Author's Note: This fic takes place directly after the ending of "Forest of the Dead". Abundant spoilers for Season 4's "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead". Everything about the psychic paper is totally made up - but it fits perfectly, doesn't it? This occurred to me and I couldn't let it go, so here it is, in fic form. I normally hate fanfiction, but what the hell. Live a little.
Everybody knows that everybody dies, and nobody knows it like the Doctor.
- River Song
"I'm going to go and have a lie-down." Donna looked exhausted, and the Doctor could hardly blame her. She'd lived nine years in thirty minutes. But the red around her eyes disturbed him, and he could only nod as she wandered off, looking a little bit lost.
The Doctor leaned against the engine console, looking up at the high ceiling of the TARDIS. He was lost. It had come in waves for the past few hours. The knowing and not knowing of this woman who cared so much for him, Professor River Song. Archaeologist. Where did he pick up an archaeologist?
Well, where would he pick her up. Future. Spoilers.
Meeting himself in different regenerations had been all right – sometimes a bit tense, sometimes a bit brilliant. But he'd never had this vertigo-déjà vu sense, this sort of doubling in his head. A woman who he'd never met before, and yet – it broke him to watch her sacrifice herself. And it hurt, to watch her watching him, and finding him – less. Less than what he would be.
Staring at the ceiling of the TARDIS, the engine humming and sighing under his fingers, the Doctor wasn't sure that he wanted to be River's Doctor. Rose had felt it that way, when he'd regenerated. He had felt her think it – "You're not my Doctor." She had gotten over it; he had become her Doctor again. But it had been her thought. And so he had begun to think of himself that way. Different Doctors; future Doctors and past Doctors. And himself, now. Young?
How could she call him young when he felt so, so old? He felt every day of his 904 years like a weight tied to him. Young. The way she said it – the way she looked at him, like a teenage boy, like his TARDIS had training wheels. Did that mean that he would get that much older? Did he have that much more to do?
He'd felt a sense - for years now, years and years – a sense of borrowed time. Like it would catch up to him, everything that he had done. All of the damage he had caused, the lives he had taken. The Daleks and the Time Lords, the last great Time War. It would meet him one day soon, and finish him. The thought underlying everything he did – "I'll live now, but only for a while." And now, she comes, River Song, and says that armies will lay their weapons at his feet and turn away from battle. That he will command a respect and awe that now only came from those who were on his side. Did he want to live so long? Did he want to experience that much more – pain, fury, love?
When he was already so old, did he want to go on for that much longer?
It hardly mattered, he supposed; it was set. It was the future. And he had something to look forward to. River. Someone who knows his name. Even though he knew how it would end – he'd like to see the beginning.
He fished the psychic paper out of his pocket. The message was gone, the little kiss that Donna had mocked. It was blank.
There was another thing that the Doctor knew the end to, now. River might have known it, but said nothing, hoping that, at this age, the Doctor wouldn't know the truth of what had happened to her message. But he did. She had sent it, some time in the 51st century, to Her Doctor, some future Doctor, off rescuing planets or saving alien life. And the Doctor knew now that River's Doctor, whenever he came to be, would be The Last Doctor. Because when River sent the message, Her Doctor hadn't received it. And that could only be because Her Doctor was dead.
That was how the paper worked. Messages could travel between pieces with just a thought and a push, but only if both were receiving and transmitting. If River's message had come to him, then that could only mean that the owner of the recipient paper had no brain activity. It could only mean that River's Doctor had died some time between the last time he had seen her – Darillium, the Singing Towers - and the time she sent the message. So it had chosen a time at random when his paper was still receiving. And that was now.
He stuffed the paper away and looked down at his trainers on the grated metal floor. The way he thought of his life, the way that Rose had started him thinking, of himself as different Doctors throughout his timeline, made it hard to react to such knowledge. Because the person that died, that dies in the future, during River Song's life – that person isn't him. That person is River Song's Doctor. He, now, right now he was Rose's Doctor, Martha's Doctor, Donna's Doctor. He was the Doctor with big hair that talked too fast, who wore a pinstriped suit and tan coat and held so much pain. The Doctor in the future who died, that Doctor could be anyone. It could be someone that he might dislike, or someone he would respect, but he didn't know.
All he knew was that, right now, there was only him, only his Doctor. That was the one who counted. The one who could do things, could help people. Whatever future Doctor there would be, he could wait. River Song could wait.
There were things to see. There were chapters to uncover.
Things unspoiled.