Yowzah Oneshot Collection (3)

107(G)

You're gonna make me lonesome when you go

                          leiascully

The Doctor could tell you the exact moment he falls in love with River Song. It's the same moment he meets Melody Pond for the first time. Well, for the first time since she was speaking Baby, anyway. First there's the startling realization that she can regenerate - that certainly has him at the edge of his seat. And then there's that familiar face, all lit up by time energy, and he would swear that both his hearts skip a few beats.

River. The woman who will know his name, and all that entails. And it entails rather a lot. He's been awfully distracted lately, thinking of it. Fortunately, he's found a nice long coat that hides a multitude of sins. More than all of that, though, he misses her for all the things he doesn't have to say when she's around. "Watch out for that bioluminescing plant, it's fairly deadly", for instance, and "You really don't want to mess with the Atraxi when there's a conjunctivitis outbreak, they get a bit testy". She knows. And she knows him.

He knows, he knows she isn't River yet and she very much wants to kill him, right this very moment. It's what her whole life's been about up to now, in her timeline. That really shouldn't make him want to kiss her all the more, but love isn't sane or sensible. He gave away too much of himself last time, and it still wasn't enough. It's never enough for the humans. He couldn't give Rose or Martha or even poor Astrid as much of himself as they wanted, but he couldn't give them more either. He's too much for them: too long-lived, too fancy-free, too restless. He couldn't have even told them his name if he'd wanted to: the sound of it would have burned through their minds the way the vortex seared its way through Rose's brain and Donna's. But River's different. If anything, she's nearly too much for him, which is a nice challenge. She's near enough a Time Lord with all her cleverness and her mad hair.

And all of this speeds through his mind in the moments it takes her to shake off the last of the time energy from her new limbs, as he takes the bullets from the gun she'll gladly use to kill him if he gives her half a chance. He may be tired of running, but he's not that tired. He won't go down without a fight. He has, after all, an appointment with destiny, or at least a fixed point in time.

Mind you, he's got to get there, and she's certainly on top of things when it comes to clever ways to bring him down. One gun, a banana, a letter opener, and a second gun: parry and thrust, nearly equally matched, and if it's a strange sort of foreplay, he wouldn't have any other. Oh, she's good, she's very, very good, and she banters like River will, but she hasn't got the better of him yet. He has to remind himself rather firmly that this won't all end with a bit of a snog and a grin, that she really does want him dead, which isn't quite like most of their encounters. Fortunately, there's still the coat.

River - no, Melody (he must remember that) slinks toward him.

"I'm all yours, sweetie," she promises, and seals it with a kiss he can't help returning, thinking of the Stormcage.

"Only River Song gets to call me that," he says. (She isn't River, she won't be River for a while yet; he must resist the urge to embrace her, especially with her parents right there in the room, and oh, is he ever too old for these adolescent games, but he's been waiting so long for someone to lighten his loneliness.)

"And who is River Song?" she asks. She's no coquette, but she plays it well.

"An old friend of mine," he says, editing heavily for time and timey-wimey-ness, and because she mustn't know yet. As she said to him on a beach of Alfava Metraxis, it's a story that must be lived, not told.

"Stupid name," she says, and sashays off to the window. Melody Pond, how little you know. River Song is a name to be written in the stars. But she's distracted, still new, breathing in the chaos of the city below her.