'Impermanence'
Featuring the Doctor and River
She sat with him, and he liked it when she did. She folded her fingers into his, and leant her head against his shoulder, and together they watched the fire. They watched it spit and crackle, twist and dance in the ocean breeze, casting flickering shadows over the dunes, over them, over the TARDIS.
The night sky above was so full of stars, and it was so clear she thought she could count them. And he watch her watch them, watch the stars sparkling reflected in her wide brown eyes, and he'd have to fight the urge to stroke her cheek and to kiss her.
They lived amongst those stars, and she spent her days in a prison of concrete and cold; to escape out here, to escape to a darkness deep enough for stars to burn so bright and so beautifully that they could almost be plucked from the heavens and brought down to earth, was a gift.
An exquisite light, he'd called them; he'd do that.
Squeezing out the best words, beautiful brilliant words, all the time. He'd leave her watching in awe as he spun stories as luminescent and as lofty as the stars that inspired them, before taking her hand in his and dragging her out to witness these stories first hand. She'd match him, and he'd be spellbound by a tale of
They'd leave their small campsite, and walk to the water's edge, hand in hand; they'd watch the white breakers amidst the rolling darkness of the ocean. She'd shiver, and he'd fold his arm over her shoulders, pull her in close. He'd wrap her up into his arms so easily, she'd fit beneath his chin so perfectly, that he'd be sure that he'd never let her go.
She'd remind him, in her way, that nothing lasts forever.
"Annika," he called it, impermanence; and then she'd pick up a handful of sand, and he'd watch it pour through her fingers, the way her words, her beautiful brilliant words, tumbled from her lips. She'd make everything clear, everything crystal, whenever he muddied the waters. "Nothing lasts forever," he'd say, and she'd look up at the stars. "Sooner or later, even stars stop burning."
She'd known that, of course; he was a literal mind, a scientific one. She was a literary one, a historical one, a mind broad and deep; she'd see the meaning in anything, the beauty in the way the wind whistled in from the ocean, the ancient stories only a cracked piece of pottery could conjure up.
They'd go back to camp, back to their fire, and she'd rest in his arms, still folded into him, he still wrapped around her. The nominative and the objective, she and him. As the stars shifted as the world turned one way and they turned the other, the fire would burn down, and her eyes would drift closed.
Then he'd say, "I love you."
She'd touch his hand, stroke his warm skin. Her eyes, still filled with stars, danced in the light of the slowly dying embers. "I love you too."
But whenever he said it, she always heard his mantra; nothing lasts forever. Even stars stop burning.