She'd been fixed. That's what everyone said. The glitch of her face, gone. The IQ shift kept intact. But Miss Evangelista didn't feel fixed. She still saw the world was broken, even though the others loved her now and she was just as smart - no, smarter - than them. Nobody questioned the change, except for her. She didn't want to be smart, she wanted to be herself, even if that self was a spectre in the system.
Proper Dave and Other Dave, Anita, River - everything was perfect now, all of them friends and lovers and exactly what they wanted. It wasn't, though. Nobody wanted this. They were explorers (and a personal assistant). They wanted to discover, to tread new ground. Not live an idylic, problem-free life where they sometimes pretended to be scientists but other times pretended to be a family. Whenever she felt herself slipping into that urge to accept it, why couldn't just be happy? she reminded herself of Donna. Donna Noble, the kind lady who wasn't kind because a computer programmed her to be, who made mistakes and laughed at her but felt bad, later. She wasn't perfect, but she tried. Evangelista missed that.
They were all outside on the lawn, CAL playing with Other Dave while the adults talked. Evangelista sat with a smile on her lips as artificial as the world around them. When CAL left and Dr Moon left and they were alone - the five who died and couldn't die - she spoke.
"I'm not smart, I'm not an archaeologist, or an explorer like you all," she told them. Their attention turned to her words like molasses, fighting through the siren song of the system. Just be happy. No trouble, no conflict. "I'm not smart - I'm just -" she remembered the story she told Donna. "I'm just plankton. Do you understand what I mean?" Her pretty, pretty eyes flickered between each, searching for some glimmer of hope.
Anita was beside her, a hand laid comfortingly on her arm. She didn't understand, Evangelista knew before she even spoke. "What do you mean? You're not plankton, Evangelista. You're the smartest person I know."
"I am, but I shouldn't be. You - all of you, in real life - thought I was stupid, and you were right. I mistook the escape pod for a bathroom. Twice." Evangelista laughed and it broke like thin ice over a cold, drowning sea of irrational fears. Nothing could hurt her here, so she clung to the hurt that memory brought. Evangelista knew what really happened, but nobody wanted to hear about how scared she had been, just how stupid. She hadn't wanted them to know, either. Let them think she couldn't read signs rather than she worked herself up into such a frenzy over nothing that she'd rather risk dying in an escape pod than learning the mysteries of the library. It was hard to explain, even with all her new-found intellect. She had just been scared: for herself, for Mr Lux, for the little girl in the computer. Evangelista had known about Charlotte, still felt for her despite the growing hate - the hate was mostly directed at herself, as a part of Charlotte's world. She knew because she had been Mr Lux's personal everything. Even with her stupidity, and her anxiety, and her fears, she had been necessary to him. Just as she was, and now she wasn't.
It had been so long out there, Mr Lux was likely just dust on the wind. Why fight? Why struggle to be who she had been, to be deeply, dangerously flawed? Why not just be happy?
Donna. Donna. Donna. Donna. She was flawed yet those flaws made her better than any perfect person could be. Evangelista knew in her heart that, wherever Donna had gone, she had done the best she could and it had been wonderful. Donna's fears and sorrows in the library, she'd struggled through them for her. She comforted Evangelista between the tears and the horror. Evangelista had just been handed her intellect on a computer hiccough, and she watched Donna, learned about her, but barely been able to help in return. Evangelista didn't know how to help, not instinctively like Donna. She was smart, she shouldn't be so useless.
It hurt to know so much, to know she was useless regardless of intellect. Evangelista wanted it gone. She wanted to be sweet, simple, airhead Evangelista again, with nary a thought between her two brain cells - yes, those words hurt, but she'd take them because they were truth and they were honest and everything here was a lie.
"It's not real," she said desperately, and oh she'd gone and started crying. It was just so frustrating, their blank gazes, their false comforts. "Please, everyone. You're so smart, so clever - please just look."
They looked, but didn't see. The world was exactly as it should be, cool breezes, green grass, stately buildings. And that was the problem. No world was exact, no world had no flaws. The discomfort she caused them passed like clouds across the sun. Evangelista sat down and buried her face in her hands.
"Everyone," River said. The word carried the order to leave. She placed an arm on Evangelista's shoulder like Anita had done once they were alone, and Evangelista looked up. "It's okay." Her hand came up to cut off Evangelista's protest. "I know. I - this isn't the world I wanted, either. I have to be reminded of that, sometimes. That there's so much more out there. But you see it all the time, don't you?" Evangelista nodded. "What's wrong is that you never learned how to handle a mind like that. You didn't grow up with it, and it's eating you up inside."
Evangelista let out a breath she didn't need and didn't know she'd been holding. River, oh brilliant River with her blue journal and wild hair and wild thoughts. She knew. She knew.
Evangelista flung her arms around River's shoulders, and the hug she received was warm, genuine. They separated but kept their arms on each other, kept close. The two realest things in this world. River looked just as relieved as Evangelista felt. How long she must have thought she, too, was the only one, because Evangelista couldn't bring herself to speak. Everyone else had been happy, she'd thought.
"The Doctor - you know, the man who we met at the library - told me a story once, about an amazing woman."
"Donna," Evangelista supplied. "Donna Noble."
River laughed. "Yes, but why her? The Doctor's met a lot of amazing women, a lot of us more amazing even than him."
"She's the most amazing woman I've ever met," Evangelista said, blushing as River laughed again, not cruelly, though, like so many others. The archaeologist settled in beside her, shoulder to shoulder, thigh to thigh, and began to speak.
"She saved the universe, you know. But that's a different story. I want to tell you about what happened afterwards.
When she saved the universe, she underwent something called a meta-crisis. Gave her the mind of a Time Lord, but she was human. It filled her up to overflowing, and she began to burn. She couldn't handle that sort of mind, and it hurt enough to kill her.
"So the Doctor locked that part of her away, but she could never remember who she was with him. She lost everything. He told me - and this hurt him so, so deeply - he told me she begged him not to. She would rather die than lose what she'd gained. Not the Time Lord brain, but her experiences with him, saving planets and seeing stars explode. Her desire to be more than she thought she could be. She'd learned so much with him."
"She lost all that?" Evangelista asked, careful not to let it show that she meant 'she lost me?' because she was used to not mattering to people as much as they mattered to her.
River nodded, then fell silent. She let Evangelista ruminate on the story.
"I would lose her."
"You know better than anyone how this world works."
"If I fix myself, make myself like before, I would have to rewrite from the original data, from before I died. I barely knew her, then."
"In the words of the Doctor: I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry." River slipped her arm around Evangelista's shoulder and gave her a side-hug, then kissed her on the temple. Evangelista still felt in her every action the happiness at finding a kindred soul, as that was all they had anymore. "I'm sure it can be done, but it is your choice."
"It's killing me," she muttered, aware of the irony that her salvation from death was itself a kind of death. "I have trouble, some days, remembering who I was before, remembering why it even matters. Why can't I just be happy?"
She didn't need sleep, except thinking drove her mad, so Evangelista begged the day off and just closed her eyes, sank into the code that passed for a subconscious now. Let her thoughts cycle on automatic. Normally things would jump from when she fell asleep to her waking up, but she needed to not think so halted that process.
She dreamt she was plankton. Phytoplankton fed zooplankton fed krill fed fish fed bigger fish fed a woman with red hair and loud voice who was drowning in a forgetful ocean the color of a blue journal, a blue box. She was plankton. She was supposed to be plankton.
Evangelista woke up. She hoped this was the right choice.
"River?" When she looked up, Evangelista motioned for her to come. Soon, sooner than if it had been real life, they were on the edge of the ocean. The sun was high, waves lapped at their feet and spit up white foam in striations along the beach. Out farther, the water glistened like diamonds, so bright it should have hurt to look. It didn't hurt, because nothing hurt, except feelings. The wind blew with the quietest of whispers. Donna. Donna. Donna.
"I take it you've made your choice? I'll support you, whatever you decide," River said. Evangelista was smart enough - had always been, from experience, to know when people were hurting and hiding the hurt - to know she was lying. She'd be alone if Evangelista rebooted herself, alone in her knowledge of a world beyond what they could imagine. A world that didn't need imagining to exist.
She took River's hand in her own. River was strong, not like Evangelista, but that didn't mean she needed to always be the strong one. "I won't leave you." A sigh, a clutch of fingers worn rough by work done in a different body, in a different world around her own soft ones. "I realized something. Genius or dunce, I'm still me. I'm still afraid of silly things, and I don't speak up, and I cry a lot. But I try. I want to be more - more than I can be here, more than what a misplaced decimal made me."
"What do you suggest we do then, Miss Evangelista?"
Just be happy. But happiness wasn't eternal, or else it would simply be the way things were. Happiness needed struggle to be properly defined. This mind was her struggle. It let her weigh the odds, calculate the risks, but she had to fight against what her mind told her was impossible.
"Well," she began rather modestly. River had said 'we'. They were in this together. Evangelista couldn't help but to grin the pretty grin that was her own. "I'm a genius, you're the cleverest person I know, and we're in the biggest library in existence. Let's do something impossible, Professor. Let's save Donna Noble."