her bedroom scattered around her, clothes and shoes and makeup and frilly, lacy things he can’t bring himself to look at. She will look at him and she will say, I can’t find it, and he will ask what she can’t find, and she will tug on her hair and say, I don’t know, but it’s not here.

These moods do not normally last long. Soon she will be happy and laughing and ginger and golden, a sunflower turned up to the sun, a splash of colour and a steady hand. He will begin to hate these moods, but you can’t mourn for someone that never died and so in lieu of hating her he will hate himself instead.

(aren’t you the biggest sore loser ever? you made her choose but that backfired on you, and now look, no more competition)

(shut up shut up shut up)

He couldn’t even give her a mourning period. This is unbelievably selfish of him, for two reasons, because 1. someone so brilliant and gorgeous and amazing as he was deserves to be mourned and 2. now he has to mourn him by himself. And he’s terrified that one of these days, when she asks him why he’s sad, he will blurt out the truth.

(this terrifies him because he knows she still won’t remember)

So he mourns him in silence, alone in his own head, filed with all of the other terrible things he has done to people he loves. And he knows that Rory Williams deserves to be remembered, deserves to be mourned, but sometimes he wishes he could forget him too, because Rory exists only in his mind and that is too much, even for him.

He will take her to another planet, trying to fill the hole she doesn’t know she has, but to her it is just another adventure. They will trek through the snow and around them, all he can see is whitewhitewhite, with a splash of red and heavy dose of sadness.

She is crying when he looks at her, and he will grip her gloved hand, as much for her benefit as his. The wind and the snow will lash against her face but she will not blink- somehow, she will keep her eyes open, and he will imagine (because it makes him feel better) that she is thinking of a ghost that never was and what he would have said.

But she is Amy Pond and she has nothing to be sad about and so she will bounce back soon enough, once again bursting with smiles and promises and hope. She will pull his hand and say, it’s freezing, let’s go back to the TARDIS and you can bring me someplace warm, and he will tear his hand out of hers because it is not his to hold.

(the cold only kills, after all- the worse that can happen is the snow can wear them down, can cling to their clothes and their skin and freeze them, can numb their joints and freeze their hearts, embed itself into her freckles and keep them prisoner forever. people will still miss them- or her at least. the snow cannot erase them, cannot make people forget them, cannot erase all the footprints they made and the handprints left on hearts, whether beating or stilled. the cold will not eat their existence. it can only kill.

he wishes the same could be said of him)