River was thirty-three when she left Serenity to look for the piece of herself that she'd misplaced a long time ago in some place that she couldn't remember. The ship she left wasn't the same one she'd gotten on all those years ago. There was Simon and Kaylee and their two little boys, Jayne bullied into acting more family-friendly than he would like, and Mal and Inara with a surprise coming. They didn't know about that yet. River thought it would be a girl. And Zoe was long gone; she had left barely a year after they had shone the truth into every corner of the 'verse because there had been Simon and Kaylee, Mal and Inara, and Zoe all alone in a cramped little room that had gotten too big for just one person. River knew.
They were surprised when River said she was leaving. They all tried to convince her to stay, even Jayne, but she knew what she had to do, and she wasn't going to do it from Serenity. There were already too many graves on her account – two that hurt worse than the others – and she didn't want there to be any more, not any time soon and not because of her. Mal understood. He just shook his head, hair touched with gray now, and said that if she wanted to leave he wasn't going to keep her there. So she left. She got off the next time they docked and followed her instincts to a freighter that was heading to Osiris. She was going home.
There was no nostalgia attached to her destination, and no anticipation of seeing her old family, if they were even still alive. As it turned out, they had left the planet years ago. She found her childhood home occupied by a rich old man that she had no trouble whatsoever slipping past. She went to her old room. It had been converted into a den, but she knew what she was looking for, something that she must have seen growing up but never noticed. She found the floorboard that was just slightly less worn than the rest. She had to push the desk aside to get into the corner in order to pull it up. She had thought that would be the end, that here she would find whatever she had hidden all those years ago without realizing, but all she found was a note:
Third of January, 2447 a.d.
Go to Janet's cafe where you used to meet your brother after school. Your usual table. You need to arrive at 3:38 p.m., on the fourth of September, 2534 a.d. There is a man there who has what you are looking for.
-Melody Pond
River stared down at the note. The date on the top was fifty-four years before she was born, and the name... the name seemed familiar, but she couldn't remember where she had heard it. That in itself troubled her. Any sane person would ignore the note and get as far away from the cafe as they possibly could. River was not sane by any definition of the word. The clock on the desk read 3:15. She would have just enough time.
It was raining, a cold driving rain that weighed down her dress and sloshed into her boots. She didn't mind. She had always liked the rain. She ran through it laughing, skipping from puddle to puddle the way she did when she was a child. People stared, thinking she was crazy or drunk. "Crazy," she breathlessly informed one woman who was looking at her more rudely than most.
It was exactly 3:37 when she got to the cafe. She paused in the doorway, breathing in the familiar smells. She would always get tomato soup on days like this. Janet's had the best soup in the 'verse.
Her feet still knew the way to the table after all these years and everything that had happened. There was a man sitting there, just like the note said. He had been caught in the rain too; his clothes were damp and his dark hair was still plastered to his forehead. He was wearing a friendly smile and a long brown coat that reminded her of Mal.
"Hello!" he said when he saw her. "Sit down. I was just trying to decide what to get."
"The soups are good," she said, taking a seat. The man made her nervous. She couldn't hear him the way she could hear most people; all she knew was what he said.
"Hmmm. I think I'm in more of a pastry mood right now."
She scrutinized him while he was examining the menu. Nothing. She couldn't see anything about him, not past the surface of things. But she would know, if there was danger. That had never failed her. And she had come a very long way. And most importantly, she was curious.
"You have something for me?" she said. No one nearby overheard them.
"Cinnamon rolls," the man said. "I do like cinnamon rolls. Are the cinnamon rolls here any good?"
River didn't know how to act around this man, didn't know how he would react. "I didn't come here to talk about cinnamon rolls," she said. She had two knives and a gun that she could reach in a fraction of a second. She kept her hands in her pockets and her eyes fixed on the man seated across from her.
"Why not? I love cinnamon rolls. What are you getting?"
"Do you have something for me or not?" River was seconds away from running, running all the way back to Serenity and the things she knew. But she was missing something important, and she had been led here to this man who wouldn't stop talking about cinnamon rolls.
The man looked up at her at last. "I do have something for you."
"Is it a cinnamon roll?" she snipped.
"No-oo" he drew out the syllable, reaching into his pocket. "Here you are."
A circle of dark gray metal, small enough to fit comfortably into her hand. There was a slender chain attached to it. Like a necklace. She picked it up and swung it back and forth. It would have been disappointing, but... it wasn't. She couldn't define why, something to do with the weight of it or the way the light glinted off the carvings.
"What is it?" she asked the man.
"Yours."
"Where did you get it?"
"From a man I trust more than anyone else in the universe." He stood up. "Rain's let up. I think I'll just grab something on the way out." He gave her a little wave. "I'll be seeing you."
River stayed at the table and ordered her tomato soup. She played with the strange object she had just received, touching it lightly and watching it sway back and forth as if in a gentle breeze. It was too heavy to be a necklace. It looked like it could open like a locket; there were hinges on one side and what looked like some kind of fastening on the other. She finally realized what she had in her hand when the soup came.
It was a fob watch. An antique from Earth-that-was. Or a replica, more likely. She slipped it into her pocket. It felt slightly warm through the thin fabric of her dress, like the touch of another's hand. She ate her soup, trying to look as though it had her undivided attention. Which it normally would. But her thoughts really rested with the small circle of warmth nestled against her thigh.
She had a safe place, hidden in the more disreputable part of the city. No one would come here; she had seen to it. She crouched down and took out the watch. Neon lights from the street washed over it like an alien sun. All of a sudden, she wasn't so skeptical of the people who said humanity wasn't alone. That man she had met in the cafe...
It would open. She worked her fingernail around the hairline crack that bisected the watch, looking for... what? A trap? She would know if there was danger. Slowly, she raised it up to the level of her eyes, stared at it. She wanted to see inside. She could hear it, almost, like the murmur of voices from behind thick walls and locked doors. But she wasn't locked in, not anymore, now she was locked out. Or was it both?
River touched the clasp that held the two halves of the watch together. She could open it. She would open it. For a moment she could hear nothing, deafened by the roar of her own breathing and the drum of her heartbeat and a strange song that came from the watch. A melody. River flicked the clasp open and the watch swallowed her.
Gold. Bright, liquid gold, what the heart of a star would be if it was made of poetry instead of matter. It enveloped her, consumed her, became her. Time did not pass. She was time, riding on the wave of eternity, bigger than planets and able to fit inside the nucleus of an atom. She remembered. She wasn't River, not anymore and not yet. Her name. Melody. She was whole again.
It ended, and she was left alone in her hiding place with the fob watch clutched in her hand, a faint memory of gold, and whole worlds at her feet. Melody looked at her hands, her legs, felt her hair. She laughed. She remembered now, and knew what she had to do. She was half a millennium out of her way, but that was all right, she could take care of that. There would be people keeping track of these things, some sort of police to see to it that history stayed on its course. There always were. It made life a lot more fun for a girl like her. She was going to get back where she needed to be, and damned if she was going to do it legally.
Melody stepped out into the night and set off. This was the very first day of her life, in a way. The old life had belonged to someone else, to River Tam. She thought about that for a moment, remembered being River. She had had a family. That was new. She thought for a moment about going back, seeing Simon and Kaylee and Jayne and Mal and Inara again. But that wasn't her world anymore. She would fit into it like a square peg into a round hole. And that was good, that was how she felt. Squared away. Soft edges sanded off, all sharp angles and corners now. Besides, she had another family, one that she hadn't seen in a lifetime, and she was determined to get back to them one way or another.
They didn't need to know about this little escapade; she had no intention of ever telling them. He would know. Hell, he was behind the whole thing. But she wasn't going to worry about him, not for a long time. Play before work. She wasn't really looking forward to killing the man from the cafe. But then, it wasn't really him she would be killing, it was the next one. Poor mum and dad would be so upset. Of course, she had to find them first, and then him. The Doctor.
The poor man had probably been trying to keep her safe when he brought her here. She assumed he was there, somewhere in between the streets of New York and her new childhood on Osiris. Who else could it have possibly been? But he failed, he lost, just like he always did. She could add her own name to the long list of people he hadn't saved. The funniest part was that the Alliance actually believed that the facility they'd stuck River in was their own idea. But then, that was how it always worked, wasn't it? It was really the Silence, of course. She understood that now. And she understood her purpose. Melody Pond set off down the dark streets with new life in her heart and murder in her mind. She was ready to become what she was born to be.