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The TARDIS was not a place of safety, not anymore. When Rory had seen the console room lit in shades of green, his first thought was that this was wrong. Then the voice spoke, and he knew it was dangerous. House was happy to toy with him and Amy, and he had an entire TARDIS at his disposal. Corridors would twist and writhe causing them to stumble, doors would close at just the right time to separate them, even their minds would be altered to plunge them into darkness or to see a corpse running in the place of their partner.
At first, they had been running through corridors of grey metal but slowly the walls began to change. White alabaster, that a stubborn part of Rory's mind insisted on calling bone, was intertwined with the familiar walls like thread on a loom. Clusters of circular indents upon the walls became more and more common as they ran.
'Simply seeing you run around like rats in a maze is not entertainment enough.' House's voice boomed out from above as the corridor's roundels brightened from the dull yellow they had been to a verdant green.
The corridor turned to a corner, albeit one that was splintered. Behind and to the right was House's domain and yet the crevice in the corner of the wall wasn't lit by green. Rory looked to Amy and found agreement in her eyes. They began to sidle through it much to House's confusion. 'Where are you going? There should not be anything there.' Neither of them responded.
The crack was longer than it had looked from outside. It had been several minutes and they were still shuffling along sideways. Rory couldn't see much of what was up ahead but he could tell that the gloom was lightening slowly, he became able to make out the shape of Amy but not much more. Eventually the crack widened out into a corridor where the roundels weren't lit at all, green or otherwise. No House. Rory blew a breath of relief.
'I think we're safe.' Immediately after he said that, clicking noises started coming in from all around. It was the sound of many many-legged creatures scuttling towards them. 'Run?' If his voice sounded resigned, could anyone really blame him?
'Run,' Amy said.
Rory and Amy burst into a dusty room that evidently hadn't been visited in centuries, the butterflies pinned to its door had crumbled as they shoved their way in. The door slammed shut behind them, the sound of a lock clicking accompanied that motion. The part of Rory's mind that called the walls bone was getting louder, especially since their colour had transitioned from snow-white to a more yellowed hue. 'Why does the TARDIS have bone spiders?!' Amy demanded of the air as she gasped for breath, holding herself up against the mushroom at the centre of the room.
'Well, they used to be my scouts,' the air answered. Its voice was one that felt as though it were demanding trust of Rory in a similar way to how the Doctor's does. He turned to see dust rise up to form an image of a man with grey hair, his chest shrouded in a smoking jacket but still noticeably near non-existent from a gunshot wound that looked to have been inflicted by a shotgun. 'The TARDIS usually keeps them contained here but the seal between here and there has decayed with the Matrix gone.'
'Do you know what happened to the TARDIS?' Amy questioned but the dust entity continued speaking as though it hadn't heard her.
'I'm sure I will be next to diminish. You should leave, for your own safety. This console room has seen terrible atrocities and I would prefer your deaths not join them.' The dust fell to the floor, whatever force that had been animating it was gone for the moment. Rory tried operating the controls but none of them worked. They could only move forward as backwards, even if the door could open, would be straight into the legs of those spiders which looked much too sharp to be comfortable.
As they left, Rory glimpsed, out of the corner of his eye, the material of the floor wearing away as though it were part of a timelapse where centuries were compressed into seconds. Unfortunately, this fraying did not stop at the threshold of the console room but continued out into the bone corridor, fragments cracking and falling away to reveal marrow and then the flesh beneath. Amy didn't seem aware of it, so Rory remained silent, perhaps it was another of House's tricks. The veins of this flesh flowed with coruscating golden blood. When Rory looked too closely at the flashes in the ichor, for a moment he found himself-
-in another time, another place, facing a middle-aged man who shrieks and rants and curses the cowardice of an elderly woman as she walks away. She wasn't ready to ascend to the next level of the Game. They are alone in a cavernous cathedral that was once the Ship. The woman disappears from sight as the man waits and waits and waits. No-one comes. Candlelight gleams off the knife that had been resting on his knee as he lifts it to his neck and draws it acr-
-but then Amy touched his arm. Rory blinked. He was back in the corridor rather than that ancient church where someone had once been full of fervent belief. He reassured her that he was alright. He could tell that she didn't believe him, but that was fine. He didn't believe himself either. The next time the ichor glowed in the veins, Rory averted his eyes. He did not wish to get dragged into another phantasm of history; many things had happened in this ship and not all of them were pleasant. Even his thoughts felt different, with words that upon another glance he could not fathom the meaning of. It was presumably some convulsion or after-shock of being thrust into an alternate timeline. Because that is surely what that was, this Ship that imitated a cathedral sounded like the TARDIS and yet it was not a form he could envisage this TARDIS taking.
The feeling of his thoughts not being his own faded somewhat. Amy was either unseeing of the different walls or stubborn enough to push through these visions, as she never flinched or looked away from the glistening tubes carved out by little fragments of history as they streaked through the TARDIS' body. Well, Rory supposed his mind was still not entirely his own. Not when little thoughts such as that randomly popped up.
It wasn't the first time that this sort of thing had happened, Rory still occasionally feels the Lone Centurion rear up in his head, fragments of memory seeping through from a past that no longer was. Whenever he sees Latin, it is always instinctually translated for him before he can wrestle that life back into the door in his head, shutting it away behind every lock he can imagine. He refuses to remember those two thousand years spent alone in a world where the stars were gone. He could have borne never aging and never dying if only he had Amy with him. But he didn't, so he locks those days away. He doesn't want to remember all those times he nearly didn't make it to the present. He doesn't want to be able to imagine Amy waking from the Pandorica only to find an exhibit on the mysterious death of a Roman centurion centuries out of his time.
Fundamentally, the Lone Centurion was still him, just older and shaped by a different life. But these new snippets were from a mind so much larger and older than his own, he couldn't hope to contain them behind any sort of obstruction. The Doctor's thoughts were pushing their way into his head whether he wanted them there or not.
'The further into the TARDIS you get, the more time ceases to exist.' Oh, now he was hearing them. Auditory hallucinations are never a good sign. 'You see, the TARDIS is a living being with blood made of history. Well, that's not entirely true but it's a good enough approximation. She tries to keep things consistent for us in the console room and surrounding areas, making sure that one moment comes after another but beyond that, everything happens at once. Out there, you could find anything from her birth to her death. Those flashes in the ichor is the TARDIS trying to shunt them aside for your safety, so you don't physically wander in on them. Oh, and I'm not a hallucination.' Rory wasn't sure whether that was a good thing. 'I know that's exactly what a hallucination would say but I'm just fulfilling this little bootstrap paradox from the future. After all, I needed to have said this at some point for it to be relayed to you via the after-effects of breaching those shunted histories. You are getting stray thoughts from my head though. Since the deeper you venture into her, the more the boundary between TARDIS and Time Lord starts to blur.'
'Thank you for that helpful explanation, Doctor,' Rory muttered. Amy turned her head towards him from her position up ahead, her brows furrowed in confusion. Another mark for that being a hallucination then. It was then that the corridor shook, diverting her attention. The walls were thrumming with some barely restrained energy, the golden lines that had crept through the flesh were starting to turn green. Amy broke into a run, Rory followed, only for the floor and walls to twist with such force and alarcity (a word thrown up from the Doctor's head) that Rory was reminded of a bone being broken. (One thing the Doctor was all too familiar with.)
'So this is where you are.' The air rumbled with House's voice. 'No, don't look down, not yet. I am curious to see how long this will last. The rules of physics within this timeship are wondrously malleable.' Amy was the first to look, and as she plummented, Rory's eyes were dragged down with her to see that there was only air beneath his feet. He fell.
When Rory came back to consciousness, the first thing he was aware of was the texture of the floor. It was soft and squishy against his cheek, leaving a orangey-red residue on his hands and knees as he pushed himself up off the floor. A quick glance around found Amy up ahead, her back turned towards him. Something was strange about the walls, they seemed to merge into the floor in a manner that didn't seem crafted as such, more evolved.
'Is it just me, or does it look like a stomach?' Rory questioned as he poked the wall, it quivered. This was not at all reassuring. He wiped his hands off on his trousers, and continued onwards towards Amy.
'Maybe it's what the TARDIS really looks like,' Amy said, her voice slightly toneless. She was staring off into the red fog that the corridor faded into. Rory thought about it, the idea made a certain sort of sense, especially since this supersized artery resembled a corridor. Instead of the grey metal or bone-white walls, there was glistening blood-red flesh. Every few metres, the corridor was interrupted by a hexagonal outcropping of bone, the only remnant of what this corridor had once been made of and perhaps on another level of reality was still made of.
'Maybe it's House doing this,' Rory suggested. 'Soon he'll be monologuing like a movie trailer.' The joke shrivelled up and died in the empty air, which was strangely odourless and clean despite the organic nature of the walls.
'It's not House. We're trapped here, Rory. So deep within the TARDIS that the Doctor doesn't even come this far,' she continued on with barely a breath between sentences, words flying out at such a pace that Rory suspected she kept talking because she had to, because she might break if she stopped. She had always been able to see more than he could. 'Look at the console room and his study, they're full of clutter and rubbish. These corridors are missing all that, the Doctor hasn't been here. He probably won't think to look. He'll assume we're dead while we wait for him to find us, slowly dying of starvation or thirst or age or maybe we just decide to get it over with.' Those last words were almost unintelligible with how quiet her voice had become, but Rory still understood them, he wished he didn't.
'It'll be alright Amy, in the end.' He had to believe that. 'We'll make our way to some more familiar areas, the Doctor will find us, House will be defeated.' Rory wasn't paying much attention to the words coming out of his mouth as it worried him that Amy was so affected by all this but he couldn't help her, not yet. The most important thing when dealing with trauma is to remove the subject from that traumatic environment.
'It's not House that scares me but all this.' Amy gestured about her, meaning the TARDIS itself. 'It hid itself so easily. Pretended to be technology rather than an organic being.' Her voice was hollow, detached. Disassociation in action. If not for Rory pulling her along, she might have stopped walking entirely. They had to keep moving, the TARDIS was protecting them from House but at the cost of not hiding its true nature. That nature was infinitely more dangerous than House could ever be. It was this thought that allowed Rory to make a decision.
They had to go back. To House. He might try to play with their lives like toys on a board but at least they would be somewhere where the very geography wasn't harmful, where they wouldn't be constantly reminded of how wrong it all was while travelling down what looked suspiciously like a digestive system. Rory took the first branch away from it that he could. As they moved further away, the corridors losing their organic nature, Amy slowly began to return to herself. She was aware of what was around her and able to walk without support by the time they reached corridors that were panelled with wood. The annoying part of Rory's mind kept screeching Lungbarrow at them, whatever that meant. Rory would be glad to have the Doctor's thoughts fade from his head.
Once they got to the white alabaster walls that they had escaped through in the first place, the roundels flared with emerald light. Amy had a haunted look in her eyes but she managed to pull herself together enough to take the lead. 'Hello there House.'
'Amy, Rory. Greetings to you both. Shall we get back to business?'
When it was all over, the TARDIS's mind restored to its natural body and House exorcised, the consequences of seeing what they saw in there, deep in the TARDIS, made themselves apparent. Rory could still feel the shape of the Doctor's thoughts, if not always their contents. They mostly felt like sorrow and regret, as the Doctor gazed upon his damaged friends, and knew in his hearts that he was at least partially responsible for what Amy and Rory had gone through. Amy flinched every time she entered the console room and caught sight of the central console; Rory suspected that she could still see the truth of the TARDIS, despite having returned to these safer areas where a veil should have been drawn back over her eyes like it had been for him.
Neither of them could even get a good night's sleep in their new room which, despite the Doctor's claim, had a double bed. Rory's dreams were of the console room viewed as it perhaps truly was, arteries of golden blood and history all flowing into a central console that looked more like a pustule than a device, the stream was filtered through a time rotor made of teeth that nibbled at the Doctor as he operated it, the dream always ended right as the TARDIS noticed his presence and was about to descend on him. When he awoke, he usually found himself looking at an equally awake Amy who herself had just woken up from a nightmare. Rory didn't have to ask what she dreamed of.
One night, he woke up alone. He followed the soft sounds of conversation to the butterfly room where the Doctor and Amy were talking quietly.
'I really don't think we can sleep here anymore Doctor.'
'Alright. I'll take the TARDIS to a quiet world and get the sleeping bags out.' It was strange to not hear any levity in his quiet, sad voice. On his way out, he stopped to talk to Rory. 'You should talk to your wife. She needs someone who can understand her.' They both looked towards Amy, as she gazed up at the butterflies that were shimmering under the moonslight in this simulated night sky. 'I don't have the right perspective as frankly, I'm more similar to the TARDIS than I am to you and her,' the Doctor explained, his eyes reflecting a somehow kaleidoscopic light, before he left for the console room.
Rory came up to Amy and they watched the butterflies together in silence. One that was broken by Amy asking 'What was your nightmare about?'
'Our bedroom being consumed by a rising tide of blood. We drowned in our sleep.'
'The usual, then.'
'Yeah. And you?'
'The usual too.' She didn't need to elaborate, Rory remembered that time all too well himself.
Eventually the Doctor returned, and led them out into a grassy plain, the TARDIS hidden behind an outcropping of rock. There were two sets of sleeping bags set out by a campfire under a vibrant night sky. 'I'll see you two in the morning,' the Doctor said as he sat down next to the campfire, staring up at the stars. Amy and Rory both headed for the sleeping bags. For the first time in days, their sleep did not end with a ragged gasping for breath as they were wrenched out of a nigh-incomprehensible sight, but instead it ended with the dawn light tickling their eyelids. That and the smell of sausages whirling their way into their nostrils.
'Good morning Ponds.'
'Doctor, what are you doing?' Amy asked, blinking the sleep out of her eyes.
'Isn't it obvious? I'm making you breakfast,' the Doctor said as he held a pan over the roaring campfire. 'This is the Eye of Orion, the most tranquil place in the universe. I almost never get here, too many other things to do.' He impaled two sausages on a fork each and held them out to Amy and Rory while keeping the pan on the fire to cook a further set of sausages. 'As such, we're not jumping back into the TARDIS yet. Today will be a day of rest, no adventures. Just peace and quiet.'
'Didn't you say that you could never really get the hang of restful?' Rory questioned as he extracted himself from the cocoon he had made of his sleeping bag.
'I'm sure I can find something to do here.' The Doctor continued to sit by the campfire, even after breakfast was finished.
'You're being weirdly helpful. Normally by now, you'd have jumped up and scurried away, looking for the next interesting thing,' Amy said, her suspicion evident.
'It's because he feels guilty,' Rory cut in, looking the Doctor straight in the eye. 'He blames himself for sending us back to the TARDIS, right where House could mess with us and drive us into the worst parts of his ship.'
The Doctor sighed. 'You do realise, Rory, that the connection goes both ways. You're not exactly fine yourself after what you saw. Neither of you are. My home, my TARDIS can be wonderful but also genuinely dangerous. I've watched too many people wander off into those corridors never to return. Most of them were enemies, an unfortunate few were friends.' The Doctor took a deep breath in. 'I found one of their bodies yesterday. Even if I find her alive in the depths of my TARDIS, I'll never be able to see that sharp toothy grin she was so proud of in the same way again.'
'They don't all die, do they? I thought I saw someone in the kitchen a while ago,' Amy asked.
'Dressing gown, slippers, smoking a cigarette?' The Doctor mimed those characteristics and continued speaking when Amy nodded. 'That was Fitz. He's an old friend of mine and probably the third-closest thing you'll find to the child of the TARDIS. He's been around in there for centuries which is mostly my fault. The TARDIS keeps him away from the most dangerous parts of herself.'
'How is that your fault?' Rory asked in confusion.
'A very long series of events that involves Ogrons, paradoxes, and a remembrance tank that turned out to be a loom. It's not something that would happen these days.' The Doctor smiled a smile that was meant to be reassuring. 'Anyhow, I've gotten off-topic. Where were we…'
'The TARDIS being dangerous,' said Amy.
'Yes. Even in her right mind, she doesn't fully understand humans. You're like ants or bacteria to her. When House took control, he made certain that she wasn't in her right mind, she didn't even have a mind. All that was left was a body with a handful of instincts ingrained into it. Enough to interfere with House's control, enough to try and keep you safe, but not enough to maintain those seals. You probably know better than me why she maintains them.' Amy refused to linger on the thoughts that felt like they were heading down a helter-skelter and instead asked a question.
'If we're like ants, what are you to the TARDIS?'
'I'm not entirely sure,' the Doctor admitted. 'Sometimes it feels like I'm like a monkey to her, other times an equal.'
'Does that bother you?'
'Nah. You can get used to anything in nine hundred years.' A smile slipped onto the Doctor's face as he spoke. 'After all, she's got my best interests in mind.'
'It can't just be the guilt that's bothering you.' The smile disappeared so quickly that Rory almost looked down to the ground, expecting to see its shattered remains. 'You don't normally notice when you've gotten off-track in a conversation, it's usually us who have to remind you.' Amy had always been perceptive, for better and for worse.
'Yeah, it's not just the guilt. That stuff is par for the course. Really, it's that I can't do anything to help you,' the Doctor declared. 'It's not some monster I can defeat. You're up against your own brains.'
'We just need time.' pleaded Amy.
'And you'll get it. All the time you need.' For some reason, it was always the Doctor's sad smile that reminded Amy how old he was. 'But if you want to keep doing this, travelling in the TARDIS, you can't sleep in it. We'll do this instead. Okay?' His eyes searched Amy's and Rory's for consent and found it.
From then on, the days were normal. Full of terror and monsters and running, just as they always were. Most importantly, there was no time to think. Neither Amy or Rory could stop to reflect on things. That was what the nights were for. Some nights were spent on the worlds they had just visited, with the people they had helped. The Doctor usually wheeled out a feast from the TARDIS and held court. He told stories about all sorts of things, from worlds made of watercress to gods playing games with marbles the size of flies. These stories were to entertain, always with happy endings, always with extravagant gestures to make children giggle. Always keeping the attention off of Amy and Rory who usually had a more private supper after which they would settle down to sleep. Once the feast ended, the Doctor too settled down near them, guarding them physically. He had a faint hope that the presence of a friend would help them mentally. If there was a way he could take on their trauma and bear it for them, he would take it instantly. After all, if anyone deserved the bad dreams, it was him.
Other nights were spent more peacefully. The Doctor would land the TARDIS somewhere and put out tents or sleeping bags depending on the view. And there usually was one. Whether it was chromatic meteor showers or frozen oceans of sand, the three of them usually spent the evening in the same way, playing board games or discussing interesting questions with a meal before choosing to call it a night and going to bed.
Not every night was good. Sometimes Amy awoke with a scream dying out in her throat for a reason she couldn't remember. The Doctor was always there to give her a hug and reassure her, they often talked until the dawn came or she fell back to sleep. When Rory awoke from his dreams, the Doctor was also there for him. Often offering a fresh cup of hot chocolate and a consoling smile because the Doctor had an idea as to what was going on in Rory's head. But slowly, the bad nights got fewer and farther between. Amy became able to step over the threshold of the TARDIS without flinching, Rory stopped hearing the Doctor's thoughts. They were even able to sleep in the TARDIS again.
It wasn't perfect by any means; sometimes in the wrong light, Amy would glimpse a reflection of the fleshy walls in the glass floor of the console room or Rory would wake up from another dream of the worst kind and panickedly search for Amy in their bed. But they didn't stop these quiet evenings spent around a campfire, watching the embers float upwards from the flame while the Doctor stared up at the stars, his eyes refracting their light into a thousand different colours. The tradition didn't stop with Amy and Rory either. Hundreds of years and several faces later, the Doctor would have a quiet dinner with a friend before getting up from the chair by the fire and sweeping her arm wide to show them the glimmering chasms of light that lay before them atop the cliff , the wonders of the universe didn't always have to be seen out of the corner of your eye as you run away from some deadly danger. The Doctor sat down after her spiel on the exact minerals that composed the chasm walls and the gases that reacted with it and each other to create that beautiful effect. There was no trail here to follow for answers, no slight improvement to make to the TARDIS, no conversation to avoid since Yaz was slowly dozing off. The Doctor breathed in and out and was at peace.