The Centaur and the Centurion

by McPoodle

Chapter 1: The Pitter-Patter of Little Hooves

Author's Note:

Note: This chapter contains spoilers for Season 5 of Doctor Who, which first aired in 2010. Read on if you've already seen that season, or just don't care!

The Centaur and the Centurion

by McPoodle

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Chapter 1: The Pitter-Patter of Tiny Hooves

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The time machine known as the TARDIS sat inside the barn at Sweet Apple Acres. It was cleverly disguised as a small blue shed, manufactured by the “Police Call Box” company. Well, maybe not that cleverly, as it was far too tall and narrow to appear the slightest bit comfortable to anything other than three fillies stacked on top of one another.

And yes before you ask, at one point the Cutie Mark Crusaders did attempt to prove this very fact. It somehow ended with all of them having to be broken out of a ten-thousand-year old lump of amber.

Inside the TARDIS—which was far bigger on the inside than it appeared on the outside—a couple of humans were sleeping in a feather bed.

Slowly, the one with long red hair opened her eyes and looked around. “Rory?” she asked her companion.

The one with short brown hair turned around to face her. “Is something wrong, Amy?” he asked.

“No,” she said quietly, “and that’s the problem. The Doctor always wakes us up early.”

Rory lifted his head and listened for a moment. “We’ve landed,” he concluded, based on the lack of the distinctive sound generated by the TARDIS when it was traversing space-time. He looked over at his wife, who was already out of bed and getting dressed. “You know, maybe he just wanted to let us sleep in for once.” He opened his mouth to say something else, but stopped himself, smiling mischievously.

Amy turned to face him, her shirt only half on. “Don’t you—” she warned.

“I wonder what time it is?” Rory asked facetiously—the most useless question you could possibly ask in a time machine.

He got a pillow in the face for that remark.

“Worth it!” he proclaimed, his voice muffled by a mouth full of fabric and goose down.

# # #

A few minutes later found the humans wandering through the halls of the TARDIS, calling out for their friend the Doctor from time to time. That stopped when they found the room with the Olympic-sized swimming pool in it.

One wall of the pool room was covered with a variety of mosaics depicting various events of interest to the Doctor. Some were from the past history of Earth, the Doctor’s favorite planet. Others showed scenes from its future, or from planets that Amy and Rory had either visited or never heard of. Rory walked over to the wall, his eyes scanning its contents.

Amy gave the wall only a glance before she set her priorities on what she wanted to do first.

“Cannonball!” she screamed, diving right into the pool, clothes and all, and utterly drenching a dismayed Rory.

If there was one thing Amy Pond prided herself on, it was knowing when and how to act like a child. Her relationship with the millennium-old humanoid alien known only as “The Doctor” stretched all the way back to her childhood, when the Doctor had arrived to investigate a most disturbing crack in the wall of young Amelia Pond’s bedroom—a crack that had been stealing away her family and friends one at a time, making it so that they had never even existed. Amelia’s Doctor had stepped into the TARDIS to get the materials he needed to help her and, well, being the Doctor, he wound up not coming back to her until she was an adult—being a time traveler, of course, he had literally just popped out and popped back in—making her The Girl Who Waited. This Doctor-shaped hole in Amelia’s childhood had shaped the person the adult Amy had become, someone who had dedicated her life to accompanying the extraordinary time traveler in his journeys through space and time. And what travels they had been! Amy had seen things that nobody back home could possibly believe. And as for Rory...

From the edge of the pool, she looked up at the young man as he was examining a mosaic of the Great Fire of London, a grim look upon his face. “Young”? Had she actually thought of him as young? Well yes, he had been her age once. But then he had become the latest victim of the Crack, his mind implanted by the Doctor’s enemies into an artificial ageless body in Roman-era Britain, programmed to kill Amy the moment he met her. He was able to overcome this programming, but only after he had mortally wounded the love of his life. Having no other choice, he placed her unconscious body into an alien artifact meant as a trap for the Doctor, and stood watch over it from the shadows until the Twenty-First Century when she could be revived, thus passing down into legend as The Last Centurion. Afterward his original human body had been brought back from nothingness, but he retained the memories of his copy, making him in a sense even older than the Doctor. Rory didn’t like to think about that experience—in fact, he told the Doctor that he had locked those memories away, which is possibly why he was so good at passing himself off as an ordinary man in his twenties. But it was at times like these, when he’d look at something and Amy knew he was thinking about some event it evoked centuries in his past, that she knew better. As she watched, Rory shook his head to clear it and turned to her, his trademark goofy grin plastered across his face.

Amy wasn’t supposed to know about Rory’s suppressed memories. Amy wasn’t supposed to know about a lot of things. But a little thing like having everyone you knew and loved stripped from your memories one by one was motivation enough for her to search out all sorts of information, even when people like the Doctor thought she was better off not knowing. Especially when people like the Doctor thought she was better off not knowing.

“I think I’m finished swimming,” she told him.

“Ready for Getting Dressed, Round 2?” he asked.

Amy smiled, and held her hand out so that Rory could help her get out of the pool.

# # #

“Doctor? Doctor? Yeah, I don’t think he’s on the TARDIS.”

Amy looked around the confines of the console room, the place from which the time machine was navigated, and also the location of the doors leading to the outside world. She tugged awkwardly at the hem of her yellow dress, the only clothing she had left to wear after drenching her last set of casual clothes. “Why are there two sets of doors leading out?” she asked herself.

Rory walked into the room a few moments later, cradling a cup and saucer in one hand. He was wearing a pinstripe brown suit that he remembered had caused the Doctor to give him an odd look the last time he wore it. “Here you go, Dear,” he said, passing the cup to Amy and then looking around. “Um, why are there two sets of doors leading out?” he asked.

“I have no idea,” Amy said before taking a sip of her tea and smiling—Rory was really good with a teakettle. “Where’s your cup?” she asked.

“I wasn’t really in the mood,” he said. “And besides, we’re out of that really good herbal blend I like. Hey, there’s an idea—do you think the Doctor’s gone shopping?”

“Maybe...” Amy said hesitantly, putting down the cup and running her hands lightly over the console’s controls.

Rory put a hand on Amy’s shoulder. “Amy, that’s your there’s-something-I’m-not-telling-you ‘maybe’.”

Amy sighed. “He goes out sometimes to do things,” she told Rory. “While we’re asleep. Nothing dangerous, or so he told me.”

“What sort of things?” Rory asked.

“To check up on people and places where he’s been, to see how well they’ve done after he’s done his save-the-planet-from-imminent-doom thing. To look in on the companions he travelled with before us. And to examine his failures, when he’s in one of his moods. And yes, I do suppose he goes shopping sometimes.” She looked up at a blank screen set high on one wall. “But I’ve got this sudden feeling that this time he’s gotten in over his head. I think we need to go find him.”

Rory looked over the controls for a bit before finding a familiar label and flicking the switch located next to it. This caused an image to appear on the screen, showing a wooden wall and a window, beyond which was an orchard of fruit trees. “Doesn’t look that bad,” he remarked.

Amy looked down at the displays on the console and sighed. “I can’t read any of these, so I have no idea where or when we are.” Those displays had been deliberately scrambled so that only the Doctor could understand them, and Amy wondered—not for the first time—if any of her predecessors among the Doctor’s companions had done something rash to deserve that scrambling.

“Well, let’s see if we can figure it out.” Rory twisted a knob to make the external camera on the TARDIS pivot around. This revealed posts and beams framing a hayloft. “Looks like a barn,” he said. “I want to say Earth.”

“...Although it’s probably ‘The Planet of the Barns’ or something equally screwy,” Amy remarked. “But if it is Earth...I’m thinking America or maybe Canada, late Nineteenth or early Twen—Hold it! Do you see what I’m seeing?” She pointed out the open doors of the barn in the image, at a creature that was walking by.

Rory squinted. “Is that...?”

“It’s a miniature zebra!” Amy exclaimed with an audible squee. “And it’s adorable!”

“Yes, Dear,” Rory said with an eye roll. Clearly, Amy was in “baby mode” again, when anything smaller and cuter than a rabid bulldog caused her to prance around on tiptoes and start talking about buying things for their as-yet nonexistent child.

Rory had only been dumb enough to tell Amy she was in “baby mode” once.

“I’m going to get a closer look!” Amy exclaimed, racing around the console to flick the switch which opened the original pair of external doors.

“Be careful, this is obviously not your ordinary farm/orchard,” Rory urged, looking intently at the view screen. The creature had already walked out of sight of the open doors, but in the brief time he had been able to observe it, Rory had noticed that the zebra had a meticulously groomed mane and a set of pale golden rings around its neck, making it likely to be a pet of some sort. Also, there was something a little unnerving about how small the horseshoes and tools he saw in the barn were. So, best to be cautious. He turned to follow Amy out of the TARDIS when he heard her scream in agony.

Racing forward, Rory grabbed Amy’s arm and yanked her roughly back into the TARDIS. He then quickly dashed over to the console to close the door and activate the TARDIS nanites, before returning to the young woman’s side to examine her. The small corner of his mind not concentrating on saving the life of his beloved barely noticed a second cry of alarm coming from outside, before the closing doors cut it off.

Amy had only managed to reach one hand out of the TARDIS before the pain had hit. It had only been exposed to the outside air for less than a second, but in that time the hand had nearly been stripped to the bone. As they watched, a gray cloud of nanites swiftly descended upon the hand, anesthetizing it before rebuilding the lost tissue. While Amy shuddered in disgust, Rory felt a bit of uncomfortable fascination—he had trained to be a nurse in order to be more like the legendary Doctor that young Amelia had so often ranted about. Now, in one brief moment, he had learned more about how the hand was put together than he had ever picked up from hours of textbook study and corpse dissection. That explained the fascination; the discomfort came from the fact that Amy had to suffer in order for him to learn this. Here was the heart of Rory Williams’ feelings about traveling with Amy and the Doctor: he was helping his wife and one true love to realize her life’s dream, but travelling the universe and plunging into danger over and over again was the last thing he’d ever want for his own life. He thought of himself sometimes as a latter day Bilbo Baggins for this reason—out battling dragons when he’d much rather stay in his cozy little hole.

Amy wiggled her reconstructed fingers a bit to make sure they were working as they should before standing back up. “Well, there must be a way to go out there,” she said. “The Doctor did it, after all.”

“That doesn’t really mean anything,” Rory said with a smile, remembering several times that the Doctor had accomplished the seemingly impossible before their unbelieving eyes.

Amy ignored him, her eyes scanning the console. “Probably that second set of doors,” she said to herself.

“Before we commit to going out there again,” Rory said, “why don’t we see if he left us a message or something?” He discretely positioned himself between Amy and the other set of doors, although he doubted he’d be able to stop her from getting to them if her mind was set on going through them.

Amy smacked her head. “Of course he’d leave us a message! Hold on...” The flick of another of the console’s several dozen switches caused a hologram of a man’s head to appear in midair.

“Just stepping out for a bit,” the hologram said in an reverberating voice. “I doubt you’ll even know that I’m gone.” The man looked young, but there was something in the voice which reminded the listener more of a favorite great-grandfather than somebody of his apparent age. “But if something does go wrong, don’t come after me. Equis is a very unusual planet, with very unusual rules. And one of them’s ‘no humans’. Just sit tight, and I’m sure I’ll work my way out of whatever mess I’ve gotten myself into and get back in time for tea.” The head then disappeared.

“Alright, then we wait,” said Rory, stepping forward and handing his wife her half-empty cup of tea.

Amy pouted before taking a sip. “I’m tired of waiting,” she whined.

“Well let me show you something I noticed in the meantime,” Rory said, walking around the console to reach the controls for the external camera. “I think the people running this place are midgets. Here, let me—what are those?”

Amy was in the act of turning her head to look at the monitor when she heard the lock to the TARDIS being engaged and the external door open and then rapidly be slammed shut. “Doctor!” she exclaimed congenially as she turned back towards the door. “You’ve got a lot of explaining to...” Her words faded in her throat as she realized the individual who had just entered the TARDIS was not who she expected.

The small yellow-furred young mare with bright red hair looked up at the tall yellow-clad young woman with bright red hair.

“What are you doing here?!” they asked in unison.

Comments

[blank check]

The recap of the season seems wastefully expository. If I hadn't watched everything you mentioned, I wouldn't really care. It would have been much better to skip all of that and get into the meat of the chapter. As it is, this looks more like a mix between a prologue and a preface.

[jwizard]

4971229

While you do have a point, it's not for your benefit.

It's for those that haven't watched much Doctor Who.

Like me for instance. The knowledge I've gleaned about the Whoverse is from those good ponies who put in useless exposition bits.

Or like to be reminded of things.