Title: The Children’s Story
Author: sarah531
Rating: PG13
Characters: Amy and Rory’s children Alec and Johnny; totally OCs- plus Amy, Rory, Aunt Sharon and the Doctor
Summary: Alec William Pond is about to discover that the bedtime stories his parents told so well were true.
The Children’s Story
3. One Last Crack
The next day Alec was sick. It was all the excitement, he knew, the thrill of learning the secret, of learning so much so fast. He supposed he’d bottled it up somehow, like when he’d been to see a horror film with Dad and had been perfectly fine throughout, then sick in the car on the way back. You get it from your mother, Dad had said once, she kept the bad things in…
Mum and Dad let him stay off school, of course, and Mum went off to her office and Dad to the hospital. Alec was trusted to stay at home, in bed, and he did. At around lunchtime he heard his dad come in.
“You alright, Alec?” he called.
“Yeah,” Alec called back.
“If you want any food, there’s plenty in the cupboard, ok?”
“I’m not hungry. Okay.”
Alec lay back in his bed and tried to read a book, but he realised after a few minutes that he was quite hungry. He put on a dressing gown and went downstairs…and heard Dad’s raised voice, and another voice, a woman.
It was Sharon, in the kitchen.
“She needs help,” Sharon said. “Amy needs to be put away. Not permenantly, Rory, she can still have a life, she needs help.”
“I didn’t invite you in,” Dad said angrily. “You need to leave.”
“I’ve tried everything,” Sharon said. “I thought I’d have one last crack at you. Amelia’s deluded. She believes in impossible things. What sort of life are Alec and John going to have if she teaches them there’s…there’s monsters under the bed?”
“Those impossible things,” Dad snapped, “you’ve seen them! You were at the wedding, Sharon. You let the Doctor right into your mind! How can you be doing this?”
“It was just tricks,” Sharon said. “He was an actor, it was done with mirrors and special effects. And I’m not going to sit by and watch two innocent kids get caught up in their mother’s delusions.”
“Leave,” said Dad.
“Rory,” Aunt Sharon said, “can’t you see, you’ll hurt them.”
“You’re the one doing that,” Dad said. His mouth was set in a hard line and his fists were clenched. Alec had never, ever seen him that angry. “Sharon. Listen. This is a loving family- you’ve never had one, maybe you don’t get it. Me and Amy love our kids more than anything. We’d happily fight and die for them. Understand?”
“I understand,” Sharon said. She was wearing an expression of kindly, patronizing sympathy and Alec suddenly realised, with horror, that he hated her. He had never hated before and it was a terrible feeling: the only thing he could compare it to was when he was playing a video game, and it was a really difficult bit where you fought a fire-breathing monster and he tried over and over again and finally gave up and threw the controls against the wall in a sudden burst of rage and broke them, and Dad shouted at him. He had felt terrible, and now it was much worse.
“If you change your mind you know where I am.” Sharon said.
She let herself out. Dad sat at the kitchen table, put his head in his hands for a couple of seconds, and then looked up and saw Alec.
“Oh. Alec!” He stood up and ran to him. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”
Alec just nodded. It was only just beginning to really get to him, that he might be taken away. That he might have to leave Mum and Dad, maybe Johnny too, leave his bedroom and his X-Box and his laptop and his art set with the fifty different colours (he was thinking of tiny and irrelevent things now, but somehow they still seemed to matter), leave his whole life.
He started to cry.
“Hey, hey…” Dad said. He held him tightly. “Alec, she’s not going to succeed. I promise. You’re staying with us.”
“Uh-huh,” said Alec, still crying and feeling like a little kid.
“I promise,” Dad said again, and Alec chose to believe him. He let go and swiped his face with his sleeve.
“I think I’ll have something to eat…”
“You do that,” Dad said. “I’ll make you your favourite. Beans on toast.”
*
One week later and Mum and Dad were both sat at the breakfast table when Alec and Johnny came downstairs, something that rarely happened as both had jobs, and everything was silent as the children took their places.
“Sharon is sending a social worker in,” Dad said. “Things have been talked over, we’re under observation now, but that’s it.”
“Daddy…” said Johnny.
“You’re not going anywhere,” Dad said firmly. “Any idiot could see we’re a loving family, alright? Everything’s going to be fine.”
Alec nodded, although that was more for Johnny’s sake than his, and his mother offered up a gloomy sort of smile.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” she said. “No. Honestly. It is.”
*
Sometimes you have to fight to get what you want…
When Alec got back from school the house was empty. Mum was working, Johnny and Dad were at football practice again. They’d be back soon, but for now everything felt quiet, and sort of bad…
Alec thought about his mother’s diary, as he had been doing for the past week. He felt terrible to think of it, his mother suffering because of him. Except not because of him, but it was still sort of his doing. And in the back of his mind he wondered if he’d been an easy baby, his first memory was of jumping in the deep end of a swimming pool, terrifying Mum and Dad as the lifeguard dragged him out…had he been a crying child, keeping them awake, shredding their nerves and igniting their tempers?
He wanted to look for the diary. He just wanted to know. If he’d been a bad child. If he could put right what he might have put wrong.
The diary entries, they’re from around those times…
He wanted to understand, and wanted to help.
He turned on the television so the house didn’t seem so quiet, and walked across the carpet to the cupboard where the blue box was kept. He opened it, moved the box, nothing.
In truth he thought it was probably in the attic, hidden away. So it was the attic he ventured into, torch in hand, and he went through every box- through his and Johnny’s old baby clothes, Dad’s old nurse’s scrubs, old comics and magazines…
Downstairs the front door unlocked, and he heard Dad, and Johnny, and Mum.
“Alec, you up there?” Mum called up the stairs, the ladder to the attic hidden from her view.
“Yeah,” he called back, hoping she wouldn’t come up to see him. “Yeah, just in my room.”
As he spoke those words he saw a little book in the corner of a box, a pink book with AMY written on the front. Without allowing himself to consider the implications of what he was doing, he opened it to the first day.
Back was all it said.
He turned the page and kept reading. And he felt so guilty, and wanted to put it down, but he couldn’t-
Not used to it, not used to love without fear. I used to think I loved the Doctor, but I decided I didn’t after all. Had a fling, had half a fling, had something, grew up next day. But didn’t, maybe, didn’t…
Alec’s heart pounded, but the next pages, he knew upon seeing them, were the reason the diary had been locked away. Written in pink, dated to the year of Alec’s birth-
Once upon a time there was a girl, and she was young and silly and probably a bit stupid, killed her baby to save her husband. Didn’t know she was doing it, but she did, and she didn’t really do it but she DID.
The tiniest crack opened in Alec Pond’s heart.
She could do anything, saved her husband from death again without even knowing she did it, rewrote the whole universe, saved her parents, saved her best friend, her best friend who saved all worlds…
Killed her baby to save her husband, didn’t deserve another…
Alec put it down, hands shaking.
Killed her baby…
He sat there for a while, not moving. He could hear voices downstairs- Johnny and Dad were playing video games, Mum would be cooking. She loved to cook, to come up with weird food, to mix everything up. Something from the Doctor? It had always been something from the Doctor. And she’d had a fling with him, and she’d, and she’d…
He picked up the diary.
He went downstairs and past the living room, past Dad and Johnny, to the kitchen. Mum was cooking, like he’d expected. She looked up and smiled at him, and it faded when she noticed the look on his face, and he put the little book on the kitchen table and said in a frightened voice-
“Did you do that?”
And pointed to the words in pink on the page.
Mum moved forward slowly, like she was facing one of the monsters she’d woven into a bedtime story, and picked up the yellowing pages.
“Oh,” she said softly.
“Mum, you have to tell me. Did you…”
“No!” she said, voice raised just a little, hand covering the papers. “Alec, sweety, sit down.”
Alec did.
“When we were…” she began. Then she stopped. “Once, me and your dad…we were sort of dragged into our dreams. That’s the important bit, okay, we made our own decisions but we made them in a dream.”
Alec nodded.
“And…there was this man, not the Doctor, a bad man. He gave us two worlds and made us choose, made me choose, between the world where I married your father and lived here, or the world where your father and me kept travelling in the TARDIS. Your father’s world, or the Doctor’s. In one world I was pregnant, in the other I wasn’t.”
“And I was the baby,” Alec said, not whispering, trying to sound grown up, “I was your baby.”
“No!” Mum said. “No, you’re my baby now, you weren’t then.”
“What happened?” Alec asked. “What happened to the baby?”
“Your father…” Mum trailed off. “I saw him die, right in front of me. And I had to choose a world, and I chose the one with him in it, understand? But to do that I had to die, and I was mad with grief, I didn’t think. I didn’t think about the baby. And then it all faded away like a dream…”
Alec kept listening.
“I woke up and I had everything, I had my boyfriend and my best friend and the whole world. And I never thought about it much again, that baby, until I had a real child.”
“Which was me.”
“Yes. I had you and I didn’t think I deserved you. How could I when I’d done something so horrible?” And she clenched her hands into fists and pulled herself up onto the worktop, which seemed like the action of a much younger woman. “I sort of…” And she trailed off.
Alec looked at her and tried to imagine it -Dad dead, Mum sobbing, and the whole house seemed to come down. He wondered where the Doctor had been.
Mum stayed where she was, the food forgotten, and she stared at her son with such hopeful eyes. Alec considered the fling (the affair?) and decided it should wait until later.
“I’m sorry,” Mum said.
“Why?” Alec asked.
“For not telling you.”
Alec just nodded. He didn’t know what to say. It felt a little like he’d just found out he’d been meant to have an older sibling, except they’d died in childbirth, and his parents had kept quiet because the grief was too great.
“Alec,” Mum said, “Are you okay?” She said it in a sad and nervous tone.
“Yeah,” Alec said. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
Dad came in, a worried expression on his face. Some sort of parent sixth-sense had led him to the kitchen, and Mum gave him an I’ll-tell-you-later look.
“I’m just finishing dinner,” she said to Johnny, who was entering the room behind Dad. “Want to lay the table, sweety?”
Johnny looked at them all, trying to decide if what was going on was anything to worry about, and then nodded and went through to the kitchen.
Dad picked up some plates. “Come along, Alec,” he said kindly. “It’s Italian night, you don’t want to miss it.” He put a hand on his shoulder, and the whole family gathered in the dining room, Mum wiping the sadness from her face and telling Johnny what she’d added to the lasagne to make it extra special…looking at them all, smiling…
There was a noise.
They all heard it at the same time. It filled the room and echoed around-
“That’s the TARDIS,” Mum whispered.
Alec said nothing, Johnny gave a little gasp.
Dad looked at Mum.
“Quick!” he said, and each parent took a child’s hand, and they ran outside, bursting out of the front door and onto the grass, seeing it, seeing him-
“Ponds!” the Doctor yelled. “Lovely to see you!”