Two Fools in Love
Disclaimer:These characters and their wonderful, bittersweet story belong to other people.
*A/N* Just a quick warning-it's really pretty angsty. I just took all the depressing facts about their relationship and squeezed them into a small scene in a certain cell in the Stormcage Containment Facility. I like to place the Doctor somewhere very close to the end of the Pond era, maybe even between Power of Three and Angels take Manhattan. I hope you enjoy it.
P.S. This was inspired by a grammar lesson. Not kidding. We were asked to write phrases for all three conditionals, and with that, DW was bound to come to my mind.
Nobody said it was easy
It's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard
Take me back to the start
-"The Scientist" by Coldplay
Doctor River Song lay on her bed, gazing at the ceiling without seeing a thing. Tears were dropping steadily onto the pillow.
She didn't notice him standing outside the cell, gripping the bars as if his life depended on it.
He'd only just remembered. The things he'd said, the things he'd done, the things he'd not done…
He couldn't turn back time to correct his actions (no matter how much he felt like trying), but he could comfort her now, make sure this was not her last. He owed her that much, even if it just meant delaying her pain for as long as he could.
"Hi honey," he said softly. "I'm home."
She flinched, jumped to her feet and quickly wiped the tears off her face. "Hi! I just met-"
"Younger me, yes. I remember." He entered reluctantly. She looked so miserable… He wondered what he would have done if he had known how he was making her feel back then.
"I'm sorry, River," he burst out finally. "I didn't know what I was saying...who you - I'm sorry!" Frantically, he looked for more words to express himself but couldn't find any.
So he just stood there and hoped she'd know somehow what he was he was trying to say.
"Don't worry, sweetie," she replied quietly. "It's not your fault. You were young. Look at what I did, I poisoned you."
She was right, he knew that, and yet still she wasn't. "And then you saved my life."
"Yes, I did. And then you saved mine. That's what we do, you and me. We save each other."
"Not always," he whispered, remembering Demon's Run. The Library. The scared little girl in the warehouse.
She took his hands and held his gaze the way only she could. "But often enough."
"How can you not hate me?" The words were out before he could stop them. Ever since he'd learned about her childhood, her whole miserable, stolen childhood, this question had been lying around in his head like a stone that felt much too heavy to carry. And then she married him, which must have been an answer in some way.
"I can't let you die without knowing that you are loved, by so many and so much...and by no-one more than me."
He'd made himself the beginning, the centre and the end of her life, he had taken someone else's life and made it all about himself, and yet there she was and told him she loved him and she trusted him and he was forgiven. How could she?
"You are the only one who could actually hate yourself," she answered after a while and added with a grin: "Believe me, I've tried, but do you know how hard it is? Hating you? Even I couldn't keep it up for long."
He was still staring at the ground, feeling worth- and hopeless. She raised a hand and forced his face tenderly in her direction. "Look, I guess we're heading towards the end of this, and it hurts. I won't deny that. But I don't care, because, yes, my life's all about you, but for heaven's sake, it's a good one! And whether I like my life or not is nowhere near your decision, so don't you dare to tell me it's not enough."
Sometimes he wondered whether he was as strong as she was. Regarding all the things he'd been through without losing it he probably was, but he never felt like it.
"I'm just trying to say," he said slowly after a few eternities, "if there was anything I could do to stop this," he waved a hand at the unspoken pain between them, "I would."
Conditional two, whispered a very unwelcome voice in his head. Used to express that the statement in question seems highly improbable, but not completely impossible. The correct form in this case would be conditional three.
Shut up, he snapped back angrily. I hate that form, it's depressing. There's no hope in it, no future. The saddest bit of grammar in the universe. There's always a way out.
You know there wasn't this time. There was never anything you could have done.
He buried his face in her hair and pretended not to listen.
"We're such fools, you and I, eh?" she whispered. "Why else would we do this to ourselves?"
"Foolishness for the win!" It was supposed to be a joke, but it sounded sad. "Worth it, though," he added very quietly.
She smiled and pulled him into a long kiss, the kind that made him feel high and dizzy and breathless for hours. They were about as close as they could possibly be, yet he could feel her slipping through his fingers a little bit more and from the way she held him so tightly it hurt he could tell that she felt the same.
And he knew she wasn't okay and neither was he, but had they ever been?
The woman who had been abducted and raised by monsters, trained to kill and locked up in prison and the man who had spent his entire life running from the things he had seen and done.
Two fools in love.
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