Title: The Heaven at the End of Hell
Summary: "River's death was a collage of all the most traumatic parts of her childhood wearing a cheap mask of normalcy, and that was about as close to Hell as River believed it was possible to get. "
Rating: M for disturbing content.
Word Count: 1164
Other Chapters: No.
Disclaimer:The British Broadcasting Corporation owns Doctor Who and all related trademarks. I do not in any way profit from the use of these trademarks.
Pairings: Eleven/River (mentioned)
Contains: Trauma.
Warnings: vague threats against children; extensive talk of bodily violation
River felt as though she ought to love the children, but she didn't. She could barely stomach the sight of them.
They were hers, sort of. Gifts from God she'd never accepted and certainly hadn't wanted. She'd thought about getting rid of them, but she kept having vivid nightmares about doing it, and then driving back to her home to find them whining for dinner in her kitchen, and she had this terrible feeling that those dreams were either perfectly prophetic or had already happened. Nothing was actually real here, and the difference between a dream and a dream-within-a-dream was negligible and hard to spot.
In an offensively loose sense of the word, they loved her. They went through all the motions of loving her, anyway, just like every other identical child in this nightmare world. They said they loved her, and they hugged her when she picked them up from school, cried for her when they had nightmares, and made her kiss their open wounds whenever they fell off the slide. They loved her because they'd been programmed to love her. Because they never could have done anything else. It hit a bit too close to home for River and it disgusted her in ways she didn't entirely understand.
She might have been able to love a real child, unwanted though it would have been. Melody Pond's birth had been a violation of Amy's body so profound that it made River sick to think about it, but Amy had loved that child anyway and that child had genuinely loved her, even though it was torn from her the day it was born. That was a significant part of the problem. For River, birth had always been tied to violation and parenthood to loss and lies. These children were walking lies born of loss, and unlike flesh-and-blood children, they had no redeeming qualities. River couldn't love them because there was nothing in them to love. They were empty shells whose defining traits were that they were children. Just... children would do. River couldn't love them any more than she could love wallpaper.
She also couldn't hate them any more than she could hate hideous wallpaper. She really just wanted them gone.
Of course, River had been raised by an abuse cult that trained her to murder without mercy or empathy and regularly deleted her memories. It seemed highly unlikely that she'd have been a better mother to flesh-and-blood children than she was to these virtual ones.
She remembered giving birth to them, though she never really had. Her physical body had never really been violated the way her mother's had, but that was little comfort when she was getting regular post-traumatic flashbacks to unbearably painful experiences she'd never consented to and all the while there was this little voice in the back of her mind telling her that she ought to be happy about them. She was a second-generation victim and the only mercy was that she only had to live with the effects; she'd never been through the thing itself, whatever her memories indicated to the contrary.
She didn't know how Amy lived with it.
The Doctor had probably been aware on some level that River was capable of having children, but River had done all in her power to never remind him of it. Any latent desires he may have had to give his race a second chance were all well and good, but they weren't using River's body as a vessel for it. It was horrible, but River would have burnt Gallifrey to the ground herself before she gave birth to one of its children. She knew how her husband had loved being a father and still loved babies. Whenever the matter came up, she'd made it clear to him that she didn't care.
But that was her Doctor, and it was Pretty Boy who'd trapped her in here. He hadn't know. He couldn't have known. He had a shallow sense of the life he'd wanted with Rose Tyler and romanticized memories of what marriage and parenthood were supposed to be like, and he'd given her a hallow imitation of it in the sincere but misguided hope that it would make her happy. She'd rather be dead.
She had this strange sense that she had a husband somewhere. She didn't know if that was his doing, somehow, or hers own mind betraying her. She knew that she had a husband, so she had one in this nightmare. She always subconsciously set an extra plate at the dinner table, and the kids mentioned having a father, but there was never any actual virtual man there to play the role. Everyone just seemed to be obsessed with and constantly waiting for a ghost. That also hit a bit too close to home for River.
Really, River's death was a collage of all the most traumatic parts of her childhood wearing a cheap mask of normalcy, and that was about as close to Hell as River believed it was possible to get. If he'd just sent her back to university, that would have been tolerable. This wasn't.
River sighed. She watched fake wind blow fake leaves across playground full of identical children. She didn't know which ones were hers, which almost meant that none of them were.
"Silence will fall when the question is asked," River said over a soundtrack of generic, unintelligible shouts in high voices. "Tell me I can finally die when this Trenzalore business is done."
Evangelista shrugged. "I don't know."
"I didn't ask if you knew." River never thought she'd see the day when she'd beg Evangelista for reassurance. She'd never particularly disliked Evangelista, but the girl was... well, she hadn't been the greatest asset to the expedition. In this world, though, Evangelista had become the one thing she'd always desperately wished to be for the small sacrifice of thing she'd always treasured. River wondered if there a similar twisted narrative playing out in her own life. She was confronting her worst fears, but to do so she had to be gaining something, though it may have only been the chance to save her husband one final time.
"I can't live, can I?" River asked. She'd like to live. She missed her husband, her parents, her brother, her students, her cosy little flat on the dark side of the moon... It would be very nice if this were just a Hellish intermission and she'd get them all back when it ended.
"It doesn't seem likely," Evangelista said.
"And you?"
"Almost certainly not."
River had to believe that Trenzelore would be the true end. She was clearly being saved for something, by her husband and by the universe if not by Pretty Boy. "I'll see him again," she said. "One last time. Get to say a proper goodbye. That's almost worth it." It would be the Heaven at the end of this Hell. She could look forward to that.