A super short chapter, but it needed to be separate from the interlude ones... don't worry, there's at least one more being posted today!
Tick tock goes the clock, he gave all he could give her,
Tick tock goes the clock, now prison waits for River.
River song floated in the waters of lake Silencio, eyes closed, trying to hold on to the memory of that first kiss.
Of course she'd kissed and been kissed before. But never with the Doctor, never with someone she thought she must have been born to love. Yes, she knew that the body she'd held in her arms, the lips pressed against hers, had actually belonged to a shape shifting robot, but it had been the Doctor controlling that Doctor-suit. He that she had been looking at before her eyes drifted closed.
So she floated and remembered, trying to ignore the cold that was seeping into her bones. It had been years since she'd felt the cold, there had been no real temperature inside that endless moment. River didn't even know how many years she had spent in that time, laying her plans, hunting down her mother, and trying to save the Doctor. Now she was feeling the cold, and remembering the intensity of that kiss. A kiss which had literally changed the universe.
Light flared above her, and her eyes opened in reflex. Above her, on the surface of the lake, and canoe was on fire bearing the body of her beloved. He had promised her that he would barely be singed in the fire but River didn't want to witness the pyre, so she fumbled with the vortex manipulator strapped to her wrist, attempting to return to her last coordinates.
Instead she materialised in a luxuriously appointed women's restroom.
"Hello again beautiful," said the very naked time agent who was lazing on the couch. "You disappeared, but I knew you'd be back to join me in the hot tub. Come on in, the water is amazing. Remember that clothing is strictly not required."
It was a sign, or at least River chose to interpret it as such. She'd run from the law, done everything in her power to change fixed time, and failed. It was the Doctor who had found a way to fix things. Now she would have to trust him to make this right.
River took off the vortex manipulator and strapped it back on the Time Agent's wrist, avoiding his eager hands as she did so. She talked him into putting his clothes back on, then sat on the couch and waited for the hallucination to wear off.
Jack Harkness would get to arrest her after all. While she waited River remembered that Jack had been one of the people who tried to help save the Doctor. The universe was a small place indeed. Jack would never know that he had let her escape, but if anyone had been tracking his vortex manipulator they would know at least some of what had happened. Maybe that explained how the man had been on earth nearly two thousand years before his birth.