Yowzah Oneshot Collection (3)

21

The Lights of Aeterna

bluegarters

It's a beautiful night on Aeterna II. Overhead, four moons dance in a sea of colours, some of which the Earth has never seen. The observation balcony is deserted, a dark bow in the side of an abandoned skyscraper, a monument to a civilisation lost to the ripples of time. Shadows crowd at the edges of her vision, but River Song is sitting in the curve of the Doctor's arm, together in the reflected light of one of the universe's miracles. She is thirty tonight, and literally on top of a world, and their life together is a beautiful yet fragile thing, held in their cupped hands.

'You're quiet tonight,' she says, nestling her cheek against his shoulder, his breath ghosting across the top of her head.

'Who needs talking with a view like this?' he counters, his voice light. She almost laughs, almost teases about finally finding the one thing in the universe that can shut him up for a moment, but something deep in his tone startles her; or perhaps it's the way his arm tightens incrementally, instinctively around her waist.

She hasn't travelled with him for eight years without learning to read the signs. 'Something's wrong,' she says, keeping her voice neutral. Eight years ago, she wouldn't have noticed. Five years ago, she would have had a fight with him for hiding things from her. Two years ago, after their flight from Hosking Four, she would have waited until they were back in the Tardis, back in safety, before confronting him. Today, she simply asks, here and now, pressed against the quiet rhythm of his two hearts.

Eight years ago, he would have kept quiet. Five years ago, he would have smiled that sharp smile of his, fond and slanted all at once, and said, 'Spoilers'. (Ah, how she hated that one little word.) Two years ago, he would have told her what she needed to know, after a long, protracted attempt to evade her questions, and perhaps after getting his hand forced by some aliens attempting to shanghai the Tardis.

Tonight, she feels him press a kiss into her hair, buying himself a little time. She watches the moons of Aeterna II dance across the night sky, as he holds her close, the silence between them a warm, familiar thing, soft with memories and laughter and comfort.

'I'm beginning to understand,' he says at last, his voice muffled in her curls. He's still keeping it light, but a whisper of pain - or is it apprehension? - dances along the edges, like the golden edges of candle flame.

'Understand what?' her younger self would have asked impatiently, but she waits, lets him pick his own way across the words. He'll tell her what he can. She'll look for the rest of what she needs to know later, in her own way, and he won't stop her.

The moons are flashes of light in an eternal sunset, the oceans of a world spread out at their feet, reflecting the kaleidoscope of colours above. She's never seen anything quite so beautiful, except perhaps the look in his eyes on a day when everybody lives.

'Since you were born, your parents and I have been fighting to protect you, to keep you safe,' he says, and the arm around her waist is tighter yet, pulling her into him, as if she might escape - or be taken. 'I can't...I can't tell you why, and I can't tell you how.'

She thinks of how her childhood memories don't begin until age seven; she remembers the way her dad kept a sword hanging by the front door and another under his bed -an eccentric collection, he'd said; she feels the shape of a gun in her hand, pulled from underneath her mother's pillow, sees the omnipresent mobile in her mum's fingers, a mobile which her mother never used, but caressed like a weapon, or a lover.

As far as she'd known, he'd never met her parents.

'They kept you safe for thirteen years,' he's saying, above the roaring in her ears. They were her parents, staid and puttering. They were quiet, normal people, who never seemed to have grasped modern technology. Stuck in the fiftieth century, she'd always told her friends, rolling her eyes. They'd worked hard, and lived quietly, and there'd been nothing special about them, except perhaps a bit of wanderlust that kept them moving. What had she missed? How had she missed it?