Chessie Maring is also River Song (musicalwater) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-01-25 21:51:00 |
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Entry tags: | doctor, door: doctor who, river song |
Who: River Song and The Doctor
What: River picks a period. The Doctor says goodbye.
When: Before contagion plot.
Where: The Thirties.
Warnings: Vague sads?
It was a scene drawn from a book, perhaps Waugh or someone prone to lavish depictions of the heights of hedonistic fun but the impression given was strongly one of light, caught and kept. It shattered over the heads of so many men and women, sharded through the crystalline swags of chandalier beads. It was golden effervescence thrown into glasses, dangling carelessly from the flower-stem wrists of the women. It was in the silk that hissed sibilantly around their legs as they promenaded around the room on the military-brown arms of men who spoke in low voices, a language that glottalstopped and started, conversation that hummed presciently of something not yet intruding on a party scene but gathering itself into sentience just a year or two out of reach.
River enjoyed the thirties. She liked the lavishness, the squeak of perfectly-fitting satin shoes that would last a night, she liked the certainty of self that sang true in so many voices that made her feel like a secret someone had been too careless with. She was wearing something that rattled dangerously with beads when she moved and she stood in a cluster of heathery uniforms and admired the shine on their boots as she checked her lipstick. She liked a party most of all and whilst at the present minute it was entirely historically accurate (and that could be no fun at all, sometimes) she was being paid the kind of attention that put the hostess’s nose completely out of joint.
She was like a dragonfly skittering through groups of people; an entirely too bright, too lavish dress and her hair a wild cloud, someone who laughed above the mellow music with an earthy, dark pleasure in laughing at all. Her wrist that held the fan (peacock feathers, too much for this crowd but River rarely cared) was bare, almost starkly so. She was listening to a tale of a grandparent explorer, of treasures harvested from what would become Iran, with a gleam that betrayed a more than nascent interest.
The Doctor hadn’t dressed to impress. He was capable, of course; the TARDIS had a wardrobe that would rival the warehouses of most century-old theaters, and even better none of the wool ever got moth-eaten and all of the clothing was authentic. Most of the time he just didn’t bother. The Doctor almost never attempted to blend in. He liked being noticed, and somehow, even in the most dangerous of places, people eventually discovered things that were more concerning than his bowtie--which right now was blue and oh so slightly askew. He walked through the thick haze of stylish cigarette smoke and caught up his wife by the elbow. He smiled into her face as he rotated her around not with strength but by force of personality. The flirtatious sheen to his eyes was at first shallow, just a game, but it quickly became authentic as he looked at her.
“Care to dance?” He sketched a childish jump of his brows and folded her arm over his without waiting for an answer. The smell he brought with him was not shallow glasses of crystalline champagne or deep rocky red wine. The cigarette smoke and the floor polish seemed to slide right off him in the wake of an impossibly sharp scent that didn’t have a name in any human tongue. It was the smell of time bending, of space passing. The Doctor always had a suggestion of old wood and new paint in the background of it, but right now it was so strong that even a human would have noticed a strangely spacial scent about him. They probably would have associated it with the thin air at the top of mountains.
He took her left hand in his right one. The world doesn’t end if the Doctor dances, a voice said in his head, thick with the accent of late twentieth century London. He closed his eyes against the memory for a moment and drew the woman that clicked of pearls onto the dance floor. “Up to no good?” he asked, as he shifted to a brass-led beat.
River might have grown used to the interludes in time that were the Doctor reappearing, bringing himself and the ozone-layered scent of time itself dragging at his heels into whichever time or continuum she was dallying in. It was, however, impossible to grow used to such a thing when there was no indication at all that it would continue, that the last time would not be the next time and thus the greeting was akin to a candle being set alight, strong and warm and unwavering. She drew in a breath of stars that did not exist in this universe, of great, wide dark space and the TARDIS that clung to a coat that shouldn’t have been made for at least half a century, and she reached up one hand to tug the bow-tie into alignment with a fond pat that left her fingertips a fraction longer than needed on his breastbone.
“Always,” she said, with the wide-eyed look of an ingenue, and the broad grin of River caught exactly as she liked to be, in the thick of things. There might have been from someone who laid down plans as intricate as clockwork, some sense of indignation at being interrupted. River’s plans melted like sugar, and she smiled across at him with the level gaze of a tall woman stood on just enough heel to make them of one height. “Why are you here, sweetie? Something I should know about?”
They danced unthinkingly well together. Perhaps it was because the Doctor knew how to lead people and dancing was a mere extenuation of being forever followed, guiding those who knew how to keep up. Perhaps it was because River consented to it out of the novelty of being led at all. A room full of a dead age rioted around them, and River looked at her own hand looped around his, at his long fingers. The Doctor didn’t dance without reason, not any longer. The thought gave her a flicker of regret, an ember of human sympathy long since dampened down. Unless this was a time before, instead of after.
He wasn’t looking at their hands. He settled his jaw just against the curve of her ear and moved back and forth in a slower, easy motion that heralded the appearance of the jitterbug in wilder, more drunken places. The bow-tie pressed against her neck between his scratchy tweed lapels. He was idly watching the crowd at the edge of the floor, because he always watched people wherever he went even when he wasn’t looking for anything at all. One or two people had noticed the cut of his pants and his absurd socks, but it was hard to mock when the Doctor had his arms full of River and there was no denying that River was all class. He saw River’s mark staring from the sea of faces and smiled to himself, but it was a passing whimsy. It said something that he fully expected to have her complete attention if he was present.
“So far there are three of you,” he said, in that manner of his that always plucked out phrases meant to be part of a conversation started five minutes ago. “Three of you with people on the other side of the door. You, Rose, and Amy.” He was silent for a brief moment. “You think more will come?”
River was always, if unaware of it or at least seemingly unaware of it, tense. It was a frenetic tension, one of bowstrings drawn silk-tight to pull a note as close to perfection as possible out of the air, as if the working of her mind drew her into readiness to execute the next thing and the next, as if the parts of an end-goal were the steps of a dance she was always on the brink of taking. It pulled through her shoulders and it straightened her back and it kept her attention precisely where it needed to be. It had waned a little as she was guided on a path not of her own exact choosing around a dancefloor that had been, as the steady harmonic thrum of two heartbeats was something she could feel if she moved her fingers just a fraction. The distraction - for that was what it was, the Doctor - allowed for letting go the mark a little, not for long, with the self-certainty of catching him again that was a cat leaving be a mouse temporarily for future pleasure.
She drew in a breath of tart, fresh paint and mothballed tweed and she smiled as radiantly as if the conversation were the nonsense most people discussed as they moved and she gave it thought, dismissing the lack of preamble as those who knew the Doctor well enough not to expect it.
“I think there are always more,” River said thoughtfully and slowly, and she tilted her head to look at him directly for a half-beat, “Once something has begun, it rarely stops on its own.” Rose was one thing, unexpected and half-unwanted (River discarded such things as jealousy with the certainty of being able to sift through time to find a place when she wasn’t) but Amy was another. There were more to the Doctor, a little like reading ahead or behind, if they surfaced.
“I suppose the question is, what can you do about it?”
The Doctor could, of course, smell of whatever he chose. It was one of the abilities of Time Lord physiology, among a great many other things. Most of the time he just didn’t bother, except when visiting worlds where it was advantageous to smell of certain things at certain times. Usually that required another alien race capable of noticing, and humans certainly weren’t. Everyone knew that humans were the Doctor’s favorite.
River’s mark and River’s doings in this obscure spot in German history passed out of the Doctor’s immediate thoughts and into the infinite space of his mind. He could recall it rapidly and at will centuries later, but for now it might as well not even be there for all he needed it. He steered them around the floor, somewhat inexpertly because he just expected all the other couples to get out of the way. “If,” he said, very softly into the curls above her ear, “there was something I could do about it, I would have.”
It wasn’t possible to see his face just then, but it wasn’t necessary to know how deeply disturbed he was to see so many of his mistakes presented in such starkly living truth in so short of a time. It was as if all the horrible, embarrassing, disgusting things he’d done turned up to remind him of what he could not fix. Yet they took the form of his great loves, too, and he could not turn them away any more than he could turn off his hearts. He shifted against her as a crescendo climbed, twisted her out and wrapped her back up again, dropped her in a dip with perfect control and almost no actual effort or attention. He smiled benignly at the man at the bandstand, who was watching River’s hemline during this reversal against gravity.
The finer points of Time Lord physicality were not something that many people understood or at least had an academic breadth of knowledge around the subject. River was a woman who pursued knowledge single-mindedly and with intent of purpose and whilst there was not a great deal known of Time Lords, what there was, River knew. She had, after all, the breadth of time to find it. “It’s not like you to admit defeat,” her voice was very warm and it was faintly mocking, as if she knew an answer to a riddle that had only momentarily defeated him - as it was, the fact that he could not peremptorily rid himself of all of them was a fact that had some comfort to it, for River. Whilst Amy (and indeed, all other accoutrements that were the Doctor’s past companions) was a distraction, she was a reminder of where things came from. River had a tendency toward forgetting, if the remembering was not pleasant.
But given the time (and the small drop in gravity that stole her breath briefly) and perspective, to see what little there was to the Doctor’s expression, albeit upside down, her own was mutable and it shifted from the pleasure and obvious enjoyment to something a little less clear-cut. “What have you been doing?” River demanded, upside down and with a hemline slipping toward scandalous, but capable of ignoring historically accurate temporarily. “What’s happened?” It was a moment that lacked the over-familiarity that River cultivated and somehow all the more familiar for its lack. She was - if she was ever - rarely worried, confident in her own capabilities and that of the not-quite-a-man who looked as though he were being hunted by his own secrets, but she sounded it now, as if she meant it.
Undoubtedly it was difficult to find information about a race of beings who, when they had existed, been capable of crossing the entirety of space and time to erase any extensive information they thought might be an immediate threat to their civilization. It did not help that, after a certain time, there was no record of anyone or anything resembling a Time Lord called Doctor. But there was the Doctor himself, and his flippant little comments. Sometimes you could learn things from those... until you remembered that the Doctor lied, and flippant comments could either mean everything or nothing with no particular rhyme or reason. He was a frustrating man that way. It made him popular with the ladies. And a great many other beings.
The Doctor brought her back upright again, spun her as if it might rattle her brains and make her a little less keen on solving the puzzle that made him up, and then brought her close again. His expression was sad, but it had been for some time. She could read it better than most people--than anyone. She was the one who knew this face best, next to Amy, and Amy wouldn’t recognize that expression. “Doing?” he asked, innocently. “Moving around. I can visit more places; more of these doors they talk about in the book.”
River knew how to read the Doctor precisely because the expressions were to her, like a book rather than symptomatic; there was no answering call of sadness, no low-down twist of something sharp and awful that echoed back what it saw. She felt for it, experimentally, but there was nothing, only the composition of the Doctor’s face and the downward tug of his mouth and the eons of loss he had in his eyes. River knew loss the way the men and women in the room knew war; an abstract concept that forever circled but kept distance enough to be somehow glorious. If River wished to feel anything at all, it was a secret she kept securely fastened away with all her skill with locks.
“Oh yes,” she said brightly and the beads jangled and they bounced the light across the floor as they clattered to a stop somewhere around her knees. River smiled guilelessly back (and that was always when one was most wary) “I’ve been doing that too.” She laid a hand across his shoulder and she picked a piece of thread from his lapel with her fingernails, very delicately, and threw it on the floor. “It’s fun, isn’t it?”
His eyes tracked the fall of the thread. He shifted and made sure he still had all the contents of his pockets. “Ah.” His hazel eyes gleamed down at her as he shifted to get a good look at her face. His hand reaffirmed its position holding hers, but he didn’t miss a beat. “Vortex Manipulator?” He squinted a little at the smile on her face and sighed. “Very bad for you.” He said it the way health aficionados spoke to people who smoked too many cigarettes, a kind of resigned suggestion. The majority of people had found something else to stare at, whether the bottom of their champagne glass or their conversation partners. The Doctor watched how quickly the humans accepted the bizarre as normality with undisguised affection, then his attention reverted back to her after a full swing around the room.
“Can you get to the other doors with it, or you have to go through the intervening dimensional hub?” Then, clarifying: “The hotel?” The Doctor had managed to recalibrate the TARDIS so he could visit doors without leaving the door himself, but he hadn’t been able to stop the inevitable 24-hour clock that put him back in Sunny’s mind. Twenty-four hours. The length of time suggested a human-based logic, because they always relied on their sun to make sense of everything.
River’s eyes were very bright; she was enjoying the party and she was enjoying the interlude (and she had caught the flicker of the Doctor’s hands to his pockets with a smile that was almost soft, certainly fond). But now they sharpened with the acquisitive gleam of something newly visible. “You can go without the hotel?” she said, and she didn’t miss a step in the ongoing promenade that was the Doctor and River; he was half a step ahead always, but it rarely took long to find her place in the dance. “Of course; the TARDIS is entirely used to interdimensional travel, you’d just have to recalibrate the settings to incorporate the temporal shift and the baseline dimension,” somewhere, it occurred to her, this would be a going back instead of a forwards, a knowing instead of a guess. But for now, it was an estimation and her gaze was very direct on the Doctor, on the little boy’s face he wore that was entirely too expressive for his own good.
“Can you manage to skip the rules?” She had thought about it, of how to trick a dimension into believing she was there when she wasn’t but River hadn’t a TARDIS at her disposal. She twined her fingers more securely about his with something of a sedate air, and she smiled at him with the vague air about it that meant she was thinking. River had the ability to keep secrets of the desperate, of those who learned to conceal because they must until it became second nature. Despite it (because of him, River did many things because she liked them, but she did a rare few because she wanted to see what he would do) she gave him just a little. It was always more fun that way. “Through the hotel. How many doors have you managed yet? We ought to do a tour. Take in the sights.” River’s smile had become serene.
“No,” the Doctor replied, to her suggestion. He wasn’t being cruel, though the reply was a little distracted, he was simply being honest. The Doctor was well aware that he wasn’t at his best right now. He wasn’t sight-seeing, he wasn’t killing time. He wasn’t even escaping anything or wasting years of his life trying to be something he wasn’t. Instead, he was trying to solve a problem, and he was trying to find exactly the right way to do it. She was absolutely right about the TARDIS, and though he smiled at her knowledge of his darling machine, he didn’t actually reply. The smile was enough. He took his fingers from hers and led her off the edge of the dance floor toward a tray of champagne, knowing she would reach for it when it was offered--even if only to wave it off--and also let him go. He put a little bit of distance between them.
“I’m looking for somewhere to go,” he said, so sober that his tone alone should have set off alarms in psychiatric hospitals across the universe. He lifted both hands and readjusted his coat on his shoulders, but his fingers didn’t continue on to his tie. He put two thumbs on the inside of his braces and pulled, just a bit. He smiled a cheeky, shallow smile. “Someone to be.” The Doctor was going to solve the problem of his presence in Sunny’s mind... by making himself benign, rather than attempting to warp this entire universe so he wasn’t there at all.
River reached the way she was expected to and there something of the elegance of the place in the gesture, a languidity not River’s own. It was a distracted movement, champagne belonging to the past in her hands instead of the Doctor’s own and when she swung around and the beads clattered once more, he was not at her side but rather further away. She might (had she been someone else, someone prone to such things) have shown some vague sign of regret for that, but she was who she was and she was equally used to that. He was often there and then he was not; the vague novelty of it being the first time she had no knowing of it even being a time had long dissipated with the champagne bubbles and the conversational hubbub of the room.
“What do you mean?” she said now, impatient and sharp and she recognized the shape of the gestures, and a thin sense of what was meant. “You’re not anyone else. You’re you. Even if you must choose the face of someone who looks like he doesn’t need to shave. You can’t be anyone else, the world needs you.” It was neither emotional, nor was it plaintive, it was not the cry of a woman who saw the potential loss of a love. It was factual, the way River was cuttingly factual and it had a knowing laugh knotted into it that said perhaps she felt more of it than she ought to and put the laugh there to say she did not.
The Doctor dropped his hands away from elastic and polyester mix, sending them out and down in a flutter of elongated gestures more dramatic than anything going on in the dance floor. As if some invisible line were drawn between the two of them in the air, he deemed it safe to step closer again, swept forward with the intensity that caught up in the pale circle of each eye. “This world doesn’t. It gets along on its own. So do all the other worlds, in all the universes, in every door. The sun keeps rising, as the people here would say.” A little flicker of amusement put a chink in the chain of slight white pressure marks beside the corners of his mouth. “Being me is what’s causing the problem. The woman is coming apart. I have to watch. I can feel it happening. Without being able to do anything of substance about it.” By this time he was so close his breath made little waves in the static wisps of her hair. “Because I am not anyone else.”
River drew in a breath of stars and ozone, of wool and paint and the Doctor beneath it all - a kind of coming home, if home were anything at all but quiet madness, a confusion of people and time and the Doctor intrinsic to the mayhem and the music of it - and she closed her eyes for just a beat of a time, not hers but borrowed. She looked as his face sketched out the feeling beneath; impossible to see all that sifted beneath the surface but enough to read in the grooves of his mouth and the shape of his hands. There was warmth, stood close enough for it to look like care to anyone looking, and River liked that as much as she liked the Thirties, as little as she cared for the substance of it as much as its shape.
“They don’t know what they don’t have,” River fierce, sharp with it a fraction, for things, a person that was not quite hers but could not be said to belong to anyone else. Her hand was around his wrist; it could have been a trick, something to do with wallets or pockets, but it was temporarily there, as if she’d forgotten it. “Just because other worlds know how to do without you, doesn’t mean ours does.”
The Doctor turned his hand. Not quickly, not with any strength, just moving the solid bone of his wrist through her fingers. The movement was like a caress that involved no fingers, and a moment later he patted the hand that gripped his with a warm dry palm. A smile creased his features, lighting up his eyes, softening his mouth as his thin lips pressed together. “I’ll miss you too.” He smiled a few seconds longer and then it seemed to occur to him to say, “Well, I would, but as I won’t be me anymore I won’t know who or why I’m missing but I’m absolutely sure, yes, I will miss you too.” The chameleon arch the Doctor modified to alter his own existence wasn’t really meant for that purpose, but like most TARDIS-related technology, it would be very good. He wouldn’t even know he wasn’t himself; not consciously, anyway. He had a moment of pity for his future self’s therapist (therapist because he was fond of the twenty-first century and planned on hiding there). His eyes twinkled as the smile flickered up once more, and he gave her a cheeky little nudge with his hip as she stood there. “It’s not so bad. You’ll still have time to run into me,” he said, referring to the tangle of timelines.
River did not blush. She was not a woman given to it, nor did the intimation of finer feeling signify anything at all - she was in fact, rather a woman given over to amusement at others’ blushing, at their sentimentality and their display of it as one might express amusement at things that were both out of fashion and quaint. She smiled back at him instead, something that hovered, warm and well-meant, the way River’s smiles were always something else beyond their configuration.
“Spoilers,” she said softly, as if it were a promise, their lines so interlaced that prying them into linear histories would undo all that they were. River was a woman made for bold, grand things and for cavorting through history without a care; she was wistful, as if something kept because it was precious was being broken and made irretrievable. The Doctor was not a man who understood all because he could, but who understood everything everyone else did not. It was, after all, why she’d married him.
“When does time run out?” she said lightly. She’d let go his wrist, her fingers barely grazed it as if she were absent any care about it all at all but she stood close enough for the very stillness of herself to be visible, that barely-breathing concentration that was the truth to River’s lie.
“Soon enough. For me.” Again the sad, twinkling smile, ageless, and one could see where that age-old concept of immortality met humanity and recalled old Greek gods sitting on marble thrones that knew more than they should and whittled their time away with bothersome games involving mankind and randomized chance. “It’s better not to look for me,” he told her, with hints of improper glee at the idea of some new adventure, however unpleasant it might be for everyone--including himself. He gave a callous little toss of his head. “I need to give Sunny time to set herself right.” He didn’t say her name quite right, not quite British, not even quite American. It sounded like two syllables when he said it. The Doctor was given to truthful subtleties like that.
“Besides, I’m not sure if it will reverse the way it’s supposed to even if I have the thing in my hand.” He was going to put himself in some object to sieve out the existence of the Doctor from that of John Smith. (Because everyone knew he was going to pick the name “John Smith,” it was the most anonymous name in English-speaking history.) Then he was probably going to stash it somewhere she couldn’t find it. The Doctor could be predictable at times.
He stepped away from her, his fingers stumbling over hers and stretching away through space. They tingled with things yet to come, and things that would not come. “Goodbye,” he said, smiling at her. “Try to stay out of trouble.”
River didn’t care for many people - she had neither the interest in them, nor that faint, fault-line of guilt and sympathy twined together that made the circling men and women around them all too human and all too willing to dream, too susceptible to hope. She cared even less for Sunny, a woman whose existence did not stem tides, hold back wars, rein in chaos. She smiled at him, one that glistened too brilliantly to be truly real, one that shone as brightly as the glasses of champagne and the chandeliers. As if he weren’t speculating on the possibility of it all failing and the predictability that she would seek him out. She was River Song. She had been made to find him.
“I make no promises,” River told him, lazy suggestion ribboned through it. “Life’s too much fun to stay out of trouble, sweetie.” She blew him a kiss, pursed lips and sparkling naughtiness and not one whit of lost things and wishes in it - and then River turned, very deliberately. She put her back to the Doctor to turn to a room that had lost its luster just so there was no chance at all of looking for him and finding him gone already.
He had a habit of that.