A/N Hey LURKERS! Please R/R!

Cavalia. An entire planet of horses. The TARDIS landed on an expense of lush green land that reached out to the horizon, where it met a beach that had known no human footprint. A Clydesdale and two smaller Arabians met us as we exited the ship and the Doctor spoke with them telepathically. I could smell salt on the air, as a cool wind came in from the sea, the errant curls that had fallen out of my braid whipping at my face. The Doctor broke contact with the larger animal and the two smaller ones appeared to bow before us.

"Fancy a ride?" The Doctor grinned like a madman as he mounted one of the Arabians. I had never ridden bareback before and my experience with horses consisted of school trips to the petting zoo. I gingerly climbed on and before I could get comfortable, the horses took off in the direction of the sea. The world was a green blur as we sped past pastures of lush grass and groves of trees. My face flushed with the cool air and the exhilaration of riding a wild horse, bareback. The Doctor looked back at me and the look on his face was happier and more free than I had ever seen him. It was as if I had never seen him smile before that day.

The horses took us to the beach and ran along the water's edge for what seemed like forever. They brought us into the water, kicking up green foam as they pranced and played. The beasts were like children in the ocean, and if I didn't know better, I would have thought they were laughing along with us.

"This is amazing!" I called to the Doctor over the whinnies and the sound of waves crashing further along the beach.

"I know. Beautiful, isn't it?" The hem of the Doctor's coat was getting dark with seawater and our shoes were soaked through. Neither of us could have cared less at that moment.

Jumping off his horse, the Doctor pulled me off mine and threatened to pull me down into the water. The horses bayed and pranced around us, and the four of us played on the beach, chasing each other through the surf.

Breathless, we sat down in the sand, pulling off shoes and socks. I rolled up the legs of my jeans as I watched the Doctor remove several layers of his armor. In just his trousers and jumper, he was dressed as carefree as the joy on his face.

"So why are we here?" I lay back and stretched out on the sand.

"The horses need our help. One of their elders has died and they've asked us to make a funeral pyre. Not easy to chop wood when you haven't got thumbs." The Doctor wiggled his thumbs at me. I gave him a courtesy chuckle.

I sighed. I wanted nothing more than to lay on that beach forever next to the Doctor. He leaned back next to me, perhaps a little too close.

"I came here in my eighth incarnation just before the Time War began. They find me every now and again. They prefer to be left alone, mostly."

"Oh, I can't blame them, Doctor. This is... this is paradise."

Even as I said it, I knew we were in for a long day of work. Thankfully the horses were cooperative enough to let us harness them to carry some of the load as we found it, and by dusk we had built ten foot tall pyre on the beach. On top we gently lay the body of a greying stallion and watched as horses of all shapes, sizes and colors began coming down from the hills and across the fields toward the sea. Before climbing down the pyre I laid a handful of wildflowers on the fallen elder. As the other horses gathered we built a fire further down the beach. The sun set behind the hills and the sea glowed below a moon that was impossibly close.

"Bio-luminescent." The Doctor said quietly. "Organisms in the water soak up light energy from the sun which causes them to glow at night."

We waited until the second moon began to rise and lit the pyre. A cacophony of cries and whinnies from the hundreds of horses on the beach was deafening. They were wailing in sorrow. It nearly brought tears to my eyes. The Doctor took my hand in his as we looked on with reverence. The smaller moon rose higher in the sky and the horses began to prance. They were making designs in the sand, still crying.

"What's happening, Doctor?" I asked quietly. I caught my breath when I met his eyes. They were deep pools of sorrow and regret and sympathy.

"I'm so sorry, Edie. I brought you here to mourn your family. The horses of Cavalia write the names of their lost loved ones in the sand before the second tide. They believe the sea takes their souls into the horizon, into the stars." He held out a switch to me, and I was speechless. I couldn't be angry, but neither could I fathom participating. "You can do this, Edie. You need to do this." He pressed the switch into my hand and held it there until I took it. As much as I didn't want to acknowledge the pain I had been running from, neither could I pretend I didn't need to say goodbye.

I took the switch and broke it in half. "Then so do you, Doctor." I held one half out to him. His face was unreadable, I held his gaze until he took the piece of wood from me, and I walked toward the sea to meet the tide.

The water lapped at my naked feet as I wrote their names in the perfect white sand. Just behind us, the pyre burned bright and hot and before me the ocean glowed blue under two full moons. With each letter, my grief rose closer to the surface. I took my time drawing their names into the earth and a few paces down the beach, the Doctor had begun doing the same. Around me, the scent of wood and fire and earth and salt and horses stung my senses. I don't know when the tears began to fall, but as I drew the last letter of my daughter's name, I was sobbing. The tide began to come in and I fell to my knees. The glowing blue water began filling hoof prints and letters in like sandcastle moats. It spilled into the intricate swirls and circles the Doctor had drawn and began to lap at my knees. He came to me and enveloped me in his arms.

We kneeled there as the tide came in, and I could feel his tears fall into my hair. On the beach the pyre collapsed in a shower of sparks and the sorrowful dance of the horses began to quiet. That is what I saw looking back at our time there, but at the time, all I felt was a growing rage as the tide evened. The more I cried, the more frantic the caged animal of my grief tore at its restraints. I pushed against the Doctor and ran into the sea, wailing, as if the water was dragging my family out of my grasp. I wanted to follow them down into the airless glowing grave and feel the salt burn my lungs as I drowned. Knee deep in blue surf I raged, begged the sky to take me in trade. I cursed God, I cursed myself and I begged my family's forgiveness that I was left to live. It was as if I could finally move inside my nightmare.

The Doctor caught me before the gravity of the doubled tide could pull me out to sea. He held my face in his hands and pressed a low, soothing song into my head. When my sobs ebbed to hitched breath he pulled me to him and kissed me.

I could taste his tears despite being in the ocean. His kiss was hard and desperate and full of want. He left the song in my head as he pulled me against him, and moved our kiss beyond chaste comfort.

"Can you hear it, Edie? Can you hear the horses singing?" We were both breathless, lips and eyes swollen.

"What are they saying?"

"It's for us, Edie. You and me. They're saying your heart is beyond mending, so I must lend you one of mine."

The horses began to move away from the beach and the pyre had collapsed to half it's height. We went to our fire and silently peeled off our soaking clothes. The Doctor lay them in front of the fire to dry as I pulled the quilt out of my bag. Without words, we lay together and I pushed my desire into his mind as before. But this time, he replied.

He kissed my forehead, each of my tired green eyes and where my eyelashes met my freckled cheeks. One arm kept me pulled close to him and the other brought my leg up over his hip. I could finally feel his chest atop his two hearts, no suit between us, pressing against my breasts. Without reservation I could let my hands tangle in his hair. I grew dizzy with the smell of him, and I felt him inhale my own scent as he pressed kisses to my collarbone. And as we let every wall we had built fall to pieces around us, he showed me his desire the same way I had shown him mine.

The picture he painted in my mind showed me as he saw me. My green eyes were full of pain and want. He longed to feel my hair trail flames down his body and to feel the swell of my womb warm against his cool hands. For months he had wished to cast aside his rules and claim me as his. I showed him how I wanted to have his weight on me again, hip pressed to hip, and to let him make me cry out his name. I wanted his hands to get lost in my hair and to feel his fingerprints on my thighs days from now.

We didn't need to speak and the only sounds on the beach were the crackle of the fire, the surf and our labored breath. As the fire died, I let him take me over the edge with him, his low growl against my ear. The song in my head had ceased and I fell asleep listening to the sounds of Cavalia and the Doctor's rhythmic breathing as he slept for the first time in weeks.

Our agreement to delay physically consummating our relationship remained unspoken. While we laid our feelings and our bodies bare on that beach, we didn't want our pain to be what bound us. We left Cavalia leaden with vegetables, fruit and fish, gifts from the horses. I couldn't begin to imagine how they acquired it. It was with a heavy heart that we went through the doors of the TARDIS and back to our crazy life. As bittersweet as it was, the new openness we shared more than made up for the peace we lost less than a week later.

Despite having broken down so many walls, we remained true to ourselves. Neither of us desired domesticity or lazy mornings spent in bed. I preferred the feeling of opening the TARDIS door to a new world, eyes locked on his, the thrill of anticipation heavy in the air. He could no more treat me like a girlfriend, with courting and dates and meeting the parents than I could treat him like just a lover. He still rambled on, was still oblivious while being provocative, still a boy in a 900-year-old Time Lord body. I was still the human woman with the mop of red hair who piped music through the TARDIS and danced whenever the mood struck. Now, when the Doctor made my knees weak with his tasting everything, or his high-pitched giggle, I could act on it without reservation. He could take my guitar out of my hands and pull me into an embrace whenever the desire struck him.

We didn't spend the next week in domestic bliss, but by being more us than either of us had been in awhile.

Three days after Cavalia I found the Doctor in the library, a place into which I had not yet ventured. I was looking for a distraction after a particularly disturbing day on Tarajii Prime and the TARDIS led me there. I had anticipated the Doctor's library to be immaculate, grand and inviting. What I found was a dark room filled from floor to ceiling with books arranged only by color. At first it appeared to be a room no bigger than a large closet, full of red volumes. Taking down an ancient volume from the shelf, I felt the wall move sideways. With a small tug, the whole shelf disappeared into the wall like a pocket door, revealing yet more red books in an even larger room. Each wall moved as if on rollers, so that the library became an ever-changing maze of books, tables, chairs, sometimes an overstuffed sofa would be tucked between two walls, occasionally a desk would appear. The books ranged from things that had been written in my lifetime and others that were apparently too old for the TARDIS to translate. Here and there were map tables overflowing with star charts and maps from planets other than my own. I was too enthralled with the room itself to wonder how I would find my way back to the door.

Coming through the green section, I found it. It was like finding a raven's treasure tucked away in shadowy corner of an attic. A chaise lounge so tired from use its legs had long been replaced with books. It had served as a bed many, many nights, a worn blanket and pillow laid out among notebooks, ancient tomes and a very moth-eaten old wool scarf made from odds and ends of different colors. Letters, diaries, a swatch of cloth here, a single earring there created a museum of trinkets set on the surrounding shelves like trophies. I sat down on the chaise and picked up a letter lying on a pile of books. I didn't open it, but held it to my face, where I could smell the light sent of candle wax from the seal and women's perfume. Surprisingly, a women's bridal garter was slipped over the base of a small lamp on the floor. As I regarded its incongruity, the wall to my right slid back and the Doctor was there, brainy specs sitting precariously on the tip of his nose.

I felt as if I had found his secret hiding spot and was immediately sorry for lingering.

"Sorry. I was looking for something to do, and the TARDIS led me here." Our eyes connected and the double entendre was not lost on either of us. Instead of the furrowed-brow response I may have received just a week ago, instead I got a welcoming grin.

"Yep. You found my little hideaway." He sat next to me, close enough that our shoulders and knees touched.

"You are quite the magpie!" I smiled at his collection affectionately. "Who is this from?" I fingered the white garter. It glittered with rhinestones.

The Doctor chuckled. "That was Donna's, actually. She took it off after we defeated the Rachnoss because she had a run in her stockings." The sadness in his eyes made me take his hand. "That over there," he pointed to a circle of gold propped up against the books on a shelf above us, "That's my souvenir medal for lighting the Olympic torch. 2012." He smiled as his eyes looked back on that day.

I let him tell me what he wanted to share and watched the memories flow over his boyish features. At some point he put away the brainy specs, when his eyes teared up for the second or third time. He had waited to long to have someone to talk to, someone who could truly understand. Not only were there trinkets from his adventures, but from his home as well. A tiny bit of wire from his tutor, Badger's, electronic components. A dead piece of TARDIS coral from his father's ship. A blade of red grass pressed in the pages of a book. As he fingered the blade of grass I could feel the longing wash off him and the fleeting thought of how much my hair reminded him of that long red grass passed from my mind to his. He caught my green eyes with his brown ones before pulling my face to his lips.

We fell asleep curled up there together, after sharing our most intimate thoughts with one another, with and without words. We could never have imagined how important our ability to slip into each others minds would be in just a few short days.