Yowzah Oneshot Collection (3)

195(G)

              A pocket full of seeds

               honeynoir (bracelets)

“River! It was an accident!” The Doctor huffed and tried again to toe the very small and unnecessarily sharp pebble in his left shoe at least a little bit to the side. Which... didn’t work. Well, of course it didn’t work. He dug his heels into the dirt instead, trying for some leverage for his voicebox. “Riveeer!”

How many times could one be cold-shouldered by archeologists? And not only him; they’d snubbed the flowers as well. Who snubbed a bouquet that had only caused one small explosion? Everyone – including River, especially River – had withdrawn into a great drab saggy tent and left him sitting in a pile of sand that was soft enough to crumble at random and not slant enough to let him lean against it without going over, knee over elbow over... ear, was it?

Well, they could spend as much time in their tent as they wanted; he was the one with the bouquet, after all. It was one of those arrangements swathed as diligently as a newborn; long red stems mostly hidden, glittering petals resting on his arm. He tried his best not to actually cradle it.

“Next time I’ll leave,” he told it. “Just you watch me. I’m only staying because the weather’s nice.”

After what was probably too long a while since he’d stopped shouting that he could take credit for it, River slipped under what passed for a tent door. She wiped her hands on a handkerchief – stuffed that into her satchel – redid her ponytail – and zipped up her jacket before striding towards him, which was so rude he got a little weak in the knees. “There’s tea in there if you want some,” she said. “Sugar’s all gone – the shock – but there should still be some milk left.”

“Who puts twenty people in a cave full of reactive gas? River.”

She brought a not-so-faint odour of dust, damp and somebody else’s burnt hair and perched next to him, as if the pile wasn’t a crumbly fiend at all. “Who brings the only substance it reacts with into that cave?”

“I’ll have you know I could have brought flowers that exude nothing and then this would have been just another boring, just – Why am I expected to know everything?”

“Why are you sitting in the dirt when you could have come inside?”

“I wanted to sit here.”

“Ah.” She looked the flowers over, steadied herself with a hand on his upper thigh, and leaned forward to sniff them. “Any pollen?”

“No-no, completely allergen-free. Just... the exuding.” He was definitely not squirming; he was so used to her... hands now he was entirely blasé.

“Not even a trace of pollen?”

Oh. “We are not getting pollen-ed in public! Again. Shhh. That was evil potpourri and you know it.”

River removed her hand, freed the bouquet from his slackened grasp and propped it up against her shoulder. “They’re very pretty. Why are you giving them to me?”

“How can you possibly not be tired of the digging? And why do all these sites look the same?”

“I’m thinking of becoming that professor,” she said, fussing with the flowers.

He crossed his legs (casually), sunk thirty-two millimetres and two degrees to the left, and swallowed. “Already?”

“Oh, being confused with someone else is getting tiresome.”

“You abbreviate yours. Dee-Arr-full stop Song. Completely different.”

“Would you at least stop publishing postscripts to my work?”