cont'd
(part one)
4.
River gets the timelines confused at first, when she’s very young, with both sets of memories playing out in her head all the time before she learns how to separate them. Her parents don’t have another corresponding timeline for her childhood, not when she’s that young--they got her back ten excruciating months after they lost her, but for River it was almost a decade. The older she gets, the easier it is to block Melody’s life from bleeding over into hers when she’s awake; her mind is always so busy, so many things to explore and process, to think-feel-taste-smell, so many patterns and pieces of life to fit together, that it’s less difficult to push them side when she’s focused on other things. They mostly come to her in dreams, like she’s watching a movie about someone’s else life while she’s asleep.
It stops feeling so much like a movie when she’s seven and snaps Jorah Apexai’s wrist for trying to take her lunch at school. She doesn’t even think about it. He reaches out with his large, grubby hands to snatch her biscuits and, lightning quick, she grabs his wrist and twists until she hears it snap. He screams and starts crying, running off to tell their head of year, while the other kids stare. River stares down at her hand for a moment, and she can hear her voice in her head, her sing-song tone saying, “We mustn’t take what isn’t ours, Melody,” and River thinks that’s just rich coming from a kidnapper.
She closes her eyes. Her hand tingles; she can still feel his bone cracking, like it’s permanently imprinted on her skin, and she’s going to be sick. River takes a deep breath, and then another, and quickly packs up her lunch and runs upstairs to the loo. She locks herself in one of the stalls and collapses on the toilet seat, pulling her feet up to perch on the rim and resting her face on her knees.
She’s going to be in so much trouble. The other kids are going to be afraid of her and her parents are going to think she’s bad, that she’s the thing the clerics tried to turn her into--a weapon, a killer. She pictures her dad’s disappointed face turning away from her and her mother backing away when River tries to go to her over and over again in her head. Her face scrunches up to fight back tears, but they still come, leaving a sticky, salty trail down her cheek and puffy eyes.
River stays in the bathroom for two hours, stubbornly ignoring three different teachers who come and try to coerce her to out by telling her that her parents are on the way (obviously), that she’s not in trouble (clearly a lie), that everything will be okay (not remotely true), that they just want to talk to her and find out what happened (they think her parents are abusive, that she hurt Jorah because she’s been hurt like that, or that she might have an antisocial personality disorder, which would line up with her frankly intimidating intelligence level and lack of peer socialization; they don’t consider anything else because they have no other frame of reference for what she is--not that River’s entirely sure what she is, either).
It’s not so bad in the toilet, River decides, switching positions again, so that her back is leaning against one side of the stall and her feet are propped up on the other. It’s definitely less creepy than the orphanage, and only a bit smellier, and the only thing sinister about the graffiti on the walls is how badly it’s spelled. She can just stay here forever, and not have to see anyone looking at her like she’s a monster. It would be ever so dull, but at least no one else would get hurt.
River is drowsily contemplating the feasibility of spitball constellations, when she hears a voice above her, saying, “Well, hello there, Moaning Myrtle.”
River looks up to see a fall of red hair and her mother’s face, looking down at her with a mixture of pity and tenderness and amusement over the stall, and something in her chest gives, even though her only outward reaction is to stick her tongue out at Amy. “I’m not that pathetic.”
Amy makes a face. “You’re hiding in a toilet. It’s pretty bad.”
River looks away, her shoulders slumping. “I didn’t mean to, Mum.”
“I know,” Amy says. “It’s okay.”
They leave the bathroom hand in hand, and when River touches her mother’s hand, she doesn’t pick up any revulsion from her. River presses further into Amy’s mind as they walk down the twisty corridor of her school, careful to keep her face down, eyes on her feet and the shiny wooden floor, so she doesn’t have to look at anyone and so her mother can’t see how hard she’s concentrating and figure out what she’s doing. Amy’s thoughts are choppy and somehow flowing all at once, images and feelings and words running together. Amy is thinking, God, it’s just a flesh wound; it’s not like she maimed him and that poor stupid kid and oh River and there’s a flash of a woman with wildly curling blond hair spinning around and firing a blaster and Amy is thinking in someone else’s voice and now they’ve taken a child, the child of your best friends, and they’re going to turn her into a weapon and then oh hell BISCUITS biscuitsbiscuitsbiscuits and there are images of biscuits, chocolate chips ones and jammy dodgers and weird, lumpy ones with nuts, and River, are you listening to me? You’re totally listening. Well, you can just bloody stop that right now.
River gasps, dropping Amy’s hand quickly and scrambling back. “I’m sorry!” she says. “I had to see. I had to know if you--if you hated me.”
“Of course I don’t hate you,” Amy says, like it’s the most ridiculous, impossible thing she’s ever heard in a lifetime of impossible things. “It’s not... you just need to be careful. Promise me you’ll be more careful.”
“I promise,” River says, and means it.
She doesn’t get in trouble for breaking Jorah’s hand, but she does get a long lecture from her dad on being cautious and trying to blend in while her mum alternates between agreeing with him and making funny faces while he’s not looking. She ends up having to transfer to another school, just to be safe, and if her parents are ever frightened of her, of what she did and could do at any moment, they never let her see it, but she is frightened.
River knows she isn’t like them--she’s human but not, human but more; she’s something new, and an echo of something very, very old. Her parents don’t have two hearts beating one after the other, a steady thrumming in their chests, and they can’t feel the motion of the of planet as it spins and spins, or the splintering and diverging of universes that comes with each new breath. She’s their daughter, but she’s never really belonged to them, and she’s just beginning to realize that one day she’ll leave them behind: because she belongs to the vortex, to the infinite sprawl of time and space, and it will exist long after every other constant in her life turns to dust and memory, and so will she.
*
Sometimes she has bad dreams about being stolen, about broken limbs and endless training and experiments and grey aliens in suits, but the night terrors don’t start until the spaceman comes.
The first night she wakes up screaming, both of her parents rush into her room, looking wild-eyed and harried and sleep-disheveled. “River,” her dad says, sitting on the bed beside her, his large, calloused dad-hands cupping her face. “River, it’s alright. We’re here.”
River stops screaming and stares up at him as if seeing him for the very first time, holding her tiny body as still and taut as a wire. “Daddy?”
“And Mummy, too,” he says, sharing a worried glance with Amy as River’s eyes dart back and forth between them before she finally takes a deep, gasping breath and relaxes.
“I had a nightmare,” she says, words tumbling out in a rush. “About a spaceman and he ate me and then I was the spacemen and it was scary, scarier than the aliens and lady with one eye, and I couldn’t move and I couldn’t get out.”
“It’s not real,” Amy says, smoothing River’s sweat-slick hair back from her face. “This is real, the three of us, okay? Those things never happened to you, remember? We stopped it. You’re River, not Melody, and you don’t have anything to be scared of, because we will never let anything hurt you.”
“They’re just bad dreams, sweetheart,” Rory promises. “That’s all they are now. And if anyone ever tries to take you again, I do have a sword.”
“Okay,” River says, quietly. She knows they’re right; she knows this is real, but Melody’s life feels real too, and it was awful. She worries her bottom lip. “Can I sleep with you tonight?”
She ends up sleeping with them every night for the next two weeks; and it helps to have them there, where she can see and touch them and reassure herself that they are real, that this life is the real one, but it doesn’t stop the dream-memories from coming, unbidden, and they keep getting worse. She wonders if they’ll ever stop.
*
The day Melody Pond shoots the Doctor is the worst day of River Song’s life, so far.
He’s not anything like what she imagined, as either versions of her, and it’s horrifying and just a little thrilling to think she took his life once, that she ever had that much power over anything, when she couldn’t even get out of the suit. It gets worse from there: when the time engine lands back in Florida in 1969, the Doctor is waiting for her, alive, and so is a woman with long red hair, and River feels both her own bone-deep familiarity with the face she sees smiling at her every day and Melody’s fear and incredulity, her desperate hope. Then her mother shoots her and Melody is still reaching out for her even after that, and River doesn’t dream this: she lives it with Melody, she sees and feels it unfolding in her mind, a memory too powerful to block.
In that moment, River is at the Canopy City Library with her mother, sitting cross-legged on the smooth wooden floor with the other children, listening to Amy do a reading from her latest book, a fairy tale called The Pandorica Box. River’s heard this story a hundred times before, but she loves the lilt of her mother’s voice and the way her tone and cadence changes for each character: her favorite is the way Amy’s voice goes throaty and smug for the mysterious sorceress; it always makes her giggle. She’s sitting there, and she is also standing on the beach and firing her weapon and watching the Doctor fall and then she’s in the warehouse being shot at, and he’s alive and her mother’s there-her mother is alive-and Melody thinks maybe, maybe he wasn’t the one who lied to her.
Then Amy fires at her, and River balls her hands into fists, pressing the crescents of her fingernails into the soft flesh of her palm until it stings, and she comes back to herself, to her reality. River doesn’t want to cause a scene--she knows she has to be careful even now, especially in public--so she stays very still, even though she’s shaking and it feels like her hearts are in her throat and she’s going to puke them up any second. She’s killed someone because she’s a weapon, she’s exactly what they tried to make her into, and River remembers it even if it’s been rewritten. She remembers the murder she committed, and what Amy tried to do to her: she’s something so terrible her own mother would try to kill her.
Amy glances up from her e-reader to smile at her audience and as she does, her eyes find River in the front row, white as a ghost and trembling, even as she tries to hold herself straight. River knows the exact moment when her mother realizes there’s something wrong with her because her faces dies and the reader slips out of her hands, forgotten, and hits the ground with a sharp thunk.
Amy jumps at the noise and gives everyone an awkward grin. “Sorry, kids, I have to cut this one short,” she says, standing up and smoothing her hands over the creases in her silky skirt. “I have... my daughter is, uh, getting sick, and I better take her home. Don’t want any of you little ones to--catch anything. I’m sorry. We’ll reschedule, I promise.”
Ignoring the protesting crowd and her agent rushing forward to talk to her, she steps down off the small stage to crouch down in front of River and reaches out to touch her shoulder, but River shrinks away from her. Amy pulls her hand back, stricken.
“River,” she whispers, tilting her head down until she’s looking her daughter directly in the eye. “Hey, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, and I’ll explain, but I need to get you out of here first. Come on.”
River ignores her and closes her eyes and sees it all happening again, a burst of memories that aren’t hers, that she doesn’t want, flashing in the dark.
“Now,” Amy says, cross and low like a growl, and holds out her hands. Rivers knows better than to argue with that tone, so she takes them and lets her mother pull her up. She feels dizzy at the sudden movement, like she’s not tethered to her body and might float away; there are too many versions of her in her head right now for all of them to fit.
Amy doesn’t let go of her as she makes her excuses to the librarians and event organizers and rushes them out of the building, up the spiral staircase that wraps around the hollow trunk of the great tree into which the library is built and out onto the main walkway, higher up in the canopy. She doesn’t say a word to River until they’re out of the library and lost in the throng of people moving along the walk, and even then she keeps River’s hand clamped in hers.
“It was the Doctor’s death this time, wasn’t it?” Amy says quietly, looking down at her, and her eyes are wet, and River understands, suddenly, that her mum’s been dreading this moment since the first night she woke screaming about the spaceman.
She doesn’t answer for a moment. Instead, River tugs her mother sideways until they’re walking along the edge of road. The walkways between the giant trees that grow as tall as Old Earth skyscrapers and make up the different levels of the Canopy City are made of wood and steel frames, with reinforced glass on the bottom and along the high railings. It’s like walking on air. River loves it, loves looking down at her feet and over the sides as she walks and seeing the mix of forest and city far below.
“I killed him,” she says after a while, still looking down. She wonders what it would feel like to jump, to fall from this high up, through the air and the lights and the branches. River’s never been afraid of heights.
Amy squeezes her hand. “That wasn’t you. You know that.”
“I killed him,” River says again, “and you shot me, Mummy. And that was you.”
Amy stops and kneels down in front of River, not caring for one second if she’s in someone’s way. “Look at me,” she says, her hands cupping River’s face, and she’s crying now, and River can feel how painful this is for her, can see the memories flashing through Amy’s mind, too, fragmented and jumbled, and she hears, I’m sorry I love you so much I’m sorry I’m so sorry oh River it’s okay it’s going to be okay thank god she was with Rory.
“I didn’t know it was you, silly,” she says out loud. “It didn’t know who was in that spacesuit. I just knew whoever it was killed the Doctor in the future, and I wanted to save him. I’m so sorry. And I’m very, very glad I missed.”
River sniffles, and Amy smiles at her, sweetly, and wipes the tears away with her thumbs. “I still did it. I killed him.”
“You didn’t know any better, and anyway, it didn’t take,” Amy says, grinning again, goofy and infectious. “Because he is so alive. Time can be rewritten, and that’s what we did to get you back. We saved you both.”
River nods. This is something she’s always understood, intrinsically, because of what she is, the way a normal child her age might understand the difference between a dream and reality. It doesn’t mean they feel any less real.
*
That night, River and her dad sit snuggled up outside on their porch swing, rocking gently back and forth in the cool breeze.
“Daddy,” River says, then pauses. She doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, but every time she closes her eyes she sees it: the Doctor falling down in the sand, her mother pointing a gun at her. “Daddy, you’ve killed people. Haven’t you?”
Rory tenses beside her. “Yes,” he admits. He looks her in the eye when he says it, his normally open face carefully blank. “I’ve killed people in this life, but most of them were when I was a Centurion.”
“But you’re a good guy,” River insists. “You only kill bad people. The Last Centurion is a hero.”
“It doesn’t make it better,” he says, his lips curving up ruefully. “Or easier. I’m a healer-on Earth I’d be a doctor; that’s our word for healer, not like here-and before that I was a nurse. I’m supposed to save lives, not end them.”
I’m a weapon, River thinks, and everyone knows what weapons do.
She hugs her dad tighter, burying her face in his side. “I can’t stop seeing it, over and over and over in my head,” she says, her voice muffled against his shirt. “I don’t want to. I’m River. I don’t want to be Melody.”
“You don’t have to be,” her dad says. “You’re not, just like I’m Rory, mostly. The Last Centurion is someone else, but I can be him when I need to be--when my girls need me,” he adds, and ruffles her hair while she yells and swats his hand away.
River scoffs. “I can take care of myself. And mum can, too.”
“Yeah, probably better than I could, I know that,” he says, laughing, and there’s something in his expression that she can’t place. “But I’ll do whatever I can--I’ll do whatever it takes to keep you safe.”
“How do you keep it separate?” River asks abruptly, not liking his furrowed brow or the far-away look in his eyes, and she needs to know. It’s gotten easier, but it still takes so much effort to keep Melody’s memories out of her head. She wonders if it’s like that for other people with rewritten histories, or if it’s harder for her because she’s part Time Lord, and she’s aware of the different timelines anyway. She wonders what else they did to her, what other modifications they made to make her a better tool, a more perfect machine.
“It’s easy,” Rory says, looking down at her. “It’s a bit like having a door in my head, and that’s where I keep those memories. I’ve got two thousand years of them floating around in there. It’s enough to clog up anyone’s head, so I don’t think about it much anymore. I just keep the door closed.”
River looks away from him and out at the lights of the city, at the lanterns hanging along the crisscross of walkways and stairs that curve around the massive tree trunks, and imagines a door in her mind: a bright blue door at the end of a corridor made of stars. She thinks of Melody in the orphanage and the astronaut at the lake, of Madame Kovarian’s singsong cruelty and the doctor’s dozen faces; she thinks of her other life and puts it there. After a moment, she takes a little gulp of air and closes her eyes; her body tenses, expecting to see it, but there is only blankness-for once, there is only a sweet, sold blackness in her mind. She feels lighter, feels like herself, like River again. The memories are still there, but only if she goes poking around in them.
River can be Melody Pond when she needs to be, just like her father can be the Last Centurion, but she doesn’t have to carry it with her all the time. She can close the door whenever she wants.
5.
“A cactus?” Rory says flatly. “You have a date with a cactus?”
“That’s racist, dad,” River says, jutting her chin out stubbornly. She should have known that he was going to be like this. “He’s part Vinvocci.”
“Yes, but are they not cacti?”
River rolls her eyes, hard, and crosses her arms, leaning back against the kitchen counter in a pose that she hopes conveys both worldly sophistication and smug superiority. “You are so hopelessly 21st century sometimes.” She can hear Amy’s shriek of laughter at that from the stairs and doesn’t even try to hide her smirk.
Her dad closes his eyes, pained. “And how old is he?”
“He-” River pauses, uncrossing her arms to drum the fingers of one hand sharply against the counter top. There’s really no way he’s going to take this part well, and she knows that, so she might as well get it over with. “He’s a bit twenty.”
“A bit tw--sixteen!” Rory shouts. “River, you are sixteen.”
“Yes,” River says, “and I’m at university, and no one in any of my programs is anywhere near my age. And I can talk to him. I can almost--he can almost keep up with me.” She catches her dad’s eye, then, willing him to understand what it means to her to have found someone she fancies, someone she can actually communicate with about the quantum mechanics and the fourth dimension, about social constructs and cultural evolution and ancient histories, about the way she sees the universe-someone who isn’t threatened by her or dismissive because of her age or gender. River likes Gilbert, and she likes the way he looks, green spikes and all; she doesn’t know anyone else like him, and he’s not boring like every other person on this tiny, wretched garden of a planet.
Amy saunters into the kitchen, looking entirely too happy for a woman whose daughter is about to go on her first date-or, rather, the first date of which she should be aware. River wouldn’t be surprised if her mother’s known this whole time, if she’s been willingly turning a blind eye to the late nights supposedly spent at her college’s libraries or tutoring other students. She’s surprisingly shrewd at times, for a human human, especially when it comes to River. Sometimes River feels like her mother knows her better than she knows herself.
“But, Amy, twenty,” Rory says, desperately, running a hand through his hair. “Don’t you think that’s a bit old?”
Amy scrunches her face up and just looks at him, like he’s suddenly spouted another head or tentacles out of his orifices-there had been an epidemic a few years back-and the faint lines around her eyes and the corners of her mouth (physical evidence, River thinks, of her mad life spent laughing and making ridiculous faces in impossible situations) deepen, sinking further into her skin. She is still beautiful, the most beautiful woman River’s ever seen.
“Oh God, Amy,” Rory says, looking horrified. “I can’t even think of that right now.”
River glances back and forth between them, eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What? What you talking about?”
“Oh, I was just reminding your dad of some things,” Amy says, breezily. “You know, we were your age when we started dating the first time. Well, the second first time. It took a bit longer the actual first time. We’ll, yeah, we’ll tell you about it one day.”
“The second first time?” River says, feeling something slot into place in her mind. She looks from her mother to her father, and there’s something else there, but she’s not quite sure what.
River thinks of cracks and paradoxes, of her mother’s book and the princess who slept in a box for two thousand years, guarded by the Last Centurion, and woke up in a world without stars. In the book, the wizard used up all his magic to destroy the box and help the princess save her kingdom and her stars from the goblins, and in the end no one else but the princess remembered the wizard or that the stars had ever been stolen. No one else remembered, River realizes, because only time travelers can tell when time has been rewritten. The wizard didn’t use magic to save them at all; he used time travel to fix everything, like he always does, because he’s the Doctor and the Doctor is a giant cheater.
She’s always known her mother’s books and her parents’ stories are based on things that happened to them, on their adventures with the Doctor, but it’s all so fantastical that it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s been made up. She feels so foolish, so unbearably slow, that she didn’t put it all together before now: that the only magic in the fairy tale is science, the physics of time rewritten. River can remember all of her rewritten histories when she wants to, can decide what she wants to be real and what she wants to forget, but she wonders if she’ll ever find out how much of The Pandorica Box and the other books--the bedtimes stories her mother told her and the other stories, the ones she keeps locked away, lullabies and lies from another life--is fiction and how much is true. She’s asked a hundred times, but the answer is always the same: “You’ll find out when you’re older.” River is so very tired of not being old enough to know anything or do anything; she’s tired of hiding, of being careful, tired of her quiet, dull life.
“Exactly how many times would you say your lives have been rewritten because of him?” River says casually, bouncing on her heels a bit.
“I couldn’t tell you,” Amy says, crossing her arms, eyes darting quickly over to Rory before settling somewhere on River’s forehead, of which there is admittedly quite a bit, instead of meeting her gaze. “Some of them probably happened before I ever met the Doctor, so I wouldn’t remember, would I?”
“So how’s me going on one little date with someone who’s a few years older than me any worse than you running off with a lunatic who’s about a millennia older than you?” River says and smiles archly. Her mother can be tricky and evasive when she wants to be, but River’s learned and catalogued her weaknesses, learned both of their weaknesses; she knows exactly what buttons to push to get what she wants, and most of the time it even works. “Both of you, even. And I thought you were the sensible one, Dad.”
Rory’s mouth opens and closes wordlessly, like a starving baby bird. “Let’s not point fingers here.”
Amy only smiles softly, looking very far away, and River knows where she’s gone though she herself has never been, before the moment passes and she moves to lean against the counter next to her daughter. “So, this Gilbert,” she says, looking down at River, eyes glittering with mischief, “do you think he has those spikes everywhere?”
River laughs, grinning up at her mum so hard her face hurts. “Only one way to find out.”
“I’m going away now,” Rory says loudly. “Somewhere far away where I can’t hear you saying things that destroy my will to live.”
*sgfkjgdjkdfgdf so that's not all i have, but as rough as some of that is, the rest is worse. in case anyone actually reads this and cares, this is what would have happened: river, amy, and rory turn the silence's time engine into a paradox machine, and that's how the paradox holds: that's how what we see in the first half of series six still happens (the doctor dying, melody in the orphanage) even though the doctor lives and amy and rory get their baby back. that's where the tardis is in the first episode: it's with the ponds; river's taking them to steal baby!melody from kovarian, and then the doctor expects her to turn the tardis into a paradox machine, so that they don't destroy time, the universe, everything. the sections are supposed to be threaded in such a way that it all leads to the climax where river realizes that she's the one who saved herself and the doctor and the tardis, not him. the doctor knows that there's a paradox invovled, but he only knows of one way to maintain a paradox like that (the paradox machine), and you need a tardis to make one, but there's only one tardis left in the universe. that's what he was running from in this story: dying and sacrificing the tardis so that amy pond gets her daughter back, and asking river to be the one to cannibalize the tardis. he was like 70% sure it wouldn't actually happen because river and amy have a way of making impossible things true, but he wasn't sure: time can be rewritten. idiot.
the story was also going to cover river and the doctor's different regenerations and growing friendship and relationship, whatever. she learns about the paradox machine and the master, martha and donna and rose; puzzles out his bittersweet, undefined relationship with amy; and never, ever gives him the upper hand, even when he's the one who knows more about her life than she does. this river also H A T E D him for abandoning them all in the gamma forest, when her mother misses him so much and river herself needed someone like her desperately as she grew. she first meets him again as a teenager (her date is a disaster involving touch telepathy and terrible, traumatic s e x, and she finds a way to summon him so she can yell at him because she needs to yell at someone) when he's the thirteenth doctor; that's young river's doctor (and bear in mind that this river never regenerated in the alley, so she's still in her original body). her first regeneration (mels, yay! but not a psychopath and not called mels here, obviously) interacts mostly with the twelfth doctor, and then alex kingston's river song is actually her second regeneration and interacts with eleven.
SORRY I WILL NEVER FINISH THIS BYE.