Hiding

            “Doctor.” 

            The gentle word pulled him from his thoughts, and he raised his eyebrows, peering through the fringe of hair that dangled in front of the eye between him and River.  “Hm?” 

            Her hand brushed the hair out of the way, but it sprang back, just not quite as far as it had been.  “Can I ask you something?”

            He chuckled, shaking his head and looking out at the view of the scarlet oceans of Viraliss.  “Asking permission.  You.  Now I’ve seen everything.”

            “No, you haven’t,” River whispered near his ear, leaning forward to follow his gaze.  It really was beautiful here.  Another stunning place he decided to take her on one of the outings that she had long called dates, but he had only recently begun to admit to.  “Why do you hide it?  Your name.”

            “What brought this on?” he asked in an attempt to divert from answering the question, an attempt to hide the rush of sadness the question had brought.

            “A moment of quiet that gave space for it.”

            He should’ve known it wouldn’t help.  “Melody Pond,” he said softly, “River Song, professor of archaeology, child of the TARDIS....”  The Doctor shook his head.  “You’re a lot of things.  You can even regenerate, or could anyway.  But there are things, oh so many things, you can never be.  Regeneration, wisdom, intelligence, these things aren’t what make the Time Lords.  Neither is being a child of Gallifrey, which you aren’t.”

            “I know a long-winded way of saying I wouldn’t understand when I hear one,” River said teasingly.  “I am probably the only other person in the universe who knows it, Doctor.  Can you not also tell me why it’s only the two of us?”

            He was silent for a long moment, twining his fingers together, contemplating the view without seeing it.  Finally, he asked her a question of his own.  “Why aren’t you Melody Pond anymore?”

            River blinked, then half-smiled.  “But I am.  I’ve always been.”

            “No, you haven’t.”  The smile he turned to her was not joyful.  “You know when you stopped being Melody Pond.  You remembered who you were, what you had been, what you had done,” as he spoke, his eyes wandered away from her again, the weight of his years in them, “and you were River Song instead.  Knowing who you were, associating with your parents as much as you could, you made yourself into someone else rather than remain Melody Pond.”

            She searched his eyes, at least the one she could see.  “The Time Lords are gone, my love.  No one knows that history anymore.”

            Not even a ghost of a smile remained.  “Names are how we tell one thing from another.  What we call something, that name is what we associate with everything to do with that thing.  One infamous man tainted the name Adolf for all of human history.  Any child unfortunately named that, no matter how much time had passed, would always, always be associated with what someone else had done.

            “And I am not even someone else,” he finished, nearly inaudible.

            “You?” she scoffed, a bit overwhelmed with disbelief.  “What could you possibly have done that would warrant this level of hiding?  What could a man like you possibly do that time could never heal?  This was long before the Time War, and even that, you did because you had to.  What caused this?  What are you hiding from?”

            “River!”  The force of the snap stopped her in her tracks.  “Don’t ever try to suppose that you know me.  That you know what I am or am not capable of.  I have known you for a fraction of my life, after centuries of traveling with people far, far better than I am, who have helped me make myself better, helped me make a name I am proud of.”  He hid his face in a hand, hid from those eyes that were shockingly innocent for a woman who had done so much in her own life.  “The Time Lords knew.  I couldn’t hide it from them.  But I could make something new, and I could present that to the rest of the universe, I could be something else to everything else that was out there.”

            “Then why tell me at all?”

            “Never admitted something just so you could?  Just to certain people who would understand, who,” he broke off for a moment.  “Who would forgive you anything.  I know it’s meaningless, you don’t know what it means, it’s stupid to think.”  His own words were silenced this time by River placing a hand over his entwined ones.  He looked up to see a soft smile.  She had no words this time, but at the moment, the fact she didn’t say anything was better than anything she could have said.

            Leaning her shoulder against his, they watched the tide go out.