"Amy?" Harry called out sheepishly, having spent the past 20 minutes searching the endless corridors for the Scot.

"In here."

She was sitting on the bed of a large, unoccupied bedroom. The coverlet on the bed was pink, but the walls were - shockingly enough - blue. When he came around the bed far enough to face her, she was smiling a bit bashfully.

"Sorry about that," she said, sounding embarrassed. "I just...you can't ask me things like that, Harry. You can't, because I can't tell you. Just you...being here. It's wrong. It could change everything."

"Everything?"

Harry didn't realize he was frowning until he could practically see his eyebrows furrowing at the top of his vision. Amy nodded solemnly. "You and Hermione, you're - how did the Doctor say it? - temporally displaced. Two things, two people, who were only meant to exist in our imaginations, living and breathing right in front of us. It could make more cracks."

"Cracks?"

"Cracks in the fabric of the universe," shrugged the redhead as though reciting the contents of a grocery list. "Two pieces of time and space that never should have touched. And you're swashing 'em together."

He didn't know if he should apologize for that or not, and so said nothing. They sat in silence until Amy seemed ready to explode. She eyed him speculatively. "You're hiding from something, a whole big something," she concluded with a quirk of her inquisitive eyebrows.

Feeling like he'd been opened up and falsely examined for too long, Harry scowled. "Well you should know, you've read those books and seen those films all about me, haven't you?"

"That's not how it works,"argued Amy instantly. "You're temporally displaced; you and Hermione aren't operating according to the stories anymore. If you were, you'd be in a tent pining over Ginny right now, instead of here with me. Trust me, this?" she gestured around at the TARDIS, "was not in the books."

Harry was tired of this; the logistics of it was making his brain hurt. He found a chair tucked in neatly at the desk and sat down, swiveling round to face Amy. "Is this your room?"

She shook her head. "No, I dunno whose room this is. The TARDIS keeps all of the Doctor's companions rooms, though I can't imagine why. Not like they're coming back, is it?" She looked almost unbearably sad as she said it, staring at the purple shirt hanging over the back of Harry's chair. "So many empty bedrooms, just waiting..."

"He can't have had that many, er, companions," Harry speculated. "He looks so young."

That got him an inelegant snort. "He's 907 years old. Alien, doesn't age, just...changes, I guess. He's had a lot of companions. More than I even know."

Harry looked around the room again, wondering what kind of people it took to travel with that mad Doctor over hundreds of years. Just as he thought it, he felt an odd, ringing, sort of sighing silence in his own mind. A word formed between his lips before he made the conscious decision to speak.

"Rose."

Amy blinked. "Sorry?"

His head cleared, but the TARDIS seemed a little bit warmer, somehow. More comfortable. "Nothing," he shrugged. "Say, Amy, is the TARDIS...?"

"Alive?" smirked Amy. "She got in your head, didn't she? She must like you."

Alive...a living space ship. How novel. He reached out to touch the wall, and felt a happy sigh in his head. It was much nicer than having Voldemort in there. "I like her too," he replied quietly.

Amy's smirk settled into something more natural and much older. "I'm running from something too, you know," she announced gently, directing them back to their earlier topic. "Hiding things. I ran away the night before my wedding. Hopped into this mad blue box, ran away from my responsibilities, my boyfriend...everything. And I've been running ever since."

He had a feeling there was a lesson in this somewhere. "Are you gonna go back?"

"If I don't get killed saving the universe first," she shrugged casually. "Everyone's gotta face the music sometimes, Harry, even if it's frightening." It was odd, that Amy was treating going home to get married the same way Harry treated going to war. But he wasn't about to begrudge a woman who'd never had such horrible things to think about.

Before he could form a response to what she said, there was a loud bang and suddenly the world was upside-down. They both let out a shout and grabbed the nearest anchored piece of furniture, Amy's surprise mingled with laughter. Apparently this was a frequent occurrence.

"Come on," she chuckled once the ship had steadied. "Let's see where the Doctor's taken us."

"Want to take a proper spin?" queried the Doctor once they'd had their fill of morose conversation. At her bewildered look he pointed over his shoulder at the TARDIS' gleaming console. "I'm sure she wouldn't mind if you had a go."

"You mean Amy?" asked Hermione, and the Doctor laughed.

"No, no, though come to think of it...no, of course I don't mean Amy! I mean the TARDIS. She's sentient, you know. I didn't grow her myself or anything, but the old girl's been here when all my other companions have gone."

Hesitantly, Hermione stood up and made for the console with the Doctor smiling encouragingly. "Your companions? You mean your friends?"

His smile went from encouraging to slightly sad, as though it had cracked down the middle. "Yes, it's rather easier to call them companions, isn't it? Like how human doctors don't call their patients 'the mother of two,' or 'the postman' or - the Postman would be a brilliant name! I mean really, forget the Doctor, the Postman!"

Hermione grinned, feeling his cheerfulness was infectious in some strange way. "Because you 'deliver the goods'?" she joked. He pointed to a lever, and she pulled it. He pulled her around the console and nudged her towards buttons, knobs, dials, whirligigs, and even a few doodads.

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night!" he crowed, pulling a switch, and suddenly everything went topsy-turvy. She clung to the edge of the control deck to keep from falling all the way over (already dropped into a crouch), staring up at all the flashing lights and whirring pieces with probably the dopiest smile of all time on her face. For the first time in months she didn't flinch away from the loud noise or the blinding light, but instead embraced them like something clean and separate from the war and entirely brand new.

It was a magic all its own. It was science.

The Doctor was laughing uproariously, gazing almost lovingly up at the heart of the console before reaching up for what he shouted was called: "The Scatter Plotter!" With an enormous whirring hum, the TARDIS gave one last shudder and stilled. Hermione took a deep breath and stood up, leaning on the console as she rubbed at her stiff side. It was aching a bit, but otherwise it was as if Nagini had never bitten her.

"Whew!" The Doctor clapped his hands. "Well, that was fun, eh?"

"Is is always like that? The flying?" she asked, still gasping for breath. The alien grinned so widely she didn't need an answer.

It was trilling, every minute of it. He saw new people and new places every day, through all of time and space. He could meet...Shakespeare! Or Plato, Socrates, any of them! He could meet Arthur Conan Doyle! Oh, Merlin, the Doctor was probably plastered all over history, and she didn't even notice for a moment. All that reading, and...the whole time, he had been right there, hiding between the lines. Like an afterthought.

Someone who had always been there, through everything, steady as a rock.

She turned, almost expectedly, when the door opened to admit Amy and Harry. He grinned at her, clearly delighted, and for the first time in her life Hermione didn't think about what she was doing beforehand. She opened her mouth to speak at the exact same time as him.

"I love you."

"Let's stay here."

Harry, apparently, hadn't been thinking too clearly either.

They crashed halfway across the console room from one another, not kissing, just embracing, so overwhelmed with joy and relief that they could do nothing but wrap themselves tightly enough around each other to be mistaken for one interwoven being.

Over their heads, still perched halfway down the glass stairs, Amy shot the Doctor her best "I-want-something" smile. "Doctor?"

He quirked an eyebrow at her. "You want the nosy one, don't you?" he sighed. She grinned sweetly, and he groaned as though Christmas had been cancelled. "This is why I don't do domestics!" he shouted at the ceiling. "Mickey and Rose were bad enough, and then Jack - the horror! - but now you want your fiance?"

She laced her fingers together and tucked them under her chin, grinning and begging with her eyes. Finally, the Doctor dropped his head back and flipped another switch on the console. "Hold on tight, everyone!" he announced before they were thrown back into the vortex.