Yowzah Oneshot Collection (3)

173(G)

Ceci n'est plus qu'un conte de fée

                       leiascully

This is a love story.

This is a fairy tale.

This is the song of Song, the legend of the Doctor. This is the story of two irresistible forces and an immovable universe.

The universe never stood a chance.

+ + + +

Who else could River fall in love with but the Doctor? Who else could capture her attention?

The difficulty with being a singular individual: one is alone in the universe.

Not even swappable heads could alleviate that after a while.

+ + + +

On April 22nd, Amy's assistant Donna has to ask three times if Amy wants the minutes from the morning's meeting.

"Nothing," Amy says. "My little girl got married today."

"Oh!" Donna says. "I didn't even know you had a daughter." She pauses, confused. "Aren't you a bit young for...?"

"Nevermind," Amy says quickly. "Ignore me. I'll have the minutes, thanks, Donna."

"No problem," Donna says. "I'll bring them right in." She throws Amy a quick smile and pops back out. Amy writes a reminder to herself to send a thank you note to the temp agency that sent Donna around in the first place. She's invaluable, that woman.

Amy tries to get back to work, but she can't stop staring out the window. "Today," she whispers to herself. "Today my little girl got married, and my best friend died, except that he never did, and she's never been my little girl."

The scent of Petrichor drifts through the room, enchanting and just a bit wistful. Amy sniffs hard and dabs at her eyes with a tissue. She has to focus. The company won't run itself, after all.

Delight, she thinks. She will bottle delight next.

+ + + +

River goes back to the children's house later to fetch the photographs. The vortex manipulator has been reconfigured to warn her if she's about to cross her own timeline - a small improvement, but a useful one. Young Melody is already elsewhere. Even the poor mad caretaker has gone. River doesn't need to think about navigating the house. Her feet know the way even after all this time. The photographs are all in their frames and she sweeps them into a bag. Back in her cell, she sticks them one by one into an album and captions them as best she can. Melody, age 5. A little later, Melody's first bicycle. Perhaps she'll leave out Melody's first semi-automatic. She will take them to her young, fresh-faced mother and they will bend their heads close together and admire the infant Melody Pond with her downy hair and her curious eyes and her surprisingly strong grip in the one photograph they have of the two of them together. Amy looks so happy in that snapshot, cradling her newborn daughter. It makes River feel odd. She wishes she could remember that.

She will not tell her mother the things she suffered. She will not tell her mother she remembers the terror of the space suit and the smell of sweat. They will share a moment and a cup of tea, and then her father will come home reeking slightly of hospital and they will all eat takeaway, and for a little while, they will feel like real true family without the inconvenience of timelines.

+ + + +

River and the Doctor, the Doctor and River. It is a timey-wimey mess of a romance, an utter travesty of a narrative.

It was foolish of Kovarian, River thinks, to underestimate the Doctor's charm. She watches him sleep, a rare moment of exhausted abandon. He almost never sleeps, and the smoothness of his face is unutterably enchanting. Her Doctor, whose entire existence has been predicated on talking people into doing things they don't want to do, or at least wittering until they give up, and they thought he wouldn't win her over.