Checkmate (Doctor Who fanfiction)

Evil Miss Psycho?

I held Amy's hand as we walked through the art gallery, looking at the pamphlet over her shoulder. The Doctor meandered along with us, sometimes behind us, sometimes beside Amy, but rarely near me. Good. We paused to listen to a little speech being given about Vincent Van Gogh, whose section of the museum we were currently in.

"So this is one of the last paintings Van Gogh ever painted. Those final months of his life were probably the most astonishing artistic outpouring in history. It was like Shakespeare knocking off Othello, Macbeth and King Lear over the summer hols. And especially astonishing because Van Gogh did it with no hope of praise or reward. He is now..."

The Doctor stood next to me and I cast him a sideways glance.

"Thanks for bringing us- I mean her here."

He looked back at me, astonished that I was speaking to him. "You're welcome."

Amy, energized by the fact that I was getting along with him for two sentences, leaned over me to tease him.

"You're being so nice to us. Why are you being nice to us?" She demanded.

"I'm always nice to you two!" He objected.

"Not like this! These places you're taking us! Arcadia, the Trojan Gardens, now this. I think it's suspicious," she joked. I squeezed her hand and she smiled at me.

"What? It's not. Nothing to be suspicious about," he insisted. I raised an eyebrow at them and held him off at an and length.

"Okay then. While, she was joking... why aren't you?" I demanded, immediately jumping into Ninja mode since he's being suspicious. He didn't answer. I finally tuned into the speech that we were following as the man who gave it moved around the room.

"Each of these pictures now is worth tens of millions of pounds, yet in his lifetime he was a commercial disaster. Sold only one painting, and that to the sister of a friend. We have here possibly the greatest artist of all time, but when he died you could sold his entire body of work and got about enough money to buy... a sofa. And a couple of... chairs? If you follow me now..."

"Who is it?" A little boy's voice caused me to look over.

"It's the doctor," another young schoolboy said. The Doctor looked over, suddenly interested when his name was mentioned. Notoriously self absorbed, as always. Instead of finding the boys gawking at him, we found them looking at work painting of an old man leaning good elbow on a wooden table top.

"He was the doctor who took care of Van Gogh when he started to go mad," the second boy said.

"I knew that," proclaimed the first boy convincingly.

"Look. There it is. The actual one!" Amy dragged us away from the group odd tourists who followed the man giving the Van Gogh speech to look at the painting Vincent had done of a tall, towering cathedral. She held up the matching pamphlet picture to the large painting.

"Yes. You can almost feel his hand painting it right in front of you, carving the colours into shapes... Wait a minute." He stopped dead cold, and I regained the grip on Amy's hand that I'd lost.

"What?" She asked cluelessly.

"Well, just... look at that," he said nervously.

"What?" She repeated.

"Something very not good indeed."

I was getting fed up. Yeah. Keep being vague for us. That will solve all the problems.

"What thing very not good?" She continued.

"Look there, in the church window." He pointed. I leaned forward and examined a detailed Dragon-like face in the window he meant.