River is made of win. This is truth.
So there she was, living her happily ever after. Forever.
On Friday (but it was always Friday) she was playing golf with her imaginary friends, sipping cocktails and fanning herself, when suddenly she threw her golf club through a nearby window, smashed her wineglass, and said, "Good grief." Then she went to find Cal.
"Cal!" she demanded. "This is rather intensely boring and I miss my doctor! I am fed up with taking care of perfect little imaginary children and hanging out with imaginary friends! I demand that you- Cal?"
The little girl had a frightening, empty, vacant look on her face.
"Cal? Are you all right?"
Suddenly the mansion felt very empty.
"Doctor Moon?" she called.
No helpful satellite answered.
"Oh dear," she said in a small voice. She went to the window.
There was nothing but whiteness outside. Just... white. "Oh God," she whispered. "Please don't let me die. Not without seeing him, please?"
As if in answer to her prayer, the TV widened and lengthened to form a doorway, and a glowing figure stepped through.
"God?" River asked hesitantly.
The glow faded, sinking into the figure's skin to reveal a young blond woman with a long purple coat. "'Fred' will do," she said.
And then they were sitting around the living room table, having tea.
"What?" River asked. "We skipped just then, didn't we?"
The blond woman said only, "My, these chocolate biscuits are good."
Then River noticed that it wasn't quite the mansion living room any more. Instead of dignified mahogany and thick carpeting, there was airiness and marble and ionic columns. "This isn't my living room," she said crossly. "What have you done to my living room?"
The blond woman didn't look up. "Oh, it's just reverted to my usual setting," she said. "We're sort of inside my brain at the moment."
River looked down at the creamy marble floor. It looked like floor. "That's ridiculous," she said. "Humans don't have that much memory space."
The blond woman gave her a look that suggested that River was being rather thick at the moment.
"You're not human?" River said.
"I'm not really much of anything at the moment," said the woman. "Rather like you, I am not much more than a rather advanced computer program that thinks it was once alive."
"I'm a person! I'm real!" River said hotly.
The blond woman smiled briefly. "That's the spirit."
"Look, who are you?"
Enigmatic smile again.
Sudden suspicion. "Do you know the Doctor?"
The blond woman looked away. "Let's take a walk," she said.
They strolled beside a swift, wide river. Green banks rolled away on either side. River caught sight of a church tower somewhere in the distance. "I really wish you wouldn't do that," she said. "I hate skipping. Anyway, where is this place? I don't remember it."
The other woman seemed lost in memory. "The Thames," she said. "1892 A.D. Earth."
River surveyed her. "You used to travel with the Doctor then?"
"What makes you think that? There are other time travelers. You're from the fifty-first century, right? Your little pet Time Agency, then."
"I.... I just know. You... you seem a bit like him, somehow."
The blond woman stopped, and stared out into space, and her hands were twisting around and around and she was muttering under her breath, something about vectors. And then the flow of technobabble stopped, and all that was left was words. "I have to warn... to warn him... The bait," she said, her eyes focusing for one scary moment and looking into River's. "The serpent. Carrot in front of the donkey. He'll reach out... and the mirror will shatter. Lady of Shalott, will go floating down the river. River," and then suddenly she was back to normal and walking along like nothing had ever happened.
This was turning out to be a very strange day.
River was sitting, feeling useless, on the edge of an ornamental marble fountain, while Cal sat in front of the blond woman. Their fingertips were on each other's temples, and they seemed to be exchanging information.
River looked down into the fountain. Goldfish were swimming in there, goldfish that weren't quite goldfish, that seemed to have too many fins.
Cal took her hands away, opened her eyes, frowned in concentration. "Yes," she said in her little girl's voice, "it's possible."
"Anything's possible," said the blond woman, smiling, and suddenly River was filled with the strangest sort of rage.
She grabbed the blond woman and pushed her bodily against the wall. She was so light, like she was made of air. River put her down, gently. "I want answers," she said, almost crying, almost weeping with confusion.
The first genuine smile, and it warmed up the universe. "All right."
They were sitting together on the bed in River's old room. She clutched at the bedspread unsteadily, unbalanced by this false familiarity. "All right," she said. "First off, what's your-" Suddenly she remembered the Doctor, and corrected herself. "-what should I call you?"
"Like I said, Fred will do nicely."
"All right. Fred." It was a strange name, but someone called River Song did not do well to comment on other people's names. "So... if you're not human, what are you?"
And then she was looking into impossibly ancient eyes, and suddenly, she knew. "Oh," she gasped. "Oh. Well. I didn't know there were any- oh. He always said-"
"He doesn't know about me," Fred said in quiet, even tones, but her fists were clenched. "I didn't exactly survive. Something of a secret emergency program in the Matrix- I was recorded. The original me died. I'm something... else. Just a... copy. The consciousness I was copied from... she's dead." Fred swallowed. "He saw her die."
Something else was quickly becoming apparent, and River felt a huge, dreadful question looming up before her. She staved it off. "So you sort of emailed yourself here then?"
"Not immediately. I floated around for a couple billion years first. For a while I didn't even know I was me. Then I ran into a certain piece of code. A sort of virus, a Bad Wolf, we used to call them in programming class- it copied itself into my data, fixed up all the bits I was missing. I looked for more- this code, you know, it's replicated, all over the universe! And, well, it led me here, and now I seem to have a body, which is quite a relief, let me tell you."
"It's a nice one," River complimented her, with a tiny little smile.
"Thank you," Fred replied.
River reached out and took her hand. Sitting like that, on the bed, holding hands, feet dangling, she felt sixteen again, and nervous. "Why do you think you are here?" she asked.
"I don't know," Fred told her, and her ankles crossed, Mary Janes clicking, and it struck River that Fred was just as nervous as she was.
"There's no place like home," River murmured. "Well. I did say I was bored."
This time she welcomed the shift, encouraged it. They were once again standing on the lawn, Cal and her team and the children all lined up to wave goodbye. River looked at them, and remembered why she'd become an archeologist, remembered that no matter how wonderful the past, what's even more wonderful is saying goodbye to it, storing those memories on a beloved bookshelf in your mind, and moving on, on to the next great adventure.
This time it wasn't the TV- for a symbolic departure, they needed something more dignified than that, and so Fred twisted her thoughts and summoned up a door, plain beech wood, with a red-painted door handle and no keyhole. River and Fred exchanged a glance, and then they stepped forward together, and together took hold of the handle and turned it and stepped through, hands still threaded together, into the future and the whole wide universe.