"Stratigraphy" Eleven/River, River/OFC 4.5k words, rated Teen for vague sexual situations and loom references The Doctor, the archeologist, and the Braxiatel Collection.
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The ground is gridded out, foot by foot, inch by inch. River Song is looking for buried treasure. The usual tools of her profession are still lying in their neat black cases, protected from the sun and dry wind. Her students cast longing glances at the cases, imagining the computers and scanners and folded robotic implements hidden within, imagining their hands unblistered and still, the safety and shade of the mobile survey unit. They are using hand tools as archaic as the artifacts they're looking for. Their resentment is banding them together. The sky presses down.
This is a matter of principle to River. Using robots was something the Doctor would have scoffed at. It's cheap, it's lazy - you want your hands in the dirt, you want old-fashioned tools, hard work, honest sweat. He'd taken her to a dig once in 1923, Egypt, Earth, insinuated himself with a floppy straw hat and linen trousers dangling loosely from his hips, and told her about the mystery and dignity and rightness of this, ordinary people sifting through ordinary sand finding extraordinary things.
"This is the golden age," he'd said. "Archeology's not what it used to be, in your century." And like that, she was instantly embarrassed by her degree, her papers on chrono-extrapolation programming, her immersive, immaculate renderings of the site on Heiradi she'd never visited. The Doctor popped open a beach umbrella and sat down underneath, drawing lines in the sand with the heel of his boot.
When he took her home, she retracted her application to graduate school and sat drinking in the local freightship port until she found a captain who'd take her on. She spent the next year fudging receipts and tax forms, and then requisitioned a single-person transport vehicle and disappeared twenty minutes before the authorities showed up.
The next time she met the Doctor, he hadn't taken her to Egypt yet. He told her she would become a professor of archeology, which he thought was such a lovely career - he was very proud of the woman she would become. She laughed, slightly hysterically, and continued being a wanted criminal instead.
When the title came, it was via an actual degree, funnily enough. She'd always assumed she'd con her way into academia. But it's real: she took classes, at first just for something to do, something safe and legal and quiet, to give herself a break. The next thing she knew, a semester turned into a year turned into five years, twenty-three papers, and a book-length thesis on using contemporary techniques on class-III worlds. It was publishable, she published it. A mid-level university offered her a position as assistant professor, trying to make herself heard in cavernous rooms filled with distracted, sleeping, over-ambitious, lazy, self-righteous, bored, misplaced, desperately intense students. They were all so very young.
She told them, "Archeology isn't what it used to be, in this century." She told them, "You need to get your hands dirty if you want it to matter." They took notes, they nodded off, they raised their hands primly; two of them developed crushes on her and she slept with one, a brash twenty-something girl who was still critiquing her cataloging methods as River went down on her.
A semester of lecturing and processing data via satellite and never bringing the pretentious, naive, undeniably attractive girl back to her own rooms, a semester turned into a year turned into three years. She realized this was more or less the person she'd been when she'd first met the Doctor. She was, more or less, like the Doctor himself, talking the good talk but never following through, not when it came to putting in the work, doing it the hard way, hands-on and honest.
"Have you ever even done the things you tell us to do?" the girl asked once. She had a name, her name was Ella, but River knew that she knew that they both knew they were using each other, so she was the girl and River was the professor and they carefully kept from discussing anything other than where, what time, I'll wear those shoes you like.
She was coasting. She was compromising. She had, without realizing it, entered a normal life that would carry her to a normal grave. She was better than that. She knew she was, because she used to be, she had been a remarkable person living a remarkable life. She was drifting, and it scared her.
So she volunteered for an expedition.
It's hot. There are two suns, one red and tangible, one too bright to look at. She sweats through the linen shirt hanging loosely from her shoulders, she drinks carefully from a canteen. This area has been excavated before, but not this particular patch: she could find something extraordinary. Instead she finds potsherds.
(Everything good has already been discovered. This is a fact.)
How a day goes is, she wakes up at dawn. The coffee is terrible. Her graduate students come tumbling from sleep, their faces already dusty and tired. She arranges them across the field, like so. Inch by inch, foot by foot. She lightly taps on the hard, dry ground with the mallet. Two inches of clay break loose. There's nothing there; she notes down in the log that there is nothing there. She gently brushes the dust away, and taps on the ground again. There's nothing there. A breeze pushes the dust back; she sweeps it away. She carefully documents the fact that she has swept it away.
Six hours later, she has a handful of ceramic shards, tagged, bagged, filed. They'll be transported to a local museum where they will sit with the other ceramic shards. She files paperwork. She sweats through her shirt and wonders what exactly it is she's doing here.
Beneath the howling wind and the music from the next tent over, she can hear it: that wheezing, groaning, brakes-left-on racket. The Doctor occasionally has a perfect sense of timing.
She suppresses a grin, and waits.
The Doctor met River Song on the day she died. It's like something out of a cautionary tale for adolescent Time Lords, it's one of the reasons relationships with non-Gallifreyans were frowned upon (and occasionally illegal, depending on the era), it's cause for alarm and no small amount of chagrin. It's ridiculous, is what it is.
The Doctor was the wrong man when he met River. He's still the wrong man now. They're on the bed his ship made for them - it's not quite right, it's too small, his legs dangling off the end, she almost falls off once. She thinks it's funny.
She says, do that Gallifreyan thing, and he knows it's either a joke or a lie. There's nothing sexy about the things Gallifreyans did. He could knit her a sweater, maybe, ha-ha. Do that human thing, he says, the one with your fingernails.
Her hands on his body, like she's searching for something that isn't there yet. Scrape the dead skin off, find the alien underneath. She's already learned the things he hasn't taught her; he's yet to want the things she can give. She loves the man he'll one day become, and he'll love her, eventually. Her hands on the back of his neck, pulling him down. He'll love her eventually.
She looks at him like there's something specific she's hoping to see. She asks loaded questions (he doesn't know what they're loaded with). She's frequently disappointed in him. He's not, to his knowledge, doing anything particularly wrong, and she refuses to explain the exact nature of his failure. When you're older, she says, you'll understand. He's not sure how he could possibly be any older than he already is.
She looks at him like she sees the alien beneath his human skin, sees two hearts and strange blood. She holds his future over him. One of these days he'll learn how to be the man she needs. An older man, a better man. One of these days he'll be ready. She kisses him hard and wet, all the passion he doesn't quite deserve; she puts up with his awkward fumblings, elbows, knees, shaking hands, the half-remembered knowledge of how to do this.
They're on the bed his ship made for them, the mattress hard beneath their backs. "There's a museum I've been meaning to show you," he says.
"A museum?" she asks, skeptically. This is a segue: she gets up off the bed, meanders towards the shower. He hears the water go on and thinks about her body underneath it.
"You like museums! They're one of your favorite places. They are one of your favorite places, aren't they?"
"Not particularly," she calls out.
"Oh. Well." He rolls over onto his stomach, face buried in the pillow. Breathing the smell of her in. Long curly strands of hair tickling his nose, glinting gold in the dim light. "You'll like this one, though," he says, voice muffled. "Anyway. It's important to me. I want to share it with you." It's easier to talk to her when he knows she can't hear him.
The asteroid isn't that hard to find, not if you have a state-of-the-art navigation system and a genius-level understanding of transtemporal mechanics. He's one of the few people left who remember this place exists. Probably the only one who'd bother showing up, who'd know how to get past the barrier, avoid all the traps and defenses. It's still locked down tight, self-sufficient, despite how long it's been abandoned.
He lands the TARDIS in the gardens. Everything's overgrown now, of course, sprawling and unkempt, nature thumbing its nose at the stuffy, tightly-manicured aesthetics it'd once been constrained to. They walk hand-in-hand up what remained of the gravel path, towards the mansion looming in the distance.
It's not that he's nervous, as such. Just - concerned. Mildly. He pauses at the entrance, sweeps a hand over the doors, feeling the force field lurking inside the wood. "It's a bit of a temporal anomaly, so if you feel your hair stand on end, don't worry. Nothing's going to leap out from the shadows and grab you. At least, I don't think so. I hope not. Well, possibly-"
"You're babbling, darling."
He smiles apologetically, then sets about breaking and entering.
Five minutes later he finds the right sequence of settings on the screwdriver. The door swings open, pneumatic hinges hissing gently. She pushes past him impatiently, he follows. It's like walking into a mausoleum.
He flips on the power with a flourish, gestures her in grandly. "Welcome to the Collection," he announces.
This is a place a person could get lost in for days. Mezzanines lead to wings lead to corridors lead to other mezzanines, rooms within rooms within rooms. He drops Jelly Babies here and there, as breadcrumbs, just in case.
The signs are gone. No banners, no branding; even the maps have empty spots, cartography trying and failing to re-write itself. The museum is anonymous now.
(It'd been a sort of cack-handed job, ending the war. All grand sacrifices and very little follow-through, and he'd yet to find the will to smooth out all the wrinkles.)
"What is this place?" She's staring at one of the signs that isn't a sign anymore, and then staring at him, and clearly trying to figure out why he's brought her here, out of all the places in all of time and space.
"I told you, it's a museum. Only the most beautiful, most precious things were brought here. Artworks from all across time and space, saved from wars, natural disasters, carelessness, general lack of foresight. The good of the universe on display for once, instead of all the-" He waves a hand vaguely. "-Other stuff."
"This is beautiful?" She nods at an assemblage of metal rods and spheres crawling haphazardly up the wall.
He tilts his head, squints his eyes. "In its way." He moves into it, tucking his body into an open space. "I thought so," he says, then ducks out, grabs her arm and pushes her where he'd been.
"Pardon me, did I miss something?"
"Shush. Stand there. Very still. Now. What do you feel?" He waits eagerly, scanning her face. She looks amused more than anything. "Close your eyes, if that helps."
"Oh. That's-"
"Very complicated science. Long explanation short, it creates a light telepathic field." He checks the placard: Early morning, spring. "This one is set to 'possibility', I think."
Rooms within rooms within rooms. He's running out of Jelly Babies, switches to sunflower seeds. A trail stretching out behind them. He plays tour guide, makes things up, occasionally relates personal anecdotes. She humors him. They walk on, hand in hand.
They kiss beneath a stained-glass window, the artificial light streaming down on them quite poetically, if he does say so himself. A chaste kiss, or near enough to it: he doesn't quite feel comfortable losing himself here.
"What is this place?" she asks again.
He hesitates. Kisses her forehead, brushes her hair back. He reminds himself that he took her here for a reason. He wants to do this. Needs to do this.
"It was my brother's," he says quickly. Offhandedly, like maybe she won't quite notice what he's saying. "His greatest achievement, his raison d’etre. And it's the last piece of him that exists, now."
"You had a brother," she says, not quite a question.
"In a manner of speaking, yes. It's complicated."
"Things with you usually are." She rubs his back, pulls him in close.
"We lost touch, over the years. I was exiled and then he left and, well, our paths never seemed to cross. And I never made the time. We'd both burned so many bridges, I - I didn't want to deal with it. With him, with me, with the whole - whatever. And then, well." He doesn't say it, and she doesn't say it, and together they try very hard not to think it: the war is a thing they've silently agreed to leave alone.
"What was his name?" she asks softly.
He pauses. "Braxiatel," he says. "His name was Braxiatel."
There is a moment, here. She could ask him a question, he could answer. She'll have to ask, one of these days. His name, his real name, is not a thing he will ever volunteer, is not a thing he feels he has the right to volunteer. She will ask him and he will some day, somehow, answer. A dead name, a dead language. He wonders how the syllables would feel in his mouth, the particular cadence he'd impart to her, the length and rhythm and heft of it, so she could say it back to him. So he could remember it, after all those lifetimes spent forgetting.
His name is a heavy, familiar thing, caught in the back of his throat. He's waiting. But River is walking off with studied nonchalance, following a line of Monan paintings down the wall. "Is that fruit?"
"Quite possibly," he says. "Well, that there, the green thing, that's a sort of mitten."
"Mitten."
"The Monans had great need of mittens. Quite cold on the host world, you see, and they had so very many hands."
Braxiatel himself is long gone, but the Collection remains. Gallifrey was taken imperfectly out of history (and 'taken' is itself an imperfect word, to describe that), the lines of each citizen unraveled separately, haphazardly. There are echoes. Boundaries, with nothing left to bound: like after the eruption in Pompeii, how the bodies disappeared but the shape around them was caught, hollows in ash. The Collection is the thing around the place where Braxiatel used to be.
Like Pompeii, or an art class assignment: Draw the space around the object. Record the world in reverse. The echo, the hollow, the void.
Brax had run his timeline ragged. Maybe it just seemed easy, at first: slip forward, find his future self, ask a few subtle questions. Brax had never been above cheating to get what he needed. He'd known the consequences, of course, they all had. Build your life out of paradoxes, it's bound to fall apart.
He'd sold off the Collection and then he bought it back. He paid for Gallifrey's freedom with his life's work; it must have seemed fitting. Every painting leaving behind dark squares of wallpaper. Some things are priceless, some things cannot be replaced. His empire was rebuilt more haphazardly the second time around.
Braxiatel was never the Doctor, and Braxiatel was never Romana, and even when he was President, the role was temporary, a stop-over, a means to someone else's end. His ambition curled tight as a fist.
And he'd known, of course. Known all the men he'd become. Seen it in his own eyes, older, wearier, more arrogant, more desperate. Maybe one day a man had shown up in plain clothes, clean-shaven, a stranger wrapped so close in his new identity only the two hearts gave him away. Maybe he recognized the thing in his head and his soul, that echo of an old betrayal, the monster that was claiming him for herself. That would claim him, that had to claim him, that he had to one day take into himself. For Romana, for Gallifrey, for the universe, for the sake of the fact that he'd always known he would. Braxiatel carried Pandora with him to his death, because there had never been anything else he could do.
It doesn't do to know your own destiny, it really doesn't.
The Gallifreyan wing is sparse. Each piece seems painstakingly chosen, and specific in a way he can't quite define. Each of these things mean something. An archway from the vaults beneath the Academy, stone and mortar ragged around the edges. A sculpture, Pythian era, the personification of Time holding soil in her cupped hands. Books, scrolls, a data access panel promising the last remaining fragments of the Matrix - he keeps himself, somehow, from tapping the 'Continue' button. Prydonian robes and collar, the stiff brocade, braid and metal, he remembers that, the feel of it on his shoulders, how heavy it'd been.
And, at the end of the hall, a holoscupture of the last true president of Gallifrey. Her portrait is precise, not unkind but unflinching. No romantic liberties taken. It's built from biometrics, surface scans, security records. A data-memory captured, possessed, preserved for posterity. The Doctor's hearts break a little on Brax's behalf, and his own.
"Romana," he says. River stiffens almost imperceptibly. "Madame President. You magnificent woman." He ghosts a hand over the image of her face: chin, cheekbones, lips. She looks annoyed. She was always very good at being annoyed. He imagines her posing reluctantly, berating a hapless tech, yelling at the Chancellery guard, who would be young, and awkward, and a little in love with her. He imagines her rushing off to More Important Business (which she always had, even when he was around), robes sweeping out behind her. The guard following. Of course, of course. The first and the last, the honored and the hated. The Lady Romanadvoratrelundar.
"She regenerated, after this. Born out of a civil war. I suppose it helped her, but..."
"This was the Romana you loved."
He hasn't told her yet. What will he say, how will he phrase it? Will he make a Traveling Companion Flowchart? Will he say the wrong name? Will he sit her down and grasp her hands earnestly, do his very best to be a good man, an open man? Or will she find out on her own?
"Are you still in there?" She pokes him in the temple, a little more than gently.
"Somewhere, yeah," he whispers. Clears his throat, tries to shake it off, put a smile on his face.
She looks at him like she wishes he'd stop pretending, at least around her, at least some of the time. He wishes he could remember how.
In the back room, through an unassuming door, is the other catalog. The private one. The vault within the vault, history decays more slowly here, Braxiatel's elaborately paranoid barriers and shields holding back the effects of the time lock. Transaction receipts, contact lists, the carefully coded provenances. Time lines of a thousand cultures, each art period noted, political eras, disasters natural and artificial marked out. Names he recognizes: M. Arcadian, B. Summerfield. He allows himself a moment of nostalgia, and then a moment of guilt (they'd both been so terrible to her, hadn't they; all the selfish plans, the bastards they'd been), and moves on.
He rifles through drawers, tossing documents around, feeling himself start to get a bit too manic. Something catches his eye: a handwritten message, on a tiny scrap of paper, saved for reasons he'll never comprehend.
Tell anyone and I will personally rebuild the Oubliette, just for you. - N
She's reading over his shoulder. "N''?"
"The only Gallifreyan of note to never be president," he says.
She raises an eyebrow but says nothing, just gives out a faint, bemused 'hmm'.
He throws the paper back into the drawer. Keeps looking, not knowing what he's looking for, if he's looking for anything at all. Feeling that edge in him sharpening. Feeling something threatening to spill over. Dumping out the contents of filing cabinets and sonicing access panels and flipping through binders and -
"Stop," River says finally, sharply.
He stops. Papers still fluttering in the air, drifting to the ground. "I'm sorry," he says. "This is..." He doesn't know what it is. It's something awful, and oddly seductive, and too heavy for him to carry. He wants to carry it anyway.
"It's alright," she says, and puts her arms around him. More gently than she usually does; he can feel her sadness and confusion from here. But he does not rest his forehead against hers, does not lean into her embrace, does not open up in the way he supposes she really does deserve. Instead he stands still and stiff, blinking back tears, teeth clenched and his hands buried in her hair.
The war had not been his to win. None of their wars were. Still: he won it anyway. The war, like its cousins before it, belonged to to the capitol, and to the outlands; to the guards and guardians and all the Agency's wolves. He won it anyway. This is a fact he must endure. So is the fact of his incontrovertible past, the things that cannot be undone. This is a before that he will never be able to visit; this is fixed and hidden from him. Gallifrey fell and will always have fallen.
He's beginning to realize what kind of man that makes him.
They follow the trail of mini-marshmallows and sunflower seeds and Jelly Babies back outside to the gardens. The sun is bright and hot, moving fast to the horizon. The moon will be rising soon.
She leads him to a bench and makes him sit, hand wrapped tightly around his upper arm. He's always skittish but he's worse, now, something stretched taut inside him, ready to snap.
She wants to tell him that it's okay to be afraid, and that she understands. She wants to tell him that she knows what it's like to carry that sort of guilt around, to know that you are capable of terrible things, to know that you’ve changed but worry you haven’t changed enough. She wants to say, you don't have to be alone.
He's an idiot, really, a self-defeating egotistical idiot. She loves him anyway. Besides, he doesn't know what she is yet, he doesn't know what she's done. She can't tell him, cannot offer any sympathy that wouldn't seem hollow. All she can do is whisper small jokes in his ear and hold his hand as the sun sets.
She changed her name because she knew she had to. She changed her name as part of a required transubstantiation. And even before, she'd chafed under the preciousness of it, the fairy-tale sound, the name of a girl or a woman who grew old without growing up, a name from the dressing-up box. She could not keep it. She'd known before the Doctor told her. She hadn't needed his confirmation. The name had simply not fit, as her old bodies had not fit, a series of nagging suspicions that she was not what she was intended to be.
So she gave up her body twice, and her name just the once, and somewhere inside the unlocking joints and electric skin found herself slid neatly into place. A crucial part of her emerging. Her name is still a fiction but it is, somehow, a better fiction, one more readily understood and accepted. The body about her makes a particular sort of sense, the hips and hair and shoulder blades, calf muscles, teeth, knees, spine. A rightness to her.
The Doctor had said once that with one exception he'd always regenerated with extraordinary awkwardness, like his new body was a puppet he didn't quite have control over. He'd said he never payed attention to what he was becoming. He'd also said he was, essentially, a collection of counter-arguments, and he'd said he was an attempt to repent or repair, and he'd said he didn't actually remember much of it at all. Possibly some of those are true.
She wants to tell him that she knows what it’s like to hold so much inside you. She wants to tell him that she knows how it feels, remembering the monster you’d been. But it is what it is. They are what they are.
She'll go back to her potsherds. He'll start running again. They have until dawn, at least. She can feel him relaxing, settling down as much as he ever does. She won't push, he won't volunteer. Still. He'll let her kiss him, accept whatever physical comfort she can offer. One day they might have fewer secrets between them. For now, this will have to be enough.
She pulls his arm over her shoulder and listens to him name all the stars in the constellations glittering above them.
