Yowzah Oneshot Collection (3)

30(G)

            Of Maps and Memories

                    bendingwind

Across several pages of River’s beloved diary, there are scribbled maps and scrawling descriptions of incredible places, and unlike the rest of the extraordinary events described therein, these are drawn carefully with painstaking detail rather than gleefully jotted down an messily illustrated. They are different—these are the places she explored within the TARDIS. These are their places, filled with memories and peace and longing.

Every drop of ink put into those oh-so-precious maps is a memory to be cherished.

***

The first two pages of her journal are mostly black and white, with a slightly messy blue circle sprawled across the center to indicate the TARDIS’ console. Neatly written out in the bottom corner is the title Floor Zero.

There is a tiny circle for the chair the Doctor dropped her into while he treated a nasty cut on her arm after he rescued her from the particularly dangerous kittens of the Regis Corona. Afterwards, she often complained about how it had disappeared except when she looked out of the corner of her eye. “Where am I supposed to sit,” she asked, “while you fiddle about uselessly with all those buttons?” There are also two carefully placed dots for the repair kit and the first aid, which she had reason to become intimately familiar with over the course of her time with the Doctor.

There are marks in different ink indicating the different areas of the back rooms, added as she slowly became familiar with them. She once joked, the first time she entered the Doctor’s room, that she wanted to mark it in shiny gold ink but was afraid it would make her seem too much like a lovelorn teenager. He had laughed at that. It, like almost everything on these precious pages, is marked in plain black ink.

***

The next map was once red, but a reaction with some strange radiation when they visited the Medusa Cascade turned entirely to shades of grey. Nonetheless, that in and of itself is a memory of a beautiful day spent sitting just outside the TARDIS, staring at the stars. It was the first time she’d worked up the courage to slip her hand shyly into the Doctor’s, and she’d been so thrilled when his beautiful fingers had briefly squeezed her hand before he left go. She’d related the event to him from her perspective later, and he had smiled a real smile, one that spread across his face and into his beautiful eyes.

The map itself was always one of her favorites, and it catalogues most of the vast library inside the TARDIS. There is a careful label on every section she ever visited, some for research and some for more… interesting… purposes. She even wrote down a section especially for Spoilers, where his companion diary was kept. She never did read it, though she often remarked that she wished she could. However, spoilers were spoilers, and there were some things she said she’d rather not know before they happened.

***

Floor 17-J, as she often remarked with disgust, was her absolutely least favorite floor. He’d teased her that that was only the case because she got lost there so often. Precisely because of that, however, her map is incredibly detailed despite the fact that the floor is the size of a small continent.

The truth, which she told him only later, was that she’d spent a horrible night crying at the Valley of Regret over a horrible mistake, and because he’d once told her he’d played there as a child sometimes. She hated to imagine a ghost of him playing in the ruins, she’d explained with a shudder.

***

Farther back in the diary is another map of which she is particularly proud, and it depicts one of her favorite floors. The recreation donut thing has a swimming pool that, though it is no longer located in the library, reflects words swimming in the water when the light from the artificial sun hits it just right. There are other memories, in particular the time there was a leak of corobrium oil (an aphrodisiac to Time Lords, he’d explained defeatedly later) at the precise time they went swimming. If River engineered the leak on purpose, she never said.