A Screwdriver for River
It's become an obsession for me, ever since I met her for the first time…from my point of view at least, saving the woman who apparently means or will mean so much to me in the future, River Song.
It started simply enough, after Donna and I left the library I set my screwdriver aside and made a new one. Is has to be the screwdriver I used in the library, so I'll recognize it when she uses it in the library. Besides, I was due for a new one anyway, too many bad memories associated with my screwdrivers. Astrid Peth, floating freely in space. Anyway, all I did then was add in a neural link with a large cache of memory that would link with the one on River's suit and hold her pattern until I could upload her into the Library's mainframe.
Simple, easy, done, Molto Bene.
But it wasn't enough.
After the next time I met her, literally a lifetime later, I went back to the screwdriver and refined it further. I sped up the linking time and the uploading time so that River wouldn't have to wait long before becoming one with the mainframe. It took me as long as Amy took to get a good night's sleep. Hopefully one without angels, weeping or otherwise.
But still it wasn't enough.
And so the pattern continued.
After each encounter with River, I would throw myself into improving the screwdriver. After the Bone Meadows and the picnic at Asgard, I updated the link with River by infinitesimally smaller margins. After Big Bang 2 and Amy's Wedding, I reduced the uploading time again. And then after seeing her just before her imprisonment at the Stormcage it hit me, what about the others?
I mean by then knowing what I knew about River, I knew she'd get bored with just Cal and Doctor Moon for company. So I installed a new neural link; one that would connect to the others and store them all, separate so there wouldn't be any unfortunate mixing. I mean, they had Dave and Other Dave making it hard enough, how would they live with half-Dave and half-Other Dave and other-half-Other Dave and other-half-Dave.
And the pattern continued, and I changed. I swaggered more because she told me I did it. I opened my TARDIS by snapping my fingers around her because she said I could. I confronted the collective forces of my greatest enemies at Stonehenge at talked them into retreating using only my words because that's how she described me. I worked to become the man she said I was, maybe that was self-fulfilling prophecy.
After a while, I realized that I was becoming less cautious and cockier, far more willing to step into danger than my predecessors, because I knew that I could not die. I would not die. Not until River had the perfect screwdriver to save her.
We grew closer with each encounter as I saw more and more of what the future or present me saw in her. I learned so much about her and she learned so much about me, including the big thing, my name. Now I know why I told her that, she deserved to know it.
And then one day, it was done. The screwdriver was complete: a neural link with enough memory to store all five of them starting at the moment of their deaths, controls that would allow River to use it just as easy if not easier than I could back then, and both red and shift settings, once I finally found out what they were.
So, I suppose its time then, one last date before we meet for the first time and the last. And I'll make it the best, I'll make it a night she'll never forget, because neither will I.
This idea came to me while watching the New Year's Eve/Day marathon of Doctor Who specifically Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead. This is intended to be the musings of a future Doctor and not necessarily the Eleventh.