Fanfiction: Infinity
Title: Infinity
Author: bendingwind
Notes: [Doctor Who | M/R | 5022 words]
Characters: River/Eleven, River, Eleven, Amy, Rory
Summary: prompt by tardis_coral for the spoiler_song ficathon, River/Eleven, 5 times River asks the Doctor his true name, and the 1 time he tells her.
17.
“I am not doing anything for you until you tell me your name!” River Song pronounces, fists planted firmly on her hips as she stares down the strange floppy-haired man with terrible taste in fashion. A bowtie, really?
“I realize we haven’t actually met yet, River, you’ve made that perfectly clear-well, I’ve met you, don’t look at me that way I already said I’d explain it later-and you have no idea who I am, but will you please just trust me?”
“Not without a name,” she repeats, stubbornly.
“I already told you, I’m the Doctor! That’s my name!”
“Doctor is a title, not a name,” she points out, and he looks as if he might die from sheer exasperation.
“River, there are Usorian spaceships orbiting this entire planet, waiting to put up sun screens so that they can kill everyone on it and mine it for meat, and I need a spectro-inverter to stop them. You’ve already broken in once, just tell me the passcodes and I’ll get it myself!”
“Naaaaame,” she singsongs, and his face scrunches up in impotent rage. River beams-she’s always enjoyed riling people up, but this man in particular wrinkles his face up in the most marvelous way when he’s angry. Two people round the corner, and River quickly places her bag of stolen spectro conversion units behind her back. They’re worth more than her life if she’s caught stealing them.
“Doctor, there you-is that River?” the woman asks, and River finds herself rather aghast at meeting yet another person who apparently already knows who she is. Obviously, this was not the day to break into the Council’s secure holding facility.
The Doctor nods, and the woman swaggers up to River with a slightly predatory grin. “Hi, I’m Amy Williams. That’s Rory, my husband.” She motions vaguely in the direction of the man who was with her, and her smile widens a little. “Goodness, you’re a lot younger, aren’t you? I hardly recognize you!” River takes a step back as Amy comes a little too close for comfort, and trips over an unfortunate ridge in the hallway. Amy reaches out as if to steady her, but her hand only lands ineffectually on River’s shoulder, followed by a quick stinging pain. River feels her limbs stiffen and she drops her bag, suddenly unable to control her extremities. Slowly, she collapses.
“Good idea with the alien toxins, Rory,” Amy says, peering down at River, who struggles ineffectually to move. “Right then,” she squats down in front of River, still smiling, “Want to tell us those codes now, River?”
“Wait, now-“ the Doctor begins to protest, but Amy shushes him with a violent wave of her hand.
River struggles to make her throat work properly, but after a moment she is able to choke out a “yes.” She wouldn’t put it past this beautiful redhead to leave her here, paralyzed, to be found by the authorities. Might as well let them get the rest of the merchandise-it’d be a pain to haul, anyway. Rory pulls a pad of paper and a pen out of a back pocket-what kind of clothes is he wearing, anyway? He looks like something out of a history film-and stands, poised to write her instructions down.
“First door’s Y-E-L-L-K-I, Yellki, the name of the guard’s wife. Second’s 008842224. After that, push the little yellow button to override the handprint authorization and type in Hassibel, H-A-S-S-I-B-E-L, the manager’s name, and then 4439. The third door’s just your basic lock-there’s a sonic blaster in my left pocket that ought to get you through.”
“I’ve got a sonic screwdriver,” the Doctor says dismissively, “but thanks for offering. Rory, get her blaster.”
“Wait, what?” she says, still straining a little to speak properly, “I thought you didn’t need it.”
“I don’t,” he agrees, “I’m just going to take it apart. Nasty things, sonic blasters. Always come out on the wrong side of things when one’s involved.” He shrugs, a little more happily, and the man called Rory reaches into her pocket and retrieves the sonic blaster. From one of his own pockets, he produces a second thin needle, which he carefully jabs into her arm, just below the first needle mark. “This will negate the toxin in about ten minutes,” he explains, pulling out an old-fashion (and by old fashioned, she means from the era of dinosaurs) bandage and placing it over the punctures in her skin. He pats it briefly before standing.
“Nice to, er, see you, River,” he says, ridiculously awkward. Amy chuckles lightly behind his back. “Yeah, River, it was nice to see you. You age well, I promise. C’mon Doctor, we’ve only got half an hour.” She skips ahead, Rory close in her footsteps, but the Doctor doesn’t follow immediately. Instead, he takes one long look at River, lying helplessly on the floor. After a moment, he shakes his head, smiles at her, and turns to follow his companions.
20.
River is leaning against a rail by the console of the TARDIS, watching the Doctor fiddle with random knobs and levers and something that looks rather like surviving pictures of a twentieth century toaster. She half suspects he’s only doing it because he’s bored, not because his time machine actually needs this much piloting. Amy and Rory are elsewhere-River has a good idea where-and the room is a bit too silent for her liking.
“Does anyone know your name?” she asks.
“No-well, yes, but not anymore, or I suppose she could. There’s only one person alive who knows-or maybe will know, who knows how many different times she’s in right at this moment-my name. My mother knew, and my-well, we were together, had two children and a granddaughter, so I guess she was sort of my wife, only Time Lords don’t exactly marry-anyway, they both knew. There’s another woman, who knows where she is just now, could be anytime, who knows. Sometimes.”
“…so, two dead women and a woman who sounds like she must have the most hectic existence ever. What do you mean, she could be anytime?”
“Well,” he scratches the back of his head nervously, a habit he’s only recently picked up. She hadn’t noticed it until three weeks after she’d started traveling with him and his two companions, Amy and Rory Williams (Amy and Rory Pond, the Doctor likes to joke), and she strongly suspects he’d picked it up from that green-skinned elephant guy in that bar on Quillp. “I don’t know a lot about her, but I know she’s traveled through time without me on at least a couple of occasions, and she gets around quite a lot.”
River is more than a little outraged by this. “What, you can only tell strangers your name?” she quips, her words a little more biting than she’d like. She wants to sound funny, and witty, with just a little sting, and she’s afraid she’s given away just how hurt she is that he still won’t let her call him anything but ‘the Doctor’. He looks as if he doesn’t quite know what to say.
“It’s not like that. I haven’t told her. We keep… meeting in the wrong order, you see. It’s complicated. She knew my name before I told her, at least in my timeline. It’s all very… timey-wimey,” he says, and grimaces as if the words taste strange on his tongue. “Won’t be saying that again. Not the same.”
She knows better than to ask, when he has strange moments like that, what the hell he’s talking about. Instead, she focuses on this woman, perhaps more curious (and jealous) than she should be. She’s only been traveling with the doctor for two months.
“So… what do you know about her?” she asks, trying very, very hard not to sound interested. He’s moved around to the other side of the console, where he’s doing something that’s making a rather odd, loud clicking noise. He doesn’t answer for a bit.
“Well… I think I probably marry her. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but I think I do.” River’s jaw hits the floor. Future best friend, pet cat morphed into a human, dalek-human hybrid, even daughter, she could have handled, but the mental image of the (totally asexual, as far as she could tell, and she’d done her best to tell) Time Lord with a wife more or less scrambles her brain.
“What?” she asks, as soon as it fully sinks in.
“Well, yeah,” he says, poking his head around the console where he can see her. He looks unfairly amused when he spots her flabbergasted expression. “I think I probably marry her. Just have to wait and see, I guess. Would you hand me that button there, the blue one, it’s rather boring don’t you think?”
“…Sure,” she says, and she carefully pops a blue button off of the console, leaving a rather rusty screw behind. She offers it to the Doctor, who glances at it and exclaims, “What! No, not that one, the other one! Put that back, it’s important and it should definitely not be off of the console for very long. I want the paler blue one. She does as he says and stands there, watching as he attaches it to a red button already fixed on the end of a complicated series of bars and levers that probably does something very, very trivial and ridiculous. There’s a huge button with a “Do Not Touch” sign in a back hallway behind her room that, when pressed (because she’s River, and of course she pressed it), only mops the floor.
“So, you keep meeting your wife in the wrong order,” she says, when he steps back to admire his handwork.
“Possibly,” he agrees, adjusting the blue button just a little and stepping back once again.
“Has she tried to ravish you yet, thinking you were married-you?” she teases. He glowers at her for a moment, and she laughs. When he doesn’t answer beyond the look, she asks, “So… what is your name?”
Irritation instantly gone, he grins and her and flicks her nose, gently. She scowls angrily up at him.
“That’s not for you to know,” he says, before twirling around and leaving the console room in a strange series of rather clumsy but oddly graceful motions. She can almost swear she hears him add a yet to that sentence once he’s out of sight.
“I’m going to start calling you something stupid like Sweetie if you won’t tell me!” she calls in his direction, and grinning broadly, she settles back against the railing around the console. He gave her a copy of the TARDIS instruction manual, and she fully intends to memorize it before they arrive at What-Will-Be-Cardiff, 509 A.D.
24.
“Dammit, tell me your name,” she pants, leaning over him. There is a small dark vial clutched tightly but carefully in her gloved hand. “They won’t give me the other half of the antidote unless I can identify you by name, so they can check their records to insure you aren’t a danger.”
He doesn’t respond, face motionless and still, lips an unhealthy pale blue. She feels tears pricking at the back of her eyes.
“Come on, Doctor, wake up and answer me!” she says, part plea, part angry exclamation. He remains still, and she fights against the urge to shake him violently, because she is all too aware that it won’t do any good.
A familiar vworp-vworp echoes through the air, and River looks up with frantic eyes. There it is, a familiar and beloved blue box, right where it shouldn’t be. The door clicks slightly as it opens.
“You wouldn’t tell me your name,” she says, almost whispering, to the familiar man who steps out. He shrugs.
“You didn’t need to know it, and they only insisted because they thought you’d tell them without me around to put a stop to things.” He holds out a second vial, this one clear and full of red fluid. “Mix this with the other bit and shake it for ten seconds before pouring it down my throat. Leaves a nasty aftertaste otherwise.” Hurriedly, she unscrews the lid and begins mixing it with the other half of the antidote. His footsteps move away from her, the door clicks open and shut once again, and the sound of de-materialization reaches her ears, but she doesn’t look up to watch the TARDIS go. She pours the antidote into the Doctor’s mouth-her Doctor, the one she’s been with through this entire adventure-and after a split second he sits up, coughing loudly.
“What-you figured out the antidote?” he asks, eagerly, peering at the small set of vials in her hands. Mute, she can only shake her head and fight the urge to either cling desperately to him or shout at him until he gets it through his thick, thick skull that she doesn’t want him to risk himself that way for her, ever again.
25.
Their timeline is beginning to fall out of sync-twice already she’s met him in the wrong order-but they’re together at the moment and that, quite frankly, is all she cares about.
The Doctor is sitting in an oversized armchair by the fireplace in her favorite reading room, just off the TARDIS’ extensive library. There’s a fire in a tiny fireplace, and lengthy paper on the evolution of non-technological technology on Lamasteen in his delicate, lovely hands. River, who has only just returned from a two month ‘vacation’ on Keelmahara (where she successfully charged tourists absurd amounts of money to help them locate buried treasure, which they have undoubtedly discovered is all rocks surrounded with a perception filter by now) is sitting in a seat across from him, watching as he carefully turns the pages.
He broke those two fingers running from strange orange blobs on Rolma Pax, the time she had to ditch her favorite pair of purple stilettos, and the scar, just there on his cheek and still a little pink, came from a clumsy moment when he tripped bailing her out of prison after a party on Bomsay ℒ-μ10. He hadn’t even batted an eyelash at the short red dress she’d been wearing, and it had made her unreasonably angry. There is a bruise on his shoulder, covered by his jacket, from a nasty blow delivered by an equally nasty policeman in 1894, who for once was not chasing River. And there’s a tiny tattoo, just below his right shoulder blade, that he doesn’t know he has. He was unconscious at the time, and the planetary immigration authorities wouldn’t let him through without a proper tag, so River and Amy had decided it was best to just do it and never tell him.
He is a remarkable, remarkable man-Time Lord, she corrects herself, but really isn’t he a man nonetheless? Not human, but a man-and River wants, more than anything in the world, for him to think she is an equally remarkable woman.
She’s fairly certain he doesn’t, but fortunately, she is also not the type of woman to give up.
“Doctor?” she asks, and he looks up from the paper.
“What?” he asks in turn, lovely eyes staring curiously at her. She studies the wallpaper behind his head for a moment, pondering over what she’s about to ask. Does she have any right to know his name? What has she done, to deserve such a thing?
“What…” At the last moment, her courage fails, and she changes her question. “What am I like, when I’m older?” He blinks at her, as if he doesn’t quite know what to say.
“You were… you,” he finally answers, and of course it’s not an answer at all. River feels unreasonable anger at him welling up once again, and she stands abruptly. She starts to leave them room, and suddenly he’s standing too, right behind her, one of those beautiful hands resting lightly on her shoulder.
“Sit,” he says, and she complies, not quite able to meet his eyes. He remains standing.
“I don’t have words for it,” he explains, carefully. “But you were marvelous. You are marvelous.” River looks up at him then, and his eyes are so full of kindness and understanding that the temptation to shoot him is almost overwhelming. Stupid Time Lord.
“What’s your name?” she demands, because it’s ridiculous that she’s probably in love with a stupidly kind and wise man, and she doesn’t even know his name. It is his turn to look away, and then, reluctantly, he leans down so that his mouth sits in the air next to her ear. His ridiculous floppy hair tickles her cheek and her eyes focus on the corner of his bowtie, and she fights so, so hard to control her breathing. Softly, he whispers something, and she closes her eyes and savors the sensation of his breath on her neck. He straightens and walks back into the library proper, and his words don’t sink in until he’s already gone.
“Not yet,” he says, “Soon, but not yet.” Her eyes widen with understanding, and not for the first time, she wants to cry because of this man.
26.
“Sooo…” she sidles up next to him, intentionally brushing her hip against his. He looks at her, eyes dark with something, and then shakes his head as if to clear it. He’s elbow deep in the inner machinery of the universe’s largest oven, and if he can’t get the wires reconnected in the next five minutes, the universe’s largest restaurant world is going to explode. She’s already fixed the bug in the programming that caused the problem in the first place.
“Not now, River,” he says, clearly aware of exactly what she is trying to do. His fingers fly, delicately rethreading wires and occasionally flipping tiny levers on the inside of the machine. She slips a gloved hand across the side of his ribs, under that ridiculous jacket, and one of the people behind them coughs loudly. He doesn’t quite manage to cover his coworker’s blunt comment, “Sexual harassment.” They’re in the twenty-seventh century, and things like that are still a big deal.
He squiggles and sends her a disapproving look when she doesn’t immediately remove her hand, which River takes as an invitation to move her hand lower, and he actually yelps aloud and jumps a little.
“River! ” he scolds, “The fate of the world is at stake here, would you stop groping me?!”
There are mild, cautious titters from the small crowd gathered behind them, and River looks over her shoulder to shoot them a reproving glare. They shut up immediately. He continues to work, dutifully ignoring the hand traveling to his inner thigh or the shoulder touching his own so intimately, and eventually the wires are properly connected and warning signals, one by one, stop screaming at them.
He grabs River by the arm, a little more roughly than usual, and begins to pull her towards the TARDIS. They are intercepted by their audience, all of whom are alive because of his actions, and reluctantly dragged to a party in their honor.
Half an hour later River and the Doctor are comfortably ensconced in some sort of booth, surrounded by people celebrating the salvation of their planet (and River may or may not have conned them out of a sacred statue that will be worth a ridiculous sum of money in the near future). Her leg is pressed tightly against his, and for once he’s not protesting. Slowly, the center of the party drifts away from its unwilling guests of honor, until no one is paying them any attention.
She leans over and whispers in his ear, as sultry as she can manage, praise over what he’s done today. When she finishes, she bites down, the barest hint of pressure, on his earlobe. He shudders violently at the contact, but still doesn’t protest, and she lays a line of kisses along his jaw. He turns his head so that his lips meet hers, and she can’t quite believe it, but she’s kissing him. She tries to deepen the kiss, running her tongue lightly over his soft lips. He tastes salty and a little bit like the Siberian Huxlau they are for lunch, and it’s wonderful, but then he’s pulling away. His eyes are dark and fascinating and fathomless as he stares back at her. Her plan of seduction fades quickly from her mind, drowned in the desire simply to be with him. She smiles, hopeful and bright, because even though he was the one to pull away in the end, he kissed her back. His expression does not change, and slowly she begins to lose confidence.
“Will you tell me now?” she asks, slowly and softly, and half of her knows he won’t, but the other half can’t stop the ridiculous hope that he will.
“No,” he answers, and she closes her eyes. She’s a strong woman, and she won’t cry over this. And if she does, it will be somewhere where he cannot see how much it hurt. She doesn’t want him to think less of her because of the way she feels.
29.
She’s stumbling through a deserted concrete hallway, bleeding from a stab wound to her shoulder and favoring badly burned ribs. She hasn’t seen the Doctor for three years, and there are ridiculous pink-and-orange-striped, poodle-like Afraxillians chasing her, and at this moment she’d give anything for even a fifth-rate, broken down neutron-inverter so she could skip just a few minutes forward in time. It might be enough to save her.
She’s already had to drop a gun she could no longer summon the strength to hold; slowly, she’s coming to realize that she’s going to die here. Somehow, the thought that the Doctor will never know happened to her hurts worse than the looming threat of death.
She wonders, not for the first time since he left her outside her flat on Earth in 5083, if he even cares what’s happening. Sometimes, just sometimes, she was so certain he felt the same way. The party on BawaDima where he let her kiss him: the café on Pluto III where he kissed her, just a brief peck of lips, before she slid down a ventilation shaft to unlock a door from the inside. She’d felt so certain that he loved her, then. She’d been sure he’d answer her, when she asked for his name on BawaDima.
She feels tears well up at the thought of dying without ever knowing his name, his real name, and she forces them back down. She’s certainly going to die here if she dissolves into a weeping mess.
And she’s going to die here. She stumbles and only barely recovers, and she thinks maybe it would be easier to just give up-and then, like a benediction from on high, a familiar sound reaches her ears, and she stumbles into her Doctor’s arms as he dashes out of the TARDIS.
“River,” he gasps, and she fights the mad urge to sob in his embrace. His arms tighten around her for a moment, and then he pushes her back.
“Are you alright?” he asks, more than a little desperate as his eyes search her up and down for signs of injury. His eyes rest briefly on her shoulder, and he winces.
“Ribs are burned, too,” she mutters, and suddenly she finds herself unable to meet his eyes. “They had some sort of a gun. You’re a bit late, aren’t you?” His mouth briefly twists into a devastated frown, and then his deceptively thin arms tighten around her in another quick embrace. He lets go, and with minimal awkward shuffling, picks her up and carries her into the TARDIS. He sets her there, against the railing by the console, as he takes them away to someplace safe.
“Come on,” he says, looking down at her with infinitely old and infinitely sad eyes. “Let’s get you to the recovery room.” She can only nod, exhausted, as he unsteadily picks her up again and carries her farther into the TARDIS. Somewhere between the console room and the recovery room, she loses consciousness. When she wakes up, she’s lying in a soft dark bed, and he isn’t in the room with her. She isn’t terribly disappointed, because she knows exactly where he’ll be. She stands and stretches, happily noting that she’s fully recovered, and leaves the room.
She’s already forgotten what it feels like to doubt him.
“I’ll have to drop you off so you can leave me-from-the-past that he-I-er, well, me-from-the-past will be showing up on Irillion about two hundred years from now, and you’ll need to leave a note there so you can tell him he has to go rescue you,” he says, when she opens the door to her favorite reading room just off the library. He must have heard the hinges squeaking. He’s sitting in a chair facing the small fireplace, and a feeling that can only be called home wells up in her chest.
She nods, and then, realizing he can’t see her, clears her throat and utters a simple “Yes.” He turns to smile at her.
“I missed you,” he says.
“It’s been three years.” There isn’t any accusation or anger in her voice, though once there would have been.
“Five for me,” he says, amiably. Slowly, afraid she’ll wake up if she moves too quickly, River walks to him. She stands there, by the side of his chair, looking down at him while he looks up at her.
“I love you,” she says, simply, and the small smile that creeps onto his face is so full of happiness she thinks her heart will break.
“I know,” he says, and if this moment were any less important, she’s swat him for such a stupid answer. Instead she kneels down beside him and presses her lips to his, not for curiosity or greed or ownership, but because she can’t think of any other way to say I’m yours.
He kisses her back, and a wave of joy washes over her when he realizes he’s saying and I’m yours in return.
She almost died today without knowing.
The kiss deepens and slowly the clothes come off, unhurried and gentle, soft fingers against softer skin as she joins him in the chair, placing feather-light kisses up the side of his torso as she does. He purrs and she moans, quietly, while they explore unfamiliar stretches of body. She runs a hand through his silky hair and he bites, ever so carefully, the lobe of her ear. She wonders if he’s intentionally echoing what she tried to do to him on another world a long time ago, and then forgets about it completely as he brushes kisses across her forehead. She kisses his throat and slowly licks the tender spot just above his pulse. His fingers-beautiful, beautiful fingers that she’s always loved-toy with the edges of her panties, brushing her inner thigh. She curves her spine to move closer to him, and nips at his throat in retaliation.
He laughs, then, a deep throaty laugh that is utterly unfamiliar, and she laughs too with the sheer joy of hearing that sound from him, and knowing she caused it. His fingers move again, toying with her opening, and her laughter abruptly turns into a soft moan. He continues to move his fingers as he kisses slowly across the swell of her breasts, and time dissolves into a series of touches and pleasures and the simply joy of being there, together, doing this.
Finally she is straddling him, and they are rocking together, a gentle rhythm for something that should have happened so long ago but was always meant to happen now, here. He is purring again, and she muffles her giggles in his shoulder when she realizes that this is the Time Lord’s expression of satisfaction. She pulls back a bit and moves to engage his lips once again.
There are drums, quiet and steady and intoxicating.
The motions become less rhythmic and coordinated as they near their climax, but they are lost in each other and neither of them cares. Someone nuzzles a neck and someone runs cool hands up a smooth ribcage, pausing to trace each rib. Purring and panting and soft, soft moans rise through the air.
And, in a moment of bliss as they both come, River knows his name. It is everything that he is, a word-phrase-sound that encompasses all he was, is and ever will be. She shudders with the darkness and the joy of knowing.
The ecstasy ends, and reality sinks in. She gasps and pushes violently off of him, scrambling back to the opposite corner of the room.
“You’re-“ she begins, before words give out. Solemnly, he nods, old sad eyes staring at her like the end of the world. “You…” She waves a hand helplessly, unable to grasp the enormity, the horror, the thrill, of what she knows.
“You are your name.”
He nods, once again, and still makes no move to speak. Slowly, as if she will break and shatter if she bends too quickly, River rises and walks to him. More hesitant than she has ever been, even when they had only just met, she reaches out to place a warm hand on his cheek.
He smiles, and she knows it means everything to him that she is willing to accept him-the true him-and the horrible burden that comes with knowing the fundamental nature of another being in exquisite, painful detail. A tear runs down her cheek, and moving as slowly as she did, he reaches up to wipe it away with the rough pad of his thumb.
She has never loved him more.
River, you know my name. You whispered my name in my ear. There’s only one reason I would ever tell anyone my name-there’s only one time I could…
Hush, now. Spoilers.
A/N: Time Lords can too purr.
First venture into light (maybe?) smutfic, and I’m pretty sure I FAIL at writing it, so please ruthlessly point out every typo, awkward sentence and/or gross/off-putting metaphor you happen to notice. I promise I’ll appreciate it. A sexier word for panties would be wonderful (the first person to bring up ‘thong’ will be summarily shot). Quiet!sex is intentional, because I personally find that hotter.
This fic basically ate my brain, but despite the sweat, blood and tears (okay, there wasn’t any of that, but it felt like it. Mental sweat, blood and tears if you will) I really enjoyed writing this. Also, I may or may not have an ear fetish.
Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to Doctor Who and I am not making any profit from this work of fanfiction.
Author: bendingwind
Notes: [Doctor Who | M/R | 5022 words]
Characters: River/Eleven, River, Eleven, Amy, Rory
Summary: prompt by tardis_coral for the spoiler_song ficathon, River/Eleven, 5 times River asks the Doctor his true name, and the 1 time he tells her.
17.
“I am not doing anything for you until you tell me your name!” River Song pronounces, fists planted firmly on her hips as she stares down the strange floppy-haired man with terrible taste in fashion. A bowtie, really?
“I realize we haven’t actually met yet, River, you’ve made that perfectly clear-well, I’ve met you, don’t look at me that way I already said I’d explain it later-and you have no idea who I am, but will you please just trust me?”
“Not without a name,” she repeats, stubbornly.
“I already told you, I’m the Doctor! That’s my name!”
“Doctor is a title, not a name,” she points out, and he looks as if he might die from sheer exasperation.
“River, there are Usorian spaceships orbiting this entire planet, waiting to put up sun screens so that they can kill everyone on it and mine it for meat, and I need a spectro-inverter to stop them. You’ve already broken in once, just tell me the passcodes and I’ll get it myself!”
“Naaaaame,” she singsongs, and his face scrunches up in impotent rage. River beams-she’s always enjoyed riling people up, but this man in particular wrinkles his face up in the most marvelous way when he’s angry. Two people round the corner, and River quickly places her bag of stolen spectro conversion units behind her back. They’re worth more than her life if she’s caught stealing them.
“Doctor, there you-is that River?” the woman asks, and River finds herself rather aghast at meeting yet another person who apparently already knows who she is. Obviously, this was not the day to break into the Council’s secure holding facility.
The Doctor nods, and the woman swaggers up to River with a slightly predatory grin. “Hi, I’m Amy Williams. That’s Rory, my husband.” She motions vaguely in the direction of the man who was with her, and her smile widens a little. “Goodness, you’re a lot younger, aren’t you? I hardly recognize you!” River takes a step back as Amy comes a little too close for comfort, and trips over an unfortunate ridge in the hallway. Amy reaches out as if to steady her, but her hand only lands ineffectually on River’s shoulder, followed by a quick stinging pain. River feels her limbs stiffen and she drops her bag, suddenly unable to control her extremities. Slowly, she collapses.
“Good idea with the alien toxins, Rory,” Amy says, peering down at River, who struggles ineffectually to move. “Right then,” she squats down in front of River, still smiling, “Want to tell us those codes now, River?”
“Wait, now-“ the Doctor begins to protest, but Amy shushes him with a violent wave of her hand.
River struggles to make her throat work properly, but after a moment she is able to choke out a “yes.” She wouldn’t put it past this beautiful redhead to leave her here, paralyzed, to be found by the authorities. Might as well let them get the rest of the merchandise-it’d be a pain to haul, anyway. Rory pulls a pad of paper and a pen out of a back pocket-what kind of clothes is he wearing, anyway? He looks like something out of a history film-and stands, poised to write her instructions down.
“First door’s Y-E-L-L-K-I, Yellki, the name of the guard’s wife. Second’s 008842224. After that, push the little yellow button to override the handprint authorization and type in Hassibel, H-A-S-S-I-B-E-L, the manager’s name, and then 4439. The third door’s just your basic lock-there’s a sonic blaster in my left pocket that ought to get you through.”
“I’ve got a sonic screwdriver,” the Doctor says dismissively, “but thanks for offering. Rory, get her blaster.”
“Wait, what?” she says, still straining a little to speak properly, “I thought you didn’t need it.”
“I don’t,” he agrees, “I’m just going to take it apart. Nasty things, sonic blasters. Always come out on the wrong side of things when one’s involved.” He shrugs, a little more happily, and the man called Rory reaches into her pocket and retrieves the sonic blaster. From one of his own pockets, he produces a second thin needle, which he carefully jabs into her arm, just below the first needle mark. “This will negate the toxin in about ten minutes,” he explains, pulling out an old-fashion (and by old fashioned, she means from the era of dinosaurs) bandage and placing it over the punctures in her skin. He pats it briefly before standing.
“Nice to, er, see you, River,” he says, ridiculously awkward. Amy chuckles lightly behind his back. “Yeah, River, it was nice to see you. You age well, I promise. C’mon Doctor, we’ve only got half an hour.” She skips ahead, Rory close in her footsteps, but the Doctor doesn’t follow immediately. Instead, he takes one long look at River, lying helplessly on the floor. After a moment, he shakes his head, smiles at her, and turns to follow his companions.
20.
River is leaning against a rail by the console of the TARDIS, watching the Doctor fiddle with random knobs and levers and something that looks rather like surviving pictures of a twentieth century toaster. She half suspects he’s only doing it because he’s bored, not because his time machine actually needs this much piloting. Amy and Rory are elsewhere-River has a good idea where-and the room is a bit too silent for her liking.
“Does anyone know your name?” she asks.
“No-well, yes, but not anymore, or I suppose she could. There’s only one person alive who knows-or maybe will know, who knows how many different times she’s in right at this moment-my name. My mother knew, and my-well, we were together, had two children and a granddaughter, so I guess she was sort of my wife, only Time Lords don’t exactly marry-anyway, they both knew. There’s another woman, who knows where she is just now, could be anytime, who knows. Sometimes.”
“…so, two dead women and a woman who sounds like she must have the most hectic existence ever. What do you mean, she could be anytime?”
“Well,” he scratches the back of his head nervously, a habit he’s only recently picked up. She hadn’t noticed it until three weeks after she’d started traveling with him and his two companions, Amy and Rory Williams (Amy and Rory Pond, the Doctor likes to joke), and she strongly suspects he’d picked it up from that green-skinned elephant guy in that bar on Quillp. “I don’t know a lot about her, but I know she’s traveled through time without me on at least a couple of occasions, and she gets around quite a lot.”
River is more than a little outraged by this. “What, you can only tell strangers your name?” she quips, her words a little more biting than she’d like. She wants to sound funny, and witty, with just a little sting, and she’s afraid she’s given away just how hurt she is that he still won’t let her call him anything but ‘the Doctor’. He looks as if he doesn’t quite know what to say.
“It’s not like that. I haven’t told her. We keep… meeting in the wrong order, you see. It’s complicated. She knew my name before I told her, at least in my timeline. It’s all very… timey-wimey,” he says, and grimaces as if the words taste strange on his tongue. “Won’t be saying that again. Not the same.”
She knows better than to ask, when he has strange moments like that, what the hell he’s talking about. Instead, she focuses on this woman, perhaps more curious (and jealous) than she should be. She’s only been traveling with the doctor for two months.
“So… what do you know about her?” she asks, trying very, very hard not to sound interested. He’s moved around to the other side of the console, where he’s doing something that’s making a rather odd, loud clicking noise. He doesn’t answer for a bit.
“Well… I think I probably marry her. I mean, I don’t know for sure, but I think I do.” River’s jaw hits the floor. Future best friend, pet cat morphed into a human, dalek-human hybrid, even daughter, she could have handled, but the mental image of the (totally asexual, as far as she could tell, and she’d done her best to tell) Time Lord with a wife more or less scrambles her brain.
“What?” she asks, as soon as it fully sinks in.
“Well, yeah,” he says, poking his head around the console where he can see her. He looks unfairly amused when he spots her flabbergasted expression. “I think I probably marry her. Just have to wait and see, I guess. Would you hand me that button there, the blue one, it’s rather boring don’t you think?”
“…Sure,” she says, and she carefully pops a blue button off of the console, leaving a rather rusty screw behind. She offers it to the Doctor, who glances at it and exclaims, “What! No, not that one, the other one! Put that back, it’s important and it should definitely not be off of the console for very long. I want the paler blue one. She does as he says and stands there, watching as he attaches it to a red button already fixed on the end of a complicated series of bars and levers that probably does something very, very trivial and ridiculous. There’s a huge button with a “Do Not Touch” sign in a back hallway behind her room that, when pressed (because she’s River, and of course she pressed it), only mops the floor.
“So, you keep meeting your wife in the wrong order,” she says, when he steps back to admire his handwork.
“Possibly,” he agrees, adjusting the blue button just a little and stepping back once again.
“Has she tried to ravish you yet, thinking you were married-you?” she teases. He glowers at her for a moment, and she laughs. When he doesn’t answer beyond the look, she asks, “So… what is your name?”
Irritation instantly gone, he grins and her and flicks her nose, gently. She scowls angrily up at him.
“That’s not for you to know,” he says, before twirling around and leaving the console room in a strange series of rather clumsy but oddly graceful motions. She can almost swear she hears him add a yet to that sentence once he’s out of sight.
“I’m going to start calling you something stupid like Sweetie if you won’t tell me!” she calls in his direction, and grinning broadly, she settles back against the railing around the console. He gave her a copy of the TARDIS instruction manual, and she fully intends to memorize it before they arrive at What-Will-Be-Cardiff, 509 A.D.
24.
“Dammit, tell me your name,” she pants, leaning over him. There is a small dark vial clutched tightly but carefully in her gloved hand. “They won’t give me the other half of the antidote unless I can identify you by name, so they can check their records to insure you aren’t a danger.”
He doesn’t respond, face motionless and still, lips an unhealthy pale blue. She feels tears pricking at the back of her eyes.
“Come on, Doctor, wake up and answer me!” she says, part plea, part angry exclamation. He remains still, and she fights against the urge to shake him violently, because she is all too aware that it won’t do any good.
A familiar vworp-vworp echoes through the air, and River looks up with frantic eyes. There it is, a familiar and beloved blue box, right where it shouldn’t be. The door clicks slightly as it opens.
“You wouldn’t tell me your name,” she says, almost whispering, to the familiar man who steps out. He shrugs.
“You didn’t need to know it, and they only insisted because they thought you’d tell them without me around to put a stop to things.” He holds out a second vial, this one clear and full of red fluid. “Mix this with the other bit and shake it for ten seconds before pouring it down my throat. Leaves a nasty aftertaste otherwise.” Hurriedly, she unscrews the lid and begins mixing it with the other half of the antidote. His footsteps move away from her, the door clicks open and shut once again, and the sound of de-materialization reaches her ears, but she doesn’t look up to watch the TARDIS go. She pours the antidote into the Doctor’s mouth-her Doctor, the one she’s been with through this entire adventure-and after a split second he sits up, coughing loudly.
“What-you figured out the antidote?” he asks, eagerly, peering at the small set of vials in her hands. Mute, she can only shake her head and fight the urge to either cling desperately to him or shout at him until he gets it through his thick, thick skull that she doesn’t want him to risk himself that way for her, ever again.
25.
Their timeline is beginning to fall out of sync-twice already she’s met him in the wrong order-but they’re together at the moment and that, quite frankly, is all she cares about.
The Doctor is sitting in an oversized armchair by the fireplace in her favorite reading room, just off the TARDIS’ extensive library. There’s a fire in a tiny fireplace, and lengthy paper on the evolution of non-technological technology on Lamasteen in his delicate, lovely hands. River, who has only just returned from a two month ‘vacation’ on Keelmahara (where she successfully charged tourists absurd amounts of money to help them locate buried treasure, which they have undoubtedly discovered is all rocks surrounded with a perception filter by now) is sitting in a seat across from him, watching as he carefully turns the pages.
He broke those two fingers running from strange orange blobs on Rolma Pax, the time she had to ditch her favorite pair of purple stilettos, and the scar, just there on his cheek and still a little pink, came from a clumsy moment when he tripped bailing her out of prison after a party on Bomsay ℒ-μ10. He hadn’t even batted an eyelash at the short red dress she’d been wearing, and it had made her unreasonably angry. There is a bruise on his shoulder, covered by his jacket, from a nasty blow delivered by an equally nasty policeman in 1894, who for once was not chasing River. And there’s a tiny tattoo, just below his right shoulder blade, that he doesn’t know he has. He was unconscious at the time, and the planetary immigration authorities wouldn’t let him through without a proper tag, so River and Amy had decided it was best to just do it and never tell him.
He is a remarkable, remarkable man-Time Lord, she corrects herself, but really isn’t he a man nonetheless? Not human, but a man-and River wants, more than anything in the world, for him to think she is an equally remarkable woman.
She’s fairly certain he doesn’t, but fortunately, she is also not the type of woman to give up.
“Doctor?” she asks, and he looks up from the paper.
“What?” he asks in turn, lovely eyes staring curiously at her. She studies the wallpaper behind his head for a moment, pondering over what she’s about to ask. Does she have any right to know his name? What has she done, to deserve such a thing?
“What…” At the last moment, her courage fails, and she changes her question. “What am I like, when I’m older?” He blinks at her, as if he doesn’t quite know what to say.
“You were… you,” he finally answers, and of course it’s not an answer at all. River feels unreasonable anger at him welling up once again, and she stands abruptly. She starts to leave them room, and suddenly he’s standing too, right behind her, one of those beautiful hands resting lightly on her shoulder.
“Sit,” he says, and she complies, not quite able to meet his eyes. He remains standing.
“I don’t have words for it,” he explains, carefully. “But you were marvelous. You are marvelous.” River looks up at him then, and his eyes are so full of kindness and understanding that the temptation to shoot him is almost overwhelming. Stupid Time Lord.
“What’s your name?” she demands, because it’s ridiculous that she’s probably in love with a stupidly kind and wise man, and she doesn’t even know his name. It is his turn to look away, and then, reluctantly, he leans down so that his mouth sits in the air next to her ear. His ridiculous floppy hair tickles her cheek and her eyes focus on the corner of his bowtie, and she fights so, so hard to control her breathing. Softly, he whispers something, and she closes her eyes and savors the sensation of his breath on her neck. He straightens and walks back into the library proper, and his words don’t sink in until he’s already gone.
“Not yet,” he says, “Soon, but not yet.” Her eyes widen with understanding, and not for the first time, she wants to cry because of this man.
26.
“Sooo…” she sidles up next to him, intentionally brushing her hip against his. He looks at her, eyes dark with something, and then shakes his head as if to clear it. He’s elbow deep in the inner machinery of the universe’s largest oven, and if he can’t get the wires reconnected in the next five minutes, the universe’s largest restaurant world is going to explode. She’s already fixed the bug in the programming that caused the problem in the first place.
“Not now, River,” he says, clearly aware of exactly what she is trying to do. His fingers fly, delicately rethreading wires and occasionally flipping tiny levers on the inside of the machine. She slips a gloved hand across the side of his ribs, under that ridiculous jacket, and one of the people behind them coughs loudly. He doesn’t quite manage to cover his coworker’s blunt comment, “Sexual harassment.” They’re in the twenty-seventh century, and things like that are still a big deal.
He squiggles and sends her a disapproving look when she doesn’t immediately remove her hand, which River takes as an invitation to move her hand lower, and he actually yelps aloud and jumps a little.
“River! ” he scolds, “The fate of the world is at stake here, would you stop groping me?!”
There are mild, cautious titters from the small crowd gathered behind them, and River looks over her shoulder to shoot them a reproving glare. They shut up immediately. He continues to work, dutifully ignoring the hand traveling to his inner thigh or the shoulder touching his own so intimately, and eventually the wires are properly connected and warning signals, one by one, stop screaming at them.
He grabs River by the arm, a little more roughly than usual, and begins to pull her towards the TARDIS. They are intercepted by their audience, all of whom are alive because of his actions, and reluctantly dragged to a party in their honor.
Half an hour later River and the Doctor are comfortably ensconced in some sort of booth, surrounded by people celebrating the salvation of their planet (and River may or may not have conned them out of a sacred statue that will be worth a ridiculous sum of money in the near future). Her leg is pressed tightly against his, and for once he’s not protesting. Slowly, the center of the party drifts away from its unwilling guests of honor, until no one is paying them any attention.
She leans over and whispers in his ear, as sultry as she can manage, praise over what he’s done today. When she finishes, she bites down, the barest hint of pressure, on his earlobe. He shudders violently at the contact, but still doesn’t protest, and she lays a line of kisses along his jaw. He turns his head so that his lips meet hers, and she can’t quite believe it, but she’s kissing him. She tries to deepen the kiss, running her tongue lightly over his soft lips. He tastes salty and a little bit like the Siberian Huxlau they are for lunch, and it’s wonderful, but then he’s pulling away. His eyes are dark and fascinating and fathomless as he stares back at her. Her plan of seduction fades quickly from her mind, drowned in the desire simply to be with him. She smiles, hopeful and bright, because even though he was the one to pull away in the end, he kissed her back. His expression does not change, and slowly she begins to lose confidence.
“Will you tell me now?” she asks, slowly and softly, and half of her knows he won’t, but the other half can’t stop the ridiculous hope that he will.
“No,” he answers, and she closes her eyes. She’s a strong woman, and she won’t cry over this. And if she does, it will be somewhere where he cannot see how much it hurt. She doesn’t want him to think less of her because of the way she feels.
29.
She’s stumbling through a deserted concrete hallway, bleeding from a stab wound to her shoulder and favoring badly burned ribs. She hasn’t seen the Doctor for three years, and there are ridiculous pink-and-orange-striped, poodle-like Afraxillians chasing her, and at this moment she’d give anything for even a fifth-rate, broken down neutron-inverter so she could skip just a few minutes forward in time. It might be enough to save her.
She’s already had to drop a gun she could no longer summon the strength to hold; slowly, she’s coming to realize that she’s going to die here. Somehow, the thought that the Doctor will never know happened to her hurts worse than the looming threat of death.
She wonders, not for the first time since he left her outside her flat on Earth in 5083, if he even cares what’s happening. Sometimes, just sometimes, she was so certain he felt the same way. The party on BawaDima where he let her kiss him: the café on Pluto III where he kissed her, just a brief peck of lips, before she slid down a ventilation shaft to unlock a door from the inside. She’d felt so certain that he loved her, then. She’d been sure he’d answer her, when she asked for his name on BawaDima.
She feels tears well up at the thought of dying without ever knowing his name, his real name, and she forces them back down. She’s certainly going to die here if she dissolves into a weeping mess.
And she’s going to die here. She stumbles and only barely recovers, and she thinks maybe it would be easier to just give up-and then, like a benediction from on high, a familiar sound reaches her ears, and she stumbles into her Doctor’s arms as he dashes out of the TARDIS.
“River,” he gasps, and she fights the mad urge to sob in his embrace. His arms tighten around her for a moment, and then he pushes her back.
“Are you alright?” he asks, more than a little desperate as his eyes search her up and down for signs of injury. His eyes rest briefly on her shoulder, and he winces.
“Ribs are burned, too,” she mutters, and suddenly she finds herself unable to meet his eyes. “They had some sort of a gun. You’re a bit late, aren’t you?” His mouth briefly twists into a devastated frown, and then his deceptively thin arms tighten around her in another quick embrace. He lets go, and with minimal awkward shuffling, picks her up and carries her into the TARDIS. He sets her there, against the railing by the console, as he takes them away to someplace safe.
“Come on,” he says, looking down at her with infinitely old and infinitely sad eyes. “Let’s get you to the recovery room.” She can only nod, exhausted, as he unsteadily picks her up again and carries her farther into the TARDIS. Somewhere between the console room and the recovery room, she loses consciousness. When she wakes up, she’s lying in a soft dark bed, and he isn’t in the room with her. She isn’t terribly disappointed, because she knows exactly where he’ll be. She stands and stretches, happily noting that she’s fully recovered, and leaves the room.
She’s already forgotten what it feels like to doubt him.
“I’ll have to drop you off so you can leave me-from-the-past that he-I-er, well, me-from-the-past will be showing up on Irillion about two hundred years from now, and you’ll need to leave a note there so you can tell him he has to go rescue you,” he says, when she opens the door to her favorite reading room just off the library. He must have heard the hinges squeaking. He’s sitting in a chair facing the small fireplace, and a feeling that can only be called home wells up in her chest.
She nods, and then, realizing he can’t see her, clears her throat and utters a simple “Yes.” He turns to smile at her.
“I missed you,” he says.
“It’s been three years.” There isn’t any accusation or anger in her voice, though once there would have been.
“Five for me,” he says, amiably. Slowly, afraid she’ll wake up if she moves too quickly, River walks to him. She stands there, by the side of his chair, looking down at him while he looks up at her.
“I love you,” she says, simply, and the small smile that creeps onto his face is so full of happiness she thinks her heart will break.
“I know,” he says, and if this moment were any less important, she’s swat him for such a stupid answer. Instead she kneels down beside him and presses her lips to his, not for curiosity or greed or ownership, but because she can’t think of any other way to say I’m yours.
He kisses her back, and a wave of joy washes over her when he realizes he’s saying and I’m yours in return.
She almost died today without knowing.
The kiss deepens and slowly the clothes come off, unhurried and gentle, soft fingers against softer skin as she joins him in the chair, placing feather-light kisses up the side of his torso as she does. He purrs and she moans, quietly, while they explore unfamiliar stretches of body. She runs a hand through his silky hair and he bites, ever so carefully, the lobe of her ear. She wonders if he’s intentionally echoing what she tried to do to him on another world a long time ago, and then forgets about it completely as he brushes kisses across her forehead. She kisses his throat and slowly licks the tender spot just above his pulse. His fingers-beautiful, beautiful fingers that she’s always loved-toy with the edges of her panties, brushing her inner thigh. She curves her spine to move closer to him, and nips at his throat in retaliation.
He laughs, then, a deep throaty laugh that is utterly unfamiliar, and she laughs too with the sheer joy of hearing that sound from him, and knowing she caused it. His fingers move again, toying with her opening, and her laughter abruptly turns into a soft moan. He continues to move his fingers as he kisses slowly across the swell of her breasts, and time dissolves into a series of touches and pleasures and the simply joy of being there, together, doing this.
Finally she is straddling him, and they are rocking together, a gentle rhythm for something that should have happened so long ago but was always meant to happen now, here. He is purring again, and she muffles her giggles in his shoulder when she realizes that this is the Time Lord’s expression of satisfaction. She pulls back a bit and moves to engage his lips once again.
There are drums, quiet and steady and intoxicating.
The motions become less rhythmic and coordinated as they near their climax, but they are lost in each other and neither of them cares. Someone nuzzles a neck and someone runs cool hands up a smooth ribcage, pausing to trace each rib. Purring and panting and soft, soft moans rise through the air.
And, in a moment of bliss as they both come, River knows his name. It is everything that he is, a word-phrase-sound that encompasses all he was, is and ever will be. She shudders with the darkness and the joy of knowing.
The ecstasy ends, and reality sinks in. She gasps and pushes violently off of him, scrambling back to the opposite corner of the room.
“You’re-“ she begins, before words give out. Solemnly, he nods, old sad eyes staring at her like the end of the world. “You…” She waves a hand helplessly, unable to grasp the enormity, the horror, the thrill, of what she knows.
“You are your name.”
He nods, once again, and still makes no move to speak. Slowly, as if she will break and shatter if she bends too quickly, River rises and walks to him. More hesitant than she has ever been, even when they had only just met, she reaches out to place a warm hand on his cheek.
He smiles, and she knows it means everything to him that she is willing to accept him-the true him-and the horrible burden that comes with knowing the fundamental nature of another being in exquisite, painful detail. A tear runs down her cheek, and moving as slowly as she did, he reaches up to wipe it away with the rough pad of his thumb.
She has never loved him more.
River, you know my name. You whispered my name in my ear. There’s only one reason I would ever tell anyone my name-there’s only one time I could…
Hush, now. Spoilers.
A/N: Time Lords can too purr.
First venture into light (maybe?) smutfic, and I’m pretty sure I FAIL at writing it, so please ruthlessly point out every typo, awkward sentence and/or gross/off-putting metaphor you happen to notice. I promise I’ll appreciate it. A sexier word for panties would be wonderful (the first person to bring up ‘thong’ will be summarily shot). Quiet!sex is intentional, because I personally find that hotter.
This fic basically ate my brain, but despite the sweat, blood and tears (okay, there wasn’t any of that, but it felt like it. Mental sweat, blood and tears if you will) I really enjoyed writing this. Also, I may or may not have an ear fetish.
Disclaimer: I do not own the rights to Doctor Who and I am not making any profit from this work of fanfiction.