FIC: the waste lands [Doctor Who / SGA]
Title: the waste lands
Author: vanitashaze
Rating: PG-13
Fandoms: Stargate: Atlantis & Doctor Who
Pairings: River Song / the Doctor
Prompt: Atlantis in its heyday.
Notes: Title taken from the T.S. Eliot poem of the same name; the People are, if you didn't pick that up already, the Ancients. This story was slated for a slot on the 13th, but is actually being posted on the 14th, because I misread my calendar. And in conclusion, am I stupid? Yes I am.
Summary: They're so guilty, the two of them. Or, the adventures of the Lonely Gods.
THE WASTE LANDS
It comes to her in the night, like a lover, a ghost. This dream she's had since childhood. Except that's not right - it doesn't feel like a dream, it never has, but more a blood-memory, a shur, something bad, something wicked. A nightmare. It always starts the same. A forest; trees scratching up the night sky, their shapes dark, sinister and their edges vague, like they're not even sure where they end or begin, their borders or existence. There's a man by her side, pale face lit up like a 'Lantean tower. Crooked nose and full lips. His color bleeds into the landscape, too. She loves him. "Run," she screams. They're running. "Hurry!" And she knows, suddenly, that they're not running. They're being chased. And it comes. Out of the trees, it comes. Corpse-pale, a blur of sound and hunger and teeth. And it reaches for her and the man fires and it hisses and she screams -
- And Roni wakes up in twisted, sweat-soaked sheets, bellowing in terror like an animal. Shaking, she will run a hand over her eyes. She should meditate; Gais would say that the nightmare is a manifestation of her guilty spirit. She won't, though. Never does. Instead she'll walk on the East Pier and fall asleep in tomorrow's department meeting, and every waking moment she can spare she'll spend in her lab. Her title is biologist but it would be closer to call her magician. She reads hidden things: unravels thousands of years in an hour, mysteries as big as a planet or as small as a cell, or the bodies of the Noa, the Furlings, the Asgard; the histories they carry writ on their genes. The 70% of the universe still colliding in their bodies.
Biology is not, by and large, important to her People, but they appreciate their own beauty, and this she can show them easily. She reads the history of themselves. She will find her own peace, when there is peace to be found. She will survive, when there is not.
*
In fact, Roni does sleep though the department meeting, as she suspected she would. It was very beautiful last night; she stayed out later than expected. The Flagisalis were singing, and Atlantis brought their song into herself so that Roni could hear them. The pier hummed. She has lived here all her life and barely recognizes the touch of her home in her head, but wouldn't know what to do if it stopped; what she would ever do with that lonely place, the .0028% of her that will never stop listening.
Like most Ancients, Roni's never stopped to think about life for the humans, what it must be like for them. To believe they are alone. To be spinning through space unanchored, uncalled for by anything but human voices. What it would mean for her, to leave Atlantis and all its kin that they've spread across the Fifth Shining System, the technology they take with them even on the shortest of excursions - brooches and blasters, message-relayers and voice-keepers, eggs that light up the darkness even when fire would do. Trivial things; the addict's guilty little hit. Most likely, she never will think about it. Too soon, her People will fight a war. They will leave behind the wreck Atlantis has become: sink their beautiful, insane city underneath the sea.
They won't stop to think about it either. But they'll find out.
*
Normally her lab is cool and quiet, calm whispering over everything like the slight steady flow of the air filters (in with the new and out with the old -); not a child's calm, but an adult's, a calm of efficiency and progress. A hospital orderliness. It's peaceful, almost, and that's an odd veneer for the work they do here - biology is so rude, so much of the time, strange and necessary and never neat - but then again, there's a certain removal to this science, a feeling of watching the universe blossom 1 x 10999 times removed from you. She's dealt with bone scrapings taken from the graves of their ancestors, cheek swabs from her own mouth, but it's hard to recognize oneself in a cell culture.
The lab today isn't calm. It's quiet, yes, no one raises their voice above a whisper, but there's something moving through her Apprentices and Assistants, electricity traveling through water; a nervous tremor passing along brushing hands, a murmured word, a moment's glance. They're feeling something.
"What's going on?" Roni demands. "Did I give you permission to gossip?"
The tremor jolts; voices rise and fall, surrounding, pulling her in as surely as drift on the tide. A completed circuit. She feels it too: anger, and fear.
"Didn't you hear?" Eos says, in her dreamy way. "They found another body."
*
("I do not understand," Chayen says. "Why are they doing this?"
"They hate us," Eos says, lightly.
"But we created them," Chayen says. "They should be grateful."
Eos shakes her head. What is there to say? Chayen does not love his father. The humans do not love them.)
*
As a general rule, Roni's People don't abide with history. They don't like it; they've tried writing it, but even then it tends to wear thin in places, and show the way things really went down. Mistakes they've made speak themselves in the margins. Achievements they've claimed for themselves show themselves to belong to others. The People are a proud race; they're proud of their history, even though they have no reason to be.
Perhaps they are not so proud of their history, then. Perhaps they are proud of their stories. Perhaps they are proud of their dreams.
*
The first time she meets him in his new body, it will be in the ashes of one of Atlantis' sister cities, Helike, with her trinium towers and burning libraries. She will be crying. There were gardens here, once; sturdy tubers and broad-faced flowers and trees like whips, taken from a hundred human worlds and brought to Helike, to her whorls of color and growth. Her first kiss was thick with this clean, vibrant smog. Among all the things lost in the last salvo, in the fires, this will not be one of them. By the time Helike falls, collapsing finally into the ashes of herself, her gardens will be long gone. For years there will have been no one left to tend them.
"Shh," he murmurs, and rocks her as she would a child. "Shh. It's alright."
Life during wartime is strange, surreal, a glimpse of a once-familiar world from the bottom of a well; everything blurred. Names, dates, bodies. Since coming here she's slept with people she wouldn't even recognize, had she seen them again, and some she knew only by sight. She remembers not the sex but some characteristic of their bodies: Assistant Physician's dark, supple skin; the soldier whose hair was so blonde her eyelashes seemed almost translucent; the parabola the Aurora's second officer made when he arched, came. Helike is burning but it has been snowing ashes for weeks, as the husks that the Wraith jettisoned from their ships burned up in atmosphere.
Roni thinks this is the end, and allows herself to fall apart accordingly. In fact, her People will fight for decades yet.
"I don't even know your name," she whispers. As if it matters.
"Oh, that's right," he says, "I suppose we haven't met yet." And then, a brush of lips above her right eyebrow: the slightest of kisses. As if they were lovers, and not strangers thrown together by war. "I'm the Doctor."
"Roni," she says.
"I know," he says. And for a moment - just long enough for the first tower to fall - she believes him.
*
"With the Council's kind help, we have pushed the boundaries of science as we know it, but in our quest we have neglected our duties. The human worlds have become overpopulated," Lir says passionately. He spreads his hands; he's nailing himself to a cross. "They do not have enough space, enough resources. They suffer, Councilors, for our neglect."
"What do you propose we do?" one of the senior Councilors asks. Her rich voice cuts through the ravages of her face, a river through desert. She was beautiful, and is now sympathetic. She lost half of her face to a human's shard-studded club on a goodwill mission, as she traveled to find out who was killing her People as they kept watch over experiments. "Liberty," the man had cried. She ran him through.
"We must introduce a natural predator," Lir says. "Slow to breed but hard to kill; the opposite of a human, but not too different - a biped, for instance. Something to even the balance."
*
"Biologist Roni," Lir says. "My old friend Roni. You're looking beautiful."
"What do you want?" Roni snaps. She's busy. Her Assistants and Apprentices work with nervous hands; more and more of them sneak out during breaks to fuck on the balcony across the hall, any and every combination, brief glimpses through the windows: Eos' breast in Chayen's mouth, Mizar swallowing Chayen down, Eos and Mizar kissing behind the curtains they make of hair and hands. Her children think they know fear, and desperation. She thinks they're being unutterably silly, and in a few years, will do the same.
"A challenge," he says. So lightly.
"I do not have time for games," she says.
"Good," he says, "because I am not playing."
She looks at him then; the lines that carve themselves into his high forehead, the fervor burning in his eyes. He believes what he's doing is right. He always has. "If you want a weapon," she says, "go to the Physics."
"No," he says. "No, Roni, I need your help."
"Whatever you are planning, I can guarantee they do not deserve it," she says.
"They hate us, Roni," he says. "They would kill us all if they could. Please. They -" killed Alon, she hears, they killed him and left Lir to grieve "- are building ships. Some fool taught them how to."
"So destroy the ships," she says.
"We already have. They're building more; they've taken our gates, our gifts to them, and used them to spread the knowledge of how to destroy us. They have," he spits, "a coalition."
She closes her eyes. That's what she will remember, lifetimes later, whenever she thinks back to this moment; that she closes her eyes.
"What do you want?" she says.
"A predator," he says.
"On Kardon they have these things called bee'shaks," she says. "Savage, actually. Lots of teeth. I'll get someone to find you one."
"Roni," he warns.
"Not just a predator, then," she says, and slowly, he nods.
"Not just a predator," he agrees, and sighs. Runs his hand through the hair he has left. It seems as if it has been hours since Alon died, but decades for Lir, as if he had taken the time and wrote it into his face. They years they had are compressing his body, crumbling him. One day he'll be nothing but dust and a clever tongue, held together by wicked ambition.
"We need a bogeyman," he says. "A nightmare. So they won't forget."
Immediately she thinks of: teeth. And blood. She wasn't joking when she offered him a bee'shak. Even her People have an instinctual fear of things that go riprendsnarl in the night. But her intellectual mind quickly takes over, unfolding it for her like a puzzle, a work of art. The creature must be self-sustainable. It cannot feed on meat, for then her People's other experiments would be threatened, and the humans could appease them with livestock. The creature must be resilient. The creature must be strong, to grapple with a full-grown human. Should it have wings, hands, should it swim or walk on the land?
Above all else, though, it must be terrible. Like nothing they've ever seen before, or will again. It must be terrible enough that the Council can hold onto its leash and the humans will settle, for even the thought of it terrifies, this creature that will be too terrible for anyone to actually utilize. The threat will be enough. It's a brilliant plan, she realizes; build one, let it loose once or twice, and save hundreds of lives, maybe thousands. With this thing at your disposal, you could eliminate war itself - not just between the humans and the People, but among the humans themselves, the few volatile colonies that have already began to tear themselves apart. This creature Lir envisions will destroy destruction, forever, and she will build it for him.
"A ghost, Lir," she says. "That's what we need. Not a monster - you're right - a nightmare. Something that shouldn't even exist."
"Though I certainly hope it will," he parries back, smoothly -
"- No, but that's the brilliance of it, Lir. Think of it, please. Something half-legend, where the stories, the idea of it, is so much more powerful - " her mind spinning, a thousand concentric circles a minute "- we don't need it to attack people, friend, we need it to haunt them."
"A wraith," he supplies.
"Yes," she says. "Yes. That's right. I'll make you a wraith."
Already, she can see it in her mind: the hand reaching for her out of the dark, pale fingers curled inwards, and in the palm, a opening like a black hole, like a mouth, like hunger itself.
(Her mind filters out the screams.)
*
In the end, they will make a death in their own rough image.
*
"Do you know anything about paradoxes?" he will ask, one day, far in her future, deep in his past. They're walking the streets of Rome, for once silent; the Romans are in mourning for their Caesar, cut down on the steps of the Forum, but they won't be for long. The whole city is a Potentia in overload. Counting down. Twenty-eight half-cycles. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six.
"Not much," she says.
"Odd," he comments, and shuffles forward.
Sometimes she likes this second, newer Doctor, free of all the stuttering and muttering and jumping about. It's refreshing, in a way. Steadying. She's had enough of fire; she'd would much prefer to wrap her life around stone. Even if getting answers is akin to wringing blood out of one.
Finally, her curiosity gets the better of her. "What is?"
"That you don't know much about paradoxes," he says. "Which, by the way, are tricky things. The temporal ones. Did I ever tell you about Yan-Ylan? Whole planet exists because of one. Strange place. Though not as strange as Barcelona. They have dogs with no noses," he confides.
"Why is it strange?" she asks, undeterred. Then again: he's just as silly as ever.
He smiles briefly, sadly. "You created one."
"I'm pretty sure I'd know if I created a paradox," she says. "I've created a lot of things -" he won't meet her eyes, never does "- but not one of those."
"Ah, but how would you ever know?" he asks. "You're in it right now."
They stop, face each other. She fingers the necklace he bought her, beaten gold coins brought a quarter-way around the globe - precious, and expensive, as if they were a treasure, as if that journey was such a great feat. Years ago, she might have said it wasn't, but she's learning about humans now, about the way they think of things. A caravan guard and two bandits died for a necklace her People would have given a child. It means something. It does. In this way, the Doctor has been friend and mentor both, for he's teaching her how to think of these things. How to watch, observe, and never belong.
(She spares herself the more familiar lecture, which goes along the lines of: They're so guilty, the two of them. The lonely Gods. Creators and destroyers both, sometimes in the same move. The last of their kinds. They're playing a game of bavat with the universe, or perhaps against it, and she can never quite shake the feeling that some day, one of them is going to lose.)
"Not long, now," he comments, lightly, and they survey the empty street. Waiting for the first cobble to be thrown.
Fourteen half-cycles. Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven. Ten.
"You know," she says, "I've been thinking of going to one of the great human Universities. In the fifty-first, maybe."
"Oh, really?" he asks. "What for?" His hand finds hers as they prepare to run. Don't leave me. She's still surprised at how childish a god can be.
"Archeology," she says. I won't. (In her head, she amends this to: Not for long. It will probably hurt her more to leave the TARDIS than its occupant.)
"I'm a time traveler, I laugh at archeologists," he says, but grins, a little slice of manic. She squeezes their clasped hands, gently.
Five half-cycles. Four. Three. Two. One -
*
"Chayen, you are driving me to the point of insanity," Roni grounds out. "Insanity is a very steep cliff and I swear to you I will fall over quickly if you do not stop giving me null results. Please, please. I beg of you. By the Council, give me something good."
"I'm sorry, Roni, the simulations are not working," he reports glumly. "There is nothing strong enough to survive such a procedure, and even if they were, they'd fall apart in days. We simply don't have enough time."
"We'll think of something," she says. "We must."
"Why?" he says. "Roni, it's a grand ambition you have, but listen to yourself. We are Biologists, not conjurors. How are we to make ourselves a ghost?"
"Did I ask you, First Assistant Chayen?" she snaps, and he shrinks back. She's hurt him; she knows that he thinks of her as a friend rather than a superior.
"No," he says, distantly. Respectfully, and she grinds her teeth. Respect doesn't salve the frustration any more than familiarity did. "I am sorry, Biologist Roni."
"It's alright," she says, and of course, that's when the sirens start.
*
The klaxons are shrieking. She spots Mizar down the hallway, fighting to get to his home knot of Biologists. "WHAT IS IT?" she shouts, already coughing. "I DON'T KNOW," he shouts back. "HELON GAS, BUT THERE'S NO FIRE." Already the Scientists are pouring out of their labs and into the hall, blood in a clot, fighting to get this way, that way, there, anywhere. She gets elbowed in the ribs and doubles over, gasping, before someone pulls her upright.
"Roni, listen to me," the man says, urgently. She can barely hear him over the din. "You must not use the Iratus bugs."
"What?" she tries to ask, but he shouts right over her.
"Listen to me," he says - snarls. Face more animal than the things she's trying to create. He's something very old and powerful wrapped up in the body of a funny-looking man wearing odd clothes, and she's never been more frightened, or fascinated, in her life. "The Iratus bugs. You cannot use them. You're going to create something horrible." And suddenly: lets go of her, gravity and tides, she's swept into frantic melee of people and he's running the other way.
"Wait!" she calls over the crowd. "Please! Who are you? How do you know my name?"
And then, belatedly: "What's an Iratus?"
*
In the end, it's Lir who gets credit for her creation. It's Lir the Council decorates and proclaims Second Scientist - as if he knew anything about science - and First Counselor for the Council on Human Development; it's Lir who drinks the bitter, herb-scented drink they keep for these occasions of commencement, brewed in secret and served up in flutes of flamed Potentia glass. It's supposed to make you lucky, and wise, but Roni knows for a fact that it just makes you slightly giddy and sends you to bed. Still. It shouldn't be Lir. It should be her up there, she thinks, sour with jealousy, but she's wrong. It's not really even her creation, anymore: she spliced and splinted it, twisted it together from chitin and skin, but it was the Physics who built the temporal-distention environment she needed to speed the process. Roni found the idea in the Gallifrean fables from the Seventh Shining System, of ships more creature than machine, but it was Eos who grew their clever little Darts. Roni took Mizar for a walk on the docks, but it was he who saw the freighter's transporter beams, a gift from the Asgard, and insisted that they be installed in the Darts. It will be the Council that decrees her original batch of seven be cloned, for sustainability, and that the cloning facility have such a light guard, for secrecy. It will be her creations themselves that turn their clever little Darts into Hives.
Destruction is, by and large, a group effort. In ten thousand years, a man will destroy 5/6s of a solar system with the tools they have left behind. He will take the credit for it, as Lir took his. Unlike Lir, he will have actually deserved it, but like Lir, too, he was not alone in his mistake. There were underlings. There were the People themselves. There was a pilot.
Like scientists everywhere, the People's Scientists fight over ownership, but spark ideas off each other like stones rubbed together; when they are hurled, they take the whip of fire with them. Had Lir spread the credit more evenly among the Scientists, a more precise hierarchy might have emerged, but he didn't, and the remaining webs of inspiration and theft will be too complicated for the Council to unravel. They will need their Scientists, now, too much to piece out individual blame. They will also need a hung man, but that will not be too difficult.
It was Roni's idea. Lir took the credit.
This is what will save her, years away from this boisterous congratulations ceremony, when the first bombs hit.
*
The second time she meets him, she simply passes him in the hallway.
"Excuse me," she says, distracted.
"You're excused," he replies.
*
("Oh, oh," she croons, as she lifts the Iratus bug out of its cage. She's never seen anything so Council-damned ugly in her life. "Hello, beautiful.")
*
The third time they meet, her ship has taken a direct hit, and her lab is on fire. Not from the Wraiths' beam weapons, damn them, but from a combination of exposed wiring and circulatory plasma for the Hippaforalkus' beams - highly flammable, and the smoke mildly toxic when inhaled. She's going to die, but slowly. Chayen is already dead, caught by the initial explosion. Thank the Council for small favors, she thinks, fuzzily, and then someone is dragging her through the smoke, bumping her over a doorstep, and then she's - what? In a cave? In a stomach? In an enormous plant? "Thank you," she tries to say, but can't stop coughing, spitting up gobs of black sputum. Her head is spinning like a planet in orbit.
A face swims into view. "It's alright, deep breaths," the face says. "Should probably get you some oxygen." But the face doesn't do anything but make a face - ha, she thinks - and picks at his ruined clothes. The both of them are covered in oily black smoke.
"So much for this suit," he mutters, and that's when her head clears enough to gets her first proper look at her rescuer.
"You again," she croaks. The man from Helike. Younger than her, odd clothes, shadowed brow and thick hair like a Flagisalis' curved fin. A soldier, probably, from the edge to his eyes, and she takes the time to mourn someone turned old so young. Except - not, really; he's old in the way she's only ever seen once before in her life, in a corridor with alarms going off in her ears and in her head, a warning being shouted in her face. Or was that this man? She's not sure. He has a spaceship, must be, that appears bigger on the inside, for Council's sake. She's not sure of anything.
"Me again," he agrees, and that's when she remembers - oh, Chayen - and throws up black bile all over his conductor-toed shoes.
*
("Rubber," he says despairingly. "It's called rubber."
"It's conductor and I'll have none of that," she says, only half-teasingly. "Rubber's a human word."
The old lady doing her shopping on Bristol Street looks at her rather oddly after that, but she's People, and more than that, deeply unsettled. The twenty-first century is like going for a walk in a cell culture. Not only have the animals escaped from the zoo, they've invented shopping malls and cable TV.)
*
Her first week on-board the TARDIS is boring and brief. She sleeps, restlessly, pumped full of oxygen and inoculations and whatever else this weird ship can think up; she explores, and cries in brass-edged saunas and rooms full of hats. For the most part her rescuer seems perfectly fine with leaving her alone, as if he trusts her already. He's either an exceedingly foolish man, or an exceedingly powerful one. The first week she doesn't much care one way or another. But the ship itself is a comfort beyond belief. Looking back, she thinks it might have kept her sane. "I can hear it," she tells him, during one of their brief intersections, this time in the kitchen. He doesn't look surprised, but then again, he seems to know everything about her, from her name to the way she takes her xe - dark and bitter, and apparently he knows this as well, that she talks to his ship, and that his ship talks back. It's not Atlantis; it's different. Possibly more sane, possibly a bit less. But it speaks to her; fills that .0028%. It's enough, for now.
But, Council, she misses her home.
"This is a TARDIS," she says.
"Ye-es," he says.
"And you can take me anywhere in space or time," she says.
"Have you been reading ahead in the vacation brochures?" he asks, vaguely perturbed.
"Then take me to Atlantis," she says.
*
"Chayen," she sobs out against his chest, "Eos, Mizar, children -"
*
So, alright.
She's mature enough to admit that was a mistake.
*
There's a woman they visit, every hundred years or so, tucked away in the sunken blue depths of Atlantis. The Doctor knows who she is, but won't tell her. "I'd like to pretend that I didn't," he says, hands in pockets. "That she doesn't have a destiny, as great and terrible as yours." He considers, for a moment. "As mine. I came here as a child, and pretended just that. That we were just two people, lost in the vastness of space and time. I think I fell in love with her once or twice."
Roni touches the forcefield of the stasis chamber, feeling the slight buzz and tingle against her fingers. She can imagine him as a little boy, a little Time Lord, falling for the woman behind the glass. She can imagine herself doing the same. She'd like to leave her handprints on this woman, the last of her kind; kiss that spot on her neck, there, the faint lines at the corners of her eyes; palm that imagined dip in her thigh. Laugh with her. See her smile. And yet -
"She's beautiful," she says, and steps back. "But she's not People."
"No," he says.
"So it will rise again, one day," she says.
"Yes," he says.
"Good," she breathes. "Good."
*
She will leave him more times than she can count: sometimes for minutes, sometimes for days. He leaves her more times than she can count: for the same. When they meet it always seems one knows more than the other. She'll leave him to go to the Chenna markets on Wednesday and on Thursday he'll come back in a different skin. He seems to alternate between bodies, between personalities, but there are two that are most common: the manic besuited one with hair like an Earth hedgehog, and the dark, intense young man, barely out of his teens. About two lifetimes, then, she estimates. Two lifetimes spent on her, and she feels infinitely treasured, and more hunted than the woman in her nightmare.
"Roni, my Roni," he murmurs. Dragging his lips up her collarbone. He's not bad at sex, though it's taken her one and a half lifetimes to get him into bed.
"Theta," she moans, and he freezes. Sits up. Disentangles himself from her; figures, she thinks.
"How did you -" he asks.
"You told me," she says. "Or, you will."
He smiles, but beneath it another expression moves, like the human expressions one can sometimes glimpse underneath a Wraith's sneers. It's the same expression he uses on people who say things like, the death of minions is regrettable but necessary. Sometimes she thinks he would never travel with her - would condemn her, even - except for the fact that he's as trapped as she is, the paradox she wove like she used to weave DNA.
"I keep aiming for you but we never really connect, do we?" he says.
"We don't need to," she says, and repeats herself, like the broken earth record he played for her. She feels like she's been shouting this across the constellations, the whole of space and time, for as long as they've met; maybe longer. Every word they've ever said to each other has been a variation on these four. "We don't need to."
*
("You will deal with our queen," the male says. It sounds unsure, and looks it, or at least as much as a semi-insectoid can.
"Hold on a moment -" Lir protests.
The Wraith glance at each other for a moment, and then turn back to Lir, resolve stealing across their features. "You will deal with our Queen," it repeats, and this - this is not a request, or even an order. This is a threat.)
*
"You know, I've been alive for decades," she says, rather drunkenly, "and I didn't even know where my name came from until today. I don't even think my People knew; there were civilizations in Pegasus before us, I suppose we just picked some things up. The way of the world, and all that. Cross-contamination, cultural diffusion -"
"Oh, big words," he jokes.
"I do have a degree," she informs him, and cuffs him on the shoulder.
("Ow," he complains. She ignores him.)
"Roni. From The Roni," she says. "In the K'etshan tradition. It's the name of a mythic river, from which all oceans spring. They wrote a ballad about it. It's actually quite beautiful."
"I had a friend once," he says. "She probably heard it once. Her name was Rani - well, Ushas, but she called herself Rani. A lot like you. Quite clever with the, the genes and things."
"Would I have liked her?" she asks.
"Probably not," he says.
*
"Roni, archeologist," she says in K'etshan. The TARDIS' translation circuit will spit it out as River Song.
*
The first time he meets her, she dies.
It is perhaps the most fitting punishment she could bestow. Death after death after death, trailing out behind him like the list of his crimes. By the time he meets her, she's grown cocky, all traces of the People scrubbed out of her speech, replaced by fifty-first century slang; not eager for her death but certainly ready for it. Her last thought is that Theta will thank her for this, someday. They're the only ones they trust enough, to set down each others' sentences.
The first time she dies, he brings her back to life. Traps her, in an artificial world, with children and nothing real.
This, too, is a punishment, one she justly deserves. All this - normalcy, it's what her People died fighting for, and what they will never have, because of her. But eternity, looping around a hard drive? The idea is unbearable. She thinks of the woman under the sea, living her life in a handful of minutes; waiting for ten thousand years. Roni wonders how long she can last, like this.
She won't realize it, but the answer is forever.
fin.
Author: vanitashaze
Rating: PG-13
Fandoms: Stargate: Atlantis & Doctor Who
Pairings: River Song / the Doctor
Prompt: Atlantis in its heyday.
Notes: Title taken from the T.S. Eliot poem of the same name; the People are, if you didn't pick that up already, the Ancients. This story was slated for a slot on the 13th, but is actually being posted on the 14th, because I misread my calendar. And in conclusion, am I stupid? Yes I am.
Summary: They're so guilty, the two of them. Or, the adventures of the Lonely Gods.
THE WASTE LANDS
It comes to her in the night, like a lover, a ghost. This dream she's had since childhood. Except that's not right - it doesn't feel like a dream, it never has, but more a blood-memory, a shur, something bad, something wicked. A nightmare. It always starts the same. A forest; trees scratching up the night sky, their shapes dark, sinister and their edges vague, like they're not even sure where they end or begin, their borders or existence. There's a man by her side, pale face lit up like a 'Lantean tower. Crooked nose and full lips. His color bleeds into the landscape, too. She loves him. "Run," she screams. They're running. "Hurry!" And she knows, suddenly, that they're not running. They're being chased. And it comes. Out of the trees, it comes. Corpse-pale, a blur of sound and hunger and teeth. And it reaches for her and the man fires and it hisses and she screams -
- And Roni wakes up in twisted, sweat-soaked sheets, bellowing in terror like an animal. Shaking, she will run a hand over her eyes. She should meditate; Gais would say that the nightmare is a manifestation of her guilty spirit. She won't, though. Never does. Instead she'll walk on the East Pier and fall asleep in tomorrow's department meeting, and every waking moment she can spare she'll spend in her lab. Her title is biologist but it would be closer to call her magician. She reads hidden things: unravels thousands of years in an hour, mysteries as big as a planet or as small as a cell, or the bodies of the Noa, the Furlings, the Asgard; the histories they carry writ on their genes. The 70% of the universe still colliding in their bodies.
Biology is not, by and large, important to her People, but they appreciate their own beauty, and this she can show them easily. She reads the history of themselves. She will find her own peace, when there is peace to be found. She will survive, when there is not.
*
In fact, Roni does sleep though the department meeting, as she suspected she would. It was very beautiful last night; she stayed out later than expected. The Flagisalis were singing, and Atlantis brought their song into herself so that Roni could hear them. The pier hummed. She has lived here all her life and barely recognizes the touch of her home in her head, but wouldn't know what to do if it stopped; what she would ever do with that lonely place, the .0028% of her that will never stop listening.
Like most Ancients, Roni's never stopped to think about life for the humans, what it must be like for them. To believe they are alone. To be spinning through space unanchored, uncalled for by anything but human voices. What it would mean for her, to leave Atlantis and all its kin that they've spread across the Fifth Shining System, the technology they take with them even on the shortest of excursions - brooches and blasters, message-relayers and voice-keepers, eggs that light up the darkness even when fire would do. Trivial things; the addict's guilty little hit. Most likely, she never will think about it. Too soon, her People will fight a war. They will leave behind the wreck Atlantis has become: sink their beautiful, insane city underneath the sea.
They won't stop to think about it either. But they'll find out.
*
Normally her lab is cool and quiet, calm whispering over everything like the slight steady flow of the air filters (in with the new and out with the old -); not a child's calm, but an adult's, a calm of efficiency and progress. A hospital orderliness. It's peaceful, almost, and that's an odd veneer for the work they do here - biology is so rude, so much of the time, strange and necessary and never neat - but then again, there's a certain removal to this science, a feeling of watching the universe blossom 1 x 10999 times removed from you. She's dealt with bone scrapings taken from the graves of their ancestors, cheek swabs from her own mouth, but it's hard to recognize oneself in a cell culture.
The lab today isn't calm. It's quiet, yes, no one raises their voice above a whisper, but there's something moving through her Apprentices and Assistants, electricity traveling through water; a nervous tremor passing along brushing hands, a murmured word, a moment's glance. They're feeling something.
"What's going on?" Roni demands. "Did I give you permission to gossip?"
The tremor jolts; voices rise and fall, surrounding, pulling her in as surely as drift on the tide. A completed circuit. She feels it too: anger, and fear.
"Didn't you hear?" Eos says, in her dreamy way. "They found another body."
*
("I do not understand," Chayen says. "Why are they doing this?"
"They hate us," Eos says, lightly.
"But we created them," Chayen says. "They should be grateful."
Eos shakes her head. What is there to say? Chayen does not love his father. The humans do not love them.)
*
As a general rule, Roni's People don't abide with history. They don't like it; they've tried writing it, but even then it tends to wear thin in places, and show the way things really went down. Mistakes they've made speak themselves in the margins. Achievements they've claimed for themselves show themselves to belong to others. The People are a proud race; they're proud of their history, even though they have no reason to be.
Perhaps they are not so proud of their history, then. Perhaps they are proud of their stories. Perhaps they are proud of their dreams.
*
The first time she meets him in his new body, it will be in the ashes of one of Atlantis' sister cities, Helike, with her trinium towers and burning libraries. She will be crying. There were gardens here, once; sturdy tubers and broad-faced flowers and trees like whips, taken from a hundred human worlds and brought to Helike, to her whorls of color and growth. Her first kiss was thick with this clean, vibrant smog. Among all the things lost in the last salvo, in the fires, this will not be one of them. By the time Helike falls, collapsing finally into the ashes of herself, her gardens will be long gone. For years there will have been no one left to tend them.
"Shh," he murmurs, and rocks her as she would a child. "Shh. It's alright."
Life during wartime is strange, surreal, a glimpse of a once-familiar world from the bottom of a well; everything blurred. Names, dates, bodies. Since coming here she's slept with people she wouldn't even recognize, had she seen them again, and some she knew only by sight. She remembers not the sex but some characteristic of their bodies: Assistant Physician's dark, supple skin; the soldier whose hair was so blonde her eyelashes seemed almost translucent; the parabola the Aurora's second officer made when he arched, came. Helike is burning but it has been snowing ashes for weeks, as the husks that the Wraith jettisoned from their ships burned up in atmosphere.
Roni thinks this is the end, and allows herself to fall apart accordingly. In fact, her People will fight for decades yet.
"I don't even know your name," she whispers. As if it matters.
"Oh, that's right," he says, "I suppose we haven't met yet." And then, a brush of lips above her right eyebrow: the slightest of kisses. As if they were lovers, and not strangers thrown together by war. "I'm the Doctor."
"Roni," she says.
"I know," he says. And for a moment - just long enough for the first tower to fall - she believes him.
*
"With the Council's kind help, we have pushed the boundaries of science as we know it, but in our quest we have neglected our duties. The human worlds have become overpopulated," Lir says passionately. He spreads his hands; he's nailing himself to a cross. "They do not have enough space, enough resources. They suffer, Councilors, for our neglect."
"What do you propose we do?" one of the senior Councilors asks. Her rich voice cuts through the ravages of her face, a river through desert. She was beautiful, and is now sympathetic. She lost half of her face to a human's shard-studded club on a goodwill mission, as she traveled to find out who was killing her People as they kept watch over experiments. "Liberty," the man had cried. She ran him through.
"We must introduce a natural predator," Lir says. "Slow to breed but hard to kill; the opposite of a human, but not too different - a biped, for instance. Something to even the balance."
*
"Biologist Roni," Lir says. "My old friend Roni. You're looking beautiful."
"What do you want?" Roni snaps. She's busy. Her Assistants and Apprentices work with nervous hands; more and more of them sneak out during breaks to fuck on the balcony across the hall, any and every combination, brief glimpses through the windows: Eos' breast in Chayen's mouth, Mizar swallowing Chayen down, Eos and Mizar kissing behind the curtains they make of hair and hands. Her children think they know fear, and desperation. She thinks they're being unutterably silly, and in a few years, will do the same.
"A challenge," he says. So lightly.
"I do not have time for games," she says.
"Good," he says, "because I am not playing."
She looks at him then; the lines that carve themselves into his high forehead, the fervor burning in his eyes. He believes what he's doing is right. He always has. "If you want a weapon," she says, "go to the Physics."
"No," he says. "No, Roni, I need your help."
"Whatever you are planning, I can guarantee they do not deserve it," she says.
"They hate us, Roni," he says. "They would kill us all if they could. Please. They -" killed Alon, she hears, they killed him and left Lir to grieve "- are building ships. Some fool taught them how to."
"So destroy the ships," she says.
"We already have. They're building more; they've taken our gates, our gifts to them, and used them to spread the knowledge of how to destroy us. They have," he spits, "a coalition."
She closes her eyes. That's what she will remember, lifetimes later, whenever she thinks back to this moment; that she closes her eyes.
"What do you want?" she says.
"A predator," he says.
"On Kardon they have these things called bee'shaks," she says. "Savage, actually. Lots of teeth. I'll get someone to find you one."
"Roni," he warns.
"Not just a predator, then," she says, and slowly, he nods.
"Not just a predator," he agrees, and sighs. Runs his hand through the hair he has left. It seems as if it has been hours since Alon died, but decades for Lir, as if he had taken the time and wrote it into his face. They years they had are compressing his body, crumbling him. One day he'll be nothing but dust and a clever tongue, held together by wicked ambition.
"We need a bogeyman," he says. "A nightmare. So they won't forget."
Immediately she thinks of: teeth. And blood. She wasn't joking when she offered him a bee'shak. Even her People have an instinctual fear of things that go riprendsnarl in the night. But her intellectual mind quickly takes over, unfolding it for her like a puzzle, a work of art. The creature must be self-sustainable. It cannot feed on meat, for then her People's other experiments would be threatened, and the humans could appease them with livestock. The creature must be resilient. The creature must be strong, to grapple with a full-grown human. Should it have wings, hands, should it swim or walk on the land?
Above all else, though, it must be terrible. Like nothing they've ever seen before, or will again. It must be terrible enough that the Council can hold onto its leash and the humans will settle, for even the thought of it terrifies, this creature that will be too terrible for anyone to actually utilize. The threat will be enough. It's a brilliant plan, she realizes; build one, let it loose once or twice, and save hundreds of lives, maybe thousands. With this thing at your disposal, you could eliminate war itself - not just between the humans and the People, but among the humans themselves, the few volatile colonies that have already began to tear themselves apart. This creature Lir envisions will destroy destruction, forever, and she will build it for him.
"A ghost, Lir," she says. "That's what we need. Not a monster - you're right - a nightmare. Something that shouldn't even exist."
"Though I certainly hope it will," he parries back, smoothly -
"- No, but that's the brilliance of it, Lir. Think of it, please. Something half-legend, where the stories, the idea of it, is so much more powerful - " her mind spinning, a thousand concentric circles a minute "- we don't need it to attack people, friend, we need it to haunt them."
"A wraith," he supplies.
"Yes," she says. "Yes. That's right. I'll make you a wraith."
Already, she can see it in her mind: the hand reaching for her out of the dark, pale fingers curled inwards, and in the palm, a opening like a black hole, like a mouth, like hunger itself.
(Her mind filters out the screams.)
*
In the end, they will make a death in their own rough image.
*
"Do you know anything about paradoxes?" he will ask, one day, far in her future, deep in his past. They're walking the streets of Rome, for once silent; the Romans are in mourning for their Caesar, cut down on the steps of the Forum, but they won't be for long. The whole city is a Potentia in overload. Counting down. Twenty-eight half-cycles. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six.
"Not much," she says.
"Odd," he comments, and shuffles forward.
Sometimes she likes this second, newer Doctor, free of all the stuttering and muttering and jumping about. It's refreshing, in a way. Steadying. She's had enough of fire; she'd would much prefer to wrap her life around stone. Even if getting answers is akin to wringing blood out of one.
Finally, her curiosity gets the better of her. "What is?"
"That you don't know much about paradoxes," he says. "Which, by the way, are tricky things. The temporal ones. Did I ever tell you about Yan-Ylan? Whole planet exists because of one. Strange place. Though not as strange as Barcelona. They have dogs with no noses," he confides.
"Why is it strange?" she asks, undeterred. Then again: he's just as silly as ever.
He smiles briefly, sadly. "You created one."
"I'm pretty sure I'd know if I created a paradox," she says. "I've created a lot of things -" he won't meet her eyes, never does "- but not one of those."
"Ah, but how would you ever know?" he asks. "You're in it right now."
They stop, face each other. She fingers the necklace he bought her, beaten gold coins brought a quarter-way around the globe - precious, and expensive, as if they were a treasure, as if that journey was such a great feat. Years ago, she might have said it wasn't, but she's learning about humans now, about the way they think of things. A caravan guard and two bandits died for a necklace her People would have given a child. It means something. It does. In this way, the Doctor has been friend and mentor both, for he's teaching her how to think of these things. How to watch, observe, and never belong.
(She spares herself the more familiar lecture, which goes along the lines of: They're so guilty, the two of them. The lonely Gods. Creators and destroyers both, sometimes in the same move. The last of their kinds. They're playing a game of bavat with the universe, or perhaps against it, and she can never quite shake the feeling that some day, one of them is going to lose.)
"Not long, now," he comments, lightly, and they survey the empty street. Waiting for the first cobble to be thrown.
Fourteen half-cycles. Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven. Ten.
"You know," she says, "I've been thinking of going to one of the great human Universities. In the fifty-first, maybe."
"Oh, really?" he asks. "What for?" His hand finds hers as they prepare to run. Don't leave me. She's still surprised at how childish a god can be.
"Archeology," she says. I won't. (In her head, she amends this to: Not for long. It will probably hurt her more to leave the TARDIS than its occupant.)
"I'm a time traveler, I laugh at archeologists," he says, but grins, a little slice of manic. She squeezes their clasped hands, gently.
Five half-cycles. Four. Three. Two. One -
*
"Chayen, you are driving me to the point of insanity," Roni grounds out. "Insanity is a very steep cliff and I swear to you I will fall over quickly if you do not stop giving me null results. Please, please. I beg of you. By the Council, give me something good."
"I'm sorry, Roni, the simulations are not working," he reports glumly. "There is nothing strong enough to survive such a procedure, and even if they were, they'd fall apart in days. We simply don't have enough time."
"We'll think of something," she says. "We must."
"Why?" he says. "Roni, it's a grand ambition you have, but listen to yourself. We are Biologists, not conjurors. How are we to make ourselves a ghost?"
"Did I ask you, First Assistant Chayen?" she snaps, and he shrinks back. She's hurt him; she knows that he thinks of her as a friend rather than a superior.
"No," he says, distantly. Respectfully, and she grinds her teeth. Respect doesn't salve the frustration any more than familiarity did. "I am sorry, Biologist Roni."
"It's alright," she says, and of course, that's when the sirens start.
*
The klaxons are shrieking. She spots Mizar down the hallway, fighting to get to his home knot of Biologists. "WHAT IS IT?" she shouts, already coughing. "I DON'T KNOW," he shouts back. "HELON GAS, BUT THERE'S NO FIRE." Already the Scientists are pouring out of their labs and into the hall, blood in a clot, fighting to get this way, that way, there, anywhere. She gets elbowed in the ribs and doubles over, gasping, before someone pulls her upright.
"Roni, listen to me," the man says, urgently. She can barely hear him over the din. "You must not use the Iratus bugs."
"What?" she tries to ask, but he shouts right over her.
"Listen to me," he says - snarls. Face more animal than the things she's trying to create. He's something very old and powerful wrapped up in the body of a funny-looking man wearing odd clothes, and she's never been more frightened, or fascinated, in her life. "The Iratus bugs. You cannot use them. You're going to create something horrible." And suddenly: lets go of her, gravity and tides, she's swept into frantic melee of people and he's running the other way.
"Wait!" she calls over the crowd. "Please! Who are you? How do you know my name?"
And then, belatedly: "What's an Iratus?"
*
In the end, it's Lir who gets credit for her creation. It's Lir the Council decorates and proclaims Second Scientist - as if he knew anything about science - and First Counselor for the Council on Human Development; it's Lir who drinks the bitter, herb-scented drink they keep for these occasions of commencement, brewed in secret and served up in flutes of flamed Potentia glass. It's supposed to make you lucky, and wise, but Roni knows for a fact that it just makes you slightly giddy and sends you to bed. Still. It shouldn't be Lir. It should be her up there, she thinks, sour with jealousy, but she's wrong. It's not really even her creation, anymore: she spliced and splinted it, twisted it together from chitin and skin, but it was the Physics who built the temporal-distention environment she needed to speed the process. Roni found the idea in the Gallifrean fables from the Seventh Shining System, of ships more creature than machine, but it was Eos who grew their clever little Darts. Roni took Mizar for a walk on the docks, but it was he who saw the freighter's transporter beams, a gift from the Asgard, and insisted that they be installed in the Darts. It will be the Council that decrees her original batch of seven be cloned, for sustainability, and that the cloning facility have such a light guard, for secrecy. It will be her creations themselves that turn their clever little Darts into Hives.
Destruction is, by and large, a group effort. In ten thousand years, a man will destroy 5/6s of a solar system with the tools they have left behind. He will take the credit for it, as Lir took his. Unlike Lir, he will have actually deserved it, but like Lir, too, he was not alone in his mistake. There were underlings. There were the People themselves. There was a pilot.
Like scientists everywhere, the People's Scientists fight over ownership, but spark ideas off each other like stones rubbed together; when they are hurled, they take the whip of fire with them. Had Lir spread the credit more evenly among the Scientists, a more precise hierarchy might have emerged, but he didn't, and the remaining webs of inspiration and theft will be too complicated for the Council to unravel. They will need their Scientists, now, too much to piece out individual blame. They will also need a hung man, but that will not be too difficult.
It was Roni's idea. Lir took the credit.
This is what will save her, years away from this boisterous congratulations ceremony, when the first bombs hit.
*
The second time she meets him, she simply passes him in the hallway.
"Excuse me," she says, distracted.
"You're excused," he replies.
*
("Oh, oh," she croons, as she lifts the Iratus bug out of its cage. She's never seen anything so Council-damned ugly in her life. "Hello, beautiful.")
*
The third time they meet, her ship has taken a direct hit, and her lab is on fire. Not from the Wraiths' beam weapons, damn them, but from a combination of exposed wiring and circulatory plasma for the Hippaforalkus' beams - highly flammable, and the smoke mildly toxic when inhaled. She's going to die, but slowly. Chayen is already dead, caught by the initial explosion. Thank the Council for small favors, she thinks, fuzzily, and then someone is dragging her through the smoke, bumping her over a doorstep, and then she's - what? In a cave? In a stomach? In an enormous plant? "Thank you," she tries to say, but can't stop coughing, spitting up gobs of black sputum. Her head is spinning like a planet in orbit.
A face swims into view. "It's alright, deep breaths," the face says. "Should probably get you some oxygen." But the face doesn't do anything but make a face - ha, she thinks - and picks at his ruined clothes. The both of them are covered in oily black smoke.
"So much for this suit," he mutters, and that's when her head clears enough to gets her first proper look at her rescuer.
"You again," she croaks. The man from Helike. Younger than her, odd clothes, shadowed brow and thick hair like a Flagisalis' curved fin. A soldier, probably, from the edge to his eyes, and she takes the time to mourn someone turned old so young. Except - not, really; he's old in the way she's only ever seen once before in her life, in a corridor with alarms going off in her ears and in her head, a warning being shouted in her face. Or was that this man? She's not sure. He has a spaceship, must be, that appears bigger on the inside, for Council's sake. She's not sure of anything.
"Me again," he agrees, and that's when she remembers - oh, Chayen - and throws up black bile all over his conductor-toed shoes.
*
("Rubber," he says despairingly. "It's called rubber."
"It's conductor and I'll have none of that," she says, only half-teasingly. "Rubber's a human word."
The old lady doing her shopping on Bristol Street looks at her rather oddly after that, but she's People, and more than that, deeply unsettled. The twenty-first century is like going for a walk in a cell culture. Not only have the animals escaped from the zoo, they've invented shopping malls and cable TV.)
*
Her first week on-board the TARDIS is boring and brief. She sleeps, restlessly, pumped full of oxygen and inoculations and whatever else this weird ship can think up; she explores, and cries in brass-edged saunas and rooms full of hats. For the most part her rescuer seems perfectly fine with leaving her alone, as if he trusts her already. He's either an exceedingly foolish man, or an exceedingly powerful one. The first week she doesn't much care one way or another. But the ship itself is a comfort beyond belief. Looking back, she thinks it might have kept her sane. "I can hear it," she tells him, during one of their brief intersections, this time in the kitchen. He doesn't look surprised, but then again, he seems to know everything about her, from her name to the way she takes her xe - dark and bitter, and apparently he knows this as well, that she talks to his ship, and that his ship talks back. It's not Atlantis; it's different. Possibly more sane, possibly a bit less. But it speaks to her; fills that .0028%. It's enough, for now.
But, Council, she misses her home.
"This is a TARDIS," she says.
"Ye-es," he says.
"And you can take me anywhere in space or time," she says.
"Have you been reading ahead in the vacation brochures?" he asks, vaguely perturbed.
"Then take me to Atlantis," she says.
*
"Chayen," she sobs out against his chest, "Eos, Mizar, children -"
*
So, alright.
She's mature enough to admit that was a mistake.
*
There's a woman they visit, every hundred years or so, tucked away in the sunken blue depths of Atlantis. The Doctor knows who she is, but won't tell her. "I'd like to pretend that I didn't," he says, hands in pockets. "That she doesn't have a destiny, as great and terrible as yours." He considers, for a moment. "As mine. I came here as a child, and pretended just that. That we were just two people, lost in the vastness of space and time. I think I fell in love with her once or twice."
Roni touches the forcefield of the stasis chamber, feeling the slight buzz and tingle against her fingers. She can imagine him as a little boy, a little Time Lord, falling for the woman behind the glass. She can imagine herself doing the same. She'd like to leave her handprints on this woman, the last of her kind; kiss that spot on her neck, there, the faint lines at the corners of her eyes; palm that imagined dip in her thigh. Laugh with her. See her smile. And yet -
"She's beautiful," she says, and steps back. "But she's not People."
"No," he says.
"So it will rise again, one day," she says.
"Yes," he says.
"Good," she breathes. "Good."
*
She will leave him more times than she can count: sometimes for minutes, sometimes for days. He leaves her more times than she can count: for the same. When they meet it always seems one knows more than the other. She'll leave him to go to the Chenna markets on Wednesday and on Thursday he'll come back in a different skin. He seems to alternate between bodies, between personalities, but there are two that are most common: the manic besuited one with hair like an Earth hedgehog, and the dark, intense young man, barely out of his teens. About two lifetimes, then, she estimates. Two lifetimes spent on her, and she feels infinitely treasured, and more hunted than the woman in her nightmare.
"Roni, my Roni," he murmurs. Dragging his lips up her collarbone. He's not bad at sex, though it's taken her one and a half lifetimes to get him into bed.
"Theta," she moans, and he freezes. Sits up. Disentangles himself from her; figures, she thinks.
"How did you -" he asks.
"You told me," she says. "Or, you will."
He smiles, but beneath it another expression moves, like the human expressions one can sometimes glimpse underneath a Wraith's sneers. It's the same expression he uses on people who say things like, the death of minions is regrettable but necessary. Sometimes she thinks he would never travel with her - would condemn her, even - except for the fact that he's as trapped as she is, the paradox she wove like she used to weave DNA.
"I keep aiming for you but we never really connect, do we?" he says.
"We don't need to," she says, and repeats herself, like the broken earth record he played for her. She feels like she's been shouting this across the constellations, the whole of space and time, for as long as they've met; maybe longer. Every word they've ever said to each other has been a variation on these four. "We don't need to."
*
("You will deal with our queen," the male says. It sounds unsure, and looks it, or at least as much as a semi-insectoid can.
"Hold on a moment -" Lir protests.
The Wraith glance at each other for a moment, and then turn back to Lir, resolve stealing across their features. "You will deal with our Queen," it repeats, and this - this is not a request, or even an order. This is a threat.)
*
"You know, I've been alive for decades," she says, rather drunkenly, "and I didn't even know where my name came from until today. I don't even think my People knew; there were civilizations in Pegasus before us, I suppose we just picked some things up. The way of the world, and all that. Cross-contamination, cultural diffusion -"
"Oh, big words," he jokes.
"I do have a degree," she informs him, and cuffs him on the shoulder.
("Ow," he complains. She ignores him.)
"Roni. From The Roni," she says. "In the K'etshan tradition. It's the name of a mythic river, from which all oceans spring. They wrote a ballad about it. It's actually quite beautiful."
"I had a friend once," he says. "She probably heard it once. Her name was Rani - well, Ushas, but she called herself Rani. A lot like you. Quite clever with the, the genes and things."
"Would I have liked her?" she asks.
"Probably not," he says.
*
"Roni, archeologist," she says in K'etshan. The TARDIS' translation circuit will spit it out as River Song.
*
The first time he meets her, she dies.
It is perhaps the most fitting punishment she could bestow. Death after death after death, trailing out behind him like the list of his crimes. By the time he meets her, she's grown cocky, all traces of the People scrubbed out of her speech, replaced by fifty-first century slang; not eager for her death but certainly ready for it. Her last thought is that Theta will thank her for this, someday. They're the only ones they trust enough, to set down each others' sentences.
The first time she dies, he brings her back to life. Traps her, in an artificial world, with children and nothing real.
This, too, is a punishment, one she justly deserves. All this - normalcy, it's what her People died fighting for, and what they will never have, because of her. But eternity, looping around a hard drive? The idea is unbearable. She thinks of the woman under the sea, living her life in a handful of minutes; waiting for ten thousand years. Roni wonders how long she can last, like this.
She won't realize it, but the answer is forever.
fin.