AN: I suppose you could see this as a separate story. And it is, really, but it touches on the same theme. Their lives don't happen in the right order, so what happens to them seems entirely different, depending on which of the two you follow.
If you wanted a hot and sunny beach to yourself, you had to find a planet that had no people on it. Two moons in the sky reflected the sunlight all night round, making the darkest point in the middle of the night still a twilight, and the dragonets liked to sun themselves on mountainsides at this time of year.
It was easy to think that you were the only person in existence. He checked the time again and waited, reflecting on how many times he'd been alone during moments like this.
There was shimmering feel to the air behind him, and he turned. The air seemed to ripple for a moment, and then a glow formed. The light grew strong and sharp for a moment, and then suddenly erupted in light and noise. An oval of pure light in the twilight of a lonely beach. From the light came bursts of staccato laser fire, blasting through the circle, and fusing the sand it hit into instant glass. The Doctor ducked instinctively.
"YAAAAAH!" Screaming like a banshee, River Song emerged, barefoot and wearing nothing but a two piece bathing suit, shooting back the way she came without looking. More laser fire chased her.
The circle of light closed behind her instantly, leaving them alone on the beach.
River peeked up from the sand and saw him. "Hello Sweetie."
"I could have picked you up, y'know?" The Doctor pulled her upright. "You didn't need to use a Voret Energy Door."
"I needed a new bathing suit." River said, as though that explained everything, frizzing out her hair.
River Song. There were so many questions about Lake Silencio. Was she to be the woman who murdered him? Or the one who married him? He had not intention of marrying this woman who had him so flummoxed, but she would not tolerate being the one who took his life. He'd made it clear to the galaxy that she was the woman who murdered him, and then made it clear to her in particular that she was the one who married him. In reality, she was both. Technically, she was neither, with him alive and the timeline that held their wedding being a 'neverwas'...
As a wedding present, he had given her forgiveness, and she had given him back the universe.
It was a match that could only happen to the two of them, and after four centuries, he had to admit it was the best crazy mistake he'd ever repeated the first time..
"I thought you hated wine." River commented as she sipped.
"I do, but what's the point of being a time traveler if you can't bring a good vintage?" He shot back. "Besides, you have to use wine to toast."
"What are we toasting?"
"Spoilers." He threw her favorite line back at her.
"Then what's the point?"
"Some things have to be celebrated."
"Amen to that. Where are we by the way? I don't recognize the co-ordinates."
"Zookil." The Doctor responded. "Before the Migration arrived."
"I didn't know Zookil was a colony world." River was surprised.
"Mm. It will be in about... nine seconds."
River grinned around her wineglass and stretched out next to him. The glow of twin moons was bright enough to feel like a sunset, but the stars were visible...
A moment later, a fire-trail lit the sky. It wasn't a shooting star. Then another came. And another. Then a much larger one.
"There they are. The first scout ships, setting up the landing zone." The Doctor said. "Another ten minutes, and there'll be dozens, hundreds of landing ships coming down, lighting up the sky. A fireworks show that nobody ever saw but us."
The trails of the landing craft were in perfect patterns, perfect sequence. "Beautiful." She approved.
They sat quietly, watching the sky light up with thousands of people, arriving at their new home.
"This is actually my fourth time here y'know? The first time was champagne. In about a thousand years, the sun of this world will go semi-Nova unexpectedly." River said softly. "The flare will knock out anything in the system that can fly, and the colonists will attempt something crazy in the panic."
"What caused the Nova?" The Doctor asked with interest.
"Don't know. What matters is, they will attempt to hide in a database. They digitize their whole population. They hide the database in the centre of the planet to protect it." She threw back the last of her glass, poured herself another. "It won't be enough."
"How do they plan to de-digitize themselves?" The Doctor asked, intensely curious now.
"They didn't have a clue. Time was against them." She explained.
The Doctor was silent a long moment. "Let's do dairies." The Doctor pulled out his journal, and River pulled out hers.
The Doctor stared at her as she flipped through pages. "I've got pockets that are bigger on the inside. You're in a bathing suit. Where exactly were you hiding that book?"
River just smiled. "Wouldn't you like to know?"
She settled on a page after a little back and forth, and The Doctor took a note of it. She was about halfway through their story...
Rory hadn't been a nurse in three lifetimes, but after settling in to life on earth again, Amy had abandoned her career as a kiss-o-gram, and taken up some work modelling, and Rory went back to the hospital. His experiences had changed his whole outlook on most everything, and he quickly changed to a teaching position in the hospital, training new recruits.
He was their trainer, so when they had practical questions, they all came to him, and he always had an answer for them. The newest of them were so nervous, convinced that a typo would kill a patient. He did his best to put them at ease.
So when a new intern came running up to him in a panic over a screw-up as simple as taking a pulse, Rory took it in stride.
"Why would his heartrate be 400 beats a minute?" She demanded.
"It wouldn't." Rory said soothingly. "Now come on, let's go check this."
When he saw The Doctor in the hospital bed, with a knowing smile on his face, Rory felt his own heartrate hit that mark. He made a show of taking the pulse again. The readout said 400 bpm. "Must be a screw-up with the machine." He said simply. "Go get a proper stethoscope, and I'll show you how to actually do it."
"Yessir."
Once they were alone, Rory spun on his son-in-law. "Your twin hearts just scared one of my students out of a years' growth." He said shortly. "Are we about to be invaded by aliens?"
"Nope."
"Amy's visiting her mother."
"I know. I went to the house first."
"So what brings you here?"
"Can't I just catch up with my favorite Roman?"
"You could, but I'm certain you didn't." Rory said. "You're here for a reason, and I know it wasn't a check-up, so let's have it."
"I need your help with something." The Doctor said. "I need you to come with me for a mission. We have to retrieve something, but for reasons that you don't know, I can't do it personally. Timey-Wimey reasons say so. I need someone I can trust, someone who knows all the things I can do, and can appreciate the stakes... and most important, someone who won't ask why, or tell about it later. That's you." He spread his hands wide. "Are you in?"
"I can't ask why?" Rory repeated.
"Or tell Amy."
"Amy finds out you were back, and she'll kill me for not telling her."
"Then it would be a good idea if Amy didn't find out. You'll be back before anyone knows you're gone."
"I've heard that from you before."
The Doctor felt the barbs hit him, and said nothing.
Finally, Rory spoke again. "When the Pandorica opened, I was suddenly back into existence. When the trap was sprung, I was holding Amy's body... And then you just appeared and gave me instructions. I could barely follow the words, let alone understand how you were there. Running with a time traveler is impossible to figure out from minute to minute, but I learned to roll with the punches... because following your instructions that day brought me back my wife."
"And the universe." The Doctor put in helpfully.
Rory nodded absently. "Yeah, that too."
The Doctor took stock of the Roman for a moment. A man who didn't care at all about the universe when compared to A Woman. Exactly what he needed right now. "Let's boogie! Or Waltz. Waltzes are good."
"Where are we going?"
"The Library."
"Huh. Okay, well I have a book to return so, let me just..."
The Doctor was already running.
"So, for reasons you don't need to know, we'll be coming in cloaked..."
The TARDIS jarred to a halt, and Rory quickly pulled a lever. The last time they had to land somewhere invisibly, River had done the same thing.
The Doctor looked around the console. "Did you just do something?"
Rory spread his hands innocently. "Exactly what would I do?"
"Fair point." The Doctor ducked back the other way. "This part is tricky, I need to fix an exact location in space time, accurate to the inch and the second. What really hurts is that you're too thick to realize how incredible brilliant I'm being to pull that off. Suffice to say, it's the sort of thing that I consider challenging."
The TARDIS lurched dramatically, and Rory clung to the console, his feet leaving the floor for a second.
"I... meant to do that." The Doctor added once they'd settled. "Now, hang on a second, I have to just..." The Doctor fiddled for a moment. "There."
The screens lit up and showed the world outside the TARDIS.
"Who's that?" Rory asked automatically.
The Doctor didn't answer. He almost never did this, go back to watch one of his own regenerations at work. Not that he knew of anyway. He supposed if anyone could be hidden from his younger selves, it was his older selves.
Ten was leading Donna Noble out of the Library, back toward the TARDIS, leaving River's Journal behind. The Doctor felt a pang. Ten was so cold to her. And why wouldn't he be? He was a cold person.
Still, he saw the exact moment of realization on Ten's face. He turned and bolted back to the Alcove, grabbing the sonic screwdriver off the book.
Inside the TARDIS, invisible, even to them, Rory watched the screen in open confusion. "Who is that?"
Now closer, the TARDIS picked up the sound of the world outside. "Oh yes. I'M VERY GOOD!" Ten roared at Donna.
"What? What have you done?"
"Saved her!" Ten shouted, and took off running.
There were screens enough in the Control Room, that the TARDIS could follow both Ten and Donna at the same time. The former Doctor was now out of sight, but the TARDIS could see all of Time and Space. Rory followed the action on one screen, The Doctor stared at Donna. The woman slowly made her way toward the TARDIS, toward her version of it, glancing back at River's Journal, over and over, tempted...
Donna Noble. The Doctor thought thickly. The most important, most special woman in the whole of creation...
Donna was unaware of the destiny unfolding around her, and wandered back to the Blue Box that brought her, letting herself in. The instant the doors shut behind her, shadows gathered tightly around the front door. Vashta Narada, making one last grab for the Time Lord?
"Stay with me! You can do it! Just stay with me! You and me!" Ten raged from the other screen, and The Doctor joined Rory to look. Ten had wrath that always made him so strong inside. "ONE LAST RUN!"
Ten took the tables at a leap, cleared the shelves instantly...
The Doctor had seen it before, in fact he'd done it before, but he still urged them on. Come on, one last run, come on!
"Doctor, who is that?" Rory pressed him, watching the screen anxiously.
They were quickly reaching the point where River's name would be spoken aloud, and that would lead to questions. He turned the screens off immediately.
"Rory, we have to time this right. This whole planet is a library, the one thing they know how to do is sort and organize. The place is maintained by drones, so there'll only be a few minutes before that Book is collected and tossed. We have to go now." The Doctor said. "But I can't go in there myself. I can't be seen. Long story. Universe goes all kablooey kinda thing, but I need that book."
"River's journal?" Rory said. "You're not reading my daughter's diary."
"It's important."
"Yeah, yeah I'm sure it is."
"If you do it, I'll give you a peek."
"Are you kidding? Amy would kill me!"
Rory slipped out, made his way over to the alcove that looked over the great immense library, and picked up the book. He sent a glance over his shoulder, and saw the hard man in the blue suit slip around the corner. The woman with the long brown hair was nowhere to be seen. He knew he shouldn't, but he couldn't help himself. He set the book down and followed.
The hard man in the long trenchcoat went through a few hallways, with Rory careful not to make any noise. He seemed lost in thought.
When he came into a room with the TARDIS sitting in a shadowy corner, Rory froze. He didn't know why the Doctor would bring the TARDIS there or make it visible, but he knew there was only one of them in the universe.
Wasn't there?
The hard man snapped his fingers, and the doors of the TARDIS opened for him, bathing him in light. Rory squinted and saw the woman with the long brown hair waiting for him within. He entered the TARDIS, snapped his fingers again, and the doors closed. A moment later the familiar roar of the engines came, and Rory felt a chill, wondering if he was now marooned on this planet sized Library.
After a moment, he returned to the alcove that overlooked a canyon of bookshelves, and picked up River's Journal. Rory turned to try and find the invisible TARDIS, when a hand clapped over his wrist, and he started.
A young man with a blonde ponytail gave him a mad grin. "Sorry, this is getting confusing now, sorry. But you need this one." And with that, the bizarre man took the blue book out of his hand, and replaced it with another, seemingly a little more frayed around the edges. "Get outta here Rory; kablooey, remember?"
Rory grabbed his wrist. "Wait. I need that book."
"No, you need the one I gave you. Trust me."
"Trust you? I don't even know who you are."
Ponytail-man grinned in a strangely familiar way. "I'm The Doctor." He said, and pulled away, running off into the Library as fast as he could.
Rory felt a migraine growing behind his eyes and went with it. It wasn't the first ridiculous mystery he'd had to live with. Wouldn't be the last.
The Doctor was cursing like a sailor in various languages that Rory couldn't begin to guess at when he finally found a way back into the invisible TARDIS again. "Doctor?"
"He wasn't ginger, was he?" The Time Lord said sullenly.
"Um... no. Is that significant?"
"Probably not."
"Weren't you watching?" Rory waved at the screens, still blank.
"Nope. I figured I'd send you and keep my eyes off; so that I'd have one last chance to confirm, or stop myself if I had to." The Doctor sighed, and took the book off him. "By the way Rory, you and Amy left some stuff in your old room last time. You want it back?"
"Uhh... I'll take a look, see if there's anything there we need." Rory said. He had sense enough to know that he was being dismissed. The Doctor let him go... and then hit a lever, sealing all the ways into the Control Room.
And the Doctor did something he vowed never to do. He went looking for Spoilers; in the pages of River Song's Diary.
He took me to the The Matrix Launch Party. It's our second time on Zookil, but no champagne this time. A glaring oversight for a black-tie event. The were demonstrating how they could recreate a digital image. They had a room there where you could create a digital image and have it replicated. I thought it seemed silly, but there was this little girl there who lost her puppy in an accident, and she brought a vid-pic of it. Right there in front of the whole place, they fed the scan in, and replicated. The girl was overjoyed. Her puppy was back from the dead. Given how our adventures usually go, I was expecting it to morph into some giant monster and eat the poor girl. I guess I'm getting jaded, because it seemed to work out fine.
After that, they talked about how they were going to rebuild a whole digital civilization. Personally, I think that's cheating, but I'd never tell him so.
I was a little disappointed at first, expecting either a romantic outing or a insane adventure. It seemed positively mundane; but he made up for it...
"Bingo!" The Doctor hissed to himself. "Ooh, not bingo. Bad doggie. Bad choice of words." He went to the console and started tapping. "Now, Zookil... What do I know about Zookil? A colony world, but a very big one. Practically a homeworld. Why would these people need to make a production about replicating a digital civilization? They wouldn't. They created that process specifically for this... The Matrix Company isn't based out of Zookil... So where would they get a digital civilization to reintegrate?" He smacked his forehead. That's my job; duh! Ohh, not Duh. Never saying that again either. He drew the timeline in his head. Okay, so some time before we are on the beach, she went to this party, but she didn't know what it was about, or why it was important. So from her point of view, before the beach, she found out about the destruction of Zookil, but it's confirmed she went back once after that before the beach... Which would put it about...
He tapped at the console and brought up an image of Zookil, then of the star it orbited. He tapped at the controls, and the screen showed a simulation of a massive solar explosion, a sun blowing up and a wave of destruction flashing over the planet Zookil.
"Yep. That''s do it. The Matrix Party wasn't launching a new product, it was celebrating an Ark coming home..." The Doctor said aloud solemnly, and turned away from the console, back to the flight controls...
...and found Rory hadn't gone anywhere. He was sitting on the handrail, with River's Diary in his hand, open to the page the Doctor had left it at. He looked at the diary, then back to the screen running the simulation. He said nothing for a long time.
"How'd you get back in here without me noticing?" The Doctor demanded.
"Amy taught me how."
"Where did Amy learn how to sneak in here?"
"River taught her." Rory said promptly, looking back at the screen. "Doctor. Are you preparing to blow up a solar system full of people, just to watch how they hide in a computer?" He said seriously.
Beat.
"Yes. Except no." The Doctor said simply. "And five centuries later, they will be restored to the physical world. I need to learn how they do that."
"Tell me that you have a good reason, other than keeping this date with River." Rory tapped the aged pages in front of him.
"They'll survive." The Doctor said harshly. "They'll be out of time, they'll start from scratch, they'll lose maybe fifteen percent of the population, twenty max; but they'll survive."
"Doctor, I will have to stop you."
Pause. The Doctor's shoulder's straightened suddenly and he somehow grew a foot taller. Rory swallowed even before the Time Lord turned around and met his gaze. "Will you?" The Doctor said calmly. Very calmly. Scary calmly. "Rory the Roman. Not only can you not stop me, but if you wanted to try, you're too late. I sent about a billion worlds to their deaths in my career. Fifteen percent of one world is nothing."
"That was War. Remember who you're talking to, I've seen what you fight. Those were all sacrifices, not... What are you fighting now?"
Beat.
"Failure." The Doctor said simply.
Rory shook his head. "I don't know a lot about anything, but I know that fifteen to twenty percent of a planet is... a lot of people. Innocent people. Families. Children."
"Everyone dies Rory."
The human almost punched him across the nose again. "I know that. Everyone knows that. Everyone knows that everyone dies. And nobody knows that better than you. But I really, honestly, truly think that all the stars and all the suns will go dark again, if you ever, for one second, accepted that." Rory let that thought settle in, and exploded. "SO WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING HERE?"
Beat.
"It's River." The Doctor said quietly. "River's in danger. No. Not danger. She died. I couldn't save her. We've all... lost. If you could go back... and undo a loss, what would you do? I'm a Time Traveler. It's all in play for me. I can save people who are a hundred years dead. I can bring River Song back." He paused. "But I have to figure out how."
Rory was silent. He didn't seem shocked. Surprised, but not stunned. It hadn't sunk in. It had barely sunk in that the mysterious River Song was his daughter. Even that was a shock because he never knew Amy was pregnant... "This is why you picked me, isn't it? You could have picked any former companion, anyone you know from your entire life, anyone who understood the universe, anyone from the history books, whether they've been written yet or not. You picked me. And it was because... you couldn't go back to the Library yourself, and you knew somebody else might try and stop you. But River's my daughter so you figured I'd let you burn a planet to save her."
"Yeah." The Doctor said. "Yeah, that's why I picked you."
Silence.
"If she died..." Rory said finally. "She must have been buried somewhere."
"No body."
"There's something. A Marker. She's the Last Time Lord's Wife, there has to be something!" Rory snapped.
The TARDIS appeared in an ordinary Glasgow Cemetery. Rory was stunned when they stepped out. "I... expected something more... Astronomical."
The Doctor wasn't smiling. "I thought about that but as far as the universe knows, River is the one that killed me... This is Amy's family. River's family. Your own ancestors are spread across half a dozen cities and towns. The ponds have a family place. I put a marker here, written in ancient Celtic. Amy never knew that the woman to the far left of her great aunt is actually her daughter."
Rory sank down to his knees and ran a hand gently over the century old headstone. "God, I came here with Amy half a dozen times, and this was right here the whole time." He looked back at The Doctor. "I came here with Amy a decade before I met you, and this was here. Our daughter, you... the whole time."
"Time Travel. Things like this are all around you and nobody notices them." The Doctor said gently. "They have been all along."
Rory shivered. "I should... flowers or something..." He turned and found a huge bouquet of flowers being held out to him. He had no idea where the The Doctor had conjured them from, and he didn't care. "Do they even come from earth?"
"Nope."
"I remember when my father died, it took months... He just lingered, in pain for months, and then it ended and... nobody said it, but we were relieved when it was finally over." Rory placed the flowers on her grave. "God, what it must be for you. It's not over, even when it's over."
The Time Lord made no comment to that for a long time. "Sometimes it's good. Not being over."
Rory stood up. "Okay. Go do it. Go do whatever voodoo it is you do, and save my daughter. And whatever you do, don't let Amy find out about any of it."
The Doctor gave a single nod. Rory shivered again. This guy never used one word where he could you a hundred. He never sat still for longer than half a millisecond, and he told jokes when people were shooting at him. For this, he was dead quiet.
"Head back to the TARDIS." The Doctor said quietly. "I'll... be along in a few minutes."
Rory left him alone with a marker that had River's name on it, written in an ancient language so nobody would know that it stood for her.
There was no sign or Rory at the entrance to the cemetery. He was already in the TARDIS. Instead, he found someone else waiting for him.
"I thought you used museums to keep score." River said cheekily "Cemetery's just make you all sad."
"Yeah, they do." The Doctor said carefully. "What are you doing here?"
"You invited me."
"I did?"
"Yup. Told me to bring a press packet for you." She handed him a plasti-steel folder, circa 98th Century. "The Matrix Corporation, making your digital dreams a new reality."
The Doctor read the packet. "Ahh yes. It says here that there was an attack on Zookil five centuries ago. Their sun exploded; and to hide from the inevitable destruction, they digitized their entire species, but they never got the chance to un-digitize themselves. There's a company that has spent forty years looking for a way to fix that, and they're about to announce something."
"Zookil was destroyed?" River seemed stunned. "We were just there, having a bottle of champagne." Realization struck. "We were toasting something, but you didn't tell me what."
"Probably a job well done. So let's go do it."
"But... we were just there, Zookil wasn't destroyed!" River insisted.
"Except it was, five centuries before this packet." The Doctor nodded. "That'll be our next stop. Then back to The Matrix Party, to make sure they got this un-digitizing trick right."
Destroying a whole civilization just so that they would learn everything that could be learned about digitizing themselves. The Doctor thought to himself. Who would do something so despicable?
You've done it before. Ten's voice whispered in his memory.
The Doctor tuned it out. He really didn't need the Time Lord Victorious telling him he was right.
Rory gave his blessing. Rory would get himself killed to be nice to a scared Ganger. And he'd let the universe burn to save his family.
This is what you do. You take people and fashion them into your weapons. Davros hissed from the end of the universe. I made the Daleks. You made Rory what he is now.
River knew him better than most anyone still alive, and was watching him out of the corner of her eye. "What are you thinking?"
The Doctor didn't let it show on his face. "Why do you call yourself Doctor Song?" He asked. "You're a Professor."
"I took your name after the wedding. Doctor-Song."
"You hyphenate?"
"The alternative was I call myself Doctor River Doctor."
"You didn't have to take my name at all."
"Oh yes I did, just not till a few years after I got my Doctorate." River smiled. "Long story. Spoilers are involved."
The Doctor grinned as she put his arm in hers like something out of a movie.
AN: Yeah, this was just a random thought that wouldn't go away. Don't expect any future chapters.