Author's Note: Going out of town for the weekend again. So you should be getting this tomorrow morning. But...meh. You can have it now.
ooOO00OOoo
She stumbled ever farther from the warehouse and its warring inhabitants. When she'd seen the TARDIS again after so many years, it had woken something in her that would not be silenced. Something other than Bad Wolf. Even now it was humming, singing, yelling, roaring in her head. It fought together with the wolf against Madam's training, the two conflicting impulses making her head pound and driving her out into the snow. She wrapped her arms around herself, shivering from forces outside and in.
Go back. Said Madam's training. Get close to him and kill him.
Run away! Said the music, backed by animalistic howls. Keep him safe!
She'd made it as far as the docks before exhaustion claimed her. She found an abandoned shipping crate and crawled inside of it, finding it packed with what must be raw cotton. The fibers were rough on her skin and full of seeds. But she didn't care. It was softer and warmer than the ground outside. And now that she was far enough away, the conditioning's voice had died out and the girl could listen to the music.
The music and the wolf twined together until they were one being in her mind. Then together they danced through her, breaking down the chains Madam had put there. When they were done, they broke apart into a golden cloud that poured down upon her being, soaking into the barren soil of her soul. When it was done she was a whole person once again.
"I am the Bad Wolf," she said, eyes drooping as the remnants of the music swirled a lullaby in her mind. "I create myself." She fell asleep to the sound of the universe.
ooOO00OOoo
When she awoke, she was clear-headed and condition-free for the first time in years. The impulse to kill the Doctor was still there. Years of training couldn't be broken in a few hours, but for the first time in six years, she knew who she was.
"Rose," she said, trying the sound of the name on her lips. "Rose Tyler." She shook her head sadly. It didn't fit. Rose Tyler was a shop girl from London who went on mad adventures with the Doctor. She fell in love with him, was lost to a parallel world and…she strained to remember. What happened then? She thought back, remembering the last time she had been Rose Tyler.
She was…twenty six, she'd just been promoted to head of her department…she was on her way home from work when there was a flash of something…then the tractor trailer behind her had exploded, and…
She shook her head again, it was no good. The memory just wasn't there. Either it was just so long ago that she couldn't remember, or those things had been there, editing themselves, and the events of the crash, out of her memory. She'd figured out what they did early in her captivity. Before her mind had given over to Madam and her teachings.
She wished that she could be mad at Madam and her monsters, but…they'd brought her back to this world. To his world. How they'd managed to do what he'd deemed impossible, she might never know. But it didn't matter. She was here now and that was so much closer than she'd been before. Of course… she looked down at her eight year old body. This wasn't exactly what she'd been envisioning.
How had she regenerated, anyway? If that was even what had happened. Unless she had been compressed into the body of a child a la Cassandra, she couldn't think of whatever else could have happened. So if she had regenerated, how? Was it something that Madam had done to her? Or was it the Doctor?
A confusing mix of love, lust, and hate washed over her and she squirmed uncomfortably.
"I'm eight!" she wailed. "Why did I have to be eight?"
But there was no helping it. She would just have to grow up. Again.
ooOO00OOoo
Some time later, she emerged from the cotton with a plan. For all that he was in America looking for her apparently (and did he know who she was? Oh god, what if he did?) she knew that he spent most of his time in England. And despite everything, the loss of her parents, her name, even her body, she still identified as English. So, she snuck aboard one of the tankers bound for the British Isles. What she'd do when she got there, she hadn't the faintest notion. But at least she'd be back in her home again. She hoped Queen Victoria wasn't amused.
ooOO00OOoo
The trip was long and boring. Her young body just couldn't handle the abuse she was putting it through. And, of course, she just had to go and get herself locked inside one of the containers with no food or water. If she didn't die of dehydration, starvation would claim her soon after. She'd tried banging on the container walls, to no effect. No one came down into the storage areas, there was no one to hear her scream. Without anything to do and her body weakening rapidly, she spent the rest of the trip sorting through the events of her life. Trying to put them into perspective. She raged against the loss of her Mum and Pete. And little Tony. How old must he be now? Would he even remember his lost sister? She railed against the conditioning she'd been put through. Conditioning that even now was calculating ways of finding him, then using her innocent features to get close to him. And finally, she wept for his death. For while she'd not gotten a good look at any of the three men in the warehouse that night, there was one thing of which she was certain: none of them was her pinstriped Doctor.
When the ship docked a month later, she was grimy, tired, and hungry...and in possession of a new body. She'd died, packed away within the shipping crate. And promptly begun starving again. They opened her container and she stumbled from her hiding place. The cry went up immediately.
"Oi now! Who're you?"
"Look at that! It's a child!"
"Was 'e onboard the whole time?"
The men guided her to a local café where they sat her down and fed her. She consumed her first hot meal in weeks without tasting any of it. Within short order, the authorities were called and they descended on the café with a flurry of clipboards and paper.
She told them she'd been kidnapped. Summoning her biggest, most pathetic eyes, she wove a tale of abuse and neglect. Sticking to her age-appropriate understanding, she repeated over and over that she was kidnapped, all the while leading them to believe that she'd really been sold by her family. When she pulled out her old estate accent, it was a done deal, and she found the whole thing rather easy. Maybe too easy.
But they believed her.
She was taken away and cleaned up, given new clothing and a pretty hat. Two weeks later, she was adopted by a nice woman named Mrs. Pond.
"What's your name?" Amelia asked her. Amelia was Mrs. Pond's niece.
"Don't have one. But everybody calls me Melody." Because, when she wasn't paying attention, she had a habit of humming the lullaby that had sent her off to sleep that first night in the cotton. The song of the TARDIS. The song of the universe.
"Are you my new sister, Melody?" Amelia asked.
Melody looked back and forth between her dark chocolate skin and Amelia's flame red hair and fair skin. Then she shrugged. She had been adopted. "I guess so."
"Great! Wanna play Doctor and aliens?"
ooOO00OOoo
That night, Melody laughed until she cried. Of course it had to be the Doctor.
There had been a crack in her wall, Amelia had told her. And on the other side had been a huge eyeball. But the Doctor had come in his blue box and fixed it. The adults all thought that Amelia was making him up. But Melody knew better. He'd been here. And immediately after his regeneration, it sounded like.
Mrs. Pond wanted her to provide a stabilizing influence for Amelia; distract her from her obsession with the Doctor. But Melody would do no such thing.
She would stay right here with Amelia, and wait for the Doctor to return.