Like Mother Like Daughter

Amy and Rory wonder how they could have produced such a daughter as River Song.


“I always thought, when I had a daughter, she’d be more like me,” Amy said as she watched the Doctor and River arguing over the croquet rules in the meadow behind the medieval castle.

They weren’t actually in the past this time, but in the present, or near enough, in the 1980s. They had decided on a lakeside picnic, and found this tumbledown castle as the perfect site. Apparently the Doctor had had something to do with its tumbledown nature at some time in the past.

Rory shifted on their picnic blanket, watching his daughter and son-in-law. “River’s a lot like you,” he said thoughtfully, still amazed and somewhat unnerved by the realization that the canny warrior woman they’d come to know was actually his daughter.

Amy turned to him, eyebrows raised. He looked up and saw. “She is,” he protested. “She’s smart, beautiful, brave as she can stare, sexy as sin and totally impossible.”

“Ah!” Amy shoved him on the shoulder. “Why thank you very much, Mr. Pond!”

Rory grinned at her affronted tone and pulled her down on the checkered blanket with him.

She snuggled her head on his shoulder and they watched as the Doctor and River reinvented the game of croquet, arranging the balls and hoops and stakes, laying out geometric angles, and taking impossible shots, knocking each other’s balls off trees and stonework and once into the lake, as if they were playing a particularly large game of trick billiards.

River smirked at the Doctor as he waded into the lake, his pantlegs rolled up over his skinny legs. When he wasn’t looking she stole his shoes and socks and hid them in the crook of a tree. When he turned back after knocking his croquet ball back onto shore, River was standing sedately at the water’s edge, radiating innocence.

“See?” Rory said from their inclined vantage point. “Just like you.”

Amy elbowed him in the stomach.