Geometry [Doctor Who, Amy/Rory, Eleven/River, PG-13]
Who fic! I really liked writing this, these people are just too fun to write. :3
Title: Geometry
Word Count: 3200
Summary: There are four sides to the story. From four slightly insane people.
Author's Notes: Betaed by the lovely reena_jenkins. Born out of my immeasurable love for the current team TARDIS! And how they're all lovely but really messed up. I was listening to a song from the Gattaca soundtrack - The Other Side by Michael Nyman - obsessively while writing this. You can listen to it here.
Geometry
She knows so much. She knows the Doctor’s name and that Gallifrey is not gone, not completely. She knows what happens on Earth in 2027 that will change Amy and Rory’s lives forever. She knows how the dinosaurs really died, and how Susan is fine but misses her grandfather, and how the Doctor dies and comes back to life; she knows the name of Amy and Rory’s daughter and how her parents like to take long walks in distant beaches when they’re in their sixties, bickering all the time. She knows five more people that travel in the TARDIS after them, three of which traveled with her as well. She knows she doesn’t have much time left with the Doctor, and she can’t tell anyone, not for any reason; and sometimes she feels like it might drive her mad, knowing so much.
“Spoilers,” he used to say, when she was seventeen and he was 1300 and wearing a new face, and he has been saying it less and less with time, until it came a point when she was saying it herself, annoying him with the same phrase that used to bother her so much. She had been such a child, looking up at the stars and craving adventures but waiting for them to find her. If the Doctor taught her anything, it was that if she wanted adventure, danger, excitement, she had to go out and get it herself. And so she has, to the point of recklessness, but never with a doubt.
He saved her from an alien invasion, of course. When they were over with the running and the explaining and the counting of hearts, because even at that age she was so very curious already, he told her, “When I’m done with you, you’ll be the one doing the saving.” She preened a bit at that, and suddenly she couldn’t wait for it.
He had taken her to her first tomb. Not the one they take students to on their second day in Archeology school, almost as if to dissuade them to stay on the course; or the Egyptian salvage her parents took her to see when she was little, behind cords and properly sanitized, not a speck of dirt to be seen except for the one there for authenticity purposes. Her first tomb, part of a never before explored set of caves on a forgotten planet, covered in the symbols of a dead civilization, so vastly different from her own. Her blood ran fast all the time they were there, and having him with her, pointing excitedly and waving his screwdriver around randomly only made it sweeter.
The first time they kissed, the first time for her, he didn’t know it was her first, he just casually pulled her against him, eyes wide and pupils blown, after they had brought an empire down. There was no warning for his tongue opening her mouth, or for his hands burying themselves in her hair. It’s only when they pulled apart and she was trembling lightly that he swallowed, asked, “Remind me again, River, how old are you today?”
She said, “Nineteen,” almost like a dare, and he went a bit pale. He tried to let her go, but she wouldn’t bulge. “I take it this is not the first time it happens for you,” she said almost gleeful, because she wouldn’t lie to herself pretending she hadn’t wanted this, and he had been driving her crazy acting as if he couldn’t notice.
“Ah, no. I mean, maybe. Spoilers, River.” The tone was playful, but there was a hint of something else in his voice. Like he knew her too well, for too long, and it pained him to say that.
She was his past and he was her future, and now, River in her prison cell and the Doctor still new to his eleventh skin, they’re the opposite. She’s almost come to terms with it.
When River first met Amy, she was 23, and Amy 54. Now she’s the older one, the wise one, while Amy’s an impossibly young wild child, so free, but oddly not that different at all. And if Amy hasn’t changed, if she can still flirt and taunt Rory and look at him with such fire in her eyes, then River supposes maybe it’s not that bad, then, that she’s aged so much herself.
River was 25 when she stole the Doctor’s notebook, the one with her life in it, and then she couldn’t read it, because where would the excitement be, in living knowing everything beforehand? She put it back, and the next day she started keeping her own notebook. It had looked so clean and empty, just waiting to be filled.
Even now, she hopes there won’t be pages enough to fit it all.
Amy has driven him crazy all his life. They meet for the first time when Amy is eight, at a playground near both their houses, when Amy throws sand at his face when he asks if she isn’t too old for imaginary friends. Instead of leaving and never talking to this obviously unbalanced weird Scottish girl again, he sits down next to her. “Well then, how do you know he’s real?” he asks, and she lights up, starts talking about this strange man that crashed into her shed. He never quite leaves her side after that.
Two thousand years is a terrifyingly long amount of time. He had known that logically, when the Doctor asked him if he was sure. But he hadn’t known, not really, not how it meant that he was never hungry, never sleepy, just tired of waiting but braving ahead for Amy.
He would talk to her through the Pandorica, a hand touching the stone as he told her how much she would like this time period, how there were knights and so called magicians everywhere, and that she would like the clothes. He has never asked her, exactly, if she could hear him, but she once does tell him, in between dreams in a rare moment of consciousness at night, how she had always felt so safe, even though it passed like a blur to her.
Rory was there when Rome fell, when Christianity came to the island, and when jousting tournaments started to be fought for ladies’ favors. He was there for the eras of the great warrior kings and for every single war fought with France. He drank to the health of the new Queen Catherine of Aragon; and he fought briefly in the Great War, because it was hard to ignore what was happening around him as he endlessly protected the box, as he talked to her and remembered her, her image blurred by two thousand years of waiting.
He remembers when he used to be just Rory the nurse, twenty-three, with an amazing if slightly eccentric girlfriend. They would go to the cinema, argue over the movie and wear costumes for sex. He had never known there were countless planets just there to be explored, hadn’t seen Amy’s thrilled face as she picks the lock of a military base gate, had never thought of the stars as anything else than a decorative addition to the skyline.
He looks at Amy, sleeping beside him on their bed in the TARDIS, and he wonders at how his life has changed.
The Doctor leaves them on a beach, once, takes off and doesn’t say anything, and it’s only until a while later that they realize it’s their anniversary. Or at least, it has been a year since their wedding - it’s only been a few months in Leadworth, and he’s surprised at how little he misses home. Home is Amy now.
It’s a stunning place. The water is a soft turquoise, so light you can see the fishes swimming by, all kinds of imaginable colors. The sky edges more to lilac than to blue, and they can’t seem to stop taking it all in, the strangeness and the water forever lapping at the coarse sand and the three moons that hang in the sky. They’re completely alone, and all they have is each other.
They have sex on the sand, because it seems rude not to while on an abandoned beach, breathless from laughter. It’s terrible; there’s sand everywhere and they keep getting hit by the waves but it’s perfect too, just to have Amy laugh in his ear before biting it and saying his name, over and over.
They race each other to the water afterwards, try to do it again but stop when it becomes obvious it would involve accidental drowning now that the tide is coming in. “Ah well, I guess we can always use the TARDIS’ pool,” she says, devilish, and this is why he loves her so much.
When twilight comes, the sea goes silver, a bright mirror for the moons above. Rory sits on the beach, Amy’s head on his lap, and they both watch the ocean as he gets his fingers through her hair. “One year, Rory Pond. It seems like a lot, doesn’t it?” she says, sounding sleepy and content.
“Not really, no.” They both know what he’s speaking of.
She turns her head a bit to look at him. “Was it worth it? Waiting for me?”
He bends down to kiss her mouth lightly, but she still closes her eyes, chases his lips when he pulls away. “Of course it was.”
When the Doctor comes back for them, there’s a great deal of screaming and shuffling for clothes and mumbled apologies as the Doctor tries not to watch and Rory not to blush.
There’s something wrong with her mind, Amy thinks. Or maybe she’s just going mad, what all those psychiatrists wouldn’t say in so many words.
She remembers her parent’s funeral, how it had been sunny and bright and completely wrong. She also remembers her mum throwing her a birthday party when she was twelve and buying her a cake because she was terrible at baking, and how her dad - her wonderful tiny little dad - had made everyone pancakes when it turned out not even that cake was edible.
She and Rory can have entire conversations only to realize it didn’t happen that way, not really. She never actually yelled, “Well you’re not my mother, so who cares,” at her aunt when she was fifteen, so angry she couldn’t see, and she didn’t run to Rory’s house in the middle of the night to sneak in through his window and lie with him on his bed, silent and pressed close. Instead, she fought with her mum and made up with hugs after, and the first time she and Rory fell asleep together was on her sofa, watching movies and with popcorn spilled all over them. When they woke up, her parents had put a blanket over them.
Some of the memories are the same though. No matter what timeline, fake or real, new or old, the first time that Rory kissed her he was dressed as the Raggedy Doctor at thirteen; right on the verge of leaving childhood behind forever and already too old to think it was completely innocent. She thought it was an experiment, and said it was good practice when they pulled apart. He had stammered and blushed and looked so very sad, and he didn’t kiss her again for years, until she realized that he had meant it even then, and she had only been thinking of the Doctor. “You’re so stupid,” she said when she was eighteen, right before kissing him again, and in that moment, it had only been Rory on her mind.
Rory is ageless now. He gets this look, sometimes, that reminds her too much of the Doctor. It’s like he’s seen too much, done too much, but refuses to be tired. They’re even slightly alike now, her boys. The Doctor shook her world and Rory helped her pick up the pieces, to build herself up again. They have been the most important people in her life, the Doctor in his absence and Rory always by her side. She thinks it’s only fair that she gets to keep them both.
Amy’s past is unclear, hazy, but the present is strikingly clear. There’s so much to see, and so much to learn, that she can’t imagine ever finishing taking it all in. There are icy waterfalls and methane lakes and dancing with Rory at the top of skyscrapers in dim bars in the thirty-sixth century, the Doctor doing his silly giraffe dance somewhere behind them. There are expeditions in jungles where River and the Doctor get conspicuously lost together, and Amy gets eaten alive by alien mosquitoes. There are picnics in distant stars and revolutions in Earth colonies. And there will always be running and laughter and danger, even if they’re just having tea in Leadworth, because her life is what it is.
“I can’t believe you let them do that,” she says, biting into her buttery toast in the TARDIS’ kitchen, sitting on the counter.
“Well I thought they were just being polite!” Rory says, still looking slightly green. Their latest alien contact had gone well, if slightly disturbingly.
“What, by mating with your hand?”
“Oh, I’ll mate with your hand,” he says before grabbing her wrist and putting her fingers in his mouth, licking the butter off them until she’s crying with laughter. She pulls him closer until he’s standing between her legs, her heels digging into his thighs.
A long time later, they sit on the edge of the TARDIS’ door, their legs swinging into open space, bright and never ending. Faulty memory or not, she will never forget her first day in the TARDIS, that moment when she realized that the magic she had dreamed as a child was real. That she had been right all along.
Her memory might be tricking her, she might clinically slightly insane according to all those psychiatrists, and the Doctor will die or maybe not, but she puts that in the back of her mind. She is here, in this vast nothingness filled with countless lives, with Rory’s hand grasping hers, and that’s all that matters.
Maybe it doesn’t matter what she remembers or not after all, but the new memories they make.
He’s never stopped running, the Doctor, the madman with a box that could never sit still. He could never run far enough from the ever-there presence of his people, and now that they’re gone he can never run far enough from their absence.
Space and time have a way with messing with people’s minds. There is just too much of them, too much for any mind of any species to fully comprehend. It becomes an addiction, an always-there craving for more. He’s seen it in different degrees in all the people that have traveled with him, and he sees it in himself when he looks in the mirror, right before he sees the thing disguised as a little girl that he trapped there for all eternity. He tends to avoid mirrors, all in all.
He regrets many things, but he can’t help being selfish with the people he lures into the TARDIS with smiles and promises of adventure. There’s just a thrill about seeing their eyes widen with awe at a new and exhilarating star, or a magnificent event in their own planet’s past. So he won’t stop doing it, even if Amy hasn’t made sense since a crack appeared in her wall and Rory has so many lifetimes in his head, and River has died for him and will probably be the death of him too.
River is a mystery he very badly wants to crack.
They see her again at an excavation, and the fact that she’s not expecting them is a surprise in itself.
“You’re just in time, though, sweetie,” she says. “Take a look at this and tell me it doesn’t look like an early period Atlantis stele.”
It does, in fact, look very Atlantean. “Not that I even believe in Atlantis,” says Rory, “but aren’t we supposed to be on, say, the wrong planet for it?”
“Very well said, Rory. I expect Doctor Song doesn’t always escape prison for anything less important than life or death situations. Or a particularly interesting find,” the Doctor says, eyebrow raised and looking at River, falling into flirting without realizing it.
River touches her hip to his, smiling up at him. “Well you know me, Doctor. I’m a sucker for a good mystery.”
He doesn’t really know her though, and it’s been driving him mad, trying to figure it out. She’s his future and he’s her past, and he’s so very curious he can almost taste it.
It’s a few days later when they’re pressed against each other in a utility closet, hiding from the mercenaries that planted the Atlantean objects. They’re breathing hard, sweaty from running, and the Doctor whispers in her ear, “Who are you, River Song?”
She laughs. “You say that, Doctor, but you don’t really want to know. Where would be the fun in that?” and it’s so wrong and so true that he presses closer still, kisses her with none of the hesitation of the last time, because she infuriates him and mystifies him, all at once.
She slips her fingertips an inch down his trousers, just a little taste of what’s to come. “You and public places, Doctor, will you never change?” she asks against his mouth, and the fact that she knows him so well gives him both a thrill and a chill. There is a lot he would rather no one knew about him.
When they say goodbye, once again in her prison cell, she straightens his bow tie, an oddly intimate gesture. “You’ll see me soon,” she says. “The Silence is waiting. And here’s a spoiler for you: stay away from oysters.” She sounds as if she’s quoting him, and he doesn’t doubt it.
He follows his own advice, and is glad for it when he has to take care of both Amy and Rory through their horrible bout of food poisoning. “Least aphrodisiac thing ever,” is what Amy has to say of it.
River and he, they start making sense with every new piece of the puzzle. He could always move ahead to find his own future - rules be damned, he’s done it before - but River is right. Where would be the fun in that?
Everything is connected. Every decision, every turning point in a person’s life creates a mark, invisible but there nonetheless. Join them all like in a children’s book, and you will see a shape, the path of your life, and it will invariably join with another person’s figure, and that one with another, connecting every single living thing in the entire universe. Geometry in motion.
As a Time Lord, he guesses it’s his duty to keep track of the connections; but that is a lie he tells himself, because even before he was the last of his people, there was nothing he liked more to do.
So he will never stop running, because there will always be worlds to see and people to save and new things to explore and jammy dodgers to be had. All in all, he wouldn’t miss it for the world.
Title: Geometry
Word Count: 3200
Summary: There are four sides to the story. From four slightly insane people.
Author's Notes: Betaed by the lovely reena_jenkins. Born out of my immeasurable love for the current team TARDIS! And how they're all lovely but really messed up. I was listening to a song from the Gattaca soundtrack - The Other Side by Michael Nyman - obsessively while writing this. You can listen to it here.
Geometry
She knows so much. She knows the Doctor’s name and that Gallifrey is not gone, not completely. She knows what happens on Earth in 2027 that will change Amy and Rory’s lives forever. She knows how the dinosaurs really died, and how Susan is fine but misses her grandfather, and how the Doctor dies and comes back to life; she knows the name of Amy and Rory’s daughter and how her parents like to take long walks in distant beaches when they’re in their sixties, bickering all the time. She knows five more people that travel in the TARDIS after them, three of which traveled with her as well. She knows she doesn’t have much time left with the Doctor, and she can’t tell anyone, not for any reason; and sometimes she feels like it might drive her mad, knowing so much.
“Spoilers,” he used to say, when she was seventeen and he was 1300 and wearing a new face, and he has been saying it less and less with time, until it came a point when she was saying it herself, annoying him with the same phrase that used to bother her so much. She had been such a child, looking up at the stars and craving adventures but waiting for them to find her. If the Doctor taught her anything, it was that if she wanted adventure, danger, excitement, she had to go out and get it herself. And so she has, to the point of recklessness, but never with a doubt.
He saved her from an alien invasion, of course. When they were over with the running and the explaining and the counting of hearts, because even at that age she was so very curious already, he told her, “When I’m done with you, you’ll be the one doing the saving.” She preened a bit at that, and suddenly she couldn’t wait for it.
He had taken her to her first tomb. Not the one they take students to on their second day in Archeology school, almost as if to dissuade them to stay on the course; or the Egyptian salvage her parents took her to see when she was little, behind cords and properly sanitized, not a speck of dirt to be seen except for the one there for authenticity purposes. Her first tomb, part of a never before explored set of caves on a forgotten planet, covered in the symbols of a dead civilization, so vastly different from her own. Her blood ran fast all the time they were there, and having him with her, pointing excitedly and waving his screwdriver around randomly only made it sweeter.
The first time they kissed, the first time for her, he didn’t know it was her first, he just casually pulled her against him, eyes wide and pupils blown, after they had brought an empire down. There was no warning for his tongue opening her mouth, or for his hands burying themselves in her hair. It’s only when they pulled apart and she was trembling lightly that he swallowed, asked, “Remind me again, River, how old are you today?”
She said, “Nineteen,” almost like a dare, and he went a bit pale. He tried to let her go, but she wouldn’t bulge. “I take it this is not the first time it happens for you,” she said almost gleeful, because she wouldn’t lie to herself pretending she hadn’t wanted this, and he had been driving her crazy acting as if he couldn’t notice.
“Ah, no. I mean, maybe. Spoilers, River.” The tone was playful, but there was a hint of something else in his voice. Like he knew her too well, for too long, and it pained him to say that.
She was his past and he was her future, and now, River in her prison cell and the Doctor still new to his eleventh skin, they’re the opposite. She’s almost come to terms with it.
When River first met Amy, she was 23, and Amy 54. Now she’s the older one, the wise one, while Amy’s an impossibly young wild child, so free, but oddly not that different at all. And if Amy hasn’t changed, if she can still flirt and taunt Rory and look at him with such fire in her eyes, then River supposes maybe it’s not that bad, then, that she’s aged so much herself.
River was 25 when she stole the Doctor’s notebook, the one with her life in it, and then she couldn’t read it, because where would the excitement be, in living knowing everything beforehand? She put it back, and the next day she started keeping her own notebook. It had looked so clean and empty, just waiting to be filled.
Even now, she hopes there won’t be pages enough to fit it all.
Amy has driven him crazy all his life. They meet for the first time when Amy is eight, at a playground near both their houses, when Amy throws sand at his face when he asks if she isn’t too old for imaginary friends. Instead of leaving and never talking to this obviously unbalanced weird Scottish girl again, he sits down next to her. “Well then, how do you know he’s real?” he asks, and she lights up, starts talking about this strange man that crashed into her shed. He never quite leaves her side after that.
Two thousand years is a terrifyingly long amount of time. He had known that logically, when the Doctor asked him if he was sure. But he hadn’t known, not really, not how it meant that he was never hungry, never sleepy, just tired of waiting but braving ahead for Amy.
He would talk to her through the Pandorica, a hand touching the stone as he told her how much she would like this time period, how there were knights and so called magicians everywhere, and that she would like the clothes. He has never asked her, exactly, if she could hear him, but she once does tell him, in between dreams in a rare moment of consciousness at night, how she had always felt so safe, even though it passed like a blur to her.
Rory was there when Rome fell, when Christianity came to the island, and when jousting tournaments started to be fought for ladies’ favors. He was there for the eras of the great warrior kings and for every single war fought with France. He drank to the health of the new Queen Catherine of Aragon; and he fought briefly in the Great War, because it was hard to ignore what was happening around him as he endlessly protected the box, as he talked to her and remembered her, her image blurred by two thousand years of waiting.
He remembers when he used to be just Rory the nurse, twenty-three, with an amazing if slightly eccentric girlfriend. They would go to the cinema, argue over the movie and wear costumes for sex. He had never known there were countless planets just there to be explored, hadn’t seen Amy’s thrilled face as she picks the lock of a military base gate, had never thought of the stars as anything else than a decorative addition to the skyline.
He looks at Amy, sleeping beside him on their bed in the TARDIS, and he wonders at how his life has changed.
The Doctor leaves them on a beach, once, takes off and doesn’t say anything, and it’s only until a while later that they realize it’s their anniversary. Or at least, it has been a year since their wedding - it’s only been a few months in Leadworth, and he’s surprised at how little he misses home. Home is Amy now.
It’s a stunning place. The water is a soft turquoise, so light you can see the fishes swimming by, all kinds of imaginable colors. The sky edges more to lilac than to blue, and they can’t seem to stop taking it all in, the strangeness and the water forever lapping at the coarse sand and the three moons that hang in the sky. They’re completely alone, and all they have is each other.
They have sex on the sand, because it seems rude not to while on an abandoned beach, breathless from laughter. It’s terrible; there’s sand everywhere and they keep getting hit by the waves but it’s perfect too, just to have Amy laugh in his ear before biting it and saying his name, over and over.
They race each other to the water afterwards, try to do it again but stop when it becomes obvious it would involve accidental drowning now that the tide is coming in. “Ah well, I guess we can always use the TARDIS’ pool,” she says, devilish, and this is why he loves her so much.
When twilight comes, the sea goes silver, a bright mirror for the moons above. Rory sits on the beach, Amy’s head on his lap, and they both watch the ocean as he gets his fingers through her hair. “One year, Rory Pond. It seems like a lot, doesn’t it?” she says, sounding sleepy and content.
“Not really, no.” They both know what he’s speaking of.
She turns her head a bit to look at him. “Was it worth it? Waiting for me?”
He bends down to kiss her mouth lightly, but she still closes her eyes, chases his lips when he pulls away. “Of course it was.”
When the Doctor comes back for them, there’s a great deal of screaming and shuffling for clothes and mumbled apologies as the Doctor tries not to watch and Rory not to blush.
There’s something wrong with her mind, Amy thinks. Or maybe she’s just going mad, what all those psychiatrists wouldn’t say in so many words.
She remembers her parent’s funeral, how it had been sunny and bright and completely wrong. She also remembers her mum throwing her a birthday party when she was twelve and buying her a cake because she was terrible at baking, and how her dad - her wonderful tiny little dad - had made everyone pancakes when it turned out not even that cake was edible.
She and Rory can have entire conversations only to realize it didn’t happen that way, not really. She never actually yelled, “Well you’re not my mother, so who cares,” at her aunt when she was fifteen, so angry she couldn’t see, and she didn’t run to Rory’s house in the middle of the night to sneak in through his window and lie with him on his bed, silent and pressed close. Instead, she fought with her mum and made up with hugs after, and the first time she and Rory fell asleep together was on her sofa, watching movies and with popcorn spilled all over them. When they woke up, her parents had put a blanket over them.
Some of the memories are the same though. No matter what timeline, fake or real, new or old, the first time that Rory kissed her he was dressed as the Raggedy Doctor at thirteen; right on the verge of leaving childhood behind forever and already too old to think it was completely innocent. She thought it was an experiment, and said it was good practice when they pulled apart. He had stammered and blushed and looked so very sad, and he didn’t kiss her again for years, until she realized that he had meant it even then, and she had only been thinking of the Doctor. “You’re so stupid,” she said when she was eighteen, right before kissing him again, and in that moment, it had only been Rory on her mind.
Rory is ageless now. He gets this look, sometimes, that reminds her too much of the Doctor. It’s like he’s seen too much, done too much, but refuses to be tired. They’re even slightly alike now, her boys. The Doctor shook her world and Rory helped her pick up the pieces, to build herself up again. They have been the most important people in her life, the Doctor in his absence and Rory always by her side. She thinks it’s only fair that she gets to keep them both.
Amy’s past is unclear, hazy, but the present is strikingly clear. There’s so much to see, and so much to learn, that she can’t imagine ever finishing taking it all in. There are icy waterfalls and methane lakes and dancing with Rory at the top of skyscrapers in dim bars in the thirty-sixth century, the Doctor doing his silly giraffe dance somewhere behind them. There are expeditions in jungles where River and the Doctor get conspicuously lost together, and Amy gets eaten alive by alien mosquitoes. There are picnics in distant stars and revolutions in Earth colonies. And there will always be running and laughter and danger, even if they’re just having tea in Leadworth, because her life is what it is.
“I can’t believe you let them do that,” she says, biting into her buttery toast in the TARDIS’ kitchen, sitting on the counter.
“Well I thought they were just being polite!” Rory says, still looking slightly green. Their latest alien contact had gone well, if slightly disturbingly.
“What, by mating with your hand?”
“Oh, I’ll mate with your hand,” he says before grabbing her wrist and putting her fingers in his mouth, licking the butter off them until she’s crying with laughter. She pulls him closer until he’s standing between her legs, her heels digging into his thighs.
A long time later, they sit on the edge of the TARDIS’ door, their legs swinging into open space, bright and never ending. Faulty memory or not, she will never forget her first day in the TARDIS, that moment when she realized that the magic she had dreamed as a child was real. That she had been right all along.
Her memory might be tricking her, she might clinically slightly insane according to all those psychiatrists, and the Doctor will die or maybe not, but she puts that in the back of her mind. She is here, in this vast nothingness filled with countless lives, with Rory’s hand grasping hers, and that’s all that matters.
Maybe it doesn’t matter what she remembers or not after all, but the new memories they make.
He’s never stopped running, the Doctor, the madman with a box that could never sit still. He could never run far enough from the ever-there presence of his people, and now that they’re gone he can never run far enough from their absence.
Space and time have a way with messing with people’s minds. There is just too much of them, too much for any mind of any species to fully comprehend. It becomes an addiction, an always-there craving for more. He’s seen it in different degrees in all the people that have traveled with him, and he sees it in himself when he looks in the mirror, right before he sees the thing disguised as a little girl that he trapped there for all eternity. He tends to avoid mirrors, all in all.
He regrets many things, but he can’t help being selfish with the people he lures into the TARDIS with smiles and promises of adventure. There’s just a thrill about seeing their eyes widen with awe at a new and exhilarating star, or a magnificent event in their own planet’s past. So he won’t stop doing it, even if Amy hasn’t made sense since a crack appeared in her wall and Rory has so many lifetimes in his head, and River has died for him and will probably be the death of him too.
River is a mystery he very badly wants to crack.
They see her again at an excavation, and the fact that she’s not expecting them is a surprise in itself.
“You’re just in time, though, sweetie,” she says. “Take a look at this and tell me it doesn’t look like an early period Atlantis stele.”
It does, in fact, look very Atlantean. “Not that I even believe in Atlantis,” says Rory, “but aren’t we supposed to be on, say, the wrong planet for it?”
“Very well said, Rory. I expect Doctor Song doesn’t always escape prison for anything less important than life or death situations. Or a particularly interesting find,” the Doctor says, eyebrow raised and looking at River, falling into flirting without realizing it.
River touches her hip to his, smiling up at him. “Well you know me, Doctor. I’m a sucker for a good mystery.”
He doesn’t really know her though, and it’s been driving him mad, trying to figure it out. She’s his future and he’s her past, and he’s so very curious he can almost taste it.
It’s a few days later when they’re pressed against each other in a utility closet, hiding from the mercenaries that planted the Atlantean objects. They’re breathing hard, sweaty from running, and the Doctor whispers in her ear, “Who are you, River Song?”
She laughs. “You say that, Doctor, but you don’t really want to know. Where would be the fun in that?” and it’s so wrong and so true that he presses closer still, kisses her with none of the hesitation of the last time, because she infuriates him and mystifies him, all at once.
She slips her fingertips an inch down his trousers, just a little taste of what’s to come. “You and public places, Doctor, will you never change?” she asks against his mouth, and the fact that she knows him so well gives him both a thrill and a chill. There is a lot he would rather no one knew about him.
When they say goodbye, once again in her prison cell, she straightens his bow tie, an oddly intimate gesture. “You’ll see me soon,” she says. “The Silence is waiting. And here’s a spoiler for you: stay away from oysters.” She sounds as if she’s quoting him, and he doesn’t doubt it.
He follows his own advice, and is glad for it when he has to take care of both Amy and Rory through their horrible bout of food poisoning. “Least aphrodisiac thing ever,” is what Amy has to say of it.
River and he, they start making sense with every new piece of the puzzle. He could always move ahead to find his own future - rules be damned, he’s done it before - but River is right. Where would be the fun in that?
Everything is connected. Every decision, every turning point in a person’s life creates a mark, invisible but there nonetheless. Join them all like in a children’s book, and you will see a shape, the path of your life, and it will invariably join with another person’s figure, and that one with another, connecting every single living thing in the entire universe. Geometry in motion.
As a Time Lord, he guesses it’s his duty to keep track of the connections; but that is a lie he tells himself, because even before he was the last of his people, there was nothing he liked more to do.
So he will never stop running, because there will always be worlds to see and people to save and new things to explore and jammy dodgers to be had. All in all, he wouldn’t miss it for the world.