i pin those patterns on my coat
title: patterns of fairytales
author: unicornsforsale/battledress
pairing: river/doctor, amy/rory, river/many others, implied amy/doctor
warnings: violence, suggestions of child abuse, indefinite wip status
notes: the river song fic that ate my brain. i started it before 6.5 aired, so in the unlikely event that i finish it, it will end up being a full-on rewrite. see end for more notes!
summary: River Song has two names and two sets of memories from two different lives, two different histories behind her and an infinite number of unfolding futures. Featuring paradoxes, rewritten time, tree-top cities, ominous haberdashery, the inherent awkwardness of touch telepathy, and women rewriting their own stories.
1.
River Song has two names and two sets of memories from two different lives, two different histories behind her and an infinite number of unfolding futures. She was Melody before, in the life that never happened, and sometimes she still is: when she wakes up from nightmares about headless men in robes or the spaceman (it eats her, it gobbles her up and she is trapped and she can’t move the way she wants, can’t control it, and he is falling down in the sand and his eyes were so kind and so very old and no one had looked at her with such kindness in a very long time and she is crying, and she is supposed to hate him but she doesn’t want anyone to die, and she begs and begs for help but no one ever comes until one day someone does, and it’s her mother screaming, and she will get out, she’ll make a way, there’s always a way out), then she remembers and she is Melody still, or perhaps again, both herself and her-almost-was-self.
For this moment in time she is only River, and it’s three hours until her ninth birthday. She’s stayed awake long past her bedtime, practically vibrating with anticipation in her leaf-shaped bed in her little yellow room, much too excited to sleep when today is so close to being yesterday, and that means that tomorrow will be today and today there will be a party just for her, and she’s going to have it in Virtual Egypt, with cake and presents and balloons on steps of the Old Old Earth pyramids, looking out at the Sphinx of Giza. It’s going to the best birthday ever, even if the pyramids are only simulations. She’ll see the real ones one day.
River knows she should go to sleep because when she wakes up it will already be tomorrow, but her brain is much too busy, whirring around with thoughts of ancient Egypt and Virtual Egypt and all the time-traveling adventures she’s going to have when she’s grown up and doesn’t have a stupid bed time and also about her presents, and she wishes it were her birthday now, but it’s not now, it’s hours and eons away.
Except, River remembers, sitting up and flinging her quilt back, that it isn’t. Her birthday is happening right now. She jumps out of bed and races down the hall to her parents’ room because she’s right, she knows she is, and if she tells them while they are still mostly asleep, her plan has at least a 42% chance of working. The door is unlocked this time, which is good because last time it wasn’t, and she had pulled the door off its hinges trying to get to them because the spaceman had come for her in a nightmare, and she was pretty sure that seeing her do that had scared her dad because he’d had fallen off the bed when she burst in that night, and ran to the bathroom, spluttering and wrapped in one of the blankets, while her mum laughed and laughed, hastily tugging at her nightgown before holding her arms out to River and saying, “Okay, come here, you.”
But the door is unlocked and she pushes it open to find her sleeping parents, snuggled together under heaps of blankets. One of their windows is open, letting the cool breeze of the forest’s mid-year season fill the room with a crisp night breeze and the scent of green. River has the tactical advantage here and decides that a surprise jump attack is the best course of action. She lands on top of them and everything is a tangle of limbs and blankets and her father yelling, “River! Always with the jumping!” while her mum just groans and buries her head under the pillow. Phase one is a success.
“Parents,” River announces triumphantly, pushing herself up to sit between them, “it’s my birthday.”
“Nice try, kid, but your birthday’s not for another few hours at least,” Amy says, voice muffled by the pillow.
“Wrong,” River says. “So very wrong.”
Her dad rolls his eyes and makes a grab for her, hugging her to his chest. “Okay then, Professor Song,” he says, ruffling her hair and reaching down to tickle her sides, laughing while she shrieks and giggles and tries to squirm away. “Enlighten us.”
Amy kicks at him underneath the blankets, hard. Rory yelps and kicks her back, losing his grip on River long enough for her to escape. “What was that for?”
“Oi, you know what for, stupid,” Amy says, lifting her pillow to glare balefully at him.
Rory rolls his eyes, running a hand across his stubbly face. “I haven’t spoiled anything for anyone, and I’m not afraid of you, Amelia Song.” Amy narrows her eyes and stares harder, not breaking eye contact until Rory starts to subtly scoot away from her. “I’m... mostly not afraid of you. Anymore.”
“It’s my birthday right now,” River says loudly, drawing their attention back to where it should be, namely on her and her rightness, “because linear time is an arbitrary construct.”
“What?” Rory says, staring up at her blankly, while her mum mutters something about “bloody timeheads” and drops the pillow back on her head.
“Time isn’t linear,” River says, insistently. “It’s happening all at once.”
She knows because she can feel it, can feel time rippling all around her as it pulls everyone else along, inexorably, can reach out with her mind and feel the creation and collapse of interminable parallel universes branching out from each second of her timeline, from everything and everyone, all that was and might have been and will be and will have been. Sometimes the concentration it takes not too lose herself in it, not to be crushed by the weight of it, is too much, and it feels like her head is going to split open.
Last week her teacher had asked the class, rhetorically, how might things be different if the Papal Mainframe had networked a different iteration of Herself (which would have been a Level Four Heresy on planets that weren’t church neutral) and River had thought back to that moment in time, poking around until she found the threads of time that felt right, had the proper crunchy-timey texture-color, and she’d gotten so lost in the fluctuations and patterns, all the what-ifs and never-weres, that it took thirty minutes of subjective time for her to pull out of it, and when she did her head was throbbing so badly she got sick all over her desk and ruined her favorite blue jumper. The other students in her year already thought she was a freak before that--they called her a baby because she was younger than most of them by four years, and it’s only four years because her parents wouldn’t let her skip anymore levels--and that had made things at school worse for a while.
“And that means...?” Rory says.
“It means everything is happening all together, all at the same time, so even though it’s today for us right now, it’s also tomorrow and the next day and last Wednesday and next month and always was and always will be,” River says, leaning forward and rubbing her hands together excitedly. “So, really, it’s always my birthday.”
“So,” Amy says, slowly, lifting up a corner of the pillow to squint at River, “what you’re really saying is that you want your presents now?”
“Yes.” River sighs, happily. “And that I should probably get presents every day. And cakes.”
And then her mum swats her in the face with the pillow and her dad laughs before grabbing her again like a traitor and holding her down so Amy can tickle her. River could break free if she wanted, she’s strong enough, but she doesn’t ever want to, especially not when the tickling subsides and her mother leans down to spread kisses across River’s eyelids and the curve of her cheek and the tip of her nose.
“Happy birthday, sweetie,” Amy says, pressing one last kiss to her daughter’s forehead, and River feels suddenly content to wait until tomorrow to open her gifts; she thinks maybe this is best birthday present she could ever possibly get, this life in the forest with her parents. Except for the cakes.
2.
This is how Melody Pond becomes River Song:
It starts on the shore of a lake in Utah in 2011. There is a spaceship in that lake, hidden just beneath the surface of the water, a time engine full of Silence and a little girl who is a weapon and a miracle, trapped in a spacesuit that was built to protect her, in a spaceship she was built to fly. Melody hates being trapped, and she especially hates being trapped in a room with the Silence--she is still a little afraid of them even after two years of living in an orphanage infested with them, even though they have never hurt her--but she does love the ship.
The first time they brought her there, the day they stole her away, she had been afraid of the time engine and its sparse, shadowy control room. Soon, though, they had started teaching her how to fly it, how to pilot it with her thoughts and minute movements of her hand on the console; in those moments, she was glad they had stolen her from the clerics and Madame Kovarian, as content as possible with her lonely little life. Now flitting through time and space in their (her) ship, jumping from Florida in 1969 to the coordinates they give her in 2011, comes as easy to her as breathing. The hours of waiting, of being confined, come less easy. She’s still a little girl, after all, and all the expert grooming and genetic tampering in the universe can’t override childish impatience or prevent a tiny shiver of fear at the thought of facing the Doctor, of fulfilling her mission so early and without Madame Kovarian there to instruct her. Finally, inevitably, a small cluster of Silence moves to stand before her, where she leans against the bulkhead of the ship. Go, they tell her. He is waiting.
Melody sees him the moment she breaches the surface of the water, just as they said; there are other people with him, in the distance, but Melody’s focus is on the Doctor, on the Objective, always. She hesitates in the shallow water, at the edge of the banks, because this is it, he’s come to her at last. Once, before the Silence took her away from Madame Kovarian, Melody had asked her how she’d ever be able to find the Doctor and neutralize him if he had all of time and space to hide from her, and Kovarian’s lips had twisted and curved into what would have been a smile one anyone else’s face, and she’d said, “Oh, don’t worry about that, dear. He’ll come to you.”
And he does, and did, and will. He walks across the sand to her, and Melody walks forward to meet him. Standing in front of him isn’t at all what she’d thought it would be. She has to do this, she knows that, she’s always known that, but she thinks she needs his help, too. If anyone could save her and Doctor Renfrew from the Silence, if anyone could get her out of this, it’s the Doctor. He can tear down empires with words, make armies turn and run away in fear; helping one little girl escape would be easy, would be nothing for him, but Melody knows she can’t ask him to save her when she has to kill him, so that he can’t hurt anyone else.
“Hello,” the Doctor says, gently, ancient eyes darting up and down the spacesuit. “It’s okay. I know it’s you.”
Melody’s hearts beat frenetically in her chest at that, but her hands are steady inside the thick lining of the suit. She’s been prepared for this since birth, and she is brave, she will be brave, so she lifts the visor on the suit to look at him.
“Well, then,” he says, smiling slightly. The Doctor’s eyes keep flicking from her face to the spacesuit to the ground and back again, a dozen different emotions that she can’t place dancing across his face. Time is in flux here, jumpy and wobbly, and Melody can feel his timeline (and hers, both of theirs) rewriting itself with every fidget and twitch of his body. “Are you ready?”
Melody almost gasps, but doesn’t. Growing up with Madame Kovarian meant learning to be very good at giving nothing away. She says, simply, “I have to be.”
The Doctor winces at that. “Okay. Okay, good, good for you, you really are very brave. I’m not ready, not quite yet.” His gaze meets hers for the first time. “There’s something you need to know first. You need to know that this is my fault, all of it. Everything they ever taught you about me, it’s all true, and you’ve had to pay for it instead of me, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but I’m going to fix it. They’re coming for you right now--your parents, and it’s going to be alright. They’re going to save you.”
She wants to believe him, wants that more than anything, but she knows better. That is the first rule, the very first thing she was taught: the Doctor lies. Melody knows he’s lying now because her parents are dead: they died at the battle of Demon’s Run, when the Doctor came to kidnap her. “But it won’t save you.”
He smiles at her her again, infinitely sad and infinitely kind. “No. Well, yes, in a way.” He pauses, lips pursed, before going on rapidly. “Unless you shoot me again, in the future, for rewriting your life after you told me not to, but then you haven’t told me yet, have you? And you did help. So maybe this is what always happened--will have happened. I don’t know yet, and you never give anything away, unlike me, apparently,” he says, flinging an arm out in frustration, his mouth tightening. “I’ve been running from this moment for hundreds of years, trying to think of a different solution, but if one exists, I can’t see it. Maybe you can, maybe you did. We’ll find out soon.”
Melody blinks. She’s yet to find something she can’t understand if she turns it over in her mind enough, but the Doctor’s words are inexplicable. He’s talking about things that haven’t happened, that won’t happen if he’s dead, talking to her like he knows her. The Doctor lies, she thinks. “You’re stalling.”
“A bit, yes,” he says, looking at her again, eyes squinting in the bright sunlight . “Do you remember me, Melody Pond? Do you remember when we talked?”
“No,” Melody says, but she lies, too. She remembers everything, things she shouldn’t, things other people forget: the Silence who fade from everyone else’s memories the minute they turn their heard, like they never existed at all; the Doctor and his silly clothes and his pretty stars; her father pressing kisses to her head and holding her clumsily to his chest; the scent of her mother’s skin and the orangey-red of her hair, the sound of her voice as she told Melody story after story about the Doctor, about her father, about the endless, unfurling universe.
The Doctor’s face crumbles at the lie, and he hangs his head, and in that moment he isn’t a god or trickster or a warlord or any of the hateful things they drilled into her mind. He’s just a man, just a sad old man in a silly bow tie with a too-young face and eyes that can’t hide what he is, the truth of his long life, and Melody doesn’t want to watch him die, but she can’t help him and he can’t help her. She wishes they had been able to teach her how to hate him; it would be so easy, she thinks, if she hated him.
“Okay,” he says, quietly. “Geronimo.”
Melody raises her arm and fires.
The Doctor stumbles, falling to his knees in the sand as the second pulse hits him, and his body starts to die. Whorls of golden light curl around his hands and face as the regeneration starts, and he moves to stand again.
She watches him as he looks over to the people waiting in the distance and says, “I’m sorry,” before his body turns to pure energy. There is something niggling at the back of her mind, something telling her to look over at those people, but Melody just stares, transfixed, at the time energy swirling over the Doctor’s skin like a nebula. It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen, and she’s going to stop it. She fires again, and this time when he falls, he doesn’t get back up. It’s over.
The others are running toward them now, but the suit turns of its own accord before she can see them, and walks her back into the water. Melody hears the sound of gunshots behind her, one-two-three-four-five rounds, but they all miss.
3.
River Song is five hundred and twenty three years old, give or take a few time loops and rewritten years and however long they spent on that mushroom planet, which may have been an hour or may have been a century--no one can really be sure, but the TARDIS was quite cross with them both when they finally dragged themselves back--before she understands everything the Doctor said to her that day by the lake in Utah and why he said it.
She’s in her cell at Stormcage, sketching in her diary the events of the last week--the Doctor strapped into into the Pandorica, her father as the Last Centurion for the very first (and very last) time, her mother in her wedding dress--when she hears the familiar, grating vroop vroop vroop of the TARDIS as it materializes in the corridor. River grins and snaps her diary shut. She’d thought today would be boring.
The Doctor saunters out with a sly little grin on his face, and her usual greeting dies in her throat when she sees the Stetson on his head. It hasn’t been so very long ago for her since she sat down at a picnic with him and her long dead newlywed parents and watched herself kill him in a timeline that both happened and did not happen. Of course, River thinks wildly, of course this mad inversion of a life together would result in ominous haberdashery.
“Hello, River,” he murmurs, leaning up against the bars, and the warmth in his voice, in his eyes as they move over her body, feels like coming home after spending so much time with his younger self.
“Hello, idiot,” River says, even as she reaches out to thread her fingers through his where they wrap around the bars. “What are you doing here?”
He leans back and cocks his head to side like a perplexed bird, the picture of mock outrage. “Do I need a reason to visit my favorite prisoner in the whole of the universe and, indeed, some very cozy pockets of time outside the universe? Couldn’t I just have missed you?”
River’s eyebrows shoot up at that nonsense. “Honey,” she says gently, “don’t think I don’t know exactly where you are in your timeline.” She untangles one of her hands from his to flick the brim of his hat. “Why are you here now?”
“I need your help. I need you to fly the TARDIS while I do a... thing,” the Doctor finishes lamely, scratching his face, his eyes fixed intently on hers. “And then--then I need you to do another thing.”
“I can’t,” she says, shaking her head. “I can’t be there. I can’t watch it again, not one more time.”
“And I wouldn’t ask you to, even if I thought the universe could handle three of you in the same place at the same time without imploding.” He squeezes her hand. “River, I’ve found you. Not the little girl in the spacesuit, before that--baby you, baby Melody. I went through that batty old man’s memories, the one from the orphanage, and backtracked from there. She took you to New York in 1963. That’s why you went there to search for the Silence in 1969. You were leaving me clues, you clever thing. You always do.”
“Yes,” she says simply, yes and yes and yes.
River knows how this story ends. Melody Pond goes to sleep in an alley, dirty and hungry and cold and utterly alone (but free, so very free), and wakes up the next morning and centuries later in her bedroom in her house, with a new name and memories of two different lives floating around in her head. River Song grows up in hiding with her parents in the Gamma Forest and sometimes when she’s baking cupcakes with her mum, she blinks, and she’s in Madame Kovarian’s sparse compound in New York, learning Venusian aikido and being drilled on the Doctor’s different faces. New-old memories stop coming when she’s seven, the year Melody kills the Doctor and he kills the Silence, the year she dies and is reborn: the year River learns how to close the door in her head and teaches herself how to forget.
Her life is built on a paradox, and it shouldn’t hold. The Doctor only knew where to look for her in the past because he made her and parents watch her shoot him in the future--he only knew how to save her because he was never able to save her. When Amy and Rory went back and stole her from 1963, time should have collapsed, the universe should have exploded, the Reapers should have come from the vortex to devour them and repair time, but none of those things ever happened. For all her cleverness and all her years spent wondering, she’s never been able to figure out how he managed it, and he never would tell her.
“Amy and Rory are waiting in the TARDIS,” he says softly, running his thumb along hers. “We’re going to make a quick stop in Utah--that’s where I get off--and then I need you to fly her. Take them to New York to get their baby. Will you come?”
“Will I come help you rewrite my own life?” River closes her eyes. She feels like there is something squirming inside of her and all around her, and she’s genuinely not sure if it’s her nerves or the fourth dimension that’s gone all wobbly. It tends to do that around the two of them.
“Yes,” River says again, because they both know she already did, and because she stopped telling him no when she didn’t have to a long, long time ago, and it’s still too often.
The Doctor smiles at her in that sweet, fey way of his (and that is one constant of his, that smile, no matter which face it is) and oh, how she loves him. “Magnificent,” he breathes. “You know, this may work out after all. I’m almost mostly pretty sure.”
River rolls her eyes, and turns in her cell to grab her diary and the simple cloth bag tucked away underneath her bed that she keeps half-packed, mostly because it distresses the guards so and teasing them is her primary source of amusement these days. They confiscated her vortex manipulator and her weapons belt last time she broke back in, as they do every time, but she has spares in her room on the TARDIS.
The Doctor slips his sonic out of his pocket and fiddles with it until the locks on her cell spring open, then flings the door aside with a flourish. “After you, my dear.”
A second later, the alarm goes off and she hears the sound of boots thundering down both sides of the corridor. “Oh, oops,” he says, freezing like a little boy caught sneaking jammy dodgers after midnight.
“Run,” River says, laughing, and takes off for the TARDIS barefooted, tugging him along by the lapel of his tweed coat.
She has questions, but they can wait a moment longer.
(part two)
author: unicornsforsale/battledress
pairing: river/doctor, amy/rory, river/many others, implied amy/doctor
warnings: violence, suggestions of child abuse, indefinite wip status
notes: the river song fic that ate my brain. i started it before 6.5 aired, so in the unlikely event that i finish it, it will end up being a full-on rewrite. see end for more notes!
summary: River Song has two names and two sets of memories from two different lives, two different histories behind her and an infinite number of unfolding futures. Featuring paradoxes, rewritten time, tree-top cities, ominous haberdashery, the inherent awkwardness of touch telepathy, and women rewriting their own stories.
1.
River Song has two names and two sets of memories from two different lives, two different histories behind her and an infinite number of unfolding futures. She was Melody before, in the life that never happened, and sometimes she still is: when she wakes up from nightmares about headless men in robes or the spaceman (it eats her, it gobbles her up and she is trapped and she can’t move the way she wants, can’t control it, and he is falling down in the sand and his eyes were so kind and so very old and no one had looked at her with such kindness in a very long time and she is crying, and she is supposed to hate him but she doesn’t want anyone to die, and she begs and begs for help but no one ever comes until one day someone does, and it’s her mother screaming, and she will get out, she’ll make a way, there’s always a way out), then she remembers and she is Melody still, or perhaps again, both herself and her-almost-was-self.
For this moment in time she is only River, and it’s three hours until her ninth birthday. She’s stayed awake long past her bedtime, practically vibrating with anticipation in her leaf-shaped bed in her little yellow room, much too excited to sleep when today is so close to being yesterday, and that means that tomorrow will be today and today there will be a party just for her, and she’s going to have it in Virtual Egypt, with cake and presents and balloons on steps of the Old Old Earth pyramids, looking out at the Sphinx of Giza. It’s going to the best birthday ever, even if the pyramids are only simulations. She’ll see the real ones one day.
River knows she should go to sleep because when she wakes up it will already be tomorrow, but her brain is much too busy, whirring around with thoughts of ancient Egypt and Virtual Egypt and all the time-traveling adventures she’s going to have when she’s grown up and doesn’t have a stupid bed time and also about her presents, and she wishes it were her birthday now, but it’s not now, it’s hours and eons away.
Except, River remembers, sitting up and flinging her quilt back, that it isn’t. Her birthday is happening right now. She jumps out of bed and races down the hall to her parents’ room because she’s right, she knows she is, and if she tells them while they are still mostly asleep, her plan has at least a 42% chance of working. The door is unlocked this time, which is good because last time it wasn’t, and she had pulled the door off its hinges trying to get to them because the spaceman had come for her in a nightmare, and she was pretty sure that seeing her do that had scared her dad because he’d had fallen off the bed when she burst in that night, and ran to the bathroom, spluttering and wrapped in one of the blankets, while her mum laughed and laughed, hastily tugging at her nightgown before holding her arms out to River and saying, “Okay, come here, you.”
But the door is unlocked and she pushes it open to find her sleeping parents, snuggled together under heaps of blankets. One of their windows is open, letting the cool breeze of the forest’s mid-year season fill the room with a crisp night breeze and the scent of green. River has the tactical advantage here and decides that a surprise jump attack is the best course of action. She lands on top of them and everything is a tangle of limbs and blankets and her father yelling, “River! Always with the jumping!” while her mum just groans and buries her head under the pillow. Phase one is a success.
“Parents,” River announces triumphantly, pushing herself up to sit between them, “it’s my birthday.”
“Nice try, kid, but your birthday’s not for another few hours at least,” Amy says, voice muffled by the pillow.
“Wrong,” River says. “So very wrong.”
Her dad rolls his eyes and makes a grab for her, hugging her to his chest. “Okay then, Professor Song,” he says, ruffling her hair and reaching down to tickle her sides, laughing while she shrieks and giggles and tries to squirm away. “Enlighten us.”
Amy kicks at him underneath the blankets, hard. Rory yelps and kicks her back, losing his grip on River long enough for her to escape. “What was that for?”
“Oi, you know what for, stupid,” Amy says, lifting her pillow to glare balefully at him.
Rory rolls his eyes, running a hand across his stubbly face. “I haven’t spoiled anything for anyone, and I’m not afraid of you, Amelia Song.” Amy narrows her eyes and stares harder, not breaking eye contact until Rory starts to subtly scoot away from her. “I’m... mostly not afraid of you. Anymore.”
“It’s my birthday right now,” River says loudly, drawing their attention back to where it should be, namely on her and her rightness, “because linear time is an arbitrary construct.”
“What?” Rory says, staring up at her blankly, while her mum mutters something about “bloody timeheads” and drops the pillow back on her head.
“Time isn’t linear,” River says, insistently. “It’s happening all at once.”
She knows because she can feel it, can feel time rippling all around her as it pulls everyone else along, inexorably, can reach out with her mind and feel the creation and collapse of interminable parallel universes branching out from each second of her timeline, from everything and everyone, all that was and might have been and will be and will have been. Sometimes the concentration it takes not too lose herself in it, not to be crushed by the weight of it, is too much, and it feels like her head is going to split open.
Last week her teacher had asked the class, rhetorically, how might things be different if the Papal Mainframe had networked a different iteration of Herself (which would have been a Level Four Heresy on planets that weren’t church neutral) and River had thought back to that moment in time, poking around until she found the threads of time that felt right, had the proper crunchy-timey texture-color, and she’d gotten so lost in the fluctuations and patterns, all the what-ifs and never-weres, that it took thirty minutes of subjective time for her to pull out of it, and when she did her head was throbbing so badly she got sick all over her desk and ruined her favorite blue jumper. The other students in her year already thought she was a freak before that--they called her a baby because she was younger than most of them by four years, and it’s only four years because her parents wouldn’t let her skip anymore levels--and that had made things at school worse for a while.
“And that means...?” Rory says.
“It means everything is happening all together, all at the same time, so even though it’s today for us right now, it’s also tomorrow and the next day and last Wednesday and next month and always was and always will be,” River says, leaning forward and rubbing her hands together excitedly. “So, really, it’s always my birthday.”
“So,” Amy says, slowly, lifting up a corner of the pillow to squint at River, “what you’re really saying is that you want your presents now?”
“Yes.” River sighs, happily. “And that I should probably get presents every day. And cakes.”
And then her mum swats her in the face with the pillow and her dad laughs before grabbing her again like a traitor and holding her down so Amy can tickle her. River could break free if she wanted, she’s strong enough, but she doesn’t ever want to, especially not when the tickling subsides and her mother leans down to spread kisses across River’s eyelids and the curve of her cheek and the tip of her nose.
“Happy birthday, sweetie,” Amy says, pressing one last kiss to her daughter’s forehead, and River feels suddenly content to wait until tomorrow to open her gifts; she thinks maybe this is best birthday present she could ever possibly get, this life in the forest with her parents. Except for the cakes.
2.
This is how Melody Pond becomes River Song:
It starts on the shore of a lake in Utah in 2011. There is a spaceship in that lake, hidden just beneath the surface of the water, a time engine full of Silence and a little girl who is a weapon and a miracle, trapped in a spacesuit that was built to protect her, in a spaceship she was built to fly. Melody hates being trapped, and she especially hates being trapped in a room with the Silence--she is still a little afraid of them even after two years of living in an orphanage infested with them, even though they have never hurt her--but she does love the ship.
The first time they brought her there, the day they stole her away, she had been afraid of the time engine and its sparse, shadowy control room. Soon, though, they had started teaching her how to fly it, how to pilot it with her thoughts and minute movements of her hand on the console; in those moments, she was glad they had stolen her from the clerics and Madame Kovarian, as content as possible with her lonely little life. Now flitting through time and space in their (her) ship, jumping from Florida in 1969 to the coordinates they give her in 2011, comes as easy to her as breathing. The hours of waiting, of being confined, come less easy. She’s still a little girl, after all, and all the expert grooming and genetic tampering in the universe can’t override childish impatience or prevent a tiny shiver of fear at the thought of facing the Doctor, of fulfilling her mission so early and without Madame Kovarian there to instruct her. Finally, inevitably, a small cluster of Silence moves to stand before her, where she leans against the bulkhead of the ship. Go, they tell her. He is waiting.
Melody sees him the moment she breaches the surface of the water, just as they said; there are other people with him, in the distance, but Melody’s focus is on the Doctor, on the Objective, always. She hesitates in the shallow water, at the edge of the banks, because this is it, he’s come to her at last. Once, before the Silence took her away from Madame Kovarian, Melody had asked her how she’d ever be able to find the Doctor and neutralize him if he had all of time and space to hide from her, and Kovarian’s lips had twisted and curved into what would have been a smile one anyone else’s face, and she’d said, “Oh, don’t worry about that, dear. He’ll come to you.”
And he does, and did, and will. He walks across the sand to her, and Melody walks forward to meet him. Standing in front of him isn’t at all what she’d thought it would be. She has to do this, she knows that, she’s always known that, but she thinks she needs his help, too. If anyone could save her and Doctor Renfrew from the Silence, if anyone could get her out of this, it’s the Doctor. He can tear down empires with words, make armies turn and run away in fear; helping one little girl escape would be easy, would be nothing for him, but Melody knows she can’t ask him to save her when she has to kill him, so that he can’t hurt anyone else.
“Hello,” the Doctor says, gently, ancient eyes darting up and down the spacesuit. “It’s okay. I know it’s you.”
Melody’s hearts beat frenetically in her chest at that, but her hands are steady inside the thick lining of the suit. She’s been prepared for this since birth, and she is brave, she will be brave, so she lifts the visor on the suit to look at him.
“Well, then,” he says, smiling slightly. The Doctor’s eyes keep flicking from her face to the spacesuit to the ground and back again, a dozen different emotions that she can’t place dancing across his face. Time is in flux here, jumpy and wobbly, and Melody can feel his timeline (and hers, both of theirs) rewriting itself with every fidget and twitch of his body. “Are you ready?”
Melody almost gasps, but doesn’t. Growing up with Madame Kovarian meant learning to be very good at giving nothing away. She says, simply, “I have to be.”
The Doctor winces at that. “Okay. Okay, good, good for you, you really are very brave. I’m not ready, not quite yet.” His gaze meets hers for the first time. “There’s something you need to know first. You need to know that this is my fault, all of it. Everything they ever taught you about me, it’s all true, and you’ve had to pay for it instead of me, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but I’m going to fix it. They’re coming for you right now--your parents, and it’s going to be alright. They’re going to save you.”
She wants to believe him, wants that more than anything, but she knows better. That is the first rule, the very first thing she was taught: the Doctor lies. Melody knows he’s lying now because her parents are dead: they died at the battle of Demon’s Run, when the Doctor came to kidnap her. “But it won’t save you.”
He smiles at her her again, infinitely sad and infinitely kind. “No. Well, yes, in a way.” He pauses, lips pursed, before going on rapidly. “Unless you shoot me again, in the future, for rewriting your life after you told me not to, but then you haven’t told me yet, have you? And you did help. So maybe this is what always happened--will have happened. I don’t know yet, and you never give anything away, unlike me, apparently,” he says, flinging an arm out in frustration, his mouth tightening. “I’ve been running from this moment for hundreds of years, trying to think of a different solution, but if one exists, I can’t see it. Maybe you can, maybe you did. We’ll find out soon.”
Melody blinks. She’s yet to find something she can’t understand if she turns it over in her mind enough, but the Doctor’s words are inexplicable. He’s talking about things that haven’t happened, that won’t happen if he’s dead, talking to her like he knows her. The Doctor lies, she thinks. “You’re stalling.”
“A bit, yes,” he says, looking at her again, eyes squinting in the bright sunlight . “Do you remember me, Melody Pond? Do you remember when we talked?”
“No,” Melody says, but she lies, too. She remembers everything, things she shouldn’t, things other people forget: the Silence who fade from everyone else’s memories the minute they turn their heard, like they never existed at all; the Doctor and his silly clothes and his pretty stars; her father pressing kisses to her head and holding her clumsily to his chest; the scent of her mother’s skin and the orangey-red of her hair, the sound of her voice as she told Melody story after story about the Doctor, about her father, about the endless, unfurling universe.
The Doctor’s face crumbles at the lie, and he hangs his head, and in that moment he isn’t a god or trickster or a warlord or any of the hateful things they drilled into her mind. He’s just a man, just a sad old man in a silly bow tie with a too-young face and eyes that can’t hide what he is, the truth of his long life, and Melody doesn’t want to watch him die, but she can’t help him and he can’t help her. She wishes they had been able to teach her how to hate him; it would be so easy, she thinks, if she hated him.
“Okay,” he says, quietly. “Geronimo.”
Melody raises her arm and fires.
The Doctor stumbles, falling to his knees in the sand as the second pulse hits him, and his body starts to die. Whorls of golden light curl around his hands and face as the regeneration starts, and he moves to stand again.
She watches him as he looks over to the people waiting in the distance and says, “I’m sorry,” before his body turns to pure energy. There is something niggling at the back of her mind, something telling her to look over at those people, but Melody just stares, transfixed, at the time energy swirling over the Doctor’s skin like a nebula. It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen, and she’s going to stop it. She fires again, and this time when he falls, he doesn’t get back up. It’s over.
The others are running toward them now, but the suit turns of its own accord before she can see them, and walks her back into the water. Melody hears the sound of gunshots behind her, one-two-three-four-five rounds, but they all miss.
3.
River Song is five hundred and twenty three years old, give or take a few time loops and rewritten years and however long they spent on that mushroom planet, which may have been an hour or may have been a century--no one can really be sure, but the TARDIS was quite cross with them both when they finally dragged themselves back--before she understands everything the Doctor said to her that day by the lake in Utah and why he said it.
She’s in her cell at Stormcage, sketching in her diary the events of the last week--the Doctor strapped into into the Pandorica, her father as the Last Centurion for the very first (and very last) time, her mother in her wedding dress--when she hears the familiar, grating vroop vroop vroop of the TARDIS as it materializes in the corridor. River grins and snaps her diary shut. She’d thought today would be boring.
The Doctor saunters out with a sly little grin on his face, and her usual greeting dies in her throat when she sees the Stetson on his head. It hasn’t been so very long ago for her since she sat down at a picnic with him and her long dead newlywed parents and watched herself kill him in a timeline that both happened and did not happen. Of course, River thinks wildly, of course this mad inversion of a life together would result in ominous haberdashery.
“Hello, River,” he murmurs, leaning up against the bars, and the warmth in his voice, in his eyes as they move over her body, feels like coming home after spending so much time with his younger self.
“Hello, idiot,” River says, even as she reaches out to thread her fingers through his where they wrap around the bars. “What are you doing here?”
He leans back and cocks his head to side like a perplexed bird, the picture of mock outrage. “Do I need a reason to visit my favorite prisoner in the whole of the universe and, indeed, some very cozy pockets of time outside the universe? Couldn’t I just have missed you?”
River’s eyebrows shoot up at that nonsense. “Honey,” she says gently, “don’t think I don’t know exactly where you are in your timeline.” She untangles one of her hands from his to flick the brim of his hat. “Why are you here now?”
“I need your help. I need you to fly the TARDIS while I do a... thing,” the Doctor finishes lamely, scratching his face, his eyes fixed intently on hers. “And then--then I need you to do another thing.”
“I can’t,” she says, shaking her head. “I can’t be there. I can’t watch it again, not one more time.”
“And I wouldn’t ask you to, even if I thought the universe could handle three of you in the same place at the same time without imploding.” He squeezes her hand. “River, I’ve found you. Not the little girl in the spacesuit, before that--baby you, baby Melody. I went through that batty old man’s memories, the one from the orphanage, and backtracked from there. She took you to New York in 1963. That’s why you went there to search for the Silence in 1969. You were leaving me clues, you clever thing. You always do.”
“Yes,” she says simply, yes and yes and yes.
River knows how this story ends. Melody Pond goes to sleep in an alley, dirty and hungry and cold and utterly alone (but free, so very free), and wakes up the next morning and centuries later in her bedroom in her house, with a new name and memories of two different lives floating around in her head. River Song grows up in hiding with her parents in the Gamma Forest and sometimes when she’s baking cupcakes with her mum, she blinks, and she’s in Madame Kovarian’s sparse compound in New York, learning Venusian aikido and being drilled on the Doctor’s different faces. New-old memories stop coming when she’s seven, the year Melody kills the Doctor and he kills the Silence, the year she dies and is reborn: the year River learns how to close the door in her head and teaches herself how to forget.
Her life is built on a paradox, and it shouldn’t hold. The Doctor only knew where to look for her in the past because he made her and parents watch her shoot him in the future--he only knew how to save her because he was never able to save her. When Amy and Rory went back and stole her from 1963, time should have collapsed, the universe should have exploded, the Reapers should have come from the vortex to devour them and repair time, but none of those things ever happened. For all her cleverness and all her years spent wondering, she’s never been able to figure out how he managed it, and he never would tell her.
“Amy and Rory are waiting in the TARDIS,” he says softly, running his thumb along hers. “We’re going to make a quick stop in Utah--that’s where I get off--and then I need you to fly her. Take them to New York to get their baby. Will you come?”
“Will I come help you rewrite my own life?” River closes her eyes. She feels like there is something squirming inside of her and all around her, and she’s genuinely not sure if it’s her nerves or the fourth dimension that’s gone all wobbly. It tends to do that around the two of them.
“Yes,” River says again, because they both know she already did, and because she stopped telling him no when she didn’t have to a long, long time ago, and it’s still too often.
The Doctor smiles at her in that sweet, fey way of his (and that is one constant of his, that smile, no matter which face it is) and oh, how she loves him. “Magnificent,” he breathes. “You know, this may work out after all. I’m almost mostly pretty sure.”
River rolls her eyes, and turns in her cell to grab her diary and the simple cloth bag tucked away underneath her bed that she keeps half-packed, mostly because it distresses the guards so and teasing them is her primary source of amusement these days. They confiscated her vortex manipulator and her weapons belt last time she broke back in, as they do every time, but she has spares in her room on the TARDIS.
The Doctor slips his sonic out of his pocket and fiddles with it until the locks on her cell spring open, then flings the door aside with a flourish. “After you, my dear.”
A second later, the alarm goes off and she hears the sound of boots thundering down both sides of the corridor. “Oh, oops,” he says, freezing like a little boy caught sneaking jammy dodgers after midnight.
“Run,” River says, laughing, and takes off for the TARDIS barefooted, tugging him along by the lapel of his tweed coat.
She has questions, but they can wait a moment longer.
(part two)