Syllabus week was a hell that I was not prepared for.
"If I have to listen to one more professor recite the same anti-plagiarism spiel, I'm going to scream," I announced as finally, at the end of the first week, I threw myself onto the couch in my apartment. Or rather—I noted as River peered up at me from her seat at the dining table—our apartment. She was smirking at me over a glass of white wine, gracefully lowering some translated diary of King What's-His-Name the Nth onto the table.
"Rough day at the office, dear?" she asked, far too amused for my pride as I scowled towards her.
"I understand that it's not really torture, but syllabus week was devised by an unwell mind." She only hummed at my observation, taking a slow drink from her glass before setting her eyes back onto her opened book.
"At least with actual torture there's a bit less monotony," she agreed easily. "If you'd prefer, it's not too late to switch your major. You could be a doctor in archaeology and still call yourself the Doctor."
It was more tempting than I could say. While the goal was to graduate with a STEM degree to get me started, my class roster required me to have a different professor for every class. The archaeology department was rather small, and shared space and staff with the larger history and social science college, which had the fun accident of allowing River to take her first semester's classes with only seeing two exceedingly sympathetic professors. Almost all first year archaeology students took the same classes which meant only hearing the syllabus week spiel, at least in its entirety, a blessed two times as opposed to my number approaching infinity. Still, I shook my head, sending the traitorous thoughts away.
"I suppose I could, but I don't think that will have quite the same affect on my I-point-and-laugh-at-archaeologists father. If I'm going to hold it over him that I actually have a degree, I need it to be in something that can't be unmade by a quick vacation."
"Point and laugh?" River's question was preempted by a laugh and I winced. That particular statement wasn't going to be heard by River until well into her future. Whoops.
"Spoilers." After another moment of wallowing in self-pity, I peeled myself off of the couch and went to grab my own glass from the kitchen, only to open the fridge and find a nearly empty bottle of, not wine, but— "Wait, did you open my bottle of baijiu? Where did you even find it? I thought I had it in my room!"
"Ganbai," was her only response as she toasted her half-full glass towards me with a sly smile.
Living with River wasn't without difficulty. There were certainly moments where I had to readjust my expectations—moments where the Doctor's voice echoed my own bespoke psychopath through my mind—but River never failed to distract me from the banality of living life consecutively. Whether it was our noteworthy introductory or our future found-familial connection, River decided almost immediately that she wasn't going to pretend to be anything less than what she was in our apartment. It wasn't unusual for me to come home to her sharpening a collection of knives stolen from all over campus—steak knives from the mess hall, wicked leatherworking shears from art classes, scalpels from biology. Her humor was sharp and, as she grew more comfortable with my presence, black as pitch. When I chanced upon her on campus or if we went to eat a meal together neither of us had to cook, she was an entirely different person. The trust issues, the difficulty communicating, the glancing around every corner and assessing potential threats seemed to evaporate when there were others in a room, but I knew they weren't gone. River was a master of disguise, but she was broken. Still, over the course of that endless syllabus week, I'd started to grow used to her sharp edges. I appreciated them.
River stealing my alcohol was not a factor of the abuse and trauma she'd suffered, though. That was unnecessary cruelty.
"River, that was a gift from Ching Shih!" The blonde didn't seem all too moved as she took another sip and I sighed, defeated. If you can't beat them… I reached into the cupboard and pulled out a rocks glass, pouring what remained in the bottle—hardly two shots' worth—into the glass.
"So what exactly did you do to earn a bottle of baijiu from the infamous Zheng Yi Sao?" River asked, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper as I took a seat at the table across from her, glass in hand. I cringed at the question, though it was only reasonable for River to ask.
"I broke a man's nose," I confessed quietly. River didn't laugh, but her eyes were sparkling with undisguised mirth as she regarded me. An eyebrow arched, clearly asking me to elaborate, and I sighed. "I didn't mean to! Something got Donna started on pirates, and how all the good ones were men, so Dad got it in his head to introduce her to Ching Shih. Problem is that I got snatched on our way to Lantau Island. Since I wasn't a local girl, I was exempt from their don't-hurt-women code, but they weren't expecting me to know how to throw a punch. By the time the Doctor and Donna tracked me down, I was enjoying drinks with the good lady."
"And the man with the broken nose?" River asked, eyes sharpening dangerously.
"Ching Shih decided that I wasn't exempted from their code after all. Ganbai." I took a long sip of my drink, breathing deeply around the burn of the alcohol. River's smiled twisted like a knife, smirking as she finished her drink. Once the baijiu was spent, though, her smirk pulled into a frown as she lowered her glass back onto the table.
"You were lucky."
"Yes, I was." Donna had been absolutely terrified to learn that I'd been in the company, for lack of a polite word, of lawless pirates. The Doctor had been singularly displeased until I was back in his line of sight, unharmed and trading stories with the pirates' leader. We never spoke about what might have happened that day—what might have occurred if there had been more than two men to escort me, if my punch hadn't landed quite so luckily, if the lady herself had taken offense to my self-defense—and I tucked that fear away into a box that I tried very hard not to look into. But luck was all that had separated me from drowning that day, and that scared me enough to keep moving to the next adventure.
Without a moment's warning, River leapt to her feet and dragged me from my chair, ignoring my protests as her hands steadied and abandoned my glass on my table and pulling me into the empty space between the living and dining area.
"What are you doing?!"
"You need to learn how to fight. Properly." Her hands brushed off my shoulders, squaring them even as I was unsteady on my feet with surprise. Once I was standing without help, she stepped back and dipped into a readied pose. "Come on, then."
"River, I—I appreciate the sentiment, but what I need right now is to message my advisor back. If I'm going to finish undergrad in reasonable time, I'm going to need him on my side. Not to mention the dean of the college, and it'd probably be a good idea to— Ah!" River shifted her weight and flew at me without hesitation, and I ducked away from her hands. It wasn't the right move, though; she swept a leg under me, and I yelped as I found myself on my back, head bouncing against the floor painfully.
"Back on your feet," she ordered, the veneer of mirth and an easy-going nature all but worn off as she stared down at me with hard amber eyes. "Up you get. You're not done."
"I really don't think this is a good idea." I shoved myself into a somewhat seated position, frowning as I attempted to make sure I hadn't managed to hurt myself in the fall. River's look softened slightly and she offered me a hand. I took it, accepting the help up and—
A strangled noise escaped me as River twisted on her heel and vaulted me over her shoulder to land, once again, on my back on the floor.
"Back on your feet!"
A groan worked its way out of my lips and I shut my eyes for a brief moment against the light from the ceiling fixtures.
With a roommate like River Song, it'd be a miracle if I survived until Thursday.
"Ah!" The cold water helped as I lowered myself into the bath, but there was little to distract from the sharp aching and throbbing that had replaced my blissful lack of hyperawareness about my body. It had been an unforeseen complication that River—having received non-conventional training, to put it mildly—had very little idea of how to actually train another person. As a result, her training of me resulted in me mostly getting well-acquainted with the thinly carpeted floor.
"You did better than I—"
"River!" I yelped as the woman in question let herself shamelessly into the bathroom. My head pounded at my own voice and I winced, too tired and sore to even put an effort into covering myself decently. It didn't seem to be necessary, though; River totally ignored me as she moved to assess her reflection in the vanity mirror. She looked just as she did when I had walked into the apartment, as if the last several hours hadn't happened.
"Like I said, better than I thought you would," she finished with a roll of her eyes. "I expected you to stop getting off the ground after the fourth or fifth knock-down."
"Would that have made you stop?" I grumbled under my breath, sinking tiredly further into the water when River responded with a cheery "Of course not!" The cold water seeped into me slowly, finally granting relief to my overworked pain receptors, and I sighed contentedly.
"You don't have classes tomorrow, so let's go for a run. You said you wanted to be a UNIT operative, right? Training muscle memory won't do much if you don't have any muscle," River commented lightly. After taking a moment to assess the likelihood of River allowing me to drop out of any form of physical exercise or combat training, I relented and refocused my mind on enjoying the blissful growing numbness in my extremities until long after River walked back to her own room.
I wasn't able to stay in the water forever, though. River's impromptu lesson had meant forgoing dinner and, while I doubted my ability to walk back and forth to the mess hall, I needed food before sleep. Steeling my nerves, I eventually pulled myself out of the tub, dried off with reasonable success, and managed to put pajamas on the right way front before heading into the common area.
I could feel echoes of another presence as I passed River's closed door, but I ignored the signals of wakefulness as I continued to the kitchen. A consequence I hadn't realized after our psychic overexposure of our first meeting was that the familiarity that had taken me time to acquire with the Doctor's or even Donna's minds had rooted quickly with River. Though I couldn't discern her distinct thoughts or emotions—especially not through distance or a shut door—I could still feel River's presence humming against the background of my thoughts. It was comforting in the way that the Doctor's mind had been to me—in the way that all Gallifreyans had once been loosely bound—but I avoided contact with her mind as much as possible. Her mind had already been put through a barely-metaphorical wringer, and I had no desire to push her limits or test her triggers.
It was habit more than conscious thought that landed me on the couch with a bowl of cereal balanced precariously in my lap. A sandwich might have been better—anything with protein, really, after the brutal training session River had so kindly forced onto me—but there was comfort in the chocolately cereal that the Doctor had snuck away into the cupboards with a conspiratorial wink as if there was a responsible adult anywhere near us that had forbidden Count Chocula. Meals on the Tardis had been few and far between when it was just the Doctor and me—we both had a terrible tendency to fluctuate wildly from going to a destination specifically for cuisine or forgetting to eat a handful of meals over the course of an adventure—but Donna had been a major proponent of regularly scheduled mealtimes. Drinking the chocolate-flavored milk at the end of the bowl, it was easy to recall Donna's rebuttals in defense of the practice: "You're already a skinny streak of nothing. There's still hope for Athena though, so let the poor girl sit down and eat for ten minutes!" Breakfast turned out to be Dad's favorite, though I was certain he'd never hinted as much to Donna because he had initially argued against the practice, pointing out that morning didn't exist in the vortex, so breakfast as a concept was just silly. As I finally placed the bowl in the sink, I was smiling as the realization that the memory of Donna wasn't so harsh, so painful, anymore.
Donna was always going to be the most important woman in this universe to me. She was the reason I was able to come here, to meet Dad and be involved in all the wonderful and awful madness I'd started. I'd never forget her, not one detail about her, and one day I'd be able to go back and safely remove the block on her memories. I'd figure it out, find a way somehow. She deserved to remember how special and wonderful she was. There must be some way to separate the weight of the Doctor's mind from her, some way to separate the Time Lord from the human again.
Or…
Donna—the DoctorDonna, as she'd proclaimed herself in those blinding moments—had called herself half Time Lord, half-human. That was terrifying to the Doctor, of course, because there was no precedent for a metacrisis but there was precedent for a partial Time Lord. The fact that I existed at all was evidence that Time Lords weren't completely incompatible with humans. So the problem was less philosophical and more mechanical: was the issue that the sheer breadth of the Doctor's experiences were trying to fire through human neurons? If that were the case…
"DNA mapper," I found myself murmuring, thoughts whirling. I had the Doctor's biodata mapped out. He used it—will use it—to synthesize the symbiotic nuclei that stabilized my bond with the Tardis. I didn't have Donna's biodata, but that could be acquired. Hell, the Tardis might have scanned her at some point. If not, it wouldn't be too difficult to pop back to Chiswick and bump into an unsuspecting ginger—
No. I needed to stop that thought there. Regardless of the idea's feasibility, it'd be invasive at best. If Donna couldn't remember her travels safely, I couldn't exactly modify her biology enough to be compatible with the metacrisis with informed consent and there was zero chance I'd be able to guarantee her safety. I couldn't make a single physical change to Donna, no matter how much I'd love to talk to her again.
"But if it were the memories that were the issue…" There went that mouth again, moving ahead of the brain. But that mouth had a point.
I hadn't been able to accomplish my goal of catching the Doctor's mind, for lack of better terminology, before the metacrisis settled in Donna's subconscious. The Doctor hadn't been able to remove the memories before they formed connections to her conscious mind. Donna, stubborn and wonderful as she was, didn't posses a mind that would give anything up without a fight. She managed to cling onto the memories of an entire bubble universe that hadn't quite existed because of that tenacity, and she refused to let go even as it burned her. The memories were catalogued, the connections forged, but a human mind was flexible. Perfect recall didn't exist, and that might be the loophole to exploit. The memories weren't dangerous in and of themselves, just their scope. If memories could slowly be filtered away—not deleted, as the Doctor had wanted to do, but persuaded to fade into obscurity—then Donna's mind might adapt.
Filters. Memory filters.
Kate's voice, not Donna's, came to mind. Six years, and he hardly remembers me.
Donna had centuries of memories to filter out, but it might be possible. It might even be probable.
Taking the briefest of moments to lament that I couldn't take aspirin to help with the soreness of my body, I slung my button-covered bag over my shoulder and raced towards the library. While I had a fair collection of books at the apartment, I had unfortunately decided to, at least for the most part, acquire textbooks as I needed them for classes. First and second year texts weren't going to provide the insight I needed into this subject material, but the library on campus should be able to give me at least a decent starting point. And when I exhausted this library, there were others.
I was going to save Donna Noble.
Posted 14:41, 9.27.22