A/N: Well hello, sweeties. It's been a while. As always, my love and care goes to my British Bestie, the lovely Miss Becs, without whom this would not be the story it is. Thank you, honey x

Set: The Library/Darillium

Spoilers: Silence In The Library & Forest of the Dead.

Pair: Doctor/River (In case you hadn't grasped that yet)

Summary: Melody-Pond-The-Superhero is resigned to the reality of the situation. She knows this is the way things must end for her. She accepts it. To save these people, to save her husband, she will sacrifice herself without complaint. But she does not want to die alone.

Disclaimer: I don't own them. I think Moffat should give them to me, though.

Think of Me

By

Tricki

River Song does not want to die alone. This is the inextinguishable flame burning at her subconscious as she strips wires in the CAL mainframe, preparing the machine to utilise her memory space. Soon, she will be plugged into this data core in order to rescue four-thousand people, one of whom is her husband. Melody-Pond-The-Superhero is resigned to the reality of the situation. She knows this is the way things must end for her. She accepts it. To save these people, to save her husband, she will sacrifice herself without complaint. But she does not want to die alone.

In fairness, she won't be technically alone: her husband is lying on the ground nearby, passed out from a punch she delivered to him earlier. The problem is, he is a young version of her husband; a version of her husband so young he doesn't even know who she is. Flowing through River's brain are the multitude of missed clues from the last several meetings with her husband, the way he had held her much too tightly a week ago, ignoring her protestations, the way he had taken extra care to map her entire body with his fingertips the Thursday before that, and the way he had silently wept as they'd watched the Singing Towers of Darillium two nights ago.

Yes, there were clues that she was running out of time with him, she had merely failed to see them. Now, as she puts the finishing touches on the contraption that will kill her, she draws her modified vortex manipulator from the pocket of her space suit. The little device that clips onto the CommsUnit on her suit is a miracle of science compared to the old strap on she used to use. The new one is precise down to the minute, and given this knowledge, she intends to pop out for a while and be back before any time has passed at all. There is someone she needs to say goodbye to.

xXx

Given this is the last night the Doctor will ever spend with his wife, he is tempted to ignore the incoming message on his psychic paper, but he senses is it something of critical importance. The towers are in intermission, he and his wife have been chatting idly about what they shall do with themselves afterwards. She has a particular favourite restaurant on FlogifanicusTitasican XI, but he wonders if she won't have experienced the full glory of Darillium if he doesn't take her to eat the local cuisine. She is stunningly beautiful and sparkling with life in a way that sharply conflicts with the reality he knows will face her after this night. He's really not coping well with the knowledge that after tonight he will never see his wife again. His beautiful, perfect, vibrant, cleverer-than-he-is-but-he'll-never-admit-it wife. The idea of living without her again is beastly, and it is taking all his control to keep up the facade for the night. Given all this, he should condemn anyone contacting him on this night to whatever fate the universe has in store for them, but something within him senses an urgency, a pertinence to the message; so he apologises to River and pulls the psychic paper out of his pocket. The message reads only 'Meet me by the back entrance in five minutes'.

Even without identification or a usual term of endearment he knows who has sent him this message, and even though he so hates to disappoint the glorious creature sitting beside him, he has a feeling this slightly older iteration of herself needs him right now, and rather urgently at that.

Skidding around the corner, decked in full tails, he finds his wife, probably only days older than she is sitting around the corner waiting for him. He recognises the space suit instantly and his hearts clench in his chest.

"River." He breathes, crashing into her and clasping her face in one hand while he grabs her waist with the other. He rests his forehead against hers and kisses her in a way that makes her heart break. The breath she takes is deep but laboured, as if she can't quite convince her body that it needs to keep working for a little while longer.

"River what are you doing here? How did you get here?! Has it happened yet?" His questions come out in a jumbled rush, but somehow she understands each one.

"It hasn't. I just... I just wanted to say goodbye. I needed to see you and... I just... I needed a you who knew me. Is that selfish?" Her eyes are beginning to prickle with tears, but she resists the urge to break as she always does.

"No, no it's - River I..."

"God you look beautiful today." She interrupts him, stroking his clean-shaven cheek with the deepest affection he can imagine. He is rather breathtaking in his tails; tonight's bowtie is classic black silk, and she straightens it gently for him before running her fingertips over his lapels.

"River, stay with me. Don't go back, please. Please." He is pitiful with begging, and seeing him in such a state is causing her physical pain.

"I can't, my love."

"Yes you can! We'll work something out, time can be re-written! Stay!"

"I can't!" She shouts at him, pulling away fiercely. "If I stay here then you'll die the first day you met me! None of this - none of us will have ever happened! What's the point being alive without you? The entire universe will suffer without you in it and I can't have that on my head!"

"River - "

"-No! People will die without you to save them. Entire civilisations will fall." She takes a breath and lets the heat diffuse from their argument. "At the risk of sounding like a Bronte heroine, your life is more important than mine."

"You sound more like one of the Golden Girls." Grumbles the Doctor, and River snorts with laughter.

"I don't even want to know why you've been watching Golden Girls." She says, her lips tweaked with a smile despite the situation.

"I'll have you know some of the - the writing is very... clever. And insightful about the mindset of human eighty-somethings. It's - it's research!"

River laughs at him. And laughs some more. And then the reality of the situation seems to hit them both, and she reaches out to clutch his hand, almost crushing his bones beneath her fingers.

"If you won't stay with me then why did you come?" He asks her. His tone is gentle: a genuine query rather than an attempt at distressing her further.

"I've told you. I wanted to say goodbye to my husband."

"You know I was - am - right there with you."

"You don't know who I am. I just wanted... I didn't want to die without seeing you one last time."

He unclips the CommsUnit from her suit and pulls it over her head. "I actually need that." She remarks with a watery smile.

"You're a little difficult to kiss with a great mound of plastic around your shoulders, dear." Instantly his hands are caressing her neck and cheeks, his lips seeking hers with the most torrid mix of emotions known to any civilisation in the known universe. There is love mixed with pain, desire mixed with tenderness, desperation mixed with resignation, and somewhere in there a tiny glimmer of hope that somehow he can still redeem this situation somehow. When they break apart, she is crying fully, tears streaking down her face - a face which usually glows with mischief and life and is now a picture of acquiescent anguish. One of her hands clasps at his clothing, tightly but not in such a way that the River waiting for him to return to hear the towers sing will notice any dishevelment.

"River, you don't have to do this!" His words are an impassioned hiss, and she loves him a little more for ignoring the reality of the situation so steadfastly simply for the sake of keeping her alive.

"She must needs go that the devil drives." Retorts his wife enigmatically, and at any other time he would instantly attempt to outwit her. Now he simply wants to rail against both her resignation, and her using Shakespeare against him at a time such as this.

"Promise me," the blonde says, snapping him out of his thoughts and drawing a shaky breath. He regrets deeply that her hair is not falling about her shoulders as it usually would be, is not available for him to properly tangle his fingers in. "Promise me that you'll think of me sometimes?" Again she graces him with the watery smile, and he is crumbling as the weight of her pain washes over him. How can she think she means so little to him that he won't even bother to think of her?

She continues, fingers tracing the skin of his cheek again. "Promise me that you'll remember all the stupid things as much as you remember the times we saved the universe?"

"And the times you almost destroyed it? One in particular springs to mind..."

"You're doing exactly the same thing tonight. You've offered to sacrifice yourself to save me. How many times have you saved the universe- or even a single planet in the last four hundred years? None of that would happen." His eyes drop to the ground, and she knows him well enough to know concession when she sees it. "You see, sweetie? You're just as bad as I am."

"River, I can't let you do this!"

"You don't have a choice." His wife informs him, and he both knows that she is right, and that he will not win this fight with her no matter what trick he pulls. "And I want you to remember..." She says, regaining her composure to the best extent she can. "That no one - no one - will ever love you as much as I do. But you will always be loved."

"But by no one more than you." Whispers her Doctor, tears streaking from his own eyes now as he parrots the words his wife spoke on the day of their wedding - their first wedding.

"By no one more than me." He closes her hands within his and she nods. "I need to - "

"No!" He exclaims, refusing to release her as she tries to pull away from him, clearly intending to return to her fate. "No, River..." He settles his forehead against hers again, breathing the scent of her as if she is water and he has been lost in the desert. "You've said your bit now I think you owe me mine before you - "

" - What, die?" Her eyes lock on his, and she looks like a tense animal rather than the impossibly brave woman he has loved since he was eight-hundred-and-some years old.

"I was going to say 'run'."

Her "oh" comes out on a soft puff of air, and when she moves to tilt her face away from his, he catches her beneath her chin and directs her back to him.

"I love you, River Song. Melody Pond." He pecks her lips softly. "My bespoke psychopath. I have loved you more deeply than I thought I could after everything I have lost and left behind in my life." He kisses her deeply now, the taste of tears that have rolled down cheeks and onto lips becomes an unpleasant tang on their tongues, a reminder of the reality they face when all they should be aware of is each other. He wishes he could bury his hand in her curls, feel the beating of her heart through this infernal space suit. He wishes everything could be somehow different. Better. Anything but this.

"So don't you dare think - even for a moment - that you need to make me promise to remember you. I will spend every day wishing for you, River. And I promise you, I will find a way to fix this. Somehow." He pulls her head back from his, making sure she is looking in his eyes. "Do you trust me?"

"I absolutely trust you." She says, and it may be the thousand millionth time he's heard the words from her, but something about them always reassures him.

"Do you believe me?"

Unable to honestly say she thinks he'll somehow be able to rescue her she says "I absolutely trust you" once more, and he laughs a little, shaking his head and burying his face in her neck. She is warm and alive, and no matter how hard he tries, he cannot get the image of her dead and burnt out body out of his head, knowing it will be a reality for her in a few minutes time. This ending has been a fact of their relationship for him since the day he met her, and even though he wishes he had taken this knowledge - the promise of all this pain - and used it to keep her at arms' length, he has not. He has loved her anyway.

"I'll fix this, River, I promise you." He mumbles into the curve of her neck, as she trails her fingers through his neat new haircut - just as she did the night before for her, and just as she will later this evening for him. He shivers with something between anticipation and dread, touching his lips to her throat and straightening. He wishes he could make her believe that she won't end here, but he is no more capable of spoiling her than she is of spoiling him.

When she kisses him, he is not faced with indecision as he was the first time she kissed him. He caresses her, holds her body as close to his as he can, greedily absorbing every detail of this moment. He will count these kisses as their last, for even though he will spend tonight in a tangle of limbs with her slightly younger self, this is the real end. This is the oldest they will be together, and at this moment he wonders at the benefit of being able to save entire civilisations when he never seems to be able to save the people he loves most in a way that will keep them in his life.

Breaking away from him, she stoops to collect the CommsUnit and clip it back onto her shoulders, and when she turns back to him, she once again is a superhero, braver than he can even fathom. She curves her hand around his cheek, and while she has regained her composure spectacularly, this is the moment he chooses to break. Tears flow freely from his eyes and he stifles a sob. Smiling at him tenderly, she says "I know. I know you think you won't recover from all this, that this time is the time it's too much, but you'll go on. You'll have adventures and catastrophes and discover whole new worlds, and you'll be fine. And you won't even miss me, really, because I'll still be a story in your head. Your mad wife and all the trouble she gets you into. All the times she's desiccated ancient landmarks just to get your attention. You can pretend we're still running."

"River, I - "

"Hush, my love. You'll be fine, because as a certain baby-faced ancient god once said to a certain someone's mother, 'we're all stories in the end;'" she draws a shaky breath, her voice wavering but her tears staying under control as she says, "and you gave me the best."

While she resets her vortex manipulator with one hand, he is clasping the other tightly in both of his, remembering a time she shattered the bones within it simply to appease him.

When their eyes lock again he utters, "I love you, River," with such tense fervour that she's worried she may break again. His lips curling with mirth he says "One of the best things I've ever done was marry you."

River chortles, and quirks an eyebrow. "And which time would that be?"

"All forty-seven of them. Even the ones under duress." They share a laugh, while the vortex manipulator flashes, reminding her that, in more ways than one, she is running out of time.

"I love you too. But you already know that."

The Doctor nods and steals a final kiss, a kiss that tastes horribly like 'goodbye'.

Another pulse of light from the device attached to her CommsUnit, and she takes a step away from him, retreating to a comfortable distance.

"Tell Sexy goodbye from me."

"I will."

"You know, if it has to end, I'm glad it ends with you in handcuffs." She says with a wicked sparkle and a wry smile, before she is transported back to The Library.

This is the last time he sees her older self. These are the words he considers her last ones to him. Her smirking face is the last image he retains of his wife.

Back in The Library, River completes her task, strapping herself into her deadly contraption and watching as a version of her husband who is much, much too young begins to regain consciousness on the floor. Adroitly she lays the clues he needs to bring them to this point, she tells him of their final night, lest something happens in his stream that would prompt him to alter it. She wants it exactly as it was: a last night out with her husband at Darillium. Holding on to an image of the Doctor's much older self with a new haircut and a bunch of wilted Venutian flowers, River Song dies, and in doing so makes it possible for her younger self to live.

xXx

If the slightly younger River Song who is currently seated before the Singing Towers of Darillium has any idea of what is coming for her, she does not let on. Sipping champagne she wonders idly when her husband will be back. It seems to have been rather a long time, and he has been acting peculiarly, even for him. Suddenly she catches sight of lankly limbs, and feels a sense of quiet relief. Tonight has been perfect, and she couldn't quite bear the thought of trading her gown for something more conducive to battle and her champagne for an Alpha Meson. Bounding up to her he pulls her to her feet and into his arms, kissing her in a way that is definitely not suited to the crowd of oh-so-civilised society they are currently inhabiting. She enjoys it immensely, shooting a lurid wink at an elderly Neptunian couple over her right shoulder. While earlier in the night he had seemed burdened, even crying at one point during the performance, now he seems almost fiercely intent on enjoying the night as much as he can. He settles at her side, an arm draped behind her, and draws lazy circles on her far shoulder. Despite glares of horror from several other audience members, he peppers kisses across the shoulder closest to him, making her all but purr with contentment.

"Not that I'm complaining, Sweetie, but what's gotten into you?"

"Simple case of healthy adoration of my wife." He assures her, lips still against her skin.

"Alright." She concedes, shrugging the shoulder not being kissed and enjoying the moment. Suddenly he breaks away from her, sitting up and looking at her with penetrating intensity. She cocks her head and watches him patiently.

Fumbling in his inside pocket he mumbles. "I almost forgot. I have something for you."

Her eyes widen with surprise. "Your screwdriver?" Suddenly her eyes flash with mischief, and she asks "Is this a clue? Am I going to need this for tonight?"

Stopping himself before he asks exactly how she would intend to use a sonic screwdriver in the bedroom, he replies with "No and - no. What is - ? No. I just thought it might come in handy." Again her eyes sparkle, and he doesn't need to slip inside her mind to know that her thoughts are filthy, even though he can.

"Are you even partially capable of behaving, woman?" He demands laughingly, eyes devouring her as if she were an expensive dessert.

"Not with you in that suit." Purrs his wife. Her hand curves around his thigh and ducks up his leg inappropriately. He squirms visibly, and River is infinitely satisfied with his response.

"I'm serious though, you don't hand out sonic screwdrivers to just anyone."

The smile he offers her is rich with affection, and he traces a free curl hanging by her temple with the tips of his fingers. "You're not just anyone."

As he touches a kiss to her temple he beams the words "love you, wifey," with a kind of childlike enthusiasm that should have long ago been lost to a man of well over a thousand years.

River does not look away from the sight before her, her idle study of the universe's best heeled.

"Don't take this the wrong way, sweetie," she begins, a note of danger in her tone despite the lightness of her words. "But if you ever address me as 'wifey' again I will be forced to commit an act of violence. Okay?" The last is added sweetly, and punctuated with a kiss to the his cheek, her fingers brushing over it. The words "love you" are added on as an afterthought.

The Doctor pushes aside thoughts of her older self's fingers brushing against his cheek in exactly the same way only a few minutes earlier, instead focussing on the warmth of her body beside his. She is everything right with his world right now, and he intends to savour every moment with her. As the rest of the audience take their seats, and the towers prepare to resume their song, the Doctor mumbles decisively in River's ear. "Alright, I've made a decision. You absolutely must eat the local cuisine of Darillium, and after that I'm taking you to FlogifanicusTitasican XI for dessert."

Rolling her eyes as she turns towards him she remarks teasingly "All the time you spend getting me into this dress and now you're trying to feed me up until it doesn't fit anymore?"

"The only reason I spend so much time talking you into it is because it takes so little time to talk you out of it."

River laughs, and her laugh is bliss; it's calamine lotion on a bee sting and honey on a sore throat.

"Now who's misbehaving?" She mumbles suggestively into his ear, before resting her head on his shoulder and watching in awe as the towers begin to sing again. With one of her arms draped lazily over her husband and her fingers entwined with his, River Song and her Doctor watch the towers of Darillium sing, and she has never felt quite so alive.