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It happens about a week after time stopped and started again, after she was married and arrested and sentenced to a lifetime behind bars all in one day, smiling recklessly through the trial and ignoring the horrified gazes of the judge and jury. She smiled because she didn't do it, and that alone would have been enough, even if it were the only comfort she would ever have in her prison.
Except, of course, it isn't.
The Doctor comes at night, dapper in coattails and bowtie, and reminds her with a grin that it is still technically their honeymoon. So they end up in Rome - except the Doctor insists on driving, and of course he parks the TARDIS in the wrong place, which results in angry Praetorian guards demanding to know what they're doing in Caesar's bedroom, what is that blue box, and Doctor? Doctor who?
"You know," says River later, as they sit on a red-tiled roof, the Doctor gasping for breath - and really, with all the running they do, one would think he was in better shape. "They do have a point. You are such a tease." She leans her head against his shoulder, thinking back to their wedding, to his whispered words in her ear. Laughingly, she mimics, "'I just told you my name!' Oh wait, no I didn't."
She feels rather than sees him tense against her, his shoulder jerking under her chin. Startled, she raises her head up to look at him, and the look on his face is like nothing she's seen before – speechless and stricken, and maybe a little frightened. Then the expression vanishes, shuttered behind his usual manic good cheer.
River Song is an archaeologist, not an anthropologist. But she knows all the legends of old Earth, and the recurring theme that runs like a bright, deadly thread through each: Cupid and Psyche, Pandora and Epimetheus, Adam and Eve. The prying lover, the nagging wife, curiosity leading to disaster.
She had already promised herself long ago she would never take that role with the Doctor. He has seen the birth and death of stars and held the lives of millions, and some secrets are too deep and deadly to tell. And while her life, such as it is, has always been centered on him – born to his friends, raised as his enemy, and somehow breathtakingly and inexplicably becoming his lover – the reverse is not true.
River turns her face away slightly, schooling her features into stillness. There's no reason for this, she thinks. After all, she has known for a very long time that the price of having the Doctor was not getting all of him.
Nobody told her it would hurt so much.
It's not like a knife in her heart, or a punch in the gut, or the thousand other overblown things people use to describe moments like this. Instead, there's a slow twisting dread, and a tightness in her throat.
It's her own fault, she thinks angrily. A completely unreasonable mistake, and she really should have seen it coming. What kind of idiot asks a question she already knows won't be answered? What is the point of bringing it out into the open, stripping away all the comfortable fictions, all the murmured words of love?
For a dizzying moment, she realizes, This is how ordinary people must feel. She had always ridiculed them for inventing fictions to make life bearable, for convincing themselves that aliens and horrors didn't exist. Except now, if this is what it's like, then she can understand why. She wants to take back her words, so that she can still pretend that maybe, maybe, the Doctor trusts her enough to tell her.
Except –
You are forgiven. Always and completely forgiven, he had said, his voice quiet and emphatic, burning right down to her bones with the intensity of it. That was the first time at the lake, when he had no plan, when he had really thought he was going to die at her hand, and there had been nothing in his voice but love, wide and boundless.
So what has she done to him – what will she do with the knowledge of his name – that is so much worse? She thinks about the sudden, petrified expression on his face, and her mind conjures up a thousand gruesome possibilities. She imagines him in agony, imagines herself causing it. She feels sick. Terrified.
"Doctor," she says, and her voice is hoarse and scraping. "Doctor. What did – " but of course she can't ask that. She's not supposed to know, because they didn't mend time only to break it a week after. And yet she has to, she has to at least know when, so she can make sure she never gets there, because she can't live with this.
Then his arms are around her, solid and strong, and his breath is warm against her ear. "River," he says, sounding as wrecked and raw as she feels. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean – it's not you, it's not anything you did - never think for a moment that I don't - " and she knows he's about to tell her, despite his fear. She turns, raises a hand, and puts it firmly over his mouth, because that's not how she wants this to happen.
"It's not a test," she says quietly. She can feel his doubled heartbeat, slow and rhythmic, and she remembers a time – so long ago for her, just a few weeks for him – when his hearts had been failing, when she had given up all the lives she might have lived to keep him alive. She hadn't even known who he was then, except that he loved her, and it had still been the best choice she had ever made.
There are some things she will not doubt, she thinks, because the first rule is that the Doctor lies, but the corollary is that he never betrays. And this, whatever is between them, is true.
So she will wait, and trust, and count the days.
The Doctor thinks, later on, that it was a selfish thing to do.
He always assumed that River already knew his name, because they had established early on that they meet in reverse order. Logically, she should know his name until he tells her, after which she won't know it any more.
It doesn't work like that.
He should have known. He knew from the start that their timelines weren't completely backwards, because his second encounter with her hadn't been at the Singing Towers of Darillium. But he hadn't cared enough, at the time, to work out the implications, because she was just a stranger then. A fascinating and mysterious stranger who had saved - would save - his life, but not vital like breath and blood, as she is now.
His own breath is ragged, and he can feel his blood pounding in his ears, because he's been so stupid, how did he not notice? She doesn't know his name, and he hasn't told her yet, meaning that for a while at least their timelines move together.
He can't stop her future – too late for that, too late ever since the first time he met her – but he can live in the present, just for a little, and grasp at hope. Because as long as she doesn't know his name, she can't go to the Library yet. And as long as he hasn't told her, he'll always know that he can see her again, at least once more, before time takes her from him forever.
As comforts go, it's not much more than staving off the inevitable. He doesn't really care. The Doctor is a thousand years old, and it's still the first time he has had something like this: River by his side, strong and fearless and flame-bright, and all his. He'll take every minute of it he can get, and hold it close as long as he can. If causality itself promises that he hasn't come to the end yet, so much the better.
River's looking at up at him. Her mouth is set in a tight line, and her face is unnaturally calm and pensive. Then she turns away, the wild halo of her hair hiding her face from him, and there's a moment when he doesn't understand what's wrong, because this is good. Then he realizes that he hasn't said anything for almost a minute, and his silence can be interpreted as many things, none of them promising.
Suddenly, River turns convulsively back towards him. Her hand grips his arm, hard, as if some new and terrible thought has seized her. "Doctor," she says, and her eyes are wide and wild. "What did –"
She cuts herself off before she can say anything else, but he understands what she meant. What did I do, in your past, to break your trust? It's such a River thing to think: to automatically assume that it was her fault instead of his, when in reality everything she has suffered and will suffer is because of him.
For a moment he feels only a helpless wonder that she loves him at all, when he's used her so ruthlessly. He let her bear the blame for his murder, reviled by a thousand worlds. He let her give all her future lives for him, when he couldn't even give her her childhood. And in between, in a hundred small ways, he's told her that he doesn't trust her.
Of course, he realizes, all of that is still in her future. She hasn't experienced most of it yet. When she does, she'll see that he's not good or kind, but oblivious and self-absorbed and casually cruel to her. And then she'll stop loving him, and he'll deserve that.
River is still gazing at him. There's pain in that look, and also acceptance, and it's the latter that breaks him. She shouldn't look at him like that, as if she didn't have the right to expect anything from him.
He can't do this. He has to tell River his name, even if it means he must live in fear that every day will be their last. He won't have his peace of mind if the price is her quiet misery. He's selfish, but not that selfish, and though he will never be as good a man as she seems to think he is, he can at least try to deserve her a little.
He pulls her into an embrace, holds her tight, as if he could tell her by the sheer pressure of his arms everything he can't say, and bends down to whisper in his ear. She stops him with a hand across his lips.
"It's not a test," she says. He hears, I trust you.
He is suddenly, achingly, grateful: for River, for the secret of his name that he can keep a little longer and the promise of the time they still have. And then he thinks of that fatal day in the Library, except now he realizes that it, too, was a promise. Because it meant that, despite all he had done to her in his ignorant past, she had loved him to the end.
He closes his eyes against the sudden rush of heat in them, holds her close, and bends his head to kiss her.