"That's right, yes, you're going. You've gone for ages, you've already gone, you're still here, just arrived, haven't even met you yet. It all depends on who you are and how you look at it. Strange business, time." ~The Sixth Doctor, as played by Colin Baker

Speculative drabble as to who Melanie Bush was, and how she first met the Doctor. We never did see her first adventure, after all.

And just to make a point, this has references to Classic Who, the original Doctor Who. If you don't know who Melanie is, you should go and watch Trials of a Time Lord with the Sixth Doctor. It also has the Valeyard, and I'm fairly sure he was the inspiration for the Dream Lord.

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River Song was a woman of many faces and many more names.

She had been a little red-headed girl in a spacesuit, a dark-skinned toddler thrown into foster care and eventually adopted and brought to Leadworth, a curly-haired woman who would fly with the most impossible man... And then she had died, uploaded as ones and zeroes into a worldwide computer database, shrouded in darkness and forever in peace.

But like all computers, it was bound to crash. Sure, the power cells would outlast the sun -all three of them, in fact- but technology was technology and it couldn't last forever.

And then she woke up in a field of grass disoriented and confused and wearing clothes a few sizes too big, with hair curlier than her last regeneration and a red to rival her mother's. She stumbled to her feet and walked for a bit before stumbling into a town, discovering the planet she was on (Shallacatop), the year (78th century on that planet, so around the year 60,000 on Earth), and the name of the town (something human vocal cords couldn't pronounce).

Even after living there for almost a year, she still wasn't sure how she got there. It should be impossible to transfer a bio-signature from any sort of technology to coordinates and expect a physical form to appear. It just didn't work like that. It didn't. Yet here she was, living under a fake identity (because if she used the name Melody or River Song, then he would be bound to notice and she was fairly sure that that wasn't supposed to happen, considering that he knew when she died) on a new world, living and breathing and certainly not dead.

It was on a cool spring afternoon when she walked into him.

"Oh, my apologies," said the man in front of her. He was wearing the most ridiculous clothing she had ever seen, which was impressive considering who she was married to. Had been married to. He had a blonde afro, rather pudgy face, yellow pants with thin red stripes, orange ankle guards over green shoes, a frilly yellow tie with purple polka dots... Oh, just looking at it almost gave her a headache. "Might I ask your name?"

"Melanie Bush," she responded. "And yours?"

"I'm the Doctor," he said with a smile.

And the woman of many faces was flying through the stars once more.