Churchill interrupted the Soothsayer's story. "Why would you do this?" he asked. "Of all the things you've told me, this I find hardest to believe. Why would you invite your friends to see your death?"
The Doctor answered, "I had to die. I didn't have to die alone." He thought back wistfully, "Amy and Rory. The last Centurion and the girl who waited. However dark it got, I'd turn around, and there they'd be. If it's time to go, remember what you're leaving. Remember the best. My friends have always been the best of me."
"And did you tell them this was going to happen?"
The Doctor looked at his arm. There were two more tally marks. "It would help if you didn't keep asking questions. We don't have much time."
"And this woman you spoke of, the reason it is always just after five on April 22nd, did you invite her?"
"Yes, she was there," the Doctor said. He thought back to the woman in a jean jacket relaxing on a large picnic blanket on the shores of Lake Silencio. Then he said enigmatically, "River Song came twice."
The Doctor went to Lake Silencio with Amy Pond, Rory Williams and River Song. They picnicked and drank a bottle of wine that Napoleon had thrown at him. An Apollo astronaut rose from the lake and the Doctor went to meet it. He ordered his companions to stay back and not interfere not matter what they saw. The Doctor stood before the astronaut, feeling a bit jumpy. "It's okay, I know it's you," the Doctor said in a soft voice. The astronaut's visor was lifted to reveal River Song, trapped in the suit by the Silence.
River Song was not always a Time Lady, she was born a human named Melody Pond. That was why the Silence needed the space suit, because they needed to ensure that she became a Time Lady. The space suit with so much alien tech helped a growing baby girl survive on alien worlds and through various experiments as she was transformed from human to a being with regenerative abilities. Years, possibly life-times, had passed under the surveillance of the Silence. However, each time Melody Pond escaped, for all the brainwashing and psychological manipulation they put her through, she failed to kill the Doctor. The Silence determined that they needed a strong trigger for their post-hypnotic suggestion: that Apollo space suit.
Standing on the shore of the lake, the Doctor said, "Well, then. Here we are at last."
River Song slowly lifted the gun to point it at the Doctor. "I can't stop it. I'm not in control."
"You're not supposed to stop it. This has to happen."
"Run!" River tearfully begged.
"I did run. Running brought me here."
"I tried to fight it, but I can't, it's too strong."
"I know. It's OK. This is where I die. This is a fixed point, this must happen, this always happens. Don't worry... You won't even remember this. Look over there." The Doctor nodded in the direction of his companions on the picnic blanket.
River looked over and sobbed, "That's me. How can I be there?"
"That's you from the future. Serving time for a murder you probably can't remember. My murder."
"Why would you do that? Make me watch?"
"So that you know this is inevitable. And you are forgiven. Always and completely forgiven."
River felt her arm shift slightly, arming the gun. "Please, my love. Please, please just run!"
"I can't."
"Time can be rewritten."
"Not those times… Don't you dare. Goodbye, River."
River shook her head and sobbed. The Doctor closed his eyes and threw open his arms, accepting his fate. There were five bursts that made him flinch, but he stayed standing. He was not dead. The Doctor opened his eyes and demanded to know what she had done. River smiled and coyly explained that she had drained her weapon systems.
"But this is fixed. This is a fixed point in time," the Doctor sputtered.
"Fixed points can be rewritten," River said.
"No, they can't, of course they can't, who told you?!" the Doctor raved. Suddenly, everything went white.
The Doctor stopped telling his story.
"Well? What happened?" Winston Churchill asked.
"Nothing," the Doctor answered.
"Nothing?" the Roman Emperor repeated.
The Soothsayer with red nail polish answered, "Nothing happened. And then it kept happening. Or, if you prefer, everything happened, at once, and it won't ever stop. Time is dying. It's going to be 5:02 in the afternoon for all eternity. A needle stuck on a record."
"A record? Good Lord, man, have you never heard of downloads?"
"Said Winston Churchill."
Churchill smelled something. He sniffed the air. "Gunsmoke. That's gunsmoke!" He noticed a gun in his hand. "I appear to have fired this." He turned to see the Doctor holding a pike.
"We seem to be defending ourselves," said the Doctor.
"I don't understand."
The Doctor explained, "The creatures that lead the Silence. Remarkable beings...they're memory-proof."
"But what does that mean?" Churchill asked as he and the Doctor backed out of the Senate Hall.
"You can't remember them. The moment you look away, you forget they were ever there." The Doctor checked his arm and saw four marks in total. "Don't panic. In small numbers, they're not too difficult." The Doctor changed his grip on the pike and saw that his right arm was covered in tally marks. The two men looked up slowly and discovered a troupe of Silents hanging from the ceiling like bats.
A cylindrical device was thrown into the room and rolled across the floor, beeping. The Doctor shouted Go and tried to make a run for it, but bumped into the much larger Churchill. The bomb went off; it was a flash-bang. Armed soldiers burst into the room. They heard a soldier should, "Go! Go! Keep the Silents in sight at all times, keep your eye drives active."
"Who the devil are you?! Identify yourselves!" Churchill demanded.
A red-haired woman wearing an eye-patch sauntered through the smoke. "Pond. Amelia Pond," she said.
The Doctor laughed and told Winston Churchill not to aim the gun at his friend. As she came close, the Doctor saw that her eye-patch was familiar, the same eye-patch as worn by everyone who worked with the Silents. "No! No, Amy, Amy," he said in a disappointed tone. "Why are you wearing that?"
Amelia Pond fired her fun and the Doctor fell unconscious.
The Doctor woke from the stun gun in Amelia Pond's office on a train travelling towards Area 52. He tried reasoning with her, hoping he could make Amelia Pond remember being Amy, remember the proper timeline. However, he abruptly stops babbling once he sees that the walls of her office are lined with drawings of their adventures and the paper weight he was fidgeting with is a model of the TARDIS. Thanks to the crack in the universe which Amy grew up next to, she can remember alternate timelines. Sadly, she doesn't remember them clearly.
"You look rubbish," Amy said.
"You look wonderful," the Doctor responded, tossing the model TARDIS at her.
"So do you," she said with a smirk. "But don't worry. We'll soon fix that." She held up a tweed jacket with shirt and bowtie. The Doctor hurried off to change.
As the Doctor was changing, Amy sat at her desk and quickly began to sketch.
The Doctor returned clean shaved and wearing his familiar outfit. His hair was still longer than it was in Amy's memories. "How do I look?" he asked.
"Cool."
"Really?!"
"Noooo."
"Cool office though. Why do you have an office?! Are you a special agent boss lady? Not sure about the eye patch."
"It's not an eye patch," Amelia explained. "Time's gone wrong. Some of us noticed. There's a whole team of us working on it... You'll see."
"And you've got an office on a train, that is so cool. Can I have an office? Never had an office before! Or a train. Or a train slash office."
Amelia rushed over and gave the Doctor a big hug. "God, I've missed you!"
"OK, hugging and missing now." The Doctor broke the hug. "Where's the Roman?"
"You mean Rory!" Amy said. "My husband Rory, yeah?" She held up a sketch of a man with a large nose and kind eyes. "That's him, isn't it? I've no idea, I can't find him. I love him very much, don't I?"
"Apparently."
"I have to keep doing this. I have to keep writing and drawing things. It's just so hard to keep remembering..."
"It's not your fault, time's gone wrong. Do you remember why?"
"The lakeside."
"Lake Silencio, Utah. I died."
"But then you didn't. I remember it twice, different ways."
"Two different versions of the same event, both happening in the same moment. Time split wide open. Now look at it." He pointed out the window. "All the history you can remember is happening all at once."
"Does it matter? I mean can't we just stay like this?"
"Time isn't just frozen. It's disintegrating. It will spread and spread and all of reality will simply fall apart."
In Area 52, inside the Pyramids of Giza, the Doctor and Amy walked past more than 100 captured Silents. The Doctor is given an eyepatch by Captain Williams. He explains that it is called an eye-drive, an external memory storage system to remember the Silents. The Silents are each kept separately in tanks filled with fluid to prevent them from using their electrical attacks. They click, buzz, and chatter upon seeing the Doctor. Captain Williams really doesn't like the way they are looking at him and ordered several guards to start checking the seals on every level of the pyramid. They arrived in the King's Chamber, where River Song was waiting for them.
Author's note: Sorry for the exposition paragraph near the beginning of this section. This whole story is based on the assumption that the episode "Let's Kill Hitler" never happened. I'm in the middle of making a actual story about River, Kovarian, and the Silents. I just wanted a better answer to "why the space suit?" than "because it's cool".
