Just Sleep
Cryswimmer
Just Sleep
Some nights, he just watched her sleep. This was one of those nights.
He had developed a habit of picking River up from Stormcage each evening, after Amy had settled in to sleep. He was tired of River having the upper hand, and knowing him so much better than he knew her. He decided that he would get to know her, or at least try to. He hadn't counted on how much he would enjoy it. Nearly every night, he would promise himself he wasn’t going to do it, then he would spend some time fiddling with the TARDIS and finally he would give in and go pick her up.
She was rarely surprised to see him. She came with him willingly, but that didn’t surprise him. He might not be her Doctor yet, but he was a break from the monotony of prison at the very least. They went on their travels – stopping off for dinner in Paris, or a walk along the canals of Rome, or jaunting off into the far reaches of space – and then he had to take her back. Some nights he did so directly, but on others she was tired enough to ask for a nap.
The first time it had happened, he had been a little uncomfortable. He had known what she would be to him, and keeping her around for extended periods seemed to be tempting fate. Still, on the nights when she was particularly tired he found that she was a little listless without some rest. She had told him once that she had a hard time sleeping in the prison. He could certainly understand that.
So he had decided months ago to have the TARDIS set up a room. No sooner had he made the choice than a room appeared. It hadn’t been what he had planned. The room had a huge bathroom – both a shower and a tub – and a bed that was enormous. There had been a small wardrobe, a couple of comfortable chairs, and a desk. Her bedding was in browns and beiges, trimmed in a soft peach color, as fluffy as a cloud, and mounded with pillows. Frankly, it wasn’t what he had pictured for her. He would have thought boudoir maroon or cabaret black would have been more her style – lace and useless frill, with a sexy edge – but that wasn’t what the TARDIS had created. Instead, when he had input River Song, the TARDIS had created a lovely space that was both utilitarian and comfortable. The Old Girl never ceased to amaze him.
The first time he had taken River into the room, she had been stunned speechless. Honestly, it had been one of the few times he had seen her so dazed. This didn’t make sense to him, because she had seen their future, so she must have known about the room. Or maybe she hadn't. Maybe they were finally moving through time in the same direction, at least for a while. She had looked around, wandered to the bed, and picked up a soft pillow. “This is for me?” she had asked very quietly.
“The TARDIS designed it,” he was quick to tell her. “You need a place to sleep, and sometimes to clean up, and I guess she thought you’d need space after being in a cell all day.”
River had silently nodded, walked slowly into the bathroom, and closed the door. He had just stood there, waiting and wondering what he should do, as he heard the water come on. Thinking she might have just decided to take a shower or something, he had backed from the room and headed for his control console. He felt more comfortable there than standing in a woman’s bedroom.
She had returned a few moments later. No shower, he decided when he looked her over, but a freshly scrubbed face with red-rimmed eyes and a tenuous smile. “The clothes are amazing,” she told him. “I don’t know how she got the size right.”
“Oh, she can certainly be amazing,” he muttered, thinking how different the room had been from what he had pictured.
“It’s all so perfect. Thank you.” River was uncharacteristically serious and genuine.
He had given her a shrug – he hadn’t really done anything, after all – and asked her where she wanted to go. River had been just as willing as he was to move on from the moment. He didn’t think she was any more comfortable with it at that point than he was. And the room had gone to good use. Many nights, she had slept there while he dealt with minor repairs. Some nights she came and just slept. She rarely closed the door to the room, although he kept it closed when she wasn’t around. He didn’t want to deal with Amy’s teasing over the room – her insinuations that River was really his wife – any more than he had to. It might be true – future true – but it was still uncomfortable.
Tonight had been one of the nights when River seemed too quiet, and he had finally suggested she get some sleep. She hadn’t argued, which she normally did by explaining that she didn’t want to miss a minute away from Stormcage, but instead she had walked up the stairs and taken a few steps down the hallway before returning.
“I don’t…” she began, but she didn’t seem to know how to finish.
“Don’t?” he prompted.
She took a deep breath. “I don’t want to be by myself,” she finally admitted. “Would you mind… either you can come sit in my room, or I can rest out here.”
He looked at her a long time, noting the fatigue around her eyes and the vaguely haunted look. He knew that look. “You wound up in solitary, again?” he asked.
She didn’t answer, which was an answer in and of itself. He didn’t press her. Instead, he set the TARDIS in orbit around a comfortably deserted planet in a quiet corner of the universe, and put her systems in standby. Then he left the console and headed for River.
He climbed the stairs and followed her down the hallway to her room. Solitary confinement wasn’t simply putting her in a private cell – she was always in a private cell – but rather an exercise in sensory deprivation. The sessions in solitary, River had explained, involved a cell with smooth walls and floor, no light or sound, and minimal food and hygiene accommodations. It wasn’t torture, but to a mind as quick as River’s it was miserable. She needed… stimulation.
He had learned when he picked her up that when she wasn’t in her room, he needed to check back on the next day. He tried to keep his visits relatively chronological for his own sanity. The secondary benefit was that he didn’t have as much guess work about where they were in time. He knew where to find her, what he had said and done on their previous visits, and for the most part what she needed from him. It had been a good way to get to know her without letting things get more complicated than they already were.
He had checked in on her the previous two nights – if the TARDIS was correct in her navigation, and he had no reason to think she hadn’t been – and she had not been in her cell. That meant that she had likely been in solitary for a couple of days at least. “What did you do?” he asked. “Is it the warden again?”
“No,” she told him quietly. “I got in a fight.”
He stopped her with a hand on her arm. “A fight? River, you could have been hurt.” She might be imprisoned for a horrible crime, but she wasn't a horrible person. To his knowledge, she didn't have any specific skills in fighting. The guards were armed with multiple weapons, and the prisoners there were the worst criminals in the universe. Was she trying to get herself killed?
She shook her head. “I’m stronger than I look,” she reminded him. “Some of the other women aren’t. Most of the time, the guards keep us separate, but once in a while… I’m not going to stand by and watch someone hurt, or worse, when they don’t have the strength to fight back.”
He followed her into her room, noting that she left the door propped wide open. She sat on the edge of the bed, and she looked exhausted.
“I would have thought you might have slept some of those two days,” he remarked. “To pass the time if nothing else.”
She shook her head. “It’s safer to stay awake,” she told him. “If I fall asleep, I lose track of time. I have a pretty good sense of time passing, and if I lose that I just feel… I have to stay awake.”
“No wonder you look like the walking dead,” he snapped, feeling terribly sad for her, and channeling that sadness right into anger. “You can’t stay awake for days at a time!”
“I do what I have to do,” she told him, her calm voice a counterpoint to his yelling. “I knew you’d come at some point, and I knew I’d sleep when you did. I’m sorry if it cuts into our time.”
He took a deep breath and settled himself. “We have as much time as you need,” he reminded her. “I’ll drop you off as soon as I pick you up.”
She gave him a weak smile as she lay down on the bed, and he was reminded that his timing was not always so perfect. He hooked a chair with his foot and pulled it over to sit next to the bed, and he took her hand in his. Her hands had always amazed him. They were neither small nor delicate, but rather they were useful hands. She had fairly short nails she kept polished and neat, and yet she had calluses from work. How anyone could have work-roughened hands without breaking a nail was beyond him. He considered it one of the many mysteries of River.
She held his hand with hers, just a little more tightly than she normally did – when she did – and then turned on her side and pulled it up by her face. He just watched as she took a deep breath, let it out on a long and relieved sounding sigh, and fell almost instantly into sleep. He could tell the moment it happened, because her face lost its wary look and relaxed completely. It seemed the only time she was really at peace was when she was sleeping.
So he watched her, and he mulled over in his mind what it must be doing to this lively, energetic, intelligent woman to be cooped up in a cage all day. Yes, he had her nights – or most of them – but the days must be wearing on her.
He wished that he could simply take her somewhere and leave her there, but he knew it wasn’t a possibility. As nice as it might sound, he knew it wasn't an answer. First of all, he didn't really know who she had killed or why, and she showed no indications of trusting him with that information in the near future. Until he had all the information, he had to assume that she indeed needed to be there unless she was closely supervised. In addition, she had told him that she was pardoned at some point – for some reason – and a prison escape would eliminate that possibility by creating a true crime. If she was to have her future, he could not interfere with it.
But that didn't mean he had to leave her there to rot. She was bright and lovely, and in the prime of her life. Human lives were short, and he did not want that time wasted. That was one reason why he did what he could to make her days more bearable. The other reason was more personal. He simply enjoyed being with her. She had such a lively mind, and she could keep up with him when he explained something fairly complex. She understood the intricacies of the universe without oversimplification, and she could jump from time to time just as easily as he could. It was rare to know someone who was so adaptable.
His companions varied in their ability to tolerate time travel. Rose had relished it, as had Donna. They had been very uniquely suited to the TARDIS, to him, and to his travels. Mickey and Martha had been less so, and the travels had stressed them. Amy and Rory were also well suited to time travel, but he wondered how much of that had to do with growing up near a major disruption in reality. The crack in Amy’s wall had exposed her to temporal anomaly, and Rory likely spent nearly as much time around it as Amy had. He honestly couldn’t be sure. They also had one another to rely on, and that had to make the time transitions easier.
It was just possible that River also had some sort of innate predisposition that suited her to time travel. It didn't explain why the TARDIS liked her so well, or why she could fly her, but it at least rationalized her ability to move so smoothly between times and places. He had spent a lot of time thinking about the matter – far more time than he cared to admit, truth be told – and he simply couldn't find a better rationale. He didn't bother asking River. He knew she would just warn him about “spoilers”. He really was starting to hate the word.
River moved in her sleep, pulling his hand under her cheek and becoming slightly restless. She held on for dear life as her body twitched and her eyes moved quickly beneath her eyelids. He was familiar with this as well.
“Shh,” he told her. “You're safe, River. You're safe. It's just a dream.” He repeated the reassurances over and over until she finally settled, stroking her hair as he did so with his free hand. He was used to this as well. Almost every time he saw her sleep – whether she was napping on the steps in the console room, or dozing off while they watched a sunset on some distant planet – he saw her battle the nightmares.
He could certainly commiserate; he had them almost every time he slept. Nearly a millennium of being alone, of travel and war and seeing the worst of every race there was... it was not a recipe for restful sleep. He could keep the demons at bay when he was awake, but not as easily when he slept. It was one of the reasons he did so very rarely. Thankfully, his physiology did not require a great deal of sleep.
River did. She slept for hours, fighting the nightmares occasionally and being calmed by him almost immediately. It really didn't occur to him that he had spent so much time just watching her sleep. It wasn't a boring thing to do, oddly enough. Her facial expressions between the nightmares were entertaining to say the least. At times, they were positively funny. His hand fell asleep where she had twisted his wrist to tuck his hand under her cheek, but shifting position solved that problem. His back also developed an ache from leaning over, so he grabbed one of her many pillows and used it to prop himself more comfortably, resting his feet up on the bed.
He didn't expect to doze off himself. For a few moments he must have, because her movements startled him back awake. He calmed her, settled himself again, and resumed his vigil. She hadn't wanted to be alone, so he would not leave her alone. He couldn't have said why it was so important to him, but it was.
Nearly ten hours after she lay down, she began to show true signs of waking. She released his hand, stretched slightly, and at length she opened her eyes. His own met hers as she flashed her glance around, orienting to her surroundings.
“Hello, Sweetie,” she said, and her voice was deep and gravelly from sleep. He rather liked the sound, although he couldn't have said why.
“Hello,” he replied.
She watched him a moment longer, and then shifted to sit up as he moved himself out of her way. When she did so, her balance appeared to be momentarily off. She shook her head, gripped the mattress, and finally looked back up. “How long was I out?” she asked. Her voice was still a low rumble from disuse. “I seem to have lost track.”
“A good while,” he admitted. “Your body had to catch up.”
She took a deep breath and nodded her agreement. “Restroom,” she told him. “Then a shower, I think.”
He nodded and stood, then held out a hand for her. Uncharacteristically, she allowed him to assist her to stand. Once she was fairly stable, he released her so that she could go into the restroom. She closed the door behind her and he left her to her privacy. As an afterthought, he closed the door to her room. He wouldn't put it past her to traipse past the door in no more than a towel, and he wasn't ready to deal with that. His feelings from just spending the night beside her were confusing enough.
It hadn't been bad. In fact, he had rather liked the silent companionship. He hadn't minded her restlessness, even when it had woken him. She had likely saved him from the nightmare he would have experienced if he had slept more than a few minutes. If he were truthful, he was more disconcerted by the fact that he wasn't upset by the situation. He felt that he probably should have been.
After several moments, he decided that he simply wouldn't dwell on the situation. There wasn't a point. Instead, he would set course for Earth, probably in America. If memory served – and it normally did – he should be able to find an acceptable pancake house to visit when River was cleaned up and ready to go. Once he got her some breakfast, they could talk about where she wanted to visit today.