Title: Sand and Surf
Author: betawho
Rating: PG
Characters: 11th Doctor, River Song, Surprise Guest
Words: 464
Summary: River is teaching the clumsy Doctor how to surfboard...
The Doctor wobbled on his surfboard, his arms windmilling as he struggled for balance.
River grinned at him, zizzing along on the slope of the wave, enjoying the look of her husband, all glaring white skin, floppy hair, and bright flower patterned swim trunks. “Balance, Sweetie!” she yelled over the thunder of surf and wind, laughter edging her voice.
“I’m trying!” he yelled back, his surfboard whipping this way and that under him, forever in imminent danger of falling. But he was grinning.
River’s grin suddenly washed away when a shark’s dorsal fin broached the water behind the Doctor’s surfboard.
She didn’t even bother to yell a warning. She leaned and curled her board closer, jumped and slammed both heels into that triangular gray snout, its mouth full of teeth.
She felt the thud of impact and sank. Before the shark could recover, she swam up strongly, grabbed the Doctor’s board and hauled herself aboard, out of the water. She scanned the water for the shark, pulling her legs up and standing, her heart pounding.
“Like this, Sweetie.” She wrapped an arm around him, stabilized him with her better center of gravity. He grinned, looking down at her lank corkscrew curls, he wrapped an arm around her black-clad waist. “Let’s get you back to shore,” she said.
Always more graceful together than apart, the Doctor hunkered his knees a bit and got into the sway of the board. He grinned at the wind in his hair, his wife under his arm, a new skill to be mastered, a beautiful day.
River looked behind them, scanning for fins.
The surf board sizzed up on the beach, grating sand. The Doctor jumped off grinning, and twirled. “That was brilliant! Let’s do that again!” he enthused, eyes bright, eager, boyish. Totally oblivious.
Before River could respond, a grey dorsal fin broke the water, bare yards from the beach, a heavy gray triangular head lifted up, mouth full of snaggle teeth. The body rose up out of the water, a gray-skinned, muscular, human torso. The humanoid walked up onto the beach, shaking its heavy shark head dazedly.
“Dammit, River, that hurt!” The gray head morphed, the body gaining color. By the last step up onto the beach the mutant shark had become a golden-orange skinned humanoid man with gills and a lovely, delicate frill waving down the center of his smooth head like a mohawk.
River’s shoulder’s dropped and she glared. “Dammit, Jim! I thought you were a shark!”
He grinned, teeth luminescent yellow in the sunlight. The last of the shark fin merged into his muscular golden back. He rubbed his nose ruefully. “A perfectly good prank, ruined.”
The Doctor looked from his dripping, glaring wife, to his golden-scaled ichthyoid friend.
“Did I miss something?”
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