Yowzah Oneshot Collection (3)

113(G)

           Visions of Our Futures

               orphan_account

He promises that he will pick her up at seven o’clock, and for once he is exactly on time.

As he steps out of the TARDIS, the first thing he notices is how young she looks; for a moment, he stops dead, oddly disconcerted. It is not as if he hasn’t seen her this young before; he was there at her beginning, after all. It is because this time, it is as if their roles are reversed. He remembers standing outside her cell just as he is doing now, sauntering off into the TARDIS without a care in the world. It was the first time she kissed him goodbye, a first for him and a last for her. It was the first time he really realized just how star-crossed they really were.

Now, standing in front of a young River Song, he knows now how River felt that day. Because it is River Song, Melody Pond, in the cell in front of him. She is the same woman in so many ways but not his wife, not quite the woman he had fallen in love with.

This is River Song before she even is River Song. This time, it is his turn to hold the spoilers, his turn to be the one with a heavy heart weighed down by all the things she does not yet know.

She looks up, catches his eye, and her face breaks out into a wide smile. Even her smile causes a pang deep in his hearts, because River does not smile like that, like he is her whole world. She teases and smirks and makes him dizzy and red-faced; but she does not smile like that, not for him. Her love for him hides beneath the façade she wears in all but their most intimate moments.

“Hello, sweetie,” she says, and it sounds wrong coming from her too-young lips. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

He pushes down his misgivings and straightens his bowtie one last time. “Can’t a man spoil his wife without a reason?”

She chuckles, stands. “I suppose so. Where are we off to tonight?”

“Well,” he begins, “there’s this one beach on one of the planets in the Andromeda galaxy. Or, if you don’t want to do that, there’s a restaurant on the edge of a cliff on the Sunflower Planet—it’s got an awfully long name, terrible to pronounce, but the inhabitants call it what would translate to the Sunflo—”

“Doctor,” she interrupts with a fond smile. “Wherever you want to go is fine.”

But it’s not, it’s really not. He wants her to tell him what to do, how to be. She has always been his compass in their wibbly-wobbly timelines, and now that she is not, he finds himself completely and utterly lost.

“All right,” he says, and then turns and walks into the TARDIS without another word, expecting her to follow him. When she doesn’t, he pops his head back out the door to find her with a hand on the side of the time machine, uncertainty clouding her gaze.

“River?” he asks gently, and then sees her come back to herself, shaking herself back to the present.

“Just saying hello to Mummy,” she supplies as an explanation, but her smile doesn’t reach her eyes.

He nods, unsure of what to say, and goes back inside, busying himself with the console until she walks inside.

“So, restaurant or beach?” he asks her, and she smiles.

“I honestly don’t care, darling. Surprise me.”

“All right,” he says, knowing with sudden clarity what he’ll do. “Get dressed. The TARDIS will direct you to something appropriate.”

His tone sounds flat even to him, and he can tell she hears it, too, because she doesn’t even try to flirt with him. She leaves the console room without a word as he flips levers and switches and puts the brakes on because he needs her to hear it and come correct his terrible driving skills.