Rewritten
Both claimed they wouldn't, for anything in the world, trade away the confusion. Both had promised, at one point in time, never to change the future. The first time, her first run through, River succeeded. She made it through her existence with the Doctor without creating a paradox no larger than they already where. She ran the race, finished the course, and lived in the hard drive of a computer, with every book ever written at her fingertips. A binary programmed world, the almost perfect world. First and foremost, River was an archeologist. She missed her Doctor, of course, but she would have been lost without her books. She remained, completely, totally, blissfully, unaware of the chaos raging outside the sheltered hard drive until the books started to change.
It was little things, at first. Miss Evangelista forgot her name on occasion, but that was quickly remedied. Anita lost a scar she had received on their first expedition together. It was the little things, also, that set the ball in motion. They were teaching Ella and Josh – the hard drive children – pre-flight Earth history for a year. Her compatriots seemed bereft of knowledge of Christopher Columbus and the Age of Exploration. They all seemed to believe the world expanded in 1562, when a man named Rodger Fitzgerald took to the seas. River took to the history textbooks, desperately trying to find reference to the history she knew to be true. But there was nary a word in the hard drive and only Cal seemed to notice the problems.
Panic filled River's binary heart the day they reached 1969 in history class. There was no moon landing. There was no mention, at all, of the Apollo Missions. She could feel her whole life unraveling at the seems. Panic drove River to the newspaper clippings and the magazines from each and every time period. She searched, driving herself into an overworked frenzy to figure out what was going on. Late nights dragged on in the binary world, as River hunched over articles and stories looking for just the slightest clue. It was those moments when only Cal dared join her.
"It's happening," Cal murmured, as she slipped a mug of coffee onto River's desk. The young girl's brown hair fell over her face and obscured her eyes, but her tone of voice said it all. She had been crying. River yanked herself from her articles and stared at her young friend. "It's happening," Cal repeated, "he's destroying everything." Her hands sorted skillfully through River's piles of papers. A yellowed newspaper was pulled from the stack. "Here." River read the short missive of an impossible supernova, with the energy escaping into the universe in every direction, and – River speculated – through time itself. Fear gripped her stomach. Cal had found the first mention of the largest paradox machine ever built. "He's rewriting time." And River had no words to express her turmoil of emotions.
O.O.O
Her words followed him like a taunt. Not River's words, no, that would be too much like a bad romance novel. Although, the Doctor wasn't fully sure if having Adelaide's words be the things that plagued his every waking moment was a worse romantic cliche than had they been the words of his wonderful River. His wonderful, majestic, glorious River. Both claimed they wouldn't, for anything in the world, trade away the confusion. Both had promised, at one point in time, never to change the future. But River knew from the beginning that there were ground rules. Rule number one had always been simply: the Doctor lies.
His first time through – his first time experiences the joys of her companionship and the beauty in the simplicity of the complicated life they built together – he didn't make it through. Her death drove him insane. He had lost companions, so, so, so many companions, but he could not stand the life of the one person who understood him so deeply that her absence stung worse than the loss of his entire race. Everyone. Sarah Jane. Romanadvoratrelundar. Rose. In one generation alone, he couldn't count those who sacrificed their lives, just for him. It was River's death that plagued him, but it was Adelaide's last words that haunted him.
The Time Lord Victorious is wrong! A dreaded whisper, a ghostly whisper, poured into his ear ever moment of every day as he worked to keep River away from her path of death. He destroyed at star to create a machine with enough power to support their paradox. He kept enough details in place to make it work, he poured so much energy and so much time into making it work. There had been a legend, a myth, a fact, a story, which floated around the very threads of time and space. A story about a monster. A trickster. A goblin. A demon. Because a demon was what he had become.
He destroyed lives in a vain attempt to save one, single life. He sacrificed many, many who still saw him as the brilliant, burning star of hope in the darkness of the world. But they were misled, because he embodied the darkness. He turned into everyone's worst nightmare. He made pacts with the darkness and made friends with evil. Across the universe he ran, trailing death and destruction behind him. The Doctor was Victorious. He was the Time Lord Victorious and he controlled time and time itself. He even went back to the offer, the offer of immortality. He stood with the Krillitanes on the brink of cracking the Skasis Paradigm when she stopped him.
O.O.O
Their battle raged throughout the universe. No life, no time, no period remained untouched. Fields of flowers turned into lakes coated with blood. Skeletons piled in the basements of churches and homes. Their battle raged until the end of the universe when they stood alone, the last two surviving members of the universe. The Time Lord Victorious. The Universe's Last Song. Alone, on the battle field, with no energy left to fight. They stood together in the shadow of the last star in the universe. The last light in the universe was going out, and still they stood together, shoulder to shoulder, silent. Mourning. They mourned the loss of the universe, and he let the weight of his mistakes crash over his shoulders. She held him then, until his sobs stopped and he lifted his eyes to the last remaining star. An unspoken conversation passed between the fighters.
They returned, this time united, and lived through the torment all again. They fought versions of themselves, past selves, who had not come to see the true consequences of their actions. They righted wrongs and saved lives and put things together the way they had been, before time was rewritten. They fixed Time Lord Victorious. They fixed the need for the Universe's Last Song. And when everything was set in place, they passed beyond the veil and left the universe in the hands of others. Before they passed, neither claimed to be without mistake. Both vowed that without their mistakes, they would have had no life worth living.
The Doctor. River Song.
Their names were whispered in the darkest of corners and in the coldest of places and in the times when no hope could be found. And everywhere the names were mentioned – Doctor and Song – hope prevailed.