Work Text:
If an archaeologist and a historian walked into a bar, they'd be drunkenly sniping at each other within a few pints. And sometimes, they'd even be literal about it*. There is little warm fellow feeling between the disciplines. Something no one remembers until faculty dinners.
It comes down to searching. Seeking. River, revelling in the snatches she can find of a time in which she no longer lives— photographs and watches, a late 2nd-century gladius, with traces of plastic residue no one can explain, could never work in history. It is linear, and that, of course, is the joy of it. Filling blanks and making wool-skeins out of other people's wars, all safely gathered up and recounted in lovely books. One damn thing after another.
Every time they meet, River and her Doctor, she finds herself learning new tastes of past, and future, and parallel. She learns to stand side-by-side with someone in different centuries. She can travel down the full, delightful, 900-something years of him, only to find she has over a millennia to cross on her way back. Archaeologists live in gaps. They construct stories, but only lightly, because any new discovery in the dirt might re-write them. She has, reflects, become the best sort of geography teacher. The sort who knows worlds cannot stand still.
She doesn't quite understand the look in the Doctor's eyes when she tells him this, his hand pressed lightly against her chest, as if he strains for a second heartbeat that, at times, River is sure she can hear. She lets her pulse double for him. The flutter-fast skirling of her blood in her ears and throat, under her skin. “Where are we now?”
He smiles at her, knowing and sad, ever-old and newly young. Something taken from strange ground. “All sorts of places, River Song.”
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. A history book. An explicarium. And it is boring.
*That part really depends upon the bar. And revisionism.