A/N: Because I needed to get it out of my head. 13th Doctor and River Song. Spoilers for 'The Time of Angels'/'Flesh and Stone'. Watch me get majorly Jossed in a few years' time.

Summary: He meets her for the last time. She meets him for the first. A random landing causes a chance meeting between the Doctor and River Song. Spoilers for 5x05/'Flesh and Stone', AU Thirteenth Doctor. One shot.

He lands the TARDIS with its usual whirring sound -- he's flow thirteen incarcerations with the sound and, no matter how often he's reminded that he's got the brakes on, he can't fly without that sound.

The planet they're on, the year they're visiting, is nothing out of the ordinary. A random planet in the fifty-first century, a place to relax after their most recent adventure. He should have known, after his centuries of life, that trouble always follows him – especially when he saw her.

River Song.

She's the youngest he's ever seen her, and when he approaches her she has no idea who he is. Either he's got a future (past) adventure with her involving memory erasure, or this is her first meeting.

Working on the assumption that this is her first meeting, he tries to explain who he is, only to get a derisive laugh out of her. Even introducing his companion, someone with clothes clearly from the twenty-first century, she just takes him for a Time Agent.

Then chaos occurs.

A random alien encounter -- the Doctor knows who they are but has no time to explain, he and his companion delving in to the fray. River, after a second of hesitation, joins them.

He knows he has to be careful -- twelve regenerations, thirteen faces, he knows that if he gets fatally wounded he won't regenerate -- but he doesn't act like it. He throws himself in to the action like he's on his first face, nothing to lose and a seemingly endless supply of regenerations if he fails.

But lose he does.

"Octavian said you killed a man."

"Yes, I did."

"A good man."

"A very good man. The best man I've ever known.

"Who?"

"It's a long story, Doctor. Can't be told. Has to be lived. No sneak previews."

He stumbles, he fails, he dies. In a moment of realization he sees that he never gave River any information on his past faces -- the screwdriver he'd given on his previous face, on her last meeting before the Library. More mysteries are brought up -- this is the only meeting in which she didn't know him, he never got to properly explain; how did she know?

And then, everything goes black.

x x x

It was a good few months before his companion returned to the fifty-first century for more than a couple of days. Ending up there allowed them to sign on as a Time Agent, time travel without need of the TARDIS which sat, alone, in a storage facility.

The Doctor's companion and River Song got to know each other moderately well in those few months, but no definite relationship -- it was hard when one of you was in prison and the other could only visit a couple of times a month at the most.

But it was on their way to check on the TARDIS that really surprised them -- standing beside it, holding a key hanging from a thread, was the Doctor.

"Well, never known any Gallifreyan to have a fourteenth face."