Title: Five Minutes
Rating/Warning: PG
Length: 818 words
Summary: Rory and Amelia wait for the Doctor to return.
Author Note: Sequel to All Perfectly Normal and will probably make more sense if you read that first. The third story is The Games Children Play.

Five Minutes

Amelia climbs up onto the gate at the bottom of Rory’s garden and kicks her heels against it, clumps of mud and grass falling to the ground from her red wellies. Rory leans against the fence next to her and tucks his hands in his coat pockets. Both of them wait for the blue box to reappear.

“Where do you think he’s gone?” asks Amelia.

“Five minutes into the future he said. Does that mean he loses five minutes?”

“Guess it means he won’t be any older and we’ll be five minutes older.”

“I guess.”

“A spaceship and a time machine.” Amelia tilts her head back to look at the stars. “Where would you go? If you could go anywhere and any when, where would you go?”

“Dunno,” says Rory. Adventures are more Amelia’s thing than his. “Do you think they have garages or repair places for spaceships? That might be useful.”

“I think I’d like to go the moon,” says Amelia. “Or Ancient Rome, or Paris.”

“You don’t need a spaceship or a time machine to go to Paris.”

“No, but if I could go anywhere, why not?” She looks at him suspiciously. “You think I’m taking about places we could go to that we normally can’t, don’t you?”

“Well,” says Rory carefully, “a spaceship and a time machine.”

“I can go to the moon if I want to,” says Amelia, “even without a blue box. Girls are allowed to be astronauts too you know.”

“I know.” He ducks his head to hide his smile. “Maybe we should think about going somewhere that we normally can’t though, if we happen to have a blue box around.”

“You’re the one not coming up with any ideas.”

Rory leans his head back against the fence and Amelia looks down at him.

“I’d like to go to Ancient Rome too,” he tells her.

“Good.”

“And maybe the Restaurant at the End of the Universe.”

“You read too much,” she scoffs. “That isn’t real.”

“Well if we can go anywhere…”

Amelia sticks her tongue out at him and Rory grins. When she does that and doesn’t just hit him over the head or punch him in the side it means that she does think he has a point, she just doesn’t like him getting one over on her.

“RORY WILLIAMS!” he hears his Mum yell and Rory’s face falls.

“I’d better go,” he says quietly.

“If you have to.” Amelia looks up at the stars again and shuffles along the gate away from him. “I’m staying put though and if the Doctor comes back don’t expect me to come throwing things at your window again. Wouldn’t want to annoy your parents.”

He hears his Mum shout out again and he moves away from the fence, skirting around the broken glass and mess where the blue box had crashed into the greenhouse.

“And you’d better not tell her that I did that,” says Amelia.

Rory turns back to look at her, but she’s still facing the sky and not him.

“I won’t,” he says. “You know I won’t.”

“Well she’s not gonna believe you when you tell her it was an alien.”

“He’s not an alien,” Rory says heatedly.

“He has a spaceship, stupid,” says Amelia, finally looking at him just so that she can glare at him.

“RORY! NOW!”

Amelia makes a shooing gesture with one hand.

“Yeah, Rory. Run along.”

He leaves, because sometimes there’s just no point arguing with her. There’s no point arguing with his Mum either when he gets in. He just lets everyone yell at him and goes back to bed.

In the morning he thinks that maybe none of it was real, but there are crumbs on the kitchen table that he sweeps off with one hand as he walks by. There’s a pile of wet, raggedy clothes on the kitchen floor and the greenhouse still looks like a bomb – or a blue phone box – hit it.

Plus Amelia is still there; sat on the ground and leaning against the garden gate, fast asleep.

Rory wakes her up, by shaking her shoulder and telling her to, loudly in her ear. She opens her eyes wide and starts struggling to her feet, then stops as she realises that the vegetable patch is empty.

“Maybe he didn’t want to wake you up,” says Rory hesitantly.

She glares at him and he backs away, trying to keep his school shoes out of the mud.

They both know she wouldn’t have slept through that strange sound. They both know that the Doctor didn’t come back, even though he promised.

“I hope he’s okay,” says Rory. “He didn’t half bump his head.”

“He won’t be if I ever get hold of him,” says Amelia, tossing her head as she stands up. “I’m going home. See you at school, yeah?”

“Yeah, sure,” he replies, knowing that she’d much rather be elsewhere.