fic: One Small Breath In the Whole of Time
Title: One Small Breath In the Whole of Time
Author: lonewytch
Fandom/Characters: Doctor Who; Eleven/River
Wordcount: 3617
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Through to the present
Beta and tweakage: silverlinepark, thank you, sweetie
Summary: A paper cage she escapes at will, and the Tardis the blue sky that she flies into when he comes.
A/N: Companion piece to Time, it Took Us to Where the Water Was
When Melody Pond dreams, time seems to move through her, passing like a blade through her cells and leaving tracks as it goes. And when she looks at the tracks that it has left, she can see where things have come from and where they will lead to. In her dream she can see it all, people and places running through her, working their way into her as sure as a glacier’s flow. She can see the boundless expanse of space and all the galaxies strung out like beads.
Along one of the tracks is a man out of time. A man who doesn’t sleep for two thousand years ,who watches over a black box endlessly, with a slow patience that is somehow more solid than the granite that he and the box rest under. A man who isn’t really a man, until he is remade again in his own image.
And on another track that meets it is a girl with red hair. A girl whose head is filled with the secrets of the universe which pour through it, a girl who remembers things that nobody else can, who waits and waits, who screams into the night as something turns to nothing in her arms.
Then along one of brightest of tracks in her dreams is a little girl who is stolen away by the goblins, and lives a bleak fairytale darker than in any book. A little girl who forgets herself over and over again, whose hearts beat endlessly with the name of one man and whose focus is honed and keen like a knife point. And then she realises that this track leads to her. It cuts a line straight into her, deeper than anything has a right to go, and into her insides it carves out a new name for her in the place where she chooses.
And into the space where this bright track leads she sees a man, a wonderful, strange man who cups all of time in his hands, and he holds the beam of light that leads to her like a thread in his hands. It is knotted and twisted round his fingers and around and around inside him. And she knows what this means and she smiles in her sleep.
*
She wakes in a hospital, the pillow cupping her head, the crisp smell of sterilised glass and metal around her. The last pieces of a wonderful and strange dream slip from her head, leaving her fingers grasping after it. The room is white, soft, suffused with a glow, and she holds her hands up in front of her to see if she is really still there. Light streams from a wide window onto them, its rays covering her like water.
She remembers then - the dripping gold on her hands, gathering in the creases and the whorls of her palms and fingers - the way something went from her skin to his as she laid her palms on his face; her lips on his; the wetness of his mouth conducting the life force from her, carrying it on into him with her breath; the taste of him in her mouth. She remembers feeling like she was dying as life drained from her and not caring, because it felt so wonderful to make the choice, to dispense life not death, to know that she was not bound by her name any more.
She remembers how the Tardis felt in her mind, like homecoming, the primal glow of a hearth against the dark night, a turning spiral language of circles that consumed her head, like being folded inwards into her walls, but outwards at the same time.
She can still see her parents’ faces in her mind, just before they left the hospital - it is blurry and she remembers them through a mist of exhaustion, as if she was seeing from underneath innumerable layers.
Amy.
Rory.
So many years she called them that, all the time secretly thinking; Mum… Dad.
Most of all she remembers a voice, as the swirling fog of weariness dragged her into its depths, a voice that said;
She’s going to be amazing
She is River, now.
*
She is the life and soul at the University, she wants to do everything, have everything, because she knows this life is her last even though its winding track may be longer than most. She drinks them all under the table, she beats them in every test and exam, she outsmarts them at all of their games, she wows and dazzles, she is mad and she is magnificent - but she always keeps them at arm’s length. She knows she is brilliant and she is clever, but she has seen the stars and now they are inside her, burning holes into her. She needs to fill those holes.
She breezes through her degree, her Masters, and then onto her Doctorate, her mind is quick, like air, quick and concise as a breath. She studies the traces that sentient beings have left behind, places where the long dead have streaked themselves across the ground. Crumbling cities, bones in the dirt, forgotten tombs. All the time she looks for the signs that he was there, and everywhere she finds them.
She hardly needs to sleep so at night she sits late amongst the warm wood and the mellow lamps of the library, and she studies. She studies his stories, everything he ever did that is recorded and that she can lay her hands on, the good and the bad, and the sublime. She knows the myths, can recite them in her dreams and she tries to peel away fact from tale from legend. Everything that’s important she writes into her blue book, the book that he left her; Tardis blue, a blue that beats inside her, a blue whose vibration her hearts tap out one by one by one.
Until one night the astronaut suit comes back.
We were always coming for you, Melody Pond.
*
River dreams that she is suspended in time. Her arms, her legs, her whole body is weightless, no more than a feather on a still pool of water, She makes no ripples, she casts no shadow, she does not move, she does not think, she does not feel. The sun shines from above but is refracted into rays that dance and taunt around her, gold on blue, the colours of the Tardis. But it’s wrong, all wrong. She is cocooned, a second skin between her and the world around her, she is masked, her true face hidden. When her feet touch the bottom of the lake she wakes up, but realises she wasn’t dreaming.
*
She is dragged out of the water with noise all around her, the night has fallen and when they lift the visor she can see the Milky Way like a stain across the black, stars spilled like milk. They shake and slap her back to awareness, shine lights in her eyes, rip the suit from her, tangling her ankles and wrists in its wires painfully. She tumbles onto the floor, face in the ground. She feels the sand on her cheeks, in her eyes as they force her arms back and handcuff her
I did it, she tells them as they haul her to her feet. I killed the Doctor, it was me
And then someone punches her hard and she tastes the copper tang of blood flooding her mouth, and she swallows down on all of it and holds it inside, because all she feels is a fierce joy that he had a plan, and that he is somewhere out there in the sky. She wants to scream and shout her elation, but instead she mocks a struggle, kicks out, spits in the face of the guard who punched her and finally feels the sharp sting of a tranquilliser needle in her neck.
*
She’s out of the cell on her first night, ghosting in the shadows, drawing a circle around her level of the facility, hands trailing the blue walls, bare feet hushed on the floor, playing a game of avoiding the cameras. She’s back in the cell when they check on her in the morning.
She skims through her first weeks then at Stormcage, learning its feel, its pattern, the kinks in its armour - its security. She mentally notes the places where she can take advantage, push a little, gain a little ground. The guards and prisoners alike despise her, mistrust her intensely. It doesn’t touch her. Her feet are restless, but she doesn’t yet dare leave the facility, for his sake.
One night she lies on her back wrapped inside the dark and listens to the endless rain throw itself thousands of feet down to the ground. She is in that half state between sleep and waking and is stunned when she feels the slow breath of the Tardis beginning to materialise next to her. She has always known she would see him again, that she was written into his future and that she had to write his into her journal, but she expected him to keep a low profile for longer than a couple of weeks.
She’s shocked to realise that he’s attempting to land inside the cell itself and sits up, tucks her knees to her chest, watches. There is a bird in her stomach that is trying to escape, its wings stroke her insides and her hands are its fluttering breath. She wraps them around her legs to still them. The light at the pinnacle of the Tardis punctures the dark over and over and she wonders if the metal frame of the bed will buckle and fold like paper if he materialises too close to her.
The blue ebbs and flows, lapping close to her toes. His calculations are right though and, the Tardis finally manifests solid and whole only a couple of centimetres from the side of her bed. She sits heart pulsing looking at that bright, blue wholeness which makes the dingy cell seem only half real.
The doors open in front of her and amber light pours into the cell and into her. She feels the Tardis in her, subtle at first, but it’s a quickening that jumps from synapse to synapse, growing brighter until she feels warm to the bones. He steps silhouetted into the light. It strokes the edges of him, shifts, blurs until she can’t see where it ends and he starts. Then he steps forward, meets her eyes, and he is smiling, and there is a question there, a lack of surety that she can’t quite read.
Well? he says after only a few breaths, pointing to the small gap between the edge of the Tardis and her bed, unable to contain his smugness at landing perfectly.
She knows that isn’t all he’s really asking but she doesn’t answer, she can’t. Her mouth is dust, her hearts a staccato thudding so loud she feels like the sky can hear it.
He cocks his head at her hesitation, his smile deepening. She watches him think for a few moments, and then he holds his arms out to her. She bunches her muscles then she leaps from the bed and into him harder than she means to. He half catches her and they move entangled and ungainly into the Tardis light. His forehead presses to hers, she can feel him and the Tardis inside her and cannot separate one from the other
Yes…welcome home…my River….at last….my love
*
River dreams that she is flying through space. She moves past nebulae, through giant gas clouds and skirts black holes which are greedily swallowing all around them. She circles star systems seeing the light of civilisations everywhere. She is unstoppable in the dark, she is directionless yet everywhere at the same time. She holds the stars in her fists, she breathes the light of the nebulae where they are birthed. She knows what it means to create, to become.
*
She smiles as she hears him arrive; just as he has done on so many nights gone by that she has forgotten to count now. There is a game they play when he arrives and everything is well with them both. He will open the Tardis doors and walk out, or she will walk in, and then they will stand and look at each other, neither speaking, the silence stretching, until someone either laughs, or starts, or jumps forward to embrace and kiss the other; a continuation of the game that began when she first met him and when he first met her. She hasn’t lost this particular round yet.
The Stormcage is only half real to her now. She makes use of her time there, reading , studying, thinking - but it’s just a borderland around real life to her. A means to an end. A paper cage she escapes at will, and the Tardis the blue sky that she flies into when he comes.
Tonight she sits and watches him fly. He bounds round the console like a moth gone mad round a bulb. Energy seems to drip from him as he flashes by. He pulls levers, rings bells, pushes buttons. He’s showing off, he knows it and she knows it. Though River is conscious she could fly her better (and he is too but won’t admit it), there is such a pleasure in watching him in his element that she is content to ignore the occasional groan of objection from the old girl. The console is that altar that he circles around, his centre of gravity, the feel of her beneath his hands is where he is most at home. He meets her gaze often as he dances and she deliberately varies rolling her eyes or looking dutifully impressed. Somehow he is awkward but always elegant and she is endlessly fascinated by the way that he moves his limbs, graceful yet uncoordinated. Mostly she watches his hands. On the levers, pressed to the surface of the console, spiralling through the air as he gesticulates flamboyantly.
He tells her he is taking her somewhere amazing again, somewhere she will love, somewhere he wants to show her, somewhere special. She laughs and says that surely at this rate he will run out of destinations. He says, No. Never. And he is all seriousness as he walks over to her, cups her cheek in his hand and says, Never.
*
One night she begins to dream before sleep drags her fully under. She can still hear the perpetual rain on the window of her cell, and that rain grows louder and louder until it is a crashing river before her. Still touching the waking world slightly, she thinks to herself “A River for River”, before the current pulls her on down and into her sleep. She stands on the bank of this river and she is filling her pockets with stones though she doesn’t know why and she cannot stop. They are round and smooth, worn clean and shining. She piles them in and her coat becomes heavier and heavier. She walks into the river, the water ice upon her thighs, her waist, her neck and then over her head. She rests then, on the bottom of the river, and the water flows over her, and it feels like time bleeding away from her, days and days gone from her grasp, days never to be repeated, and she mourns the passing of the current, but she cannot break free to swim to the surface and touch it again.
*
There have been years and years together, years of wrapping themselves around the universe, seeing things she couldn’t have dreamed of. Years of danger, times where they both came close to death, times when they ran and ran because their lives depended on how fast they could go. Years of the soft Tardis light on their skin, years of them joined together and burning together, hot like suns, harder than stones.
Perception of time is relative. She knows this intensely, that it exists like a concertina, slices of it folded up on each other. The trees mark it differently to most humans, outstripping them by many years. Rings leading to their hearts track their lives. For the stones a year means nothing.
Even so, today she cannot help feel bitter as she watches the man she loves slip away from her like an ebb tide. He is younger and younger almost every time, she sees it in the set of his eyes sometimes before he speaks. There is less anguish there, but also less wisdom, less gentleness when he looks at her. And though she always feels that rush of sweetness in her when she sees him, now it is tinged with bitterness as he becomes more distant. He doesn’t love her any more…no, not yet, she corrects herself, he doesn’t know her as he did…as he will. Nearly every time their paths cross now it is from necessity and not through the pure thrill of each other’s company - she is becoming a stranger to him.
.
Today he still flirts with her, touches her arm, her hand, smiles at her but she can feel that he does not entirely trust her. He is intrigued by her, oh yes, he is intensely curious in the way that only he can be, he watches her covertly most of the time they are together. She fears that soon this may be all she has left, and so she flirts a little harder, acts a little more mysterious, casts a few more insinuations, and feels herself warm as she sees his fascination grow.
They work together in a rhythm that she knows well, a rhythm that he is beginning to recognise, and they do what they must. When he returns her to the Stormcage, he doesn’t embrace her before they part, he just waves her off and saunters back into the Tardis and she bites her lip so hard she feels blood flow and she swallows it down, and all that’s left inside is some hollow place where she feels like everything has been scraped out. And she goes back to her small cell and she reads her diary, and she remembers.
*
River dreams of the sun that the earth spirals around. She dreams that she is falling into its face, and that her flesh unknits from her bones, that her bones turn to black cinders, and then to ash, and to dust, and to nothing, and she is consumed in the light.. But in her dream she doesn’t stop thinking, doesn’t stop dreaming, doesn’t unbecome, she is aware of herself still falling into the sun, towards its core. She is all fire and all light and when she wakes up it feels like there are solar flares trailing wherever she looks.
*
When River realises she is going to die, she feels strangely at peace.
She works her fingers frantically to wire herself into the computer core, she understands the connections that need to be made, the circuits that need to cross, she understands as well as he does how the energy will flow and burn and consume.
Thought and images flash through her mind. The wood in the library where she has just flown down from lingers in her memory, warm and still. Her crew moving in their white suits like a flurry of snow against the dark wood, the shadows melting them away one by one, pieces of her dropping away as they leave her.
She thinks of how he didn’t know her and flinched away from her hand asking who are you and of the cold and the fear that rose in her at that moment, how she felt like she was falling and falling.
She remembers how his name burnt on her lips as she spoke it to him, how her heart felt like it would pound out of her chest. That name spoken to him by her so many times before; spoken during their nights of heat and stars, nights when they would press their foreheads together as their bodies linked, and he would be there with her inside her mind, and he would whisper the language of Gallifrey to her, and it would sound strange and beautiful on his tongue. She thinks of how he smelled of salt, warm skin and clean clothes and of the unmistakable scent of the Tardis.
The Tardis. The first place and the only place she ever really belonged.
Even in the last moments she still isn’t afraid to die. She never has been in her lifetime; she has seen the skies and everything beyond them, done wonderful things, dark things, she’s never been one for either fear or regret. She knows history won’t forget her easily, though she doesn’t much care about that.
He rails at her and begs her to let him take her place, and she loves him for that then. For being the Doctor, for not knowing her at all yet still being prepared to die for her, for everything that he will become, for all the days and the nights that he will give her. As she lays the cold metal of the conductor plate around her head to let the computer draw out her life, as she chokes out the word, Spoilers, his eyes - so young - are what she takes with her to her death. His old, young eyes, and the knowledge that for one small breath in the whole of time, she was amazing.
Author: lonewytch
Fandom/Characters: Doctor Who; Eleven/River
Wordcount: 3617
Rating: PG
Spoilers: Through to the present
Beta and tweakage: silverlinepark, thank you, sweetie
Summary: A paper cage she escapes at will, and the Tardis the blue sky that she flies into when he comes.
A/N: Companion piece to Time, it Took Us to Where the Water Was
When Melody Pond dreams, time seems to move through her, passing like a blade through her cells and leaving tracks as it goes. And when she looks at the tracks that it has left, she can see where things have come from and where they will lead to. In her dream she can see it all, people and places running through her, working their way into her as sure as a glacier’s flow. She can see the boundless expanse of space and all the galaxies strung out like beads.
Along one of the tracks is a man out of time. A man who doesn’t sleep for two thousand years ,who watches over a black box endlessly, with a slow patience that is somehow more solid than the granite that he and the box rest under. A man who isn’t really a man, until he is remade again in his own image.
And on another track that meets it is a girl with red hair. A girl whose head is filled with the secrets of the universe which pour through it, a girl who remembers things that nobody else can, who waits and waits, who screams into the night as something turns to nothing in her arms.
Then along one of brightest of tracks in her dreams is a little girl who is stolen away by the goblins, and lives a bleak fairytale darker than in any book. A little girl who forgets herself over and over again, whose hearts beat endlessly with the name of one man and whose focus is honed and keen like a knife point. And then she realises that this track leads to her. It cuts a line straight into her, deeper than anything has a right to go, and into her insides it carves out a new name for her in the place where she chooses.
And into the space where this bright track leads she sees a man, a wonderful, strange man who cups all of time in his hands, and he holds the beam of light that leads to her like a thread in his hands. It is knotted and twisted round his fingers and around and around inside him. And she knows what this means and she smiles in her sleep.
*
She wakes in a hospital, the pillow cupping her head, the crisp smell of sterilised glass and metal around her. The last pieces of a wonderful and strange dream slip from her head, leaving her fingers grasping after it. The room is white, soft, suffused with a glow, and she holds her hands up in front of her to see if she is really still there. Light streams from a wide window onto them, its rays covering her like water.
She remembers then - the dripping gold on her hands, gathering in the creases and the whorls of her palms and fingers - the way something went from her skin to his as she laid her palms on his face; her lips on his; the wetness of his mouth conducting the life force from her, carrying it on into him with her breath; the taste of him in her mouth. She remembers feeling like she was dying as life drained from her and not caring, because it felt so wonderful to make the choice, to dispense life not death, to know that she was not bound by her name any more.
She remembers how the Tardis felt in her mind, like homecoming, the primal glow of a hearth against the dark night, a turning spiral language of circles that consumed her head, like being folded inwards into her walls, but outwards at the same time.
She can still see her parents’ faces in her mind, just before they left the hospital - it is blurry and she remembers them through a mist of exhaustion, as if she was seeing from underneath innumerable layers.
Amy.
Rory.
So many years she called them that, all the time secretly thinking; Mum… Dad.
Most of all she remembers a voice, as the swirling fog of weariness dragged her into its depths, a voice that said;
She’s going to be amazing
She is River, now.
*
She is the life and soul at the University, she wants to do everything, have everything, because she knows this life is her last even though its winding track may be longer than most. She drinks them all under the table, she beats them in every test and exam, she outsmarts them at all of their games, she wows and dazzles, she is mad and she is magnificent - but she always keeps them at arm’s length. She knows she is brilliant and she is clever, but she has seen the stars and now they are inside her, burning holes into her. She needs to fill those holes.
She breezes through her degree, her Masters, and then onto her Doctorate, her mind is quick, like air, quick and concise as a breath. She studies the traces that sentient beings have left behind, places where the long dead have streaked themselves across the ground. Crumbling cities, bones in the dirt, forgotten tombs. All the time she looks for the signs that he was there, and everywhere she finds them.
She hardly needs to sleep so at night she sits late amongst the warm wood and the mellow lamps of the library, and she studies. She studies his stories, everything he ever did that is recorded and that she can lay her hands on, the good and the bad, and the sublime. She knows the myths, can recite them in her dreams and she tries to peel away fact from tale from legend. Everything that’s important she writes into her blue book, the book that he left her; Tardis blue, a blue that beats inside her, a blue whose vibration her hearts tap out one by one by one.
Until one night the astronaut suit comes back.
We were always coming for you, Melody Pond.
*
River dreams that she is suspended in time. Her arms, her legs, her whole body is weightless, no more than a feather on a still pool of water, She makes no ripples, she casts no shadow, she does not move, she does not think, she does not feel. The sun shines from above but is refracted into rays that dance and taunt around her, gold on blue, the colours of the Tardis. But it’s wrong, all wrong. She is cocooned, a second skin between her and the world around her, she is masked, her true face hidden. When her feet touch the bottom of the lake she wakes up, but realises she wasn’t dreaming.
*
She is dragged out of the water with noise all around her, the night has fallen and when they lift the visor she can see the Milky Way like a stain across the black, stars spilled like milk. They shake and slap her back to awareness, shine lights in her eyes, rip the suit from her, tangling her ankles and wrists in its wires painfully. She tumbles onto the floor, face in the ground. She feels the sand on her cheeks, in her eyes as they force her arms back and handcuff her
I did it, she tells them as they haul her to her feet. I killed the Doctor, it was me
And then someone punches her hard and she tastes the copper tang of blood flooding her mouth, and she swallows down on all of it and holds it inside, because all she feels is a fierce joy that he had a plan, and that he is somewhere out there in the sky. She wants to scream and shout her elation, but instead she mocks a struggle, kicks out, spits in the face of the guard who punched her and finally feels the sharp sting of a tranquilliser needle in her neck.
*
She’s out of the cell on her first night, ghosting in the shadows, drawing a circle around her level of the facility, hands trailing the blue walls, bare feet hushed on the floor, playing a game of avoiding the cameras. She’s back in the cell when they check on her in the morning.
She skims through her first weeks then at Stormcage, learning its feel, its pattern, the kinks in its armour - its security. She mentally notes the places where she can take advantage, push a little, gain a little ground. The guards and prisoners alike despise her, mistrust her intensely. It doesn’t touch her. Her feet are restless, but she doesn’t yet dare leave the facility, for his sake.
One night she lies on her back wrapped inside the dark and listens to the endless rain throw itself thousands of feet down to the ground. She is in that half state between sleep and waking and is stunned when she feels the slow breath of the Tardis beginning to materialise next to her. She has always known she would see him again, that she was written into his future and that she had to write his into her journal, but she expected him to keep a low profile for longer than a couple of weeks.
She’s shocked to realise that he’s attempting to land inside the cell itself and sits up, tucks her knees to her chest, watches. There is a bird in her stomach that is trying to escape, its wings stroke her insides and her hands are its fluttering breath. She wraps them around her legs to still them. The light at the pinnacle of the Tardis punctures the dark over and over and she wonders if the metal frame of the bed will buckle and fold like paper if he materialises too close to her.
The blue ebbs and flows, lapping close to her toes. His calculations are right though and, the Tardis finally manifests solid and whole only a couple of centimetres from the side of her bed. She sits heart pulsing looking at that bright, blue wholeness which makes the dingy cell seem only half real.
The doors open in front of her and amber light pours into the cell and into her. She feels the Tardis in her, subtle at first, but it’s a quickening that jumps from synapse to synapse, growing brighter until she feels warm to the bones. He steps silhouetted into the light. It strokes the edges of him, shifts, blurs until she can’t see where it ends and he starts. Then he steps forward, meets her eyes, and he is smiling, and there is a question there, a lack of surety that she can’t quite read.
Well? he says after only a few breaths, pointing to the small gap between the edge of the Tardis and her bed, unable to contain his smugness at landing perfectly.
She knows that isn’t all he’s really asking but she doesn’t answer, she can’t. Her mouth is dust, her hearts a staccato thudding so loud she feels like the sky can hear it.
He cocks his head at her hesitation, his smile deepening. She watches him think for a few moments, and then he holds his arms out to her. She bunches her muscles then she leaps from the bed and into him harder than she means to. He half catches her and they move entangled and ungainly into the Tardis light. His forehead presses to hers, she can feel him and the Tardis inside her and cannot separate one from the other
Yes…welcome home…my River….at last….my love
*
River dreams that she is flying through space. She moves past nebulae, through giant gas clouds and skirts black holes which are greedily swallowing all around them. She circles star systems seeing the light of civilisations everywhere. She is unstoppable in the dark, she is directionless yet everywhere at the same time. She holds the stars in her fists, she breathes the light of the nebulae where they are birthed. She knows what it means to create, to become.
*
She smiles as she hears him arrive; just as he has done on so many nights gone by that she has forgotten to count now. There is a game they play when he arrives and everything is well with them both. He will open the Tardis doors and walk out, or she will walk in, and then they will stand and look at each other, neither speaking, the silence stretching, until someone either laughs, or starts, or jumps forward to embrace and kiss the other; a continuation of the game that began when she first met him and when he first met her. She hasn’t lost this particular round yet.
The Stormcage is only half real to her now. She makes use of her time there, reading , studying, thinking - but it’s just a borderland around real life to her. A means to an end. A paper cage she escapes at will, and the Tardis the blue sky that she flies into when he comes.
Tonight she sits and watches him fly. He bounds round the console like a moth gone mad round a bulb. Energy seems to drip from him as he flashes by. He pulls levers, rings bells, pushes buttons. He’s showing off, he knows it and she knows it. Though River is conscious she could fly her better (and he is too but won’t admit it), there is such a pleasure in watching him in his element that she is content to ignore the occasional groan of objection from the old girl. The console is that altar that he circles around, his centre of gravity, the feel of her beneath his hands is where he is most at home. He meets her gaze often as he dances and she deliberately varies rolling her eyes or looking dutifully impressed. Somehow he is awkward but always elegant and she is endlessly fascinated by the way that he moves his limbs, graceful yet uncoordinated. Mostly she watches his hands. On the levers, pressed to the surface of the console, spiralling through the air as he gesticulates flamboyantly.
He tells her he is taking her somewhere amazing again, somewhere she will love, somewhere he wants to show her, somewhere special. She laughs and says that surely at this rate he will run out of destinations. He says, No. Never. And he is all seriousness as he walks over to her, cups her cheek in his hand and says, Never.
*
One night she begins to dream before sleep drags her fully under. She can still hear the perpetual rain on the window of her cell, and that rain grows louder and louder until it is a crashing river before her. Still touching the waking world slightly, she thinks to herself “A River for River”, before the current pulls her on down and into her sleep. She stands on the bank of this river and she is filling her pockets with stones though she doesn’t know why and she cannot stop. They are round and smooth, worn clean and shining. She piles them in and her coat becomes heavier and heavier. She walks into the river, the water ice upon her thighs, her waist, her neck and then over her head. She rests then, on the bottom of the river, and the water flows over her, and it feels like time bleeding away from her, days and days gone from her grasp, days never to be repeated, and she mourns the passing of the current, but she cannot break free to swim to the surface and touch it again.
*
There have been years and years together, years of wrapping themselves around the universe, seeing things she couldn’t have dreamed of. Years of danger, times where they both came close to death, times when they ran and ran because their lives depended on how fast they could go. Years of the soft Tardis light on their skin, years of them joined together and burning together, hot like suns, harder than stones.
Perception of time is relative. She knows this intensely, that it exists like a concertina, slices of it folded up on each other. The trees mark it differently to most humans, outstripping them by many years. Rings leading to their hearts track their lives. For the stones a year means nothing.
Even so, today she cannot help feel bitter as she watches the man she loves slip away from her like an ebb tide. He is younger and younger almost every time, she sees it in the set of his eyes sometimes before he speaks. There is less anguish there, but also less wisdom, less gentleness when he looks at her. And though she always feels that rush of sweetness in her when she sees him, now it is tinged with bitterness as he becomes more distant. He doesn’t love her any more…no, not yet, she corrects herself, he doesn’t know her as he did…as he will. Nearly every time their paths cross now it is from necessity and not through the pure thrill of each other’s company - she is becoming a stranger to him.
.
Today he still flirts with her, touches her arm, her hand, smiles at her but she can feel that he does not entirely trust her. He is intrigued by her, oh yes, he is intensely curious in the way that only he can be, he watches her covertly most of the time they are together. She fears that soon this may be all she has left, and so she flirts a little harder, acts a little more mysterious, casts a few more insinuations, and feels herself warm as she sees his fascination grow.
They work together in a rhythm that she knows well, a rhythm that he is beginning to recognise, and they do what they must. When he returns her to the Stormcage, he doesn’t embrace her before they part, he just waves her off and saunters back into the Tardis and she bites her lip so hard she feels blood flow and she swallows it down, and all that’s left inside is some hollow place where she feels like everything has been scraped out. And she goes back to her small cell and she reads her diary, and she remembers.
*
River dreams of the sun that the earth spirals around. She dreams that she is falling into its face, and that her flesh unknits from her bones, that her bones turn to black cinders, and then to ash, and to dust, and to nothing, and she is consumed in the light.. But in her dream she doesn’t stop thinking, doesn’t stop dreaming, doesn’t unbecome, she is aware of herself still falling into the sun, towards its core. She is all fire and all light and when she wakes up it feels like there are solar flares trailing wherever she looks.
*
When River realises she is going to die, she feels strangely at peace.
She works her fingers frantically to wire herself into the computer core, she understands the connections that need to be made, the circuits that need to cross, she understands as well as he does how the energy will flow and burn and consume.
Thought and images flash through her mind. The wood in the library where she has just flown down from lingers in her memory, warm and still. Her crew moving in their white suits like a flurry of snow against the dark wood, the shadows melting them away one by one, pieces of her dropping away as they leave her.
She thinks of how he didn’t know her and flinched away from her hand asking who are you and of the cold and the fear that rose in her at that moment, how she felt like she was falling and falling.
She remembers how his name burnt on her lips as she spoke it to him, how her heart felt like it would pound out of her chest. That name spoken to him by her so many times before; spoken during their nights of heat and stars, nights when they would press their foreheads together as their bodies linked, and he would be there with her inside her mind, and he would whisper the language of Gallifrey to her, and it would sound strange and beautiful on his tongue. She thinks of how he smelled of salt, warm skin and clean clothes and of the unmistakable scent of the Tardis.
The Tardis. The first place and the only place she ever really belonged.
Even in the last moments she still isn’t afraid to die. She never has been in her lifetime; she has seen the skies and everything beyond them, done wonderful things, dark things, she’s never been one for either fear or regret. She knows history won’t forget her easily, though she doesn’t much care about that.
He rails at her and begs her to let him take her place, and she loves him for that then. For being the Doctor, for not knowing her at all yet still being prepared to die for her, for everything that he will become, for all the days and the nights that he will give her. As she lays the cold metal of the conductor plate around her head to let the computer draw out her life, as she chokes out the word, Spoilers, his eyes - so young - are what she takes with her to her death. His old, young eyes, and the knowledge that for one small breath in the whole of time, she was amazing.