Yowzah Oneshot Collection (3)

74(G)

rules for dating my Time Lord daughter

                 coffeesuperhero

The TARDIS feels dreadfully empty without someone else, the specific someone else being his daughter, who has abandoned him to pursue an education, as though centuries of flying around time and space wasn't education enough.

Everyone always leaves, in the end. When it's the humans, he can understand. They get older, they want their feet on the ground to live out their sequential, ordered lives, and it's always horribly sad when they say, "I want to go home," but they're human and they're homesick and they don't live forever and so it's comprehensible, it's to be expected.

Who doesn't want to go home, every now and again?

He can't, though, ever, not even for a moment, so he puts it out of his conscious thoughts, or at least, he pushes it all the way to the very edge of them. It never really goes away, but he can layer it over with running and adventuring and that seems to help the sting of it. Just a bit.

He's halfway through plugging in the coordinates for the birth of the first star in the Horsehead Nebula when he realises he's been talking to himself about how beautiful it will be, expecting his daughter to interrupt with questions or corrections or suggestions or something, but of course she won't. She's not here.

He wonders where a version of River is who will know enough to understand all of this.

"The Bone Meadows," he mumbles, flipping back through memories of his wife. "She said she was excavating some something or other in the Bone Meadows, but when?"

He has to land on the site five times before he hits it right. He's fairly certain that the TARDIS ignores his coordinates the last time and just flies them to the appropriate time, but he's pretending that he's done it on his own.

One of River's students is working on a dig close by, speculating as to how the people had lived there, a thousand years before.

"Oh, that's wrong," he says, interrupting the students' theorizing. They look at him with no small measure of disgust. "Well, it is. I just saw it five minutes ago."

"I'll thank you to stop deviling my students," River says, and he whirls around to face her. "Hello, sweetie."

"Hello," he says, and before he can talk himself out of it, he flings his arms around her. The curls of her hair tickle his nose.

"I take it she's gone, then," River says, and he pulls back, shaking a finger at her.

"You knew!"

River merely spreads her hands and shrugs her shoulders, as if to say, "I am her mother."

"But she's barely even one hundred," he laments.

"She's one hundred and seven, and what, you thought it would be the three of us and the universe forever?"

"And the TARDIS," he amends.

"Doctor, you really can't just ignore what we already know about--"

"I can, I am, that never happened," he interrupts. There are Things About Which They Do Not Speak, and their daughter's potential future-- he swears it's still just a potential future, since, after all, it hasn't happened for her yet, and time, precious, beautiful, infinite time, can be rewritten-- is at the top of the list. He regrets having gone to Asgard, and he really doesn't want to know the entire story of the art planet. They haven't been back to Nighthawks since, or Las Vegas. How dreadful.

River is giving him a Look. "Doctor."

"River," he says, and she rolls her eyes.

"Once upon a time, my love, you wanted a life of your own, too," she reminds him.