Yowzah Oneshot Collection (3)

96(G)

      when at last i see thee whole

                 bendingwind

They choose a trendy restaurant in twentieth-century Paris to play diary catch-up this time. He orders orange juice, and she orders a second, and they both ignore the strange look the waiter gives them.

“So where are we?” she asks, a current of strain running through her too-casual tone. His thoughts brush against hers, very gently, and she closes her eyes.

“Artolius Corona, lovely, I love the Artolius Corona!” he says, beaming at her. He sobers quickly. “Didn’t you love it? I thought you enjoyed skiing on the northern lights…” he trails off, looking a bit confused. Her face softens and her posture loosens, but not as much as he’d like.

“I loved the Artolius Corona, sweetie,” she says with a small smile. When she fails to mention the particularly stimulating night they spent in the Arboreal Lodge after, his confusion morphs into alarm.

“River…” he says. “Why did you call?”

“Check the message again,” she responds, fidgeting slightly. He frowns and retrieves the scrap of psychic paper from his coat pocket. It no longer reads ‘hello sweetie,’ signed with an x; instead it bears a neat, blue little plus sign.

“Er,” he says, “This isn’t another attempt to get me to go back and fudge the results on that maths exam you failed when you were thirteen, is it? Because I’ve already told you I’m not going to risk a paradox over your grades...”

“Really?” she says leaning forward. Her eyes flash with irritation in that way he finds particularly intriguing. “This is not about my maths exam, you stupid man.”

“I’ll have you know that I’m quite clever,” he harrumphs, glancing once again at the paper. He tilts it a little and notes the way it shimmers purple, and realizes what it is—the universal symbol for pregnancy adopted during the twenty-second century. “Oh! Oooooh,” he says, turning to her with wide eyes. “Oh god, I’ve gotten pregnant from a Nostrovite bite again, haven’t I? Look, River, I can explain—”

Her glare stops him.

“Really, there’s a perfectly good explanation…” he repeats, in a much smaller voice.

“To the best of my knowledge, you are not carrying Nostrovite eggs,” she hisses.

He breathes a sigh of relief. “Good, I hate being pregnant.”

She appears to be trying her hardest not to completely lose her patience with him. He stares at the psychic paper and does his best to look as if he’s concentrating hard on deciphering her message while he waits for her to lose her patience and explain it to him with words. Words are nice things, quite handy for communication, especially when she’s doing such a marvelous job of keeping him out of her mind.

“Are you seriously not getting this,” she says, and it’s not a question.

“Well… no, not exactly,” he says, scratching his cheek nervously. Subtext has never really been his strong suit. She looks ready to deck him and he prepares to dodge (he never quite knows what she might do next, which is fascinating and infuriating and wonderful all at once) . He reaches out one last time in the hopes that she’ll let down her mental shields, and instead encounters… something new. A sort of shimmering light on the edge of her consciousness, so familiar and yet entirely new…

“River,” he whispers, staring at her with wide eyes. Her eyelashes flutter closed and she lets out a heavy breath.

“It’s okay, right?” she says, without opening her eyes to look at him. “It’s going to be fine?”

He can’t quite seem to find the words to answer her questions. Of course it will be fine. More than fine. It’s…

His mind once again brushes the foreign, tiny pulse from her, and it playfully taps against his consciousness. River senses it as well, at lets down her own walls, revealing all her insecurity and fear and the current of overwhelming joy running beneath it all.

“River,” he repeats, and he lets his eyes close as he leans forward to touch his forehead to hers and lets their thoughts wrap around him.

Theirs. More than one. As in two. As in… a baby… with tiny baby toes and adorable baby yawns and squiggly baby thoughts. Not finished yet, not quite sentient… but close.

They stay like that for a time. The waiter comes with their orange juice, but they do not notice. He sets it on the table and walks away. Finally, he finds words.

“My son,” he says, and almost chokes on the word. He hasn’t spoken of his children in hundreds of years, and even now the pain of it almost cracks his hearts, “My son, Silon, my youngest… when he was a boy, we would play a game. We would pretend that we were free from the restraints of the Time Lords, free to change what we would about the universe. He said to me once… he said that if he could change anything about the universe, he would teach humans the secrets of the Time Lords. He was barely eight years old, but he said that he thought they would do it better. He said that Time Lords just sat around watching bad things happen.” His eyes feel damp and he tries his best not to blink, in case it causes his tears to run.

“Are you telling me you engineered this to test your son’s theory?” River mumbles, half-serious.

“No!” he chuckles giddily, “No, of course not! I just… a baby!”

“Yeah,” she says with a tiny smile.

“How long?” he asks, pulling back so that he can see her more clearly. He scrambles in his pocket for the sonic and gleefully scans her.

“Four months,” she replies, answering his question at the same time as the screwdriver does. “I sent the note months ago. You are very, very late.”

She looks down at her glass of orange juice and slowly traces its rim.

“Doctor…” she says, and a flurry of a thousand questions brushes against his mind. “Will… it will all work out okay, won’t it?” She knows that he knows her future, knows what will happen to her—but sometimes, he doesn’t. Sometimes she doesn’t tell him things—things like this—so that they can experience them in the same way. And sometimes she doesn’t tell him things because the things that neither of them know provide a haven, a safe place where someday they can both go, timelines in synch and hearts beating to a matching tune.

“Yes,” is all he can say, as he reaches across the table to stroke her cheek, “Yes, everything will be fine.” He hopes he isn’t accidentally lying, again.

Once, you showed me your name looping through mine and connecting us to a third, in the sentence that told of my life. I have known this from the beginning and yet I never saw it coming.

You and I, River Song. You watch us run.