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And she hopes, that's the worst of it. After all he’s done to her, after all she's been through, she hopes. She believes. Of course they could come back and save her, her Raggedy Man and Rory. Of course they would come back and save her.
She waited. She survived. She did everything right, and still.
Muffled through the TARDIS door, her Raggedy Man shouts: Look, we take this Amy, we leave ours. There can only be one Amy in the TARDIS.
Which one do you want? it’s your choice.
She cries out for him, first questioning, then frightened, then angry. An endless litany, a chant: Doctor, Doctor, Doctor.
She is seven years old, and the madman in his magical blue box has left her sitting in her back-garden in the cold, all night long. She is fifty-eight years old, and her madman is shutting her out of his magical blue box and leaving her to die.
“Doctor.” A final plea. Please, Doctor, please. Hear me. Please.
Thirty six years, she survived and waited. The little Scottish girl in the little English village, all alone once more.
She knows that he’s made his choice, deep in her bones. If she’s honest with herself, she’s known it from the beginning, but for one small moment- one golden moment- she’d given in and let herself believe.
Of course he was never going to choose her.
What was she if not damaged goods? Bitter, old; far too angry. A permanent reminder of his mistakes made flesh. Hell, if it wouldn’t cause a paradox, she has no doubt he’d pick little Amelia over Amy, every time. Why travel with an adult, prone to skepticism and rationalism, and have to compete with all the mundane demands of other people and life, when you could have little Amelia Pond, the fairytale girl. The girl who never grew up, not this time. What he needed was someone to trust him, to be in awe of him; someone through who he could see the wonders of the cosmos anew. Someone who he could save, and wouldn’t that be tidy, getting in there early and avoiding all those pesky little problems like abandonment issues and symptoms of dissociation before they complicated everything?
He did it once before, after all, with her parents.
Of course he was never going to choose her. The fact that she’s still Amy, the fact that part of her loves him still, will never be enough.
He’s a coward, if nothing else. Her daughter knows this too.
“Rory,” she tries; instead "Please.” Rory, who still loves her, conflicted though he may be; Rory, who once waited two-thousand years for her. What’s a mere thirty-six compared to that?
She presses her hand in desperation against the glass. It's smooth and cold, and unyielding beneath her touch. She’d forgotten just how warm humans are.
And there he is, as close as he can be without touching. Her husband.
“I'd forgotten how much you loved me.” The words spill out of her gently; she no longer has the energy- nor the desire- to prevent them. “I'd forgotten how much I loved being her,” she admits, and it's true. It's always been true, no matter how many times he left her.
Twelve years, five psychiatrists. He’d taken so much from her. Her daughter’s childhood had been taken from her arms, but he’d taken River's adulthood from her, written himself all over it. But she loved The Doctor, still, and she loved it. Travelling in the TARDIS. Wandering the cosmos, seeing the stars, righting wrongs and solving mysteries and right back home for tea. “Amy Pond, in the TARDIS, with Rory Williams.”
“'I'm sorry, I can't do this,” Rory says, in a rush; to the Doctor or to other-Amy, or to her, she’s not sure.
And there it is, that sound- the door softly unlatching. Her traitorous heart leaps, and she almost weeps with gratitude.
But she can’t. And it's the Doctor’s fault, by proxy anyway, that suddenly she doesn’t have the nerve. She’s been strong for so long, doing what she had to to survive, and now- she can’t do it. She can’t, and she hates herself, just a little bit, for it, but she can’t do that to Rory, or to herself. It's the Doctor’s fault. There’s something about him that makes people want to be braver and stronger and better than they are, but she’s not as strong as him. She’s selfish, and scared, and human, and still, after everything, she wants to make him proud.
So she forces the words out, even as she wills herself not to cry.
“If you love me, don't let me in. Open that door, I will, I'll come in. I don't want to die,” and she doesn't, she’s scared. She's so, so scared, like a child facing nightmares she doesn't understand. “I won't bow out bravely. I'll be kicking and screaming, fighting. To the end.” She's stubborn, always has been.
“Amy,” says Rory, and she presses herself further against the TARDIS doors, as though through sheer force of will she could merge the two of them together. “Amy, I love you.” She wishes, suddenly, that she could hear him say it forever. All that easy affection, all that kindness, overflowing in so few words.
That’s what she's giving the other-Amy. Love, for a lifetime; and she’ll be too scared to accept it, too afraid that his love for her comes with conditions and qualifications; and she hopes that he’ll say it to her anyway.
“I love you, too,” she says, nothing left to lose. “Don't let me in.” Please. Please see me. “Tell Amy, your Amy, I'm giving her the days. The days with you. The days to come.”
“I'm so, so sorry.” Good, kind, dependable Rory. What good does sorry do?
“The days I can't have. Take them, please. I'm giving you my days.”
How does that old song go? Those endless days, those sacred days you gave me; I'm thinking of the days, I won't forget a single day, believe me.
Let Amy Pond have her days of bitter, terrified loneliness, and spend them travelling among the stars instead. Let her have wonderful adventures with the Doctor, see things no human has; and then, when it's all over, let her grow old with her husband. Let her learn, clumsily, what it means to have a family, to have a mother, a father. A daughter.
“I'm so, so sorry.”
She doesn’t say: don’t be. Let her have this, at least.
And here they come, the blank-faced robots she’s spent decades fighting. It’s all she can do to stay still, every instinct screaming against it. She wants to flee, or to fight, or to just curl up and cry, but she made a promise. And unlike him, she’s the kind who keeps her promises.
They advance towards her, those bloody Handbots, only trying, in the end, to save her. Do not be alarmed. This is a kindness.
She hopes, perversely, that he can hear her dying. That he’s stuck around long enough to hear the dull thud of her armoured body as it hits the ground, even from inside the TARDIS.
Killed by a kindness. Ha.
She doesn’t expect to wake up.
Very few dead people do, she imagines. Much less people who have just been horrifically vanished out of existence.
The second thought she has after not-dying is: Where am I?
Not the Facility, that's for sure; there's no blinding lights or lingering smell of disinfectant, and the distant vibrations sound closer to the rumbling of an engine than the gentle hum of machinery. Not the TARDIS either, she thinks, deliberately neutral; somewhere new, then.
Right. Be careful. Some instinct tells her to keep her eyes closed, and she does. Deliberately relaxes her breathing too, as though she’s still unconscious. Now. Orientate yourself. Where are you? What can you hear? What do you have?
Where: She’s lying on some sort of bunk, or maybe bench; hard, but far softer than her makeshift bed in the facility. An experimental flex of her muscles confirms that all limbs are intact, and what’s left of her armour digs into her, which is strangely comforting.
There’s a distinct lack of weight on her hip, however, suggesting that her holster has been emptied. Weaponless does not mean defenceless; but still, it is far from ideal.
She strains her ears, next, trying to gather what information she can. There’s the rumbling of an engine of some sort, its vibrations echoing all around her, through the walls. Some sort of tapping, or clicking- metal, maybe, but not quite. In the distance, somewhere, the drip-drip-drip of water. No, not water- there’s a faint tang of iron in the air. Blood. Not a good sign. She can’t hear anything to indicate that anyone else is in the room, though.
Alright, then. What do you think?
She comes up with: nothing. Debates opening her eyes, but frankly, she’s not sure she wants to. She died. The Doctor abandoned her, and she died, and the prospect of having to spend another thirty-odd years scared and alone and surviving, knowing for certain that he’ll never come back, that he'll never choose her-
She’s startled out of her thoughts by a voice, whirring and laboured as though spoken over tape.
“If you’re waiting for me to reveal that you’re awake,” it says; “well, I should have thought you’d have learnt your lesson about waiting, Amelia Pond.”
Fuck. Well, there's no point pretending now. She opens her eyes, levers herself up into a sitting position, and glares.
“Who are you?” she snaps, as though she’d been expecting this. “Answer me. Who are you? And where am I? And how did I get here?”
Out of the shadows in the far corner, a figure materialises; the darkness settles comfortably back on it like a cloak. It’s tall, taller than she is, dark red cowl flowing down into the dark.
It steps forward, into the light, with an odd grunting noise, and seems to drag the shadows with it. Up goes the left arm, metallic fingertips catching the light from where they emerge from the drapes of the sleeve. It pushes back the hood, revealing the creatures head-
The shadows don’t bother obscuring this. A skull gleams, brilliant in the artificial light, the teeth sharper and longer than she's comfortable with. The eye-sockets are deep, black wells, drawing the light in hungrily.
It shifts, the light falling unevenly, and she realises, no, it's not the creature's head, it's a mask. She forces down her initial panic, although a creature wearing a skull mask for a head is hardly any more comforting.
Heart still racing, she aims for sarcastic and lands close. “What is this, a Hammer Horror? A bit dramatic, isn’t it?”
For a long moment, the skull stares at her. Watching intently with those deep, empty eyes. And then:
“It is, isn’t it.” Whirr, creak. “Dramatic.”
The figure’s voice, like its breathing, is a strange collision of human and machine, and she suppresses a shudder at the sound.
“The name’s Kreiner. Father Kreiner. Tell me, Amelia Pond, what’s the last thing you remember?”
She scowls at Amelia Pond, but wills herself patience. She needs information, first; and there's no use antagonising her only source of it, let alone her captor-slash-rescuer (maybe both). No one’s coming to save her this time either, she’s sure of that much.
She rubs her eyes, hard, psychedelic patterns flashing behind them, and makes a show of trying to think.
It doesn’t help. The gloom stubbornly refuses to clear. Everything in this- what, room? ship?- seems to be infused with darkness, shadows draping themselves across every inch of space. There’s some sort of artificial light source coming from nowhere-in-particular, illuminating her in a harsh, revealing glare while casting everything else- Father Kreiner excepting- in deep shadow.
(Father Kreiner. A priest, maybe; that would explain the robes. Some sort of alien cult, perhaps.)
“I… The Handbots killed me. And…and I was Unmade.”
She can almost remember it, the memory just out of reach, like nothing she’d even been able to conceptualise before. What use are words like painful or horrifying- so limited, so dull, so corporeal- when trying to describe the sensation of being Unmade. Of having her timeline Unravelled, moment by moment, picked and pulled apart. Of dissolving into nothingness, raw Time burning her skin and corroding her life like acid. It engulfed her, and kept on engulfing her, until it met itself where it started and she was no more.
“You were.” His intonation is as flat as ever, but part of her imagines hearing a vindictive pleasure in his voice when he says: “And yet, you are still here. The Doctor isn’t the only one who can meddle in Time, you know.”
The Doctor. And it all starts rushing back, the grief and loneliness, and the anger, and it floods through her like cleansing fire, so intense for a moment that she can barely speak.
“Are you a friend of the Doctor?”
“You could say that.” And perhaps she’s imagining it again, ascribing emotions to machines (it wouldn’t be the first time), but the voice sounds wry and bitter.
And then he turns towards her again, the deep black hollows of the mask’s eyes locked directly onto hers, and the anger that infuses his speech seems to transcend the flat mechanism of his voice in its clarity. “I hate the Doctor. I loathe him. And I will be the one to kill him.”
She stares into the eyes, and shapes start to coalesce. It's her imagination, it must be, but for a moment in its shadows she sees a thousand faces, screaming. Frozen in perpetual terror.
Father Kreiner, inside the gaping jaws of his mask, suspends his face in a grin for one long moment, then lets it fall.
“It's unfair, isn’t it. Being left behind.”
She blinks rapidly, shaking the image from her head. Tries to hide how shaken she is by transmuting it into anger. “What? What? What do you- How do you know that?”
He cocks his head, a gesture of innocence, and she’s suddenly more frightened than ever. Some prey-animal instinct tenses her muscles, and screams at her: Wrong! Wrong! Run!
For a moment, she’s flung back to her only point of comparison, and pictures The Doctor. The way he’d look at her, sometimes, his eyes so old, and for a moment time and space itself, every star-birth, every supernova, every birth, every death, every waking hour that has been and will be, would be held within them. It would make her dizzy; make her feel like pressing hard upon a bruise, tender and painful and overwhelming. But then she’d blink, or look away, or something would happen, and she’d be fine again, and the Doctor’s eyes would just be plain-brown, puppyish and finite.
But it's not that. It's nothing like that at all.
The realisation creeps up on her from behind, settles in her mind fully-formed and uneasy. It’s similar, the way he cocks his head, that alien mimicry of a human gesture, but it's too far, when he does it. The angles are all wrong. His neck is bent too far, further than it should be able to, and the edges of his mask begin to blur and phase into the gleaming bones of his shoulder.
And then- nothing. It's fine. He's fine, or at least as fine as a skull-wearing evil monk can be. He's fine, she's fine, everything's fucking normal and everyone's so fucking fine.
“Haven’t you guessed? He has a rather nasty habit of abandoning his supposed friends to die.” And then, very seriously, he says, “The Laws of Time demand that you should never have existed. You should be dead.”
“But I’m not. Because of you.”
“In a sense. But while you’re here, I think we might be able to help each other.”
She opens her mouth to protest, but he cuts her off immediately, loud enough that his voice is hoarse and strained even as the mechanism, compensating, whirrs louder. “Tell me, what options do you think you have left? He’s not coming back for you, Amelia Pond. He never was.”
He extends a hand in offer. His left hand. A strange patchwork of metal grafted onto flesh, loose tendons stretched across gears like wires.
I hate the Doctor. I loathe him. And I will be the one to kill him. The Doctor wouldn’t want her to do this. To help this man who might kill him, to form an alliance with whatever this dodgy alien cult is. But he left her to die. He made Rory choose between them because he was too much of a fucking coward to look her in the face and abandon her properly.
Fuck it, she thinks. I hate the Doctor. If she repeats it often enough, she might almost believe it, one day.
She takes his hand, strangely warm in her own, and pulls herself off the bed.
“Alright. But I’m not joining you, or your weird gothic cult, or anything like that, you hear me? And don't call me Amelia Pond. Or Amy Pond, for that matter. I’m not- her. Clearly.”
And, she thinks to herself, part sacrilege, part revenge; I’m not sure I have been for a very long time.
“Of course,” intones Father Kreiner, and Lord help her but she thinks she might be able to discern amusement in his voice. “And please, feel free to choose your own name. I have a feeling you'll fit right in."
"Come,” he says, and disappears into the darkness; and if she hesitates just a little before following, he’s none the wiser.