Title: hang your heart here
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: The Doctor/River Song
Rating: K
Spoilers: 03.08 "Human Nature", 03.09 "The Family of Blood", 06.01 "The Impossible Astronaut", 06.12 "Closing Time"
Summary: He had never done this before (but he wanted to).
The prospect of owning a house (permanence) was terrifying.
He had been running for so long, just him and the TARDIS and all of time and space to see; another key in his pocket and a name on a contract was not something he ever imagined for himself.
(But John Smith would have—and did. He had wanted it with a strange desperation, a home for himself in Farringham with Joan.)
And he was nine-hundred-and-ninety with time slipping through his fingers.
He chose it with River in mind, solid and blue (and bigger on the inside). There could be no other choice—he thought she would agree.
She found a TARDIS-blue envelope on her cot when she returned from Asgard, flushed with adventure and sunlight. Attached to the brass key was a tag—the words "somewhere new to run to," a set of coordinates and a date.
Laughing, she reached for her vortex manipulator.
The house in southern California was elegant without being ostentatious, bits of alien technology worked cunningly into knickknacks on the shelves.
(The book scanner nestled beside a glass paperweight was not from 2015).
It wasn't just a house—he had given her a "home".
(I'm home.)