River awoke to find herself upon a large, soft and very familiar bed. She didn't know how she got there, but knew that for the moment she was safe and could rest. She remembered being on the run from… something she couldn't recall, and then suddenly found herself awakening as if from a very deep sleep.
"Well, you're finally awake!"
The Doctor. Of course he would be there, since she was within the TARDIS. She was still rather groggy and yawned and stretched several times before answering him.
"I'm just fine, sweetie." she said. "But what am I doing here? And where are Rory and Amy?"
The Doctor was looking down at her from the end of the bed, with a mixture of worry and dread within his eyes. Just how was he going to explain everything to her?
"River, they're… they're fine. This is very important. What is exactly the last thing you remember doing?"
"Besides waking up here? I was running. That's all. I can't explain how I just went from that to this."
"I can, River. And I'm guessing that you were in America, right?"
Something about the Doctor's tone deeply worried her. Normally, even in rough or downright dangerous situations he would try and make light of things or smile, and he was doing neither. No, he was deeply serious for some reason, and she was about to find out why.
Reaching into a pocket, he pulled out something he shouldn't have… her diary, and thumbed over it until stopping on several specific pages before handing it to her.
"Where did you get this? You know you're not supposed to…"
"Just read it, River. You'll see why."
River did as he asked, wondering what was so important within her diary that the Doctor needed her to read. But as she began to read what was quite unmistakeably her own handwriting, she immediately knew that something was very wrong.
The Singing Towers? She knew for a fact that she had never been there, and that she never wrote about it. After turning to the next page and seeing that it was blank, she skimmed back to earlier pages and found references to the Pandorica and other events that she had no memory of. Was this it? Did she lose a good chunk of her memory somehow?
"Doctor, what has happened?" she asked. "This doesn't make any sense! And why do you have my diary in the first place? Spoilers, you know…"
"Spoilers don't matter anymore, River. Our timelines are in sync now, and everything in that book has happened for me. As for that, I… I retrieved it a while after you had died. I'm so sorry, River."
"But… but if I'm dead, then why am I…"
A spark ignited within River's mind, and she was filled with a horrible realization. No, please, let it be anything but that!
"I'm not the original River Song, am I?"
"No. I'm so sorry, River. You're a Ganger. My guess is that the Silence captured and cloned the original River, but of course she'd have never remembered, and were so preoccupied with their destruction by humanity that they just forgot about you in the shuffle. I don't know what they planned to do with you. You were frozen in stasis in a secret room not far from where we rescued Amy from, and it was only because I detected faint Time-Lord traces that I even found it, else you would have been trapped there forever."
It was too much to take in all at once. She was a copy. The real River Song was dead. She was a copy. A copy. A copy. River felt like she couldn't even breathe. The Doctor in front of her would always see her as a substitute, no matter how much he tried to deny it. Everything was ruined. Maybe the Doctor would have been better off leaving her frozen for eternity instead of waking her up into a complete nightmare.
"I'm not even real! Now I know what Mother felt like, in a way, even though she was actually controlling her copy. I was about to say spoilers at that, by the way, but why bother? Even if you didn't already know everything, it was another woman's life! A dead woman! Just how did she die, anyway?"
"She saved over 4000 people, Donna Noble, and myself. It was the first time I ever met you, back in the regeneration before this one, and it's been a horrible burden ever since just knowing exactly when and how you were going to die. At the end, you always knew that it was probably going to end that way, and had no regrets. I knew from that point on that you were something special, River Song. And this is… a bit of a second chance, in a way. I don't expect things to be the way they were, but I want to be your friend, and… I'm just so glad to see you again."
The Doctor's voice quivered at his last words, and River clearly saw him tearing up and in clear pain at her outburst. It didn't matter who she was, for she still loved this man and would do anything for him, and she pulled herself out from under the mess of blankets to stand up and comfort him with a warm hug.
"I'm so sorry, sweetie. I can't imagine how painful everything must have been for you, but… it's going to take me some time to come to terms with this. I honestly don't know what to feel about myself, but I do know that I love you, and that's never going to change. Come… I do want to eventually see these Singing Towers that I gave such a wonderful review about, and to talk. We have much to discuss, and I want to hear everything. No more holding back."
Neither knew from that point forward exactly what was going to happen in their futures, which for the first time meant that they'd be completely honest with each other. Maybe she wouldn't be as close to the Doctor as she once had been (or more accurately, as her predecessor had been), but it didn't matter to her. Just being with him was more than enough.
As for her own life, she figured that she probably wasn't more than a year or two old at most. And she didn't know if she could keep her name, since River was officially supposed to be dead, or how to talk to her parents… but she did know one thing for sure.
No more spoilers.