A/N: This is an AU story, which explores what would happen if Amy was never kidnapped by Madame Kovorian. It may be worth remembering that I wrote this before Let's Kill Hitler.
I don't own Doctor Who.
Melody Pond is six years old when she realises she's not normal.
One minute she's on the swing and it feels like she's flying towards the sky, and then she hears a breaking sound and for a moment it feels like she's falling.
And nows she's on the ground and her head hurts and feels wet and she's scared and certain that she's going to die.
But she doesn't die, because suddenly she feels warm and light and she doesn't hurt anymore.
By the time her mother realises something is wrong she's already changed.
Melody's parents always tell her not to go into the woods alone, because big bad wolves might not be lurking there but strange men and aliens might be.
Melody goes there anyway, she wears a bright red coat. Her parents never did tell her normal fairy tales.
She's in the thickest part when a strange creature that looks like a wolf appears, but it's not a wolf. It's the kind of wolf that haunts childrens dreams, the kind that stays with you, even when you're an adult. It's the kind in fairy tales, the kind which lurchs in the corner of your eye.
The Not-Wolf stalks towards the child, watching her hungrily with a gaze that had struck terror into many humans already that day.
But Melody Pond meets his gaze, and throws the largest stone she can find towards it.
The Not-Wolf looks at her with amusment, and looks like he's about to rip her to shreds, when a strange man in a pin stripe suit runs towards it, brandishing a strange object. The Not-Wolf turns and feels, with the man running after him.
"Wait!" Melody shouts, but he's already gone.
Melody doesn't properly meet the Doctor until her seventh birthday.
It's a disaster, and Melody is about to run up to her room and cry when she hears a strange wheezing sound, and a big blue box appears in the living room. The door opens, and a man wearing a bowtie and a paper party hat pokes his head out.
"Melody Pond," the man says, his voice serious, "Are you having a rubbish birthday?"
Melody can only nod.
The man grins, "Good, thought I got the wrong brithday. Again. Right, hello, I'm the Doctor. So then, Melody Pond, you want a birthday present? How about the whole universe? What do you say, we can go anywhere you want."
Melody is young enough to believe him, and old enough to recognise him from her mother's wedding photo's. She doesn't even hesitate before racing into the box.
They end up fighting Cybermen on Eart in the future.
The Doctor tells her mother they went to Rio.
Melody continues going on adventures with the Doctor. Sometimes they manage to meet in the right order, but only ever on Saturdays.
The Doctor shows up to her birthday every year since she was seven, but only because he's trying to get to her seventh birthday.
On Melody's tenth birthday he shows up in the middle of a game of pass-the-parcel, and Melody abandons her friends to run into the TARDIS.
When she get's back, her mother lectures her on doing impossible things infront of people, because it is extremly hard to explain, and tends to cause parents to take their children to psyhchairtrists.
Melody pretends to listen, but really, she'd do it again any day.
Melody is twelve years old when the daleks invade earth.
She looks one of them in the eye and manages to kill two of them. The third one is clever enough to leave her alone.
Even the Doctor isn't quite sure how she did it.
Melody is at home with her boyfriend when the Doctor is visiting.
"Hello," he says, grinning, "You must be Paul. Melody's told me so much about you."
"Doctor," she hisses, but, being the Doctor, he ignores her.
"You were born on the fifth of August, you're favourite colour's green, you-"
"Melody, why don't you take Paul to your room," Melody's mother suggests, and Melody is grateful for the excuse.
"What a wierdo," Paul says once they're safely in Melody's bedroom.
"He's not that bad," Melody says, feeling the need to defend the Doctor.
"Yeah, he is. God, do you have to see him a lot? How do you cope."
Melody gets mad then, because even if the Doctor is a bit strange, he's also mad and fantastic and the most brilliant man alive, and no one has the right to talk about him like that.
"Get out," she snaps, "Just get out."
Melody slips into the TARDIS without another word.
Paul is never spoken of again.
When Melody is seventeen, she's knocked down by a car and regenerates again.
When she arrives home, she just stares into space, because suddenly, all of her plans for the future go out the window. She's wearing the body of a girl who doesn't exist, and for the first time in her life, she thinks of herself as a freak. Not quite human and not quite timelord.
But then the Doctor's there, and he's offering her a chance to escape. She glances at her parents, who both nod, and runs into the TARDIS.
She never stops running.
