She had been called Ace, once.
That was before the Time War; that was before names became luxury and she watched from above as the Time Lords, a people once renowned for spectacular wisdom, tore through the most vile and unimaginable methods of torture and attack. They became Daleks through their blood feud against Daleks.
She knew; she knew it was wrong. She knew there was nothing she could do to stop it—she, a young sometime-human, sometime-Time Lady, in training to become a true Time Lady at the Prydonian Academy. She shed her name and stole into secrecy until the words came in whispers; the Time Lords were gone. Gone, and the man who took them, who trapped them in the Time Lock, was none but her Doctor.
He would've been proud of her, the Doctor would. She stole a TARDIS, Type 60—hardly the beautiful blue box she'd known the Doctor within which to soar as an eagle through time and space, but one that took her exactly when and where she wanted—the few times she used it.
The first time, she returned to Earth…it seemed only right, she felt, to see what had become of that piece of rock floating so listlessly through the sky. She lay out on a grassy slope with hundreds of others, watched the sky alight with fireworks. In a far place in her mind, she remembered fondly the days when it had been herself lighting up the air with explosives. She was no longer a child, however.
Certainly no longer a child; by that time, she was twenty-seven, with the wits of any Time Lady and the tenacity of a human; a combination deadly at best. Her art was no longer explosives (though in a pinch she could deliver one hell of a blast) but rather in the subtlest, trickiest sciences. Her latest obsession had been the creation of a hallucinogen effective against all humans but herself.
Another leap took her to the early twentieth century—nineteen-fifteen. It seemed the sort of place the Doctor would turn up; she was right, at any rate. She just missed him, a few years off, but she met a lovely woman, Nurse Redfern, whom she supposed surprised herself with her own eagerness to tell her story. She let her examine a tome written in the Doctor's own hand, and even copy the words hastily into her own blue book. She saw faces of the Doctor she'd never seen, faces of his friends she'd never met. She left the nurse with a goodbye and a promise she knew was impossible to fulfill: that she would return.
She was now in the fifty-second century, on The Library; again, it seemed she came too late. The people of The Library told her when she asked of a curious savior who came and left without a trace, known only as the Doctor. He, and his companion identified as Donna Noble, drove away the Vashda Nerada, piranhas of the air, and left without a trace.
Her departure from this place was the final trip she took using the ship. She left it discarded in an alleyway; it was accurate, but hardly meant for a home, as the Doctor's ship was. The controls were on random for this final journey, the start of a brand new adventure.
She left the city, peering about the mysterious natural world outside. The sky was specked with stars, and two silver moons hovered like eyes peering back into her. The grass was tall and swayed softly back and forth, back and forth….the hushing wind was broken by the most beautiful sound in the universe.
The box materialized, the doors opened, and he stuck his head outside.
"River?" he asked.
A brand new adventure, indeed…she had work to do.
There are worlds out there where the sky is burning, and the sea's asleep, and the rivers dream; people made of smoke and cities made of song. Somewhere there's danger, somewhere there's injustice, somewhere else the tea's getting cold. Come on, Ace. We've got work to do.
Seventh Doctor, Survival (the last piece of dialogue in the Classic Series)