fic: Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have to Take Me Home
Title: Whoever Brought Me Here Will Have to Take Me Home
Author: lonewytch
Fandom/Characters: Doctor Who; Eleven/River
Wordcount: 2241
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Through to the present
Summary: I'm sorry, my love.
A/N:
Written for the Hell in Heels ficathon over on spoiler_song for winninghearts prompt: He has no plan to save himself and she will not kill him. They live out their days in a disintegrating universe, loving but never touching.
I'm sure someone somewhere must have done this idea before in ficland, but I've taken some of the cards of the Tarot Major Arcana as an inspiration for structuring the piece.
The World
Time, time….what has become of me?
The pen stops, ink drips from nib to paper, black crow feet tracking across the diary page. Outside, the roar of the street swells in her ears. Traders and chariots, musketeers and cavemen, rose sellers and sabre toothed tigers, cars and bicycles and dinosaurs, all thrown together in one boiling mass. She walks to the window slowly. As she leans towards it her breath mists a layer across the surface. She marks the circular Gallifreyan symbol for Time through it then looks into the gaps like there’s answers there for her. But there aren’t so she sweeps it away with her hand then turns her attention to the street outside. The window glass is warped, and she looks through it at the world as if she is lying on the bottom of an ocean. The colours shift and bend into each other, distorting the figures that pass by.
She hears screams as part of the street crumbles to nothing, a sickly crackle and grinding, cobbles and tarmac and flagstone flipped each other, time slicing away from itself. She closes her eyes and turns away.
The High Priestess
She moves through the city like she is in a trance. People and animals swirl and eddy around her, a whirlpool of colour against her widow’s black. She holds all the power now, she knows that. Power over time, power over life. She never wanted it. It was only ever forced on her by others. The power to maim, the power to kill, the power to hate. She had transformed that all in one glorious moment filled with golden light, in a dancehall in 1930’s Berlin. With her hands, and with her lips, she shaped life, created him anew, filled him with herself. It was heady, and it was intoxicating to choose and claim her future like that.
And so she chooses again; his life. His life and all their deaths. Including his.
The Wheel of Fortune
The steps are long and sharp up to his room, which they both know is really his cell. She becomes an echo of an echo, spiralling her way up. She’s carried on an updraft of hope that lifts her limbs so it is almost no effort to move. Maybe this will be the day, maybe this will be the time. 5.02pm and the Doctor reveals the mystery of what will be his greatest ever escape.
He has any book he wants at his disposal - it is no trouble for her source material from any time era now, to pull out any volume from the chaos of history piled onto itself. They have already pooled their knowledge of time, quantum physics and maths, and they have both been found wanting. They are reduced to searching through myths and legends by this point, desperately flicking pages for hours and hours - who knows what arcane lore might be found in one of the books?
She refuses to believe that there is no answer, no way to mend this. She believes that if she is strong enough to break time, then surely she must be strong enough to mend it again. She thinks that if she applies her will hard enough, maybe its force alone will be enough to conjure an answer from either her or him. She thinks if she loves him hard enough maybe that will be enough to stitch the pieces of reality back together. She will write her own story this time, and it will have the ending that she wants.
The Tower
She nods briskly to the guards outside the heavy wooden door. They move into the room and she hears a brief scuffle then the distinctive metallic click of handcuffs closing. This room is comfortable and well appointed, she has made sure of that, but when she’s there his wrists are cuffed and linked to a chain attached to the wall. It kills her to see it, but what can she do?
She steels herself and bites her lip so hard she almost draws blood, steps over the threshold. He sits slumped in a chair in the corner, fingers steepled, his face pale and stressed. She longs to reach out and smooth the lines from his brow with the tips of her fingers, to stroke all of the worry away, but that’s not within her power. She moves carefully round the room, out of his range.
“Hello River”
“Hello, my love”
“Are you ready to stop this yet?”
“Have you found a way yet?”
He gestures to the books stacked haphazardly, volumes and volumes from all different eras, in many different languages. Piles of parchment covered in scrawling Gallifreyan symbols, words and diagrams lifting in the warm breeze from the window.
“No. There is no answer here, River, you and I both know that”
She feels tears begin to burn and tries to blink them away “Then I’m not ready to stop this.”
She walks out, but she can’t help but look back. He is reaching out his hand towards her, even though he knows he can’t touch her, and there is both pain and compassion in his eyes. She longs to just reach out to him. All it would take is one step, one moment.
“River. I do love you. Please, do this for me.”
“I’m sorry, my love”
The Devil
Kovarian had schooled her relentlessly as a child in the use of swords and guns. She’d drilled her in the myths and the legends of his many faces; in the bad and only the bad, never the sublime, never the ones where he saved civilizations from extinction and prevented genocides. She’d beaten her cruelly when she rebelled and never laid a hand on her in gentleness. She’d laughed in her face as she forced her into the suit as a child, then again as an adult. But in the end, River thinks to herself, she has created a force of nature that she cannot possibly harness. Her heels beat hard on the stone floor of the pyramid as she makes her way to the room where Kovarian is being held, a rising tempo, quickening with her blood and her frustration. She is there in the central tomb, framed by sarcophagi, her lipstick cracked and running into the lines at the side of her mouth.
“Are you really going to do this? You stupid little girl. Letting everything go to wrack and ruin, just for one man”
Her voice is heavy with spite, but River can also hear the whisper of fear in her tone as well. She disables the safety on her plasma gun and hefts its weight thoughtfully in her palms.
“I was terrified of you, you know. I used to dream about you at night, for years and years. Oh, I didn’t remember you properly, you were just a shade in my dreams. Some nameless, faceless hag, that used to chase me through my nightmares. But you were there. I was never really free of you.”
“My bleeding heart” Kovarian’s voice is a rasp and River is reminded suddenly and sharply of the prickling pain of the spacesuit. “Even you can’t be such a fool as to let everything end just for his sake”
River lifts the gun to Kovarian’s face. Points. Fires.
“Yes. Yes I am a fool.”
The Hermit
“Do you have an answer for me yet? Have you found a way?”
His head is in his hands. It’s speeding up now, they both know that. It’s almost something you can feel, the quarks, and the neutrons vibrating as they are pulled apart by the disintegrating universe around them. It feels a little like the vibration of loud music against the air, a silent roar pressing against skin and deep in the chest.
He holds a book up to her and her heart is in her mouth for a split second, but she can tell from the hang of his head, the haunted look in his eyes that there is no answer here for them. Still, she takes it gingerly, making sure not to touch him.
“A Comprehensive History of the Tricks of Harry Houdini” she croaks out. And then they both laugh, even though there’s no humour in it, no joy. Still, it’s a release of sorts. It echoes hollowly off the stone walls.
“Stay with me for a while, River. It’s lonely up here.”
She looks at him with suspicion, trying to read his body language, his tone. But his eyes are as deep and unfathomable as ever. She has no idea what he is thinking as he watches her. He just smiles though, and shakes his head a little.
“Leave the cuffs on, post guards, whatever you want. Just stay here with me.” He gestures towards the desk, the chain clinking as he moves his arms, “We can look through the books.”
So she lights the fire in his room and sits, legs curled under her, just out of his reach. He reads to her, ancient myths, alchemy, arcane magic texts, looking at her from over the top of the books he is holding. She is carried on the rise and fall of his voice into sleep, and when she wakes in what would usually be measured a few hours later, he is watching her, a smile on his face.
The Lovers
Once she has made sure they remember each other, she watches them get married again. Her parents say their vows on the deck of a 17th Century ship, stranded out in the desert, while flamingos and hot air balloons fly overhead. She watches the way their eyes shine and the way that they keep touching each other, as if they can’t help but do it, as if they are scared their memories will betray them again. She hugs them both hard before she leaves. Amy is sombre, and crosses her arms after embracing her.
“River, you’re not coming back are you?”
“There’s no time,” she laughs hollowly at that. “I have to find a way. The Doctor and I will find a way.” It sounds weak even to her, there is no hard conviction there like there was in the first days.
Amy nods “Yeah, he always finds a way”
Rory just looks at her for a long and measuring moment, his eyes thoughtful and sad. Then he kisses her forehead tenderly.
“Goodbye, River”
The Chariot The hardest thing is the death of the Tardis. That is something she cannot forgive herself for, so she only goes there once, close to the end. She walks through the sand barefoot, lets it burn her feet raw, and her hands shake uncontrollably as she slides the key home. She kneels as if supplicating and rests her head against the console. She is weak, River can sense that, her essence drawn out by the fading world around her.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I am a fool.” she mumbles into the hard console surface. But there is no answering surge of light or a hum from deep inside the old girl, and she thinks what is left probably isn’t enough to hear her. She lays the key down on the console and walks out, onto the dunes, into the sun. She doesn’t scream at the sky.
Death
They’re at the eye of the storm and will be the last to go, he’s told her that. She can feel a dull vibration growing in the walls around them, as the roots of the tower are gnawed away.
“Come to me” he says, “Let me hold you” as she crouches shaking in the corner wondering at the enormity of what she’s doing. She wants to put her hands over her ears, but he speaks gently, there is no force left in his voice any more, only tenderness. “River. River. Look at me.”
She looks up at him and sees that he is no longer captive. The hook has given, shaken loose by the crumbling wall. The chain is pooled on the floor at his feet and he has the freedom of movement to approach her to grasp her arm. Her heart thuds painfully as if it’s going to break out of her skin. She instinctively tenses against the wall, as if there is anywhere to go, but he is making no move towards her. He sits, leaning forward in his chair, and watching her intently, as if he has all the time in the world, as if it’s not slipping away while he looks at her.
“My River song” he is saying to her “Unstoppable. Amazing. No one ever loved me like you did. No one ever will.”
“Oh, my love.”
“It’s okay. It’s okay River. It doesn’t matter now” he leans back in his chair and smiles at her as if time isn’t dying , as if she’s the only thing in the world, which she almost is now.
Her legs are surprisingly steady as she stands, moves to him, her hand doesn’t shake as she lifts it to his face and traces the air next to his cheek. He still makes no move towards her, just watches her with all that’s left of time in his young-old eyes. She can feel the heat from his skin, rising, conducting its way to her skin. Still, he is motionless.
“Thank you, my love” she tells him “for letting me find my own way.”
The Star
She chooses.
Author: lonewytch
Fandom/Characters: Doctor Who; Eleven/River
Wordcount: 2241
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Through to the present
Summary: I'm sorry, my love.
A/N:
Written for the Hell in Heels ficathon over on spoiler_song for winninghearts prompt: He has no plan to save himself and she will not kill him. They live out their days in a disintegrating universe, loving but never touching.
I'm sure someone somewhere must have done this idea before in ficland, but I've taken some of the cards of the Tarot Major Arcana as an inspiration for structuring the piece.
The World
Time, time….what has become of me?
The pen stops, ink drips from nib to paper, black crow feet tracking across the diary page. Outside, the roar of the street swells in her ears. Traders and chariots, musketeers and cavemen, rose sellers and sabre toothed tigers, cars and bicycles and dinosaurs, all thrown together in one boiling mass. She walks to the window slowly. As she leans towards it her breath mists a layer across the surface. She marks the circular Gallifreyan symbol for Time through it then looks into the gaps like there’s answers there for her. But there aren’t so she sweeps it away with her hand then turns her attention to the street outside. The window glass is warped, and she looks through it at the world as if she is lying on the bottom of an ocean. The colours shift and bend into each other, distorting the figures that pass by.
She hears screams as part of the street crumbles to nothing, a sickly crackle and grinding, cobbles and tarmac and flagstone flipped each other, time slicing away from itself. She closes her eyes and turns away.
The High Priestess
She moves through the city like she is in a trance. People and animals swirl and eddy around her, a whirlpool of colour against her widow’s black. She holds all the power now, she knows that. Power over time, power over life. She never wanted it. It was only ever forced on her by others. The power to maim, the power to kill, the power to hate. She had transformed that all in one glorious moment filled with golden light, in a dancehall in 1930’s Berlin. With her hands, and with her lips, she shaped life, created him anew, filled him with herself. It was heady, and it was intoxicating to choose and claim her future like that.
And so she chooses again; his life. His life and all their deaths. Including his.
The Wheel of Fortune
The steps are long and sharp up to his room, which they both know is really his cell. She becomes an echo of an echo, spiralling her way up. She’s carried on an updraft of hope that lifts her limbs so it is almost no effort to move. Maybe this will be the day, maybe this will be the time. 5.02pm and the Doctor reveals the mystery of what will be his greatest ever escape.
He has any book he wants at his disposal - it is no trouble for her source material from any time era now, to pull out any volume from the chaos of history piled onto itself. They have already pooled their knowledge of time, quantum physics and maths, and they have both been found wanting. They are reduced to searching through myths and legends by this point, desperately flicking pages for hours and hours - who knows what arcane lore might be found in one of the books?
She refuses to believe that there is no answer, no way to mend this. She believes that if she is strong enough to break time, then surely she must be strong enough to mend it again. She thinks that if she applies her will hard enough, maybe its force alone will be enough to conjure an answer from either her or him. She thinks if she loves him hard enough maybe that will be enough to stitch the pieces of reality back together. She will write her own story this time, and it will have the ending that she wants.
The Tower
She nods briskly to the guards outside the heavy wooden door. They move into the room and she hears a brief scuffle then the distinctive metallic click of handcuffs closing. This room is comfortable and well appointed, she has made sure of that, but when she’s there his wrists are cuffed and linked to a chain attached to the wall. It kills her to see it, but what can she do?
She steels herself and bites her lip so hard she almost draws blood, steps over the threshold. He sits slumped in a chair in the corner, fingers steepled, his face pale and stressed. She longs to reach out and smooth the lines from his brow with the tips of her fingers, to stroke all of the worry away, but that’s not within her power. She moves carefully round the room, out of his range.
“Hello River”
“Hello, my love”
“Are you ready to stop this yet?”
“Have you found a way yet?”
He gestures to the books stacked haphazardly, volumes and volumes from all different eras, in many different languages. Piles of parchment covered in scrawling Gallifreyan symbols, words and diagrams lifting in the warm breeze from the window.
“No. There is no answer here, River, you and I both know that”
She feels tears begin to burn and tries to blink them away “Then I’m not ready to stop this.”
She walks out, but she can’t help but look back. He is reaching out his hand towards her, even though he knows he can’t touch her, and there is both pain and compassion in his eyes. She longs to just reach out to him. All it would take is one step, one moment.
“River. I do love you. Please, do this for me.”
“I’m sorry, my love”
The Devil
Kovarian had schooled her relentlessly as a child in the use of swords and guns. She’d drilled her in the myths and the legends of his many faces; in the bad and only the bad, never the sublime, never the ones where he saved civilizations from extinction and prevented genocides. She’d beaten her cruelly when she rebelled and never laid a hand on her in gentleness. She’d laughed in her face as she forced her into the suit as a child, then again as an adult. But in the end, River thinks to herself, she has created a force of nature that she cannot possibly harness. Her heels beat hard on the stone floor of the pyramid as she makes her way to the room where Kovarian is being held, a rising tempo, quickening with her blood and her frustration. She is there in the central tomb, framed by sarcophagi, her lipstick cracked and running into the lines at the side of her mouth.
“Are you really going to do this? You stupid little girl. Letting everything go to wrack and ruin, just for one man”
Her voice is heavy with spite, but River can also hear the whisper of fear in her tone as well. She disables the safety on her plasma gun and hefts its weight thoughtfully in her palms.
“I was terrified of you, you know. I used to dream about you at night, for years and years. Oh, I didn’t remember you properly, you were just a shade in my dreams. Some nameless, faceless hag, that used to chase me through my nightmares. But you were there. I was never really free of you.”
“My bleeding heart” Kovarian’s voice is a rasp and River is reminded suddenly and sharply of the prickling pain of the spacesuit. “Even you can’t be such a fool as to let everything end just for his sake”
River lifts the gun to Kovarian’s face. Points. Fires.
“Yes. Yes I am a fool.”
The Hermit
“Do you have an answer for me yet? Have you found a way?”
His head is in his hands. It’s speeding up now, they both know that. It’s almost something you can feel, the quarks, and the neutrons vibrating as they are pulled apart by the disintegrating universe around them. It feels a little like the vibration of loud music against the air, a silent roar pressing against skin and deep in the chest.
He holds a book up to her and her heart is in her mouth for a split second, but she can tell from the hang of his head, the haunted look in his eyes that there is no answer here for them. Still, she takes it gingerly, making sure not to touch him.
“A Comprehensive History of the Tricks of Harry Houdini” she croaks out. And then they both laugh, even though there’s no humour in it, no joy. Still, it’s a release of sorts. It echoes hollowly off the stone walls.
“Stay with me for a while, River. It’s lonely up here.”
She looks at him with suspicion, trying to read his body language, his tone. But his eyes are as deep and unfathomable as ever. She has no idea what he is thinking as he watches her. He just smiles though, and shakes his head a little.
“Leave the cuffs on, post guards, whatever you want. Just stay here with me.” He gestures towards the desk, the chain clinking as he moves his arms, “We can look through the books.”
So she lights the fire in his room and sits, legs curled under her, just out of his reach. He reads to her, ancient myths, alchemy, arcane magic texts, looking at her from over the top of the books he is holding. She is carried on the rise and fall of his voice into sleep, and when she wakes in what would usually be measured a few hours later, he is watching her, a smile on his face.
The Lovers
Once she has made sure they remember each other, she watches them get married again. Her parents say their vows on the deck of a 17th Century ship, stranded out in the desert, while flamingos and hot air balloons fly overhead. She watches the way their eyes shine and the way that they keep touching each other, as if they can’t help but do it, as if they are scared their memories will betray them again. She hugs them both hard before she leaves. Amy is sombre, and crosses her arms after embracing her.
“River, you’re not coming back are you?”
“There’s no time,” she laughs hollowly at that. “I have to find a way. The Doctor and I will find a way.” It sounds weak even to her, there is no hard conviction there like there was in the first days.
Amy nods “Yeah, he always finds a way”
Rory just looks at her for a long and measuring moment, his eyes thoughtful and sad. Then he kisses her forehead tenderly.
“Goodbye, River”
The Chariot The hardest thing is the death of the Tardis. That is something she cannot forgive herself for, so she only goes there once, close to the end. She walks through the sand barefoot, lets it burn her feet raw, and her hands shake uncontrollably as she slides the key home. She kneels as if supplicating and rests her head against the console. She is weak, River can sense that, her essence drawn out by the fading world around her.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I am a fool.” she mumbles into the hard console surface. But there is no answering surge of light or a hum from deep inside the old girl, and she thinks what is left probably isn’t enough to hear her. She lays the key down on the console and walks out, onto the dunes, into the sun. She doesn’t scream at the sky.
Death
They’re at the eye of the storm and will be the last to go, he’s told her that. She can feel a dull vibration growing in the walls around them, as the roots of the tower are gnawed away.
“Come to me” he says, “Let me hold you” as she crouches shaking in the corner wondering at the enormity of what she’s doing. She wants to put her hands over her ears, but he speaks gently, there is no force left in his voice any more, only tenderness. “River. River. Look at me.”
She looks up at him and sees that he is no longer captive. The hook has given, shaken loose by the crumbling wall. The chain is pooled on the floor at his feet and he has the freedom of movement to approach her to grasp her arm. Her heart thuds painfully as if it’s going to break out of her skin. She instinctively tenses against the wall, as if there is anywhere to go, but he is making no move towards her. He sits, leaning forward in his chair, and watching her intently, as if he has all the time in the world, as if it’s not slipping away while he looks at her.
“My River song” he is saying to her “Unstoppable. Amazing. No one ever loved me like you did. No one ever will.”
“Oh, my love.”
“It’s okay. It’s okay River. It doesn’t matter now” he leans back in his chair and smiles at her as if time isn’t dying , as if she’s the only thing in the world, which she almost is now.
Her legs are surprisingly steady as she stands, moves to him, her hand doesn’t shake as she lifts it to his face and traces the air next to his cheek. He still makes no move towards her, just watches her with all that’s left of time in his young-old eyes. She can feel the heat from his skin, rising, conducting its way to her skin. Still, he is motionless.
“Thank you, my love” she tells him “for letting me find my own way.”
The Star
She chooses.