Yowzah Oneshot Collection (3)

54(G)

and i feared not the blade for such a worthy cause

if_i_be_waspish

She wasn't always like this: hard, closed, hurt. At least, she didn't imagine she was always like this. Psychopaths weren't just born, were they? No; she likes to imagine she was a fairly normal baby, aside from the whole part-Time Lord-thing. She likes to imagine that if what happened to her hadn't happened to her she would have gurgled and sucked her thumb, cute as the next kid. Maybe she would have grown up in the suburbs, had crushes on normal boys and girls, ridden her bike down the cul-de-sac without training wheels for the very first time as her father chased behind her close enough to catch her if she fell.

The dreams in her childhood were always of someone catching her when she fell; she dreamt of safe, loving arms that wouldn't hurt her, she dreamt of soft lips pressing tender kisses to her forehead, of loving hands sweeping her hair out of her face as she drifted off to sleep in a warm room where she felt safe enough to dream of wild adventures, far-off lands, and fantastical creatures.

But she's never even ridden a bike.

She always wonders how she would have been-who she would have been-if the hands that touched her in her childhood had done so with love. If she hadn't been a prisoner in a dark house, too cold no matter what time of year it was, even when the sun beat hard and heavy outside and the air was so thick it felt like it could choke somebody. If she'd had unlocked windows instead of doors that she couldn't open, if she could have felt the wind move through her hair without fear for what was coming behind it.

But she hadn't grown up like that, and she'd never been touched with love; there were days back then she was sure she never would be-after all, she wasn't read fairy tales or nursery rhymes at bedtime, no one sang her lullabies that would get stuck in her head for days until she was humming them on the playground at school. The only songs she ever sang as a girl were reminders to fulfill a prophecy, reminders that she was little more than a pawn in a war game she never asked to be a part of and though she forgot so many things from her childhood, memories pulling like an abandoned kite tied to a fence post at the back of her mind - there, but tattered and never fully formed-she could never quite forget that.

She spent most of her childhood cold and feeling sick to her stomach, convinced she'd forgotten something incredibly important, something always burning at the edge of her memory just out of reach. When she was very little, she would cry sometimes; she cried for herself, and for the mother that held her in the black and white photograph on the broken-down dresser. River-not River, not back then, not yet-stared at that picture for hours until she knew the plane of her mother's face by heart and she tried to remember that for at least a moment in time, she had been loved. For a long time, her mother's face in that photograph was the only way she even knew what love looked like, the only way she even knew how to long for it. Even if she couldn't remember how it felt, even if all she knew how to sing now were songs about murder.

When she escaped, the first time she heard the radio was a revelation. She had lain down on the floor of an abandoned warehouse and just let the music wash over her; no agenda, no prophecy, no thought to what she might someday become.

But she did become it, even still.

x

Depending on where he is in his timeline, how much of her story he knows, he'll apologize to her for his inability to save her back then.

"Oh, sweetie," she says, every time, because it will never not be true: "You couldn't have saved me, we both know that."

And, depending on the when, something flickers behind his eyes that steals her breath. It seems to get deeper as he ages, what she sees in his eyes, and it coils a knot of dread low and tight in her belly that she struggles to untie, because enough of their lives together have been wrought with tension and sadness and heartache, and she's had quite enough of that. They both have.