A very violent reentry - OTA - Spoilers for the 10th doctor's era

[professorsong]

"All the time we've been together, you knew I was coming here," she had said. She was right - about the library. But she was wrong, so wrong, about the Enterprise. Call it a joke of Q's. She wasn't in a laughing mood.

Professor River Song had done what she had to do. Perhaps somewhere in her mind she had always wondered if she would really do what needed to be done when it came down to it. throw herself in the way of a projectile to save him, yes. But when there was thought? When there was time for thought? She offered to give herself to save him, but hadn't she known, hadn't she always known that he wouldn't let her? That he would use the danger to her to do what he wouldn't when he had been the one at risk? She knew the Doctor. She loved the Doctor. Every form she had ever met, and the ones she only knew of as stories. She knew that to save everyone, he would give his life. Some days she didn't half wonder if he wanted to die. She didn't think she could ever love him enough to let him.

But when it was someone else taking the risk, then... ah then he would see another way clear. Another way out. Then he would come up with an impossible plan and pull it off. He did so hate to lose. So, somewhere back in the depths of her mind she wondered if she would ever have the courage not to say she was going to step between him and danger, and not to do it on instinct and emotion, but to stare death in the face and give herself to it to save him.

And now she knew. This time there was no hope for a crazy last minute plan. She knew that. And she knew he knew it. Because her journal was full. Because there was no time for another plan. For the two of them who treated space and time like a giant play yard... No. For her. For her there was no time left. So she did what she had to. She didn't say she was going to take his place, she didn't give him the chance to argue. She knocked him out, handcuffed him, and took his place. River Song worked at the controls.

But he came to too soon. He started to speak, and that... That was what he was best at. Speaking. And it was when he was speaking that he could do anything, save anyone. But not this time. She wouldn't let him, because the alternative was that he would die. And she would not let him. So she spoke. She took his death from him, and she took his trick. In the end, she learned from the Doctor in the most important ways.

The words were still on her lips. Her last words. They were meant to be her last words. "Hush now, spoilers," she had said, she still tasted the words. She closed the connection as the timer ticked down. There would be no more running. And no chance for him to stop her, to take her place. Tears fell from her eyes as the world went white.

Energy filled her, used her, passed through her. She wouldn't scream. She refused. She wouldn't do that to him. Spoilers. Her last word, the last he would hear. He carried too much pain, he hated goodbyes. But she could give him this.

But when the white faded, she wasn't dead. She felt like she should be. She wasn't in the library. She was in a hallway in a space ship she didn't know. And she was alone. No Doctor. She hadn't done it. Or rather... he had. He had saved her somehow. And he could be dead himself for it. But the pain. Oh... the pain.

She was no longer wired into the chair. She was in her space suit, hands wrapped around her journal and her sonic. She had other things with her as well, but with the pain this was all she could feel. A worn leather journal. A Sonic screwdriver. And pain.

Comments

[thelasttimelord]

He's starting to hate that word, along with the smile that comes with it. Like this is a game, a joke.

Like she didn't die, in that chair, because he couldn't get himself free fast enough and wasn't just hanging there staring at her dead body until he finally did get out of it with Donna's help. Like she hadn't been a bad enough, a shocking enough proof with one utterance, mystery without being another dead body on the heap.

"That won't work forever."

[professorsong]

"It doesn't have to work forever, sweetie," she said softly, almost sadly. It didn't. For her this was the last time, and even for him, it was finite. Long, but not forever. Still, 'it doesn't have' to was noncommittal enough. It was clear this was an end. He just wasn't accepting it. But he would. Eventually, he would. And he still had all that time of theirs ahead of him. All that time to love her.

And perhaps that was the nicest thing she could have done for him, to die in front of a version of him that didn't yet care about her.

But he was the Doctor. He didn't have to care... to try. Death itself was a foe.

[thelasttimelord]

Forever she didn't have. Not the way he did. No one did, and those who did, came and went. Died, or slipped away. Or had to be left behind, for other reasons. But she had time. Even if her expression meant she understood that time might not be much. Though he was uncertain because the rest of her seemed to be staying together. Impossibly, heart still beating, lungs still working, when everything said they should give up, give out.

But they didn't, and he was more than certain he had Q to blame for that, too.

"You'll have time here." This ship. This time. "It seems the snag making this place work, is working for you, too."

[professorsong]

As much as it pained her to admit this, "I don't understand," she told him, studying him, watching him. Was he giving her some sort of false hope to try and get her to hold on. She'd play along of course, for him. But she did need to know. If nothing else, she didn't want his first/last memory of her to be of her seeming stupid. That wasn't the lie she was looking to sell. Not today, not to him.

[thelasttimelord]

"Don't take it too hard. You're joining the ranks of everyone here in that."

Another mystery within a mystery, within an ongoing chess game, where the game master had all but given up appearing, without taking the ants out of the farm or the farm off the table, or kept new ones from crawling in. "You're not dying." It takes a flash bright second of pause before he realizes how dour and steel still that had sounded. "Not that that's a bad thing."

Except it is. It very much is. Humans were not supposed to live past their deaths.

"Except that you should be. Your body is stuck in a very stable state of constant near total deterioration without deteriorating."

"You should be dead already," tastes too close to You died already. It didn't take this long then. "But it's keeping you in stasis."
Not the bed. The loop around all of the ship. Q's whatever he wanted to call it. A million words strung together on a child's toy.

[professorsong]

"I should be," she agreed. "I intended to, so you could live, so you could do what you always do, Doctor, and save them all. And so help me if I am in this much pain because you chose me, over all of them, over Donna..." the threat in her voice was there, fed by the pain. Because yes, there is a treacherous part of her that wishes the Doctor would, of he were forced to choose, choose her one day over anyone else. But even if such a day ever came, she'd fight as hard as he would for him to not have to make the choice, and if he still had to...

Not this version of him. That's part of why she took the choice from him. Because he didn't know her yet, didn't love her yet, and if he sacrificed Donna... if he sacrificed even a single stranger to save her... he would have never forgiven himself.

And if she was here because he somehow made that choice... she would find a way to unmake it, to rewrite that moment of time. He might not have long left with Donna, but she wanted him to have that time, to know when they part that at least she is alive and well. Not trapped inside some computer in a library of the dead.

[thelasttimelord]

He wants to say, You did. That it hung on him like a weight.
The way everything did in those last months. Before he knew.

Just how bad it would get. How much would be gone.

His brow wrinkles, hard and confused though, while his eyes narrowed in the same, at right where her threat trails off. Sharp with pain, but heavy with an inference. Naming Donna. Who had been there, and who he had, also, lost not too long after his encounter with River. But there was something to the way she said that. Like if he'd dared.

"What about Donna?" It's harder.

Did she somehow know about the meta-crisis? About what had happened to her?
About how for a few minutes Donna was the most important person in the universe, the one who saved them all?

[professorsong]

"She's your companion. For all I know you Doctor, you just met me. "Don't you dare choose me over her, you spend the time with her you have. You'll have time with me, later. Plenty of it. It's not over for you, not us. So don't you dare sacrifice them for me, you'll still get to see me again, you still have all of that ahead of you. At the moment, Donna means more to you than I do.." she said softly, trying not to feel her heart breaking, "and at the moment, she should."

[thelasttimelord]

"She's here, too." He says, though neither his face or his tone seem convinced by River's words, or by the way she says them, reflecting toward the back, even as she would die a minute later back in the right time.. Nor anywhere near considering telling her what happens to Donna, that has already happened to him, past tense now, any more than her own future that matched his even further past. This tangled web Q wove around his timelines.

Did he actually do anything with all the stuff he brought over?

[professorsong]

Okay, now she was confused too. She didn't show it. She nodded instead. "Alright," she said. She didn't think the pain would have lasted this long, she expected to be long dead by now. She would dearly love to know what was going on, but she'd also love to not be in pain. And, well, he was ticked off at her. But that wasn't altogether atypical.