Second-to-last chapter, y'all. For those of you who are with me, thanks for sticking with me! Thanks for starting at all. :-)
Rose had told me to go where something bizarre was happening, and the Doctor would eventually turn up. Well, apparently, I was the bizarre happening. The Doctor had picked up on the spatial disturbance caused by the miniature reality bomb, and had assumed he would be walking into a small-scale Dalek attack. When he realised it was just me, he had examined me with his sonic screwdriver (mostly by shining it in my eyes and trying to blind me) and determined I was human, he had tried to ditch me.
But I wouldn't let him.
I chased him down the deserted corridors of what had once been some sort of Torchwood instutution, way, way back in the day.
"Doctor, please, stop, I need to speak with you," I pleaded, not able to keep up with the bow-legged, boot-wearing, bowtied man.
"Nope, sorry, leave a message after the tone," he said. "Beep!"
"What?"
"It means go away," he shouted, keeping his desperately quick stride.
"Doctor, my name is Reed! I think I can help you!"
"I'm beyond help."
"No, you're not."
"Okay, dazzle me, Reed. What are you going to help me with? I don't need any aluminium siding for my house, and my light bulb supply is abundant, so I don't really see how you can be of service."
I laughed in spite of myself. "You're a mad man!"
"Yep. A mad man with a box."
"A blue one! I knew that!"
"Everyone knows that!" he shouted, once again quickening his pace.
We came to the end of the corridor and stopped at what looked to be a disused lift. He used his screwdriver to bring it to life.
"Look, Doctor, I've come from another world," I said, relieved he had finally stopped moving.
"Nonsense, you're human. My sonic doesn't lie."
"No, I mean, from a different universe."
"What do you mean a different universe?"
"I mean I came across the void using the reality bomb technology that Torchwood harnessed back in 2008, while you were fighting the Daleks."
He stared at me for a long moment. "And?"
"And, while we're on the subject, Rose says hello."
His eyes went wide. "Rose? Rose who?"
"Rose Haverbrook."
"Who?"
"No, wait... what did she say? Her father is... Pete Tyler? So, she would have been Rose Tyler when she knew you, right? So, yeah, she says hello."
He stood up very, very straight, and looked down at me with an eerily serious expression. "Don't toy with me."
"I... I'm not," I stuttered. "I mean, I wouldn't do that. She helped me get here. She thought it was important that I see you."
At that point, the door of the lift opened, and the Doctor grabbed my arm and dragged me onto the lift with him.
"All right, Miss Reed, you have my attention, congratulations," he said darkly. "Now, why the hell would Rose Tyler want you to meet me?"
"It's not Miss Reed, it's just Reed."
"Talk."
"Well, I've been having these visions, and you're in them."
"Is that all?"
I was so nervous, I felt my heart pounding in my throat. This was my one chance, I felt, to convince the Doctor that I was worth listening to, worth helping. Frantically, I began, "Well, they've been going on since I was a child. Well, not exactly a child, more like fifteen, but still, it's been ten years, the same kind of visions, with the same people in them. You are one of them. And there are other people in them, these women... well, not all of them are women, some of them are young girls. Two of them are girls, one of them is a woman. And she died. I saw her die. And you were there because she's your..."
"You look familiar," he interrupted.
"Yeah, I know, I look like Queen Elizabeth the first," I answered, exasperated.
He squinted at me, and smirked. "Sort of, yeah."
I felt vaguely insecure. "What's that? What's wrong?"
"Nothing," he said, pulling away from the smirk. He spun around in place and clapped. "Just a big fan of hers, that's all. But that's not what I meant."
"What did you mean?"
"Not sure yet," he replied, cryptically.
We arrived at the ground floor, and the Doctor had to use the sonic screwdriver to open the doors. We walked out into the Torchwood lobby, or what would be the Torchwood lobby, if it weren't covered with dust and infested with squatters.
Without speaking, I chased him across the street and down a narrow alleyway. Sitting at a junction with another alley sat a bright blue box. He stopped short of going inside, and then turned around to face me.
"Now look," he said. "I don't know who you are, what your bloody visions are about, and what it's all got to do with me, but I feel certain that if Rose Tyler sent you here, she must have done so at great personal risk, and cost. It must have required a tremendous amount of dangerous resources and cloak-and-dagger rubbish, so I'm not going to take this lightly. This had better be good! But be on your guard, Miss Reed, because I don't trust you at all. And I'm not in the market for a running-about, have you got me?"
"Perfectly," I said.
"In fact, let's make this simple. Choose two words that best describe your visions, why I should listen to you or help you, or allow you to help me, or whatever other dramatic nonsense you have bouncing around in your pretty ginger head. Two words. Go."
"Your wife," I answered.
And so, I was invited aboard the TARDIS. I was led back into a sitting room of sorts, and I felt like I was seeing yet another trained professional ready to misdiagnose my visions. He brought me a cup of tea, and sat across a coffee table from me, just like many of my other doctors had.
"So tell me, what's Rose up to?"
"Oh, a lot," I said. "She authenticates interdimensional contacts for Torchwood."
"Ah," he said, nodding. "She assessed your visions to be genuine."
"Yes."
"Probably because of their relationship to me."
"Partly, yes."
I filled the Doctor in on Rose's impressive educational credentials and her family life, though I left out the part about how the pin-stripe's clone had died doing something brave and she married someone else. I reckoned he'd worked out that much for himself, given that I'd originally called her by a name he didn't recognise.
"So, Miss Reed, you know River, you do?" he asked after a long chat about nothing special.
"Who? Oh! River, is that her name? No, I don't," I answered. "I've just seen her... and I felt her die."
He nodded. "I wish I could have been with her."
"You were."
"But I was... different then. I was younger, not quite fully aware of what I was seeing, the gravity of what I was losing."
"Yeah, I know."
"Why you?"
"I was hoping you could tell me that," I said to him. "I have no idea my connection to any of this. I don't know why your wife and I are psychically linked across dimensions, I have no idea what the girls have to do with it..."
"Ah yes, the girls."
"Yeah, a little one, maybe eight years old, and a teenager."
"Is the teen a black girl? Quite pretty, semi-homicidal?"
"Yes!" I answered. "How did you know?"
"They're all the same person," he told me. "River was a Time Lord, of sorts, though not of the original ilk. They are different regenerations of the same woman. She was called Melody, or Mel, when she was young, until she became the woman that you describe, the woman who died. My wife as I knew her, she's River."
"Melody, River. Both beautiful names," I mused. It was unlike me to say something like that, but I felt so beatific, so relieved to know the names, finally of the females I'd been seeing in my visions since I was fifteen years old. "Why did she have more than one name?"
"It's a long story," he sighed.
"I'm getting tired of hearing that," I complained. "Rose said that to me at least a dozen times when I was meeting with her, usually when you came up in conversation. I've got time. Tell me a long story."
He stared at the floor through a triangle he had made between his legs and left arm. And then he said, "Fine. When she was born, she was given her mother's surname, because, well, her mother had been kidnapped by this band of bad guys who wanted me dead."
"Excuse me?"
"I told you it was a long story."
"Okay, I'm listening."
"They wanted me dead, so they thought a good way to do that was to kidnap the pregnant mother, who was a good friend of mine, then deliver and steal the baby and raise her to be an assassin, with me as her target."
"Ah. You do live a rich, full life, Doctor, I must say."
"And they didn't know the father's surname, so they gave her her mother's surname, which was Pond."
"You're joking! That's my mother's maiden name!"
He glared at me. "Now we're getting somewhere," he all but growled.
"We are?"
"So, her mother named her Melody. Melody Pond. But the indigenous people of the nearby woodlands where she was raised got it wrong. They didn't have a word for 'pond,' and the only water in the forest..."
"... is the river."
"Yes."
"I was named because my mother loved a poem said, the wood that grows in rushing water..."
"...is the reed."
"You know it?" I asked.
"It's a poem by Nigel Portus-Montgomery," he said. "Bending to the Current. It was River's favourite."
"Yes! That's the poem! Oh my God!"
"Reed, what's your surname?"
"Williams."
"Tell me about your parents."