Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

     "Alright kids!" the woman shouted, bounding into the room in her outfit that day. She wore a dark blue dress with tiny white fairy lights all along it, blinking like little stars. "Today we're going to learn about stars!"

     "Field trip?" nearly all the children asked at once.

     "Yes, field trip," the woman, obviously their teacher, confirmed.

     "Oh no," a bespectacled little boy with cherry blond hair and a striped tee-shirt mumbled.

     "To The Bus!" the teacher exclaimed, reaching for her bag on the desk and pulling her curly hair into a pony tail before stepping onto the school bus to find all the children in their seats.

     "Where are we going Ms.Frizzle?" one of the girls, Dorothy Anne, asked.

     "Into space!" Ms. Frizzle shouted, pressing her foot on the gas as The Bus lurched and sputtered until the engine turned over and the big yellow vehicle shot off into the sky.

     Once safely gliding through the solar system, Ms.Frizzle stood up and began to address her class.

     "A star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by its own gravity. The near-"

     "What's that?” a boy breathed, Is it a shooting star?" He pointed to a streak of sparking light that zipped past the bus.

     "Actually," the eccentric woman began, an edge of foreboding in her voice, "what we call shooting stars are really meteoroids falling to earth, or comets, zipping through the atmosphere," Ms.Frizzle could recognize that streak of light anywhere, and it was no comet. She prayed, begged even, although Ms.Frizzle was not a begging person:

     Please, not now, not in front of the children.

     But a strange wind had started to alter the currents inside of The Bus, and she knew it was too late.

     "Ms.Frizzle?" Keesha pipped up, "what's that noise? Is The Bus breaking down?"

     “At my old school, our busses never broke down,” moped the new girl, Phoebe.

     Then Ms. Frizzle heard it too, that noise, that wretched noise she had grown to hate over the years. All the children whipped their heads around to stare at the spot in the back of the school bus where it was all coming from,

     "Hi honey, I'm home," a man sauntered out of the blue box that had materialized.

     Click, Snap!

     The Doctor looked down to find the barrel of Ms. Frizzle's gun pressed sharply into his abdomen.

     "R- River?" he asked.

Chapter Text

     "River?" he asked again, reaching up a hand to pull the gun away, but a fire in his wife's eyes told him he really oughtn't.

     "Get back in the TARDIS, and fly away," she ground out through a clenched smile.

     "But-" he began, then seeming to notice the children staring at him and the TARDIS, chose to whisper a different question, "Are you holding these children hostage?"

     "No- I-" River sighed then quickly tucked the gun back in her purse before any of the kids could see is, "I'm a teacher."

     The Doctor almost burst out laughing, the only thing stopping him was the knowledge that she still had shot him before, and the certainty that she would do it again. River, alone with children? Anyone letting that happen must have been insane, or just extremely lacking in knowledge of her past.

     "Oh, humans," he mumbled to himself. Feeling a tug on his tweed, he looked down at a small girl with thin jet black hair gripping his coat.

     "Are you an alien?" she asked.

     "Actually-" he glanced over at the other adult on the bus and saw her giving him her 'No.' stare. "No, I'm not, I-" then he walked over to River and put his arm around her waist, hugging her stiff form to him, "I am your teacher's husband."

     "You're Mr. Frizzle?" a boy asked far too loudly, as though he were uncertain he would be heard. To River’s chagrin, he was.

     The Doctor looked over at her amused, "Yes," he said matter of factually, "Yes, I am Mr. Frizzle"

     "Can he stay Ms. Frizzle? Please? Please?" one of the girls pleaded.

     Knowing that if she said no, no matter how much she wanted to, she would never hear the end of it; River obliged. She sent The Doctor to the back of the bus for the rest of the trip, where anytime she mentioned something earth scientists had figured out, he would mumble, "Wrong!" 

     Once all the children had gone home The Doctor squeezed his knees into a child's desk while River sat at her's grading papers.

     "Time for you to leave," she said, not looking up.

     "So," he began, pretending he hadn't heard her, "Ms.Frizzle?"

     "I said leave."

     "River? River Frizzle? Is that another pseudonym? Is Frizzle derived from Drizzle? Ha! That would-"

     River’s gaze shot up, "Leave, Doctor."

     He paused, head cocked to the side, trying to read her strange behavior. "Why?" he asked

     "Can you please once consider what I want and go? Out through the door! It's right over there in case you couldn't remember!”

     "That was one time!” The Doctor tried to leap to standing to defend himself, but his legs got caught in the cramped space of the child’s desk. It disturbed him that this didn’t elicit River’s usual endearing smile at his flailing. 

     “Oh don’t try to tell me your forgetfulness isn’t a pattern.” River noted from a distance how easy it was to slip back into arguing with him. 

     “What the hell is this about River? What is going on? Why are you being so bloody cold all of a sudden.”

     River laughed, and she found she couldn’t stop the admission from stuttering out of her chest "Because. Because… I hate you.” 

     "What?” The Doctor eased out of the chair this time, coming up to kneel in front of River– Ms. Frizzle’s— desk. “What did I do?" 

     River stopped and bit her lip, breathing deeply before she eased open a drawer at the bottom of her desk and pulled out that worn blue book with tattered yellowing edges. She hadn’t touched it in ages; she was scared of what she would do.

     “So, where are we?”

     The Doctor was still for a moment before pulling his own diary from his inner pocket and slipping into the routine.

     “Byzantium?” River asked.

     “Yup,” he replied, “Demons Run?”

     “Yeah,” River flipped towards the back of her diary, “Trenzalore…” The Doctor froze and looked at her.

     “What?”

     “Trenzalore? Have you done it?”

     “How do you know about that?”

     “I was there Sweetie,” she cringed at how easily the endearment rolled off her tongue.

     “But that’s not- you were-“

     River gave him a cocky little grin, laced with resentment. “You promised to get me out. You promised to come back.”

     “But that wasn’t- I was-“

     “But you left me.”

     “River, I- Listen I-, No. No! “

     River’s countenance had turned to stone, “Nothing at the towers meant anything to you did it?”

     “River that’s ridiculous and you know it!”

     “Well, you took your good old time then didn’t you?” And the mask slid on, sickly sweet to hide her damage. She slammed the book shut and dropped it into the desk drawer, the display of her anger in contrast to the smooth unbothered slide of her voice, “God forbid I not spend 357 years waiting for you before realizing you didn’t care!” She walked to face the back wall; busying herself with a student display.

     The Doctor broke the silence after a few moments, “How did you get out?”

    “Oh, I’m very clever.” She wasn’t going to pass up the chance to brag, “we used the Library’s systems to build a body my electronic data would accept and then CAL deleted me from the system. Would have gone faster if we hadn’t needed to do it all from inside the Data Core but our contacts had run dry you see.”

     The Doctor’s mouth was agape and his fists clenched at his sides.

     “What!” he demanded, he ran both his hands through his fringe while pushing breath out through his teeth. River couldn’t tell if he was angry or about to cry, probably both. “You risked your life! Do you understand how dangerous that was!”

     She spun around quickly to face him; she could feel tears beginning to prick the backs of her eyes. She would not cry in front of him, he didn’t deserve that kind of response from her.

     “Yes! I do!”

     He looked down; both of them were silent for a while.

     “I’ll go,” he said, she nodded and walked back to her desk, sitting down swiftly and beginning to grade papers again. “But first,” she paused, but wouldn’t look up at him, “why didn’t you come and find me?”

     “I had no evidence to suggest that you wanted me to.”

     “I suppose not.”        

     River watched him walk out of the classroom, confirming every fear she had convinced herself she didn’t have anymore. He had some young companion to get back to surely, a pretty wide-eyed human girl who’d snap her mouth shut and listen to him drone on about something as simple as quantum gravity for the seven hundredth time. 

     After the door shut quietly she stood and quickly packed up her bag, making sure to retrieve the overflowing blue book from the drawer she had stuffed it into, and gingerly placed it in the pocket.

     She locked up her room and slid into her car in the parking lot. If some tears landed in her lap on the drive home; she pretended not to notice.

Chapter Text

      Escaping CAL wasn’t even the hardest part. Oh sure it took about 143 years of concentrated effort, if she had been less reckless it should have taken her 200; and perhaps it was one of the most painful things she had ever experienced, which for River is saying a lot– but all things considered, it was a piece of cake. After two centuries the Vashta Nerada had starved. River watched a team of five intrepid and discerning graduate students step off of a transport, and after all sorts of tests and scans, it was with a sharp and shameful envy that she watched five smiling faces step back on. The Library slowly resumed its operations, and River patiently waited for a visitor who never came. Once patrons had gotten over their knowledge of the planet’s past The Library began to bustle once again, then it was quick work to reprogram the librarian’s assistants to harvest stem cells from an unsuspecting patron every 5 years or so. It only took 37 years to hack the automated printing office and perfect a mutation of the biological structure of their new synthetic paper to create something perfectly identical to human skin (the consequences of which are that if you visit, you may wish to avoid call numbers JNFT35680- LNV89000? It’s not dangerous but could perhaps be unsettling to some). She spent fifty years or so translating her binary code into a practical genetic one, every cell had to be accounted for and any errors could be catastrophic. She spent the next fifty proof-reading. A body lay in the basement, scarred in several places where it had been sewn together, but it was the spitting image of Professor River Song. Finally, gnashing her virtual teeth, CAL flipped the switch. 

     If you were to ever be transferred, in your entirety, across a high-speed data cable, you would experience a profound sort of lightness. With no limbs– real or simulated– to move in response to electrical impulses there would be a sense, for the briefest moment, that you were experiencing your purest form. You will of course, never bask in this particularly pleasant warm buzz, because regardless of the fact that such technology will not exist within your lifetime, it is such a wildly dangerous thing to attempt that you would have to be completely and utterly mad to even consider it.

     The pleasant humming peace that River Song soaked in was soon interrupted by a sensation quite akin to having your entire body fileted and your bones beat repeatedly with large wooden clubs all while you lay in the rapidly shifting heat of a fire in the process of being lit by an eleven-year-old boy scout named Kenneth. This pain culminated in the realization that River had just felt true peace for the third time in her life and just like the last two instances, it was immediately followed by harrowing and unimaginable pain the likes of which one simply cannot prepare themselves for. Perhaps, peace is the worst torture a person could willingly pursue. 

      There’s nothing like waking up in a corporeal form for the first time in several centuries to that thought. Yeah, compared to actually getting off of The Library planet, that was easy. 

     It turns out that when all records of your existence suggest you had died heroically saving 4,022 people and a precious public institution, it becomes exponentially more difficult to acquire identification, and subsequently money, and subsequently from that any way off of a godforsaken planet. A part of her had hoped the sacrifice of her team may have bought them some kind of museum corner, or at least a display box in the little gift shop, where she could find her vortex manipulator. But alas no, instead donations from the Lux corporation had funded the commission of a gigantic brass statue of the man himself surrounded by her team of five, fixed atop a horrendously gaudy fountain in one of the planet's largest reading gardens. It was truly a travesty, River would have looked so much better in gold. 

     Asking around got her nowhere, the academics who frequented The Library were snobs and didn’t take to the idea of picking up hitchhikers. Every once in a while she’d start to make headway with an older gentleman, be right on the edge of convincing him that he wanted to give her a ride to the next system over, but inevitably his wife or his son or his escort would appear from the stacks and he’d make an unconvincing show of jilting her off. 

     River considered the obvious option only briefly.

     If for all intents and purposes she was presumed long dead, then everyone she had ever known was long dead. There was no one to call, no one to reach out to with a “you couldn’t get rid of me if you tried”, and making new friends was out of the question. She couldn’t put a pin on exactly why, but people seemed so much less trusting than they had been 500 years ago. Perhaps she was projecting. 

     River was always moving west, chasing the light. 

     It took her 2 years to circumnavigate the planet. Every day she’d wake up, pick up a book, and start walking. She’d take breaks to read every couple of hours before beginning her trek again. Small cafes dotted the main hallways and abandoned plates were plentiful sources of necessary nutrition. Somewhere in the Earth fiction section, on the 11th floor of a tower in the planet’s northeast quadrant, there was a copy of a book called “The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E Frankweiler”. River never read it, never even went to that section, but if she had she may have taken some familiar comfort in its similarity with her own day-to-day life. Speaking of, days on The Library were on the slightly longer side, the planet’s rotation relatively slow compared to most habitable zones. The hypothetical downside of this is decreased gravity and a colder mean temperature, hypothetical because The Library has geothermal heating and a simulated gravity only a little weaker than Darillium’s. The upside to longer days is that it’s easier to walk briskly, or commandeer a shelving shuttle, and delay the sunset for weeks. The Vashta Nerada were gone, of course, but something kept her traveling, maybe it was the spirit of adventure.

     It was not the spirit of adventure. It was fear.

     A month, she avoided night for a month. But sleep is rarely restful when you’re running from something, and as River chased the ever-moving sun, so was her own exhaustion relentless in its pursuit of her. It was a simple matter of oversleeping, she had settled down in a quiet corner chair, a comforting beam of sunlight cutting across her face. She dreamt.

     A bright blue briar bush, its thorny branch climbing up her ankle, wrapping itself around her bare thigh. She looks down at the scratches of red it leaves as it tears at her flesh, climbing still to rip apart the white linen of her dress. Her husband stands at a distance and watches as neon tendrils crawl up her torso.

     “You are an echo River. You should have faded by now.” 

     She opens her mouth to speak. To scream. To beg. To ask how he has gone so long with her in the corner of his eye, unburdened by the guilt that should have welled up in him at that. She opens her mouth but she feels sharp vines knotted in her throat, she gags instinctively to cough them up but this only pushes their points in deeper, ripping her apart inside and out. 

     The Doctor steps toward her and places one hand on her bicep, the other cupping her cheek. The tendrils of the time stream move to make way for him. He could stop this. The thorns will leave if he takes their place, her torment will end if he touches her everywhere they have laid claim to. If he touches her everywhere. He leans in and kisses her, the briar loosens wherever it had taken hold, it shrinks within her throat and she whimpers into their kiss at the relief. 

     That wasn’t for him. That was not a reaction to his touch but to the sudden absence of pain that it brought with it. He will think that she forgives him. She pushes him. 

     Agony. Worse than before, the throbbing of an old wound reopening as the glowing blue ropes resume their steady climb, eeking towards consuming her entirely. He steps back, expressionless as before.

     “There is a time to live, and a time to sleep. River. Wake up.”

     River opened her eyes to shadows emanating faint whispers, she bolted up from her chair and did the one thing she knew would always keep her safe. She ran. She ran until she reached a computer consol, her fingers flew across the keyboard to bring the overhead lights on, they clicked several times before finally, a warm glow flickered above her. Without even stopping to think she opened a communications window as a familiar phone number spilled onto the screen-

     “No! Shit!” she practically shrieked into the space as she turned to pace a very quick circle before coming back to the computer.

     “ River?” 

     River’s ears perked up at the familiar voice coming through the speakers.

     “ River you know they’re gone. They’ve been gone for centuries, you are safe here.”

     “ CAL thank god, I heard them I-” She glanced behind to count her own shadows, “-I overslept, God I’m an imbecile!” River rubbed her temples with her palms, coaxing thought out of her addled mind, “CAL I need you to-”

     “ River the Vashta Nerada are dead in this place. I promise. There is a couch down the hall and around the right corner. I will leave the lights on while you sleep.” 

     River’s hands stilled and her hands fell to spread over the expanse of her face, as much in frustration as in concession, and though she'd never admit it, probably also to stop her from pressing the key to dial the number that still flashed at her from the screen. 

     Without a word, she followed CAL’s directions and discovered a dark wooden coffee table surrounded by large leather chairs, and yes, a couch. Whatever reluctance she felt towards staying put ebbed out of her like waves with the approach of low tides, apprehension rhythmically creeping back in, but never quite as far as it had been before. Who knew how far the sun had gotten in her lapse of diligence, it would be foolish to chase it, she’d just as likely find herself stuck in the night. She’d be better of getting a full night’s rest and continuing her journey with the dawn. River knew of course, that the light would not keep her safe, if the Vashta Nerada were still here she would have been devoured months ago. But comfort is a thing you learn to appreciate in your old age, even if your logic isn’t sound. And though she’d be loath to admit it, there was something spiteful in her race against time. At least it gave her something to do rather than mope around, she was never very good at sitting still. Perhaps, she thought, she ought to try to get better at that. 

     Curled up on the couch, she let herself dream of calling the TARDIS to pick her up, perhaps she’d get lucky and The Doctor wouldn’t be there. Of course, that was an impossibility these days. The new body was genetically identical to her previous one but something of that spark- the bit of the vortex that used to live inside her- had been lost. With it went the psychic link she had with her other mother. Turns out this wasn’t something she could get herself out of on her own. 

     “CAL,” she mumbled, on the edge of sleep, “darling, I think I need your help again to get out of here.” 

     From the computer around the corner came a sweet and soothing voice, “In the morning.” 

Chapter Text

A bright blue briar bush, its thorny branch climbing up her ankle, wrapping itself around her bare thigh. She looks down at the scratches of red it leaves as it tears at her flesh, climbing still to rip apart the white linen of her dress. Her husband stands at a distance and watches as neon tendrils crawl up her torso.

“You are an echo River. You should have faded by now.” 

She opens her mouth to speak. To scream. To beg. To ask why he always stands and watches, unburdened by the guilt that should have welled up in him at sitting idley by while she is torn apart, shredded by the time stream. She opens her mouth but she feels sharp vines knotted in her throat, she gags instinctively to cough them up but this only pushes their points in deeper, ripping her apart inside and out. 

The Doctor steps toward her and places one hand on her bicep, the other cupping her cheek. The tendrils move to make way for him. He could stop this. The thorns will leave if his hands take their place– her torment will end if he touches her everywhere they have laid claim to. If he touches her everywhere. He leans in and kisses her, the briar loosens wherever it had taken hold, it shrinks within her throat. 

She has learned to expect this, the instinct to hum in relief. She swallows her protests down and allows The Doctor to continue to press his lying tongue between her teeth.

This is worse, to sit complacent under his touch. It isn’t fair. The only way to ease her torture is to give him what he wants. He will think that she forgives him. No, he deserves to hurt too; to lose a part of himself the way she has lost a part of hers. She feels itching in her gums, the slide of smooth enamel along her cheeks, and then it’s easy.

Snap.

River Song jolted awake. She swiped her tongue around her mouth to chase the taste of blood, trying and failing to identify its source. 

“Well. That was new,” she mumbled to her own ceiling. 

River had the same dream every night, reliably for the last– god she didn’t even know anymore– was it 500? 600 years? And every night it had been exactly the same: The Doctor’s time stream wrapping itself around her and tearing into her flesh while the man himself stood stiff and vacant, watching her endless agony. Of course, after Trenzalore, her mutinous and heartbroken subconscious had been eager to add his gentle dismissal to the nightmare. 

You should have faded by now.

What he meant by that was, 

I’m not coming to get you, leave me alone. 

And it’s not that she couldn’t deal with rejection. It’s not that she couldn’t have gotten herself out of the data core: clearly, she could have! It’s the way she trusted him completely, only for him to leave her picking up dust like she was a book on a shelf. 

River’s hand slid under her pillow and knocked against the tome she had placed there the night before. Normally she would spend her mornings before school started prepping her lesson plan, working out (this body didn’t need maintenance in the same way, but she was terrified by the idea of visibly aging, so for good measure, she tried to counteract it.) or weeding in her garden. Today she had other things to attend to because where her life had settled into a drab, consistent, and comforting routine for the last several years, yesterday had thrown everything off kilter. 

On this morning River brewed her tea and sat at the iron table on her patio with that worn blue diary. She hoped never to see the man again, but responsibility dictated she make note of the meeting just in case they ever needed to compare timelines again. Yes, responsibility was why she flipped through from the front to search for the next empty page; responsibility was why she lingered over certain words and passages on that journey; and responsibility was why her entry regarding their most recent encounter took up three pages of the book. She made note of the dream and it’s changes as well. 

As the sun began to work its way above the treeline she went back inside. River had always wanted a mansion, a large stone manor with iron details and cold echoey halls. Instead, she had found her way into a quaint craftsman-style home in Virginia. River had also always wanted to be a daring archeologist with at least five unfathomably and diversely attractive lovers at any given time. Instead, she had found her way into a job as an elementary school teacher in Virginia in 1994 AD and hadn’t had sex, real sex, in at least 130 years.

Humans, during The Golden Anthropocene in particular, were often predisposed to yearn. The culture of abundance with it’s supermarts, sports stars, reality television shows, and digital watches had convinced any who participated that if they could only obtain that nebulous and coveted more – they would then achieve sweet satisfaction. Of course, as the philosophers in the cult of mediocrity (circa 2078 AD) tried to convey to a reasonable amount of people with an acceptable rate of success, the issue was that humans at the time had equated the meanings of the words satisfaction and joy. 

“If some of you would lower your expectations just a little bit I’m sure most of us would find it somewhat easier to get by,” Exclaimed the Supreme-ish Medicrote Artimus Grudge, at a routine meeting of The Council of the Middle of the Road in 2080 AD. “What is needed is a general acceptance of the idea that life is not an ongoing search for joy, but a settling-in to satisfaction. To learn to achieve satisfaction within the most resonable circumstances you can obtain is the only way to be even remotly happy in your lifetime.” He had concluded.

River had met Artimus Grudge once at a dinner party. Though she found him profoundly boring and thought his habit of licking remnants of food from the tines of his fork with every bite to be absolutely revolting, she had come to see his philosophical point.

While she of course mourned that she once had the life she’d always wanted, and felt nostalgia for the chase, that’s all it was– nostalgia. A kanker sore in the mouth of the soul, sweetness in the past now sitting sour on the tongue. River may have gone a long time since experiencing the emotional high of dodging alien fire, but it had also been some time since she had felt the burn and ache of being hit. She was sometimes reminded of the gut twisting agony of losing a friend in the field as she watched her fifth grade class pack up their bags each year. This only lasted a moment though, before she recalled that they were all alive, and were likely to remain so once they’d moved on to the sixth grade. She took sweet pleasure in small things: her patch of Flame Azalea and Grass of Parnassus which drew droves of native pollinators to her garden in the spring and summer, the way the sunlight filtered into her kitchen at sunset while she cooked, red wine, sewing an extravagant outfit from scraps of fabric, the wonder it sparked on the faces of her students when her dress began to glow like radioactive uranium halfway through a lesson (She’ll concede, obtaining materials for that one had been a bit of an adventure). Her pains were few: wanderlust mostly, grief that would prick at her regardless of where or when she was, she could hardly say she was lonely when she spent every afternoon with a group of strange and miraculous students who adored her for the seemingly unending knowledge that she held. And so was it worth it? Maybe not. Would she have saved herself a lot of trouble if she had chosen to remain in the monotony of her life under CAL? Oh yes. But she hadn’t, she had thought she wanted adventure again and so she’d chased it, when she had-

A crunch from around the corner of her house startled her from her reverie. It had sounded like footsteps. 

Carefully and slowly, with the hunter’s stealth she still retained, River walked the length of her yard and quickly snapped around the corner of the building. 

Nothing. 

Then, a squirrel skittered up a nearby tree, knocking a pine cone to the ground.

Aha. 

River tried to tamper down her strange disappointment as she retreated back inside to pack up for the day ahead. 

—

Wanda had been talking about this roller coaster non-stop for the last month. 

“The wildest, scariest, best scream-your-lungs-out ride in the world.” She called it. In a different life, River would have taken the girl to Kursaal or Hedgewick’s. But dissuading her from doing such a thing was a vow she had taken to make sure all field trips were strictly educational. And she hadn’t quite figured out how to twist that one to make it sound pedagogically significant. 

River had found a couple of weeks ago that The Great Consciousness had taken up residence in her school, which would have been a bigger problem than it was if not for the fact that she had an excellent rapport with the hive being and had been able to convince it that cooperation could be mutually beneficial. This was how she found herself tugging a sentient rope from the back of the classroom closet.

“Oh good morning, class!” One digestive system coming up!”

If you make a scene in front of the students our deal is off. 

She thought to herself, knowing the Great Consciousness would pick up on it.

“Ee- yah!” She gave a more insistent yank on the rope. Hurtling it towards her skeletal model, and watching it expand cooperatively into the shape of the human digestive system beneath the plastic rib cage.

“Now, that’s more like it.” 

The skeleton hiccuped in response. 

The idea for today’s lesson plan had come to River several weekends ago, right before the summer ended. There was a playground in her neighborhood which she often wandered by on her evening walks. In a startling turn of events, she saw a child bravely ascend a towering set of stairs, then just as bravely hurl himself down the enclosed slide, skin screeching against the hot plastic all the way until he emerged from the red maw of the tube only to promptly throw up all over the woodchip covered ground. 

To someone else watching that day, this was what happened on playgrounds. It was gross, and they would do anything to forget it as quickly as they could. But to an elementary school science teacher, that was education. Once River heard Wanda gushing about this roller coaster at the start of the school year she knew the lesson titled “For Lunch” would find its way onto her syllabus as early as it would fit. 

It was remarkably easy to convince Arnold to stay behind. In a number of ways, primarily his vocal anxiety, he reminded River of her father. His frequent complaints alongside his almost unwavering capitulation made it impossible for her not to be fond of him. After boarding the bus, Arnold very predictably went straight for an early lunch, allowing her and her TARDIS to shrink down and slip inside unnoticed.

Oh yes, the bus was a TARDIS, disguised of course, to fit in with the suburban sprawl. Jack had started affectionately referring to it as Buster when he and River had first obtained it. Buster hated this, but it was a hundred times better than Sexy, and so the name stuck.

They progressed exactly as planned into the mouth and River cherished every second of dodging teeth like they were enemy traps. Into esophagus and down to the stomach, as long as Ralphie didn’t throw up, this whole trip would go off without a hitch. Of course, River knew it was safe, she would never willfully endanger someone’s child. Well, willfully. How was she supposed to know that Arnold would have swallowed two sticks of gum and that said gum would form a titanic mass threatening to capsize The Bus? Regardless, it wasn’t an issue, she was a fantastic pilot and deftly maneuvered the craft around the burg, only catching it a little bit on the side mirror. Everything was fine.

Well, mostly fine. She had no idea that out of all the substances in the universe the one that could crack through a Tardis would be stomach acid. It could float in lava for christ’s sake! Why would she even stop to think stomach acid was a risk? 

“Ah, nothing to worry about,” River had learned well to school her expression over her several thousand years, “just a little stomach acid.” She announced to the students. No need to concern them. 

“A few things are too tough to be broken up and dissolved.”

“Like, school buses, right?” Phoebe squeeked out. She was a tad uptight in River’s opinion. Always going on about her old school even when she’d been River’s student for over a year. She needed to loosen up, and what were teachers for if not to push their students just a little bit?

“Only one way to find out!” 

River pressed the mesmerglober and transformed Buster into a submarine, speeding the class into Arnold’s small intestine. In contrast to the unexpected vulnerability of the TARDIS to stomach acid, River had prepared for this part of the adventure. She produced High PH diving suits and encouraged the students to explore. 

Wanda would be the one to stray too far, always carrying herself with a bit too much confidence and getting into trouble. River was so proud of her.

Chasing Wanda brought them into the large intestine, which honestly, River hadn’t planned to breach in the lesson. She’d been in worse places but in this chapter of her life, where she could choose just how knee-deep in shit she wanted to get, she wasn’t going to willingly subject herself to literally being knee-deep in her student’s shit. In this case, as Wanda shouted from down the long fleshy tunnel, there wasn’t a choice. 

She put on a brave face and started driving around in search of her student. And of course, the job of an educator never stops, as her pupils, seemingly oblivious to the danger their peer was in, continued to ask questions about the role of the large intestine in digestion. Actually, the students understood exactly how high the stakes were, they just had such implicit trust in the woman they knew as Ms. Frizzel, that they couldn’t have been afraid of anything as long as she was there. They knew she would find Wanda.

And find Wanda she did, dancing atop the giant glob of chewing gum like a lumberjack about to lose a birling match. God, River was so proud of her.

Once their wayward Wanda had been retrieved, the lesson finally got back on track. There was just too much risk of being compacted should they try to leave the back way, so the only other choice was to go up the way they came. River had planned on agitating Arnold’s stomach and forcing him to regurgitate The Bus, needless to say, she was relieved when Wanda came up with the more sound plan of influencing Arnold to burp. Turns out your teachers aren’t lying when they tell you that sometimes, you teach them back. 

With everyone Rebigafied and Arnold informed of precisely how he had been violated, the class period could be counted as finished. Regret followed River that she hadn’t sought out informed consent, her PhD advisor would have been disappointed. Of course Arnold would have been embarrassed for his class to have seen the insides of his body. Sometimes, her time as a specimen under The Silence meant that River didn’t understand certain human boundaries. She had grown much better at it over the years, but clearly, she slipped up from time to time.

It was for this reason that River lost her chipper facade as soon as her final period class had been ushered to their busses or their parents’ waiting vehicles. She began setting up for tomorrow’s lesson but couldn’t bring herself to smile at what was usually one of her favorite subjects to teach– dinosaurs. She liked to whip out that she was semi-fluent in their language. It had happened when she was struggling in one of her University linguistics courses, The Doctor had used the grammatica-

Oh, blast it all. 

She’d finish this in the morning. Right now there was a bottle of wine at home and River had enough guilt and loneliness from the past two days to get her through the whole thing. As she grabbed her bag from the desk drawer she noticed a tiny shadow sneaking through the threshold of the classroom.

“Wanda?” 

“Sorry, Ms. Frizzel. I was just. Um-” The girl fiddled with the zipper on her backpack, which she was currently clutching close to her chest.

“Aren’t you going to be late catching your bus? Did you forget something?”

“Oh no, I go to an afterschool program. But it is kind of a walk so you’re right, I should get going.” Wanda slung the bag back around her shoulders and started to saunter out of the room with a false bravado that River recognized immediately. 

“Ah ah ah, you won’t trick me like that missy. What were you doing here?” 

Wanda slumped, sheepishly opened her bag, and shuffled up to River’s. She pulled out a brown paper bag and plopped it on one of the empty spaces not covered in beakers, Petri dishes, and paper. 

“Oh, what have we here?” River asked as she gingerly lifted the bag, peeled it open, and peered inside.

“It was supposed to be a surprise.” Wanda shot out suddenly, her tone accusatory. 

Resting inside the bag was a crisp peanut butter and jelly sandwich, cut into triangles, and a small button pin with a tan June bug beetle against a lime green background. 

“Well, I’m certainly surprised.” River began.

“It’s like a present.” Wanda retorted.

“It’s a sandwich.”

“Duh.”

“Wanda, was this your lunch?”

“No, I’m not stupid, I had my mom make an extra.”

“I see…”

“My parents are divorced,” Wanda explained like her teacher had the thickest skull in the galaxy, “and sometimes my dad decides to visit but he doesn’t tell any of us first. After he leaves my mom says that we get to have PB&J for dinner. I’m always sad when he goes, but the PB&J makes me feel better, so I thought since Mr. Frizzel surprised you and then made you sad by leaving again, you should get to have PB&J for dinner too.” 

“What-” River was immediately interrupted by Wanda’s continued explanation.

“And I got the bug pin from this summer camp I went to and I know you like bugs 'cause you’re always catching them and letting them go out the window when they get inside the classroom. I think bugs are cool too.” she took a deep inhale but didn’t seem to have any more words to use the breath on, so she released it in a puffing sigh.

River weighed the value, consequence, and the morality of discussing her emotional state with a child, and then managed,

“Wanda, do I seem sad?”

“Oh. I don’t think anyone else noticed it today. But yesterday you were kinda like how my mom is when my dad is around.” 

“Aha.” That was concerning.

“Anyway I really should get going or the after-school people will call my mom and say I’m missing.” Wanda turned on her heels and started out of the room.

River stuttered out a measly “Thank you” before composing herself enough to throw out, “And quick thinking today to make Arnold drink your seltzer. Well, done.” After the fact.

Wanda turned again at the threshold, “Thanks Ms. Frizzel!”

 River grabbed her purse and moved toward the coat closet, “Claiming to be his conscience was a nice touch.”

Wanda made a dismissive motion in the air, “Sure, but Arnold would do anything I told him to anyway.”

River noticed this before and had been chuckling at their dynamic for a couple of weeks. “I’ve been wondering if he may have something of a crush on you, Wanda.”

The girl looked down, then back up to River with a twinkle in her eye, “Oh I know he does.” she said through an impish grin. And with that, Wanda skipped out of the doorway and into the hall. 

Oh, the things River could teach that girl if she had her Alpha Meson Blaster and wasn’t bound by a state curriculum. 

Back at home, a glass of bottom-shelf Cabernet in hand, River thought that maybe the Peanut butter and Jelly really had made her feel better.