fic: The Night Has Eyes to Recognise Its Own
"You will not ever be forgotten by me. In the procession of the mighty stars your name is sung and tattooed now on my heart. Here I will carry you. Here I will carry you forever."
He’s not human.
Not even close.
He doesn’t feel like they do. Time is the millstone that makes its grinding passage through him. It leaves ash behind it. As moments come and go they draw out with them some of the intensity, some of the sharpness of the way the world presses onto him - or so he tells himself. On the long nights when he can find nowhere else to be but floating in some obscure black corner of the universe, he sits in the repair swing at the belly of his ship fiddling with wires and circuits and whispers to her about how things around him are fading like dying stars and becoming blurred at the edges.
He’s lived too long and become too tired not to know that the Universe is a dark and cruel place sometimes. Short flashes of life and shared warmth mean nothing to the forces that hold up reality. He likes to think of himself as hardened to it. He likes to think of himself as hard as the rock of a lonely moon, and of his hearts as old and dry as the dust that layers it. So this is what he tells himself:
He doesn’t feel like they do.
*
“A Library. Deserted for a hundred years! All sealed up, sweetie, and nobody has a clue why. I know you can’t resist. I’ll send you a note, let you know when.”
There’s violent rawness to him. If he closes his eyes he can see it wheeling inside him, buffeted by his thoughts; a crow or raven rising black-red against a blue night, feathers spiralling down around him.
It could be a little like the bruised rose of tender flesh that is revealed when the top paper layer of skin is peeled away. It could be that visiting the Library right now will be sharp white crystals of salt settling and soaking into that flesh. It could be.
The jacket of his suit lies discarded on the Tardis floor, collapsed in erratic folds, like origami gone wrong. He ignores it as he paces round the console, fingertips trailing the controls, his nerve endings picking up on the soft vibration of comfort his ship is sending out but his mind barely registering it. The haunting song of Darillium reverberates in his ears, a throbbing convergence of sound, weaving its way around his jittering thoughts.
There had been a last kiss before she left, a kiss filled with the rich salt of the ocean as his tears slid between their lips. It had tasted both like the smokiness of the Time under her skin and of the sharp darkness of his grief crumbling inside him. When they’d pulled apart she had looked at him, green eyes wide, silently begging him to tell her what was the matter. But all he’d been able to do was shake his head, sealing his lips tight against the words, the apologies, the goodbyes that wanted to come spilling out.
Now the shapes of the white webbing walls and stairs of the Towers are imprinted on his retina like a sunflare that will not fade. He sees them every time he blinks.
It could be a bad idea to go there, and most likely is, but it is one which is seemingly as unstoppable as the movement of Time itself. It compels him, and he sets the coordinates for the Library, ignoring the way his hand trembles when he punches the keys in the correct order. The Tardis moves willingly, a low throbbing hum from deep inside her setting up resonance with the hammering of his hearts inside him. He opens the doors and stands at the very edge of his blue box, watching her flight path in towards the planet filled with every book ever written.
First they sweep past the cold moon, the silent watcher of the little girl at the core of the planet below it. The sphere is hard silver on his eyes, secrets whispering away under its surface, circuits and signals radiating towards the Library data-core. Another Doctor with a shell of steel, in a lonely and forgotten orbit.
From a distance, the Library is all soft pinks and beiges, the buildings merging into an undulating pattern; but as the distance closes the hard creases of the towers and bridges eventually reveal themselves. Towers and halls, bridges and walkways, great halls and huge domes, all are thrown into relief by the lines and shadows framing them. The old girl slips into a slow, snug orbit which hugs the planet closely. It’s then that he fully discovers the ache filling his throat. He tries to analyse, to rationalise what it is, where it comes from; to understand the chemical reactions that are taking place in his body in response to external stimulus.
By the time his tears begin to flow, the Tardis is humming a soft sad lament that wraps itself round his own heaving sobs. They orbit out their grief around the peaks and spires of the Library, singing it out to the stars.
*
His brain is so different, the shapes and the angles of it specific to Timelord physiology. Where human’s minds are like small but bright stars piercing into the black, his is like the giant nebulae that stars are born from.
He has spread himself into many human’s minds over the long years, enough times to know how they think and how they feel. He has pressed his fingers to their temples and flowed into them, sometimes to explore and discover, sometimes to share himself, sometimes to leave a message, sometimes to heal. The pathway he takes into their minds leaves an imprint like a watermark, barely visible under the surface, a roadmap for him in case he needs to follow it inside them again. And all these times inside the minds of humans have shown him the places where they differ to him, the walls between them.
She was something in-between, a living contradiction, something impossible.
Impossible River Song.
She retained the relative simplicity of the structure of a human mind, but yet somehow that structure was filled with all the elegance and intelligence of a Timelord’s. She held the two parts of herself in an effortless juxtaposition that he marvelled at, and the brush of her mind against his was both rough and smooth. It was the sweetest mix of both everything he remembered best and cherished most about his own kind, and everything he admired most in the human race. She was a blessing of water when he was parched and dry as old paper, desperate for the contact of his people. Even her darkness, which he recognised as a clear mirror of his own, he embraced.
He’s not human. Still, in the end it turns out that grief and loss cut at him at least as keenly as it does for them. The sparks of electricity jumping through his synapses take a slightly different pathway, the signals firing around his brain are structured more subtly, but in the end it still amounts to the same thing. Where a River once was, flowing around his life, is now only the imprint of her memory, a dried bed of sparse pebbles and fine dust - and an aching in his bones that he cannot seem to quell.
*
They got married again, of course.
Of course.
Not just once. It never could have been just once more as they blazed their way across galaxies; but a countless times on a numerous different planets, with wildly differing ceremonies. There was always just that one more time, that one last one last time that they were going to do it, but they forgot to stop. He remembers each time clearly and turns them over carefully, delicately in his mind as if moving too fast will cause them to crumble and fade. Or as if he’s afraid he could cut himself on the sharp edges of them.
His favourite memory is the day that they re-married with as close to the traditional Gallifreyan ceremony as he could assemble. He chose a planet with as similar a climate and topography he could find, with flowers and fauna alike to the ones of his home world. It took some searching, but he found it in the end. They picked Amy and Rory up from England during a rainy day with a grey smudged sky, and they emerged from the Tardis under a burning binary star system. They married in shimmering heat, on a wild and wide plain of orange grass which moved in the wind as if they stood in the midst of a great sea.
That day she wore blue flowers in her hair - and that was a sight to behold, River Song with flowers in her hair - and a white dress that was all silk and softness against his skin when he embraced her. His name burned inside his mouth when he spoke it out loud, and he felt a tremor run through her body when she heard it, a vibration from the inside out as his true name sunk into her bones and settled in the marrow there. When he pulled back from her, her eyes were bright and wise, and the sea seemed to be inside them.
*
In the first days after visiting the Library, a thin film settles over him, layering itself between him and the Universe. It lies closely over his skin, sticking to it like a cobweb, muffling the sounds that reach his ears and taking the taste from his food. It covers his eyes so that the things he sees are bleached of colour, it cushions his nerves from what they know and what they don’t want to know.
He doesn't feel. He isn’t like them.
In the end though, it begins to dissolve and everything becomes brighter and sharper. It’s all too hard, too real and it leaves him feeling like a ghost. He is insubstantial from the inside out, and walks slowly and carefully because he’s afraid of breaking himself. He puts one foot in front of the other with care as he wanders the corridors of the Tardis aimlessly. He is made of smoke, and any impact on him will blow right through him, and scattering his atoms away from each other. He needs to hold himself together, because if he doesn’t all his bones and blood and nerves will tumble haphazardly to the floor.
He looks at their timelines over and over again in his mind - he knows there is no logical scientific reason to, nothing tangible to be gained from doing so, but he cannot help himself. While she was still with him their pathways through time wrapped around and across each other, twisting and twining in an intricate dance. Back then, they were at the centre of a maze of timelines which formed a pattern he was sure must hold some meaning. He studied it to try and understand the strange sequence they encountered each other in. It was as if they had created an elaborate equation as they criss-crossed time and met with each other; chance meetings, planned visits, stolen moments, long nights. He always wondered what the answer to the equation was. He never found it.
Now, he sees only a tangled nest behind him. There seems to be no rhythm or structure to the way they moved around each other, it is all just threads crossing and weaving haphazardly. There is one place where a thread flares brightly, and then its light dies away, the place where her thread stops and knots itself back into the structure. There is only one line of light travelling outwards, which leads to him and seems to hook itself right in his guts, tugging at him. He wants to follow its pull backwards, to acquiesce to the sharp pain right at the core of him. But there is no way back in that he can see.
It hits him deep in his chest then, and that’s the moment when he thinks he must hurt more than humans do, because of his two hearts.
*
When he can move properly again (days-weeks-months by measures of Earth or Gallifreyan time, he doesn’t even know), when he feels as if he is real again and not just something made of smoke and breath, his mind begins to flood with memories. All the places that he ever knew her, all the things that they did together, all the places he met her; an incoming tide filling him up. They wheel through his mind with the force of a moon round a planet, snatches and shards brushing by him and against him. He captures them as they pass, pulls them close to himself and examines them.
He looks for small things, connections where the present collides with his memory of her, the places that their timelines pivoted around, junctions and intersections. He studies his diary. He dares to orbit the Library again. He opens the doors and lies on his stomach at the threshold of his ship, his fingers splayed across the diary pages as the planet glows beneath him.
Finally, he visits the places. Some he skates over, ghosting in and out quickly, just stepping from the Tardis door, taking in the colours, the scents and then leaving again. There are so many to visit. Others he lingers longer at, standing stock still against grey and pink skylines, crouching in gnarled and twisted metal whose shapes make no sense, watching the mist of his breath by torchlight in cold ancient tombs.
Markets spinning with scent and sound, vast space stations, countless archaeological sites, ballrooms, waterfalls, oceans, planets of ash and dust…he presses his presence into them all, marking time, remembering.
*
The last place of all he visits is her old cell.
The Stormcage coordinates are branded onto his bones, and it’s all too familiar to set the ship spinning on her way. Yet the great blank in his internal landscape that stands vacant and still as they move through the vortex, makes the trip feel foreign to him.
He cannot count the number of times that he has materialised there over the long years. It could be that it’s more than the number of stars which were visible from her narrow cell window, stars you could only see on the few occasions when the rain ceased and the clouds cleared, brushing the darkness out of the sky. On those rare nights the galaxy was a streak of white scattered onto a soft blue. The smell of the place sends signals firing through his nerves so strongly and hits the recall centres of his brain so hard, that he can taste his own memory, sharp in his mouth. The damp, the smell of too many bodies, the smell of the caged anger of the other inmates, it all rolls over him and into him. And always the smell of the rain, beating down, the electricity in the air.
A dark form sleeps on the narrow bed, its latest occupant. The scent of her isn’t in the room any more, it must have departed when she did, to her freedom and to the fate he’d bound her into, a fate which orbited like a dark planet between them. He wraps his hands around the bars just once. His perfect recall tells him the exact spot where she placed her fingers the last time he saw her in the cell, and he shadows it with his own.
*
He drifts for a time.
Stars go supernova, planets are pulled into black holes, pulsars beat out their strange signals unnoticed in the deeps of space.
The Universe breathes out a little, gets bigger.
Things change, and fade, drifting away like a cloth tattering and fraying in the breeze.
He heals as much as he can.
Eventually, he takes on a new companion.
*
There is a place he goes now, just every once in a while, when he knows that it must be the night time on Earth because his companion sleeps. It’s somewhere to be when even the thrum of his ship under his palm can’t quell the loneliness and fill the spaces inside him.
On those nights, he dares to materialise in the deep, dry silence of the Library. He stays safe inside his blue box, letting her walls be the shield that keeps the shadows at bay. He runs diagnostics and checks that CAL is ticking over, lost her sleep and in her deep dreams of the books. He checks on Doctor Moon, locked into his lonely orbit, sweeping the data-core clean with every pass.
After this, he sits on the floor and presses his hands against the doors of his ship, the warm air and dust of the Library just a few centimetres away from his palms. He closes his eyes and rests there, tethered to his thoughts, until the morning and the clattering of feet through the Tardis corridor searches him out of the darkness.
Quote at the beginning from Carry by Tori Amos
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