Merry Day-After-Christmas! As my gift to you, here's my first DW fanfic, my favorite show at the moment, concerning my favorite couple. Hopefully you won't need the receipt.
Disclaimer: Will I ever own Doctor Who? Spoilers... (in other words, no)
Her entire life's mission, all the years she's spent training since she was a child, hinges on this single moment.
Melody Pond moves with purpose as she circles her prey, who mirrors her every action. Each time she draws closer only leads him to move farther away, an endless game of ring-around-the-rosy that both know must come to a stop eventually. But they find it so much fun to play.
Nevertheless, she came here for a reason.
"I was born to kill the Doctor," she explains to her parents as they watch helplessly from the sidelines.
Now her man finally comes forward, surprisingly calm while staring in the face of his possible murderer. She had often pictured how he would react when she at last came to face him; images of an expression of absolute terror, fruitless attempts of escape, and pathetic pleadings for mercy often came to mind. Not once did she expect the Doctor to flirt with her.
She plays along, assuming it is some kind of trick, for she was taught that he is an exceptionally clever man. She tosses underhanded innuendos like they were playing ball in the park, but he maneuvers through her teasing with practiced ease. It was almost as if he had done this many a time before.
He gets right up in her face, speaking to her like an old friend, yet for some reason she feels that this is how it should be. And when she pecks him on the lips, it feels like the most natural thing in the world.
After all, she was born to kill.
It doesn't take long for the poison in her lipstick to kick in, causing her victim to collapse on the ground. He may be clever, but so is she.
She had been trained to expect the unexpected when it came to the Doctor. She knew he would try to fight it, but she had no idea he would do so not to save himself, but his friends. But even more shocking was that he chooses to forgive her, to save her, to want her to be the last thing he saw as he died.
All at once, the man she had been brought up to believe was a heartless killer became someone worth saving.
As she begins to give off the golden glow of regeneration energy, she brings her hands to cup the Doctor's face. Immediately the dead man opens his eyes.
"River, no... what are you doing?"
There it is again. River.
Will she be Melody Pond, the woman who kills the Doctor? Or River Song, someone he trusts with his very life?
"Hello, sweetie," is her only reply as she seals her decision with a kiss.
Already she knows that she loves him.
~0~0~0~0~0~
Archeology can be quite fun when you double as a time traveler. Trying to figure out how the dinosaurs became extinct? Just go back and see for yourself. However, it can be a dangerous thing if you use it to try and change the future. Particularly your own.
River Song is destined to kill the Doctor on April 22nd, 2011, at 5:02 pm, at Lake Silencio, Utah. It is a fixed point. There is no stopping it from occurring.
But fixed points can be rewritten.
River has one sliver of hope. Legend has it that she will either be the woman who marries the Doctor, or the woman who murders him. And on her life she would let time wither away and collapse on itself before she would allow it to be the latter.
There has to be a way to save him. There was always a way.
But why does he refuse to see it? Doesn't he realize how much the universe depends on him, how much she depends on him?
"You've touched so many lives, saved so many people," River tells him. "Did you think when your time came you'd really have to do more than just ask? You've decided that the universe is better off without you. But the universe doesn't agree."
She knows that she's fighting a losing battle. Once the Doctor's mind is set, it is near impossible to change it. But he needs to at least know what he's leaving behind.
"I can't let you die-"
"But I have to die!"
"Shut up!" she screams. Never before had those two words she's said so often to the Doctor been more important. "I can't let you die without knowing you are loved. By so many and so much. And by no one more than me."
It was such a basic mistake, wasn't it, Madame Kovarian? Take a child, raise her into a perfect psychopath, introduce her to the Doctor... who else was I going to fall in love with?
She isn't quite sure how she did it, but one thing leads to another and River finds herself facing the Doctor, the two bound together by a simple piece of cloth as they each give themselves to the other in marriage.
Now they are at last seeing eye-to-eye, literally; for it's when she stares deep into those green irises that she is reminded of just how extraordinarily clever her new husband is.
He claims that legends are no more than mere gossip, or in other words, archeology. But River has a sneaking suspicion that he just can't help but put a little faith in them. After all, he is a legend himself.
~0~0~0~0~0~
"Well then, soldier, how goes the day?"
Perhaps it isn't the proper time for some humor given the somber scenario, but trying to keep River from a wisecrack is like trying to force a Sontaran to retreat from battle.
But the Doctor was not amused.
"Where the hell have you been?" he demanded. "Every time you've asked, I have been there. Where the hell were you today?"
River remained perfectly calm throughout his entire tirade. She knew the Doctor hates failure, but unfortunately he is quite familiar with the feeling.
"I couldn't have prevented this," she explains.
"You could have tried!"
"And so, my love, could you."
River can't remember much about her early childhood, but one of her most prominent memories is of a bedtime story she used to be told every night. The tale told of a child taken from her parents, but the kidnappers were never the villain. It was always the two-hearted man with no compassion in either, who had been so convinced that he had already saved the day that he simply sat back and let the infant be taken right out from under him.
River turns to comfort the parents, but the Doctor is too absorbed in her accusation of him to pay the ones hurt most any mind.
"You think I wanted this? I didn't do this! This, this wasn't me!"
Now he's done it. He's made River Song angry.
"This was exactly you!" she told him. "All this. All of it! You make them so afraid."
Demons run, when a good man goes to war.
"When you began all those years ago, sailing off the see the universe, did you ever think you'd become this? The man who can turn an army around at the mention of his name: Doctor."
Night will fall and drown the sun, when a good man goes to war.
"And now they've taken a child, the child of your best friends."
Friendship dies and true love lies.
"And they're going to turn her into a weapon just to bring you down."
Night will fall and the dark will rise...
"And all this, my love, in fear of you."*
When a good man goes to war.
Truth hurts, but River knows the Doctor needs to hear it. Pride can be a dangerous thing, especially when there's so much to lose.
But even so, she can't bear to see him suffer when she knows she can prevent it. So at long last, she tells him who she is.
As the TARDIS vanishes from sight with a very giddy Doctor along with her, River realizes why he had been so hard on himself when he thought he had to die. She caused it. But at least today he could leave with a little spring in his step and hope in his hearts.
~0~0~0~0~0~
River Song has, to say the very least, a difficult life. She could list a whole slew of things that have gone terribly, horribly wrong for her, but there's one that trumps them all.
Kidnapped at birth? That was just the beginning. Raised to be a psychotic murderer? Child's play. A service of 12,000 consecutive life sentences? Walk in the park.
No, the worst part is being in love with a time traveler.
It can be wonderful, too, being able to roam among the stars with the most amazing man in the universe. But due to their opposing timelines, one day he can be her husband, the next practically a stranger. And through it all, no matter where are when they are, one single word chases unceasingly after River, preventing her from a fully intimate and trusting relationship with her Doctor.
Spoilers.
She couldn't comfort Amy by telling her that the Doctor will never die at Lake Silencio. She couldn't reveal that she had been the little girl from the orphanage, an impossible astronaut tasked with an impossible mission. She couldn't even kiss her own husband without fearing the day that he won't know to kiss back.
Spoilers, spoilers, spoilers.
She's really beginning to hate that word.
~0~0~0~0~0~
River watches with amusement as her Doctor saunters towards the TARDIS, tailcoats flying behind him and his top hat slightly askew. He's always happier at weddings; they mean new beginnings, and the Doctor loves beginnings.
"Did you dance? Well, you always dance at weddings."
The Doctor turns at her voice, a teasing smile on his face as he contributes a witty remark. This is familiar to them both: the subtle flirting, playful banter, dancing around the subject of what is to come for each of them.
But if there's one thing the Doctor dislikes, it's not knowing something.
"River... who are you?"
She wishes she could simply tell him. But time can be rewritten, and foreknowledge is a dangerous thing. He proved himself that the mere revealing of an event from the future can prevent it from happening.
Just as her name suggests, she is a river in the Doctor's life. Always moving from one place to the next, occasionally bending to meet him, then rushing on just as soon as she arrives.
There's a reason that River changed her name. She can never truly be a Pond, like her parents: stagnant, peaceful, waiting.
As much as she may wish it to be otherwise, River Song can never wait.
"You're going to find out very soon," she says. "And I'm sorry, but that's when everything changes."
The Doctor hates change. Because that means they've moved on from the beginning, and are flowing ever closer toward the inevitable end.
~0~0~0~0~0~
When you're with the Doctor, you see quite a bit of running. You run from the looming danger before you, which is not always fun. You watch the enemy try to run from whatever brilliant plan the Doctor devises on the spot, which is always fun.
And you look on as the Doctor himself runs from his future with you, which is never fun.
Although their game can get quite tiresome, River has learned to see the excitement in it. There's never a dull moment with the Doctor. No matter where they are in their timestreams, there's always something new for one of them to discover.
"Can I trust you, River Song?" he asks.
"If you like," she replies as her face forms its usual knowing smirk. "But where's the fun in that?"
The Doctor may try to run from her, but she's always loved a good chase.
~0~0~0~0~0~
River sits at her desk, eyes as blank as the pages before her. Of all the things she needs to put in a book, it just has to be one of the most painful instances in her life. And mind you, there's been several.
And it had started out so wonderfully, too. Yet somehow they went from a witty greeting that she only laughed at because she could just picture him spending hours coming up with it for her to staring unblinkingly at the Angel of Death that took her father away.
"The angel, would it send me back to the same time, to him?" Amy asked.
"I don't know! Nobody knows," the Doctor cried, anxious to get her away from that terrible place.
Amy, being Amy, ignored him as she took a step closer. "But its my best shot, yeah?"
"No!"
Rule One: the Doctor lies.
Of course he knew that it was her best chance of being with Rory. But love is something unfamiliar to the Doctor; he doesn't understand giving up everything for the sake of another. Not yet, anyways.
But River knows a thing or two about love, which is why she decided to step in. "Doctor, shut up! Yes, yes it is."
She was willing to give up seeing her parents, her best friends that she grew up with, ever again. As long as they were happy.
"Amy, please," the Doctor pleaded. "Just come back into the TARDIS. Come along, Pond. Please."
"Raggedy man..." She turns around to face her imaginary friend for the last time. "Goodbye."
Then Amelia Pond was gone.
And here sits her daughter, mere hours later, not a thing on the paper save her fallen tears.
The walls she has so carefully built over the years to guard her vulnerable side have been weakened, more than ever before. But she isn't ready to let the Doctor in so he can heal her, and in all honesty, neither is he. He's still freshly broken from the departure of the Ponds, and as she had promised her mother, she needs to look after him.
But when you hide the damage, you have to put it somewhere. And what better place to conceal it than between the covers of a book she knows the Doctor will be too pained to ever read?
Wiping away the last of her tears, River picks up her pen and begins to write.
~0~0~0~0~0~
River has a lot of time to think as she calmly wires herself into the Library computer. The Doctor lay unconscious on the ground- she's always had a pretty good right hook- his hand cuffed to a nearby beam.
But he's not her Doctor. No tweed jacket, no suspenders, no bow tie. She used to always tell him how absurd he looked wearing those things, but now that they were gone she misses them so much.
He's a Doctor, but not her quirky, ridiculous, utterly endearing Doctor. He's a stranger.
She's known this day would come for quite some time now. And looking back on her life with the Doctor, River realizes that so many things had hinted toward her final end without her even knowing it.
Ah Doctor, you and your secrets. You'll be the death of me.**
I'm not going to be there to catch you every time you feel like jumping out of a spaceship.
The day's coming when I'll look into that man's eyes- my Doctor- and he won't have the faintest idea who I am. And I think it's going to kill me.
Silence will fall when the question is asked.
They never did find out what that meant. But now River knows that the question isn't "Doctor Who?", and the silence won't be the Doctor's. The question was "Who are you?", and the silence will be hers.
The Silence in the Library.
She supposes that she should be scared. But what terrifies her even more than death is the prospect of living the rest of her days without ever seeing her Doctor again.
Even today had been unbearable. Since the Doctor doesn't know her yet, so many things that River had taken for granted were missing from their interactions with one another.
When he tried to look in her diary, she had to explain to him how reading it was against the extensive list of rules that he hasn't given her yet.
When she yelled "I hate you sometimes!" there had been no automatic "No, you don't" in reply.
And when she delivered her historic "Hello, Sweetie" he simply brushed past her like she meant nothing to him.
And here they are, River once again in a dreaded spacesuit as she stares across at the man she loves more than life itself. But unlike Silencio, it won't be his inevitable death that will occur, but hers.
The Doctor begins to stir, and River knows that once he comes to he'll try to put himself in her place. They will fight like the old married couple they are, although he doesn't know that yet, but she knows that it's meant to be this way.
The Doctor still has so much to learn. He'll learn not to put his pride above others. He'll learn not to run from what has to happen. He'll learn that to truly love a person, sometimes you must let go.
Despite the countdown to her death moving ever closer to zero, a smile creeps up on her face with the knowledge that though he hasn't learned these things yet, it is a guaranteed fact that someday, with her help, he will.
* Yeah, I paraphrased the speech a little to fit better with the poem. Sue me.
** For those who aren't aware, this is taken from Last Night, the third part of five from the Night and the Doctor series of DW shorts. Do yourself a favor and go watch them.
And concerning my little theory about the Question, let the record show that I highly doubt this will come true. But then again, it seems like a very Moffat thing to do, and wouldn't it be so cool?
Anywho (haha, see what I did there?), hope you enjoyed this!