I'd leave my rage to the sea and the sun
Title: I'd leave my rage to the sea and the sun
Author: shegrewhearts
Fandom/Characters: Doctor Who, River (mentions Eleven/River)
Rating: PG
Word count: ~1400
Summary: When your whole life has been built around and because of a single man, how do you define yourself?
A/N: I love River Song with a fierce, fierce passion, but I feel like her character has lost some ground for me with some of the series 6 revelations. She used to be that independent, bad-ass woman who came into the Doctor's life and basically upended any stability he possibly held onto, until she became that puppy-eyed lover whose whole life existed as an answer to the Doctor's growing power. This is a little of how I'm trying to come to terms with River's characterization, and how I'm trying to combine River's badassery with her new state of being. If you agree/disagree with me or just like the fic, I'd love for you to say so! Hope you enjoy it.
The title is from Laura Marling's song "All My Rage." God, do I love Laura Marling.
River hated the hole he left.
Her chest felt emptied, vast. Heaviness weighed down the space between her hearts, made her palms prickle, sucked the energy from her bloodstream. She walked for miles in highly-concentrated cities, ran faster than she could across deserted planets, swam until each re-surface became a battle.
Her shoulders ached and her feet stung, but River could not have stopped running even if she wanted to. Love may have conquered time, but it had not conquered her fears.
Foundation and blush had long since faded from her cheeks, but the mascara caked to her eyelashes like black snowflakes and her lipstick caught in the creases of her dry lips. The green of her dress had turned to gray, and was tearing at the seams in more than one place. Still, River did not care.
She was an expert on the man, had had her whole life built around him. Going to university had been about escaping that, about finding herself, but instead had merely been about ways for her to find him, ways for her to track him down, storybook style. She already knew the workings of his mind; that had been her childhood, and was not readily forgotten.
A certain rancor coursed through her, sending her scattering when she tried to stand still. All thoughts ceased; her mind cared about one thing, and one thing only: finding the Doctor. Killing the Doctor. Loving him.
She needed a shower and badly, but had not had the time for such luxuries in weeks. There was no one she could turn to, not a single friend in the universe save her parents and her lover. Amy and Rory had once been her best friends, but, as her parents, could not be the friends she used to love. She still loved them dearly and always would, but there were some things you could not share with your parents. Some things you could not share with anyone.
Pain spiked through her neck but she ignored it, ignored the synapses of her brain as they fired out warnings. Rest, they begged. We need rest.
Rest was for those who could afford it.
His whimsy and magnificent fantasies were too idyllic, too imagined, too unreal. Anything is possible, he would have said, and she would have laughed right along and fallen even more vulnerable. To accept love was to accept vulnerability, and River had lived too long a soldier to believe in letting down her guard.
Morning-afters terrified her, gentle touches frightened her, and the workings of their intimacy marred her ability to deceive him. Her lies, her protection, her shield: all wasted, all left to dust. She was stardust in his arms, and through his breath he brought her life.
Everywhere she went she would see him, and if she closed her eyes to dream he would dance across her consciousness, taunt the strings that held her together. Her hearts beat against their cage of flesh as if to say, We want to get out, we must get out, we need to get out. She had lost true control over them a long while ago.
River dreaded every second they spent apart, yet cringed at the prospect of being with him. His imminence reminded her of death.
Darkness and gloom and sourness brewed within her, hardened her, gave her purpose. She was his demon, she knew, his tailored assassin-bride, and she meant nothing except in relation to him. Her existence orbited around him, became from him, craved him. He was her core, her very being; the Doctor was her soul, and she had spent months away from him.
Souless and in pain, River trudged on in the bleak, determined never to decay. River had all the time in the universe and absolutely none at all, so she could not waste another second. In this instance, she was not him. River Song was not the Doctor.
She raised herself from her seat, gulped down the rest of her flagon, and wiped the sweat from her brow. No one was around.
The desert seas stretched out for miles, dark and blue and heavy with salt. The sun had morphed her hair from soft to brittle, had browned the pigment of her skin and replaced her naiveté with hard reality. But she welcomed it. She welcomed the running and the brilliant newness that surrounded her, engulfed her, swallowed her whole. She beckoned the whole of the universe to her with open arms; she wanted to learn it, devour it, understand it.
The universe would be the friend she never had.
Several small, frail tumbleweeds rolled past her and caught on the desert greenery. Branches curled like fingers and reached out like arms, clawing at her as she walked past. Flies buzzed in her ear and mosquitos attacked her body, but River did not notice. Trifles were of no importance.
"Well, River," she mused, speaking aloud to herself. "Better to have the midlife crisis over with early, I suppose."
The breeze answered her, rumbled low through the rushes. It magnified then de-crescendoed, falling back to silence.
"Look at yourself," she muttered, climbing up over a dune. She reached the summit and gazed out across the half-dead sand and sea. "I hate him," she said, to no one in particular. "I hate that I won't see him for weeks and I still think about him. I hate his dumb hair and his stupid, too-short pants. I hate when he leaves the brakes on, and when he steals my guns. I hate him."
The grass whispered in the wind, laughing at her. Large birds circled in the distance, diving and rising and seeking out prey. She let out a heavy sigh, then took a large breath.
She screamed as loud as she could into the desert wind, shouting out to the open sky. Blood rushed to her head but she kept screaming, releasing months of tension and disruption and ignorance. She screamed at the Doctor, at the Silence, at the jury from her trial who had spit in her face. Her call drifted up towards the Heavens and she stopped only when gasping for air, clutching at her chest as if the secrets of the universe were kept just inches below the skin. She supposed they were, in a way.
Dizziness overtook her and she fell back into the sand, landing with a dull thud. Hot, golden grains swallowed her into the ground, warming but shielding her back from the sun. She plunged her hands underneath the sand and lifted them up slowly, watching the waterfalls of tiny rocks trickle back down to the dune. With her eyes closed, she inhaled the smell of salty air and desert dust and let it overwhelm her senses.
"Oh, River," she sighed. "Why do you let him do this to you?"
And then she sat up, so suddenly that the small rodent who had been crawling around nearby shot off into the distance at record speed. She clasped her hands together and dug her nails into her skin, hard enough to draw blood. Wiping the red on her thighs, she stood up from her perch and gazed out across the landscape.
River was done. She was done letting things happen to her; she was done being the victim - it was time, now, to be the survivor. She couldn't keep blaming the Doctor for her restlessness, or for the loneliness that sometimes consumed her from the inside out. Nobody could make her feel a certain way, or do a certain action: River held her own destiny, and it was high time she realized that and went forward.
"River Song," she whispered. "Archaeologist. Time traveller," she hesitated, squinting in the sunlight. "Lover."
River was through allowing her life to weave around him. From now on, they played on her terms, and, when she felt generous, their terms. But her life no longer existed solely because of him. River Song would live with him, if she so chose, but the important thing was that she would live. River Song was, for the first time in her very long life, going to live.
She laughed out loud, wiping away forehead sweat with the back of her hand. "That's got a nice ring to it."