AN ~ okay so this took (way) longer than I thought to update. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to go in sequence or timey-wimey. I decided on timey wimey, because it just makes more sense with River's character. Hope you enjoy Again, suggestions/questions/headcanons welcome
PS – 29 hours 20 minutes to go!
Chapter 2: Change the Future
I dunno, just do it!
His words seemed to flush all the air from her lungs. He always asked the impossible of her, and usually, she delivered, but today, her heart was galloping. She looked her forearm up and down, fingertips to elbow and back up again. If only he had left her the Sonic, she could have vibrated the stone particles into shattering. Or if she could reach her PDA where it lay on the armchair behind her, or – there wasn't much point wasting any more thought on it, since she couldn't reach the PDA anyway. The angel's fingers were already biting into her skin – the pain getting progressively worse now that she was thinking about it. The way those stone claws had her trapped, there was no way of escaping without tearing skin at the very least.
Unless she dislocated her wrist.
She had to catch her own breath at the thought. It was an easy and not overly painful matter when in handcuffs; pressure applied in the right places by one hand could easily slip the bones of the opposite forearm out of joint. She was quite well versed at it – though of course she never told the Doctor that one of her primary methods of escape was something so mundane. This situation, though, was a completely different matter: the way her wrist was pinned, just above head height out in front of her, was all wrong for a manoeuvre like this. But it was not impossible to pull off, and every moment she wasted here the others could be in serious danger.
She took a deep breath, staring at the sharp grey fingers until they blurred and then shifted back into focus. By then, her breathing had steadied, and her heart rate had slowed to a slow thudding. Difficulty is a construct of the mind. Nothing is easier than anything else. She needed to do this, and so, she would do it. It was as simple as that. Simple.
Three.
Two.
One.
As she twisted, a needle of pain shot up her arm. She winced for just the slightest of moments – but the slightest was enough. The Angel squeezed, and she heard the bones crack. She bit her lip, forcing her eyes to stay open as she staggered back from the Angel as fast as she could. Her wrist throbbed. She wrapped her good hand around it, and while the pressure made it feel a little better, her fingers quickly became slick with blood.
Across the room, the Angel smiled at her, as if it knew what it had done. Perhaps it did. River gritted her teeth and glared down at her wrist as she checked that she had not cut any important veins or arteries, and wiped the blood away with one of her captor's whitest tablecloths. He wouldn't be using it again anyway, but it still made her feel a little better.
River twitched her fingers. Though it smarted something terrible, they were all still working. The damage was not too bad – but, she thought as she contemplated bandaging it, it was very obvious. The Doctor would be so mad. No, not mad; he hated it when she hurt herself. He would be disappointed, though. And rightly. She had failed him, and she had failed whoever he was trying to save.
Hugging her wrist to her chest, and keeping her eye on the mirror at the back of the room, River picked up her trenchcoat in her good hand. She slung it over one shoulder and bit her lip again as she slipped her broken wrist through its own sleeve. With her good arm, she wiped her face on the edge of her sleeve. Just as she turned to leave, she spied the book which lay abandoned on the chair.
The Doctor had always warned her that knowledge of the future was dangerous…but for him to react that badly, something must be desperately wrong. Something which he believed should, and possibly even could, be avoided. She had screwed up the first opportunity to do so. Perhaps if she looked, she could change it at the next choice moment before he noticed her failure. Drawing a deep breath, she reached for the book, stuck her thumb between the pages and pried the book open to the contents page. Her eyes ran down the list until she saw what he must have seen.
Amelia's Last Farewell.
She let the breath out slowly. She could hear the others coming back up the stairs, worried about Rory. So he wasn't in the cellar. Where, then?
The lights flickered again, and with a flutter of her heart, she realised that she had lost sight of the Angel. It was still chained up, of course, but she could not be sure for how long. She whipped back around and locked eyes with it for an instant before moving her gaze a little to the left. It was screaming again. River gripped both the book and the PDA tightly in her good hand, and washed the fanged features from her mind as she shook her hair out and swept into the other room to interrupt.