Fic: Tidewater. (Season Four Spoilers, PG, AU)
Tidewater. Doctor Who Season Four, with major spoilers for 4x08 and 4x09.
Fic below the cut.
"The dragons are a myth," she says. Another chunk of the wall falls in, rolling past her, with a great grinning lizard's head at the top. She scowls at it. "They're just a legend. This is a research site, not a fairy tale."
"Oh ?" he asks.
They run.
So, you've come this far, so I should tell you: this is River Song's story. Ten/Rose, Donna. PG for mild suggestiveness. Spoilers up to and including 4x08, "Silence in the Library." Speculation for 4x09, "Forest of the Dead." Plus this is probably totes AU. Also, I may have gone crazy.
Tidewater.
The first time she meets him, she's running for her life.
She mistakes him for another student, standing around in a skinny wool suit in the boiling Audiran sun and waving a flashlight above his head; she curses her luck and his obviously regressive genes and grabs his hand while the rock walls shatter down around them. "Run !" she says.
The eyes he turns to her are ancient; ancient, and a little sad. He frowns over the tops of his glasses and she has the uncomfortable feeling of having misread the situation. Entirely. A chunk of sandstone flies past their heads.
"You go on," he says, calmly, obviously distracted. "Take your own advice."
"Are you barking mad ?" she cries out, tugging at his sleeve. "You'll be crushed ! The entire compound's collapsing !" He slips his narrow arm out of her grasp and steps back, thoughtfully, still turning the flashlight around in his hands. River gapes at him, blinking dust out of her eyelashes.
"So it is," he says. As she stares at him he kneels down and presses his ear to the shifting stone floor, while the ruins totter and rumble around them. She knows she ought to run but she's fascinated, transfixed; he is so still and the world is shaking itself to pieces. He puts the flashlight to the floor and it hums gently, tickling the low brain in the back of her skull. "Ah," he says. "They're awake."
"What's awake ?" she shouts at him. "What are you on about ?"
For the first time, he smiles.
"The dragons," he replies, leaping to his feet now, with an odd enthusiasm; he doesn't bother to brush the dirt and debris off of his knees. And now she knows he's insane.
"The dragons are a myth," she says. Another chunk of the wall falls in, rolling past her, with a great grinning lizard's head at the top. She scowls at it. "They're just a legend. This is a research site, not a fairy tale."
"Oh ?" he asks.
They run.
The next time, she's four years older, fuller, grown out of a coltish twenty-one and into her woman's body, and feeling every inch of it. It's given her a kind of girlish arrogance, a swing in her hips. She remembers him like a hallucination, fresh and sharp and utterly alien to her; so when she spots him across the bazaar, she waves and grins and wonders if she's dreaming.
He doesn't look up.
She breaks into a kind of run, keeping her arms close to avoid knocking into any of the vendors, her sandals snapping smartly against the soles of her feet, her hair bouncing in curls. She stops a foot or so from him and starts to say-
"Doctor ?" There's a woman beside him, one she didn't see; a regular-looking sort of woman, with blonde hair in a messy bun and blue jeans low on her hips, holding out a bolt of cloth against her chest. "This one, do you think ? Or the green." The fabric is shimmering, embroidered in tiny swirls of leaves and roots, pulled against her curves and changing shades in the light. The Doctor is staring. He looks different, somehow. "I like them both." The blonde looks up at her. "Hello."
"Hello," River says.
"I love your bracelets," the woman continues. "Did you get them here ?"
"I- yes."
The blonde turns back to the Doctor, who is standing quietly with his hands in his pockets. She grins, tongue between her teeth, and she is not plain any longer but lovely; transformed by a brief and simple sort of happiness so luminous that River smiles as well, caught.
"You should have brought all the credits," she says, still grinning. "I told you so. I'm an expensive date." He crosses his arms and rocks backwards on his heels, mischief and happiness at the edges of his mouth and eyes. River's throat constricts. The woman tilts her head. "Sorry, I didn't get your name. I'm Rose."
"River."
"That's lovely !" she says. "Gorgeous name. You busy ?" River shakes her head, mute. "Could you point out the stall for me ? I'd love to pick up some of those bracelets for a friend."
"Do I-" the Doctor says suddenly, as if seeing her for the first time, "know you ?"
"Audira," she says. "Irritable dragons. And," she adds, "you were useless."
"A-ha !" he cries out, and leaps forward to shake her hand. She gives it over and he envelops it in both palms, narrow fingers not quite as warm as hers, despite the heat of the day; a strange double-pulse in her thumbs. She shakes back, charmed again. "Rose, this is the- the dig site, with the thunder-lizards- we were running for our lives. I remember. You look well. How long's it been ?"
"Five years."
"Five years." He scratches the back of his neck. "Three for me. That's interesting. Well, ladies," he says, glancing backwards, "I see an arc-reversal transmitter with my name on it going that-away."
"Really ?" Rose asks.
"Quite literally," he says, frowning. "Which is- ah, very bad."
They part ways in the market and River walks home, alone, to the flat she shares with Nadine and Sheely; but before she does, she stops at the last stall on the walk and sees it, nestled between other leatherbound journals and antique books smelling slightly of salt and wear. She picks it up- it's a lovely deep blue, like the namesake that ran through her father's land. The pages are empty.
"I'll give it to you for a song," the merchant says.
And River laughs.
When she is twenty-eight she already has three more entries in the diary; Moerin-5-P, briefly, in a crowd; Capraxis, where she kept seeing him in the great glass elevators but never quite caught up (the reactor had a meltdown and they evacuated, but she was sure he hadn't died) and Zulia, the spa planet with hot springs, where they'd just discovered an ancient Zulian temple, pre-settlement, and she was running her own grid and her own team of diggers. "You're moving up in the world," he tells her.
"No, but really," she says, leaning closer. "What's going to happen ? Fire ? Flooding ? Rebel uprising ?" She grins. "Tell me." He looks away, a slight smile budding at the corner of his mouth.
"Nah." He folds his arms in back of his head and settles into the chair more deeply, leaning backwards on two legs. "Rose wanted a bit of a break. Daquiris and sightseeing, evening entertainment on the beach. She's around here somewhere, getting wrapped in seaweed for some ungodly reason." His tone is all indulgent irritation, but River reads something below it- a settled peace, a contentment. It brightens something in her, and darkens something else. He goes on. "To tell you the truth, I don't mind it. Lot of running these last few- well, years, I suppose."
"How long's it been for you ?"
"A bit," he says.
Time, as it must, passes.
By her thirty-third birthday she's begun to believe that this is it, that it's over; a mad fantasy, if it was ever even that, come to an end. No sightings, no meetings for five years- a long span of time for a woman with a ambitious career, moving around the system, with a string of boyfriends not quite dashing enough, backwater planets that seem too small. Time to focus. Time to put away the notebook as a relic of the past.
And then, the Relegaunts.
"Stop," she says, tears cracking her voice. "Stop it !" He's holding down the button of the sonic and the creatures in their pods are screaming. Electricity crackles through the air, exploding in sparks of blue light across their alien skin. "Just let go !" She's shouting at him, dragging on his arms and pounding on his back and he's not even trying to shake her off, just standing like iron, dealing out pain to the pod-soldiers who, minutes ago, had opened fire on the crowd. They were frightening, but this is terrifying.
She can barely recognize him. "Doctor !" she shrieks.
He lets go and his hands are still shaking. The soldiers struggle to their feet as he watches them, watches them beg; he nods and says nothing as they retreat. She puts her hand on his shoulder but he shakes it off, turning away, stalking off through the arena, under the arches and between the columns, through the dust. River follows him, still calling out his name. "Doctor !"
"Go back," he warns. His voice is thick, clotted and strange. "Go away."
"I won't just-" and then she stops, stares, struck dumb by the sight of the ship. It is the ship, it must be; she's never seen it before but she heard Rose speak of it, warmly and lovingly, just once. He opens the door with a fierce twist of the key and stalks off into the depths. Impossible, and yet the door hangs open behind him, daring her eyes to disagree. It's as blue as a river, humble and simple, just a scuffed-up box sitting in the dirt. "It's beautiful," she says, without meaning to. She follows him inside.
It is- different.
"I asked you to go," he snarls. He's standing behind a console with a column of glassy green light pulsing at the center; the walls are golden and alive, patterned with round medallions and studded with coral arms extending into the space. It's an alien landscape of power and beauty, and she finds herself staring up into it, ignoring him. "Are you listening ?"
"You left the door open," she retorts.
"My mistake," he snaps. "You can shut it on your way out."
"What's wrong with you ?" she asks, truly curious, not letting her irritation take hold. "What's happened ?" She looks him in the face, turning away from the soft golds and greens, and finds herself staring into eyes that are dead. Shuttered, dark; windowless gaps, nailed shut. There are deep lines there, crowded at the corners- how could she have missed the fringe of gray hairs, the wear on his skin, the shadows ? "Oh God," she says. "Oh, no." His mouth trembles and the pulse in his throat bobs.
"Please go," he says, more softly, sounding as if the words could break him in half. "I travel alone." She steps forward and he seems to fall, slightly, with his hands on the console for balance. His arms are shaking. She can't hear him breathe. She's never seen a man try to hold in tears with such desperation.
River rests her hand on his arm.
"Not anymore, you don't," she says.
She tries to make it work.
He's manic and confusing, except when he isn't; the moments where his face turns to ash and his eyes darken like clouds, and he leaves her to wander the halls of his ship, to soak in the silence. She tells him it's alright to grieve and he ignores her for a full day afterwards; later, he apologizes and takes her to a planet of carnivals, but it's awkward and too sad. She feels ridiculous, trailing this overgrown puppy of a man, but she doesn't have the heart to let him go.
He takes her to the most incredible places, things she's only dreamed of; he spreads the universe out at her feet and tells her to pick a card, any card. He takes her to see the first Temple of the Moon on Zulia, to watch the first peoples of that planet haul and chisel the cornerstones, and then to the flamboyant, mesmerizing rituals of consecration. "I knew it," she whispers, behind her mask. "I knew they were descended from amphibians. The canals everywhere, the aqueducts- it wasn't irrigation, it was transportation."
"You're brilliant," he tells her, his eyes glowing with pride. Her heart aches and flutters, against her better judgement. "Just brilliant."
They sit in the study afterwards, often; him laughing aloud at the mistakes in textbooks and her compiling notes for another journal article. He takes her back to her own time when she's finished one- she emails the report from a public console and hops back into the TARDIS. He leaves her with her mother every few months, for time alone with the ship; she doesn't ask where, or when, he goes. Sometimes she misses her colleagues and sometimes she doesn't, and sometimes she hardly thinks about it. It's charmingly domestic, those evenings, arguing about her practice and preconceptions of history. She's learning a lot.
What she isn't learning, exactly, is her place in his orbit.
He flirts when he ought to hold back and he holds back when he ought to be kind. He gets cold and distant suddenly, when she says the wrong thing or the doors open onto the wrong scene(familiar places are the worst.) He hugs her and turns her about and tosses her balance to the air- she's an adult who feels like a girl around him, since the beginning, infatuated and wary and spinning, inside, always. They escape from a Tarmulon prison and she kisses him, triumphantly, when he breaks the lock.
"Don't worry," she says, when his eyes widen. "I won't do that again."
She does.
She's only a day over thirty-four when her tension snaps and she follows him to his room from the study, chatting idly, with a book tucked casually under her arm. He turns to say goodnight and she presses him against the wall, gently, resting against him and covering his mouth with hers. He doesn't resist, and doesn't press back- he lets her deepen the kiss, yields his mouth under hers. She draws back to look at his eyes; a spark flutters beneath the surface, but the rings are dark. Still as water.
"I'm not getting any younger," she says. He laughs and backs through the door, her hands still resting on his waist. She kisses him slowly, thoroughly, trying not to startle him; he startles anyway, when she backs his knees into the bed.
"I haven't," he murmurs. "Not since-"
"I know," she says. That gulf yawns between them, perilous and empty as space. The punctuation to his sentences, the pauses in his breath, an unopened room; the name still written on the mugs and the romance novels gathering dust. Things he won't part with, things she's learned to ignore. "It's okay." She leans him back and he obliges, opens to her, lets her tug his shirt out of his trousers and shuts his eyes with a soft groan as she straddles him. She kisses his throat. "I love you," she whispers.
His eyes snap open.
"River-"
"No, no, it's alright," she covers. "It's just us. It's just us, here." She kisses his face, his forehead, the lids of his eyes. She can feel both of his hearts beating furiously under her hands, and then she feels them slowing. He's backing away without moving. Shutting down. He stares up at her like a ghost.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry," she says, a little sharply, and then softens her tone. She can be logical. "You want this, and I want this. I don't see what the matter is."
"I care about you." His voice is stretched thin, hollow to the center. "I do. But I can't-"
"What are you going to do ?" She's honestly asking, need and anguish in her voice. She stands up, her knees touching his, and he looks up at her from flat on his back. He's rumpled and raggedly handsome and God, she wants him more than ever, and she feels that she might die. "Really, what will you do ? Dry up and blow away ?"
He shuts his eyes again.
"Yes," he says. "Yes."
She asks him to take her home.
Home is boring, until it isn't.
River works almost non-stop, travelling and writing; a fellowship with the university of Raxia, a research trip to Cohn, a working holiday on K'Ko. Two books. She's awarded the highest prize in her field and she gets drunk at the reception; her friends carry her away from the bar when she starts pointing and laughing at the other nominees. She turns thirty-seven and her mother has a heart attack (non-fatal.) She starts spending more time on-planet. Starts to think about mortgages. Children. Tenure. Shuttle rides to the beach planet of Corinthia at Christmas.
But she just misses him on Baltu Prime, the next big-ring planet over from hers, with a lot of rich universities begging for her to apply; when she arrives in her best heels and smartest suit, they tell her she missed the morning's show- an alien with a flashlight just stopped a weevil infestation from taking over the school. "Just ?" she asks. She leaves her paperwork and assures them she'll call back. She doesn't.
Instead, she takes a long-range job, shuttle ride to the edge, where they're having problems with atmospheric distortions.
"Every time we move an artifact," they tell her, "we get this." The lightning storm rages above their heads. "We've never seen anything like it." It's odd and intriguing until a student is electrocuted, and things start disappearing. She is determined to solve it herself, but the second death ups the urgency. She takes a day of leave to find a communications expert, and she finds one, on the rim.
"I want to find a man," she says. "He hasn't got a mobile or a transmat or a video-link. He's got paper."
"Paper ?"
"Psychic paper," she says.
"Oh, goody," the technician says. "One of those."
The device they give her is unusual, even for someone versed in ancient technologies. It's an imprint, a transmitter of thought waves, a tool to focus her energies on the receiving device. After that, she can hope and pray. She clears her mind and sits in the middle of her bedroom floor, feet crossed at the ankles, feeling vaguely ridiculous. The device hums at a pulse below her hearing, though it shimmers along her bones warmly. She thinks about him, about the ship; her muddied feelings for him, her doubt, and then his hands- his pockets- the paper. It connects. Her message zings through her like a sneeze, leaving her eyes watering and her legs unsteady.
Help me, she asks him. Please.
He arrives after breakfast.
She scares up trouble in her work once in a while, and the Doctor finds her, if he needs to; they play a sort of tag about it. She doesn't call him unless he's really needed, and he doesn't come unless he agrees. Sometimes he brings a companion along, and sometimes not. It's fine. It works well, and is occasionally a source of great amusement: once he saves her favorite assistant, Kata, from a swarm of mutant bees; and Kata writes gooey romantic poetry in the margins of her field journal for weeks afterwards.
Youth.
Her own journal is cracking at the edges from being carried about on her hip for a decade, the soft dyed leather almost as smooth and pliable as skin. The pages are yellow, some stained. She doesn't let him read it, as a sort of joke- she's too grown-up to write poems like Kata, but that doesn't mean she can't tease him about it a bit, fluster him. It's not his place to know what she's writing.
There's only one meeting she doesn't record, never records, though she never forgets.
Barcelona, in the spring. She's only there because of a bunch of dusty old mummies; a dog-cult dug up and turned into a logistics nightmare with all the tourists around. She's under a tent in the hot sun, directing her crew, when she sees him. But it's not him.
It's them.
They're holding hands; from a distance she can't see the way their fingers curl, warm and cool, little swirls and dips of fingerprints fitted together in their skin; though she might suspect it. Rose's head is yellow and her crown reflects the light like tall grass in the sun. They move closer, through the crowd; the woman is smiling at him and his face is naked as the empty sky, utterly bare with joy.
River looks away. It's a face of his she's never seen. "Square six, square seven," she calls out. She never really knew- guessed, maybe. "Kata and George. Chii, you take square eight." She was never that young, that bright, not with him. "Square nine we'll move on tomorrow- there's some soil that needs moving." She loved a shadow of that man, she tells herself. "Brigit, I need three copies of this by noon."
And shadows pass.
The next time she sees him they break a curse on a forbidden temple and it's so like the old days, danger and sprinting and breathless laughter; when it's over she holds him, holds on. She puts her arms around his neck and she breathes heavy, hysterical puffs into his shoulder a little, and he lets her. His arms are firm around her. "Tell me," she says, "tell me you're alright. That you're not lonely."
"Not at the moment," he says, stroking her elbow.
The library is her mistake.
"You're so young," she says, her heart in her throat. "Younger than I've ever seen you." He bristles at that, like he would; she wants to back away and say nothing, keep the timeline as unscarred as possible, but she can't help it. She knows him, knows that arrogant posture, the tight vein in his neck, the curiosity crawling around underneath his skin. He's so young and his eyes are so alive.
She's too startled by him, she makes mistakes- she says too much, she finds herself snapping at him, him snapping back, a tension crackling beneath the surface that never existed before. The woman with him is suspicious. Donna. So things will happen soon- very soon. And she still can't say. "River Song," he snaps, while they run from another spread of darkness, "I'll remember that name." They jump a stack of fallen books together and she reaches for his hand, reflexively; it slips out of her grasp at the next turn. He doesn't notice. He saves the day, like he's supposed to.
And at the end of it, they stand outside his ship while sunlight pours through the windows of the library, the dust circling in the air around them- just dust, just air. "I'm sorry about your team," Donna says, gently. "You going to be alright ?"
"I'll be fine," River says. She gestures at Lux, sprawled unconscious over a reading bench, with Other Dave scowling beside him. "I'm going to sue the pants off of that one, for starters. Then write a bestseller." Donna grins, tiredly.
"Good for you." Her glance rests on the Doctor, then back on River. "I'm going to take a half-dozen hot showers and have a lie down, if you don't mind," she tells the Doctor. "Didn't much fancy being modern art."
She leaves, and they are alone.
"I'm only going to ask one more time," he says. "Who are you, to me ?"
"I- well." So much she could say. She doesn't say. She promised him, a version of him, that she wouldn't love him; promised herself that she would, anyway, forever. Promised him that she'd keep his own secrets from himself, protect his future as much as possible. "I'm your- friend," she says, cheerily. "I'm your friend. We travel together for a while."
"And that's all ?" His eyes search hers, and she looks past him. She can't stand those eyes; stars burning themselves away, so young and so new and with so much ahead. It doesn't seem fair. She nods and he leans back, satisfied. "Well, good to meet you, Professor." He holds out his hand for her to shake. She takes off her glove and touches his skin; his bare, pale, cool skin; for the first time in years. It's the briefest of touches. She makes a choice.
She pulls him close.
"It happens at Astra. At the starfields," she whispers, fiercely. "You think the reactor's safe but it's not- it's overloaded and the gauges are wrong, they're broken. She goes down to find the rest of the workers-"
"Don't tell me that !" he snaps, wrenching himself free of her grasp; he stumbles backwards and she catches him, drags him back into her arms. "You can't- it breaks every-"
"Astra," she says. She kisses his cheek and fights back a sob. "At Astra. Don't forget."
"If you knew me," he rages, "you'd know better than to-"
"I do know you," she says, brokenly. It stops him cold in the middle of his ranting. "I do know you. And I lo-" she stops. Smiles. Her hand finds his face, traces his hairline, where there's not a touch of grey. "So go on. Busy life, plenty of places to see." She pulls herself back together. "Get going, pretty boy." She pushes his chest playfully and he takes a step backwards, halfway into the TARDIS. He watches her for a long minute.
"Goodbye, River Song," he says.
"Goodbye, Doctor."
She closes her eyes and listens to the sound of the ship, vanishing from her world.
"You dropped your book, Professor."
She turns around and Other Dave (just Dave now) is holding it out. Her journal. The ratty edges press together in his hands, and she takes it from him gratefully. They'll be loaded onto the med ship in a moment, and taken home. She looks up at the sunlight, streaming down around them reassuringly. She opens the book.
The pages are perfectly empty.
Every one is blank; clean and sterile, smoothly unmarked. She runs her hands along the spine, the crease in the center, puts the cover to her face and inhales deeply; the smell of the leather is as rich as curry, and it speaks of a hundred lifetimes, a hundred million sights, things she's loved as deeply as her own life. Her own life, which begins again now. Timelines. Crossing and uncrossing, like streams of water in the sea. She wonders how long she'll remember.
Probably not long.
"Let's go," she says. She pats Dave on the arm. He smiles at her, trustingly. They're going home.
She leaves the book on a shelf.
Fic below the cut.
"The dragons are a myth," she says. Another chunk of the wall falls in, rolling past her, with a great grinning lizard's head at the top. She scowls at it. "They're just a legend. This is a research site, not a fairy tale."
"Oh ?" he asks.
They run.
So, you've come this far, so I should tell you: this is River Song's story. Ten/Rose, Donna. PG for mild suggestiveness. Spoilers up to and including 4x08, "Silence in the Library." Speculation for 4x09, "Forest of the Dead." Plus this is probably totes AU. Also, I may have gone crazy.
Tidewater.
The first time she meets him, she's running for her life.
She mistakes him for another student, standing around in a skinny wool suit in the boiling Audiran sun and waving a flashlight above his head; she curses her luck and his obviously regressive genes and grabs his hand while the rock walls shatter down around them. "Run !" she says.
The eyes he turns to her are ancient; ancient, and a little sad. He frowns over the tops of his glasses and she has the uncomfortable feeling of having misread the situation. Entirely. A chunk of sandstone flies past their heads.
"You go on," he says, calmly, obviously distracted. "Take your own advice."
"Are you barking mad ?" she cries out, tugging at his sleeve. "You'll be crushed ! The entire compound's collapsing !" He slips his narrow arm out of her grasp and steps back, thoughtfully, still turning the flashlight around in his hands. River gapes at him, blinking dust out of her eyelashes.
"So it is," he says. As she stares at him he kneels down and presses his ear to the shifting stone floor, while the ruins totter and rumble around them. She knows she ought to run but she's fascinated, transfixed; he is so still and the world is shaking itself to pieces. He puts the flashlight to the floor and it hums gently, tickling the low brain in the back of her skull. "Ah," he says. "They're awake."
"What's awake ?" she shouts at him. "What are you on about ?"
For the first time, he smiles.
"The dragons," he replies, leaping to his feet now, with an odd enthusiasm; he doesn't bother to brush the dirt and debris off of his knees. And now she knows he's insane.
"The dragons are a myth," she says. Another chunk of the wall falls in, rolling past her, with a great grinning lizard's head at the top. She scowls at it. "They're just a legend. This is a research site, not a fairy tale."
"Oh ?" he asks.
They run.
The next time, she's four years older, fuller, grown out of a coltish twenty-one and into her woman's body, and feeling every inch of it. It's given her a kind of girlish arrogance, a swing in her hips. She remembers him like a hallucination, fresh and sharp and utterly alien to her; so when she spots him across the bazaar, she waves and grins and wonders if she's dreaming.
He doesn't look up.
She breaks into a kind of run, keeping her arms close to avoid knocking into any of the vendors, her sandals snapping smartly against the soles of her feet, her hair bouncing in curls. She stops a foot or so from him and starts to say-
"Doctor ?" There's a woman beside him, one she didn't see; a regular-looking sort of woman, with blonde hair in a messy bun and blue jeans low on her hips, holding out a bolt of cloth against her chest. "This one, do you think ? Or the green." The fabric is shimmering, embroidered in tiny swirls of leaves and roots, pulled against her curves and changing shades in the light. The Doctor is staring. He looks different, somehow. "I like them both." The blonde looks up at her. "Hello."
"Hello," River says.
"I love your bracelets," the woman continues. "Did you get them here ?"
"I- yes."
The blonde turns back to the Doctor, who is standing quietly with his hands in his pockets. She grins, tongue between her teeth, and she is not plain any longer but lovely; transformed by a brief and simple sort of happiness so luminous that River smiles as well, caught.
"You should have brought all the credits," she says, still grinning. "I told you so. I'm an expensive date." He crosses his arms and rocks backwards on his heels, mischief and happiness at the edges of his mouth and eyes. River's throat constricts. The woman tilts her head. "Sorry, I didn't get your name. I'm Rose."
"River."
"That's lovely !" she says. "Gorgeous name. You busy ?" River shakes her head, mute. "Could you point out the stall for me ? I'd love to pick up some of those bracelets for a friend."
"Do I-" the Doctor says suddenly, as if seeing her for the first time, "know you ?"
"Audira," she says. "Irritable dragons. And," she adds, "you were useless."
"A-ha !" he cries out, and leaps forward to shake her hand. She gives it over and he envelops it in both palms, narrow fingers not quite as warm as hers, despite the heat of the day; a strange double-pulse in her thumbs. She shakes back, charmed again. "Rose, this is the- the dig site, with the thunder-lizards- we were running for our lives. I remember. You look well. How long's it been ?"
"Five years."
"Five years." He scratches the back of his neck. "Three for me. That's interesting. Well, ladies," he says, glancing backwards, "I see an arc-reversal transmitter with my name on it going that-away."
"Really ?" Rose asks.
"Quite literally," he says, frowning. "Which is- ah, very bad."
They part ways in the market and River walks home, alone, to the flat she shares with Nadine and Sheely; but before she does, she stops at the last stall on the walk and sees it, nestled between other leatherbound journals and antique books smelling slightly of salt and wear. She picks it up- it's a lovely deep blue, like the namesake that ran through her father's land. The pages are empty.
"I'll give it to you for a song," the merchant says.
And River laughs.
When she is twenty-eight she already has three more entries in the diary; Moerin-5-P, briefly, in a crowd; Capraxis, where she kept seeing him in the great glass elevators but never quite caught up (the reactor had a meltdown and they evacuated, but she was sure he hadn't died) and Zulia, the spa planet with hot springs, where they'd just discovered an ancient Zulian temple, pre-settlement, and she was running her own grid and her own team of diggers. "You're moving up in the world," he tells her.
"No, but really," she says, leaning closer. "What's going to happen ? Fire ? Flooding ? Rebel uprising ?" She grins. "Tell me." He looks away, a slight smile budding at the corner of his mouth.
"Nah." He folds his arms in back of his head and settles into the chair more deeply, leaning backwards on two legs. "Rose wanted a bit of a break. Daquiris and sightseeing, evening entertainment on the beach. She's around here somewhere, getting wrapped in seaweed for some ungodly reason." His tone is all indulgent irritation, but River reads something below it- a settled peace, a contentment. It brightens something in her, and darkens something else. He goes on. "To tell you the truth, I don't mind it. Lot of running these last few- well, years, I suppose."
"How long's it been for you ?"
"A bit," he says.
Time, as it must, passes.
By her thirty-third birthday she's begun to believe that this is it, that it's over; a mad fantasy, if it was ever even that, come to an end. No sightings, no meetings for five years- a long span of time for a woman with a ambitious career, moving around the system, with a string of boyfriends not quite dashing enough, backwater planets that seem too small. Time to focus. Time to put away the notebook as a relic of the past.
And then, the Relegaunts.
"Stop," she says, tears cracking her voice. "Stop it !" He's holding down the button of the sonic and the creatures in their pods are screaming. Electricity crackles through the air, exploding in sparks of blue light across their alien skin. "Just let go !" She's shouting at him, dragging on his arms and pounding on his back and he's not even trying to shake her off, just standing like iron, dealing out pain to the pod-soldiers who, minutes ago, had opened fire on the crowd. They were frightening, but this is terrifying.
She can barely recognize him. "Doctor !" she shrieks.
He lets go and his hands are still shaking. The soldiers struggle to their feet as he watches them, watches them beg; he nods and says nothing as they retreat. She puts her hand on his shoulder but he shakes it off, turning away, stalking off through the arena, under the arches and between the columns, through the dust. River follows him, still calling out his name. "Doctor !"
"Go back," he warns. His voice is thick, clotted and strange. "Go away."
"I won't just-" and then she stops, stares, struck dumb by the sight of the ship. It is the ship, it must be; she's never seen it before but she heard Rose speak of it, warmly and lovingly, just once. He opens the door with a fierce twist of the key and stalks off into the depths. Impossible, and yet the door hangs open behind him, daring her eyes to disagree. It's as blue as a river, humble and simple, just a scuffed-up box sitting in the dirt. "It's beautiful," she says, without meaning to. She follows him inside.
It is- different.
"I asked you to go," he snarls. He's standing behind a console with a column of glassy green light pulsing at the center; the walls are golden and alive, patterned with round medallions and studded with coral arms extending into the space. It's an alien landscape of power and beauty, and she finds herself staring up into it, ignoring him. "Are you listening ?"
"You left the door open," she retorts.
"My mistake," he snaps. "You can shut it on your way out."
"What's wrong with you ?" she asks, truly curious, not letting her irritation take hold. "What's happened ?" She looks him in the face, turning away from the soft golds and greens, and finds herself staring into eyes that are dead. Shuttered, dark; windowless gaps, nailed shut. There are deep lines there, crowded at the corners- how could she have missed the fringe of gray hairs, the wear on his skin, the shadows ? "Oh God," she says. "Oh, no." His mouth trembles and the pulse in his throat bobs.
"Please go," he says, more softly, sounding as if the words could break him in half. "I travel alone." She steps forward and he seems to fall, slightly, with his hands on the console for balance. His arms are shaking. She can't hear him breathe. She's never seen a man try to hold in tears with such desperation.
River rests her hand on his arm.
"Not anymore, you don't," she says.
She tries to make it work.
He's manic and confusing, except when he isn't; the moments where his face turns to ash and his eyes darken like clouds, and he leaves her to wander the halls of his ship, to soak in the silence. She tells him it's alright to grieve and he ignores her for a full day afterwards; later, he apologizes and takes her to a planet of carnivals, but it's awkward and too sad. She feels ridiculous, trailing this overgrown puppy of a man, but she doesn't have the heart to let him go.
He takes her to the most incredible places, things she's only dreamed of; he spreads the universe out at her feet and tells her to pick a card, any card. He takes her to see the first Temple of the Moon on Zulia, to watch the first peoples of that planet haul and chisel the cornerstones, and then to the flamboyant, mesmerizing rituals of consecration. "I knew it," she whispers, behind her mask. "I knew they were descended from amphibians. The canals everywhere, the aqueducts- it wasn't irrigation, it was transportation."
"You're brilliant," he tells her, his eyes glowing with pride. Her heart aches and flutters, against her better judgement. "Just brilliant."
They sit in the study afterwards, often; him laughing aloud at the mistakes in textbooks and her compiling notes for another journal article. He takes her back to her own time when she's finished one- she emails the report from a public console and hops back into the TARDIS. He leaves her with her mother every few months, for time alone with the ship; she doesn't ask where, or when, he goes. Sometimes she misses her colleagues and sometimes she doesn't, and sometimes she hardly thinks about it. It's charmingly domestic, those evenings, arguing about her practice and preconceptions of history. She's learning a lot.
What she isn't learning, exactly, is her place in his orbit.
He flirts when he ought to hold back and he holds back when he ought to be kind. He gets cold and distant suddenly, when she says the wrong thing or the doors open onto the wrong scene(familiar places are the worst.) He hugs her and turns her about and tosses her balance to the air- she's an adult who feels like a girl around him, since the beginning, infatuated and wary and spinning, inside, always. They escape from a Tarmulon prison and she kisses him, triumphantly, when he breaks the lock.
"Don't worry," she says, when his eyes widen. "I won't do that again."
She does.
She's only a day over thirty-four when her tension snaps and she follows him to his room from the study, chatting idly, with a book tucked casually under her arm. He turns to say goodnight and she presses him against the wall, gently, resting against him and covering his mouth with hers. He doesn't resist, and doesn't press back- he lets her deepen the kiss, yields his mouth under hers. She draws back to look at his eyes; a spark flutters beneath the surface, but the rings are dark. Still as water.
"I'm not getting any younger," she says. He laughs and backs through the door, her hands still resting on his waist. She kisses him slowly, thoroughly, trying not to startle him; he startles anyway, when she backs his knees into the bed.
"I haven't," he murmurs. "Not since-"
"I know," she says. That gulf yawns between them, perilous and empty as space. The punctuation to his sentences, the pauses in his breath, an unopened room; the name still written on the mugs and the romance novels gathering dust. Things he won't part with, things she's learned to ignore. "It's okay." She leans him back and he obliges, opens to her, lets her tug his shirt out of his trousers and shuts his eyes with a soft groan as she straddles him. She kisses his throat. "I love you," she whispers.
His eyes snap open.
"River-"
"No, no, it's alright," she covers. "It's just us. It's just us, here." She kisses his face, his forehead, the lids of his eyes. She can feel both of his hearts beating furiously under her hands, and then she feels them slowing. He's backing away without moving. Shutting down. He stares up at her like a ghost.
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be sorry," she says, a little sharply, and then softens her tone. She can be logical. "You want this, and I want this. I don't see what the matter is."
"I care about you." His voice is stretched thin, hollow to the center. "I do. But I can't-"
"What are you going to do ?" She's honestly asking, need and anguish in her voice. She stands up, her knees touching his, and he looks up at her from flat on his back. He's rumpled and raggedly handsome and God, she wants him more than ever, and she feels that she might die. "Really, what will you do ? Dry up and blow away ?"
He shuts his eyes again.
"Yes," he says. "Yes."
She asks him to take her home.
Home is boring, until it isn't.
River works almost non-stop, travelling and writing; a fellowship with the university of Raxia, a research trip to Cohn, a working holiday on K'Ko. Two books. She's awarded the highest prize in her field and she gets drunk at the reception; her friends carry her away from the bar when she starts pointing and laughing at the other nominees. She turns thirty-seven and her mother has a heart attack (non-fatal.) She starts spending more time on-planet. Starts to think about mortgages. Children. Tenure. Shuttle rides to the beach planet of Corinthia at Christmas.
But she just misses him on Baltu Prime, the next big-ring planet over from hers, with a lot of rich universities begging for her to apply; when she arrives in her best heels and smartest suit, they tell her she missed the morning's show- an alien with a flashlight just stopped a weevil infestation from taking over the school. "Just ?" she asks. She leaves her paperwork and assures them she'll call back. She doesn't.
Instead, she takes a long-range job, shuttle ride to the edge, where they're having problems with atmospheric distortions.
"Every time we move an artifact," they tell her, "we get this." The lightning storm rages above their heads. "We've never seen anything like it." It's odd and intriguing until a student is electrocuted, and things start disappearing. She is determined to solve it herself, but the second death ups the urgency. She takes a day of leave to find a communications expert, and she finds one, on the rim.
"I want to find a man," she says. "He hasn't got a mobile or a transmat or a video-link. He's got paper."
"Paper ?"
"Psychic paper," she says.
"Oh, goody," the technician says. "One of those."
The device they give her is unusual, even for someone versed in ancient technologies. It's an imprint, a transmitter of thought waves, a tool to focus her energies on the receiving device. After that, she can hope and pray. She clears her mind and sits in the middle of her bedroom floor, feet crossed at the ankles, feeling vaguely ridiculous. The device hums at a pulse below her hearing, though it shimmers along her bones warmly. She thinks about him, about the ship; her muddied feelings for him, her doubt, and then his hands- his pockets- the paper. It connects. Her message zings through her like a sneeze, leaving her eyes watering and her legs unsteady.
Help me, she asks him. Please.
He arrives after breakfast.
She scares up trouble in her work once in a while, and the Doctor finds her, if he needs to; they play a sort of tag about it. She doesn't call him unless he's really needed, and he doesn't come unless he agrees. Sometimes he brings a companion along, and sometimes not. It's fine. It works well, and is occasionally a source of great amusement: once he saves her favorite assistant, Kata, from a swarm of mutant bees; and Kata writes gooey romantic poetry in the margins of her field journal for weeks afterwards.
Youth.
Her own journal is cracking at the edges from being carried about on her hip for a decade, the soft dyed leather almost as smooth and pliable as skin. The pages are yellow, some stained. She doesn't let him read it, as a sort of joke- she's too grown-up to write poems like Kata, but that doesn't mean she can't tease him about it a bit, fluster him. It's not his place to know what she's writing.
There's only one meeting she doesn't record, never records, though she never forgets.
Barcelona, in the spring. She's only there because of a bunch of dusty old mummies; a dog-cult dug up and turned into a logistics nightmare with all the tourists around. She's under a tent in the hot sun, directing her crew, when she sees him. But it's not him.
It's them.
They're holding hands; from a distance she can't see the way their fingers curl, warm and cool, little swirls and dips of fingerprints fitted together in their skin; though she might suspect it. Rose's head is yellow and her crown reflects the light like tall grass in the sun. They move closer, through the crowd; the woman is smiling at him and his face is naked as the empty sky, utterly bare with joy.
River looks away. It's a face of his she's never seen. "Square six, square seven," she calls out. She never really knew- guessed, maybe. "Kata and George. Chii, you take square eight." She was never that young, that bright, not with him. "Square nine we'll move on tomorrow- there's some soil that needs moving." She loved a shadow of that man, she tells herself. "Brigit, I need three copies of this by noon."
And shadows pass.
The next time she sees him they break a curse on a forbidden temple and it's so like the old days, danger and sprinting and breathless laughter; when it's over she holds him, holds on. She puts her arms around his neck and she breathes heavy, hysterical puffs into his shoulder a little, and he lets her. His arms are firm around her. "Tell me," she says, "tell me you're alright. That you're not lonely."
"Not at the moment," he says, stroking her elbow.
The library is her mistake.
"You're so young," she says, her heart in her throat. "Younger than I've ever seen you." He bristles at that, like he would; she wants to back away and say nothing, keep the timeline as unscarred as possible, but she can't help it. She knows him, knows that arrogant posture, the tight vein in his neck, the curiosity crawling around underneath his skin. He's so young and his eyes are so alive.
She's too startled by him, she makes mistakes- she says too much, she finds herself snapping at him, him snapping back, a tension crackling beneath the surface that never existed before. The woman with him is suspicious. Donna. So things will happen soon- very soon. And she still can't say. "River Song," he snaps, while they run from another spread of darkness, "I'll remember that name." They jump a stack of fallen books together and she reaches for his hand, reflexively; it slips out of her grasp at the next turn. He doesn't notice. He saves the day, like he's supposed to.
And at the end of it, they stand outside his ship while sunlight pours through the windows of the library, the dust circling in the air around them- just dust, just air. "I'm sorry about your team," Donna says, gently. "You going to be alright ?"
"I'll be fine," River says. She gestures at Lux, sprawled unconscious over a reading bench, with Other Dave scowling beside him. "I'm going to sue the pants off of that one, for starters. Then write a bestseller." Donna grins, tiredly.
"Good for you." Her glance rests on the Doctor, then back on River. "I'm going to take a half-dozen hot showers and have a lie down, if you don't mind," she tells the Doctor. "Didn't much fancy being modern art."
She leaves, and they are alone.
"I'm only going to ask one more time," he says. "Who are you, to me ?"
"I- well." So much she could say. She doesn't say. She promised him, a version of him, that she wouldn't love him; promised herself that she would, anyway, forever. Promised him that she'd keep his own secrets from himself, protect his future as much as possible. "I'm your- friend," she says, cheerily. "I'm your friend. We travel together for a while."
"And that's all ?" His eyes search hers, and she looks past him. She can't stand those eyes; stars burning themselves away, so young and so new and with so much ahead. It doesn't seem fair. She nods and he leans back, satisfied. "Well, good to meet you, Professor." He holds out his hand for her to shake. She takes off her glove and touches his skin; his bare, pale, cool skin; for the first time in years. It's the briefest of touches. She makes a choice.
She pulls him close.
"It happens at Astra. At the starfields," she whispers, fiercely. "You think the reactor's safe but it's not- it's overloaded and the gauges are wrong, they're broken. She goes down to find the rest of the workers-"
"Don't tell me that !" he snaps, wrenching himself free of her grasp; he stumbles backwards and she catches him, drags him back into her arms. "You can't- it breaks every-"
"Astra," she says. She kisses his cheek and fights back a sob. "At Astra. Don't forget."
"If you knew me," he rages, "you'd know better than to-"
"I do know you," she says, brokenly. It stops him cold in the middle of his ranting. "I do know you. And I lo-" she stops. Smiles. Her hand finds his face, traces his hairline, where there's not a touch of grey. "So go on. Busy life, plenty of places to see." She pulls herself back together. "Get going, pretty boy." She pushes his chest playfully and he takes a step backwards, halfway into the TARDIS. He watches her for a long minute.
"Goodbye, River Song," he says.
"Goodbye, Doctor."
She closes her eyes and listens to the sound of the ship, vanishing from her world.
"You dropped your book, Professor."
She turns around and Other Dave (just Dave now) is holding it out. Her journal. The ratty edges press together in his hands, and she takes it from him gratefully. They'll be loaded onto the med ship in a moment, and taken home. She looks up at the sunlight, streaming down around them reassuringly. She opens the book.
The pages are perfectly empty.
Every one is blank; clean and sterile, smoothly unmarked. She runs her hands along the spine, the crease in the center, puts the cover to her face and inhales deeply; the smell of the leather is as rich as curry, and it speaks of a hundred lifetimes, a hundred million sights, things she's loved as deeply as her own life. Her own life, which begins again now. Timelines. Crossing and uncrossing, like streams of water in the sea. She wonders how long she'll remember.
Probably not long.
"Let's go," she says. She pats Dave on the arm. He smiles at her, trustingly. They're going home.
She leaves the book on a shelf.