Yowzah Oneshot Collection (2)

37(G)

Of all the wonders that I yet have heard

      mygalfriday (BrinneyFriday)

Strolling into the console room raking his fingers through his mussed hair, the Doctor whistles contentedly, skips up to the controls and flips a lever. The TARDIS hums around him and he buttons his waistcoat with a grin, his thoughts still back in his bedroom, where his wife sleeps wrapped in nothing but bed sheets. He’d picked her up after she finished her afternoon lectures and that was hours ago. With no pressing universe-destroying plots to thwart, they’ve managed to occupy their time with other, less stressful but equally thrilling activities. For once, he’d been the one to wear River out instead of the other way around and he’d pulled himself from her arms only after watching her sleep for half an hour first.

She’s so beautiful, his Professor Song, and closer to the Library than ever. Every time he meets her, he waits with dread for a mention of that fated expedition, his hearts thudding in his chest and dread settling in his stomach until their diaries have been checked. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s coming. He can feel it. He hates to be away from her for more than a moment or turn his attention away long enough to look anywhere else for fear he might miss a flicker of those eyes or a naughty grin. He is running out of time, and he’s so greedy for every bit of it he has left with his wife. It makes him clingy in public and more passionate than ever in private, but River certainly isn’t complaining about either. She beams at him every time he wraps his arm around her waist in a crowd, her eyes light up when his hands wander and his kisses bruise.

And of course he’s happy to make her happy. He only wishes he’d tried so hard all along. He wishes he had lived every moment with her with this sort of quiet desperation. River deserved this desperate, passionate wooing every single day of their marriage, not just now, when he’s so close to the end it scares the hell out of him.

The TARDIS hums again under his fingers and the Doctor’s smile softens.

“A date,” he murmurs, and giggles. They haven’t had a real date since her release from Stormcage. They still go on adventures frequently, of course, but nights solely spent romancing his wife have become few and far between. The Doctor intends to fix that today, just as soon as River wakes. Glancing fondly up at the time rotor, he asks, “Do you think she’d like to go dancing?”

“She definitely would.”

The Doctor starts, whirling to find River lounging in the doorway in a pair of jodhpurs with a gun strapped to her thigh, knee-high boots and one of his shirts tucked into her trousers, the top four buttons left undone to allow him a tantalizing peek of the lacy bra he’d peeled off of her hours ago. Her hair, he notices smugly, is still very thoroughly rumpled. “Dancing it is, then,” he beams.

River sidles up behind him as he turns back to the console, fiddling with buttons and levers as he contemplates the best place for dancing where they won’t run into their younger selves. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she presses herself against his back, nuzzling her cheek into his shirt. “I thought I was driving.”

“You were sleeping,” he points out, in the middle of mentally reviewing dancing in the 47th century versus the early 20th. “Besides, you can’t drive yourself to your own date, River. Honestly.”

She kisses his shoulder and he sighs happily at the warm press of her lips through his shirt. “And they say romance is dead,” she murmurs in amusement.