Yowzah Oneshot Collection (2)

48(M)

       Not half so happy in heaven

        mygalfriday (BrinneyFriday)

An ancient blue book he dare not touch, half a closet full of a clothes that still smell like her and a wedding ring she hardly ever wore.

After the Towers, it’s all he has left.

It’s not nearly enough but he clings to his meager possessions like the Fisher King, shoring his fragments against the ruins. He stares at her diary for hours at a time, fingers aching from clenching his hands into tight fists – he will not read it. Reading it means it’s over, it means there are no more spoilers to protect and that is something he is not ready to face. He may never be ready.

More often than not, when he opens his closet in the morning and finds her things mixed among his, he ends up staring at her favorite dress or those boots she used to trek everywhere in, and he loses track of time as he lingers in the doorway of their closet and just breathes her in – that mingled scent of the vortex and expensive perfume that still clings to everything she owned. He wears her wedding ring on a long chain around his neck. He tucks it under his clothes and takes comfort in the press of it against his skin, in knowing that it was hers and it’s always near, should he need to take it out and remember.

When the grief is not so crippling that it renders him a useless shell of a man, he talks to her. He lies awake at night, resolutely not looking at the empty side of the bed as he recounts his day. He reads aloud from her favorite books and pretends she is listening. He disappears beneath the console with his tools and goggles, muttering that yes, he does know what he’s doing, thank you very much, wife. Running down corridors chased by an angry mob of some sort – human or alien, they’re very fond of angry mobs – he presses his hand to the ring beneath his shirt and says could really use your gun arm right now, dear.

It helps to pretend she’s still with him, that she can hear him and that maybe she’s out there somewhere, rolling her eyes. He likes to pretend she’s still free to roam the universe, the way she was always meant to. But she isn’t and he knows it. She’s trapped in a library date core because he isn’t clever enough to save her. He hovers above the planet to pay his respects in the only way he can, at the only tomb she has, and hates himself. She deserved better from him while she was alive and she deserves better now.

In the end, he chooses Leadworth – because New York is still too fresh, too painful, and because his wife had been right. He really is a sentimental idiot. The gravestone is simple but elegant, bearing only her name. He stays just long enough to see it put up, on its own under a tree with bright pink cherry blossoms, before stumbling back to the TARDIS, fingers fumbling for the chain around his neck as tears blur his eyes.

After that, he avoids her grave like the plague itself. It’s enough to know that it’s there; that he gave her this last normal thing to make up for everything he couldn’t give her while she was alive.  But the gravestone is always there in the back of his mind, much the way River herself always was – and still is. There were days when it was all he could do to wait for his companions to fall asleep so he could sneak away and pick her up, take her somewhere amazing. Now, he finds that the gravestone calls to him instead, a macabre temptation that will not leave him no matter what he does or where he goes.

April

He waits until their anniversary and comes with a bouquet of red and violet fuchsias, stepping out of the TARDIS hesitantly. The cherry blossoms are falling from the tree and fluttering to rest at River’s grave, as if nature itself wants to pay homage to this miracle of a woman who danced through stars and loved more fiercely than anyone the universe has ever known. The bronze stone glitters in the sunlight and the Doctor approaches it slowly, his hearts pounding.