Last Words ('By or bye' entry)

[templeremus]

Title: Last Words

Genre:  Tragedy/Romance/Missing Scene

Characters: Amy Pond

Word Count: 450

Summary: The story of Amy's time in New York has almost come full circle. One footnote remains. Spoilers up to The Angels Take Manhatten.

For the second time in Amy's life, her home no longer seemed to fit. 
 

There were rooms that she couldn't enter, and too much quiet: layers of it, settling like dust, covering her in a film of unreality. Only the study felt like its old self, and she found comfort in its disorder, the piles of uncorrected proofs and the cards from well-wishers stacked beside the typewriter. There had been flowers too, but she had thrown them away. It had been painful, somehow, to think of them stagnating, dried-out leaves becoming dirt under the feet of visitors. 

 

There would be more arrivals soon. Neighbours with casserole dishes, old colleagues of Rory's bringing their best air of professional detachment. A nurse had stopped in earlier that morning to make sandwiches and tea. The cup had cooled and grown a milky scum over its surface, but she drank it anyway, swallowing past the tannin bitterness in the back of her throat. You'll need your strength, the visitors had said, each in their own way, and it was true, though none of them could know the half of it.
 

Perhaps guessing that her days might be limited, Melody had evidently taken care over the manuscript. There was little for Amy to do except read it through. When she reached the end page she fed it into the typewriter, bending close as she did so. Rory had threatened to buy her a word processor for her last birthday, but she had found herself strangely fond of the old machine - the impressions it made in the paper and the way certain keys stuck if hit with too much force. Give it to a museum, she'd told him. When I'm gone. Put in a plaque. The readers'll be queuing around the block.

She had found that it eased the dread a little, to spin up these kind of ideas with him, the way she might unfurl a plot twist in one of her books. In words all things were possible; it was the writing down that set events in stone, declaring once and for all what was, must always be. The two of them had managed to live in the gaps between stories for long as they could, and their happiness had run deep enough to bridge centuries.
 

Around her, the empty house settled, and waited. She let her hands find their place on the keys of their own accord; pausing to think would mean stopping altogether, and she had not come this far merely to drop the thread when there was no-one left to help her spin it. 
 

The title, usually last, came first.
 

Afterword

By Amelia Williams

It was time to make a start.