Yowzah Oneshot Collection (2)

82(G)

                Redemption Song

                         leiascully

None but ourselves can free our minds
- Bob Marley, "Redemption Song"

It isn't Melody Pond who kisses the Doctor back to life as if she's Prince Charming and he's Snow White, poisoned by pretended innocence. It's someone else, someone who's lived in Melody's head all along, in that still, cynical, romantic center that never believed the Doctor was the devil anyway.

How could one man ruin everything?

King and Queen of Cantelon,
How many miles to Babylon?
Eight and eight and other eight.

The Doctor, saint or sinner. There's a balance in the universe and it isn't even good and evil: it's kind and cruel. Melody has crossed that line a hundred times, flagrant, careless, but the Doctor, she sees, has tried to live in kindness. That is worth something, even to her. He cares for his people. He has fought hard in the hope that their lives will be a little better, a little greater. He has, all-unknowing, made that wish for her.

He is all the things Kovarian said he was: selfish, thoughtless, controlling, entitled. But he is all the things that Amy and Rory said as well. He's kind and he's caring and he's playful and he's old, so very old, and so very, very lonely.

He wants to save the universe. He hopes that his efforts have not been in vain. He is dying and he still cares that she might escape her legacy of cruelty, that she might be the woman who loves the Doctor.

She spends the rest of her lives on that hope. She spends the rest of her lives to see the bleak despair leave her parents' faces. She remembers being Mels, loving them every day, loving the Doctor a little too through their eyes. She has always taken a fierce joy in knowing more than those around her, in being more. She has kept her own secrets. She has taken lives without a second thought. Now she gives them without considering.

River Song, she thinks. A new life, without regenerating. She thinks of the beauty of the Judas tree with its silver bark. She thinks of the gold luminescence of time energy pouring back into the Doctor, as if even the vortex loves and sustains him. Everything loves the Doctor, except the Silence. Even his enemies cherish him. What would the Daleks be without the Doctor? Whom would the Weeping Angels hate more than any other? She knows how close loathing can be to love: just the flip of a switch, and one passion becomes the other.

The Doctor fills the void. He ends the Silence. He spreads the word, and the word is "You are important. In this grand, magnificent, infinite, callous universe, you are special. Now let's go see everything."

Surely there's a place for a man like that. Surely there are still adventures left for her.

Will I get there by candle-light?
If your horse be strong and your spurs be bright.

River Song has always been there, nameless, waiting, in the place she went inside herself when Kovarian was too much. The dream built by a little girl who just knew she had parents somewhere, even though she was told over and over she wasn't a child, she was a weapon. River Song isn't a person: she's a destination. River Song is who the Ponds would have wanted their child to be. She saw their faces, the look in their eyes. Our child, the look said, is a stranger to us, and worse, she's cruel and their hearts broke a little.

It will take a long time, Melody thinks. She has less of time than she used to. She gave it away. She made a choice. She stood by her parents. She stood by her man. She stood for kindness and dignity and the powerless. And it felt marvelous and terrifying and right.

At least she fulfilled her destiny, she thinks. She is the woman who killed the Doctor. And she's the woman who brought him back.

She's free to make her own destiny now. She's free to be someone besides Melody Pond. River Song is as good an end as any; she's not a foregone conclusion, but she's a story Melody would like to tell. She'd like to be the good wizard for once, or at least someone not quite the murderous queen. Merlin, maybe - he went both ways.

It will always be a balancing act. Danger and cruelty are part of her nature, and kindness is something she has hardly discovered. Even as Mels, it was more refraining from cruelty than choosing to be kind. Her parents made that easy. The rest of the universe will not.

But she'll prevail. After all, she's going to be River Song. River Song wouldn't take "It's complicated" for an answer.

How mony men have ye?
Mae nor you daur come and see.

She totals up her resources as she paces the room she's taken shelter in. It doesn't take long. She has herself and the clothes on her back. No TARDIS, no companions. No weapons but her own body. She'd like to go home and curl up on her mother's shoulder like the child she never really was, but she can't now, when she's too much something they fear. Nevermind. She'll be enough. She always has been.

She'll be River Song, quick with a gun and quicker with justice. She'll play to her strengths. She's clever. She's got nice hair. She is the daughter of the Girl Who Waited and the Last Centurion, and someday, if she's very, very good at what she does, she'll be the Doctor's love. She won't forget who she's been, but she'll build a new future, beholden to none but those who care for her (this, she hears, is family).

She'll be good. She'll be more than that - she'll be amazing, and as Amy once wished, she'll be very, very brave.

"River Song," she says out loud, smirking at her reflection in the glass of a window. "You'd better get going. You haven't got time to waste anymore." She steps out the door and into a new life.