Disclaimer: I own nothing, for fun, not profit. Title is taken from the last line of Canto 34 of Dante's Inferno. The excerpt below is from Eavan Boland's "The Pomegranate."
Setting/Spoilers: For all of Series 5 and 6. Set around the events of "The Wedding of River Song."
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
Eavan Boland, "The Pomegranate"
.
(Amy's choice, they'd once called it, like it was a thing, a moment. Pick a world, simple as that.
It was an easy thing to say, Amy thought, but it was all just words in the end. Amy wasn't stupid: choice didn't have anything to do with it.
But, "If you bump into my daughter," she told the Doctor, "tell her to visit her old mum sometime.")
.
Amy had forgotten nearly everything, but she was almost certain that River Song hadn't forgotten a thing. Which was irritating, but then again, Amy had only forgotten nearly everything. She sketched in the evenings, her hand hesitating over faces-that-weren't-quite before she erased and tried again. It was never names that were the problem, somehow.
It didn't surprise her, then, that this was one of the first things she remembered:
She couldn't see, and could taste terror and death reaching for her, but then she'd literally fallen into River's arms. (Told you I could get her back, River was saying to the Doctor.) There was tangible relief in her grip on Amy's arms, and care in her touch all the rest of the way through the Byzantium. Amy didn't like to be out of control, especially in life-or-death situations, but River gave off confidence enough for the both of them, and it wasn't so bad as it might have been.
And then, snatches: River flying the TARDIS, posing as Cleopatra, glancing through the windows at Amy's wedding.
Maze of the dead, River had said. It's not as bad as it sounds.
.
No, River hadn't forgotten anything: privileges of having a Time Lord's mind. As for Amy – well, River had lived most of her life without her parents, long enough for them to exist on the very edges of her memory when she wasn't with them.
And yet, she could define so many things by those edges.
(River-as-Melody at seven years old had twice come face to face with Amy. Melody had clung to the memory of her face all her life, and had one picture to confirm it. This is my mother, she'd thought with relief, and begged, help me. She'd been met with a bullet the first time.
River-as-Mels, half a century older and just coming off a secondhand childhood obliquely spent with her parents, had been surprised by the vindictive pleasure that had sprung up in response to Amy's unsolicited scream as she aimed a gun in her direction. Still, she had treasured Amy's grasping hands on her regenerating form, her firm voice and reproving gaze as the Doctor lay dying (Show me River Song, she'd said,) and her smile coming into focus despite everything as River woke into a new being.
This is my mother, River had thought wearily, and handed her the title aloud for the first time.)
Despite claims to the contrary, River wasn't a psychopath in the true sense of the word, but there was something unhinged in her nonetheless that she'd long since learned to embrace and twist into other things, like the thrill of gunfights and her passion for archaeology; and this much River could always have control over. Violence and history. The two weren't so incongruous.
There had been one time in the bowels of Stalingrad, working their way up to woo away dissenting Soviet theoretical physicists, that she and Amy had nearly been mobbed. They'd instinctively gone back to back when they'd been surrounded, but Amy, for all her readiness to go down fighting with her fingernails, mostly stared as River foiled one man, took his gun, and used it on the rest without hesitation.
"I do love a good bloodbath," River said, only half facetiously, and was too conscious of it. Amy was still staring at her, quite rightly, as if she couldn't decide what to make of her statement.
.
"You know things, yeah?" Amy called over to River, who, to her credit, didn't react. Amy was lounging undignified on her couch with her sketchbook in hand, while River sat at the desk she'd vacated, sketching plans for her distress beacon.
"I know things," River confirmed.
"Any reason you're not sharing them with me?"
"Spoilers," she said absently, pedantically.
"You've said that before," Amy acknowledged, realizing that to her own memory, River had never said any such thing. But she could remember a lake, a bright cerulean sky hung with a moon and no stars, a man dying and her world collapsing in grief, or a man living and the world going mad. Maybe.
"And while we're on the subject, spoilers how, exactly?" Amy asked. "And for what? I know time's gone all weird, but I'm still a bit hazy as to how. I mean, how can we even be moving through something that's static? How is there even a future to save?"
"There might be yet," River said, still bent over her papers. "I'm trying not to alter anything with what I say. Or I am, but not the important things. Or rather, I'm trying to change one universe-changing event for all our sakes, without changing anything else, which is rather difficult as you might imagine."
"Things that are personally important to you?" Amy guessed. "Tell me you're not in this for a vendetta or something."
"The opposite, actually. And yes, it's very personally important to me."
"These 'spoilers'," Amy air quoted indulgently, sitting up and laying aside her sketchbook. "It's funny – of course I remember the lakeside ending twice, but I also remember living two whole lives before that. At first I didn't have parents, I never had, and suddenly, they'd always been there."
"And once, there were no stars, there'd never been stars, and suddenly there they'd always been," River said gently.
Amy looked at her sharply. "You were there for that, too?"
"Spoilers," said River again, but smiled this time.
Amy remembered that world, and creating pictures of stars as the images flowed down her arm and fingers from her mind, being told to "Look up: do you see stars?" There in the darkness, there'd only been a moon, but that hadn't bothered her. What had bothered her was that everyone knew what a star looked like, and everyone had a word for "star," but still insisted that stars couldn't exist.
"Your memory has brought back so much," said River. "You can bring back your world."
"There you go making things bigger than they are," said Amy, rather irritated. "This is life, River; it's not a bloody fairytale."
River was not put off, and only chuckled, annoyingly self-aware. "Hardly, dear. We are all of us stories."
.
"How did you get all caught up in this business, anyway?" River asked Amy early in their friendship this time around.
They'd been walking along the quay at Canary Wharf. Amy watched the glitter of the Thames in the half-sunlight, waited for a train to pass overhead, and shrugged. It wasn't so much that she'd gotten caught up in it, after all, than that few others had seemed to notice, and Amy had never really been one to let things sit.
"What was I supposed to do?" she asked rhetorically. "Wait?" Amy tossed her hair back from where the wind had blown it in her face, studiously pretending not to notice how River's eyes were watching her guardedly.
For her part, River knew this: memory was a twisted thing, singularly subjective and patterned by the rhythms of the imagination. It was easy to get lost in it, a sea of impressions and meanings, this is what was important about that,whether it had happened that way or not. It was hard to find a path out when there wasn't one, and harder to find another body among the waves.
(Drifting in a lake, heart pounding to the time of lake currents, climbing up and out along a predetermined path, straight and without subtlety or meaning. Then back again, down and down and like to drown: the opposite of emergence. She would die before she did it again. She would die before she did it.)
"Fair enough," River said.
.
They divided the labor at that point: River went to Cairo and got the great pyramid at Giza from the Americans with relatively little trouble, and Amy recruited a small army of their own.
There was something about Captain Williams, too, that made her heart jump and her mind prickle in a way that wasn't necessarily bad – he was like River in that way. But he at least looked back at Amy like she was the stranger she was, treating her with unwavering respectful formality. There were never secrets lurking in his eyes, which, after an indeterminable length of an afternoon with River, was refreshing. But she would sometimes catch herself looking a bit too long at him sometimes, though he was kind enough to never comment on it.
They set up in the pyramid, surrounded by sphinxes and riddles and other not-ancient finery. "How very like you," Amy remarked dryly to River when she first took the tour of what they were converting into their control room, pretending to stare down one of the sphinxes to make River laugh. "Aren't these things deadly if you don't answer the question correctly?"
They started capturing Silents, and their bodies on any given day became mazes of tallies and ink scratches, this is now many times I nearly died and forgot it today. It was an imperfect system, the constant cycle of forget-remember-forget; and somehow the feeling of forgetting, the memory of forgetting, was already uncannily familiar to Amy.
Soon River had taken her crack team of engineers and was at work constructing her device on top of the pyramid. Time and space, she'd told Amy – no part of it would escape this call.
"Won't you come see it?" River entreated her once it was finished.
Amy had been monitoring the news at the time, history bombarding her all at once, and she thought the only silent place left in the universe must be in the hallways outside this very room, living in rows and rows of cells, suspended in absolute stillness. She checked her arms on habit: no marks. She was getting better at this.
River was watching her closely and curiously, her skin also free of tallies, and Amy replied, "Sure."
Captain Williams insisted on accompanying them on the long climb up to the top, with River leading the way. Amy gasped a little when she emerged into the clear, cool dusk. The stars were in their perpetual half-emergence against the hazy sky, looking down over a world that was fundamentally wrong. Desert below and open spaces all around. It was breathtaking.
River activated the beacon, and the three of them wordlessly stood there for a suspended moment, surprised into stillness by a sudden feeling of inexplicable rightness. But then, inevitably, one of them finally shifted and fractured the moment, and it was by tacit agreement that they climbed down again into the pyramid.
.
Sometimes River stared at the Silents in their tanks, knowing they didn't know who she was in her current incarnation, that there was a very real danger of her being harmed – and wasn't that ironic? There was some kind of understanding that passed between them that made River question that precept, though. They knew her, whether they knew what she was or not. She'd seen they way they draw electricity from pure air just once, watched the way they twisted in front of her and felt the crackle of anticipation, and a Doctorism had slipped out –
"Oh, you're beautiful - "
- and then there was Amy screaming a warning to her from half a room away, and Rory slamming into her at full force down and away from the branches of electricity, and a machine gun opening fire behind them and over their heads. Afterward, Amy handed the weapon over to Rory, every line in her body tense, and none of them ever spoke of it.
Today it was also Amy who came upon River staring, and she rolled her eyes and pushed River into moving down the hall. A few of the guards who had been watching her non-interactions with the Silents warily moved to let her and Amy pass.
"Seriously, are you trying to provoke them?" Amy hissed at her, holding onto her arm. "It was hard enough getting them in there, let's not give them another reason to get out."
It reminded River of the times Amy had waited outside the headmaster's office and come to bail her-as-Mels out of jail years and years and years ago, stern and reprimanding and not-quite-mothering; and as she never had then, she followed Amy quietly. She was used to not-quites at this point, after all.
.
They tracked down and captured Madame Kovarian. They adopted the eyepiece technology and began to remember.
But first (and this was important,) there was River, steel-backed and meeting Kovarian's gaze head-on, not a word passing between them.
Amy didn't even realize she needed to get out of the room until she'd already done it. She somehow made it into the labyrinth outside, surrounded by nothing but a multitude of Silents suspended in their unearthly blue light, immobile and aquatic and watching her. Her hands came up to her face as though they were disconnected from her mind, touching the wet trails on her cheeks with shaking fingers and a morbid fascination.
I'm crying, she thought. Why am I crying?
(This was something Amy never told anyone about giving birth: the terror, the revulsion, the knowledge that something even worse was coming after because if not what was the point, and – but this was beautiful – how she'd come to know her daughter in the days that followed. Unexpected joys, Melody resting awake against her chest and radiating content into Amy's heart, the shape of her tiny face, the sounds she would make, I will never not know that you are mine.)
The door open and shut behind her. There was a touch on her arm.
"Amy," River implored her softly, and when that didn't work, "Mother."
Amy felt like a little girl watching the world fall into place without her, holding a stolen title like a forgotten balloon, and surveying the world around her from a viewpoint of sudden, unacknowledged displacement.
So this was her daughter.
.
(Melody-as-Mels had gone over to Amy and Rory's three days before their first wedding anniversary with a bottle of champagne, having not seen them since before Christmas. Ostensibly they'd been "travelling." Mels knew what that really meant, and didn't begrudge them it. There'd be time enough for her role later. If she'd been conditioned to one thing in her first life, it had been patience.
She found her parents there in a state of shock, or nearly ready to come out of it. Her heart dropped, because she already knew what was coming.
They'd had a baby, they told her. Named her Melody. Been forced to watch as their daughter was stolen from them. There was more to it, of course, but Mels didn't ask. Her father was alternating between helplessness and formless, directionless rage. Her mother's blank face was tired beyond mere emotion.
"The Doctor's looking for her," Rory said. Amy didn't say anything.
You don't sound like you believe that, mate, Mels thought, but she knew how very true it was.
She remembered the Doctor coming for her in an orphanage in the 1960's and sensing something in her very being call out to him and be answered, instinctively knowing we two are different. She remembered nights in her foster parents' house and sleepovers in Amy's bed, when he'd come and known who she was and why she was there. He'd promised her she'd be magnificent, and smiled at her with the thrill of their shared secret. She'd loved him for that, even as she'd hated him with the weight of all the years she'd been taught to do so. She'd looked over at her sleeping mother's face, all ruddy and chubby still with all her little-girl state of being. The Doctor's gaze had often followed hers, and she'd resented it.
Touch Amelia and die,Mels would think sometimes, with all the angry indignation of a child watching an adult steal away her mother,but sometimes she'd simply rolled over and blankly thought take her, take her, see if I care.
He never had, though, and she listened to the TARDIS depart silently (for once) on those nights with a burning apathy scorching her from the inside. Anger and hope and fear – those burned too, and they could mix in to be indistinguishable from the first, and then it was hard to know anything.
These years were for her, though, and they were for Amy and Rory, and they weren't going to be taken from them by the Doctor or Kovarian or even Mels herself.
Six inches from her, Amelia slept unawares, and Mels rested easier.
.
After Demon's Run, Amy remembered, she'd been too dazed and heartbroken to really process the fact that her daughter was right in front of her, guiding her and Rory into their home in Leadworth, bustling about in the kitchen and making tea as though she lived there. It was River, was all she could think. It was River.
When River eventually got around to awkwardly preparing to leave, having tried to make her parents as comfortable as possible, Amy blurted out, "But we can still save you."
River looked discomfited, but her shoulders sagged the tiniest bit, giving away that she'd been expecting this moment. "Amy," she said (and Amy was glad of that much,) "I don't need to be saved."
Something was clawing its way out of Amy's chest. Her whole body still ached from giving birth to the woman in front of her.
"The Doctor promised," she insisted.
"He'll deliver," River assured her.
"And we're just supposed to wait here until he does?" Amy snapped.
"No," River denied quietly, but didn't elaborate.
"My daughter," Amy began again, but broke off when she realized she didn't have anywhere else to go.
"Will be absolutely fine," River finished for her firmly. "I promise you that much, for whatever it's worth to you."
Amy almost wanted a gun to point at her again. Let us save you, she wanted to demand, before they hurt you, before you become this. Let us love you. Her body ached to hold her daughter. Her whole body ached.
River reached out then, as if to comfort her. Amy sat still, conscious of Rory gently and tacitly warning River away from the idea. They shared a moment Amy didn't watch, and then she was gone.)
.
River had kept her distance for three days after Amy remembered, and on the fourth followed her to Hyde Park, where she slowly settled next to her on a park bench.
"I'm sorry," River apologized after a moment. "This is always the hardest part."
Amy shrugged. She didn't like the idea that she'd do – had done? – this more than once. But of course, of course she had. For a moment, she missed her husband-that-wasn't so keenly it burned and stole her breath.
She'd always been a bit starry-eyed where River was concerned, and who could blame her? River wore weapons and four-inch stilettos like she'd been born into them, throwing Amy winks over her shoulder even as she held secrets to her chest. There was such an easy, cheeky comfortableness about the way she used things and wore mystery. But there was a well that ran dangerously deep and still behind it all that Amy had never had to touch, and this was the difference between that woman being a favorite acquaintance and that woman being her daughter.
It had been so much easier to talk about nothing with River before she'd known this impossible woman was her daughter, several decades older than her, and a trained assassin; so much easier to take River's inexplicable tenderness toward her with a grain of salt and the word spoilers hanging silent and understood between them.
But there was another word that would always hang between them, and Amy didn't dare speak the name she'd given her daughter not even a full year before.
"When I think about what I want for my daughter," Amy said instead, not looking at her, "I want her safe and whole and strong, and look at you now, River Song. Look at you."
Maybe it was the right thing to say, and maybe it wasn't. A tear skipped down River's stony face as if this were something she dreaded Amy witnessing; and Amy hesitantly reached up to brush it away, unsure that River would allow the touch. But it meant something that she'd given birth to this woman, just as it meant something that this woman had deliberately chosen to seek her out time and time again.
Later, they would go back to work and get a wire that Winston Churchill ("Winston Churchill!" Amy would exclaim exasperatedly) had been holding the Doctor prisoner these last three months (River would read the charges and smile and murmur "Oh, how very you,") and then everything would truly start to happen at once. But for now, Amy breathed deep and started again.
"Do you know," she began conversationally, "I knew I'd like you from the first time I saw you. You were wearing killer heels and flew into the TARDIS, and then you flew the TARDIS, and I knew we had to be friends. If there were ever two women he didn't want to meet, it's probably us. Now that I think about it, actually, he was awfully reluctant to make introductions."
River chuckled, a little of the lingering tension in her throat giving way. "Spoilers, mother."
"You just wait," Amy said, grinning. "I bet you were just showing off when you realized I had no idea who you were. Look mum, no hands, and all. God, you were laughing the whole time, weren't you?"
"No hands?" River inquired, all intrigued tone and gleaming eyes.
"It's a phrase. Don't go getting any ideas, young lady." Amy warned, bumping her shoulder.
It wasn't enough, not by a long shot; but even as inexperienced and out of her depth as Amy was, she knew there were some things you didn't tell your children. Instead, she tried to content herself with tucking her arm through River's and watching the kids bait the pterodactyls.
(But then, you mothered me, and Amy remembered the warm circles River had absently rubbed against her shoulder and arm in the forest and beyond it, the way she'd clutched at River's clothes like a little girl, and wondered if she'd been laughing then too.)
.
The Doctor came to visit her in Stormcage the day before she left with Father Octavian for the Byzantium. It was the first time either of them had ever had a use for visiting hours, and if River had her way, it would be the only time.
"Today I dropped off your parents at their new house," he told her, watching her pack. The guards hovering twenty feet away were watching her warily.
There was much more to it, River knew immediately, and he'd miss Amy terribly, but for now she lightly remarked, "You'll have to give me the new address."
The Doctor was quiet. River judged between two knives, and chose one, strapping it to her right calf under her diaphanous black dress.
"Rory's partial to the car," the Doctor told her.
River smirked. "Well, boys and their toys. How's Amy?"
"She asked me to tell you to come visit sometime, actually," he said, and her expression softened to a smile.
"I'll be sure to do that, then."
He was already missing Amy desperately, she could tell, his gaze starting to go through her and faraway even now.
"Amelia Pond," he said distantly. "The girl who waited."
The epithet he'd put on her mother had the tone of a goodbye to both girl and title; and so River, recognizing how sacred a thing it was to him, let him have it.
.
(At 5:02 PM on April 22nd, Amy opened her front door, and seeing the woman standing there, crossed her arms and said, "I know you, don't I?")
.
One day, River jumped out of the Byzantium and into the TARDIS, finding there a Doctor too young to truly know her, and her mother: a girl, engaged but not yet married, years away from giving birth, and a stranger to her. River was used to this; but even so, it was strange meeting Amy properly for the first time.
It had been fun becoming Amy's superhero, perhaps more fun even than becoming her best friend, but it wasn't the same. River found herself back in her cell awaiting the verdict on her pardon, craving some light of recognition in her mother's eyes.
This was, at last, one secret she didn't have to keep.
There was an empty seat meant for her when she arrived at her parents' home, and an empty wineglass sitting in front of it. Welcome home they said to her, and River smiled, eyes coming to rest on the quiet figure of her mother, who was looking up into the starry sky and waiting for her, beautiful and vibrant and still so very young.
"So, where are we?" asked Amy, the question already falling out of her mouth by rote.
Ah, life with a time traveller. Both of them already knew all the steps to reacquaintance and refamiliarity. What, here and now? River wanted to tease her.
"I just climbed out of the Byzantium," was what she actually said, pouring herself a glass and sitting down. "You were there."
Amy knew that, of course, as she had climbed out too, eyes closed from fear of what might emerge from her for the last leg of the journey. "The angel no longer exists," the Doctor had insisted over and over, but River had maintained her grip on Amy's hand as they went up, telling her where to step and how, and Amy kept her eyes firmly shut, squeezing River's hand in tacit thanks. On the beach, River and the Doctor coaxed her to open them, and in the cool sea wind, she finally had.
"How's that, then?" River asked her.
"Not as bad as I thought it would be," Amy had admitted, squinting against the bright light, her hair flying across her face.
And (See you, Amy, River had said when Amy padded over to say goodbye) here they were again.
"The Doctor's dead," Amy said, here and now; and just like that, an entire world around those words, the Doctor's dead, when the reality itself had never been in existence! But here too was Amy admitting to her that she'd killed Madame Kovarian, staring into her wine and hiding something from her in the depths of her glass,
(River Song didn't get it all from you, sweetie, and Amy would never tell anyone)
refusing River's absolution because "I remember it, so it happened, so I did it." Simple as that.
Perhaps after all there was something to it. River remembered tearing off her own eyedrive, then Amy's, remembered starting to forget again, half of her world reorientating itself as the vertigo kicked in, looking twice in the darkness going up the stairs and reaching for the pen she'd stopped keeping in her pocket, but they had come too far for that, damn it. At the top of the pyramid, feeling the breeze on her skin and the Doctor's lips on hers and time starting to move again through her veins, sluggish and sweet – it had been more like freedom than anything else she'd ever known. She'd gone back to Lake Silencio feeling something like triumph.
For there she'd been on the beach in her own peripheral vision: older, and witnessing herself with open eyes and understanding – and that last was a gift.
Years and a reality apart, and here they were together, and the Doctor wasn't dead. The thought made River grin. Cautious hope scrawled its way across Amy's face as River chuckled. At last, a secret she did not have to keep.
I've been waiting for you, River thought in the silence before she spoke. How we've triumphed, you and I. A whole world making itself in words.
And so she told her.
.