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Time runs back to front.
She named herself after herself. River Song.
Time is like a river. She’s never quite got the gist of what it’s singing.
She asked her mother once where it came from. Her mother told her how the only water in the forest was the river, showed her the little scrap of cloth with her name embroidered.
That doesn’t explain how she started using it though. But then again it does.
Her mother named her after her, she named herself after herself. Time is a loop running backwards.
It’s always backwards for her, her and the Doctor. It’s odd, that. You’d think it would be random, but it isn’t, not usually.
The first time he met her was the last time she ever saw him. That’s a terrible thing to know.
And it feels sometimes like she’s losing him in pieces, every time she meets him and knows him better, there’s less of the him she knows.
Her life running backwards.
It’s not that she doesn’t spend time with him. She’s with him more than she’s not. Catching glimpses out of order.
She knows him like she knows herself, pieces excavated, put together, guessed.
She’s an archeologist, she says that it’s just for him, but it’s not.
Looking backwards, time layed out in layers, jumbled. She loves it, making sense of it all.
When she finds him, snaking his way through the histories, like a secret message just for her, when she makes sense of him with all the rest, that’s just extra.
Time runs backwards. It’s a cruel thing, it’s never enough.
She assembles her parts of him, and looks into his eyes, a little younger than they were last night. She’s growing wiser, she sees the way he looks at her now: awe. Like she’s something terrifying and beautiful, and always one step ahead. He has always looked at her that way, she used to not understand.
Now she’s becoming the version of herself that taught him who she was.
She kisses him.
Time runs backwards.
She’ll never have enough moments, lives are made of lives, not glimpses.
But in the moment she is satisfied.