Holy goodness! This fic was a long time coming. Well, months in fact. Originally this was me dealing with Manhattan and Snowmen, and filling in my headcanon blanks, as I couldn't imagine how River could have allowed her husband to go off retiring on his cloud, of all things, without delivering a good kick to his sorry Time Lord arse. Then time went by with the fic fully written on my notebook and me too busy or lazy to type, edit and post it—the finale happened, and my headcanon was shoved upside down. XD It's taken me that long to properly tackle this fic and give it a good rewrite and a new direction. Got done eventually.
I have the lovely PhoenixDragonDreamer to thank for her relentless and squeeful support! Thanks for always being so supportive, honey =)
To help figure out the setting: the Doctor is between Manhattan and Snowmen, after Darillium. River has done Manhattan, but not Darillium yet when she seeks him out. The rest should be self-explanatory.
Enjoy!
She scoffed in disbelief, peering incredulously up at the delicate flight of stairs as it spiralled towards the clouds, out of sight.
You are kidding. But this was very real. She was standing halfway into the sky, having just climbed off of a white ladder, and her informants had not been lying: she knew where this ludicrously pretty path was taking her—all the way to the ivory tower. Slowly, River picked up her skirts and started up again.
She reached a place of puffy clouds and stillness, a clear night, in which her breathing fogged in front of her face and then faded without leaving a trace. There stood the lonely TARDIS, scratched and silent, a dismal blue. The usual electricity in her veins was lacking; instead she felt a mix of anger, and a chilling sense of helplessness. Shaking herself, she strode forward and knocked twice, imperiously. She could have just walked in. She wouldn't. She wanted him to open that door, however long it might take.
She had little to wait after all. Out peered her husband, all pale face and rumpled hair, forehead creased at the unwelcome intrusion. His ringed eyes widened at the sight of her, and his lips parted in a quiet little O. River chewed on the inside of her cheek and remained unspeaking, waiting for his reaction. The Doctor schooled his features; his mouth tightened into a taut line, and he breathed deeply, no doubt bracing himself for the encounter. He hovered for a few more seconds, then, defeated, took a step back and flung his arm around as though to invite her in—however reluctantly.
River walked past him. She had seen this interior before, on a silly outing ended up by accident to the planet of the Rain Gods, and the recollection made her a little more hopeful; indeed, she even had an interesting memory on that very console… but never before had she realized how cold and clinical the new colours might seem, how very wide the room had become, compared to the cluttered and colourful mess it had been back then, with the Ponds. She frowned as her gaze scanned her surroundings. Her husband slumped onto a seat, feigning detachment; still she could see his eyes flickering to her, every so often.
"How did you find me?" he eventually asked, straightening a bit to peer at her, when he could not bear it anymore.
"I had spoilers, I suppose," she said evenly. "I knew whom you would go to, after Manhattan. The dark days… Madame Vastra mentioned it, long ago. She gave no details, of course, but it was not difficult to put the pieces together, once… once the moment had come. Neither was she too keen, when I came to her, on disclosing the information of where exactly I might find the TARDIS… She felt that it was not her place, and yet she would have done the same for Jenny. She helped me reach you."
"Manhattan." He gaped at her, having apparently only retained the one word, out of everything she had said. "You mean you just… you just lived that? Our last encounter?"
She nodded. "Yes. I know I left the TARDIS, then, but I had a wrong feeling… I did tell you not to be alone, but I assumed you wouldn't listen, and after a while I just had to check on you. I knew these would be trying times, of course, but still I wasn't quite expecting what I came to hear from Madame Vastra." Angry disbelief coloured her voice despite herself. "Retirement? Really?"
"We're almost—linear," he murmured, visibly deaf to her words. "Almost. Such close meetings." His mouth tightened, and something flashed across his face that she couldn't quite unravel. For a second, he squeezed his eyes shut as though he could not or wished not to see her, as though she stood in front of him as a mere ghost, as he pondered their scattered mess of a relationship.
Not listening. She couldn't control the fury that shot through her, never mind the pain she felt at his own suffering, the lines of loss upon his face. "Don't duck the issue," she snapped.
His eyes flashed at her. "I'm not ducking it," he said in a low voice. "We are right on the issue."
"The issue is your staying up here, locked away from the world," she reminded, jaw tight.
"That is none of your business, River."
"You think?" She laughed a sharp, mirthless shard of a sound. "I'm your wife."
He looked away. "What are you doing here?"
She was not quite sure what to answer. The obvious reply was that she'd meant to snap him out of this; the most truthful, that she hadn't been quite sure what would come out of this visit, but could not for a second imagine staying away. He wouldn't like either, she suspected, nor even take her seriously. She had left him, the last time. Feeling like a walking reminder of his losses—thinking he'd be better off without her. She had gotten a sense that he wanted her gone—that there was something on his mind, a direction he was headed to, and she ought to let him face that on his own. Like on Demon's Run, she was to stand aside as he rose and fell. Couldn't be with him, until the very end.
Evidently he hadn't fared better on his own. She should have known. He drifted now, without even that faint purpose, without the will to live. The look of him chilled her.
"I'm your wife," she repeated eventually. He had a small, convulsive move as though to shrug her off.
"And this is utterly wrong," she carried on, her voice louder now, more confident as she dismissed her uncertainty and found the concern that had led her here, all over again, to lend her some strength. "Honestly… I don't know what you're thinking. I don't even know if you're thinking anymore."
"I am, thank you very much," he snapped, "and I've decided this. Thank you for your opinion, but you cannot change anything."
"Doctor." She had to pause, take a deep breath to calm and collect herself. Control was necessary if she was to handle him, to get through to him at all, yelling would only trigger his own petulant aggressivity and push him away all the further… Instinctively, her hands went to lean against the controls, as she was standing close to the console. They settled and found their place, less familiar, natural still. What do you think? she wondered fleetingly, and considered pulling a few levers and getting them away, whether he liked it or not. But it wouldn't do any good—and when she gazed upwards in despair, dim lights blinked dismally back at her. She was alone in this, alone to talk him out of his downward spiral.
"Yes?" he eventually said, as she gave no indication that she was ever going to put a sentence after his name.
She glanced up just in time to catch him staring at her. There was some desperation deep below the surface, a pool of something dark in his clear eyes, lurking underneath. He shot his head away, so fast he might have hurt his neck, and she bit her lips hard, hard enough to draw blood. There was something, something there—something more than mere emptiness. But at least he was interested in what she had to say, try as he might to conceal it.
"It's wrong," she said, voice faltering slightly, hopelessly. "Don't you see? This isn't you."
"Oh, but it is," he stubbornly retorted. "It's my decision."
"You can't decide to get rid of who you are! You can't decide to let go of what keeps you alive!" She was almost shouting, and once more found it ever so hard to steel herself. "Doctor. You need traveling. You always have."
"Well, perhaps it's time for a change," he bit back without facing her.
"Go on, then. Tell me what you've got left to live for," she snapped, exasperated.
He reeled, and the silence rang like a stab.
River shook, regretting the words as soon as they'd flown out of her mouth—her furious, rash, mercilessly accurate words. She tried to grasp his hands, but he danced out of her reach, all the way across the console. There was ice in her head, in her gut, trapping her frantic heart. Helplessness tasted like poison. "My love," she whispered, pleading.
"Please, don't," he said under his breath. "Please. Get out." He didn't sound like he could manage more than a whisper, dying lifeless upon his lips. She trembled as though he'd slapped her.
"Doctor. No."
"You're not helping anything. Your being there, it just—" He shuddered. "It'll just hurt more in the end. River, you're making it worse."
"Do you think it's not hurting me?"
"You just don't know what you're talking about." His hands clung to the edge of the console. "River, I want you to go. I'm asking you to go. Please."
"But I can't leave you."
He shook his head frantically, squeezing his eyes shut. And she stepped around the console, touched his cheek, his weary eyelids with her fingertips. She barely brushed his pale skin, a shadow of tenderness, hovering. He opened his eyes and looked at her helplessly.
"Please," he mouthed, but she was no longer sure what he meant, and she moved to kiss him anyway. Her hands curled around his collar, and his mouth opened under hers, warm and soft and desperate for too many things at once. She tried to give him a small comfort, but they were all jagged edges, one and the other, and they moved a bit messily as though wrestling with their passion. His teeth caught her lower lip. Closing her eyes tightly, she lost herself in the blur, forgetting the world around them.
When she had to catch her breath, he pushed her away, his hands remaining wrapped around the tops of her arms—squeezing quite too hard, unable to let go, apparently. Then his fingers loosened. They fell off of her and he took a stumbling step backwards.
"Doctor," she said softly, "my love."
"You don't—"
"Let me help you," she cut him off. "Let me—"
"How are you planning to do that?" he interrupted, fiercely. "You…" He paused, shook his head. "It's too late. It was always going to be too late."
She didn't respond at once. River looked around, throat tight. "Don't travel alone, I told you," she uttered. "I didn't think you would choose not to travel at all. It was never even an option."
"I asked you to travel with me, didn't I?" he whispered.
She shut her eyes briefly. "You know we don't work like that. We never have, you and me. Our timelines are what they are. Our lives… We always knew what we were getting into."
"Indeed." He said the word curtly, like it were a blade or a shard of glass—meant to bite into her or himself, she knew not and cared not to find out.
She did not add that she had also needed her space, after everything, to bury her own grief deep and out of sight. Perhaps he could tell, and blamed her for that, too—refusing to share, even when he hardly would either. Anyhow, he paced away, shoulders taut and tense.
"Don't you just tell me not to travel alone, River," he spoke again eventually, voice bleak. "Don't you think that I can just pick someone up and forget about—everything." He seemed to struggle for words again, she had never known them to fail him so badly before. His speech was cluttered and shivering with pain, errant, scarcely managing coherence. He had lost so much, so many in the past. He acted as though he could not face her, or reality, for reasons she could not comprehend.
"I never said that," she remembered to respond.
"The Ponds." He exhaled sharply, gaze turned upwards, searching for something or other in the TARDIS lights as though they were stars. "Mad Ponds. All along with this face, I've never had anyone but them. They were what kept me anchored."
"It always is this way," she said softly.
A violent, wrathful jerk of his hand came to dismiss her words. "I don't know how to do it anymore," he near-choked. "Carrying on, always carrying on. Seeing people, and finding in them what could drive me forward. I don't see their faces anymore. They're like a blur, parts of a big world that never seems to show mercy. And I am supposed to love and save that world, to fight for it and give it all my strength. Well, see what strength I have left. I'll keep it. I'm too tired, and much, much too old. It feels like the weight is pulling me down, too many years, and too many people and none of them left in the end. None. Not ever. I always know, and I always go for it anyway."
His voice died in a ragged murmur, and she knew there was nothing to say in the face of that truth, multi-faceted and never-changing. Always the same loss, with name after name after name, echoing. Time given, slices of life, merely slices and too light to hold and keep him. She was too light, herself, bounced through time and space and danced in and out of his reach, kept him warm for a few hours at a time, held him cradled in her core. She would have to leave him, eventually and always.
"I understand," she managed, desperate for stronger, more soothing words. "My love, I do. But you have to carry on—"
Once more, he stepped away as she was reaching for him. "You're counting so much on that," he bit. "That they'll be happy, and that I'll carry on. That whatever time we have is worth the end. After all, I've known loss before, strong enough to leave me crushed. But the more I let people in… The more it hurts, River. It burns. I can't breathe sometimes, at night—" He forced himself to a stop, it seemed, reeling. "No more," he breathed. "No more. I can't do this again, I can't just go ahead and be the silly old Doctor, the madman in a box. Those days are over. I just… I need to keep to myself, to keep—to keep together."
He paused for air then, and looked at her properly. She couldn't tell what he might read on her face; she only felt very cold, a chill spreading out from her insides. His mouth trembled as he seemed to drink her in, and for a moment, she thought she'd reached him somehow, at last—that he was reacting to her, in his desperation, seeing her, that she could catch him… But he whirled away, hands moving messily about, the arch of his shoulders painfully tense. Those taut muscles would not welcome her touch, she instinctively thought—would scarcely feel it. He had not allowed himself to be moved by her hands or voice, for all of his overflowing pain and apparently violent reactions. He was closed to her somehow.
She ached. She longed to run, and even more yet to seize him, shake him, kiss him. She would bite his lips and grasp the back of his neck and pull and push him around until something flared within him that was more than hollowness, this negative energy whose outpour left her terrified. Until his rage found some focus smaller than the universe, until he could just cry, weep himself to exhaustion and find some rest into her arms, if temporary.
Temporary. Fleeting. Momentary. She was that, too, she realized with a vicious pang. For herself, she had come to terms with it long ago, poured into him her eternity, her unlived faces and never known a regret. For him, she cringed before reality and wished herself eternal. She had never let herself stay, though, never allowed him to depend on her, or vice versa. She had always been lucid, harshly so if required, made her bed long ago and he was left to wander sleepless. Nothing she could do.
He would lose her; she was already losing him—like she had lost her parents, and quite possibly herself along the way. Just letting go, when holding on became the wrong and the hurtful thing to do. On some days, it felt like she had lost the ability to feel anything but overwhelming numbness, emptiness—lost the right to cry. How was she to mourn the parents who would have a life together, another child? The mother she'd encouraged to go? The husband who would grow to love her someday, as he stumbled around her and stared hard, oblivious, untrusting? Just holding herself together had become her one priority, smiling on, marching on like it could keep them protected. It couldn't, neither him, nor herself. Pain was unavoidable. Love always did come laced with it.
She ought to let go—again. She ought to leave him, when the sight of her was obviously torture. His back was still turned, evading all the emotions and memories her face would trigger. Old, they would be lovelorn even together. Back to front was not the end of it.
She wondered where this would leave them, by the end. Perhaps, the next day, she would find him on her doorstep, grinning and healed, on the surface at least. Perhaps he would kiss her like she was the only thing in the universe.
She never was, and thank God for that. At least she knew he would have someone, after this. No such grief would be his undoing.
So much loss he had endured, but always, he would find someone new to slip into his hearts.
She made herself take a step back, then another, and another still. A shudder ran like a spasm across his shoulders, shook and rocked him.
"Leaving now, are you?" he called hoarsely.
"I think that's for the best," she uttered, amazed at the steadiness of her own voice.
He was quiet. She focused on her own movements, her own breaths, slipping faintly in and out of her lungs. She turned away and her hand was at the door already, brushing the wood, when footsteps sounded abruptly and she was whirled and pinned against the surface, gasping. Her hair whipped her face, and she could smell his scent again—so very, very close. She stared into his eyes, and they stared back, painfully wide, his mouth set and trembling.
"River," he breathed, and then he was kissing her, and she was drowning into him.
She clung. They trembled, clumsy and desperate, teeth clashing before they leaned away. It was but a moment. Already the shadow was back upon his face, his eyes only flashing over her, falling away. She didn't feel quite real in his arms, feeble and hovering.
The door was solid against her back, keeping her standing when he let go. She listened hard for the TARDIS' very low hum, always floating at the very edge of her consciousness. It sang a soft, mournful song.
Damaged goods, they were—a meeting out of line. Almost in sync, as he had commented, and too much so. Perhaps they were never meant to be.
He pulled Amy's glasses from his pocket and absently flicked them on, while stepping away. For a second she wanted to scream.
Amy would have given him a good tongue-lashing, had she seen him this way. The two of them might have gotten a piece of her mind.
But Amy had known about carefully locked feelings, and the terror of letting go, losing control, opening the doors to the deep and the dark and the long-lost and never-had. In the end, they all danced the same dance.
It didn't end with an embrace.
River opened the door soundlessly, and stumbled out onto the cloud. It did not feel like tangible enough a ground to let herself sink. So she walked away, step after rigid step.