Yowzah Oneshot Collection (1)

129(G)

my days vanish like smoke; my bones
burn like glowing embers.

*togethertheyfightcrime*

I have lost things you will never understand.

To save River, whose saving had meant the loss of her, was nothing the Doctor knew how to do. He grasped at thoughts through the blackness and knew nothing but the nothingness; there wasn't anything that could be done to bring back what had been forgotten. And what had been forgotten was River. Her memory had faded into an echo in the Library, and when the Doctor brought that memory back into her body, it had been too late, much, much too late.

"It's all right, my love," River would tell him some nights when he cried and she didn't (couldn't) understand why, but she still smoothed her hands over his cheeks and murmured platitudes in the darkness. "I'm right here."

But she wasn't, she wasn't there, and she didn't even know, and all it served to do was deepen the fractures in the Doctor's chest and twist and twist at his hearts. The pain of it was physical, a constant stabbing and a neverending ache, that tore and throbbed at the Doctor's body at all times; he didn't know how he was going on, how he was even alive, when all he wanted to do was hold River and wrap them all in golden light until there was nothing left. The Doctor wanted to fall asleep with River in his arms and never wake up, and maybe, just maybe, he would have done enough good in his long, long life for his dreams to be of who she once had been.

It wasn't a plea he would even have granted himself; then again, nobody had ever hated the Doctor more than the Doctor could. Especially now, he knew. Especially now.

The Doctor had made a promise, long ago, on what felt like both the first and worst day of a life that still continued on no matter how much he wanted to end - he had promised something that now, alone beside the shell of his wife, made him want to fly apart at the edges and rain down across the universe, staining it with the colors of his idiocy and cowardice and foolishness because he had promised, he'd promised -

Not those times. Not one line.

He could have fixed it, changed it, and damn the fabric of reality, the Doctor didn't care about it anymore. (It had been River who made him care, in the dark times.) But even the tiniest rewrites - visiting her past self and just talking to her or sending a lonely little Melody gifts at Christmas or even watching Mels and the Ponds from the scanner on a cloaked TARDIS - had the greatest chances of destroying it all, shattering everything the Doctor had had with River into memories as faded as she was while time coiled and snapped and changed and the Doctor knew he would feel every rewrite, every past, draped over him like a noose - he would taste what he had ruined and in time, he would forget too, and the Doctor couldn't risk that. He had always been a selfish, selfish old man, and the flame of that only grew and licked at his insides whenever he stared at the pale remnant of River Song.

He would not destroy the little he had left of River Song.

And yet what if what if what if he could fix her, and in a terrible, dark, selfish moment of recklessness the Doctor landed the TARDIS for the first time in so, so long, in a room whiter than winter's breath.

Melody was not afraid of the box or the Doctor, but he hadn't expected her to be. He took the sleepy culmination of the past of the only thing that mattered to him, and led her into the TARDIS.

The TARDIS was more than displeased at the paradox, she was disappointed, and the hurt of it stung but was nothing compared to, well. Compared to. So when the Doctor pushed open the TARDIS doors to their bedroom where River was sleeping and Melody frowned, confused, he did not even say a word, because he deserved this. The old girl was not going to cooperate, was not even going to lead him to the console room, and it hurt because River was the TARDIS's before she was even the Doctor's and yet the TARDIS would do nothing.