Senior Moment

River Song meets Wilfred Mott.


Wilf was having a cup of tea at the Senior Center while Donna and Sylvia shopped for clothes. He waved at a couple of friends.

Suddenly there was a ruffle of attention across the room. He turned to look and saw a truly gorgeous woman standing in the doorway. As she sauntered in, every male head in the room swiveled to watch her.

Strong, poised, confident, with a head of riotous curls and a body to make a man gnaw his own foot off. She looked to be in her forties. Wilf sighed, if only he was a decade younger...

She weaved her way athletically through the crowd. She came to stand by his table. He looked up in surprise.

"May I sit down?" she asked in a deep throaty voice that put him in mind of 1940's film stars.

He waved a hand in invitation, mute. Knowing he was the focus of every envious male eye in the room, he sat up straighter, proud, and tried not to look as tongue tied as he felt. Beautiful woman always did that to him.

She placed herself elegantly in her chair and leaned forward. "Wilfred Mott?"

His eyes widened. "Yes? Do I know you? I'm sure I would have remembered."

She fluttered a smile at him. "Charmer."

His chest puffed up a bit.

"I'm here about Donna," she said seriously.

His heart stuttered. "Donna!" He started to jump up. "Has something happened to Donna?"

"No! No." She laid a hand on his arm. "Nothing's wrong," she said gently. "I didn't mean to startle you."

He subsided back in his chair. "Don't scare an old man like that!"

"Not so old, Wilf," she said, her eyes becoming amazingly deep, far older than she looked, almost frightening. They reminded him of something, but he couldn't think what. She also sounded like she knew him.

"Who..?"

She smiled gently. "I'm the friend of a friend. I'd heard that Donna was having a problem."

"Which one?" he asked with long suffering patience.

Her eyebrow hiked up, eyes piercing. "She's having more than one?"

He waved a hand. "Work, marriage, children. Just life," he said.

She smiled, relieved. "I meant a more, unusual, problem."

His eyes sharpened, then darted quickly around the room to see if anyone else was listening. Most everyone had gone back to their own concerns.

"What are you talking about?" he whispered hoarsely.

"Fainting spells, headaches, a tendency to 'miss' when unusual things happen?" she prompted.

"How do you know about that?" he asked suspiciously. "Have you been watching us, is this some sort of government thing?"

She threw back her head and laughed. Heads turned. She ignored them.

She looked down at him with delight.

"He said you were a wily old bird," she said. She turned serious. "Has there been any trouble like that? If there is, just let us know, we'll take care of it."

"Let who know? Who are you? Who's 'he'?" Wilf asked, feeling worried, and out of his depth, and cranky about it.

"The Doctor. Although he doesn't know I've come."

Wilf sat back in surprise. He looked her over. "You know the Doctor?"

"You could say that," she said, her voice lightly sultry.

He leaned forward again, suddenly eager. "How is he?" he asked, worriedly.

"He's good," she said smiling. "He's excellent."

Wilf tapped the table nervously. "Last time I talked to him, he said he was going to regenerate. That the old him would die, and a new man would walk away."

She grimaced. "Yes, well, my Sweetie is prone to being overly dramatic. You do change when you regenerate, but it's not death. Rebirth more like."

He blinked at her wording. "'You' regenerate?" he asked.

Taking his clarification as a question, she smiled. "Yes, this isn't the body I was born in."

His eyes roamed down her. "Can I just say you chose well?"

She laughed. "Thank you," she nodded graciously.

He latched onto another part of her statement. "Your Sweetie?"

She held out a hand. "Let me introduce myself. Doctor River Song. Mrs. Doctor River Song." she stressed the possessive.

His eyebrows jumped high. His eyes brightened. "Oh, my dear girl!" He reached forward and pumped her hand enthusiastically. "He's married? You're married? To each other?" he said in confuddled delight.

"Yes. Irritating darling that he is." She shook his hand back, beaming at his pleasure.

He loosed her hand and leaned forward for a coze. "So, how is he? What's he like now? How did the regeneration go? How did you two meet?"

She chuckled at his eager cascade of words. The charming man. "He's fine. He's a bit different than when you knew him, still tall, still has messy hair, but happier, more relaxed."

"I can see why, with a wife like you," he said in admiration.

Really, she could become addicted to this.

"So how did you meet?" he asked, casually cradling his mug of tea.

"Actually, he met my mother first, when she was a child. She traveled with him for a while, once she was grown up. Like your Donna did."

"So you've known him all your life?" he asked.

"In a way." She shrugged. "But in the end, I saved him, and he saved me, and the rest all seemed to fall into place. Which," she said as she leaned forward, "is why I'm here."

"Donna," Wilf said sadly, cautiously eying this strange and rather magnificent woman.

"Yes." She smiled. "How is she?"

He realized she wasn't asking just for herself, but for the Doctor. Since the Doctor could never see Donna again, telling his wife was the next best way to get news to him.

Wilf puffed up with pride. "She's going to be giving me my second great-grandchild in a few months. She and Sylvia are out shopping for maternity clothes. She's happy, mostly. She uses that lottery money the Doctor got her to travel, and she's always on some crusade to help somebody.

"She's back home now until after the baby's born. Her husband won't let her travel when she's expecting, in case there are complications," he said rather worriedly. "But my great-granddaughter is smart as a whip." He beamed with grandfatherly pride. "The smartest little thing you've ever seen."

River smiled at him gently. "And yet you worry. About 'complications.' About how what was done to Donna will affect your grandchildren," she said observantly. He grimaced. She laid a hand on his arm. "You don't need to worry. I'm part Time Lord, part human. I was born with what my mother calls a 'time head.'" She rolled her eyes.

Wilf smiled at the timeless parent/child gesture. He looked her over hopefully. Strong, confident, intelligent, beautiful.

"Your grandchildren will have advantages because of their heritage. They will have been born with it. Unlike Donna."

She pulled something out of her pocket and laid it on the table between them. It was a pendant. A tiny red lacquered apple, no bigger than his pinkie fingernail, with a silver outline of an eye on the side. Suspended on a silver chain.

"Give this to Donna," the woman said. "Tell her it's because she's the apple of your eye. So she will wear it always."

He turned over the tiny plump apple with one finger, it was complete with little green stem and leaf. Just the sort of thing Donna would like.

"Why?" he asked suspiciously.

"It's a perception filter."

His eyebrows jumped up, remembering the Doctor turning a young woman into a cactus. "It makes her look like something else?" he asked, confused.

She smiled again. "No, this one works slightly differently to most perception filters. It will prevent anything Donna sees from triggering her self-defense mechanism. No more fainting whenever odd things happen. No more worries that she'll see something she shouldn't and trigger her memories. The perception filter will disassociate them from anything she's seen before, make it all seem new, just like to anyone else."

Wilf's eyes opened wide with hope. Donna's husband had become concerned with her frequent fainting spells. He and Sylvia had had a devil of a time convincing him not to take her to a doctor or neurosurgeon, for fear they'd discover the changes to her physiognomy. It was only her memory that was blocked, she still had a Time Lord brain.

She was fine, as long as she didn't remember, didn't access that huge archive of knowledge that would overload her, and burn her out.

"She could even meet the Doctor again, with no ill effects," the woman said, a tinge of hope in her voice.

Wilf looked up at her, a woman with fierce but gentle eyes. Loving eyes.

He scooped the pendant into his hand. A lump rose in his throat. "I'll give it to her when the baby is born. That'll give her even more reason to wear it."

River smiled. She stood up and held a beckoning hand down to him. "Mr. Mott," she asked formally, "would you give me the pleasure of having dinner with me?"

He screeched back his chair. He took her hand and tucked it into his arm. "Doctor Song, it would be my honor."

The white haired, elderly gentleman escorted the voluptuous siren out of the tea room.

All eyes followed them.

One of his peers sighed behind them. "Lucky bastard."