FIC: Ceremonial
7 Nov 2010 01:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
promethia_tenkTitle: Ceremonial
Fandom: Doctor Who, River, River/Doctor
Length: 2,500 words (!)
Rating: PG 13, suggestions of sex and murder
Spoilers: season 5
Summary: Life is held together by ritual.
AN1: Written for![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cinderbella333 in exchange for this work of brilliance. She requested a fic about River being superstitious. I'm not sure to what extent this counts, but it is about River being ritualistic, about all the little ceremonies and symbolic acts she uses to give order to her life.
War Paint
Almost every society in the universe, River knows, has its ceremonial costumes, its uniforms, its masks and markers and badges and disguises--outward signs that set a person apart, place them in a role beyond their normal life. And so does she. Even if she is a society of one right now.
She eyes up the black catsuit laying on her bunk. Yes, it’s just a piece of clothing. But it’s also something more: another self. Someone not so entirely separate from her and yet also different. More. Smarter and braver and harder and faster and maybe a little bit crazy. Someone who would break into a queen’s treasure trove and run off with the loot. Someone in a position to need to do so . . . .
How did she ever end up here?
In the shower she has an inspiration, and for a few minutes the amusement of it takes her mind off the knot in her stomach. Cat ears. And a tail. For a cat burglar, see? She closes her eyes against the spray and laughs aloud at the thought, palms braced against the tile. Why not? Ten years ago she would have dismissed this whole business--every bit of it, every last insane detail--but now . . . . She should do it. Because she can.
Five minutes later she’s talked herself out of it, though, and is drying herself off. True, the sheer cheek of it would have given her that extra little psychological boost, and who knows, maybe if she’s caught in the act, the amused confusion it would provoke would gain her a few extra seconds to react. But she’s also going to be crawling through ventilation shafts and around heavy machinery and the last thing she wants to do is get something caught. There’s a reason catsuits are skin tight. And as tempting as it may be to put this off a bit for the sake of a visual pun, she needs to get moving now, while she’s got her courage up. She reaches for her outfit and starts going over mental checklists.
By the time she finishes doing up the bodice, her mind has honed itself down to that sleek sense of purpose, and she steps out into the corridor, the lines of the starship’s schematics sweeping by her inner eye as she aims herself towards her objective.
Gift
River smiles faintly to herself as she works. There are men with guns coming after her--she really doesn’t have the time to be aligning her glyphs as if she’d sat down with drafting equipment. Oh, she is a moron sometimes. Still, it’s an undeniable pleasure to watch her message shaping itself up in pristine rows and columns, even if it’s not the sort of thing he’d notice or care about. He will notice her spelling mistake, she hopes. Well, provided she gets a late enough model. He’d certainly had enough fun ribbing her about it when she was just learning, so she can practically hear him now: Honey, the next time you use an ambiguous declension to imply I’m a family pet, I’m not coming to pick you up, and you’ll have to find some other way to cope with the hard vacuum of space . . . I kid, I kid--I won’t be complicit in the death of someone who can plot a temporal recursion drift like that. Heh. She has missed him too much, of course she’s going to show off a little. Ok, a lot. Ok, she is shameless, but he always smiles at it. And . . . she’s going to have to check her coordinates again just before she delivers them, but if she’s calculated right, she’s actually going to make her jump in the same sector of space where they were once stranded for a week, a half a million years in the future. Not that she has any control over the Byzantium’s course, but it is a nice coincidence. Heck, if he’s traveling alone right now, maybe she’ll strand them there again . . . .
There. There’s that done. She gives her finished work a final admiring glance and then turns to go, taking a moment to wink at the camera on her way out: hello, sweetie.
Meditation
She always begins the same way. She rarely has control over her surroundings, so she controls this. Her diary. An open stretch of time. A pen for when she’s sure. A pencil for when she’s not. And a tie for when her hair--inevitably--starts to annoy her.
When she’s in a rush, she’ll jump straight to the information she needs, but for this . . . no, there is a ritual. First she reviews the general timeline--as far as she’s been able to construct it. Then a list of open questions: niggles, observations, pieces that don’t fit . . . all the little burrs that pull at her brain as she tries to do other things. From there she rereads her notes from their last meeting and starts looking: for patterns . . . for similarities . . . for clues.
The shape of it rises up in her mind, from out of the tangle of her other thoughts. It’s like a network or . . . some complex system of orbiting bodies, each with their own mass and heft, each with their own potentials and forces, subject to laws of attraction she only dimly understands but means to interpret. As she reads, information flows from the page and takes its place in the flux. The system shifts. New events push and pull and the whole breathes and grows and shapes itself to this new reality--balances, symmetries, tensions, ambiguities, incongruities--the fullness of it felt but not seen, space and time and thought stretched out together across the span of her consciousness.
There is a meeting, a moment that she can’t yet place. It exists in her mind in several places at once, and therefore in none of them. When she feels out into the gaps it all dissolves or retreats or evaporates and she gropes in frustration like . . . Tantalus after water. She reaches instead for the strings and tugs. Ideas sweep around her in arcs, and the system responds, adjusts, returns to its balance even as it moves. It’s a physical discomfort, the moment she can’t place--all these spots that don’t fit catch and pull at the flow, and the eddies ruffle her, and disturb her calm.
She runs her fingers down a page, soothes the jags in her concentration. There are words, and she traces them absently. The drawing of a face she’s seen only a few times, and not that time, not the time she can’t place. She smiles at it and soothes her fingers over him too, the slight moisture in her fingertips causing the graphite to smudge, faintly. She sits forward and squints down at the damage. It’s . . . not bad, actually. The quirk in his lips has gone from knowing to ever so slightly lascivious, and . . .
Oh.
She knows that look, yes. Has seen it before--- She riffles through pages, searching, searching . . .
And then there are cascades. And revelation. And brutal, ecstatic disorientation as the point she can’t place coalesces finally and everything, everything rushes around it, and flows with . . . inescapable grace, and finds in itself a new order.
She reaches for her pen.
Penance
The TARDIS dematerializes--silently, she notes, with gratitude--and she is alone again in her cell. If she’s lucky, the guards never even noticed her absence. Admittedly, there is something appealing about the idea of about a week in solitary right now (does that man ever shut up?), but she really doesn’t want to deal with the recriminations that would go along with it, the dance of questions and evasions, having to look again into the warden’s leering face and keep all her lies straight. No, she doesn’t have the energy for confrontation today, and she clutches her diary in one hand and prays to be left by herself, with a hard cot to support her and four walls to contain her guilt. Penance, she finds, takes structure and routine.
The Doctor has always been stronger than her in this way, as much as he refuses to believe it. He can face down his demons in the middle of the night, can wrestle them unassisted, in the dark, and then get up the next morning to do it all over again. She has no such fortitude. She can pull a trigger with a clear head, in the deadly certainty of its necessity. That is her strength, and she does not regret it, would do it again, would do it a million times if she had to. But this . . . this great afterwords . . . . No, she has no resources for it within herself, no way to cope with all the hours and minutes that stretch away from that point with a taunting emptiness. For some things, she laughs to herself, you need institutional help, and every once in a long while, even River Song can admit that she does need help.
He’s never been able to understand this choice of hers. Probably never will, either: he’s lived too long outside of any institution at all to recognize the value of sometimes giving over control. His anger, that day, had been terrible to see--he’d not even looked at her as the police took her away, for the first time, chained at the wrists--but forgiveness had come soon enough (at least from her perspective). Forgiveness, however, was not the same as understanding (at least from his perspective), and long after he’d forgiven her he continued to prod, to question, to goad her to leave her prison and not come back, not realizing the impossibility of the suggestion.
Ringing boot steps suddenly echo down the hall--running. So, they’ve found her out after all. Perhaps it’s for the best. She turns towards the bars and resigns herself to what will happen next.
Mantra
There’s a naked pause.
“River . . .” his face is pained, but also open, wondering. He reaches to her hair: “What did I ever do to deserve you?”
Oh, god. For a good ten seconds she considers simply not answering. Then, faint: “Spoilers.”
She can’t quite take the ensuing quiet. She grips his shoulders and starts to move.
Superstition
River once explained time loops to an eleven year old in the following way:
Being in a time loop is like being on a see-saw. You’re in one part of the loop on one end of the see-saw and someone else is in another part on the other end, and the whole thing exists all at the same time, and it stays in balance. You’ve played on a see-saw before, so you know what it’s like. You’re free, on your end, to do all kinds of things: you can move up or down the seat, you can invite someone else on too, you can bounce up and down . . . but whatever you do is going to affect the other person on the other end, and they’re free to do the same things, and the whole see-saw will move back and forth to keep everything in balance.
And her sister’s son, who had always been the precocious one and therefore her favorite, asked, with perfect innocence, the trenchant question: What happens if someone jumps off?
Well, she said, as calmly as she could, we try not to do that to people we like.
That was years ago. There’s a children’s play park, now, on the walk between her home and the University. She never looks over to watch what the children are doing; she finds reason to be fascinated with the stonework on the post office across the street.
Vows
“Aww, sweetie, you didn’t have to wait up for me.”
He’s just sprung up from one of the jump seats, looking considerably more perturbed than she’d like: “Where have you been??! I have been . . . worried sick!” His hands flail in the air as he bounds towards her.
“I couldn’t have been gone two hours togethe---woah!” He catches her slightly off balance as he skids into her. “Were you really? Worried?” He doesn’t answer that, but she takes his strangle embrace as response enough. “I’m . . . I’m sorry--I didn’t know . . . .” She struggles within herself over what to do with this uncharacteristic display of concern.
There’s some sort of mumbling into her shoulder which sounds like it might involve anxieties about witchcraft trials and . . . tapioca pudding? She knows there’s some strange laws on this planet, but that seems extreme, not to mention messy. She decides to go for distraction:
“I’ve brought you something.” With great difficulty she extricates one of her arms and twists it around her head to dangle her prize under his nose. Distraction seems to work:
“Nooooo!” He lets her go to grab the new thingamajig and squint at it piercingly.
“Yes.” --trying not to sound too smug.
“No!” He glances rapidly back and forth between her and the thing in his hands.
“Yes.” And this time she gives the smug free reign. Oh, she is good.
“Well, that certainly makes life easier. Where on earth did you find it?”
“Do you mean where on Ferrulous Prime? . . . and I’m sorry--it’s gonna have to be a secret.”
He gives her a look somewhere between disapproval and a pout, which she chooses to ignore. She wanders away to start the pre-flight routine.
“I thought these didn’t even exist in this century! It couldn’t have come cheap. Wait . . . ,” he trails after her, suspicious. “You didn’t sell an organ or something, did you?” And he surreptitiously lifts the hem of her shirt to check for scars.
She laughs and slaps his hand away. “I didn’t sell an organ.”
“Cheated a government official?”
She shakes her head.
“Stole it from the national museum? . . . Won it in a pudding eating competition? . . . . . . . . Shagged a parrot cult priest??!?!” She abandons all pretense of pressing buttons to lean against the console in amusement and watch him, and the conjectures continue unabated until he notices and grinds to a halt: “Why won’t you tell me?!?!”
“At this point? Because it’s far more entertaining to listen to you guess.”
He stares at her for several seconds before growling in frustration and making a vain attempt to strangle the air, to which she cocks an eyebrow. He deposits himself back in the chair in a huff:
“Keep your secrets, then, but if I find out this is more than the ordinary sort of unsavory, I’m filing for divorce!”
She turns back to the console and resumes her pre-flight. “Promises, promises . . . .” She makes a point of leaving the breaks on before she takes off, and peers through the time rotor to catch the hint of his smile.
____________________
AN2: This whole fic builds on an almost ridiculous amount of speculative meta, so thanks generally to anyone who's ever picked the show apart with me for a bit, and thanks particularly torumpelsnorcack , elisi , and owlsie for analysis and rambling.
AN3: The cat ears and tail are apparently a request made by Alex Kingston for the scene in the royal collection, which got turned down by the producers. Who I can only assume are idiots.
Fandom: Doctor Who, River, River/Doctor
Length: 2,500 words (!)
Rating: PG 13, suggestions of sex and murder
Spoilers: season 5
Summary: Life is held together by ritual.
AN1: Written for
cinderbella333 in exchange for this work of brilliance. She requested a fic about River being superstitious. I'm not sure to what extent this counts, but it is about River being ritualistic, about all the little ceremonies and symbolic acts she uses to give order to her life.War Paint
Almost every society in the universe, River knows, has its ceremonial costumes, its uniforms, its masks and markers and badges and disguises--outward signs that set a person apart, place them in a role beyond their normal life. And so does she. Even if she is a society of one right now.
She eyes up the black catsuit laying on her bunk. Yes, it’s just a piece of clothing. But it’s also something more: another self. Someone not so entirely separate from her and yet also different. More. Smarter and braver and harder and faster and maybe a little bit crazy. Someone who would break into a queen’s treasure trove and run off with the loot. Someone in a position to need to do so . . . .
How did she ever end up here?
In the shower she has an inspiration, and for a few minutes the amusement of it takes her mind off the knot in her stomach. Cat ears. And a tail. For a cat burglar, see? She closes her eyes against the spray and laughs aloud at the thought, palms braced against the tile. Why not? Ten years ago she would have dismissed this whole business--every bit of it, every last insane detail--but now . . . . She should do it. Because she can.
Five minutes later she’s talked herself out of it, though, and is drying herself off. True, the sheer cheek of it would have given her that extra little psychological boost, and who knows, maybe if she’s caught in the act, the amused confusion it would provoke would gain her a few extra seconds to react. But she’s also going to be crawling through ventilation shafts and around heavy machinery and the last thing she wants to do is get something caught. There’s a reason catsuits are skin tight. And as tempting as it may be to put this off a bit for the sake of a visual pun, she needs to get moving now, while she’s got her courage up. She reaches for her outfit and starts going over mental checklists.
By the time she finishes doing up the bodice, her mind has honed itself down to that sleek sense of purpose, and she steps out into the corridor, the lines of the starship’s schematics sweeping by her inner eye as she aims herself towards her objective.
Gift
River smiles faintly to herself as she works. There are men with guns coming after her--she really doesn’t have the time to be aligning her glyphs as if she’d sat down with drafting equipment. Oh, she is a moron sometimes. Still, it’s an undeniable pleasure to watch her message shaping itself up in pristine rows and columns, even if it’s not the sort of thing he’d notice or care about. He will notice her spelling mistake, she hopes. Well, provided she gets a late enough model. He’d certainly had enough fun ribbing her about it when she was just learning, so she can practically hear him now: Honey, the next time you use an ambiguous declension to imply I’m a family pet, I’m not coming to pick you up, and you’ll have to find some other way to cope with the hard vacuum of space . . . I kid, I kid--I won’t be complicit in the death of someone who can plot a temporal recursion drift like that. Heh. She has missed him too much, of course she’s going to show off a little. Ok, a lot. Ok, she is shameless, but he always smiles at it. And . . . she’s going to have to check her coordinates again just before she delivers them, but if she’s calculated right, she’s actually going to make her jump in the same sector of space where they were once stranded for a week, a half a million years in the future. Not that she has any control over the Byzantium’s course, but it is a nice coincidence. Heck, if he’s traveling alone right now, maybe she’ll strand them there again . . . .
There. There’s that done. She gives her finished work a final admiring glance and then turns to go, taking a moment to wink at the camera on her way out: hello, sweetie.
Meditation
She always begins the same way. She rarely has control over her surroundings, so she controls this. Her diary. An open stretch of time. A pen for when she’s sure. A pencil for when she’s not. And a tie for when her hair--inevitably--starts to annoy her.
When she’s in a rush, she’ll jump straight to the information she needs, but for this . . . no, there is a ritual. First she reviews the general timeline--as far as she’s been able to construct it. Then a list of open questions: niggles, observations, pieces that don’t fit . . . all the little burrs that pull at her brain as she tries to do other things. From there she rereads her notes from their last meeting and starts looking: for patterns . . . for similarities . . . for clues.
The shape of it rises up in her mind, from out of the tangle of her other thoughts. It’s like a network or . . . some complex system of orbiting bodies, each with their own mass and heft, each with their own potentials and forces, subject to laws of attraction she only dimly understands but means to interpret. As she reads, information flows from the page and takes its place in the flux. The system shifts. New events push and pull and the whole breathes and grows and shapes itself to this new reality--balances, symmetries, tensions, ambiguities, incongruities--the fullness of it felt but not seen, space and time and thought stretched out together across the span of her consciousness.
There is a meeting, a moment that she can’t yet place. It exists in her mind in several places at once, and therefore in none of them. When she feels out into the gaps it all dissolves or retreats or evaporates and she gropes in frustration like . . . Tantalus after water. She reaches instead for the strings and tugs. Ideas sweep around her in arcs, and the system responds, adjusts, returns to its balance even as it moves. It’s a physical discomfort, the moment she can’t place--all these spots that don’t fit catch and pull at the flow, and the eddies ruffle her, and disturb her calm.
She runs her fingers down a page, soothes the jags in her concentration. There are words, and she traces them absently. The drawing of a face she’s seen only a few times, and not that time, not the time she can’t place. She smiles at it and soothes her fingers over him too, the slight moisture in her fingertips causing the graphite to smudge, faintly. She sits forward and squints down at the damage. It’s . . . not bad, actually. The quirk in his lips has gone from knowing to ever so slightly lascivious, and . . .
Oh.
She knows that look, yes. Has seen it before--- She riffles through pages, searching, searching . . .
And then there are cascades. And revelation. And brutal, ecstatic disorientation as the point she can’t place coalesces finally and everything, everything rushes around it, and flows with . . . inescapable grace, and finds in itself a new order.
She reaches for her pen.
Penance
The TARDIS dematerializes--silently, she notes, with gratitude--and she is alone again in her cell. If she’s lucky, the guards never even noticed her absence. Admittedly, there is something appealing about the idea of about a week in solitary right now (does that man ever shut up?), but she really doesn’t want to deal with the recriminations that would go along with it, the dance of questions and evasions, having to look again into the warden’s leering face and keep all her lies straight. No, she doesn’t have the energy for confrontation today, and she clutches her diary in one hand and prays to be left by herself, with a hard cot to support her and four walls to contain her guilt. Penance, she finds, takes structure and routine.
The Doctor has always been stronger than her in this way, as much as he refuses to believe it. He can face down his demons in the middle of the night, can wrestle them unassisted, in the dark, and then get up the next morning to do it all over again. She has no such fortitude. She can pull a trigger with a clear head, in the deadly certainty of its necessity. That is her strength, and she does not regret it, would do it again, would do it a million times if she had to. But this . . . this great afterwords . . . . No, she has no resources for it within herself, no way to cope with all the hours and minutes that stretch away from that point with a taunting emptiness. For some things, she laughs to herself, you need institutional help, and every once in a long while, even River Song can admit that she does need help.
He’s never been able to understand this choice of hers. Probably never will, either: he’s lived too long outside of any institution at all to recognize the value of sometimes giving over control. His anger, that day, had been terrible to see--he’d not even looked at her as the police took her away, for the first time, chained at the wrists--but forgiveness had come soon enough (at least from her perspective). Forgiveness, however, was not the same as understanding (at least from his perspective), and long after he’d forgiven her he continued to prod, to question, to goad her to leave her prison and not come back, not realizing the impossibility of the suggestion.
Ringing boot steps suddenly echo down the hall--running. So, they’ve found her out after all. Perhaps it’s for the best. She turns towards the bars and resigns herself to what will happen next.
Mantra
There’s a naked pause.
“River . . .” his face is pained, but also open, wondering. He reaches to her hair: “What did I ever do to deserve you?”
Oh, god. For a good ten seconds she considers simply not answering. Then, faint: “Spoilers.”
She can’t quite take the ensuing quiet. She grips his shoulders and starts to move.
Superstition
River once explained time loops to an eleven year old in the following way:
Being in a time loop is like being on a see-saw. You’re in one part of the loop on one end of the see-saw and someone else is in another part on the other end, and the whole thing exists all at the same time, and it stays in balance. You’ve played on a see-saw before, so you know what it’s like. You’re free, on your end, to do all kinds of things: you can move up or down the seat, you can invite someone else on too, you can bounce up and down . . . but whatever you do is going to affect the other person on the other end, and they’re free to do the same things, and the whole see-saw will move back and forth to keep everything in balance.
And her sister’s son, who had always been the precocious one and therefore her favorite, asked, with perfect innocence, the trenchant question: What happens if someone jumps off?
Well, she said, as calmly as she could, we try not to do that to people we like.
That was years ago. There’s a children’s play park, now, on the walk between her home and the University. She never looks over to watch what the children are doing; she finds reason to be fascinated with the stonework on the post office across the street.
Vows
“Aww, sweetie, you didn’t have to wait up for me.”
He’s just sprung up from one of the jump seats, looking considerably more perturbed than she’d like: “Where have you been??! I have been . . . worried sick!” His hands flail in the air as he bounds towards her.
“I couldn’t have been gone two hours togethe---woah!” He catches her slightly off balance as he skids into her. “Were you really? Worried?” He doesn’t answer that, but she takes his strangle embrace as response enough. “I’m . . . I’m sorry--I didn’t know . . . .” She struggles within herself over what to do with this uncharacteristic display of concern.
There’s some sort of mumbling into her shoulder which sounds like it might involve anxieties about witchcraft trials and . . . tapioca pudding? She knows there’s some strange laws on this planet, but that seems extreme, not to mention messy. She decides to go for distraction:
“I’ve brought you something.” With great difficulty she extricates one of her arms and twists it around her head to dangle her prize under his nose. Distraction seems to work:
“Nooooo!” He lets her go to grab the new thingamajig and squint at it piercingly.
“Yes.” --trying not to sound too smug.
“No!” He glances rapidly back and forth between her and the thing in his hands.
“Yes.” And this time she gives the smug free reign. Oh, she is good.
“Well, that certainly makes life easier. Where on earth did you find it?”
“Do you mean where on Ferrulous Prime? . . . and I’m sorry--it’s gonna have to be a secret.”
He gives her a look somewhere between disapproval and a pout, which she chooses to ignore. She wanders away to start the pre-flight routine.
“I thought these didn’t even exist in this century! It couldn’t have come cheap. Wait . . . ,” he trails after her, suspicious. “You didn’t sell an organ or something, did you?” And he surreptitiously lifts the hem of her shirt to check for scars.
She laughs and slaps his hand away. “I didn’t sell an organ.”
“Cheated a government official?”
She shakes her head.
“Stole it from the national museum? . . . Won it in a pudding eating competition? . . . . . . . . Shagged a parrot cult priest??!?!” She abandons all pretense of pressing buttons to lean against the console in amusement and watch him, and the conjectures continue unabated until he notices and grinds to a halt: “Why won’t you tell me?!?!”
“At this point? Because it’s far more entertaining to listen to you guess.”
He stares at her for several seconds before growling in frustration and making a vain attempt to strangle the air, to which she cocks an eyebrow. He deposits himself back in the chair in a huff:
“Keep your secrets, then, but if I find out this is more than the ordinary sort of unsavory, I’m filing for divorce!”
She turns back to the console and resumes her pre-flight. “Promises, promises . . . .” She makes a point of leaving the breaks on before she takes off, and peers through the time rotor to catch the hint of his smile.
____________________
AN2: This whole fic builds on an almost ridiculous amount of speculative meta, so thanks generally to anyone who's ever picked the show apart with me for a bit, and thanks particularly to
rumpelsnorcack , elisi , and owlsie for analysis and rambling.AN3: The cat ears and tail are apparently a request made by Alex Kingston for the scene in the royal collection, which got turned down by the producers. Who I can only assume are idiots.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 19 Nov 2010 12:38 pm (UTC)(Just coming back to re-read and finding myself in the same state of mind.)
(no subject)
Date: 19 Nov 2010 03:57 pm (UTC)(Thank you for saying so. I feel like this is my graduate thesis on River or something . . . )