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eponymous_roseTitle: Turning and Turning
Word Count: 3700
Rating: PG
Characters: Rory Williams, Amy Pond, others
Warnings: None. Spoilers through "The Big Bang".
Notes: Thank you to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
avarill for the beta!
Summary: Things changed. Rory stayed the same.
When Rory Williams was a kid, he'd picked up a book of poetry and read the one about turning in a widening gyre, the one with falcons and whatever it was that kept slouching towards Bethlehem. It hadn't really stayed with him, and what little he'd managed to remember wasn't even enough to get him through a decent pub quiz.
Now, though, he had the bit about twenty centuries of stony sleep rolling around and around in his head.
Two thousand years didn't seem like much time when you put it that way, really: twenty centuries. Lots of people live for a century. And it wasn't exactly twenty centuries either, was it? Less than that by a bit.
So here he was, just waiting for less than twenty lifetimes. No problem. He'd waited longer for the bus.
So Rory stood taller, stayed at attention, and waited, a stony sentinel against the ravages of time.
An hour later, he was slumped against the Pandorica, amusing himself by making his gun-hand open and close, open and close. He still felt a bit sick when he looked at it, like it wasn't quite part of himself, some scrap of his body someone had replaced while he was asleep – granted, someone had in fact replaced his entire body while he was asleep, so the confusion wasn't entirely unjustified.
And he still heard the shot that should've killed Amy, but that sound was starting to fade, now, because he could swear he could hear her voice, sometimes, could smell her, could feel her warmth even through the universe's most ludicrously complex security system. That meant a lot.
Sometimes he looked at the Pandorica and pictured it like it was just another extension of his body, and he concentrated on that open-close-open-close feeling, and nothing happened at all.
It took him almost a week to work up the nerve to start talking to the Pandorica.
Once he did, though, it became easier and easier to talk, to tell Amy all the little things he loved about her, to tell her all the little things he hoped she loved about him. Once he ran out of feelings to spill, he made some up, like they were kids again, playing Amy's Raggedy Doctor version of make-believe. He invented adventures for them, told her stories about lives they'd never led. It was strangely comforting.
Some days, he couldn't figure out what to talk about, so he just babbled about whatever came into his head. He talked about growing up in Leadworth, and growing up a Roman, and how weird it was that the two childhoods had a lot in common, even though one was entirely the product of his imagination. Not that Rory Williams was much more than a figment of imagination, lately.
He thought about telling her about his day, but there were only so many ways to say, "Talked to you, went out to find something to eat, remembered am living plastic with no food-related needs, talked to you some more, wondered if gun-hand ever needs oiling." So he asked her about hers, tried to imagine the responses. It was a pretty one-sided conversation, and he was always a bit embarrassed when he laughed at something Amy had never actually said.
All in all, though, he'd remember those early days with something like nostalgia. Rory Williams was never much for talking, but that didn't mean he didn't have a lot to say.
Things changed. Rory stayed the same.
The Pandorica shifted, sometimes moving because it was caught up in the tides of history, sometimes moving because he had a feeling it would be better to be someplace else, and he was learning to trust what Rory Williams felt was right. He left the box alone from time to time, but only briefly, only for the time it took him to poke his head out and see what was happening in history today.
It seemed like everything was moving too fast. He had almost no recollection of the fourth century, for instance, which he'd initially attributed to a general lack of interesting happenstances, but which he later suspected might have been due to that collapse of the universe that was apparently underway. Everything converging on a point, that sort of thing. As if staying in approximately the same spot for a ludicrous number of years wasn't bad enough for his sense of time. He'd probably blinked and missed several wars that were vitally important to the creation of modern civilization.
On the plus side, it looked like his centurion's uniform was part of the whole living plastic deal – Rory didn't know a lot about typical timescales when it came to tarnishing and rust and things like that, but he suspected he should at least be seeing some signs of wear and tear after the first few centuries. He asked Amy about it, but she seemed as clueless as he was.
So he sat and spoke to his box and didn't polish his armour while the Roman Empire fell.
It took him a while to start talking to people again, and when he did, he tried to keep it short and sweet. Some of them built legends around him, which was a bit flattering, and a few tried to kill him as some sort of challenge, which was a bit disturbing. He dealt with the former and the latter the same way: by ignoring them and moving on with the Pandorica. Oh, sometimes he had to wave his gun-hand around a bit and be all bringer-of-doom-ish, but he was getting pretty good at that, and even the worst of the challengers were bright enough not to argue with the freakish alien ray-gun thing.
He didn't have a clue what year it was until he walked to a village, one day, and found out that he'd missed the turn of the millennium by a long shot. He'd been looking forward to celebrating the half-way point of his vigil, and he hadn't even noticed its passing. He felt like he should've at least brought Amy flowers or something.
He was starting to figure out that space was contracting; he spoke to people who had never seen the stars. But time was contracting, too, and one day he counted the seconds and found that the days were getting longer, that his perception of them was becoming more and more detailed. Centuries had passed in what seemed like the blink of an eye; now, each year was beginning to take shape, to resolve itself into seasons and then, gradually, into individual moments.
Rory was beginning to feel old.
He'd been looking forward to hitting the bits of history he knew more about, but it turned out that meeting famous people in the past was about as likely as meeting famous people in the present. Someday he'd have to ask the Doctor how he did it.
On the few occasions he might've run into a familiar face, he'd always had something else that needed doing, or he'd shrugged and cancelled the trek and decided to spend the evening at home with Amy. There wasn't much left to be said, now, and what there was, he tried to say anyway, but mostly they spent their time in comfortable silence, waiting for each other, together.
They listened to a storm, one night, and Rory counted the seconds between lightning and thunder, between light and sound, and in those moments there was peace.
The centuries moved on, quietly, in no great hurry, and Rory moved along with them.
It was getting harder and harder to keep up with who actually owned the box, lately, but Rory followed wherever it went, did whatever it took to stay at its side, sometimes unobtrusively, sometimes not. He was becoming as much a part of the legend of the Pandorica as the box itself.
But every now and then, a bunch of explorers would come by, challenging themselves to open the mystical box. That was a considerable pain in the arse, especially since most of them were better with swords and whatnot than Rory was, and Rory didn't exactly want to find out how much damage swords and whatnot could do to the Amazing Plastic Man.
They were still intimidated by the gun-hand thing, at least, which was a trick that probably wouldn't last for much longer, once weapons using gunpowder came into regular use. If there was one thing Rory was learning, it was never to underestimate humanity's capacity for shrugging off the impossible.
But the legend helped in that regard; after a while, all Rory really needed to do was to position himself properly in the shadows and intone things in an appropriately dramatic tone of voice. It was all about appearances, really.
He was starting to figure out why the Doctor was so big on that bowtie.
"I just want a peek inside." The man hadn't waved a sword or a gun around, and Rory didn't have anything better to do, so they were just standing in front of the Pandorica, having a chat.
"Sorry, mate," said Rory. "Not its time."
The man sighed and backed up a step, staring at the Pandorica, at all the symbols that Rory had memorized centuries ago. "Must be something amazing in there."
And Rory smiled. "You have no idea."
The London Blitz came out of nowhere.
Oh, Rory knew all about it from school, could guess approximately when he'd encounter it, but he'd been rather concerned with a stiffening of his plastic hand-joint lately, and he was busy coming up with ways to get a message to Amy if he should fall apart entirely, this close to the end. He was so concerned about the future that he never saw it coming.
The incendiary bombs were terrible things, sending whorls of flame across the walls, ripples of smoke slamming outwards in concussive blasts. He couldn't really feel pain, not the way he still remembered it feeling, but he did know fear, and the terror that he might melt, that this bizarre existence might end, was only outstripped by his fear for the Pandorica, for Amy. Not now. Not this close to the end.
He rolled to his feet, coughing more out of habit than because he had actual lungs that were suffering the effects of smoke inhalation. There were some things that were worth doing without – eating was an annoyance more than anything – but the small things, the little frailties, were quintessentially human in a way that Rory found difficult to define, and that made them important.
Dragging the Pandorica around was something he'd become something of an expert at – in his lighter moments, he'd imagined this would come in handy if he and Amy got a flat that needed a lot of furniture moved. Now, though, he was fumbling for the rope he normally used, cringing back from fresh billows of flame, and all the while he could hear the air raid sirens, loud and strident, nightmarish.
It was so ludicrous that he found himself laughing, found himself wondering if the whole world had gone mad or if he'd just managed to get a head start.
Another explosion; a different building, but far too close for comfort. Rory couldn't keep his footing, and he went down in the wrong direction, smacking his shin against a flaming bit of wood. His leg sizzled, and there was a terrible, burning smell, and Rory kicked back with a yelp, staring in horror at the shinplate of his armour. It looked like he'd left it in the microwave too long, but he realized almost immediately that the warping seemed limited to the armour, that his leg was relatively undamaged.
The creak of the ceiling caught his attention, and he jumped back to his feet, grasped hold of the rope, and pulled.
He woke up a while later, and for a time he was so terrifyingly disoriented that he just wanted to shout and shout until he woke up, like he was in the middle of a nightmare. He hadn't lost consciousness in nearly two thousand years, after all – this was a hell of a time to start.
But presently he rolled over, and saw the Pandorica some distance away, surrounded by gawking onlookers, and he felt a wave of such relief that he just laid his head back on the dirt and laughed, staring up at a sky that probably held untold dangers, but for now, just for now, it was the most perfect blue he'd ever seen in his life.
Most of his armour had to be scrapped at that point – pity, because the stuff had held up so well. He found himself thinking that maybe these plastic aliens should go into tailoring.
He got odd jobs where he could; with the war on, every able-bodied person was needed somewhere, and though the pay was abysmal, he managed to square away enough to ensure a steady supply of clothing, which had come to be his only expense. The Pandorica had been moved to another warehouse; he still snuck in at night, though without his centurion's get-up, he knew he'd be a less imposing figure, so he had to be a bit more careful about it.
One day, on his way home, he bought flowers and took them to Amy, which became a tradition, which became yet another part of the legend. By the time a month had passed, he didn't even have to keep bringing flowers; other people brought them for him, perhaps aware that they were keeping some sort of vigil, perhaps just wanting to be part of something that didn't involve so much death.
The last fifty years were longest of all.
Rory spent most of the sixties as a vigilante superhero.
It hadn't happened on purpose, not entirely, because he was getting more and more nervous about keeping a low profile, historically speaking. It hadn't seemed like such a big deal early on, but now that things were starting to look familiar, he felt a bit like he was treading on eggshells, that the slightest change would result in his never having been born. Again.
He'd been walking the streets of London, just walking for the sake of having something to tell Amy about when he got home, and he'd run into a couple of nasty-looking blokes pounding some poor kid to a pulp, and he'd told them to stop – quite reasonably, he thought. When they'd laughed at him, he'd politely shown them his gun-hand, and they'd very considerately run away. The guy he'd rescued had turned out to be a budding newspaper reporter, and the next day London was all agog over Mr. Pistol, which wasn't the first superhero name Rory would have chosen, but did have a nice, sibilant ring to it.
Every now and then, for the sake of appearances, he patrolled the streets, occasionally stopping evildoers from doing evil, and generally managing to find time to stand on a street corner and practice the odd ominous monologue. He was working on a catchphrase.
And still he went home each night to Amy, and told her the stories he'd invented, and this time there were three of them: Amy Pond, the Raggedy Doctor, and Mr. Pistol. The whole thing was turning into a rather twisted set of children's stories. Maybe someday he'd have a sit-down and publish them, if he could find the time.
It seemed, lately, that there was never enough time.
It took Rory a while to realize that the stretching of time, the awareness of moment after moment after moment, was starting to reverse itself, that he was becoming less and less aware of the passing days again. Nobody else seemed to be noticing it, and he was fairly sure some scientist boffin would have sounded the alarm by now if it were something tangible, so the possibility remained that Rory had completely gone round the bend and was just imagining things, but he didn't think it worked that way. He'd spent too much time around Amy Pond to doubt the universe's infinite capacity for weirdness.
Sometime during the seventies, he came across a series of articles by a young reporter investigating the origins of the legends to do with the existence of points of light in the sky, the so-called stars that nobody else seemed capable of remembering. He'd read with interest; there had been several scientific examinations of the problem, but they'd all been dry as anything and patronising to boot, hypothesizing about humanity's desperate need to feel as though it were part of a larger collective.
This reporter's articles had a more personal touch, had something to them that convinced Rory that maybe he wasn't the only one who still had flashes of the Big Dipper and all the rest. There was a certain wonder to them, a wide-eyed awe that felt more real than anything he'd witnessed in centuries.
He resolved to look her up, but one thing led to another, and the days turned into weeks turned into months, and he lost track of her.
After her articles about the stars, Sarah Jane Smith never published again.
When Rory had first set out to live for two thousand years, he'd expected to find some great truths about humanity, some grand pattern that would let him make sweeping generalizations, that would give him some perfect insight into the human condition. In his darker moments, he thought it might give him a better idea about what it meant to be human, now that he melted instead of getting a tan.
But that wasn't it at all. He didn't feel any more qualified to make statements about humankind as a whole. He hadn't seen any grand pattern, any cycle that repeated over the years, any common point that would unite all of humanity.
What stood out were the differences, the way that no two people thought exactly alike, the way that no two wars were waged exactly alike, the way that no two sunsets looked exactly alike. Rory Williams was beginning to nurse a healthy appreciation for infinity. The more he found out about people, about places, about things, the more he knew he had yet to learn.
Some days, he understood the Doctor very well indeed.
"I don't believe in fairy tales," the boy said, sullenly, and stopped to toe his shoe into a pile of dirt. A horde of ants swarmed around his foot, and he withdrew carefully, bending to watch the flurry of activity. "Fairly tales," he proclaimed, "are stupid."
Rory shrugged, bent down beside him. "I was just wondering if people still told stories about the Pandorica."
"You do."
"Yes, well, apart from me."
The boy glanced up at him for a moment, and then repeated, more slowly, "Fairy tales are stupid," and went back to watching the ants. Rory was somewhat relieved that the boy didn't seem inclined to squash any of them; he'd done some reading about stepping on butterflies and such, and the general consensus on this whole time-travelling business seemed to be to avoid killing insects at all costs. Insects and grandfathers.
"That's sort of sad," Rory said, and hadn't realized he'd spoken aloud until the boy darted a quick look at him. He shrugged in response. "Kid your age should be all over fairy tales, imagination, that sort of thing. Dreaming up new worlds to live in."
The boy mirrored his shrug. "I like this world."
Rory couldn't argue with that.
They watched the ants for a long time as they toiled away towards their own mysterious ends, and then they talked a bit about the football, though Rory was working mostly from memory. He hadn't had time to see a match in longer than he'd care to imagine.
Finally, a woman came up to them, scolding the boy for running off, and distractedly thanked Rory for keeping him company. "I've got to go now," the boy said, solemnly, and shook hands with Rory. "Maybe the story about the Pandorica isn't so stupid."
"Stories are important," said Rory, and smiled. "But so's living. Have a good life, kid."
And the boy walked off, accompanied by his mother's fussing – "Why would you run off like that, Mickey, you'll worry your Gran sick" – and Rory grinned up at the sky.
Almost time.
Out of all the odd jobs he'd had to take over the past two thousand years, working at the museum was his favourite.
He'd been hired because, for a security guard, his expertise and passion for history was second to none. Granted, his knowledge was a little spotty, but it couldn't be faulted for its spectacular attention to minutiae.
Much of the job involved wandering around and looking at the displays – and mentally correcting a few of the most egregiously wrong statements the little placards made. A thousand years ago, he'd have been terrified at the prospect of making the Pandorica available to the general public. Now it was the best thing he could imagine.
He told the stories to anyone who'd listen, exaggerated his own feats and daring, and started bringing in another character, a fairytale princess who'd been stronger than anyone, who was waiting to wake up and go out into the world again, and everything bad in the universe was frightened of what would happen when she did.
He loved the night shifts best, though, when it was just him and the museum and Amy, like old, old times, only now there were echoes of the people who'd been there during the day: a chocolate wrapper wedged between two exhibits, a scuffed footprint from a particularly exuberant child. It was history on a day-to-day basis, history within history, history that recurved upon itself and still managed to be a little different every time.
And at night, he could touch the Pandorica, could run plastic fingers across the familiar symbols, and he could remember Amy Pond, and none of the stories in the world would compare with what he knew was coming next.
Two thousand years, and he loved her more every day.
Word Count: 3700
Rating: PG
Characters: Rory Williams, Amy Pond, others
Warnings: None. Spoilers through "The Big Bang".
Notes: Thank you to
avarill for the beta!Summary: Things changed. Rory stayed the same.
When Rory Williams was a kid, he'd picked up a book of poetry and read the one about turning in a widening gyre, the one with falcons and whatever it was that kept slouching towards Bethlehem. It hadn't really stayed with him, and what little he'd managed to remember wasn't even enough to get him through a decent pub quiz.
Now, though, he had the bit about twenty centuries of stony sleep rolling around and around in his head.
Two thousand years didn't seem like much time when you put it that way, really: twenty centuries. Lots of people live for a century. And it wasn't exactly twenty centuries either, was it? Less than that by a bit.
So here he was, just waiting for less than twenty lifetimes. No problem. He'd waited longer for the bus.
So Rory stood taller, stayed at attention, and waited, a stony sentinel against the ravages of time.
An hour later, he was slumped against the Pandorica, amusing himself by making his gun-hand open and close, open and close. He still felt a bit sick when he looked at it, like it wasn't quite part of himself, some scrap of his body someone had replaced while he was asleep – granted, someone had in fact replaced his entire body while he was asleep, so the confusion wasn't entirely unjustified.
And he still heard the shot that should've killed Amy, but that sound was starting to fade, now, because he could swear he could hear her voice, sometimes, could smell her, could feel her warmth even through the universe's most ludicrously complex security system. That meant a lot.
Sometimes he looked at the Pandorica and pictured it like it was just another extension of his body, and he concentrated on that open-close-open-close feeling, and nothing happened at all.
It took him almost a week to work up the nerve to start talking to the Pandorica.
Once he did, though, it became easier and easier to talk, to tell Amy all the little things he loved about her, to tell her all the little things he hoped she loved about him. Once he ran out of feelings to spill, he made some up, like they were kids again, playing Amy's Raggedy Doctor version of make-believe. He invented adventures for them, told her stories about lives they'd never led. It was strangely comforting.
Some days, he couldn't figure out what to talk about, so he just babbled about whatever came into his head. He talked about growing up in Leadworth, and growing up a Roman, and how weird it was that the two childhoods had a lot in common, even though one was entirely the product of his imagination. Not that Rory Williams was much more than a figment of imagination, lately.
He thought about telling her about his day, but there were only so many ways to say, "Talked to you, went out to find something to eat, remembered am living plastic with no food-related needs, talked to you some more, wondered if gun-hand ever needs oiling." So he asked her about hers, tried to imagine the responses. It was a pretty one-sided conversation, and he was always a bit embarrassed when he laughed at something Amy had never actually said.
All in all, though, he'd remember those early days with something like nostalgia. Rory Williams was never much for talking, but that didn't mean he didn't have a lot to say.
Things changed. Rory stayed the same.
The Pandorica shifted, sometimes moving because it was caught up in the tides of history, sometimes moving because he had a feeling it would be better to be someplace else, and he was learning to trust what Rory Williams felt was right. He left the box alone from time to time, but only briefly, only for the time it took him to poke his head out and see what was happening in history today.
It seemed like everything was moving too fast. He had almost no recollection of the fourth century, for instance, which he'd initially attributed to a general lack of interesting happenstances, but which he later suspected might have been due to that collapse of the universe that was apparently underway. Everything converging on a point, that sort of thing. As if staying in approximately the same spot for a ludicrous number of years wasn't bad enough for his sense of time. He'd probably blinked and missed several wars that were vitally important to the creation of modern civilization.
On the plus side, it looked like his centurion's uniform was part of the whole living plastic deal – Rory didn't know a lot about typical timescales when it came to tarnishing and rust and things like that, but he suspected he should at least be seeing some signs of wear and tear after the first few centuries. He asked Amy about it, but she seemed as clueless as he was.
So he sat and spoke to his box and didn't polish his armour while the Roman Empire fell.
It took him a while to start talking to people again, and when he did, he tried to keep it short and sweet. Some of them built legends around him, which was a bit flattering, and a few tried to kill him as some sort of challenge, which was a bit disturbing. He dealt with the former and the latter the same way: by ignoring them and moving on with the Pandorica. Oh, sometimes he had to wave his gun-hand around a bit and be all bringer-of-doom-ish, but he was getting pretty good at that, and even the worst of the challengers were bright enough not to argue with the freakish alien ray-gun thing.
He didn't have a clue what year it was until he walked to a village, one day, and found out that he'd missed the turn of the millennium by a long shot. He'd been looking forward to celebrating the half-way point of his vigil, and he hadn't even noticed its passing. He felt like he should've at least brought Amy flowers or something.
He was starting to figure out that space was contracting; he spoke to people who had never seen the stars. But time was contracting, too, and one day he counted the seconds and found that the days were getting longer, that his perception of them was becoming more and more detailed. Centuries had passed in what seemed like the blink of an eye; now, each year was beginning to take shape, to resolve itself into seasons and then, gradually, into individual moments.
Rory was beginning to feel old.
He'd been looking forward to hitting the bits of history he knew more about, but it turned out that meeting famous people in the past was about as likely as meeting famous people in the present. Someday he'd have to ask the Doctor how he did it.
On the few occasions he might've run into a familiar face, he'd always had something else that needed doing, or he'd shrugged and cancelled the trek and decided to spend the evening at home with Amy. There wasn't much left to be said, now, and what there was, he tried to say anyway, but mostly they spent their time in comfortable silence, waiting for each other, together.
They listened to a storm, one night, and Rory counted the seconds between lightning and thunder, between light and sound, and in those moments there was peace.
The centuries moved on, quietly, in no great hurry, and Rory moved along with them.
It was getting harder and harder to keep up with who actually owned the box, lately, but Rory followed wherever it went, did whatever it took to stay at its side, sometimes unobtrusively, sometimes not. He was becoming as much a part of the legend of the Pandorica as the box itself.
But every now and then, a bunch of explorers would come by, challenging themselves to open the mystical box. That was a considerable pain in the arse, especially since most of them were better with swords and whatnot than Rory was, and Rory didn't exactly want to find out how much damage swords and whatnot could do to the Amazing Plastic Man.
They were still intimidated by the gun-hand thing, at least, which was a trick that probably wouldn't last for much longer, once weapons using gunpowder came into regular use. If there was one thing Rory was learning, it was never to underestimate humanity's capacity for shrugging off the impossible.
But the legend helped in that regard; after a while, all Rory really needed to do was to position himself properly in the shadows and intone things in an appropriately dramatic tone of voice. It was all about appearances, really.
He was starting to figure out why the Doctor was so big on that bowtie.
"I just want a peek inside." The man hadn't waved a sword or a gun around, and Rory didn't have anything better to do, so they were just standing in front of the Pandorica, having a chat.
"Sorry, mate," said Rory. "Not its time."
The man sighed and backed up a step, staring at the Pandorica, at all the symbols that Rory had memorized centuries ago. "Must be something amazing in there."
And Rory smiled. "You have no idea."
The London Blitz came out of nowhere.
Oh, Rory knew all about it from school, could guess approximately when he'd encounter it, but he'd been rather concerned with a stiffening of his plastic hand-joint lately, and he was busy coming up with ways to get a message to Amy if he should fall apart entirely, this close to the end. He was so concerned about the future that he never saw it coming.
The incendiary bombs were terrible things, sending whorls of flame across the walls, ripples of smoke slamming outwards in concussive blasts. He couldn't really feel pain, not the way he still remembered it feeling, but he did know fear, and the terror that he might melt, that this bizarre existence might end, was only outstripped by his fear for the Pandorica, for Amy. Not now. Not this close to the end.
He rolled to his feet, coughing more out of habit than because he had actual lungs that were suffering the effects of smoke inhalation. There were some things that were worth doing without – eating was an annoyance more than anything – but the small things, the little frailties, were quintessentially human in a way that Rory found difficult to define, and that made them important.
Dragging the Pandorica around was something he'd become something of an expert at – in his lighter moments, he'd imagined this would come in handy if he and Amy got a flat that needed a lot of furniture moved. Now, though, he was fumbling for the rope he normally used, cringing back from fresh billows of flame, and all the while he could hear the air raid sirens, loud and strident, nightmarish.
It was so ludicrous that he found himself laughing, found himself wondering if the whole world had gone mad or if he'd just managed to get a head start.
Another explosion; a different building, but far too close for comfort. Rory couldn't keep his footing, and he went down in the wrong direction, smacking his shin against a flaming bit of wood. His leg sizzled, and there was a terrible, burning smell, and Rory kicked back with a yelp, staring in horror at the shinplate of his armour. It looked like he'd left it in the microwave too long, but he realized almost immediately that the warping seemed limited to the armour, that his leg was relatively undamaged.
The creak of the ceiling caught his attention, and he jumped back to his feet, grasped hold of the rope, and pulled.
He woke up a while later, and for a time he was so terrifyingly disoriented that he just wanted to shout and shout until he woke up, like he was in the middle of a nightmare. He hadn't lost consciousness in nearly two thousand years, after all – this was a hell of a time to start.
But presently he rolled over, and saw the Pandorica some distance away, surrounded by gawking onlookers, and he felt a wave of such relief that he just laid his head back on the dirt and laughed, staring up at a sky that probably held untold dangers, but for now, just for now, it was the most perfect blue he'd ever seen in his life.
Most of his armour had to be scrapped at that point – pity, because the stuff had held up so well. He found himself thinking that maybe these plastic aliens should go into tailoring.
He got odd jobs where he could; with the war on, every able-bodied person was needed somewhere, and though the pay was abysmal, he managed to square away enough to ensure a steady supply of clothing, which had come to be his only expense. The Pandorica had been moved to another warehouse; he still snuck in at night, though without his centurion's get-up, he knew he'd be a less imposing figure, so he had to be a bit more careful about it.
One day, on his way home, he bought flowers and took them to Amy, which became a tradition, which became yet another part of the legend. By the time a month had passed, he didn't even have to keep bringing flowers; other people brought them for him, perhaps aware that they were keeping some sort of vigil, perhaps just wanting to be part of something that didn't involve so much death.
The last fifty years were longest of all.
Rory spent most of the sixties as a vigilante superhero.
It hadn't happened on purpose, not entirely, because he was getting more and more nervous about keeping a low profile, historically speaking. It hadn't seemed like such a big deal early on, but now that things were starting to look familiar, he felt a bit like he was treading on eggshells, that the slightest change would result in his never having been born. Again.
He'd been walking the streets of London, just walking for the sake of having something to tell Amy about when he got home, and he'd run into a couple of nasty-looking blokes pounding some poor kid to a pulp, and he'd told them to stop – quite reasonably, he thought. When they'd laughed at him, he'd politely shown them his gun-hand, and they'd very considerately run away. The guy he'd rescued had turned out to be a budding newspaper reporter, and the next day London was all agog over Mr. Pistol, which wasn't the first superhero name Rory would have chosen, but did have a nice, sibilant ring to it.
Every now and then, for the sake of appearances, he patrolled the streets, occasionally stopping evildoers from doing evil, and generally managing to find time to stand on a street corner and practice the odd ominous monologue. He was working on a catchphrase.
And still he went home each night to Amy, and told her the stories he'd invented, and this time there were three of them: Amy Pond, the Raggedy Doctor, and Mr. Pistol. The whole thing was turning into a rather twisted set of children's stories. Maybe someday he'd have a sit-down and publish them, if he could find the time.
It seemed, lately, that there was never enough time.
It took Rory a while to realize that the stretching of time, the awareness of moment after moment after moment, was starting to reverse itself, that he was becoming less and less aware of the passing days again. Nobody else seemed to be noticing it, and he was fairly sure some scientist boffin would have sounded the alarm by now if it were something tangible, so the possibility remained that Rory had completely gone round the bend and was just imagining things, but he didn't think it worked that way. He'd spent too much time around Amy Pond to doubt the universe's infinite capacity for weirdness.
Sometime during the seventies, he came across a series of articles by a young reporter investigating the origins of the legends to do with the existence of points of light in the sky, the so-called stars that nobody else seemed capable of remembering. He'd read with interest; there had been several scientific examinations of the problem, but they'd all been dry as anything and patronising to boot, hypothesizing about humanity's desperate need to feel as though it were part of a larger collective.
This reporter's articles had a more personal touch, had something to them that convinced Rory that maybe he wasn't the only one who still had flashes of the Big Dipper and all the rest. There was a certain wonder to them, a wide-eyed awe that felt more real than anything he'd witnessed in centuries.
He resolved to look her up, but one thing led to another, and the days turned into weeks turned into months, and he lost track of her.
After her articles about the stars, Sarah Jane Smith never published again.
When Rory had first set out to live for two thousand years, he'd expected to find some great truths about humanity, some grand pattern that would let him make sweeping generalizations, that would give him some perfect insight into the human condition. In his darker moments, he thought it might give him a better idea about what it meant to be human, now that he melted instead of getting a tan.
But that wasn't it at all. He didn't feel any more qualified to make statements about humankind as a whole. He hadn't seen any grand pattern, any cycle that repeated over the years, any common point that would unite all of humanity.
What stood out were the differences, the way that no two people thought exactly alike, the way that no two wars were waged exactly alike, the way that no two sunsets looked exactly alike. Rory Williams was beginning to nurse a healthy appreciation for infinity. The more he found out about people, about places, about things, the more he knew he had yet to learn.
Some days, he understood the Doctor very well indeed.
"I don't believe in fairy tales," the boy said, sullenly, and stopped to toe his shoe into a pile of dirt. A horde of ants swarmed around his foot, and he withdrew carefully, bending to watch the flurry of activity. "Fairly tales," he proclaimed, "are stupid."
Rory shrugged, bent down beside him. "I was just wondering if people still told stories about the Pandorica."
"You do."
"Yes, well, apart from me."
The boy glanced up at him for a moment, and then repeated, more slowly, "Fairy tales are stupid," and went back to watching the ants. Rory was somewhat relieved that the boy didn't seem inclined to squash any of them; he'd done some reading about stepping on butterflies and such, and the general consensus on this whole time-travelling business seemed to be to avoid killing insects at all costs. Insects and grandfathers.
"That's sort of sad," Rory said, and hadn't realized he'd spoken aloud until the boy darted a quick look at him. He shrugged in response. "Kid your age should be all over fairy tales, imagination, that sort of thing. Dreaming up new worlds to live in."
The boy mirrored his shrug. "I like this world."
Rory couldn't argue with that.
They watched the ants for a long time as they toiled away towards their own mysterious ends, and then they talked a bit about the football, though Rory was working mostly from memory. He hadn't had time to see a match in longer than he'd care to imagine.
Finally, a woman came up to them, scolding the boy for running off, and distractedly thanked Rory for keeping him company. "I've got to go now," the boy said, solemnly, and shook hands with Rory. "Maybe the story about the Pandorica isn't so stupid."
"Stories are important," said Rory, and smiled. "But so's living. Have a good life, kid."
And the boy walked off, accompanied by his mother's fussing – "Why would you run off like that, Mickey, you'll worry your Gran sick" – and Rory grinned up at the sky.
Almost time.
Out of all the odd jobs he'd had to take over the past two thousand years, working at the museum was his favourite.
He'd been hired because, for a security guard, his expertise and passion for history was second to none. Granted, his knowledge was a little spotty, but it couldn't be faulted for its spectacular attention to minutiae.
Much of the job involved wandering around and looking at the displays – and mentally correcting a few of the most egregiously wrong statements the little placards made. A thousand years ago, he'd have been terrified at the prospect of making the Pandorica available to the general public. Now it was the best thing he could imagine.
He told the stories to anyone who'd listen, exaggerated his own feats and daring, and started bringing in another character, a fairytale princess who'd been stronger than anyone, who was waiting to wake up and go out into the world again, and everything bad in the universe was frightened of what would happen when she did.
He loved the night shifts best, though, when it was just him and the museum and Amy, like old, old times, only now there were echoes of the people who'd been there during the day: a chocolate wrapper wedged between two exhibits, a scuffed footprint from a particularly exuberant child. It was history on a day-to-day basis, history within history, history that recurved upon itself and still managed to be a little different every time.
And at night, he could touch the Pandorica, could run plastic fingers across the familiar symbols, and he could remember Amy Pond, and none of the stories in the world would compare with what he knew was coming next.
Two thousand years, and he loved her more every day.
