There's a Language in the Sky
lonewytch
Come inside River, I want to show you something. A world inside the both of us, Thief and I. A place where all our shadows lie, but the light is oh so glorious too. It soaks us and streams through us. All the wishes and the longing and all the deep gut grief and all the incandescent joy. All the stars you want to ever see. Ponds and rivers and streams and the heart of the wide sea of time. Everything deep inside that never sees the outside, tangles and wires, and webs and nerves and an energy that runs and turns. All the dreams of Gallifrey that haunt us, its glory as it burns, the colours working their way through our systems. There's nothing we want to keep from you.
*
He lies against her on the bed, in the room where they most like to be. The walls illuminate the room gently, pouring liquid amber over their bodies, holding them tightly. The Tardis drifts in the vortex, streaming between here and there, then and now, and they are cupped inside her in their own small world, moving in time with her.
He watches River as she stirs in her sleep, eyelids fluttering while her eyes work quickly underneath the paper thin skin. She is dreaming deeply and he wonders what is capturing her sleeping mind in that world; the tips of her fingers twitch and a soft moan escapes her lips as she shifts restlessly. The sigh of the Tardis is a soft hum that rises up through the bed, a satisfied noise, soaked in respite; it vibrates through his bones and outwards into the blood and flesh, calming him, soothing him. For once they are on the same page. Just over a month past the broken universe, past her entry into Stormcage and nights and nights have already belonged to them both. They have discovered each other in the darkness. She has become like a second skin to him. It's as easy and as wonderful as living.
*
Thief is not asleep, he simply lies, watchful, his mind oh so nearly at rest, but skimming the edge of calm like a stone over water. She is sleeping though and I stretch across her sleeping mind, pouring in the old language, splitting her dream as I swim with a lazy stroke through the waters of her mind. I pour in symbols, meanings, memories...
*
In her dream the language and the colours turn clockwise, then widdershins, something she can't quite grasp on the edge of her understanding, a taste like suns and moons on her tongue that she nearly remembers. Shapes that still her, then shake her until she is nothing but liquid forming and layering on them. A golden dripping light that drags her into its depths and streams around her. A homecoming under her own skin, thrilling her. A shuddering that rises from the roots of her as she glimpses something so much wider and bigger than herself; and then she jerks awake.
*
"Bad dream?"
He rests his hand softly on her solar plexus. She scrubs bleary eyes with her fists, and their deep greens seem to shift as she peers at him.
"Strange dream." She breathes the words out and he can almost see her exhaling her sleep into the air around them. "Something to do with the Tardis, I think. I'm having them constantly, the more time I spend here."
Her brow is creasing with frustration and he can see the dream creeping out of her, or sinking back down into her. She starts to sit up, levering herself upwards from the bed, her hair lifting from where it was spread and pooled. But he wants her warmth back down beside him so he pushes gently back against her.
"Lie next to me, tell me. Maybe I can help make some sense of it."
She collapses back, letting her own weight carry her until she lies supine again, and he snuggles into the crook of her neck, pillowing his head against her curls, to listen.
*
"There's light all around me, I'm bathed in it. It's not separate from my skin, it goes through me, sinks down through the pores, into my bones and I can feel it wrapping itself around my insides. It touches something, something that feels... well... ancient, and when we touch it's like part of me rises up and out with the light so I become it and it becomes me and, I can't make sense of it... There are circles within circles, shapes with meanings. Gallifreyan, I think, because I know some of it from what she taught me in Berlin, but these words are so old that I can't understand them. I know that they mean something though. Does that make sense, sweetie? I don't know them, but I kind of know what they mean. I just can't think of what they mean... It's like my brain won't work. But I do know because they're spinning and turning inside me as well as outside me, and it feels like they're pulling and tugging at bits of me. Then it's like I start to remember and understand and everything goes still, but then my mind starts going all to pieces, because I can't hold it, it's just too damn big, and I start to shake, like it's rocking at the core of me, and then the shaking wakes me up."
*
As she speaks her eyes look fevered. The words rush from her like she can't contain or stop them, as if she is a spring pouring out until it stutters, dries. When she finishes, the mist leaves her gaze and she turns her head to look at him, blinking like she's clearing away a film from her vision. She is so close he can see the small capillaries webbing under her skin which are making her cheeks flush. She is breathing quickly and he brings up his palm to cup her face, to calm her.
"I've never thought to ask you yet River, exactly how much Gallifreyan do you know?"
She looks at him, her eyes widening a little and then bites her bottom lip; "I know shapes, and I know ideas. I know the scraps of it that were recorded from my studies, but that's so little. The only parts of it I really understand are the bits that are to do with the Tardis and driving her."
He waves a hand in disdain at that.
"You don't need instructions for driving. Instructions and labels are rubbish but really, River, you don't know the rest?" He watches as her eyes go unfocused again, turning bleary, glassy. He can read her well enough, even at this early point, to know that she is concentrating hard when she purses her lips, just so, as she is doing right now.
"I know all the shapes, as I said," she sighs out, as if letting go of something she can't hang on to, as if letting go of smoke from her hands. "I know the shapes of all the different versions, for some of the shapes I even know the words, but I can't really get it, can't quite understand it." She scrunches her eyes with impatience as he watches her intently, and it makes her nose wrinkle adorably. "It's like, the language is about ideas bigger than the ones I know." She turns to him frowning. "Does that make sense, sweetie?"
It makes perfect sense to him; his native languages, so complex, expressing theories of physics that underpinned the universe and the raw power of time itself. It hits him with pangs of nostalgia that run deep, hidden veins of remembering, inside. To speak in those languages again, to converse... and River will know them fully one day, he knows this from his future. He almost shakes his head ruefully as he thinks of cliff faces, home boxes and who knows how many other pieces of archaeology inscribed with words of passion and glory..."Hello Sweetie" lighting up the night sky, burning holes into the universe.
"Gallifreyan is ...complex. The language you speak, Earthian..."
"English," she corrects him.
"English. Though strictly would it be Scottish since your mother is...? Oh never mind. But anyway, your language is inept."
One of her eyebrows rises archly as she regards him.
"Well, I don't mean to be rude but it is, in comparison. Gallifreyan is a language of power, it describes the state of the universe and the condition of life and death, the nature of time; the words themselves actually live. They express concepts far beyond those the human language can grasp."
He can feel the Tardis listening, an expectant waiting, like a rustle just beyond his hearing. As he speaks the light coming from the walls grows steadily brighter, hotter, more intense, until the entire room is aglow, and their bed wallows like a ship in the middle of it. He lets himself lapse into silence, bemused. He had always assumed that the first time River entered the Tardis, an initiate seeking the truth he promised, and the old girl had folded River into herself and shown her how to fly, that River had learned his language then. Now it seemed that River's dreams were being couched in the languages of Gallifrey, terms she doesn't fully grasp yet. Suspicion seeps into him that the Tardis is pouring in waves through her head at night, trying to speak to her, to teach her; much as the universe had once poured through the head of her mother. That it's too much for her to contain and hold, that she's overflowing with it because she doesn't have the structure there to pin it all upon. And then it hits him all of a sudden that it must be him who teaches her, here and now, that this is the moment she learns his language. And he feels a conviction about this, and a thrill of excitement, but also a deep fear at peeling back the layers of himself to where his language is hidden deep. All the words and the structures, webbing across his mind and entangled with memories of his home. He pulls her towards him.
"River, I need to show you something..."
*
Thief showed her something... has shown her something... is showing her something... is just about to... In the place where his skin ends and the endless insides begin is this thing that he needs to tell her. He is frightened and he is elated, and his hearts pump faster, hot salt speeding through his veins. His breath comes quicker. I feel it dripping through the floor and the wall. She is soaked in almost-understanding, this River, this water girl, this swimmer in the ebb and flow and the tide of time. Time takes her and time gives her back into our hands, as time takes everything.
Show her.
*
Excitement stains his gaze, and she is almost frightened at his intensity as he speaks of the power of his native languages. She can see the tension in his form and, as he speaks, the light and the heat of the walls in the bedroom increase until they are flooding over them in ecstatic waves. As his words describe the forgotten language, they paint the room, like deja-vu on her tongue, like a half formed memory haunting her. Things just outside her grasp, ideas too big for her that stalk their way across the universe, and the stars and all of time. He grasps her shoulders almost painfully, as some sort of realisation lights his eyes and then he pulls her towards him, pressing the length of his body to hers, hot skin on hot skin, sweat rising from their pores as the heat from the walls rises. Then he presses his forehead to hers and the universe ignites
*
Always their minds are strange to him, these humans. Somehow cumbersome and so tied to thinking of life in terms of a linear progression, journeys from a to b, here to there. Yet as he wraps his mind over hers he can almost feel her vortex-altered DNA singing out to him; because the human structure of her mind is only a thing that her perception of time lies upon. Really, down there under the surface, she is spread every which way, branching like roots of awareness into the past and the future and all the small places in between. There is a seeding awareness of time as a vast all-encompassing thing happening everywhere and every-when; an awareness like his own. Oh, she knows so many things, secret under her surface, he can see them all now. Knowings that have woken her in the night, even as a child, with dreams of a spider web of galaxies in space; with dreams of time, like leaves falling, slices of time pressed together like the pages of an ancient book. Things that have kept her sweating in ecstasy as she has gripped the covers in her slumbers... she knows the words for them, yes he can see that, but she doesn't know the words.
*
It is like a sea wall breaking and like all of him pouring into her in a bright flash that makes her wonder if she has suddenly burned alive there in the bedroom, and all that is left of her is charred bones on the covers. It doesn't hurt, but yet it does, this feeling of him settling across her, into her, more intimate than anything she can ever imagine. When she holds him close when they are together, she has often pushed him deep into her, desperately wanting him to fill her and fill her, for him to be inside her whole, oh, and now he is and it's glorious and terrifying all at the same time.
As the first wave of contact starts to recede, and she feels him distinct inside her mind, she opens herself to him, holding nothing back, keeping nothing away. She wants him to know all of her in this moment. She has no resentment for her childhood lost at his expense, and she freely gives him access to the pain and the terror. To the horror of the suit, needles and wires in her flesh, to the half forgotten years in the orphanage. To the years lost and wandering while she searched out her parents. She gives him her joy at finding them, the sweet memories of Amy and Rory as children. She gives him the way his name beat in her blood, over and over; Doctor... Doctor... Doctor... in time with her heart, the name they drummed into her. She shows him, too, her remorse for what happened in Berlin, but how different she is now, how strong, how the years have shaped her into River. She gives him the pure joy of loving him. How could I not love you? My love... And then she looks into him as well, and the very first thing she sees is years and years of him and the Tardis wrapped close around each other, strands woven, belonging to each other through all of time and space.
*
She opens to him like a flower to a bee. He hovers, silk laid over the surface of her mind, not pushing, never probing. But still she opens to him as thoroughly as a flower unfurling its petals and he sees right into the heart of her. He can feel tears prick under his eyelids, as he realises all those years of holding herself back that wait in her future, once their timelines twist back on themselves and she has to keep secrets from his younger self. Yet here she is, right back at the beginning, laying herself bare for him.
The horror of her childhood, which he sees fully for the first time, makes him flinch and his hearts ache. All my fault, he tells her, but she shows him there is no blame, nothing to forgive. He sees the way he was drilled and drummed into her, how he was conditioned to course through her veins; how when she killed him it left her empty, drained of all desire, all the hate drawn from her. She was empty, a shell in that room in Berlin until he convinced her to step into the Tardis. And then, oh! He sees how the Tardis is actually part of her. He knew the vortex had altered her DNA but he didn't know how thoroughly his ship had woven her way through River's being and her dreams. And there in a bright shining light in the corner of her being... she is talking to you every night, trying to teach you, you don't have the right words yet, here...let me show you.
*
They twist and twine in me now, they are stone and they are snow wrapped across me like the years that mean nothing. Just a way of marking time which the stones do not mark at all, and the snow it melts as it settles... and where shall we go next... and I love you... and take my hand, don't let go... and hello, sweetie... you wouldn't stand a chance and neither do I... just a fairytale... skin upon skin upon skin lasting the whole night through... watch us run... they run... they run...
*
The shapes he presses into her suddenly give structure to the forms deep inside her mind, to the language that pours into her as she sleeps and leaves her restless and pulsing with secrets she is keeping from herself. This is the language she has known since she was a child, whispered to her through the long nights of her confinement inside the suit, threading their way through her long years of searching, stitched into her dreams during her years at university.
There are words that are glorious, that make her lungs fill suddenly with a gasping breath, they are terrifying words that are as big as the universe, that describe the beautiful and the horrific. There are words that describe the structure of quasars and supernovas and the hot surging clouds where the stars are born. They describe the lost things, the unseen, the singularity at the heart of black holes, the dark matter that rests curled inside beams of radiation, all the particles packed inside each other like a matryoshka doll, all their hidden structures right down to the essence of all things. Some words are circles within circles, expanding and spinning out across time, gathering all the disparate threads into themselves and pushing them out again in every direction. It feels like it's too much for her to hold, yet somehow there is a place for all of it to go, it all fits into her, and she tells him... I'm bigger on the inside.
*
In her mind he relearns his own language as he watches her wonder at it. Hand in hand he takes her through a landscape of shapes and sounds that structure the hidden world behind everything. Love and physics, mathematics and inspiration, firing round the synapses of both of them, describing them whole and their place inside everything. Her mind fits around all the forms of his language perfectly as if she was made to hold it, as if her entire being was born for this purpose; to understand him and his people and the way that they structured and saw themselves and the cosmos. And how could he ever think that she had a human mind? Because hers is as edgeless as his, as huge and as quick and sharp and incisive and he revels inside it as words and worlds stream through them both.
*
After a time that she can't begin to measure, the words inside her begin to coalesce, and they become a story they are telling to her, a story that they are writing across her. First they show her two stars rising in the sky, yellow and red, and a copper moon like a cup of blood next to them. They show her a sky that burns with rust and burgundy, wisps of pink and orange clouds. Then next she feels air grazing her skin, hot and burning as the suns radiate onto her. She is standing under a tree whose branches twist and twine closely, and above her its leaves are a bright silver. Bizarrely she thinks of silver fish in the sea, but these are fish that are afire under the suns and the moon, and they cast a ripple of light down over her face like she's underwater. Before her the grass is by turn red and gold and it moves like waves as it is combed by the wind, peppered with purple and blue flowers. In the distance she can see the curve of the Citadel and she can sense the secrets, whispering, hidden beneath it. The sun glances off its dome, and she knows from everything she has read and the language bubbling under her surface that this is...
*
...home is a place that we three are grown from, a place that we exist in symbiosis with, if only for a time. Home is our roots that carry the sap to our branches so that we can live and go on living and it forms some of our bones but it isn't all of us. Home is just a word that can't cover what it does and doesn't mean, home is...
*
...Gallifrey, with green forests in the distance, a promise of emeralds on the horizon, a cool line upon the warmth of the fields in front of him. And beyond them, he can see further than the eye can, to the lifts and folds of the crimson desert. She is there, next to him, as he turns, slipping her hand into his and looking at him with her cat-green eyes shining with tears...it's so beautiful...you're so beautiful... He realises that he is crying as well and that those tears are his own memory weeping. As his tears layer themselves between him and what's before him, the fields begin to ripple and then to curl at the edges, like a piece of paper with flames licking at its corners. Suddenly he can smell the smoke and the ash, hear the screaming of billions cutting into him, and he is dragged down into a memory he never wants to revisit and he is drowning in it...he tries to shield her from it...I never wanted you to see this... but in this shared memory, she just grabs him and pulls him upwards, turns him towards her then enfolds him in her arms and into her mind again where there is a solid and unmistakable place hollowed out that is the shape of him. With a start he realises that she is twining herself around his memory, shielding him from the raw pain there, and he can't place the moment when they stepped across from her mind to his and back to hers again. It seems as if there is no boundary here, he cannot find it and maybe they are completely one at this moment...
*
Until he breaks away from her and they are both gasping and sweating and trembling as they look at each other. And she says to him in Gallifreyan; "Hello, Sweetie," and he says back to her in the same ancient language; "I love you." And their words burn across the sky and across each other, etching themselves into one another's bones. Then there is nothing else that they can do but kiss each other urgently and press their skins together, as if there is not enough time in the world to hold both of them, as if there is not enough space in all the wide sky to encompass them.
*
...this is how it is, and has always been and will be forever.
I create us all. Him I steal away and shape as my own. Her I give birth to over and over every night in dreams. I am the line that wraps around them, so that as my River ends, my Thief begins with her again, and they burn across the sky, until she ends again and he begins again, and they burn again. All of time flowing in every direction and the two of them curled into a constant motion inside it, a constant spinning wheel that cannot be broken, that will last forever, perfectly formed and perfectly held within me.