Author's Notes: Post Series 6 timeline, post everything revealed in River's timeline except for the Library and the Singing Towers. This is the story of the Doctor's whole life, his past and his future. This is the story of River's inevitable trip to the Singing Towers and how the Doctor came to realize there was nothing he could do to keep her from going to the Library.
Characters: Doctor 11 or later, River Song, Amy, Rory, Jack Harkness, and others.
The Long Journey
They met for the first time on the day that she died. They met for the first time on the day she was born. Through their sacrifices they fell in love.
The Doctor watched River Song walking around the TARDIS control room. She was talking to Amy, her mother, who was fussing over the newest addition to the family: Carys. In watching them he couldn't help thinking about all that they had gone through and what was still in her future.
Over time she had told him the story of her life, of how she grew up and how she had come to love him.
River Song had almost no memory of her first childhood; her memories began when she regenerated in New York. She became a toddler with all the knowledge she had possessed as a child. She was found by a woman who took Melody into her home. Melody grew up with her adopted mother for many years, but in the late 1980s the woman grew ill and died. She was entering her late teens and no longer had a guardian, so Melody headed to England in order to try finding her biological parents.
When she found Amy and Rory, Melody bought a home nearby under her adopted mother's name and used the money she had inherited to support her self and pay the bills. She then reversed her aging so that she was the same approximate age as her parents and grew up right along side them. She was Mels Collins, the daughter of Samantha Collins who moved to Leadworth to hide away. Mels was always clever enough to avoid anyone prying into the fact that her mother was never seen, usually with the excuse that she was "away on a trip".
Those were the happiest years of River's young life. She adored her parents and spent most nights at Amy's house. She could separate the reasons why she found her parents in her mind. She was there because she wanted to be with them and she was there because they would one day lead her to the Doctor so that she could kill him. Yet as the years passed and Amy and Rory began dating she couldn't help but admit to herself that she adored the Doctor. The devotion he showed to her parents when she did manage to kill him was the thing that changed her adoration into love.
She was his wife now and quite recently pardoned for the crime of killing him. He would look at her and remember every moment they had spent together, learning about one another, and thinking back upon it all he was still amazed that they had reached this place. He had known from the day they had me t that he would trust her completely, enough to share his true name with her. The day he married her was the day he truly understood why he would trust her completely. He hadn't even been quite sure what he felt for her when he made the decision to marry her, he just felt that in the moment it was the best way for her to learn the truth. That she would go to prison for his death while he lived took such incredible strength. He saw her every day and gradually understood what he felt for her. He had always found her to be fun and flirty, mysterious and intelligent, not to mention quite attractive. Yet as he came to understand what she was giving up, so much freedom and experience in the free world, the more he began to realize he loved her.
Other than River and his first wife Mareksa, all of the Doctor's other marriages had been accidents usually involving cultural misunderstandings or the excessive consumption of liquor and sometimes the combination of the two. The short term marriages never meant anything, although it may have been a mistake to marry Elizabeth I. He had never really wanted a serious relationship after Mareksa, he had loved her so fully that even in his millennia long life without her he hadn't moved on, not until he loved Melody Pond.
He watched his family, vaguely thinking that it would be a good idea to move the children into a safer room other than the control room of the TARDIS but Rory and Amelia were far too cautious of their young ones to let them wander into anything dangerous. There were three little Ponds, or Williamses, he supposed that they had been given their father's name. Carys was only a few months old, Tristan was two, and Hope was three. Hope was born about a year after her older sister Melody and so far had shown every sign of being a completely normal child, unlike Melody.
Then there was the reason why he gathered his wife's family into the TARDIS. He walked over to his wife and wrapped his arms around her from behind, resting his hands upon the swell of her stomach. It had been a very long time since he had experienced the wonder and joy of being a parent and somehow, beyond all reason or expectation he was going to be a father again.