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“So, what you’re telling me is, you’ve got a bird who dumped you on the night before your wedding and took off with some bloke claiming to be her imaginary friend but who may actually be a pervert but you can’t really tell because he also resembles an awkward giraffe.”
“Well, I mean, I never actually, you know, mentioned the word pervert. Or, um. Or giraffe. For the record.”
“I have a brain, lover boy; I can infer. Anyway. So your girl took off with this bloke, and now they’re dragging you along like some kind of bizarre third wheel-slash-pet-puppy. And you’re letting them. That about right?”
“Well… um. Yes. Essentially.”
A pause.
“Eh, I’ve heard worse. Why don’t you sit down and tell me all about it?”
Rory sits.
***
This all starts, bizarrely enough, with Amy’s desire for lunch. Or, as she puts it, “A proper lunch, where nothing is blue when it isn’t supposed to be blue and nothing fizzes when it isn’t meant to fizz and no oddly-squishy potato thing turns out to not be a potato at all and then puts me into a hallucinogenic state.”
The Doctor shoots her a baleful look (“but Pond, hallucinogenic states are cool!”), but eventually and somewhat grumpily lands them in London, in the springtime, in 2007. Amy mutters something about unimaginative holiday spots and then hares off in search of chips, the Doctor following at a steady clip and nattering on about alien cooking oil products and the end of the world and by the way, Pond, have I told you about that time when I landed on this planet inhabited solely by talking cod, they sold chips there too, isn’t that just wonderfully ironic.
Rory trots after them dutifully. The Doctor slips and arm through Amy’s, and Rory, once again dutifully, resists the urge to punch him.
They pass a pub just as the Doctor starts a tirade about the evils of tartar sauce and the hundred years of stolen alien tech involved in its production and Rory, simultaneously, realizes exactly how pathetic he is being.
“Um,” he says, coming to a stop, “know what, I’m kind of, um. Not in the mood for chips right now.”
“But you love chips,” says Amy, frowning. “We always have chips. Are you sick or something?”
“Um,” says Rory, secretly hoping that she will come over and check, preferably with her lips, and flushing with shame at the very thought, “no.”
Amy raises an eyebrow. “Then come have chips. With your girlfriend.”
Fiancée, thinks Rory, mutinously, and also her imaginary friend, the git. “I also like beer,” he points out, “and pie.”
Amy plants her hands on her hips, eyebrow still raised.
“You two go have fun,” adds Rory, in what he hopes is a sufficiently cool Non-Clingy Fiancée voice. “I’ll meet you back here when you’re done. Having your chips.”
Amy stares at him. The Doctor looks between both of them, somewhat awkwardly. A decent amount of hand-flapping occurs.
“Okay,” says Amy, finally, and gives him a goodbye kiss. On the cheek. Rory resists the urge to groan.
Instead he marches into the comfortably damp and dingy pub, runs straight into a woman with brilliant copper hair that has him thinking Amy Amy Amy and, on an impulse, buys her a drink.
Ten minutes later, he is sharing beer with one Donna Noble, best temp in Chiswick and Jaded Romance Expert, talking about how pathetic he is.
How did this get to be my life? thinks Rory, but. He suspects he already knows.
***
Halfway through their first pint:
“So,” says Donna, “reasons to hate the person they dumped you for. Go.”
“Well,” says Rory, “I don’t really hate him, per se, you know…”
Donna shoots him a look.
“Right,” Rory says, taking a gulp of lager. It’s good. Fortifying. “When he’s in the room, it’s like I’m invisible to her. He’s all she can see.”
Donna winces, sympathetically. “She made him lie to me. For months, the git.”
“And,” adds Rory, feeling the indignation roiling within him, or perhaps just the remains of his lukewarm pie, “he acts like he isn’t even interested. At all. He gets all flappy like a baby chicken, and she still can’t take her eyes off him.”
“She had the most irritating voice,” says Donna, miming incessant chatter with her hands. “Like, think the most, the most annoying woman in the universe, add about a gallon of smugness and a really annoying teeth-clicking habit, and you’ve still got someone you want to punch in the face lessthan her. And her laugh. Don’t even get me started on her laugh.”
“And it’s like, it’s like he doesn’t really care about Amy. I mean, I know they’re mates, and all, but. You should see the kind of trouble he gets her into. You wouldn’t believe it.”
Donna raises an eyebrow. “She tried to kill me, once.”
“He,” says Rory, “wears. Tweed.”
“Oh God,” says Donna, laughing, “yours is worse.”
***
A third of the way through their second:
“Travelling, you said. Ever been to Egypt?”
“No,” says Rory.
“Yeah, well. If you go, don’t drink the water,” says Donna, somewhat bitterly. She takes a gulp of beer, like she’s washing away the taste of annoying tour guide advice. “Also don’t buy anything from the street vendors, never eat anything that doesn’t come pre-packaged and overpriced by the tour company, and never leave the tour bus without permission. But mostly don’t drink the water.”
A silence hangs in the air. Rory resolves never to go to Egypt.
“I’ve been to Venice,” he offers.
“Did you drink the water?”
“No,” says Rory, and decides not to say because it was infested with alien fish-vampires at the time.
***
At the bottom of their second:
“She kissed him. In her bedroom. With her wedding dress still hanging on the wall.”
“He made coffee for me, every day. I always thought it tasted a little weird, turns out he was poisoning me. For her.”
“He was the stripper at my stag party. He came out of the cake.”
“Oh, yeah,” says Donna, not even blinking, “she was a giant spider.”
“What,” says Rory, eyes bulging. “Really?”
“Yep,” says Donna, with some satisfaction. “She kept calling me puny human.”
Rory takes this in for a moment, then slumps forward, forehead colliding with the edge of the table.
“Mine does that too,” he mutters, against the cool glass. Donna goes and gets him another beer.
***
Halfway through their third pint:
“You look like you’re looking for something, lover boy,” says Donna, not unsympathetically. “What is it?”
Rory swirls his glass, watching the beer slosh around inside it. It’s quite a pretty colour, he decides. Of course, lots of things are a lot prettier when you’re mildly intoxicated.
“A reason, I suppose,” he says. “A reason for her to stay. I need her to stay, Donna, I can’t tell you. I just – she, I mean, she’s really, she just, she calls me an idiot all the time and we dated for three months before she let me call her my girlfriend and she runs off with strange men on the night before our wedding and I love her so much.”
“You,” says Donna, fondly, “are so pathetic.”
“Yes,” groans Rory, “I know.”
They sit in companionable quiet for a minute. Rory drinks some more beer.
“What are you looking for?” he asks, just because.
“A man,” says Donna, then wrinkles her nose in disgust. “Not like that, you idiot.”
***
At the bottom of their third:
“I suppose,” says Donna, quietly, “I’m looking for a reason, too.”
***
A few sips into their fourth pint:
“You know,” says Rory, “the worst part is, I can’t even really hate him. I should, you know, because he’s stealing my fiancée, but it’s, I mean. He’s just, like, completely insane and probably just as completely traumatized from something and also about six, and I never learned how to deal with clinically insane, overly angsty children.”
“Well, I know what to do with giant spiders,” says Donna, shrugging. “You drown ‘em. Next time I see a giant bug, that’s exactly what I’m gonna do. Find the nearest body of water and – sploosh.”
“I can see how that would be cathartic.”
“If I could actually get my hands on a giant insect around these parts, yeah.”
“Well,” Rory points out, barely slurring at all really, “a spider isn’t an insect, you know, technically it’s an arachnid, and – ”
Donna smacks him on the back of the head.
***
Halfway through pint five:
“Rory!” Amy calls, breezing through the doors, “you done yet? Let’s go, we’re off to Rio, Himself promised to take us right away and I’ve already bought a new bikini.”
“This your bird, then?” asks Donna, unimpressed.
“Not a bird,” says Rory, indignantly and a bit woozily, “an Amy.”
Amy gawks at him. “Are you drunk?”
“No,” Rory says, leaping out of his chair. It isn’t as graceful as he’d have liked it to be. “Well. Maybe a little.”
Amy grins. It’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen, but then again he’s pathetic so he would think that, wouldn’t he.
“You idiot,” she says, and leaps around the table to kiss him.
There is a clatter like the knocking-over of chairs from yonder. “Pond!” cries the Doctor, amidst the utterly unintentional shattering of glasses. “Rory! Come on, let’s go and you are kissing okay I can come back later.”
Donna’s eyebrows creep slowly to her hairline. “And the drunken giraffe appears. What a day.”
The Doctor freezes.
“Um,” he says, gulping. “Hello!”
And Amy and Rory abruptly stop kissing, on account of the fact that the sound of Donna’s hand slapping against the Doctor’s cheek is a little too loud to be atmospheric or particularly romantic.
“Thanks,” mutters Rory, hopefully too low for Amy to hear and thus low enough to keep the additional slapping to a minimum, “you’re a real pal.”
“Yeah, you too,” says Donna, grinning. “Pleasure meeting you, kiddo. And thanks for the beer.”
Rory lets the love of his life and the guy she seems to have kind-of eloped with hustle him out of the pub, but he makes sure to wave goodbye. Slightly drunk and Amy-addled as he is, he almost misses the kiddo.
He almost misses the way the Doctor cradles his reddening jaw with a bit too much reverence to be quite normal, too. Almost.
***
“So,” says Amy, out on the street, “who was she?”
Rory peers at her. “Were you jealous?” he asks, and wonders whether he sounds way too incredulous and wondering about it. He decides the answer is probably yes.
“Don’t be an idiot,” snaps Amy, in a way that means yes but if you ask me again I will cut you. “What on earth would make you think that?”
“Well,” says Rory, “Um. Well, you kissed me.”
“Yeah,” says Amy, slowly, like explaining quantum physics to a precocious toddler, “you’re my, you know, my boyfriend. I’m allowed to do that. And you look really cute when you’re drunk.”
Rory processes this for a second.
“And also,” adds Amy, “I lo – I mean, I, uh. I missed you.”
“Fiancée,” says Rory, feeling something warm expanding inside his chest. “You know, ring, wedding, that kind of thing?”
“Yeah, ‘course,” Amy says, slipping her hand into his. “Fiancée.”
Rory wants to leap in the air and dance around, like this is some kind of achievement. This, he decides, is probably kind of pathetic as well. He settles for grinning, a trifle smugly, and taking a good old Triumphant Glance in the Doctor’s direction. It feels every bit as good as he thought it would.
“So,” Amy says, completely casually, “who was she?”
“Just a friend,” say Rory and the Doctor, simultaneously.
Rory glances back over at him. The Doctor shuffles, uncomfortably, and Rory Williams may be many things, slightly lovelorn and a bit sad among them, but he isn’t actually an idiot, no matter what anyone might say. He can tell the Doctor’s hiding something, and he can tell based on recent experience that it’s probably something tragic and emotionally fraught.
But then again he’s got five pints of beer and a steak pie in his belly and Amy’s hand in his. He figures he can cut the guy a little slack.
“So! Rio!” cries the Doctor, grabbing Amy’s other hand to yank her through the TARDIS doors, and Rory figures he can let that go, too.
***
A woman appears in front of the pub in a flash of light and a puff of smoke.
“A glass of Scotch, please,” she says, sidling up to the bar with a vixenlike gait and a deadly smile. “The best you have. In fact, you’d better make it a double. I’ve just come from my wedding.”
The bartender hustles off like someone’s just lit a fire in his pants, which given the equal-parts-smouldering-and-terrifying look on the woman’s face is highly possible. Donna looks up from her current pint.
“Wedding, eh?” asks Donna, gesturing to the seat next to her. “Sounds like you could use a good drink.”
The woman tosses her hair over her shoulder, a huge mane-like cascade of gold curls. There’s a gun at her waist. Donna decides she likes her, very much.
“Oh, sweetie,” says the woman, settling down in the seat, “you have no idea.”