This is a going to be a long one! It's about half-written, and I think I've got the plot all figured out, but I need a little extra motivation to keep up with it, so I'm posting it now. Started before the 50th, so the story picks up where The Name of The Doctor left off.
Thanks for reading!
She can still taste the goodbye in his kiss as her eyes open to silver, painted stars on a ceiling pulled from her memories. Charlotte, perched in a window sill with her crayons and coloring books, looks up.
"Did he say it?" Charlotte asks, swinging round to face River.
"Yes, he did." River tells her, smiling a little sadly and sitting up, tucking her knees under her chin to mirror Charlotte.
"So is it time now?" Charlotte asks.
"Yes dear, I think it's time."
She decides not to rush it, mostly for Charlotte's sake. They'd been talking and working on it together for years, but the old-soul sadness is seeping out of the cracks in Charlotte's little-girl smile. She'd never say it, but the way her little fingers curl around River's tells her that she doesn't want to let go. She will though. For all her childishness and ancientness (River can never decide which of the two is more selfish), Charlotte is the most selfless person River has ever met.
4022 people saved, cradled, burning bright lives swirling through her little head as the years passed heavy.
They go to Fortescue's Ice Cream shop in Diagon Alley. The sun is shining, and she's pulled the shop out of the second book in the series, before the war. There are smiles and laughing children in the bright, late-summer sunlight. A couple tables away Harry and Ron and Hermione are eating their ice creams too. The sun melts River's ice cream quicker than she can eat it and she licks it off her thumb as it drips.
"Should I bring Anita and everyone here or do you want to go back to the house and say good-bye there?" Charlotte asks her. She's watching the three young heroes at the other table and River's heart aches.
"Let's go back to the house after this." River tells her, and Charlotte looks up and smiles, understanding the unspoken this is the me and the you time, just for us.
Their afternoon stretches out until the shadows grow long, and if it takes longer for evening to fall than it should, River is happy to pretend not to notice.
Back at the house River tucks the two children in for the last time. They all huddle together on Charlotte's bed, a warm pile of smiles and pointy elbows pressed against her sides as River reads to them. She takes her time, reading and reading well past their bed time until they drift off to sleep and Charlotte's eyelids are heavy. She carries the little boy and the little girl to their beds and kisses their foreheads. Her eyes prickle with unshed tears, and she lingers over each of them, memorizing the sound of their soft breathing. When she's done she goes back to sit next to Charlotte, wrapping an arm around her little shoulders.
"Should we wait until tomorrow?" She asks her.
Charlotte shakes her head against River's shoulder.
"No, we've had a long time already," she says, bravely. River hugs her a little tighter and kisses her head.
They go downstairs together and River says goodbye to her team. They've gotten close, through the years together in the mainframe. Closer to each other than to River, though; they'd formed families, units with the children between them, tying their hearts together. River had only ever been half with them, really. She'd been waiting, always waiting.
She had been closest to Anita, and as they hug goodbye Anita says, "You know it's really not so bad here, are you sure you can't stay?"
One last time River shakes her head and says, "I can't, Anita, if there's a chance I can save him I have to try."
Anita pulls back and drops her voice, "You don't know if it will work."
"I have to try." River says again.
Anita shakes her head, "You know," she says, with a sad smile, "I'd sort of been hoping you'd never get that goodbye you've been waiting for. I'm a terrible friend."
"You're a wonderful friend," River tells her, pulling her back in for another hug, "and if it weren't for-you know- maybe I'd have been able to do it, just stay here with you."
Anita snorts, shaking her head, "Oh please, I don't believe that for a second, River Song."
"I'm so sorry Anita." River says, pulling her in for another hug, "If this works, I'll find some way to contact you, I promise."
"Oh, you'd better." Anita says, and with a watery smile she steps back.
With all the good-byes said, River takes a moment for one last look at the four people who had followed her into the library all those years ago. They look happy, and they're together, and considering they'd all technically been eaten alive by shadow monsters, it looks very much like a happy ending; one of those happily-ever-after's that tend to crop up in all Charlotte's favorite books.
"I'll miss you." She tells them.
Other Dave says, "Only if you survive," and Anita hits him.
River just laughs, "Well yeah, there is that."
"We'll miss you too." Says proper Dave, and Evanglista nods in agreement from his side.
She materializes with Charlotte in their reading room. It's not really a reading room, of course; it's a file where they've been saving all of their research over the years. There isn't much to go on, even in the largest library in the universe information on Time Lords is scare. They've been at it for a long time though, and the shelves are lined with books, their pages marked, and notebooks filled with findings covering desks and chairs and lamp stands.
"This seemed like the best place to go from," Charlotte tells her. Now that they're so close to the end she can see a quiver to Charlotte's lower lip, and she doesn't meet River's eyes.
River kneels down in front of her, catching her face between her hands.
"Charlotte, darling, you listen to me, alright?" Charlotte nods, meeting her eyes, "Whatever happens today, I am so very, very grateful to you. You, my dear, are the bravest, kindest and brightest person I know. You have done absolutely everything you could to help me, and if-" Charlotte cuts her off with a little sob, "-no, really dearest, if this doesn't work today, it doesn't matter, alright? We tried, we did our best and it is not your fault." Charlotte is crying now and River pulls her into a hug. "Oh Charlotte, I love you so much." Charlotte hugs her back, with all the strength in her little arms until the tears finally stop. They pull apart and Charlotte manages a smile.
"You know I-I uploaded you right before-right before you were going to-to you know…stop," Charlotte says, "It's going to probably hurt, a lot, once you, once you get back out there."
"That's okay Charlotte."
They pull apart and River steps back, filling her eyes with Charlotte's face.
If this is the end she wants the last thing she sees to be something wonderful.
Charlotte smiles and River locks her face against the back of her eyelids as she closes her eyes. She takes a deep breath, reaching for a still place in her head.
It starts as a tingle in her fingers and toes, the feeling spreading until it's everywhere.
There's a familiar flash of light burning across the synapses of her mind and suddenly there is pain.
White hot and raging, burning across her mind and through every cell-burning, burning so that her lungs can't pull in the air and her hearts are seizing up and through it all the worst of it is panic, fear.
It's not hers. She curls down around the little mind screaming and dying and through the burning death of the cells in her eyes something familiar and golden swirls up though the white spacesuit that covers her abdomen. For a moment it is a different sort of burning against her insides, and then it catches in her blood, spreading through her body and it is dying, but it isn't just dying anymore, it's changing.
Charlotte's voice, soft and sweet in the quiet reading room, "In their infancy, the energy that allows adults to change their body to avoid death is extremely concentrated. For this reason, cross-breeding with other species is virtually an impossibility.
His long fingers trailing across her belly button, "We grew our children in bottles."
"Why?"
"Convenience."
When her eyes open the sun is too bright and her mind is sizzling as the neurons re-align. She's trying to remember something, and someone else is with her, someone scared and glowing and very, very new.
Charlotte is sleeping in an armchair and the room is lit by just the one lamp next to River as she reads. The book is very old, the language ancient and difficult to decipher, even for her. The story is even older, more of a legend really, about a dying goddess and a child who saved her in a wave of golden light.
"It makes sense, really." She tells Charlotte later, pacing, "It's survival. If the mother were to die the baby would die too, so, theoretically for the sake of survival, the baby could automatically, you know, transfer some of that excess regeneration energy to the mother."
"River, what are you doing?" he asks her through his half-open eyes as his heart beats catch tune again under hers.
She thinks about moving out of the sunlight but something in the shadows eating chicken legs and use the red settings it doesn't have red settings but yes it does, it should, it should, it should.
She stays in the sunlight, trying to focus past the snapping sizzling in her brain and the fearfearfear that is breaking her hearts.
"I'll make sure you re-materialize in the sunlight" Charlotte says, as they sit together in the highest tower of Cair Paravel watching dolphins and mermaids glinting together in the sea far, far below. "I figured out how to call Mr. Lux, I'll tell him you're coming. You just have to get to the transporters before nightfall."
There is a doorway to her left, a doorway that will lead to a hall that will lead to a sunlit walkway to a building where 4022 people left the library. She has to go too. Her legs are all funny when she rises, the lengths aren't right. She misjudges where her body is in relation to the door and she runs into the doorjamb painfully as she tries to walk through. As she falls she tucks her body that is all wrong and snapping golden underneath around her stomach. Something important and scared and then there is red like shifting walls around her face and "you will be brave" and glinting strong and warm with large hands that carry her back and "you're safe now".
I'll keep you safe she thinks through the fluttering fear against the edges of her new brain, and she stumbles through the door and the hall and the sunlit walkway that drops away, a long fall on either side won't be there to catch you every time, yes that's right, actually isn't it?
The dust in the transporter room is different than everywhere else- all kicked up and littered with footprints.
4022 people with two feet each, so many footprints as they lined up to leave the library. Two more people but just one more set of footprints.
She waits, huddled on the transporter ring, trying to keep her new hands and feet tucked inside the circle, just waiting for the girl who waited but didn't wait alone, strong and warm and keeping her safe as 2000 years passed.
She wraps her arms around her middle and her new mouth makes words and it feels funny but it's important so she whispers against the shadows gathering at the corners of the room as the day passes, "I'll keep you safe."
Finally she hears the transporter come alive around her. She's vaguely aware that it's been hours, but time feels unfamiliar after too long in the computer where it never seemed to work right. The transporter takes all her cells apart again, and they don't like it so soon after regeneration and just getting acquainted with themselves and each other. When she gets to the other side and all put together again the golden light is bursting out of the cracks and it hurts and fearfearfear.
Too young she thinks, he doesn't understand that this isn't dying.
She is vaguely aware of people running forward, trying to help, and she thinks it must be her voice, strange and new humming in her throat telling them to stay, stay away, please.
The baby yes, yes, that's what's nestles there against her new spine, panics, little hearts fluttering too fast, much, much too fast until the tiny body can't keep up and she feels him dying, dragging a sob up out of her throat, and then he is changing, the glow breaking out through the cracks between her fingers as she presses them against her abdomen.
As the glow fades the people press close again, their voices sounding strange in her new ears and then their hands on her arms and shoulders, her back, so very strange. She realizes she is crying. Mr. Lux is there, she remembers him contracts in pieces falling on the floor in the shadows. But his face is different, older, she thinks, more lines means older because he's human.
He says, "Professor Song? Is that you Professor Song?" Of course it is, she thinks, he's being silly but then no he's not really because she has a new face now, a new face so she has to tell him, "Yes, yes I'm Professor Song.' With tears all over her new face.
They're talking about heart rates around her, sounding confused and urgent and she thinks she should probably tell them that she and the baby have two hearts each, but her mind is stuck, looping and looping around the words baby and new face, sliding back and forth between English and Gallifreyan as her eyes
slide
closed.
"Professor Song, is that a picnic basket?" The way the sound flows around her name is familiar even though the voice is wrong. She turns and tries to hide her disappointment when she sees his face. It's a nice face, really, and the hair is lovely, but his eyes don't know her like she needs them to today.
"Always the observant one, aren't you Sweetie?" She says, forcing a smile.
"Were you the one who called me here? I think there's some kind of emergency…"
"What makes you think it's an emergency?"
"The note said 'come quickly'."
She smirks, and says, "Doesn't sound like an emergency to me."
He looks at her for a moment, frustrated and strung taught and something haunted on his face. He's silent for longer than she's comfortable with.
"Why am I here?"
She holds up the picnic basket pointedly.
"There had better be something really, really important in that basket." He says.
"There is actually."
It's just lunch, in the basket, but it's a very nice lunch and she brought a blanket that she makes him help her spread out on the grass. Summer on Asgard is a beautiful season, and it's a perfect day, just like she'd planned.
"So what's the occasion?" he asks.
"Again with the assumptions, who says it's an occasion?"
"It just…feels like one," he says, "that's a nice dress."
She stretches one leg out farther than she needs to so that the hem of the blue dress slides a little too far up her thigh. She doesn't look at him, but she does smirk because she knows he's looking, he always does. "It's one of your favorites," she tells him.
"I thought you were supposed to keep spoilers like that to yourself," he complains, plucking at the grass.
"Oops," she says, "let's call it a preview instead."
"Is today special?" he presses, looking back up at her, searching.
"Not at all, doesn't matter really, I just wanted to tell you something." She says, pulling plastic containers of food out of the basket and spreading it out on the blanket between them.
"What did you want to tell me?"
She pulls her dress away from her waist a bit more and makes sure the bio-dampeners in her earrings are secure. "Nevermind, Sweetie, it can wait. Here, take these," she says, quickly, hoping to distract him. He opens the Tupperware and sniffs at the contents.
"What is it?" He asks.
Her hearts clench and she takes a long swallow of her grape juice before she can answer.
"Those are fish fingers," she says, "I brought custard to dip them in."
"What? Do fish have fingers? No, they don't, at least not on earth. Wait, you know I have met fish with fingers except… they were actually…fish people." He drops the container of fish fingers quickly.
She laughs at him, because really, some things don't change and she loves that. "No Sweetie, they're bits of fish that you eat with your fingers. Fish Fingers, see?" She takes a bite to prove their edibility to him.
"And you dip them in custard?" He asks, sounding intrigued.
"Yes dear, you dip them in custard."
"Seems a bit strange." He says.
"Yes it is." She agrees.