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Hello, Sweetie (River Song/Doctor)
Title: Hello, Sweetie.
Author: Meeee (unfortunately)
Fandom: Doctor Who, set during "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead"
Characters: River Song, Tenth Doctor, the Master
Rating: PG
Summary: She never traveled with him in this body. There is no River Song. These are the places he's already been. With someone else.
[Author's note: The only River Song/Doctor fanfic I will ever write, trust me. I took some creative liberties with the dialogue and plot and didn't bother addressing her later appearance in Season 5, so it is a bit AU. Also this is a first draft and I still hate the ending. But I have been writing this for two years now and just want it DONE.]
When the Doctor is needed, she knows how to get his attention. She's always known. And as soon as she wakes up, she's ready. With rage and bile and spitting hatred, it's all still there. Still intact, a perhaps regrettably flawless process. She wakes with the instant knowledge that she needs to find him. She needs to hurt him.
How little changes.
**
"River Song, archaeologist," she smirks, offering her hand glibly. On the surface, perhaps one would think such an introduction was merely meant to antagonize the Doctor after his stated dislike of the profession. But she's chosen her name with the intent to cut him deeply. She wonders if he even fully remembers the Singing River, the time they spent there witnessing the truth of the legend. Where he first became obsessed with human culture, their creative gullibility and short-sightedness, something she just couldn't work up the same fascination about. An unhealthy fascination, she'd argued, for a species so much greater than these backwater tribal factions.
When she first started to lose him.
She thinks she catches him blinking quickly, but he's practically built for self-repression, always has been, and she can hear him quite clearly disregarding the insane, hopeful half-possibility and meeting her eyes with a disinterested, decidedly gruff gaze.
And then he starts to usher them out, order them around roughly, imperious and all-knowing and distracted, and that's when her smile widens, when she's absolutely sure she's struck a nerve.
**
By the time they finally meet again, in the Library, her identity has been fixed firmly in place. She's been traveling with this archaeological crew for four days, but her records and their fond memories stretch back almost two years. She still has hated every minute of it. The stink of humanity in the 51st century is every bit as potent as that at the end of the universe.
She almost thinks perhaps it is too easy, too obvious, summoning the Doctor via his psychic paper. But then he's always been a bit too oblivious for his own good, always denying himself the obvious explanations if it meant he'd have to confront his own feelings on the matter at hand.
He is so good at distracting himself that she could probably even sign it 'The Other One' and he still wouldn't get it, still would puzzle at it for seconds before finding something else to use up his interest.
The pact, too, with the Vashta Nerada, is a precarious component. While she couldn't care less if it eats her loyal crew, or even this latest busybody, brainless ape the Doctor's taken to hauling around, she hasn't had a lot of luck with alliances with hostile species in the past. She considers the possibility, en route to the Library in the cramped little space junker they laughably call a ship, of storing her biodata in her screwdriver. Just in case. It's an old trick, but she wouldn't be here without it in the first place.
**
For the record, he —she— was surprised as anyone upon awakening in the body of a woman. Gender switching was not unheard-of on Gallifrey, but only a rare subset of the population would ever manifest the trait, and even then the circumstances had to be special.
Although, the Master muses, running a hand absentmindedly down the curves of his —her— torso, it's not as if these circumstances don't exactly fit the bill.
"Bet your life?" he asks her, as they're standing together in the Library some time later, and the shadows are deepening around them.
"Always," she snaps back, the knife of a smile slashed across her face, enjoying every nanosecond of his wide-eyed stare. Knowing and yet refusing to know.
**
When it's clear that none of them are going anywhere, when the Master's made absolutely sure of that, she begins to poke him in earnest.
"Crush of the Byzantium? Picnic at Asgard?" She has to hold back laughter, it's almost too delicious watching the memories of long-forgotten emotions flit across his face. She settles for a sickly sweet smile.
She never traveled with him in this body. There is no River Song. These are the places he's already been. With someone else.
"Tell me you know who I am," she pleads, but he can only stare at her, trapped in his unhappy pragmatism. Her true identity is simply too impossible this time. Too good to be true.
"I'm sorry," he says, his old fallback, and somehow that is the absolute last straw. She snaps the book shut, suddenly offended despite herself, and wanders off. Unable to break an old habit, she finds she's positioning herself just so to keep the Doctor in her peripheral vision at all times.
And even in this seemingly spontaneous act which is not entirely fictional, the Master is continually calculating, constantly teasing and pushing. The book she's left behind in plain view of the Doctor, of course, is filled with rubbish. It is the temptation of peeking into an unknowable future that is going to undo him—not the contents.
But when his curiosity gets the better of him, when he's finally picked up the book and is just about to turn the pages, she finds herself suddenly next to him again, drawn as if by gravitational force. She snatches it out of his hands spitefully.
"Sorry. You're not allowed to see inside the book," she informs him imperiously. "It's against the rules."
"What rules?" he asks, his jaw jutting, stubborn.
"Your rules," she says with a sweet smile, the kind she reserves for only the worst sort of torture.
**
The Doctor is pacing again as she sits and watches him in silence. He's desperately trying to contain his own frantic demeanor, convert it into harmless bursts of manic energy. It reminds her of a cat jumping at half-imagined ghosts and shadows—the type that don't devour. It reminds her of the drums and the habitual bouts of tapping she's had to curb since coming here and easing into her new identity. But then he has always reminded her of herself. That's as it should be, isn't it? Isn't that the universe's greatest joke? The two of them are forever bound.
The Vashta Nerada have gotten out of hand after all. Typical. She has no idea how she always manages to fall into alliances with the species hell bent on revenge, turning viciously on a perfectly reasonable pact and instead choosing in the end to stumble blindly toward a conflict they have no hope in winning.
Still, his ape companion is long gone, his screwdriver, the ancient old thing, has began to mysteriously malfunction, and the Doctor is nearly at the breaking point. She realizes the phrase, 'Tension so thick you could cut it with a knife' is entirely too cliche, but it flits through her mind anyway. This should be her moment of greatest triumph, despite the danger. This should have been the moment she was waiting for.
But she's grown inexplicably tired of this, this revolving around each other like planets in fractured, misshapen orbit. She wants him to know, wants him to put two and two together and come up with the only equation that makes sense. She wants him to fight, the only thing they can ever do, the thing that defines them the best.
"Sometimes I hate you!" she finds herself bursting out during a particularly vexing argument.
"I know!" comes the automatic reply, out of place and yet not, and her hearts nearly skip a beat.
"Oh, for heaven's sake!" Mr. Lux tells them. "Look at the pair of you! We're all gonna die right here, and you're just squabbling like an old married couple."
The Doctor and the Master stare at each other, and for a moment all defenses are down, all pathways are clear, all possibilities probable. It could be centuries before either has it in mind to speak. But time is growing short, and there is still work to do.
"I'm sorry," she tells him, co-opting his line with no short amount of bitter satisfaction. "I'm really very sorry."
And she whispers his name in his ear. His true name. The one he's told nobody else. The one she had to tease from his mind herself, all those years ago at the Academy. She lets all the implications sink in for a moment, enjoying the quickened pulses under her fingertips, before stepping away.
"Are we good?"
He stares. Surely he must know now. Surely. But the answer is suddenly all too important.
"Doctor... are we good?"
**
Perhaps she's convinced him too well that he can finally trust her. Or perhaps he is still fighting himself, unwilling to comprehend. Whatever the reason, their alliance, tenuous as it is, holds and for a few fleeting hours, she truly believes that her plan will succeed after all. She can commandeer his TARDIS, leave him stranded. Let him deal with the angry Forest. Or she can allow him to live—her prisoner. Both outcomes have some degree of merit to them, and as always, she remains flexible enough to allow for both options.
And then all too soon, things go wrong again. When the Doctor is around, they always do. In some ways, his nature is every bit as destructive as hers. Perhaps more.
He's proposing a plan, now, to rescue his beloved apes, that will surely kill him. Try as she might, she can't get him to budge.
"Don't think you'll regenerate, Doctor," she hisses, her face full of panic. But there's no stopping him, when it comes to his precious humans. There never was. He'd choose death over losing them. It was a choice he could never make for her.
"Shut up," he tells her, and she storms off in a huff. She should just let him get on with it, let him burn his hearts out and die, and leave this place. In a Doctor-free universe she can take her pick of worlds to conquer, move onwards and onwards until the drums stop.
She wonders, sometimes, if the drums will ever stop.
"I told you to go," he snaps impatiently when she returns, watching him work silently.
"Lux can manage without me," she murmurs, drawing closer. And in point of fact, Lux can recover from the concussion she's left him with all on his own. "But you can't."
Her body may be weak and female, but his frame is even slighter. Plus, as ever, she has the element of surprise. The Doctor goes down with one swing of her fist.
**
By the time he comes to, she's nearly finished the preparations, strapping herself into the chair and readying the wires to the main computer. Not that it'd matter how far she was into the process, however, considering she's cuffed him to a support structure just a few feet out of reach. She takes a moment to admire the way he scrabbles to his knees, lunging desperately toward her, before continuing to attach the wires. How little changes, indeed.
It'll hurt, of course -she wasn't exaggerating when she told him it'd kill someone stone dead— but this is sure to hurt him more. She tells herself that this is precisely why she is doing it. Far better than dwelling on the irony of sacrificing herself for the Doctor.
"Time can be rewritten," he pleads with her, straining at the end of his tether even still. She starts as if slapped, tears pricking her eyes despite herself.
"Not those times." It comes out harsher, more reactionary than she intended. "Not one line! Don't you dare!"
And then she twists the knife, cementing her true identity firmly in his mind.
"You'll see me again," she promises, readying the cables. "You and me, time and space. You watch us run." And silently she adds, We used to run across those fields all day. On the slope of Mount Perdition. Remember?
With that, finally, blessedly, it dawns on him. There's no hiding from it now, no contorting those facts. He fumbles with speech, trying to piece it all together in his mind. Trying to sort the lies from the truth. He'll likely be doing that for a very long time. The satisfaction that accompanies that thought is bittersweet. Isn't this just the way of it. She finally has the Doctor where she wants him and she has to die to get it. Again.
And for a moment, just before she connects the cables and the energy overload rips through her body, she truly is sorry.
She's so, so very sorry.
Author: Meeee (unfortunately)
Fandom: Doctor Who, set during "Silence in the Library" and "Forest of the Dead"
Characters: River Song, Tenth Doctor, the Master
Rating: PG
Summary: She never traveled with him in this body. There is no River Song. These are the places he's already been. With someone else.
[Author's note: The only River Song/Doctor fanfic I will ever write, trust me. I took some creative liberties with the dialogue and plot and didn't bother addressing her later appearance in Season 5, so it is a bit AU. Also this is a first draft and I still hate the ending. But I have been writing this for two years now and just want it DONE.]
When the Doctor is needed, she knows how to get his attention. She's always known. And as soon as she wakes up, she's ready. With rage and bile and spitting hatred, it's all still there. Still intact, a perhaps regrettably flawless process. She wakes with the instant knowledge that she needs to find him. She needs to hurt him.
How little changes.
**
"River Song, archaeologist," she smirks, offering her hand glibly. On the surface, perhaps one would think such an introduction was merely meant to antagonize the Doctor after his stated dislike of the profession. But she's chosen her name with the intent to cut him deeply. She wonders if he even fully remembers the Singing River, the time they spent there witnessing the truth of the legend. Where he first became obsessed with human culture, their creative gullibility and short-sightedness, something she just couldn't work up the same fascination about. An unhealthy fascination, she'd argued, for a species so much greater than these backwater tribal factions.
When she first started to lose him.
She thinks she catches him blinking quickly, but he's practically built for self-repression, always has been, and she can hear him quite clearly disregarding the insane, hopeful half-possibility and meeting her eyes with a disinterested, decidedly gruff gaze.
And then he starts to usher them out, order them around roughly, imperious and all-knowing and distracted, and that's when her smile widens, when she's absolutely sure she's struck a nerve.
**
By the time they finally meet again, in the Library, her identity has been fixed firmly in place. She's been traveling with this archaeological crew for four days, but her records and their fond memories stretch back almost two years. She still has hated every minute of it. The stink of humanity in the 51st century is every bit as potent as that at the end of the universe.
She almost thinks perhaps it is too easy, too obvious, summoning the Doctor via his psychic paper. But then he's always been a bit too oblivious for his own good, always denying himself the obvious explanations if it meant he'd have to confront his own feelings on the matter at hand.
He is so good at distracting himself that she could probably even sign it 'The Other One' and he still wouldn't get it, still would puzzle at it for seconds before finding something else to use up his interest.
The pact, too, with the Vashta Nerada, is a precarious component. While she couldn't care less if it eats her loyal crew, or even this latest busybody, brainless ape the Doctor's taken to hauling around, she hasn't had a lot of luck with alliances with hostile species in the past. She considers the possibility, en route to the Library in the cramped little space junker they laughably call a ship, of storing her biodata in her screwdriver. Just in case. It's an old trick, but she wouldn't be here without it in the first place.
**
For the record, he —she— was surprised as anyone upon awakening in the body of a woman. Gender switching was not unheard-of on Gallifrey, but only a rare subset of the population would ever manifest the trait, and even then the circumstances had to be special.
Although, the Master muses, running a hand absentmindedly down the curves of his —her— torso, it's not as if these circumstances don't exactly fit the bill.
"Bet your life?" he asks her, as they're standing together in the Library some time later, and the shadows are deepening around them.
"Always," she snaps back, the knife of a smile slashed across her face, enjoying every nanosecond of his wide-eyed stare. Knowing and yet refusing to know.
**
When it's clear that none of them are going anywhere, when the Master's made absolutely sure of that, she begins to poke him in earnest.
"Crush of the Byzantium? Picnic at Asgard?" She has to hold back laughter, it's almost too delicious watching the memories of long-forgotten emotions flit across his face. She settles for a sickly sweet smile.
She never traveled with him in this body. There is no River Song. These are the places he's already been. With someone else.
"Tell me you know who I am," she pleads, but he can only stare at her, trapped in his unhappy pragmatism. Her true identity is simply too impossible this time. Too good to be true.
"I'm sorry," he says, his old fallback, and somehow that is the absolute last straw. She snaps the book shut, suddenly offended despite herself, and wanders off. Unable to break an old habit, she finds she's positioning herself just so to keep the Doctor in her peripheral vision at all times.
And even in this seemingly spontaneous act which is not entirely fictional, the Master is continually calculating, constantly teasing and pushing. The book she's left behind in plain view of the Doctor, of course, is filled with rubbish. It is the temptation of peeking into an unknowable future that is going to undo him—not the contents.
But when his curiosity gets the better of him, when he's finally picked up the book and is just about to turn the pages, she finds herself suddenly next to him again, drawn as if by gravitational force. She snatches it out of his hands spitefully.
"Sorry. You're not allowed to see inside the book," she informs him imperiously. "It's against the rules."
"What rules?" he asks, his jaw jutting, stubborn.
"Your rules," she says with a sweet smile, the kind she reserves for only the worst sort of torture.
**
The Doctor is pacing again as she sits and watches him in silence. He's desperately trying to contain his own frantic demeanor, convert it into harmless bursts of manic energy. It reminds her of a cat jumping at half-imagined ghosts and shadows—the type that don't devour. It reminds her of the drums and the habitual bouts of tapping she's had to curb since coming here and easing into her new identity. But then he has always reminded her of herself. That's as it should be, isn't it? Isn't that the universe's greatest joke? The two of them are forever bound.
The Vashta Nerada have gotten out of hand after all. Typical. She has no idea how she always manages to fall into alliances with the species hell bent on revenge, turning viciously on a perfectly reasonable pact and instead choosing in the end to stumble blindly toward a conflict they have no hope in winning.
Still, his ape companion is long gone, his screwdriver, the ancient old thing, has began to mysteriously malfunction, and the Doctor is nearly at the breaking point. She realizes the phrase, 'Tension so thick you could cut it with a knife' is entirely too cliche, but it flits through her mind anyway. This should be her moment of greatest triumph, despite the danger. This should have been the moment she was waiting for.
But she's grown inexplicably tired of this, this revolving around each other like planets in fractured, misshapen orbit. She wants him to know, wants him to put two and two together and come up with the only equation that makes sense. She wants him to fight, the only thing they can ever do, the thing that defines them the best.
"Sometimes I hate you!" she finds herself bursting out during a particularly vexing argument.
"I know!" comes the automatic reply, out of place and yet not, and her hearts nearly skip a beat.
"Oh, for heaven's sake!" Mr. Lux tells them. "Look at the pair of you! We're all gonna die right here, and you're just squabbling like an old married couple."
The Doctor and the Master stare at each other, and for a moment all defenses are down, all pathways are clear, all possibilities probable. It could be centuries before either has it in mind to speak. But time is growing short, and there is still work to do.
"I'm sorry," she tells him, co-opting his line with no short amount of bitter satisfaction. "I'm really very sorry."
And she whispers his name in his ear. His true name. The one he's told nobody else. The one she had to tease from his mind herself, all those years ago at the Academy. She lets all the implications sink in for a moment, enjoying the quickened pulses under her fingertips, before stepping away.
"Are we good?"
He stares. Surely he must know now. Surely. But the answer is suddenly all too important.
"Doctor... are we good?"
**
Perhaps she's convinced him too well that he can finally trust her. Or perhaps he is still fighting himself, unwilling to comprehend. Whatever the reason, their alliance, tenuous as it is, holds and for a few fleeting hours, she truly believes that her plan will succeed after all. She can commandeer his TARDIS, leave him stranded. Let him deal with the angry Forest. Or she can allow him to live—her prisoner. Both outcomes have some degree of merit to them, and as always, she remains flexible enough to allow for both options.
And then all too soon, things go wrong again. When the Doctor is around, they always do. In some ways, his nature is every bit as destructive as hers. Perhaps more.
He's proposing a plan, now, to rescue his beloved apes, that will surely kill him. Try as she might, she can't get him to budge.
"Don't think you'll regenerate, Doctor," she hisses, her face full of panic. But there's no stopping him, when it comes to his precious humans. There never was. He'd choose death over losing them. It was a choice he could never make for her.
"Shut up," he tells her, and she storms off in a huff. She should just let him get on with it, let him burn his hearts out and die, and leave this place. In a Doctor-free universe she can take her pick of worlds to conquer, move onwards and onwards until the drums stop.
She wonders, sometimes, if the drums will ever stop.
"I told you to go," he snaps impatiently when she returns, watching him work silently.
"Lux can manage without me," she murmurs, drawing closer. And in point of fact, Lux can recover from the concussion she's left him with all on his own. "But you can't."
Her body may be weak and female, but his frame is even slighter. Plus, as ever, she has the element of surprise. The Doctor goes down with one swing of her fist.
**
By the time he comes to, she's nearly finished the preparations, strapping herself into the chair and readying the wires to the main computer. Not that it'd matter how far she was into the process, however, considering she's cuffed him to a support structure just a few feet out of reach. She takes a moment to admire the way he scrabbles to his knees, lunging desperately toward her, before continuing to attach the wires. How little changes, indeed.
It'll hurt, of course -she wasn't exaggerating when she told him it'd kill someone stone dead— but this is sure to hurt him more. She tells herself that this is precisely why she is doing it. Far better than dwelling on the irony of sacrificing herself for the Doctor.
"Time can be rewritten," he pleads with her, straining at the end of his tether even still. She starts as if slapped, tears pricking her eyes despite herself.
"Not those times." It comes out harsher, more reactionary than she intended. "Not one line! Don't you dare!"
And then she twists the knife, cementing her true identity firmly in his mind.
"You'll see me again," she promises, readying the cables. "You and me, time and space. You watch us run." And silently she adds, We used to run across those fields all day. On the slope of Mount Perdition. Remember?
With that, finally, blessedly, it dawns on him. There's no hiding from it now, no contorting those facts. He fumbles with speech, trying to piece it all together in his mind. Trying to sort the lies from the truth. He'll likely be doing that for a very long time. The satisfaction that accompanies that thought is bittersweet. Isn't this just the way of it. She finally has the Doctor where she wants him and she has to die to get it. Again.
And for a moment, just before she connects the cables and the energy overload rips through her body, she truly is sorry.
She's so, so very sorry.