Series Title: And Make the World of Colours
Chapter Title: Shades of Gray: Story
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: PG
Characters/Pairing: River/Melody, Rory, Madame Kovarian, Amy
Summary: In the beginning there was only black, at the end came only white.
Notes: This took longer than expected. 'White' was really easy, and 'Black' wasn't bad, but 'Gray' did not like me. Hopefully it turned out , everyone who read this story, and especially to the people who reviewed it. Spoilers for A Good Man Goes To War. Concrit, please. The tenth, and last, in a series of colour!fics.
Black:
When she was Melody Pond, they taught her of the black. They taught her of evil. The Doctor, they said, was evil, the most evil and dangerous thing in the universe. They did not teach her of good—perhaps with good came too much mercy—and so for years the black was all she knew.
And even as they taught her of the black, they could not see that it would come to be their undoing.
They could not see that it was the black she craved, the deep, pure black which she could see, right outside her window. The black and the freedom to run from it, to run and fly where the only lights were the stars.
There was always light, where they kept her. On the ships the lights were always on so they could guard her, in the Home there were always lamps outside or men with flashlights inside, and so though they taught her of the black it was years before she could breathe it.
When they taught her of the black they did not call it that, they only called it evil. The books she read spoke of evil men with black hats and black mustaches and long black capes, though, and made out that black was evil. And so Melody called evil black, and asked them of it.
"What colour is evil?" she asked once. "Is it black, like the sky?"
"If you like, dear," Madame Kovarian said tersely when Melody asked her, and told her to get back to training.
The books they gave her had heroes too, men in white hats who fought the men in black. The books were right about the evil, and the books were right about the black, so she asked Madame Kovarian about the men in white.
"Is there really good?' she asked.
"No," said Madame Kovarian. "Good is a fictional construct created by the people of Earth. It's a silly notion, and there shall be no more talk of it."
Gray:
River's parents taught her many things.
The first thing her parents taught her was that good was real.
They taught her, also that the Doctor was not evil. He was shadow and darkness and space, but he burned with light and made himself to gray.
Her mother taught her that shadows like the Doctor could burn like the sun, and her father taught her that family was more important than good or evil.
Her father never told her she should kill, even to save her loved ones—but she watched him, and from him she learned the difference between killing and hurting. She learned that the right thing was not always the good one. She learned that the Doctor needed someone to stop him, someone who would do what was good so that he could do what was right.
Her father taught her good, and mercy, and her mother taught her of Van Gogh.
"Good things and bad things can't exist by themselves," her mother told her. "They need each other. You can make good from bad, beauty from pain, but you need the pain to see the beauty. And if there aren't good things, then there isn't any point."
"What do you do if there are no good things?" she asked her mother.
Her mother looked away, and her father kissed them both on their foreheads. "There are always good things," he told them both.
River's mother smiled, confident again. "That's right. There are always good things; you just have to see them."
River looked down at the floor, chewing her lip. "Does that mean I'm not evil, then?" River asked.
Her parents frowned, and her father knelt in front of her. "River," he told her, "There might be such a thing as evil somewhere in the universe, but everything I know is far more complicated than that. And even if it weren't for that, you wouldn't be evil. Anyone pure enough to be evil would have to be in love, and love precludes evil. Do you love anyone, River?"
River nodded. "I love you. And Mum." She thought for a moment. "And the Doctor!" she said.
"Then you can't be evil," her father told her, and she smiled.
White:
The library was white. There was no evil there, no shadow. Outside the Computer, of course, there lurked a hungry darkness ready to devour all who entered. But inside there was only light and white and brightness.
In Ancient China, white was the colour of funerals. River had gone there once, not exactly enlightened, but fairly interesting as places went. It suited her death, she supposed—as far from the black and the shadow as she could get. No way to touch the stars in CAL's computer, and she hated to watch the skies there. The stars in the computer were nothing more than points of light. She could have asked to fly those simulated skies, but the cold falsity of the virtual heavens was would asphyxiate her quicker than the real thing ever could.
As prisons went, it was a nice one—more like protective custody than anything else. She had a family (not the one she'd dreamed of in her youth, but those dreams had long since been replaced) and she was safe. No tigers would come for her here, unless she wished them. Still, it was a prison. She had spent her youth in captivity, and would live out her afterlife there, until the library crumbled and CAL shut down forever.
She told the children-who-couldn't-grow-up every story she had of the Doctor, taught them of the gray and the black, of the shadow and the dark and how the light refracts when given crystal.
"Do bad things really happen?" the little boy asked once, as if asking if monsters were real.
River looked down at her hands, at her white dress (her funeral gown, she called it in her mind), and her pure unblemished skin. She looked at the places where once there had been scars. She looked at the children, safe in their beds.
"No, my love," she said. "It's only a story."