Write All Night (Spoiler_Song New Year Fic): Neverland, Part 1
Neverland
The faint jingle of her bracelets and crunching of silk against silk was barely louder than the sound of breathing as she stepped into the room, dark except for a single Garfield nightlight plugged into the wall. But she knew he was there, even before she saw the silhouette hunched over the bed in the far corner, the Philotaxian motor oil mixed with musty old tweed was enough to take her right back to the glass floor of that damned old ship.
“You never told me you had another child,” his voice ghosted into the darkness. Even in the shadows it was obvious his head was resting in his cupped hands and his elbows were dug firmly into his legs. Most likely, he’d been there a while.
“You haven’t been around in a while,” she bit back acidly.
“What’s her name?”
An egg sized lump materialized at the back of her throat. “F-Freya.”
“Freya.” It was soft off his lips, lighter than air itself. “Like the Valkyrie Goddess of Norse mythology.” It sounded like a question, but it wasn’t. “She was said to be the Goddess of war and death and love.” Finally, he lifted his head, and craned it towards the bed on the opposite side of the room. “So different from little William. If you’d been a boy, you would’ve looked just like that.”
Her eyes skipped across the bedroom to the lump that was her son’s sleeping form, illuminated by the nightlight. It made his silken hair look like glowing embers piled upon his pillow. “Where’s the TARDIS?” she asked smoothly.
The Doctor rose to his full potential and sauntered towards her. “Jenny has it.”
“Jenny?” She skipped backwards into the hallway, with her silk dress hissing as she moved. “Who is Jenny?”
He wrapped his fingers around the door handle and pulled it shut with a pale click. “My daughter.”
She almost couldn’t move. “Your daughter?” she echoed, her eyes flashing colors that only existed in the Metroplian Galaxy. “Your daughter!”
The Doctor inverted his eyebrows in response. “What’s the matter with you?” He pressed his hand to her bare shoulder and ushered her towards the stairwell, away from the bedroom door. “Yes, my daughter. It’s a long story. Actually, it’s not that long, just complicated. Well, not really complicated…well, maybe complicated if you’re not a-”
“Doctor!”
“Right, well, what I mean is…she’s a generated anomaly.”
“What?”
“Get it? Clever, isn’t it? Donna came up with it.”
“Donna? Is that her mother?”
“No! Noooo. Donna and I…why does everyone always assume that? No, Donna Noble was a companion of mine, from a long time ago. Long before you. No, no. Donna just happened to be there when Jenny was born. Created, technically. They took my DNA and created her in a progenation machine, which technically means I’m both her mother and her father, but she just calls me her father to make things simple.”
“And if it was before me, then why did you never mention this daughter before?”
“Oh, simple. I thought she was dead. Turns out, since she’d been shot within the first fifteen hours of being progenerated, she was able to heal herself with residual Timelord energy, but I didn’t know that at the time. She found me again, shortly after -” His voice stilted for less than a second. “Well that doesn’t matter,” he corrected. “She found me and we’ve been traveling together ever since. So she dropped me off here for a spot and I told her to go take the TARDIS for a spin around the galaxy while we catch up! Sound fun?” He suddenly angled his head to the left and took her in. “You’ve aged.”
“And you don’t look a second older than the day you popped out of the TARDIS doors all those years and a rewritten history ago in my garden.”
The Doctor folded his arms into one another as he studied her fiery hair, longer than the last time he’d seen it, now flowing all the way down her back, and felt an inner twinge as he noticed the wrinkles of time around her eyes and the corners of her mouth. His arms unwound and he embraced the sides of her head in a gesture that, to anyone without foreknowledge, might appear as though he was about to passionately kiss her. Instead, he drew her head in so as to rest against his. “Amelia Pond. It’s been too long.”
“Where’s River?” she managed to ask, all the while soaking in the warm of his skin. To her surprise, she felt a near imperceptible tremor in his fingers and the slyest of precipitation on his skin.
“She’s gone…”
“Gone? G-gone where?”
“The Library.”
Amy felt raindrops on her cheeks, hot, wet raindrops. Never mind that she was standing indoors. Her hand moved to touch the matting lashes beneath her left eye. “I’m crying…”
“…Rory, why am I crying?”
Her husband sat beside her in their bed, with a pair of glasses pressed to his face and a medical book resting in his hands. He looked up in confusion. True to her word, there were tears fleeing her eyes, though she didn’t look nor sound sad. “You’re sad,” he said automatically, echoing words she’d used on their wedding day. “Why are you sad?”
“I…I don’t-” A bullet firing sob cut her off, coming from the baby monitor. Her eyes grew triple their size and before Rory had even torn back the covers, she was in the nursery, hovering over a bassinet. The epicenter of the noise was inside, with tiny arms broken free of their blanket and a mess of ginger curls matted around the miniature fists. “Shhh…” And Amy attempted to hold the infant, swishing her back and forth while humming an age old lullaby, a trick that had always worked with Will.
“Let me try,” Rory whispered from the doorway. He’d thrown on his blue robe and grandpa-esq brown slippers, which, under different circumstances, she most certainly would have made fun of him for.
Amy timidly released the child into the arms of her husband. She touched her eye again and still felt the tears, an unrelenting current. Looking to the child she whispered, “You’re sad…”
“…why are you sad?”
The Doctor seemed jarred by her words. “You’re crying and you’re asking me why I’m sad?”
“But you are.” The tears continued to fall, maybe even harder, as he kissed her forehead. “River hasn’t just gone to the library, has she?”
The Doctor shook his head against hers. “I’m sorry.”
Amy lifted her hands, cupping them over the back of his, which still rested on the sides of her face. “You need to see something.” As gently as she could, she pulled them down and led him back into the bedroom. Her hand slid seemingly in and out of the inner pocket of his tweed jacket, where she retrieved his sonic screwdriver. It was heavier than she remembered, thicker between her fingers, and most surprising of all, the light from the diode was blue.
“I’ve made a few adjustments since I saw you last.”
Amy chose not to comment as she ushered him over to the bed. Wielding the sonic like a flashlight, she hovered it over the face of the sleeping girl. Although her face and hair looked blue beneath the light, the color itself couldn’t hide what the darkness had.
“Impossible.”
“Is it?”
“She looks just like her.”
“Except for the eyes. They’re all his.” River Song clutched the wrapped baby to her chest, her smile even prouder than the one Amy had seen the day she’d wed The Doctor. “I just need you to take her for a while,” she promised. “I have an expedition to head and I can’t take her with me.” She lifted her wrist, revealing her vortex manipulator. “Ten minutes max, I promise!”
“You lie.”
“I do.”
“What if The Doctor drops by?”
Ginger curls bounced around her face as she shook her head emphatically. “He mustn’t know! Spoilers, Amy. If - for some reason - he were to show up here before I get back, just - just tell him the truth…that you’re babysitting.”
Amy shifted her eyes across the room to the spot where her two-year-old son was playing with alphabet blocks and a toy spaceship on the floor. “Okay,” she exhaled. “Ten minutes.”
“I owe you, Amy!”
“You have no idea!” Just as soon as River had placed the sleeping bundle into her arms, she vanished in a crackle of light and electricity.