Amy had been travelling in the TARDIS for a few days before she started to explore properly. The length of time it took to get somewhere seemed to have no relationship with how distant it was in time or space. That was how she met the Queen in the far future in her nightie and the trip from World War II London to the roaring Sixties had taken three days. This time they were only supposed to be going from slightly future Wales to Amy's London to take in the National Gallery. They had been in flight for two days this time and the Doctor assured her that it would probably take another couple of days.
At least. Possibly.
Amy wondered sometimes whether he took the long route around to suit whatever bit of tinkering he needed to do on the ship. He had spent most of the last two days up to his braces in a piece of machinery that seemed to be refusing to do what he wanted it to, judging by the level of muttering and the occasional yelps.
With time to kill, Amy decided to explore and find the library and the swimming pool. She was secretly quite excited about the possibility of a swimming pool inside a library but the Doctor seemed to have no idea where either of them was at the moment. She had a feeling that the internal geography of the TARDIS was sometimes a little more fluid than even he liked.
Amy had read enough fairy tales to know that exploring somewhere as confusing as a forest or the TARDIS (geography in both seemed related) could be dangerous if one was not properly prepared. A survival kit containing food and drink seemed like a sensible precaution, as did the ten balls of twine that fell out of the closet where she found the rucksack. She attached one end of the twine to a door handle and set out, unwinding carefully as she went.
There was no particular logic to which corridor Amy took when she met forks and branches. Sometimes she took the one that felt right, other times she used 'ip dip sky blue' to pick a direction. One time she even spun in a circle with her eyes closed and stopped when she thought she might fall over from dizziness.
Opening the doors to peek in as she went was fascinating. There were dozens of bedrooms, some coated with what had to be centuries of dust and others that looked as though their occupants had only just left. A few had been neatly packed up but most of them had that look of someone expecting to come back and just...not.
The thought that it could happen to her depressed Amy a bit. She hoped that all those empty bedrooms had been left because their occupants had found something better rather than because they had died. The TARDIS seemed like a happy, exciting fairy tale dream but Amy had read the originals of some of those fairy tales. There was no happily ever after a lot of the time.
There were other rooms that Amy backed away from quickly because they were filled with weird machinery and she was quickly learning about the perils of weird machinery. One room looked like an armoury and Amy decided that it might not be a good idea to ask the Doctor why he had one.
She found the garden just after she stopped for sandwiches in a room that looked a lot like someone had stolen Miss Marple's living room and added it to the TARDIS.
Air scented by freshly mown grass and sweet flowers wafted over Amy as she opened the door and she stood there for a long time, trying to make the dappled sunlight and soft breeze within make sense. There was a garden complete with trees, sunlight and summer breezes in the TARDIS.
There was a moment of dizziness as Amy stepped over the threshold. When she looked back, the door into the TARDIS seemed to be attached to nothing. It hung in the air like she had always imagined the wardrobe door into Narnia might, if the fir trees in the wood had been cut down, and looked both out of place and completely right all at once. Amy frowned at it, suspicious, and then stepped back into the TARDIS corridor and carefully wedged the door open.
Then she returned to the garden and set off to explore.
As she walked, it grew harder to remember that she was still on board a ship. Clumps of flowers smelled rich and real and there were even fat bumblebees making their clumsy way from petal to petal. Somewhere in the distance there was bird song and after a little while Amy crossed a little babbling brook, which babbled quite picturesquely, using a little foot bridge that she half expected to find a troll under.
After ten minutes Amy realised that she had left the end of her twine wrapped around the door to the TARDIS, not thinking to attach a new ball, and her aimless wandering had left her completely lost. It should have been worrying, but she knew that she was still in the TARDIS and that made everything alright.
"Hello,' said a voice behind Amy.
She jumped and spun around. The blonde girl who met her eyes raised an eyebrow.
"Are you OK?" she asked.
The accent was London-ish and the black trousers and red jacket looked contemporary Earth, but the Doctor looked like a mad geography teacher so Amy never took appearances as guarantees of species.
"Who are you?" Amy asked.
The girl smiled sadly. "I'm Rose. Sort of."
It was Amy's turn to raise an eyebrow. "Is that supposed to mean something to me?"
A flash of hurt crossed Rose's face. "Oh. I sort of assumed...maybe not." She seemed to shake herself and then regain her composure. "I travelled with the Doctor for a while. Then I sort of became part of the TARDIS and he pulled me out, but a bit of me got left behind and here I am. Sort of an echo, I guess."
It sounded completely fantastical, but Amy believed her. "So there's a Rose out there somewhere and you're the TARDIS' memory of her?"
Rose shrugged. "I think so."
"Why are you in here?" Amy said, gesturing at the woods and flowers and sunshine around them.
Rose looked up, the sunlight bathing her face, and giggled. "I don't know! Maybe the TARDIS thought I needed somewhere to be. I'm pretty sure this isn't supposed to happen, but the Doctor said that humans couldn't look into the TARDIS and I did that."
"So you just hang around," Amy said. "In here. Watching bees and sitting in the sunshine. Sounds a bit boring."
Rose shrugged. "It's not always a garden here, sometimes it's a library. Once it was my old living room in Mum's flat. I got to watch the Doctor and the other me on the telly. That was really weird. It's a bit easier when I'm just reading about it."
"Doesn't that get confusing?" Amy asked.
"A bit," Rose agreed. "I go to sleep and never really know what it will be like when I wake up."
Amy frowned at the pretty garden around them. The birds and the trees were lovely, but not as a forever thing. She had always needed people and events, even though she liked having her aunt's huge, empty house to come home to at the end of the day. It was what had made the last couple of years so hard, being alone and watching her friends getting older and growing away. Sometimes she wondered why university had seemed like such a terrifying prospect when she was eighteen. Maybe she would have found people of her own if she had gone.
"Don't you get lonely?" Amy asked quietly.
Rose shrugged and looked down. "A bit. Sometimes."
"Does he know you're here?" Amy asked.
"No," Rose said. "I think that's why the TARDIS keeps me here: she stops him finding me."
"Why?"
Rose shrugged. "He's moved on. He's not even the Doctor I knew anymore. My Doctor died on the Game Station and I didn't get to meet the new one. I don't think I want to."
"So you're just stuck here, forever?" Amy asked.
"I don't know." Rose frowned. "I hope not. Forever is a long time."
There was an awkward pause. Rose cocked her head as though listening and a moment later a broad grin crossed her face.
"Want to see something really cool?" she asked.
"Sure," Amy said.
Rose took her hand – a habit that Amy thought she must have picked up from the Doctor – and tugged her into a trot through the soft grass. It was exhilarating to run like she had as a kid, just running without any expectation of getting somewhere and or doing it right, feeling her hair tumbling around her. Amy laughed out loud as they pelted down a slope and they finally tumbled into a pile of cushions under a gazebo.
"Look up," Rose said.
The roof of the gazebo appeared black at first and then it shifted, pinpoints of light appearing and then seeming to rush past. Larger dots appeared, clusters of sparkles that changed colour and as she watched. Then the view zoomed in on a cloud, a star nursery, and stayed there.
"He's decided to hover," Rose said. "Looks like we're near the Eagle Nebula. It's one of his favourites."
"He has favourite nebulas?" Amy asked.
Rose just looked at her and Amy decided that Rose had a point.
They watched the nebula for hours as the sun slowly descended around the gazebo. Amy shared her sandwiches, which Rose politely nibbled despite probably not needing them, and everything became slightly sleepy and magical.
"Were you ever scared?" Amy asked.
Rose sighed. "Sometimes."
"Does it get easier?"
"You get used to it after a while, being scared, but it never goes away," Rose said. "I reckon that maybe you get dangerous when you stop being scared."
"I ran away with the Doctor," Amy said. "I keep thinking there's something I should be getting back for, but I can't remember what it is."
Rose rolled over and propped her head on her hand. "I ran away from my boyfriend. Pissed him right off."
"There's no one waiting for me," Amy said, feeling the ache of loneliness that sometimes haunted her dreams.
"Seriously? There must be someone."
Amy shrugged. "Nope. No family, no boyfriend, most of my friends moved away from Leadworth. It's not exactly excitement central."
"Maybe that's not so bad," Rose said. "The Doctor told me that we'd go back for a visit the day after I left. It was a year. Mickey got arrested for my murder."
"He said that he'd get me back the morning after I left," Amy said, "if I ever want to stop travelling. It's important, I think. There's something that I wanted to do. It'll come back when I get home."
"I've been reading about your adventures," Rose said. "When the TARDIS gives me a library, some of the books are his stories. He kept arriving at your house years after he said he would."
"Well, I'll cross that bridge when I come to it," Amy said. "Right now, I want adventures."
They were silent for a moment before Amy realised that Rose was still looking at her.
"What?" she asked. "Do I have something in my teeth?"
"No," Rose said. "It's just..."
She trailed off and for a moment she seemed to struggle for words. When Rose kissed her, Amy closed her eyes and felt the ache of loneliness ease a little. Rose's lips were soft and inviting and Amy was disappointed when she pulled away.
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have done that," Rose said.
Amy smiled. "I'm not sorry."
"Oh," Rose said with a small smile.
It was two days before the view of the Eagle Nebula disappeared from the gazebo. Rose showed her back to the door and Amy reluctantly re-traced her ball of twine back to the control room. She returned to the garden three times and Rose seemed to become both happier and more distant each time.
"What's wrong?" Amy asked on her final visit.
They were sitting under a tree, Amy leaning back with Rose's head in her lap. Sometimes they spent hours barely able to separate, consumed in a fiery passion that Amy could never remember feeling before. Then there were times like this when it was enough just to sit and sometimes kiss.
"I don't know," Rose said after a while. "It's like there's something wrong inside the TARDIS, something just where I can't see it."
"The Doctor's worried, too," Amy said.
"I know." Rose suddenly sat up and looked at her. "If something happens...you will remember me, won't you?"
"Of course I will!" Amy said sharply. "How could I forget you?"
There was something in Rose's eyes, some piece of knowledge that she seemed to be trying to hide, but she lowered her eyes too quickly for Amy to be sure.
"Don't mind me," Rose said. "I'm just being a little crazy. You know."
Their parting kiss was fiercer than before and Amy thought she saw tears in Rose's eyes as the door closed between them.
When Amy returned to the TARDIS in her wedding dress with Rory, she had the vague feeling that there was something odd happening. The memories of her two lives, the one in the empty house and the one with her parents, bled and spilled into each other so that it was hard to keep track of what had really happened. She thought it was probably best for both of them if they travelled for a while, at least until they had their timelines straight.
One day she went looking for the twine path, haunted by the memories of blonde hair and soft sunlight, but somehow the TARDIS had rearranged its geography again and it had gone.
She did find the swimming pool in the library that time, though.