Yowzah Oneshot Collection (2)

84(M)

    I'll wear you like a familiar scar

                           leiascully

River knows each time a new person is uploaded to the Library. She long ago gave up waiting for him. She took up gardening instead: it soothes her to sift through the soil and make it smooth for her plants. It soothes her to tend to things that are rooted in their time and place. She's tending her roses when she senses the ripple in the space-time of the Library that means another soul has been literally saved, and she just goes on pruning and clipping. It takes time to find one's feet in the Library, with its strange twists of space and time. She'll meet the new person eventually; the roses need tending now and besides, the work soothes her. But then she looks up and there he is.

"Hello, sweetie," he says, lingering just out of reach with his hands in his pockets and an apprehensive look on his face. His normal face, his real face, the face he's usually worn with her. His hair falls over his brow and he peers through it, nearly shy.

It's only because she's River Song and she has a reputation to maintain that she manages not to burst into tears or punch him or demand where the hell he's been all this while. She shucks off her gardening gloves and drops them by the side of the garden path, letting the pruning shears fall on top of them.

"Is it that time, then?" she asks. "You've met the astronaut?"

"Not so impossible after all," he says with that wry smile.

She tilts her head and looks at him, brimming with too many words to know which ones to say first. She takes a step forward and he opens his arms and meets her halfway, just as he always has done.

"River," he murmurs into her hair.

"My Doctor," she affirms. "I am so sorry."

"Shhh, love," he says. "Water under the bridge. Anyway. I'm sorry as well."

She looks into his eyes, those beautiful ancient eyes.

And then, because in this strange world, she thinks it and it happens, they're in bed together, exploring the beloved expanses of each other's skin. He undresses her slowly, tracing each of her scars with his fingertips and his lips. She shivers under his fingers. Her Doctor, who knows her inside and out. He's memorized these scars; he reads them as easily as he would her journal, taking meaning from swirl and ridge.

"I thought you'd leave these behind," he says, touching the place on her shoulder where a Cyberman's bullet grazed her.

She shrugs, slowly and luxuriously, blissful at his touch. "They're a part of me. The Library doesn't edit; it just reconstructs. I wouldn't have given them up in any case. I earned each and every one of them. They're as much a part of me and my history as you are, my love."

"But they're reminders of bad times," he says.

"Some of us want to remember those times too," she says. "The big bangs and the big nothings."

"And who would have guessed you for a sentimental fool?" he teases her, stroking her hip where she has a scar from an adventure without him: the Sontarans may look stupid, but they're not bad in a fight, unfortunately for her. There's no sensation in the skin there. She arches into his hand anyway, the absence of feeling as poignant as the feeling.

"Yes, well," she says. "Everyone knows my name, and no one knows yours. Everyone knows you're a sentimental fool, and no one knows that I am. We complement each other."

"In so many ways," he says with a twinkle in his eyes as he slides down her body to kiss the puckered skin on her hip. She can't even feel the warmth of his lips except at the edges of the scar, and it's driving her mad. Somehow it makes it even more appealing that he's touching her scar: violence mixed with lust, history mixed with love.