Doctor Who Fic: In Our Youth Time: Part Four: Woman of Time
Part Four: Woman of Time
Melody took a much needed vacation. She was tired of being the one who knew everything, she was tired of the Doctor, she was tired of running, she was tired of parents who didn’t know her, she was just tired.
The backwoods of Meltopa 5 were exactly what she wanted and she didn’t meet a single person, hostile or otherwise, for three weeks. She didn’t study, she didn’t exercise, she didn’t read, she didn’t trace timelines, she didn’t investigate; she just rested.
After it was over, she felt more like herself, more like taking on the universe.
So she went back to doing what she was good at for the next few years, taking jobs as they came, gaining experience for her next degree, whatever she decided it would be, not exactly avoiding the Doctor, but not seeking him out either. She regularly went home for every holiday and birthday and enjoyed time spent with her parents.
Surreptitiously she investigated to see if the Silence were still tailing her and they appeared to have vanished so she wondered if it was safe for her to travel with the Doctor yet. But she was content to wait until he contacted her.
Eventually she decided she couldn’t really put off her Demon’s Run excursion any longer and triple checked her coordinates and time to make sure she landed at the right spot. It was at times like this she really wished she was traveling by Tardis. The things that Vortex manipulators did to her hair…
When she landed she really wished she hadn’t because she was in a cavernous room with bodies lying all around her: a Sontaran and a human girl and so many Headless Monks.
Carnage wasn’t really a sight she associated with the Doctor. Bad things usually happened, people often died, but this had been a proper battle where the whole point was to kill.
Her parents were there, very young, her mother all in white, absolutely broken, and her father like the Roman centurion he had been once upon a time, his bravery covering his heartache. Vastra and Jenny were in the background, but mostly Melody looked for the Doctor, for that figure of outraged justice, practically shaking in his pain.
“What are you doing here?” he said, looking up at her entrance. “Don’t you have somewhere to be? Someone else’s timeline to erase?”
“That’s hardly fair,” she said, standing straight.
He strode over to her, very angry.
“If you insist on being here, couldn’t you have come sooner? Look, look what happened.”
“I could not have prevented this,” she said.
“You could have tried,” he roared.
“And so, dear Uncle, could you.”
It was the first time she’d directly addressed a younger Doctor by that term. He looked at her sharply and so did her parents.
“This is not my fault,” he said. “I didn’t do this. This isn’t me.”
“Perhaps not directly,” she said, thinking back to her entire childhood. “But this is exactly you, Doctor. Don’t you think the universe might be just a little bit afraid of who you are? Did you think when you started all those years ago, that you’d ever become this? A man so powerful people would stop at nothing to snuff out his life. And now they’ve taken a child, the child of your best friends, and they’re going to turn her into a weapon. And all this, in fear of you.”
“I’m tired of not knowing, Melody,” he said, striding toward her. “You know too much. Tell me who you are. No more games, no more spoilers, no more double Melody/River memories.”
“Doesn’t that tell you who I am?” she asked.
He stopped, stopped and thought, and she watched his brain put it together.
“You,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Are.”
“Yes.”
“Then she was.”
“She was.”
“So you’re both.”
“Indeed.”
“And I’m going to.”
“You’d better.”
He honestly started giggling at that point and then straightened his bow tie.
“How do I look?”
“Amazing,” she told him.
“Shall I do the honors?” he said.
“Please,” she said, dropping a mock curtsey.
The Doctor walked over to her parents and escorted them to her.
“Amy, Rory, I’d like you to meet your daughter, Melody…”
“Pond,” she supplied, smiling shyly.
“What?” her mom asked, looking very confused. “What?”
“Hello, APs,” Melody said. “Sorry for the confusion, but someone had to let you know what to name me.”
“Uh, sorry, I don’t get it,” her dad said.
“This is your daughter all grown up,” said the Doctor. “Thankfully she hasn’t got Rory’s nose.”
“I still have my sword, Doctor,” her dad said absently, staring at Melody. “So, you’re our daughter? Does that mean our baby…?”
“Will be fine,” Melody assured them. “In fact, I think the Doctor might be just about to take you to her.”
“Then you know where she is?” her mom asked, whirling on the Doctor.
“Florida, unless I miss my guess,” the Doctor said, looking to Melody for confirmation.
She nodded.
“But no more spoilers,” she said, smiling. “I don’t want to change too much of my childhood.”
“Thank you, Melody,” the Doctor said, smacking a kiss on her forehead. “Sorry for the shout-y bits, come along, Ponds.” He swaggered back to the Tardis. “Vastra, Jenny, until next time. Melody, you’ll make sure they get home.”
Her parents gave her one more gob smacked look and Melody smiled reassuringly at them.
“It’s okay. The Doctor will find your daughter and he’ll keep you safe. Go with him, go to her. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Her dad put one hesitant hand out and she clasped it firmly.
“You’ll be okay?” he asked.
“Yes, and so will you. All my love. Now go.”
They turned and went back into the Tardis where the Doctor could be heard cackling.
The Tardis vanished and Vastra and Jenny rounded on Melody.
“Now what was that all about?”
Melody rolled her eyes and explained as best as she could for their knowledge and then took everyone back home.
Then she went to visit her parents. For them it had been forty years since Demon’s Run.
“Oh, sweetie,” her mom said, enveloping her in a hug. “I can’t thank you enough for what you did.”
“So what happened after you left?”
“We went to the orphanage and got you and made our plans for keeping you safe,” her dad said.
Melody nodded. Nothing had changed; her memories were still the same.
“Then what do you remember about River Song?” she asked.
Her mom groaned.
“It’s too hard to remember really. I can remember meeting River Song vaguely, but I remember meeting you at the same time.”
“The Pandorica had both you and River there,” her dad put in. “I think.”
“The beach happened with River there, with you there, with…well, never mind.”
“What?”
“Spoilers, sweetie,” her mom said. “This timeline’s still got to play itself out.”
“So what about Demon’s Run?”
“Well, the first time’s a bit vague because that’s where it all started even if it was in the middle,” her dad said. “River showed up and then the Doctor shoved us in the Tardis and we left to go get you. That’s when our memories started to change. Before that there had only been River. Maybe. It’s so hard to tell.”
“You should ask the Doctor if you can get a straight answer out of him,” her mom suggested. “Our human brains just can’t handle the differences as well. It’s best we forget and if we try too hard to remember we get headaches.”
“Then don’t try,” Melody said, putting her hand over her mother’s. “I’m just glad it worked out.”
“Me too,” her mom said. “I can’t imagine what it would have been like to not watch you grow up in front of me, I hate thinking about the things you went through.”
“I didn’t,” Melody said, putting an arm around each of them. “I grew up your little Melody and that’s what I’ll always be. If slightly better at shooting things than most parents would prefer.”
They laughed at that and she looked at them, gray haired and bent, certainly they never, no matter how much the Tardis had preserved them, would be able to travel with the Doctor long term again.
“Don’t worry about us, Mels,” her mom said, catching her concern. “We’re fine. We’re normal, in fact.”
“I get your mother all to myself, what more could I want?” her dad asked, squeezing Melody’s shoulder. “This is your time to run, honey.”
“I’m running,” she said. “I think soon I’ll be able to run with the Doctor again. Then who knows what we’ll do.”
“Heaven help the universe,” her dad said, winking at her, before they broke the conversation up to have some food.
Melody stayed with her parents for a few weeks making sure they were okay. They had a routine going and she didn’t like to disrupt it. They were older, but still capable of taking care of themselves. Both her grandparents were gone from her mother’s side, but her Grandpa was still hanging on and her parents helped take care of him. Otherwise they were both retired, living comfortably on savings and what the Doctor had set them up with.
Melody swore she would always take care of them as they had taken care of her.
“I’ll always be your Melody,” she said firmly before she said goodbye.
***
The most interesting job offer Melody had yet received was to work with the Church, more specifically Father Octavian. The man was a legend with the clerics, tough and fair. She was a little bit nervous to meet him as she’d heard he had expressed extreme displeasure at being told he was going to work with a young girl with no official training or experience.
Not that she was so very young, not really. But her training and experience had all happened in ways he couldn’t even dream of, so she didn’t let it bother her and simply set out to do her job.
Still, she rather thought she might need some help on this one since she was a bit under read on Weeping Angels. The only problem was that she didn’t want to involve her Doctor because she didn’t want word getting around that he was still alive. The Church most definitely had connections to the Silence even if they were very unofficial and unknown to most of the clerics who were a part of it. So Melody set about getting a hold of whichever Doctor came for her message first.
The plan came together nicely once she knew how the Angel was being transported and the head of security was someone she’d met at uni and had had to be rather rude to due to circumstances entirely beyond her control such as him being a complete prat.
It went beautifully and once she knew the black box was recording she set about giving her message.
“Triple seven, five, slash, three, four, nine by ten, zero, twelve, slash, acorn. Oh, and I could do with an air corridor.”
When she landed in the Tardis on top of a very flabbergasted Doctor she had no time to waste even though she knew how much he hated it when anyone else took over. But there wasn’t any time to explain and this was a time for her more precise Tardis flying skills.
“They've gone into warp drive, we're losing them! Stay close!”
“I'm trying!” he snapped.
“Use the stabilisers.”
“There aren't any stabilisers!”
“The blue switches!”
“The blue ones don't do anything, they're just...blue.”
“Yes, they're blue. They're the blue stabilisers!” She switched them on and they all stopped falling about. “See?”
He glared at her and she wanted to pity him since she knew how much he liked flying about like a mad man.
“Yeah, well, it's just boring now, isn't it? They're boring-ers. They're blue boring-ers.”
Her mother was there too looking very young indeed and positively didn’t have a clue who Melody was.
“Doctor, how come she can fly the Tardis?”
The Doctor was sulking and didn’t answer. For a minute, Melody was struck how very young he was, how much her parents had changed him, given him back some of the maturity and sense of personal responsibility she’d seen from afar in some of his younger selves. Also, how much he’d changed to be a good example for her when she was growing up.
But she couldn’t focus on that, simply flew the Tardis, enjoying it tremendously. It had been too long and the Tardis welcomed it too, welcomed her lovingly.
“I've mapped the probability vectors, done a fold-back on the temporal isometry, charted the ship to its destination, and parked us right alongside.”
They did have a brief argument about the brakes, but then the Doctor bounced right back.
“Come along, Pond, let's have a look.”
“No, wait! Environment checks,” Melody said in exasperation.
“Oh, yes, sorry! Quite right. Environment checks.” His version of environment checks was to stick his head out the door. “Nice out. We're on Alfava Metraxis, the seventh planet of the Dundra System. Oxygen-rich atmosphere, toxins in the soft band, eleven hour day, and...” he stuck his head back out, “…chances of rain later.”
Melody followed them out and was introduced to her mother and the Doctor called her a Professor.
It made her wonder how such a young Doctor could know something about her future, but she firmly stashed that thought away for future perusal.
The Doctor was eying her like she was an escaped criminal and she didn’t know why. He was so edgy she thought he might explode. But he definitely got intrigued once he found out about the Angel and wasn’t impressed at all by Father Octavian and his men.
She tried to exchange diaries with him, but he apparently didn’t even have one himself yet. This was all going a bit worse than she had expected, especially when her mother got locked in a room with an image of a Weeping Angel.
Of course she got herself out brilliantly and they all trooped into the maze filled with statues where the clerics dashed about setting up perimeters and things like that.
Her mother contented herself with quizzing Melody about the Doctor and Melody did her best not to answer anything, even when the Doctor made little comments about her ‘not saying that last time.’
She realized he was simultaneously experiencing this event in two timelines, one here and now and one with River Song. As the Doctor he wouldn’t be able to forget the previous timeline even if it had been written over. In his personal timeline he was living it for the first time, but as he did so, the memories of the first timeline mingled with what was now established time.
She’d known it would happen that way, but hadn’t really understood, because he’d never been so blatant about showing it before. This must indeed be very early on in his acquaintance with her.
Still, they all had a nice chat about the Aplans, the indigenous life forms of the planet, and then the Doctor stopped suddenly.
“Oh!”
“What's wrong?” asked her mother.
Melody looked, really looked.
“Oh.”
“Exactly,” he said.
“How could we not notice that?” Melody asked.
“Low level perception filter, or maybe we're thick,” he answered, annoyance at himself pouring into his voice.
“What's wrong, sir?” asked Octavian.
“Nobody move. Everyone stay exactly where they are. Bishop, I am truly sorry. I've made a mistake and we are all in danger.”
“What danger?”
“The Aplans. They've got two heads,” Melody answered, seeing as how the Doctor was preoccupied planning their escape.
“Yes, I get that. So?”
“So why don't the statues?” The Doctor constructed a little experiment with the lights and Melody’s worst fears were realized. “They're Angels. All of them!”
So they ran. The clerics they’d left behind at the entrance were dead. The Angels were everywhere. All they had left was a crashed ship leaking radiation above their heads and her mother freaking out about her arm being stone when it was not.
“The statues are advancing on all sides and we don't have the climbing equipment to reach the Byzantium,” said Octavian.
Melody hadn’t a clue what to do so she did what she usually did in such situations, she turned to the Doctor.
“There's no way up, no way back, no way out. No pressure, but this is usually when you have a really good idea.”
“There's always a way out,” he said, looking to all sides.
Then the Angels tried to make the Doctor mad and, while it pained her, it also made Melody smile. That was a very bad idea.
“But you're trapped, sir, and about to die,” said Angel Bob.
“Yeah, I'm trapped. Speaking of traps, this trap has got a great big mistake in it. A great big, whopping mistake!”
“What mistake, sir?”
The Doctor turned to her mother.
“Trust me?”
“Yeah.”
He turned to Melody.
“Trust me?”
“Always.”
“You lot - trust me?” the Doctor asked Octavian.
“We have faith, sir.”
“Then give me your gun.” Melody stared. She’d never ever seen the Doctor with a gun. He always had a fit about her family arming itself. “I'm about to do something incredibly stupid and dangerous. When I do...jump.”
“Sorry, can I ask again? You mentioned a mistake?” asked Angel Bob.
“Oh, big mistake. Huge. There's one thing you never put in a trap, if you're smart, if you value your continued existence, if you have any plans about seeing tomorrow, there is one thing you never, ever put in a trap.”
“And what would that be, sir?”
“Me!”
He fired and Melody jumped, grinning with all her might.
***
The problem with jumping in an anti-grav environment was that it was very hard to judge where to land. Melody refrained from rubbing her bruised backside and concentrated on not dying.
They were stuck inside the hallways of the crashed ship and the Doctor had a crazy and wild plan that involved giving the Angels exactly what they needed to move and kill them all.
Melody could see Octavian was at its breaking point. He’d been on a simple snatch and grab job, then everything had turned on its head, his men had been killed, and he was on the run for his life with people he barely knew and barely trusted.
He’d been upset with her being involved from the beginning and while he was definitely impressed with the Doctor’s reputation, he didn’t know him the way he would once he got out of this situation. If he got out. The odds were against any of them getting out at the moment.
Octavian turned to her and his face was utterly fierce.
“Ma’am, I've lost good Clerics today. You trust this man?”
“I absolutely trust him.”
“He's not some kind of madman then?”
Um…well, that was slightly more difficult and what was the appropriate answer exactly?
“I absolutely trust him,” she said again weakly.
So they did it. And they escaped. But something was very wrong with her mother and Melody started to get more worried than she normally did on these expeditions.
They ran into the oxygen forest and left the Doctor behind with the Angels and Melody got a little bit angry at him and his self-sacrificing ways. It was always his way. Send everyone else away, leave himself with the monster of the week, and try to die, making everyone else vulnerable since their best weapon was usually him.
Of course he did mostly manage to think up a clever way of getting out at the last minute. If this had been her Doctor she would have been able to tell him exactly what she thought of it all, but she was so busy watching what she said that she wasn’t doing her best job. Blast him and making her some sort of guardian of time.
Then her mother collapsed while they ran.
“Amy, what's wrong?”
“Four,” she said, continuing her count down.
“Med-scanner, now!” Melody said.
“We can't stay here, we've got to keep moving,” Octavian said.
“We wait for the Doctor,” Melody said, busily using the scanner.
“Our mission is to make this wreckage safe and neutralise the Angels. Until that is achieved...”
“Father Octavian, when the Doctor is in the room, your only mission is to keep him alive long enough to get everyone else home. And, trust me, it's not easy. Now, if he's dead back there, I'll never forgive myself, and if he's alive-" she straightened suddenly. “Doctor, you're standing right behind me, aren't you?”
“Oh, yeah,” he crowed, leaping down beside her. “Say, you’re leaving words out.”
“Pardon me?”
“Sometimes you’re her and sometimes you’re not. Something changed for you, something to change the way you relate to me. Must say, this version’s got a lot more respect.”
“I hate you,” she muttered.
“No, you don’t,” he said confidently, taking over with her mother, figuring out exactly how to save her and then dragging Melody and Octavian off into the forest.
“Why are you sticking around anyway?” the Doctor asked Octavian. “Those are your men back there.”
“It’s my job to make sure this mission is a success, I can trust my men to do their jobs or it’s pointless to make them my men in the first place. You and Melody are the variables here, my place is with you.”
“I almost like him,” the Doctor said.
Then they ran into a crack in time and Melody wrinkled her nose at the déjà vu before she inwardly groaned at needing to keep another secret. She really understood what her mother had said to her at Stonehenge a lot better now.
“That time energy, what's it going to do?” she asked, because she hadn’t really spent any time with the cracks personally.
She’d been too busy exploding and causing them.
“Er, keep eating.”
“How do we stop it?”
“Feed it.”
“Feed it what?” she asked.
“A big complicated space-time event should shut it up for a while.”
“Like what, for instance?”
“Like me, for instance!”
“Why are you so angry?” she rounded on him. “What exactly have I done to make you so angry? What happened to you, Doctor?”
“What did you do to me?” he asked, facing her. “Why are there two of you? You look exactly the same. Why don’t you have a last name? What did you do to River Song?”
“I didn’t do anything,” she said, exasperated.
It was really annoying being blamed for something he’d done.
“I don’t have time for this,” he said, whirling around and stalking further into the forest.
Then Octavian was caught in the grip of an Angel and the Doctor and Melody were forced to leave him behind.
“You ready?” the Doctor asked.
“Content,” Octavian said, his voice brave. “Save my men, that’s all I ask.”
“Go!” the Doctor shouted and he and Melody ran.
They did still need to save the men and her mother, so Melody tried to figure out the teleport. It had never been her best subject, but she was determined to do something and not watch the Doctor half eying her with distrust and half raving with anger about the situation.
She thought that maybe, somehow, his double memories were affecting his concentration; this must be at least one of the first times it had happened to him. He clearly wasn’t used to it and didn’t understand it and wasn’t happy about it. And he blamed her.
But Melody forced herself to put all of that behind her. She wasn’t going to focus on how much it hurt to not have the Doctor trust her because of something that was more his fault than hers. She didn’t regret anything about her life except being forced to kill him and she wanted him to know how much she loved and respected him, how much he’d done for her, how grateful she was. How much fun they could have together.
But now wasn’t that time, so she saved her mother instead.
“Don't open your eyes. You're on the Flight Deck, the Doctor's here, I teleported you. See? Told you I could get it working,” she said flippantly to the Doctor.
“Melody, I could bloody kiss you.”
“What a horrible thought,” Melody said, slightly repulsed. “Doctor, learn to think before you speak.”
He made a face at her but then the Angels came and he saved them all by making it so the Angels had never existed.
Which was rather complicated explaining to the Church when they came to get the men who had been left on the beach because no one could remember what the mission had been in the first place. No one but the Doctor, Melody, and her mother.
They wanted Melody to attend an inquiry so she waited to go with the clerics.
“So, Melody, here we are at the end,” the Doctor said.
“Only the beginning,” she told him.
“Not going to give me any hints?” he asked.
“It's a long story, Doctor, can't be told. It has to be lived. No sneak previews. Well, except for this one: you'll see me again quite soon, when the Pandorica opens.”
“The Pandorica, ha! That's a fairy tale.”
Melody laughed.
“Oh, Doctor, aren't we all? I'll see you there.”
“I look forward to it,” he said, and it seemed he meant it.
“I remember it well,” she said.
“Can I trust you?” he asked. “Can I trust there’s a good reason for the double timeline?”
“Of course,” she said. “It’s more fun that way.”
She winked as the teleport picked her up and she was left with his smile rather than his wrath which she much preferred.
The inquiry went a lot more smoothly than she’d thought it would. There was really nothing they could say against her since their records clearly showed they’d hired her for the purpose she said they had. The footage from the surviving men corroborated bits of her story.
Soon she was back at school becoming a Professor and on her second graduation her parents and the Doctor came to meet her.
“We’re so proud of you,” said her dad.
“You must get tired of saying that,” Melody said.
“Never,” her mom said.
“What’s my present this time?” she asked the Doctor.
“How’d you like to come traveling?” he asked, flipping his sonic idly.
“Is it time?” she asked, barely containing her excitement.
“We’re free now, Melody,” he said, taking her hand. “Free to run wherever we want.”
“Let’s go,” she said, squeezing his hand.
“Oi, take us home first,” her mother said, rolling her eyes.
“And you take good care of her,” her dad told the Doctor sternly.
“Oh, Ponds,” the Doctor said, putting an arm around their shoulders.