Yowzah Oneshot Collection (3)

54(G)

But he can't hide it, and she can't read what she sees in his eyes. Spoilers.

"Besides," She always says, her hand cupping his face tenderly, "I wouldn't want you to, my love. Not if it would lead me anywhere but right here, right now, with you."

Because she loves him. Despite what she was trained to be, or perhaps because of it, she loves him.

She remembers the first time she ever told him that; it, too, was a revelation. More for her, she thinks, than for him. He's known her longer when she says it, but the words fall from her lips into the air and she's surprised to see them hanging there because if you'd asked her just the day before, she would have told you love just wasn't in the cards she was dealt, it wasn't a weapon she'd ever learned to assimilate into her arsenal (now, she'll tell you she knows it's not a weapon):

He's just caught her as she's fallen out of another spaceship somewhere, somewhen; it's relatively new for her, only a few times in, but catching her is old hat for him by now, she can tell. And when he stretches his arms out to steady her so she doesn't fall over, she looks into his eyes and it hits her all at once. It floods through her, her veins carrying it to every cell in her body so that every single part of her knows this one truth. It happens so fast that she can't stop the words from floating out; they push past her tongue, past her teeth, past every barrier someone else ever built inside of her, until they sail to his ears.

He can't say the words back, and she doesn't ask him to. She just watches as the emotions play over his expressive face-she could name them one by one if she looks hard enough, but the one that slips under her skin to make itself a very painful home is the one she doesn't understand but knows that she someday will: sadness.

And that's just it: he looks at her so sad sometimes when she loves him, like she's fragile; like she's made of porcelain, and his hand is a pick-axe. Like he will break her. He won't tell her why-he can't tell her why, but she has her theories. She's given up multiple lives and hundreds of years for him, and she still can't convince him that he deserves it, that she's not sorry, that he is worth any burn that might lick at her flesh. And if he doesn't know by now that she would die a thousand times over for just one single hour with him, well there's nothing that would convince him of it, anyway.

x

Things are always frantic and heated between them, a mess of bodies and limbs and soft moans of oh yes, sweeties, and Please, don't stops. This time is no different. They have hundreds of years together, but each time they meet it feels like they only have moments, it feels like it's not enough. Of course, it isn't. Centuries will not be nearly time enough for their hot mouths to tell the flesh of these bodies their secrets, to make enough promises with tongues and touches and yes, yes, yes. Their bodies tangle fast and hard until only their rapid breaths fill whatever air happens to be around them, until their skin hums with the aftershocks of pleasure and secrets shared.

River doesn't know how to go slow, and she's not sure she would even if she did--it would feel like too much. She would feel too much. It would remind her of everything she wants, but knows she can never have: him, wholly hers, in love with no one and nothing but her. It is selfish of her to even want that, she knows, but what did she survive her childhood for if not the right to be a little selfish?

She slips her dress back on over her head and then fastens her vortex manipulator over her wrist. She fluffs her hair, then types the coordinates home. It's never lost on her that, for now, again, her home is a prison-and strangely enough, she prefers this one to the one of her childhood; even with its bars and guns it's warmer than where she grew up.

Still, how much of her life would she spend captive, she wonders?

She considers the Doctor as he fiddles with a setting on the console of the TARDIS that certainly doesn't do whatever he thinks it does.