This was originally written around three years ago for a ficathon, but I figured it was high time I posted it here. I don't own the characters.

Moments of Revelation 1/2

***

The Doctor: "… The Time War--the final battle between my people and the Dalek race."

Van Statten: "But you survived too."

The Doctor: "Not by choice."

From Dalek, by Robert Shearman

***

The singing wakes River up. It's a lamentation--low and lyrical--and even though she knows every language ever spoken on Earth, she can't identify this one. She wonders briefly if it's a dirge for her, if maybe she just dreamed that she and the others (well, most of them) survived the attack by the Reavers. When she gets out of bed, the sound stops abruptly, but the deck is cold beneath her bare feet. She's alive, then. The dead either have more important things than cold toes to worry about or nothing to worry about at all. She climbs the ladder quickly and pokes her head through the hatch, waiting.

No Reavers, no Alliance, no one here, no one to hear, nobody here but me...

She reaches out for the others. Simon is with Kaylee, and they're actually sleeping for a change. Mal is dreaming of Inara, and Inara is dreaming of snow and red silk. River doesn't like to touch Jayne's mind--the others think she's disturbed--but she can hear his snores echoing up from beneath the deck. Zoe's on the late watch, playing with the dinosaurs and missing Wash.

She hears the strange song again--louder now and mixed with something that feels like sobbing even though it isn't--and when no one else stirs, she knows it's in her head. She follows the trail through Serenity, through her mind.

Kaylee knows about the engines and instruments that keep the ship flying. Mal knows about all the storage areas big enough to stow a crate or two of cargo. But River knows about all of the dark places in between: cubbies, alcoves, service conduits. She knows how to hide and how to seek and it doesn't take her long to figure out where the song is coming from. By the time she gets to the shuttle bays, the sound is so loud that River's resorted to putting her hands over her ears. It doesn't help. She opens the spare shuttle's hatch and finds a pretty blue box full of pain.

Simon put her in a box once. River didn't like it.

Box can't think, can't feel, can't scream, can't sing, can't cry--

but this one does. She lays her hands on it but the hurt is too much so she pushes at the doors with her mind instead.

Let me in.

The panel swings open and she walks into a room bigger than any place in Serenity. A bell tolls far in the distance, reinforcing the idea that the blue box--

TARDIS,

it tells her--is enormous. The dirge fades away even as the sense of grief intensifies around her.

River knows that this can't be, but it is and it's strange and magical and would be beautiful if it weren't in such an obvious state of decay. A thick blackish fluid is oozing from what look like wounds in the walls and fixtures, and there are more puddles of fluid on the floor. There is so much pain here, so much despair, and when she wanders around the center console in the impossible room, she finds its source.

When River turned three, Simon gave her a puzzle box with a toy surprise inside. When she finally opened it eight minutes later, she found a miniature porcelain doll, pretty and perfect. She dropped the doll some time later and then it was not-so-pretty and not-so-perfect, but she kept the box until she could solve it in less than twenty seconds. The broken figurine was lost and forgotten but now she's found it again, lying on the floor of the strange, almost-beautiful room.

Pretty young/old man shattered into a million pieces.

On Miranda, the people laid down and they died because they forgot how to live. This man forgot how to live too, but River is going to help him remember.

***

She sits beside him and pulls his head into her lap. His hair is soft and fluffy where it's not matted with blood, and his features are almost as delicate as Simon's. His clothes are strange and through what's left of them she can see raw burns, strange angles that must be broken bones, and more blood, both old and fresh. She can sense that there are worse injuries inside, so she doesn't try to move him any further. Simon could set the broken bones, dress the burns, stop the bleeding both internal and external, but he can't do anything about the

Gallifrey burning/Daleks gone/ashes to ashes/everything dies…

buzzing around the Doctor's head.

River doesn't like doctors (except, of course, for Simon). The doctors that she's known offered only pain, but this man is The Doctor and the distinction seems to be important to him. Perhaps being The Doctor is what's kept him alive when ordinary men in his condition would be long dead. In any case, he's dying now, but River feels an odd duality as well. In some way that she can't quite understand he is hovering on the brink,

dead/alive.

Then there's a spark of awareness and his mind asks the question that his body is too far gone to articulate.

"Who are you?"

She hardly knows where to begin.

Albatross, little girl lost, time bomb, killer woman, weapon, why don't you cry me a

"River."

Her voice echoes through the chamber and she's suddenly unsure of whether he's still capable of hearing it. She gives him her name again mentally, along with the self-portrait she holds in her mind: a wide, lazy, tree-lined ribbon of water meandering along a grassy valley, the current creating gentle eddies against boulders and rugged banks. There was a time when she was nothing but whirlpools, swirling round and round, but she's better since Miranda. Simon and the others expect her to be normal now, but River was never ordinary and she grows tired of pretending sometimes.

"Let me go."

His mind's voice is drenched with so much pain that she almost does, but she sees so many impossible things in his mind and she hungers to learn more about them. The Doctor is special, and not just because he's not human.

I won't let you die like they did.

She can't explain about Miranda, no one can, but she can show him her memories. He hurts so much already and it's not fair to hurt him worse, but he has to see in order to understand.

They're still in my dreams--the dead and the ones worse than dead. They're dust, but your heart--hearts--are still beating. You have to get up now. You have to try.

"Too late,"

he insists, but she knows it for the lie it is. She's doesn't understand most of what she sees in his mind, but she's sure that he's worn many faces and lived through several lifetimes. He could live through this too, if he truly wanted to. There's new life ready to burst into him, but he's shutting it out, damming it all up behind a thick, seemingly impenetrable wall.

River weighs the risks and the benefits of trying to save him and calculates her odds of success. If she's wrong, he'll die quickly, with no more pain. But River can't remember the last time she was wrong about anything.

She gathers herself and reaches out for him. Her earlier sending was from a time of peace and tranquility, but she is angry now and her avatar is dark, muddy, and storm-swollen. She is the River-- a cascade of white water surging against his self-imposed dam--and it's much too much for his battered body and mind. His chest hitches in a final, agonal gasp as the shock kills him, but the blockage trembles, trembles, and then explodes into a torrent of white light.

River pulls away from him just in time as the energy fills him and then spills out of every break in his skin. The floor beneath them quivers as the TARDIS keens in sympathy and the gonging first slows and then finally stops as the light fades away, leaving behind a different body. River knows the flavor of his mind, though, and that's changed only slightly. He's more bitter now, more acidic -- like the way the coffee tastes when Mal makes it.

He's also very, very angry.

***

End of Chapter 1