The Doctor's Wife
A Doctor Who Angst Fanfic
Summary:
Amy chases her husband. The Doctor loses a best friend. River loses her family, and she's the one left to wipe up the pieces.
Disclaimer: Guess who trapped the companions? Yeah, not me. Although frankly with my angst-whore muse I wouldn't be surprised if I did the same thing to you when I take control of the series. Err... spoilers?
A/N: This is written in a very similar style to "The Doctor's Song" which is why I have the current title that I'm not very happy with. If anyone has a better idea, by all means please share.
This is basically River's internal dialogue in the last scene(s) in The Angels Take Manhattan. Yes, I did intend this much depression. It's my coping mechanism.
Enjoy...? (I like it but it's not exactly "that made my day so much better!" material.)
(1270 words)
Life was hard and long and tiring. Today? Oh, today. The one thing she could see as solidly on the bright side of things was that – for perhaps the first time – she was the Doctor's wife, and he was her husband. For once, she didn't ask him where he was, where they were. She revelled in the feeling of his possessively roaming eyes.
But she had tempted fate and screwed over the universe too many times for such a positive to come without a rebound, and oh, was karma a bitch. And in the middle of something so cruelly domestic, too ("River, how many times do I have to tell you she'll clean herself off in the time vortex?" "As many as you think necessary, Sweetie; we're still giving her a proper washing.")
They had fixed things, things were fine. Family. Not something that River had ever really understood, not properly have one a certainly never a normal one, but maybe now she'd figure it out, only slightly wibbly wobbly and what have you. Things were, well—
Normal. She didn't even think the word; if she had, she would have seen far earlier. Too good to last. One problem with always hiding the damage from the Doctor was that you often accidentally hid important things from yourself. And that was when days like this happened.
"Amy! Come see this."
"What?"
"There's a gravestone for someone with the same name as me."
"What?"
...
"Doctor!"
It wasn't a title she had ever embraced – too confusing by itself; too painful in light of what she'd 'done' even with her name attached – but she reacted as if her mother had yelled her own name. It was a much more primordial link to the source of her life, a tie to her genetics, and a fear she understood all too well that yanked her from thoughts of American pubs.
For all he was her husband, even now, he comforted her mother first. Maybe he knew her mother's expressions better than her own; maybe she had just gotten too good at hiding her pain; maybe, just maybe, he only went to her mother because he could see the fixed point in time beginning too form. Even she, only Human+, could see it. Her father was gone, and her mother? Her mother had lived twelve years of her life on nothing more than dreams and fairy tales of the raggedy man dropped from the sky.
And, in the end, after all that? She was Amelia Williams, not Amy Pond.
"No. No! We can go and get him in the TARDIS. One more paradox—"
"Would rip New York apart."
"That's not true. I don't believe you."
Somehow – perhaps somewhere within herself, she was more certain than the Doctor of the fixedness of this point in time – she was certainly never sure afterwards why – the damn words tumbled out of her mouth.
"Mother, it's true."
And in that moment what was, before, an open-to-discussion-on-fixedness point became certain. The Doctor, as usual with goodbyes, ignored this. She certainly never said such a dirty word to him, only hello and oh, these days, what a hello it was.
It figured she would have a goodbye like this to make up for them.
"The Angel. Would it send me back to the same time? To him?"
"I don't know. Nobody knows."
What a convincing liar he could be, when he didn't need to be. How much easier it was to believe him, when he wasn't putting everything into making absolutely certain that you did believe him.
What a useless, awful waste it was now. What an angry, selfish way to keep someone away from goodbye.
"Doctor, shut up! Yes, yes it is."
Any when she was called, she came like any diligent daughter. She thought of so, so much time she had spent with her mother, with her father, getting into trouble and being sprung by her best friend – like any good mother would do – of good times and bad, of when she knew what the Doctor was worth but still her own mother didn't know who she was. She thought of the one time when her vortex manipulator was acting particularly possessed, and she had quite accidentally run into her parents in New York and their – apparent, anyway – ages were the right way around for once in their lives and why hadn't she bothered to check whether the date of that encounter made any sense?
She thought of the great adventure in front of her mother, her best friend, her sometimes role model. She thought of how lucky her mother was that her father was the kind of man who wanted to settle down and grow old together, and not someone who could not bear to see his wife age. Amy was the mothering type and even if she didn't have any more biological children of her own – and after River's birth, she couldn't exactly say she blamed her mother – Amy would find a way to mother the living hell out of a gaggle of children all her own. And maybe the loyal Roman would have a say in the matter as well.
"You look after him. And you be a good girl, and you look after him."
She would, because really, what choice did she have? He was one of those people who would wallow in self-pity if left alone for long enough, and she was one of the few people who understood him well enough to always be able to step in and clear up the mess he made when he failed to say goodbye.
So clear up she did. She packed away her sorrows like any experienced time traveller who never met her friends in exactly the right order could, left those emotions somewhere she could deal with them in private later, and turned on the compassion she had inherited from her father.
"What matters is this, Doctor. Don't travel alone."
"Travel with me, then."
Unexpectedly, the cap on her feelings cracked. For a fraction of a second, she felt the full force of the pain, the anguish, the oh god I just lost my parents. She needed time alone, time to scream, cry, and babble like a fool.
Sometimes she even missed Stormcage, where at least she wasn't alone in those sentiments. And even when she was alone, she was allowed to go mad. No one ever knew it was simple grief bottled up over the years and never let out rather than her insanity finally showing. Not that she care. In fact, she liked it better that way. River Song may be mental, but never sad, never lonely, never sentimental.
It only made it that much harder to pick up the broken pieces of the people she loved most in her life when she couldn't admit she had too many of her own.
"Whenever and wherever. But not all the time."
And never in the right order, though that hardly needed saying. Close to, sometimes, or as close as you can get with two time travellers who aren't exactly that fond of waiting – or doing things in the right order, for that matter.
Because that was what made her different from every other person the Doctor dragged along on his travels. She wasn't human; she understood – and manipulated – time just as well as he did, flew his ship better than he did, and, perhaps most importantly, was not a companion. She was his wife.
And first and foremost, above all else, that meant making him feel better.
"One psychopath per TARDIS, don't you think?"