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Amy rarely remembers just how old her husband is. Not because of the problems time travel causes with age—does time on the TARDIS count?—but because usually he’s twenty-two year old Rory, same age as her like he’s always been. He’s never been out of England, barely ever wanted to leave Leadworth. She was always the one who wanted to go, to be somewhere else. He’s her Rory, and if she hasn’t known him his whole life she’s known him for all the important moments. She likes to think she was there for most of them.
But sometimes, especially since Demon’s Run, since she actually saw the Last Centurion again—it’s different. They went to Constantinople and he could guide them through the twisting, incomprehensible streets. She would say something about her getting old, or about all the endless possibilities of their world, of time and space open before them, and he would look at her with eyes that were Rory’s but weren’t. They were impossibly old and wise and a little pitying. The look would flicker away in an instant, so quickly that Amy thought she imagined it at first, but still… Amy doesn’t like it. She doesn’t like the parts of him she doesn’t, can’t know.
And then one night, or what passes for night in the TARDIS, she wakes and Rory isn’t beside her. Not in the he just got up to go to the loo way; in a his spot on the bed is cold way.
She refuses to panic, clamps down on memories of seeing Rory die, of his not existing, of his leaving her like the Doctor did. Nothing could have happened to him on the TARDIS—she likes him, probably more than she likes Amy. Nothing when House isn’t running the place, Amy amends, again Not Remembering, with all of her formidable will power, Rory’s corpse in the halls of the TARDIS, his hatred of her scrawled in blood.
But still, she gets out of bed. The Doctor might know where he went. She strides down the halls on bare feet, but then she slows so that her footsteps are quieter. The halls are hauntingly silent when the TARDIS isn’t going somewhere. It’s a bit freaky.
Silent, that is, until she nears the main console room, and she hears raucous laughter, the Doctor’s laughter, and Rory’s deadpan murmur, and suddenly all her worry shifts into irritation that they’re having fun without her. Rory could have woken her up.
“And then,” Rory is saying as Amy pauses at the doorway to watch her boys, “Cesare said to get off his horse!” The last words have a slippery feel to them, like the TARDIS wants her to know that it’s translating.
The Doctor nearly doubles over in laughter, slapping the console, and Rory smirks too, calmly checking some wires for something, Amy doesn’t know what. Amy has a brief flash of totally unreasonable jealousy, because the Doctor never lets her touch anything to do with the TARDIS. Why does Rory get to fiddle with it? She moves forward to point out the unfairness of this, but then, in a move even she admits is uncharacteristic, she pulls herself back. She wants to listen, to see who they are when she’s not around.
“That sounds like him,” The Doctor chokes out, “He could be a bit unpleasant. Or maybe spoiled. Comes of having a Pope for a father. Lucrezia was the same way.”
“Oh, for sure,” And something in that sigh makes Amy raises her eyebrows. She doesn’t know who this Lucrezia person was, but the last girl who made Rory sigh like that had ended with Amy’s fist in her face. What the bloody hell had Mary Rolston thought, flirting with her man? Even before he was, technically her man.
“You can stop that, you know. All the important ones are fine,” the Doctor pointed out, in that way of his that made it sound like Rory could have stopped hours ago and why didn’t he already know that? Which makes Amy wonder just how long they’ve been sitting out here while she slept.
Rory just rolls his eyes and puts down the wires. He reaches down to pull something about from underneath the stool he’s sitting on. Amy can’t see what it is, exactly, because his body is in the way, but soon Rory’s arms move back and forth, and a steady scraping sound fills the room. It is the only noise in the room other than the Doctor’s tinkering for a moment, and Amy is about to announce her presence because they must be finished by now, because how much can they have to talk about, when the Doctor speaks.
“You really don’t need one of those.” The Doctor sounds nervous. Uncomfortable. It makes Amy worried too, because a nervous Doctor tends to end with something exploding.
Rory shrugs. “After the past few months, I thought it might be good to have one on hand. Just in case.” Amy tries to move so that she can see what it is. Maybe the TARDIS decides to be on her side, this once, because suddenly it came into view. A glint of metal, a cloth-wrapped hilt—a sword, about the length of his arm, with brutal-looking edges, like the ones in Amy’s old Roman history books. Where on Earth—or not on Earth, more likely—had Rory gotten one of those? And what is he doing to it with a rock? And why does Rory, her Rory, the nurse, the caretaker, the fixer, need a sword?
“And you don’t have to do that to it,” the Doctor goes on, jerking his chin scornfully at the stone, like Rory is trying to start a fire with two branches when there’s a perfectly good match sitting nearby. “You could just use the screwdriver and poof, it’s sharp enough to cut a hair. If you’d want to cut a hair, that is, though why you would want to I have no idea. Perhaps to give someone a haircut. That sounds dangerous.”
Rory doesn’t stop. The stone against the metal makes a rhythmic rasp. Amy thinks, in one of those thoughts that had once had her called batty back in Leadworth, that it sounds like Rory—steady, understated, and subtly dangerous. But he isn’t dangerous—except when he is, when his eyes go old and she can see a man who has done terrible things for the woman he loves.
“It’s how I know to do it,” Rory replies at last. “It’s comforting to keep a habit.” He looks down at the sword for a moment, then says with the air of someone recalling something from a long time ago, “I think Augustine told me that.”
“Auggie! Great guy. Bit depressing once he found God. Real lark before that.”
Rory nods, absently. “There was something about habit in an uncertain world—I’m not sure what. You know how he talked.”
“That sounds like Auggie. As I said, depressing.” The Doctor has the air of forced levity about him he uses when he thinks a conversation is going to become serious and really would not like it to.
But Rory speaks again, and he sounds inexpressibly tired. “How many times have you died?”
The Doctor stops fiddling. “Ten.” And then, “What about you?”
“Three, I think. Maybe four. They’re blending together, which happened and which didn’t, which one was which.” One more rasp, and then Rory leans the sword against the console, point down. “My deaths are blending together. Not many blokes can say that, can they?”
“Not many blokes can tell stories about how Henry VIII challenged them to a duel.”
“He would never have won.” There is a certainty to that declaration that Amy has rarely heard in her self-conscious Rory’s voice, a surety of his own skill.
“No, not Henry.” The Doctor begins to tinker again, but slowly, more thoughtfully than usual.
Rory sees what he’s doing and leans over to help. It is only when he is looking down at the machinery that he asks, almost too quietly for Amy to hear, “How old are you?”
The Doctor doesn’t miss a beat, like he didn’t miss a beat when Rory pried before. “900. Or thereabouts. How old are you?”
“Twenty-two, sometimes.” Rory sighs. “Other times, millennia.”
The Doctor’s sigh sounds almost exactly like Rory’s, tired and lonely. “That’s quite a difference.”
“Yeah, it is.” Neither of them move for a moment, their sides almost touching, shoulder hunched almost identically, those two men and the TARDIS. Amy has never seen them look more similar. She’s never seen them look farther away.
Once more, she has that flash of jealousy, though she’s not sure of who. They’re her boys, both of them, but she’s never really considered before what it would be like without her. She’s supposed to be the place where they connect, the only thing they have in common.
Except that’s not true, not really, not anymore even if it once was, she realizes. Because her boys now both know people she has never met, can’t meet without the Doctor messing with his timey-wimey ball thing and exploding the universe again. They can remember dying, and so can she, sort of, but not multiple times, not like they can. They’re two infinitely old creatures sitting on the deck of an already-old TARDIS and talking about all their many years. She might have all the time in the world, in the universe, in this time machine, but she’ll never be as old as either of them, though they both hide it so well.
And suddenly she also realizes that this isn’t the first time the two of them have sat like this, without her. That hurts, a bit, because Rory has never really told her anything about those millennia that didn’t actually happen, always says he barely remembers and nothing interesting really occurred. She had figured that was true, because it was Rory and he was the only one of the three people on the TARDIS actually good at staying out of trouble. But maybe there was more. Maybe is something he couldn’t share with a wife mere decades old, only the centuries-old Doctor who is like him, old he than he looks and in some ways the last, the only, of his kind. Maybe she isn’t good enough, and Rory will go find a woman older, who can meet the millennia in his eyes with equal experience. Or maybe he and the Doctor will run off together and leave her, poor Amelia who hasn’t met Augustine, on her own. She moves, to interrupt, to press herself into the moment.
Then Rory turns to press another button, trips over his own feet, and nearly impales himself on the sword. The Doctor throws up his hands and starts pointing out that that’s why they don’t have weapons on the TARDIS, and Rory stammers our an apology and trying not to look as embarrassed as he is. Amy stops, grins, and slips away. There’s a heaviness to the room tonight, the quiet of too much age. But they’re still her boys, still her Raggedy Doctor and her gorgeous, brilliant, clumsy Rory. She’ll leave the old men to their talk. In the morning, they’ll be young again.