fic: Apparently Two, But One In Soul, You and I
Title: Apparently Two, But One In Soul, You and I
Author: lonewytch
Rating: G
Pairing/Characters: River/11, Idris, Tardis
Wordcount: 2220
Summary: And there he found Her. Nestling deep inside, floating on the tides of the sub/unconscious, burrowed deep into River's marrow, secret inside every cell of River's body at this very moment. His Old Girl.
Written for the spoiler_song River/11 ficathon. Title from Rumi. For scandalbaby and the prompt: I can feel the room sway / everything's spinning round / feet lifting off the ground (Amy Kuney, "Sway".) Hope you like it, sweetie!
Many thanks to easytheretyger for the beta.
It was just a touch, that was all.
Skin against skin, whorls and swirls of palms and fingertips pressed tight to each other, and then the heart of his ship opening up inside both of them. Time - more Time than he could see even inside himself (and he could see so much.) Time extending out in every possible direction. Not just what had been and what would be, but every could have been and might come to be, all pooling out in a vast tapestry of exquisite intricacy. No “in the beginning” no “at the end”, just a web woven back into itself, encompassed in the press of River’s palm to his.
*
A body - defined and structured, and its breath moving in and out of the lungs. How strange this was/is/will be. I feel the flow of air from around me, through my mouth, and then from lung to blood, carried around the body and powering all the mechanics of bone and nerve and flesh, that are moving around each other not quite perfectly.
I am boxed and bound like He is, my lovely thief, bound inside a wall of skin. This wall of skin is the place where I touch the wall of the world. My name is Idris, and it sounds strange on their tongues. Yet that has never been my name. My name is so huge that it burns through the nebulae and the distant stars, it streams through time, it ripples out through the particles that compose everything that was/is/will be. It is a name that is unknowable, even by me.
*
“I didn’t realise at first, I didn’t know her. How could I not have known her?”
River cradled his head in her lap, her back pressed against the headboard of their bed, listening as he spun out the story of the scrapyard beyond the Universe. The tale of the day his ship had walked and breathed and spoken, just like the both of them, yet so unlike them at the same time. There was both joy and sadness aching in his voice as he spoke of it. She pushed his hair back from his eyes, trailed her fingers over his forehead, soothing the lines of emotion with her fingertips.
“My ship,” he whispered sadly at the end of the tale, lifting his arm and reaching out towards the walls of the ship which were radiating a gentle light all around their bedroom. She watched as his hand grasped and closed on the air.
*
There is this thing called a heart in me. I know it. My thief, he has two, perfectly balanced against each other on either side of his body. Yet I only have this one and it was/is/will be failing even now as i walk and talk at him.
How strange to feel words form inside my mouth, their sense limited and shaped by the structure of a brain that is so small to me. Thoughts firing along nerves and into the movement of lip, of tongue against teeth, of air expelled and made into sound. There are things so much vaster than there is even language for, and I reach after the words for these huge things which I wish to say. I search for them along the paths of this brain, but there is no memory of them, they were never there - I cannot find the meaning and pin it down to sense. And this body, it fails me. Heart slowing, breathing shallow, time burning up through its skin.
There are things that are important though, things that I can find the words for, things that I have said/am saying/will say.
Hello.
The only water in the forest is the River.
*
“You know, I can hear her inside me, I -”
She broke off as he sat up rapidly, spinning round on the bed and almost tangling himself in the covers as he moved. He crossed his long legs awkwardly, and leaned forwards into her.
“Tell me, River. Tell me what it’s like for you. Nobody - no one ever has been what you are. You’re unique you know, no one was ever conceived inside the vortex before you.”
“Child of the Tardis,” she said to him gently. “I’m the first.”
“And the last.” He looked troubled, frowning as he took hold of her hand, squeezing it tightly. “It’s brought you nothing but grief. If you’d been conceived normally - ”
She threw her head back and laughed out loud at that, stopping him mid-sentence. The silly, silly man. So wise sometimes, but at the same time so infuriatingly stupid.
“If I’d been conceived normally, my love, I’d be Melody Pond, Geography teacher. I’d not have known you in the way I do. It’s brought me everything, sweetie. I never would have had my life any other way, it’s very important for you to remember that. I have no regrets, and neither should you.”
He nodded his assent, squeezing her hand again, gently this time, before leaning forward to place a soft kiss against her lips. He left his forehead pressed against hers for just a moment, eyes studying hers from too close, before pulling back and looking at her bright eyed, expectant.
“Tell me.”
She nodded back at him, squeezing his palm in turn, searching for the words to describe what was really a knowing inside her; a sense of his ship deep within, burning every time she stepped into his world.
“I can feel Her in me every time I’m inside Her. I walk into Her, and a light switches on in me. A far off light, deep, but all through me. So deep inside my body that I can’t pin it down and examine it. And at night, when I sleep here, my dreams are filled with that light.”
She huffed a little in frustration, searching for words that she knew full well were inadequate at defining something that couldn’t really be forced into the structure of language.
“All I know is that I feel her, she’s there in me. I know things that I never would have known if not for her. I understand her, the way she works, the energy underlying the mechanics. Big things, things a human probably shouldn’t know, even if she is part Timelord.”
He’d grown increasingly excited as she spoke, she saw it in the way his eyes widened and his hands fidgeted, as if they were desperate to do something. He was almost bouncing by the time she finished speaking, the springs of the bed contracting and releasing under his movements.
“Do you know what I’m thinking?” he asked, a smile spreading across his face.
“No, but I know you’re thinking something, I can almost hear the cogs squealing,” she teased, open to whatever he had in mind if it wiped the sad smile from his face and the loss from his eyes.
“You can feel Her. Let me try; let me come into you with my mind and feel what it is that you feel. Please?”
*
Freed from that body, the Idris who was, I stream through time, endless and never beginning. I am all that was/is/will be, I am the power at the heart of this blue box of gold, pushing it onwards through the stars and across the web of time.
Except for when she walks within me.
The River flowing through the life of my thief. Born out of me and the endless sun, forever spinning and burning inside me. She was walking/is walking/will walk through my doors and bring sweeping with her the sense of my light settling into bone, the feel of myself made almost flesh again.
*
The control room was the heart of his ship, time rotor plunging and plumbing the depths of her power, and so that was now where he and River both stood. His back was pressed sharply against the console, and he let one hand roam restlessly over the surface of it, stroking and gliding over the controls within his reach. So many shapes of weird and wonderful design, the feel of them long familiar under his palm. He could name them all with his back to them and his eyes closed. He could name all of them in his sleep.
“Just relax,” he told her. “Let yourself be open to me.”
She hummed, and he watched as her eyelids fluttered closed, wild hair framing her face beautifully. Anxiety fluttered in him, his mouth dry with anticipation and worry. What if it didn’t work? What if he could feel nothing inside her but RiverRiverRiver? That was so glorious in itself that he suddenly felt almost selfish for wanting more. But he wanted, needed, to feel what it was she could feel, to sense and grasp this vague and indefinable sense of his ship within her.
He stilled his restless hand, pressing it flat to the console, then reached out and took her hand with his other, letting his eyes fall closed and plunge him into darkness. From skin to mind he flowed effortlessly across and through and over, no barriers before him, because she had deliberately let them all drop and melt away. There was that sudden warm flush of contact, of deep connection, and River was suddenly there, sweet and golden like honey, welcoming as she always was. He marvelled for a moment at the unique complexity of her mind, sharing his love and awe with her, before letting himself drop deeper inside, sinking down into the darker places where she wasn’t even consciously awake and aware.
And there he found Her. Nestling deep inside, floating on the tides of the sub/unconscious, burrowed deep into River’s marrow, secret inside every cell of her body at this very moment. His Old Girl.
*
Hello.
*
Still half aware of the environment around him, the whole control room seemed to spin, as if he was at the hub of the wheel. River, himself, and the console with the rotor at its centre as the linchpin that connected this vast sense of movement shifting around him. And all this had been a beautiful experiment that he didn’t dare hope would actually work. Yet here he was, all the world falling away under his feet as he was lifted on a soaring wave of light that was so intimately familiar to him, that spoke both of long years and of years meaning nothing at all. He tumbled down through alleys and riverways of time, vibrations running through him, a soundless roar that shook both himself and River where they stood.
They were joined together, hand to hand and mind to mind. They were like a single blood cell pumping through the heart of something so much huger, so much more amazing, so much more alive than they could ever be.
They were spinning out into endless time, no beginning or ending, all of the universe and everything that would ever be contained inside and outside them. They were drifting on an endless sea of everything that was, could and would be.
And all through it, all through Her was a beating, swelling tide of love and love and love....
*
I cannot speak now, I have no words, no mouth to form them, no lips to scrape out the consonants, no tongue to press vowels from the air. Yet there is this: their skin against each other, both of them laughing inside my River as they fly through the heart of me.
There is this: the place where I press myself into her and then into him...
*
Later, they lay back on the bed, his head cradled in her lap again, both of them exhausted yet content. The light was still there in her, as it always was when she was inside Her. It rested softly in her body and mind, a soft and comforting hum, the sound of home.
“You know She still hears you, even when you’re not inside me,” she whispered tracing his cheekbones and the line of his jaw. “She told you as much back then when she was Idris. She’s yours and you’re hers. Even after I’ve gone, long after I’ve gone, you two will always be together.”
He shifted on the bed, lines rearranging themselves on his face, sadness and grief seeming to flicker momentarily through the shift of his body and the movement of muscles under his skin - before it was gone again as quickly as it had appeared.
“Don’t talk like that,” he whispered back to her, hand coming up to cup at her hand, fixing it in place against his cheek.
“I just want you to know that you’ll be okay, my love. I won’t always be here, but She will be, even after everything else falls away.”
His eyes met hers, hazel iris coated in a slight sheen of sadness. When he spoke, regarding her steadily, she could tell his words had a meaning to them she couldn’t quite grasp.
“She was beautiful. All through it, but at the very end when the light was shining out of her heart, just before her body died, she was almost unbearably beautiful to look at.
I’ll always remember her.”
*
...there is us.
Author: lonewytch
Rating: G
Pairing/Characters: River/11, Idris, Tardis
Wordcount: 2220
Summary: And there he found Her. Nestling deep inside, floating on the tides of the sub/unconscious, burrowed deep into River's marrow, secret inside every cell of River's body at this very moment. His Old Girl.
Written for the spoiler_song River/11 ficathon. Title from Rumi. For scandalbaby and the prompt: I can feel the room sway / everything's spinning round / feet lifting off the ground (Amy Kuney, "Sway".) Hope you like it, sweetie!
Many thanks to easytheretyger for the beta.
It was just a touch, that was all.
Skin against skin, whorls and swirls of palms and fingertips pressed tight to each other, and then the heart of his ship opening up inside both of them. Time - more Time than he could see even inside himself (and he could see so much.) Time extending out in every possible direction. Not just what had been and what would be, but every could have been and might come to be, all pooling out in a vast tapestry of exquisite intricacy. No “in the beginning” no “at the end”, just a web woven back into itself, encompassed in the press of River’s palm to his.
*
A body - defined and structured, and its breath moving in and out of the lungs. How strange this was/is/will be. I feel the flow of air from around me, through my mouth, and then from lung to blood, carried around the body and powering all the mechanics of bone and nerve and flesh, that are moving around each other not quite perfectly.
I am boxed and bound like He is, my lovely thief, bound inside a wall of skin. This wall of skin is the place where I touch the wall of the world. My name is Idris, and it sounds strange on their tongues. Yet that has never been my name. My name is so huge that it burns through the nebulae and the distant stars, it streams through time, it ripples out through the particles that compose everything that was/is/will be. It is a name that is unknowable, even by me.
*
“I didn’t realise at first, I didn’t know her. How could I not have known her?”
River cradled his head in her lap, her back pressed against the headboard of their bed, listening as he spun out the story of the scrapyard beyond the Universe. The tale of the day his ship had walked and breathed and spoken, just like the both of them, yet so unlike them at the same time. There was both joy and sadness aching in his voice as he spoke of it. She pushed his hair back from his eyes, trailed her fingers over his forehead, soothing the lines of emotion with her fingertips.
“My ship,” he whispered sadly at the end of the tale, lifting his arm and reaching out towards the walls of the ship which were radiating a gentle light all around their bedroom. She watched as his hand grasped and closed on the air.
*
There is this thing called a heart in me. I know it. My thief, he has two, perfectly balanced against each other on either side of his body. Yet I only have this one and it was/is/will be failing even now as i walk and talk at him.
How strange to feel words form inside my mouth, their sense limited and shaped by the structure of a brain that is so small to me. Thoughts firing along nerves and into the movement of lip, of tongue against teeth, of air expelled and made into sound. There are things so much vaster than there is even language for, and I reach after the words for these huge things which I wish to say. I search for them along the paths of this brain, but there is no memory of them, they were never there - I cannot find the meaning and pin it down to sense. And this body, it fails me. Heart slowing, breathing shallow, time burning up through its skin.
There are things that are important though, things that I can find the words for, things that I have said/am saying/will say.
Hello.
The only water in the forest is the River.
*
“You know, I can hear her inside me, I -”
She broke off as he sat up rapidly, spinning round on the bed and almost tangling himself in the covers as he moved. He crossed his long legs awkwardly, and leaned forwards into her.
“Tell me, River. Tell me what it’s like for you. Nobody - no one ever has been what you are. You’re unique you know, no one was ever conceived inside the vortex before you.”
“Child of the Tardis,” she said to him gently. “I’m the first.”
“And the last.” He looked troubled, frowning as he took hold of her hand, squeezing it tightly. “It’s brought you nothing but grief. If you’d been conceived normally - ”
She threw her head back and laughed out loud at that, stopping him mid-sentence. The silly, silly man. So wise sometimes, but at the same time so infuriatingly stupid.
“If I’d been conceived normally, my love, I’d be Melody Pond, Geography teacher. I’d not have known you in the way I do. It’s brought me everything, sweetie. I never would have had my life any other way, it’s very important for you to remember that. I have no regrets, and neither should you.”
He nodded his assent, squeezing her hand again, gently this time, before leaning forward to place a soft kiss against her lips. He left his forehead pressed against hers for just a moment, eyes studying hers from too close, before pulling back and looking at her bright eyed, expectant.
“Tell me.”
She nodded back at him, squeezing his palm in turn, searching for the words to describe what was really a knowing inside her; a sense of his ship deep within, burning every time she stepped into his world.
“I can feel Her in me every time I’m inside Her. I walk into Her, and a light switches on in me. A far off light, deep, but all through me. So deep inside my body that I can’t pin it down and examine it. And at night, when I sleep here, my dreams are filled with that light.”
She huffed a little in frustration, searching for words that she knew full well were inadequate at defining something that couldn’t really be forced into the structure of language.
“All I know is that I feel her, she’s there in me. I know things that I never would have known if not for her. I understand her, the way she works, the energy underlying the mechanics. Big things, things a human probably shouldn’t know, even if she is part Timelord.”
He’d grown increasingly excited as she spoke, she saw it in the way his eyes widened and his hands fidgeted, as if they were desperate to do something. He was almost bouncing by the time she finished speaking, the springs of the bed contracting and releasing under his movements.
“Do you know what I’m thinking?” he asked, a smile spreading across his face.
“No, but I know you’re thinking something, I can almost hear the cogs squealing,” she teased, open to whatever he had in mind if it wiped the sad smile from his face and the loss from his eyes.
“You can feel Her. Let me try; let me come into you with my mind and feel what it is that you feel. Please?”
*
Freed from that body, the Idris who was, I stream through time, endless and never beginning. I am all that was/is/will be, I am the power at the heart of this blue box of gold, pushing it onwards through the stars and across the web of time.
Except for when she walks within me.
The River flowing through the life of my thief. Born out of me and the endless sun, forever spinning and burning inside me. She was walking/is walking/will walk through my doors and bring sweeping with her the sense of my light settling into bone, the feel of myself made almost flesh again.
*
The control room was the heart of his ship, time rotor plunging and plumbing the depths of her power, and so that was now where he and River both stood. His back was pressed sharply against the console, and he let one hand roam restlessly over the surface of it, stroking and gliding over the controls within his reach. So many shapes of weird and wonderful design, the feel of them long familiar under his palm. He could name them all with his back to them and his eyes closed. He could name all of them in his sleep.
“Just relax,” he told her. “Let yourself be open to me.”
She hummed, and he watched as her eyelids fluttered closed, wild hair framing her face beautifully. Anxiety fluttered in him, his mouth dry with anticipation and worry. What if it didn’t work? What if he could feel nothing inside her but RiverRiverRiver? That was so glorious in itself that he suddenly felt almost selfish for wanting more. But he wanted, needed, to feel what it was she could feel, to sense and grasp this vague and indefinable sense of his ship within her.
He stilled his restless hand, pressing it flat to the console, then reached out and took her hand with his other, letting his eyes fall closed and plunge him into darkness. From skin to mind he flowed effortlessly across and through and over, no barriers before him, because she had deliberately let them all drop and melt away. There was that sudden warm flush of contact, of deep connection, and River was suddenly there, sweet and golden like honey, welcoming as she always was. He marvelled for a moment at the unique complexity of her mind, sharing his love and awe with her, before letting himself drop deeper inside, sinking down into the darker places where she wasn’t even consciously awake and aware.
And there he found Her. Nestling deep inside, floating on the tides of the sub/unconscious, burrowed deep into River’s marrow, secret inside every cell of her body at this very moment. His Old Girl.
*
Hello.
*
Still half aware of the environment around him, the whole control room seemed to spin, as if he was at the hub of the wheel. River, himself, and the console with the rotor at its centre as the linchpin that connected this vast sense of movement shifting around him. And all this had been a beautiful experiment that he didn’t dare hope would actually work. Yet here he was, all the world falling away under his feet as he was lifted on a soaring wave of light that was so intimately familiar to him, that spoke both of long years and of years meaning nothing at all. He tumbled down through alleys and riverways of time, vibrations running through him, a soundless roar that shook both himself and River where they stood.
They were joined together, hand to hand and mind to mind. They were like a single blood cell pumping through the heart of something so much huger, so much more amazing, so much more alive than they could ever be.
They were spinning out into endless time, no beginning or ending, all of the universe and everything that would ever be contained inside and outside them. They were drifting on an endless sea of everything that was, could and would be.
And all through it, all through Her was a beating, swelling tide of love and love and love....
*
I cannot speak now, I have no words, no mouth to form them, no lips to scrape out the consonants, no tongue to press vowels from the air. Yet there is this: their skin against each other, both of them laughing inside my River as they fly through the heart of me.
There is this: the place where I press myself into her and then into him...
*
Later, they lay back on the bed, his head cradled in her lap again, both of them exhausted yet content. The light was still there in her, as it always was when she was inside Her. It rested softly in her body and mind, a soft and comforting hum, the sound of home.
“You know She still hears you, even when you’re not inside me,” she whispered tracing his cheekbones and the line of his jaw. “She told you as much back then when she was Idris. She’s yours and you’re hers. Even after I’ve gone, long after I’ve gone, you two will always be together.”
He shifted on the bed, lines rearranging themselves on his face, sadness and grief seeming to flicker momentarily through the shift of his body and the movement of muscles under his skin - before it was gone again as quickly as it had appeared.
“Don’t talk like that,” he whispered back to her, hand coming up to cup at her hand, fixing it in place against his cheek.
“I just want you to know that you’ll be okay, my love. I won’t always be here, but She will be, even after everything else falls away.”
His eyes met hers, hazel iris coated in a slight sheen of sadness. When he spoke, regarding her steadily, she could tell his words had a meaning to them she couldn’t quite grasp.
“She was beautiful. All through it, but at the very end when the light was shining out of her heart, just before her body died, she was almost unbearably beautiful to look at.
I’ll always remember her.”
*
...there is us.