Hello again! Thank you SO much to everyone who reviewed the first chapter, it's very encouraging to receive your feedback!
Someone asked about what River looks like, I don't go into a lot of detail here but I'll try to sneak little bits in as we go along, and of course feel free to use your imagination!
Thank you for reading and Merry Christmas!
She wakes up in a hospital room. A soft beeping from the machine monitoring her brain wave patterns sounds, and a nurse walks in moments later.
"Hello Professor Song," she says, "how are you feeling?'
"Drugged", River tells her, feeling the weight of her limbs and a haziness to her thoughts.
"They had to sedate you as soon as you arrived on Mr. Lux's ship," the nurse says, checking a monitor over River's head, "they were concerned about psychological stress to the baby."
The words sink through the drug and brain-cell shaken haze, and her hearts seize up, her hands flying to her abdomen.
"The baby, is he alright?"
The nurse puts her hand on River's shoulder and she has kind eyes.
"I think I'd like to be a nurse." 16 year old Rory Williams tells them around a mouthful of ice cream.
"I'll get the doctor, he'll explain everything to you," the nurse says, turning to leave.
River catches her wrist, "Just… he's alive, isn't he?" she asks. She could check for herself, of course, but she's so afraid and the nurse's eyes are warm and she thinks it would be better to hear it from warm eyes rather than to reach down and find the emptiness herself.
"Yes he is, Professor Song," The nurse tells her, giving her hand a gentle squeeze. River nods, gives her a grateful smile, and as soon as the nurse is gone she's crying again. It's a happy, relieved crying this time.
"Happy crying is the most human sort of crying there is," he tells her after their fifth wedding.
"Than what's your excuse?" she asks, and kisses him again.
She reaches under the hospital blanket and the flimsy gown to rest her hand against her stomach. The skin feels too warm and she smells burn cream. They applied it before the excess regeneration energy kicked in and healed the damage, because when she pulls the blankets back the skin is healed and buzzing under her fingertips.
His lips on her broken hand and his life sealing up the cracks, bright and golden. She runs away, shooting words like arrows to keep him at bay behind her.
"River!"
Two tiny heartbeats echo up her spine. They're still a little too fast, out of sync with her own, but the place in her head that had screamed with his fear and pain is quiet, sleeping. She writes Galifreyan across the space between her new hip bones, swirling safe and love there in the past, present continual tense.
He's written many, many old words into her skin, but never 'safe', and she finds out why at the end as she watches him watch her die.
In spite of the drugs, she knows when the doctor is coming and pulls the hospital gown back down just as he opens the door.
"Professor Song, how are you feeling?"
"Drugged," she says again, "but it's fading. Are you here to fix that?"
The doctor smiles and introduces himself as Doctor Toryn Reed. As he washes his hands he describes his extensive education and accomplishments in the medical field disinterestedly, like he's reading someone else's resume. He also reveals that he had been selected by Mr Lux personally to treat River.
"Of course, I jumped at the opportunity. You're a bit of a miracle Professor Song, and a hero, did you know that?"
She shakes her head, "I've been in a computer for a while, you'll have to fill me in."
He sits down on the hovering stool next to her hospital bed, looking over the monitors and reports flowing from the machinery around him to the computer in his hands as he talks.
"4022 people, missing for a hundred years, come home. It was incredible. Practically the only thing the press talked about for a week straight. Mr. Lux gave a lot of interviews of course. He wrote a book too, it was a bestseller."
River thinks she should feel grateful, but she just feels vaguely annoyed; Mr Lux hadn't know the half of what had happened in that library. "Oh, really?" she says.
"Yup. It's called", he pauses, clears his throat softly around a little smirk, 'The Last Song in the Library'"
River snickers, "Seriously? He actually called his book that?"
"He did, I laughed at it too," he sits back, grinning at her, "I think I'm going to like you, Professor Song."
"Sometimes people do," River tells him.
"Good thing too, in the book you were a bit…melodramatic. I don't do well with melodramatic." He says, wiping his hands on a towel with an expression of distaste.
"Would you have quit?" She asks him, "If I'd been the melodramatic type?"
"Ha!" he says, "Are you kidding? I told you, Mr. Lux hand-picked me. Do you have any idea how much I'm getting paid for this?"
"It's good to know my doctor has such pure motives," she settles back against her pillows with a smirk. The banter feels good, like slipping into an old pair of shoes.
"Purely monetary," he assures her, "Speaking of money," he pulls a pair of gloves over his wrists, releasing them with a snap, "I want you to know that in spite of all the money and time I poured into my post-doctorate specialized certification in semi-human and alien physiology, I haven't got a clue what you and baby here are." He glares at her, a spark of humor in his eyes softening the expression, " It's very frustrating."
"Terribly sorry about that," she says, smiling.
"As you should be."
She explains the basics of regeneration to him, and what Charlotte had done, uploaded her body in the nanosecond between the completion of the upload and the complete failure of her body, preserving it in that state as Charlotte had the 4022 occupants of the library hundreds of years before. She tells him that her consciousness had been preserved in another form and uploaded directly into the mainframe. She doesn't tell him by whom or the reasons why.
"One more run River, you and me."
"In all of the uploading and saving and whatnot, nobody knew to save the baby, he was as good as dead."
"So you decided to try to find a way to get out."
She nods, "We did some research, in the mainframe. It's the largest library in the universe, so lots of materials, you know."
She explains their findings to him, he carefully notes the titles of the books they'd found.
"So basically, infant, sorry, Time Lords?" she nods, "Right, baby….Time Lords…they're producing all this energy as they develop so that they can do that cellular regeneration thing you do to keep from dying and ageing and all that." He pauses, and she nods, confirming, "You didn't have any left, so when you were dying your baby passed you a bunch of it, and you were able to regenerate and survive, and you ended up with a new face out of the whole deal as well."
"Basically," she says.
"Right, okay," he pauses for a moment, scribbling something into his computer with his finger, "Any idea why the baby has continued to regenerate?" Her hands settle back over her stomach, tensing.
"How many times has it happened?" she asks.
"Twice, since you were brought here."
She feels sick, remembering the first time and the second time, the feel of him dying inside of her. It had happened again, twice now while she'd been sleeping.
"That's not supposed to happen," she says.
"I was afraid of that. We're not sure what's triggering it, but each time the baby's heart – sorry – hearts rate increases until cardiac arrest, and then the regeneration happens."
"He's scared," she says, softly, curling her fingers over her stomach
"We can't know that," he says gently, "we don't even know how aware it is at this stage of development."
She shakes her head, "No, he's scared, I can tell."
"Oh," the doctor says, he pauses, clears his throat, "er, psychic are you?"
"A bit, yeah."
"Lovely," he says, scratching his head awkwardly.
She watches him, her eyebrows raising in disbelief. Surely not…."Maybe I should mention it only works with physical contact…."
"Oh! Good, right that's, you know, very…fascinating. Scientifically."
"Why doctor, something in your head you don't want me to see?"
There's some red creeping up from his collar and high on his cheekbones.
Seriously?
Her eyebrows shoot up,
"I'm a very old, pregnant, alien lady. And I was dead last week…."
"Right," he says, quickly, cutting her off, "Well anyway. The good news is we've found a sedative that works on both of you. As long as we can keep baby calm, hopefully we won't have any more problems." She lets him change the subject.
"I suppose that means I'm stuck in bed for a while?"
"Most definitely."
She groans, "Forewarning, I'm not very good at keeping still."
"We'll try our best to keep you occupied. Anything I can get you at the moment?"
"A mirror, please."
"A mirror?" He looks surprised, "I was thinking more along the lines of, you know, food, maybe some reading materials…."
"I haven't actually seen my new face yet, I'm suddenly thinking it might be a rather attractive one," she says, eying him pointedly as the red flares across his neck again.
He hurries to his feet, avoiding eye contact and making a show of fiddling with his hand-held computer, "I'll send the nurse in with one."
"Thank you doctor."
"Anytime professor," he waves over his shoulder, his voice floating back to her through the open door, "As long as the pay is good ."
The mirror arrives with her lunch and the whole lot is a bit of a disappointment. The sandwich tastes like dirt in her mouth, the mayonnaise clinging to her tongue and throat. She used to like mayonnaise.
"Ugh," says Amelia, "my Mum never listens. Look at the mayonnaise in this sandwich, it's like frosting!"
"Looks fine to me," Mels tells her, sitting down with her greasy hamburger from the school cafeteria. She notices the napkin the sandwich had been wrapped in crumpled next to Amelia's juice box. Her Mum had written, 'Love you darling' in purple ink and signed it with 'xoxo'.
"Trade you," Mels says, and Amelia happily agrees.
They take her unfinished lunch away and leave her with a small hand-held mirror. The search for something her new taste buds will accept takes up the rest of the afternoon.
When an orderly comes in with the second meal attempt (a blueberry muffin and cream cheese), she is laughing.
"I got my dad's nose," she tells him, chuckling (she has to tell someone) and reaching for the muffin. The muffin is promptly spit out and the orderly goes off to search for something else (celery, preferably, maybe a side of ketchup).
The eyes are Rory's mum's, which is interesting, and the hair is Amy's, only curly. Really curly. She's pretty sure that shouldn't have happened again. Three faces in a row with the curls. Interesting.
"A few freckles too," she tells the orderly as he returns with her celery, "that's new."
He looks at her blankly, and sighs tiredly as she pushes the bitten celery and smeared ketchup back to him a moment later.