Yowzah Oneshot Collection (1)

65(G)

and repeat after me with your heart:

Sometimes he wishes he could go back to the then and pin her down with his hands and his voice and his eyes and his lips and ask her: does every him taste different to her?

But you can’t step in the same river twice, and it seems to go double when the river is a River.

xx

Sometimes he shows up and she never expects him.

Sometimes he stumbles upon her calling cards – cliff faces and ancient artifacts, home boxes and psychic paper, personal ads in newspapers that also happen to have history splashed across the front page in black ink.  She used the Rosetta stone once, and there was that time she’d scrawled ‘hello, sweetie’ across the back of the shadow proclamation itself (he’d found it in the archives but he’d been there when they signed it and he’d spent days afterward trying to figure out how the hell she’d managed to be there then. I’ve got pictures of all your faces. He’d assumed she meant photos. Not memories.).

Those are the good ones. Those are the adventures, the running, the his hand in hers and danger all around them exciting memories. He loves those ones – and the words hello, sweetie can send a thrill sliding straight down his spine, no matter if they’re spoken (okay especially when they’re spoken) or scrawled on walls, or written in ancient ink on documents older than the both of them combined.

Then there are times when he doesn’t call her, and she doesn’t call him, but they meet anyway.

Lives as knotted and tangled together as theirs are – it can’t be entirely surprising when the universe decides to make them trip over some of those knots.

This planet is burning. War is a word he wishes he’d never read or spoken or understood. It isn’t loud, violent and exploding the way people who have never seen it imagine it to be. It is the heartsick feeling of watching young people die without any knowledge of what they were there for in the first place. This planet is burning and he was too late.

He walks through the devastation anyway. His hands itch and his skin crawls and it is too much ash, too many greys and whites and blacks, falling like snow around him in the eerie orange light. The ground is too slippery and people are dying too quietly all around him.

So of course the universe laughs, and he stumbles, nearly tripping over her, kneeling in the too soft ground, her head bowed and almost unrecognizable.

She is crying. Tears streaking tiny paths of clean skin across her dirty face. She doesn’t make a sound though – her grief is silent. He brushes a hand over her head, stirring the ash there and she looks up, lifetimes of pain in her eyes that he wishes he could erase.

She stands under her own power though, and walks ahead of him into the TARDIS.

She doesn’t speak for four hours, and even then she will only say ‘some things I never wanted you to witness.’

He kisses her then and she tastes so, so bitter – dark and metallic – she crumbles under his tongue.

She is young.

And he just has to love her harder, then.

xx

She is tricky. She is like holding water,but  his hands are not watertight and she always slips through eventually.

His first time with her is her first time with him, but he doesn’t realize it until years later.

She doesn’t say anything, and her hands grip him, pin him, push him, pull him until he assumes they’ve done this before and he welcomes the roughness of it. He likes the pleasure-pain of her teeth against his neck and her hands in a bruising grip over his hips. When his grip grows tighter she moans and he knows she likes it too.