Title: Five Things Amy Never Expected
Fandom: Doctor Who (2005)
Rating: all audiences
Length: 500 words
Content notes: Contains oblique spoilers for all aired Eleventh Doctor canon.
Author notes: Thanks to kouredios for looking this over!
Summary: Five things that surprised Amy Pond about her new life.

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Five Things Amy Never Expected


1.

The Doctor hums sometimes, late at night, while he's tinkering with the TARDIS -- rewiring this or rejiggering that, Amy never really listens to what he says he's doing.

On nights when she's lying awake and reading, she can hear his voice through the walls. Never loud enough to make out words, but on those nights she knows he's singing to his ship.

Sometimes it feels like eavesdropping on a mother crooning to her baby, or a man humming as he dances with his lover around the room.

Other times it feels as though the Doctor is singing her to sleep.


2.

It isn't weird, being on the TARDIS with Rory. Sharing the TARDIS and the Doctor with Rory; sharing Rory with the Doctor. (Not like that.)

(Okay, maybe like that, every now and then. She didn't expect that, either.)

If he'd asked her, she would have said it wouldn't work. Rory means safe and solid and home; the Doctor means adventure and fish custard and things that shouldn't go together but do.

Amy never would have guessed it, but turns out Rory and the Doctor are like that, too.


3.

Once you've met the version of yourself who spent years alone, learning to fight, developing wrinkles, nurturing anger because it's the only thing she has, you don't forget.

You dream about her sometimes. The dreams where you get to tell her that you're sorry leave you breathless with tears when you wake. But those are the good ones.

The dreams where you try to reach her but she doesn't hear you, doesn't know you're there -- those are the ones that send you burrowing miserably into Rory's arms, weeping, wishing you could un-know some of the things that you know.


4.

She mourns all the time for her daughter's infancy, childhood, adolescence which were stolen from them. Sometimes it seems her arms and heart will never stop aching.

But she loves her relationship with River. How many women ever know their daughters (or their mothers) as compatriots, as fellow-travelers? Her daughter is fierce, strong, beautiful, and they're friends. They drink wine together and laugh and cry under the stars. They save the world, more than once.

Fuck you, Kovarian, she thinks after one of River's whirlwind visits. You can't take this away from me.


5.

It never gets old. Linking arms with her boys and skipping down the street to an alien teahouse. Watching the galaxy's slow whirl from a picnic spot on a flat blue plain. Stepping into a Bible story, or a history book, and learning things didn't happen exactly as people said.

She knows they can't do this forever, but she doesn't ask the Doctor when their time will be up. Or whether they'll have grandkids. Or what she and Rory will do next, once the blue box and its madman are gone.

She doesn't need to know how their story ends.