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Entry tags:
Echoes (PG, 1/1)
Title: Echoes
Characters/Pairing(s): Ten/River, the TARDIS
Rating: PG
Word count: 4,600
Spoilers: EoT Children in Need clip
Summary: He keeps River close not just because he loves her, and not just out of fear of her fate – she's somewhere safe to stand while the ground crumbles round him.
Betas:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
platypus and prof_pangaea
Disclaimer: Not mine, obviously.
Author's Notes: Posted just in time to get Russelled on Christmas Day, I'm sure. Includes one incredibly tiny plot point courtesy an anonymous mousie.
::xposted to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
professor_song and dwfiction and archived at Teaspoon and AO3
The second thing the Doctor does after leaving Earth is connect the TARDIS' randomiser.
The first thing he does is disconnect the Cloister Bell.
His meddling ship drops him at the Lexington Crater. Mars, again, and when he curses and tries to coax the TARDIS into taking off, she wheezes and coughs, stubbornly resisting all attempts to soothe her.
Mars has long since been terraformed, ochre dust now concealed under thick layers of loam. The Doctor steps out of his ship on a cornflower-studded plateau near the crater rim, where a sweaty team of people moves cautiously inside a rope grid, digging in neat squares, stepping carefully from one block to another.
Archaeologists, and therefore inherently uninteresting, despite what his ship might think; but just as he's wondering whether he can sneak a vintage shilling into the dig without anyone noticing, a woman with a curly mop of auburn hair pokes her head above a grid square and calls out to him.
"Oi! You here with the new scanner?"
And it's River, of course it's River, because the TARDIS is temperamental under the best of circumstances, and the best of circumstances was miles away when he last set her moving.
He shoots a withering look over his shoulder at his ship. Couldn't have brought him to a tropical beach planet swimming in nubile young men and women, couldn't have brought him far away from this solar system and two planets' worth of recollections; no, she had to drop him here, near the one person who might have memories of him he doesn't yet share, and isn't sure he wants to create.
She's pretty, though, with the sun glinting off the copper frizz of her hair, and the tilt of a smile on her lips. Fond remembrance, he wonders, or mere flirtation? River played coy in the Library, but perhaps here her lack of recognition is genuine.
There's only one way to find out.
"So, you're not here with the scanner," River says.
"Nope. Just passing through."
"Then you're useless to me." River pauses, then looks him up and down. "On second thought, stick around 'til we're done here. I'm sure I can find a use for you after that."
"Actually," he says, reaching inside his suit for the sonic and flipping it in his hand, "I've got something better than a scanner."
"Do you, now?"
"Watch and learn." The Doctor points the screwdriver at the pile of dirt at River's feet. "There's something small and metallic, oh, about six centimetres into the ground, right there."
"That's the blade of my trowel," she sighs.
He adjusts the screwdriver. "Oh. Sorry. Six centimetres below that."
River gives him a sceptical look, but dutifully begins clearing away more dirt, sieving it before pushing it to the side. After several minutes, she lifts up her palm for the Doctor to view. She's holding two metal shards, fragments of Ice Warrior armour.
"You can stay, pretty boy," River says, and the way she looks at him makes him think some archaeologists might hold his interest after all.
Later, much later, after they've unearthed many more fragments, River covers the Doctor's hand with hers and questions whether the sonic might have any other uses he'd care to share with her.
He shows her when she drags him back to her temporary housing pod and into the shower with his clothes still on, pressing him against the moulded fibreglass wall, water streaming down their faces and hair while she kisses him. He flinches when the first cold drops splatter his skin, but it's safe, it must be safe, or ... well, if it isn't safe, at least he'll get to enjoy himself for a little while first.
"Wouldn't it have been easier to take everything off before getting in the shower?" he asks as River gently nips at his neck. "Oh. Oh. No marks, please, please, I won't be able to wear open collars for a week, and I love a good open collar, can't have casual Friday without one ... oh. Never mind. Don't stop."
River starts working at his tie, its knot soaked through and stuck fast. The Doctor presses the screwdriver into River's hand, curling her fingers round the handle, and the tie slips free from his shirt to slither into a pool of water at their feet. River points the sonic at the buttons of his shirt, pops them one by one.
"Nice toy," she says. "You can make me one of these anytime you like."
He reaches for the zip of her jumpsuit, inching it down and making the rather pleasant discovery that River hasn't bothered with a bra today.
"We'll see," he says, and bends to kiss River's breastbone.
When he returns to the TARDIS, she's made a miraculous recovery from her engine failure, and allows him to set the randomiser again.
She's also started to make a faint chiming noise, almost indistinguishable from her usual creaks and groans, but he decides to ignore it.
She drops him on a young farming colony blessedly thousands of miles from Mars, where the local ranchers speak to him desperately about saving them and their livestock, the colony's primary economic lifeline, from a massive burrowing creature that's little more than a gaping, toothy hole in the ground.
The predator is reproducing quickly, too quickly, sprouting hundreds of smaller mouths every time it digests more cattle and humans. There are too many maws to jam open and starve; fire kills, but slowly; there isn't enough water to drown them all.
What does eventually work is forcing the TARDIS, howling in protest, back to a point on the timeline before the first tiny maw arrived as an uninvited guest lurking in the grit trapped in the waffle sole of a ship captain's shoe, and making sure that the colony spaceport's xeno-microorganism sensors are functioning properly.
Rationalisation comes more easily now than it used to. The colonists wouldn't have lasted another week without him. The organism didn't belong on this world in the first place. His senses tell him that the colony survived, so surely something he did must have saved them.
He leaves behind a peaceful, bucolic planet full of grazing cattle and friendly colonists oblivious to their near miss with extinction.
And the next time he sets the TARDIS randomiser, the chiming noise gets louder.
The universe holds so many distractions, but River is an especially enticing one. The Doctor visits her whenever he feels like overriding the randomiser, which happens more frequently as he grows bolder, time carrying him farther away from a snowy street on 21st century Earth.
River is beautiful. River is sexy. And River is smart, too smart to be easily impressed, so he finds himself taking more risks around her: engineering a defeat at the last possible moment simply to prove he could have done it any time he pleased; provoking the pompous and dangerous until he's racked up more death sentences in a month than he had in the previous year; pushing his luck whenever he can.
River rolls her eyes and calls him a show-off, but her reactions rarely stop him from doing it again. She still matches him step-for-step as they run, and beneath her angry words he can sense a touch of pride in his daring. Besides, inevitably they resolve their disputes in bed.
One day on Regulus IV, rescuing workers trapped by a chemical explosion, he leaves things too late and stumbles at the threshold of the TARDIS, just ahead of the raging fire, smoke so thick not even his respiratory bypass can protect him. River, wearing the oxygen mask and fire-resistant suit he'd refused, drags him into his ship by the back of his collar and then rushes out again to save the people he could not.
Drifting in and out of consciousness in the infirmary, he wonders if this is the moment the Ood predicted, if all his running since 2059 has come to naught. River hovers over him, treating his injuries. Once he starts to recover, she leans close to him, her fingers tangling in his hair, stroking his scalp.
"You nearly saved them all," she says. "I got the last few. Everyone's fine."
"Knew we could do it." He grins weakly and relaxes into River's touch.
Suddenly, she yanks his head back, holding him tight against the pillow. "Are you trying to kill yourself?" she asks. "You deliberately walked in there unprotected, and all your Time Lord superpowers couldn't save you from a nasty case of smoke inhalation. I tell you, I've tolerated this egotistic pursuit of yours for a long time because you're very good at it, but this is too much. You nearly died."
"It's not that simple – ow, River, let go!"
She relinquishes her grip on his hair and sits down in the chair beside the bed, resting her head on folded arms beside him. "Okay, then, tell me why it's not so simple."
"This is what I do, River. You know that. I save people, and sometimes there isn't time to think about myself."
"But you are thinking about yourself, don't you see? You're making things difficult because you thrive on chaos. You breathe it like air. I admit it's part of your charm, but it's like you're laughing at death. Normal people don't do that."
"River, I'm about as far from normal as they come."
"Doesn't the thought of dying worry you at all? I know it worries me."
"That's very sweet of you to say."
She smirks at him. "I was talking about myself. But I suppose your death might be a little upsetting."
"I'm touched."
"You certainly are."
He exhales, breath still ragged from the smoke. "I need to tell you something," he says. "I've died before. It's horrible, and it's awful, but I've died before, and I'll do it again. It's one of those Time Lord superpowers."
River raises her head and stares at him. "You're joking."
"I'm really not." He coughs hard several times, and River rubs lightly on his chest to soothe him. "And I'm really not sure I'm capable of talking about this right now, either," he finishes.
"Okay," River replies, her voice uncertain. "But the instant you're better ..."
"The full story, I promise." He watches her head towards the door. "River," he says in a hoarse whisper, "I do think of myself sometimes. Much more than I should, probably."
She smiles and flicks off the lights. "Get some rest. I'm sure you'll have some other suicidally noble gesture to make tomorrow."
That's the moment the Doctor realises he's hopelessly in love with her.
He runs, again.
A quick tap of the randomiser, and he's parked in the shadow of the Phosphorous Carousel. The Carousel has three levels of eight concentric rings, each rotating independently based on music selection, and features more than a thousand sculpted creatures to ride.
It teems with families and species from nearby star systems, but the Doctor still manages to secure a one-hour pass without waiting, and makes his way up to the second level – high enough for a view, and low enough that he can observe the complex weavings of the gears and support arms that rotate the rings above.
He settles on a woolly mammoth in the fourth ring, climbing the steps to its back and grinning at his perch above the lowly horses and other, smaller carousel creatures. The ride begins to spin, and he takes his time watching the other passengers as they shriek and laugh in delight.
There's a teenage girl in the fifth ring, a slim brunette clinging to the plaster-feathered back of a two-toed merlax. She passes the Doctor once, then twice as her ring speeds up and his slows; he passes her on the third song, but loses ground again on the fourth. They keep pace with each other, one catching up, then falling behind, never quite synchronised.
By the time the Doctor's ticket expires, he's lost count of the number of times he's drawn past the merlax, or vice-versa. He steps down from the mammoth and starts walking towards the exit. The girl smiles at him shyly, and then minutes later, as he watches the carousel from the TARDIS doors, she's just another dot spinning round and round above him: small, indistinct, and then lost in the crowd.
The TARDIS' chiming noise is back, clearer this time, the sound now deeper and fuller. Probably just the harmonic resonance of a loose coil or spring somewhere, the Doctor thinks. Something to fix later.
He whisks River away after class for a picnic on Asgard, half a galaxy away from the university where she teaches. On a grassy hill overlooking the colossal rock arch known as Bifrost, they lay waste to a basket of smoked salmon, brown bread, and fruit, and the Doctor reclines on his elbows, watching River pop the last lingonberry into her mouth.
"I think we should get married," he says.
"What makes you think we aren't already married?"
He glances at her left hand, then back up at her.
"Do give me some credit," River says. "If I have a ring, do you think I'd be stupid enough to wear it before you know we're married?"
"You could have slipped up."
Her face falls. "That happened once. Once. And only because you provoked me."
"I don't remember any ..."
"Oh, no, you don't. I'm not playing that game with you. Maybe you really don't remember. Or maybe you do, and you're just trying to make me think you don't so I say something, and I'm telling you right now, if this is your idea of a romantic marriage proposal, it needs work."
He sighs. "Never mind, then."
River smooths out a wrinkle in the picnic blanket. "Why do you want to get married, anyway? You're not one for settling down, and you know I'm not, either."
"Maybe that's okay. Maybe I just want you, River. Stay with me. We don't have to settle down. We could just keep travelling."
"You know this can't last forever," she says quietly.
"Nothing lasts forever," he replies. "That doesn't mean we can't enjoy ourselves for a while."
"I thought we were enjoying ourselves." River lies down beside him. "Is something bothering you? Feeling a little more ancient than usual today?"
"No, I ... oh, forget I said anything." He collapses on his back, deflated.
River's hand starts to undo his shirt buttons. "How about a compromise?" she says, working his shirt open and dancing her fingers along the t-shirt below. "If we aren't already married, I'll agree to marry you, and if we are, there's nothing to worry about, is there?"
He considers. "That would do. Either way, there's a honeymoon, isn't there? Although if it's already happened, you're the only one who remembers it ..."
"Why don't you help me jog my memory?" says River. She pulls the Doctor's t-shirt free of his trousers and slides on top of him, then whispers in his ear: the real honeymoon will be even better.
The TARDIS greets them when they return.
Bong. Bong. Bong.
"Wedding bells?" River asks.
The Doctor's jaw clenches. "Malfunction. Thought I fixed that ages ago." He slides underneath the console. "Oh, you clever girl. You clever, clever, insolent girl. You rerouted the circuits on your own."
"I'll say it's a malfunction," River yells, covering her ears against the din. "That's the most depressing wedding bell I've ever heard."
The Doctor grips a fistful of wires and jerks them out violently, yelping as sparks cascade over his hand. The bell falls silent.
"Oh, thank goodness," says River. "Honestly, that sounded like something you'd hear at a funeral."
The Doctor crawls out from under the console. "I suppose it does," he says, and sets course for River's flat.
His hand shakes as he enters the coordinates.
The randomiser sends him forward three and a half billion years, where he sees the Face of Boe from a distance at a party, a younger Face in a smaller, less smoky jar, doing tricks with its tentacles to amuse a throng of women. Jack never changes, the Doctor thinks.
The randomiser sends him to a planet lashed with rain, everything soaking wet and impossibly green, and he stands, drenched, in the forest, listening to raindrops clattering on the leaves and branches, feeling life pulse around him.
The randomiser sends him to sixteenth-century England, where he agrees to a drunken bet that he can marry the queen. After a series of unlikely coincidences, costume changes, and other chicanery engineered with a somewhat unwilling time machine, he achieves his goal, then manages to cock it all up on his wedding night by accidentally calling his new bride the name of another redhead he'd been fond of. He's never quite sure how he makes it back to the TARDIS unscathed, but even after outrunning the queen's guards, there's still a splitting headache and the whirlpool of fragmented timelines in his mind to deal with. He spends the next two days unravelling every knot he'd tied in time, until the sixteenth century is whole again.
The randomiser sends him across the universe and back. His ship regrows her Cloister Bell connections twice more, each time concealing her work in a different subsystem to make it harder for the Doctor to detect. She is a patient and stubborn worker. But his terror makes him just as stubborn.
A younger River answers his knock on the door of her flat with a puzzled expression.
"It's you."
The Doctor pats himself down, pretending to look surprised. "Incredible! So it is."
River touches his cheek, reaches up and kisses him. "As lovely as it is to see you, sweetie, I think you should go."
"But I just got here!"
"Yes, and that's wonderful, but I'm ... ." River hesitates, as if searching for the right words. "I'm expecting someone else," she finally finishes.
"I've always wanted to meet one of the others. Which one is it? Felicia? And wasn't there a Bryan? What about Tl'xaltl, are you still seeing it?"
"Tl'xatli," she corrects him. "No, it's none of them. It's someone you wouldn't want to meet. Really, you should go."
He arches an eyebrow. "River, why wouldn't I want to meet one of your other lovers? I'm not jealous. I'm curious."
River tries to turn him in place and push him back towards the TARDIS. "You told me yourself you didn't ever want to meet this one. And he'll be here any minute –"
"River. Who is it? What's wrong?"
"Please, just go! You know I can't tell you."
"Yes, you can," he says, and brushes her hands from his arms. "If someone's threatening you ..."
"No one's threatening me, except you and your relentless stupidity! Go."
"No," he says icily. "Not until you tell me what's going on."
"You really want to know?" she asks, finger jabbing at his chest. "Ask your future self when he gets here."
The Doctor staggers backwards, eyes wide. River watches him, her face a mixture of anger and heartbreak.
He's explained regeneration to her. He hasn't explained how long he's been delaying the prospect of an eleventh self, or the myriad of ways he's kept himself from even thinking of the prospect of an eleventh self, because River's one of those ways, albeit the most important one. He's held her close not just because he loves her, and not just out of fear of her fate – she's somewhere safe to stand while the ground crumbles round him.
He also hasn't told her it's his fault the ground is crumbling in the first place.
A breeze wafts through the otherwise still air in the corridor outside the flat, a distant wheezing accompanying it, strengthening into the full-blown scrape and grind of the TARDIS' approaching engine.
A blue police box lands neatly beside his own. And as its door creaks open, the Doctor trembles and breaks for his ship.
He can hardly hear the door slam shut behind him for the tolling of the Cloister Bell, clanging louder and louder until he's crouched on the floor moaning stop it, stop it, his hands covering his ears.
He slumps in a heap at the base of the console, crumpled in on himself. "I'm sorry," he cries. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm just not ready yet. Please, can't I have one more trip? Please? I'll do anything, just stop."
At last, there is silence, though his head still reverberates with a high-pitched drone.
"Thank you," he says, chastened. "One trip, I swear."
He rises to his feet, removes his coat, and tosses it over the back of the captain's chair, then hears the soft slap of leather on the floor. It's the psychic paper, which must have slid out of his inside pocket, and now lies flipped open and face down.
Picking it up, he turns it over and discovers a set of date and time coordinates at River's university, along with a message: Singing Towers of Darillium at peak in 4236. Take me? x
A chill runs through his body. "That's not what I meant," he says softly. "That's not what I meant." Shouting, so his bloody ship can hear him: "Not this!"
He slaps the psychic paper on the console, banging his hand so forcefully the impact vibrates along his forearm. "You can't make me. I won't do it."
The Doctor grips the console, bows his head. One of them will have to give in, him or the TARDIS. In the hundreds of years they've been together, each has had to sacrifice for the other. On balance, he's not sure who's ahead, and not sure keeping score matters anyway for the sort of decisions he has to make.
He's still standing at the console, knuckles white, when he hears the Cloister Bell ring, once only, echoing a warning that resonates all through his bones.
He swallows, and enters the coordinates River gave him.
Their hotel suite faces the Darillium Sea, where the Singing Towers rise in craggy, spiralling clumps of multicoloured coral, broad and tall enough to be visible from a great distance in daylight. The Doctor and River have spent the late evening strolling hand-in-hand along the boardwalk like all the other tourists here for the Towers' duodecennial performance, window-shopping and laughing and counting the minutes until the coral begins to sing.
River buys them each straw hats and flower garlands, telling him, "Not that I don't love the new haircut, sweetie, but since everyone else has these ... ." She places the hat on the Doctor's head and carefully tilts it just so. "There, that suits you very much."
"You really think so?" he says, stopping to admire himself in a mirror, and only then notices River collapsed in laughter behind him.
He leaves the hat on the rest of the night to amuse her, only removing it when it interferes with nuzzling her ear as he holds her close in front of him on their balcony. His fingers tiptoe beneath the layered fabric of her sarong, touching her slowly, gently.
"Cheeky," she gasps.
"Hush," he says, still stroking her. "Listen."
Hundreds of metres away, the coral blooms, opening millions of tiny pipes waiting for the right wind conditions to strew gametes across the water. The towers whistle and moan polyphonically in a richly layered, unearthly song that grows in power and harmony as the winds gather speed.
River stands and listens, so transfixed by the sound of the towers that she doesn't complain when the Doctor stills his hand for a moment to concentrate as well. In the dark, he can't see the Towers, so he watches River instead, memorising the planes of her face in the moonlight, and the scent of her hair against his skin.
He knows she'll remember this night, because she told him so. Now he wants to learn every part of it for himself, his last chance to be with her in this body, and her next-to-last chance to be with him. She's never said anything about her dealings with his future self beyond that one slip-up, and what if she loves him less in his next life? What if he doesn't love her at all? He's clung to her so tightly since Mars, and now she's one more thing he's terrified to let go of at the very end.
He rests his chin on her shoulder, closes his eyes. River shifts in his arms, and he feels her hand caress his cheek, then pause.
"Oh, you are not," she says.
She turns round to face him, brushes a tear away with her fingers, and shakes her head. "You get sentimental at the oddest times."
"The Rough Guide to the M-87 Galaxy calls the Singing Towers of Darillium one of its top ten romantic destinations. Any sentimentality I may or may not be displaying is officially sanctioned."
"Okay, sweetie." River slides her arms around his neck. "You want to play sentimental romantic, I can do that."
"Good," he says, and takes her hand, and leads her to the bedroom.
Outside, the coral sings its mating song.
And in the morning, before leaving River back at the university, the Doctor tells her he's finally made her a sonic screwdriver of her own, and presses his gift into her hand.
The TARDIS is silent when the Doctor returns.
"Come on!" he yells. "Not even one last dig at me? A little more ringing in my ears until I do what I'm supposed to do?"
His ship doesn't respond, just keeps making the everyday background whirs and murmurs she's always made.
"You're not even going to bother this time," he says bitterly. "You already know you've won."
He taps his fingers on the randomiser. "I could still set this, you know. I could keep running."
More silence, the sort of thing he'd call "eerily quiet" if he weren't so damned certain there's nothing eerie or mysterious about it: it's entirely deliberate. The TARDIS is waiting for him, and if there is one creature in the universe with the perseverance to wait him out, it's this one.
There is the promise of adventure, and the promise he made to his oldest companion. He trails a finger over the randomiser switch.
At last, he unscrews the device from the console and tosses it aside, metal clattering on the floor grating. He reaches for the destination controls, half-expecting them to already be set, but apparently the TARDIS has left him this last choice.
He enters the coordinates, and his ship leaps forward.
When they arrive on the Oodsphere, he slips on his sunglasses and sets the straw hat at a jaunty angle. River accused him of laughing at death, but if he's going to have to face it again at all, he might as well mock it.
He looks round the room, wondering if this will be the last time these eyes see it. Maybe there's still some way out of this; some thread in a timeline not yet fully woven, and hidden from his view; a button he hasn't pressed or risk he hasn't taken that will keep him moving one more day.
He won't know unless he tries. He pats the TARDIS console fondly, and heads for the door.
The TARDIS hums in response. There is no hint of bells this time, none at all.
Characters/Pairing(s): Ten/River, the TARDIS
Rating: PG
Word count: 4,600
Spoilers: EoT Children in Need clip
Summary: He keeps River close not just because he loves her, and not just out of fear of her fate – she's somewhere safe to stand while the ground crumbles round him.
Betas:
platypus and prof_pangaeaDisclaimer: Not mine, obviously.
Author's Notes: Posted just in time to get Russelled on Christmas Day, I'm sure. Includes one incredibly tiny plot point courtesy an anonymous mousie.
::xposted to
professor_song and dwfiction and archived at Teaspoon and AO3The second thing the Doctor does after leaving Earth is connect the TARDIS' randomiser.
The first thing he does is disconnect the Cloister Bell.
* * *
His meddling ship drops him at the Lexington Crater. Mars, again, and when he curses and tries to coax the TARDIS into taking off, she wheezes and coughs, stubbornly resisting all attempts to soothe her.
Mars has long since been terraformed, ochre dust now concealed under thick layers of loam. The Doctor steps out of his ship on a cornflower-studded plateau near the crater rim, where a sweaty team of people moves cautiously inside a rope grid, digging in neat squares, stepping carefully from one block to another.
Archaeologists, and therefore inherently uninteresting, despite what his ship might think; but just as he's wondering whether he can sneak a vintage shilling into the dig without anyone noticing, a woman with a curly mop of auburn hair pokes her head above a grid square and calls out to him.
"Oi! You here with the new scanner?"
And it's River, of course it's River, because the TARDIS is temperamental under the best of circumstances, and the best of circumstances was miles away when he last set her moving.
He shoots a withering look over his shoulder at his ship. Couldn't have brought him to a tropical beach planet swimming in nubile young men and women, couldn't have brought him far away from this solar system and two planets' worth of recollections; no, she had to drop him here, near the one person who might have memories of him he doesn't yet share, and isn't sure he wants to create.
She's pretty, though, with the sun glinting off the copper frizz of her hair, and the tilt of a smile on her lips. Fond remembrance, he wonders, or mere flirtation? River played coy in the Library, but perhaps here her lack of recognition is genuine.
There's only one way to find out.
* * *
"So, you're not here with the scanner," River says.
"Nope. Just passing through."
"Then you're useless to me." River pauses, then looks him up and down. "On second thought, stick around 'til we're done here. I'm sure I can find a use for you after that."
"Actually," he says, reaching inside his suit for the sonic and flipping it in his hand, "I've got something better than a scanner."
"Do you, now?"
"Watch and learn." The Doctor points the screwdriver at the pile of dirt at River's feet. "There's something small and metallic, oh, about six centimetres into the ground, right there."
"That's the blade of my trowel," she sighs.
He adjusts the screwdriver. "Oh. Sorry. Six centimetres below that."
River gives him a sceptical look, but dutifully begins clearing away more dirt, sieving it before pushing it to the side. After several minutes, she lifts up her palm for the Doctor to view. She's holding two metal shards, fragments of Ice Warrior armour.
"You can stay, pretty boy," River says, and the way she looks at him makes him think some archaeologists might hold his interest after all.
* * *
Later, much later, after they've unearthed many more fragments, River covers the Doctor's hand with hers and questions whether the sonic might have any other uses he'd care to share with her.
He shows her when she drags him back to her temporary housing pod and into the shower with his clothes still on, pressing him against the moulded fibreglass wall, water streaming down their faces and hair while she kisses him. He flinches when the first cold drops splatter his skin, but it's safe, it must be safe, or ... well, if it isn't safe, at least he'll get to enjoy himself for a little while first.
"Wouldn't it have been easier to take everything off before getting in the shower?" he asks as River gently nips at his neck. "Oh. Oh. No marks, please, please, I won't be able to wear open collars for a week, and I love a good open collar, can't have casual Friday without one ... oh. Never mind. Don't stop."
River starts working at his tie, its knot soaked through and stuck fast. The Doctor presses the screwdriver into River's hand, curling her fingers round the handle, and the tie slips free from his shirt to slither into a pool of water at their feet. River points the sonic at the buttons of his shirt, pops them one by one.
"Nice toy," she says. "You can make me one of these anytime you like."
He reaches for the zip of her jumpsuit, inching it down and making the rather pleasant discovery that River hasn't bothered with a bra today.
"We'll see," he says, and bends to kiss River's breastbone.
* * *
When he returns to the TARDIS, she's made a miraculous recovery from her engine failure, and allows him to set the randomiser again.
She's also started to make a faint chiming noise, almost indistinguishable from her usual creaks and groans, but he decides to ignore it.
* * *
She drops him on a young farming colony blessedly thousands of miles from Mars, where the local ranchers speak to him desperately about saving them and their livestock, the colony's primary economic lifeline, from a massive burrowing creature that's little more than a gaping, toothy hole in the ground.
The predator is reproducing quickly, too quickly, sprouting hundreds of smaller mouths every time it digests more cattle and humans. There are too many maws to jam open and starve; fire kills, but slowly; there isn't enough water to drown them all.
What does eventually work is forcing the TARDIS, howling in protest, back to a point on the timeline before the first tiny maw arrived as an uninvited guest lurking in the grit trapped in the waffle sole of a ship captain's shoe, and making sure that the colony spaceport's xeno-microorganism sensors are functioning properly.
Rationalisation comes more easily now than it used to. The colonists wouldn't have lasted another week without him. The organism didn't belong on this world in the first place. His senses tell him that the colony survived, so surely something he did must have saved them.
He leaves behind a peaceful, bucolic planet full of grazing cattle and friendly colonists oblivious to their near miss with extinction.
And the next time he sets the TARDIS randomiser, the chiming noise gets louder.
* * *
The universe holds so many distractions, but River is an especially enticing one. The Doctor visits her whenever he feels like overriding the randomiser, which happens more frequently as he grows bolder, time carrying him farther away from a snowy street on 21st century Earth.
River is beautiful. River is sexy. And River is smart, too smart to be easily impressed, so he finds himself taking more risks around her: engineering a defeat at the last possible moment simply to prove he could have done it any time he pleased; provoking the pompous and dangerous until he's racked up more death sentences in a month than he had in the previous year; pushing his luck whenever he can.
River rolls her eyes and calls him a show-off, but her reactions rarely stop him from doing it again. She still matches him step-for-step as they run, and beneath her angry words he can sense a touch of pride in his daring. Besides, inevitably they resolve their disputes in bed.
One day on Regulus IV, rescuing workers trapped by a chemical explosion, he leaves things too late and stumbles at the threshold of the TARDIS, just ahead of the raging fire, smoke so thick not even his respiratory bypass can protect him. River, wearing the oxygen mask and fire-resistant suit he'd refused, drags him into his ship by the back of his collar and then rushes out again to save the people he could not.
Drifting in and out of consciousness in the infirmary, he wonders if this is the moment the Ood predicted, if all his running since 2059 has come to naught. River hovers over him, treating his injuries. Once he starts to recover, she leans close to him, her fingers tangling in his hair, stroking his scalp.
"You nearly saved them all," she says. "I got the last few. Everyone's fine."
"Knew we could do it." He grins weakly and relaxes into River's touch.
Suddenly, she yanks his head back, holding him tight against the pillow. "Are you trying to kill yourself?" she asks. "You deliberately walked in there unprotected, and all your Time Lord superpowers couldn't save you from a nasty case of smoke inhalation. I tell you, I've tolerated this egotistic pursuit of yours for a long time because you're very good at it, but this is too much. You nearly died."
"It's not that simple – ow, River, let go!"
She relinquishes her grip on his hair and sits down in the chair beside the bed, resting her head on folded arms beside him. "Okay, then, tell me why it's not so simple."
"This is what I do, River. You know that. I save people, and sometimes there isn't time to think about myself."
"But you are thinking about yourself, don't you see? You're making things difficult because you thrive on chaos. You breathe it like air. I admit it's part of your charm, but it's like you're laughing at death. Normal people don't do that."
"River, I'm about as far from normal as they come."
"Doesn't the thought of dying worry you at all? I know it worries me."
"That's very sweet of you to say."
She smirks at him. "I was talking about myself. But I suppose your death might be a little upsetting."
"I'm touched."
"You certainly are."
He exhales, breath still ragged from the smoke. "I need to tell you something," he says. "I've died before. It's horrible, and it's awful, but I've died before, and I'll do it again. It's one of those Time Lord superpowers."
River raises her head and stares at him. "You're joking."
"I'm really not." He coughs hard several times, and River rubs lightly on his chest to soothe him. "And I'm really not sure I'm capable of talking about this right now, either," he finishes.
"Okay," River replies, her voice uncertain. "But the instant you're better ..."
"The full story, I promise." He watches her head towards the door. "River," he says in a hoarse whisper, "I do think of myself sometimes. Much more than I should, probably."
She smiles and flicks off the lights. "Get some rest. I'm sure you'll have some other suicidally noble gesture to make tomorrow."
That's the moment the Doctor realises he's hopelessly in love with her.
* * *
He runs, again.
A quick tap of the randomiser, and he's parked in the shadow of the Phosphorous Carousel. The Carousel has three levels of eight concentric rings, each rotating independently based on music selection, and features more than a thousand sculpted creatures to ride.
It teems with families and species from nearby star systems, but the Doctor still manages to secure a one-hour pass without waiting, and makes his way up to the second level – high enough for a view, and low enough that he can observe the complex weavings of the gears and support arms that rotate the rings above.
He settles on a woolly mammoth in the fourth ring, climbing the steps to its back and grinning at his perch above the lowly horses and other, smaller carousel creatures. The ride begins to spin, and he takes his time watching the other passengers as they shriek and laugh in delight.
There's a teenage girl in the fifth ring, a slim brunette clinging to the plaster-feathered back of a two-toed merlax. She passes the Doctor once, then twice as her ring speeds up and his slows; he passes her on the third song, but loses ground again on the fourth. They keep pace with each other, one catching up, then falling behind, never quite synchronised.
By the time the Doctor's ticket expires, he's lost count of the number of times he's drawn past the merlax, or vice-versa. He steps down from the mammoth and starts walking towards the exit. The girl smiles at him shyly, and then minutes later, as he watches the carousel from the TARDIS doors, she's just another dot spinning round and round above him: small, indistinct, and then lost in the crowd.
The TARDIS' chiming noise is back, clearer this time, the sound now deeper and fuller. Probably just the harmonic resonance of a loose coil or spring somewhere, the Doctor thinks. Something to fix later.
* * *
He whisks River away after class for a picnic on Asgard, half a galaxy away from the university where she teaches. On a grassy hill overlooking the colossal rock arch known as Bifrost, they lay waste to a basket of smoked salmon, brown bread, and fruit, and the Doctor reclines on his elbows, watching River pop the last lingonberry into her mouth.
"I think we should get married," he says.
"What makes you think we aren't already married?"
He glances at her left hand, then back up at her.
"Do give me some credit," River says. "If I have a ring, do you think I'd be stupid enough to wear it before you know we're married?"
"You could have slipped up."
Her face falls. "That happened once. Once. And only because you provoked me."
"I don't remember any ..."
"Oh, no, you don't. I'm not playing that game with you. Maybe you really don't remember. Or maybe you do, and you're just trying to make me think you don't so I say something, and I'm telling you right now, if this is your idea of a romantic marriage proposal, it needs work."
He sighs. "Never mind, then."
River smooths out a wrinkle in the picnic blanket. "Why do you want to get married, anyway? You're not one for settling down, and you know I'm not, either."
"Maybe that's okay. Maybe I just want you, River. Stay with me. We don't have to settle down. We could just keep travelling."
"You know this can't last forever," she says quietly.
"Nothing lasts forever," he replies. "That doesn't mean we can't enjoy ourselves for a while."
"I thought we were enjoying ourselves." River lies down beside him. "Is something bothering you? Feeling a little more ancient than usual today?"
"No, I ... oh, forget I said anything." He collapses on his back, deflated.
River's hand starts to undo his shirt buttons. "How about a compromise?" she says, working his shirt open and dancing her fingers along the t-shirt below. "If we aren't already married, I'll agree to marry you, and if we are, there's nothing to worry about, is there?"
He considers. "That would do. Either way, there's a honeymoon, isn't there? Although if it's already happened, you're the only one who remembers it ..."
"Why don't you help me jog my memory?" says River. She pulls the Doctor's t-shirt free of his trousers and slides on top of him, then whispers in his ear: the real honeymoon will be even better.
* * *
The TARDIS greets them when they return.
Bong. Bong. Bong.
"Wedding bells?" River asks.
The Doctor's jaw clenches. "Malfunction. Thought I fixed that ages ago." He slides underneath the console. "Oh, you clever girl. You clever, clever, insolent girl. You rerouted the circuits on your own."
"I'll say it's a malfunction," River yells, covering her ears against the din. "That's the most depressing wedding bell I've ever heard."
The Doctor grips a fistful of wires and jerks them out violently, yelping as sparks cascade over his hand. The bell falls silent.
"Oh, thank goodness," says River. "Honestly, that sounded like something you'd hear at a funeral."
The Doctor crawls out from under the console. "I suppose it does," he says, and sets course for River's flat.
His hand shakes as he enters the coordinates.
* * *
The randomiser sends him forward three and a half billion years, where he sees the Face of Boe from a distance at a party, a younger Face in a smaller, less smoky jar, doing tricks with its tentacles to amuse a throng of women. Jack never changes, the Doctor thinks.
The randomiser sends him to a planet lashed with rain, everything soaking wet and impossibly green, and he stands, drenched, in the forest, listening to raindrops clattering on the leaves and branches, feeling life pulse around him.
The randomiser sends him to sixteenth-century England, where he agrees to a drunken bet that he can marry the queen. After a series of unlikely coincidences, costume changes, and other chicanery engineered with a somewhat unwilling time machine, he achieves his goal, then manages to cock it all up on his wedding night by accidentally calling his new bride the name of another redhead he'd been fond of. He's never quite sure how he makes it back to the TARDIS unscathed, but even after outrunning the queen's guards, there's still a splitting headache and the whirlpool of fragmented timelines in his mind to deal with. He spends the next two days unravelling every knot he'd tied in time, until the sixteenth century is whole again.
The randomiser sends him across the universe and back. His ship regrows her Cloister Bell connections twice more, each time concealing her work in a different subsystem to make it harder for the Doctor to detect. She is a patient and stubborn worker. But his terror makes him just as stubborn.
* * *
A younger River answers his knock on the door of her flat with a puzzled expression.
"It's you."
The Doctor pats himself down, pretending to look surprised. "Incredible! So it is."
River touches his cheek, reaches up and kisses him. "As lovely as it is to see you, sweetie, I think you should go."
"But I just got here!"
"Yes, and that's wonderful, but I'm ... ." River hesitates, as if searching for the right words. "I'm expecting someone else," she finally finishes.
"I've always wanted to meet one of the others. Which one is it? Felicia? And wasn't there a Bryan? What about Tl'xaltl, are you still seeing it?"
"Tl'xatli," she corrects him. "No, it's none of them. It's someone you wouldn't want to meet. Really, you should go."
He arches an eyebrow. "River, why wouldn't I want to meet one of your other lovers? I'm not jealous. I'm curious."
River tries to turn him in place and push him back towards the TARDIS. "You told me yourself you didn't ever want to meet this one. And he'll be here any minute –"
"River. Who is it? What's wrong?"
"Please, just go! You know I can't tell you."
"Yes, you can," he says, and brushes her hands from his arms. "If someone's threatening you ..."
"No one's threatening me, except you and your relentless stupidity! Go."
"No," he says icily. "Not until you tell me what's going on."
"You really want to know?" she asks, finger jabbing at his chest. "Ask your future self when he gets here."
The Doctor staggers backwards, eyes wide. River watches him, her face a mixture of anger and heartbreak.
He's explained regeneration to her. He hasn't explained how long he's been delaying the prospect of an eleventh self, or the myriad of ways he's kept himself from even thinking of the prospect of an eleventh self, because River's one of those ways, albeit the most important one. He's held her close not just because he loves her, and not just out of fear of her fate – she's somewhere safe to stand while the ground crumbles round him.
He also hasn't told her it's his fault the ground is crumbling in the first place.
A breeze wafts through the otherwise still air in the corridor outside the flat, a distant wheezing accompanying it, strengthening into the full-blown scrape and grind of the TARDIS' approaching engine.
A blue police box lands neatly beside his own. And as its door creaks open, the Doctor trembles and breaks for his ship.
* * *
He can hardly hear the door slam shut behind him for the tolling of the Cloister Bell, clanging louder and louder until he's crouched on the floor moaning stop it, stop it, his hands covering his ears.
He slumps in a heap at the base of the console, crumpled in on himself. "I'm sorry," he cries. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm just not ready yet. Please, can't I have one more trip? Please? I'll do anything, just stop."
At last, there is silence, though his head still reverberates with a high-pitched drone.
"Thank you," he says, chastened. "One trip, I swear."
He rises to his feet, removes his coat, and tosses it over the back of the captain's chair, then hears the soft slap of leather on the floor. It's the psychic paper, which must have slid out of his inside pocket, and now lies flipped open and face down.
Picking it up, he turns it over and discovers a set of date and time coordinates at River's university, along with a message: Singing Towers of Darillium at peak in 4236. Take me? x
A chill runs through his body. "That's not what I meant," he says softly. "That's not what I meant." Shouting, so his bloody ship can hear him: "Not this!"
He slaps the psychic paper on the console, banging his hand so forcefully the impact vibrates along his forearm. "You can't make me. I won't do it."
The Doctor grips the console, bows his head. One of them will have to give in, him or the TARDIS. In the hundreds of years they've been together, each has had to sacrifice for the other. On balance, he's not sure who's ahead, and not sure keeping score matters anyway for the sort of decisions he has to make.
He's still standing at the console, knuckles white, when he hears the Cloister Bell ring, once only, echoing a warning that resonates all through his bones.
He swallows, and enters the coordinates River gave him.
* * *
Their hotel suite faces the Darillium Sea, where the Singing Towers rise in craggy, spiralling clumps of multicoloured coral, broad and tall enough to be visible from a great distance in daylight. The Doctor and River have spent the late evening strolling hand-in-hand along the boardwalk like all the other tourists here for the Towers' duodecennial performance, window-shopping and laughing and counting the minutes until the coral begins to sing.
River buys them each straw hats and flower garlands, telling him, "Not that I don't love the new haircut, sweetie, but since everyone else has these ... ." She places the hat on the Doctor's head and carefully tilts it just so. "There, that suits you very much."
"You really think so?" he says, stopping to admire himself in a mirror, and only then notices River collapsed in laughter behind him.
He leaves the hat on the rest of the night to amuse her, only removing it when it interferes with nuzzling her ear as he holds her close in front of him on their balcony. His fingers tiptoe beneath the layered fabric of her sarong, touching her slowly, gently.
"Cheeky," she gasps.
"Hush," he says, still stroking her. "Listen."
Hundreds of metres away, the coral blooms, opening millions of tiny pipes waiting for the right wind conditions to strew gametes across the water. The towers whistle and moan polyphonically in a richly layered, unearthly song that grows in power and harmony as the winds gather speed.
River stands and listens, so transfixed by the sound of the towers that she doesn't complain when the Doctor stills his hand for a moment to concentrate as well. In the dark, he can't see the Towers, so he watches River instead, memorising the planes of her face in the moonlight, and the scent of her hair against his skin.
He knows she'll remember this night, because she told him so. Now he wants to learn every part of it for himself, his last chance to be with her in this body, and her next-to-last chance to be with him. She's never said anything about her dealings with his future self beyond that one slip-up, and what if she loves him less in his next life? What if he doesn't love her at all? He's clung to her so tightly since Mars, and now she's one more thing he's terrified to let go of at the very end.
He rests his chin on her shoulder, closes his eyes. River shifts in his arms, and he feels her hand caress his cheek, then pause.
"Oh, you are not," she says.
She turns round to face him, brushes a tear away with her fingers, and shakes her head. "You get sentimental at the oddest times."
"The Rough Guide to the M-87 Galaxy calls the Singing Towers of Darillium one of its top ten romantic destinations. Any sentimentality I may or may not be displaying is officially sanctioned."
"Okay, sweetie." River slides her arms around his neck. "You want to play sentimental romantic, I can do that."
"Good," he says, and takes her hand, and leads her to the bedroom.
Outside, the coral sings its mating song.
And in the morning, before leaving River back at the university, the Doctor tells her he's finally made her a sonic screwdriver of her own, and presses his gift into her hand.
* * *
The TARDIS is silent when the Doctor returns.
"Come on!" he yells. "Not even one last dig at me? A little more ringing in my ears until I do what I'm supposed to do?"
His ship doesn't respond, just keeps making the everyday background whirs and murmurs she's always made.
"You're not even going to bother this time," he says bitterly. "You already know you've won."
He taps his fingers on the randomiser. "I could still set this, you know. I could keep running."
More silence, the sort of thing he'd call "eerily quiet" if he weren't so damned certain there's nothing eerie or mysterious about it: it's entirely deliberate. The TARDIS is waiting for him, and if there is one creature in the universe with the perseverance to wait him out, it's this one.
There is the promise of adventure, and the promise he made to his oldest companion. He trails a finger over the randomiser switch.
At last, he unscrews the device from the console and tosses it aside, metal clattering on the floor grating. He reaches for the destination controls, half-expecting them to already be set, but apparently the TARDIS has left him this last choice.
He enters the coordinates, and his ship leaps forward.
* * *
When they arrive on the Oodsphere, he slips on his sunglasses and sets the straw hat at a jaunty angle. River accused him of laughing at death, but if he's going to have to face it again at all, he might as well mock it.
He looks round the room, wondering if this will be the last time these eyes see it. Maybe there's still some way out of this; some thread in a timeline not yet fully woven, and hidden from his view; a button he hasn't pressed or risk he hasn't taken that will keep him moving one more day.
He won't know unless he tries. He pats the TARDIS console fondly, and heads for the door.
The TARDIS hums in response. There is no hint of bells this time, none at all.
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I love the way Ten struggles with the TARDIS. The latter's presence is subtle yet tangible, and the whole thing seems very much like something that could happen in canon. You describe the growing sense of dread and Ten's fears so well. I think my favourite bit is when he almost runs into Eleven.
Your River is wonderful and kick-ass. Your Ten/River is a perfect combination of sexy and sweet. I love this!
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Thanks, though -- I'm glad you liked this story so much.
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