Yowzah Oneshot Collection (3)

83(G)

          Reel Your Heart In Tight

                       leiascully

River Song doesn't cry. She hasn't wept through several ages of man, through the death of planets or the snuffing of stars. Still, as she sits in her cell bundled up on her cot with her arms clasped around her shins and her cheek on her knee, her face feels puffy and hot. It's the only part of her that's warm at all, really. The guard brought her an extra blanket and pushed it between the bars with a pole, his face creased with distrust and distaste and a little bit of awe, but she's still shivering. She keeps thinking of the kiss, her first kiss with the Doctor. She shivers in a different way then, for a moment, and her eyes prickle. It hurts to breathe: the heat is too much. Then she feels ill again.

His first kiss with her. Her last kiss with him. She wanted it to be special, a high point in this bloody backwards romance. She wanted to melt into his arms, to hear him confess in a whisper that he loves her, to share one last moment of togetherness with the ridiculous madman who is the love of her ridiculous life. But she bollocksed it up somehow. It was wrong - it was all wrong. Oh, his mouth was as warm and familiar and perfect as ever, and he did kiss her back with some flicker of passion - God, the touch of his fingers on her bare shoulder went all through her - but the moment wasn't right. He wasn't hers yet.

Tragic, really. She's been his since the moment he strolled into her life wearing that stupid bow tie and a knowing smirk, but it's taking so long for him to be hers. Every precious moment they aren't together feels wasted, but she knows better than anyone how he hates to be rushed or pushed. And he was so startled tonight, his hands rising from her skin to grasp at the air as if he could pull answers out of it. He is her Doctor, but not hers.

Already this year she's thought of four hundred and sixty-seven detailed scenarios by which she could escape- four hundred sixty-six, now that she used one getting to America - but she hasn't got much of a reason yet. Without him knowing what they have been or will be to each other, she might as well stay in this cell, swathed in her blankets. She has few enough things to pack when she does decide to go. All of her most precious possessions are in her head. She can't forget him wherever she goes.

She tried once or twice, in her reckless youth. But he was always with her somehow. Her inner voice spoke in the husky drawl he affects when he's amused or aroused. Out of the corner of her eye, she could almost see him, a lean unsinister presence but still one that made her heart thud hard behind her ribs and her breath cut short. So she stopped running from him and ran with him instead.

Has she changed things tonight? Has she rewritten what was or what was to be? Her memories are intact when she flips through them: a kiss; a touch; murmurs in the dark; the heady joy of saving the universe; the burn of her leg muscles as they flee the latest nasty thing, still alive to fight another day. Perhaps tonight she was supposed to kiss him. Perhaps she's made it all possible tonight, all the nights that were to come. Maybe in his magic box that's old, new, borrowed, and blue, he's thinking of her and her "yes". She'll always say yes. She always has done.

He came for her because of what they'd been to each other. She'll always come for him because of what they'll have been to each other, later in his life. They're a Catch-22, an ouroboros eating its tail, inseparable. You can't have him on her doorstep without his memories of her. You can't have her counting down the minutes until he doesn't know her at all without having her known him for most of her long strange life. River and the Doctor, the Doctor and River. They go round and round together. They can't help it. The universe stacked the deck against them, but dealt them the same hand. Some days it's all aces. Today she wants to fold and all the cards are wild.

How strange he'll surely feel, counting down the same way. How odd it will be, to see his River regress from who she is now to the slightly gawky, slightly awkward, somehow out of place very-nearly-still-a-girl she was then. She's cultivated a certain image over the years and she wasn't settled on it then. How much will he have done to make her who she is? How much has she done already to contribute to that? The knowledge that he'll be waiting just the way she is, for the day they aren't what they'll be, almost helps. How strange it is to look at your lover, your life, and have him see you through eyes that barely know you. She doesn't envy him the chance.