AN: I don't claim that this would work, I just want it to. Sorry for any inaccuracies. A million thanks to Becs for the beta. Xx
Spoilers: Um... an implied knowledge of everything Doctor/River related to the end of season 6, I'd say.
Disclaimer: I don't own, but if Moffat wants to talk about buying this storyline, I will be willing to negotiate. {Or maybe even donate :p }
Alive
by
Tricki
The Doctor is a time traveller.
This is one of two facts he spirals back to and between. The other is that he can't abide never seeing his wife again. It's simply not something he can willingly do, something he cannot comprehend. Surely any living being would, given access to a time machine, go forward in time and speak to their dead{ish} spouse when she begins to forget him in the present day? Alright, that's probably not a scenario he can expect many people to relate to, but it's his entire reality; it's a fact that beats soundly on his cerebral cortex at all moments:
His wife is forgetting him. One day she will cease to know him.
Now, upon seeing little flashes of incomprehension in her eyes with more regularity, he can finally appreciate how painful this was for her, can understand her desire to chronicle every single moment of their time as if to prove it happened when he no longer remembered it. It began with his request – his instruction – that she keep a diary, a record of their time, but became something much more personal and detailed. It became their story, in all its dizzying heights and universe destroying lows.
She was better behaved with the rules of the timeline than he is currently being; probably because he imposed them at some point, and she is nothing if not loyal, but he has grown to need his wife, and he can't let her go.
One day he sets off in his TARDIS for a time and place he should not visit: The Library in the fifty-second century.
He can't quite think how to quantify the place when he lands in the main library building – is it where he found or lost the woman he loves? It was the first place he laid eyes on her and also the last, in a technical, linear, wibbly-wobbly sense. She had terrified him that day, mainly, he now reflects with a smile, because he knew she would be important to him. Her knowing his name had been a landmine in a supposedly clear field, and all at once he had known he would love her. That was the only reason he could imagine ever revealing his name to someone, and that impending love had been one of the most terrifying battles he had ever had to face.
Now he stands before a computer, tinkering with its wiring and trying to decide how best to approach this. Does he try to download her, make her real again? Does he try to somehow enter the computer world? Does he try to project her from it? He doesn't know. He knocks out entering the computer; he's not sure if she knows it's real or not - and isn't he, even if he's not admitted it to himself yet, angling to bring her back for good? That's impossibly selfish of him, but he wants her back; real River, River who knows him as perfectly as he knows her; River who loves him as much as he loves her. He needs to discuss it with her – after all, he doesn't want to bring her back if she doesn't want to come back, and maybe, just maybe, he's hoping she'll remind him of the time-stream.
...And tell him that it doesn't matter.
He thinks bringing a projected form of her out is probably the most sensible way of proceeding, but he also knows he won't be able to touch her. He needs to touch her. Regardless of all his earlier logicy-wodgicing, he needs to go inside.
After rigging up an impressive restoration programme with a back up module on the TARDIS in the not unlikely case that the computer malfunctions {as computers are wont to do}, he is ready to become a Downloaded Digital Doctor.
"Wish me luck, Old Girl." He beseeches his TARDIS quietly, and punches the 'Initiate Sequence' button.
.x.
When the Doctor materialises in her hallway, River Song is not surprised. "Is it that time of day already, my love?" She queries with the merest hint of a smile on her lips.
"River..." He breathes the word rather than says it: it surfs out of his mouth on a breath he doesn't know he's holding. She's clothed in a white silk dress that floats about her body as she rises from her place on the stairs. She leaves a very significant blue book in her wake.
"Present and correct." She answers, the smile on her lips growing all the while. She's a much older River Song than the one he deposited in a Stormcage last week, and he is glad of this fact.
He repeats her name in wonderment.
"Yes, I think we've established that. Me: River, you: Doctor. This isn't how this usually goes, Sweetie." She adds the last when she finally reaches him after walking the seemingly endless hallway.
He ignores her sarcasm, takes one of her hands in both of his, and presses it to his cheek. "River" falls from his lips once more. It seems to be all he can say. He didn't realise how much he missed having her know him.
He presses his lips frantically to her fingers, palm, wrist, and forearm before crushing her to his chest and burying his face in her curls.
"Doctor?" Her query is muffled by his body. It's not that she objects to him holding her; it's just not the way her computer-generated Doctor usually behaves.
"Oh god, River."
"I'm not trying to be pushy, Sweetie, but usually by this stage you're shirtless, not crying in my hair." His wife observes mildly.
"I am absolutely not crying - and what do you mean usually?" He pulls back from her then and studies her face. She refrains from pointing out that she's said 'usually' at least twice already.
"Have I been here before?"
"You come here every day..." She replies bemusedly, trying to work out why her fantasy Doctor is malfunctioning so. She doesn't ask for angst; they had enough of that in their real life.
"Then why did I have to completely re-programme the system? Why doesn't the TARDIS know the backup procedure? River what do you mean?" He demands of her, talking faster than he can think.
Suddenly she understands. "Oh my god. Are you real? Are you really here? What are you doing here?" She almost yells at him, first flinging herself into his arms and then seriously considering slapping him.
"I came to see you. What do you mean am I real?"
"We're in a giant computer which simulates ideal reality. Do you really think my ideal reality doesn't involve you?"
He has no response other than to kiss her soundly on the mouth.
"You haven't told me what you're doing here." She manages once their lips have separated.
"I came to see my wife. No law against that, is there?" He retorts flippantly.
"No law, just an implied rule." Her comment is somehow pointedly subtle.
"Say something River-ish." Is his sudden instruction, deftly changing the topic.
"I don't know where we are. What if I spoil you?"
"Tell me how we meet."
"Here. At the Library." She frowns.
"For you."
"Spoilers." She winks, and that's all it takes. He scoops her up in his arms and twirls her.
"River!" He grins. "River, River, River, River, River..." Her name falls from his lips like a prayer, and she is highly bemused by his behaviour.
"Doctor, what's going on?" She asks him firmly.
"Where are the children, by the way?" He diverts her neatly.
"Oh, them? They only last while you believe they're real, and they didn't look anything like you. Although I suppose I must have a recessive redhead gene..." She trails off, lost in thought, before glancing up at him sharply, a teasing glint in her eye. "Besides, can you imagine me being that domestic?"
"Not for a moment." He replies slowly, his face deadly serious while his eyes glimmer with mischief. "I'm even having trouble seeing you spend this much time in an actual house."
"Surreal, isn't it?" She queries brightly. "Although I do prefer the king size upstairs to my cot in Stormcage."
"Have you had a single non-sexual thought in your entire life?" He grins.
"None that were memorable." She quips, leaving him with no choice but to step forward and kiss her. "Now this dress" he mumbles against her mouth, his hands smoothing over her hips and back.
"Needs to come off?" She suggests hopefully.
"Is not what I would have picked to make you spend all eternity in." He amends her statement. "Although I do very much enjoy the clingy-silky-softy-ness."
His hand dips lower than her lower back and she growls playfully, gnashing her teeth before pushing away from him.
"Now, stop trying to ply me with sexual favours and tell me why you're here." Her instruction is clearly non-negotiable.
"I missed you." Is his simple response, and she's surprised to see him being quite so earnest.
"Have we done the Singing Towers?" She asks softly, comprehension flitting across her features.
"Not yet."
A frown clouds her countenance. "Then why...?"
"You're starting to forget me. I can see it."
"Sweetie..." She breathes, torn between telling him that was always the deal and knowing all too well the particular kind of anguish associated with losing the person you love while they're right in front of you.
"I want you back, River." He says bluntly.
Her lips curl wickedly. "You just want two of me."
She sees the thought flash behind his eyes, but he shakes his head to dismiss an admittedly appealing mental picture. "One of you is more than enough trouble."
"I'm quite sure one of you is more than enough trouble, too, but I wouldn't say no to an extra. Or two."
"Two extras?" He demands, looking something between horrified and a little impressed.
"Well, perhaps I need a reserve. You know, for when we have a player down with injury or exhaustion." Her eyebrow arches with evil, and he has the ridiculous urge to kiss that, too. The conversation they're having would not be out of place for any aged River, but somehow he thinks everything is better from this one, this version of his wife who knows every moment they've spent together.
"Five minutes and I've already stunned you into silence! Surely my younger self isn't that polite, my love?" She is teasing him, and at this age, by this woman, he greatly enjoys being teased. He squash-hugs her again, but releases her far too quickly.
"No, young-you is still rather very impossible. Old-you just knows how to push my buttons better." He quips, tapping her nose. The action makes her smile, even though she wants to tell him off for calling her old.
"What if I brought you back, River?" He asks, the sudden desire to cut to the chase overtaking him. "What if I could find a way to make you real again? To download you?"
She considers him patiently in a way her younger self never would. "What did I say to you the first time we met?"
"That I was pretty." He replies after little consideration.
"You were and are; what else?"
His offering of information is grudging at best. "That I wasn't allowed to change a word. But what if I could change it for the better, River? What if we could be together for thousands of years, just you and me? A TARDIS for a house, a forcefield for a picket fence and the entire universe – all of time and space for our backyard?"
She forces her breathing to be even; it's a tempting offer, despite what she knows to be true. "It would change everything, sweetie. And if you had this me you wouldn't do the same things with young-me and then I would be completely different. You could change the whole time-stream."
Her words are extremely gentle and kind, and in some ways that makes it harder.
"I'm sure I could bring you back. You could be alive."
River smiles at him tenderly and caresses his face. "Oh, you beautiful man," she says with such love that both of his hearts constrict simultaneously. "You brought me to life the first time I laid eyes on you. Every moment that I have ever really, truly lived was because of you. I owe you everything." As their bodies have inched closer of their own volition, her voice has gradually dropped to a whisper. His eyes squeeze shut, and he rests his forehead against hers, curling long, spindly fingers around her head to draw her even nearer. The anguish on his features is potentially lethal to her resolve.
"I love you, River Song. I don't think I said that enough while I had the chance."
"My Doctor," she sighs, lips mere millimetres from brushing his, her eyes clamping closed as well. "I love you more than all the words in all the languages of all the galaxies of all the solar systems of all the universes combined can describe."
When he opens his eyes he tells her something the veracity of which he cannot deny:
"I know." He runs his thumb over her cheekbone from peak to back, before he traces the line of her jaw and rolls her lower lip under his thumb. "I've always known."
The kiss they share feels terrifyingly like a farewell.
"No." He says suddenly and decisively as he pushes away from her and begins pacing up and down the simulated hallway, all the way from door to stairs. He gives brief consideration to the walls: they're the colour of something he's eaten, something bland and silly like almond flavoured ice-cream or soy milk or something equally human – something just as mundane and terrifyingly human as the way he feels for her.
She watches him pinching the bridge of his nose, his brow deeply furrowed. "No. I can't accept this, I can't do this! I can't just watch you forget me and then let you go. I can't." He comes to a brief standstill behind her, clasps her right upper arm tightly in his hand and presses his face into her curls – her mad, bouncy, luscious curls, that he sometimes thinks are a metaphor for her entire personality.
"I love you too much, River." He breathes, almost inaudibly, into her hair, and it's the hardest thing he's ever had to admit. He pushes off her again and continues to pace. "Why did you have to use all your regenerations?" He tosses at her over his shoulder, his words cutting.
"Because I was saving you. In the unlikely scenario that it's escaped your notice I feel the need to point out: it's something I did quite a lot of."
He turns to face her slowly, the entire length of the hall between them. His hand lowers from the bridge of his nose. "Of course. After all, it's why you're here." He observes.
"You know that's not what I meant."
"I know." He nods, and the distance between them, even when it has been light-years and millennia, has never felt so great.
He rakes a hand through his hair, and after a long moment's calculations asks: "what about after you're gone?"
"Oh, don't tell me, the antivirus software's going to expire in a month?" She jokes, and it's almost enough to make him smile.
"After the last time I see you, what if I come back for you then? It won't interfere with the existing timeline, just... we'll just tack a new chapter onto the end." The hopefulness of his tone makes her realise that he needs her just as much as she needs him; it's a bit of a revelation. He takes two long strides towards her.
"The end of my timeline meeting the end of yours." River says, processing the information before glancing up at him sharply, her eyes even wider than usual. "That might work. I need to think - "
"It will work." He states so confidently he cuts her off, and gains two more steps.
"If you can find a way to download me from this thing." She cautions, terrified of getting either of their hopes up.
"I'll find a way." He vows, before closing the gap between them entirely and kissing her soundly, as if to seal the pledge. "I've launched armies and destroyed tyrants and re-written the past. I promise you I will find a way to get you out of here."
She kisses him gently, her fingers tracing his all too familiar skin. "I believe you." She breathes, touching her lips to his lightly. "Besides, now that you know how to get here you're more than welcome to visit."
He cradles her body against his tenderly for a long moment, enjoying the feel of her. Even though she's really no different to his present day River, something about her is entirely altered. "I think I'll have to take you up on that." Mumbles the Doctor, his acutely sensitive body taking in the steady rhythm of her pulse, the regularity of her breathing.
"Now, is this a good time for a man to ask if he can make love to his wife?" He asks gallantly, aiming for 'endearingly old-fashioned' rather than 'awkwardly formal'.
River's smile is honey mixed absinthe mixed with evil. "I thought you'd never ask."
At that moment, as she half-leads-half-drags him up the stairs, he thinks - for the first time in longer than he'd care to admit – that there might be still be a happy ending for them after all. Beyond everything, that is something he thinks is worth fighting for.