The Doctor watched with a feeling of inevitably impending pain as River walked back into her office at the University, clutching his old sonic in her hand. He had added the chip that would save the most important part of her, though he wondered how much she would appreciate being trapped in CAL's fantasy world for the rest of eternity. Knowing her, she probably spent half her time telling little Charlotte bedtime stories and the other half coming up with new ways to debauch the rest of her crew.

The TARDIS hummed gently to him as he walked up the ramp. She too knew what was about to happen, and she mourned the loss of the human who had been born to commune with her. The Doctor touched the console and hung his head. He always lost them. No matter how hard he tried, what he did, how clearly the timelines unfolded in his mind, he always lost them. He remembered River's death vividly even though it had been hundreds of years ago for him. There weren't many memories that stayed so crystal clear after a regeneration, but he had never been able to forget. The electricity shooting through her body as her back arched in pain and he strained to pull his wrists from the handcuffs she'd locked on him. He hadn't even known her then, but he'd felt their marriage bond when she touched his face. He'd known she was telling the truth when she whispered his true name in his ear. He closed his eyes, trying to shake the memory from his mind. He couldn't do anything about it now. It was up to his tenth self to save her essence in the childlike computer.

River, Amy, Rory...he'd destroyed their whole family, hadn't he? The craving for Amy had always been so strong, the closest thing he had to the lost bond with the rest of his people. She had drawn him to her again and again, like an insect attracted to the light, when it would have been best for her to leave her behind. His previous self had been better at that. His ninth self had even managed to send Rose away, not that it had worked. Of course, knowing Amy, she would have taken being sent home about as well as Rose had.

He'd always told himself the balm of her presence in his present would make up for the pain of her loss in his future.

He always lied to himself.

Suddenly a thought occurred to him. River was inside the computer at the Library — couldn't he go visit her? Surely there was a way for him to interface with the enormous computer and access River's essence. It wasn't quite like the Matrix, back before the war, when he could have fully resurrected her, but he should be able to speak with her. If he could get the interface sophisticated enough, maybe she'd even be able to give him the slap he knew he'd have coming for never having told her what would happen the first time they met.

Nevermind the Vashta Nerada. They were nothing but a bunch of insects when it came down to it. Nasty little things, but he was the Lord of Time. His fear of them had always been more for the sake of his companions than for himself.

Determined, he set the coordinates for the Library.

****

The TARDIS wouldn't let him land.

He pounded on the console with his fist, staring at the whirling of the vortex on his monitor. "What? What is it? Why can't we land there?"

As ever, his beautiful machine didn't give a direct response. Wasn't capable of it, really, which was why her time as Idris had been so wonderful for him. Though he had been slightly disturbed by the revelation that she always took him where she believed he needed to be. Was it possible for a TARDIS to have her own agenda? What could a trans-dimensional being with the power to control space-time even want?

He hadn't properly reflected on the incident with House for many years after it had happened. He had been thinking of Idris like she was a human, or another Time Lord, but she was no such thing. That had been clear enough when she had burned through her human body in under an hour.

The console flashed a warning at him and he flipped the switch to turn it off, annoyed. He needed to think of a way to force her to land. The TARDIS flashed a strong negative in his head.

"Too bad," he snapped. "You're my ship. You're supposed to do as I say."

She flashed him an image then, as she sometimes did. Green and pink coral, an underlying thrum, and a sense of forestalled power.

For a moment he was nonplussed. "What are you trying to tell me? Your coral's very..." he tried to think of a word that wasn't insulting, "glowy, but what does it have to do with landing at the Library?"

Almost seeming impatient, she sent him an image of Gallifrey and the grove where she and her sisters had been grown. "What — are you saying there's another TARDIS down there?"

An affirmative pulse echoed through his mind. "That's not possible. There are no more TARDISes. There's just you."

There was no response. He sighed. "Can we at least get out of the Vortex and take a look?"

With what seemed like reluctance, she materialized in space above the library. On the monitor he could see the tiny artificial planet and its doctor moon, rotating slowly. The cameras zoomed in to show the spindly towers and high bridges. They were as empty as he expected. Nothing appeared to be amiss; he couldn't see any difference from how it had looked the last time he'd been here, with Donna and River and that idiotic archaeological team. He closed his eyes briefly, trying not to think of poor Donna. Was there anyone he'd ever loved that he hadn't destroyed?

Unsure of what else to do, he set the TARDIS running scans of the planet, which she did easily enough. If there really was another TARDIS down there, the scans would certainly pick it up, but there couldn't be. Even if the Master had somehow managed to escape certain death yet again — honestly, the man wouldn't stay dead — his biggest problem before had been the lack of a TARDIS. They had all burned with Gallifrey. He had heard their screams in his head, too, that awful day.

The monitor beeped.

TARDIS detected, the screen read.

His wide, genuine grin appeared for the first time since he'd left River. It couldn't be another Time Lord. He would have been able to hear another Gallifreyan in his head, of course, and there was still that same deafening silence he'd never really adjusted to since the day he woke up, unexpectedly alive, his body and his TARDIS both in ruins.

For the first time since he'd lost Rory and Amy he wished he had another companion, someone to share his joy and his intrigue. If nothing else, he'd just been presented with a beautiful mystery to solve. And there were very few things the Doctor liked more than unsolved mysteries.

His fingers flew over the keys, setting the controls to take them down to the surface. Surely the TARDIS wouldn't deny him now. Not when she'd shown him the curiosity herself.

He never got a chance to finish. Out of the corner of his eye, the monitor lit up, then went white. "What?" he whispered.

Before he could register what had happened, the TARDIS shook and he was knocked to the ground. He had to crawl towards the monitor as the exterior shields took a battering from debris, rocking the TARDIS violently.

What the monitor showed was unmistakeable.

The Library was gone.

****

Amy sat in the garden of their townhouse, watching her son chase a butterfly around the late-blooming hydrangeas she had planted around the flagstones. The cup of hot tea she held warmed her hands against the chill of the October day. She idly thought about how much she missed having a smartphone. Her brain had been so accustomed to multi-tasking at all times, like any young person from the early twenty-first century, that it had been very hard to adjust to living without it. She'd had hers with her when she came, but it wasn't as though it had a cellular network to run on. Not in postwar America. They had played one last honorary game of Angry Birds before hiding it away in the back of a cupboard where it couldn't be found by accident.

That wasn't the hardest part of living in the wrong time, of course. Not by a long shot. The hardest part had been the first few years after they'd arrived, struggling to establish themselves in a time and place where they knew no one, had no credentials or documentation or money, and were obviously foreigners. More than once Amy had cursed herself for not carrying one of the Doctor's psychic papers that day. Despite the fact that they both had skills still applicable to their new time — was there a time when nurses and writers didn't exist? - they had no references and no way to prove their experience. Not to mention that despite their best efforts, they constantly made anachronistic mistakes. They had no real idea what the slang was, or what exactly had been the state of medical science in World War II-era America. They were able to slide under the radar in many respects because of their accents, but there had been more than one time they were afraid they might give the game away completely. For the first six months after the angel's attack, Amy had worked as a waitress and Rory had washed dishes in a run-down diner on 10th Avenue in Manhattan. The meager income they brought home had barely been enough for the rent on a small railroad apartment overlooking the train yard. The experience they gained by listening to the locals had been invaluable.

Fortunately, in the non-electronic era, it had proved relatively easy to forge a nursing certificate for Rory and green cards for them both, once they'd found the right Staten Island mobster. Once they'd both found better work, they had rented a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights and had settled in and tried to adjust.

No sooner had they gotten settled than the war came to America. It had been unbelievably strange, knowing most of what was going to happen and not being able to tell a soul. Not that anyone would have believed them if they'd said anything. The war hadn't been too difficult for Amy and Rory. Rory was considered too important at his hospital by the time the draft was enacted to be subject to it. The rationing and blackouts hadn't been too bad when she considered what was going on back in London. It was the first time she'd felt grateful to be stranded in the United States instead of England.

Rory had had a harder time than she had, adjusting to life in America fifty years before they were even born. He had been devastated that he had never been able to tell his father what happened, but Amy reassured him that the Doctor would pay Brian a visit.

She hoped he would, anyway. Truthfully she wouldn't put it past her raggedy man to run off as if the whole thing had never happened. He never dealt well with emotional pain. River was there to keep him in line, but the Doctor listened to River about as often as River listened to the Doctor.

Amy's entire body stiffened as she heard a noise she had never expected to hear again before she died. For a moment she sat frozen, her mind whirling with things that shouldn't be happening and information she shouldn't have. She looked at Anthony, who had abandoned the butterfly in favor of digging a hole next to one of the blue slate flagstones. Ordinarily she would have chastised him for damaging the rented yard. Instead she finally felt compelled into action.

She ran for the house, skidding to a halt as she grabbed the phone in the front hall. She picked it up and dialed the number for the operator. "DK121, please," she said. No matter how long she lived she would never get used to asking to be connected instead of just dialing the number.

"Connecting you now," the switchboard operator said in her nasal Brooklyn accent. Amy couldn't get used to that either.

The hospital's own switchboard operator picked up, and she demanded to be put through to her husband. "Wait just a second," the woman said, sounding unconcerned. After a pause, she said, "Ma'am, he's in with a patient right now."

"It's an emergency. Get him, now!"

"I really don't think - "

"I don't care what you think! If I have to come down there and kick your ass I'll do it! Get my husband on the phone right this minute!" Her accent thickened as she got more upset.

The operator made an annoyed-sounding huff and said, "Fine. Hold on a minute."

There was a long pause; there was no such thing as hold music in 1948. Amy waited impatiently, tapping her foot on the wood floor.

"Hello?" came Rory's uncertain-sounding voice.

"Rory! He's here. You have to come home right now!"

****

The Doctor stepped out of the TARDIS into the fading autumn daylight. He looked around. Brooklyn in 1948, looking just about right. The cars hadn't yet developed the swoopy-yet-ageless style of the 1950s and were relatively plain and modest. A row of townhouses, all faced in brown limestone, ran in both directions down the side street where he had landed. Did Rory and Amy live in one of these? How fitting, after their row house in London. It almost made him smile.

There was a figure trotting toward him. A tall, red-headed figure. He grinned. "Amy!"

She ran faster and he held out his arms for a hug.

Amy stopped short, ignoring his open arms, glared at him furiously, and then gave him a slap. "You idiot! Do you know what you've done?"