The Pond Inheritance

By Laura Schiller

Crossover: Across the Universe/Doctor Who

Copyright: Beth Revis/BBC

When Dr. River Song, archeologist, convict and very new bride, stepped out of the TARDIS for her promised honeymoon tour, she was not quite pleased to find herself in a white laboratory full of metal shelves. There was a distinct chill in the air, too, and not only in her mood.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, Doctor, but this doesn't look like Planet Barcelona to me."

"That's because it isn't," said the Doctor, annoyingly matter-of-fact. "We're on the starship Godspeed. Earth's first-ever generation ship. Seriously, one little economic depression – okay, maybe four or five – in the 2020's and suddenly they all start zooming off into space. America started it, of course. Pioneering spirit and all that. And no, River, you cannot blame my piloting this time. For whatever inscrutable reason, the Old Girl wants us here."

He patted the TARDIS and moved ahead of River on his lanky legs, whipping out his sonic screwdriver for any sense of trouble. She followed with a wry smile of resignation, figuring that as his wife she might as well get used to this.

One row of shelves over, they found what they were looking for.

She had once been told, a lifetime and several apocalypses ago, that the Doctor never interfered with history – unless he saw children crying. The slight female figure on the white-tiled floor, sitting in a puddle of water between two slowly defrosting cryogenic tanks, was not quite a child anymore – but judging by her huddled posture, her quiet sniffs and the fall of bright orange hair hiding her face, she might as well have been. River felt transported back to her childhood – her second childhood in Leadworth. "Tell me I'm not crazy, Mels," she heard a Scottish voice whisper. "Please tell me you still believe in him."

"Amy … " she murmured, involuntarily taking a step closer.

The red-haired girl looked up, jumped to her feet – giving them just enough time to see that her face was a stranger's – and ran up to them, smiling through her tears.

"River!" she exclaimed, throwing her arms around the older woman's neck.

River's first thought was, Please don't tell me you're my future daughter. Her next was, Does the Doctor know about this? Peering over at him, she was relieved to see him looking even more gobsmacked than she did.

"Close your mouth, sweetie, you'll let the flies in," she told him. "And as for you … Amy … " Carefully detaching herself from her armful of crying teenager, she held the girl at arm's length and took a closer look at her face. "You'll have to forgive me, but I'm not sure who you are. I'm a time traveller, you see. I tend to meet people out of order. Do you understand?"

The girl nodded, wiped her tears with a cloth handkerchief from her pocket and made a nervous effort to stand up straight, suddenly conscious of meeting a pair of strangers. Come to think of it, there was a resemblance. She had the Pond eyes, a soft spring green, and that same dusting of freckles – although, thankfully, she had been spared the Williams nose. River tried not to notice how bitterly disappointed those green eyes looked for a moment, until that look was blinked away by a determined smile.

"Oh … right. Yeah. Well, I'm Amy Martin. I … we're cousins. Once removed, I think is this phrase. Your grandmother – Tabitha Pond – is my mom's sister."

"So you're Maria and Robert's daughter? From the States?" She remembered, vaguely, eavesdropping on Tabitha's often spirited phone conversations with her sister Maria, who had caused such an uproar in the family by leaving behind a lucrative research position in London to marry a soldier from Colorado. The confusing similiarity of their daughters' names, whether deliberate or not, had been another affront. Apparently, the women of this family all had tempers to match their hair.

Amy nodded, giggling slightly, as the banality of the situation – just two distant relatives catching up, in the most unlikely time and place – caught up to her. Her smile quickly faded, however, and she hurriedly turned around to push the two cryotanks back into their shelves and shut the doors.

"My – my parents," she said, swallowing back tears. "You don't want to see that. Anyway - " She deliberately turned away from River and held out her hand to the Doctor, who had been doing his tactful best to fade into the walls and, as usual, failing spectacularly. "You must be Eleven, right? I haven't seen you with that face since I was - "

"Spoilers!" he sang out, holding up his hand, grinning at the implication that Amy knew several of his incarnations. "No giving away when we'll visit you."

Amy rolled her eyes at him, making River smile despite herself.

"This is brilliant," he continued, pumping Amy's hand up and down while using the other to scan her with his sonic screwdriver. "You really are related to River! Someone remind me to give my TARDIS a refit. Oh, and there!" One beep of the sonic, and Amy's red, puffy eyes looked noticeably better. "One of the many benefits of being married to River, I'm always finding new uses for this. Now, Amy Martin, my cousin-by-marriage with the fantastically ginger hair … what do you say to taking a little trip?"

"In your time machine?"

"TARDIS," he corrected her. "Short for Time And Relative Dimensions In Space. And yes."

For a moment, underneath her joy, Amy's eyes looked positively hungry.

"You have no idea how long I've waited for this," she said. "I'd do anything to get off this floating box."

Tell me about it, cousin, thought River, who had a Stormcage cell waiting for her at the end of her honeymoon.

"Well then," said the Doctor, snatching up Amy's hand in one hand and River's in the other. "Come along, ladies. I have just the planet to show you."