She invades his dreams.
She waltzes in and out his mind, no matter the day, no matter the hour. He doesn't ever sleep, not really, and there's always been a reason and now he knows it's her. She dances in his daydreams, polluting his precision, his power.
The two of them are so alike he finds it hard not to think of her all the time. The comments he makes, the thoughts he processes; only she would understand them like he does. No belligerent explanations to unwilling listeners who want star-filled oceans and planets with no trees and diamond-studded doorways. He tries to convince himself that that's fine but he's far too old to truly believe it anymore. He's seen so many suns and so many moons that sometimes he wants someone else to share and shoulder the responsibility before it overwhelms him altogether.
He holds so many people's hands that sometimes, on quiet Sunday afternoons and early mornings on Tuesday's, he wishes she would come and hold his. The feeling of her hands in between his wizened fingers and the tickle of her hair under his chin are two of the things he seems to miss most (but really, he misses a lot more than that.) He misses the intensity in her eyes and her unrelenting belief in all that he does. He misses the feisty yet fraught passages of language and he'd be lying if he didn't miss the flirting.
And not just the flirting, it's everything that goes with it. The little smiles she thinks he doesn't see when he impresses her with yet another one of his little surprises. The pre-emptive pout that creeps onto her lips when she doesn't get her own way and the way she tries so hard to fake her nonchalance. The way her presence makes him comfortable, how every time she returns it feels like she's never really left. How every time she returns, it's him she's returning to. How it's his lips that she aches for and his hands she reaches for whenever she sees him. How each time she raises her mouth to his, he still gets a tingle in his stomach and how he always waits for her to deepen the kiss, to show him she still loves him, as if awaiting her permission. He might be a mad man but he's a gentleman through and through.
But mostly he misses the company. When he's with River, he never feels truly alone. Simply knowing she's near is comforting because in a weird and warped way, she's the only thing he's ever truly got right (though he hopes his single-hearted counterpart is doing right by Rose. But it's Rose, he was going to make sure he did right by her in one universe or another. He had to.) River asks him often, in his quieter moments, where it is he travels to inside that wise, old mind of his. And he tells her it's to Rose, to the girl he gave himself to but is still the girl that got away. She's not jealous, she's intrigued and she wills him to find a loophole, just once, just to put his mind at rest and go back and see her, to know for once that she's okay. But he never does and she doesn't know if it's because it's too painful to go back to or too precious to share.
And really, he doesn't complain, he misses Rose but River is in every way his equal and really, that matters more. He can share things with her that he daren't do with anyone else and with everything he sees – the good and the evil, sometimes all you need is someone to share it all with. Someone who will bury your head in their shoulder, who won't ask if you're okay because they already know you're not.
But for now, he will have to wait. He has a leggy red-head and her husband to look after first and something keeps telling him that the three of them don't have too much longer together.
But he and River? They'll have forever.