fic: The Stars Will Be Watching Us, and We Will Show Them.
Title: The Stars Will Be Watching Us, and We Will Show Them.
Author: lonewytch
Pairing: Eleven/River Song
Wordcount: 2539
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Right through to the present
Summary: Humans would call these moments memories. The stories that they tell to themselves to keep time from taking everything they did, everything they saw, back into itself.
A/N: Written for the who_contest comm, for the theme Entrances and Exits. Title from Rumi.
My fic Masterlist
Once, in a place of wood and of dry stories that shadows were born from, in a place watched over by a metal moon and little girl, he saw her for the first time. The woman who was an echo of his own future, a sound moving backwards, etching out a path before him that he was afraid to meet.
She came through the Library door in light and in smoke, so self assured and so ready to dance with him, even though he didn’t know the steps. River Song. Right from the start, he always knew that she could make quite the entrance.
*
There's a ballroom hung with elaborate chandeliers, the walls covered with heavy velvet drapes which are wine coloured and lush, shadows sleeping in their dips and folds.
He is wrapped up in his tux and he lounges against a pillar, drink in hand, watching the dancers twist and turn mirrored in the polished floor beneath them. She is fashionably late. He glances to his side, towards the door and then at his watch periodically, striving to appear relaxed despite the anticipation fluttering in his stomach.
Finally she appears in the doorway wearing charcoal grey. The light paints her shape into the dress, her hips and breasts full where the fabric skims over them. Her hair is, for once, tamed and piled high, curls dancing around the sides of her face as she turns her head looking for him. Her lipstick is a deep scarlet, her eyes dark and filled with smoke and stars.
In his mind all the dancers freeze and turn as if entranced, like he does. The music stops, the matte shapes of the bright ball gowns still against the shining floor and every eye in the room is on her. Nobody breathes. When he releases his own breath he realises that everything is still moving around him, only he is frozen, immobile, clinging onto his breath like he’s afraid it will escape him altogether.
*
There are moments that happen which are burned into him, making marks as sure as the creases on his skin. Except these marks are inside; inside the walls of his skin, inside his blood, inside his cells. These moments criss-cross through the valves of his twin hearts and are written across his veins.
*
They stand on the threshold of the Tardis, watching as a planet burns beneath them.
A sphere of dull orange fire lights up the blackness, a raging mass of huge flames that he can almost feel. He fancies he can taste the smoke on his tongue, and he swallows it down stirring up memories he usually keeps well buried. He is sick at heart and bows his head, watching as his tears fall out through the door and past the protective shell of the Tardis to become drops of ice spinning out in the darkness. Timelord’s tears, held like amber in the grip of the Universe, on an endless journey through the black.
There was nothing you could do she is telling him, her arms around him from behind, her body against his, her hands pressed to his chest and a palm over each of his hearts.
We were too late. I should have got here sooner, should have seen it coming
It isn’t your fault. There was nothing you could have done. We need to leave, you shouldn’t watch this.
Then she is gone from his back and he hears the sound of her flicking levers, pulling the monitor round. The orange glow recedes until it’s just another point of light punctuating the black.
Later, she lies behind him cradling him into her, her palm pressed over his left heartbeat all night.
*
Humans would call these moments memories. The stories that they tell to themselves to keep time from taking everything they did, everything they saw, back into itself.
The Time Lords had another name for memories, something that cannot be translated into any other language. A name that describes how the fundamental nature of the universe is encoded into every particle that ever existed. A name that tells how the flower remembers the star, how the snowflake remembers the black hole. A name that tells of the shape of memory.
*
Stormcage in the 52nd Century. The prison is surrounded by one of those huge encircling storms that wraps itself around the cylindrical building like it’s binding earth to sky.
The skies above are wall to wall dark blue, grey and purple, gorgeously bruised, and lightening spider webs its way across the clouds. Rain spirals, breaks and then spirals again.
The weather is threatening, but he is full of bubbling excitement as he hasn’t seen her in weeks and wants to make an entrance as impressive as any she’s ever made. He flings the doors wide, ignoring the way they rattle in the frantic winds, and places the Tardis into an orbit at the same level as her window. The wind and the displaced air moans past the opening as he leans from it, balancing on the threshold; it buffets at his ears roaring like the sea and he is utterly drenched by the rain.
He whoops and shouts on each pass near her cell window, until eventually he sees her curious eyes peering through the bars and her hands wrapping around them. He waves his hand in a flourish and sees the movement of her mouth, her peals of laughter swallowed up by the storm.
*
Most human’s memories are as fluid and shifting as the tides. He’s seen inside them and he knows that when they remember something they aren’t remembering the thing itself, but their last memory of it. And then when they remember again, some time later, they remember - again - only their last memory, not the original event.
So, things slowly shift and change and become embroidered and layered over time, until what is remembered by them is only a ghost of what really happened. Over centuries, memory is passed along, stories are retold, and myth is created.
*
An ancient Sumerian tomb, a vault pressed deep in the earth with the sun slanting through the entrance and all the dust dancing into and out of its light.
He doesn’t expect to see her there, and is surprised to find her prising the artefact he has come for from where it nestles in a dark alcove.
Hello sweetie she says over her shoulder without even looking round at him. Everything is still and the dust, thick in the air, lies like a blanket over everything. She turns, mischief sparkling in her eyes and brushes back a curl which has escaped her hair grip. There is a smudge of dirt across her left cheek and she is gripping the stone carving to her chest. He holds out his hand for it, and she pouts at him;
Oh Doctor, I got here first, so that’s just rude. Besides you’re going to need this from me one day, at a very specific time and place.
He begins to speak, but her fingers are pushing against her lips, the universal sign for the keeping of secrets. She doesn’t say Spoilers just turns the press of her fingers into a kiss which she blows at him, winking - and then she is gone in a crash of light, static left buzzing in the air, the dust swirling and sticking to his trousers.
*
His memories are not like theirs. His recall is perfect, sharper and more accurate than any human’s. Things that are become things that were - but they are static, frozen inside him. Oh, the things he has done do fade, he thinks, given time - given decade upon decade time will settle onto anything. But rather than the mutable memories of humans, the nature of what he recalls remains fixed, receding into the distance as implacable and relentless as a mountain stabbing into the sky.
They are stories of fixed form, tales that do not change with the passing of time and that don’t soften at the edges, stories that remain as true as they were the first time they were lived.
*
A Class 7 Starliner, sliding through space and skirting alongside bright green gas clouds, tourists on holiday in some far flung part of the galaxy.
He is passing by in the Tardis when he picks up a distress call, readings on the monitor telling him something is horribly, dreadfully wrong. He materialises on the primary command deck to find the crew slumped brokenly at the controls, the sharp tang of blood in the air. From through a doorway leading onto a corridor comes the smell of burning, the green flash of rapidly discharging plasma guns and the noise of frantic screaming. There’s a sick twisting anger in his stomach at the sound of shots thudding in the air over and over. He steps back into the Tardis, calls her, steps out again.
She arrives in seconds, a crash and a blaze of electricity bringing her flashing to a stop in front of him, her hair corkscrewing wildly from the static of the vortex manipulator. Her hand rests casually on the gun at her hip and there’s an easy tension held in the muscles underneath her skin. He watches as her eyes scan the room taking in the sights, sound and smells, before stepping protectively in front of him and saying over her shoulder,
Hello sweetie, what do you need me to do?
*
He tells these particular memories to himself often, so that time doesn’t fade them. They pass through skin and flesh, through tissue and bone and settle there in the marrow, anchored by his will.
Their presence weaves her story, bright and dark inside him. Hers may not be cast out like a net across time and space over hundreds of years like his, but she webs her way surely over the stars and the space within him.
Once there was a child born into the heart of Time, her moment of inception cradled in the burning vortex…
*
The first time they make love. Their wedding night.
They return from Calderon Beta with stars resounding in their eyes, in their hearts and in their mouths. He tastes them as they kiss while stumbling over the threshold of the Tardis. She holds onto him as though the wind will blow him away, her small hands grasping at his jacket, pulling it away from his body. Kissing her over and over is as easy and natural as breathing and he thinks, in that moment, that there is nothing else he wants to do but that for the rest of his lives.
They stumble their way up the ramp and into the corridor, bumping into rails and walls as they go, but they cannot be stopped now. They are on a trajectory towards a place of warmth and light, the first bedroom that the Tardis helpfully provides.
From then it is all hands and skin; fingers placed just so, leaving their prints all over each other; mouths whispering their secrets into each others skin. It is her eyes and the soft warmth of her on him. It is the way that he holds her hips, her hair falling onto his face as he whispers his true name into her ear.
*
Once there was a changeling child and she was stolen away by the goblins…
Once there was a weapon called Melody Pond…
Once there was a woman who ripped apart time for the sake of love…
Once there was someone called River Song… she ran across the universe carrying both chaos and love in her wake, and a man looked at her as she passed and swore that he would write her name into the sky for as long as the stars burned
*
The song of the Towers.
The shape of them is intricate, grown out of the body of the planet itself, a glaring white mesh of shapes stretched out above and laid for miles and miles out over the dunes. They send out a web of shadows onto the sand, dark patterns cast and framed by the humming light from a trinity of moons.
The shapes express the principles of maths and the laws of quantum physics, he tells her, the cogitations and musings of the planet beneath them - a living, breathing sentient being.
A warm wind blows; it moves through the shapes towering above them, twisting round pinnacles, arches and plinths, until finally a humming sound fills the air. It grows in intensity until it can be felt vibrating through the feet and deep in the chest - then the wind changes direction a little and the humming becomes a song. A million notes heard all at once, spreading out from every tower across the wide dunes as the wind reaches them. An impossible song, filled with too much sound, yet somehow perfectly in harmony. The sound of a planet singing itself into the sky.
He holds her as they sing, as she listens wide eyed. The sand at the base of the towers is warm and swallows up his grief; the sound of the singing deadening the noise of his weeping.
*
Once there was woman who lived the stories in his bones. Now she runs through their pages. Now she is only a story herself…
*
The strongest memory of them all:
Her walking through the doors of his home. Her, coming and going like waves on the shore. Innumerable times which play across his mind over and over like a record on repeat, years stacked up onto each other. Each instance layered snug with the next one like leaves of paper, like the pages of a book held fast between hard covers.
River Song coming through his doors; in flowing dresses, in trousers, holding guns, holding books, sometimes holding onto herself. Usually smiling, a few times frowning and just a couple of times red eyed with tears streaking down her face. Sometimes shrouded in smoke, blood on her brow; sometimes all the light that the universe could possibly hold shining from her eyes. The sharp memory of his own wonderment that it shines for him.
The lifting of the lights the second that her feet meet the floor inside, the soft thrum of the Tardis growing louder, clicks and whirs from deep inside the belly of his ship.
Her commandeering the controls from him, pushing him to the side with her hips, her hands sliding over the levers and buttons with familiarity. Her falling into his arms, pushing him away, winking at him, laughing at him, stars dancing through her eyes. Her breath warm and brushing his cheek, her mouth soft under his.
Always the smell of her - like rain, like something wild, like smoke and stars.
Everything. So much that it never ever could have been enough, no matter how much it was.
*
And in the end there is just this story, held deep in his bones and cupped between the battered blue covers of a book. The best and the worst story he will ever tell.
He tells it to himself again and again when the nights yawn and threaten to swallow him up.
Author: lonewytch
Pairing: Eleven/River Song
Wordcount: 2539
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Right through to the present
Summary: Humans would call these moments memories. The stories that they tell to themselves to keep time from taking everything they did, everything they saw, back into itself.
A/N: Written for the who_contest comm, for the theme Entrances and Exits. Title from Rumi.
My fic Masterlist
Once, in a place of wood and of dry stories that shadows were born from, in a place watched over by a metal moon and little girl, he saw her for the first time. The woman who was an echo of his own future, a sound moving backwards, etching out a path before him that he was afraid to meet.
She came through the Library door in light and in smoke, so self assured and so ready to dance with him, even though he didn’t know the steps. River Song. Right from the start, he always knew that she could make quite the entrance.
*
There's a ballroom hung with elaborate chandeliers, the walls covered with heavy velvet drapes which are wine coloured and lush, shadows sleeping in their dips and folds.
He is wrapped up in his tux and he lounges against a pillar, drink in hand, watching the dancers twist and turn mirrored in the polished floor beneath them. She is fashionably late. He glances to his side, towards the door and then at his watch periodically, striving to appear relaxed despite the anticipation fluttering in his stomach.
Finally she appears in the doorway wearing charcoal grey. The light paints her shape into the dress, her hips and breasts full where the fabric skims over them. Her hair is, for once, tamed and piled high, curls dancing around the sides of her face as she turns her head looking for him. Her lipstick is a deep scarlet, her eyes dark and filled with smoke and stars.
In his mind all the dancers freeze and turn as if entranced, like he does. The music stops, the matte shapes of the bright ball gowns still against the shining floor and every eye in the room is on her. Nobody breathes. When he releases his own breath he realises that everything is still moving around him, only he is frozen, immobile, clinging onto his breath like he’s afraid it will escape him altogether.
*
There are moments that happen which are burned into him, making marks as sure as the creases on his skin. Except these marks are inside; inside the walls of his skin, inside his blood, inside his cells. These moments criss-cross through the valves of his twin hearts and are written across his veins.
*
They stand on the threshold of the Tardis, watching as a planet burns beneath them.
A sphere of dull orange fire lights up the blackness, a raging mass of huge flames that he can almost feel. He fancies he can taste the smoke on his tongue, and he swallows it down stirring up memories he usually keeps well buried. He is sick at heart and bows his head, watching as his tears fall out through the door and past the protective shell of the Tardis to become drops of ice spinning out in the darkness. Timelord’s tears, held like amber in the grip of the Universe, on an endless journey through the black.
There was nothing you could do she is telling him, her arms around him from behind, her body against his, her hands pressed to his chest and a palm over each of his hearts.
We were too late. I should have got here sooner, should have seen it coming
It isn’t your fault. There was nothing you could have done. We need to leave, you shouldn’t watch this.
Then she is gone from his back and he hears the sound of her flicking levers, pulling the monitor round. The orange glow recedes until it’s just another point of light punctuating the black.
Later, she lies behind him cradling him into her, her palm pressed over his left heartbeat all night.
*
Humans would call these moments memories. The stories that they tell to themselves to keep time from taking everything they did, everything they saw, back into itself.
The Time Lords had another name for memories, something that cannot be translated into any other language. A name that describes how the fundamental nature of the universe is encoded into every particle that ever existed. A name that tells how the flower remembers the star, how the snowflake remembers the black hole. A name that tells of the shape of memory.
*
Stormcage in the 52nd Century. The prison is surrounded by one of those huge encircling storms that wraps itself around the cylindrical building like it’s binding earth to sky.
The skies above are wall to wall dark blue, grey and purple, gorgeously bruised, and lightening spider webs its way across the clouds. Rain spirals, breaks and then spirals again.
The weather is threatening, but he is full of bubbling excitement as he hasn’t seen her in weeks and wants to make an entrance as impressive as any she’s ever made. He flings the doors wide, ignoring the way they rattle in the frantic winds, and places the Tardis into an orbit at the same level as her window. The wind and the displaced air moans past the opening as he leans from it, balancing on the threshold; it buffets at his ears roaring like the sea and he is utterly drenched by the rain.
He whoops and shouts on each pass near her cell window, until eventually he sees her curious eyes peering through the bars and her hands wrapping around them. He waves his hand in a flourish and sees the movement of her mouth, her peals of laughter swallowed up by the storm.
*
Most human’s memories are as fluid and shifting as the tides. He’s seen inside them and he knows that when they remember something they aren’t remembering the thing itself, but their last memory of it. And then when they remember again, some time later, they remember - again - only their last memory, not the original event.
So, things slowly shift and change and become embroidered and layered over time, until what is remembered by them is only a ghost of what really happened. Over centuries, memory is passed along, stories are retold, and myth is created.
*
An ancient Sumerian tomb, a vault pressed deep in the earth with the sun slanting through the entrance and all the dust dancing into and out of its light.
He doesn’t expect to see her there, and is surprised to find her prising the artefact he has come for from where it nestles in a dark alcove.
Hello sweetie she says over her shoulder without even looking round at him. Everything is still and the dust, thick in the air, lies like a blanket over everything. She turns, mischief sparkling in her eyes and brushes back a curl which has escaped her hair grip. There is a smudge of dirt across her left cheek and she is gripping the stone carving to her chest. He holds out his hand for it, and she pouts at him;
Oh Doctor, I got here first, so that’s just rude. Besides you’re going to need this from me one day, at a very specific time and place.
He begins to speak, but her fingers are pushing against her lips, the universal sign for the keeping of secrets. She doesn’t say Spoilers just turns the press of her fingers into a kiss which she blows at him, winking - and then she is gone in a crash of light, static left buzzing in the air, the dust swirling and sticking to his trousers.
*
His memories are not like theirs. His recall is perfect, sharper and more accurate than any human’s. Things that are become things that were - but they are static, frozen inside him. Oh, the things he has done do fade, he thinks, given time - given decade upon decade time will settle onto anything. But rather than the mutable memories of humans, the nature of what he recalls remains fixed, receding into the distance as implacable and relentless as a mountain stabbing into the sky.
They are stories of fixed form, tales that do not change with the passing of time and that don’t soften at the edges, stories that remain as true as they were the first time they were lived.
*
A Class 7 Starliner, sliding through space and skirting alongside bright green gas clouds, tourists on holiday in some far flung part of the galaxy.
He is passing by in the Tardis when he picks up a distress call, readings on the monitor telling him something is horribly, dreadfully wrong. He materialises on the primary command deck to find the crew slumped brokenly at the controls, the sharp tang of blood in the air. From through a doorway leading onto a corridor comes the smell of burning, the green flash of rapidly discharging plasma guns and the noise of frantic screaming. There’s a sick twisting anger in his stomach at the sound of shots thudding in the air over and over. He steps back into the Tardis, calls her, steps out again.
She arrives in seconds, a crash and a blaze of electricity bringing her flashing to a stop in front of him, her hair corkscrewing wildly from the static of the vortex manipulator. Her hand rests casually on the gun at her hip and there’s an easy tension held in the muscles underneath her skin. He watches as her eyes scan the room taking in the sights, sound and smells, before stepping protectively in front of him and saying over her shoulder,
Hello sweetie, what do you need me to do?
*
He tells these particular memories to himself often, so that time doesn’t fade them. They pass through skin and flesh, through tissue and bone and settle there in the marrow, anchored by his will.
Their presence weaves her story, bright and dark inside him. Hers may not be cast out like a net across time and space over hundreds of years like his, but she webs her way surely over the stars and the space within him.
Once there was a child born into the heart of Time, her moment of inception cradled in the burning vortex…
*
The first time they make love. Their wedding night.
They return from Calderon Beta with stars resounding in their eyes, in their hearts and in their mouths. He tastes them as they kiss while stumbling over the threshold of the Tardis. She holds onto him as though the wind will blow him away, her small hands grasping at his jacket, pulling it away from his body. Kissing her over and over is as easy and natural as breathing and he thinks, in that moment, that there is nothing else he wants to do but that for the rest of his lives.
They stumble their way up the ramp and into the corridor, bumping into rails and walls as they go, but they cannot be stopped now. They are on a trajectory towards a place of warmth and light, the first bedroom that the Tardis helpfully provides.
From then it is all hands and skin; fingers placed just so, leaving their prints all over each other; mouths whispering their secrets into each others skin. It is her eyes and the soft warmth of her on him. It is the way that he holds her hips, her hair falling onto his face as he whispers his true name into her ear.
*
Once there was a changeling child and she was stolen away by the goblins…
Once there was a weapon called Melody Pond…
Once there was a woman who ripped apart time for the sake of love…
Once there was someone called River Song… she ran across the universe carrying both chaos and love in her wake, and a man looked at her as she passed and swore that he would write her name into the sky for as long as the stars burned
*
The song of the Towers.
The shape of them is intricate, grown out of the body of the planet itself, a glaring white mesh of shapes stretched out above and laid for miles and miles out over the dunes. They send out a web of shadows onto the sand, dark patterns cast and framed by the humming light from a trinity of moons.
The shapes express the principles of maths and the laws of quantum physics, he tells her, the cogitations and musings of the planet beneath them - a living, breathing sentient being.
A warm wind blows; it moves through the shapes towering above them, twisting round pinnacles, arches and plinths, until finally a humming sound fills the air. It grows in intensity until it can be felt vibrating through the feet and deep in the chest - then the wind changes direction a little and the humming becomes a song. A million notes heard all at once, spreading out from every tower across the wide dunes as the wind reaches them. An impossible song, filled with too much sound, yet somehow perfectly in harmony. The sound of a planet singing itself into the sky.
He holds her as they sing, as she listens wide eyed. The sand at the base of the towers is warm and swallows up his grief; the sound of the singing deadening the noise of his weeping.
*
Once there was woman who lived the stories in his bones. Now she runs through their pages. Now she is only a story herself…
*
The strongest memory of them all:
Her walking through the doors of his home. Her, coming and going like waves on the shore. Innumerable times which play across his mind over and over like a record on repeat, years stacked up onto each other. Each instance layered snug with the next one like leaves of paper, like the pages of a book held fast between hard covers.
River Song coming through his doors; in flowing dresses, in trousers, holding guns, holding books, sometimes holding onto herself. Usually smiling, a few times frowning and just a couple of times red eyed with tears streaking down her face. Sometimes shrouded in smoke, blood on her brow; sometimes all the light that the universe could possibly hold shining from her eyes. The sharp memory of his own wonderment that it shines for him.
The lifting of the lights the second that her feet meet the floor inside, the soft thrum of the Tardis growing louder, clicks and whirs from deep inside the belly of his ship.
Her commandeering the controls from him, pushing him to the side with her hips, her hands sliding over the levers and buttons with familiarity. Her falling into his arms, pushing him away, winking at him, laughing at him, stars dancing through her eyes. Her breath warm and brushing his cheek, her mouth soft under his.
Always the smell of her - like rain, like something wild, like smoke and stars.
Everything. So much that it never ever could have been enough, no matter how much it was.
*
And in the end there is just this story, held deep in his bones and cupped between the battered blue covers of a book. The best and the worst story he will ever tell.
He tells it to himself again and again when the nights yawn and threaten to swallow him up.