Nighttime at the hospital is incredibly lonely. Every night, as the orderlies, doctors and nurses trickle out, she can feel the white walls closing in around her like Stormcage had on that first, terrible night, before he came to take her away. She hardly ever sleeps, of course, but they turn the lights out and draw the curtains and the darkness is so thick she can almost feel it against her skin. She tries to read, but reading reminds her of stories with Charlotte's little hand in hers, and oh, she misses her, so she stops reading. When she stops reading, she finds herself remembering 300 years' worth of nights in prison that were not actually spent in prison. She remembers his face and his hands and his voice and oh, she misses him too.
When she does sleep, she dreams, but there is no relief there either. She dreams almost always about him, and they are rarely happy dreams because at the end they are always saying goodbye
Six days into her stay at the hospital she wakes up a few hours before dawn with two gunshots echoing in her ears and his body on the sand blazing across the back of her eyelids as they fly open.
The heart-rate monitor is blinking red and an automated voice repeats, "Heart-rate has exceeded the safety limit, please remain calm and the on-call doctor will be with you shortly."
Of course it's not her hearts that are the problem, and she presses her fingers against her stomach and her thoughts against the building fear of the little mind there.
"I'm sorry," she whispers, "I'm so sorry baby, we're safe, don't be scared."
The doctor arrives with sleep still gathered around the corners of his eyes and quickly administers a sedative. He spends a few minutes with her, speaking quietly and checking vitals before he leaves her alone again in the dark.
"I'm so sorry River," he says. It's been years of nights with him for her, but she can tell tonight it's still new for him by the way he stares around her cell, and the guilt on his face.
"Why?"
"You're in prison and it's my fault."
She laughs, taking his face between her hands and drawing his eyes down to hers, "Sweetie, I've never been as free as I am right now," and she kisses him to prove it, and there is no voice in her head whispering about death and hope in an endless war and youmustkillthedoctor, because she is free.
She had been told to move as little as possible, but she suddenly feels like she can't breathe, like the darkness is a weight on her chest and if she stays laying there she will suffocate slowly. River gets up to draw the curtains back from her window. The floor feels like ice against her bare feet and the room spins. She doesn't know the length of her own arms and legs, and it take her longer than it should to take the few steps between her and the window. She feels like a cripple, like her body is another kind of prison and the thought stirs a dangerous panic at the back of her mind that she fights back immediately, drawing deep breaths.
When she does reach the window and the button that pulls back the automated curtains, she stands there, hands gripping the sill and eyes locked on the stars. She presses one hand and her forehead against the glass and lets the silvery moonlight ease the weight of the darkness against her chest.
"Would you like to hear a story?" she whispers to the baby, "I know, you're too little to understand stories," she pauses for a moment, with a sardonic smile, "well, at the moment you're sedated anyway, aren't you? But Mummy needs the practice, ok? Once upon a time that never actually happened, the bravest man in the universe kept his wife safe for a very long time while she slept. She was always tired, his wife, she hated waking up in the mornings and was usually late for school," she stops for a moment, smiling at the memories,
"Don't be like that, baby, alright? Anyway, this time she slept for so, so long. 2000 years, actually. Lots of things happened, people came and tried to take her away sometimes, there were terrible fires, floods and wars. And that man, the bravest man in the universe, was all alone, just waiting for her to wake up. He didn't give up though" She has to stop again, biting her lip to hold back the tears, "he kept her safe from everything and everyone until the day she woke up. And after that, darling, they were always together, and he was never alone again."
She turns to the side, leaning her shoulder against the window and cradling both hands around the small bump of her belly.
"I am not the bravest man in the universe – well, obviously, I'm not a man, or I'd be your dad rather than your mom – but that's not the point. I'm not the bravest man in the universe, but I am his daughter, and I'll keep you safe. I promise, and you will never be alone." River strokes her thumbs across her stomach, picturing tiny fingers and toes all curled up and still.
Sometimes she can remember flashes, the way her fingers were too small to wrap around the hilt of the gun, the weight of it against her small arms dragging it down to point at the sand.
She goes back to bed and spends the rest of the night telling stories. She doesn't tell the sad ones, just happy, silly stories about Amy, Rory and Mels in Leadworth. The nights pass a little quicker after that, with the curtains open and the stories that make her smile.
On the nights she does sleep, the dreams continue. She sees Doctor Reed almost daily, but nothing they try seems to work, either to keep the dreams away or to keep the baby from reacting. A month into her stay at the hospital, the sedatives stop working and the baby regenerates again. It's just as horrible as she remembers, the fear and the dying, and they call in Doctor Reed who turns up with red-rimmed eyes and his shirt on backwards.
When all the tests are done he sits beside her bed, his shoulders falling into a slump.
"The baby is getting weaker," he tells her, softly.
"I know."
"How many times can he do the, uh…regeneration?"
"I don't know," she tells Doctor Reed, but she can feel it draining out of him, she can see it sometimes, a soft glow that should be lovely but isn't. It's like blood dripping slowly (but oh, not slowly enough) from an open wound.
"Not much longer, I think."
She doesn't sleep for two weeks, and the exhaustion writes itself across her face in dark lines beneath her eyes. Doctor Reed doesn't look much better than she does.
On a Wednesday afternoon he comes in quietly with a frighteningly defeated slump to his shoulder. He sits in the stool next to her bed and takes her hand in both of his, pressing firmly.
"River", he says after a moment, "I don't know what else to do."
She closes her eyes and shakes her head.
"We just don't have enough information. I've tried everything, talked to everyone I can think of, but I just… I don't know how to fix this, River. I am so sorry." He presses their clasped hands against his forehead, and it's probably just the exhaustion, but he's squeezing his eyes shut like he might cry.
Fighting down her own despair, she curls her fingers around his and squeezes his hand lightly, "Don't worry Doctor Reed, I'm pretty sure Mr. Lux is still legally obligated to pay you," she teases him, but her voice shakes.
He laughs shortly, "Well good, because I've already picked out my space yacht and I'm very attached."
He puts their clasped hands down and scoots a little closer.
"River, what about the baby's father?"
Her hearts squeeze and there's afternoon daylight pouring through the open window but she feels like she's being choked by the dark again. She fixes her face still and impassive.
"What about him?" she asks.
"Is he…still alive?"
She thinks she can see where the conversation is going and doesn't like it. She considers lying for a moment, decides against it. "No. Well actually, it's complicated, but basically yes he is."
"Somehow I feel like that should be a very not-complicated yes-or-no question," he says, wryly.
"I'm an old, pregnant, alien lady, and I was dead last month, remember? Everything is complicated."
"Okay then, let me re-phrase the question. Alive or dead or whatever, can we contact him? Would he, you know, be able to…help somehow? Wait, sorry, he is, you know, the same…species as you, right?"
"Well… basically yes," she tells him.
"Yes to which?"
"The species part."
"And the other part?"
"He might know something," she tells him, and really, he's the only one left in the universe to ask, "but he didn't know about the baby, and he doesn't know I'm alive," she takes a deep breath, because she's never said it aloud before, "And I don't want him to know. Ever." The words hurt a little bit on the way out, and they hang in the air, cold and hard.
Doctor Reed looks at her, a shadow passing over his eyes. He's too professional to ask though, and she's glad.
"Could someone else approach him, or could we contact him in a way that wouldn't have to involve you?"
"I….don't know. Probably not, he's a bit difficult to pin down."
"Yes, I've heard sort-of-dead people sometimes are."
"Well I'm not," she points out, motioning to the hospital bed she's hardly left in weeks.
"Yes but you're my patient, and pregnant, and that would be entirely inappropriate." As soon as the words leave his mouth he turns bright red, drops her hand and leans back from the bed, eyes wide and looking down. She laughs at him and bites back a few flirty responses on the tip of her tongue, changing the subject before he flees the room in embarrassment.
"We're really out of options then?" she asks after a moment, sobering.
"I'm afraid so," he tells her.
With the assistance of a surprisingly helpful Mr. Lux, River is able to contact the Library mainframe, namely Charlotte, and her team. She begins her own research again, with Charlotte's help, going over all the information they had gathered again and again, and coming to the same conclusion Doctor Reed had.
At night she tries not to worry. She keeps telling stories, and she puts off sleeping until exhaustion drags her eyelids closed and the nightmares came. She wakes up to sleepy, growing panic at the back of her mind as the effectiveness of the new medicine wears off far too quickly.
There is only one place left in the universe that might have the answers they need, and the inevitability presses in on her. It's not all bad though.
The door closing on darkening Berlin and the man dying on the floor in a fancy suit. Something warm and golden pressing around her shoulders like Amy's arms and Rory's voice, but different because this one knows who she is. Feeling like home as all the terror drains slowly and quiet and soft and not really words but more like feelings of "safe now" and "everythingisgoingtobealrightbecauseI'vebeentotheend".
If she's honest (which she is sometimes is and wants to be very much although she knows she's out of practice), she wants to go back to the TARDIS too. In the quiet moments, at night between stories, she can feel the sudden homelessness of her new existence. She has no home to go back to, not even a prison cell. There is no family or friends waiting to welcome her back to life. Mr. Lux, strangely kind and gentle with the new lines of 13 years on his face, had shown her the footage of the 2044 coming home. After a hundred years, their direct families and friends were gone, but there were grandchildren and great grandchildren and nephews and nieces waiting with open arms as they stepped tearfully from the ship. She had blamed the lump in her own throat on the pregnancy.
The idea of home feels wonderful. Sometimes, when the fear starts to rise in the pit of her stomach she closes her eyes and reaches for the feel of the warm console room light against her skin and her thoughts. She wants to go back, to feel home and breathe it in. What she so very much does not want is to see him seeing her and now knowing her. Again. The thought makes her feel ill, but she blames that on the pregnancy too.
She tells Doctor Reed as little as she can. She tells him that she's going to have to do some time travelling, probably some running and most definitely some disguising. Staying in bed is really not going to work. He hestiantly tells her he can give her at most six weeks on a strong dose of a new sedative before the effects wear off.
"Can you do what you need to in six weeks?" he asks her, worry creasing his brow.
"I'm going to have to."
"This is really, very dangerous. Are you sure someone else can't go?"
"Positive." She tells him, because even if there was someone else who could read the Galifreyan, just finding the library would be almost impossible without the help of the TARDIS herself.
Mr. Lux turns up for his weekly visit with a vortex manipulator and a set of perception filters. She doesn't ask and neither does he, but she knows he's in contact with Charlotte. He tells her to be careful and hands her a bank account number on a post-it note and squeezes her shoulder on his way out.
Tracking the Doctor down, plotting out ways to meet him, potential points along his timeline and relationships she can exploit is all as natural as breathing. She was trained for this, to track him down, to get close to him, and it's so much simpler than trying to get his attention ever was.
She plays with the idea of looping back in his timeline. Joining up with him and one of his less-romantically inclined companions is certainly the most appealing option. She spends the most time on Donna, planning out way she could step into the events of his life while he'd travelled with her without making too much fuss.
She'd really rather liked Donna.
In tandem they rip up the contracts and the pieces fall, fluttering to the floor.
At the end though, she decides it's too dangerous to risk stepping back. Which leaves her with going forward.
Which means Clara, and the Doctor with his 11th face and the bowtie.
"what am I doing?"
"As you're told."
She stops telling stories at night, occupied with planning instead. She traces as far as she dares along Clara's timeline, pinpoints the most likely relevant time period which would be, for Clara, immediately following Tranzalore. She studies Clara, the real, original Clara, everything she can find. She hires an ex-time agent on the shadier side of the law to take her new vortex manipulator for a spin, sending him to different points along Clara's timeline to gather information. She compiles it all neatly and she begins to design her own character, someone unobtrusive to fit neatly into Clara's life exactly when she needs to. She sends the time agent out again to lay the groundwork for her identity. When it's all done she pays him extra to take a hallucinogenic, just enough to addle his memories of the weeks spent working for her. She's a professional, after all.
She can see the worry in Doctor Reed's eyes each time they meet. He stays longer than he needs to each time, repeating things she already knows and things that she doesn't really need to know (the Murarian birthing process, for example. The males lay eggs). She lets him, because she is learning that he is very kind, and the concern under all his babbling warms her hearts even after he leaves and all the lights go out and she is alone again.
On the day she is set to leave the hospital he arrives in the morning to administer the sedatives. After weeks of worried babbling, he is very quiet and he moves slowly.
"Do you have any family, Doctor Reed?" two months together, and she'd never asked him about himself, and suddenly it bothers her.
"Just my mum," he tells her, coming to sit next to her bed, "my Dad kicked off before I was born, we've never heard from him."
"Foolish. You must not have gotten your intelligence from him then."
He smiles at her, a warm, genuine sort of smile, and it makes him look so very young. He has a nice face, really; high, sharp cheekbones and a clean, square jaw line. His eyebrows are thick over his intelligent eyes, and there's almost always a little crease in-between them.
He moves to sit on the edge of her bed, right next to her, his knee brushing against her hip.
"I will miss you," he tells her, and there's a stark honesty in his voice and in the way he covers her hand with his.
She smiles at him, turning her hand to squeeze just the tips of his fingers. "I'll be back before you know it. Time travel, you know."
"Whether it's six minutes or six weeks, I'll spend the entire time completely worried. Have I mentioned my high blood pressure?" he says, leaning in slightly.
"You're much too young for high blood pressure."
"Apparently not. Anyway, now that you know, keep it in mind, would you?"
"Are you trying to make me feel guilty?" she teases him.
"Absolutely, it's completely your fault," he tells her, and kisses her forehead very quickly before he says goodbye.