A/N: So if you're unfamiliar with the video game The Eternity Clock, voiced by Matt Smith and Alex Kingston, River's diary contains entries about the times she met Doctors One through Nine with her vortex manipulator. Only her meeting with One is titled and contains the most detailed information. The other meetings I've constructed from her brief descriptions of the various incarnations. If you haven't read TEC diary entries, I recommend you do so. This series of ficlets make a lot of little references back to the information contained in them and is heavy on episodic throwbacks.

Nine Times

Prerequisites

"Mechanical repairs, I know, I know." River let her chin fall forward to her chest. "Why don't you pick a date to reschedule, Andi? Let me know." She dismissed the call just as an electronic voice began to respond with an apology. Oh, she'd been warned against dating androids, but she thought all the parts would be…stimulating. Turns out, not so much. "Rubbish," she muttered as she fell onto her dorm bed. "Androids are rubbish."

She spread her arms into a Christ-like position and her knuckles hit something hard. River rolled onto her side and stared at the spine of her history textbook. It seemed that everyone in the fifty-first century used electronic books, but not River Song. She'd grown up on Earth in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties. How could she not love books? They were the only place she could escape to before she finally escaped from Kovarian. It was only fitting that she'd paid extra for all of her textbooks to be specially printed. And she didn't even have to steal the funds, Professor Candy had developed a soft spot for her and given her a part-time job as his assistant in Luna's Antiquities Department.

History. She'd always had an issue with that in the nineties. Her teachers thought she was delusional, that she'd never grown out of Amelia's fairytales, but Mels knew better: The Doctor wasn't there to stop it. All of the death and destruction; he just didn't care. At least that's what Kovarian had drilled into her skull. But that day in Berlin, when she'd seen him crawling up the steps on his dying breath to save her parents, she realized that maybe—just maybe—she was wrong.

The first time she'd spoken to Professor Candy about enrolling at Luna, she'd told him she was looking for a good man. At halfway through her first semester, working on just her core classes, she still wasn't sure how she was going to find him. Not The Doctor, but the good man: the man who had begged her for help on those fateful steps. That was The Doctor that Amelia had told her stories about. But he'd also abandoned her. Five minutes, he'd said. It was easier when things were still black and white. The shades of gray were so messy.

River pushed herself into a sitting position against her headboard and opened the textbook in her lap. Volume IV. The text had been so expansive that her printed version had broken into several volumes, another reason she'd been strongly advised to use the electronic copy, but she liked the feel of the smooth cover and the smell of the ink on the grainy paper. Her inner masochist even savored the inconvenience of the occasional paper cut. As she pressed back each page, her eyes blanked across the print. She'd been assigned to read about the Mordee Expedition, but each time she tried she encountered the same problem: how could she ever trust history or the people who claimed to be its experts again?

A room com buzzed and River tossed the history text onto her pillow. She swung her legs off the bed. "Andi," she snapped as she initiated the link, "I thought I told you–"

"Ms. Song?"

River straightened. "Professor Candy. I–"

"Was expecting someone else," the old man's voice chortled. "I was just calling to see if you might be interested in attending a conference tomorrow evening. I know it's short notice, but something's arisen and I can't attend myself. I recalled your fascination with time travel and I thought, well, I thought you might like to take my seat."

"Time travel?" River asked curiously.

"Oh yes. Guest speakers from the Time Agency. Captain Hart, I believe."

"Captain Hart," River said, testing the name on her lips. She licked them. "Why, yes, Professor, I think I would be interested."

"Perhaps you could take notes for me?"

River turned to her mirror and fluffed her curls. "I can take much more than that…"