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locker_monsterTitle: The Boy Who Waited (41/49)
Rating: PG
Characters: Rory, with appearances from Barbara
Timeline: set between "The Pandorica Opens" and "The Big Bang"
Summary: London, 1996. Barbara Wright prepares the Pandorica for exhibit at the National Museum. As the work unfolds, she recounts the lengthy history of the stone box and its loyal protector, the Lone Centurion.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who belongs to the BBC. Everything else is me taking liberties with history.
A/N: A huge thank you to my beta
punch_kicker15. This story would still be sitting on my hard drive if it weren't for you.
London, 1868 A.D.
“Get down!”
The warning came too late. The shot was fired and within the tiny confines of the London sewers it sounded like an explosion. Sore ears was the last thing on Rory’s mind, though.
Being shot was a tad more painful than being stabbed, he found.
The bullet had the fortune to hit him in the upper left thigh, right in the only place that his various pieces of armour didn’t cover. It was a cheap pistol, and a poor shot, and the projectile remained lodged in Rory’s plastic flesh instead of passing right through him. He cried out as his leg crumbled beneath him. The bullet felt red hot, like an ember was trapped in his skin, but he knew it was just in his head.
“Centurion!” Harkness started to kneel down to check on him.
“I’m fine,” Rory insisted. “Just go!” Up ahead, their target was making a quick getaway, the light of his lantern receding into the distance.
Harkness didn’t need to be told twice. He picked up the lantern Rory had been carrying. “What I wouldn’t give for a torch right now.” With a revolver in one hand and the lantern in the other, Harkness wasn’t exactly a picture of agility, but with no illumination down in the tunnels there was no other choice. He took off after their target, his boots splashing in the muddy water.
Rory allowed himself a second to moan with pain. The bullet was really lodged in there; he’d need a pair of forceps to get it out. As great as it was to watch technology develop, in that moment he really wished that gunpowder hadn’t been invented. An arrow may have been slower and less deadly, but at least it was bigger. Rory could have torn out an arrow shaft from his thigh with no problems.
“Complain later,” he muttered to himself and he hauled himself to his feet. He tried to put weight on his left leg and he was rewarded with a nice fiery stab of pain that made him grit his teeth. As much as it hurt, he forced himself to take a step forward. He took another and another until he was hobbling along at half speed.
The light from the two lanterns had all but disappeared. At the far end of the tunnel he saw Harkness disappear around a bend. The only consolation that Rory could come up with was that their target was equally handicapped as Harkness. It was hard to turn and shoot when you had a heavy lantern in one hand. Harkness had the advantage as he could shoot ahead of him without needing to twist or turn.
Too bad the captain couldn’t take the shot even if one presented itself. The piece of alien technology strapped to their thief’s back would be in the way.
Rory had always assumed that nothing alien remained on Earth once all the stars had disappeared. With no other civilizations in the universe it was impossible to have technology from another planet. Harkness had told him otherwise. If something alien had arrived and was still on Earth the day the stars disappeared, then it still existed. It was just petrified, like the Daleks and the Cybermen beneath Stonehenge. The object wouldn’t work, but it was still an oddity and it could influence the progress of human technology. Rory had no idea what their thief had stolen, but Harkness thought it was dangerous enough to pursue.
The sewers. It had to be the sewers. This couldn’t have been a chase aboveground with streetlamps and plenty of open space.
Another shot rang out, this one muffled by distance. Rory didn’t hear a cry of pain but he did hear footsteps running off. If Harkness had shot their target, he would have no reason to stay on the move.
Pushing past the pain, Rory picked up his pace. Without lights to show him the way, he relied on his other senses to guide him. The smell of freshly burnt gunpowder grew stronger the further along he went. When he reached the bend in the tunnel, he spotted a small pinprick of light. “Harkness!”
No reply.
His leg felt ready to fall off by the time he reached the dropped lantern. Lying in the shallow water next to it was Harkness. His gaze was blank. A neat bullet hole marred the right side of his forehead. Rory collapsed into a heap next to the captain’s body, unable to stand any longer. Futilely, he reached out and put his fingers to Harkness’ throat. He was still warm, but there was no pulse. The man was dead.
Rory felt his whole body sag as he let out an unsteady breath. “I’m sorry.” He hadn’t known Harkness for long and he really couldn’t count him as a friend, but he had been an ally.
With a grunt, he stood up. He didn’t have the strength right now to carry Harkness’ body out of the tunnels. He’d have to find a way out and then come back later. The man deserved a proper burial even if he knew no one in this era. Rory reached down to pick up the lantern.
Harkness drew in a deep and very loud breath, causing his entire body to spasm.
“Jeez!” Rory flung himself back and he collided with the curved wall of the tunnel. He was glad he didn’t have a heartbeat; he’d probably be having a coronary right now.
For a moment, all Harkness could do was breathe. Then he noticed Rory. He sat up, moving clumsily, like he had just gotten out of bed.
“You’re not dead.”
“You’re not bleeding.” Harkness pointed to his thigh.
Rory glanced down. There was a hole in his trousers, but that was it. The absence of blood was quite noticeable. He looked back at Harkness and saw that the man’s bullet wound was quickly disappearing. The skin was knitting back together, healing right before his eyes. This was completely impossible.
They stared at each other, not saying a word. It wasn’t as if the stories they had to tell would be unbelievable. Both of them just seemed unwilling to admit that either of them were something more than human. Finally, Harkness stood up. The back of his coat was soaked and neither of them smelled that great either. “Do you need help?” He gestured to Rory’s leg.
“Yeah.”
Harkness picked up the lantern and handed it to Rory. He positioned himself at Rory’s left side and encouraged him to lean on him to take some of the weight off his leg. Rory slung his arm over Harkness’ broad shoulders while Harkness gripped him around the middle. They lurched down the tunnel, back the way they came, looking like they were in a three-legged race.
For a few minutes the only sounds were the creak and clank of Rory’s armour and the splashing of their footsteps. Rory was starting to wonder if they were going to ignore this completely when Harkness said, rather simply, “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
A straight exchange. Rory could handle that. “I’m an Auton.” He figured Harkness was well travelled enough to know what that was.
“Plastic, huh? Do you have one of those guns in your hand? I knew an Auton who could do some surprising things with that hand…” Harkness trailed off with an unashamed grin.
“Do you always have to do that?” asked Rory.
“Do what?”
“Flirt!”
Harkness laughed and the sound bounced off the walls. “You could always flirt back if it’ll make you feel better.”
Rory was suddenly regretting asking the question. “What about you? What’s your story?” He didn’t care if the change of topics had no subtly at all.
“I’m immortal. I can’t die. It makes me a fixed point in time.”
The tunnel began to slope up, forcing Rory to tighten his hold around Harkness. “A fixed point?” He bit back a cringe as his leg gave a painful twinge. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not really sure. It’s something a friend told me once and he knows about these sort of things. But the important thing to know is that if I’m dead, I always come back. So don’t panic if I get taken down.”
Rory was starting to see that he and Harkness had a lot more in common than he thought. Men out of their time and practically indestructible. He wondered how old Harkness was. If he couldn’t die, from anything, then old age wasn’t a problem. “Does the Queen know about this?”
Harkness pointed to a ladder leading up to the surface. Rory lifted the lantern a little higher, casting light up the rungs. “How else do you think she took an interest in the unexplainable?”
“You?” Rory leaned against the ladder and looked up. It wasn’t that far, but from his perspective it looked like a mile climb. “Is this the only way out?”
“Unless you want to take a swim. Give me the lantern. You can go first. If you fall, I can catch you.” It sounded like another joke, but Harkness’ expression was earnest enough. Despite all the smiles and innuendo, he was a serious, steadfast man. He got the job done, whatever the consequences. It made Rory glad he was on the captain’s good side.
He handed the lantern to Harkness and started climbing up the ladder. By putting most of his weight on his right foot he managed to stay relatively pain free, but he was forced to hop up the rungs, slowing down his progress. “So when you say you got the Queen interested in the unexplainable…”
“I stopped an assassination attempt on her, got shot right in front of her for my troubles. When I woke up, I was in a cell in the Tower of London. Wish I could say that was the first time that had happened. She questioned me for days, wanting to know why I wasn’t dead. When I finally told her, she wanted to know more.”
Rory paused at the top of the ladder to push aside the sewer cover. Fresh air rushed in, a relief from the stuffy confines of the tunnels. He hauled himself out and then reached back to take the lantern from Harkness.
“Remember when we first met, when I told you that you could either help me or be locked up for all of eternity?”
“How could I forget,” Rory said dryly. He leaned heavily on his right foot as Harkness pushed the cover back into place. He wasn’t sure where they were, but no one was around to wonder why two men, one of them dressed as a centurion, were climbing out of the London sewer system.
They took up the same positions as down in the tunnels. If one ignored the fact that Rory was dressed like a Roman, they looked like two mates stumbling home after a night of drinking. “That was the Queen’s ultimatum to me. I’m not one for eternal imprisonment, so I took the job and created Torchwood. It was about time anyway, give or take a decade.”
Hobbling along, they made their way back to a more populated area. “Since we’re being so honest,” began Rory, “can I ask how you ended up here? Not in just London, I mean, but here, in the 19th century.” With the gas lamps lit, they had no need for the lantern and it wasn’t even theirs to start with. Rory handed it off to the first street urchin he saw.
“I don’t know, it’s a little fuzzy. I was in a bar on an alien planet chatting to a handsome young midshipman one second and then the next I woke up in a dingy alleyway in Victorian England. I thought it was just a rough night. And then the sun set.”
“No stars.”
Harkness nodded his head. “The planet I was on never existed. I guess as a fixed point I was thrown back in time. I can think of worse places than London in the 19th century so I decided to stay.”
Spotting an empty hansom cab, Harkness flagged it down. He helped Rory to get in, garnering a perplexed look from the driver. Some money from Harkness and a request to get to their destination as quickly as possible fixed that issue.
“Do you need a doctor?”
Rory was tempted to say, “Just one with a bow tie” but he kept the comment to himself. “I can get the bullet out myself with the right medical equipment.”
The conversation dropped off. Rory was too busy flinching every time the cab hit a bump in the road to keep talking. He wasn’t looking forward to sticking a hot lance to his plastic skin to melt the wound back together but it would be slightly more enjoyable than having a bullet lodged in his thigh. He made it a vow never to get shot again.
The cab dropped them off at the warehouse where the Royal Collection had stored the Pandorica. It was also, technically, Rory’s home. It wasn’t as though he had set up a sofa with a side table and a lamp and a tea set, but it was where he stored his few possessions when he wasn’t using them and the most likely place to find him if Harkness needed his assistance. It was almost like being back at the temple in Rome.
While Harkness went to speak with one of the security guards about getting some supplies for Rory’s leg, Rory limped off to his section of the warehouse. He passed priceless paintings and artefacts along the way, but these ones weren’t for display purposes. Everything was packed away in crates. What lay inside each was a complete mystery to him.
Lacking a sofa, he had some chairs and he gratefully sank down into one. “Rough day at the office,” he muttered, acknowledging a question from Amy. As he waited for Harkness to return, he stripped off his armour until he was down to just his trousers and a single tunic. Extracting a bullet would be much easier if he didn’t have a bronze chest plate and wrist guards getting in his way.
“One of the guards will bring everything you need,” said Harkness when he took a seat across from Rory. He took off his own soiled coat.
“Thanks.” Rory tentatively probed the area of the wound. The bullet felt like it was lodged halfway in.
“So I have to ask, since we’re being honest.” Rory looked up at Harkness. “What’s an Auton doing protecting a large stone box?”
“I killed the last guard.” With a groan, Rory stretched out his leg and rested it on the overturned crate he used as a table.
“I’ve killed a lot of guards, but that doesn’t mean I have to take up their post.”
Could he tell Harkness everything? About Amy, and the Doctor, and the real reason they were no stars in the sky? He’d understand the mechanics of it all, no doubt, but did he have to know? Maybe Captain Jack Harkness better off thinking the same, old tired myths about the Pandorica and its protector.
But he had promised Harkness, a story for a story. He didn’t have to tell the man everything, but he owed him some of the truth.
“I killed the last guard, but I hurt someone else, too. Protecting the Pandorica, it’s not exactly a penance, but it’s my choice, my burden.”
Harkness stayed remarkably quiet and it was the lack of a response that told Rory he had struck a chord with the man. Without realizing it, he had stumbled upon another thing they had in common. They had both hurt someone that they loved.
“There’s also a bit more to it than that,” added Rory, to cover up the tense silence, “but that’s the important part.”
“It’s a love story,” said Harkness and there was a touch of a smile on his lips.
Rory sat up abruptly and his foot slid off the edge of the crate. “Sorry?” It was practically a yelp as the bullet shifted, sending tendrils of pain through his leg.
“It’s nothing.” Harkness turned his gaze to the Pandorica and there was open admiration in his eyes. When he looked back at Rory, his usual mischievous twinkle had returned. “So how about a name? I can’t keep calling you Centurion. And you should call me Jack.”
“Jack…” It was less formal than Harkness and it felt right. Rory couldn’t picture any other name for the captain. “I’m the Centurion. That is my name.” It wasn’t a trust issue. If he told Jack the truth, he knew the man would keep his secrets. But while he still thought of himself as Rory Williams, he couldn’t present that face to the world. As long as the legend of him persisted, he had to be the mysterious protector of the Pandorica. For now, he had to be more than a man.
“Centurion, then. I’ve heard worse and I’ve done more with less. But just one thing.”
Rory steeled himself for an awkward question.
“You need to update your look. That thief saw you from a mile off. You could have saved yourself a bullet wound if you had swapped out the helmet for a top hat.”
A laugh bubbled up from within Rory and he didn’t care if he jostled his leg. After a night like theirs, it felt good to hear something ridiculous. “I should start wearing a frock coat over my armour?”
“I was thinking of something a little more subtle…”
Rating: PG
Characters: Rory, with appearances from Barbara
Timeline: set between "The Pandorica Opens" and "The Big Bang"
Summary: London, 1996. Barbara Wright prepares the Pandorica for exhibit at the National Museum. As the work unfolds, she recounts the lengthy history of the stone box and its loyal protector, the Lone Centurion.
Disclaimer: Doctor Who belongs to the BBC. Everything else is me taking liberties with history.
A/N: A huge thank you to my beta
punch_kicker15. This story would still be sitting on my hard drive if it weren't for you.1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 | 42 | 43 | 44 | 45 | 46 | 47 | 48 | 49
London, 1868 A.D.
“Get down!”
The warning came too late. The shot was fired and within the tiny confines of the London sewers it sounded like an explosion. Sore ears was the last thing on Rory’s mind, though.
Being shot was a tad more painful than being stabbed, he found.
The bullet had the fortune to hit him in the upper left thigh, right in the only place that his various pieces of armour didn’t cover. It was a cheap pistol, and a poor shot, and the projectile remained lodged in Rory’s plastic flesh instead of passing right through him. He cried out as his leg crumbled beneath him. The bullet felt red hot, like an ember was trapped in his skin, but he knew it was just in his head.
“Centurion!” Harkness started to kneel down to check on him.
“I’m fine,” Rory insisted. “Just go!” Up ahead, their target was making a quick getaway, the light of his lantern receding into the distance.
Harkness didn’t need to be told twice. He picked up the lantern Rory had been carrying. “What I wouldn’t give for a torch right now.” With a revolver in one hand and the lantern in the other, Harkness wasn’t exactly a picture of agility, but with no illumination down in the tunnels there was no other choice. He took off after their target, his boots splashing in the muddy water.
Rory allowed himself a second to moan with pain. The bullet was really lodged in there; he’d need a pair of forceps to get it out. As great as it was to watch technology develop, in that moment he really wished that gunpowder hadn’t been invented. An arrow may have been slower and less deadly, but at least it was bigger. Rory could have torn out an arrow shaft from his thigh with no problems.
“Complain later,” he muttered to himself and he hauled himself to his feet. He tried to put weight on his left leg and he was rewarded with a nice fiery stab of pain that made him grit his teeth. As much as it hurt, he forced himself to take a step forward. He took another and another until he was hobbling along at half speed.
The light from the two lanterns had all but disappeared. At the far end of the tunnel he saw Harkness disappear around a bend. The only consolation that Rory could come up with was that their target was equally handicapped as Harkness. It was hard to turn and shoot when you had a heavy lantern in one hand. Harkness had the advantage as he could shoot ahead of him without needing to twist or turn.
Too bad the captain couldn’t take the shot even if one presented itself. The piece of alien technology strapped to their thief’s back would be in the way.
Rory had always assumed that nothing alien remained on Earth once all the stars had disappeared. With no other civilizations in the universe it was impossible to have technology from another planet. Harkness had told him otherwise. If something alien had arrived and was still on Earth the day the stars disappeared, then it still existed. It was just petrified, like the Daleks and the Cybermen beneath Stonehenge. The object wouldn’t work, but it was still an oddity and it could influence the progress of human technology. Rory had no idea what their thief had stolen, but Harkness thought it was dangerous enough to pursue.
The sewers. It had to be the sewers. This couldn’t have been a chase aboveground with streetlamps and plenty of open space.
Another shot rang out, this one muffled by distance. Rory didn’t hear a cry of pain but he did hear footsteps running off. If Harkness had shot their target, he would have no reason to stay on the move.
Pushing past the pain, Rory picked up his pace. Without lights to show him the way, he relied on his other senses to guide him. The smell of freshly burnt gunpowder grew stronger the further along he went. When he reached the bend in the tunnel, he spotted a small pinprick of light. “Harkness!”
No reply.
His leg felt ready to fall off by the time he reached the dropped lantern. Lying in the shallow water next to it was Harkness. His gaze was blank. A neat bullet hole marred the right side of his forehead. Rory collapsed into a heap next to the captain’s body, unable to stand any longer. Futilely, he reached out and put his fingers to Harkness’ throat. He was still warm, but there was no pulse. The man was dead.
Rory felt his whole body sag as he let out an unsteady breath. “I’m sorry.” He hadn’t known Harkness for long and he really couldn’t count him as a friend, but he had been an ally.
With a grunt, he stood up. He didn’t have the strength right now to carry Harkness’ body out of the tunnels. He’d have to find a way out and then come back later. The man deserved a proper burial even if he knew no one in this era. Rory reached down to pick up the lantern.
Harkness drew in a deep and very loud breath, causing his entire body to spasm.
“Jeez!” Rory flung himself back and he collided with the curved wall of the tunnel. He was glad he didn’t have a heartbeat; he’d probably be having a coronary right now.
For a moment, all Harkness could do was breathe. Then he noticed Rory. He sat up, moving clumsily, like he had just gotten out of bed.
“You’re not dead.”
“You’re not bleeding.” Harkness pointed to his thigh.
Rory glanced down. There was a hole in his trousers, but that was it. The absence of blood was quite noticeable. He looked back at Harkness and saw that the man’s bullet wound was quickly disappearing. The skin was knitting back together, healing right before his eyes. This was completely impossible.
They stared at each other, not saying a word. It wasn’t as if the stories they had to tell would be unbelievable. Both of them just seemed unwilling to admit that either of them were something more than human. Finally, Harkness stood up. The back of his coat was soaked and neither of them smelled that great either. “Do you need help?” He gestured to Rory’s leg.
“Yeah.”
Harkness picked up the lantern and handed it to Rory. He positioned himself at Rory’s left side and encouraged him to lean on him to take some of the weight off his leg. Rory slung his arm over Harkness’ broad shoulders while Harkness gripped him around the middle. They lurched down the tunnel, back the way they came, looking like they were in a three-legged race.
For a few minutes the only sounds were the creak and clank of Rory’s armour and the splashing of their footsteps. Rory was starting to wonder if they were going to ignore this completely when Harkness said, rather simply, “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
A straight exchange. Rory could handle that. “I’m an Auton.” He figured Harkness was well travelled enough to know what that was.
“Plastic, huh? Do you have one of those guns in your hand? I knew an Auton who could do some surprising things with that hand…” Harkness trailed off with an unashamed grin.
“Do you always have to do that?” asked Rory.
“Do what?”
“Flirt!”
Harkness laughed and the sound bounced off the walls. “You could always flirt back if it’ll make you feel better.”
Rory was suddenly regretting asking the question. “What about you? What’s your story?” He didn’t care if the change of topics had no subtly at all.
“I’m immortal. I can’t die. It makes me a fixed point in time.”
The tunnel began to slope up, forcing Rory to tighten his hold around Harkness. “A fixed point?” He bit back a cringe as his leg gave a painful twinge. “What does that mean?”
“I’m not really sure. It’s something a friend told me once and he knows about these sort of things. But the important thing to know is that if I’m dead, I always come back. So don’t panic if I get taken down.”
Rory was starting to see that he and Harkness had a lot more in common than he thought. Men out of their time and practically indestructible. He wondered how old Harkness was. If he couldn’t die, from anything, then old age wasn’t a problem. “Does the Queen know about this?”
Harkness pointed to a ladder leading up to the surface. Rory lifted the lantern a little higher, casting light up the rungs. “How else do you think she took an interest in the unexplainable?”
“You?” Rory leaned against the ladder and looked up. It wasn’t that far, but from his perspective it looked like a mile climb. “Is this the only way out?”
“Unless you want to take a swim. Give me the lantern. You can go first. If you fall, I can catch you.” It sounded like another joke, but Harkness’ expression was earnest enough. Despite all the smiles and innuendo, he was a serious, steadfast man. He got the job done, whatever the consequences. It made Rory glad he was on the captain’s good side.
He handed the lantern to Harkness and started climbing up the ladder. By putting most of his weight on his right foot he managed to stay relatively pain free, but he was forced to hop up the rungs, slowing down his progress. “So when you say you got the Queen interested in the unexplainable…”
“I stopped an assassination attempt on her, got shot right in front of her for my troubles. When I woke up, I was in a cell in the Tower of London. Wish I could say that was the first time that had happened. She questioned me for days, wanting to know why I wasn’t dead. When I finally told her, she wanted to know more.”
Rory paused at the top of the ladder to push aside the sewer cover. Fresh air rushed in, a relief from the stuffy confines of the tunnels. He hauled himself out and then reached back to take the lantern from Harkness.
“Remember when we first met, when I told you that you could either help me or be locked up for all of eternity?”
“How could I forget,” Rory said dryly. He leaned heavily on his right foot as Harkness pushed the cover back into place. He wasn’t sure where they were, but no one was around to wonder why two men, one of them dressed as a centurion, were climbing out of the London sewer system.
They took up the same positions as down in the tunnels. If one ignored the fact that Rory was dressed like a Roman, they looked like two mates stumbling home after a night of drinking. “That was the Queen’s ultimatum to me. I’m not one for eternal imprisonment, so I took the job and created Torchwood. It was about time anyway, give or take a decade.”
Hobbling along, they made their way back to a more populated area. “Since we’re being so honest,” began Rory, “can I ask how you ended up here? Not in just London, I mean, but here, in the 19th century.” With the gas lamps lit, they had no need for the lantern and it wasn’t even theirs to start with. Rory handed it off to the first street urchin he saw.
“I don’t know, it’s a little fuzzy. I was in a bar on an alien planet chatting to a handsome young midshipman one second and then the next I woke up in a dingy alleyway in Victorian England. I thought it was just a rough night. And then the sun set.”
“No stars.”
Harkness nodded his head. “The planet I was on never existed. I guess as a fixed point I was thrown back in time. I can think of worse places than London in the 19th century so I decided to stay.”
Spotting an empty hansom cab, Harkness flagged it down. He helped Rory to get in, garnering a perplexed look from the driver. Some money from Harkness and a request to get to their destination as quickly as possible fixed that issue.
“Do you need a doctor?”
Rory was tempted to say, “Just one with a bow tie” but he kept the comment to himself. “I can get the bullet out myself with the right medical equipment.”
The conversation dropped off. Rory was too busy flinching every time the cab hit a bump in the road to keep talking. He wasn’t looking forward to sticking a hot lance to his plastic skin to melt the wound back together but it would be slightly more enjoyable than having a bullet lodged in his thigh. He made it a vow never to get shot again.
The cab dropped them off at the warehouse where the Royal Collection had stored the Pandorica. It was also, technically, Rory’s home. It wasn’t as though he had set up a sofa with a side table and a lamp and a tea set, but it was where he stored his few possessions when he wasn’t using them and the most likely place to find him if Harkness needed his assistance. It was almost like being back at the temple in Rome.
While Harkness went to speak with one of the security guards about getting some supplies for Rory’s leg, Rory limped off to his section of the warehouse. He passed priceless paintings and artefacts along the way, but these ones weren’t for display purposes. Everything was packed away in crates. What lay inside each was a complete mystery to him.
Lacking a sofa, he had some chairs and he gratefully sank down into one. “Rough day at the office,” he muttered, acknowledging a question from Amy. As he waited for Harkness to return, he stripped off his armour until he was down to just his trousers and a single tunic. Extracting a bullet would be much easier if he didn’t have a bronze chest plate and wrist guards getting in his way.
“One of the guards will bring everything you need,” said Harkness when he took a seat across from Rory. He took off his own soiled coat.
“Thanks.” Rory tentatively probed the area of the wound. The bullet felt like it was lodged halfway in.
“So I have to ask, since we’re being honest.” Rory looked up at Harkness. “What’s an Auton doing protecting a large stone box?”
“I killed the last guard.” With a groan, Rory stretched out his leg and rested it on the overturned crate he used as a table.
“I’ve killed a lot of guards, but that doesn’t mean I have to take up their post.”
Could he tell Harkness everything? About Amy, and the Doctor, and the real reason they were no stars in the sky? He’d understand the mechanics of it all, no doubt, but did he have to know? Maybe Captain Jack Harkness better off thinking the same, old tired myths about the Pandorica and its protector.
But he had promised Harkness, a story for a story. He didn’t have to tell the man everything, but he owed him some of the truth.
“I killed the last guard, but I hurt someone else, too. Protecting the Pandorica, it’s not exactly a penance, but it’s my choice, my burden.”
Harkness stayed remarkably quiet and it was the lack of a response that told Rory he had struck a chord with the man. Without realizing it, he had stumbled upon another thing they had in common. They had both hurt someone that they loved.
“There’s also a bit more to it than that,” added Rory, to cover up the tense silence, “but that’s the important part.”
“It’s a love story,” said Harkness and there was a touch of a smile on his lips.
Rory sat up abruptly and his foot slid off the edge of the crate. “Sorry?” It was practically a yelp as the bullet shifted, sending tendrils of pain through his leg.
“It’s nothing.” Harkness turned his gaze to the Pandorica and there was open admiration in his eyes. When he looked back at Rory, his usual mischievous twinkle had returned. “So how about a name? I can’t keep calling you Centurion. And you should call me Jack.”
“Jack…” It was less formal than Harkness and it felt right. Rory couldn’t picture any other name for the captain. “I’m the Centurion. That is my name.” It wasn’t a trust issue. If he told Jack the truth, he knew the man would keep his secrets. But while he still thought of himself as Rory Williams, he couldn’t present that face to the world. As long as the legend of him persisted, he had to be the mysterious protector of the Pandorica. For now, he had to be more than a man.
“Centurion, then. I’ve heard worse and I’ve done more with less. But just one thing.”
Rory steeled himself for an awkward question.
“You need to update your look. That thief saw you from a mile off. You could have saved yourself a bullet wound if you had swapped out the helmet for a top hat.”
A laugh bubbled up from within Rory and he didn’t care if he jostled his leg. After a night like theirs, it felt good to hear something ridiculous. “I should start wearing a frock coat over my armour?”
“I was thinking of something a little more subtle…”
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