I Sit By Myself, Talking to the Moon (Melody, River/Eleven)
Title: I Sit By Myself, Takling to the Moon
Rating: PG
Characters: Melody Pond, River Song/Eleventh Doctor
Spoilers: all!
Summary: Melody Pond has an imaginary friend.
Author's Note: In the past day, quoththewriter has not only pointed out that there were pairing titles in my fics that read 'Doctor/Eleven' instead of 'Doctor/River', she has also beta'd this for grammatical things, even though she has not a clue what any of it meant. Damnit, James! Stop being so amazing.
‘at night when the stars light up my room,
I sit by myself,
talking to the moon,
trying to get to you,
in hopes you’re on the other side,
talking to me too.
cause when the sun goes down,
someone’s talking back,
they’re talking back.
I know you’re somewhere out there.
somewhere far away.’
- ‘Talking to the Moon, Bruno Mars
Melody Pond is a child who lives her life alone.
She hasn’t been given dolls or stuffed animals; she’s been given guns and weapons and been taught how to use them. She sits with her back against the wall, eyes staring straight ahead, trusting nobody and nothing but whom she’s told to trust. The Doctor is her enemy. There are people out there, bad people, who want to take her. This is what she’s been told from birth, from the time she was created by Madame Kovarian.
But Melody Pond is a child, and this is where their logic fails - logic that seems sound until that variable is thrown in, a change in the direction of the wind, because Melody Pond remembers.
(Her heart and soul were there, even though she wasn’t. And she remembers voices telling her how much she is loved and there was a bowtie, too. There was a bowtie that was stupid, and noise and lights. She’s no normal child: she’s human plus.)
These memories are hers.
And they can’t take them away from her.
When she dreams (when they aren’t nightmares) she dreams about a man whose name she doesn’t know, so she calls him John. In her dreams, he takes her away and tells her that she’s more than a weapon and that those people in her memories are real. He tells her that nobody is ever going to hurt her again. He tells her that there are no more threats. And he tells her it’s going to be alright, that he’s going to save her and he wishes he could do it sooner.
Sometimes he doesn’t take her far. Sometimes they walk around and she doesn’t have to wear the suit, but sometimes they sit on the edge of stars and swing their feet and he tells her ridiculous stories.
She knows they are dreams. Nothing can escape the suit they put her in.
Not even her.
But she’s a variable, one that they didn’t expect.
When she turns five, the dreams aren’t enough.
They think nothing of the imaginary friend she’s created from memories of a face she doesn’t know she remembers.
“John,” she says, sitting on the edge of the tiny bed they’ve given her. It’s nighttime, and the stars are pinpricks of light giving way to shadows in her room. Something in her doesn’t like the shadows. She’s not afraid, of course. She can’t be afraid. She’s not allowed.
“Are you real?” Her voice is tiny in the spacesuit, dwarfed by it. “Can you be real? They’re gonna hurt me.”
Melody lies down and stares at the ceiling, letting the moonlight wash out the color in the room. “I’m scared.” She admits, because she can tell anything to her imaginary friend. A five year old can tell everything to their imaginary friend. They don’t have to keep secrets. Ever.
“Help me.”
She likes to pretend that he talks back.
-
When Melody Pond is six, she is strong.
She’s not the type of strong that they want her to be. They want her not to fear anything, and she doesn’t. Not when she’s with them, the Silence, and the people who want her to shoot and kill and be a weapon, the people who want her to learn everything about the Doctor.
The Doctor, the man who’s going to kill her. The man who could have any face in the world but sometimes looks a little bit like John.
Melody Pond is strong when she’s six.
Because she’s not human any more, not even a little bit. And that’s what they wanted. She’s more than a weapon now: she’s a time lady, with a little bit of human, contained in a spacesuit that‘s been giving her energy enough to transform her.
(Melody Pond is the reason for an entire species trip to the moon, but she doesn’t know that yet.)
And when she is six, she runs away.
She runs as fast as she can inside of a spacesuit that’s starting to kill her, as fast as she possibly can, and she doesn’t look back.
(When nobody is looking, she tilts her head to the stars and whispers, Help me..)
The moon is large and bright in the darkness. It seems bigger in the open sky than it had ever seemed from her window. There’s a face in the moon, she notices, if she tilts her head just the right way. There’s a face even though it’s really craters.
John took her to the moon once, in one of her dreams. He whisked her away and before she could blink she was there, dancing along the craters that were really a face and not craters at all. In her dream, the moon could talk.
When she feels like she’s all alone, Melody Pond talks to the moon, even though she knows it’s not really a moon.
The moon is John.
-
She breaks out on a Saturday. She tears out of the spacesuit with more strength than any human child could possibly muster.
She finds him, once. He’s with a red-haired woman she’s seen before.
Yes, Melody Pond finds the Doctor. She knows it’s him, because his friend tries to kill her.
(She doesn’t know that she succeeds.)
-
When she regenerates, they find her again, and take her with them - light years away from everything she wants to know. Their words are cruel this time, the weapons bigger, and slowly, Melody Pond becomes the weapon that she’s meant to be, with a new spacesuit. A better one.
One that she can’t escape from.
-
She kills him in America, when she’s less of a time lady and more of a weapon. She kills the Doctor on a beach with the red-headed lady watching.
“I know it’s you.” He tells her, like it means something.
Melody Pond pulls the trigger and doesn’t look back.
-
They keep her just in case, but she knows that they really keep her because she could hurt them now. She likes it. She’s proud that they’re scared of her, the little girl they turned into a weapon. She doesn’t trust them, and she doesn’t trust the Doctor - because he can come back, she knows. Time happens all at once and she’d have to kill him a thousand times if she wanted him to never have existed at all. The only person on earth that she trusts is John, her imaginary friend.
She’s eight when he visits and it’s not a dream, her imaginary friend John. He’s different than the Doctor. He has to be.
She knows it’s him because he smiles in the same way.
John Smith, the man with the stupid bowtie.
She tells him this, and he tells her that he’s going to save her now, that he’s going to take her away. He tells her that she’s more than a weapon, that she’s got parents, a Mum and a Dad who love her, and apparently the curly hair comes from an aunt on her Mum’s side, they figured it out.
She asks him if they’re going to the stars now.
He tells her they’re going home.
It’s not until the TARDIS turns blue and she’s inside it that she understands.
-
When River Song is lonely, she talks to the moon.
It’s a good friend to have - always appearing no matter where you are, as long as you’re on earth. She’s not on earth often these days, with the Stormcage for a home, and when she’s not in the Stormcage she’s with the Doctor, and she doesn’t need the moon then.
She doesn’t always have the moon, so sometimes, River Song closes her eyes and imagines it.
“Doctor,” she begins.
She doesn’t have to pretend that he talks back.
The nights that she talks to the moon are the nights when the Doctor visits.