Yowzah Oneshot Collection (3)

89(G)

Like a promise to the ocean that we will always keep moving toward the music

        mygalfriday (BrinneyFriday)

He doesn’t actually know how old he is. The problem with time travel is that it makes it a bit difficult to keep track. He guesses, really. And then rounds down because he is nothing if not vain and it’s easier to say nine hundred than nearly a thousand, easier to say a thousand than several millennia because becoming too ancient is just frightening and incomprehensible to his fragile and oh so humany mortal companions.

Sometimes it scares him too.

Forever roaming the universe in his blue box and losing track of just how long he’s been running, like a traveler lost in a maze. Sometimes he has company and it makes being lost a little easier to bear but they always find their way out again and leave him drifting in the dark, reaching out to brush the sides of the maze with his fingertips, hoping to find a way out, a light to guide him.

He never does. Until her.

So old, Doctor, she would say if she knew. So old and growing sentimental.

At times, he looks at her, serene and young, bathed in starlight, or older and exhilarated as she holds his hand and runs, grinning just as breathlessly as he is, and he thinks she is his destiny. Like every struggle and adventure through space and time, through the hundreds, thousands of years since he decided to steal that blue box (and it stole him right back) and ran away has all been leading here.

To her.

He’s been running his whole life but even while he ran from something, he was running to her, before he ever knew her name.

Perhaps he is growing sentimental and romantic in his old age, thinking of River Song as the beacon of light at the end of his dark and winding path. There have been others, of course – flickers of light against the darkness. But none shined so brightly as his River, none called to him like a siren song the way she did and if every dark day of his (too) long life was leading here, to this moment now with her in his arms and her hair tickling his nose, then he would live his lifetimes twice over, live through every painful memory and triumph and be content knowing he would end up right here. It was worth it.

She was worth it.

River Song was made for him.

But maybe he was made for her too. It just took him a long time to find her.

-

She would do it all again.

The amount of times she has worked to ensure her own existence, her own future is enough to make most people mad. She made sure her parents stopped dancing around each other, she gave Amy her empty blue book to help her remember when she could have let her forget, could have made sure she stayed Melody Pond, a normal little girl who grew up with parents who loved her and cuddled her at night when she was frightened.

Instead, she chose another path. She chose to grow up surrounded by towering aliens in dark suits and an addled caretaker, with the occasional visit from Auntie Kovarian. She chose growing up with her own parents and a life of imprisonment, with the entire universe thinking her the lowest creature to ever exist.

Many would call her foolish.

But River Song knows better.

She didn’t just choose all of those things. She chose him. And he makes all those other things pale in comparison. He makes them not matter.

She never had a home before, a place where she belonged.

She lived in a dank, musty orphanage and then on the streets, where she starved to death. And then she lived with two clerics of the Church in Leadworth, who posed as her foster parents and kept an eye on her, training her at night for her purpose. Then, on the moon in a tiny dorm room with a girl – reptile? – who shed scales all over her textbooks. And after that, a gray prison cell with only the constant pounding of the rain and the rumble of thunder for companions.

But when the Doctor comes to call, she opens the doors to the blue box and steps inside, enveloped in the warm glow of the TARDIS as the Old Girl hums in her mind, like a mother welcoming her child.

Warm. Happy. Safe.

The Doctor leans at the console, arms crossed, fringe falling into his eyes as he grins at her and asks, “Where to today, Mrs. Doctor?”

River approaches him with a matching beaming smile, straightening his bowtie and letting her nose brush his chin, radiant and happy with every choice she has ever made that lead her here, now.

She is home.