A/N: This piece was inspired by the artwork entitled Among the Stars, by Saimain over at devart and the Song Paradise by Coldplay. It's set during Forest of the Dead, mostly during the scene when River and 10 have their little spat, and he's staring at her after she tells him his name.
It's VERY obviously 11/River, with River/10 of course. Do enjoy!
He doesn't mean to be looking through the doors in her mind, but when he sees it, he can't stop. There's a young man, so impossibly old for one so young. That feeling is familiar and he knows, intrinsically that what he is seeing is dangerous. She looks at him with such awe and love and devotion that he can hardly bare to watch any longer. What really kills him is when he sees the man return her looks with as much longing as he himself now feels, with as much devotion as he could see in her face.
The things he's seeing now are things that she would protect if she could, be he knows that she isn't thinking about that at all. He can sense that she has settled into a sense of finality that she hadn't had before. A sense of fate. He watches the two in the uttermost intimacy, fingers curling in each other's hair, legs wrapping around waists, running up and down thighs, nips and bites , breathy sighs escaping, and moans breaching the delicate gate of lips, arms clutching at shoulders and the skin of backs, his head laid to her breast, hers thrown back in ecstasy, the soft slide of silken sheets against hot, flush skin, pulses in a beating quartet, though this fact is lost in the collage of the memories of a thousand and one nights of utter ecstasy, one million sighs for each star visited together, a trillion small climaxes of pure and unadultered bliss.
He thinks they must have lived in paradise, but he can see the see the desperation in their ministrations. They live in hell, not a heaven of anyone's making.
He sees the little things, the frustrations and the quirks, and every single motion that she etched into her brain in an effort to keep him with her for the rest of all eternity, despite the foreknowledge that he'd be gone one day. Lost to her forever.
Today was that day.
He saw one last time, the love and devotion in her eyes, tears in the corners.
No matter what trials they came upon, they braved the storm for one another.
He can see the devotion in the eyes of the impossibly old young man as well.
Behind her visage, he can see stardust floating eternally through the heavens, golden like the TARDIS.
She is burning and ancient and forever.
She is like him.
Later, when he stands before the TARDIS, he recalls her words. "I've seen whole armies turn and run away and he'd just swagger off to his TARDIS and open the doors with a snap of his fingers,"
He holds his hand out in front of him, fingers poised, trembling with trepidation at the implications should he snap his fingers and the door open.
His fingers burst with the pressure of friction and the door swings open at his command.
He has a lot to live up to.
He knows that now.
He enters the TARDIS, heart heavier, but his soul empowered. He'd be that hazy man without a face someday.
But today was not that day.
He has time.