a/n: Unedited self-indulgence, here we are!
Disclaimer: Ha, ha, no.
Title: virtue is only virtue
Word Count: 706
Summary: But he's no longer the white-haired Scotsman waiting by her door with a mournful look in his old eyes. He's younger, face sharper, looking at her in a way that made her blood run cold. [Fix-it fic]
"Hello, sweetie." River's eyes readjusted in the dim light. Shadows pooled on either side of the large room, turning the figure into a silhouette. She recognized him by his posture alone. The way he set his shoulders and hand flexed by his side for his Sonic.
That split-second she wondered if he had followed her from the Singing Towers to join her on another adventure.
But he's no longer the white-haired Scotsman waiting by her door with a mournful look in his old eyes. He's younger, face sharper, looking at her in a way that made her blood run cold. This was a stranger standing before her. This wasn't the smiling man with the ridiculous bow-tie or the spiky-haired man with the arrogant laugh. This face was new and old and terrifyingly still by her presence.
River's heart leaped. Doctor?
"Get out," he demanded.
…
Once upon a time, there was a little girl caught in the current of space and time, unable to find her way back home.
…
She held him by the shoulders and brought herself closer to whisper the truth in his ear. It was a name so old she swore she felt the stars respond somewhere off in the distance.
"Are we good?" she asked, watching his expression change as the tenuous connection between them pulled tighter at her heart. What was that he had told her at Darillium again? That single night lasted for over twenty years, but everything about their relationship was now narrowed down to this single moment in time. "Doctor, are we good?"
He stared at her. He looked as though he were a man about to fall to his knees.
This was his start. This was her end if the stories were anything to go by.
…
With regenerative energy burning away at her human blood, a woman took her in and gave her a single task.
…
"Time can be rewritten," he begged. All of his future selves echoed in his words. Time can be rewritten.
There was a man binding them together with the frayed ends of his bow-tie, making promises that could only last so long. She was stepping out of a lake, a fixed point trapping her in a nightmare, and he was dead by her hand. You are forgiven, he had told her. Time had died. She had lived.
But enough of that now.
"Not those times. Not one line," River warned him. She thought of her Doctor in that long night, the way the stars reflected off her shimmering dress, him in his suit with his secrets. Assuming tonight was all they had left—assuming they could ever meet again and move forward—
But her diary was almost full. He had given her his Sonic. With no more chances for regeneration, she knew this was her end. He would see her again and they'll be back as strangers in unfamiliar lands, chasing each other across time and space. No witness, no hope, no reward, this unending cycle was her penance.
River stood straight and the sensors itched at her scalp. She spared him one last look as he pleaded for her to change things. My doctor. And she wondered if there was any virtue left in the world where one had abandoned another.
…
But he lived and they kept on running until time caught up with her.
…
And there was a blinding flash of light.
…
It was still a happy ending if they were ever allowed such things.
…
There was no darkness in her afterlife. There were hazy memories of a meadow, a story being told as night entered a child's room. There was something real beyond the data and the glow of the distant Moon outside the window, but River was idyllic and unchanging.
Until a woman came as the moonlight dimmed. Her white coat swirled around her long legs; rainbow suspenders paired with a black shirt; her Yorkshire accent loud as she greeted River at the cottage's door. She was new and old and terrifyingly bright in the fading moonlight.
"I told you, sweetie." She pulled her Sonic out of her pocket and offered her free hand to River. "Time can be rewritten."
And River threw herself into her wife's open arms.