Danielle Song would describe herself as a lot of things. An avid reader, a little shy but also quite talkative. She was rather pretty, incredibly smart and always humble. She could be resourceful when she needed to be, and she was close to her mother and father. She was a lot of things, she would freely admit, but confusing really wasn't one of them.

That was why the Doctor's confused look just baffled her even more than he seemed to be. He'd never looked like that at her. Depending on the body he was wearing he could be kind, or dismissive, or even cheeky. They could have a laugh between each other, no problem. They needed to get along, after all. They were family.

Plus, her mum did love him a lot. Even though she had been 'married' many times, the Doctor was the only one that Danni ever considered her actual partner. From the floppy-haired idiot onwards, the Doctor was part of her mother's life and, therefore, part of hers.

Danni could handle the Doctor staring at her like she had two heads. She was incredibly good at surprising him, and even better at impressing him. She wasn't sure, though, how she felt about him staring at her like she'd broken his hearts.

"Mum?" she asked, looking at River and looking distinctly uncomfortable. "I-I'm not sure what is happening, but it totally wasn't my fault."

The Doctor, who had been able to do nothing but stare at the woman who was supposed to be his wife, suddenly jolted at her words. His gaze, his attention, turned firmly onto River and he growled slightly. Danni backed up and away from him, towards her mother, where she knew she'd be safe.

"Did-Did I do something?" she asked River. "I mean, I really was at Stormcage this time. I promise. I didn't run or anything. I was waiting, like I said I would."

River, who didn't remember having a daughter at all and only had a recording from the woman in front of her to go off, just looked her over for a moment. She seemed to be quickly becoming anxious and agitated. "Why would you think that we thought you'd left Stormcage?" she asked.

The Doctor shook his head. "What did you do?" he asked. "River, what did you do?!"

Danni's brows furrowed, mistaking his anger at the sudden change in situation at being at what she said. "Well, you know…" she started leadingly but her mother didn't seem to understand what she was implying so she shrugged. "I keep escaping," she explained. "And, after being caught up in that shootout that I really didn't start last time, you told me to lay low for a bit. So I did. Then I was in here."

The Doctor strode forward and past Danni, much to her surprise, straight up to River. He looked positively livid. "What did you do?" he demanded lowly. "Do you have any idea, any idea at all what you did?!"

River shrugged. "I did what you asked," she said. "I talked to my younger self and got her to sleep with Captain Flash. Maybe this is the way the universe wants it to be."

"No," he snarled. "Never. Go away." He motioned behind him to the hallway. "I need to think and you can't be here for that." She didn't move and he stared her down. "Now."

She sighed, annoyed. "Fine," she snapped. "But you can't blame me for this."

The Doctor didn't watch her go; he was just happy for her to be away from him. He'd have dropped her back off in her cell if he didn't think that she was key to what had gone wrong.

How could she think she was his step daughter? How could she think that he was married to River?

He had been so certain that his plan was going to work. All he'd had to do was fix the time line, get Jack to River on time, and everything else should have fallen back into place. He should have been dropping River off for a completely different reason, and he and Danielle should have been travelling the universe once again. Now he seemed to have a bigger mess to fix.

He braved a glance over at Danni, who was looking at him with an almost concerned look on her face. He couldn't help the small smile tugging at his lips. At least, even with the madness going on, she was alive, safe, and stable in a time line that wasn't being erased.

"Wow," she said lowly. "You must be really mad at her."

He nodded. "Usually," he replied. His curiosity got the better of him, though. "How do you know?"

"Because you shouted at her," she explained, again with a bit of a shrug. "Even when you two are doing that, you know, insulty-flirty thing you do, you don't tend to raise your voice at her. What did she do?"

"She's changed the course of history, taken my wife from me, then had the audacity to marry me herself," he retorted.

"Oh, the usual, then?" He chuckled slightly and she smiled at him. "I'm sure it's not as bad as you think, pops."

"No, it's worse," he replied. He gave her another look over, desperate to just shake her until she remembered who she was.

"What did she do, then?" Danni asked him, walking over to the console. She put her hands on an emptier part of the top and pushed herself up until she was sat on it. Her legs dangled adorably in the air and it felt like a rather un-Danni-ish move for her to do, but he didn't point that out.

"She has fundamentally changed the fabric of the universe," he ranted dramatically. "I don't know how, or what she did, but we're all from three separate time lines and I don't how to revert the change because I'm not sure she's even aware of what she did, so I have to work out what's changed to fix it."

"Really?" Danni asked, sounding intrigued. "So, what, in your version of events you two aren't married?"

"In my version of events you're…" He paused in his words. She called him her 'step-father', and 'pops'. He was a parental figure to her and if he wanted to keep her close, did he really want to scare her away by telling her how they were intimate instead? Did he want to make her feel uncomfortable enough to leave, where he couldn't keep an eye on her?

"You're not the one in Stormcage, River is," he finished. She frowned.

"That makes no sense," she replied bluntly. "Why would mum be in Stormcage when I'm not? She's only there because she got caught trying to break me out."

The Doctor scoffed slightly. "No, that's not…" He paused for a moment. "Danielle, why are you in prison?"

She shifted, looking slightly uncomfortable as she stared at her shoes. "Oh, do we have to go into that now?" she asked. "It's old news, we don't need to discuss it. And I apologised. You said you accepted it."

He moved over, dipping his head down to look at her encouragingly. "I need to know so I can figure out what is happening," he explained gently. "And I'm sure, no matter what you do, I really did accept it. I'd never stay mad at you."

Her brows furrowed, as if his words didn't correlate with her experience with her own Doctor, which baffled him all the more but also made him even more determined to fix the wrong in the universe. "Well, I guess, if you're right about the time line thing, it never happened to you…"

"Exactly." He straightened again. "If I can pinpoint the exact point the time line changed, then I can go back and fix it before we get any bigger issues."

"Like what?"

He opened his mouth, ready to tell her the horrors he imagined the universe to be like without her being by his side. He then decided that worrying her probably wasn't the best idea. "Messing with time normally comes with consequences," he offered. "What did you do?"

She shifted again. "Alright," she reluctantly agreed. "But there is a bit of a backstory that you don't know, so, you know… Don't be angry."

"I doubt I will be."

"I… um… I kinda, well, I kinda killed you."

He blinked, surprised. "Sorry?" he asked.

"It sounds worse than it is!" she protested. "And, you know, you didn't actually die. I just…" She growled slightly. "This is stupid. You know all this!" She jumped off the console. "And yet you always keep bringing it up! 'Danielle, you're not moving on'. 'Danielle, you're only acting out because you're still upset'. 'Danielle, trauma can take a toll on anyone.' I'm not a child! I've served over 200 years of my sentence, for god's sake…"

"Danielle," he barked, interrupting her before she could continue ranting. She paused in her pacing to look at him, eyes blazing. "I need you to tell me what happened. All of it."

She didn't look very happy. "From when?" she asked, reluctantly.

Good question. She obviously had a lot of life to go over. "Start from when you first came to this universe," he suggested. "When did you land? What Doctor was it?"

"Came to this universe?" she repeated. "What do you mean by that?"

"When you first got your vortex manipulator," he clarified. "When you were brought from your other universe, the one you grew up in."

"I-I grew up here," she said slowly. "I grew up in Leadworth. Well, for the most part."

This, evidently, was also quite surprising to him and Danni was starting to actually believe what he was saying about being in different time lines. It sounded a bit preposterous, but then again she did travel time and space almost constantly, so messes weren't exactly unheard of. But for the three of them, all knowing different lives, to be in the same TARDIS sounded a bit too farfetched, even for her. And she knew the Doctor could be incredibly dramatic at time.

But he wasn't being, was he?

With a swallow that came with her reluctance to speak about her past, she moved back to lean against the console. "I grew up with my mum, my grandad and my gran in Leadworth," she started. "My gran met you when she was a kid, and there was a whole thing about her parents being sucked into a crack and she grew up with and without them at the same time. You've always been in their lives, but when she found out she was pregnant with my mum, they stopped travelling. It was too late, though, and my mum had vague Time Lord-type qualities. When she about twenty, after hearing so many stories about you, she found one of your incarnations and started to travel with you on and off. She found it better to find her own transport. She used to say there was too much ego in the TARDIS with you both there. Then she met my dad, Jack, and got knocked up with the best mistake in the universe." She shot him a cheeky look. "That's me."

He didn't seem to even recognise that part of the story. "She grew up with Amy and Rory?" he asked. She nodded.

"Of course she did," she said. "When I was born, she took me back to see them but she found it difficult to raise me, so I lived with them while she went around the universe, you know, being 'River Song'. And I grew up with my grandparents until I was..." He stepped a little closer as she thought back through the fog in her memories. "I think I was fourteen, I might have been a little younger. I'm not sure now, I find it… That's the Silence, though, isn't it? Fuck with your memories."

A heavy pit of realisation hit the Doctor. "They took you instead, didn't they?" he asked. She nodded.

"I was there for a long time," she continued. "They filled my mind with nonsense I can't remember then, when you all finally found me, just let me go. No one knew what they'd done to me." She smiled fondly. "That's where my mum regenerated, you know? She still has a load of bodies left, but she gave one up for me. It was… I still appreciate that."

"And then, when you were older, they came back for you, didn't they?" he asked. "Took you to a beach where they had you kill me."

"I actually don't remember any of it," she admitted. "All I remember is waking up in a cell in Stormcage with the feeling something awful had happened. You came to explain the whole story to me, about how you weren't mad, but that I was safer there because eventually they'd realise I hadn't completed my job. And so, I became the woman who killed the Doctor. Serving twelve thousand consecutive life sentences for something I don't remember doing."

"Except, occasionally, you escape and jaunt around the universe with your mother and her husband," he added for her. She shrugged again, once again looking rather smug.

"No one can keep me locked up for long," she bragged. "Who wants to stay within grey walls when there's a universe to see?"

He chuckled, agreeing completely. She had always enjoyed travelling too much to stay in one place for too long. He reached out, grabbing her hand without much thought and walking her around the console. "Everything has changed," he explained. "I need to run some tests, see if I can pinpoint exactly when the weakest point is."

She allowed him to drag her, which made him wonder just how many times this other Doctor had dragged her places. He began connecting her up to the console, trying not to think about the wife he'd lost. He was going to get her back, after all. Focusing on solving the mystery going on was a lot easier than on the anguish that was threatening to overspill. She also now wasn't being erased from history, either, so he held onto that. If he couldn't fix this…

At least she was safe. She was safe, alive and doing what she did best. He could live with that.

Maybe.

Danni was watching him work, thinking of how strange that he wasn't the Doctor she knew and yet he moved like he was; like he had one train of thought and things like manners weren't part of that when there was something to work on.

But she was curious what was different about him. "What's your Danni like?" she asked. "You said she was from a different universe. How does that work?"

He paused for a moment, wondering yet again if he should tell her the whole truth. "My Danni," he started. "My Danni was given up by her mother to save her from what you went though. She-" He smiled to himself. It was so strange, explaining his wife to her face, but she was the one topic he could talk all day about, especially when he missed her as much as he did. "-She's smart, kind, and incredibly beautiful."

"Nothing different there, then," she interjected and he laughed.

"And modest," he said teasingly. She looked a little disappointed.

"Oh, that's where we differ," she replied. "We don't know modesty in my family."

Thinking back on Amy, River and Jack, he completely believed her. "She can always say the right thing when something big and obvious is staring me right in the face but I'm too stupid to see it."

"Like now?" she guessed and he nodded.

"I know there's something I'm not seeing," he muttered. The results from the scanning he'd set off already were showing everything as completely normal compared to what he'd expect from Danni. He'd have to go further afield. "Something right in front of me that I really could use her pointing out."

"Maybe that's the problem," she replied. "Maybe your brain is too used to her saying something rather than working it out yourself."

"I am quite capable of working it out myself!" he huffed. Danni shrugged.

"I don't know, you're not working it out right now and it's right in front of you," she replied.

"You know, my Danni is much nicer than you," he grumbled.

"You would think that, she's your wife."

"No, she's just…" He trailed off and blinked, surprised. She had her eyebrow raised, like she was daring him to disagree. "What makes you say that?"

"Because you've been nice to me and horrid to my mother," she offered. "Plus, you looked at me the way my Doctor normally looks at her. It's sweet." She pulled a face. "Well, no, it's gross. It's just gross. You're ancient and married to my mother. But it was obvious, really."

He didn't pay much attention to her attack at his age. "That's it," he said. She frowned.

"What's 'it'?" she asked.

"You!" he exclaimed, surprising her. "You're not my Danni at all. You don't say it out loud because you're not talking to anyone! You notice it all and figure it out yourself." He began unplugging her from the console, realising that none of the tests were going to help if the time line thought she was supposed to be there. He chucked the wires away. "What's wrong?"

"Well, you're raving like a madman and…"

"No, no, no, I know that's wrong," he dismissed. "What's wrong right now? What doesn't feel right? What has stood out to you?"

She looked a little confused before her brows furrowed slightly. "Well, there was one thing," she admitted slowly. "Something that didn't feel right when you said it."

He nodded encouragingly. "What was it?"

"Well, my mum loves you. Like, a lot," she started slowly. "And she can be very single-minded sometimes."

He tried his hardest not to grimace at the idea of River liking him, let alone loving him. "That is wrong," he agreed, ignoring her glare. "But not to you."

"No, but her convincing herself to sleep with someone else on your command is," she replied. "And you're wanting to get your Danni back, which is something she definitely wouldn't want to do. She wouldn't want to go back to a universe where you weren't together."

The pit in his stomach was growing again, but he shook his head. "No, I'd know if she'd messed with the timeline. She was with me the entire time."

"All the time?" Danni prompted and he went to nod again, but paused. His hearts sank.

"Except when she was talking to herself," he realised. He glanced at the hallway. "She did something," he declared. "This is all her fault." He turned back to his wife, who had a small, smug look on her face. "You are absolutely amazing," he praised and she looked a little confused at the words. "Even when you're this strange version of yourself." He grabbed her hand, dragging her behind him again. "We need to find your mother. I need to know what she said."

Danielle Song really didn't know how to feel about being dragged around by her mother's husband. She knew that it wasn't unusual for the Doctor to pull people around, but she also knew that she wasn't being treated like a normal companion. It was just all very…uncomfortable.

But her mother wasn't anywhere. The TARDIS was normally rather good to Danni, what with her being a child of the TARDIS, but if she was hiding River then there had to be a reason. River Song had escaped.