There is nothing for him to look at but her body, hanging limp in the throne. Professor Song's coronation was interrupted by her strange and abrupt assassination.
It should be him in that chair.
It should be him.
Swallowing, he looks away from her. He shifts on the cold cement floor; the pipe he's handcuffed to is damp against his shoulder. Despite the chill of the cement floor, the room itself is hot from the computer mainframe. Pipes, damp, rust, wires: there's nothing to look at, nothing to keep him occupied.
Nothing but her.
And it's funny, it's always funny with almost dying, how your thoughts are ramped to fast out of control precision. You don't have time to really sit down and think, you just have to go, cut through all the questions and all the answers to the one that will keep you and everyone else alive. It's how he's always worked best: on the fly, ten seconds from death, nine, eight, the situation faceting out into possibilities, probabilities, factors. So while he'd had time to look at River, to consider her into the equation of here and now, in the future to himself personally, he hadn't truly been able to sit down and think about her, simply River Song, till now, underneath the hum of the computer and the damp against his shoulder.
Professor River Song: the archaeologist with all the secrets, who might be lying but who knew his name, who called him sweetie and flirted shamelessly with everyone but who had eyes for only him.
He studies her in death the way he hadn't been able to when she was alive. The curves of her face, the slender line of her neck as it disappears into the white bulk of the spacesuit, the aggrieved curl of her hair pulled back into its high ponytail. The single tear, caught out to dry on the stagnancy of her cheek.
He notices that she'd had the time to place the two screwdrivers side by side on top of that infernal diary, and Jack's old squareness gun beside it. She'd had the time to consider things, to drag his body over to the pipes and handcuff him to them.
A mind particular in its habits—she'd set her affairs in order before she'd hooked herself up to that chair.
She'd had the time to run, to fly far away and never come back and let him die.
Love: such a funny, flightless bird.