Fic: DW: this song is the cross that I bear (River Song, gen)

[coffeesuperhero]

Title: this song is the cross that I bear
Fandom: Doctor Who
Summary: When the TARDIS forgave her, she cried.
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimers: This isn't for profit, just for fun. All characters & situations belong to Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat, BBC, and their various subsidiaries. Title from a song by the Barenaked Ladies, which I also had nothing to do with.
A/N: Spoilers for everything current, just in case. I've been writing this, off and on, since Let's Kill Hitler aired. It has been a frustrating, emotionally trying tale, and it made me a little weepy on more than one occasion, but I've tried to tell it anyway, because sadness is easier sometimes when it's shared, though it will probably get jossed tomorrow. D: Thanks to leiascully for looking this over.



There is no one near her when she wakes. The soft lights of the room glow marginally brighter, and she blinks, once, knowing without any sort of explanation exactly how the system that controls them works. If she closes her eyes she can feel time like other beings feel the air, know the temperature, can tell you if they're hot or cold. She can tell you the time. All of it.

She has never really been one for reflection, but now seems an appropriate moment for it. It should be strange that an entity which chooses to refer to itself as the Order of the Question should raise a child to believe its agenda without any questions. It should be strange, but it isn't, really, because it is exactly the kind of thing you do if you're bringing up a weapon instead of bringing up baby.

She doesn't regret killing the Doctor. She does regret shooting the TARDIS. She would gladly spend the rest of her life doing penance for that. There had been pain, briefly, when the bullet found its target, but she ignored it in her zealous drive to fulfill her mission and skip off to see the universe. She'd had plans, oh, yes, she'd had plans. Kill the Doctor, shoot Hitler, steal the time machine and go on a mad rambling tour of time and space, shuffling people off their mortal coils as she felt was appropriate, finding herself a new face and a new body whenever she felt bored or tired or dull or ordinary.

It was the TARDIS that changed everything. She might gleefully have left him there, dying on the floor of a convention hall in Berlin, her parents looking on in their horror and their grief, but the TARDIS called her names she hadn't known she answered to. The Doctor said her name, but the TARDIS sang it, the melody of the time vortex resonating through her, and her whole world tilted on its axis.

When the TARDIS forgave her, she cried.

"I'm sorry, my love," she had said, standing by the console, her hand resting tenderly on the stabilizers. The lights of the TARDIS grew warmer for a moment, and it was like the mother's embrace she had never known she wanted. She's never known a need for love or a need for forgiveness, but in that moment she felt as though she would die without them. She had to grip the railing just to stay standing, and for how long, she does not know. Time stands as still as she likes in the TARDIS, and for once she was content to let it.

She has watched other people experience joy at the thought of home, of love, but she's never felt it, and she had never thought she'd care to try. Long ago, she found the word, "psychopath," and she had embraced it with a delight that frightened her captors and amused the person she thought she was. But when she stepped through the door of the TARDIS and it spoke to her, it taught her more than just how to fly: the TARDIS taught her about herself, it taught her to feel, to love, to long for the comfort of home. The TARDIS is home to her now. No other place in all of space and time will bring her joy and comfort in the same way as that precious, infinite, beautiful blue box that sings the song of her heart. River will never be able to shut out its song. She wouldn't want to. She longs for the TARDIS like the Doctor longs for Gallifrey, aches to step into that boundless space and just be, no obligations, no missions, only the blessed balm of warm bright lights and the promise of a life lived with whatever purpose she chooses, in any place or time she chooses. The TARDIS is freedom. The TARDIS is love, hope, joy; the TARDIS is all of those intangible ideas that she has been taught to dismiss, that she has been told are unnecessary, laughable, signs of weakness, fragility, all to be filed under Things She Ought Not Want. Good little weapons don't love, after all.

But River Song does.

She had lingered, there in the TARDIS, unwilling to leave the only thing that has ever really known her, the only thing that has told her the truth. She asked about herself, about Amy and Rory and the Doctor and Gallifrey and time and space, about everything she could think of, and she could think of quite a bit, but the TARDIS has a flying mind that is more than a match for hers, and what a relief that had been, to find someone, something, who could keep up.

The Doctor, she understands now, is a flashpoint. He's a polarizing force. What a people they must have been, before the wars, a whole planetful of Doctors, living and loving and knowing time, guarding it against the rest of the cosmos, against peoples who could not know. She knows, now. She sees herself, finally, as a person, not just the weapon the Order trained her to be. She will protect the Doctor, not for his own sake, but for time, for the TARDIS, and yes, for love. The TARDIS loves the Doctor, she knows: she could feel it in the warmth of the lights when she asked about him. She will not hurt someone the TARDIS loves, not unless she has no choice in the matter, not unless the TARDIS tells her it will be all right. She will take the TARDIS' worldview as her ethos until she finds an inner compass of her own. Fake it 'til she makes it. Or something like that. It's a thing in progress. Sometimes she feels like she's still regenerating, still learning to be comfortable in the skin she inhabits, and maybe that's to be expected.

She feels empty, but she supposes that, too, is to be expected. More than life, more than potential, has left her now. She had been living with one purpose, and now that too is gone, all for the sake of a boy and his box, the Doctor and the TARDIS.

The Doctor. She could fall in love with someone like that: someone clever and mad and arrogant and ridiculous, someone who understands time like she does, someone like her, or as close as she feels she might find.

But that will keep, or perhaps it won't, but either way, it is what it is, it was what it was, and it will be what it already will have been. She doesn't know what this is, what she feels for anybody, for her parents, for the Doctor, for herself, not really even for the TARDIS. She wants to call it love, respect, admiration, but she isn't certain. She needs time, time to live, to learn, time to love other people, time to love herself, to sort it all out, and she may have less time now than she did before, but that only increases her drive to find answers, to know herself. She wants to know everything, and maybe that, more than anything else, is to be expected. Knowledge, for a Time Lord, is like air.

She knocks around the galaxies for a few years before she applies to an archaeology program that promises to be the best the multiverse can offer. They ask her why she wants to pursue this particular degree, and for a laugh she tells them she's looking for a good man. There are still some things she'd rather not verbalize. "I'm trying to find a life of my own after being brainwashed and trained to be a living weapon who was supposed to kill the only other surviving member of my species," is a bit personal, even for a personal essay, and "Histories fascinate me," is terribly dull, even if that's what she's telling herself lately.

Histories do fascinate her, but the truth is somewhere in between the lie she told the interviewer and the lies she tells herself. She is looking for a good man, because she has spent all her life being told that she was looking for a bad one, and she suspects that just like her personal untruths, the truth about the Doctor is somewhere between traditional notions of Good and Bad. This wasn't exactly a revelation to her-- one of the fun things about being much, much smarter than her captors had been that she'd figured them all out a long time ago-- but distinctions between good and bad never mattered to her before. After Berlin, after the TARDIS, these things matter.

So she looks for the Doctor in all the pages of history, because all she wants now is the truth, and when she finds it she intends to write her thesis on it and then get on with her own life. If she happens to start living for herself in the interim, so much the better. The Doctor is always going to be there, showing up on her doorstep unannounced, she's sure, but she doesn't have to go with him. She's as mad as he is, probably, but she's mad on her own schedule. The TARDIS would come if she called, anyway, of that much she is certain. That's what matters to her, that she can go home again.

Time flies. She thinks of Amy and Rory, thousands of years ago, living and loving each other. In some parts of time, she's there, now, their mad best mate Mels, the scourge of Leadworth.

But that's the past, or the old present, or something like that. It's difficult, trying to fit time into words that aren't Gallifreyan. For this particular version of this particular present, however, she wants to concentrate not on what she's done or what she may do or what her parents may be doing, but on her classes, whether or not they've anything to do with the Doctor. She's adding an extra language or four on the side, because she's dreadfully bored. It had been difficult not to threaten her advisor when he told her she was restricted to the usual number of hours for first-year students.

"You've got to sleep sometime," he had said, beaming, far too jolly about enforcing the rules for her liking.

"I really don't," she had replied, and it hadn't been a lie. An hour of sleep every so often and she's fine, but of course they've never admitted a student who was even a tiny bit Time Lord, so she shouldn't expect them to know.

She grins, she bears it, and when she can bear it no more she hacks into the computer system and adds her name to the rolls of three more classes, but still she finishes her work early and spends every night in the massive library on campus. By her calculations, she'll have read through every book they have by the time she's finished her degree.

Lately she's been tempted to track the Doctor down just to ask him if time is supposed to pass this way: slowly and in order. Things didn't seem nearly so dull when she was devilling Amy and Rory in her clever disguise as their best mate, but writing paper after predictable paper on topics her professors find interesting is excruciating.

When she nearly fails a class because she writes a tongue-in-cheek answer for her final in Religions of The Scarlet Junction, she decides it's time to shake things up. She changes tactics and tries her hand at a normal life for awhile: she makes a few friends, goes to the pub, has some laughs. She goes on dates. There's the Nestian duplicate, and he's fun for awhile, but it's nothing serious, just a lot of noisy sex. Then there's a shy, quiet girl in her seminar on the economic systems of Raxacoricofallapatorius, and it's almost serious, or as serious as she can really be without revealing the stranger parts of her lives to someone who isn't a complicated space-time event. When it ends-- and badly, of course, as though there's any other way for a first horrible heartbreak to go-- she skives off a whole day of classes and waits for the TARDIS to come and soothe the dull ache in her chest. She waits for someone to want her. In one way or another, she feels as though she's been waiting for that all her life. Perhaps she's more like her mother than she knows.

When the TARDIS does appear, it's not what she expected, but somehow it's what she needed all the same.

All she sees of the Doctor is one long-fingered hand shoving her father out the door before the TARDIS door slams shut and her beautiful, dear blue box vanishes from her living room, all her hopes vanishing with it.

"Ri-- um, Mel-- er, I'm so sorry," Rory says, nearly stumbling over a pile of books behind the couch. "I'm... not really sure what to call you."

"That's alright," she says, willing herself not to cry at the disappearance of the only comforting thing she wanted. She doesn't cry. She's River Song, badass of ever, or some day she hopes to be, and she's not crying, not even in front of her father. "I don't really know what to call you either."

"Your mum will be along in a bit," he says, gesturing to the empty air behind him. "Long story: we got separated on the planet we were on, I was closer to the TARDIS, so when we got your message, we came here first and he went back for Amy."

"It's a time machine," she sighs, her irritation with the TARDIS replacing her sadness. The TARDIS knows her; the TARDIS knows what she needs. Why did it send her parents when all she wanted was the warm glow of those lights and the feeling that all of time and space was stretching out before her? "You could have been here whenever you liked."

"I know," Rory says sheepishly. He shrugs and runs a hand through his hair. "What can I say? Your kid's in trouble, you don't think about these things."

"I'm not in trouble," she says. She grips her mug of tea tighter, determined not to care that he cares, wishing for the TARDIS to return and take all her bad feelings away. Why has it left her?

Rory steps over and sits next to her on the couch, but he's careful to leave a large amount of space between them. That helps, but it hurts, too. It's all so awfully complicated.

"You probably wanted the Doctor," he says finally.

"I wanted the TARDIS," she corrects, a bit more forcefully than she had intended.

"Oh. Oh, well. She'll be along in a bit, too, then," he stammers. "I... maybe you shouldn't tell your mum that."

"He'll fix it, you know," River says absently, picking at a spot on her trousers.

"Fix what?"

"Time," she sighs. Strange that he doesn't have to ask to whom is she is referring, but once the Doctor walks into someone's life, that's how things go.

"I don't know that he will," Rory says, bitterness running underneath all the concern in his voice.

River smiles a crooked smile at him and takes a long sip of tea. "Told you that, did he?"

"Yeah, basically. Not in so many words. But here you are, grown, in the fifty-first century, and there we are, in the TARDIS, in Leadworth, in all of time and space and whatever, running and saving other worlds and doing everything except raising you. What should I think, but that he wasn't joking around when he said that this is all he can do?"

"Rule one," she says, shaking her head.

"The Doctor lies," they say together, and Rory sighs.

"Do you hate him?" she asks, after the moments of silence become uncomfortable. "I'll understand, you know. I spent a few lives doing just that."

"I'd love to," Rory tells her. "But I can't. I can't, after everything that we've all been through, after they took you, they took Amy, and still, I can't hate him. I'm angry at him all of the time, but I don't hate him. I'm definitely not winning father of the year for that, huh?"

She blinks. It takes her a moment to put words to what she's feeling, to understand that it's sympathy she has for her father, this person who is good and kind, who loves her but cannot hate the Doctor. If she hadn't grown up with him, she would never believe that anyone could be as quietly good as Rory Williams, but here he is.

"I might nominate you anyway," she says, and he smiles. It's the only time she can remember regretting that she doesn't look like her parents: no one will never tell her she has her father's smile or her mother's eyes.

"Do you... do you want to talk about... it? Whatever it was that brought us here? I'm not the TARDIS, but I'm good at... I don't really know what I'm good at, honestly, other than being a nurse."

"Loving Amy," she says, slipping back into her role as their best mate, the person who they could always count on for too much excitement, style over substance. "You were always very good at that."

"I can love you, too," he says, almost unbelievably earnest. "I loved you from the minute I saw you." He swipes at his eyes with the back of his hand. "Oh, no. I was gonna be so cool about this, I was gonna be the cool dad."

"Small chance of that," she laughs.

"You get that from your mother," he tells her, to her unexpected delight.

"Maybe she gets it from me," she jokes.

"No," Rory laughs. "I know our lives are very strange, but trust me: you get that from Amy." He sighs. "I don't know what you got from me."

"Darts," she jokes, suddenly too tired of all of it to say anything more serious than that. "There's a board in the cupboard."

Rory's eyes light up. "Think you can still beat me? I should warn you: I've been practising."

So they play. She talks, in between turns. Rory doesn't say much, choosing instead to listen and try his best to beat her at a game she taught him to play. He's here, and that's something, but she doesn't want to think too much about it, because feelings she doesn't really understand are threatening her with tears again, and she's determined to win this game.

They're in the middle of their third round when the TARDIS finally appears, Amy leaping out almost before the outlines of the TARDIS are solid. She is brandishing what appears to be a badminton racket.

"Okay, where is this person? Alien? Whatever," Amy says, looking around the room. "Who was it?"

"Amy?" Rory asks, his hand still poised to throw a dart. "What are you doing?"

"The TARDIS said that my daughter was sad," Amy says, still gripping the racket. "This was the only thing I could find in there to hit somebody with. So. Who made you sad, and when can I hit them?"

"I'm not sad," River says.

"Then why are you crying?" Amy asks.

"I'm not," River says, but she puts her hand to her face anyway. "But I am. Why am I crying?"

"I think it's a Pond family trait," Amy mutters. "Remind me to tell you about the time I wasn't crying in front of Vincent van Gogh. What's wrong?" She puts down the racket and steps closer to River.

"It's just a broken heart," River says, layering an extra helping of cavalier over the hurt. "It'll heal. Don't worry, I've got a spare."

"Bad breakup," Rory supplies. He waves his hand at the badminton racket. "I already offered to be overprotective about it. She turned me down."

"Well, that's... normal," Amy says, and she sounds surprised, but only for a moment. "Wait. You can't be dating already."

"And why not?"

"Because you were a little girl five minutes ago," Amy whispers. She reaches out, a little awkwardly, and squeezes River's hand. "I'm not crying, either. Stuff it, Rory," she adds.

"Okay," he answers. "I'm not, either. I'm the Cool Dad."

"Only when you're a crying Roman," Amy teases. She looks back to River. "Do you want us to stay?"

"Stay for dinner," River says, and they do. They order in-- Rory jokes that he's never had fifty-first century takeaway, and River tells him that it hasn't really changed in the last three-thousand years. It's a little strange, but they make it work. They even ask her about her classes, as, she supposes, parents do.

It matters to her more than she thought it would, that they care for her as they do. She's light years and centuries away from them, but like the TARDIS, they still want her. The love they have for her is overwhelming in its intensity at such a close range, but she wouldn't push them away if it meant her life. She's glad, now, for the years she has been away from them that have given her the peace of mind to be able to accept their love without running from it the way she had before, when she was Mels, Mels the best mate who was always in trouble, always starting fights, always trying to make Amy and Rory tell her that they didn't want her around.

They never did.

Looking at them now, remembering their faces in the hall in Berlin, she knows they never will. She's been searching for the truth of her own life, and part of it is here, with them.

She hugs her parents outside the TARDIS when it's time for them to leave and go back to exploring the universe with the Doctor.

"I told you once that you were going to be a superhero, and look at you," Amy says. Her voice is proud. "I know this is strange, but... we'll make it work. No spoilers, I know, but how many parents can say that they know they were right?"

"I think I could manage to be a superhero," River tells them. "I don't know if I know how to be your daughter."

"There isn't a manual," Amy says. "It's not like school. There's not a quiz at the end to see if you've done it right."

"We're not going to mark you off for trying to kill Hitler, or anything," Rory adds.

"You're ours," Amy says fiercely. "Remember that. All that other stuff, with the Doctor, with the Order, that doesn't matter. And anybody who breaks either of your hearts has to answer to me," she says, pointing at the badminton racket, and oh, if this doesn't feel the same as that day in the TARDIS, her beautiful blue box that sent her what she needed instead of what she wanted.

"Thank you," River says, and that's as much as she can manage.

"You could come along, you know," Amy says, hand on the door of the TARDIS. "See the universe. There's planets and everything."

"Amy," Rory says, sounding appropriately scandalized, "she's got class, do you want her to fail?"

"It's a time machine, Rory," Amy says, but Rory just looks at River and smiles knowingly.

"I'm telling you, it's genetic," he says, and she is quite proud, she realizes, to be theirs, the only daughter of The Girl Who Waited and The Last Centurion, Amelia Pond and Rory Williams. No matter what she calls herself, no matter how far she goes, that is always with her, connecting her to the rest of the universe in a way that even knowing time does not.

"I'll see you again," River promises them. It's odd, feeling kinship with people for once, instead of only the TARDIS, but they have a claim to her heart, just as the TARDIS does. "I'll send you a graduation invitation, if I graduate."

Amy smiles as she opens the TARDIS door. "Oh, I think you'll be fine."

"Someone should give us a vortex manipulator for Christmas," Rory grumbles loudly.

The Doctor's voice drifts out of the TARDIS. "Terrible way to travel!"

River and Amy share an exasperated look, and then her parents disappear into the TARDIS.

She spends her summer holiday in the thirty-fifth century thanks to the almost-legal acquisition of a vortex manipulator, and when she's finished gathering enough data to add to her thesis-- and disprove the recent work of one of her more annoying professors, not that she's keeping score-- she hits up a cafe, orders the local favorite, and waits.

The TARDIS whooshes into existence a few minutes later, and she winces sympathetically at the screeching noise of the brakes.

"Oh," the Doctor says, somewhat disconcerted as he pokes his head out of the TARDIS. "Sorry. This was supposed to be Crestellion. You rang?"

She breezes through the doorway; she doesn't stop walking until she's reached the console. "Hello, sweetie," she says, beaming down at the stabilizers. "I've missed you."

"Well," the Doctor mutters, and she turns to look at him, a proud smile curving his lips as he adjusts his bow tie.

"I wasn't talking to you," she drawls, and she swears that the TARDIS is amused. The Doctor seems to feel it, too, if the sour look he gives the console is any indication.

"You can't just commandeer the TARDIS any time you feel like a holiday," he grumbles.

"And you are so wrong about that," she corrects, punching in coordinates.

They land in front of the familiar house in Leadworth. It has just rained, and the ground is soft under her feet as she walks to the front door. She takes a deep breath, smiles at the smell of the grass after the rain, and lets herself in with the key that Rory keeps under a planter near the door.

Her parents are not home, but of course she planned it that way. She leaves the box with the vortex manipulator on the kitchen table. The box is, predictably, TARDIS blue. She sets an envelope with a graduation invitation next to the box. The date is several thousand years in their future, and three more in her own, but what's the good of a vortex manipulator if you can't jump forward to make sure you haven't dropped out of school?

She lingers for just a few minutes before going back to the TARDIS.

"I don't want this to be rewritten," she announces when she returns. "I don't want to forget all of this. You told them there wasn't anything else to be done, but I remember Rule One, Doctor. Don't you dare erase my life that way. It isn't yours to change."

"I'm responsible," he says sadly.

"Maybe this was your responsibility, but it isn't your right," she points out, and he inclines his head.

She returns herself to her rooms on the university grounds, piloting the TARDIS without further objection or commentary from the Doctor. It's strange, talking to him, this man she was supposed to dispatch, a very long time ago. She suspects there's quite a bit more to that story-- to her story-- than even the Doctor knows, but half the thrill of life is the unexpected, and though it's difficult to surprise her, it's not impossible. The surprises in her future may be unpleasant, but they may be wonderful. For now, what she knows is that she's not done. It'll take years more, but that, surely, is what growing up is like for every child, even those who have taken a much more usual path, with parents who raised them long before they were grown and no mad man with a time machine coming to call.

"Enjoy academia," he says, saluting her as she saunters toward the door.

"I'm writing about you, you know," she says, and a shadow crosses his face.

"There's more to your life than me, River Song," he sighs.

She rolls her eyes. "Don't flatter yourself. I may be new at applying some measure of sanity to my life, but I'm not some doe-eyed schoolgirl, Doctor."

"I know that," he says, smiling at her, hands in his pockets. "I just wanted to make sure you did."

River shakes her head at him. "Oh, Doctor," she sighs, strolling to the door of the TARDIS. "Why do I let you out?"

"I'd say that I'd see you again, River Song," he says, just as she reaches the door, "but that might be a spoiler."

"You'll see me again," she assures him, and winks. "Sexy misses me."

"Told you that, did she," he asks. He looks fondly around the TARDIS. "Well, there's no accounting for taste. She thought Rory was the pretty one."

"Au revoir, Doctor," she says, laughing.