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Amy feels frightened and strangely a little bit sad the first time she opens a door seemingly deep inside the TARDIS and it instead leads her to somewhere with open sky.
One minute she is sleepless and exploring the plain-walled hallways in her nightie and the next she is in a garden full of plants that she recognizes from Earth, and there is soft, summer rain falling from the place where the ceiling should logically be. Amy freezes in shock and then slowly stretches out a hand, collecting droplets in her palm. They look and feel real, and she finds her fear fading, her mouth stretching into a smile of wonder. There is wetness on her face because Rory would have loved this place but she wipes the raindrops off her cheeks without a second thought.
For all that this place is unexpected, she gets the feeling that no harm would ever come to her here, and so she stays for a moment longer before she turns around. She’s meaning to find the Doctor and tell him that somehow the TARDIS’s front door has moved to a different place inside the ship, but then she realizes that the doorway she’s come through simply hangs in open air: a portal. It’s not built into the familiar blue police box wood.
She still goes to find the Doctor, but now she has no theories to pose to him as to what she’s stumbled upon.
“It is a room,” he insists as she drags him by the hand back through his labyrinthine ship. Amy thinks he must not be understanding what she means—it’s not a room, it’s a planet, and it’s outside—so the only thing she can do is show him.
She opens the door again and there it is: the same garden. It’s stopped raining now, and it smells the way the earth sometimes does after a storm—a thing so familiar and yet unique that she doesn’t have a word for it—convincing Amy even further that this can’t possibly be inside the TARDIS.
“We’re outside,” she tells him again, pointing upwards. “Look, there’s no ceiling!”
The Doctor obligingly looks upwards but then says, “There is a ceiling, it’s just so far up you can’t see it. The room has its own atmosphere—that’s why it rains.” Seeing the incredulous look that still lingers on her face, he says, “It’s like the forest in the Byzantium. Except the TARDIS’s version is much more sophisticated and realistic than that, of course.”
“Oh,” Amy says, “so this is where we get all the oxygen we breathe in here?”
“Ah,” the Doctor says. “Not quite. The plants produce oxygen, sure—they’re real plants—but I don’t think that’s the reason the TARDIS put them here. She did that for us. Well, I think she did it for—”
He suddenly cuts himself off with a pained and distant smile, deliberately not looking at her. She’s known the Doctor long enough now to know he’ll get all withdrawn if she tries to make him finish the sentence and name the person he’s thinking of.
She’s known the Doctor long enough now that she thinks there’s no one in the whole universe she knows better than him.
“It’s like a courtyard,” Amy says instead of telling him any of that (because it makes her chest ache for some reason) “or a really big greenhouse.”
“Yes, like that,” the Doctor says.
Then, he squeezes her hand gently and leads her away. He sits her down in the kitchen and makes her tea and looks at her with his old, sad, kind eyes and then he sends her back to bed.
She finds other similar rooms over the next few months. Well, she thinks it’s months, but they travel through time so it’s a bit hard to tell. That’s okay, though. Amy has all the time in the universe.
There’s a lagoon with purple waters and even some seashells that, by the looks of them, must have belonged to unseen, tiny crab-like things. The shells crunch under her slipper-clad feet. There’s a cloud that is solid enough to walk on suspended in infinite blue sky. There’s a snowy mountainside, where she doesn’t stay for long because it’s too cold for her thin nightie, and a forest where the trees look like nothing so much as giant daisies, which makes her feel like she’s turned into an ant. She likes that one especially much—it like she’s in Honey I Shrunk the Kids. She knows it’s a very corny American movie, but it has a special place in her heart because of the jokes Rory told when they watched it together as teenagers. His fake accent was so terrible it made her snort soda out of her nose.
She thinks she had watched the movie on VHS while alone in the house one night—her Aunt had been away again, and she liked to watch movies when that happened—but for some reason it reminds her of feeling comfortable and cared-for and seen.
Amy finds other, more room-like rooms in her insomniac exploring, but the outdoor-like rooms come to be her favorites. It’s like she’s dreaming of a fairytale world, and she can linger in it peacefully.
The Doctor always comes to find her after a while. She thinks the TARDIS must have some way of telling him when she won’t be able to sleep because he never looks like he’s just been woken up himself. Amy always asks him if he’s ever been inside the particular room she’s stumbled across that night. He always answers her: some rooms he has found before, but some are new to him also. That seems strange to her—he’s apparently lived here for centuries and centuries but there are still rooms in his ship he knows nothing about (or has forgotten). He doesn’t even have an excuse like she did with Prisoner Zero.
Prisoner Zero is gone, but sometimes she still gets the feeling that there’s something she’s missing, not in the corner of her eye but in the corner of her memory, sleeping and ghostly. It always passes quickly, but it keeps coming back.
Then, Amy finds a room that somehow feels more important than the rest, the night after they leave the Van Gogh gallery at the Louvre for the last time.
She steps through the door into a small copse of spindly trees that have translucent, silvery leaves. Beyond them, she can see a meadow of crimson, waving grasses. A mountain range lies far beyond it, snow-capped and hazy red in the distance, under a burnt orange sky with two suns skimming the horizon. The sunslight reflects off something spherical that sits between two peaks. To be visible as far away as it is, it must be a huge structure. It would take a long time to reach it by walking and she’s too tired, but Amy feels tempted to try all the same.
She settles for taking a few steps into the meadow instead, standing there and letting the persistent, gentle wind tug at her hair like it does the leaves of red grass. Her feet feel firmly rooted to the ground, almost like a gentle goddess has rested her hands on Amy’s shoulders and is encouraging her to just stand there taking it in.
There’s more detail here than in the other outdoor rooms, Amy realizes, even though every “courtyard” she’s ever entered on the TARDIS has felt so incredibly real. Never has one of these rooms shown her such an expansive horizon. Never has there been anything grand to see in the long distance.
Something painfully wistful sweeps through Amy. Vincent would have loved it. He could have made such a beautiful painting of this place.
The Doctor takes a bit longer to find her tonight, and he doesn’t greet her brightly like he normally does. Her first clue that he’s there is the sound of someone’s breath catching in their throat behind her. The only other person on the whole ship is the Doctor, but when she turns around, she finds herself half expecting—even hoping—it could be someone else. It isn’t.
He’s stopped just beyond the strange threshold to the TARDIS hallway. The nighttime darkness spills through the rectangular rift in the landscape, over his features and his unusually tense frame. He looks like he wants to be somewhere else—anywhere else—which is something she never dreamed of seeing in the Doctor. Even when he lands the TARDIS somewhere they didn’t mean to be, or somewhere that looks foreboding or just plain boring, he has never once simply turned around and left.
“Doctor?” she asks, and he flinches. She doesn’t have to ask her usual question. It’s obvious that he knows this place.
“Where are we?” she tries instead. His throat bobs.
“Somewhere we shouldn’t be,” the Doctor replies, subdued in a way he never is when answering questions only he knows the answers to.
“Sorry,” she offers, not meaning it.
The Doctor stays rooted to the spot. So does Amy.
“It reminds me of Vincent,” she remarks to fill the silence.
“It does?”
“The colors are so vivid.”
There’s another pause.
“Like a world on fire,” the Doctor supplies distantly, like he’s quoting something. It makes her wonder.
“Are these places the TARDIS makes—are they real? Do they exist somewhere out there in the universe too?”
“Some of them,” he says. “Not this one.”
Amy looks out at the sphere out in the distance, then back at the Doctor, who is also looking at it. His face is pale. He looks like he wants something so desperately he might be sick with it. She wishes for that contraption the Doctor had put back in storage earlier today: the complicated machine with the mirror that let him see what Vincent saw.
There’s an invisible kind of monster here too.
“It helped him, didn’t it?” Amy begins gently, “To know that other people could see a bit of how he saw the universe.”
She lies down in the soft grass, staring up at the border where the canopy of silver leaves gives way to clear, orange sky. She reaches her hand out in the Doctor’s direction in wordless invitation and finally he moves, jerkily, to join her.
He stretches out next to her like they both did with Vincent, but he doesn’t take her hand right away. She watches his fingers slide through the grass and burrow into the soil almost lovingly, lingering there before they meet hers. Her chest is tight with anticipation—getting the Doctor to share something about himself is so incredibly rare.
“I used to be from here,” admits the Doctor finally.
Amy ponders the verb tense for a moment, but then she realizes what it must mean. He said this place doesn’t exist out in the universe, but if he’s from here, it had to have done at some point. It just doesn’t anymore. And neither do his people.
“Not actually here,” the Doctor continues, either obliviously or intentionally not explaining the used to. “This is just a replica of it—” He hesitates. Then— “of Gallifrey.”
The name fits this place somehow. Amy tucks it away, to be brought back out and rolled over in her mind and on her tongue during future sleepless nights.
“Is it a good replica, then?” she asks, already knowing that this is the closest she’ll ever get to visiting the Doctor’s home planet and wanting to drink in every detail if she can.
“To you, it would be practically perfect.”
“But not to you?”
The Doctor sighs.
“The old girl’s trying her best,” he allows, speaking much more slowly than she’s used to. “The plants and the air are the same down to the molecular level, and the colour of the sky is just right, and the positioning of the suns. She’s even increased the gravity constant—just a bit higher than Earth—but it’s got an artificial sort of…aftertaste to it. We should be spinning on Gallifrey’s axis and…and racing along her stable circumbinary orbit, but we’re not moving at all, not while we’re in the TARDIS.”
“It’s so still here,” the Doctor says, sounding weary. “The timelines are flat and flimsy when they should be solid and ordered, curving towards their anchor in the Eye of Harmony.” Amy feels him shake his head beside her. “It’s not real.”
Not for the first time, Amy imagines what it must be like to feel time. It seems like it would be overwhelming. Who must the Doctor be, to be able to make sense of it all?
“Do you come here often?” she asks. She’s already expecting him to say he doesn’t—the Doctor’s not the type to go where he’s already been, especially if this room can’t compare to the real Gallifrey—but the sadness in his voice when he answers nevertheless manages to still her lungs for a moment:
“No. Never. Well—just once, and I didn’t stay long.”
“Why not? You must miss it sometimes.”
The Doctor doesn’t deny it, instead protesting: “It’s cheating.”
“You don’t mind cheating,” observes Amy. “You’re a time traveler, it’s sort of all cheating.”
The Doctor laughs humourlessly. His voice is hard when he says:
“There are some consequences that shouldn’t be cheated, even if there’s a way. I have to miss it here, because I’m the only one who can.”
The slightly stronger gravity here no longer feels comforting. It’s heavy like waking up in the morning and not wanting to get out of bed because no one will be there to greet you when you do.
Amy’s mouth is suddenly dry when she asks, “The consequences of what?”
“Do you see that dome there?” The Doctor pulls at their joined hands in the direction of the sphere she noticed in the mountains. Amy hums a soft affirmative.
“That’s supposed to be the Citadel of the Time Lords,” he says, “the capitol city.”
“Can we go see it?” Amy asks before she can think better of it, remembering the pull she felt earlier.
“I don’t think so. You could walk and walk and walk forever and never reach it—the TARDIS wouldn’t let you.”
“Why not?”
The Doctor pauses before he answers.
“The TARDIS is a very powerful machine, but even she can’t make—” his voice falters before he manages to say, simply, “It would be empty.”
The Doctor’s hand tightens around hers, the pressure an entreaty to please don’t leave. Or at least it would be if she was the one doing it, and she doesn’t think she’s all that different from the Doctor in this. But she won’t leave. She and the Doctor know each other better than anyone in the universe, and anyways, there wouldn’t be anywhere for her to go.
“Did you never wonder why I’m the last Time Lord?” asks the Doctor, because he knows she remembers that he hasn’t answered her question about consequences yet. “Why me and not somebody else?”
Amy thinks it probably would be rude to tell him she’d always assumed it was because he ran away the fastest. But she’s never thought of that as a bad thing.
“No,” she lies.
The Doctor pauses, and when she turns her head to look at him, he is eyeing her steadily in solemn skepticism. He sees through her. The corner of his mouth quirks up in a smile with no humor and then he looks away.
“There was a war, with the Daleks,” says the Doctor, “a Time War.”
The Daleks. Amy shudders, remembering how scared she had been when she thought the Daleks were going to blow up the Earth during the Blitz, before she’d even had a chance to be born. In her travels with the Doctor, she has seen so much technology—so many weapons—she never dreamed of before. Still, she finds she can’t fathom what a war between the Daleks and the Doctor’s people would have been like. Horrible, she thinks, but the word is flat and colourless in her imagination, compared to what the right one should be.
“They fought, and you didn’t?” Amy asks, thinking she’s right after all: the fastest runner.
The Doctor had been so angry with the Daleks, yes, but he’d also let them go. Amy has watched him go to great lengths to prevent fighting and killing, from her own backyard to the far reaches of time and space—he wouldn’t have fought. It isn’t who the Doctor is.
“No,” her friend says in a low, almost growl. The hatred in it scares her. “I fought. I—"
If it had made the Doctor do something so anathema to him, horrible indeed must have been an inadequate descriptor. Amy wonders if Gallifrey really was always this red, or if the color of the sky and grass are a metaphor, or worse.
“The two most technologically advanced races in the universe, they said we were,” the Doctor explains. “But we were also the most afraid. The Daleks didn’t care who or what they destroyed in the crossfire, so long as they could keep from losing. And the Time Lords—my people—couldn’t bear losing either, not to the Daleks—not to anyone—so they stopped caring too.”
“What happened?” Amy asks, so softly she’s not sure she’s spoken at all. She has a hazy memory of asking the same during bedtime stories of her childhood: fairytales where there was comfort in the fact that none of it had really ever happened. But now she is here: lying in the memory of a meadow where there will one day be a war.
“The High Council of the Time Lords came up with a plan. They would destroy the Daleks, yes, but by destroying the whole universe alongside them. And the Time Lords would be left to… well, they said we would ascend past the need for physical existence.” The Doctor’s voice is low and very deliberate, and his hand is a vice around hers. She dares not speak. “The Daleks were destroying the universe in their own way, whole galaxies at a time. They had finally begun to lay siege to Gallifrey, and we couldn’t stop them. But I…”
The sentence fades.
“You stopped them,” she says, in dawning, awful comprehension. She hears the Doctor swallow.
“There was a weapon,” he explains, “and I took it. And I used it. The Time Lords and the Daleks in one fell swoop. And Gallifrey too.”
He means that he used it to kill them all.
She thinks of the Doctor, hanging out the doors of the TARDIS, almost floating away into black space, without anyone there to hold onto him like he had held onto her. There is a big red button in his hand, and he presses it. This weapon the Doctor speaks of couldn’t have looked like a simple red button—it must have been dark and hulking and complicated—but Amy imagines it that way.
She can’t visualize the Doctor’s face at all, though. If she were to turn her eyes away from the orange sky and silver leaves right now, she knows she could no longer wonder, which is why she doesn’t.
“You were really the only one willing to do that? To save the whole universe?” Amy asks. Her eyes stare upward at the false sky. The real Gallifrey would have had the whole universe beyond that sky. She wonders what it looked like at night—how many stars the Time Lords would have seen.
“Willing to commit genocide against two intelligent races? My own people? Yes. Does that surprise you?” The Doctor’s voice is unnaturally steady now, and dead: a sharp, black stain against Gallifrey’s vivid colour.
A fragment of memory suddenly strikes Amy: it was a moment she realized how much the Doctor must hate himself, but she can’t remember what caused her to think that. She reaches for it and most of it flees like smoke (Rory, dying and crumbling to dust, and bitter words falling from her lips: then what is the point of you) but she does remember that the depth of his apparent self-loathing had baffled her. She can guess why it’s there now, but she still—
“Yes,” Amy finds herself saying. “Were you really so different from any of the rest of them?”
“I don’t know,” the Doctor says, “I’d like to think a few would have agreed with me. But I was different from the rest, and I guess that means most wouldn’t have wanted me to…to do it.”
Amy can see how that would be particularly haunting: thinking that if they’d known what he was going to do, the Doctor’s people would have pleaded with him to stop. It even makes the flame of her faith in the Doctor flicker for just a second before she thinks of the voices of the rest of the universe, herself among them, that would have begged him to save them—to do it. To save Rory.
“So you don’t come here,” Amy says, “because it’s a reminder of what happened to them. Because you’re punishing yourself for it.”
“Yes,” the Doctor whispers.
"But it’s not gone,” she says, “it’s right here. And it’s beautiful. Why miss being on your home planet when you could still come here sometimes?”
And Amy knows he does miss it—the physical place at least—terribly. It was obvious in the way he spoke about the air and the plants and the gravity and the timelines, and in the way he touched the ground. It makes something molten hot churn inside her chest. The Doctor can go back but he refuses to while her Rory is really, truly gone. He’s never coming back and she’ll never see him or speak to him again. She’ll never even see a well-kept garden or a wedding ring and be reminded of what the real Rory was like.
But she can’t remember why it should make her angry like that, and so her temper cools.
“You said you thought the bad things in life don't spoil the good things," Amy reminds him, but the words that had been so comforting earlier taste like ashes on her tongue now.
The Doctor sighs, sounding every bit the old man he is. "Yes, but I don’t..." he tries, then breaks off, frustrated.
"Not this," he amends, "it's not just another thing."
"Then what is it?"
The Doctor thinks for a long time about this, his hand warm and dry in hers, remaining. Amy indulges an uncharacteristic bout of patience, listening to the wind murmuring through the red grass and the silver leaves that surround them: the ghostly whispers of the extinct. Amy wonders whether the sound would be acceptance or accusation, if it were translated into Gallifreyan. She wonders whether it would even matter to the Doctor, as long as he could hear the language of his people again.
“I chose this, Amelia. It didn’t just happen to me, I did it.”
Amy knows that the Doctor is asking her to condemn him. He’s expecting her to judge him and fear him and recoil from him for destroying Gallifrey, but she feels none of that. She has only his few sentences about the circumstances to go on, but they are enough for her. Maybe it’s foolish and dangerous and naïve to think so, but they are.
“It sounds like it did happen to you, though,” says Amy, “the war and all of it. You didn’t ask to have to choose between the letting the universe die or your people.”
“Amy—”
“It counts,” she tries to insist, mustering up her conviction, “so you should come here if you miss it. I’ll lay in the grass with you for as long as you want.”
They do just that for a moment, and Amy briefly thinks she might have actually gotten through to the Doctor. But it only lasts for that one moment before Amy suddenly feels it for the first time since stepping through the door: the hollowness of this place. It feels like missing something she shouldn’t know how to miss.
Seeing how beautiful this place is, seeing that something of Gallifrey survived in a way, should be a good thing, but it’s not. It doesn’t feel like that at all.
"I think I might be a hypocrite, Amelia Pond," the Doctor admits, sounding exhausted. She knows the feeling.
Some bad things are just too big, pulling your whole life into dizzying, draining orbit around them: black holes that can't be seen, only felt.
"I know," she says.
Some days—even though traveling with the Doctor is brilliant and she's constantly feeling inspired and empowered by what they do—Amy feels completely drained, like she's been swimming against a riptide. Like all her energy and vivacity has been spent on something she can't recall. Though her breathing is even, her lungs ache like they want to be heaving with the strain of it all.
And now, she knows the Doctor is running away from something that no longer exists, too. Holding each other’s hands means something more, now.
He tugs on her arm, bringing their joined hands to rest on top of his chest. She knows why: his whole planet and all his people are gone and his one, human-shaped body isn't near enough to contain it. There's nowhere else for it to go, except into his pile of good things. How it must eat at him.
In a dead language, the wind chants her dead fiancé’s name: "Rory...Rory...Rory..."
How it eats at her, too.
Amy squeezes the Doctor's hand in the only show of reassurance she can give: she is here beside him.
"Here" isn't a real place, of course, but the Doctor squeezes back anyways.