Chapter Seven

Elizabeth passed out of sight around the corner and Amy turned to face the Doctor. "So who's she?" she asked after a few seconds.

The Doctor bent toward her, his hands slightly clasped and his face drawn tight. "She's a young woman I'm helping to leave this city," the Doctor said.

"Then why don't you just put her in your TARDIS and fly away?"

He stepped closer to her and glanced around before leaning in to whisper. "TARDIS isn't working," he said. "Something's keeping it here."

"Maybe I could help?" Amy asked. Before the Doctor could answer a man with a baton stepped in and battered the Time Lord back with blows. The Doctor crumpled to the ground as Amy was grabbed roughly from behind. A sudden pain marred her vision and her legs buckled. There was laughter and by the time she opened her eyes again there were men in hoods surrounding the Doctor and kicking him in the ribs. She went to yell for them to stop, but a punch filled her mouth with blood and she passed out.

Her eyes opened. She didn't know how much time had passed. Men carried her by the shoulders, dragging her so that her shoes scrapped along the cobblestones. In front of her there was something large, through swollen eyes she could just make out the mechanical figure of a huge man. And she thought, no, she was sure she could see its heart beating through a porthole like window.

"Why?" Amy managed.

Something wet and warm hit her, spit. "Fuckin' Mick, keep your mouth closed."

They thought she was Irish?

The next time Amy opened her eyes she was laying on a thin layer of hay on the stone floor of some kind of prison cell. A pail stood in the corner that, from the smell of the air, hadn't been washed out since the last occupant used it. The hay itched against her skin. She realized there was too much skin itching a moment later. Most of her clothes had been taken from her and she was in just in a smock made of burlap.

It was a labor just to roll over onto her back. If she was careful about it she could expend a slight amount of Regeneration energy to heal some of the injuries. Amy couldn't afford to repair everything fully, but she could make it easier to move at the very least. She concentrated and she could feel a warm tingling feeling overcome her body. The pain dulled.

She got to her feet and took time to take in her surroundings. The Doctor was nowhere in sight and neither was Elizabeth. But the latter had been gone when they were taken. She was no doubt trying to figure out where they had vanished to right now.

The room that had the cell in it seemed to be concealed, not by a door or curtain, but by a shelf of some sort moved over an opening. There were crates stacked in the corner of the room together with the word provisions written on the side of them in large capital letters. When she steadied her breathing and listened hard there were voices in the distance. Crackling music was playing on a record player in the next room.

"Okay, Amy. Just assume they're not coming back for a while. Getting out of here ought to be easy enough." The mistake was one that most people made when they captured her (and she had been captured plenty over the years). They took her coat and most of her clothes, but left her in her underwear. Even if they had bothered to pat her down the pockets of the coat and her bra were dimensionally transcendental and much like the TARDIS were bigger on the inside.

She made one last check of her surroundings to verify that no one was watching. Amy reached down the front of the smock into the cup of the bra and drew out a Sonic Pen. They'd relieved her of her device of choice, but she kept a spare just in case. The lock on her cell was easy enough to undo with the small tool and she stepped off of the hay covered floor and onto the rough stone of the room.

Amy was able to slide the bookcase away from the wall enough for her thin frame to squeeze through. The room was empty and looked to be some kind of a private bar. It was well stocked and there were various liquors left on the tables and the surface of the bar itself. A smell like rotten fruit mixed with stale beer and cigarettes prevailed and she covered her face to avoid gagging.

As she neared the bar she found the source of the smell. Platters had been left out until they turned into a slurry of juices and the membranous remains of fruit. Whole plates were filled with cigarettes and something that looked like bird poop filled one corner of the room. She wanted to hope that whoever had used this place had abandoned it. But since she had been brought here she knew that to be false.

The room wasn't particularly dusty. Someone had been here recently. Then there was the music. At first the beat had been recognizable, but she hadn't paid any mind to it until now.

"Once I ran to you
"Now I'll run from you
"This tainted love you've given
"I give you all a boy could give you
"Take my tears and that's not nearly all
"Oh...tainted love."

"That song's fifty years too early," Amy whispered to herself. It wasn't the original Motown version of the song or the Soft Cell cover…it was period appropriate which, by the clothing and architecture she had observed outside, she could guess was pre-World War I.

She crept over the cold tile floor avoiding any spot that seemed to questionable to be stepped in. her clothes were flung over a table in the far corner with her shoes sitting in the booth seat nearby. Amy dressed quickly. "Pale as I am, they might see me giving off light in this place…" she muttered.

There were footsteps nearby, Amy clambered against the wall and dug her hand into her coat pocket for the baton like handle of her Sonic device. She held the device up, opened the compartment at the base and pressed the button on the bottom while twisting the dial that surrounded the button.

A long, slender blade extended out from the device in place of the light as she prepared to fight her way through whoever it was that had brought them here.

A pair of men led the Doctor through a room that he could only guess was the foyer of wherever they were. A large statue of John Wilkes Booth preparing to shoot Lincoln dominated the center of the checkered floor. There was a pile of bird feces resting on the lip of the monument. It was a small wonder that the air out here was just as rank as it had been in his cell.

The Doctor had read about these individuals in the books that he collected on his week-long reading spree while Elizabeth coped. The Fraternal Order of the Raven; their primary function was dealing with the presumed lesser races when they stepped out of line or with those who would seek to help or befriend those other races.

Before they dragged him out of his cell the Doctor could barely make out the charismatic shouts of a gruff male preaching the importance of racial purity. "Where are we going?" asked the Doctor.

"You're going for questioning. We need to know how the foreigner came to be in our city," the man's voice was muffled by a cloth hood.

"I came here through the Lighthouse. I suppose that's how it's usually done," the Doctor said.

The taller of the two men stopped and glanced back at the Doctor through the eye slits in his hood. "Not you, Englishman. The redhead. She's of Irish stock and her type belongs in Finkton with the rest of the potato-blooded-bastards and niggers."

The sentiment shocked the Doctor and he stood there for a second without saying a word. "Amy's Scottish. If she knew anyone had so much as accused her of being from anywhere else you'd lot be in trouble." Of course this wasn't the case, because this wasn't his Amy.

And as if thinking that brought her into being, he saw a flash of red hair and a blade burst through the taller hooded man's chest. Amy held a narrow sword through the man's body. The second hooded figure turned and pulled a pistol, but Amy countered by moving the first man's corpse in front of herself for cover. The point of the sword fired off two darts and hit the second man in the chest, he went to the ground shaking under an electrical pulse.

Amy retracted the dart tips and pulled the sword from the man, letting his body hit the floor. "There you are Doctor, sorry that it took so long." She casually flicked the blood off of the sword as the Doctor stared at her in disbelief. "What is it? Did I get some on my top?" she glanced down to check her shirt.

"You killed two men with a sword," the Doctor said in a voice that was half whisper, half shout.

"Duh," Amy said. "One of them spit on me. Well, someone in here did. They also beat me up, if you didn't notice."

"Since when do you—you know?" he mimed sword fighting in the air.

"Since you don't actually know me, Raggedy Man," Amy said.

The nick name made the Doctor swallow his next words. Of course she was just calling him that because of the fact he had been roughed up and looked a mess.

Amy tucked the weapon under her arm and stepped in close to fix his bowtie. "I do the heroic thing and leap to your rescue, saving you from a pair of anachronistic and seemingly racist American blokes," she pointed back to the statue of Booth here, "and all you can think to say is 'why did you have to kill them Amy?' It seems like no matter the universe some things never change."

"Well you certainly have," the Doctor said.

"Your Amy was a Human girl. I'm a three hundred year old Time Lady, you don't Regenerate once and time lock your entire race without getting a new perspective," Amy said.

"I—wait, you've only Regenerated once?"

Amy rolled her eyes. "Yes, what does that matter?"

"That's just…once in three hundred years," the Doctor shook his head. "I just thought we'd be more similar."

"How old are you?" Amy asked. When he shuffled away in though she followed it up with, "Doctor?"

"Around twelve hundred years…you know how hard it is counting age with frequent trips back and forth through the vortex…" the Doctor trailed off.

"And how many Regenerations?"

"Twelve…well sort of," the Doctor as he rubbed his hands together.

"You've been living life in the fast lane," Amy smiled.

The Doctor smoothed his clothes down. "Says the woman wearing a bag and stalking around the place with a sword coming out of a…what is that?"

"Modified Sonic Baton, Sonic Sword I guess…never leave home without it," Amy said. She retracted the sword blade. "See?"

The silence that passed between them was filled with a shared glance that couldn't have been the kind of thing that the Doctor remembered speaking about with Amy before on the TARDIS. It seemed like a lifetime ago. He had said the words: "The thing is Amy, everyone's memory is a mess; life is a mess. Everyone's got memories of a holiday they couldn't have been on or a party they never went to. Or met someone for the first time and felt like they've known them all their lives. Time is being rewritten all around us, every day. People think their memories are bad, but their memories are fine. The past is really like that."

The connection between him and this Amy Pond. The Time Lady Amy Pond was peppered with bits of his Amy and her companion. He could feel a second set of memories as he looked into her eyes. He could see a different TARDIS console and the fantastic adventures that they'd had there.

Had he lived that second Human life with this Amy in the space of a few seconds? Or was he imagining it. History wasn't rewritten. This was different, this was a different set of worlds. There should be no reason for the memories to cross over the way they were.

"Something is wrong with this place." Amy's voice startled him and for a moment he hoped that it was his Amy.

The Doctor clasped a hand to her shoulder. "Did you see that?"

Amy's eyes shimmered with tears. But she lied anyway. "No."

The Doctor pulled his hand away as voices neared them from another passage. "girl's a Columbian citizen. Can't tell you why I think I remember her from somewhere."

"We can just execute the Irish bitch and her Red Coat friend," a second voice said. "Unless you and the others think there might be some fun to be had with her."

"They've got Elizabeth," the Doctor whispered. It was the only thing that they could be talking about.

"Then we've got to go and get her back," Amy said as she extended the sword out.

"Maybe you should slip into some clothes first, but be quick about it. We can't have them discovering what she really is," the Doctor said.