-Prologue-

Melody looked again into the still waters of the broken fountain at eyes that weren't hers.

She sighed a sigh of orange light and started. Quickly, she glanced around to see if anyone had noticed. But, as usual, people, New Yorkers to be exact, took no notice of the grubby girl, barely thirteen and small for her age - this time. It helped that it was broad daylight. The glow around her breath and fingertips would have shone like a beacon for hours if she had died in the nighttime again.

Turning back to the water, Melody inspected the long, black hair which now surrounded her darkened face.

It was wrong. All of it.

Her eyes weren't that shade of brown, they hadn't been brown at all. Her nose hadn't stuck out like it did now. And worse, everything smelled different.

Admittedly, that could be from living on the streets. Dirty alleys, cold nights, that urine smell that seemed to be everywhere in New York, these were the realities of Melody's life now. But it was better than… something.

Melody didn't like to think about Florida. When she forced the issue during the rare, quiet moments she allowed herself, she realized that there wasn't much left of that time of her life inside her mind.

She had lived in a house with a funny, sad, little man. She hadn't liked the house. Something lived in there that wasn't Melody and wasn't the sad little man. But even when she was brave and forced herself to concentrate for hours, Melody couldn't remember what the something in the house had been. In a way, that scared her more than anything.

Whole pieces of her life were missing. Like her face. Like her parents.

She remembered some things. She remembered her bed with the stars that twinkled above her, chiming against one another when she brushed them with her hand. She remembered the picture of her mother.

She used to hold that picture and look at her mother and look at herself and felt warm, safe, even in the drafty attic that was her bedroom. The sad man had never told Melody that the woman in the picture was Melody's mother, but Melody knew.

She saw it in her mother's hair, like Melody's hair. In her freckles and her eyes. Eyes and hair that weren't hers anymore. Melody winked back a tear. Who was she now if not her mother's daughter? Was she someone else's daughter? Someone with black hair and dark skin and brown eyes? Was that how dying worked?

Most of all, however, Melody remembered the suit. You can't go walking around without the suit, a voice in the back of her head repeated, matter-of-factly. Bad things happen to little girls who don't stay in their suits. They die.

But something had happened. The suit was broken.

And Melody had died. Again and again.

First she had run, as if it would do any good. She had run all the way to New York, which, she had always thought, was the natural place to run to. Wasn't that how it always was in stories? But then she had died.

And then died again. And again. And again.

Each time she tried to fix it, but she only lasted a few weeks before dying once more.

First her hair had been yellow, her arms too long. Everything had tasted coppery and she developed a taste for pigeon. She lost that taste when she died next, but she still ate the birds when she could. They were fat and everywhere and Melody was oh, so fast.

"Can't catch me," Melody said to herself as she smiled for the first time that day. "I'm Melody Pond and Melody Pond is a super hero". It sounded right; she just hoped it was true.

-Chapter 1-

Melody ran.

Across the rooftops, she bounded from building to building, looking down, in moments of pure elation, at the alleyways below. Each jump was a thrill and she laughed before hitting down on the next rooftop.

Hard.

Harder than anyone, she had come to realize, should rightly be allowed to land and keep running. But then, that was Melody. She had met other children, here on the streets. Some of them were nice, some of them not so nice. Some had tried to hurt her and she had hurt them back in turn. None of them, however, could run as fast as Melody or jump as high or catch as many pigeons.

But none of them died like Melody either, and when Melody died, and her hair was different and her skin was different and eyes were different, none of the children wanted anything to do with her anymore, even the nice ones.

That's not what dying is, they would say. Dying is the all-over, when they catch you or the snow freezes you and you can't move anymore. But Melody knew what happened when little girls were out of their suits. They died.

She didn't need them anyhow, she thought as she bounded again onto a water tower and climbed, she was an excellent climber, to its roof. She looked out over the buildings west of SoHo, unflinchingly at the setting sun, and tried to ignore that she was doomed to die soon.

Canton wasn't happy.

Canton had rarely been happy in the wake of '69. Sure, yes, national hero. Commendation this, secret medal that, it was all rather paltry when you couldn't remember the bulk of what you had done to save the Earth. He had certainly saved it from something. The Doctor had assured him.

The Doctor. That, Canton thought, was the problem. He was possibility, the unknown, the far-out, out of this world crazy shit the kids had sang and danced about even a few years ago. But the kids weren't singing as loud anymore.

Woodstock, it seemed, had been a dizzying height for the nation's counter-culture from which it had plummeted. Now, it seemed, they were singing to sooth their own insecurities. Dealing with the knowledge that they were living in the aftermath of something magic, but something that real life was doomed to penetrate.

So, it seemed, was Canton.

After the Doctor, going to sleep in Richard's arms after a night of lovemaking and the same three arguments wasn't enough anymore. The secrecy and the thrill were enough for Richard, that had always been the problem. That was why one of them had tried to leverage his reputation as a skilled agent for exception from centuries of stigma and the other had stayed silent, protecting his career. That hadn't gone well. But it was the past.

And still, for a few crazy weeks, it was like everything had changed. But then those weeks passed and the world was basically the same for everyone else as it had been before the Doctor, before the day of the moon. Same shit, different day.

But Canton, even if he couldn't remember who he and the Doctor and Amy and Rory and River had been fighting against, could remember the fight. And he could remember the Doctor. And now he was gone. And dammit, it wasn't the same thing for him. It had to mean something or what was it all for?

So when a British outfit called Torchwood had approached him and told him that, frankly, they could care less about the genre of people he took to bed, that they were interested in having an agent in America, that they were interested in dealing with the same sensitive subject matter that Canton had signed away his rights to talk about with all but the highest U.S. officials… well, it had been easy. But it hadn't made Canton happy.

That was a year ago. An exceedingly quiet year, full of nights drinking alone and sex that didn't mean anything because his other half was selling his soul to the increasingly paranoid Nixon administration. Canton had more money than he could spend on whiskey or men, but apparently not enough to fill the hole in his life that the Doctor had blown. What he certainly didn't have was work.

Canton had come to realize that his employment had been more about intelligence than any particular need for his had been very interested, at first, about the Doctor. Something about an agent for a rival unit back across the Atlantic. But Canton hadn't felt much inclined to letting another country in on the business of the United States Secret Service. He still wasn't that kind of man.

The one time he was too far in his cups and let himself talk about an argument he had had with the Doctor about shaving his beard, about bow ties and "cool" and his big blue box, well, that had been the end of that.

The Doctor rumored to be working with the other agency wasn't young or bearded and he didn't wear bow ties. He certainly didn't have a big blue box. Maybe there was more than one, Canton had suggested, but he doubted it.

In the face of Canton's failure to be useful, he was left to languish. Which he did. Spectacularly.

Sipping his scotch, Canton sighed and frowned to himself. Looking across his dimly lit, dusty pit of an office, he wondered what Richard was doing at that moment; or perhaps Rory.

Then, Canton was thrown out of his chair by the sudden blaring of a telephone. It wasn't until he picked himself off the floor, brushing empty bottles aside with his banged up arm, one of which was not entirely empty, that he noticed that it was the other phone that was ringing. Cursing to himself, he answered.

"Canton," he said.

"And C is for…," prompted a harsh female voice on the other end.

"Canton?" tried Canton. Then, fighting through the drink towards a protocol which had never before been actualized, "C as in Cyberman, A as in Atraxi, errr. Do you want me to do the whole thing?"

"No, that is sufficient," said the voice. "I don't suppose you're in any conceivable shape to be of any use - whatsoever?"

"Depending on the work, it's entirely possible," responded Canton, smiling and suddenly believing it was true. God, just a bit of good work. The kind of work like when he ran with the Doctor.

"There's been a sighting. In the city. Of -" she paused, not wanting to commit to her sentence, "Something. Something like this Doctor you told us about."

"Doctor who?" tried Canton.

"Don't play games," The other voice snapped. "You may not have had the information we wanted, but you told us all we needed to know about this other Doctor. Enough to know that something is roaming New York with the same qualities."

"Extra Terrestrial?" asked Canton, a whole year subliming from his posture.

"Maybe," said the voice. "We won't know until you tell us."

"Out of this world," smiled Canton across the phone. He was back.

Bouncing off of the year 81,453, the TARDIS swooped through the time vortex like a pelican might swoop if it had four-and-a-half wings.

At the control console, the Doctor just laughed.

His fingers tingled as they switched chaotically, expertly from dial to switch to lever to pulley-thing to faucet to D-pad to the astrolabe. They hadn't tingled like that since the London Blitz. Not the time with the Daleks. The time when everyone had lived. And that wasn't now.

Suddenly, a train of thought concerning Rose Tyler, a Red Bicycle, the year 1995, and a promise that might shatter the time/space continuum - again - if left unfulfilled, crossed the Doctor's mind, itself Grand Central Terminal, before being directed to the "Not now, I have all the time in the Universe" station, some miles away.

And, again, the Doctor laughed.

1970, ought to do it, he thought to himself. Terribly sorry to let poor River - Melody - whoever she ends up being - on her own but she's a tough old - young - girl and I can't be too sure where I've been before or later. Best choose a nice, round number.

"America, 1970, Melody Pond, and - why not? - Canton Everett Delaware The Third! that sound about right, Sexy?" asked the Doctor, gleefully, to a companion not bound to one relative dimension in time or space.

The TARDIS whooped it's weezy whoop in response, setting The Doctor, bumpily as he liked, square in the middle of Washington Square Park. New York. October 10th, 1970.

"Ah, yes," said the Doctor to himself, stepping out of the Tardis, into the crowds that frequented the park. Hundreds and hundreds and thousands. Daily. And it was raining.

"Hmmmmmmmm," he tried again, his smile, hair, and the tingling of his fingers dampening, "This may be a tricky one."