The small girl is.
She wanders, dirty streets and broken alleys, hungry and cold and dying.
She explodes in golden flames. She wakes up again different.
She is.
She has a name.
Melody Pond, a whole name all her own.
She doesn't like it. Too fairytale. But it's hers so she keeps it close.
She knows the name of her mother: Amelia Pond, and the name of her father: Rory Williams. She saw them on the documents, before she ran.
She's still running.
" Run"
She sleeps. She dreams. In her dreams there are stars.
(Her mother remembered the stars in a future past that never will be. The stars never blinked out in this reality, or did they? She dreams that the sky is filled with stars that never existed, she dreams that the stars that always will be blinked out. She dreams. Her mother held the world's final spark in her memory, and she was conceived in the TARDIS which brought the universe to its never-was (and she was there when it did). She is a human Timelord, last and only of her kind, and the timelines are not so neat for her.)
She grows up.
She dreams of parents she never met, she dreams of red grass and amber skies. She dreams of time.
She grows up. She never marries. She gets a job and saves what she can.
She goes to England. She does not look for her parents, they aren't born yet. She simply goes.
(She knows she must kill the Doctor, even though she ran, she knows.)
(She would run away from it if she could, but England was always the TARDIS's favorite too.)
She grows older, but not quickly, not noticeably really. She wanders. She dies.
(It's a silly thing. Hit by a car of all things, while she's not paying enough attention crossing the street.)
She is a small girl again. Little more than a baby, really. But she tells them her name. Melody. She keeps the second bit to herself.
She ends up fostered by a family in a little village called Leadworth. She starts going by Mels, it's much less fairytale.
(She's one of those trouble kids. Her foster parents say so, so does her social worker. She has memories too big to fit inside her and she dreams of space and time, things that will be and might be and never were. She knows that her purpose in life is to kill.)
She plays with the neighbor kids. A little boy named Rory and a girl named Amelia who's new to the village and hates it.
Amelia tells them all about the strange, raggedy space wizard who came to her house and promised to take her away with him and neither of her new friends disbelieve her. Rory says he's glad he didn't come back because it's not smart to let strange men take you places even if they are space wizards. Amelia hits him. (He's only just met her but already he desperately, desperately wants her to never leave.)
Mels… Mels sees the stars in her friend's (her mother's) eyes and she wants with all her (single) heart. Amelia met the Doctor, her very own Raggedy Man, who came just for her and promised to be back.
It's silly. She's not big enough to kill the Doctor now anyway.
The jealousy is heavy and bitter on her tongue, so for once she lets her friends (parents) tussle without her and keeps silent.
(Amelia lives with her stern, vaguely neglectful aunt. Or is it her parents? Both of them a little silly in different ways, who love her enough to make Mels yearn for what she knows for a fact she'll never have. Do they believe her? Do they think she's crazy? Are they kind? Mels can't quite make sense of the tangle of it, this double vision of is and might-have-been. She wonders what Amelia remembers.)
Either way there is at least one psychiatrist, and Amelia tells them to call her Amy.
"Why don't you like Amelia?" Mels asks.
"Too fairytale," Amy says, and Mels laughs.
They grow up together. Mels grows up with her parents.
She watches them fall in love and laughs at them from the sidelines. (Rory was smitten from the moment they met, but Amy wasn't much better, just worse at understanding herself) Best show in the country, it really is.
It's not conventional, but then neither are any of them, not even Rory, not really.
Mels dreams. But living, living is good enough for now.
