FIC: Hold On, Be Strong [Chapter 3]
Chapter 3: Silence Will Fall
The Doctor is alive. You can’t let on.
Incredulous stares instantly turned back to their previous sad expressions in case someone was watching. Even so, Jack needed to point out: “How do we know it’s true?”
Amy shot back, “Did you just call us liars?!”
Sarah Jane nearly yelled, “Jack, Amy! Please, stop!” The other two kept their gazes locked on each other, but they ceased talking. She glanced down at Amy and Rory’s arms; she wasn’t exactly sure why they had circled before with pens at the ready, but apparently no marks meant they had some safety. She didn't know if she should, but kept her faith in their experience. “Jack, the Tardis told Melody Pond what to say to me so I’d know it was true.” She took in everyone in the garden. “The Tardis did that. Why would she for the person who killed the Doctor? How would Melody Pond even get onboard? The Tardis would shut down and no one,” indicating Amy and Rory, “including the people traveling with him last, could do anything with her, let alone make her talk to the Doctor’s murderer.”
One head turned to another, and then either quietly thought about that or started to say something, but then didn’t. One by one, they nodded until everyone turned to Dorothy and Jack. She took a few minutes before giving a strong nod too. Jack took another moment until, finally, the hard lines running down his body eased.
Sarah Jane relaxed. It was over at last. “Good.”
Barbara broke the quiet. “I admit that I still don’t understand everything.”
Sarah Jane gave a small smile back. “Oh, I’m sure we all have questions.”
“Um, yeah.” Rory reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew a black vortex manipulator. “River’s. A middle version. She said you might want to see her, Miss Smith. She programmed in the coordinates.”
Jack grew pale and Sarah Jane thought they had already lost the fragile peace they had just made. She didn’t have to worry. “Wait, River? You said she time traveled -- River Song? You know River Song?”
Rory sighed. “Why? What has she done now?” Amy punched him on the arm and he realised his mistake. “Sorry. It’s a habit. And you know it’s true,” he insisted quietly to his wife.
Jo’s smile was as bright as when Sarah Jane had first hinted the Doctor was alive. “Oh, I know people like that, including me.”
Amy looked back at Harkness. She didn’t seem happy about revealing the next part, but she did it anyway for some reason she didn’t explain. “Take the name and think about it.” She used her hands to suggest a reverse flip and his eyes went wide.
“River Song is your daughter.” He said it in a whisper. “She’s Melody Pond.”
“Middle version?” Dorothy asked, going back to what Rory had said. She clearly didn’t know the importance of the River Song pseudonym anymore than Sarah Jane, so she returned to the thing that seemed more important, at least in terms of erasing some confusion.
“Time travel again,” Amy answered. “She’s actually not a middle version, just six years older than the River you saw in the park, Miss Smith. The coordinates will take you to the younger River. You have to leave the vortex manipulator with her. It’s how she gets this one.”
Tegan Jovanka looked around. “I think I get it. Not so sure, though.”
“She comes home from different points of her timeline,” Rory explained.
“Why?”
Amy stared at her for missing the obvious. “To see us. We’re her mum and dad.”
Jo clapped her hands in excitement. “That’s brilliant! Imagine being able to see my mother and father at any age before I was born. Or at any point of my age now! I’d have so much to ask them!”
Sarah Jane thought about the time a few years ago when she had finally been able to meet her own parents, right before they had so bravely sacrificed themselves to save the world. How it had meant everything to hear how proud they were of her. She knew why Jo said what she did and she absolutely understood the Ponds.
Ian turned to Barbara. “Imagine being able to see Susan again. And our cranky Doctor.”
She smiled brightly. “We could even see her after she got married. We’ve always wanted to know how she did. She left in a ghastly time.”
“Please, I don’t understand,” Wilf said. It turned out he meant something other than River’s different ages. “Your daughter is in prison for the rest of her life. To protect the Doctor?”
Amy’s expression turned hard and she bit it out. “Yes.”
Martha asked, “Then how-- sorry, but how does she visit you if she’s in prison?”
Rory now shrugged. “She does that. Escapes, goes back.” He seemed to not see the incredulous looks around him. “She has to, go back I mean. She promised to keep the Doctor safe and Stormcage is part of it.”
“She gets it from him." Amy jerked her head at her husband. “It’s the kind of thing he’s done.”
Harkness mouthed, ‘Stormcage’. He seemed to know what that meant and it looked like he was the only one. Sarah Jane certainly didn't. But he loosened up more at the thought of River Song escaping what must the prison’s name whenever she liked. He even smiled a bit and Sarah Jane breathed a sigh of relief. He looked pointedly down at Amy’s unmarked arm before daring to ask, “Has the Doctor talked to you since?”
Rory shook his head. “No one has seen him, not that we know of, anyway. Well, except River. He doesn’t know she told us either. You know -- about everything. We had to convince one of her younger versions that it was okay.”
‘Or she might never have come to see me,’ Sarah Jane thought.
A lot of hope slipped away around the circle as they dealt with the fact they may never see the Doctor again. They felt the absolute relief that he was alive, but in the past, when it could've been the last time he’d ever appear on their doorsteps, a tiny voice still whispered that he might, just might, show up one more time. But not when he had to pretend to be dead.
Jack thought about it quietly and then raised his head. “Let me make up for what I said. Let me go see her.”
Amy scowled. “Not you. She said Miss Smith. You’re not going anywhere near her.”
“Please, call me Sarah Jane. Maybe it would be better,” Smith interceded, “if Melody--”
“River,” Amy corrected. “We use Melody. And the Doctor. She made the name hers again, but only for herself and us.”
He became one of only three people you let call you Sarah. She remembered the sadness when Melody Pond had said everyone would know her name. She knew they would use it the way it had been corrupted. Only Amy, Rory, and the Doctor would say it the way it was meant to be. “Of course. Melody should be for you. I was saying, River seemed willing to talk to us, so maybe she could come here. That way, we all get a chance to see her.”
“Sorry, still not comfortable with it,” Rory said. Steel rose again behind the quiet man’s eyes. Maybe Jack saw it or maybe he understood being a father himself. Perhaps he just went along with it to stop the fighting.
“I don’t blame you,” he said.
Wilf walked over to her and reached out to Amy. She weighed the gesture and let him touch her arm. “Please,” he begged quietly. “I’d like to thank her.”
Dorothy McShane came up to his side. “We gave you a hard time, but switch places with us. Would you be any different? But we understand now and we’d like to tell her so.”
Amy’s firm expression stayed set as Rory took a beat before leaning over to whisper in her ear. She moved a step away from Wilf to better focus on her husband. Her head swung over to him when he stopped talking and they shared something quietly between them. He nodded first, just one quick bob of his head, and then she answered with a small nod too.
“I’m going.” Rory began to strap the black device on his wrist. “I’ll tell River what you said and we’ll leave it up to her.”
Tegan spoke up. “Could you tell her that the Doctor has friends here? So does she.”
“Wait one moment,” Sarah Jane added and went into her house while the Ponds digested what Tegan had said. She hastily called Luke for information from Mr. Smith and scrawled a few lines onto a piece of paper. She came back with an envelope and heard Mickey teasing Martha. “Mum fight: yours, Jackie Tyler, and Amy Pond. Who do you think wins?” His wife grinned and nudged him. Good man Mickey, easing the tension like that.
Sarah Jane handed the envelope to Rory. “It’s everything she’ll need. I put the coordinates to my office in there, in case she wants to be sure no one sees her, and I added a note from me asking her to come here. I hope you don’t mind.”
Rory slipped the envelope inside his jacket. His wife gave him a small shove. “Go see your daughter, Centurion.”
He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and hit the button on the vortex manipulator.
An awkward silence fell over the garden. Amy sat next to where she had been standing. Jack nearly took the place next to her and thought better of it after everything that had happened.
They had put a gap between them and the Ponds. A physical gap and one made up of their attitudes. Amy and Rory were Melody’s parents. No one forgot they were also the Doctor’s current companions, but their mindset and actions focused only on the Ponds’ daughter and Amy had naturally stood on the other side of the line drawn in the sand. Now they measured the divide they, including Amy, had created.
That didn’t stop Jo. She went over and took the empty seat. “I’m sorry for what you had to go through. If I had been there and if it was my daughter -- I’m not going to insult you by saying I know just how you’re feeling.”
Amy said, “Thanks,” and meant it.
Sarah Jane spoke, breaking the quiet that followed Jo and Amy: “It’s still sinking in. The universe without the Doctor. No more, ‘Hello, Sarah.’”
Amy looked into her own broken hope. “No more, ‘Come along, Pond!’”
Ian brightened: “He said that to you? He said it to us too.”
Barbara asked the group, “Does anyone know if they ever saw each other again? The Doctor and Susan.”
Ian tacked on, “And they wanted to get back to Gallifrey someday. Did they make it?”
Sarah Jane hurriedly reassured them, “Oh, yes! Tegan and I both met Susan on Gallifrey. They saw each other there. All the charges were dropped against them and the Tardis was even recommissioned. You could say they both were.” Because despite what happened later in the Time War, the Doctor had been happy to go home now and then, either because he needed to help them -- like the time he had her leave the Tardis -- or when they helped him. He always left to explore the universe once more. Never happy to settle down again after, as Sarah Jane always suspected, he lost his wife there. No matter who else went along, it was he and the Tardis off to see everywhere.
Barbara’s face glowed over that. She leaned into Ian who laid his head gently against hers. He said wistfully, “I would like to hear one more ‘Come along, my boy.’” His warmth spread to everyone around him as they began quoting the Doctor.
Jack said with a smile aimed at the past: “I asked him who looks at a screwdriver and thinks this could be a little more sonic. He asked me, haven’t I ever gotten bored?”
Mickey went next. “Rule One: Don’t wander off. I don’t think anyone listened to that.”
Ian grinned. “He didn’t call it Rule One, but he gave us the same order. We never listened either.”
Tegan added, “As you’re told. He told me once that he said that as the fourth Doctor. Rule One - do as you’re told. Except with someone called Leela. His big thing with her was ‘no more Janus thorns’, whatever they were.”
Amy’s mobile rang. She pulled it out of her jacket pocket, but said before answering the call, “River said that. We had to do ‘what the Doctor’s friends always do. As we're told’. I didn’t know she was quoting him. Hello, stupid face,” she said into the phone. Sarah Jane wondered who she could be talking to like that.
Dorothy didn’t hear Amy speaking into the phone, because she already spoke over top of it. “My favourite is a bit long. I don’t know if I can remember it all, but it went something like, ‘Worlds are out there where the sky burns, and the rivers dream.’ I know the part about rivers is right. Hearing the name River Song made me remember that at least. The rest of it kind of went, ‘Somewhere there's danger, and somewhere else the tea is getting cold. Come on, Ace, we've got work to do.’”
Martha said, “I don’t know why, but I keep thinking of when he warned me, we might die. I told him, ‘we might not.’”
Tegan’s lively spirit became quiet. “He told you that you might die? Maybe he finally remembered instead of me being around reminding him.”
Mickey’s forehead scrunched into confused lines. “Remind him about what? That you could die?”
“No, that Adric did.” She glanced around at the stunned people. “He traveled with the Doctor, like all of us. He died trying to save us and it ended up being for nothing. And then, Nyssa... Nyssa got ill. She left to help the other people who had the same disease. She wanted to spend the time she had left taking on their Cause.” Her eyes stayed rooted on the ground and didn’t see Sarah Jane starting to comfort her. “It was like everything bad that could happen to Nyssa, happened. The Master took over her father’s body almost at the time she met the Doctor and then she ends with an incurable disease. I couldn’t take much more after both she and Adric were gone. I left for good not long after that.”
She noticed Sarah Jane as well as Jo, Martha and Mickey looking at her and clearly not knowing what to say. Wilf and the others looked at each other, just as much at a loss for words. “I’m sorry, I brought everyone down.”
Amy hadn’t heard them. She had a finger to one ear to better hear whoever was on the phone. “Don’t be daft. You know she’s going to do what she wants.”
Sarah Jane came to sit by Tegan and put an arm around her shoulders. “You told us about your friends. You don’t need to be sorry about that.”
Martha came over and put a hesitant hand on her knee. “You said the Master put his Time Lord energy in a human body?” Tegan nodded. “How long did it last? A few days, a few hours?”
“Years,” Jovanka answered. “As long as I saw him anyway.”
Dorothy asked, “Dark hair, goatee? Liked to wear black?” Tegan nodded again. “That’s what he looked like when I saw him too. How old was your Doctor when it happened?”
Tegan thought about it. “He said at some point that he was in his mid-500s then.”
“So the Master stayed in that body for a couple hundred years, because my Doctor was in his mid-900s.”
“But--” More than one face riveted to those words, especially Wilf. They didn’t care about the Ninth and Tenth Doctors giving an age actually younger by centuries, because the point was: Donna could maybe be saved. If the Master could do it, surely the Doctor could figure it out after all. Then the enthusiasm faded as fast as their hope. It was still a Doctor-less universe. Odds were: he’d never show up again. He might come back for Donna’s sake, but he evidently hadn’t thought of a way to do what the Master had done or he would have done it already.
It made Sarah Jane say, “He wished so many times he could change things. But he couldn’t, not--”
Amy caught that as she hung up her mobile. “Not one line.”
Barbara looked at her in surprise. Happy surprise. “He said that to me. When I said I would wipe out evil by going back in history.”
“He said it to River when she tried to avoid -- well, killing him.”
Her words heralded the noise of Sarah Jane’s front door banging open. The strength of it made them hear it even from the garden. River Song blasted in a second later with the force of a sonic boom. She didn’t look around, but targeted Jack. She went up tight against him, putting herself between he and Amy. Her words came out in a snarl. “You threatened my mother!”
She wore a grey tank top over a black one with flexible, form fitting trousers and combat boots. Sarah Jane didn’t notice the outfit for itself, only that it revealed strong shoulders and muscles underneath the honey coloured skin, darker than Dorothy’s.
Rory showed up in the garden, hurrying to stop his daughter. “That’s not what I said. If you weren’t as stubborn as Amy and rushed here, you’d have heard me.”
Amy told her, “He threatened you, actually.”
River’s head snapped from listening to her mother back to Harkness. She finally became aware of everyone else looking at her. “Oh. I see,” she said quietly. Her eyes dropped down and she said nothing until she finally spoke to herself, “Well then.” She came back up to Jack and held her arms away from her body. “Here I am.”
It wasn’t a dare to make a move. She offered herself up to his revenge. She still protected the Doctor and at her own expense, Sarah Jane saw. Still played the role of the Doctor’s killer. She had no idea she didn’t have to with them anymore.
Amy shot up to her feet. “Stop that! Do you think we would bring you here so he could kill you?”
“Mother,” River said firmly, still facing Jack. “Stay out of this.”
He took a step back. “It’s okay, Miss Song.”
“Doctor Song,” Rory insisted.
“Of course, Doctor Song. I’m not looking to--”
Sarah Jane didn’t want to interrupt Jack when he really needed to explain, but she saw something that made her heart freeze. “Amy, why do you have those marks on your arm?”
The ginger stared down at three black lines stark against her white skin. “Rory!”
He ran to River’s other side so they flanked their daughter. “Everyone look around! If you see something that looks like that painting the Scream, don’t look away! Just let everybody know you’ve seen it!”
Sarah Jane spun around frantically. She saw everyone else did the same. She grabbed for her phone as she ordered, “K9, scan for life forms other than us! Luke!” Her son had answered and she told him to tell Mr. Smith the same thing about finding anyone else in the garden or anywhere near the house. She used her scanner watch again.
They each called out, “Clear!” or “I don’t see anything”, until they heard Martha’s sickened whisper, “I found them.”
Sarah Jane’s watch beeped at the same time, but she didn't need it now. Sarah Jane turned around and saw them coming into her garden.
K9 said, "Mistress! I found a life form. It--"
"Never mind."
Three of them, just as the marks on Amy’s arms had warned them. The large heads covered in a dead man’s grey skin, with their eyes inside oversized sockets and jaws like mummified corpses. Their tall, skinny bodies clad in black suits of crinkled fabric branched into overly long arms and fingers. Everything about them was terrifying as they towered above each one of them. The universe created new nightmares the same way it made incredible wonders.
River took a step forward with tight fists against her side. “Get out. It’s over. You got what you want.”
The one in the center answered her. Its voice sounded male, but that meant nothing. It could have no gender at all. The voice echoed as if it answered deep within the cavern of its head and became sibilant on any ‘s’ sounds. “Your mission is not over, Melody Pond. You still belong to us.”
“No, I don't!” she yelled.
“You are still the weapon against the Doctor. You made him trust you. He walked into his death.”
River’s body quivered with her fury. “You have no hold on me. My life is mine.”
“You must complete that part of your task for the fixed point. You must see him younger. You must make him trust you.”
“You’re wrong if you think you can make me do anything.”
Amy and Rory moved to a step behind River’s shoulders at this threat. Everyone else rose to their feet and formed a semi-circle in back of them, but Sarah Jane noted how the aliens almost completely blocked the path back to the house.
Amy pushed River behind her. “You’re not taking her again.”
“We are not here to reclaim our property.”
The Ponds started a shoving match over which of them stood in front of the other two to form a shield. River temporarily won and she fired back, “I am not your property!”
“We are not here to take you with us.” Lightning sizzled around their hands. “We are here to protect you from them. They have threatened your life.”
All the quotes they give in this chapter are true, although Dorothy "Ace" McShane's for the Seventh Doctor has been shortened. The full thing is, "There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, where the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream. People made of smoke, and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, and somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace, we've got work to do!"
The facts about Adric and Nyssa are also true, including the Master putting Time Lord energy into a human brain with no problem . (He actually did it twice, but these Companions wouldn't know about the second time.)
Read Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, and Chapter 4