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Every time we flew away with the Doctor, we'd just become part of his life. But he never stood still long enough to become part of ours.
Except once.
(Amy Pond, “The Power of Three”)
***
River pops away from high stakes danger into the Ponds’ lounge to discover Amy, Rory, and the Doctor in the middle of movie night.
“Evening, my lovelies,” she says, taking off a leather jacket covered in some glowing multicolored slime: very tye-dye T-shirt minus the T-shirt. She traipses over to hang it up by the door, carefully not letting any of the slimy bits touch the wall. (There’s such a thing as courtesy, even at a house that’s a bit yours.) “Look at you three--oh, you four--” She pats the Tardis, which is parked behind the sofa, “being all domestic. It’s adorable.”
She’s glad to see she’s wound up right where and when she meant to; time travel does get so precarious when you’re seconds away from being drowned in colorful slime on one side of it. But here she is, right where she left them all: Amy and Rory, really settling into their lives at last, and the Doctor, trying to want to settle too, never mind the sheer impossibility.
“River!” The Doctor’s face goes incandescent with excitement as she saunters back into the room. “Fancy seeing you here, my darling. Be a pity if you brought a whirlwind of chaos to our nice boring night sitting on the sofa for hours and hours and hours staring at a rectangle. A pity if maybe you, for example, exploded something.” He jerks his head deliberately toward the kitchen.
“Don’t explode something,” Amy says, laughing. “Come here; it’s so good to see you.”
River smiles and embraces Amy, then Rory, who asks, “What have you been up to, then?” He touches her hair lightly and pulls his fingers away, grimacing, to find them covered in traces of rainbow slime. Dear old Dad.
“Archaeological dig,” River explains. “Turned complicated when my team got into a slight tiff with a particularly enchanting species of alien; wildly carnivorous, and mouths all over their bodies, every mouth ready to spit neon multicolored slime at you at a moment’s notice. I’ll have to get back to it soon—nine of them have fallen madly in love with me while trying to eat me, so the least I can do is let them die by my hand—but I felt like a quick holiday. Besides, it was just your anniversary a few days ago; I had to drop by!”
“And is this archaeological dig … prison-sponsored?” Rory asks, looking uncannily like Brian used to when he would interrogate them about where they’d been.
“She can break out of Stormcage if she likes,” Amy says, poking Rory in the side. “She hasn’t even killed anyone anymore.”
“The prison thing is getting very old,” River says. “At this point, I’m only sticking around because they’d be lost without me. But my pardon will all be sorted soon, I promise. I do wish I hadn’t missed your party.” She turns her attention to the Doctor. “You didn’t do that dance of yours, did you?”
The Doctor sniffs. “I don’t know what dance you could possibly be referring to.”
Amy, Rory, and River all do their own approximation of the very accurately christened Drunk Giraffe.
“Well, it looks stupid when you three do it,” he grumbles.
“There was no dance,” Amy tells River, ignoring him. “It wasn’t a dancing kind of party.”
“Like that’s ever stopped him before,” River says, at the same time Rory says, “Not that that would stop him.”
They high five while the Doctor goes even more glowery.
“And even if it had been a dancing party,” Amy says, “he wouldn’t have had time to dance anyway.”
“Oh, really?” River says, curious. “And why’s that?”
“You missed the anniversary party,” the Doctor chastises, waving a finger at her. “You don’t get to find out.”
“You made us miss most of the anniversary party because you Tardis-kidnapped us,” Amy reminds him.
“Accidentally!” the Doctor yelps. “And I remembered flowers!”
“Oh, accidentally and flowers,” says Rory. “That’s all right then.”
River lifts her eyebrows at her husband. “Will you ever behave yourself?”
“God, I hope not.” He bounces off the sofa and dips her into a very dramatic hello kiss, which she suspects is less about unbridled passion and more about wanting to do something that causes a ruckus. She can’t help noticing he steers her in the direction of the lamp. No collision, though; she so isn’t risking Amy’s wrath, even for the likes of him.
“Hello to you too, sweetie,” she says when they finally part, smiling up into his face.
“Hello, hello; gorgeous to see you, slightly slime-covered bride of mine,” he says, pulling her dramatically back up into his arms. When they’re cheek to cheek, he whispers in her ear, “Please do explode something. I’m so bored, I’m— and this is in no way an exaggeration—going to die of it in five seconds, and you’re far too foxy to be a widow.”
River kisses his earlobe. “Everybody feels that way about visiting the in-laws,” she whispers back. “Suffer.”
“Four,” the Doctor says, pouting at her. “Three and three quarters. Three and a half. Three and a quarter—”
River sits on the sofa in between her parents, taking the spot the Doctor had occupied. “So what’re we watching, then?”
“It’s rubbish,” the Doctor scoffs. “THREE.”
“Battlestar Galactica is not rubbish,” Rory protests.
“It’s one of the greatest shows in modern TV history,” Amy says. “We’ve got a lot of shows to catch up on,” she adds to River in explanation. “TV’s gotten good while we were out traveling the universe, apparently!”
The Doctor scowls. “It’s blahhhhhh! All dark and dreary. Don’t these people know that space is supposed to be FUN?”
“It’s set after the apocalypse,” Rory points out. “They’re the sole survivors of the human race.”
“Apocalypses can be fun, too, if you only go into them with the proper attitude! Two!”
River rolls her eyes at the Doctor’s imploring stare.
“And these ‘cylons’--” Big dramatic finger quotes. “--aren’t even scary. Who do they think they are, Daleks? Honestly. One—”
“— more episode!” Amy says gleefully, pressing the remote with gusto.
The Doctor staggers like he’s been shot.
Amy shakes the remote at him. “You promised you were going to not go mad staying here this time, mind.”
“But I thought we were going to be doing friendship, not depressing space television!”
“We’re doing both,” Amy declares, “for at least one! More! Episode!”
Rory waves his arms in celebration.
“Aughhhhhhh!” The Doctor swoons onto the sofa and mimes dying on top of River. He cracks an eye open after a few resolutely dead seconds. “Have they turned it off yet?”
River smiles serenely down at him. “Nope.”
“Remember me fondly, wife of mine,” he says, and dies again while Amy and Rory make percussive noises along to the theme song.
***
Amy and Rory get ready to head off to bed after their one-more-episode. It’s very responsible and thirties-ish conduct. (The Doctor yelled “Go on! And stay out!” at the television when Rory turned it off, which was altogether less mature.)
“No matter how cute he gets,” Amy says to River, who’s still sitting on the sofa next to the Doctor, “don’t let him convince you to blow something up. We’re really attached to all our stuff.”
“Even the--” the Doctor begins to say.
“Especially the,” Amy says, pointing severely at him.
“I haven’t even said what the the is!”
“Doesn’t matter. Don’t you do it.”
The Doctor scowls, then cranes his neck toward Rory. “Do I have to listen to her?”
Rory crosses his arms. “I think you already know the answer to that question.”
“I do,” the Doctor admits begrudgingly.
“Night night,” says Rory.
“Be good,” says Amy.
“No promises,” River answers.
“Ha! What a surprise,” Amy calls before disappearing upstairs with Rory.
This leaves River alone in her parents’ lounge with her parents’ new forever house guest.
“How are you holding up?” she asks, scooting closer to the Doctor.
He buries his face in his hands. That one more episode of Battlestar Galactica was the wrecking of him. (It did seem like pretty bleak fare, but then again, she’s never been one for sitting still and staring at something. Back in her Mels days, she used to drive Amy and Rory mad talking and getting up for snacks through their movie marathons.) “Only just holding up, thanks. Finally, someone who understands the drudgery.”
“I do get a bit twitchy if I go too long without mortal peril.”
“Who doesn’t??” He flings his arms up toward the ceiling like he’s begging it to agree with him.
“How long have you been playing house since we saw each other last?” During the Doctor’s panic after his initial attempt to settle here, they’d gone on a brief romp -- saved some innocents, had a very nice dinner at a restaurant in the heart of a dying star and then fled from imminent doom for dessert. He’d sworn when they’d parted that he was going back, that he would commit himself to Staying Home With Amy and Rory, and she’d almost completely believed him. That isn’t an insult, by the way; she knows her man, that’s all, and he’s tortured by sitting still.
Speaking of tortured:
The Doctor exhales deeply, his breath ruffling his hair. “I don’t know how long it’s been. A few days? A few months? A few years? I suppose decades is probably pushing it, though mind you, Rory’s really starting to get wrinkly in the brow. Especially when I forget to knock when he’s in the shower. He hates that.”
“Like father, not like daughter.”
“Haha! Exactly. And yet I keep doing it. You know that feeling when there’s something you’ve just got to tell Rory, even if and especially when he’s in the shower?”
“I think that’s unique to you, dear.”
“We’ve got a special bond, Rory and me. I even brought him a rubber duck last time. And while his mouth might have said, ‘Doctor, I mean it this time, stop visiting me when I’m in the shower,’ his eyes said, ‘Thanks for this rubber duck, this rubber duck is the height of cool, I think I’ll name it Fez, that’s how cool this rubber duck is.’”
“You’ve got to let the fez thing go.”
“I’m never letting the fez thing go. No chance.”
River shifts on the sofa, resting one of her knees over his. “So why haven’t you left yet?”
“There’s something very mysterious going on with small black cubes.” The Doctor nods at the pair sitting on the mantle.
River squints at them. “Is there?”
“One day about a year ago, everyone on Earth suddenly got one.”
“Quite mysterious, then. I thought they were just minimalist decor.”
“It’s looking that way. But isn’t that how you’d want it to look, if you were a secretly-nefarious black cube from planet Who Knows?”
“Absolutely. Best keep an eye on them.”
Channeling Amy, the Doctor points sternly at the black cubes, which do nothing. Relaxing, he adds, “And there are some good things about being here. The Wii. All the fish fingers and custard you could dream of. And glorious company. Have you met Brian?”
“Of course I’ve met Brian!” River says. “I grew up stealing snacks out of Brian’s pantry and making him furious by getting Rory home late.”
“Oh, right. ‘Course you did. Mels the snack thief.”
“After your dinosaurs-on-a-spaceship adventure, the parents and I finally explained the truth to old Gramps.”
“Splendid! How’d he take it?”
“Pretty well, after the initial mind-melting confusion. He seemed relieved. He said he’d been wondering what became of me. Mels me. He was worried about her.” River swallows, trying to tame the emotion that accompanies recalling the sad kindness in her grandfather’s eyes. The Doctor, he isn’t much for the non-ebullient emotions.
But just now, he looks rather touched too. “Ahh, Brian. Quite possibly the best Pond of the lot.”
“Ahem.” River taps him scoldingly on the knee.
“Present company excluded,” he says, taking her hand. “Did you tell him he and I are in-laws?”
“Not just yet.” River laces her fingers through his. “One shock at a time.”
“Hey! Maybe we should throw him a surprise party. A ‘Surprise! The Doctor’s your grandson-in-law’ bash. A real revelatory shindig.”
River laughs. “And you say you’re no good at human life.”
“Oh, I’m magnificent at human life. Have I ever told you about the time I spent the weekend with my pal Craig and his baby Stormageddon?”
“You’ve told me about Craig, but not about Stormageddon. I didn’t know he had a Stormageddon. Congrats to Craig and--was it Sophie?”
“Sophie it was -- and still is, unless Craig’s gotten himself in trouble! Well done, River-brain.”
For a self-indulgent moment, River pictures meeting Craig and Sophie and their almost-surely Doctor-nicknamed baby. Going on double dates.
But she would go mad in a life like this too--logically, she knows that; she’s like him, with an endless hunger for adventure in her bones--and so she doesn’t let herself get too wistful.
“Doctor?”
“Hmm?”
“Black cubes aside. Why are you really still here?”
He stays silent, pulling his hand from hers. He hates being asked the questions that it would do him good to answer.
“What else am I supposed to do?” he says at last. “It’s Amy and Rory. Am I just supposed to give them up?”
“Has it come to that?”
He stares at the smooth black emptiness of the television screen. “I think it has.”
“I know you’ve really slowed down seeing each other,” River says; she visits her parents and him enough to have noticed that. “But do you really think they’d want to stop altogether?”
“It isn’t just about what they want.”
“It isn’t? That’s not the Amy I know.”
Still not looking at her, he says, “I don’t want them to get hurt. Not any more than they already have. But I don’t want to just be ... without them, either. I never have been, you know, with this handsome face. Tried it for a bit recently, giving them some Doctor-free years. Didn’t care for it at all. And not just because Amy took up modeling without asking me if I wanted to do it with her so we could become a legendary modeling duo.”
“Such a waste of a pretty face,” River teases, figuring he’s confessed enough to earn some silliness.
“A handsome face.”
“No,” she says, caressing his cheek. “Definitely pretty.”
The Doctor is caught between preening and grimacing. Finally, he caves. “I’ll take pretty.”
She grins. “Me too.”
It would be easy enough to get distracted at this point.
It says a lot about the weight that the Doctor’s been carrying that he doesn’t.
The flirtatiousness leaves his face, turning him grim. “They almost split up, you know.”
River sobers too. “I know.”
“It was unnatural. Sends chills down the spine even thinking about it, and not the good kind either. What are they if they’re not hanging off each other’s faces all the time?”
“Heartbroken, I should think.”
“Something about not being able to have any more children,” the Doctor adds, quieter. “After what happened to Amy at Demon’s Run.”
“I know that, too.” Amy hadn’t wanted to talk about it at first, but River wasn’t about to let the two most meant-to-be people she’d ever met walk away from each other without a damned good explanation.
Not that she’d thought it a good explanation once Amy had finally admitted to it, but she’d felt responsible (irrationally, of course; she hadn’t decided to be born a weapon, no matter how much it felt like it sometimes). Responsible enough, at least, that she’d backed off, abandoning her original aggressive matchmaking schemes. Responsible enough not to chide Amy -- mercilessly shrewd Amy -- for being so blind about the heart of the one person she usually saw the clearest. What would Rory Williams want with more kids if those kids weren’t with Amy? River could see the answer to that one without even having to ask her father, but Amy couldn’t. And Amy didn’t want, couldn’t bear to ask him, and made River swear not to either.
God, it was agony: to go from seeing Amy young and excited, hopping around in red, giddy for the big wide universe the Doctor had finally brought her, not a clue in the world who River was, and then to come here and see how her face had hardened, turned disappointed and cold. And Rory, working constantly, trying to ignore what every instinct in him screamed to do: fight for Amy Pond. During that terrible time, River had tried to be around because the Doctor wasn’t.
Now the terrible time has passed, and her parents are back how they ought to be, but there’s no forgetting it happened. Something unbreakable almost broke. If there’s a reason to wonder whether life with the Doctor might be worth giving up, it’s that.
He seems to read that thought on her face.
“If I had never crashed in little Amelia Pond’s garden,” the Doctor says, in the kind of voice you’d use to tell a fairytale, “they would’ve had all this boring, brilliant everyday life stuff. No interruptions. You would’ve grown up in Leadworth as their daughter instead of their best mate: normal normal Melody Pond, with more siblings than you could shake a stick at. Your hair probably would’ve been straight without all that residual Tardis energy pulsating through it.”
“I think I speak for all the Ponds when I say we never would’ve wanted that. Much too dull for the likes of us.” With a smile, she adds, “Not nearly curly enough.”
He twines his finger gently around one of her curls. “Do you mean it?”
She takes his hand and guides it down to hold in both of hers. “You gave us the world, my love. That’s worth a bit of hurt.”
“Yes! The world, it’s worth the hurt. That, I’ve always gotten. But what I can’t understand is, how can they know that and still want to give it up?”
“I think the world out there isn’t the only one that gets bigger and more wonderful as time goes on. And Rory and Amy are getting older, and as you get older, you start to realize how much it means just to sit at home in your little nest and be sure of each other.”
The Doctor looks down at their entwined hands. River watches it dawn on him that they’re doing a pretty good impression of a couple of nest-dwelling lovebirds right now.
“Do you wish we had a nest?” he asks, peering at her a little warily.
Her answer is somewhere between God, yes and slapping him across the face for bringing up something he’ll never be able to give her and she’ll never be able to take.
She settles on, “Who’s to say meeting up for date night and mortal peril isn’t a nest?”
He grins, pleased. “A very good nest. Full of shiny things.”
“You know,” River adds, glancing around the room, “you don’t have to take up residence in someone else’s nest just because you care about them. It’s all right to leave them be. Check back in when you can. That’s what people do when they grow apart.”
“Grow apart?” He looks at her like she’s just said something incredibly foul, like ‘Leave them to die’ or ‘Eat your vegetables.’
“It’s not a sin. And it doesn’t mean you love them any less. It’s just life.” I’ve grown apart from you, she could say, but won’t when he’s so melancholy already. He does like to think himself the center of the universe, the giver of all life’s best things. She’ll always love him like he is, but her life has bloomed in her time away from him, and she wouldn’t trade it. It makes it much easier to bear the days when he’s too tangled up in the thrills and sorrows of the universe to think of her--and there are a lot of those days.
He looks down. “I can’t just let it end. What has any of it been for if it just ends?”
River finds she knows just what to say. Funny, tonight, to think he’s the old one. “Everything ends. Everything besides you gets old and gray and dies--and even you’re old and gray sometimes. Just because it can’t go on doesn’t mean it didn’t matter—”
“Not this time. Not the Ponds.”
“Even the Ponds.”
He looks at her with desperate eyes, like he’s somehow pleading with a force that can have mercy on him. “Who’s to say I couldn’t just stay here then, hmm? I’ve been a great lodger in the past. I can be one again. I’ll take up modeling or birdwatching or some other practical, well-paying career. What’s to stop me?”
“The million, million voices out there,” River says, nodding at the ceiling and the infinite world far above it, “all calling for help even though it feels hopeless.”
The Doctor sighs. “Damn it. That is my favorite song.”
“I know it is.”
“Second favorite,” he amends, touching her cheek.
She allows herself to savor it, a brief moment where all his focus belongs to adoring her. Then, as he always does, he breaks the spell with his own racing mind, shooting away like a wish toward a far-off star.
“You know what?” he says. “I expect we can probably pull it off.”
“Pull what off? Ooh, do I get to pick an item of clothing?”
“Down, girl. You’ll get us both grounded by the chaperones upstairs.” River pouts, and he presses a fingertip to her lips -- just for a second, before pulling his hand away to start gesticulating wildly. “I mean growing apart. That doesn’t have to mean forever-goodbye, now, does it? I’ve done forever-goodbye before, forever-goodbye’s terrible and passe, it’s not the way I do things anymore, no forever-goodbye for our Amy and Rory.”
He jumps from the sofa, beginning to pace the room like an especially twirly tiger given way too much sugar.
“I’m picturing dropping in for routine visits, just to check in and make sure life hasn’t gotten too dull, and all right, maybe mock them for all the old people things they’ve got into, like fiber and having bad joints. And I’ve got a time machine, for Stormageddon’s sake; think of all the adventures we can squeeze in before their knees get all un-bendy and their faces wrinkle up! We’ll do holidays, and birthdays, and Michaelmas, and random jaunts to New York City and Pluto—”
“I don’t think humans are much into Michaelmas these days, honey.”
“Aren’t they? Shame. Always a good way to perk up one’s September 29th. It really caught on in certain corners of space. Not Pluto, though, not yet anyway. The point is: they can still travel with us every so often, and when they don’t want to travel with us, well, that doesn’t mean we can’t travel to them. You’ll do your thing, your timey-wimey sexy hair adventure thing, and I’ll do mine, and when we’re together, we’ll do ours.”
She smiles. “I do like ours.”
He grins at her. “Me too. And all the while, we don’t have to just give them up. We can still be …” He trails off, trying to find a word to capture all that the four of them have become to each other.
“A family,” River supplies gently.
“Right. That.” When he exhales, the sound is entirely different from his beleaguered sigh at the start of their conversation.
He sits down next to her again, the wind gone (temporarily) out of his sails. At last, he looks, really looks, right into her eyes.
“Blimey,” he says. “Am I a Pond now?”
“You’re only just noticing?”
He considers it for a moment, then declares, “The Doctor Pond. I do like the sound of that.”
“Good.” River runs a hand through his hair. “And even if there comes a time when you need to move on--”
He frowns. “There won’t. I just told you—“
“If,” River stresses. “Because there’s a universe out there that needs you hurtling through it saving people, not sitting here on my parents’ sofa or escorting them on safe day trips through time and space--well, then, I’ll always look after them. You can count on me for that. And it’s not as if you won’t know where to find me.”
He looks at her for a just-too-long moment; she wonders if she’s said something wrong. But then he brightens. “Oh, will I? In case you hadn’t noticed, Doctor Song, you can be a tad hard to track down.”
She brightens along with him. “Expect me to fall out of the sky and into your arms at the oddest possible moment, and you’ll never be disappointed.”
“Of course.” He smiles, pulling her into his lap. “Who could be luckier?”
“Do you mean you or me?”
“Yes,” he says, merrily cryptic, and leans in to kiss her. “Say, Mrs. Me,” he adds, cutting things short a bit too soon for her liking, “now that Amy and Rory are in bed, surely it wouldn’t be so bad if we nipped out to a nearby galaxy for a drink or haphazard adventure or two.”
“Why, Mr. Song,” River says, her body humming with love, “you know how I feel about bad behavior.”
“Tingly?”
“For a start.”
“Yowza.”
***
Amy and Rory come downstairs the next morning, quite nicely rested, to find the Doctor and River passed out on the sofa, the both of them covered in the brightly colored slime that had covered River’s jacket the night before. They also look like they may have been slightly electrocuted.
“Sneaking out to archeological digs. Kids today.” Rory shakes his head ruefully.
Amy pats his shoulder. “You said it, mister.”
“They must’ve really gotten up to it if he’s sleeping.”
“Ugh. That is our daughter and our best friend. Don’t talk about them getting up to it.”
“Not up to that! Up to--aliens!” Rory gestures at the slime.
“Okay, sure. Nasty man.”
Rory sighs, and really takes his time about it. Then: “Coffee?”
“Or else.”
Rory kisses her before shuffling off to the kitchen. Amy stares at her daughter and her Doctor a little longer. It’s funny: when she’d broken her own heart with waiting for him, it was because she’d wanted the stars, the wonder, the fairytale. She’d never stopped to think that she might get this. A family and a home. A place for all of them to finally rest.
“Yeah, I think this could work,” she murmurs to herself.
“WE STAYED HERE ALL NIGHT STARING AT THE TELEVISION, I SWEAR; NO FUNNY ALIEN-BATTLING BUSINESS,” the Doctor shouts, arms flailing, and then falls right back into a deep sleep. River smacks his face with one drowsy arm and rolls over onto his chest.
Amy smiles. “Good morning, River and Raggedy Man. I’m so going to kill you if you leave any of that slime on the sofa.”
She and Rory have their coffee in the sunny back garden—the best way to wake up. The more often they do it, the more it beats even the most spectacular sunrises on the most spectacular planets; once, she would’ve thought it had to be the other way around, that something small and everyday couldn’t possibly beat the new and magnificent. But really, there’s nothing more beautiful than the everyday, especially when every one of those days has her beautiful husband in it.
It’s even better than usual today, knowing the gang’s all here, safe and peaceful. Home was a blue box for a long while, and it always will be, at least a bit. But really, home’s the four of them together. Amy loves this house, really loves it, but she’s never loved it quite as much as she does this morning, with all the brightest stars in her sky aligned.
“What’re you smiling about?” Rory asks, and Amy notices he’s smiling too.
“Oh, nothing,” she says. “Boring stuff.”