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eve11Main Post and Chapter Index
At first, the only sensation was the strange flow of telepathic time. It was just at the edge of her perception, but it was enough to feel the signature psychic compression of a mental construct. Time was moving much more quickly here than in the outside world. Cause and effect, intermingled, may not always occur in the right order. Or at least, that's how it would be perceived when her mind reconstructed the memories afterward.
Then the chill of night settled in the air, and the rest of the mindscape washed over her like a breaking wave. The heady scent of loam and moss at her back told her she was lying on the ground. More than that, it stirred a memory, steeped in petrichor and green ivy crept upon stone. River opened her eyes to a moonlit sky, and sat up to see the stucco slab of a house she knew was there, with its bright blue door and its flagstone path leading to the garden. Amelia Pond's childhood home. Of course, the Doctor's mental touchpoint would be here.
An ache settled in her chest. It was such early days for him. She shouldn't be here.
River clamped down on the emotion before it could take hold, and got to her feet. More to the point, she told herself, urgency fueling her thoughts, she couldn't be here. This liminal space was a vestibule leading to the Doctor's telepathic mind palace, and he had to invite her here, even before opening any psychic doors. He hadn't been able to feel her telepathic presence at all back at the base. So how was she here? And if she was here, where was he?
She ran to the blue door and knocked. It swallowed the sound without even a hint of vibration, unforgiving on her bare knuckles. Shaking the pain from her fingers, she traced a hand along the frame. A touchpoint was like a mental TARDIS—bigger on the inside. Indeed, River was quite familiar with that exact representation, set atop the clouds of Victorian London in the Doctor's later days. But there was no hint here of the endless depths beyond the door. It was as solid as the concrete block walls surrounding it. The knob was completely fused. There was no light behind the transom.
She turned around, looking out into the yard, and an overwhelming feeling of emptiness settled over her. There was no breeze to set the garden pinwheels spinning. No screech owls or creaking swings. It wasn't just quiet. Everything she could sense told her that this place, along with the whole world beyond it, was completely deserted.
If this were the outside world, River would have wrapped herself in steel will and bravado, established a tactical list of next steps, and gotten to it. But not here. The Doctor’s voice echoed in her thoughts--"Rule eighty-nine: sometimes it’s okay to feel small"--but in all her long life, this was the one place where she had never expected to feel alone. Alone, seconds from disaster in the desert, and she had no idea what to do next. She closed her eyes, breathing in the desolation until the weight of it sat her down on Amy’s doorstep, head in her hands.
The motion made her aware of a bulky weight in the cargo pocket of her fatigues. River lifted her head, puzzled. She had been out of assets in the desert; her pockets were empty. Whatever it was, it must have come into being with the mindscape. She gathered the item—round, firm—in her hand and brought it up to examine in the starlight.
A red apple, with two simple eyes and a mouth cut into the skin, stared back at her.
There was something different about it, something that she sensed but couldn’t put into thought. There was no life in the little carved smile, but suddenly it seemed more real than anything she could see in the yard or beyond. The shape and heft of it put the flat affect of everything else in stark contrast, like holding a three dimensional object in front of a glossy photograph. She turned her wrist to get a look at its other side. For just a moment, the apple caught the gleam of the moon and glowed. At the same time, a breeze picked up in the stillness, rustling the ivy on its vines. The glow grew to a flash of light and warmth in River’s hand, and then everything changed.
A proper wind took hold, setting garden chimes tinkling. It caught her hair and sent flyaways around her face. Then a clattering crash came from beyond the garden wall. Startled, River dropped the apple to the ground. The whole scene in front of her glitched, frizzing like a poor television signal. Everything bled away except for the fixed point of the moon in the night sky. Stars blinked in and out like fireflies as the mental view flashed through a series of breathtaking alien moonscapes, like riffling the pages of a travelogue, before it settled back to Amy's abandoned home.
Only this time, although it was dark and still, it wasn't abandoned. River stood, pocketing the apple again, and followed the whisper-trace of a new presence down the flagstone path to the ivy trellis leading into the garden. She stepped through the open gate to find a familiar figure silhouetted in the moonlight.
She took in the sight of him--standing amid the scraps of a ruined garden shed, head bent, staring at his hands as he turned them over, back to palm and back again. Though River was still in her military fatigues, he bore no trace of the hospital scrubs or grime from the outside world. He was clean-shaven, his tweed sleeve obscuring her view of the signature braces and bow tie that completed his ensemble. Something caught his attention and he looked up, scrutinizing the landscape around him. River's breath caught, and she had to fight back a surge of emotion. There was no glint of metal with the movement. The disc at the back of his neck was gone.
"Doctor?" she called, and he turned around at the sound of her voice. He was wearing the red bow tie this time, she noted, and that mundane fact was suddenly too much for her stoicism to bear. A smile lit up his face when he saw her--he saw her--and the rest of River's resolve crumbled. She flew down the path toward him, tears stinging her eyes, words caught in her throat.
The mindscape glitched again. There was a pressure in the air, almost electric, that got thicker as she approached him. She reached for him and found a solid barrier instead, that thrummed with strange energy at her touch. Her ears buzzed with static, her vision graying and only clearing again when she lowered her hand and stepped back.
He stood straight and tall in front of her, still smiling, and cocked his head. "The water in the forest. Hello, little one."
The smile was genuine, but his words broke the spell. River blinked back her tears. Stupid of her, she thought. Of course. He couldn't be a stranger to his mental touchpoint. He should belong here, as in no other place, but he had looked out into the garden as if he'd never seen it before. Now, close up, she could see how he cast no shadow in the moonlight. Even the landscape bent around his frame as though he was an illusion grafted over something else, a palimpsest in his own mind.
Still, she recognized the energy singing through the mindscape. She had never encountered it this way before, but River knew this presence, that spoke in images and metaphor, and that would always see her as the child conceived within its singular matrix. The pressure and static she'd felt as she came closer was a rough shield of some kind, keeping a fully integrated merge in check. She looked up at the figure, who was not the Doctor but was nonetheless intimately familiar, and gave herself a moment to let grief settle again in her chest, before she returned the smile.
"It was you who made Contact," she said. "Using his touch telepathy somehow. Does he know we're here? Can I talk to him?"
"We invited you--" he started and faltered, studying his hands again before looking up at her. "We are having difficulty mapping the boundaries of this interface. We . . . I . . . I remember."
His eyes flashed gold. His form faded away along with the ruined garden shed and most of the garden, the scene dissolving into a series of pictures that paged across River's field of view, too fast for her to process any one. But the history that unfolded was clear: the Doctor, in every incarnation from white-haired grandfather to bow tie and beyond, with one hand laid upon the TARDIS, in every shade and configuration of her blue Police Box.
Every shade and configuration, and beyond. The flywheel of images converged from distant past and future until they reached the present moment--his hand on her outer shell in the desert--and then pulsed and flashed to two figures alone in a desolate alien wasteland: the Doctor in his bow tie and tweed, his hand cupping the cheek of a woman that River had only ever seen as sketches in his diary.
"Idris," she breathed.
The woman touched the Doctor's hand at her cheek, and then turned her head to face River.
"I remember," Idris--the TARDIS--said again.
Another pulse shifted the images once more, this time finally settling them back to Amy's garden. Two figures stood in place of the ruined shed. The only sign of the wasteland was a small ring of packed dirt and debris on the ground around their feet. Idris was dressed in the same disheveled frock as before. The Doctor stood beside her and a step behind, hospital scrubs caked in dust, holding tightly to the crook of her arm. A half-smile broke across his face, but he stared ahead, unseeing.
River remembered the dates on those diary sketches. "He hasn't meet you yet," she said.
"He knows me, always. But this form is for you. For talking, with mouths." Idris tapped the fingers of her free hand against her thumb, miming chatter. "Inefficient," she decided, looking around at the garden with a frown. "But we-- . . . I must be delicate or I will scorch every synapse in both your brains."
A gold glow outlined her frame, brightening until Idris was washed out in a blazing blue halo. Tendrils of dusty light tested the invisible boundary of the TARDIS' consciousness in the Doctor's mind like they were searching for cracks in glass. The temperature went from a chill spring night to midsummer in a moment, and around them in the greenery grew the buzzing cicada-hum of raw, electric power.
River shielded her eyes in the glare. "Delicate is good!" she said quickly, taking a step back. The edges of the garden pocked and melted like a film reel caught under the projector light, and for the first time since the initial Contact, she felt desert grit under her fingernails. Pain bloomed in her perception--her left arm throbbing, her whole left side stinging and pulling--
It only lasted a moment. Squinting, River caught sight of the Doctor as he turned to face his oldest companion, concern etched across his phantom form. He grasped her hand in both of his, bending his head and brushing her fingers against his lips. And as quickly as the heat had flared, it faded. The light dimmed. The omnipresent crackling noise softened to the sound of ivy rustling in the breeze, and Idris stood again in her grubby dress in the garden, with the Doctor silent by her side.
"Delicate," she agreed. "Kissing, not biting. No winners. No losers."
The Doctor made no sign that he had heard her, and no attempt to speak. His figure flickered slightly as he adjusted his hold, and his face relaxed again to that distant half smile. He stepped forward, passing a hand easily across the psychic barrier that kept River and the TARDIS apart. But when River tried to reach out to him, his hand passed easily through hers as well.
"Can he sense us at all?" she asked, trying to keep her voice from wavering.
"Only by measure, not with his mind's eye. But he knows you are here, child."
"How? How can he know?" River swiped at stubborn tears. It seemed impossible of the ephemeral figure in front of her.
"I've traced it in the timelines." She lifted his hand in hers and guided it across her view of the mindscape, tracing River's outline, then sweeping across the garden wall and above as she spoke. "The water. The forest. The moon in the night sky."
"You showed me the moon when you arrived here. It was the only thing that stayed fixed in the--oh." She drew a breath, understanding. "It's a fixed point. Somehow you've set us here as a fixed point in time. That's how he knows. We're an absolute certainty, sitting right inside his head."
The Doctor's smile widened. Idris' eyes fluttered closed, and the garden view fluttered through images of a thousand different Hello Sweeties in a flash.
"But how are we inside his head? The device . . ." She caught a glimpse of the glint on the back of the Doctor's neck, and faltered. "It shut down all of his telepathic senses. It shut down everything."
"No, little one," Idris corrected, looking upward. "It's only a mirror."
River followed her gaze. A wave of blue-gold energy lit from the horizon and swept across the expanse, engulfing the stars as it overtook them. In its wake, it traced a branching network of fine filaments, too regular to be lightning, searing their pattern into the sky. There was no escaping it; the interconnected mesh surrounded them on all sides.
"Eyes still absorb light," Idris continued. "Ears process sound. Skin still rouses thoughts. But the signals are reflected and inverted."
The entire network illuminated at once, blue filaments expanding and seeping out into the black like quicksilver spilled across the sky. The mindscape captured in this tempered shell was distorted--light where the garden was dark, full where the space was empty--leaving no object untouched. It was only a mental representation, but the analogue to the physical world was clear. River had read all of the reports and had studied the readings back on the base. She had seen the disc in its most grotesque form of action, and she still hadn't let herself confront the insidious reality of the thing that had dug itself inside the Doctor's brain.
"He called it a vise." She couldn't take her eyes from the mirror in the night sky, or maybe she couldn't bear to look away and meet the Doctor's blank gaze again. She reached a hand out but it was far too distant to touch. "It must be clamped down on every single sensory neuron he has."
"It's a puny, stupid thing, blindly chasing inputs." Anger seethed behind the words, and for a moment the night air warmed ominously, drawing River's attention away from the sky. But Idris calmed, glancing at the Doctor and at their intertwined fingers. She turned back toward River, resolute. "It will learn. It will listen when we tell it to let go."
The mindscape pulsed again, the garden gone but for the lingering scent of roses in a washed out white landscape, dazzlingly bright, that faded like a camera flash into the defining walls and corners of a large, featureless room. River looked up, blinked, and the room was gone, sunk into inky black that melted away to reveal the night's twinkling stars.
"Let go . . ." She exhaled the breath she hadn't realized she was holding, and the ache in her chest bloomed into the tiniest spark of hope. "You mean, you can heal him? You can save him?"
Idris smiled. "We must save all of you first. It's why we're here, why we waited for you."
The garden was dimming. A breeze picked up, but it didn't disturb either Idris or the Doctor, standing silent and still beside her. The encroaching seconds from the outside world loomed at the edge of River's perception, inexorable. "You have a plan?" she asked.
Idris shook her head. Dry leaves skittered and whorled across the flagstones. "I am a pond, drained to reveal a path. I have nothing left. It's what you have that's important, child."
As quickly as it had surged, River's hope sank. The whisper of the weapon kindled in her mind, stoking doubt that took hold and raged with the swirling wind. Distant shouts echoed all around her, and the air was alive with a low, persistent hum that she could feel from her head to her fingertips. Their Contact was crumbling. "What do I have that can save us all? All--all I've done so far is fail."
"You haven't failed, little one. You have held the promise that we gave you. From matrix to cradle you have kept it safe, so that we may honor it now."
For the space of a breath, everything slowed. Their connection in the mindscape was falling apart. But time was converging to a carefully constructed fixed point, from within and without, and in one pure second, River sensed the likelihoods. She saw herself as the TARDIS saw her. All of herself, across her long lifetime. The rage, doubt and fear, the inner voice that she could never fully escape--it would always be with her. Twining through her past, peppering her future; there would always be a part of River Song that was falling. And from the perspective of an eleven dimensional transcendental matrix, it was both as permanent and as inconsequential as the shape of a wooden blue box chosen to fold around infinity.
This weapon cannot contain the deepest parts of you, the TARDIS sang in River's thoughts. It too must let go.
A weight lifted from her chest. River calmed, seeing the maelstrom around her as if from the eye of the storm. There was purpose to everything the TARDIS had shown her. The timbre of the hum around her was changing, low rumbles rising to higher grating tones . . . almost familiar.
"Matrix to cradle," she echoed. A womb and a child. A promise, like . . .
Suddenly, it all snapped into place. "Like a mother to a daughter."
She reached into her pocket and drew out the apple--Amelia Pond's apple, with its carved, smiling face. It was a simple gift from River's mother's mother, that Amy had remembered even when a crack in time had swallowed all trace of her parents. But it was more than that. The story had been told and re-told over the years, at family gatherings so far away in River's past, but still to come in her own parents' future. How Amelia had waited for twelve years, and how it took one pristine apple with the same etched smile from her childhood for her to realize that the Doctor had kept his promise to come back for her, with all of Time and Space at his fingertips.
In the midst of the winnowing garden, with the press of the desert all around them, the little smiling apple buzzed and thrummed in River's hand. Just as it had done at the back of her mind, she realized, ever since the TARDIS had co-operated long enough to set it there. Since the ship had instilled her own promise of a fast return.
"It's the psychic switch," she said, and laughed. "You do have a plan; it's Plan A, all over again. I trust you can trigger it now, Sweetie? Or rather, Sweeties?"
She held the apple out for the pair of them--the Doctor and the TARDIS, tethered inextricably to each other by touch and timelines. Idris took hold of the Doctor's elbow this time, and he stepped forward, his form shimmering in the waning light as he crossed the psychic barrier. His fingers quested through the air, insubstantial.
"I've done no more than I must." Idris closed her eyes in concentration, ringed again by a dusty blue-gold halo. The grating, grinding noise of wind should have swallowed her words, but River heard her perfectly. "The foundations that were fractured here will heal."
"From the temporal crash? There's no permanent damage to the timelines?" As River spoke, the Doctor's hand passed through her forearm, elbow to wrist.
"There is one timeline that couldn't be salvaged." Idris shifted again, turning her gaze to where both River and the Doctor stood in the last remnant of the garden. Blue luminous dust ate at the edges of her hair and her dress, swirling away in the darkening gale. Her eyes blazed gold, but the only sentiment River could see behind them was a fathomless depth of compassion.
"I'm sorry," she said, fading away. "I know how much this is going to hurt."
Then the Doctor found the apple in River's palm and closed his fingers solidly around it.
White light lanced out, first from the carved smile, followed almost instantaneously by pinpricks that pierced the red skin and erupted, curling across the apple's surface until it was entirely consumed. River took a step back, trying to drop it and shield her eyes but her wrist jerked, stopped short by a sudden weight. She lost her footing and fell, pulling the weight down with her. Pain sliced down her side, shoulder to hip.
The light grew, saturating everything. River's eyes watered, beset by the grit and sand kicked up by the churning air. The apple was gone. In its place, she felt the blunt pressure of the Doctor's fingers on her wrist. The blinding white settled into the glare of a cloudless, sunny sky. For a moment, they were back in the desert. And then, that moment was gone.
The Doctor had triggered the psychic switch nearly as soon as he had laid his hand on the TARDIS door. Renewed, the TARDIS wasted no time. The grinding, groaning hum that had echoed across the mindscape resolved to the familiar sound of a Type 40 time rotor pressed into service with the brakes still on. Beside River and the Doctor in the desert, the TARDIS dematerialized. And all around them, she rematerialized, leaving the soldiers and the cold blue sky behind.
The rotor clanged and shuddered into stillness. The deck plates hummed into River's cheek. Dazed, she tried to sit up, but made it no further than lifting her head long enough to see Amy racing down the steps from the console toward them, and a bewildered Rory stepping down from the open door of the step-van now parked incongruously inside the machine that, until moments ago, had been inside the back of that same van.
River felt light-headed. They were safe. The weapon that had seethed through her thoughts in the ambulance was gone, relegated to the far reaches of her psyche. And the Doctor. . . there was a tug at her wrist. Tangled beside her, he made a sound that was half groan, half giddy laugh.
"Hello, gorgeous," he sighed.
Then Amy and Rory were upon them, peppering them with questions that neither had the faculties to process. She felt the Doctor startle, but he relaxed when he realized who it must be. There was a whirring buzz at her side as Amy used the sonic screwdriver to unlock the cuffs linking them together, but he didn't loosen his grip. If anything, he held tighter, fingers searching her skin.
"River, what's wrong with your past?" he asked quietly. "Ever since the motorway . . . what's happened?"
Someone wrapped their arms around her, levering her up, and the throbbing ache kindled to a fire in her side. She tried to remember what had happened to make it hurt, but she couldn't hold the thought in her head. She looked up to see Rory looking down at her. It was his arms that were holding her up.
"We nearly drove to Utah instead of rescuing you," he said, helping her gain her feet.
A laugh bubbled out of her. The muscle movement along with motion of standing bloomed red-hot in her gut, but she didn't care.
"How do you always do it?" she asked. "All of you. Even when you don't know anything about me?"
"Do what?" Rory's curiosity quickly turned to concern. "River, are you all right?"
River swayed on her feet. She grasped Rory's shoulder to try to stay upright, but the Doctor wouldn't let go of her wrist. "Why are you . . ." he started, and stopped. "Oh. No, no, no. It's not your past that's wrong. It's mine."
"Doctor?" Amy asked, but of course he didn't hear her.
"My past," the Doctor said, going preternaturally still. "Your . . . your future."
Rory tried to shore his hold from under River's arms to her side but his hand slipped. She looked down to see his palm trace a bright red streak across her beige canvas shirt, even as the Doctor cried out, "Get her to the med bay, now!"
River looked back at the blurring, dimming view of her father's face. "You always catch me," she said.
Her legs gave out, but she never hit the floor.
*
Part 13 | Part 14
At first, the only sensation was the strange flow of telepathic time. It was just at the edge of her perception, but it was enough to feel the signature psychic compression of a mental construct. Time was moving much more quickly here than in the outside world. Cause and effect, intermingled, may not always occur in the right order. Or at least, that's how it would be perceived when her mind reconstructed the memories afterward.
Then the chill of night settled in the air, and the rest of the mindscape washed over her like a breaking wave. The heady scent of loam and moss at her back told her she was lying on the ground. More than that, it stirred a memory, steeped in petrichor and green ivy crept upon stone. River opened her eyes to a moonlit sky, and sat up to see the stucco slab of a house she knew was there, with its bright blue door and its flagstone path leading to the garden. Amelia Pond's childhood home. Of course, the Doctor's mental touchpoint would be here.
An ache settled in her chest. It was such early days for him. She shouldn't be here.
River clamped down on the emotion before it could take hold, and got to her feet. More to the point, she told herself, urgency fueling her thoughts, she couldn't be here. This liminal space was a vestibule leading to the Doctor's telepathic mind palace, and he had to invite her here, even before opening any psychic doors. He hadn't been able to feel her telepathic presence at all back at the base. So how was she here? And if she was here, where was he?
She ran to the blue door and knocked. It swallowed the sound without even a hint of vibration, unforgiving on her bare knuckles. Shaking the pain from her fingers, she traced a hand along the frame. A touchpoint was like a mental TARDIS—bigger on the inside. Indeed, River was quite familiar with that exact representation, set atop the clouds of Victorian London in the Doctor's later days. But there was no hint here of the endless depths beyond the door. It was as solid as the concrete block walls surrounding it. The knob was completely fused. There was no light behind the transom.
She turned around, looking out into the yard, and an overwhelming feeling of emptiness settled over her. There was no breeze to set the garden pinwheels spinning. No screech owls or creaking swings. It wasn't just quiet. Everything she could sense told her that this place, along with the whole world beyond it, was completely deserted.
If this were the outside world, River would have wrapped herself in steel will and bravado, established a tactical list of next steps, and gotten to it. But not here. The Doctor’s voice echoed in her thoughts--"Rule eighty-nine: sometimes it’s okay to feel small"--but in all her long life, this was the one place where she had never expected to feel alone. Alone, seconds from disaster in the desert, and she had no idea what to do next. She closed her eyes, breathing in the desolation until the weight of it sat her down on Amy’s doorstep, head in her hands.
The motion made her aware of a bulky weight in the cargo pocket of her fatigues. River lifted her head, puzzled. She had been out of assets in the desert; her pockets were empty. Whatever it was, it must have come into being with the mindscape. She gathered the item—round, firm—in her hand and brought it up to examine in the starlight.
A red apple, with two simple eyes and a mouth cut into the skin, stared back at her.
There was something different about it, something that she sensed but couldn’t put into thought. There was no life in the little carved smile, but suddenly it seemed more real than anything she could see in the yard or beyond. The shape and heft of it put the flat affect of everything else in stark contrast, like holding a three dimensional object in front of a glossy photograph. She turned her wrist to get a look at its other side. For just a moment, the apple caught the gleam of the moon and glowed. At the same time, a breeze picked up in the stillness, rustling the ivy on its vines. The glow grew to a flash of light and warmth in River’s hand, and then everything changed.
A proper wind took hold, setting garden chimes tinkling. It caught her hair and sent flyaways around her face. Then a clattering crash came from beyond the garden wall. Startled, River dropped the apple to the ground. The whole scene in front of her glitched, frizzing like a poor television signal. Everything bled away except for the fixed point of the moon in the night sky. Stars blinked in and out like fireflies as the mental view flashed through a series of breathtaking alien moonscapes, like riffling the pages of a travelogue, before it settled back to Amy's abandoned home.
Only this time, although it was dark and still, it wasn't abandoned. River stood, pocketing the apple again, and followed the whisper-trace of a new presence down the flagstone path to the ivy trellis leading into the garden. She stepped through the open gate to find a familiar figure silhouetted in the moonlight.
She took in the sight of him--standing amid the scraps of a ruined garden shed, head bent, staring at his hands as he turned them over, back to palm and back again. Though River was still in her military fatigues, he bore no trace of the hospital scrubs or grime from the outside world. He was clean-shaven, his tweed sleeve obscuring her view of the signature braces and bow tie that completed his ensemble. Something caught his attention and he looked up, scrutinizing the landscape around him. River's breath caught, and she had to fight back a surge of emotion. There was no glint of metal with the movement. The disc at the back of his neck was gone.
"Doctor?" she called, and he turned around at the sound of her voice. He was wearing the red bow tie this time, she noted, and that mundane fact was suddenly too much for her stoicism to bear. A smile lit up his face when he saw her--he saw her--and the rest of River's resolve crumbled. She flew down the path toward him, tears stinging her eyes, words caught in her throat.
The mindscape glitched again. There was a pressure in the air, almost electric, that got thicker as she approached him. She reached for him and found a solid barrier instead, that thrummed with strange energy at her touch. Her ears buzzed with static, her vision graying and only clearing again when she lowered her hand and stepped back.
He stood straight and tall in front of her, still smiling, and cocked his head. "The water in the forest. Hello, little one."
The smile was genuine, but his words broke the spell. River blinked back her tears. Stupid of her, she thought. Of course. He couldn't be a stranger to his mental touchpoint. He should belong here, as in no other place, but he had looked out into the garden as if he'd never seen it before. Now, close up, she could see how he cast no shadow in the moonlight. Even the landscape bent around his frame as though he was an illusion grafted over something else, a palimpsest in his own mind.
Still, she recognized the energy singing through the mindscape. She had never encountered it this way before, but River knew this presence, that spoke in images and metaphor, and that would always see her as the child conceived within its singular matrix. The pressure and static she'd felt as she came closer was a rough shield of some kind, keeping a fully integrated merge in check. She looked up at the figure, who was not the Doctor but was nonetheless intimately familiar, and gave herself a moment to let grief settle again in her chest, before she returned the smile.
"It was you who made Contact," she said. "Using his touch telepathy somehow. Does he know we're here? Can I talk to him?"
"We invited you--" he started and faltered, studying his hands again before looking up at her. "We are having difficulty mapping the boundaries of this interface. We . . . I . . . I remember."
His eyes flashed gold. His form faded away along with the ruined garden shed and most of the garden, the scene dissolving into a series of pictures that paged across River's field of view, too fast for her to process any one. But the history that unfolded was clear: the Doctor, in every incarnation from white-haired grandfather to bow tie and beyond, with one hand laid upon the TARDIS, in every shade and configuration of her blue Police Box.
Every shade and configuration, and beyond. The flywheel of images converged from distant past and future until they reached the present moment--his hand on her outer shell in the desert--and then pulsed and flashed to two figures alone in a desolate alien wasteland: the Doctor in his bow tie and tweed, his hand cupping the cheek of a woman that River had only ever seen as sketches in his diary.
"Idris," she breathed.
The woman touched the Doctor's hand at her cheek, and then turned her head to face River.
"I remember," Idris--the TARDIS--said again.
Another pulse shifted the images once more, this time finally settling them back to Amy's garden. Two figures stood in place of the ruined shed. The only sign of the wasteland was a small ring of packed dirt and debris on the ground around their feet. Idris was dressed in the same disheveled frock as before. The Doctor stood beside her and a step behind, hospital scrubs caked in dust, holding tightly to the crook of her arm. A half-smile broke across his face, but he stared ahead, unseeing.
River remembered the dates on those diary sketches. "He hasn't meet you yet," she said.
"He knows me, always. But this form is for you. For talking, with mouths." Idris tapped the fingers of her free hand against her thumb, miming chatter. "Inefficient," she decided, looking around at the garden with a frown. "But we-- . . . I must be delicate or I will scorch every synapse in both your brains."
A gold glow outlined her frame, brightening until Idris was washed out in a blazing blue halo. Tendrils of dusty light tested the invisible boundary of the TARDIS' consciousness in the Doctor's mind like they were searching for cracks in glass. The temperature went from a chill spring night to midsummer in a moment, and around them in the greenery grew the buzzing cicada-hum of raw, electric power.
River shielded her eyes in the glare. "Delicate is good!" she said quickly, taking a step back. The edges of the garden pocked and melted like a film reel caught under the projector light, and for the first time since the initial Contact, she felt desert grit under her fingernails. Pain bloomed in her perception--her left arm throbbing, her whole left side stinging and pulling--
It only lasted a moment. Squinting, River caught sight of the Doctor as he turned to face his oldest companion, concern etched across his phantom form. He grasped her hand in both of his, bending his head and brushing her fingers against his lips. And as quickly as the heat had flared, it faded. The light dimmed. The omnipresent crackling noise softened to the sound of ivy rustling in the breeze, and Idris stood again in her grubby dress in the garden, with the Doctor silent by her side.
"Delicate," she agreed. "Kissing, not biting. No winners. No losers."
The Doctor made no sign that he had heard her, and no attempt to speak. His figure flickered slightly as he adjusted his hold, and his face relaxed again to that distant half smile. He stepped forward, passing a hand easily across the psychic barrier that kept River and the TARDIS apart. But when River tried to reach out to him, his hand passed easily through hers as well.
"Can he sense us at all?" she asked, trying to keep her voice from wavering.
"Only by measure, not with his mind's eye. But he knows you are here, child."
"How? How can he know?" River swiped at stubborn tears. It seemed impossible of the ephemeral figure in front of her.
"I've traced it in the timelines." She lifted his hand in hers and guided it across her view of the mindscape, tracing River's outline, then sweeping across the garden wall and above as she spoke. "The water. The forest. The moon in the night sky."
"You showed me the moon when you arrived here. It was the only thing that stayed fixed in the--oh." She drew a breath, understanding. "It's a fixed point. Somehow you've set us here as a fixed point in time. That's how he knows. We're an absolute certainty, sitting right inside his head."
The Doctor's smile widened. Idris' eyes fluttered closed, and the garden view fluttered through images of a thousand different Hello Sweeties in a flash.
"But how are we inside his head? The device . . ." She caught a glimpse of the glint on the back of the Doctor's neck, and faltered. "It shut down all of his telepathic senses. It shut down everything."
"No, little one," Idris corrected, looking upward. "It's only a mirror."
River followed her gaze. A wave of blue-gold energy lit from the horizon and swept across the expanse, engulfing the stars as it overtook them. In its wake, it traced a branching network of fine filaments, too regular to be lightning, searing their pattern into the sky. There was no escaping it; the interconnected mesh surrounded them on all sides.
"Eyes still absorb light," Idris continued. "Ears process sound. Skin still rouses thoughts. But the signals are reflected and inverted."
The entire network illuminated at once, blue filaments expanding and seeping out into the black like quicksilver spilled across the sky. The mindscape captured in this tempered shell was distorted--light where the garden was dark, full where the space was empty--leaving no object untouched. It was only a mental representation, but the analogue to the physical world was clear. River had read all of the reports and had studied the readings back on the base. She had seen the disc in its most grotesque form of action, and she still hadn't let herself confront the insidious reality of the thing that had dug itself inside the Doctor's brain.
"He called it a vise." She couldn't take her eyes from the mirror in the night sky, or maybe she couldn't bear to look away and meet the Doctor's blank gaze again. She reached a hand out but it was far too distant to touch. "It must be clamped down on every single sensory neuron he has."
"It's a puny, stupid thing, blindly chasing inputs." Anger seethed behind the words, and for a moment the night air warmed ominously, drawing River's attention away from the sky. But Idris calmed, glancing at the Doctor and at their intertwined fingers. She turned back toward River, resolute. "It will learn. It will listen when we tell it to let go."
The mindscape pulsed again, the garden gone but for the lingering scent of roses in a washed out white landscape, dazzlingly bright, that faded like a camera flash into the defining walls and corners of a large, featureless room. River looked up, blinked, and the room was gone, sunk into inky black that melted away to reveal the night's twinkling stars.
"Let go . . ." She exhaled the breath she hadn't realized she was holding, and the ache in her chest bloomed into the tiniest spark of hope. "You mean, you can heal him? You can save him?"
Idris smiled. "We must save all of you first. It's why we're here, why we waited for you."
The garden was dimming. A breeze picked up, but it didn't disturb either Idris or the Doctor, standing silent and still beside her. The encroaching seconds from the outside world loomed at the edge of River's perception, inexorable. "You have a plan?" she asked.
Idris shook her head. Dry leaves skittered and whorled across the flagstones. "I am a pond, drained to reveal a path. I have nothing left. It's what you have that's important, child."
As quickly as it had surged, River's hope sank. The whisper of the weapon kindled in her mind, stoking doubt that took hold and raged with the swirling wind. Distant shouts echoed all around her, and the air was alive with a low, persistent hum that she could feel from her head to her fingertips. Their Contact was crumbling. "What do I have that can save us all? All--all I've done so far is fail."
"You haven't failed, little one. You have held the promise that we gave you. From matrix to cradle you have kept it safe, so that we may honor it now."
For the space of a breath, everything slowed. Their connection in the mindscape was falling apart. But time was converging to a carefully constructed fixed point, from within and without, and in one pure second, River sensed the likelihoods. She saw herself as the TARDIS saw her. All of herself, across her long lifetime. The rage, doubt and fear, the inner voice that she could never fully escape--it would always be with her. Twining through her past, peppering her future; there would always be a part of River Song that was falling. And from the perspective of an eleven dimensional transcendental matrix, it was both as permanent and as inconsequential as the shape of a wooden blue box chosen to fold around infinity.
This weapon cannot contain the deepest parts of you, the TARDIS sang in River's thoughts. It too must let go.
A weight lifted from her chest. River calmed, seeing the maelstrom around her as if from the eye of the storm. There was purpose to everything the TARDIS had shown her. The timbre of the hum around her was changing, low rumbles rising to higher grating tones . . . almost familiar.
"Matrix to cradle," she echoed. A womb and a child. A promise, like . . .
Suddenly, it all snapped into place. "Like a mother to a daughter."
She reached into her pocket and drew out the apple--Amelia Pond's apple, with its carved, smiling face. It was a simple gift from River's mother's mother, that Amy had remembered even when a crack in time had swallowed all trace of her parents. But it was more than that. The story had been told and re-told over the years, at family gatherings so far away in River's past, but still to come in her own parents' future. How Amelia had waited for twelve years, and how it took one pristine apple with the same etched smile from her childhood for her to realize that the Doctor had kept his promise to come back for her, with all of Time and Space at his fingertips.
In the midst of the winnowing garden, with the press of the desert all around them, the little smiling apple buzzed and thrummed in River's hand. Just as it had done at the back of her mind, she realized, ever since the TARDIS had co-operated long enough to set it there. Since the ship had instilled her own promise of a fast return.
"It's the psychic switch," she said, and laughed. "You do have a plan; it's Plan A, all over again. I trust you can trigger it now, Sweetie? Or rather, Sweeties?"
She held the apple out for the pair of them--the Doctor and the TARDIS, tethered inextricably to each other by touch and timelines. Idris took hold of the Doctor's elbow this time, and he stepped forward, his form shimmering in the waning light as he crossed the psychic barrier. His fingers quested through the air, insubstantial.
"I've done no more than I must." Idris closed her eyes in concentration, ringed again by a dusty blue-gold halo. The grating, grinding noise of wind should have swallowed her words, but River heard her perfectly. "The foundations that were fractured here will heal."
"From the temporal crash? There's no permanent damage to the timelines?" As River spoke, the Doctor's hand passed through her forearm, elbow to wrist.
"There is one timeline that couldn't be salvaged." Idris shifted again, turning her gaze to where both River and the Doctor stood in the last remnant of the garden. Blue luminous dust ate at the edges of her hair and her dress, swirling away in the darkening gale. Her eyes blazed gold, but the only sentiment River could see behind them was a fathomless depth of compassion.
"I'm sorry," she said, fading away. "I know how much this is going to hurt."
Then the Doctor found the apple in River's palm and closed his fingers solidly around it.
White light lanced out, first from the carved smile, followed almost instantaneously by pinpricks that pierced the red skin and erupted, curling across the apple's surface until it was entirely consumed. River took a step back, trying to drop it and shield her eyes but her wrist jerked, stopped short by a sudden weight. She lost her footing and fell, pulling the weight down with her. Pain sliced down her side, shoulder to hip.
The light grew, saturating everything. River's eyes watered, beset by the grit and sand kicked up by the churning air. The apple was gone. In its place, she felt the blunt pressure of the Doctor's fingers on her wrist. The blinding white settled into the glare of a cloudless, sunny sky. For a moment, they were back in the desert. And then, that moment was gone.
The Doctor had triggered the psychic switch nearly as soon as he had laid his hand on the TARDIS door. Renewed, the TARDIS wasted no time. The grinding, groaning hum that had echoed across the mindscape resolved to the familiar sound of a Type 40 time rotor pressed into service with the brakes still on. Beside River and the Doctor in the desert, the TARDIS dematerialized. And all around them, she rematerialized, leaving the soldiers and the cold blue sky behind.
The rotor clanged and shuddered into stillness. The deck plates hummed into River's cheek. Dazed, she tried to sit up, but made it no further than lifting her head long enough to see Amy racing down the steps from the console toward them, and a bewildered Rory stepping down from the open door of the step-van now parked incongruously inside the machine that, until moments ago, had been inside the back of that same van.
River felt light-headed. They were safe. The weapon that had seethed through her thoughts in the ambulance was gone, relegated to the far reaches of her psyche. And the Doctor. . . there was a tug at her wrist. Tangled beside her, he made a sound that was half groan, half giddy laugh.
"Hello, gorgeous," he sighed.
Then Amy and Rory were upon them, peppering them with questions that neither had the faculties to process. She felt the Doctor startle, but he relaxed when he realized who it must be. There was a whirring buzz at her side as Amy used the sonic screwdriver to unlock the cuffs linking them together, but he didn't loosen his grip. If anything, he held tighter, fingers searching her skin.
"River, what's wrong with your past?" he asked quietly. "Ever since the motorway . . . what's happened?"
Someone wrapped their arms around her, levering her up, and the throbbing ache kindled to a fire in her side. She tried to remember what had happened to make it hurt, but she couldn't hold the thought in her head. She looked up to see Rory looking down at her. It was his arms that were holding her up.
"We nearly drove to Utah instead of rescuing you," he said, helping her gain her feet.
A laugh bubbled out of her. The muscle movement along with motion of standing bloomed red-hot in her gut, but she didn't care.
"How do you always do it?" she asked. "All of you. Even when you don't know anything about me?"
"Do what?" Rory's curiosity quickly turned to concern. "River, are you all right?"
River swayed on her feet. She grasped Rory's shoulder to try to stay upright, but the Doctor wouldn't let go of her wrist. "Why are you . . ." he started, and stopped. "Oh. No, no, no. It's not your past that's wrong. It's mine."
"Doctor?" Amy asked, but of course he didn't hear her.
"My past," the Doctor said, going preternaturally still. "Your . . . your future."
Rory tried to shore his hold from under River's arms to her side but his hand slipped. She looked down to see his palm trace a bright red streak across her beige canvas shirt, even as the Doctor cried out, "Get her to the med bay, now!"
River looked back at the blurring, dimming view of her father's face. "You always catch me," she said.
Her legs gave out, but she never hit the floor.
*
Part 13 | Part 14
