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River Song has never needed the Doctor to survive.
That is a fact written in the stars themselves. But like the Doctor, she needs him to ground her, to ground her into living. And let her wings fly free.
She could fly without a weight, she could. But she doesn’t. Because just like how the Doctor needs a companion to see the world from another’s eyes.
She needs him to see the goodness in her heart.
Without a companion, the Doctor becomes the Beast of Trenzalore, the Valeyard, the Time Lord Victorious. The man so feared that the entire universe rallied against him—the Daleks, the Cybermen, every corner of the universe uniting (unprecedented, impossible) to destroy one man.
It is in those names that she finds comfort because all she’s known is that she’s a monster, a psychopath, given birth to kill the Doctor.
[Both of them are monsters in their own right. But all of them are legends, myths, in the same breath.]
They could both be alone, run from the path that has been set for them, run as fast as possible (just like what they’ve been doing all their lives, running, running, until the word stops meaning running and just means living now. Until living becomes a synonym of running, and to stop would mean death, or worse.)
But the stories tell of what will happen then, and while Doctor Song might not have the capability to read through timelines (yet), she feels the world grow ever darker without each other to light their path.
[Their stories intertwine, and they are running in opposite directions, she’s running to his beginning and he’s running to hers. Once she would have loved to find out who the Doctor is before her. Now, she only wishes to meet a version of him that will look at her, completely trusting in her judgement.]
[She’s not an idiot, she hears his distrust, how he treads carefully with every step, he may be the Doctor, the man who lies as easily as he breathes. But she knows him far better than anyone else, or at least one of the best at it.]
[She can feel the word spoilers burn a path through his ears, as his eyes darken a little bit in something she cannot read.]
[Does he fear it, like she once did?]
[Or is this the man who no longer trusts anyone, and would rather tear a warpath throughout the universe, like the Silence said.]
In one of those worlds, a meanwhile or a neverwere– she can’t tell. She feels the cold feeling of blood and adrenaline on her fingers.
She revels in the blood she spills, a ghost in all but name. Her heart is hollowed, and she chases pleasure, pain, joy, all these emotions turned into mirages of themselves. The Silence can no longer get a hand on her, but the cost is too high.
The feelings gleaming through, as she looks upon this reality is hollow, and she makes her mind twist and let go of that twisted reality before it can become reality. She remembers the power of memory from the Pandorica.
She remembers what power it has over people.
And she remembers what can happen because of it.
[She can turn it into reality, bring it to life, like how her mother remembering the Doctor can bring him back from the Void, the Howling, or Hell. And bring him back into reality.]
The Valeyard’s story is not one particularly defined. He is a ghost, like that version of her that lives on the precipice of another reality, one without the Doctor.
A world infinitely darker, for her and for the universe. The universe keeps turning, but the light keeps fading.
[Everything ends, and then everything begins again.]
The darkness of the Doctor is not a neverwere however. It has always been a fact. There are stories of the rage of a good man, running all throughout the universe, every second, every minute, haunted by the ghost of the Doctor.
The stories begin, of course, on Gallifrey.
But the darkness of the Doctor has always been there, from his beginnings, from the moment he became what they call the Doctor.
[Tendrils which will one day blossom into self-hatred, into the Doctor of War. Reaching a crescendo with all the lives he’s had to take, with all the blood he’s had to spill. He is the Doctor, and yet his kill count is higher than any other being in the universe. And so, he becomes one of the most feared beings in the universe.]
In Melody Pond, the darkness is not a part of her, merely what she’s had to become to survive, her conditioning, her torment, every second (many of which she can no longer remember, remember why she used to want to kill the Doctor so much) of it bringing her to want to destroy the man who leaves nothing but havoc in his wake.
But definitions don’t always fit the language. And one man’s havoc, is another species’ paradise. They become what they are to survive.
Melody Pond wonders who she is in this wide universe. River Song does not. A melody settles into a song, while a pond turns into a river.
She doesn’t love the Doctor at the start, and neither does the Doctor love her at the beginning. But there are things they both know about each other, know so much that it entices them into following.
The threads of the future influencing their present.
Some would call emotion weak; many do, in fact, in this wide universe. The Cybermen, the Daleks, they see compassion and love as weakness.
And yet the man they stand against wins, over and over, uses his compassion and kindness and wins.
They do not understand the concept. And so, they can never learn how to win.
[She goes into archeology to learn about him, to learn about the Doctor who saved her parents, and most importantly, her life.]
It is by this notion, at all, that the Doctor manages to fall for her trap. The Doctor is sidelined, as she dances around him in Berlin.
In hindsight, he is still enamored by her. Even as she tries to kill him, he sees something in her that he cannot find in her older versions.
He sees fire, he sees a fire that cannot be tamed, and he would not even want to try. It is beautiful in his eyes, something so much more.
And he knows it is so much more, that it grows and grows stronger with every breath she takes. In nanoseconds, he thinks of and sees River Song, not Melody Pond. He sees her undying love, he sees power and restraint.
Fire forging steel, fire forging everything. And that fire is hers and hers alone.
And when she calls herself a psychopath, when she calls herself something unworthy of love and affection. When she dedicates herself to killing him.
A silent anger burns through the Doctor of War. Something he hasn’t felt in a long time, anger burns in his veins, and a slight glimpse of the Oncoming Storm and the Valeyard distill themselves into the pages of his mind.
A small bit of him thinking of —fire, and blood. How dare they hurt something so magnificent? How can they tell her that she is unworthy of the love she deserves?
How can they harm such beauty, for their own twisted purposes?—
And as she edges closer to him, that thoughts shift and change, into something different– love, affection, he would do anything for her in this moment.
And when she leans in and gives a chaste kiss.
He forgets the most important thing about beauty.
His version of beauty is dangerous. When the entire universe is your backyard, what you call beauty turns into something dangerous.
And it’s going to kill him.
He distracts himself, he feels his mind wavering in the poison, he feels poison seeping in his mind, his organs, slowly taking it apart, slowly but surely.
He wishes on Amelia Pond.
He brings himself strength in half-measures. He will be strong for Amelia. He will be strong for Melody.
He will be strong for River Song.
He owes her that much. [Images of the Library flash through the Doctor’s mind at that moment, he’s a Time Lord, he can think of many things at once, think of separate things, truly multitask. If a human can only think of one thing at a time, he can think of multitudes in a fraction of a millisecond.]
The TARDIS speaks to her. Her Child reunited with her at last. The TARDIS’ Child is not like the TARDIS. She speaks and moves in three dimensions, and while she can grasp Time, grasp it and see its many facets, its twists and turns, its beauties and its horrors.
She does not exist all at once, seeing past, future, present. She only knows what is now, she cannot see the future, until it has already happened.
So, the TARDIS chooses for her, the same she does for her Thief. She gives her the same opportunities to grow, and at the end, the choice is ultimately hers.
That’s why she sabotages the temporal grace circuits, that’s why she lets her Child shoot her.
The TARDIS provides her Child the information to drive her, and to save her parents. And, as she stands here, right here and right now.
Time is not linear any longer. This is a historical point in time, it twists and turns, it is not settled, what happens here defines the future.
Time is a blur, and it is her Child’s choice that defines it now.
Melody Pond gets a message for River Song. Rory and Amy wonder what it is, but every time they ask, she never tells.
Those words are hers, and hers alone.
She believes in them, hangs on to them like her ground in an infinitely shifting and changing universe.
The words are special to her at first, as a gift for the person who took the Doctor’s hearts. She’s a psychopath, not rude.
She would be rude to ignore a dying man’s wish.
And then.. and then she finds out who River Song is.
[At the end of the twenty-four years they have together, the Doctor weeps for River Song. And she gives him the same consolation he gave her long ago in Berlin.]
[The words don’t matter. But they push the Doctor on, they keep him living, even when she is without her.]
[It is partially the reason he chooses to regenerate. It is the reason he keeps going and attempts to carry out Missy’s sentence.]
[And when he dies, when he fades, like a breath on the mirror.]
[She wakes up.]
They both start trying to run from each other. Each are afraid of who they are to each other. And yet, they will always deny one thing at the beginning of their journeys.
They were equally hopeful of what could it mean to them.
[Hope is a desolate, terrible thing.]
The Tenth Doctor has lost much. He holds and clings to life, even wasting a regeneration to keep this incarnation of him alive.
He’s afraid of death.
He is terribly mortal, ephemeral.
He loses Rose, Martha, Donna, and River. In his short life, he has lost far too much. And at the end of it, he gains his reward.
He says goodbye.
When he met River Song again on Asgard, he tried to avoid it, thinking that running away would keep the clock from ticking. Thinking that this would prolong their time together.
And as this infuriating woman walks over him, challenges him, and shows him everything at they are to each other.
[“You’re such hard work young, sweetie,” she said to him then.]
It becomes the foundation of who he becomes in his next incarnation. He doesn’t know it, of course. But–
Rule 1: The Doctor lies.
He lies to himself of who she is to him. Blinds himself from Time itself, and partially, a part of him already knows why he made the rules in the first place.
[“Has to be experienced, dear,” she whispered to him once.]
To River, to Melody (in the place where the boundaries are shifting, in the place where Melody Pond finally lets go, and River Song takes her place), she fears the Doctor’s knowledge because what it could mean for her.
All she knows is that she is a psychopath, an engineered killer, made to kill him. She is told his stories, his names, the names he has gotten from his blood wretched path.
And then her time with her mother shows her something else.
Shows her the other side of the Doctor.
Hope, love, and loss. The picture fills in, but she doesn’t yet have all the puzzle pieces yet.
But she knows enough.
She sees it when he relishes the soft chaste kiss. How he doesn’t fight against it, how he isn’t even surprised.
She knows enough.
[She cries and cries, and she is told so many things, her memories are filled with holes, she doesn’t remember who she is, but she knows things.]
[She knows the Doctor, and she rages against him. She is told not to love, not to care, and the pain that seeps through is enough to numb such pointless tendencies.]
[It makes the Madame Kovarian proud and happy. It makes her pleased. Her twisted mission, it will all have been worth it.]
[The ends justifies the means. Always.]
She sees it how he speaks of River Song, with reverence, as if she’s special. How even as she kills him, Melody Pond, River Song.
He still cares and loves her.
And she’s afraid of what that would mean for her. In the university, she ponders over and over about the Doctor when she has time.
She ponders about how it means.
[She also hears whispers about a Lake Silencio, and an Impossible Astronaut. She hears stories about the person who killed him.]
She’s afraid of what it means to be loved, and to love. Their stories are back-to-front after all. She used to know everything about who she was. A psychopath.
Now all she knows is endless unset time. Waiting for a person to set it, and for her path to be pushed forward.
She doesn’t know anything anymore.
And for a person who’s etched for every form of control since the beginning, this is frightening.
[She’s lying to herself, adrenaline pulses through her veins, for when they meet again. Her path is now hers to control, and so, she becomes who she wants to be.]
[If that is River Song, so be it.]
The Eleventh Doctor is afraid of River Song. He begins fearing her because he knows how her story ends.
The Doctor knows how stories end, of course. He’s seen too many endings for not know. He detests them. And there stands the woman who he’s seen die.
He knows what will happen when he reaches Darillium.
He knows it will be the last time they meet.
He sometimes knows too much, and sometimes he wishes he could just forget.
But after so much loss, there is hope. As the pieces slowly piece together, there is still hope for him.
And as he crashes into Amelia Pond’s garden.
He finds family again.
[They may have started this as reluctant victims of Time herself.]
But as much as they wish to pretend, they both choose this path. It is not Time’s fault that they were always meant to be together.
[The TARDIS may meddle, but she does not choose. She is a child of Time herself, but like Time, she cannot make something that never was.]
At the pyramid, at Area 52, they both say words they don’t mean.
They both act like they were unwilling participants.
[“I don’t want to marry you,” he says lying through his teeth. As if he hasn’t already asked her future self.]
[“I don't want to murder you,” she responds. But she does anyway and becomes the worst war criminal in history.]
They both meet each other at the end.
And no matter how painful their journey will be.
They will run together.
And they wouldn’t change a single thing.
[What is love anyway? There are many meanings, many words. Gallifreyan has words for every possible tense, the language unnecessarily verbose.]
[Humans have one word, and as much as they dress it up and give it meaning, it still doesn’t mean enough for it to convey it. To convey the feeling of love. Both languages can’t mean as much as they love each other.]
[But perhaps love means a different thing.]
[Maybe love is just unconditional mutual surrender.]
The Doctor speaks Old High Gallifreyan, words that can burn up stars, and says, “I trust/love/cherish you unconditionally.”
River Song shows her love in the only way she knows how, as she captures his lips, and slowly kisses her madman in a box.
The Doctor uses words as his weapon and uses it to show his devotion.
River Song proves her love in actions, as she kisses softly, not possessively, as she knows she already has him. All of him.