“Just one question,” the Doctor shouted. “Do you happen to know how to fly this thing?”
Clara’s eyes went even wider than they had gone when the new Doctor had first stood up a moment before. She was speechless, though from somewhere inside her came her voice, but which also was not her voice. “Yes,” she said and strode over to the console, “I do.”
The Doctor looked at her again, wild-eyed. “Good. Go on with it then.” He lurched around her, out of the control room and down a corridor where the TARDIS had kindly located his bedroom through the first door on the left. The bed was in its usual location and shape, the Doctor noted before stumbling onto it and passing out.
“When am I?” the Doctor thought. It was rare for the Doctor not to have a sense of the passage of time, even upon waking, and thus he approached his return to consciousness carefully. He counted his fingers and toes, arms and legs, and the various other bits and pieces before opening one eye. He was sprawled on his bed, still dressed in his predecessor’s tweed suit. His legs itched. He’d have to do something about that. At least all his parts were present and properly located. Even his kidneys had turned a more satisfactory color.
The Doctor opened his other eye, then stood a bit shakily. He wanted a good look at himself, so he stepped carefully over to the chair in front of the vanity River had used when she stayed in the TARDIS. Och, what a nose! What was it with his head? Ever since the Time War, ears, teeth, chin, now nose. He squeezed it, and a trickle of regeneration light spread out in the air before him. At least he’d stopped getting younger -- the next step down that line would have been a spotty school boy, and seeing that might have made him regenerate on the spot, as it were.
Older. He was finally becoming his old self again. Or selves again. Or like his old selves again. A feeling of peace washed through him as he recalled that he’d not burned Gallifrey, that it still stood, and now, thanks to the Time Lords, he still stood -- or at least sat, here in front of River’s vanity.
But dwelling on the past would get him nowhere, particularly not out of the itchy tweed trousers he was wearing. To his closet went the Doctor to find something more appropriate. Something blue perhaps. Or blue on blue. Something that would go with his new kidneys. Then he’d go about redecorating the TARDIS: new control room, new bedroom furniture, a more reasonably shaped bed, put in a new sitting area where the vanity was now . . . the vanity. He opened its drawers -- combs and brushes in one, makeup in another, perfume in a third. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to get rid of River’s things, even after centuries. Her furniture in his their -- bedroom, the clothes in their closet, her large collection of smalls in her wardrobe. But now that was another lifetime, and the Doctor found he was able to move on without her presence in the TARDIS.
Moving on in the TARDIS -- the Doctor suddenly realized the TARDIS wasn’t moving and had not been since he had first opened his eye. He started to the door just as it was knocked upon. He opened it to find Clara standing there. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Where are we? Where did we stop? How did we stop? How did you?” The Doctor gaped at Clara.
“You sound Scottish. Did you know that? How come you sound Scottish now?”
“Lots of planets have a Scotland.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” the Doctor said. “Riff on an old joke of mine. Tell me, where are we? When are we?”
“Outside my house in London, August 2014.”
“How did we get here?”
“I flew us here,” Clara said brightly.
“How is that possible? Only a Time Lord can fly a TARDIS.”
Clara’s face clouded. “I . . . I don’t know for sure. I just knew, but also I didn’t know. I wasn’t flying the TARDIS, but I was from something inside of me. It felt like . . . . Doctor! Could River fly the TARDIS?”
“Yes, not as well as I, of course, but she was . . . competent.”
“I think, maybe, it was my connection to her through Madame Vastra’s tea party. I didn’t see or hear her, though. I just knew what to do. Have you seen her? Did she come back again?”
“No,” the Doctor said. “She’s gone for me.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor.”
The Doctor shrugged and put his hands up in a what-can-you-do gesture. A sparkle of regeneration light floated out of his fingertips. The Doctor stared at his hands with more than interest.
“Doctor, if you’d like a manicure, I know a place a few minutes from . . . .”
“Clara!” the Doctor shouted, cutting her off, “Yes, it might work. Oh, if I can pull this off!”
“Pull what off?” But the Doctor was ignoring her. He nearly leapt to the vanity, pulled open its first drawer and grabbed a silver hairbrush. Sure enough, several long, reddish-blonde hairs were entwined in the bristles.
“Oh, if I can pull this off!” the Doctor muttered fiercely to himself.
“Pull what off, Doctor?” she repeated.
“I can at least set her free to live again.”
“Set who free, Doctor?”
But the Doctor was not responding to questions and instead placed the brush on the bed. “Step back!” he commanded over his shoulder to Clara. As she did so, the Doctor pointed his hands at the brush. The regeneration light poured out through them, turning the bedroom orange. It took a moment, but slowly something began to grow on the surface of the brush. Before long, it had taken the shape of a baby, then a girl, then a young woman, and finally, the spit and image of River Song herself, just as Clara had seen her before. Only then did the Doctor drop his hands, and the regeneration light fade. He fell back onto the floor.
Clara rushed to kneel by the Doctor’s side. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes,” the Doctor gasped, getting to his feet. He waved his hand toward the bed. “How is she?”
Clara got up and walked cautiously to the bed. What looked like River lay there, breathing shallowly. “She’s breathing, Doctor,” Clara said, “but she’s not awake.”
“Oh, oh, oh! Look at that! I’m very good!” the Doctor exulted.
“What have you done?” asked Clara.
“Saved her!”
“How?”
“We need to get to the Library.”
“A library? What are we going to do in a library?”
“Not a library, the Library, in the 51st century. And we’re going to have to time it very carefully so we get there after I’ve left, but before the truce with the Vashta Nerada expires.”
“Vashta who?” asked Clara.
But the Doctor was already out the door, calling behind him, “Please take the brush out from under her. Those bristles are quite stiff and can really hurt. I know.”
In the time it took to find River’s green dress in the closet, pull it onto the new body (Clara’s suggestion as the quickest thing they could put her in) and get the TARDIS to the Library (the Doctor remembering at last how to fly her), the Doctor had explained how two regenerations ago he had met River for his first time in the Library, the problems caused by the Vashta Nerada, her sacrifice to get the people out of the computer core, and his realization that she, and his later self, had planned it so that he could upload her into the core to save her consciousness.
“The other people could come back whole from the core,” explained the Doctor, “because their bodies had been intact when they were uploaded. River’s body had been burned up by using it as memory storage to allow the computer to download them all, so there was nothing to reload or download her into. But now . . . .”
“But now,” Clara continued for him, “you have a new body you can download her into. You clever b .--” The Doctor’s look caused her to choke off the last word. I’m no boy, he thought, not in appearance nor bearing, and certainly not in age.
The TARDIS materialized at the core of the Library. “OK, we’re here,” the Doctor said, checking his instruments. “And we still have a couple of hours left within the day the Vashta Nerada gave me to get everyone out. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” Clara replied.
The Doctor snapped his fingers, and the TARDIS’s door swung open. “Haven’t done that trick in a while,” he said to himself.
With the Doctor in the lead, he and Clara wheeled out the gurney on which they had placed River’s new body. Clara looked about the room and was surprised to see a pillar with a child’s face superimposed on it. “What’s that?” she asked.
The Doctor looked up at the pillar. “Oh, that’s CAL. She’s a little girl and the computer.”
“A little girl? And the computer?”
“Yes, yes. Do I have to give you every little detail when I’m telling you a story?”
“Seems like one you wouldn’t leave out.”
But the Doctor was ignoring her again. He went up to the girl/computer face and said, “You may not recognize me, but I’m the Doctor, just a later version of the one you just met.”
The face paused for a moment and then said, “Ah, yes, Doctor. I understand from my books about you. You must have regenerated and come back to this point in time.”
“I want to download River Song into this body. It’s an exact, genetic duplicate of hers. Can you do that?”
CAL paused. “Yes,” she said. “I will upload the body, and after it is digitized, combine it with the file of her consciousness.”
“Do you have the memory capacity for the download, or,” the Doctor paused and swallowed, “do you need my mind to help?”
“No, Doctor. You fixed me, remember? And I’m not holding 4022 records of people anymore. I have plenty of memory for one transfer.”
“Then please make the transfer.” The girl’s face paused again. River’s body seemed to vibrate for a moment before disappearing. In a couple of seconds, however, it rematerialized in the same spot on the gurney.
“Done,” said the little girl’s face.
River’s eyes twitched, then opened. “What?” she asked.
The Doctor walked to her side and looked at her. “How are you feeling?”
“What?” she asked again.
“It’s all right. It’s me, the Doctor.”
“Doctor, what?”
“The Doctor. Do you remember the Doctor?”
“Doctor?” She looked deeply into his eyes. “Oh, my goodness, it is you. It is you! You’re so much older now, not just older than you were here in the Library, but older than at any time I knew you.”
“I am, and you are still the oldest that I ever knew you. Do you know what that means?”
“No more spoilers!” they said in unison.
“Oh, my goodness,” River said. “It’s coming back to me. But how did you get my body out? It was burned up in the download!”
“I regenerated; actually, am still regenerating. I was able to direct that energy onto hairs that you left on your brush in the TARDIS, and your DNA reconstituted you.”
“Wait, you used up your last regeneration on me!?”
“You once did the same for me.”
“Oh, you wicked man! Don’t you know regifting is an insult?”
The Doctor laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s not my last regeneration. The Time Lords gave me a whole new set, and since you weren’t dying from a bespoke assassin’s killer lipstick, I only used up one. And who knows, maybe I can talk the Time Lords into giving me some more.”
“Time Lords? I thought you . . . .”
“No!” the Doctor laughed again, even more deeply, “I didn’t! It turns out I didn’t after all. Och, River, I have so much to tell you!”
“Oh, well, then.” She gave the Doctor her biggest smile. “Hello, Sweetie!” She reached her arms to his neck both to pull herself off the gurney and to bring him down to her kiss. But the Doctor stiffened and leaned back. “What’s the matter?”
“River, I’m still me with all of his memories, but I’m also not him.” River’s look turned quizzical. “My memories of that time are wonderful, but that’s what they are, memories of that time and of that life. I’ll always care for you -- I’d give up my lives to save you -- but we, us, that was a lifetime ago for me. I’m not that Doctor anymore. I’m not he any more than was the Doctor who uploaded you here. Don’t you remember me telling you all about Rose Tyler? The Doctor you met here, she’s the one who lived in his hearts, but didn’t live in your Doctor’s hearts in the same way. It’s the love of a long time ago, of a different life, a different time -- a love one can look back upon fondly, but that can only remember, not feel, the passion. It’s just like you with Mels’ loves? You used to tell me about her relationships, both passionate and frivolous, but that wasn’t your life or your loves.”
The Doctor quickly realized this last on was an analogy too far, as River grabbed the sides of the gurney, sitting up and shaking in rage. “Don’t you DARE compare the girlish adventures Mels had to what we had,” River shouted. “Don’t you dare.”
“River, I’m so, so sorry, but I’m just not that Doctor anymore.”
“You told me your name!”
“No, I didn’t,” the Doctor said slowly and forcefully. “He did. Not me.” Rescuing River from the Library had seemed to the Doctor like such a good idea at the time. It was supposed to be such a good start for him: heroic, sophisticated, scientific, very clever very Doctorish, if he thought so himself. He hadn’t anticipated this reaction, this ungrateful reaction, on River’s part.
“Then why did you take me out of CAL?” River asked. “At least there I could be with you my you through Vastra’s connection. Now I’ve lost that forever.” She put her head in her hands.
The Doctor tried to keep his voice even. “I took you out for the same reason, when I was your Doctor’s predecessor, that I put you in there: to save your life. It’s the same thing, it turns out, I did with Gallifrey. I put it in a holding place until the day it could come back safely. I haven’t been able to bring Gallifrey back yet, but I found a way to bring you back.”
“So you recreate my body, you take me out of the computer and put me in the body, and now you’re just going to walk away from me like, like,” she looked at Clara, “a used-up companion?” Clara blanched and stepped back against the TARDIS. “Oh, yes,” River continued, speaking at Clara, “the Doctor can walk away from anyone, anyone at all. You didn’t realize that until just now, did you?” River looked back to the Doctor. “I certainly didn’t.”
“River,” said the Doctor, “you and I, we’ll always be--“
“I swear I’ll make you regenerate again if you say, ‘We’ll always be good friends.’”
The Doctor pursed his lips. “Be angry if you wish. I’m the one, after all, who took you out of the fantasy of a virtual world and gave you your real life back,” he continued with thinly veiled sarcasm.
“Yes, it was a virtual, fantasy world, but one where I could see you and talk to you. I just couldn’t actually touch you.”
“And how is that different now?”
River stared at the Doctor. He could see he might have gone a bit too far with that last point. How did something that started with such a good idea on his part devolve into this?
“It is different now,” River said, “because the Doctor I was with in my virtual world was a good man.”
“Am I a good man?” the Doctor asked the room. “I don’t really know yet who I am.”
River jumped off the gurney, staggering as she landed. “I can tell you who you are. You are a wicked, wicked man. The Doctor I knew made an effort not to hurt the people he cared about -- even if he didn’t always succeed.”
The Doctor realized that she was trying to hurt him with her words the way he, apparently, had hurt her with his. This was going so badly. He forced himself to try for a gentler approach, reaching to take her arm to assist her in standing, but she pushed it away.
“I’m going to find the Vashta Nerada. Getting eaten by them will hurt less than looking at you.”
“River, please, wait,” the Doctor implored. There had to be a way to recover the situation. This is not what he had wanted or intended at all. Was it really true that he was, in this new body, not a good man, one who thoughtlessly did and carelessly said hurtful things? He would have to think about that later, but right now he had to go after her. In this state, she might well run into the Vashta Nerada, and he could not bear the thought that he would be the cause of that.
The Doctor started to go after River, but after she took fewer than a dozen steps, River collapsed to the floor and turned around to sit against the wall. A golden light began to flow from her head and hands. She held her hands out before her to look at them. “Yes, of course. I suppose it makes sense.” She turned her head to give the Doctor another venomous look. “Goodbye, ‘Sweetie.’ This has started to wear a bit thin.”
“What this is she talking about?” Clara asked the Doctor. She had pried herself away from the TARDIS and was now standing by the Doctor’s elbow.
“I don’t know,” the Doctor said. “Could be the DNA isn’t working right. Could be that it is working right, if she feels there’s nothing left in this life for her. Of course, it could be she’s just tired of talking to me.”
The full force of the regeneration hit. The Doctor had managed to use his own active regeneration energy not just to reconstitute River’s body from her DNA, but also to imbue it with the power of regeneration itself. When the light faded, the Doctor and Clara saw what looked almost like a doll in the now-outsized green dress. But it wasn’t a doll; rather a small, older woman, with a pixie cut of nearly white hair. As they approached her, they could see the lines in her face and the veins of her hand. The front of the dress threatened to fall away for lack of support, but as the Doctor leaned in to lift it to a respectable level, the woman opened her eyes. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said, fixing her mouth hard with disapproval.
“It’s all right, I’m the Doctor.”
“Hmm, seems more likely you’re playing doctor.” As hard as the mouth was, it was balanced by the woman’s eyes, glowing almost a TARDIS blue, full of mirth.
“River, do you know who I am, and who you are?”
“River? Why do you call me that?”
“It’s your name: River Song.”
The woman snorted. “River Song? Sounds like something primitive rainforest people would come up with. My name is . . . .” She stopped, looked puzzled, and then nodded emphatically. “My name is Melody Williams.”
“Melody, I --” the Doctor stopped as the eyes joined the mouth in icy reproach. “I mean, Ms Williams. I am the Doctor. Do you remember me?”
Now the eyes became searchlights, beaming into the Doctor’s own eyes. “Yes.” She stood up, not looking away. The mouth actually turned up slightly at the corners as if testing out a smile, but not fully committing to it. “You’ve been both very good and very bad to me . . . .”
“Yes,” the Doctor replied, “I’m sorry about that. I’m still trying to figure out who I am . . . .”
“Don’t interrupt me, young man.”
The Doctor straightened. “Sorry, Mum.”
She kept searching his eyes. “Hmm, maybe not so young. Not so young at all. Anyway, as I was saying, I think I have also been very good and very bad to you at different times, so perhaps we’re even and can start fresh.” This time, her mouth matched the smile in her eyes.
The Doctor found himself staring back into the woman’s eyes, unable to look away. He wasn’t sure what he was feeling, but it felt like something familiar from the past. Who was he? Was he a good man? A millennium or so ago, his answer was clear, and it took Rose to begin to change his mind until, finally, the answer became clear the other way. He had been a good man. He had saved Gallifrey; he had saved Trenzalore. Yet here he was, in theory starting out from a much better place than from which he had ever started since the Time War, and yet he, and River of all people, were questioning whether he was good.
The Doctor shook his head to clear it and looked closely at the woman. Here was someone who knew him from before. Both of them were starting new lives. Who would this woman turn out to be? Who would this Doctor be? Maybe they could help each other answer those questions. He knew he wanted her approval, at least. The Doctor took a chance. “Well, I’m still getting used to things, but I think I would like to start fresh with you, too.” The Doctor smiled, offered her his hands, which she took as she stood up.
“Interesting,” she said, looking down at her body. “We seem to have retained the same age ratio in our appearances.”
“Well, don’t forget that I’m even more older than you than I used to be!”
“Oh, I know that.” She released his hands and wrapped her arms tightly around the Doctor. “Hello, Geezy,” she said into his chest. The Doctor hugged back. The peaceful feeling he had experienced after waking in the TARDIS returned. Maybe, with some more practice, he could be a good man, after all.
Suddenly, the woman broke away, brought her hands to his sides and, with a look of concerned confusion, demanded, “What the hell is going on with these kidneys?”
Clara’s eyes went even wider than they had gone when the new Doctor had first stood up a moment before. She was speechless, though from somewhere inside her came her voice, but which also was not her voice. “Yes,” she said and strode over to the console, “I do.”
The Doctor looked at her again, wild-eyed. “Good. Go on with it then.” He lurched around her, out of the control room and down a corridor where the TARDIS had kindly located his bedroom through the first door on the left. The bed was in its usual location and shape, the Doctor noted before stumbling onto it and passing out.
“When am I?” the Doctor thought. It was rare for the Doctor not to have a sense of the passage of time, even upon waking, and thus he approached his return to consciousness carefully. He counted his fingers and toes, arms and legs, and the various other bits and pieces before opening one eye. He was sprawled on his bed, still dressed in his predecessor’s tweed suit. His legs itched. He’d have to do something about that. At least all his parts were present and properly located. Even his kidneys had turned a more satisfactory color.
The Doctor opened his other eye, then stood a bit shakily. He wanted a good look at himself, so he stepped carefully over to the chair in front of the vanity River had used when she stayed in the TARDIS. Och, what a nose! What was it with his head? Ever since the Time War, ears, teeth, chin, now nose. He squeezed it, and a trickle of regeneration light spread out in the air before him. At least he’d stopped getting younger -- the next step down that line would have been a spotty school boy, and seeing that might have made him regenerate on the spot, as it were.
Older. He was finally becoming his old self again. Or selves again. Or like his old selves again. A feeling of peace washed through him as he recalled that he’d not burned Gallifrey, that it still stood, and now, thanks to the Time Lords, he still stood -- or at least sat, here in front of River’s vanity.
But dwelling on the past would get him nowhere, particularly not out of the itchy tweed trousers he was wearing. To his closet went the Doctor to find something more appropriate. Something blue perhaps. Or blue on blue. Something that would go with his new kidneys. Then he’d go about redecorating the TARDIS: new control room, new bedroom furniture, a more reasonably shaped bed, put in a new sitting area where the vanity was now . . . the vanity. He opened its drawers -- combs and brushes in one, makeup in another, perfume in a third. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to get rid of River’s things, even after centuries. Her furniture in his their -- bedroom, the clothes in their closet, her large collection of smalls in her wardrobe. But now that was another lifetime, and the Doctor found he was able to move on without her presence in the TARDIS.
Moving on in the TARDIS -- the Doctor suddenly realized the TARDIS wasn’t moving and had not been since he had first opened his eye. He started to the door just as it was knocked upon. He opened it to find Clara standing there. “What’s going on?” he demanded. “Where are we? Where did we stop? How did we stop? How did you?” The Doctor gaped at Clara.
“You sound Scottish. Did you know that? How come you sound Scottish now?”
“Lots of planets have a Scotland.”
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing,” the Doctor said. “Riff on an old joke of mine. Tell me, where are we? When are we?”
“Outside my house in London, August 2014.”
“How did we get here?”
“I flew us here,” Clara said brightly.
“How is that possible? Only a Time Lord can fly a TARDIS.”
Clara’s face clouded. “I . . . I don’t know for sure. I just knew, but also I didn’t know. I wasn’t flying the TARDIS, but I was from something inside of me. It felt like . . . . Doctor! Could River fly the TARDIS?”
“Yes, not as well as I, of course, but she was . . . competent.”
“I think, maybe, it was my connection to her through Madame Vastra’s tea party. I didn’t see or hear her, though. I just knew what to do. Have you seen her? Did she come back again?”
“No,” the Doctor said. “She’s gone for me.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor.”
The Doctor shrugged and put his hands up in a what-can-you-do gesture. A sparkle of regeneration light floated out of his fingertips. The Doctor stared at his hands with more than interest.
“Doctor, if you’d like a manicure, I know a place a few minutes from . . . .”
“Clara!” the Doctor shouted, cutting her off, “Yes, it might work. Oh, if I can pull this off!”
“Pull what off?” But the Doctor was ignoring her. He nearly leapt to the vanity, pulled open its first drawer and grabbed a silver hairbrush. Sure enough, several long, reddish-blonde hairs were entwined in the bristles.
“Oh, if I can pull this off!” the Doctor muttered fiercely to himself.
“Pull what off, Doctor?” she repeated.
“I can at least set her free to live again.”
“Set who free, Doctor?”
But the Doctor was not responding to questions and instead placed the brush on the bed. “Step back!” he commanded over his shoulder to Clara. As she did so, the Doctor pointed his hands at the brush. The regeneration light poured out through them, turning the bedroom orange. It took a moment, but slowly something began to grow on the surface of the brush. Before long, it had taken the shape of a baby, then a girl, then a young woman, and finally, the spit and image of River Song herself, just as Clara had seen her before. Only then did the Doctor drop his hands, and the regeneration light fade. He fell back onto the floor.
Clara rushed to kneel by the Doctor’s side. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, yes,” the Doctor gasped, getting to his feet. He waved his hand toward the bed. “How is she?”
Clara got up and walked cautiously to the bed. What looked like River lay there, breathing shallowly. “She’s breathing, Doctor,” Clara said, “but she’s not awake.”
“Oh, oh, oh! Look at that! I’m very good!” the Doctor exulted.
“What have you done?” asked Clara.
“Saved her!”
“How?”
“We need to get to the Library.”
“A library? What are we going to do in a library?”
“Not a library, the Library, in the 51st century. And we’re going to have to time it very carefully so we get there after I’ve left, but before the truce with the Vashta Nerada expires.”
“Vashta who?” asked Clara.
But the Doctor was already out the door, calling behind him, “Please take the brush out from under her. Those bristles are quite stiff and can really hurt. I know.”
In the time it took to find River’s green dress in the closet, pull it onto the new body (Clara’s suggestion as the quickest thing they could put her in) and get the TARDIS to the Library (the Doctor remembering at last how to fly her), the Doctor had explained how two regenerations ago he had met River for his first time in the Library, the problems caused by the Vashta Nerada, her sacrifice to get the people out of the computer core, and his realization that she, and his later self, had planned it so that he could upload her into the core to save her consciousness.
“The other people could come back whole from the core,” explained the Doctor, “because their bodies had been intact when they were uploaded. River’s body had been burned up by using it as memory storage to allow the computer to download them all, so there was nothing to reload or download her into. But now . . . .”
“But now,” Clara continued for him, “you have a new body you can download her into. You clever b .--” The Doctor’s look caused her to choke off the last word. I’m no boy, he thought, not in appearance nor bearing, and certainly not in age.
The TARDIS materialized at the core of the Library. “OK, we’re here,” the Doctor said, checking his instruments. “And we still have a couple of hours left within the day the Vashta Nerada gave me to get everyone out. Are you ready?”
“Yes,” Clara replied.
The Doctor snapped his fingers, and the TARDIS’s door swung open. “Haven’t done that trick in a while,” he said to himself.
With the Doctor in the lead, he and Clara wheeled out the gurney on which they had placed River’s new body. Clara looked about the room and was surprised to see a pillar with a child’s face superimposed on it. “What’s that?” she asked.
The Doctor looked up at the pillar. “Oh, that’s CAL. She’s a little girl and the computer.”
“A little girl? And the computer?”
“Yes, yes. Do I have to give you every little detail when I’m telling you a story?”
“Seems like one you wouldn’t leave out.”
But the Doctor was ignoring her again. He went up to the girl/computer face and said, “You may not recognize me, but I’m the Doctor, just a later version of the one you just met.”
The face paused for a moment and then said, “Ah, yes, Doctor. I understand from my books about you. You must have regenerated and come back to this point in time.”
“I want to download River Song into this body. It’s an exact, genetic duplicate of hers. Can you do that?”
CAL paused. “Yes,” she said. “I will upload the body, and after it is digitized, combine it with the file of her consciousness.”
“Do you have the memory capacity for the download, or,” the Doctor paused and swallowed, “do you need my mind to help?”
“No, Doctor. You fixed me, remember? And I’m not holding 4022 records of people anymore. I have plenty of memory for one transfer.”
“Then please make the transfer.” The girl’s face paused again. River’s body seemed to vibrate for a moment before disappearing. In a couple of seconds, however, it rematerialized in the same spot on the gurney.
“Done,” said the little girl’s face.
River’s eyes twitched, then opened. “What?” she asked.
The Doctor walked to her side and looked at her. “How are you feeling?”
“What?” she asked again.
“It’s all right. It’s me, the Doctor.”
“Doctor, what?”
“The Doctor. Do you remember the Doctor?”
“Doctor?” She looked deeply into his eyes. “Oh, my goodness, it is you. It is you! You’re so much older now, not just older than you were here in the Library, but older than at any time I knew you.”
“I am, and you are still the oldest that I ever knew you. Do you know what that means?”
“No more spoilers!” they said in unison.
“Oh, my goodness,” River said. “It’s coming back to me. But how did you get my body out? It was burned up in the download!”
“I regenerated; actually, am still regenerating. I was able to direct that energy onto hairs that you left on your brush in the TARDIS, and your DNA reconstituted you.”
“Wait, you used up your last regeneration on me!?”
“You once did the same for me.”
“Oh, you wicked man! Don’t you know regifting is an insult?”
The Doctor laughed. “Don’t worry. It’s not my last regeneration. The Time Lords gave me a whole new set, and since you weren’t dying from a bespoke assassin’s killer lipstick, I only used up one. And who knows, maybe I can talk the Time Lords into giving me some more.”
“Time Lords? I thought you . . . .”
“No!” the Doctor laughed again, even more deeply, “I didn’t! It turns out I didn’t after all. Och, River, I have so much to tell you!”
“Oh, well, then.” She gave the Doctor her biggest smile. “Hello, Sweetie!” She reached her arms to his neck both to pull herself off the gurney and to bring him down to her kiss. But the Doctor stiffened and leaned back. “What’s the matter?”
“River, I’m still me with all of his memories, but I’m also not him.” River’s look turned quizzical. “My memories of that time are wonderful, but that’s what they are, memories of that time and of that life. I’ll always care for you -- I’d give up my lives to save you -- but we, us, that was a lifetime ago for me. I’m not that Doctor anymore. I’m not he any more than was the Doctor who uploaded you here. Don’t you remember me telling you all about Rose Tyler? The Doctor you met here, she’s the one who lived in his hearts, but didn’t live in your Doctor’s hearts in the same way. It’s the love of a long time ago, of a different life, a different time -- a love one can look back upon fondly, but that can only remember, not feel, the passion. It’s just like you with Mels’ loves? You used to tell me about her relationships, both passionate and frivolous, but that wasn’t your life or your loves.”
The Doctor quickly realized this last on was an analogy too far, as River grabbed the sides of the gurney, sitting up and shaking in rage. “Don’t you DARE compare the girlish adventures Mels had to what we had,” River shouted. “Don’t you dare.”
“River, I’m so, so sorry, but I’m just not that Doctor anymore.”
“You told me your name!”
“No, I didn’t,” the Doctor said slowly and forcefully. “He did. Not me.” Rescuing River from the Library had seemed to the Doctor like such a good idea at the time. It was supposed to be such a good start for him: heroic, sophisticated, scientific, very clever very Doctorish, if he thought so himself. He hadn’t anticipated this reaction, this ungrateful reaction, on River’s part.
“Then why did you take me out of CAL?” River asked. “At least there I could be with you my you through Vastra’s connection. Now I’ve lost that forever.” She put her head in her hands.
The Doctor tried to keep his voice even. “I took you out for the same reason, when I was your Doctor’s predecessor, that I put you in there: to save your life. It’s the same thing, it turns out, I did with Gallifrey. I put it in a holding place until the day it could come back safely. I haven’t been able to bring Gallifrey back yet, but I found a way to bring you back.”
“So you recreate my body, you take me out of the computer and put me in the body, and now you’re just going to walk away from me like, like,” she looked at Clara, “a used-up companion?” Clara blanched and stepped back against the TARDIS. “Oh, yes,” River continued, speaking at Clara, “the Doctor can walk away from anyone, anyone at all. You didn’t realize that until just now, did you?” River looked back to the Doctor. “I certainly didn’t.”
“River,” said the Doctor, “you and I, we’ll always be--“
“I swear I’ll make you regenerate again if you say, ‘We’ll always be good friends.’”
The Doctor pursed his lips. “Be angry if you wish. I’m the one, after all, who took you out of the fantasy of a virtual world and gave you your real life back,” he continued with thinly veiled sarcasm.
“Yes, it was a virtual, fantasy world, but one where I could see you and talk to you. I just couldn’t actually touch you.”
“And how is that different now?”
River stared at the Doctor. He could see he might have gone a bit too far with that last point. How did something that started with such a good idea on his part devolve into this?
“It is different now,” River said, “because the Doctor I was with in my virtual world was a good man.”
“Am I a good man?” the Doctor asked the room. “I don’t really know yet who I am.”
River jumped off the gurney, staggering as she landed. “I can tell you who you are. You are a wicked, wicked man. The Doctor I knew made an effort not to hurt the people he cared about -- even if he didn’t always succeed.”
The Doctor realized that she was trying to hurt him with her words the way he, apparently, had hurt her with his. This was going so badly. He forced himself to try for a gentler approach, reaching to take her arm to assist her in standing, but she pushed it away.
“I’m going to find the Vashta Nerada. Getting eaten by them will hurt less than looking at you.”
“River, please, wait,” the Doctor implored. There had to be a way to recover the situation. This is not what he had wanted or intended at all. Was it really true that he was, in this new body, not a good man, one who thoughtlessly did and carelessly said hurtful things? He would have to think about that later, but right now he had to go after her. In this state, she might well run into the Vashta Nerada, and he could not bear the thought that he would be the cause of that.
The Doctor started to go after River, but after she took fewer than a dozen steps, River collapsed to the floor and turned around to sit against the wall. A golden light began to flow from her head and hands. She held her hands out before her to look at them. “Yes, of course. I suppose it makes sense.” She turned her head to give the Doctor another venomous look. “Goodbye, ‘Sweetie.’ This has started to wear a bit thin.”
“What this is she talking about?” Clara asked the Doctor. She had pried herself away from the TARDIS and was now standing by the Doctor’s elbow.
“I don’t know,” the Doctor said. “Could be the DNA isn’t working right. Could be that it is working right, if she feels there’s nothing left in this life for her. Of course, it could be she’s just tired of talking to me.”
The full force of the regeneration hit. The Doctor had managed to use his own active regeneration energy not just to reconstitute River’s body from her DNA, but also to imbue it with the power of regeneration itself. When the light faded, the Doctor and Clara saw what looked almost like a doll in the now-outsized green dress. But it wasn’t a doll; rather a small, older woman, with a pixie cut of nearly white hair. As they approached her, they could see the lines in her face and the veins of her hand. The front of the dress threatened to fall away for lack of support, but as the Doctor leaned in to lift it to a respectable level, the woman opened her eyes. “What do you think you’re doing?” she said, fixing her mouth hard with disapproval.
“It’s all right, I’m the Doctor.”
“Hmm, seems more likely you’re playing doctor.” As hard as the mouth was, it was balanced by the woman’s eyes, glowing almost a TARDIS blue, full of mirth.
“River, do you know who I am, and who you are?”
“River? Why do you call me that?”
“It’s your name: River Song.”
The woman snorted. “River Song? Sounds like something primitive rainforest people would come up with. My name is . . . .” She stopped, looked puzzled, and then nodded emphatically. “My name is Melody Williams.”
“Melody, I --” the Doctor stopped as the eyes joined the mouth in icy reproach. “I mean, Ms Williams. I am the Doctor. Do you remember me?”
Now the eyes became searchlights, beaming into the Doctor’s own eyes. “Yes.” She stood up, not looking away. The mouth actually turned up slightly at the corners as if testing out a smile, but not fully committing to it. “You’ve been both very good and very bad to me . . . .”
“Yes,” the Doctor replied, “I’m sorry about that. I’m still trying to figure out who I am . . . .”
“Don’t interrupt me, young man.”
The Doctor straightened. “Sorry, Mum.”
She kept searching his eyes. “Hmm, maybe not so young. Not so young at all. Anyway, as I was saying, I think I have also been very good and very bad to you at different times, so perhaps we’re even and can start fresh.” This time, her mouth matched the smile in her eyes.
The Doctor found himself staring back into the woman’s eyes, unable to look away. He wasn’t sure what he was feeling, but it felt like something familiar from the past. Who was he? Was he a good man? A millennium or so ago, his answer was clear, and it took Rose to begin to change his mind until, finally, the answer became clear the other way. He had been a good man. He had saved Gallifrey; he had saved Trenzalore. Yet here he was, in theory starting out from a much better place than from which he had ever started since the Time War, and yet he, and River of all people, were questioning whether he was good.
The Doctor shook his head to clear it and looked closely at the woman. Here was someone who knew him from before. Both of them were starting new lives. Who would this woman turn out to be? Who would this Doctor be? Maybe they could help each other answer those questions. He knew he wanted her approval, at least. The Doctor took a chance. “Well, I’m still getting used to things, but I think I would like to start fresh with you, too.” The Doctor smiled, offered her his hands, which she took as she stood up.
“Interesting,” she said, looking down at her body. “We seem to have retained the same age ratio in our appearances.”
“Well, don’t forget that I’m even more older than you than I used to be!”
“Oh, I know that.” She released his hands and wrapped her arms tightly around the Doctor. “Hello, Geezy,” she said into his chest. The Doctor hugged back. The peaceful feeling he had experienced after waking in the TARDIS returned. Maybe, with some more practice, he could be a good man, after all.
Suddenly, the woman broke away, brought her hands to his sides and, with a look of concerned confusion, demanded, “What the hell is going on with these kidneys?”