[ milliways bar ] three years

As hard as it is to believe, meeting the Doctor - the Raggedy Doctor - for the first time isn't the strangest thing to happen to Rory Williams.

Honestly, nothing quite beats an Allpocalypse at the Bar at the End of the Universe.

And nothing quite beats living through it.

So the Doctor is more like an addendum to what has been an already very mad year.

*

When Rory first opens his eyes, he finds himself lying on the cold linoleum tiles of the coma ward, feeling a little like he'd just woken up from one himself. He is in his scrubs, running shoes, pen and name-tag accounted for and everything.

And if that isn't enough, he has the biggest migraine life probably has to offer.

After calling it in early ("I'm so sorry, Dr Ramsden. It won't happen again, I promise - it's just -" "Oh, just go home Rory. We'll call you if we need you." "Right. Right, thank you."), Rory sits around in the town square for ages, just staring at the duckless duck pond, the empty telephone booth, and the little park to the side where one or two children are playing. His mind is a bit of a mess; he wonders if what he's remembering is ... true. If he really had been rushing about with an armful of bandages while the sky was blood red, and the lake was boiling, and there were explosions and warpy time-things going on outside the Window ... and missing mountains in the background.

It's the little strip of bandage hanging over the pocket of his scrubs, stained dark with someone's blood, that gives him his answer.

*

It doesn't happen right away.

Rory starts to notice that the patients he watches over in the coma ward are starting to ... show up in places around town.

In the local Tescos down the street.

At the post office.

In the pub where he meets up with his mates every weekend.

In the park by the little lake, where he and Amy go for their fifth date.

Sometimes Rory gets pictures of them on his phone.

Other times, Rory just stares, surges of worry starting to eat away at him.

He looks up at the sky, almost expecting to see red.

*

When Rory is sacked from the hospital, he wanders a little through Leadworth, armed with nothing but his scrubs, his pen, his name-tag ... and his phone of pictures.

He winds up in the town square like always, really considering what might happen if his world ends the same way Milliways must have.

And then the sun answers by doing something weird.

And then the patients, coma patients, appear in the square again, almost as if to say, 'You do nothing, Rory Williams. Because what can you do? Grab a roll of bandages again? Fruitlessly patch up the injured until the end?'

"- the sun's going out, and you're photographing a man and a dog. Why?"

A strange man plucks his phone out of his grasp, and he does nothing to stop it.

And then a rush of ginger and a familiar police woman's costume appears next to him, and for a moment Rory forgets about the end of the world. "Amy."

She touches his arm, a little breathless. "Hi! Oh uh, this is Rory. He's uh - a friend."

Rory blurts: "Boyfriend."

"Kind of ... boyfriend."

"Amy -"

This man doesn't seem to care. Impatiently, he repeats: "Man and dog. Why?"

And then it hits him.

Maybe it's the Allpocalypse, and its spreading here, and stories and make-believe from his own life (Amy used to make him dress up!) are starting to become real, but Rory freaks out.

Just a little.

(Okay, well maybe more than a little.)

"Oh. My. God. It's him."

"Yes -"

"It's him, though. The Doctor. The Raggedy Doctor. But he was a story. It was a gaaammme -"

The Doctor grabs fistfuls of nurse scrubs, and yes. Yes, the Doctor is very, very real.

"Man and dog," he says again. "Tell me. Why."

So, he does.

*

Amy's Raggedy Doctor, in all his madness, manages to save the world.

And all under twenty minutes.

After the mess is over, Rory feels like everything in his entire life - Milliways and home - has changed.

He feels changed.

Milliways has always felt like something separate from his life, like an adventure he could visit and then leave to come back to a place where everything was normal. Mundane, even.

And now ...


He's not sure he really likes the Doctor. He's mad and reckless, and there's the way Amy looks at him that he doesn't like.

But then the blue box in Amy's backyard (and the Raggedy Doctor with it) disappears, and Rory feels both relieved and a little empty, like maybe all of this weirdness ends here and he isn't sure he quite wants that.

It's unsettling, that feeling.

He isn't meant to feel like that, is he?

He isn't meant to feel like he ... misses it. Misses Milliways, and the oddness, and the crazy adventure.

*

For three years, Rory Williams goes on without a single Allpocalyptic thing in his life.

He and Amy get a little more serious.

He gets a promotion at the hospital.

He manages to afford the most brilliant engagement ring.

He proposes to Amy.

She says 'yes'.



And then, one day, the Door appears.